Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (61 page)

But while Zelda was purposefully increasing her painting skills, in terms of a career she was still bent on writing. Mildred Squires’ active encouragement led Zelda to feel for the first time appreciated as an artist. It is hardly surprising that eventually she dedicated
Save
Me
The
Waltz
to Squires.
50

Zelda wrote to Scott that she loved and was lonely for him, that she felt there was ‘nothing so sordid as being shut up’, but that she was reading contemporary French painting texts and particularly admired flower painters who could make blossoms seem
malevolent
like the hallucinations of the dead.
51
She did not mention her novel.

Scott, who communicated regularly with the clinic, learnt she was writing at an enviable speed. Zelda asked Dr Squires to read a section of her novel, after which Squires wrote to Scott describing it as vivid and charming, though it occasionally broke off abruptly. Squires found the style similar to ‘Miss Ella’ and believed once
Zelda revised her draft it would be excellent. By 2 March Squires reported Zelda’s anxiety had decreased, her second chapter was finished, success was predicted. Nearing completion, Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘I am proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it – It is distinctly Ecole Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours … Being unable … to avoid the reiterant “said” I have emphasized it a la Ernest much to my sorrow. He is a very determined writer, but I shall also die with my boots on.’
52

Scott, sadly, had removed his own boots, halted his work on
Tender
and when the lease on the Montgomery house expired, trudged to Baltimore to find new accommodation nearer to Zelda. His Ledger reveals: ‘depression … Scotty and her friends, becomes a racket … Rosalind still there … Scotty sick, me sick, Mrs Sayre playing the fool … everything worser and worser.’
53

He had, however, become curiouser and curiouser about Zelda’s novel. On 8 March he wrote authoritatively to Squires that Zelda was not a ‘“natural story-teller” in the sense that I am, and unless a story comes to her fully developed and crying to be told she’s liable to flounder around rather unsuccessfully among problems of
construction
.’ But Zelda was not floundering around unsuccessfully. To Scott’s amazement, Squires wrote back on 9 March that Zelda had just completed her fiction.

Zelda did not mail her manuscript to Scott for advice or guidance. Instead she sent it at once, deceiving the hospital by switching addresses, to Max Perkins. It arrived at Scribner’s with this note: ‘Scott, being absorbed in his own [novel], has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits, but naturally,
terribly
anxious that you should like it … As soon as I hear that you have safely received the copy, I want to mail the ms to Scott, so could you wire?’
54

Zelda wrote to Scott that she was sure Scribner’s would reject it, but still she held back the manuscript. Then a trifle apprehensively she posted it. How right she was to have apprehensions.

When Scott finally received it on 14 March his rage was boundless.

Scott felt that this time Zelda had gone too far. Zelda felt that this time she had gone some way in asserting herself.

Scott believed she had ‘poached’ what he admitted were their
joint
life experiences for her now completed novel which he had intended to use for his work-in-progress. Although today it would seem at the very least problematic, Scott was able to justify his term ‘poaching’ because of his entrenched belief that his wife was expected to be ‘a complementary intelligence’ concerned
exclusively
with his interests and ambitions.
1
Zelda’s life he saw as his raw material. Zelda’s writings he saw as his literary property.

Despite suffering self-doubt, diminished self-respect and loss of identity through Scott’s treatment of her, Zelda still felt that she had a perfect right to use her experiences for own literary source material. But the fact that she furtively sent the manuscript to Perkins indicated she knew how much Scott would resent it.

Neither Fitzgerald spoke directly to the other. A dialogue of blame, resentment, anger and defence was passed to Dr Squires, who diplomatically mediated. On 14 March a furious Fitzgerald told Mildred Squires that after four years’ work on his novel, from spring 1930 he had ‘been unable to proceed because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums’. His letters reveal how much it rankled that her book was finished so swiftly while his was still being developed: ‘about fifty thousand words exist and this Zelda has heard and literally one whole section of her novel is an
imitation
of it, of its rhythm materials even statements and speeches’. He acknowledged Squires might think ‘the experiences which two people have undergone in common is common property – one transmutes the same scene through different temperments and it “comes out different”’. He emphasized ‘there are only two
episodes
, both of which
she
has reduced to anecdotes
but upon which whole sections of my book turn
, that I have asked her to cut’. As for Zelda’s dancing, her love for Jozan, her observations about
Americans in Paris, ‘the fine passages about the death of her father’, his criticisms, he said, would be impersonal and professional. But he would not tolerate Zelda naming her central character Amory Blaine, the name of his autobiographical hero in
This
Side
of
Paradise.

