Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (13 page)

Scott’s other Princeton friends, all wealthy, were more interested
in intellectual and literary excellence than in social aspirations. They included Alexander McKaig, Townsend Martin and Montgomery’s Lawton Campbell, who became frequent visitors of the Fitzgeralds in their early married days, and John Biggs Jnr, who became a lifelong friend of both Fitzgeralds and who occupied a special place later in Zelda’s life.

Wilson, a virgin, was like Scott painfully shy about sex. Bishop and McKaig were womanizers. One anecdote locates Fitzgerald, Wilson, McKaig and Bishop strolling down Nassau Street when two girls known to McKaig as ‘hookers’ passed them. Instantly he and Bishop rushed after them leaving Scott and Bunny flummoxed. Scott remarked prudishly: ‘That’s one thing Fitzgerald’s never done!’
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Scott’s fiction during this period is marked by the same caution about sex. His heroes have a puritanical restraint. Girls are lightly kissed by men who see a mere kiss as a commitment to an engagement. Once he uses Zelda as his role model, Scott’s heroines emulate her spirited self-centredness: men are women’s prey. Even in his apprentice work Scott’s female characters illustrate these role reversals. In ‘The Debutante’ (1917) Helen, his selfish protagonist, said that she enjoyed controlling situations though it became tedious being in charge. Helen was stimulated by chasing men but when they responded she enjoyed it less.

In ‘Babes in the Woods’, written in 1917, Scott’s college freshman courts Isabella, a 16-year-old ‘speed’, grants her the right to destroy him, waits for her high-handed ‘mask to drop off, but at the same time did not question her right to wear it’.
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Scott’s quintessential theme of the gifted man ruined by a selfish woman had begun. The Fitzgerald heroine was the writer’s inspiration so long as she was unattainable.

When Scott finally met Zelda in 1918 he came face to face with the woman of his early fiction.

Scott’s real-life bid for social favours mirrored his fictional seesaw. Each social success at Princeton was followed by an academic catastrophe. He was made a member of Cottage, Princeton’s prestigious eating club,
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joined the
Tiger’
s
editorial board in 1915, his stories appeared in the
Nassau
Lit
and he became Triangle’s secretary for 1915–16, writing the lyrics for
Fie!
Fie!
Fi-Fi!,
a much vaunted Triangle show. However when he tried to build on this by writing lyrics and offering to play a beautiful showgirl in Bunny Wilson’s production
The
Evil
Eye,
which he hoped would lead him to the prize of Triangle President, he failed yet again. His scholastic
record was so appalling he was made ineligible for the Triangle show tour, which would have included his solo performance in drag, and for the Presidency.

His Ledger registered the words ‘Drunk’, ‘Passed Out at Dinner’, ‘Drunk’, with tedious regularity. His habit of using alcohol to console himself for failure was one with which Zelda would grow increasingly bored and angry during their romance. She saw it as it was: a sign of terminal weakness.

It was not drunkenness however but a sickness diagnosed as malaria (which he preferred to think of as tuberculosis) which forced Scott to withdraw from Princeton on 3 January 1916. The University tagged his exit with the label ‘withdrawn for scholastic deficiencies’ but Scott successfully nagged the authorities for a letter saying he had left voluntarily on grounds of ill-health. Twenty years later, writing up his miseries for a
Crack-Up
essay, he said: ‘I had lost every single thing I wanted … and that night was the first time I hunted down the spectre of womanhood’, his classy name for the prostitute he had earlier ignored.
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But there was yet more to lose.

