Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (21 page)

Early in their friendship, Van Vechten noticed Scott’s inability to hold alcohol. ‘He could take two or three drinks at most and be completely drunk … he was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man.’ What he noticed about Zelda was her uniqueness. ‘She was an original … she tore up the pavements with sly remarks … She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.’
37

Van Vechten summed up how friends saw the Fitzgeralds in his novel
Parties,
where David and Rilda Westlake, modelled on the Fitzgeralds, ‘love each other desperately, passionately. They [cling] to each other like barnacles cling to rocks, but they want to hurt each other all the time.’
38
Rilda influences most of David’s behaviour: he acts only to aggravate or to please her. One complaint of Rilda’s to David shows genuine insight into the Fitzgeralds’ bond: ‘Our damned faithfulness … our clean “fidelity”, doesn’t get us very far. We follow each other around in circles, loving and hating and wounding. We’re both so sadistic.’
39
Van Vechten has even replicated Zelda’s use of ‘clean’ to imply sexual purity.

Certainly Scott and Zelda were intensely jealous of each other.
Zelda felt excluded by the literary attention he received; Scott felt excluded by the male admiration she received. Before their marriage Scott had confided to Wilson that ‘I wouldn’t care if she [Zelda] died, but I couldn’t stand to have anybody else marry her.’
40

The rising tensions between the Fitzgeralds often exploded into heated disputes which either began in Westport, continued on the New Haven train and were sustained at friends’ Manhattan apartments, or began in New York and were maintained on the train journey home.

Alex McKaig, who that August had returned to reporting the Fitzgeralds’ activities in his diary, recorded one row he witnessed on 15 September 1920: ‘In the evening Zelda – drunk – having decided to leave Fitzgerald & having nearly been killed walking down RR track, blew in. Fitz came shortly after.’
41
Sara Mayfield takes up the story. ‘Fitzgerald had boarded the train without money or a ticket. The conductor threatened to throw him off but finally let him stay when Scott promised to pay him upon his arrival in Westport. After Scott tore into Zelda for walking the tracks, she refused to give him the money for his ticket, and they joined in a verbal battle that was to continue intermittently for two decades.’
42
McKaig’s judgement was: ‘Fitz should let Zelda go and not run after her … he is afraid of what she may do in a moment of caprice.’
43

After this incident Zelda wrote Scott a letter which Mayfield considered a typical ‘passionate reconciliation’:

Though the letter idealizes the incident it also reveals Zelda’s dependency, an emotion that would have surprised their friends.

If readers of Fitzgerald’s novels who have never read Zelda’s letters find this particular note familiar, it is because Scott reproduced it almost word for word in
The
Beautiful
and
Damned.
Zelda herself had no idea that Scott had used both the episode and her exact words until she saw the published version of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
in 1922.
45
She bit back her shock and, unable at the time to voice her resentment over this appropriation, later did express her increasing discontent with her status as Scott’s assistant-wife. In
Caesar’s
Things
she immortalizes Scott as the painter Jacob: ‘Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did … He was more important than Janno; she always felt as if she should be helpful about his tinkerings; they were intricate enough to need an assistant. She didn’t really do anything but wait on his will. While Jacob painted she went to the hair-dresser and bought things … She stated and tabulated and compared the shoes of 42nd Street with the shoes of Upper Broadway.’
46
In 1920 Zelda felt shoe-shopping was insufficient for a young woman with brains, but still she hid her frustration while flirting wildly to arouse Scott’s jealousy.

She succeeded with George Jean Nathan, one witty constant visitor. Nathan, thirty-eight, short, dark and melancholic, was Scott’s model for the brilliantly original Maury Noble in
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
whom Scott compares to ‘a large slender and imposing cat’. Nathan, according to biographer James Mellow, was also a self-acknowledged chauvinist who preferred under-educated women. He tested a woman’s capabilities by asking her directions to Grand Central Station. ‘If her answer was 50 percent correct she was intelligent enough for normal use.’
47

Zelda, confident of her own intelligence, flattered by Nathan’s obvious interest, ignored this displeasing characteristic. Nathan soon addressed letters just to Zelda, beginning notes ‘Fair Zelda’ or ‘Dear Blonde’, signing them ‘Yours, for the Empire, A Prisoner of Zelda’.
48

Acknowledging the seriousness of Zelda’s addiction to chewing gum, Nathan wrote: ‘I am very sorry to hear that your husband is neglectful of his duties to you in the way of chewing gum. That is the way husbands get after five months of marriage.’
49

At one of Nathan’s excellent parties Zelda came to grief – typically when taking a bath. ‘At present, I’m hardly able to sit down owing to an injury sustained in the course of one of Nathan’s parties in N.Y.’, she reported to Ludlow Fowler. ‘I
cut
my
tail
on a broken bottle and can’t possibly sit on the three stitches that are in it now – The bottle was bath salts – I was boiled – The place was a tub somewhere.’
50

Scrutinizing Nathan’s bathroom, Zelda found other women’s golden hair in Nathan’s combs, then discovered to her chagrin that he spent time with at least two other ‘dear blondes’. One was Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos, the other Ruth Findlay, star of
The
Prince
and
the
Pauper,
a Mark Twain doppel-gänger tale of rags and royalty in sixteenth-century England.
51

Unabashed, Nathan continued their correspondence: ‘Dear Misguided Woman: Like so many uncommonly beautiful creatures, you reveal a streak of obtuseness. The calling of a husband’s attention to a love letter addressed to his wife is but part of a highly sagacious technique … It completely disarms suspicion … Why didn’t you call me up on Friday? Is it possible that your love is growing cold? Through the ages, George.’
52
By October Scott’s jealousy of Nathan temporarily cooled his friendship with him.
53

