Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (15 page)

Zelda never revealed her reaction to this plagiarism. Young, in love with love, riding high on excitement, still professionally uncertain, she was probably more flattered by the attention paid to her words than offended at their appropriation.

Zelda trusted Scott enough to show him her personal diary.
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He found it so extraordinary that he borrowed it for several months. In an act of betrayal he loaned it to Peevie Parrott, after telling him intimate details of his affair with Zelda. Parrott reported: ‘As you say, it is a very human document, but somehow I cannot altogether understand it … It is hard for me to picture it [love] anywhere but in a book.’ Parrott, like Scott,
did
picture Zelda’s
diary
in a book, and thought it worth publishing.

Parrott, Zelda, Scott and all subsequent biographers agree on that first stage of the diary’s travels. There are however several versions about the next stage.

Sara Mayfield said that in late 1918 Scott, ‘with the diary in hand’, accompanied by Wilson and Bishop, besieged Mencken’s co-editor, the critic and writer George Jean Nathan, in his Royalton apartment, where Scott, who ‘proposed to turn Zelda’s journal into a novelette called “The Diary of a Popular Girl”, asked Nathan to read it’. Nathan immediately wanted to publish it and meet Zelda. According to Mayfield, Scott seemed keen, until Zelda broke off her engagement to him in June 1919, when, ‘in an embarrassing position in regard to publishing her diary … [he] quietly diverted it to his own purposes in
This
Side
of
Paradise.
’
37

Curiously, when Mayfield later wrote Zelda’s biography she revised the story. Scott, she says, had agreed to rewrite Zelda’s diary for Nathan as ‘The Journal of a Young Girl’ but withdrew from his verbal contract, realizing he could put the diary to better use.
38

One Fitzgerald biographer suggests that Scott had always intended to use Zelda’s letters and diary in his first novel
This
Side
of
Paradise,
to ensure his hero Amory Blaine’s affair with Rosalind Connage resembled his own affair with Zelda.
39
When Scott later sent his editor, Maxwell Perkins, a segment of his manuscript containing parts of Zelda’s diary, he confessed that much of the dialogue was Zelda’s.
40

Nathan himself recorded the episode quite differently for
Esquire
thirty-eight years later. His version does
not
implicate Scott as the instigator of the deal. On a visit to the married Fitzgeralds in Westport in 1920
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he wandered down to the cellar and ‘discovered’ Zelda’s diaries. He talks about them in the plural.
‘They
interested me so greatly that in my capacity as a magazine editor I later made
her an offer for
them
[author’s emphasis]. When I informed her husband, he said that he could not permit me to publish them since he had gained a lot of inspiration from them and wanted to use parts of them in his own novels and short stories, as for example “The Jelly Bean”.’
42

Evidence suggests there were several diaries, all of which Zelda seemed prepared to give to Scott. Certainly she offered no resistance to Scott’s high-handed refusal of Nathan’s offer. Zelda may not have realized at the time that through her silent acquiescence
her
literary property became and remained Scott’s.

What
is
known is that later Scott used diary extracts in
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
as well as in ‘The Jelly Bean’.

What is
not
validated is the view proposed by some that Scott, fearful of losing Zelda to a prosperous rival, was determined to win her by writing a successful novel in which he would express his love by including her diaries and portraying her character.
43
We have Scott’s fictional appropriations but we do
not
have Zelda’s diary or diaries. Perhaps in the course of the Fitzgeralds’ changing addresses they were accidentally mislaid or removed from public perusal, if not deliberately, at least conveniently.
44

Zelda, aware of the extent to which Scott drew on her writings and ideas, was led to try out some fiction herself. ‘Yesterday I almost wrote a book or a story‚’ she wrote Scott, ‘… but after two pages on my heroine I discovered that I hadn’t even started her, and, since I couldn’t just write forever about a charmingly impossible creature, I began to despair. “Vamping Romeo” was the name, and I guess a man would have had to appear somewhere before the end. But there wasn’t any plot, so I thought I’d ask you to decide what they’re going to do.’ She wished she had sufficient ambition to carry on but was ‘much too lazy to care whether it’s done or not’. At this stage she did not want to be ‘famous and feted’, but preferred to be ‘very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own – to live and be happy’, and (she added with unconscious irony) ‘die in my own way to please myself’.
45

She told Scott she hoped ‘I’ll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It’s so much nicer to be sure I could do it better than other people – and I might not … that, of cource, would break my heart.’
46
Already she had an insight into how much ambition could cost her.

