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.
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.
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….
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.”
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.”
Gilbert Seldes, who was then editor of The Dial, met Scott and Zelda for the first time that winter in New York. There was what he calls “a long long party” at Townsend Martin’s, and Seldes had eventually and somewhat groggily lain down on Martin’s bed to recover. The room itself was lavishly decorated with painted screens and resplendent silk pillows thrown upon the bed into which Seldes sank. “Suddenly, as though in a dream, this apparition, this double apparition, approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me, smiling. It was as if they were angelic visitors. I thought to myself,
‘If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are, I will do it.’ “The heavenly pair turned out to be the Fitzgeralds. That was how they struck people. There have been dozens of memoirs written wherein one catches glimpses of Scott and Zelda sleeping like children in each other’s arms at a party; Zelda necking with young men because she liked the shapes of their noses or the cut of their dinner jackets; Scott drinking and radiating his sunny charm. Everyone wanted to meet them, to have them for dinner guests, to attend their parties, and to invite them to their openings. The youthful handsomeness of the Fitzgeralds, their incandescent vitality were qualities they possessed jointly and effortlessly. Hearst’s International ran a full-page photograph of Scott and Zelda that was picked up by newspapers and magazines throughout the country. They were the apotheosis of the twenties: The F. Scott Fitzgeralds:
Scott sitting behind Zelda, leaning slightly forward, his right hand casually holding her fingers, both of them pouting a little, dramatically; Zelda in a dress trimmed with white fur, wearing a long strand of pearls, with her hair parted uncharacteristically in the middle and falling back from her brow in deeply marcelled waves. Zelda, who rarely photographed well, and did not wear jewelry, not even her wedding ring, was always to refer to this portrait as her “Elizabeth Arden Face.”
Rebecca West’s impressions of the Fitzgeralds were entirely different:
“My relations with Mrs. Fitzgerald were few and fragmentary. I don’t know if you’ll find anybody to confirm my impression that she was very plain. I had been told that she was very beautiful, but when I went to a party and saw her I had quite a shock. She was standing with her back to me, and her hair was quite lovely, it glistened like a child’s. I am sure this was natural.
Then she turned round and she startled me, I would almost go so far as to say that her face had a certain craggy homeliness. There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in Géricault’s pictures of the insane.
Her profile seemed on two different planes. Everybody told me how lovely she was, but that is and always has been my impression.
“We got on quite well, though our relationship was interrupted by Scott Fitzgerald’s anger at me because I did not come to a party… the trouble was that nobody had told me where the party was. Recently someone reminded me… that we had both been at a party where she had talked to us about her dancing. And there came back to me a very unpleasant memory. She had flapped her arms and looked very uncouth as she talked about her ballet ambitions. The odd thing to me always was that Scott Fitzgerald, who might have been expected from his writings to like someone sleek like Mrs.
Vernon Castle, should have liked someone who was so inelegant. But she was not at all unlikable. There was something very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.
Leida s sister Rosalind spent some time with the Fitzgeralds during July and August of 1923, but it was not a comfortable visit. She remembers being taken to a party at a Long Island estate that lasted all night and into the morning; Scott would not leave and insisted on trying to drop an entire orange peel down his throat in front of an admiring audience that had gathered about him. In exasperation Zelda left without him. It was the only time that Rosalind could recall Zelda’s being in any way critical of Scott in front of her. When they left, Zelda said quietly, “I never did want to marry Scott.”
Finally Scott asked her what she wanted Scottie (whom Zelda still referred to as Patricia Scott Fitzgerald) to be when she grew up. “Not great and serious and melancholy and inhospitable, but rich and happy and artistic. I don’t mean that money means happiness, necessarily. But having things, just things, objects makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul…. I’d rather have her be a Marilyn Miller than a Pavlowa. And I do want her to be rich.”
hexafu 