Zelda (34 page)

Zelda seemed peculiar to her friends, few of whom knew about her recent breakdown, and her appearance startled them. She was haggard and her mouth fell into a slight smile, as if she were permanently amused. The Fitzgeralds had always provided Montgomerians with a topic of conversation and gossip, but now it was no longer entirely out of envy that their names came up. Someone overheard them quarreling about a suicide pact made in the early days of their marriage when they had promised that at thirty-five they’d call it quits. The notion had definitely lost its appeal for Scott, who turned thirty-five that September. He wrote at the top of his Ledger, “Recession and Procession,” adding, “Zelda well, worse, better. Novel intensive begins.”

Zelda began to feel increasingly uncomfortable in Montgomery. She felt surrounded by women of limited horizons. “You know the kind: women of fifty still known as ‘Baby.’” She gave a friend a copy of Faulkner’s new novel,
Sanctuary
, and was delighted when she learned that the woman was sleepless after reading it. She wondered if it mightn’t do many of the women in Montgomery good to be shocked out of their complacency.

Judge Sayre was gravely ill. He had not recovered from the influenza of the previous spring and the strain of his long sickness exhausted Mrs. Sayre. Outwardly she was composed, even calm, but she tended to reminisce more than she had before, as if her memories gave her comfort. It was in the midst of this atmosphere of illness and impending death that Scott announced his plans to go to Hollywood. An offer came via Harold Ober to work on a film script under the direction of Irving Thalberg, and Scott felt he could not turn it down. The money was good and he was eager to try his hand at films again after his rankling failure in 1927. He would be gone no more than eight weeks and be home by Christmas.

Even before Scott left, Zelda had begun to work on her writing. It was the only field she felt remained open to her in which she might be able to accomplish something professionally. Dancing was now permanently out of the question, for she was no longer in top physical condition and she realized the limitations of both her age
and her ability. She felt her talents as a painter were second-rate and, besides, her poor eyesight made painting difficult and tiring. She had attracted a modest amount of attention as a short-story writer in the
College Humor
pieces and she hoped there would be a market for the kind of stories she wanted to write. Writing regularly, with an astonishing degree of self-discipline and speed, she finished at least seven stories and began planning a novel during the period Scott was in Hollywood. Only one of the stories was a revision from the previous summer, and they were usually mailed to Harold Ober just as soon as they were typed. Unfortunately, only one of the stories was published and none survive in manuscript. The synopses kept by Ober give us our only clue to their general content.

Two stories were Southern in their locale and in both there was a clutter of sensational events: miscegenation, attempted incest, a shooting, and automobile accidents were elements about which the stories turned. The others centered on the chic worlds of Long Island and Europe. But no matter what their themes were, Ober could not sell them.

In notes accompanying the stories, Zelda asked Ober what he thought about them and suggested where they might be published.
“Please
tell me your
frank
opinion. … I wish we could sell something. Can’t we
give
them away? I feel sure ‘Nuts’ is a good story, why won’t Scribner’s take it? It’s so satisfactory to be in print.” Scribner’s did eventually take it (if “Nuts” refers, as it seems to, to “A Couple of Nuts”) and it was published the following summer. It was a good story, possibly the best of Zelda’s short fiction. It possesses a Fitzgeraldian aura of romance falling apart but it is unmistakably Zelda’s. All too frequently her stories had failed because they became homilies on conduct overly laden with description of setting. Her characters froze into prototypes rather than growing as memorable and separate people. But in “A Couple of Nuts” Zelda was in control of her talent.

