Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (11 page)

Zelda later fictionalized that first meeting with Scott Fitzgerald in July 1918 by writing: ‘There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.’
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It was an incorrigibly romantic line.

Scott matched it. His first impression of Zelda was that of ‘a saint, a Viking Madonna’
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whose beauty so stunned him that he changed his portrait of Rosalind Connage in
This
Side
of
Paradise
(1920) to base her partly on Zelda. Then he wrote: ‘all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty’.
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That too was a romantic line.

When Dorothy Parker encountered Zelda and Scott she thought they looked like a couple who had just stepped out of the sun.
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But Zelda and Scott each had another side: a less sunny side, and one that synchronized. Not long after they met, Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘You know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.’
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Much less romantic: definitively egotistical; yet Scott found it provocative.

What was more, he could surpass it. One of the finest – if intermittent – marks of both his fiction and his character is his clear and honest self-appraisal. In a flash of insight many years after their first meeting, he wrote: ‘I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me
plenty.
’
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In time their egotism and self-centredness would damage their relationship, but in their first few months Zelda and Scott inflamed each other by flaunting those very qualities.

Their personal evaluations had a dangerous symmetry, as did their fierce judgements on other people. After dating Scott for some time Zelda wrote: ‘People seldom interest me except in their relation
to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters.’
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Less openly in his Notebook Scott wrote: ‘When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me.’
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He had already voiced this view before he met Zelda. Like all infantry lieutenants in that period, Scott expected to die in battle. In the Officers Club he had begun writing a novel for posterity: ‘The Romantic Egotist’. Among the 120,000 words
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ran the lines: ‘I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women.’
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As Edmund Wilson said later, Zelda and Scott’s fantasies were precisely in tune. Curiously, their appearance as well as their ambitions had a strange congruence. If Scott Fitzgerald looked like an angel he also looked absurdly like Zelda. People would soon mistake them for brother and sister. There are several photos of Zelda and Scott during the year they first met. They both have that gold-leaf hair that sets off their similar black one-piece swimsuits. She lounges lazily on a bank of flowers or is poised near a pool. She holds her breath before she dives in. The only difference is that whereas Scott’s appearance at least in photos remains consistent, Zelda’s changes from photo to photo, even in those taken the same year. She had as many faces as she had voices. Both Zelda and Scott had a gift for self-dramatization which often disguised their self-awareness. Both spent extravagantly, drank heavily, spelt badly, were spoiled children of older parents. Both had disliked their first schools and been allowed to withdraw from them by indulgent mothers.

Both liked to exchange sexual roles. Scott had dressed up as a showgirl for Princeton’s Triangle Club. When Scott was temporarily out of reach, Zelda put on men’s clothing and went to the movies with a group of boys. Scott, who was always surrounded by women, admitted: ‘I am half feminine – that is my mind is.’
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Zelda by her own assertion had always been inclined towards masculinity.
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When Scott suggested that she met his mother, she wrote ner vously: ‘I am afraid I am losing all pretense of femininity, and I imagine she will demand it.’
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From early on they enacted dramas in order to attract attention. On getting it, Scott became excited by people’s response while Zelda was indifferent.

Most versions of Zelda’s legendary first meeting with Scott suggest it was at Montgomery’s Country Club. J. Winter
Thorington, a cousin of her family, believes that they met earlier at a teaparty at his Great-Aunt Bessie’s. In that version neither Zelda nor Scott took much notice of the other.
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A few days later they met again at the Country Club, when Zelda’s utter disdain for Scott first engaged his attention. He stared at her bewitched as she ignored the line of stags crowding around her.
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Without asking anyone to introduce him, he cut in on her, astounded at her popularity. Not once could he dance across the room with her before another man cut in. In the intermission, frustrated at his low ranking, he asked her for a late date but she replied: ‘I never make late dates with fast workers.’

She was prepared to give him her phone number, which he rang so often that he remembered it as long as he lived. He also remembered that her date book was filled for weeks ahead.

Despite her apparent coolness however he
had
made a visual impression on her. Scott looked like a jonquil. His golden hair, parted in the centre, was slicked down with tonic. He swaggered as he walked, rated himself a good dancer, and hid a slightly tense mouth with an engaging smile.
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His classical features, straight nose, high wide brow, heavy dark lashes, were striking, and his eyes, like Zelda’s, changed colour. Though Zelda saw them as green, when Montgomery’s Lawton Campbell met Scott at Princeton in 1916, he saw them as lavender. He thought Scott ‘the handsomest boy I’d ever seen’.
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Hardly sur prising that at Princeton Scott ‘collected a painful number of votes as the prettiest member of his class’.
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Scott himself boasted that though he did not have John Sellers’ and Peyton Mathis’s envied qualities of great animal magnetism or money, he did have the two lesser requirements, ‘good looks and intelligence’, so he always got ‘the top girl’.
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Zelda immediately noticed Scott’s smart attire. Brooks Brothers in New York had tailored his officer’s tunic. His sunshine yellow boots and spurs gave him a kick start over his fellow officers who wore ordinary issue puttees. When Zelda fictionalized him as David Knight in
Save
Me
The
Waltz
(1932) she said he smelled like new goods. This apt simile matched Scott’s own preoccupations. In his writings haberdashery is symbolic. Jay Gatsby and Scott Fitzgerald both see connections between their wardrobes and their wealth.

After checking out his clothes Zelda agreed to date him. She did not agree to stop dating other men.

Scott began to call regularly at the Sayres’. He sat with Zelda on the grey frame porch screened with clematis and vines from the sun.
He swayed with her on the creaking swing to the scent of honeysuckle, while Miss Minnie sat in her peeling rocker and the Judge ostensibly read his evening paper while observing him.

