Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  The initial opinion at Beacon about Zelda’s condition was that she was suffering from fatigue. She was described as mildly confused and mentally retarded—with a degree of emotional instability.

  Thirteen of Zelda’s paintings and fifteen drawings were exhibited from March 29 through April 30 at Cary Ross’s studio. (There was a much smaller supplementary exhibit in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.) At the top of the red, white, and blue brochure for the show was a swan with a banner bearing the legend “Parfois la Folie est la Sagesse.” Zelda came down from Beacon for her exhibition accompanied by a nurse; she visited her show, saw an exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, and then attended a luncheon with Scott, Maxwell Perkins, and a few others from Scribner’s before returning to Craig House. On the train journeying back to Beacon she became hysterical and was given medication to quiet her.

  Gerald Murphy, who went to her exhibit, and who had painted himself, felt that Zelda’s work was formed from a visual distortion. He talked about an oil painting he and Mrs. Murphy bought for $200 called “Chinese Theater.” “Those monstrous, hideous men, all red with swollen intertwining legs. They were obscene—I don’t mean sexually…and everyone who saw them recognized that quality of repellent human life; they were figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid.”

  Later when Zelda learned of the Murphys’ purchase, she wrote Scott:

  Dearest Do-Do:…

  Cary wrote that Ernest was back in N.Y.; that he had been to see my pictures. Why don’t you ask him down?…He also said the Murphys bought the acrobats. I am going to paint a picture for the Murphy’s and they can choose as those acrobats seem, somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked. Maybe they aren’t like I think they are but 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.… And don’t pay any attention to that initialled moth-hole in the Times. [Earlier in this letter she had referred to a review of Tender by J.A.D., which she thought obtuse.]

  Apparently the Tribune man still believes that movie stars got there via the gutters of Les Miserables— But we can’t buy him a ticket to Hollywood, and, on the whole, it was an intelligent and favorable review—and the liked the book even if he didn’t know what it was about psychologically. He will like it better when he reads it again.

  I hope Ernest liked it.…

  Several of Zelda’s drawings were sold, but not one to persons whom the Fitzgeralds did not know personally. Dorothy Parker bought one of the portraits of Scott called “The Cornet Player.” She remembered that the drawings “were pitifully inexpensive. There was the portrait of Scott wearing this piercing crown of thorns. They dug in; it did look like him; she had talent. I also bought something called ‘Arabesque’ which showed a dancer working out at the bar—it was a little vague, but with 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 me painful, miserable quality of emotion behind the paintings.”

  John Biggs came up for the showing and remembered seeing the portrait of Fitzgerald. “Yes, it was good. The eyelashes were feathers; it was astounding really—looked like him, and then those mad, lovely, long feathery eyelashes.” Zelda had also caught perfectly the color of Scott’s eyes, and Biggs said they were “very cold blue eyes—almost green—they were as cold as the Irish Sea someone said. I can’t remember if it was Gerald Murphy or Bunny Wilson—but… it was quite true.”

  The New York Post ran an article on April 3 (ironically the Fitzgeralds’ fourteenth anniversary) entitled “Jazz Age Priestess Brings Forth Paintings.” They said Zelda had “confounded” them with her paintings and noted that they were not exactly “jazzy,” as indeed they were not.

  When Time magazine covered her show they invoked Zelda’s link to an era that had disappeared: “There was a time,” the article began, “when Mrs. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a more fabulous character than her novel-writing husband. That was when she was Zelda Sayre.…”

  To Zelda’s disappointment very little space was given in the press to the paintings themselves. Most, like The New Yorker, gave the exhibit a puff with a cutting edge: “Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age.” Time magazine did at least mention the paintings.

  Last week…Zelda Fitzgerald showed her pictures, made her latest bid for fame. The work of a brilliant introvert, they were vividly painted, intensely rhythmic. A pinkish reminiscence of her ballet days showed figures with enlarged legs and feet—a trick she may have learned from Picasso. An impression of a Dartmouth football game made the stadium look like portals of a theatre, the players like dancers. Chinese Theatre was a gnarled mass of acrobats with an indicated audience for background. There were two impressionistic portraits of her husband, a verdant Spring in the Country geometrically laced with telephone wires.

  From the sanatorium last week which she temporarily left against doctors’ orders to see a show of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, Zelda Fitzgerald was hoping her pictures would gratify her great ambition—to earn her own living.

  The article read like an obituary.

  Scott stayed on at the Algonquin after Zelda returned to Beacon because he wanted to be in New York for the publication of Tender Is the Night on April 12.

