Zelda (23 page)

The weekend of the party was chaotic from beginning to end. A game of “croquet-polo on plow horses” was improvised on their lawn and an inscribed silver trophy was awarded to the winner, who was, of course, Cecilia. It read, “The Fitzgerald all Silver Beaker for fast and clean croquet, won by——-God sees everything.”

Among the many people at the party were Dick Knight and John Dos Passos. Dick Knight, who was a lawyer from New York, was a strange fellow, with a peculiarly misshapen large head. He told the Fitzgeralds and Cecilia that he had had to identify his brother at the morgue before he came, but he said it merrily without a trace of sadness or seriousness. Zelda and he seemed quite fond of each other.

After the party Scott and Zelda and Cecilia went to New York
and visited several speakeasies. There was also a theatre party and after that Zelda suggested a trip to Harlem. Young Cecilia was dropped off at their hotel, but to her surprise Scott and Zelda returned almost immediately. On their trip back to Wilmington the following day they stopped in Philadelphia for Zelda’s ballet lesson. To Scott’s young cousin (who had taken ballet lessons herself) she appeared to be a dreadful dancer. Scott made it obvious that he did not feel that Zelda was any good and motioned to Cecilia that he wanted to leave the studio and go have a drink. By the time they caught the train for Wilmington later that afternoon Scott was on the verge of passing out. Zelda, who was entirely sober, seemed oblivious of the situation and completely ignored Scott. Cecilia was left to manage him, his wallet, and their baggage by herself. At last the conductor, who was rewarded with their last bottle of gin, got them off and into a taxi. And for Cecilia, who had expected gaiety, the weekend turned flat and even a little frightening.

During one of Scott’s trips to New York that fall H. L. Mencken and his young assistant on
The American Mercury
, Charles Angoff, visited him at his hotel. Angoff remembers that Scott had been drinking and was rather remote toward Mencken, which displeased the critic. After a little conversation about George Jean Nathan, Scott got up and paced the room. He said,

“Henry, I got another idea for a novel going through my head. Have a lot of it written up. It’s about a woman who wants to destroy a man, because she loves him too much and is afraid she’ll lose him, but not to another woman—but because she’ll stop loving him so much. Well, she decides to destroy him by marrying him. She marries him, and gets to love him even more than she did before. Then she gets jealous of him, because of his achievements in some line that she thinks she’s also good in. Then, I guess, she commits suicide—first she does it step by step, the way all people, all women, commit suicide, by drinking, by sleeping around, by being impolite to friends, and that way. I haven’t got the rest of it clear in my head, but that’s the heart of it. What do you think, Henry?”

“Well, it’s your wife, Zelda, all over again,” Mencken said.

Scott sat down for a moment, sipped his drink, then stood back up and without looking at Mencken told him it was not only the “‘dumbest piece of literary criticism’ “he’d ever heard, but “‘I spill out my insides to you, and you answer with… Zelda.’ “He said Mencken had no compassion. “‘Of all the times to mention Zelda to
me! Of all the goddamn times to mention her!’ “Then he burst into tears. Mencken’s reaction after they left Fitzgerald was to tell Angoff that Scott would never amount to anything until he got rid of his wife.

In November, 1927, Scott wrote Ernest Hemingway that although he had wasted the summer insofar as his writing was concerned, he had accomplished a lot during the fall. He hoped, he said, to complete his novel by the first of December. Zelda was dancing three times a week in Philadelphia, as well as painting. “Have got nervous as hell lately—purely physical but scared me somewhat—to the point of putting me on the wagon and smoking denicotinized cigarettes.” The purpose of the letter was to congratulate Hemingway on the recent publication of his collection of stories
Men Without Women.
Scott wrote: “The book is fine. I like it quite as well as
The Sun
, which doesn’t begin to express my enthusiasm. In spite of all its geographical and emotional rambling, it’s a unit, as much as Conrad’s books of Contes were.” Zelda liked it a lot, he said, and thought his best story was “Hills Like White Elephants.” But, for all Scott’s genuine admiration, there was a defensiveness about his letter, the first sign of the professional competitiveness that was to mar his friendship with Hemingway. He let Hemingway know, for instance, that
“The Post
pays me $3500—this detail so you’ll be sure who’s writing this letter.”

