Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (79 page)
Read Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Online
Authors: Sally Cline
After Zelda suffered a severe attack of asthma Mrs Sayre,
believing
she was close to collapse, called Scottie who convinced Zelda to take the train back to hospital. Her mother, her sister Marjorie and Livye Hart gathered on the porch of the Rabbit Run. Livye told Sara Mayfield that after they had said goodbye to Zelda, who began walking towards the taxi, she felt Zelda had a premonition. She ran back to the porch, threw her arms round Minnie and said: ‘Mamma, don’t worry, I’m not afraid to die.’
78
In January 1948 Dr Pine, as her attending physician,
79
ordered a three-month electro-shock and insulin programme. The insulin further damaged her memory and increased her weight by 20 lb to 130 lb, which upset her. Whatever she had forgotten she could no longer remember. But she held on to the idea of herself as a painter and worked steadily on her Biblical paintings.
Her spirits improved dramatically when on 25 January her first granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan was born. On 9 March she wrote to Scottie:
There is promise of spring in the air … I urgently long to see the new baby and know that you must be engrossed in the affairs of your increased family. Here we bat the volley ball through the promisory afternoon … I go into Ashville every now and then to sense the tempo of the traffic and see what new aspirations are engrossing the people … I am having insulin treatment which is extremely disconcerting; however it is almost over – I will be most grateful to be leaving … with dearest love Mamma.
She wrote cheerful letters to the Sayres saying how much she was looking forward to her spring return. She felt positive, her mind lucid. The night of her death, a friend of Sara Mayfield’s from Selma visited the hospital:
I was with Zelda in Asheville, NC, about an hour before her death. We had been to a hospital dance and, really, all of us had a wonderful time … At the time of her death her mind, to me, was as clear as a bell. She was attractive, gracious, and charming … When she found out … that we had mutual friends and acquaintances, she was overjoyed … She did not talk too much about Scott, but when she did, there did not appear to be any bitterness. I believe she was at peace with herself.
80
Throughout this stay Zelda, treated as a voluntary patient, had been in an unlocked room and had gone into Asheville alone or with a companion. But that night, her bedroom was on the top fifth floor in Central Building, where she was locked in, and given sedatives by Nurse Doris Jane Anderson.
81
At 11.30 p.m. Anderson smelt smoke and reached the diet kitchen five minutes later, where she saw a five-foot wooden table with galvanized top burning like a hoop of fire. Terrified by the flames, Anderson made no attempt to put out the fire, but hurried to wake patients and unlock doors on the lower floors. Before calling the fire department she telephoned the Men’s Building, Oak Lodge, as instructed by her supervisor,
Nurse Willie May Hall, who later denied at the inquest she had ever given such instructions. Anderson, told that internal lines were
disconnected
, finally telephoned the Fire Department at 11.44. By this point the fire had spread up a dumb-waiter shaft leading to the roof, spurting flames on every landing. There was no automatic fire alarm, no sprinkler system, stairways were cut off, wooden external fire escapes caught fire, blaze engulfed the building. When firemen arrived, it had been on fire three-quarters of an hour. Despite all their efforts, by 4 a.m. the building was reduced to rubble. Though twenty-two patients on lower floors in Central Building had been saved, no one had reached the fifth floor where Zelda lay. The Fire Chief, ironically named J.C. Fitzgerald, claimed if the alarm had been given thirty minutes earlier no lives would have been lost.
82
Dr Pine said: ‘Had she not been asleep, Zelda ought to have been well enough to have escaped and walked away from the top floor where she was trapped.’
83
A very different version appeared in the
New
York
Herald
Tribune
on 12 March. Zelda’s escape was impossible, they said, because all patients on her floor had been locked in their rooms, the windows were shackled with massive chains and
padlocks
, and of the ten women imprisoned in those top rooms only one managed to break the window and leap to safety. The report said journalists at the scene heard harrowing cries of victims in the top rooms. Dr Wylie D. Lewis later stated that all top floor victims were asphyxiated by smoke inhalation at about 11.45 p.m.