Over Christmas 1914 in St Paul, Scott had attended a party given by Marie Hersey for her friend Ginevra King, a strikingly beautiful sixteen-year-old socialite from Lake Forest, Illinois. Ginevra, as dark and brown-eyed as Zelda was fair, but neither as daring nor as dashing, like Marie was at Westover Girls’ School in Connecticut from where she dated a string of Ivy League conquests. For Scott she had a magical glory, was rich and radiant, became his winter dream, his summer evanescence. She accepted Scott’s usual invitation for a next-day date, after which, utterly in love, he wrote daily, sent telegrams, whizzed her to the Ritz in New York, invited her to Princeton. During a two-year courtship there was ever-growing ardour on his side and ever-growing indifference on hers. Slowly, painfully, he recognized that Ginevra, ‘infinitely rare and to be marvelled at’,
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never asked him to Westover and was courted by men in a far superior social set. At her Lake Forest home in August 1916 he was made aware that poor boys should not think of marrying a girl ‘whose voice is full of money’.
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One of Scott’s oddest ideas – yet one that appealed to Zelda – had been to try and impress Ginevra by his performance as a glamorous showgirl in the tour of
The
Evil
Eye.
When he became ineligible to perform, he had to make do with his posed publicity stills, which were carried by newspapers around the country including the
New
York
Times.
There he was in blond wig, elegant off-the-shoulder
gown, lace picture hat, diaphanous stole, carrying flowers, looking every inch as feminine as Ginevra herself. He received fan letters from men who wanted to date him and an agent offered to book him a vaudeville tour as a female impersonator.

Zelda, who revelled in outrageousness, would probably have posed with him attired in a gentleman’s suit. But not Ginevra.

With his new love waning, Scott significantly mailed his thirteen-year-old sister Annabel, at convent school, a long letter that was in essence a charm course on how to get and keep men. He advised her on conversation, couture and cosmetics, how to sit, move and above all how to listen: ‘Boys like to talk about themselves.’
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He told Annabel that Ginevra was a specialist in how to gaze at a beau effectively: mouth drooping, head hanging slightly, wide-open eyes fixed on the man in question. What he didn’t tell Annabel was that the pathetic appealing look he advocated was the one he had used on his publicity photos!

Scott made even better use of his advice to his sister. He dressed up in women’s clothes, sneaked a powder compact in the top of his blue stocking, accompanied a male friend to a fraternity hop at Minnesota University, danced his way through the evening with several eligible bachelors and was not unmasked until he had to go to the men’s room.

Scott returned to Princeton in September 1916 to repeat his junior year. Though he invited Ginevra to the Yale game that November she had lost interest in him. In January she broke with him, broke his heart, then announced her engagement to the wealthy Ensign William Hamilton Mitchell, and finally entered Scott’s world of fiction as the rich unobtainable heroine. By another fortuitous coincidence Mitchell, a good-looking young aviator, was able to harden up Scott’s most consistent symbol: the aviator risking death.
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Scott kept all Ginevra’s letters and typed and bound them into a book. Ginevra thought his letters were clever, bulky but unimportant. She destroyed them in 1917.

However, the loss of Ginevra and his multitude of failures did wonders for his fiction. It grew up, had a new resonance, hinted at power.

America entered the war, Scott’s friends joined up, he took his exams for the army and received his commission on 26 October 1917. There seemed nothing left in his life except to read more good books and think about writing one. Thus it was in his first Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he started ‘The Romantic Egotist’, which he sent to Shane Leslie who had offered to
show it to his publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons. Leslie corrected the grammar and spelling and sent a covering letter suggesting that Scott was a prose Rupert Brooke. ‘Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed, it will also have a commercial value.’
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Instead of getting killed Scott met Zelda Sayre in July 1918 while Scribner’s were still considering his manuscript. On 19 August Scribner’s rejected it, overruling the enthusiasm of Max Perkins who would soon become Scott’s editor and most loyal friend. Scott rapidly revised it but in October Perkins sent another rejection. Scott captioned the telegram ‘The end of a dream’ and stuck it in his scrapbook. Meanwhile he had posted Zelda one of the chapters telling her ‘the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four’.
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It was a sharper wooing line than even those Scott had recommended to Annabel. The fact that he cautioned Zelda to secrecy about the chapter appealed to her sense of mystery. She elevated him to her top beau. The myth reports that Zelda and Scott fell in love at first sight. Not at all. On 4 September Ginevra King got married.
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Three days later Scott entered these serious words in his Ledger: ‘Fell in love on the 7th.’ Scott had been unable to offer Ginevra anything she did not have or could not acquire. But Zelda wanted to escape from the claustrophobia of Montgomery gripped by its past. With Scott she saw a chance of a life in New York – though for that she needed the conditions to be right.