Zelda (35 page)

But Scott did not understand and had misgivings about her traveling alone. Zelda in turn was hurt by his lack of confidence in her. “If you feel that I am such an irresponsible person you should have left me in a clinic.” She added that she did not intend to do anything to injure him or herself.

I wish you could believe that though I may have transitory and un-correlated ideas and impulses which make it difficult to appear as a solid individual, still they are more fleeting always and my actions accord with what I would like to be—as well as I am able.

Scott did not want to rob her of her self-confidence just when she was doing so well and he relented. Before she left she wrote him:

Scottie and I have had a long bed-time talk about the Soviets and the Russian idea…. You will be absolutely ravished by her riding trousers and yellow shirt and Scottie rearing back in her saddle like a messenger of victory. Each time she goes she conquers herself and the pony, the sky, the fields and the little black boy who follows on a fast shaven mule. I wish I were a fine sweet person like you two and not somebody who has to go 200 miles because they have a touch of asthma. … I hope you haven’t worked yourself to death. We
must
reduce our scale of living since we will always be equally extravagant as now. It would be easier to start from a lower base. This is sound economics and what Ernest and most of our friends do.

She traveled to Florida, and as a compromise took along a trained nurse.

The day before Thanksgiving Zelda received a recording of Scott’s voice which delighted both her and Scottie. “It made me feel all safe in the center of things again and important.” She played it over and over. She told him she was busy writing, but “Fantastic ex-huberance has deserted me and everything presents itself in psychological terms for novels.” Certainly she had been working very hard on her stories, but as yet none of them had been sold and perhaps a novel would do better. She said she wanted to send her stories to Scott, “but I know you are absorbed in your own so I’ll do the best I can and send it on to Ober. Darling I miss you so not having anyone to trust and talk to intellectually. There’s no use asking anybody else’s opinion because I don’t care what it is.”

The fact that Zelda did not show Scott her stories for his
opinion or approval, while reiterating her deep need for him, is worth notice. The ambivalence that lay behind it would reappear when she completed the manuscript of her novel, with disastrous consequences.

On Thanksgiving Day after the turkey dinner at her mother’s she wrote Scott again:

It makes me remember all the times we’ve been to-gether absolutely alone in some supended hour, a holiday from Time prowling about in those quiet place alienated from past and future where there is no sound save listening and vision is an anesthetic…. My story limps homeward, 1,000 words to a gallon of coffee. … 1 have a
wonderful
plot for a short thing that I will get at as soon as I can. It’s for your Christmas…. It’s fun thinking of Christmas and the night you will get home and how you’ll look as you come out the gate. I will be surprised at your mondanity [?] and very amazed that you are concise and powerful and I will be very happy that you are so handsome and when I see how handsome you are my stomach will fall with many un-pleasant emotions like a cake with too many raisins and I will want to shut you up in a closet like a dress too beautiful to wear.

It was only with Scott gone that she realized how dependent upon him she had become; it was as if he were a source of energy for her to draw upon. It was not that she hadn’t ideas of her own; it was that she needed him to confirm them and herself. She asked him repeatedly, “Do you love me so
very
much like I do you?” “Is it possible for a person to be as absolutely perfect as I think you are.” The tone grew to be obsessional.

Deo, my love, my one, my person, I miss you so terribly. It seems a year since you went and it’s very pale and pathetic just trailing about in the wake of your thoughts. When you are not there everything presents itself only in terms of your impressions and I have no independent self save the one that lives in you—so I’m never thoroughly conscious except when you’re near.

She left Scott’s hat in the hallway and his cane on their bed, “… and you could not tell that it’s all just a bluff and a make-shift without you.” She kept the light on in his study at night so that she would think he was there when she woke up. And she said her disposition suffered in his absence; maybe it was the result of her asthma attacks. “I am going to dig myself a bear-pit and sit inside thumbing my nose at the people who bring me carrots and then I will be
perfectly happy.” Caught up among her own imaginings she told Scott some bears were lovely and pleasant and lived on honey and wildflowers. “But I will be a very dirty bear with burrs in my coat and my nice silky hair all matted with mud and I will growl and move my head about disconsolately.” She said he must never go off without her again.