During spring 1919 Scott posted Zelda an engagement ring which had belonged to his mother. ‘Scott Darling, it really is beautiful. Every time I see it on my finger I am rather startled – … but I love
to see this shining there so nice and white like our love – and it sorter says “Soon” to me all the time – Just sings it all day long.’
47

Zelda told him she hardly ever took off the ‘darling ring’ except to swim, but the truth was she hardly ever put it on. ‘She soon relegated it to her trophy box‚’ said Sara Mayfield, ‘because … to exhibit it flagrantly would have impeded her conquests.’
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Zelda’s letters swung Scott this way and that on a seesaw of emotion. She assured him of her love, then confessed to an escapade when she dressed in men’s clothes to have fun in the movies with a gang of boys, followed by a crazy drive ‘with ten boys to liven things up’.
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Protestations of everlasting passion compete with ‘amusing’ encounters with other beaux. Typically she tells Scott an ‘old flame from the Stone Ages is calling’ but remembers to add: ‘He’ll probably leave in disgust because I just must talk about you.’ By April 1919 Scott’s Ledger registers ‘hysteria’. Zelda stayed cool: ‘Scott, you’re really awfully silly – In the first place, I haven’t kissed anybody goodbye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place – … If I did have an honest – or dishonest – desire to kiss just one or two people, I might – but I couldn’t ever want to – my mouth is yours.’

Ruthlessly she continued: ‘But s’pose I did – Don’t you know it’d just be absolutely nothing – Why can’t you understand that nothing means anything except your darling self and your love – I wish we’d hurry and I’d be yours so you’d know.’
50

Scott wished he could keep Zelda locked up like a princess in a tower and told her so incessantly.
51
Finally in exasperation she responded: ‘I’m so damn tired of being told that you “used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers” – you’ve written that verbatim in your last six letters! … I know you love me, Darling, and I love you more than anything in the world, but if it’s going to be so much longer, we just can’t keep up this frantic writing.’
52

But when, to placate her, he paused, Zelda chastised him: ‘The only thing that carried me through a [trip to Auburn] … was the knowledge that I’d have a note from you when I got home – but I didn’t … I hate being disappointed day after day.’
53

Her view of Scott was piercingly accurate: ‘I know you’ve worried – and enjoyed doing it thoroughly … [but]
it’s all right
I rather hate to tell you that – I know it’s depriving you of an idea that horrifies and fascinates – you’re so morbidly exaggerative – Your mind dwells on things that don’t make people happy.’
54

What Zelda did not realize was that while besieging her with
attention and becoming infuriated at her flirtations, Scott was dating another three women.

The first was the curly-haired Montgomery Belle May Steiner. May, popular with officers, fitted the pattern of Fitzgerald’s lovers. Scott’s Ledger for 1918 testifies to May’s consistent appearances if not to the correct spelling of her name: July: ‘May Stiener. Zelda … May and I on the porch. Her visiting bows’. August: ‘Zelda and May’. In September there is no entry for May, presumably because he ‘fell in love [with Zelda] on the 7th’. But in October the Ledger again registers: ‘May Steiner. Reunion on 26th … left for North on 26th.’

Months later, May and Scott were still in contact. Zelda, unaware of Scott’s entanglement, told him in her chatty April 1919 letter that after a severe bout of Spanish ’flu ‘all her [May’s] beautiful hair came out’ so she was going to New York to have it treated and would phone Scott.
55
This was the hair admired by Scott, who was secretly aware of May’s impending visit.