84
This would suggest that Zelda and the eight other women were already dead.
It took until 12 March to identify Zelda’s remains by their
location
, her dental records and a single charred slipper beneath her burnt body.
85
Rosalind, outraged at the accident, fired off an angry letter to Highland demanding that Minnie Sayre be spared all details. She had told Minnie Zelda was overcome by smoke when sleeping and not burned. ‘She believes the body is intact and takes some comfort in the thought.’
86
Three weeks after the fire, the night supervisor, Willie May Hall, surrendered herself to the city jail asking to be locked up, because she had had a compulsion to burn Oak Lodge and thought she might have set off the fire on 10 March. She claimed she had wanted to start a ‘little trouble’ to show up the night watchman, who had spurned her advances and would get the blame. Psychiatrists claimed Hall was suffering from delusions and dismissed her, but rumours persisted that the fire was arson and Highland employees were forbidden to discuss it.
All the victims’ families sued Highland and were each awarded $3,000 compensation damages. Except for Zelda’s. Questions remain. Why did the Sayres not ask for or receive compensation?
87
How could a modern hospital be so lacking in interior safety? Why was Zelda so fearful of returning to Highland? Why did she make that prophetic statement to her family about not being afraid to die? Why was she locked in a room on a top floor?
Zelda’s ashes
88
were sent to the same Bethseda mortician who had directed Scott’s funeral, and the same Episcopalian minister, Raymond P. Black, officiated at Zelda’s memorial. Minnie Sayre was not well enough to attend, but Rosalind and Clothilde with
husbands
Newman Smith and John Palmer were there, as were Scottie, Jack Lanahan, John and Anna Biggs, the Obers, Peaches Finney, Margaret Turnbull and other friends.
89
After the service they drove out to the graveside in the Rockville Union Cemetery, Maryland, where Scott’s original burial plot had been extended into a double vault for Zelda, and placed bunches of spring flowers on her grave. Margaret Turnbull laid two wreaths of pansies from La Paix over Zelda and Scott.
Two days later, Scottie wrote to her grandmother: ‘Seeing them buried there together gave the tragedy of their lives a sort of classic unity … it was … reassuring to think of their two high-flying and generous spirits being at peace together at last. I have simply put out of my mind all their troubles and sorrows and think of them only as they must have been when they were young.’
90
Despite Scottie’s affectionate words, when she came to write her own memoir she did not mention Zelda’s death at all. Zelda would not have been surprised.
At the time of her mother’s death Scottie begged her
grandmother
to see Zelda’s demise, as she herself did, as part of a pattern, as inevitable as day and night. But the pattern of Zelda’s life and the mode of Zelda’s death evoked terrible bitterness as well as distress in Minnie Sayre. Zelda’s work, like Zelda’s body, must be consumed by fire. Minnie instructed Marjorie to take every one of Zelda’s paintings that were stored in the garage and burn them one by one in the yard.
91
As a woman of her time Zelda had connived in literary and social self-sacrifice. She had learnt she could neither commission nor control desire but would accept its consequences. She had
understood
passion, both human and the Passion of Christ, in the Latinate sense of suffering. But she did not suffer meekly. Sara Haardt believed Zelda possessed ‘a great deal more than the audacity or the
indestructibility of those war generations … she had super courage – the courage that is not so much defiance as a forgetfulness of danger, or barriers.’
92
Like her heroine Gay, Zelda ‘was very
courageous
– braver than the things that happened to her, always.’
93
In her last years, Zelda’s voice was the voice of struggle: poverty, obligation, loneliness and, in relation to her mother Minnie and her daughter Scottie, loyalty and resentment.
From 1940 to 1948 Zelda’s voice was also the voice of aspiration, a word she used over and over in her last novel and throughout her art and fiction notebook. Her most creative voice was the voice of spiritual quest. But
every
voice she used was the voice of the South. Although she was buried in the North with Scott rather than in the grey gullied, grey stone Montgomery cemetery, Zelda’s
reconciliation
was with the Deep South. Today 322 Sayre Street is burnt down. A blistered waste ground encourages children to chase each other. But outside 819 Felder Avenue Zelda’s magnolia tree still blooms. Paper-white narcissi blow in the breeze. Confederate jasmine
perfumes
the night air.
