Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Initially Zelda treated Craig as a country club. She dug holes in golf greens, almost uprooted a gigantic oak with what used to be a chip-shot, worked on a piece for the New Yorker about hotels they had visited24 and played bridge.

  Her surroundings had charm: ‘The ground is shiverring with snow-drops and gentians … I wish you could [rest] for a while in the cool apple-green of my room. The curtains are like those in John Bishop’s poem to Elspeth and beyond the lawn never ends … we walk … [to] where tumbling villages prop themselves on the beams of the afternoon sun. We have tea, and many such functions to fulfill.’ She added irritably: ‘Please send the book.’25

  The costs distressed her: ‘You can imagine how I feel sitting here in this lovely place when I realize the worry and effort it is costing you … I feel very guilty: as if maybe I could have conformed more satisfactorily at home.’

  Then suddenly her money and most activities were restricted.

  On 12 March Scott had written to Slocum that Zelda had absolutely no sense of money, so he felt that every extra expense should be curtailed. Scott told Slocum that Zelda’s artistic materials alone came to about $50 a month without her typing costs. With her basic fees Scott estimated this at four-fifths of the household income. Slocum agreed to limit Zelda’s expenses, but reported that after he’d read aloud to her Scott’s letter Zelda had a ‘hysterical outbreak’.26

  Scott informed Slocum that the ‘nervous strain’ of creative work meant Zelda’s writing must be restricted. Zelda, he said, had an ‘extraordinary talent’ for metaphor and simile, was markedly successful with short character studies, might contribute regularly to the New Yorker, but her nervous system could not stand criticism. Slocum agreed Zelda was ‘doing too much in her literary efforts’. He assured Scott he had made her promise after she had finished her latest story ‘to desist until we feel that it is wise for her to re-enter this field again’.27

  Zelda countered with another request: ‘Please ask Mrs Owens to rush my paints. I want them very badly. It’s such expensive equipment, I don’t want to buy another.’ She needed pastels to try sketching covers for the Post. Would Scott retrieve her oil paints and the Dante, still at Phipps?28 When Slocum, deciding her flower paintings were ‘recreational’, relented, Zelda designed a floral watercolour Easter card with ‘Easter Greetings Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’ looped inside. But she no longer felt part of the contented couple who sent friends home-made cards.

  Later that March Slocum told Scott that though ‘prohibiting Mrs Fitzgerald’s writing has been helpful’, it was a struggle getting Zelda to breakfast in bed, or rest after her 11 a.m. massage. She was determined ‘to be as active as possible in her work’.

  Slocum gave permission for Scottie to spend a day and night with Zelda before going with Scott to the Adirondacks for Easter.29 ‘She will like it here with the pool and the tennis,’ Zelda wrote excitedly to Scott, ‘and I will be awfully glad to have her … I wish I were well, and you could get something more out of life for all you put into it than bills, and more bills.’ It was unfair he ‘should have to shoulder the heavy debts necessary to reconstitute a member of a disintigrated family’.30

  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:

  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 … I cannot agree with you … I do the things I can do and that interest me and if you’d like me to give up everything I like to do I will do so willingly if it will advance matters any. I … do not like existing entirely at other peoples expense … If you feel that it is an imposition on Cary to have the exhibition, the pictures can wait. I believe in them and in Emerson’s theory about good-workman-ship. If they are good, they will come to light some day.33

  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:

  I was so sorry to see you so sad when you said good-bye and I wish the time would come when you could be free to rest for a little while … I watch the book section for the first opinions on Tender Is The Night. You forgot to send me a copy. Please do. Or shall I order it from Scribners? … You and Cary were awfully kind about the pictures – and I hope it hasn’t cost too much.58

  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

  The Murphys, who represented the Divers’ dazzling side before their tragic fall, were negative in their response. Nor did they appreciate the dedication: ‘To Gerald and Sara Many Fêtes’. Sara was outraged about Scott’s portrayal. ‘I hated the book when I first read it,’ she said, ‘and even more on rereading. I reject categorically any resemblance to ourselves or to anyone we know.’64

  More than twenty-five years later Sara was still furious. Was she angry because Scott had misread their characters and lives, or was it because he touched on truths she did not want aired? There were obvious visual parallels between the Divers and the Murphys. Dick, moving ‘gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel’ from their strip of beach; Nicole with ‘her bathing suit … pulled
off her shoulders … set off by a string of creamy pearls’: these are precise verbal photographs of Gerald and Sara. The stimulating conversations in the Divers’ exquisite villa probably took place in Villa America. It was more likely that what upset Sara was Nicole’s decision to leave Dick for an adventurer like Ernest Hemingway, whom Sara adored, to whom Sara was sexually attracted, but for whom she would never have left Gerald. In the light of Gerald’s later determination to give up painting for ever, Dick’s renunciation of his family and his life’s work would have been equally frightening.65

  Sara wrote bitterly to Scott that ‘consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is completely left out of your make-up – I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody but yourself is like.’ In that same irritated letter she spoke warmly about Zelda. ‘Please don’t think that Zelda’s condition is not very near to our hearts – and that all your misfortunes are not, in part, ours too.’66

  Scott told Gerald the book ‘was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Gerald pointed out. Scott ‘never did really understand our life’.67

  Yet in December 1935, when Gerald’s life had been torn apart, he changed his mind. ‘I know now that what you said in Tender Is The Night is true. Only the invented part of our life – the unreal part – has had any scheme any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed.’68

  Scott was even more anxious about Hemingway’s response. A month after publication Scott wrote fretfully: ‘Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers jargon out of my head.’69 Ernest had already told Max he disapproved of Tender because the Divers acted in ways the Murphys never would. Ernest said that Scott could not invent real characters because he knew very little about people: ‘he has so lousy much talent and … has destroyed himself and destroyed Zelda, though never as much as she has tried to destroy him.’70 Hemingway finally sent Scott a three-page letter assuring him the writing was brilliant but the distortion of the Murphys had invalidated the novel: ‘faked case histories’ and ‘silly compromises’ as well as Scott’s use of the Murphys for the Divers’ glamour, and of himself and Zelda for the traumatized aspects, violated the book’s integrity.