Zelda (24 page)

^*
Dorothy Ellingson, who was a sixteen-year-old girl, murdered her mother in January of 1925 during a quarrel about the girl’s wild living. Both this case and the Leopold-Loeb sensational murder in 1924 fascinated Fitzgerald and he followed the newspapers’ reporting with great interest. Later, according to Matthew Bruccoli, in his study
The Composition of Tender Is the Night
, he mentioned them as sources for the novel to both Harold Ober and Hemingway.

THREE

Breaking Down

A rout of dancers then came in: Dancers
who were young in dances that were dead.

J
OHN
P
EALE
B
ISHOP

10

F
ROM THE PORT OF GENOA, WHERE
their boat docked, the Fitzgeralds traveled along the Mediterranean coast toward Nice. They stopped there briefly as if to gather strength and refreshment from the Riviera and then continued up to Paris. Zelda immediately arranged with Egorova for her dancing lessons to begin: class lessons in the morning with a private afternoon lesson. Painful as it was for Scott, he impotently stood by while Zelda’s entire world was once again consumed by those exhausting lessons. Zelda said: “I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work; full of presentiments. … I lived in a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank.” When she returned home from the ballet Scott was rarely there, and if he was, a barrier of indifference held them apart. It was impossible for him to share her conviction that she would one day become a dancer of the first rank. He did not object to the lessons, but they were an irritant between them. Daily Zelda sent her teacher armfuls of fresh
flowers. She saw Egorova in her poverty and dedication as an ideal figure whom she wished to emulate. One evening Scott and Zelda took Egorova to dinner at a splendid restaurant, George V; during the dinner Scott flirted mildly with the older woman and to Zelda’s surprise Egorova was pleased and rather charmed. Scott enjoyed the situation, and chided Zelda about her reaction, which was first one of shock and then of annoyance. He thought it was ridiculous of her to insist on regarding Egorova as an exemplar of dedication to the dance and impatiently he told her so.

Although Ernest Hemingway was living in Paris that spring the Fitzgeralds saw very little of him. A certain coolness had developed in their friendship, which Scott could not at first fathom. Hemingway seemed more irritable and avoided many of those drinking companions and cronies he had chummed around with the year before at the Closerie des Lilas and Lipp’s. He had recently remarried and Scott knew he was working to complete his new novel,
A Farewell to Arms
, for Hemingway had allowed him to read it in manuscript. Scott had not done the amount of work on his own novel that he had hoped to do and felt guilty before Hemingway’s progress. There was also an increasing tension between Zelda and Hemingway. They were polite to each other, but Scott was well aware of their mutual dislike. Therefore, when the men saw each other they were usually alone together. Morley Callaghan, a young Canadian writer who had known Hemingway in Toronto, was visiting Paris for the first time that spring; he was surprised to find that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not on closer terms. Perkins, who was his editor as well as theirs, had told him that they were good friends. Callaghan, too, noticed the change in Hemingway. He suspected Hemingway of testing him, of wanting to engage in bouts where he would come off the victor, whether it was boxing or drinking. When the Callaghans met the Fitzgeralds they were impressed by their handsomeness, their air of superb confidence. But they were surprised when Zelda, whom they had expected to be gay and madcap, sat silent, studying them.

At their first meeting, Callaghan reports, Scott read him portions of
A Farewell to Arms
from the manuscript copy he had. When he had finished he asked if it wasn’t beautiful. Callaghan wasn’t sure, maybe it was, but as his reluctance became clear, Scott seemed a little
injured. Zelda, however, was pleased by Callaghan’s reaction and said Hemingway’s prose sounded “pretty damned Biblical” to her. With that Scott put the manuscript away. Then, after some talk on Zelda’s part about writing in general, Scott, who seemed to them to be watching her closely, letting her talk while saying little himself, abruptly told her she was tired and should go to bed. He explained to the Callaghans about her ballet lessons, said that she had to be up early, and hoped they would understand. They didn’t quite, but all the same Zelda left them.

The next time they met, Callaghan remembers, Zelda suddenly began to talk about her own writing; she was at pains to insist that she too wrote, and wrote well. He was taken aback by her assertion, not so much because he thought she did not write well, but because of her intense insistence. The two couples had been having dinner together, and when they were finished, “Zelda laughed out loud, looking around. She had the restless air, the little sway of a woman seeking some new exhilaration, a woman in Paris who knew the night should be just beginning. She kept saying, ‘What’ll we do? Let’s do something,’” and then she suggested that they go roller-skating together. The Callaghans had agreed, when to their surprise Scott, who had been politely demurring, grabbed Zelda by the wrist and told her it was time for her to go home to bed. He put her into a taxi, and as he did so they noticed that Zelda’s entire manner changed; Callaghan wrote: “… it was as if she knew he had command over her; she agreed meekly…. And suddenly she had said good night like a small girl and was whisked away from us—and Scott dismissed the little scene almost brusquely.” Again he explained about the strain of her ballet lessons, and when Callaghan asked him why Zelda wanted to dance, he told him it was quite simple, she “wanted to have something for herself, be something herself.”

In the winter of 1928-1929 Zelda began writing the first in a series of short stories that dealt with the lives of six young women. Harold Ober made a note to himself in February about the Fitzgeralds’ arrangement with
College Humor.
“SF said that Z would do six articles for College Humor, that he would go over them and fix them up and that the articles would be signed with both their names. He said that as he remembered, they paid $200 for one article that
Zelda did, and $250 for another. He said we had better leave the price until they did the first article. They are to be articles about different types of girls. I should think they ought to pay $500 for them, if they are 4 or 5 thousand words in length.”