In fact, Fitzgerald had done little writing of any sort in 1927. He had been working since the summer of 1925 on his novel and he now very much exaggerated his progress to Hemingway, for he was making almost none. The book had gone through various drafts and would go through more before its publication as
Tender Is the Night
in 1934. It was going to be a sensational novel about American expatriate life on the Riviera, and its hero, Francis Melarky, a film technician, would be driven to murder his mother. Fitzgerald had been stimulated by both the Ellingson and Leopold-Loeb
^*
cases as sources for his novel. The novel went through a number of titles,
Our Type, The World’s Fair
, and somewhat later
The Melarky Case
and
The Boy Who Killed His Mother
, which was apparently Zelda’s suggested title.

Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law Rosalind and Newman Smith spent a weekend with the Fitzgeralds in February, 1928. The visit was, Scott noted in his Ledger, a catastrophe. He had been invited to Princeton to speak at Cottage Club. There was an enormous amount of drinking and when he returned home late that night he was on a weeping jag. During the course of an argument Scott threw a favorite blue vase of Zelda’s into the fireplace. When Zelda cuttingly referred to his father as an Irish policeman, Fitzgerald retaliated by slapping Zelda hard across the face. As a result her nose bled and her sister, outraged by what she had seen, left the house the following morning. She was convinced that Scott was behaving basely toward her sister and felt that Zelda should leave him. Zelda, however, ignored her sister’s pleas and told her that she and Scott chose to live the way they did and she would tolerate no interference from her family.

Fed up with Wilmington and with themselves they decided upon another trip to Europe that spring. “They were on their way to Paris,” Zelda wrote. “They hadn’t much faith in travel nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.”

They took an apartment in the rue Vaugirard opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, so that Scottie could have a place to play. Zelda wrote Eleanor Browder, who had recently married, that they had left New York in too much of a mess to send her a present for her wedding; “we are vaguely floating about on the surface of a fancy French apartment. It looks like a setting for one of Mme Tausand’s gloomier figures but we have got moved in…. It looks as if we’ll never stay anywhere long enough to see how we like it….”

Gerald Murphy introduced Zelda to Madame Lubov Egorova, who was the head of the ballet school for the Diaghilev troupe, the same woman who had been Catherine Littlefield’s teacher. Madame Egorova had a great gift for instruction, according to Murphy, and although she had once been a leading ballerina with the Ballet Russe, the most exciting group performing in the world at that time, it was as a coach that she excelled, for she was a superb technician.
Murphy said, “I had the feeling that unless one went through with it [arranging Zelda’s introduction] something awful would happen. I suppose that was why I helped her to begin with. There are limits to what a woman of Zelda’s age can do and it was obvious that she had taken up the dance too late.” Nevertheless, Zelda worked feverishly under Egorova’s demanding supervision, practicing eight or more hours a day. What had begun as a defiant response to Scott’s praise of Lois Moran’s ambition and energy had become Zelda’s sole preoccupation. She was determined to become a superb ballerina.

Scott later said that it was at Ellerslie in 1928 that he first began to use liquor as a stimulant for his work. Until then he had drunk only when he was not working; now he drank in order to be able to work. In 1927 and again in 1928 he was making more money from his writing, nearly $30,000, than he ever had before. But his drinking was a serious problem for both Fitzgeralds; Zelda was unable to stop him and felt that he was growing indifferent to her because he preferred the company of his drinking companions. Scott felt that Zelda’s dancing was executed in a spirit of vengeance against him and needled her about her commitment to it. But it was not simply vengeance that motivated Zelda; it was a desire to find something of her own that might give her release from her life with Scott.

Zelda described in
Save Me the Waltz
what she sought from her dancing: “It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly….”

“Zelda wanted immediate success. She wanted to dance for the world,” Gerald Murphy said. One day she invited the Murphys to the studio to watch her dance. They went with trepidation. “The stage of the training room was built on an incline, it was perhaps two feet higher at one end than at the opposite. The effect was that one looked up at her the entire time she danced. The view was not a flattering one, for it made her seem taller, more awkward than she was. There was something dreadfully grotesque in her intensity— one could see the muscles individually stretch and pull; her legs looked muscular and ugly. It was really terrible. One held one’s breath until it was over. Thank God, she couldn’t see what she
looked like. When I watched Zelda that afternoon in Paris, I thought to myself, she’s going to try to hold on to her youth. You know, there’s nothing worse; it ruins a woman.”

