Zelda (38 page)

Always one year younger than century.

Born July 1901

courtship for two and one half years before

that, since she was 13.

Catastrophe June 1917 Age almost 16

Clinic      Clinic Feb. 1918 Age 17
            To middle October bad period
            After Armistice good period
            He returns in April or May 1919
            She discharged June I, 1919. Almost 18
            Married September 1919. Aged 18

Child born August 1920

Child born June 1922

2nd Pousse almost immediately to October
1922 and therafter

Frenchman (or what have you in summer of
1923 after almost 4 years of marriage.

In July 1925 when the story opens she is just 24

(One child almost 5 (Scotty in Juan les Pins)

One child 3 (Scotty in Pincio)

In July 1929 when the story ends she is just 28

The heroine was born in 1901. She is beautiful on the order of Marlene Dietrich or better still the Norah Gregor-Kiki Allen girl with those peculiar eyes. She is American with a streak of some foreign blood. At fifteen she was raped by her own father under peculiar circumstances— work out. She collapses, goes to the clinic and there at sixteen meets the young doctor hero who is ten years older. Only her transference to him
saves her—when it is not working she reverts to homicidal mania and tries to kill men. She is an innocent, widely read but with no experience and no orientation except what he supplies her. Portrait of Zelda—that is, a part of Zelda.

We follow her from age 24 to age 29

Then, after a brief description of “Method of Dealing with Sickness Material” and a “Classification of the Material on Sickness,” he charts in detail Nicole’s case history against Zelda’s. (The chart is reproduced in the section of illustrations.)

Various elements of Nicole’s background are pure invention. For instance, Zelda was not raped by her father, and she showed no homicidal tendencies toward men, but the degree to which Scott used Zelda in a fictional counterpart is otherwise explicit enough. How much of this was clearly worked out in 1932 we do not know, but the basic elements of Dick’s and Nicole’s characters probably were. At last Fitzgerald had found his theme. That it involved a use of Zelda, that she might object to it, be wounded by it, did not seem to have disturbed him. He saw it only from a writer’s point of view.

He had spent years in a quandary about this novel; he had not published a novel since
Gatsby
in 1925, seven years before. He clearly resented the time he put into short-story writing, although that resentment now seems completely out of proportion. His income in 1931 was at its apex: he had earned $37,599 in the middle of the Depression. But writing short stories was more than just economically profitable for Fitzgerald. His stories were usually not the hack work he seemed to feel compelled to call them. The best of them, written for the top magazines in the country, have withstood whatever scrutiny was directed toward them, and many of the others were exploratory exercises in his craft. He stripped and mined the latter mercilessly for scenes and characters and moods to be incorporated into his novels. As such, these stories, about 160 in his relatively brief career, were not a compromising of his talent, as he liked to think, but a disciplining of it. They made him money and they kept him writing while he floundered with his fourth novel.

Although furious with Zelda, Scott had not written directly to her about her novel. Learning of his reaction through her doctor, she tried to soothe his irritation with a letter of careful explanation.

Dr. Squires tells me you are hurt that I did not send [my] book to you before I mailed it to Max. Purposely I didn’t—knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. Naturally, I was in my usual rush to get it off my hands—You know how I hate brooding over things once they are finished: so I mailed it poste haste, hoping to have yours and Scribner’s criticisms to use for revising.

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. I was also afraid we might have touched the same material. Also, 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. I have had enough discouragement, generally, and could scream with that sense of inertia that hovers over my life and everything I do. 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. Try, dear—and then I’ll remember when you need me too sometime, and help.

Scott was having none of it. He scored sections of the first paragraph in red pencil and made a note to himself in the margin: “This is an evasion. All this reasoning is specious or else there is no evidence of a tornado in the sta…” and the rest was made illegible by a smudge of ink. His resentment, however, was clearly enough expressed: he was not just suspicious, he was sure she was purposely trying to harm him. In the latter part of her letter when she wrote, “I was also afraid we might have touched the same material,” she had, in Scott’s opinion, given herself away.

Zelda knew perfectly well that if any portion of her book imitated or even echoed Scott’s novel he would insist that she change it. If she had sent it first to Perkins as a ploy to avoid Scott’s criticism or his demand that certain changes be made before he would allow its publication, she failed utterly. Certainly she must have known that sending it to Scott’s editor was hardly a way of keeping it from Scott. Her action could not have been as underhanded as Scott felt it was, but neither was it as innocent as Zelda maintained: she
had
heard portions of his novel and throughout the past four months she had consciously tried to learn from his style. Her motives were
mixed. But Scott’s reaction, especially since he was the more balanced of the two, was completely out of proportion.

Scott must have written Zelda in the same accusing and defensive vein as he had Dr. Squires—she had been able to complete a novel in, at the most, three months, while he had been forced to discontinue his. At this point he was totally insensitive to Zelda’s precarious state. She answered:

Dear—You know that if I could sell any of my stories I would not have written this book. Ober is swamped with my things, and it seems worthless to plague him with more. The fact that I have had time to write it while you have had to put aside your own is due to circumstances over which I had no control and cannot bring myself to feel a sense of guilt. You, of all people, certainly would not have preferred my folding my hands during my long unoccupied hours…. Believe me, dear, I quite appreciate the strain and depression under which you are existing…. I realize that there is little that your life has to offer as a substitute, but I wish you could drink less—do not fly into a rage, I know you stay
sober
—but you need some rest and I can’t think how you can get it except by using those miserable moments that gin helps to dispel and turn into activity by resting.

