Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (24 page)

Zelda, seven months pregnant and steadily gaining weight, arrived with Scott at St Paul, Minnesota, in August 1921. ‘There were the Indian forests and the moon on the sleeping porch and I was heavy and afraid of the storms.’
1
She felt acutely miserable in the cold North that seemed perpetually wet. Everywhere she looked she saw water, for Minnesota lives up to its Sioux name ‘land of sky-tinted water’. Now-extinct glaciers had gouged out more than 15,000 lakes, so that with the major rivers running along the eastern and western borders 95 per cent of its population live within ten minutes of a body of water. Abundant waterways and dense forests made it an ideal breeding ground for beavers and muskrats, ensuring that fur-trading, fishing and lumbering flourished from the sixteenth century.

When Zelda arrived with Scott, St Paul had grown from a frontier outpost to great prominence.
2
From 1870 the railroads that augmented river craft had used St Paul as a railhead, so Zelda saw a significant example of the continuing transformation of America from a rural to an urban culture, from a society based on breeding and inherited wealth to one built up by salaried executives with images fostered through the new advertising industry, in which several of the Fitzgeralds’ circle worked. Though St Paul is a beautiful city, Zelda saw it permeated by Ibsenesque melancholy and perpetual chill. Its lack of ancestral roots felt alien. St Paul
was
only a three-generation town – though proud of the fact, like the town in Scott’s ‘The Ice Palace’ where ‘everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don’t go … Our grandfathers … founded the place, and … had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the founding.’
3
When Scott’s Irish emigrant grandfather, Philip Francis McQuillan, settled in St Paul in 1857, the Minnesota Territory was only in its eighth year. As it expanded, with a speculative boom that attracted 500 immigrants a day, McQuillan prospered by trading his first ‘queer job’ of bookkeeping for, in Zelda’s view, the more peculiar one of wholesale grocery.
Scott, the grocer’s grandson, always retained a homey feeling about St Paul. Later he wrote to his former sweetheart Marie Hersey that ‘in spite of a fifteen year absence, it is still home to me’.
4
Zelda, the grocer’s granddaughter-in-law, never saw St Paul as home, not least because Scott had a shared history with Marie Hersey from which she was excluded. Marie and Scott, dancing partners at Professor Baker’s dancing class, had acted together in the Elizabethan Dramatic Club and in 1915 Marie had accompanied Scott to a Triangle Club dance.

There were other things, too, that made Zelda feel left out.

In Montgomery, the Sayres’ social standing had assured Zelda’s place. In New York, Scott’s overnight fame had given them access to a highly regarded artistic milieu. But in St Paul, though there
was
a high society, it was created by business executives rather than landowning aristocrats familiar to Zelda. Most of those Northerners found Zelda’s Southernness alien. The first Northern woman Zelda met from that society, and the only one she liked, was Scott’s school-friend Xandra Kalman, now twenty-three, who though a Catholic had in 1917 married the divorced wealthy banker Oscar Kalman, twenty-five years her senior. As soon as the Fitzgeralds arrived at the end of August 1921, the Kalmans found them a rented house
5
in Dellwood, a rich resort on White Bear Lake ten miles north-east of St Paul where they spent the summer.

‘All the people came who liked to play golf or sail on the lake,’ wrote Zelda, ‘or who had children to shelter from the heat. All the young people came whose parents had given them for wedding presents white bungalows hid in the green – and all the old people who liked the flapping sound of the water.’ When Zelda described those ‘summer people’ she admitted her contradictory feelings of safety and ensnarement. The visitors lived in ‘long, flat cottages … so covered by screened verandas that they made you think of small pieces of cheese under large meat safes.’
6

Like Scott’s sister Annabel, Xandra had attended the Visitation Convent School, in her case from 1906 until 1912, and like Scott himself had joined Professor Baker’s dancing class
7
and the Elizabethan dramatic group. The Kalmans frequently invited the Fitzgeralds to their large summer home in Dellwood. Scott, having known the couple for years, did not need to impress them and Xandra’s warmth meant that Zelda unfurled and became less aloof. Zelda called Xandra Sandy; they swam regularly together and played golf. ‘I was one of the few women that Zelda got close to,’ Xandra said. ‘We were together practically every day.’
8

