Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (25 page)

She closeted herself with the baby, pasting into her scrapbook every ‘devoted mother and baby’ photograph taken by the St Paul newspapers. Meanwhile Scott produced short stories and a winter show for St Paul’s Junior League. When he invited friends home, Zelda would say: ‘You won’t come, will you? The baby wakes up and yells and the place is too small. We don’t want you.’ If Scott overheard he would say: ‘Zelda’s got this silly notion that we can’t have anyone in the place … you’ll come up, won’t you, and help me cure her of this idea.’
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But if they actually arrived, Zelda waved them away.

The only visitor Zelda consistently welcomed was Xandra, who came regularly for lunch or to play golf. Zelda pasted into her scrapbook a newscutting of them both outside the club house, under the headline ‘Society Women Compete in Golf Tournament’.
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Though Xandra had helped Zelda find a nanny, neither she nor Zelda was prepared for the tyrannical Anna Shirley, who acted like the baby’s warder. It was a dispiriting start to a series of bad relationships between Zelda and Scottie’s nannies.

In November 1921, again coming to their rescue, Xandra enabled them to lease the Victorian frame house at 626 Goodrich Avenue
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which belonged to Xandra’s parents, on vacation abroad. Zelda’s
homesickness increased as she rattled about with only the baby and Nanny for company, because that winter Scott rented a room downtown to work with a stenographer on revisions to
The
Beautiful
and
Damned.

Scott insisted on having the baby baptized a Catholic in the Visitation Convent chapel
28
and, never a precise chronologist, dates the baptism as November in his Ledger. But St Paul historical researcher Lloyd Hackl gives the date as 8 December 1921, borne out by the baptismal certificate which gives the baby’s sponsors’ names as Annabelle [
sic
]
Fitzgerald, Scott’s sister, and Joseph Barron, who officiated.
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The baby’s name is listed as Frances Scott Fitzgerald but on the birth certificate it appeared as Scotty.
30

Baptisms generally bring to mind pictures of attentive parents and friends gathered together solemnly.
This
baptism of Zelda’s only child was as curious as was her only wedding. According to Hackl, Zelda did not attend because Scott’s parents, who considered her eccentric, feared how she might act. Though others were nervous about how much the equally unpredictable father might drink, he did attend.
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More alarming was the fact that Anna Shirley refused to let the godparents hold the baby.
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She allowed only Annabel as godmother to place her hand on baby Scottie.

Zelda did not publicly reveal her feelings of exclusion, but watched as her husband’s pride in their child became more possessive. It was as if, by being born in St Paul, the baby had become more Scott’s than Zelda’s, with ultimate authority left to Anna Shirley. Xandra recalls how one evening she and Oscar stopped by and found that the baby, whom Zelda was breastfeeding, had hiccups. The angry nanny loudly blamed it on Zelda’s excessive gin consumption the previous night. Zelda, herself breastfed for years by Minnie Sayre, was uncomfortably aware of subtle pressure from both Scott and the nanny to adopt the more distant mothering style of his Northern culture.

The harsh winter of 1921, when biting cold infiltrated every pore, further dragged down Zelda’s spirits. There is a photo of her smiling bravely on a bone-chilling sleigh-ride over ‘grey and glassy’
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snow, but she wrote Fowler: ‘This damn place is 18 below zero and I go round thanking God that, anatomically + proverbially speaking, I am safe from the awful fate of the monkey … Ludlow, I certainly miss you + Townsend + Alec – in fact I am very lonesome.’
34
When in January 1922 novelist Joseph Hergesheimer
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told Zelda he had lived off hominy grits in the wild Appalachians, she responded tartly: ‘But at least you didn’t have to live in St Paul on
the edge of the Arctic Circle.’ She also told Hergesheimer that she felt lonely because Scott was immersed in writing his play
The
Vegetable.
36

Zelda’s reaction to her first Northern winter was curiously anticipated by Scott in his 1920 story ‘The Ice Palace’, where Southern Belle Sally Carrol Happer wants to leave the South to ‘live where things happen on a big scale’. On a January trip to visit her Yankee fiancé, Sally Carrol Happer nearly freezes to death in an ice palace at the Winter Carnival. She gratefully returns to the familiar South, to the spangled dust over which the heat waves rise.
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Zelda, however, cannot return.