I love you D.O.— I would have collapsed years ago if I’d had me on my hands….

Evidently he again wrote to her, this time insisting on specific changes in the novel. We have only Zelda’s reply.

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 the time to dwell and consequently lost any story continuity. Shall I wire Max to send it back? The real story was the old prodigal son, of cource. I regret that it offended you. The Pershing incident which you accuse me of stealing occupies just one line and will not be missed. I willingly relinquish it. However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write. As you know my contacts with my family have always been in the nature of the raids of a friendly brigand. I quite realize that the quality of this book does not warrant so many excursions into the bizarre—As for my friends: first, I have none; by that I mean that all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners
and invited “The Fitzgeralds” place[s]. You have always been and always will be the only person with whom I have felt the necessity to communicate and our intimacies have, to me, been so satisfactory mentally that no other companion has ever seemed necessary. Despised by my supiors, which are few, held in suspicion by my equals, even fewer, I have got all external feeding for my insignifigant flames from people either so vastly different from myself that our relations were like living a play or I have cherished my inferiors with color…and the friends of my youth. However, I did not intend to write you a treatise on friendship in which I do not believe.

She signed herself, “With dearest love, I am your irritated Zelda.”

The novel reopened the rift between them and it was Scott who, on the surface, was the more deeply wounded. Zelda had used him, he insisted—his writing, his life, his material—to her own advantage. Yet at the end of March just before he left Alabama for Baltimore he wrote to Dr. Squires (who, astonished by the vehemence of his reactions, had apparently suggested to him that if he and Zelda could not survive together a separation might be in order):

My whole stomach hurts when I contemplate such an eventuality— it would be throwing her [Zelda] broken upon a world which she despises; I would be a ruined man for years—

On the other hand, he could not

stand always between Zelda and the world and see her build this dubitable career of hers with morsels of living matter chipped out of my mind, my belly, my nervous system and my loins. Perhaps 50% of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgment would mean anything:…these two classes [of friends and relatives] would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other—in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives. Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.

Her affair with Eduard Josanne in 1925 and mine with Lois Moran in 1927, which was a sort of revenge shook something out of us, but we can’t both go on paying and paying forever. And yet I feel that that’s the whole trouble back of all this.

^*
Upon her entry to the clinic Scott told the doctors that she was practically blind in one eye. Years after her death, a member of her family mentioned that Zelda’s doctor in Montgomery, who had treated her from childhood, thought the retina of her right eye was “missing.” Zelda had a lorgnette, which she never wore, saying that it did no good. Scott assumed it was out of vanity that she refused to wear it. She did suffer from headaches caused by eyestrain, but there is no other evidence of a defective or detached retina.

“But I warn you,” she said, “I am only
really myself when I’m somebody else
whom I have endowed with these wonderful
qualities from my imagination.”

Z
ELDA
F
ITZGERALD
,
Save Me the Waltz

14

Z
ELDA TOLD SCOTT SHE FOUND THE
title for her novel,
Save Me the Waltz
, in a Victor record catalog. It is an evocative request, with a bitter edge, and like an old song it stirs memories. In the novel Zelda probes her childhood in Montgomery as well as her life with Scott Fitzgerald. Inevitably her awareness of Scott’s process of creating fiction had deeply influenced her. And she too stripped portions from various of her short stories, like “A Couple of Nuts” and “A Millionaire’s Girl,” and added them to her novel. The surface structure of the novel is quite simple; there are four chapters, which are each divided into three sections. But she has trouble sustaining a longer narrative and
Save Me the Waltz
is not an easy book to read. Its force depends on the cumulative effect of its vignettes rather than on an orderly flow of events. Her style is turgid, and extended chunks of poetical description, an oddity of language, as well as incorrect grammar and misspellings seriously mar the novel. (It did not appear to have been
copyedited by Scribner’s at all, as several of the reviewers pointed out.) Yet, as eccentric a novel as it is, as uneven and flawed, it is nonetheless charged with her own fictional energy and voice. It becomes a good deal more than the curio of a deranged sensibility working over the grievances of a life with Scott Fitzgerald, or of a life shattered by mental illness.

Zelda recreates the life of an American girl in the Deep South before the First World War, who later, in the twenties, is exposed, through the extraordinary success of her artistic husband, to a gaudy and unstable life in New York, Paris, and the Riviera. Few women could have written about it with greater authenticity or poignancy. Again and again the autobiographical impulse seeks release in the novel, ensnaring the reader who has a prior knowledge of Zelda’s life. Perhaps that is the larger problem presented by this novel— that because it is so deeply autobiographical, the transmutation of reality into art is incomplete. We read it against the life, or as a gesture of release from the life. If Zelda is telling her side of the story, Scott’s turn will come within two years with the publication of
Tender Is the Night.
Both of the Fitzgeralds would corrupt and alter the story by seeing it through their private angles of vision.
Save Me the Waltz
is not a defense; it is Zelda’s view of that complex tangle of selves within wedlock in those postwar years when, as she wrote, “People were banking in gods….”