Zelda (62 page)

The writing of
Caesar’s Things
occupied the last six years of Zelda’s life, years without Scott, years of quiet balance punctuated by spells of relapse. It is a difficult novel to read and to understand not only because it is fragmentary and at times incoherent, but because of the peculiarity of Zelda’s grammar, her piling of image upon image, her displacement of conventional syntax.

There are a number of fragments that accompany the novel and there is a characteristic that they share: each hovers on the edge of something about to happen. There is always a portentous ambience, a precarious situation which remains unfulfilled. Nothing is resolved. And a word Zelda uses again and again is
exigency.
The novel itself seems to be in this state: situations press, but the characters are held immobile. Zelda reveals a confused anguish as she reviews her life.
Caesar’s Things
ends where it does by no accident, for Zelda is up against a decisive incident from her sane life and she cannot cope with it in conventional terms. She dodges the implications of Janno’s affair with Jacques and its effects upon her marriage to Jacob, just as it seems Zelda had done in her romance with Jozan. The covertness of her setting on the Riviera underlines the mood of the affair
itself, and Zelda’s artistry lies in her being able to convey as much as she does. But in the end we blunder against the locks of her own vision, if not of her madness, and she veers from us.

Among the fragments of fiction left in Zelda’s papers is one entitled “The Big Top.” In this, Zelda again uses the names Janno and Jacob, but it has nothing to do with the novel as it stands. In it Zelda describes Janno’s feelings upon the death of her husband.

He was gone…they had been much in love. He had been gone all summer and all winter for about a hundred years. Everything he did had been important.

She wasn’t going to have him anymore; not to promise her things nor to comfort her, nor just be there as general compensation.… She was too old to make any more plans—the rest would have to be the best compromise.

She remembered the ragged edges of his cuffs, and the neatness of his worn possessions, and the pleasure he always had from his pile of sheer linen handkerchiefs. When she had been away, or sick or something, Jacob never forgot the flowers, or big expensive books full of compensatory ideas about life. He never forgot to make life seem useful and promising, or forgot the grace of good friendship, or the use of making an effort.

This is not Janno, but Zelda, who in remembering Scott has registered his death. She ends by writing about herself.

Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.… When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to be taken care of.… But heart-break perishes in public institutions.

All these were excellent people; personable companions. Morally, they were, perhaps, the last romantics, and it may be that the worst enemy the romantic has to fear is time. Or it may be that, like the earlier Romantics, they did not know enough. But at least they knew their own predicament.

J
OHN
P
EALE
B
ISHOP

21

T
HROUGHOUT
1943
AND INTO THE
beginning of 1944 Scott’s will was in probate. Under California law Zelda received half of Fitzgerald’s estate; she could count on roughly $15,000. Judge Biggs, who was Scott’s literary executor, advised the purchase of an annuity for Zelda, which would yield her about $50 a month for the rest of her life. There was also a small bank account established for her, to be used only in an emergency.

Zelda and her mother had lived since 1940 in a white frame bungalow at 322 Sayre Street, which was nicknamed “Rabbit Run” because of the compact arrangement of its small rooms. Its tiny front porch was trimmed with green paint, and an array of potted plants and climbing roses gave the exterior of the house a cozy air. The inside of the cottage was simply furnished: the front room contained an old upright piano, a chintz-covered sofa and rockers, and a handsome cherry secretary from the Machen home. A visitor there recalls that the top of the piano as well as the walls and end tables were
covered with family mementos and photographs, primarily of Zelda, Scottie, and Scott, and that the general impression of the cottage was one of comfort without much style or flair. Two bedrooms, a kitchen with an outdoor patio behind it, and a dining room made up the rest of the house. Zelda’s eldest sister, Marjorie Brinson, and her family lived next door.

Sayre Street, which had once been in the most fashionable part of Montgomery, was in a declining neighborhood by the 1940’s. Rooming houses had sprung up on the street during the war, and there was constant noise from children running on the street, taxis honking, screen doors slamming shut. Mrs. Sayre used to say “Bottom Rail’s getting on top!” Zelda took refuge in the quiet of the patio, where she painted.

In May and again in December of 1942, Zelda’s paintings and sketches were put on exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Woman’s Club in Montgomery. In both exhibits there were a large number of pencil sketches of flowers. These were executed with exacting attention to detail; Zelda said they were drawn “after the Chinese.” Among the twenty-one water colors and pencil drawings in the December show was a self-portrait and a painting of Scott. The portrait of Fitzgerald has been lost, but the one of Zelda survives. She glares full face out of the painting, her eyes dominating the portrait. Her mouth is pale and tight, her high cheekbones wide and accented by a flush of rose color, which gives the face a curious flatness. The colors are muted and chalky. It is the intensity of the entire face that is jarring and memorable. There is something strained about the face; it has a stiffness, a quality of being visually tense that suffuses much of Zelda’s work. The painting looks rigid on the paper.

Since Scott’s death a change had slowly come over Zelda’s letters to Scottie. In her earlier letters to her daughter she had often seemed to be straining for an effect of cleverness, an amusing touch, a phrase in French, as if to add sparkle to the monotonous surfaces of her messages. The change of tone must have reflected what Zelda felt her new role to be: she offered advice, somewhat gingerly, and she tried hard to be a conscientious and sensible parent. She worried about her daughter; she wanted Scottie to say her prayers and to pray for her as well.

I trust that life will use you far less inexorably than it has used me, but should it prove harder to master in later years than at present seems probable—you will be most grateful that your past does not present any profound cause of regret.… If I seem querulous, and severe—such is not the case. I simply must (from desire to communicate from my heart from parental obligation and devotion) offer you whatever my tragic experience has mercifully indicated to be the best way of life.… It isnt just a frustrate inhibited desire to assert myself, but my deepest love that makes me want you to love God and pray.

