Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (45 page)

They had arrived with an introduction to an American couple said to know everybody in Paris. Sara and Gerald Murphy had been among the first wave of artists and intellectuals to flee the aggressive materialism of post-war America: the ‘lurid billboards’ and the ‘automobiles that swarm[ed] everywhere like vermin.’
¹
During their three years in France they had formed a web of connections that stretched from cultural grandees like Picasso and Stravinsky to young expatriates like Ernest Hemingway. And as soon as Zelda met the Murphys she acknowledged them as fellow thoroughbreds. Sara’s creamy prettiness was edged by a confident, clever chic, yet she was also a woman who seemed to hold her life in enviable balance. She and Gerald had come to Paris to paint, taking lessons with the Russian futurist Natalia Goncharova, yet Sara still had time to be an easy, affectionate mother to her three children, and to maintain an apparently unruffled marriage.

Sara, and Sara’s Paris, offered a glimpse of how Zelda’s own doubt-strewn life might gain an equivalent shape. But the plan was not to stay in the city, not yet. Scott needed to finish his novel, and they had agreed to give themselves a recuperative period of calm, somewhere inexpensive by the sea. The Murphys suggested the Mediterranean coast, where they themselves would be holidaying. Inspired by the promise of an unspoilt Provençal landscape and a warm turquoise sea, Scott and Zelda took the long train ride south with Scottie, their new British nanny Lillian Maddock, and seventeen trunks packed with their former American life.
*

They ended up in Sainte-Raphaël, a town of whitewashed walls and terracotta roofs, where they found a large villa to rent for just $79 a month. Not only was the Villa Marie cheap by American standards,
^†
it seemed to Zelda and Scott a foothold in paradise. Fragrant with lemon trees and jasmine, and shaded by dark umbrella pines, it was perched high on olive-planted terraces, its blue and white tiled balconies giving wide views of the sea. As soon as they arrived Zelda went shopping for beach umbrellas, espadrilles and bathing suits: she gave herself up to a trance of pleasure, swimming and tanning herself, and, as she later wrote, it seemed that she and Scott had achieved the most lucky of escapes: ‘Oh we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us.’
²

For Scott certainly, this summer felt like a critical last chance. He was desperate to complete the great novel he knew was inside him: ‘A purely creative work,’ he assured his editor Max Perkins, ‘not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and radiant world.’
³
In some ways
The Great Gatsby
was turning into another fictional re-working of the Fitzgeralds’ lives, with Daisy Buchanan a richer, sillier, but still ‘thrilling’ version of Zelda, and Jay Gatsby, a farm boy turned millionaire who lived by Scott’s faith in the necessary magic of illusions: ‘Illusions that give such colour to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false.’
⁴
But if the origins of
The Great Gatsby
were personal, Scott’s focus was widening, moving towards the portrayal of a larger collective illusion, the American dream.

Gatsby lived the jazz age with more extravagance than any of Scott’s other heroes. His wealth was an art deco fantasy of elaborate parties, ‘yellow cocktail music’, expensive clothes and cars.
⁵
The nickel and cream opulence of his Rolls-Royce ‘terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns’ was a symbol of the shining absurdity of his life.
⁶
But rather than merely glamorizing that fantasy, Scott presented it as an exquisite bubble, floating on the dirt and corruption of modern American capitalism. As a writer, his vision was maturing. He could see that Gatsby’s desperate wish to reclaim his perfect love with Daisy was part of the bright, precarious dream of his own generation, a dream that confused the ownership of beautiful things with happiness and freedom.
*

Scott knew very well, too, what damage that confusion had wreaked on him and Zelda. And for several weeks at Villa Marie he tried to maintain a simple, sober and productive routine; writing to his editor Max Perkins, that he was determined to recapture the purity of his artistic conscience. He could feel he was writing well, symbolism and description, romance and irony all tightly pitched. Yet for Zelda, Scott’s artistic conscience soon began to feel like very dull company. ‘What’ll we
do
 … with ourselves,’ she complained, as one heat-hazed day blurred into the next.
⁷
Servants took care of the villa, Nanny Maddock took care of Scottie and, although Zelda tried to occupy herself, improving her French by reading a Raymond Radiguet novel, she grew very bored.