The technique of mixing fact and fiction which so incensed him was, of course, one he himself used extensively. He was disturbed that her public portrayal of him did not coincide with the way he wished to be seen. Not only had she betrayed him, she had also exploited him by writing in time he paid for through selling stories that took him away from
his
novel. He overlooked his plundering of Zelda’s diaries, letters and ideas in order to offer up
her
character for public inspection.

On 16 March he wired Perkins: ‘
PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE OR IF NOT
ALREADY DONE EVEN CONSIDER ZELDAS BOOK UNTIL YOU GET REVISED
VERSION LETTER FOLLOWS
.’
3
To pacify Scott, Zelda wrote:

Scott scrawled red pencil marks over her first paragraph and angrily noted in the margin, ‘This is an evasion. All this reasoning is specious.’

Zelda tried placation: ‘Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable. We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you.’ She skirted round the most crucial point: ‘I was also afraid we might have touched on the same material.’ Then a retreat into humility: ‘feeling it to be a
dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you have mercilessly – if for my own good given my last stories, poor things … So, Dear, my own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you – but just time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so
bombastic
about Max.

‘Goofo, please love me – life is very confusing – but I love you.’
4

Scott was not buying her version of events. Enraged at Zelda’s temerity, he determined to use every available culturally
constructed
tool to impose and to justify his literary restrictions upon his wife. The first restriction was to insist that Scribner’s should cut hefty sections of her novel, cuts to be decided by him, before he would countenance publication. The second was to insist that if Scribner’s published it they should not praise it to Zelda, as it might damage her mental health or give rise to what he termed her
incipient
egomania. His third restriction was to insist on a contractual clause stipulating that one half of the royalties earned by Zelda would be retained by Scribner’s, to be credited against
his
debts to them until a total of $5,000 had been repaid.

Scott’s letter to Zelda demanding specific cuts, like so many other Fitzgerald materials, has ‘gone missing’. Retained is Zelda’s initial submissive response: ‘Of cource, I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else. I felt myself the thing was too crammed with material upon which I had not time to dwell. Shall I wire Max to send it back? … The Pershing incident which you accuse me of stealing occupies just one line and will not be missed. I willingly relinquish it.’
5

Reluctantly on 27 March Zelda cabled Max: ‘
ACTING ON SCOTTS
ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT PHIPPS CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS
WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS VELDA
[
sic
]
FITZGERALD
.’
6

Max cabled back: he had ‘
READ ABOUT
60
PAGES WITH GREAT
INTER
EST
STOP VERY LIVE AND MOVING STOP HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT STOP
AFFECTIONATE REGARDS
.’
7

Zelda, wishing to return it, refused to give in to all Scott’s demands.

She was more than irritated. She was fuming. A nurse at Phipps overheard her saying to herself: ‘I have always done whatever I wanted to do, whenever I could possibly manage it. My book is none of my husband’s Goddamned business.’
9

She held back her fury while explaining to Scott how lonely and friendless she felt: ‘all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners and invited “The Fitzgeralds” place[s].’ She reminded him he had always been the one person with whom she had felt the need to communicate intimately.
10

Scott was unmoved by her plea. He felt as misused as she had felt in the past. His telegrams to Perkins spoke of mood changes and irrationality. One said Zelda’s novel needed only small but
necessary
changes. Another said it was a fine novel. A new cable insisted the hero’s name and the book title be changed. Scott’s next telegram screamed that the whole middle section must be drastically redrafted. Finally, at the end of March he went to Baltimore to work with Zelda on revisions. Yet again the original manuscript and Zelda’s first draft revisions have been ‘mislaid’. We are left with a printer’s copy of the typed manuscript, two consecutive sets of much-revised galley proofs and a set of pristine page proofs.
11
This means we cannot know what deletions Scott insisted on that first time. We know Scott was satisfied at the extensive changes because he wrote to Perkins, ‘Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-
and-our
-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to judge it but it may be even better than I think.’ However, he again begged Perkins not to praise Zelda or imply she might achieve money or success.
12
Two weeks later Scott sent the manuscript to Perkins: it was ‘a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel’. He likened it to Wolfe’s
Look
Homeward,
Angel,
was sure it would interest the many thousand dance enthusiasts, felt it was ‘absolutely new, and should sell’. He forbade Perkins to mention the novel to Hemingway, whose new book was to be
published
that same season, not because of ‘conflict between the books’ but because of the hostility between Hemingway and Zelda. And he finally gave Perkins permission to write directly to Zelda about her book.
13