These letters suggest that without Scott Zelda’s own existence and estimation of herself were impaired. She may have exaggerated her sense of dependence on him in order to demonstrate to him and to herself how perfectly normal she had become, for part of Forel’s cure had been a somewhat mysterious “re-education” of Zelda in terms of her role as wife to Scott. That may have instilled in Zelda a standard of normality against which she tried to measure herself. That it seems to have been foreign to her individual temperament and personality was not taken into consideration. Certainly it seems strained for Zelda to write, “We are like a lot of minor characters at table waiting for the entrance of the star.” But in 1931 that was her tone.

In late November Scott wrote Dr. Forel from Hollywood about Zelda. He said that she was well, living cautiously, and drinking no alcohol whatsoever. He said that their relationship had never been better. He also mentioned that Zelda had begun writing. The death of the Judge, which he said they had expected, Zelda had taken in her stride. He had felt no hesitation about leaving her to go to Hollywood.

Scott mocked Hollywood and he never entirely got over the feeling that there was something demeaning about going there to write. But it intrigued him as a place of false glamour against which a part of him competed for attention. He went to the parties and allowed his real charm to dissolve in alcohol. In early December he must have written Zelda about his dissatisfaction at the studios; for she replied:

I’m sorry your work isn’t interesting. I had hoped it might present new dramatic facets that would make up for the tediousness of it. If it seems too much drudgery and you are faced with get to-gether and talk-it-over’ technique—come home, Sweet. You will at least have eliminated Hollywood forever. I wouldn’t stay and waste time on what seems an inevitable mediocrity and too hard going.

Although Zelda never directly told Scott of her anxieties about Hollywood, they once took shape in a nightmare, which clearly revealed her sense of impending panic about Scott and herself.

Dearest, My Love:

I had the most horrible dream about you last night. You came home with a great shock of white hair and you said it had turned suddenly from worrying about being unfaithful. You had the big leather carry-all trunk you have always talked about buying and in it were two huge canvasses, landscapes, with the trees stuffed and made of cloth and hanging off like doll’s arms. O Goofo! I love you so and I’ve been mad all day because of that dream.

She added that she missed him and wanted him near; then, astonishingly, she wrote: “Its wonderful that we have never had a cross word or done bad things to each other. Wouldn’t it be awful if we had?” She said that Scott was all she cared about on earth, “the past discredited and disowned, the future has doubled up on the present; give me the peace of my one certitude—that I love you. It’s the only instance in my life of my intelligence backing up my emotions— That was an awful dream—awful dear. I didn’t want to live and you were only formally sorry.” In the last sentence she said she didn’t mean anything she had written: “I want you to have a good time and take what you can from everywhere and love me if you want to and be kind—” She did not, of course, mean that at all. She wanted him home with her where she could be sure of him—and of herself.

Continuing to read his short stories, she wanted to cry over “The Sensible Thing,” a story Scott had written about their abortive courtship and his losing her:

Reading your stories makes me curious more than ever about you. I don’t suppose I really know you very well—but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.

In the December issue of
Scribner’s Magazine
a story of Zelda’s appeared, “Miss Ella” (sometimes referred to as “Miss Bessie,” possibly its title in manuscript), which had been written in Switzerland. It was an ambitious story and as closely constructed as Zelda could make it at that time.

“Miss Ella” was one of Zelda’s Southern stories, and it is hard to imagine either the situation of the story or its central character as existing in any other area of the world than the American South. Ella is a Victorian spinster who lives a highly ordered life in which everything has its proper place. She keeps fit by standing up twenty minutes after each meal; she naps until the hot midday sun has cooled, and at five she goes for a drive in a carriage with her ancient aunt. The grounds of her home are hidden behind a high wall, which the children of the neighborhood climb only after the departure of Miss Ella. On the other side of the wall is a wooden playhouse which charms them. The playhouse is half hidden in a thicket by masses of overgrown flowers and it conceals inside a rusting shotgun and some dried apple blossoms pasted to the walls. A proprietary Negro tends the gardens and scolds the children severely when he catches them invading the grounds around the playhouse.

