Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Read online

  Though Zelda’s artistic legacy is substantial – more than 100 paintings – it still represents only part of her total production. This may be why Zelda’s two early biographers gave it only token consideration. I have given her invisibilized art considerable attention. I was fortunate in being able to see more than two-thirds of Zelda’s paintings in public and private collections, and was given slides of the rest by Eleanor Lanahan, Zelda’s artist granddaughter, and by various owners of Zelda’s work.

  Today her painting and fiction are both attracting a new wave of critical attention. Her second novel, Caesar’s Things, unfinished at her death in 1948, is about to be published; and there will be several major exhibitions of her paintings in the USA, Paris and London.

  When we turn to Zelda’s ballet career, the facts are incontrovertible but the legend deals with them selectively. Although Zelda began her apprenticeship in the Diaghilev tradition very late at twenty-seven, within a mere three years she was invited to perform a solo role with the Italian San Carlo Opera Ballet Company: an invitation which brought her the chance she had been awaiting but which for complex reasons she reluctantly declined.

  Because Zelda’s first doctor, and Scott, perceived her dance career as the cause of her first breakdown, and because Scott and her doctors banned her from dancing, this was the biographical view adopted subsequently. Zelda’s ballet therefore has been consistently viewed as obsession rather than as artistic commitment. One of my aims has been to scrutinize these two polarized perspectives.

  However, during Zelda’s life her ballet, like her writing and painting, was subsumed under the greater interest of her marriage. As Zelda’s biographer I have tried to balance the account.

  Starting one’s own creative life as ‘the wife of’ a famous writer often presents problems of comparison at best, invisibility at worst, for the less powerful writer and partner. But Zelda’s case was more complicated. Unlike Antonia White and Jane Bowles, who also wrote out of their mental suffering, she never had writer’s block. Instead she fought the block on her writing imposed by a fellow writer. Her work is often seen as one of promise and the enemies of promise as those within. One enemy however was without. Scott, confusingly, tried to help her even as he stood in her way.

  Being Fitzgerald’s wife offered Zelda artistic opportunities she might not so easily have acquired alone, but being Fitzgerald’s wife made it harder for his public to rate her talents in their own right.

  I have scrutinized her marriage, which surprisingly soon was dominated by Scott’s increasing alcoholism and her own mental suffering, each of which nourished the other. This led them to a litany of loss. Zelda, no longer able to inhabit the identities which Scott had offered her as glamorous wife and flapper incarnate, grew first resentful, then uncertain of who she was. Her fractured ego meant her identity was constantly in flux. Though Scott admired her for her physical fearlessness, she began to betray great emotional anxiety. She feared her own sexual ambiguity and they both feared the possibility of his. She revealed the struggles within her marriage and the struggle to maintain her uncertain identity through her writing and her ballet, which Scott struggled to repress.

  Zelda felt it would be healthier to leave the marriage. But devotion and dependence led her time and again to stay. Scott felt the same ambivalence. For years they battled through a labyrinth of love and loyalty, tearing resentment and extreme bitterness. Finding a way out seemed as impossible as finding a way to stay in. Despite Scott’s affairs and escalating alcoholism and despite Zelda’s illness, neither entirely gave up on the marriage. They kept hold of its reality, and when that faded they kept hold of the fictions they had woven about it.

  In analysing the relationship they connived at, I had to analyse the very nature of marriage and the balance of power between the sexes central to any marriage, integral to this one. The Fitzgeralds’ challenges illuminated the times in which they lived. Though Zelda’s struggles were those of many women in the early twentieth century, trying to find an artistic identity in the face of pressure to remain in feminine domestic roles, Scott too was impeded by his era’s restrictions on his role as husband and male expert. In order to show alternatives open to the Fitzgeralds, I have given space to a comparison between their marriage and that of Zelda’s Montgomery friend, Sara Haardt, and Scott’s mentor, the critic H. L. Mencken.