She also missed having an audience, and her tone was only half ironic when she wrote to Edmund Wilson that ‘everything would be perfect if there was somebody here who would be sure to spread the tale of our idyllic existence around New York’.
⁸
Although the Murphys had recently arrived in the area, they were staying further along the coast at Antibes. By the time Zelda struck up a friendship with some French aviators stationed at a nearby air base in Fréjus, she had become desperate not only for company, but for the admiring gaze of men.

The aviators were around almost every day, and Zelda and Scott fell into a routine of standing them dinner at a local restaurant, then drinking and gambling along the seafront bars and casino. Scott enjoyed their conversation, while for Zelda it felt like a return to the old Montgomery days, when she’d been so pleasantly surrounded by handsome young men in uniforms, all competing for her attention.

Her favourite was Edouard Jozan. Scott rarely danced anymore, but Edouard partnered her with an easy, athlete’s grace; during the day he took her for drives along the winding mountain roads or lazed with her on the beach, telling her the local gossip in his attractively slanted English. In contrast to Scott, with his book deadlines and bothers about money, Edouard’s company was delightfully relaxing. And in the heat and intimacy of their long hours together, Zelda began to find him very attractive.

Years later, when she incorporated memories of Edouard into her fiction, she wrote about him with the erotic recall of a lover: his dark olive skin ‘smelling of the sun and the sea … the blades of his bones carving her own’,
⁹
and it’s very probable that in real life, too, the friendship became sexual. Scott’s own suspicions may have been aroused when Edouard, in a gallant tribute to Zelda, flew aerial stunts in his plane high above the Villa Marie. He could not have known what memories he was stirring of Scott’s former rivals in Montgomery, but they precipitated the ugliest fight so far in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. On 16 July Scott wrote grimly in his ledger, ‘Big Crisis,’ and from that point on Zelda and Edouard never met up with each other again.

Edouard himself would always maintain that his friendship with Zelda was innocent, but he seems to have been protecting either her reputation or his own. Zelda herself would refer to their relationship explicitly as a ‘love affair’,
¹⁰
and cite it as one of the profound emotional experiences of her life. Scott would claim that she had gone as far as to ask him for a divorce, and that he had felt such murderous anger that he had locked Zelda in her room at the Villa Marie, taunting her to wait there until Edouard came to claim her like a man.

But if there are conflicting accounts of the affair, the truth remained that Zelda and Scott had long reached the point where their marriage depended on these quarrels for cathartic release. By August Scott was able to write in his ledger, ‘Zelda and I close together.’ Yet in comparison to their previous rows, this crisis was not so easily contained. With Edouard, Zelda had threatened more of a betrayal than with any of her other flirtations, while Scott had said things that lodged more deeply than any of his former accusations. Later he acknowledged that his optimism had been premature: ‘I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.’
¹¹

Zelda, although outwardly calm for the rest of the summer, manifested odd, disturbing tics of emotion. Gilbert and Amanda Seldes came to stay at Villa Marie for a few days and were unnerved by the way that, during the drive to the beach, she always asked Scott for a cigarette at the exact point where the road curved into a dangerously precipitous bend, as though she were deliberately distracting Scott in order to court danger.