In February, 1943, Scottie married Lieutenant (j.g.) Samuel Jackson Lanahan in New York. Lanahan was a Princeton man from Baltimore whom she had begun to date before Fitzgerald’s death while she was at Vassar. It was a quick wartime wedding, with the handsome young groom in his dress blues and Scottie in a long white gown which Mrs. Harold Ober (who had been a sort of foster mother to Scottie for years) bought for her the day before the ceremony. Shortly after their marriage Lanahan left Scottie for overseas duty.

Zelda did not go to her daughter’s wedding. On February 22 she wrote Harold Ober: “Giving Scottie away must have brought back the excitement of those days twenty-years ago when there was so much of everything adrift on the micaed spring time and so many aspirations afloat on the lethal twilights that one’s greatest concern was which taxi to take and which magazine to sell to.” New York was, she said, “a honey-moon mecca,” a perfect place to begin. To Anne Ober, who made all of the wedding arrangements, Zelda wrote that she was disappointed that she “couldn’t be of any service.” She added that she received the wedding cake and shared it with John Dos Passos, who was passing through Montgomery on his way to Mobile to observe the war construction there.

Zelda wrote that she wanted Scottie to have whatever was left of her and Scott’s housekeeping equipment. “Do not consider these mine; your life contributed the greatest solace and deepest pleasure of our domestic ventures and I wish that there were more adequate testimony of our happiness to give you—because, despite the brawls and the despairing, we had long periods of a felicity such as one does not often encounter when all we wanted was our family and to be together.” She said that after her mother died (quickly adding that she saw no reason why Mrs. Sayre wouldn’t continue for another decade) she might buy a cottage in North Carolina and just waste away under the pine trees.

Scottie decided that she would spend her 1943 summer vacation with Zelda in New York. The two-week trip in July was a delight for Zelda and a trial for Scottie, who could not help being edgy about her mother. Andrew Turnbull, who had just become a naval officer remembers going to see
Oklahoma!
with them both. He felt that Zelda, who extravagantly admired his handsomeness in his fresh white ducks, was “acting the flirtatious
jeune fille.”
Scottie, sensitive to the warning signals of her mother’s illness, was right to be uneasy about her behavior. In August 1943, Zelda was back at Highland Hospital for the first time since she left in 1940. She wrote Anne Ober: “Asheville is haunted by unhappy, uncharted remembrance for me.”

A staff member who worked closely with Zelda during her second stay at Highland remarked that when Zelda was ready to go home “she looked almost pretty again, and cheerful. But, you see, it just wasn’t permanent.” Her doctors knew perfectly well that Zelda’s situation with her mother would not last for very long. There was, however, no other place for her to live, and in February, 1944, Zelda returned to Montgomery.

Lucy Goldthwaite remembers seeing Zelda at a garden party that spring in Montgomery. Miss Goldthwaite had gone to high school with Zelda and had left Montgomery in the twenties for New York, where she eventually became an editor for
McCall’s
magazine. When she was first in New York people who knew she was from Alabama would come up to her at cocktail parties and ask her if she knew Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. “You must remember how attractive they both were. They were so much of their time. I don’t know if they would be considered beautiful today, but Scott really did look like the man in the Arrow collar ad!” She did not recognize the haggard woman who came up to her in the Southern garden in 1944 and said, “Lucy, I’m Zelda Sayre.” Zelda’s hair was dark and her permanent badly styled; her dress was long and shapeless. While Miss Goldthwaite assured Zelda that she had recognized her, Zelda explained that she had just returned from Asheville, where she had been recuperating from an illness. Looking directly at Lucy for a moment, Zelda said, “We play parlor games from
The Ladies Home Journal.”
And in Miss Goldthwaite’s startled silence Zelda quickly moved away from her. Later, Miss Goldthwaite remembers that Zelda spoke to her about Scottie, saying that she wanted Lucy to
talk to her daughter in New York and tell her about herself when she was young and life was before her.

Zelda became intensely religious again in 1944 and, evangelical in her zeal, she mimeographed tracts that she wrote to save the souls of her friends. Because her friends included Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, and Carl Van Vechten, her little religious essays were saved. She believed that she was in direct communication with God and she envisioned her friends as hellhound. In February she wrote Wilson: “You should redeem yourself; pray and repent. Believing as I do that no matter what the floral catalogues may designate as rose, the odor remains funereal.” She later said that she did not like to think of his burning. “You are much to be respected and handsome and have a genius for interesting people. You must look to your salvation.”

She also wrote Scottie such directives as this:

Right things are the best things to pursue and to do, by the nature of their being. A thing is right to do because it contributes the most constructive possibility; is right because the concensus of the best authorities have endorsed it; and is the
right
course because it is the most spiritually remunerative of any possibility—Knowing the right there isn’t any alternative—because right is that which is most spiritually advantageous and all souls seek betterment. The purpose of life on earth is that the soul shall grow—

So grow—by doing what is right.

Zelda began to live more and more exclusively within these circles of Tightness, altered only by remembering. Within a few months she was writing Scottie: “Time passes: the japonica still blooms and the garden has been expectantly promisory with jonquils and the peach trees bud.… These rainy twilights are glamorous and sorrowful and make me wish that I weren’t too old to remember tragic love-affairs.” Her life was peopled with memories. The editors of
The American Mercury
wrote to her asking permission to reprint “Crazy Sunday” in a collection of their best work. They offered her $50. She told Scottie: “Scott would have been so pleased; it is good that he is still remembered. I wish that my reams of epic literature would spin themselves out to a felicitous end. I write and write and have, in fact, progressed. The book
[Caesar’s Things]
still makes little sense but makes it very beautifully and may find a reader or two eventually.”