  The Menckens’ civilized, more equal marriage attracted less media attention because legends thrive on dissipation. Thus as alcohol soaked Scott and Zelda’s menage a new, not unfavourable myth granted Scott a weary dispensation for his drinking while ignoring possible effects on Zelda. Her sense of self floundered as life in rented houses and hotels degenerated into binges, bizarre behaviour, dissipation, drunkenness and no ground beneath their feet.4 Later, Zelda’s screaming red and yellow paintings would caricature in terrifying ways that lack of ground.5

  Both Zelda and Scott began to use the word ‘ominous’ about their marriage. By September 1928 Scott had headed his Ledger entry with the word underlined three times in black. When Zelda later fictionalized those unsettling years in Caesar’s Things, in about 1938, the word ‘ominous’ occurs on almost every page.

  I examined the way the legend recorded these tragic notes. I observed how the labels progressed from ‘eccentric’ to ‘mentally disordered’ to ‘schizophrenic’, finally to ‘the crazy wife of Scott Fitzgerald’.

  Sadly, during Zelda’s lifetime, other arcane, gifted but fragmented women (including Janet Frame, Vivien Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Antonia White), who displayed similar esoteric nonconformist behaviour, were deemed more suitable for sojourns inside mental institutions than for life outside.6 It comes as no surprise to discover that Zelda the artist was also the holder of entry and exit passes to seven of the world’s most expensive mental asylums for the last eighteen years of her short life.

  Those breakdowns, crudely labelled ‘madness’, form a great part of the Fitzgerald mythology; while the evidence of Zelda’s art forms only a small part of her legend.

  What is extraordinary is that the years of Zelda’s greatest discipline as a writer, dancer and visual artist coincided exactly with those years when she was first hospitalized, then diagnosed as schizophrenic.

  I explored in depth the way one hospital7 became, in 1932, the setting for one of the most contentious battles in literary history between an artistic husband and wife. From her hospital bed, Zelda completed her first novel Save Me The Waltz in a mere four weeks, drawing on some of the same autobiographical material which Scott was trying to plot into his novel-in-progress Tender Is The Night, which took him nine years to complete. Scott, incoherent with fury that anyone other than he should use their joint life experiences as literary fodder, first insisted the publishers cut large sections of Save Me The Waltz in 1932, then a year later during a three-way discussion with Zelda and her psychiatrist forbade Zelda to write any fiction which drew on shared autobiographical incidents.

  This ban, which followed swiftly on Scott’s stringent prohibition on her ballet, meant Zelda’s rights to her own material and forms of self-expression were severely curtailed.

  Following this Scott used Zelda’s speech, letters, diaries, personal feelings and episodes of mental illness in his own fiction, and sometimes with Zelda’s assent, sometimes without, encouraged her articles and stories to be published under joint names or his name alone.

  Subsequently these undisputed facts became an issue over which supporters line up under two dramatic banners as diametrically opposed as the Plath and Hughes literary camps. Flags are waved, protests are shouted. There seems to be no middle ground.

  From one perspective Zelda has been hailed by the Women’s Movement as a feminist heroine, oppressed by a relentlessly ambitious husband who plagiarized her writing and exploited her personal experiences for his literary gains.

  The opposing perspective sees Zelda as a sick selfish tyrant, writing lively but derivative fiction, holding her loyal husband hostage financially,
impeding and dragging down his magnificent literary progress through her trivial desire for autonomy.

  Exponents of both sides have raised her up or cut her down in biographies, memoirs, academic dissertations, critical studies, articles and reviews. They have turned her into a cult figure in other writers’ novels, dramas, movies and stage plays.

  I have tried to steer a steady course between these two polarized positions.

  I have scrutinized the reasons why Scott felt he had the artistic right to silence Zelda’s voice. Scott and subsequent biographers have suggested that, because Scott was the ‘professional’ and Zelda the ‘amateur’, the interests of professionalism can be used to legitimate Scott’s actions. Zelda herself internalized the idea that those who are not professional cannot be equally talented.