1
Milford,
Zelda,
p. 352.
2
Meyers,
Scott
Fitzgerald,
p. 340.
3
Bruccoli,
Epic
Grandeur,
p 586.
4
Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 489.
5
This view is promulgated by Meyers,
Scott
Fitzgerald,
p. 341.
6
The cityscapes were pale coloured, suffused with a grey cloud-like wash, each one imbued with nostalgia and light. Scenes steeped in shades of grey ran the risk of
dissolving
into obscurity but Zelda punctuated the predominant hue with single bolts of vivid red or electric yellow. A dark skyline is edged with champagne corks blazing golden, grey horses have lips and ears of red, glowing pink street lamps flare on a dark grey street.
7
Jane S. Livingston, ‘On the Art of Zelda Fitzgerald’, in Lanahan, ed.,
Zelda:
An
Illustrated
Life,
p. 81.
8
On 12 April 1946 Zelda told Biggs she was painting an album of Bible pictures for her grandchild ‘which gives me great pleasure as they are academic in execution but with a sense of satire. It will be gratifying and I trust edifying to be a grandmother.’
9
The Biblical Tableaux are watercolour and gouache on paper, some started in the late 1930s, most produced between 1946 and 1948. Zelda used theatrical Diaghilev devices familiar from her ballet paintings. Zelda’s fixation with ethics is obvious from the titles of these mainly moral tales from Old and New Testaments:
Do
Not
Commit
Adultery,
Let
Him
Who
Is
Without
Sin
Cast
the
First
Stone,
The
Parable
of
the
Vineyard,
Honor
Thy
Father
and
Mother,
Do
Not
Steal.
Others,
Adam
and
Eve,
Untitled
(Deposition),
The
Nativity
and
The
Marriage
at
Cana,
also incorporated precepts to live life well.
10
‘Zelda Fitzgerald Exhibits Dolls’,
Montgomery
Advertiser,
Aug. 1941.
11
They include: King Arthur, Merlin, Queen Guinevere, Queen Elaine, Sir Launcelot, Sir Gawain, Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, Sir Erwaine. Like the Early Paper Dolls they are
watercolour
and gouache on paper. Each doll is different, drawn and coloured on heavy
cardboard
-stock paper, the character’s identity written in pencil on the top right corner. Most had two costumes drawn and coloured on thinner lighter paper. No doll is cut out.
12
‘Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Pictures On View At Museum’, undated, no newspaper credit, Biggs Papers,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 12,
PUL
. Figures in the ballet and circus paintings were typically elongated and neutralized to blend into the design instead of dominating the picture.
13
ZSF
to Biggs, May 1942,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 12,
PUL
. It is interesting that Biggs became Zelda’s confidant because when they first met Biggs felt Zelda disliked him. He wrote later: ‘Zelda was wildly jealous of both men and women who liked Scotty [Scott]. I don’t think she liked me.’ John Biggs quoted in Toll,
An
Uncommon
Judge,
p. 102, referred to in Taylor,
Sometimes
Madness,
p. 123.
14
The version with the traditional red boots, hood and dress was captioned ‘Red Riding Hood in academic vein’.
15
The Piglets are typical of her fairy tales which are as much an exercise in composition as in fantasy, with spatial relationships determined not only by conventional perspective lines but also by gaudy colours. The dolls and fairytale scenes which constitute a large part of Zelda’s surviving work formed a quarter of the 1974 Retrospective Exhibition of her art at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
16
Zelda had painted some scenes from
Alice
for Scottie during the 1920s but the significant paintings begin in the 1940s. Faithful to Carroll’s story, she mixes this with striking
innovative
ideas of her own. They are complex and detailed and carry autobiographical meanings as well as literary references.
17
On 10 March 1947 Zelda wrote to a friend that she was painting ‘trays and trays and trays’ which offered her another medium to express religious feelings. On an oil on metal tole tray and an oil on metal dough rising tin she painted scarlet pomegranates, symbols of Christian Resurrection. One of her painted bowls is adorned with blazing poppies, portents of death.