When Sara and Gerald Murphy met up with the Fitzgeralds they sensed a ‘spooky’ reserve of feeling in Zelda’s eyes. Or they thought they did, given what happened in early September when they were woken up in the night by Scott, ‘green faced, holding a candle, trembling’, and afraid that Zelda had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. When they got to Zelda, she was not yet unconscious but she was in a frighteningly altered state. As Sara fed her sips of olive oil, trying to get her to vomit up the pills, Zelda mumbled incoherent protests, ‘Don’t make me take that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.’
¹²

It’s possible that the Murphys’ chronology was a year out, as some evidence suggests that this episode occurred the following year.
*
It’s also very unlikely that Zelda took a fatal dose, as she had a history of scaring both Scott and herself with melodramatic gestures. But there is no doubt that that summer marked a miserable falling away of the bright resolve with which Zelda and Scott had first arrived in Europe.

By October, the heat had gone out of the sun and the Fitzgeralds prepared to travel down to Rome, where the lira was even cheaper than the franc. Despite their best economizing intentions, the summer had been bewilderingly expensive: the servants had fiddled the accounts (taking advantage of their poor grasp of French); the cheap price of alcohol along the seafront bars had spurred Scott to reckless generosity, standing drinks for everyone when the mood took him. He was shocked by his continuing inability to budget, and a few months later he admitted the depth of his panic to Max Perkins: ‘I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity.’
¹³
If
Gatsby
turned out to be a failure, Scott swore he would have to abandon serious fiction for a scriptwriting career in Hollywood.

Rome would, of course, be another change of scene, holding out the promise of yet another fresh start. But while Zelda spent her first few days as a contented tourist, taking herself off on solitary walks around the city, enjoying the romantic pleasure of getting ‘lost between centuries in the Roman dusk’, an unusually difficult winter lay ahead.
¹⁴
She had begun to suffer from recurrent pelvic infections, telling her doctors that she had got sick ‘from trying to have more children’, which suggests she may have had a miscarriage, and she was anxious about her chances of having another viable pregnancy. Even before coming to Europe she and Scott had talked about giving Scottie a brother or sister. Although Zelda had been exhausted and depressed by early motherhood, Scottie had grown into a charming toddler. The two or three hours a day that Zelda spent alone with her were now a delight to her, a shared world of simple pleasures: telling stories, drawing pictures and inventing games of make-believe.

She was ready to try for another baby, but when she was admitted to hospital for investigative surgery, the findings were bad. The infections had damaged one of her ovaries and Zelda’s chances of conceiving again were significantly reduced. In the past her body had rarely failed her, and this setback not only distressed her but made her feel physically insecure. Scott was not in much of a mood to comfort her either: their hotel room in Rome was damp, a bout of flu had left him with a persistent cough, and he was fretting over the proofs of his novel. Zelda found some distraction in an American journalist attached to the film crew shooting Roman scenes for Fred Niblo’s
Ben-Hur,
but it was only a reflex flirtation. When Scott retaliated with the actress Carmel Myers, the quarrels that ensued were tedious, spiritless affairs that did little to disperse the tension.

They were still irritable and unwell in February the following year, when they packed up to move further south to the island of Capri. But the island’s vertiginous rocky landscape and its improbable wealth of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers acted as a tonic: Zelda felt the dank claustrophobia of the Roman winter lift. She also encountered Romaine Brooks, the friend and former lover of Natalie Barney, who was wintering on Capri among a group of female artists. Zelda was interested to see this group of women, all creatively absorbed in a life without men, and as she began to spend time with them, she accepted their encouragement to start painting herself. It was a novel experience for her, losing hours each day in the study of shifting light and sea, of rock formations and flowers, but also detaching herself Scott and the complications of their marriage.

Scott, however, hated Capri. He felt sidelined by Zelda’s new hobby and her new friends; he grumbled hatefully to Max Perkins that the island, historically a haven for male, as well as female homosexuals, was ‘full of fairies’.
*
15
But the foulness of his mood was primarily due to writer’s nerves. He genuinely believed that
Gatsby
was his best novel yet: ‘My book has something extraordinary about it,’ he wrote to John Peal Bishop. ‘I want to be extravagantly admired again.’
¹⁶
Yet until it was published and the reviews came out, Scott’s head buzzed with a white noise of worry and self-doubt.