But Scott was not the only man to share the swing. He was but one of many officers who called regularly, all of whom Zelda knew ‘with varying degrees of sentimentality’.
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Dashing young aviators from Taylor Field routinely performed aerial stunts over the Sayre house to amuse Zelda. One moustached suitor, Second Lieutenant Lincoln Weaver, who had been kissed by Zelda, amused her for weeks until he proposed. At that point she instantly rejected him. Utterly astonished, he asked why had she kissed him? As testing the unknown was Zelda’s passport to excitement she replied flippantly that she had never kissed a man with a moustache before.
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The aviators’ flattering performances suddenly took a nasty turn. Two planes crashed while paying tribute to Zelda, one piloted by Weaver, the rejected moustached suitor who made the headlines as ‘badly injured’.

For Zelda the tragedy of that aviator becomes a symbol of lost love which in her fiction she reuses several times. For Scott too, the rejected lover who falls like Icarus from heaven and dies becomes an enduring fictional symbol. Zelda and Scott pasted the death of Weaver neatly into their scrapbooks and their respective legends. But Weaver himself did not die. He survived and collected his army separation pay the following year. For Zelda and Scott, even in these early years, imagination was always more powerful than fact.

In Zelda’s
Save
Me
The
Waltz,
one of the captains courting Alabama tells her that he intends to get transferred to avoid being one of her beaux who falls out of planes and clutters up roadsides. When she asks who fell out, he tells her it was ‘your friend with the Dachshund face and the mustache’. She is unmoved: ‘we must hold on to ourselves and not care … There isn’t any use worrying about the dog-one.’ Alabama’s careless response is characteristic of Zelda’s own attitude towards suitors.
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Scott’s rivals for Zelda were not pilots alone. There were golfing beaux, Southern halfbacks, rich university students and the wealthy and well-born boys she had grown up with. Scott however was a Yankee, his family were in trade, he was only an infantry lieutenant. As Sara Mayfield said: ‘He was no great catch by Zelda’s standards.’
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The self-styled ‘great Southern catches’ Peyton Mathis and John Sellers, who had been dating Sara Haardt during her vacations, began to rush Zelda when Sara returned to Goucher College and
Scott arrived on the scene. Sellers, who felt he still had a hold on Zelda, began to goad Scott. As he and Mathis disliked Scott more than the other Northern invaders who dated ‘their’ girls, when they noticed his drinking habits they mockingly dubbed him Scotch Fitzgerald. Worse still, they openly exhibited their financial superiority. On his army pay of $141 a month Scott could hardly afford to give Zelda a $10 bottle of bonded whiskey or a $6 dinner at the Pickwick Café, and he could never treat her to taxis. The Gold Dust Twins naturally had cars in which they drove Zelda to the cemetery to admire the art works, but when Zelda took Scott there to show him the Confederate graves she had to walk.

The Twins’ Southern courting approach made them disdainful of Scott’s Yankee wooing tactics. Southerners, in theory, put Belles on pedestals. Scott, in practice, certainly did not. One evening he carved his and Zelda’s initials on the pillars of the Country Club, but in a bad error of judgement made his initials large and Zelda’s small. That it rankled with her for years showed in her first novel, written in 1932, when David Knight carves words on the club doorpost. ‘“David”, the legend read, “David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.”’
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The way Zelda treated her men appalled yet fascinated Scott. He felt she treated men badly. She abused them, broke appointments with them and looked bored – yet they returned to her time after time.

In an early letter to Scott, Zelda said women should ‘awake to the fact that their excuse and explanation is the necessity for a disturbing element among men – [if they did] they’d be much happier, and the men much more miserable – which is exactly what they need for the improvement of things in general’.
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Scott, who soon saw ‘borrowing’ Zelda’s words as a neat way to improve his fictional characterizations, lifted her lines for his description of his heroine Rosalind in
This
Side
of
Paradise:
‘She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.’
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Scott found Zelda’s behaviour disturbing and erotic. At a dance soon after they met, knowing Scott was observing her, she took her escort into a lighted phone booth and kissed him. Though provoked, he desired her more. Fully aware of this, she took advantage of it. Or perhaps she could not help it. Whatever her motives, the consequence was the same: her behaviour stimulated them both to fictionalize it. Zelda not only understood Scott’s tendency to live a fictional life, she created one for herself.

Perceptively she wrote later in
Caesar’s
Things:
‘[He] was proud of the way the boys danced with her and she was so much admired … [It] gave [her] a desirability which became, indeed, indispensable to [him].’
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Scott had already written something similar in
The
Great
Gatsby
with Gatsby’s response to Daisy: ‘It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.’
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Twice in his Notebooks Scott explored a deeper reason for the way his erotic drive for Zelda was stimulated by another man’s interest. First he wrote the phrase ‘Proxy in passion’, later he enlarged on it: ‘Feeling of proxy in passion strange encouragement’.
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That Zelda did not mind his voyeuristic ardour says something about her own alienation from her sexuality. She too had a private sexual vision: she liked watching him watching her with other men.

Despite her large number of beaux and her seemingly heartless behaviour towards them, Scott began to captivate her. They began to hold intimate conversations which gave her an uncanny feeling of exposure and closeness. No man had ever talked to Zelda quite like that before. In comparison with the sportsmen she was used to, Scott was intellectual, artistic and gentle, and Zelda had a ‘quality which you couldn’t help feeling would betray her sooner or later … the quality that made her like intellectual men’.
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