The Murphys felt close to Zelda, which sometimes upset Scott; he would ask them if they liked Zelda better than they liked him. Or, if he felt they were giving her too much attention, he would say, “Sara, look at me!” Zelda didn’t like everybody, as Sara was well aware; “she was choosy, she didn’t take to many people.” Sara remembered being with Zelda once while they were introduced to several people at a luncheon. “Each time someone was brought to be introduced, she would smile at them sweetly and as she took their hands say under her breath, ‘I hope you die in the marble ring.’ Of course no one suspected that she was saying anything but the usual pleasantries; I heard her because I was standing right next to her. She was so charming and polite as she said it—must have been one of her childhood taunts.” But it was not; it was an utterance from the interior.

None of them realized that Zelda was poised on the edge of a vast and troubling doubt about herself, and if she and Scott quarreled less, it was only because they had become silent and watchful toward each other. Zelda later recalled “long conversations about the ballet over sauerkraut in Lipp’s, and blank recuperative hours over books and prints in the dank Allée-Bonaparte. Now the trips away had begun to be less fun.”

Scott’s description of the summer was no less somber. His entry for July in the Ledger read: “Drinking and general unpleasantness.” In August the situation had not improved, “General aimlessness and boredom.”

When they returned to America in September of 1928 he wrote that they were “back again in [a] blaze of work and liquor.” And on the occasion of his thirty-second birthday he summarized the year as “Ominous [underlining it three times]. No Real Progress in any way and wrecked myself with dozens of people.” It was unfortunately not an exaggeration.

Back at Ellerslie, where they had a few more months to go on their two-year lease, Zelda began her dancing lessons in Philadelphia with renewed vigor. But at home she kept entirely to herself, brooding and silent. She practiced in front of the great ornate mirror, sweating profusely, stopping only for water, which she kept beside the Victrola, and ignoring Scott’s remarks as he watched her leap and
bend. He hated the glass, which he called their “Whorehouse Mirror.”

Scott had brought back to the United States with them a Paris taxi driver and ex-boxer, Philippe, to be their chauffeur and his drinking companion. Zelda thoroughly disliked him; she said he was insubordinate to her and stupid. She hated it when he and Scott boxed together. Even John Biggs got a little tired of calls at three or four in the morning to pull Scott and Philippe out of the scrapes they always managed to get into. The household situation was further complicated by the presence of Mademoiselle, Scottie’s French governess, whom Zelda also disliked. Zelda’s relationship with Scottie had deteriorated to the point where they seemed to friends to be two children playing together. Zelda was obliquely describing how she felt about Scottie when she wrote:

And there was the lone and lovely child knocking a croquet ball through the arches of summer under the horse-chestnut trees and singing alone in her bed at night. She was a beautiful child who loved her mother. At first there had been Nanny but Nanny and I quarrelled and we sent her back to France and the baby had only its mother after that, and a series of people who straightened its shoes. I worried. The child was unhappy and thought of little besides how rich people were and little touching, childish things. The money obsession was because of the big house and going to play with the Wanamakers and the DuPont children. The house was too immense for a child and too dignified.

Their return to Wilmington brought them no more satisfaction than their period of departure had and the endless litany of their discontent continued. When the lease on Ellerslie ran out, with Scott’s novel still uncompleted, they again left America. In the brittle spring chill of 1929, nearly a decade since the beginning of the Jazz Age, the Fitzgeralds, with their blue-bound leather copies of Scott’s books and their scrapbooks, Scottie and her dolls, and Zelda in her old fur coat, boarded the ship for Genoa. Scott wrote Maxwell Perkins: “I am sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters… I haven’t been able to do it. I’ll do it on the boat and send it from Genoa. A thousand thanks for your patience—just trust me a few months longer, Max—it’s been a discouraging time for me too but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve never reproached me.”