Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (2 page)

As always I could not have written this biography without the inspiration, love and support of my family and extended family.

First I thank Em Marion Callen, who knows every line of Zelda’s art, who trod in Zelda’s footsteps with me throughout the Deep South and in Scott’s footsteps in Princeton and New York. When I faltered she didn’t. Her very presence cheered me on.

I thank next Jonathan Harris, Joan Harris, Miles Ashley-Smith, Beth Callen, Aaron Callen, Molly Smith Callen and Elsie Sheppard. Laura Williams kept me going when she was perilously ill herself with a bravery Zelda would have admired. Jane Shackman was always ready to listen to drafts; and at hard moments Manda Callen calmed me down and Vic Smith cheered me up. Aunt Het (Harriet) Shackman rang me four times a week for five years to console or congratulate. Larry Adler, who knew most participants in the Fitzgeralds’ drama, encouraged the project for years and was still encouraging when he died just before I wrote the last chapter. My stepchildren, Peter Adler, Wendy Adler Sonnenberg, Carole Adler
Van Wieck, were wonderfully supportive during those last weeks. Ba Sheppard, after twenty-four years of faithfully challenging and enthusing me, this time read every page of the final draft and
suggested
pertinent provocative cuts and edits. She enhanced the text and empowered the writer. My daughter Marmoset Adler, who has had the hardest year of her young life, never once stopped
showering
me with cuttings, photocopies and clever ideas. I thank her most of all.

A Jazz Age Icon or a Renaissance Woman?

Paradoxically, Zelda Fitzgerald embraced both definitions yet was imprisoned by neither. Zelda, who arrived with the twentieth century, had an impressive array of untamed talents. She was a powerful painter; an original writer; and a ballerina who began late but achieved substantial success.

However, it is Zelda’s character which has assumed symbolic status, her life the stuff of myth, her romance with Scott Fitzgerald which has enabled her spectacular rise and emblematic fall. As her creativity and brains were backed by beauty, rebelliousness and a flair for publicity, it is hardly surprising that in terms of her talents the legend makers sold her short.

Zelda must bear some responsibility. Her childhood escapades caused such intense gossip in Montgomery that myths about her wildness started early. Later she made it easy for mythmakers to prioritize her role as flamboyant flapper rather than hardworking artist. With her help, at least in the early years, mythmakers invented and reinvented Zelda Fitzgerald as American Dream Girl, Romantic Cultural Icon, Golden Girl of the Roaring Twenties and most often as a Southern Belle, relabelled the First American Flapper by her husband Scott Fitzgerald, the quintessential
novelist
of the Jazz Age, which he named.
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When as a bride Zelda jumped in the Washington Square fountain, danced on tables in public restaurants, performed cartwheels in a New York City hotel lobby, it was not surprising that the media gambolled with her exploits.

Zelda and Scott flourished as capricious, merciless self-historians writing and rewriting their exploits. They used their stormy
partnership
as a basis for fiction which subsequently became a form of private communication that allowed fiction to stand as a method of
discourse about their marriage. That discourse was then rewoven into their legend.

Recently myth has likened Zelda to those other twentieth-century icons, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. With each she shares a defiance of convention, intense vulnerability, doomed beauty, unceasing struggle for a serious identity, short tragic life and quite impossible nature.

During a dazzling period of American culture, Zelda, as artistic creator and as object of Scott Fitzgerald’s literary creations, spoke for a generation of bright young women. Yet she was out of step with it. Her painting and writing, too, are out of step. Their oddness jolts the reader or viewer. The legend misses that out.

Her literature and art with their hallucinatory connections between ideas are unsettling: transgressive, like their creator. When I saw her vivid, unpredictable paintings they stirred my
imagination
, but gave rise to a strange anxiety.

I looked at a nursing mother with a red blanket, an agonized
portrait
which flies in the face of acceptable motherhood. The mother has half her head severed while the baby sucks at what looks like the mother’s entrails. Powerful but hardly comforting, it set me off on an untrodden trail to discover Zelda’s overlooked relationship to her daughter Scottie.

Zelda’s paintings and her writings, like Zelda herself, are
enigmatic
but it is not their labyrinthine quality alone which skews the legend.

The way Zelda’s gifts panned out provides a second motive. Our society awards higher status to artists engaged fulltime on a single creative pursuit than to artists engaged on multiple forms of art. Being gifted in three directions – painting, writing, ballet – smacks of dilettantism.
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That Zelda’s legend is unbalanced is also rooted in how our society rates literature and painting. Generally we credit art
produced
consistently and continuously, which provides us with a complete body of work by which to make judgements.

Zelda’s does neither.

Zelda’s writing is not continuous. She was most productive during two periods: 1929 to 1934, when intermittently hospitalized, and 1940 to 1948, after Scott’s death, until her own. Between those periods Zelda was often ill or prevented from writing. As her
biographer
I had to ensure these two problems were separated.

Zelda’s art is not a complete body of work, nor is much of it dated. It lacks the habitual artistic ‘progression’ or linear development by
which one can sometimes date paintings. I have therefore, like several art critics, identified paintings by subject or theme.
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I have also managed to match up several paintings with life events or with ideas occupying Zelda’s imagination at a particular time.

Although her visual art is the most successfully refined of her three gifts, and although she produced paintings continuously from 1925 until the day before her death in 1948, many have been lost, burnt or otherwise destroyed. Fire and destruction remain two
significant
linked themes in Zelda’s life.

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.
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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.
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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 hospital
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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.