  Today we recognize that professionalism may have to do less with talent and more with financial rewards and status. Since the term ‘professional’ in Zelda’s time rested, as it does today, on the way artists could or could not define themselves by their work, I have examined how Zelda fought for that self-definition.

  I was also curious about why one writer’s silencing of another writer’s voice should have been labelled by critics as ‘artistic rivalry’. Artistic rivalry implies a competition between equals, as opposed to ‘silencing’ which implies one artist has more power than the other, so it seemed worth exploring not only the definitions but also the effects of this ‘rivalry’ on the Fitzgeralds’ domestic partnership.

  Living with a famous artist can make for a tough relationship. In the Fitzgeralds’ case Scott’s fame rested on his writing while Zelda’s ambition rested on her writing; thus they fought on the same ground. Zelda inevitably experienced feelings of admiration and frustration, rivalry and invisibility. Living with a man of publicly acknowledged talent who was necessarily self-focused engendered in Zelda a real desire to protect and support that man’s talent, but also provided little breathing space in which to nurture her own.

  Although this aspect of their story parallels late twentieth-century gender roles, I have attempted consistently to see Scott and Zelda within their own period.

  Previous writers have focused a spectacular white spotlight on this particular literary controversy.8 I aimed to view it within the context of the whole of Zelda’s art and life. I have concerned myself as much with the rest of her painting and writing as with the literary row which brought her prominently to public attention. There was no lack of material. I have been fortunate in having access to everything she wrote, published and unpublished, a literary legacy which includes two novels, a dozen short stories, a galaxy of sketches, essays and magazine articles, spiritual and artistic notebooks, a stage play, and autobiographical and fictional fragments in the Princeton University Library, where there are also scrapbooks, albums and a monumental archive of letters.

  I trawled through hundreds of unpublished painful illustrated letters, many from Zelda to Scottie which show an absentee mother’s story not previously told in full. I was fortunate in being given Scottie’s own unpublished memoir about Zelda by Scottie’s daughter Cecilia Ross.

  Zelda’s hospital letters, haunting for their traumatic honesty, are particularly startling less for Zelda’s awareness of what she sees as an unjust incarceration than for her pragmatic acceptance of hospital censorship. If she was ever to be released she was forced to write in an acceptable way. Untwining these two positions has been a hard task.

  This Letters Archive allowed me to engage with Zelda’s relationship to her mother, Minnie (a more ambivalent one than the legend logged), and with her women friends, few of whom are mentioned in earlier biographies, especially Sara Murphy, Sara Mayfield and Xandra Kalman. By good fortune I was generously offered a whole file of largely unpublished letters between Zelda and the Kalmans.9 I was also given an unpublished manuscript of Sara Haardt’s which contained conversations and an interview with Zelda.

  Though an important diary of Zelda’s and eight further stories have been lost, evidence of their themes and content has been helpful.

  Fitzgerald biographies have given the impression that after the tragedy of Scott’s early death in 1940 absolutely nothing else happened to Zelda until her own tragic death in 1948. Plenty happened to her. I suggest she came into her own artistically during those eight years.

  I have faced several problems. One problem was that a few of my older interviewees found it hard to distinguish between their memories and their readings of what has become an abundance of Fitzgerald material A second problem was the delicate issues which have surrounded biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald. For more than thirty years no full length life of Zelda Fitzgerald and no literary biography at all had appeared. After Nancy Milford’s controversial biography (1970) and Sara Mayfield’s memoir (1971), both of which disturbed the Fitzgerald family, there was a long literary silence. Scottie, Zelda’s daughter, was extremely distressed by what she saw as an unnecessary focus on Zelda’s mental condition and her sexuality in the earliest biography. Milford was ‘urged’ to remove many of those references before her biography was published.10 Despite Scottie’s dislike of Mayfield’s book, she generously gave that book also her permission. After Scottie’s death her children, though equally generous over permissions, nevertheless felt they should honour her views so retained certain biographical impediments by restricting a considerable amount of medical material in the Princeton archives. I was fortunately able to see all of that material.