The story is about a young American couple, Larry and Lola, who play the banjo and sing in a club in Paris. They are “young and decorative” and “In those days of going to pieces and general disintegration it was charming to see them together.” Their innocent youthfulness and good looks soon make them a fashionable pair among the rich. They attract a patron who introduces them on the Riviera, where they become a success. “Their stuff was spectacularly American and they made a killing at it, being simple kids.” Within
a year they are a vogue, but they’ve also become calculating. Lola is romantically involved with their patron and careless; Larry’s role is to ignore the situation, which he does. There is a casual reference to an abortion, which they have to borrow money to cover. Eventually Larry persuades Lola to leave with him for America, where, he believes, they can make a name for themselves. We learn of their flop in the States through the patron, who had been instrumental in providing them with an introduction to the smart club in America where they failed. The plot becomes complicated at this point as Mabel, the patron’s ex-wife, falls for Larry. Lola retaliates by bringing a lawsuit for a hundred thousand dollars against them. It saddens the narrator to think back on the couple, for “They had possessed something precious that most of us never have: a jaunty confidence in life and in each other. …” At the end of the story Larry and Mabel are drowned on Mabel’s yacht. Lola survives with a lonely existence before her. The narrator remembers the times they had shared together and the night he was given their Paris address: “I had promised to send them some songs from home—songs about love and success and beauty.”

Those three words were the themes of Zelda’s fiction, and of her life before her breakdown. The missing word was
ruin.
She understood that a failure of love made meaningless the otherwise potent nouns
success
and
beauty
—each of which was liable to impermanence. There is in the story an indictment of the rich as seducers nearly as strong as Hemingway’s was to be in
A Moveable Feast.
Except that Zelda points out both the responsibility and the foolishness of those who take their attention as anything more than part of an intricate game, in which the rich play as masters with little at stake.

The story was reviewed in St. Paul by James Gray, who knew the Fitzgeralds. He called it a companion piece to
Gatsby
, and added that a dual egotism had sustained the main characters—an absorption in each other was the first thing that distinguished them—as it had Scott and Zelda, he might have added.

That absorption in each other had already left its mark on both their lives, and now that Scott was in Hollywood Zelda felt intensely her need for him, his company, and his reassurance. During the eight weeks that Scott was gone Zelda wrote him thirty-odd letters. In these letters she again and again told him of her dependence upon
him. She had sensed Scott’s boredom in Montgomery, feeling bored to some extent herself, but she was more than a little uneasy about his abrupt trip to Hollywood without her.

Roaming Montgomery during her morning walks, she found the old blind bugler from the Civil War who had sold candy to her and Scott when they were courting, and bought a cream bar from him for remembrance’s sake. She continued working on her short stories and she began to read one of Scott’s stories every night before falling asleep. Once while reading “The Offshore Pirate” she wrote him, “You were younger than anybody in the world once— what fun you must have had in that curious place that’s younger than life.” In full admiration of the excellence of “Absolution” she told him, “I will never be able to Write like that.”

Rereading his stories was in part a gesture of love made in his absence, but Zelda was also reading them in order to learn how to construct fiction. It was inevitable that she would model her work on his. The social and emotional territory of their work had always been strikingly similar. She now became deeply aware of Scott’s skill as a writer, and her opinion of her own work suffered by comparison. Unfortunately this stimulated one of the symptoms of her illness, competitiveness toward Fitzgerald. For what she was doing now was measuring her abilities as a writer against his—and finding her own lacking.

In her letters to him she constantly belittled her own attempts and insisted that her writing was not going well: “… my stuff (the last two since you left) has got too thin and spiritless to be worth the effort. With some ruinous facility junk just flows and is utterly worthless.” Still, she finished her stories and continued with others, all the while writing him, “I do not believe I can write.” When she did not hear immediately from Ober she began to think she was writing for herself. No one, or at least neither Scott nor Zelda nor the Sayres, questioned the intense speed at which she was working. The isolation she must have required in order to write did not then strike Fitzgerald as being at all out of hand, nor did it remind him of that period just prior to her breakdown in Paris when she was extremely productive, writing at a tremendous clip, while continuing her ballet.

