Zelda (40 page)

In her introduction of Alabama, Zelda takes special care to stress her heroine’s primary concern: Alabama’s quest for her own identity. And, although the novel begins with a description of the Judge in relation to his family, Alabama’s sense of herself is first described within her mother’s orbit. Alabama’s quest for her own identity will grow throughout the novel, but it is here marked by a peculiar distinction.

“Tell me about myself when I was little,” the youngest girl insists. She presses against her mother in an effort to realize some proper relationship.

“You were a good baby.”

The girl had been filled with no interpretation of herself, having been born so late in the life of her parents that…childhood [had] become more of a concept than the child. She wants to be told what she is like, being too young to know that she is like nothing at all…. She does not know that what effort she makes will become herself. It was much later that the child, Alabama, came to realize that the bones of her father could indicate only her limitations.

Uncertain about who she is, the author steps in and states that Alabama “is like nothing at all….” Zelda describes “The girl” in terms of a vessel, an object which has not been “filled,” but it is a strangely impersonal figure of speech: Alabama as container.

In an interchange with her mother which immediately follows the preceding one, Alabama tries another tactic to rouse a more meaningful response from Millie. But her mother characteristically veers from a pertinent answer. Alabama asks,

“And did I cry at night and raise Hell so you and Daddy wished I was dead?”

“What an idea! All my children were sweet children.”

But Alabama does not want to know about “all” of her mother’s children, she wants something specific about herself; the very intensity of the language of her question is a push for a genuine emotional response from her mother.

Just before Alabama’s bedtime that evening she overhears the Judge asking Millie the whereabouts of Dixie (who is out with Randolph McIntosh, whom the Judge considers a wastrel). Millie tells him, “‘She’s out with some friends.’ Sensing the mother’s evasiveness, the little girl draws watchfully close, with an important sense of participation in family affairs.” (We would expect Alabama to say “her mother,” but instead Zelda uses “the,” an impersonal article, which reinforces Alabama’s sense of estrangement from her mother.) The Judge suspects that Dixie is out with Randolph and tells Millie that if she is, “‘she can leave my house for good.’ “Millie takes Alabama to bed “and the little girl lies in the dark, swelling virtuously submissive to the way of the clan.” As she falls asleep the aroma of pears from an orchard fills her room; she hears a band practicing “waltzes in the distance.”

White things gleam in the dark—white flowers and paving-stones. The moon on the window panes careens to the garden…. The world is younger than it is, and she to herself appears so old and wise, grasping her problems and wrestling with them as affairs peculiar to herself and not as racial heritages. There is a brightness and bloom over things; she inspects life proudly, as if she walked in a garden forced by herself to grow in the least hospitable of soils. She is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop with marigolds. She wants life to be easy and full of pleasant reminiscences.

In this passage Zelda weaves back and forth between two strains that she will use consistently throughout the novel. Images of flowers and
gardens reinforce the development of her central characters and establish not only mood but the interior direction of these characters’ lives. Sometimes, however, that imagery extends beyond what the reader could be prepared to accept about a character within the time sequence of the novel. For example the following passage is infused with images drawn from Zelda’s memories and hallucinations at Prangins—within the context of the novel at this point the passage does not make much sense. But within the context of Zelda’s life it is explosive with autobiographical meaning.

She grows older sleeping. Some day she will awake to observe the plants of Alpine gardens to be largely fungus things, needing little sustenance, and the white discs that perfume midnight hardly flowers at all but embryonic growths; and, older, walk in bitterness the geometrical paths of philosophical Le Nôtres rather than those nebulous byways of the pears and marigolds of her childhood.

(Much later in the novel when Alabama is ill in Naples, she too will have fantasies, but not of “Alpine gardens” in southern Italy.)

When the war comes Alabama plans “to escape on the world’s reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family…. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best.” She falls in love with the romantic figure of Lieutenant David Knight, who carves a “legend” in the doorpost of the country club, “David…David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.” Insistently he tells her how famous he will become. He asks her to tell him she loves him.

“Say, ‘dear,’ “he said.

“No.”

“You love me. Why won’t you?”

“I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk.”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“It spoils things. Tell me you love me.”

He does. But Alabama withholds from him her own pledge of love. When Zelda describes Alabama’s love for David she says it is like pressing her nose against a mirror and looking into herse’f: “So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herse’f that he became distorted in her vision….” She feels “the essence of herse f pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull
and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion.”
^*
She does not break, but remains in a sort of suspension of self within David; she fee’s “very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.”

Alabama, then, in a fantasy, enters David’s head, which is “gray and ghostly”; she looks into “the deep trenches of the cerebellum.” She runs to “‘the front lines’ “and becomes lost in “a mystic maze [of] folds and ridges [rising] in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another.” She falls and reaches the “medulla oblongata.” “Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run.” This entire scene takes place during a kiss. The mirror image at the opening is crucial, for what Alabama loves is something of herself in David. It is when she enters his head that she is terrified, and images of a bleak terrain of the mind, a deserted battlefield, are used to reinforce her terror. What she seems to be afraid of is not simply being there, but the emptiness, the oddly directionless mindscape she is within. It is immediately after this scene that David tells her he is going to see her father about marrying her.

David Knight is Alabama’s rescuer from her father’s world. A knight is a young man whose job it is to rescue princesses from their imprisonments. David Knight promises to take Alabama away with him into a world without restraint, without fortresses; a world in which law plays little part. It is the artistic world of New York.

