Zelda (6 page)

If his men idealize, or romanticize, his women do not. Their allure is apparently in their total self-centeredness and overwhelming instinct for conquest; it is matched only by their extraordinary spirit.
When inevitably the man in the story loses his girl, he describes his reaction:

I wandered around… like a wild man trying to get a word with her and when I did I finished the job. I begged, pled, almost wept. She had no use for me from that hour. At two o’clock I walked out of that school a beaten man.

Why the rest—it’s a long nightmare—letters with all the nerve gone out of them, wild imploring letters; long silences hoping she’d care; rumors of her other affairs.

But for all the young author’s talk of the enticing loveliness of his girls, only one is made love to (in “Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge”), and even then Fitzgerald presents the lovemaking ambiguously. “He knew what was wrong, but he knew also that he wanted this woman, this warm creature of silk and life who crept so close to him. There were reasons why he oughtn’t to have her, but he had suddenly seen how love was a big word like Life and Death …. Still they sat without moving for a long while and watched the fire.” Perhaps these girls were not meant to be possessed, but always lost, for the other girls are not even kissed, much less touched. The fault seems to lie in the puritanical restraint of Scott Fitzgerald’s boys rather than in his girls. Never evenly matched, the boys forfeit what might have been their upper hand to their girls’ imperious selfishness. By failing them again and again the boys, perhaps unwittingly, trap the girls into permanent performance of their game. Both sexes seem to survive on the nervous edge of the sexual maneuver while never achieving anything more than the retreat of the male and the end of the story. From the girls’ point of view it must have been a desperately unsatisfying sport they provoked; they are the creatures of a young man’s puritanical conscience, which is fascinated by the preliminary sexual game, the tease, but would prefer to lose it rather than enjoy the woman herself.

Fitzgerald spent the summer of 1917 in St. Paul and wrote to Edmund Wilson, who was already in the army, that he had taken his examinations for the regular army and had “given up the summer to drinking (gin) and philosophy (James and Schopenhauer and Bergson).” He returned to Princeton for his senior year really only waiting until his commission came through. In November he left for Officer’s Training Camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He had also begun a novel which he called
The Romantic Egotist
, about himself,
Princeton, and his generation, “and really,” he wrote Wilson, “if Scribners takes it I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight. I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation…”

Zelda Sayre was not like any of the girls Scott had known before. Zelda’s beauty and vivacity equaled Ginevra King’s, but her assurance stemmed entirely from confidence in her own good looks and drawing power. While Ginevra had moved in a larger world than Scott had known—a world of Eastern finishing schools, of wealth and social position taken for granted—Zelda’s was even more restricted than his own. To Zelda, Scott was a dazzling visitor from a place where life was lived on a grand scale.

Scott was a romancer who, never overly popular with men, was on the other hand completely at ease with girls. He was talkative, merry, imaginative, and filled by his own dreams of success and wealth and fame. His novel, which he had completed at breakneck speed on weekends at Fort Leavenworth, was still in Scribner’s hands. Shane Leslie, an Irish novelist and critic whom Scott had known from his days at Newman, and to whom he had sent the manuscript of
The Romantic Egotist
, gave this summary of its possibilities when he forwarded it to Scribner’s, his own publisher: “I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness …. About a third of the book could be omitted …. Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed it will also have a commercial value.” For he was certain that Fitzgerald would die in action in France as had Rupert Brooke. So was Scott, and his novel had an even greater value for him than it would have had under normal circumstances. By comparison his military career seemed to him a waste of time. To a fellow officer in his division who had been with him since Fort Leavenworth, Scott seemed pleasant enough, but immature and irresponsible.

In August, 1918, his novel was rejected by Scribner’s, but praised by an editor there named Maxwell Perkins. Scott sent a chapter of it to Zelda with a note saying:

Here is the mentioned chapter ….. a document in youthful melancholy …..

However ….. the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four …..

Needlessly I may add that the chapter and the sending of it are events for your knowledge alone….. Show it not to man woman or child.

I am frightfully bored today—

Desirously,   
F Scott Fit—

If his attitude of amorous nonchalance seemed a little stilted, nevertheless his note with its delicious secrecy intrigued Zelda and she carefully kept it with her mementos. Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own.

Whenever he was free Scott came into Montgomery on the great rattletrap bus that brought all the soldiers into town, and from there he took a taxi to 6 Pleasant Avenue. He telephoned every day, and when he couldn’t come he called twice. As the lazy summer passed, he too lost his insignia to Zelda’s little glove box. But Scott was not the only man who courted her; a mustached aviator amused her for a while, until he proposed and she flatly turned him down. Astonished at having been refused, he asked her why she had kissed him, and she replied that she’d never kissed a man with a mustache before.

Her honor was fought over so frequently behind
the
Baptist Church that it became known as a sort of personal battlefield. The aviation officers used to perform fancy stunts in their airplanes over the Sayre house until the gallant exhibitions were forbidden by the commanding officer of Taylor Field. But not before two officers had crashed on the nearby Speedway, one of them a desperate beau of Zelda’s—the mustached gentleman whom she had enjoyed kissing. In a spirit of rivalry, an inspired young infantry officer performed the manual of arms for the infantry before her door.

Scott never forgot his first invitation to dinner at the Sayres’ late that summer. Zelda teased her father into such a rage that, grabbing up the carving knife, he chased her around the dining table. Everyone else ignored them and after a few moments they both sat down. It was never mentioned again to Scott, but it was a harrowing introduction to the Sayre family.