May, who entered Zelda’s close-knit set when later she became Katherine Elsberry’s sister-in-law, also entered Scott’s fiction. Naturally he heightened their drama, so that in
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
(1922) May, as Dorothy Raycroft, has an affair with Anthony Patch (the Scott hero), who jilts her when she becomes seriously ill.

Zelda, unaware also of Scott’s romance with a second woman called Helen Dent,
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was more significantly kept in the dark about his brief but passionate affair in New York with Rosalinde Fuller, an English actress. Scott’s Ledger entry for October 1919 states: ‘Went to see Zelda. New York. Rosalind.’ Biographers have generally assumed this referred to Zelda’s sister, but it is more likely to have been Fuller.

Rosalinde, at twenty-seven four years Scott’s senior, was small, dark, with something of Ginevra’s pert attraction. Edmund Wilson later told Rosalinde that Scott had considered his sexual encounter with her to be ‘his first serious love affair’. At their first meeting at a Plaza Hotel party, Scott introduced himself, then suggested they leave at once. Unlike Zelda who refused late dates with fast workers, Rosalinde, an emancipated believer in free love, agreed immediately. Fitzgerald called a hansom cab, jumped his date inside, pulled a rug around their legs, and according to Rosalinde’s racy account ‘the clip-crop of the horse’s hoofs made a background to our discovery of each other’s bodies’.
57

In the cab Scott’s ‘eager hands’ felt ‘in warm secret places under
the old rug’. Once out of the hansom he met Rosalinde frequently for brief but intensely sexual assignations. Though in 1935 Scott told Tony Buttitta that he had had no sexual experience before Zelda, Rosalinde’s diary refutes this: ‘We made love everywhere, in theatre boxes, country fields, under the sun, moon and stars … no end to our delight and discovery of one another.’ Rosalinde temporarily succeeded in abolishing Fitzgerald’s sexual inhibitions.
58

Though Scott ceased to correspond with Rosalinde after their affair, its repercussions continued. The erotic hansom cab ride enters his fiction. His story ‘Myra Meets His Family’ (1920) includes the heroine’s romantic carriage ride up Fifth Avenue. In another 1920 story, ‘The Lees of Happiness’, his heroine Roxanne Milbank, known as the ‘Venus of the Hansom Cab’, was at least partly based on Rosalinde. In
The
Great
Gatsby
(1925) the narrator, Nick Carraway, chooses a hansom cab ride through Central Park in which to kiss Jordan Baker. In 1934 in
Tender
Is
The
Night,
Dick Diver (partly based on Scott) is in a Paris cab when he kisses Rosemary Hoyt, the young woman who comes between Dick and Nicole Diver (partly based on Zelda).

Whether Scott wished to retaliate for Zelda’s flirtatiousness or whether he wanted a final fling before marriage, he felt a ‘sense of shame at having let himself go so far in yielding to his physical proclivities’.
59
Curiously, Scott records no sense of shame about deceiving Zelda while berating her for what were, according to relevant Montgomery beaux, far less sexually explicit flirtations.

It is interesting to speculate on Zelda’s response had she known. She might well not have minded. For when Scott, attempting to make her jealous, dwelt on an attractive girl in New York, she parried with: ‘if she’s good-looking, and you want to, one bit – I know you could and love me just the same’.
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But what Zelda might have minded was his self-righteous deceit.

In June 1919 the climax to their roller-coaster romance came with Zelda’s involvement with Perry Adair, an Atlanta golfer. Invited by him to the Georgia Tech dance, she returned home wearing a fraternity pin as a sign of their commitment. Realizing she had gone too far, she returned his fraternity pin with a warm note. Unfortunately, possibly by mistake, possibly not, she sent Adair a letter to Scott and posted Scott the note to the golfer. Fitzgerald was incensed and told her to cease writing to him.
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