After the
Metropolitan
serialization of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned,
heavy revisions were necessary for the book publication.
38
Zelda suggested cutting the serial’s didactic conclusion. Scott cabled Perkins on 23 December 1921: ‘
LILDA
[Zelda]
THINKS BOOK SHOULD
END WITH ANTHONY’S LAST SPEECH ON SHIP SHE THINKS NEW ENDING IS A
PIECE OF MORALITY
.’ Perkins decided Zelda was artistically ‘dead right’.
39

Scott had told his publisher, Charles Scribner II, that his hero was a man with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no creative inspiration who, with his beautiful young wife, is wrecked on the shoals of dissipation.
40

The protagonists, Gloria Gilbert and Anthony Patch, move from their spoiled life as beautiful people to damnation caused by drinking and idle expenditure of unearned wealth. As Anthony’s alcoholism escalates his marriage to Gloria declines, a theme that aptly reflected the problems Scott and Zelda faced daily.

Zelda, more interested in abstract thought and descriptions than in emotions, found that concepts of beauty, damnation, and moral degeneracy came easily.
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Scott, who needed them in the writing of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned,
‘had almost no capacity for abstract ideas or arguments and could enter into other people’s attitudes only when he had known them [emotionally] in his own experience’.
42
Scott therefore found this talent of Zelda’s very useful, and indeed told Alex McKaig ‘Her ideas largely in this new novel.’
43

The novel’s autobiographical theme was pointed up by W. E. Hill’s recognizable Fitzgerald portraits on the jacket which depicted a fashionable young couple seated side by side but with heads and bodies turned away from each other. They appear bored, lifeless, sulky. Scott wrote a virulent letter to Perkins: ‘The girl is excellent … somewhat like Zelda but the man … is a sort of debauched edition of me.’
44

After listening to Scott’s complaints Zelda painted an alternative book jacket: a witty depiction of a nude with bobbed hair, exactly like herself, splashing in a champagne glass. This was Zelda’s first professional drawing. In bright red, yellow and blue crayon over pencil, it vividly expresses the Roaring Twenties tempo. Crackling flames in the same hectic colours spurt and sizzle round the title. Unlike Hill’s world-weary illustration, Zelda’s ‘The Birth of the Flapper’ offers a dizzy symbol of the prosperous, youthful, insouciant mood.
45
Scott loved its vivacity, typical of Zelda’s early sketches, which showed an illustrative skill she never lost. Unfortunately Zelda’s earliest surviving artwork was never used.

The
Beautiful
and
Damned
was published on 4 March 1922, dedicated to three early mentors: Shane Leslie, Maxwell Perkins and George Jean Nathan, to whom Scott had become reconciled despite Nathan’s insistence that baby Scottie looked like Mencken! Scott had written to Charles Scribner: ‘it’s really a most sensational book + I hope won’t disappoint the critics who liked my first one’.
46
H. L. Mencken, the critic Scott most admired, wrote: ‘There are a hundred signs in it of serious purpose and unquestionable skill … Fitzgerald ceases to be a
Wunderkind,
and begins to come into his maturity.’
47

The Fitzgeralds’ friends enjoyed the book not least because several saw themselves inside it. Nathan was Maury Noble; screenwriter Ted Paramore, whom Zelda labelled fun to be with,
48
did not even get a name change when fictionalized.

Some believed the novel was an accurate portrait of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. Edmund Wilson felt ‘It’s all about him and Zelda.’
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Others felt it was a cleverly vamped up version.

In several significant ways it
did
mirror their life.