They began to see more and more of each other. Scott carved their names in the doorpost of the country club to commemorate their first meeting, and it irritated her a little when he told her again and again how famous he would be, for he neglected to include Zelda in his enthusiastic prevision, or to compliment her on
her own considerable local fame. Describing her attraction to him, she wrote: “Dancing with [him], he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.” When she saw him leave with another girl she was suddenly jealous, not only of the girl but of him; of the aloofness which he could summon and which held him apart from her. She wanted it to be herself alone with whom he shared that pale detachment. With the summer nearly gone Scott carefully noted in his Ledger that on September 7 he had fallen in love with Zelda.
^*
He had many competitors, and she encouraged them, but that provoked his desire for her even further. Shrewdly, she understood that quite clearly. Many years later she wrote: “He was almost certainly falling in love which was acceptable to him. He had planned his life for story anyway. [She] told him about how poor she was and how he wouldn’t have wanted her had he seen her somewhere else. This displeased [him]; he could weave his own romance and was well able to do so with what there was at hand: [she] was wonderful despite, and partly because of, her rhapsodic disavowals of any appropriateness whatsoever …. [He] was proud of the way the boys danced with her and she was so much admired. The glamour of public premium… gave [her] a desirability which became, indeed, indispensable to [him].”

They spent afternoons together talking about poetry, sitting in the swing on the Sayres’ front porch and sipping long drinks filled with fruit and crushed ice. Playfully Scott told her that according to both Browning and Keats he should marry her. They discussed love and seduction while they walked in the pine groves and fields at the edge of town. She teased him and said he was an “educational feature; an overture to romance which
no
young lady should be without.” When she treated him casually, or made fun of him, he was hurt and sulky, and, certain that he was to be sent overseas at any moment, he tried to press her for a commitment. But she was apparently wary of limiting herself to him alone. It was not only Scott himself, but the uncertainty of his future in those months prior to the end of the war, which were behind her reluctance. It did nothing
to help his cause that the Judge disapproved of him because he drank too much. Surrounded by so many young men, she was impervious to Scott’s pleas.

In October, Fitzgerald at last received his orders to go North and from there presumably to France; he left Montgomery on the 26th. Once in New York, however, his orders were altered and he was sent to Camp Mills on Long Island. While he was waiting there, the Armistice ending the war was signed. In Montgomery it was celebrated with flowers and confetti dropped from the airplanes of the aviators stationed at Taylor Field. Fitzgerald returned to Montgomery to await discharge from the army. Once back, he and Zelda quarreled bitterly. He wrote a letter to an old friend in whom he had confided when he was East: “My affair still drifts— But my mind is firmly made up that I will not, shall not, can not, should not, must not marry— Still, she
is
remarkable— I’m trying desperately
exire armis
—” There is only this one piece of evidence that he ever seriously intended to break off with Zelda, and by December, after he had been back in Montgomery less than two weeks, he entered the single word “Love” in his Ledger. He had not tried very hard to disentangle himself from Zelda and it was during this interim period of his life that he again fell deeply and entirely in love with her. He was to call it “The most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and exstatic but a great success.”

Soon they were alone together whenever he could borrow a car; they drank gin and kissed in the back rows of the Grand Theatre during the vaudeville shows: and Zelda showed him a diary she kept which Scott found so extraordinary that he was to use portions of it in his fiction, in
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned
, and “The Jelly Bean.” They spent Christmas together happily before, the fire at the Sayre home, and they began to move, enchanted by each other, into a more passionate attachment. This time Zelda was more willing to commit herself. Cautious as she had been in the late autumn about pledging herself to Scott, her behavior was now incautious enough to earn his description of it, although he wrote it many years later, as “sexual recklessness,” for Zelda shared none of Scott’s Irish Catholic contrition.

Bewilderingly, she continued to go out with other men. She may have done so as a challenge to him, or to keep intact her private vision of herself as a belle; or she may have used her dates as a front
for Montgomery. Whatever her motives, she felt her behavior did nothing to diminish her love for Scott, while it drove him into a frenzy of jealousy. It was at the very least a sign of her inability to place herself in his position, a sign of her refusal to feel the hurt she was capable of inflicting on Scott. Zelda did, as she always had in the past, as she pleased, and Scott, who admired her fearlessness in their affair
to
the point of awe, was unable to make her his alone. They quarreled when she went out, Scott drank in retaliation, but she managed to soothe his feelings and continued to see other men when she wanted to. He took pride in the fact that she was invited to the inaugural ball of the Governor of Alabama that January, 1919, and later in their lives he would tell people they had met there. All of the dances on Zelda’s card were taken, but Scott’s name was not on it.

From Zelda’s point of view Scott was a new breed of man. Un-athletic, imaginative, and sensitive, he represented a world she did not know and could not hope to enter, much less possess, without him. Beguiled by his palaver and sharing with him the view that anything done moderately was better left undone, she decided that she loved him. They were both eager to conquer New York, and their entire future rested upon Scott’s success there. He decided to try journalism to support himself until his stories began to sell. He was not willing to have Zelda come North until he could show her the style of life he so wholeheartedly wanted them to share. Zelda was both astonished and delighted by the fervor of Scott’s dreams for glory, and there is no doubt she shared them. “She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire ….”

On February 14, 1919, Scott’s discharge from the army came through and on the 18th he left Montgomery for the East. In a gesture of consummate confidence he wired Zelda from New York that the world was a game: “…
WHILE I FEEL SURE OF YOUR LOVE EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE I AM IN THE LAND OF AMBITION AND SUCCESS AND MY ONLY HOPE AND FAITH IS THAT MY DARLING HEART WILL BE WITH ME SOON
.”

^*
The spelling and punctuation used by both Fitzgeralds has been reproduced exactly; no error, no matter how glaring, has been corrected. What they wrote stands as they wrote it whenever the original sources were available to me. I do not use the pedantic
sic
.