Zelda (15 page)

There was something else which made them edgy. In late
January (or early February) Zelda discovered that she was again pregnant. They apparently decided that they did not want another child so soon after the birth of Scottie. In Scott’s Ledger during March he cryptically entered “Zelda & her abortionist,” and it is not clear whether the abortion was performed in New York or in St. Paul.

In a section of his manuscript of
The Beautiful and Damned
Fitzgerald used a similar episode between Anthony and Gloria. In the first draft Gloria is with child and finds the situation intolerable. Anthony asks her if she can’t “‘talk to some woman and find out what’s best to be done. Most of them fix it some way.’” Gloria asks if he wants her to have the child and he says he is indifferent, but he does want her to be a sport about it and not go to pieces. The situation is resolved almost offhandedly a few pages later when the reader finds out that Gloria is not pregnant. This ending was kept in the published version, but there were significant alterations in the material leading up to it. In rewriting the scene Scott reduced the pregnancy to only a probability, but, believing herself pregnant, Gloria’s role in the episode is essentially the same. It is Anthony’s that undergoes change. His comments about “fixing it” are cut and the decision to abort (although, delicately, the word is never used) the imagined baby is entirely Gloria’s.

As Scott weakened the scene the emphasis changed subtly and Gloria became unremittingly self-centered; a baby would ruin her figure and distort her idea of herself. Since Zelda’s second pregnancy and abortion occurred just before the publication of
The Beautiful and Damned
, it could not have provided the raw material for this scene. But the Fitzgeralds had thought that Zelda was pregnant on an earlier occasion; the letter Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler hinting at this (although it turned out to be a false alarm) was written at the time Scott was working on the first draft of his manuscript.

Gloria mirrored something of Scott’s understanding of Zelda. In January, Scott had written Edmund Wilson a letter concerning the important influences upon his life and writing, for Wilson was writing what Scott considered to be one of the first important critical essays on his fiction; it would be published in the
Bookman.
In it Wilson underlined what he thought were three significant influences upon Scott. These were the Midwest (specifically the society of St. Paul and country clubs), his Irishness, and liquor. At Scott’s request mention of the last influence was cut from the article. Even then Scott commented: “… your catalogue is not complete…
the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”

While the Fitzgeralds were in New York at the Plaza, Burton Rascoe wrote to Zelda asking her to review
The Beautiful and Damned.
He had just begun a book department for the New York
Tribune
and wanted to include pieces that would add sparkle to his new venture. “I think if you could view it, or pretend to view it, objectively and get in a rub here and there it would cause a great deal of comment.” It would also help the sales of the book, he thought. Zelda accepted his challenge and wrote the review under her maiden name. It was her first published piece since high school.

The tone of the review was self-conscious as Zelda indulged in light mockery: she asked the reader to buy Scott’s book for a number of “aesthetic” reasons, which included her own desire for a dress in cloth of gold and a platinum ring. She humorously evoked a vision of herself as the author’s greedy and self-centered wife, and she saw the book as a manual of contemporary etiquette, an indispensable guide to interior decorating—and in Gloria’s adventures an example of how not to behave. About Anthony she said nothing at all; it was Gloria who dominated her attention. Zelda did not try to conceal the parallels between Gloria and herself:

It also seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

We cannot know to what extent Scott used Zelda’s diary but we have her word for it (as well as George Jean Nathan’s) that he did. One such portion from the novel, called “The Diary,” reads:

April 24th—I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often “husbands” and I must marry a lover….

What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages’ Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting—it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s
unwanted children. What a fate—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love….

Scott’s portrayal of Gloria was hardly a flattering one, and by the close of Zelda’s review she had dropped her bantering tone:

I think the heroine is most amusing. I have an intense distaste for the melancholy aroused in the masculine mind by such characters as Jenny Gerhardt, Antonia and Tess (of the D’Urbervilles). Their tragedies, redolent of the soil, leave me unmoved. If they were capable of dramatizing themselves they would no longer be symbolic, and if they weren’t—and they aren’t—they would be dull, stupid and boring, as they inevitably are in life.

It becomes evident in the review that Zelda was defending that part of herself within the portrait of Gloria. Zelda had been wounded by the characterization, but she did not express that directly and instead tried to cover herself by flippancy—as in the opening of the review. Gloria, it would seem, though not entirely Zelda, was representative of something Zelda felt it necessary to stand up for.

John Peale Bishop was keenly aware of the connection between Fitzgerald’s fiction and his life. Bishop wrote that
The Beautiful and Damned

concerns the disintegration of a young man who, at the age of twenty-six, has put away all illusions but one; this last illusion is a Fitzgerald flapper of the now famous type—hair honey-colored and bobbed, mouth rose-colored and profane.

He continued pointedly:

But, as with
This Side of Paradise
, the most interesting thing about Mr. Fitzgerald’s book is Mr. Fitzgerald. He has already created about himself a legend…. The true stories about Fitzgerald are always published under his own name. He has the rare faculty of being able to experience romantic and ingenuous emotions and a half hour later regard them with satiric detachment. He has an amazing grasp of the superficialities of the men and women about him, but he has not yet a profound understanding of their motives, either intellectual or passionate.

Bishop cheated a little in his review; he knew very well, for Scott had admitted it to him in McKaig’s presence, that drawing on himself and Zelda was a problem in his writing. Bishop’s review included a sentence that Zelda clipped for her scrapbook, placing it beneath a photograph of herself.

