Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (3 page)

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.
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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 I have been fortunate in having access to everything she wrote, published and unpublished, a literary legacy which includes two novels, a dozen short stories, a galaxy of sketches, essays and magazine articles, spiritual and artistic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.
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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
.
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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.
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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 feelings 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.

Everyone I met in the Deep South (where I learnt more about Zelda than anywhere else) told me that ‘ultimately Zelda was a Southern lady’. Yet in the Deep South, in her childhood, Zelda behaved as no ladies dared. It was one of the contradictions in her character she would never lose.

To understand Zelda and her work it is imperative to look closely at her roots. So it is in that place, the Deep South, at that time, the early 1900s, doing what ladies did not dare to do, that we first meet Zelda.