Gloria discovers Anthony is ‘an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination’. Anthony discovers Gloria is ‘a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness … almost completely without physical fear.’
50
Gloria, suckled until she was three, nervously chewing gumdrops, is reminiscent of Zelda chewing gum or her lip. Film magnate Joseph Bloeckman’s courtship of Gloria is based on Nathan’s wooing of Zelda; Gloria’s movie test on an offer made to Zelda to star in a film version of
Damned
;
and Gloria has a fling with aviator Tudor Baird, who suffers the habitual aviator fate in Scott’s novels: ‘Afterwards she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane fell 1500 feet … gasoline engine smashed through his heart.’
51

There are some distortions. While Scott’s ambitions were closely defined, Anthony wastes his days over ill-defined goals. Whereas Zelda’s thoughtfulness was constantly remarked on in Montgomery
52
, Gloria is utterly thoughtless. But one scene showing Anthony as a dilettante and Gloria as an obstruction has a wicked authenticity: ‘“Work!” she scoffed. “Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work – that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and ‘Gloria, don’t sing!’ … and ‘Let me read you my opening sentence’ … Two weeks later the whole performance over again.”’ It is razor-sharp in its depiction of Scott’s expectation that ‘Gloria would play golf “or something” while Anthony wrote.’
53

Over time, Scott vacillated about how close a marital portrait the book was. In 1920 he had written: ‘I married her [the flesh and blood Rosalind-Zelda] eventually and am now writing a … more “honest” book about her.’
54

Years later he wrote to Zelda: ‘I wish The Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.’
55

Later still, Fitzgerald told Scottie that Gloria had a more frivolous and certainly more vulgar nature than Zelda. Though Scott admitted he had drawn on events in their married life he denied any real resemblance between Gloria and Zelda except in facial beauty and style of speech. He told Scottie the focus was quite different. For instance, he said reassuringly, he and Zelda enjoyed their life together much more than Gloria and Anthony had.

The ‘truth’ lurks in the interstices. The Gilbert-Patches were not the Fitzgeralds, rather they were Scott’s internal fears of what they could become.

Several critics saw the relationship between Gloria and Zelda as merely superficial. John Peale Bishop felt Scott had created ‘a Fitzgerald flapper of the now most famous type – hair honey-colored and bobbed, mouth rose-colored and profane … he has as yet failed to show that hard intelligence, that intricate emotional equipment upon which her charm depends, so that Gloria … remains a little inexplicable, a pretty, vulgar shadow of her prototype.’
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Zelda pasted Bishop’s review in her scrapbook.

Lawton Campbell told Sara Mayfield:
‘The
Beautiful
and
Damned
was pure Zelda.’
57

Scott had sent a manuscript copy to Wilson, who said it represented an advance over his earlier writings but, curiously, ignored
the crucial influence he knew Zelda had on Scott’s work. He suggested that the three significant influences on Scott’s writing and character were firstly that he was Irish (romantic but cynical about romance); secondly that he came from the Midwest, so overvalued the East’s sophistication; thirdly that he drank heavily.
58
Scott asked him to delete the reference to alcohol and to add in Zelda: ‘The most enormous influence on me … since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.’
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It was a cold remark that captured an unnerving, even bleak, facet of Zelda’s nature, the antithesis to the effervescent artist who had drawn the champagne nymph.

In the last quarter of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
Scott used passages from novels and projects aborted in 1919. One project, ‘The Diary of a Literary Failure’, included the fifty-page ‘Diary of a Popular Girl’ based on Zelda’s journal, which Scott, without consulting Zelda, had not permitted Nathan to publish. Scott’s biographers who state that key passages in his novel were
inspired
by
Zelda’s letters
60
overlook the fact that it was not a matter of ‘inspiration’ but a direct borrowing of Zelda’s lines, which were then revised with the minor transposition of a few words. Scott admitted his practice to Perkins: ‘I’m just enclosing you the typing of Zelda’s diary … You’ll recognize much of the dialogue. Please don’t show it to anyone else.’
61

Without acknowledging Zelda as his primary source Scott had sanitized one letter from spring 1919. Zelda had written that she and Scott were ‘soul-mates’ who had been mated since the time when people were ‘bi-sexual’, an idea Zelda had absorbed from her mother’s theosophical doctrines. Scott redesigned it: ‘“We’re twins! … mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and – and in love before they are born.”’
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