18
Other critics are divided as to motives. Some think Zelda suffered a sudden bout of low self-esteem regarding her own work. Carolyn Shafer suggests wild mood swings drove her to extremes.
19
People in Montgomery, even today, recall Minnie’s horror and hatred. They are not
surprised
she ordered them to be burnt after Zelda’s death.
20
ZSF
to Biggs, 26 May 1943,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 13,
PUL
.
21
ZSF
to Biggs, undated 1943, author’s dating between 6 and 11 Oct., ibid.
22
ZSF
to Biggs, undated 1943, author’s dating mid-Nov., ibid. She hoped, vainly, that she might receive cash from the sale of Scott’s books for this venture.
23
ZSF
to Biggs, July/Aug. 1942 (
ZSF
’s emphasis),
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 18,
PUL
.
24
ZSF
to Biggs, 12 Apr. 1946,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 16,
PUL
.
25
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 282.
26
ZSF
–Biggs correspondence, 8 and 12 Apr. 1946,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 16,
PUL
. Zelda through Biggs (via Laird Blassell and Meeds of Wilmington) purchased 35 shares in Panhandle Eastern Pipeline common stock at 51¼
.
On 3 May 1946 she purchased 20 shares in Lane Wells at the cost of $377.55.
27
In April 1941 Zelda sent religious essays to Anna Biggs and Perkins. Once she had a
revelation
that Biggs would die next year. ‘Won’t you pray and thank God for his blessings and don’t die?’, she wrote anxiously (1 Sep. 1947). John Biggs lived (longer than Zelda). When his mother died Zelda consoled him: ‘Dear John, I am so sorry about your mother … The only peace now lies on the other side; many people are tired of struggling with these ungrateful horizons’ (9 Feb. 1943),
CO
628, Box 2, Folders 18, 17, 13,
PUL
. To Perkins she wrote comfortingly: ‘I brood about my friends; about their Christian virtues and their aspirational purposes and want them to find salvation. You have done so much for people and so endeared yourself … that, of course the Lord takes care of you’ (undated),
CO
101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944,
PUL
.
28
Dr Kirk Curnutt, Associate Professor of English, Troy State University, Montgomery, ‘Zelda’s Last Years: Fundamentalism and Madness’, lent to the author July 2000.
29
Rosalind Sayre Smith, quoted in Lanahan,
Scottie
…, p. 185.
30
Curnutt to the author, 7 July 2001 and subsequent communications.
31
Rosalind Sayre Smith to Kendall Taylor, 3 Dec. 1964.
32
ZSF
to Biggs, late Aug. 1943,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 13,
PUL
. She wrote from Mrs Wolfe’s in Asheville where she had a room with two windows for $3.50 a week and where ‘the plumbing bears an outward semblance to modernity’. She said ‘The hospital is filling up with the old contingent of my heyday there … Also have been to the flower-show with an inmate head-nurse who was my friend.’
33
Zelda’s first letter from Highland is 13 July 1946. Five days earlier Biggs had sent Highland a cheque for $275 to cover only four weeks hospitalization. A second bill for $205.71 covered four weeks from 1 August. Biggs paid the final bill of $275.
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 16; Box 3, Folder 7,
PUL
.
34
Lanahan,
Scottie
…, p. 185 (author’s emphasis).
35
Quoted in Bruccoli
et
al.,
eds.,
Romantic
Egoists,
dedication; also quoted in Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 488.
36
The State of California valued his unfinished manuscript of
The
Last
Tycoon
at $5,000 and all other manuscripts at $1,000.
37
In his 1937 will
FSF
appointed John Biggs and Harold Ober as executors, but on 10 Nov. 1940 he crossed out Ober’s name and substituted Perkins. As this raised legal problems Perkins and Ober withdrew as executors in favour of Biggs but all three worked together to administer Scott’s literary affairs and Zelda’s and Scottie’s finances. On 12 Apr. 1941 Biggs sent Zelda her monthly interest on Scott’s life insurance policy. He had collected the amount of the policy and would invest half in Government Bonds which would bring
in a small income for Zelda and Scottie. He had also stipulated that income from
writings
would be held in trust for them.