  Another writer spotted him ordering a drink at Tony’s on Fifty-second Street at ten o’clock one night. “The collar of his topcoat was turned up rakishly on one side and his hat, which he kept on, was pulled down jauntily over one eye. It was an almost studied effect, but it was oddly contradicted by Fitzgerald’s curious air of self-disapproval.” The writer observing Scott was James Thurber, and although they had never met before, the two men were to spend the next several hours together. Thurber remembered: “He was…witty, forlorn, pathetic, romantic, worried, hopeful, and despondent, but the Scott Fitzgerald I met was quiet and pleasant, too, and not difficult. When two big guys, not unlike the Killers in Hemingway’s story, walked past our table and, as luck would have it, one of them said something disparaging about Ernest, my companion rose dramatically to his feet and said to them, ‘I am Scott Fitzgerald.’ Before he could ask them to apologize, they muttered something and walked away.” That was as close to trouble as they came that night. Mostly they just talked. Thurber told Scott how much he admired The Great Gatsby, but Scott didn’t want to hear about it. What he wanted to talk about was the book he called “my Testament of Faith”—Tender Is the Night.

  As Scott talked he kept drawing from his pockets brochures for Zelda’s show. He had dozens of them about his person and by midnight so did Thurber. At three o’clock in the morning he asked Thurber if he knew any good girl he could call on. Somewhat apprehensively Thurber went off to the telephone to see whom he could round up at that hour. Finally, an actress he knew said they could come by, but to give her half an hour. Punctually the two tight flowers of American prose entered her apartment. Thurber went into another room, because, as he said, it was Scott who wanted to talk to a good girl and not he. But he noticed that as Scott and the girl sat next to each other talking until daybreak, Scott would occasionally, absent-mindedly, pass some of Zelda’s catalogs to the girl until she too was inundated with them.

  Throughout the period of Zelda’s stay at Craig House she corresponded regularly with Dr. Rennie. Her letters were written in ink on large sheets of gray drawing paper. Also on the face of the letters were drawings in pencil. The effect of these letter drawings was eerie, with the written text dripping and winding through curling, swelling shapes that were anatomical and weirdly potent. None of the eight letters were dated. In one Zelda seemed to be writing to Rennie while she was listening to music. She said she was drawing him the flowers on her table. There were violets drawn to Strauss’s Salome and roses drawn to Schu
bert. The interior parts of the flowers were carefully shaded, the stamens and pistils taking on shapes more phallic than floral, while the petals curled and ruptured like the breaking of eggs. The stems of the flowers were spiny, skeletal almost, and frondlike, as if the buds of the flowers were held to vertebral columns. The buds themselves were often shaped like fetuses. Macabrely, the flowers seemed to move as if in repulsion from their own interior parts.

  After Zelda’s trip to New York she wrote Dr. Rennie:

  My pictures looked very nice the way Cary had them hung.… I will send you the white flowers when the exhibit closes; they are the best and very like some way I’ve wanted to be, sometime—only, of course, being like that would necessitate being a stainless victim of some mighty and revolutionary circumstance. (Excuse my pompous comment.)

  I went to see Georgia O’Keefe’s pictures. They are so lonely and magnificent and heart-breaking, and they inspire a desire to communicate which is perhaps the highest function of anything creative.

  Gradually her letters to Dr. Rennie became more disconnected and incoherent; her handwriting was uneven and cramped and the content of the letters became grand and increasingly abstract: “I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.…”

  When she wrote to Scott she nearly always asked him about Tender Is the Night: could he send her copies of the reviews; why had he neglected to send her the book itself; how were the sales going? But mostly she simply praised the novel. “I have now got to the Rosemary-Rome episode. It makes me very sad—largely because of the beautiful, beautiful writing. Recapitulation of casual youth in the tenderer terms one learns to cling to later is always moving. You know I love your prose style: it is so fine and balanced and you know how to achieve the emphasis you want so poignantly and economicly. It’s a fine book.…” Later in the same letter she tells him what she is doing: hammering away, as she puts it, at golf balls. “You know my psychological attitude toward golf: it was just the sort of thing they would have brought into England during the reign of Chas. II. The French probably played it in high-heels with stomachs full of wine and cheated a little.”

  In another letter she described her bridge game:

  You know how I play: I sit and wait for Divine Guidance to show me the difference between a finesse and a (insert any technical term you know here). Then when I’ve made the mistake I pretend I was thinking of something else and utter as convincing lamentations as I can at my absent-mindedness.

  It’s so pretty here.… I suppose you wouldn’t like to rest, but I wish you could for a while in the cool apple-green of my room.… Of cource, you can walk to where young men in bear-cat roadsters are speeding to whatever Geneva Mitchells dominate the day—but mostly we walk the other way….…Please send the book.

  Scott did send her a batch of the first reviews of Tender Is the Night and she immediately wrote, telling him: “You have the satisfaction of having written a tragic and poetic personal drama against the background of an excellent presentation of the times we matured in. You know that I have always felt that the chief function of the artist was to inspire feeling and certainly ‘Tender’ did that.” Another time she wrote, “Those people are helpless before themselves and the prose is beautiful.…” She said she was reading Book I again.