Suddenly in early November the Judge grew worse. “Daddy is sinking rapidly the Doctors say. I only go once a day and take Mamma for a long drive, since he is completely unconscious and
does not know us or seem to want anybody about.” On the night of November 17 he died. Zelda was notified the following morning. She wired Scott of the Judge’s death and when she had a moment to herself she wrote to him in those abstract terms with which she had learned to describe her father, calling his death “the end of another brave, uncompromising effort to preserve conceptions—.” She added as an afterthought, “I wonder what ironic sequence, what stamina of spirit Daddy has carried over that made him think so little of the world and so much of justice and integrity?”

At his death the State of Alabama paid him its highest honors. At the capitol the main entrance to the supreme court chamber was draped with black crepe and the flag flew at half staff. Roses were cut from the grounds of the capitol and placed around his casket. A simple burial sermon was read and there were no hymns, for the Judge had requested that manifestations of sentiment be avoided. Zelda bought a blanket of flowers for the Judge’s coffin because, she wrote Scott, no one else in the family had the money to do it and “I knew how you felt towards Daddy and that you would have wanted us to.” She told him the Judge looked “very little in his clothes,” and she said simply, “It’s just the little personal things we care about in people…. Who cares what good or evil dies? And all of us care that we will never hear a certain chuckle again or see the fingers meet a certain way.”

In an obituary in the Montgomery newspaper, after the Judge had been praised for his excellence and fairness it was noted: “The remarkable thing about his success before the people is that he was in no sense a politician. We doubt if any holder of a State office in the last 20 years has known so few Alabamians personally as Judge Sayre. He did not make speeches, he did not lend his name and time to various public movements, he did not go about over the State much, he was not a joiner.”

A few days after the funeral, Zelda and her mother went to the capitol and closed the Judge’s office. Zelda told Scott how it had looked, “musty and masculine and cerebral,” with a gorgeous butterfly pinned over a map of the L & N railroad lines, some dusty cotton shirt samples and a copy of Josephus.

Zelda managed to keep her equilibrium throughout the difficult ordeal of her father’s illness and death, but she began to suffer signs of distress that were all too familiar to her. She wrote to Scott that her eyes were bothering her, that she had been sleepless with
asthma
^*
and had recently noticed touches of eczema “which I could not trace since I have done my best to lead as healthy a life as possible so you would find me fresh and cheerful when you got back.” Her father’s death had filled the house with relatives and that climate of bereavement was a great strain on her. It was doubly difficult without Scott. She wrote him, “Life is horrible without you because there’s not another living soul with whom I have the slightest communion.”

On her mother’s birthday, which was only a few days after the Judge’s death, Zelda invited her family to lunch.

Anthony’s wife is awfully nice and Tilde is pretty and Marjorie is good and kind and there we were: All Daddy had to leave behind. Mamma sat in that more aristocratic world where she and Daddy have always lived. She is so sweet and foolish and infinitely courageous.

But even with her family around her she felt isolated and out of place.

I feel like a person lost in some Gregorian but feminine service here—I have come in on the middle and did not get the beginning and cannot stay for the end but must somehow seize the meaning— It’s awful to think that Daddy isn’t here any more— 1 would like to pick up Mamma and go—

Her family fatigued her and she felt remote from them, yet obliged to make an attempt to understand them and keep in their company. When Scott wrote back to her about Hollywood Zelda replied that if he again mentioned “Lily Dalmita or Constance I will go off to Florida for a week and spend our money and make you jealous of my legs a la Creole when you get home.”

Then, as her asthma grew more harassing she did decide to spend a long weekend on the coast of Florida to recuperate. She told Scott that although she had everything in the world in Montgomery, except him, she needed to get away.

I know I am nervous and too introspective and stale— … just long riding rolling along will give me back the calm and contentment that has temporarily disappeared with my physical well-being. Please understand and do not think that I leave in search of any fictitious pleasure. After the utter solitude of Prangin there have been many people lately and people that I love with whom my relations are more than superficial and I really think I need a day or two by myself.