Zelda (60 page)

As early as 1940, in a letter to Scott about a short story she was sending to him, Zelda stated an attitude that had begun to mark all her writing. “Although you may not like it, and may find it moralistic, it conveys a message that I would be most grateful to put across: that the story of life is of far deeper implication in religious terms.” By the summer of 1942 she was writing Mrs. Turnbull: “I am trying to write a novel with the thematic intent of inducting the Biblical pattern of life into its everyday manifestations.” Taken together
these two statements suggest a possible key to
Caesar’s Things.
The problem is that Zelda’s religious fervor seems to have been closely linked to the most delusional aspects of her illness, and therefore what might have been the central thematic device of the novel is instead the most forced and peculiar portion of her book. Its subject was once again the story of Zelda’s life. Only this time the reader confronts the rigidity of Zelda’s psychosis head on, and the novel moves at a strained pace, swinging in and out of fantasies whose meanings are known only to the author. It is a sort of collage of autobiographical writing, fantasy, and religiosity. There is no sum of the parts of this novel, but only the parts themselves, truncated and wildly incoherent.

The novel seems to have originally been written in the first person, but haphazardly throughout the manuscript the
J
was changed to
she
, or Janno, the narrator’s name. (All of the main characters’ names begin with the letter
J
: Janno’s husband’s name is Jacob, her French aviator’s name is Jacques, as it was in
Save Me the Waltz.
There is a confusion of names for Jacob. He is introduced as “Harold,” but that name is dropped almost immediately to be replaced by either “Jacob” or “Jacques”; most often he is “Jacob.” Fitzgerald had used a number of names beginning with
J
, Jay Gatsby, Judy Jones, and Jordan Baker among them, but whatever Zelda’s intentions may have been on this score they remain impenetrable.)

More than half of the book, the first four chapters, deals with Janno’s youth in a small town in the South, and although the town is not named, it is Montgomery. Chapters Five and Six and the incomplete Chapter Seven are about Janno’s marriage to Jacob (who is a painter as David was in
Save Me the Waltz)
and the gradual dissolution of their marriage as they move from New York to Paris and the Riviera.

Janno is the youngest girl in a large family. Her father is a judge. She has an older brother whom she adores and follows. He is called “Monsieur,” which was one of Zelda’s nicknames for Scott. (Within the Sayre family, “Mister” had been Anthony Sayre’s nickname.) One day the family moves into a small house across from which a hospital is being built. The Judge warns Janno and her brother to stay away from the building site. He gives them no reason, but he suggests that trouble is expected there that afternoon. (Later in
the
manuscript the Judge says a new wing is being added
for “psychiatrists to practice in.”) Both children are intrigued by the building and the brother, disobeying his father and leaving Janno behind, runs off to play there. Janno walks down to the end of her street and begins to tell herself a story; she wants to follow her brother, but is uneasy about his disobedience.

Suddenly Janno starts to run toward the hospital. She falls. “The child was dead from strain, and effort, and excitement. She clung across the dried grass with the stubble sticking into her mouth, ‘if you will only let me get there—let me get there lest such obscenity should be—’ “Janno picks herself up and begins to run again. She hears the sound of violent whacking “and cries of a spectral ball-game reverberated through the lone air.” Perhaps her brother is playing ball, perhaps not; she wants to make sure. She is terrified as she approaches the spot where she thinks her brother is playing. She sees him astride something that looks like a scarecrow; the ground around him is in considerable disorder. Janno yells at him to stop whatever he is doing. The language of the little girl becomes stilted and oddly formal as if, within a scene that is becoming increasingly violent and surreal, Janno’s is the voice of balance, reason, and justice. She makes moralistic pronouncements on the action.

“What right have you to stop me?” The boy was angry at his rights being contested. He had found the thing. It was his—or more his than hers anyway.

Maybe she didn’t have a right.

“There are lots of other more felicitous things to do—a little further on in the pare,” she proffered fairly.

“Don’t you want to see me make a poppa?” This unidentified operation held possibilities of interest; her curiosity wavered.

