Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (67 page)

To cheer up Zelda and raise some funds, Scott became
enthusiastic
about arranging an exhibition of her paintings. Gallery owner Cary Ross, whom the Fitzgeralds had met in Europe, had been trying for two years to find a New York dealer to exhibit Zelda’s paintings. Ross had asked the photographer-art dealer Alfred Steiglitz to show Zelda’s drawings to his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, but ‘except for Picasso, Marin and herself, I think she is not
interested
in any living artists,’ Ross wrote disappointedly to Scott.
31
So Ross decided to exhibit Zelda’s work at his own gallery at 525 East 86th Street.

Though ill, Zelda painted assiduously. ‘Please ask Mrs Owens to hurry with my paints. There are so many winter trees exhibiting irresistible intricacies … and there are gracious expanses of snow and the brooding quality of a gray and heavy sky, all of which makes me want terribly to paint,’ she wrote Scott. ‘I have a little room to paint in with a window higher than my head … [I] feel like Faust in his den.’
32

Scott, who routinely agonized over his own art in similar terms, felt when Zelda did so she was obsessional. They quarrelled. Was it out of fear for herself or to offer him reassurance that she wrote:

But they quarrelled again when Scott took over all the exhibition arrangements. Utterly frustrated, Zelda went to bed and refused to get up.
34
Ross, however, ensured that Zelda’s work came to light from 29 March to 30 April 1934.

The exhibition ran jointly with a photographic collection by Marion Hines.
35
There was a smaller supplementary show at the Algonquin Hotel. The exhibition brochure, entitled
Parfois
La
Folie
Est
La
Sagesse
(Sometimes Madness is Wisdom),
36
emphasized Zelda’s knowledge of the Diaghilev tradition.

Scott asked Slocum’s permission for a nurse to take Zelda to New York to ‘hand her over to me’.
37
On opening day Perkins gave a luncheon for Zelda. Afterwards she went to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition. ‘They … excited me so that I felt quite sick afterwards. I loved the rhythmic white trees winding in visceral choreography about the deeper green ones, and I loved the voluptuous columnar tree trunk with a very pathetic blue flame-shaped flower growing arbitrarily beneath it. And there was a swell rhythmic abstraction done in blue and green and heart-breaking aspiration … She is the most moving and comprehensible painter I’ve ever seen.’ In another article she recalled: ‘We saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s pictures and it was a deep emotional experience to abandon oneself to that majestic aspiration so adequately fitted into eloquent abstract forms.’
38

O’Keeffe had significantly influenced Zelda’s flower paintings for four years. In Zelda’s recent
Untitled
dogwood blossoms, the
compositional
arrangement of two single flowers isolated from their surroundings was washed over with O’Keeffe’s atmospheric
watercolour
.
39
Both artists magnified single flowers from several angles to emphasize organic curves, so there exists a relationship between Zelda’s watercolour
Antheriums
and O’Keeffe’s 1928
Calla
Lilies
with
Red
Anemone.
Zelda employed O’Keeffe’s swaying impasto
brushstrokes
for her
White
Anemones,
Red
Poppies
and
White
Roses,
all shown at Ross’s exhibition.
40

Zelda’s exhibition brochure listed thirteen paintings and fifteen drawings, but four additional paintings and three additional
drawings
were included.
41

Zelda sat silently watching her good friends the Murphys, Max Perkins, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley and Gilbert Seldes, who comprised many of the purchasers. Scott had also invited Dr Rennie and Dr Squires.

Ross himself bought two oils,
Laurel
($150) and
Russian
Stable
($175), and a drawing,
Diving
Platform
($15), of a swimmer on a ladder.
42
Mencken purchased two drawings for Sara Haardt, sadly again in hospital. Mabel Dodge Luhan bought the drawing
Red
Death
for her New Mexico collection.
43
Gilbert Seldes had already purchased two paintings but had promised Scott to put them on exhibition any time Zelda or Scott requested it during the next twenty years.
44

Sara Murphy paid $200 for
Chinese
Theater,
which Gerald said depicted ‘monstrous, hideous men, all red with swollen
intertwining
legs. They were obscene … figures out of a nightmare,
monstrous
and morbid.’
45
Time
magazine more soberly described it as ‘a gnarled mass of acrobats’. Zelda, aware the oil was stylistically opposed to Gerald’s own cool precision, later wrote to Scott: ‘I am going to paint a picture for the Murphy’s … as those acrobats seem somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked … I don’t see why they would like that Buddhistic suspension of mass and form and I will try to paint some mood that their garden has conveyed.’
46

Honoria Murphy said, ‘There was no Zelda painting in our house. We would certainly have preserved it. It would have been just like my father Gerald to have left it behind in the gallery.’
47
More probably Zelda retrieved it after her decision to paint them a
substitute
.

Apart from Sara’s painting most prices were pitifully low. Scott’s friends from St Paul, Frances and Tom Daniels,
48
paid only $15 for the drawing
La
Nature,
polo player Tommy Hitchcock acquired the drawing
Au
Claire
de
la
Lune
and Muriel Draper the
Red
Devil
drawing for the same low price; New Yorker Adele Lovett bought the drawing
Ferns
for $16.25, while Max Perkins’s wife paid $32.50 for two drawings,
The
Plaid
Shirt
and
Spring
in
the
Country,
a verdant scene geometrically laced with telephone wires. Scott
gave
away
several of Zelda’s pictures, including the drawing
Two
Figures
to Dick and Alice Myers.
49

Dorothy Parker, who found Zelda’s work tortured, loyally bought two watercolour drawings for a mere $30. Feeling sorry for Zelda, she insisted on paying an extra $5 for the frames.
Etude
Arabesque
was a self-portrait of Zelda as a ballerina,
The
Cornet
Player
a portrait of Scott.
50
‘[S]he had talent,’ Parker recalled. ‘Arabesque … [had] a striking resemblance to Zelda. I bought the portrait of Scott … because I thought it the best she did. But I couldn’t have stood having them hang in the house. There was that
blood red color she used and the painful, miserable quality of emotion behind the paintings.’
51
Ironically, Parker’s portrait of Scott was destroyed in a fire.