Miss Ella’s life seems as orderly as her garden; she has, however, a story, “which like all women’s stories was a love story and like most love stories took place in the past.” In her youth she had been engaged to a Mr. Hendrix, who courted her formally and conventionally. After a proper length of time he asked her to marry him and she agreed. At Christmastime during a Sunday school party to which they had all gone, Andy Bronson lighted a firecracker and from its explosion a spark caught fire to Ella’s dress. Instantly her skirts flamed up and Andy dashed to her side, the first to reach her, smothering the flames with his hands. In the weeks that followed the accident he began to send Miss Ella gifts of flowers, and silks and beads, a fan, and “an exquisite miniature of himself when his face was smaller than his great soft eyes—treasures.” Ella discovered that “she loved him with desperate suppression. One night he kissed her far into the pink behind her ears and she folded herself in his arms, a flag without a breeze about its staff.” They planned to marry, but Ella had of course to break her engagement to Mr. Hendrix, “saving and perfecting dramatically the scene she hopefully dreaded.” He took it wordlessly and stiffly and she was relieved when he left.

The following spring on the afternoon of her marriage to Bronson, while she was upstairs dressing, Mr. Hendrix quietly entered her garden and shot his head off on the steps of the playhouse. “Years passed but Miss Ella had no more hope for love. She
fixed her hair more lightly about her head and every year her white skirts and peek-a-boo waists were more stiffly starched.” The story ends by repeating an image from the opening paragraph: the rims about Miss Ella’s eyes “grew redder and redder, like those of a person leaning over a hot fire, but she was not a kitchen sort of person, withal.” She avoids all contact with heat, that of the day as well as that of love. In fact, carefully placed images of heat and fire establish and underline the motion of the story, which is a glimpse of a frustrated woman. “Bitter things dried behind the eyes of Miss Ella like garlic on a string before an open fire” is the first sentence of the story. Her memories have “acrid fumes”; her hair is red. When Miss Ella is first introduced by the narrator of the story she is “dodging the popping bits of blue flame” from the coal fire before the hearth. It is a flame which ignites Ella’s skirts and draws her into contact with Andy Bronson. Even he is first seen by the reader in “The church [which] was hot…. There in the smoky feminine confusion stood Andy Bronson.”

Zelda had read Faulkner before she wrote this story (we know she was reading him in Switzerland before her return to America in the fall of 1931); she was nurtured by a kindred South. She had also been reading psychological studies while at Prangins and what she had learned about repression informed her description of this Victorian spinster. “Even her moments of relaxation were arduous, so much so as to provoke her few outbursts of very feminine temper and considerable nervous agitation.” Zelda was also sharply aware of those disguises of self that mask the neurotic feminine personality. The apparent orderliness of Miss Ella’s person matches the orderliness of the grounds of her home, yet both are façades: the one for the erotic attraction she has felt toward the flamboyant Bronson, the other as a mask before the playhouse, the scene of violent and self-inflicted death.

Stories of suicide were a part of Zelda’s youth and natural material for her to draw on. Although Ella does nothing violent herself, she provokes violence. Just why she no longer believes in love after the suicide of Hendrix is never made clear. What is clear is the extent to which she lives within herself after the shock of drat suicide. She retires from anything that smacks of life. She swings herself in a hammock, dressed entirely in white, rocking herself as no lover would be permitted, yet “you would never have guessed how uncomfortable she was or how intensely she disliked hammocks.” Within
this woman there is sexual energy in restraint that Zelda tries to depict, and to do so she reaches back in time, describing a woman familiar in the South but hardly one of the romantic figures of her own youth. Ella is not a belle; she is an ordinary, if neurotic, spinster who no longer likes or tolerates disorder within her person. Trying to seat herself comfortably in her hammock she “invariably loosened the big silver buckle that held her white-duck skirt in place”; she worries about an immodest showing of her legs and once in the hammock she tries to maintain “a more or less static position.”