“What’s that?” It had an interesting sound anyway, like the decapping of a bottle of soda-watter.

Mysterious voices begin to advise Janno to stop her brother, but she is afraid to.

Before she could say anything, her brother had his thumb in the eye-sockets and the child died of horror as the eye-ball came out in a film of white plasm. It was a pale blue eye; and that was the first indication that the thing he was playing with was a corpse.

Janno screams in horror as her brother tries to remove the remaining eye. “That God would let this happen had broken her heart forever and that was the way she would live.” She runs from the scene
“because she didn’t want to cause any trouble” and lies down beneath a big oak tree. While lying there Janno is visited by God in a splendor of piercing white light: “The light was Charity, the Justice of Cause and Effect and INFINITE MAJESTY.”

The action of the novel continues as if it were a natural order of events. Two men, apparently interns from the hospital, carry Janno home; she has a fever and is about to the. (“Janno was dead, and dying.…”) Her brother is already at home when they bring her in and is lying on a couch with his face to the wall. Janno tries to apologize to him, but he only snarls at her. Her father’s voice reaches her as if from far away. Abruptly the novel has again shifted gears and the reader realizes that they are no longer in the home, but in a hospital where Janno has been taken for the night. The Judge is saying, “‘You’ve ruined her, now you can keep her.’” Shortly thereafter the story line totally disintegrates. Then the author steps in to provide another strangely formal commentary:

A successful life is able to summon to memory few episodes of the past save the contributing factors to success, but a soul fallen into the hands of psychiatrists find the seeds of nervous disorder and even abberation scattered plentifully over the past.… She forgot all about this year of her life until she was grown, and married and tragedy had revivified its traces—as she then saw, carved from the beginning.

Zelda’s implication is that there was a biographical equivalent in her own life for the action that has taken place in Janno’s. If there was, it is unrecorded. All we can know is that Janno’s fantasy (never admitted as fantasy within the text), alive with images of mutilation and death, seems to be grounded on the simplest level in the fear of the consequences of disobeying her father’s authority. No one from her family comes to her rescue or assistance, and uncertain even whether she is alive, dying, or dead, Janno is completely at the mercy of those in the hospital (which need not be taken literally as a hospital at all, but could stand for any sort of institution—family, marriage, school). By the end of this scene Janno is totally rejected by her father, as well as by her brother. And, in a pattern that becomes central to the novel, there are revelations, a vision of God, strange and provocative “voices” which warn and direct Janno, which do nothing to alleviate the terror of the child, and lead her instead only deeper into the nightmare of her existence. Her voices become part of the natural order of the novel. She is moved by them; she is defenseless against them.

The third chapter begins with the death of Janno’s grandmother and the throwing away of her things. Janno is sent to school for the first time, but she doesn’t like it and runs away. It is decided that she may remain at home another year (as Zelda had in Montgomery). Janno wanders down to the springhouse where butter and fresh milk were kept; in an adjacent trough of water Negresses wash clothes. Janno decides to wash her doll’s clothes. A voice speaks to her from the well, telling her that she’s washing in an “antiquated method.” Janno ignores the advice. Then there are more voices and they turn grim; they suggest that Janno jump into the well, and their “authority was dark and ominous.” They offer her a golden kingdom which has been awaiting her. But she doesn’t want to jump; she’s afraid she won’t be able to get back out. The voices promise her food; she can become a Lorelei. The well goes through to China, the voices tell her, to a “golden kingdom asleep—a fat old China king and rich courts, sleeping forever, forever counting his money.” Still Janno refuses to leap in and goes home.

Another day she returns to the well. Its voices question her: has she learned Latin, can she play the piano? She regrets that she has neither of these accomplishments. Suddenly the well and the countryside around it begin to change before her eyes. It becomes a theatre curtain, the curtain “melts” and in its place “was the green room, and oak-panelled corridor and people in heated argument.” They are talking light-heartedly about scenes of violence: “seduction, theft, kid-napping and murder.” Janno wants to know what happened. She says it doesn’t make sense; the voices reply, “Far more sense than you do.” She says she tries to make sense and leaves the room. There is blood in the hallway; Janno waits and the scene changes again.