When Knight is in New York for embarkation he describes it to Alabama in terms of a fairy tale, and his letters probably echo Scott Fitzgerald’s: “‘The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference—and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I’d like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.’ “The third time David writes about his locked-in princess Alabama asks him (as Zelda had asked Scott) “not to mention the tower again.” In a sense she seems to believe she is a princess
“We shall suggest that it was on the basis of this exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment.”

in a tower, but a tower like the one described in the opening of the book, which has been built by her father. She is eager to escape from it through Knight, but certainly she will not accept a change of domains on similar terms of imprisonment. However, David differs decidedly from the Judge and Alabama is attracted to him because he does. He is open-handed, an artist, a man who is comfortable with people and playful; he is also as restless and filled with dreams as Alabama is. What he lacks is the Judge’s inexorable strength and single-mindedness. One day, long after David’s splendid first successes, Alabama will find herself repelled by him, and it will be largely because she misses that quality of authority she had resented in her father. A fortress, Zelda seems to be saying, had protected as well as imprisoned. Alabama turns to memories of her father for sustenance: “She thought of the time when she was little and had been near her father—by his aloof distance he had presented himself as an infallible source of wisdom, a bed of sureness. She could trust her father. She half hated the unrest of David, hating that of herself that she found in him.” Frightened then by the disintegration of her marriage, she tries to make “a magic cloak” out of the “strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David….”

With
Chapter 2
begins the story of the Knights’ marriage. In time, six novels written by the Fitzgeralds would grow out of their love affair and marriage:
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Save Me the Waltz, Tender Is the Night
and Zelda’s unfinished manuscript,
Caesar’s Things.
What Zelda cut out of the chapter probably tells us something about the kind of material to which Scott objected. Still some of it was not cut entire, but recast, and in the recasting Zelda kept what she wanted.

Alabama’s peculiar genius lay in possessing a rapacious engulfing ego that swallowed her world in the swift undertow of its ebb and flow…. Alabama was proud of David. Used to the plugging, slow, and costly successes of the life about her in the South, David’s triumphs filled her with an anticipatory sense of uneasiness, as if she had ordered some elaborate appurtenance and, penniless, awaited the bill.

The first sentence was altered to read “Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego
their
particular genius swallowed
their
world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea” (my italics). The
change was clearly intended to include David as well as Alabama.

Mention of money, debt, and drinking were pared down; and the single reference to Alabama’s jealousy in the galley proof was drastically altered by the time it was published. But the primary difference between what was published and what appeared in the galleys before revision is in Alabama’s attitude toward her family. in both versions Alabama’s parents come to visit the Knights while they are living in Connecticut. Their visit is a disaster. In a comic scene, while the Knights are trying to present themselves as models of conventional young marrieds to the Beggses, two of David’s friends appear drunk on a hammock in the Knights’ back yard. Unable to think of a way to get rid of them, Alabama manages to maneuver her mother upstairs for a rest. “From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room David knew that something was wrong.” This reads pretty much the same in the galleys except that there are additional sentences which explain why she is the way she is: “Alabama had a way of abnegating under difficulties. It wasn’t that she shirked, but her mother had led her to believe that she could have no connection whatever with anything but perfection from babyhood.” These sentences did not appear in the published version.

The two friends eventually wander off, but they return in the early hours of the morning. David goes downstairs to quiet them and winds up drinking gin and tomato juice with them. Alabama is furious with David, tries to grab the bottle from him, and as he pushes her away she falls against the door. It smacks her in the face, giving her not only a bloody nose, but two black eyes. She tries to hide her face under layers of powder, but it is useless. As soon as the Judge sees her he decides to leave immediately for Alabama’s sister’s apartment in the city. “Alabama had known this would be their attitude but she couldn’t prevent a cataclysmic chute of her insides.” As the Judge disapproves, Alabama reacts against him, but she does not express herself directly; she “sat silently,” she “said defiantly to herself,” or “to herself bitterly,” but not once, until the very end of the scene, does she speak out.

“Understand,” the Judge was saying, “that I am not passing a moral judgment on your personal conduct. You are a grown woman and that is your own affair.”

“I understand,” she said. “You just disapprove, so you’re not going
to stand it. If I don’t accept your way of thinking, you’ll leave me to myself. Well, I suppose I have no right to ask you to stay.”

“People who do not subscribe,” answered the Judge, “have no rights.”

In the galley version Alabama, at David’s suggestion, follows her parents into the city and plans to spend the night with them and her sister. David, who has just made an important sale of some frescoes, is going up to New Haven.

“Wouldn’t you mind?” she said.

“Why should I?”

Her spirits sank in disappointment.

“I don’t know,” she said. It gave her a desperate feeling to think that nothing held her—also an experimental excitement. Though she knew in her heart that she’d never have half as much fun without David as she did with him, still there was a pleasurable leap of her insides at the thought of being without him.

As she enters the elevator of Dixie’s apartment she realizes her jealousy of David’s increasing fame. Alabama’s evening with her parents and Dixie is a debacle from beginning to end. They lecture her about her and David’s extravagance; they do not listen as she tries to tell them about David’s sale of his frescoes, and when she suggests dinner out at the Ritz, they tell her it costs too much. At her insistence they go anyway. No one but Alabama has dressed for dinner; it is too early to dine properly, the Judge wants “something plain…some spinach” and everyone else orders club sandwiches. “The club sandwiches were awful. The Ritz wasn’t accustomed to serving club sandwiches at the dinner hour.” Alabama then suggests going to a show. This time the entire family balks. “Alabama took a deep breath of the warm air. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet to her like imagined drippings from the mechanics of a night-blooming garden.”