Each story was written in an astonishing but hazardous burst of energy, for Zelda was at the same time continuing her ballet lessons and her strength, although seemingly boundless, was taxed to the breaking point. By June, 1929, Zelda’s fourth sketch had been sent to Ober. Five of these stories were to be published in
College Humor
, which had taken two of her articles in 1928 and considered her talented in her own right. Nevertheless, without exception the stories were published under both Fitzgeralds’ names. Later Scott wrote Ober asking for 51,000 for the best of the stories. He said that if
College Humor
could only pay $500, Zelda’s name should stand alone. Most of the stories, he told Ober, “have been pretty strong draughts on Zelda’s and my common store of material. This is M——for instance [probably in reference to the last story in the series, published by
College Humor
, “The Girl with Talent,” for which they received $800] and the ‘Girl the Prince Liked’ was J—— both of whom I had in my notebook to use.”

The sixth story, “A Millionaire’s Girl,” was published by the
Saturday Evening Post
, and although it was Zelda’s story, Scott’s name alone was signed to it. (A wire from New York assured him that the
Post
would pay $4,000 if Zelda’s name was omitted, and it was.) Scott later wrote that the story “appeared under my name but actually I had nothing to do with it except for suggesting a theme and working on the proof of the completed manuscript. This same cooperation extends to other material gathered … under our joint names, though often when published in that fashion I had nothing to do with the thing from start to finish except supplying my name.”

The stories attracted considerable notice at the time. Sometime about July, 1930, Scott in a letter to Perkins told of three more stories that he was sending on to Harold Ober to place. Those stories were not published and were eventually lost. Zelda had written them, Scott said, “in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you’ll see that apart from the beauty and richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them—their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for a while seemed to have brought her to the
edge of madness and despair.” The same might have been said of the stories which were published during 1929, for the breakneck speed at which they were written did not impair their effectiveness, and they remain a remarkable expression of Zelda’s considerable talent as an essentially descriptive writer.

From the titles of the stories one notices that each is the portrait of a girl rather than a woman, although their ages range from sixteen well into the thirties, and although all but one have married (four have children as well). The husbands and children are, however, vague presences, placed in the stories, one suspects, as proof of a certain adequacy—that the girls have passed through a phase of life successfully—rather than as significant figures in themselves. The girls are adventuresses: sleek but restless and lonely women who are always exceptionally pretty. They are ambitious; they wish to distinguish themselves without fully knowing how to do so. And they share an immunity toward the everyday aspects of life by being in the main heiresses or actresses or dancers. There is something disquieting about these figures of allure, for they are imbued with a selfishness that is nearly as total as their attractiveness. What they suffer from is a boredom of spirit. As she says of one of them, “She wanted to get her hands on something tangible, to be able to say, That is real, that is part of my experience, that goes into this or that category, this that happened to me is part of my memories.’”

But they do not quite succeed in coming to life. Seen always from a distance by a detached and omniscient narrator about whom we know nothing (we are not even sure whether that observer is male or female), the girls do not interact with life. Rather, they are moved through it. Dialogue is almost nonexistent. Zelda states again and again that they are courageous girls, but we do not see that courage tested or at work. What she does is to describe the characters, not develop them.

If they are not entirely satisfactory as characters, the skill Zelda exercises in describing their situations and their backgrounds is nevertheless impressive. These are the fashionable, “rose-gold,” and formidable girls that the nineteen-twenties cherished and whom Zelda took as her material. They are
le beau monde.
They live in silver apartments “with mulberry carpets,” surrounded by “pastel restraint.” Their boyishness, their air of being children of the world, their carelessness, we are told, is only a decoy for their total control of social situations. Yet they seem to have no control whatsoever
over their lives, through which they float without urgency, and ultimately, for all the author’s insistence to the contrary, they are passive and elusive women.

In July the editor of
College Humor
sent Zelda some copy written to accompany one of her stories, “Southern Girl.”

You know how sweethearts have a song between them, one they have grown to like very much. When they are separated and this song is played,
their
song, for them it immediately recalls the happiness they shared, and those dusty words, “I love you.”

Examine very carefully
Southern Girl
, which the Fitzgeralds have done for this issue. There is not a line of conversation in it, but with very few words they have struck out a soft pattern of beauty and characters which were so real in their own lives that they come alive in your own. … I am so happy to have it because it marks an important milestone in the literary career of Zelda Fitzgerald. I cannot imagine any girl having a richer background than Zelda’s, a life more crowded with interesting people and events. She is a star in her own right.

This, then, was the public image of the Fitzgeralds, cultivated by the slick magazines and the tabloids. Its variance from their private lives in the summer of 1929 was staggering.

Later in her life Zelda said she wrote to pay for her dancing lessons; she hated to take Scott’s money for them, because she wanted her dancing to be her exclusive possession. At the time, however, the vehemence of her thoughts on this score were concealed from Scott. He was astonished by her productivity and even resented it in comparison to his own vexing inability to move forward on his novel. The strain of her pace began to show in fatigue, and she began to give way in her outward behavior. She was easily distracted and even the simplest conversations were difficult for her to maintain. She took refuge in an impenetrable and unnerving silence. She and Scott attended few parties together, and when they did Scott was watchful for those first signals of tension that spelled ruinous quarrels if Zelda was not sent home immediately to rest. Zelda for her part had her hands full when Scott drank excessively, and she was frequently humiliated by his conduct. They avoided being alone together in their drab apartment. The tacit motivation for their behavior was more similar than they were able to admit, and as desperately as
they needed each other, they blindly strove to disentangle themselves from each other. They became engaged in a contest for personal survival very much like the one between Nicole and Dick Diver, which Scott would write about in
Tender Is the Night.
He has Dick say,” ‘I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself.’”