Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (14 page)

Zelda threw herself into their courtship, playing the Deep South baby doll. Letters using the Southern Belles’ courtly code winged their way to Scott:

‘Nothing means anything except your darling self’ … ‘Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a button hole boquet’ … ‘Sweetheart I want to always be a help.’
1

Those lines offer some evidence that her mother’s training in femininity had at least reached Zelda’s pen if not her intentions, but in case they were insufficient to impress Scott with the strength of her desire, Zelda outdid herself with this line:

‘I’m all I’ll ever be without you – and there’s so much more room for growth – with you – all my mental faculties are paralysed with loving you – and wanting you for mine.’
2

Her mental faculties of course were far from paralysed. She ended that letter briskly with a description of a helpless movie heroine who had stimulated her scorn for the way ‘most women regard themselves as helpless’.
3

Although in love with Scott, she preserved a wry detachment. ‘Being in love’, she wrote later, ‘… is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure,… another chance in life.’
4

The couple held hands in pine groves and discussed poetry and seduction. But in wartime, loving Scott was not Zelda’s only interest. She was preparing a war benefit ballet and according to Sara Haardt they danced all night, then spent every day working for the Red Cross. When Sara and Zelda talked about it later Zelda said: ‘Some of the older girls … thought that because we talked so much we of the younger generation would never get any work done, but we sold more tags
5
and folded more bandages than all the rest … It was as if we were possessed with an insatiable vitality.’
6

In October 1918 Scott received orders to go North, after which he hoped he would be sent to France. Zelda resisted his attempts to pressure her into commitment before he left. She was cautious of throwing in her lot with an insecure unpublished writer. A Southern Belle’s expectation was rarely love on a budget; but more significantly, Zelda despised weakness. She needed Scott to feel
realisti
cally
self-confident before
she
could feel secure about leaving her safe Southern world. Later, Scott rewrote and simplified Zelda’s viewpoint until it became an avaricious girl’s refusal to marry until the beau attained New York success. But at the time he knew Zelda’s stand was consistent with her refusal to compromise on her desires. ‘Here is my heart’ were his last words before leaving.
7
Zelda would remember them until her death.

‘Zelda was cagey about throwing in her lot with me before I was a money-maker …’ Scott wrote later. ‘She was young and in a period where any exploiter or middle-man seemed a better risk than a worker in the arts.’
8

Rosalind later wrote to Sara Mayfield: ‘I do not believe that Zelda’s hesitancy about marrying Scott was prompted by any mercenary motive … it was rather her uncertainty about the wisdom of leaving her known world for a strange new one that restrained her.’
9

Rosalind’s analysis seems accurate. Despite her dashing ways Zelda had a tense uncertain side of which Scott appeared unaware, even though he had criticized her nervous habit of biting the skin on her lips. She needed the rock-solid protection of her family and community in order to rebel.

Zelda had a remarkable understanding of the way in which Scott inextricably linked his attitude to money with his attitude to her.

‘There’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love‚’ she wrote. ‘All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me – less and less.’ She reassured him that money did not matter, whilst acknowledging that if she was not adorned like a material girl he would think less of her.
10

Years later Scott would admit that he had ‘never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at some time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl’.
11

In Camp Mills, Long Island, as Scott anxiously waited to be posted, the Armistice was signed. Disappointed at not getting overseas he went on a drinking marathon, missing his unit’s sober
departure for Montgomery. However when the troop train pulled into Washington, there, sitting on a baggage truck with two girls and a bottle, was Scott. He told Zelda he had commandeered a locomotive on the plea that he was a courier with papers for the White House.
12
Zelda listened with amusement as another Fitzgerald fabrication passed into legend.

Her family neither encouraged the match nor took it seriously. Though there was Southern anti-Catholic feeling, the Episcopalian Sayres had become less opposed to Scott’s Yankee Catholicism than to his lack of money and future prospects. Scott had not graduated, had no real career and drank too much. The Judge, seriously ill for nine months with ‘nervous prostration’, was not at his most tolerant, so when Zelda said Scott was sweet her father curtly replied: ‘He’s never sober.’
13

Scott’s harshest critics were Minnie and Rosalind, who both felt strongly that their Southern Baby needed more protection than Scott offered. Later Rosalind would hold Scott and the Southern uprooting largely responsible for Zelda’s breakdowns.

For years Scott, ill at ease with the socially skilled Sayres, bitterly resented their judgemental opposition, particularly Minnie’s. He retaliated by accusing Minnie of poor parenting: ‘For a long time I hated
her
mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit – nothing but “getting by” and conceit.’
14

That Zelda, surrounded by beaux,
did
seem able to get by made him despair. She swam with boys in icy spring waters, she and Eleanor Browder formed a syndicate to buddy ‘more college boys than Solomon had wives’
15
and she irritated Scott by retelling her mother’s tales of penniless young authors turned out on dark stormy nights. Zelda’s lack of faith in him provoked quarrels.