  During those thirty-one years the Estate gave permission to one academic study (Hartnett 1991), one study of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage (Kendall Taylor 2001) and several papers on Zelda’s writings. In 1996 Zelda’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan edited an illustrated book which focused on Zelda’s art. What was still missing was a full length literary biography which saw Zelda as an artist as well as in her other roles.

  I therefore approached the Trust initially with a request centred on Zelda’s overlooked art. After long discussions, Eleanor Lanahan and other family members recognized that in order to grapple with the social and psychological as well as artistic forces that shaped Zelda’s work, I would need maximum information and help. My path was cleared, my task unimpeded. I was given full access to all papers available, to family members and to people still alive who had known Zelda, including some of her Southern Belle girlfriends.

  Zelda’s medical condition plays a key part in this biography. I was fortunate in being given access to most medical records now available and was allowed to read those hitherto under seal.11 I also spoke twice to Zelda’s last psychiatrist,12 who held a different view of her diagnoses from that recorded in the legend.

  I looked at how the label ‘schizophrenia’ was applied to women. Evidence suggests that Zelda’s failure to conform to a traditional feminine role has, to some extent, been buried within a diagnosis of mental disorder. Zelda was a courageous woman who struggled to maintain her sanity in the face of the horrific treatments she was forced to undergo. It became obvious that she suffered as much from the treatment as from the illness itself. My particular challenge was to try to separate illness from treatment.

  Zelda’s hospital label in the Thirties was schizophrenia; by the Fifties her last psychiatrist suggested (too late) that it might have been manic depression. Though the treatments for these mental diagnoses in periods separated by two decades were somewhat (though curiously, not entirely) different, that difference had less to do with diagnoses than with methods of control considered appropriate during each era. If letters and journals from other women patients in the Fifties/Sixties/Seventies are compared with Zelda’s of the Thirties/Forties, we see that emotions engendered in all absentee mothers and artists inside closed institutions were remarkably similar. Fear, frustration, resentment and despair attached themselves to incarceration, imprisonment, enclosure. Bewilderment, guilt and powerlessness clung to the role of absentee motherhood. The evidence from Zelda’s writings and comments from people close to her show such feel
ings led to incompetence over practical matters and swings from extreme harshness to wild indulgence towards her daughter Scottie.

  Reading Zelda’s notebook, which concentrated on making patterns from chaos, seeing her need for ‘aspiration’ (this word occurs on almost every page of one of Zelda’s notebooks) as if by writing it she could realize it, I understood her feelings of being out of control which any prisoner or asylum resident would recognize.

  Another challenge was to balance Scott’s lifelong loyalty to a wife diagnosed as suffering clinical ‘madness’ with his constant refusal to take her out of hospital because he feared the disruption it would cause to his work.

  The biographer’s role is first to enter imaginatively into her subject’s world, then to recognize that writer and subject are separate people, and that her task is to provide one version of possibly significant events and possibly significant motives which have impelled the subject’s life and influenced their art.

  In threading the narrative of her life through her painting and writing, aided by the memories of those who knew her, I have tried to give Zelda a life of her own, separate from Scott Fitzgerald’s, but to acknowledge where the intertwining and complicity have been purposefully tangled by the two participants.

  In Paris and New York she was spoken of as aloof, yet in her home town I heard repeatedly how warm, accessible and loyal she was, how her character was ‘shot through to the bone with a strong vein of kindness’. Certainly during this research I have been most impressed by Zelda’s moral bravery. Throughout her troubled, sometimes tormented, life she exhibited qualities of endurance and courage with what her particular enemy and Scott’s friend, Ernest Hemingway, would have called grace under pressure if he could have brought himself to praise her at all.

  Zelda shared with all four of Hemingway’s wives, though not with his heroines, the qualities of resilience and relinquishment. But her graciousness and stoicism, unlike theirs, were those of a Southern lady. Though Zelda was sometimes more irritatingly confrontational than was appropriate in the South, where difficult issues are delicately approached by stealth, she was never once accused of vulgarity.