Despite annoying Scott, Nathan enabled them to meet Scott’s ‘current idol’,
54
the critic H. L. Mencken, who, disliking New York and its literati, only visited the
Smart
Set
offices for a few days once a month from his home in Baltimore. He would book in at the Algonquin, then nip over to Nathan’s suite at the Royalton or share a hearty German lunch and beer at Luchow’s nearby. At the end of July Nathan laid in three cases of gin then invited Scott and Zelda to a New York party at his Royalton apartment to meet Mencken. The critic was enchanted by Zelda, whom he called ‘the fair Madonna’,
55
but encountering the Fitzgeralds at their most extreme presented him with a challenge. All Mencken’s friends, according to his biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, led ‘sane, systematic lives, their own personal code of conduct, like Mencken’s, being based on the avoidance of extremes’.
56
Mencken recalls that in 1920, when he and Nathan gave cocktail parties, Zelda and Scott would drive over then, despite being drunk, to Mencken’s horror would insist on driving home.
57

Baltimore born, two years older than Nathan, with a squat face and hair plastered back and parted down the middle, Mencken could hardly be termed handsome. Yet in 1920 he had become one of America’s most eligible bachelors, well-known for such cynical remarks as ‘any man who marries after 30 is a damn fool’.
58
This light side, labelled The Bad Boy of Baltimore, contrasted with his serious side, tagged The Sage of Baltimore, which reflected his position as America’s most respected critic, journalist and editor. As the writer Sherwood Anderson said, receiving a letter from Henry Mencken felt ‘like being knighted by a king’.
59
Mencken at the time was the only person in the USA for whom Fitzgerald had complete admiration.

Though Mencken’s comments were feared by authors, remembering his own first rejections the Sage treated writers with courtesy. Zelda’s friend Sara Haardt who, after graduating from Goucher College, was now back in Montgomery teaching history at the Margaret Booth school, had already submitted several stories to the
Smart
Set
and had received several of Mencken’s gentle rejections. As Sara’s fiction focused on Southern culture she was not well disposed towards the Sage, who had recently labelled Alabama ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’, his teasing term for Beaux Arts.

Scott, being Northern, was better disposed than Sara to Mencken. He had already, in his own phrase, ‘bootlicked’ the great man, who would soon become one of his intellectual mentors, by sending him a flatteringly inscribed copy of
This
Side
of
Paradise
and by adopting some of Mencken’s positive views on Dreiser and Conrad.

Flappers
and
Philosophers,
Scott’s first volume of stories, which included ‘Benediction’ and ‘Dalyrimple’ already published by Mencken, came out on 10 September 1920, dedicated to Zelda.
60
He nervously awaited Mencken’s review.
61
Although it was a commercial success,
62
Mencken now publicly called attention to the split in Fitzgerald’s work between serious fiction and entertainment.
63
The Sage felt Scott had great talent but a suspect lifestyle, possibly influenced by Zelda’s extravagant tastes. Privately, he noticed Zelda’s enjoyment of money and Scott’s preoccupation with it: ‘His wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly.’
64

Scott wished to be a serious artist but he was drawn to money. He had been thrilled when in May 1920
Metropolitan
Magazine
had taken an option on his stories at $900 each while the
Saturday
Evening
Post
paid only $500.
65
High-paying popular magazines, however, wanted bland optimistic tales, while Scott’s real interest was in astringent satire or pessimistic fiction. Zelda, who could not see the profound difference between popular and literary fiction, was proud of him for making money from magazine stories. Whether this severe misjudgement was rooted in her lack of literary training or in her father’s disapproval of writers who could not pay their way, so that she assumed high fees were a sound criterion, is not clear.

Despite earning almost $20,000 that year, Scott owed $600 in outstanding bills and a further $650 to the Reynolds Agency.
66
In desperation he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, who also blamed Zelda for Scott’s financial crisis, for a loan. ‘She wanted everything,’ he complained.
67
Certainly, when Scott had been reduced to drawing steadily against future royalties for
This
Side
of
Paradise,
68
Zelda’s request
for a fur coat had not helped. Scott’s generosity meant they rapidly ran out of funds. His scheme of borrowing ahead from his publisher and agent had already established an insecure life pattern.

Though Zelda spent money easily, she had none of her own, and no bank account. Sara Mayfield felt Scott needed the power he gained from Zelda’s dependency but Zelda resented it. There is curious conflicting evidence. One anecdote suggests Zelda felt comfortable with the situation: she took Rosalind to lunch at the Plaza, pulled out a roll of banknotes the size of a baseball and said: ‘Scott gave it to me as I went out the door, so what else could I do with it but bring it along.’
69
But sometimes ‘money vanished mysteriously’.
70
In July 1920 Scott notes: ‘Zelda hides $500’, followed in November by: ‘Zelda hides $100 from Dorothy Parker.’
71
This suggests that Zelda was resentful both about her lack of independent finance and perhaps about Parker.

Their dire finances left Zelda in a quandary about Scott’s Christmas present. With habitual ingenuity she wrote to James Branch Cabell, enclosing her photo, saying that when trying to steal Nathan’s first edition of
Jurgens
as a Christmas present for her husband ‘under pretence of intoxication’, she had been foisted off with a fencing foil which she would gladly exchange for a copy of the book.
72
Cabell, highly amused, sent her an autographed copy.