Two men and a woman sit at a long table, large enough for twelve. One of the men is in uniform, “at least a colonel”; he carries a sword “which rested in challenge with its tip on the floor.” The other man is pale, “chestnut-haired and fragile; he seemed to be on some other than the conventional relationship with the woman.” The military man says he does not accuse the pale man, but he cannot accept treason, and he intends to defend the honor of the house. The woman is wan. The men accuse her of looking “dissolute, but she was tired from self-abnegatory spiritual effort: the keeping of many rigorous and more materialistic obligations than a person was able.” A “Nubian” pours her something to drink from a gold cup. She realizes that it will kill her if she drinks; she can see a
powder dissolving to “mucus” in the cup; “she leaned back in tragic defiance.”

Janno, who is not part of the scene, but only observing it, knows that if the woman does not drink from the cup her head will be cut off by the Nubian; Janno is, however, too exhausted to worry about how it comes out. The scene is summarized: “The weak dark man who seemed to have other things on his mind was evaluating. He acknowledged to no relationship with the woman other than as a good friend of the husband. After [a] while, when the colonel had challenged him and withdrawn, the pale man said, ‘I wanted the jewels as much as the woman. The pearls were my family heritage.’ “

Suppose that the uniformed colonel, the “weak dark man” is Jozan. He challenges “the pale man,” who may or may not be the woman’s husband, i.e., Scott. But whatever the colonel’s relationship to the woman has been, he now abandons her and withdraws from the scene. The pale man is no more interested in the woman than he is in “the jewels…The pearls,” and in essence both men have abandoned her. They turn on her and accuse her of being debauched. Her reply is similar to the language Zelda uses when discussing her mental illness, and seems to have nothing to do with the situation at hand. But nothing can be taken literally. What is the cup, and why is it gold? Why mucus? What jewels? The scene could be a distorted mirroring of Zelda’s self at various stages of life. The little girl, Janno-Zelda, views the young woman, who may represent an older Zelda, as foredoomed in her dilemma, and is incapable of doing anything to change the course of her life. But like symbols in a dream, or in a poem, there is no one meaning.

Following this scene is a series of fragmented fantasies which are completely impenetrable. At one point Janno is sitting on a throne in a bright light and doctors are conferring about “the case and they decided that in case of death they would proceed with the regular medical routine.” It is this sense of being handled or manipulated, of being a “case,” of being unable to alter or control what is happening to her, even of being moved helplessly toward her death, while being a witness of it, that gives the novel its terrifying air of nightmare.

In an abrupt time switch Janno begins to grow out of childhood; Zelda stresses her faulty upbringing, which makes her unsure of herself. She worries about her popularity with boys, and even more
about her own standards of behavior. “Janno…wished that her mother had told her not to go like that with the boys; she wished that there had been rules and prescriptions for right. But there wasn’t.” In a passage punctuated by strange warnings about Christ’s right and the ways of the Lord, Zelda writes about Janno’s feelings of social inferiority.

Then something happened: they had better clothes than she did, and better manners, and she had better accept their standards of conduct. It was clearly a threat.… Then the boys assumed the air of authorized committee “You won’t have any friends—nobody else will come to see you. That I promise you.”…They went up to the haunted school-yard so deep in shadows and creaking with felicities of murder to the splintery old swing and she was so miserable and trusting that her heart broke and for many years after she didn’t want to live.…

Whatever happened to Janno in the schoolyard is suggested but left unsaid. Later in the manuscript Zelda writes that what happened to Janno was “the kind of thing one forgets.… until years later.… [when] this sort of thing looms up in a different light. It is then no longer a departure from an habitual rectitude, but a presage of the disasters which finally came; a monstrous weakness pervading life until finally it has prevailed, and declared that to corrupt and to degrade had always been its intent.” The manuscript is immersed in this sense of doom. Nothing is what it seems. The past holds only the seeds of future decay and corruption.