Perkins sent Zelda the same gracious telegram one assumes he would have sent without such a cavalier instruction, ‘
HAD A GRAND
SUNDAY READING YOUR NOVEL STOP THINK IT VERY UNUSUAL AND AT TIMES
DEEPLY MOVING PARTICULARLY DANCING PART STOP DELIGHTED TO PUBLISH 
STOP WRITING STOP MAXWELL PERKINS
.’
14
His written comments suggested that the New York and Westport parts were not as good as the Alabama state sections, which were ‘very good indeed’. The ‘best part’ was when her heroine Alabama takes up dancing.
15

On 19 May Zelda, overjoyed, replied: ‘To catalogue my various excitements and satisfactions that you liked my book would be an old story to you – It seems so amazing that you are going to actually publish it … My God! Maybe the ink will fade, maybe you’ll
discover
that it doesn’t make sense! It couldn’t be possible that I was an author!

‘Of cource, I will gladly change the questionable parts. I, too, felt the New York part was weak, though I liked the Paris party.’ Then with her characteristic thoughtfulness which has been little remarked on, she asked after his sick daughter. ‘Scott told me your daughter had been ill. I am beginning to feel qualified to make
suggestion
about the Invalid Racket: John’s-Hopkin’s is an awfully good place with very competent nurses and entirely lacking the general air of negligence that pervades most places where people are going to be sick a long time. We were dreadfully distressed – and I hope she will soon be well again. I know how worried you and Louise must be. Those nervous maladies are always alarming … it’s worse always on the people who care than on the person who’s ill.’
16

She had complied with Scott’s request to change the novel’s title and hero’s name. Zelda found
Save
Me
The
Waltz
from a Victor record catalogue. A superficial sweetness is implied in the
old-fashioned
dance request, but the bitterness of its frequent
shortening
to ‘Save Me’ blasts the sweetness apart.

If the irony of using Amory Blaine, Scott’s fictional hero’s name, for her own portrait of Scott did not appeal to her husband, the greater irony of substituting the name David Knight displeased him almost as much. Her hero’s new first name was probably taken from Van Vechten’s novel
Parties,
where Scott appears as the volatile, jealous David Westlake. Using the name of Scott’s enemy Dick Knight for her hero’s surname might be a neat revenge for the way Scott was dealing with her writing.
17
Zelda had already mentioned Scott’s dislike of Knight to her doctors at Phipps. Later that year Scott displayed his jealousy when, after an unpleasant meeting at which he had called Knight a fairy, he tetchily apologized: ‘I have never in my wildest imaginings supposed you were a fairy … It is a lousy word to anyone not a member of the species.’ Scott did acknowledge how Knight’s encouragement of Zelda’s achievements had helped her. ‘That was swell praise you gave Zelda and needless
to say delighted her and set her up enormously. She revised the book so much that she lost contact with it and yours is the first word that gives it public existence.’ But Scott couldn’t leave it at that. He acknowledged: ‘the sincerity of your feeling toward her shouldn’t offend anybody except the most stupid and churlish of husbands … [but] … [w]hen you city fellows come down you can’t put ideas in the heads of our farm girls, without expecting resistance.’
18

Though Scott sharply scrutinized Zelda’s novel for features which might damage his public image, he allowed it to be printed without decreasing the convoluted metaphors or correcting the grammatical errors, typographical mistakes and misspellings which litter the text. Scott, a notoriously bad speller, may not have recognized these flaws but that Perkins allowed the book to be
published
in this woeful state did Zelda ill-service.