John Biggs was struck by a second portrait of Scott wearing a crown of thorns. ‘Yes, it was good. The eyelashes were feathers; it was astonishing really – looked like him, and then those mad, lovely, long feathery eyelashes.’ Biggs found the eyes arresting. ‘Very cold blue eyes – almost green – they were as cold as the Irish Sea.’
52

James Thurber, who accidentally met Scott in a bar, said later
Scott
in
Thorns
was ‘a sharp, warm, ironic study of her husband’s
handsome
and sensitive profile’. The two men drank till 3 a.m., then Scott asked Thurber if he knew a good girl they could call. Scott passed the rest of the night talking to an actress Thurber knew, showering her with dozens of Zelda’s catalogues. Thurber recalled that year as one when ‘Fitzgerald made several pathetically futile attempts to interest himself in other women, in an effort to survive the mental and emotional strain of Zelda’s recurring psychotic states.’
53

One of those women was Dorothy Parker, with whom Scott had a brief involvement, he out of despair, she out of compassion. Parker, who had herself attempted suicide over a broken affair, felt she understood both Scott’s and Zelda’s confused miseries.
54

Despite high-profile reviews Zelda felt critics did not take her work seriously.
Time
magazine understood her intentions in
Football
:
‘an impression of a Dartmouth football game [which] made the stadium look like portals of a theatre, the players like dancers’, but apart from a brief discussion of the paintings both it and the
New
York
Post
concentrated
on Zelda as former Jazz Age Priestess and Famous Writer’s Wife.
Time
saw the show as ‘the work of a brilliant introvert … vividly painted, intensely rhythmic’, but headed the review ‘Work of a Wife’ and concluded that Zelda Fitzgerald hoped her pictures would gratify her great ambition – to earn her own living.
55

The
New
York
Post
’s ‘Jazz Age Priestess Brings Forth Paintings’ was more interested in Zelda’s response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s
exhibition
and her relationship with Scott. Having taken the words right out of Scott’s mouth with her novel last year, they wrote, this year ‘she trumps all his aces’ with her art.
56

Scott reported to Slocum that Zelda’s exhibition was a weird event. At times there were crowds of visitors yet there were lengthy spells when Zelda and the curator waited quite alone for someone to walk in. Scott said he could not speculate over Zelda’s feelings but she seemed to him to have retreated inwards.

When Zelda returned to Craig House, Scott remained at the Algonquin for the publication of
Tender.
57
On Easter Day, 1 April, Zelda recalled their parting:

On 8 April, four days before
Tender
’s publication, Scott suggested to Slocum that Zelda again be ‘re-educated’, with the most ‘
desirable
aims’ placed in their proper relation to each other. As this relied on the adult’s ‘proper respect for her mentor’ Scott was unsure whether they would succeed with his wife. Slocum replied that despite the hospital’s efforts Zelda still had ‘a distinct craving to be productive’, therefore was not up to re-education. He would keep prescribing rest and ‘eliminate a certain amount of her intellectual efforts’.
59

Zelda’s agitation about not receiving a copy of
Tender
increased: ‘Since you have not sent me a copy of the book, I have not bought one.’ But she
had
acquired one. ‘I watch the papers and no reviews. I can hardly wait to know what the critics will say of those “
excursions
into the frontiers of a
social
consciousness”. No matter what they say, it’s exquisite prose and a trip into unexploited fields so far as the material is concerned.’ In another generous letter she said: ‘I certainly hope the sales move as smoothly as the prose. The
beginning
is lyric and breath-taking and the end is tragic and ominous and it is a good book. So don’t mind if there are critics who have sought solace in gin rather than poetry and who like reading matter that can be discussed between the yapping of Dorothy Parker’s dog.’
60

Though Scott had been prepared to sacrifice everyone to achieve a piece of flawless fiction, the later critics saw it as flawed. It failed to achieve a single strong effect. It failed to make clear the causes of Diver’s destruction. Some thought the story rambled, others that the style became commonplace, many felt the central characters had shifting identities. Scott phoned Zelda in a state of anxiety. She responded at once in shaky handwriting. ‘Dearest: You sounded so all-in over the telephone. Please
dont
– Your book is a beautiful and moving story of a man’s disillusionment and its relative values against the social back-ground in which he counts most.’
61

But more biting criticism focused on
Tender’
s
lack of social-
political
relevance. To achieve a background in which the leisure class at play on the Riviera was at its most brilliant, Scott drew on the Murphys’ lifestyle. But his ambivalence towards that class evoked censure. From Malcolm Cowley came this line: ‘It is as if he had a double personality. Part of him is a guest at the ball given by the people in the big house; part of him has been a little boy peeping in through the window and being thrilled by the music and
beautifully
dressed women.’
62
Philip Rahv’s review in the
Daily
Worker
was harsher.
Tender
was a ‘fearful indictment of the moneyed
aristocracy
’ which Fitzgerald himself, taken in by its false glamour, had not quite recognized.
63