Xandra and Zelda, alike in their frank direct manner, also had similar backgrounds. Xandra came from one of St Paul’s most notable families. Her New Yorker great-grandfather Aaron Goodrich, who had become one of Tennessee’s most prominent lawyers and legislators, was appointed by President Zachary Taylor as Minnesota’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice in 1849. Like her great-grandfather Xandra was clever, energetic, artistic and highly organized. She inherited her wide-ranging knowledge from her grandfather, Canadian Daniel A. Robertson, who in 1850 served as a delegate to the Ohio constitutional convention, was a colonel in the Minnesota State militia, and as a lawyer and scholar served in Minnesota’s legislature before becoming mayor of St Paul in 1860 and three years later its sheriff.
9
From her father, William C. Robertson, who was in real estate and finance, she learnt sound business sense. She and Oscar instantly took charge of the Fitzgeralds.

But when Zelda left the Kalmans and the lake and drove into St Paul, everywhere she looked she saw Scott’s footprints.

Walking with Scott along prestigious Summit Avenue, whose towering elms, leaded glass windows, stone façades and pillars make it one of America’s best surviving examples of Victorian Boulevard architecture, she knew that Scott, Marie and their circle had played outside 475, Marie’s family house, or near 623, where Scott’s widowed grandmother Louisa McQuillan had lived.
10

In a small triangular park bordering Summit, Scott had played touch football with several boys now active in St Paul’s literary life. Thomas Boyd, a columnist with
St
Paul
Daily
News,
immediately interviewed the returned celebrity and persuaded him to write book reviews. Other newspapers played up the arrival of his bride. A charming photo headlined ‘Bride On First Visit to St Paul’ shows Zelda’s hawk-like profile looking pensive.

As Boyd was a partner in the Kilmarnock Book Store at 84 East 4th Street, Scott spent free afternoons with him and his writer wife Peggy Woodward, catching up on literary gossip. Scott, in his role as talent scout, generously encouraged Scribner’s to publish both Boyd and Woodward. Scott was less generous (or consistent) about the phenomenal success of
Main
Street
(1920) by the other local hero, Sinclair Lewis, who lived on Summit and who with visiting novelist Joseph Hergesheimer made up this tight-knit literary circle. Scott’s respectable bestseller
This
Side
of
Paradise
achieved 49,000 copies in its first year, compared with
Main
Street’
s
phenomenal 300,000 copies. Though Scott wrote to Lewis that it was the best
American novel so far, to critic Burton Rascoe he wrote, ‘Main Street is rotten.’
11
However, now they were all St Paul literary boys together, rivalry was temporarily forgotten.

Zelda, not one of the boys, was seldom included in their afternoon club. Instead she read widely and hardly drank. Possibly influenced by meeting Galsworthy, she devoured his novels. Max Perkins sent her
To
Let.
‘[I]t makes our Galsworthy so complete’, Zelda answered immediately, ‘that we’re both quite impressed with the long line of purple books – I don’t do much but read so I’m awfully glad you sent it to me – We are quite popular out here and are enjoying our importance and temperance … but I’m homesick for Fifth Ave.’
12

Meeting Scott’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, and his sister Annabel for the first time did little to reduce her homesickness. All three Fitzgeralds unendingly exhibited ‘Minnesota niceness’.
13
Zelda, though appreciative, felt she had nothing in common with them. She told Sara Mayfield they had neither Southern charm nor New York sophistication, that Mollie Fitzgerald was badly dressed and painfully eccentric while Scott’s father with his cane, flowing cravats and Vandyke beard struck her as an ineffectual cardboard figure from a bygone age.

Annabel, born in 1901 in Syracuse, New York, was like her parents a staunch member of St Paul’s Catholic community, in whose Visitation Convent School Annabel had been enrolled from 1909 to 1913. Zelda saw her as a conventional convent girl who even returned as an adult to the convent for retreats. Annabel tried to be helpful to her sassy new sister-in-law but never saw her as a friend.