Even with his famous flapper, he has as yet failed to show that hard intelligence, that intricate emotional equipment upon which her charm depends, so that Gloria, the beautiful and damned lady of his imaginings, remains a little inexplicable, a pretty, vulgar shadow of her prototype.

Either as a result of the favorable reaction to her review of
The Beautiful and Damned
or through Rascoe’s efforts Zelda was asked by
McCall’s
magazine for a 2,500-word article on the modern flapper, and they offered her ten cents a word. In October they sent her $300 for an article called “Where Do Flappers Go?” but they did not publish the piece. In June the
Metropolitan Magazine
did publish her “Eulogy on the Flapper.” Above the article was a sketch of Zelda done by Gordon Bryant. It is an astonishing likeness, which caught in profile the curiously savage intensity of her look. The caption beneath it again emphasized the connection between the real Zelda and the fictional one, stating that she had been put in both of Fitzgerald’s novels, and adding rather inanely, “Everything Zelda Fitzgerald says and does stands out.” Zelda wrote that the flapper was dead and that she grieved the passing of so original a model, for she saw in the flapper a code for living well. Not too surprisingly, Zelda had taken the flapper quite seriously and saw in her someone who experimented with life, who was self-aware and did the things she did consciously for their effect and to create herself anew.

How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys
do
dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men
will
marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends—it needs only crowds….

There were rights that only youth could give:

I refer to the right to experiment with herself as a transient, poignant figure who will be dead tomorrow. Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow—or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends….

By the conclusion of her essay Zelda had fallen into the familiar position of the spirited young feminist who dislikes most women. “Flapperdom” was a curative against the ills of society and Zelda insisted that it made young women intelligent by “teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young.”

At twenty-one Zelda had formulated a sort of philosophy of life; it was remarkably like Gloria’s. It was an application of business acumen to femininity: you created yourself as a product and you showed yourself with all the flair of a good advertising campaign. Women were to dramatize themselves in their youth, to experiment and be gay; in their old age (in their forties) they would be magically content. What Zelda intended to avoid at all costs was her vision of the legion of unhappy women, saddled with domesticity, weary and yet resigned to it. She was perceptive enough to understand that in their apparent resignation they thought of themselves as martyrs, and that was a position she abhorred for its dishonesty. What she wrote was a protest, but it was also a defense of her own code of existence. That this code was potentially destructive and that it would demand its own continual and wearying performance she did not take into account.

In the summertime of 1922 the Fitzgeralds and Scottie’s nurse moved out of St. Paul to the Yacht Club on White Bear Lake; they lived there until, as one of their friends said, they “made such an unholy rumpus day and night that they were asked to move out.” They found a house nearby and the summer continued with Zelda swimming and golfing, and Scott working on a play, called first
Gabriel’s Trombone
and later
The Vegetable.
Mrs. Kalman, who had helped them settle in St. Paul the year before, played golf with Zelda every day. “She was very athletic and wanted to be out doing something. Zelda was rather a good golfer, or at any rate, far better
than Scott. She was not at all interested in going out with the girls, and when Scott wanted to remain at home, Zelda stayed with him. Certainly she enjoyed being different and was definitely not our idea of a Southern belle—there just wasn’t a bit of the clinging vine about her. She and Scott were always thinking up perfectly killing things to do. You know, entertaining stunts which were so gay that one wanted to be in on them. Zelda didn’t seem so awfully different then. She was a natural person, who didn’t give a damn about clothes. But there weren’t many people whom she liked. I won’t say she was rude, but she made it quite clear. If she didn’t like someone or if she disapproved of them, then she set out to be as impossible as she could be.”

By September they had exhausted whatever interest St. Paul had held for them and decided to return East. Leaving Scottie with her nurse, they went to New York to hunt for a house. It was in New York, while they were temporarily living at the Plaza, that they first met Ring Lardner and John Dos Passos. Dos Passos had recently published
Three Soldiers
(1921) and had established his own literary reputation with that novel. It was natural that he should meet Fitzgerald, and he remembers:

“I met them together for the first time at the Plaza…. Wilson had introduced us, I believe. Scott called and asked me if I would care to join him for lunch; Sherwood Anderson would be there, and it might be fun if I came along. I did. That was when I first met Zelda. She was very beautiful, [she possessed] a sort of grace— a handsome girl, good looking hair—everything about her was very original and amusing. But there was also this little strange streak.”

After they had finished lunch someone suggested that they all go house hunting with the Fitzgeralds. Dos Passos continues: “This was just before they moved into their house on Great Neck—so off we went. We wound up seeing Ring. Lardner was a very drunk and mournful man. Somehow, perhaps to cheer ourselves, we all decided to go to a carnival that was nearby. It was quite late by this time. At the carnival I remember thinking—Zelda and I had gone off together for a Ferris wheel ride—can you imagine that? Well, there we were up in the Ferris wheel when she said something to me. I don’t remember anymore what it was, but I thought to myself, suddenly, this woman is mad. Whatever she had said was so completely off track; it was like peering into a dark abyss—something forbidding between us. She didn’t pause as I recall, but went right on.
I was stunned. I can honestly say that from that first time I sensed that there was something peculiar about her.” Not being able to recall a specific instance of what he meant, he added simply: “She would veer off; she wouldn’t exactly get mad…. [Scott] would try to stop her if she went too far, you know, try to get her off the track.