38
On 30 July 1941 Court of California awarded Zelda $50 a month plus $250 back-pay for the previous 5 months. On 7 Apr. 1941 Zelda efficiently wrote to Biggs to say she was applying for a war veteran’s widow’s pension.
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 11,
PUL.
39
Biggs to
ZSF
, 31 Dec. 1940;
ZSF
to Biggs, Dec. 1940,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 10,
PUL
.
40
ZSF
to Biggs, Jan. 1941,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 11,
PUL
. Biggs advised her about Scott’s
headstone
. She had wanted one engraved with Scott’s name, dates of birth and death, his college and profession, costing no more than $50. Biggs disagreed. He thought it should only say: ‘Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940 “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest”.’
41
ZSF
to Biggs, 15 Aug. 1947,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 17,
PUL
.
42
Biggs still harboured a secret desire to be a writer, but had been on the Bench for three years. He had Chambers in Federal Buildings, Wilmington. The 3rd Circuit ran from Pennsylvania to the Virgin Islands.
43
On 7 July 1943 for instance Biggs forgot to send her July cheque. His court cases had intervened.
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 13,
PUL
.
44
ZSF
to Biggs, 23 Jan. 1947,
CO
628, Box 2, Folder 17,
PUL
.
45
The typical Biggs admonishment ran: ‘I want to make it perfectly clear that the sending of this amount cannot act as a precedent and you will have to live on your income. The previous paragraph sounds very severe. It is not meant to be.’ 25 Jan. 1947, ibid.
46
ZSF
to Biggs, 23 Jan. 1947, ibid.
47
ZSF
to Biggs, 4 or 5 Jan. 1941,
CO
628, Box 2
,
Folder 11,
PUL
. She also asked him to send her rare
History
of
the
Dance
and her treasured books on music and ballet. Svetlov’s
History
of
the
Dance
had cost Zelda $40 in Paris.
48
Curiously, she told Biggs to send the paintings by the cheapest freight possible and
uninsured
(8 Jan. 1941). It took until 1943 for Biggs to send Zelda a box containing her costume jewellery and a steel file containing her ballet materials and camera.
49
ZSF
to Sara and Gerald Murphy, Dec. 1940/Jan. 1941, Honoria Murphy Donnelly Collection.
50
EH
to Sara Murphy, Dec. 1940, Honoria Murphy Donnelly Collection. Zelda did not hear directly from her old enemy Ernest Hemingway, but during the war she learnt of his exploits from Sara Murphy. Hemingway had been covering the closing days of battle in Europe as a Colliers correspondent when he wrote to Sara that he and Martha Gellhorn had broken up. ‘I need a wife in bed and not just in even the most widely circulated magazines.’ He was marrying someone else, ‘a girl named Mary Welsh … [who] is a great believer in bed’ (
EH
to Sara Murphy, 5 May 1945, Honoria Murphy Donnelly Collection). Mary, another writer, would be the first of Hemingway’s wives to stay the course.
51
For a full discussion see Vaill,
So
Young,
pp. 314–17.
52
Zelda sent Van Vechten a mimeographed religious essay, 13 Nov. 1944, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
53
‘I have painted … King Arthur’s round-table. Jeanne d’Arc and coterie, Louis XIV and court, Robin Hood are under way,’ she wrote Max. ‘The dolls are charming: there isn’t any reason why children shouldn’t learn while having a good time. Would you be kind enough to advise me what publishers handle such “literature”, and how to approach?’ 31 Mar. 1941,
CO
101, Box 53, Folder Zelda Fitzgerald 1921–1944,
PUL
. Perkins responded enthusiastically with several publishers’ names (3 Apr. 1941). But the paper dolls did not see publication until
Esquire
published some in 1960; then in 1996 Zelda’s
granddaughter
Eleanor Lanahan put them into book form.