It came as a relief to the family as well as to Zelda when she and Scott settled into the young married circle who attended the White Bear Yacht Club, the University Club, the Town and County Club, and the Minnesota Club which held dances, discussion groups and golf tournaments. Zelda
,
secure in her friendship with the Kalmans, once again disturbed the peace. She smoked on the back platforms of trolleys, commented out loud at the movies, outraged young men who danced with her by whispering flirtatiously: ‘My hips are going wild; you don’t mind do you?’
14
At that time pregnant women were expected to remain discreet if not to hide away. Though 1921 was the first year that American women enjoyed full voting rights, Zelda’s bold behaviour shocked Scott’s community.

To her horror Scott began to notice and comment on her increasing weight. In his September Ledger he described her as ‘helpless’ because of her extra pounds. In December his Ledger again tartly
recorded ‘Zelda’s weight’ alongside a mention of ‘cottillion’ dances and bobsleigh rides which she was now more self-conscious about attending. Without her slim figure Zelda felt like ‘Alabama nobody’.
15

Completely unprepared for the birth, she depended heavily on Xandra, who bought diapers, bassinet, cot, bathtub, booked doctor, nurse, hospital room, even a nanny, and made Zelda laugh at the bizarre baby business. Zelda wanted Xandra, her first woman friend since leaving Montgomery, to be her baby’s godmother, but Fitzgerald family intervention foiled this plan and Annabel was chosen. But neither this nor any subsequent setback disrupted Zelda’s lifelong friendship with the Kalmans, documented by the massive file of letters between them.
16

The Fitzgeralds had rented the Dellwood house for a year, but in October 1921 they were asked to leave because their landlord claimed they had damaged the plumbing. They moved downtown to the Commodore, an apartment hotel near the Kalmans’ lavish residence on Summit, to await the birth.

On 26 October 1921, in the Miller Hospital, Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald was delivered. It was a hard long labour. Xandra said ‘Scott kept popping in and out of the delivery room jotting things down in the little notebook he always carried. When I asked him what he’d hurriedly scrawled during Zelda’s labor, he replied: “‘Help!’ and ‘Jesus Christ!’” When I asked why he wrote it down he said, “I might use it some time!”’
17

Scott, told to wait outside the delivery room, threatened to kill himself if Zelda died. When he discovered suicide was unnecessary he collected his pencil, notebook and wits and, as Zelda emerged faint from the anaesthetic, coldly recorded her first comments: ‘Oh God, goofo, I’m drunk.
18
Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart – she has the hiccups. I hope it’s beautiful and a fool – a beautiful little fool.’ Zelda ruefully acknowledged that her own life might have been simpler if she had been less sharp.

Two years later Scott coolly recycled her remark in
The
Great
Gatsby,
when Daisy says about the birth of
her
daughter: ‘“I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”’
19

Zelda never forgot Scott’s detachment.

The security Zelda gained from her father’s protection meant she had never acquired necessary protective mechanisms. This had contributed to her belief that those close to her held her best interests. This episode with Scott was the first of several dents in that belief.

Zelda’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan said: ‘The little girl was called Scottie and was no fool. Zelda named her Bonnie in
Save
Me
The
Waltz.
Scott called her Honoria in “Babylon Revisited”. She arrived in her parents’ lives not only as a baby whose life they scripted, but as an artist’s model with a fictitious persona and a fictitious world they invented as they went along.’
20

Zelda, initially disappointed about the sex of the baby, within days wrote to Ludlow: ‘She is awfully cute, and I am very devoted to her.’
21

Scott telegrammed everyone:
‘LILLIAN GISH IS IN MOURNING CON
STANCE TALMADGE IS A BACK NUMBER AND A SECOND MARY PICKFORD HAS
ARRIVED
.’
22

Minnie Sayre behaved just like the mother in Zelda’s
Save
Me
The
Waltz
: ‘“My blue-eyed baby has grown up. We are so proud.”’
23
Zelda, now a mother in Minnesota, missed the slow creak of her garden swing. She missed the rusty croaking of the frogs in the cypress swamps. She felt strongly that ‘home’ was still Montgomery.

Zelda did not lose weight or self-consciousness. ‘Scottie was born and we went to all the Christmas parties and a man asked Sandy “who is your fat friend?”’
24