In December 1918 Scott wrote to a confidante that he was determined not to marry Zelda. But determined though he was he had to acknowledge that Zelda was extraordinary.
16

That is the only evidence that Scott ever seriously tried to give up Zelda. But within two weeks, his resolve weakened. He wrote the bold word ‘Love’ in his Ledger before once more falling into it, this time decisively. ‘The most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided.’
17

They spent romantic hours in restaurants, at vaudeville at the Grand Theatre, anywhere they could be alone and hold hands. Several biographers suggest they went further than holding hands.
18

Scott wrote in retrospect that Christmas 1918 at the Sayres was a
time of Zelda’s ‘sexual recklessness’
19
, though this is questionable. One piece of evidence is a note pinned to Scott’s 1934 ‘Count of Darkness’ Philippe stories: ‘After yielding [she] holds Philippe at bay like Zelda + me in summer 1917’. However Scott and Zelda had not yet met at that point so Scott’s memory appears to be faulty.
20

Stronger evidence points to the date being spring or summer 1919 when Zelda’s letters have a heightened sensual intimacy.
21
They may have made love in April 1919 on one of Scott’s three trips to Montgomery from New York where, trying to make sufficient money to marry Zelda, he lived in one room and worked as a copywriter for the Barron Collier advertising agency.
22
At this time in a letter to Scott Zelda wrote these subtly passionate lines: ‘Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth – and I want to be married soon – soon – Lover – Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic – You ought to know.’
23

Whatever date is assigned to their lovemaking, it was a brief sexual experiment after which Zelda again held back.

On 9 January 1919 Scott had a premonitory seizure of trembling; neither Scott nor Zelda knew why. The following day, Scott learnt that his mentor Monsignor Fay had died. After Fay’s death Scott had no further supernatural experiences though he continued to scatter them through his fiction. His Catholicism also died with Fay. Scott indicates that Zelda replaced the influence of Fay and the Church. ‘Zelda’s the only God I have left now‚’ he wrote on 26 February.
24

During the spring Scott wrote nineteen stories and received 122 rejections with which he papered his walls, hoping that when he became famous biographers would relish and retell that story. Indeed they do.

Zelda was given the star part of Folly in the April Folly Ball held by
Les
Mystérieuses,
a society of prominent Montgomery girls and matrons. Minnie and Rosalind had written the play which preceded the complex ballet. Zelda sent Scott a photo of herself amongst the roses in Minnie’s backyard, poised on tiptoe in her black and gold costume trimmed with tiny bells. In an auditorium decorated with baskets of sunshine roses entwined with gold and black ribbons that matched her Folly outfit, Zelda expertly performed intricate sequences. Her ethereal beauty haunted the audience long after she stopped dancing.

Her practice had not been without pain. In March she had written to Scott: ‘Your feet – that you liked so much – are ruined. I’ve been toe-dancing again and nearly broke my right foot … The doctor is
trying … but they’ll always look ugly.’
25
Curiously, Scott too had a strange view of his naked feet, which since his youth had been a source of erotic shame.

Zelda and her schoolfriend Livye Hart also performed in the Seague Musical. Irritatingly, she told Scott one actor was so impressed he ‘tried to take me and Livye on the road with him’.
26
When dancing, she assured Scott, she felt ‘self-reliant’.
27

Though Livye and Eleanor shared Zelda’s dance life, other friends were taking new directions. Katharine Elsberry, who had initially moved North with her wartime bridegroom, bore a son, and returned to Alabama where Zelda frequently visited her and the baby. With no support beyond her family’s generosity, Katharine became a dental receptionist and the first divorcee of Zelda’s set to do work other than schoolteaching.
28

At Goucher College Sara Haardt was encouraged by her English instructor Harry T. Baker to write short stories that would soon be noticed by the literary critic H. L. Mencken.
29
Since October 1914 Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan had been co-editing
The
Smart
Set.
30
Both Sara and Scott submitted some early stories. Mencken initially rejected Sara’s stories until he met her in 1923, when he published ‘Joe Moore and Callie Balsingame’, the tale of a Montgomery girl and boy who grew up in the neighbourhood where she and Zelda met their beaux. When Scott revised and submitted his 1917
Nassau
Lit
story ‘Babes in the Woods’ Mencken published it in 1919. At $30 this became Scott’s first and only commercial sale that year. Immediately he bought himself a pair of white flannels and knowing her love of finery, a luxury for Zelda. One story suggests it was ‘moon-shiny’ pajamas in which Zelda felt ‘like a Vogue cover’ and wished Scott’s pajamas ‘were touching’.
31
Another suggests it was a magenta fan with ‘those wonderful, wonderful feathers [that] are the most beautiful things on earth’.
32

Throughout their separation in spring 1919 they wrote constantly. Zelda seldom dated her letters scrawled in her large ‘sun-burned, open-air looking script’.
33
Her punctuation was restricted to a series of dashes and a scattering of exclamation marks.

Zelda pasted Scott’s telegrams into her scrapbook as they held a certain glamour. But (like Ginevra) she did not keep any of Scott’s letters. Zelda wasn’t sentimental.

Scott, who constantly catalogued, classified and preserved, did keep Zelda’s letters. Every one of them. He wasn’t sentimental either. He knew they would come in useful.

Take the letter Zelda wrote to him after one of her visits to Oakwood Cemetery.

Zelda had been moved by thoughts of long-dead passions.

Zelda’s letters at nineteen were remarkable for their sensitivity to place and her visualization of her emotions. Unlike Scott, she wrote spontaneously without regard for audience or effect. Her letters are significant because for two important years before they married we see Zelda, a frivolous, loving, acutely sharp woman, through her own words and eyes rather than through Scott’s.

To Scott the letters were a gift in more ways than one. He inserted Zelda’s graveyard description into the penultimate page of
This
Side
of
Paradise,
which he had been rewriting in summer 1919. His editorial acumen assured him there was little need to alter Zelda’s words.