  Scott cautioned her about projecting too much of themselves into the book, and she replied:

  You seem afraid that it will make me recapitulate the past: remember, that at that time, I was immersed in something else—and I guess most of life is a re-hashing of the tragedies and happinesses of which it consisted in days before we started to promulgate reasons for their being so. Of cource, it is a haunting book.… Scott: this place is most probably hideously expensive. I do not want you to struggle through another burden like the one in Switzerland for my sake. You write too well. Also, you know that I live much within myself and would feel less strongly now than under normal circumstances about whatever you wanted to do. You have not got the right, for Scottie’s sake, and for the sake of letters to make a drudge of yourself for me.

  Scott continued to insist that she not have “too much traffic with my book, which is a melancholy work and seems to have haunted most of the reviewers. I feel very strongly about your re-reading it. It represents certain phases of life that are over now.” He told her they were both on the upgrade now, and even if they did not know where it would take them, he did not want her to feel gloomy about their future:

  …the only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice with its particular intimacies of inflection.

  You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that the spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too—the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only. But, Swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fractured it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward. Forget the past—what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.

  This sounds allegorical but is very real, I want you here. The sadness of the past is with me always. The things that we have done together and the awful splits that have broken us into war survivals in the past stay like a sort of atmosphere around any house that I inhabit. The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever. I love you my darling, darling.

  At the beginning of this letter Scott had apologized to Zelda for dictating it; he said she would understand if she could see the clutter of unanswered mail on his desk. But, as authentic as the emotion of the letter was for Scott, there is something distasteful about his having dictated it.

  Zelda wanted to begin another novel. What, she asked, would Scott’s attitude be toward her plans? She wanted to know before she began, for after all, she told him, Tender Is the Night was now published and she was free to make another stab at longer fiction. Actually, her doctors were against any such attempt, and so was Scott. Zelda seemed completely unaware of why they objected. Patiently she tried to explain to Scott: “Dear: I am not trying to make myself into a great artist or a great anything.… Though you persist in thinking that an exaggerated ambition is the fundamental cause of my collapse…though, of cource, the will-to-power may have played a part in the very beginning. However, five years have passed since then, and one matures.” Short fiction, she said, was “a form demanding too concentrated an effort for me at present and I might try a play, if you are willing and don’t approve of the novel.… Please say what you want done, as I really do not know. As you know, my work is mostly a pleasure for me, but if it is better for me to take up something quite foreign to my temperament, I will— Though I can’t see what good it does to knit bags when you want to paint pansies, maybe it is necessary at times to do what you don’t like.” Petulantly as a crossed child Zelda saw nothing disturbing in this latest flash of ambition and energy, and she pressed on. She wrote “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number “and perhaps began “Auction—Model 1934.” It is doubtful that she had time to begin the new novel, for on May 19, 1934, only nine weeks after she had entered Craig House, she was transferred to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital just outside Baltimore in (as Scott noted in his Ledger) a “catatonic state”—although there remains a real question as to whether or not she was catatonic. She was to remain there for the better part of the next two years. Just before this terribl
e relapse she had written Scott that Beacon was extremely expensive and

  I do not feel as you do about state institutions. Dr. Meyer and, I suppose, many excellent doctors did their early training there. You will have to conceal as much of this from Scottie as you can anyway. So in the words of Ernest Hemingway, Save Yourself. That is what I want you to do.… I am so glad your book is on the list of best sellers. Maybe now you will have some measure of that ease and security you have so long deserved. Anyway, I hope it sells and sells.

  For the first two weeks of Zelda’s hospitalization Scott was asked not to visit her. She was apathetic and remote, and wrote him dispiritedly:

  Darling—I feel very disoriented and lonely. I love you, dearheart. Please try to love me some in spite of these stultifying years of sickness— and I will compensate you some way for your love and faithfullness.

  I’m sorry Scottie has had poison ivy. The other day when I kissed her goodbye the little school-child scent of her neck and her funny little hesitant smile broke my heart. Be good to her Do-Do.… I want so to see you. Maybe sometimes before very long I will be well enough to meet you under the gracious shadows of these trees and we can look out on the distant fields together. And I will be getting better.

  Fitzgerald accepted the doctors’ decision, but reminded them that he had seen Zelda only twice during the previous two months, and that sometimes his effect on her was to raise her spirits. He also told them that he had been “dogmatic” in the past about insisting that she not write serious fiction, and that he had perhaps been wrong. “For it there is to be said that she grew better in the three months at Hopkins where it was allowed.…” It was his thinking along these lines, as well as his awareness of Zelda’s listlessness, that prompted him to suggest to her that she bring together a collection of her short stories and articles for possible publication. And it must have been in yet another effort to stir her from apathy that he wrote to her the end of May that perhaps they could go to Europe together in late summer, “even if only for six weeks.…”