Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  After seeing Scottie, on 10 October 1946 Zelda visited the Biggs family. During an otherwise agreeable visit there were two discomfiting moments. When Anna placed a bowl of fresh berries on the table Zelda said their thorns reminded her of Christ’s crown of thorns. Anna placatingly threw them out. Then John became worried that Zelda would be late for her train back to Montgomery, and momentarily Zelda thought Scott was by her side reassuring her she wouldn’t miss it. She told John, and he anxiously hurried her off the premises.

  A few months later, on 24 April 1947, Zelda confessed to Biggs something she had been holding back for years.

  Dear John … For five years I have been desperately in love with a Russian General. Our love is sent by God and hallowed of Him and means more to me than marriage. You may not feel that your very great magnamity is au fait under such circumstance; since – of course – you assumed the obligation in fidelity to Scott … I … pray that you will forgive my not having told you before; which last is as incomprehensible to myself as it must be to you.71

  The next typed letter from Biggs, on 6 May, totally ignores the reference to Zelda’s romance. Either he did not take the remark seriously or he felt it wiser not to discuss it, but it is possible that he hand-wrote her an answer between 25 April and 5 May unseen by his secretary.72 If so, Zelda destroyed it as she did most of her correspondence in the Forties.

  Earlier clues offer evidence that this confession could have been rooted in reality. Zelda’s fascination with Russia began with her love for Egorova, after which she painted a Russian Stable and at least two Portraits of Russians, one of which is now missing. In her last years she wrote an unfinished sketch about the Russian ballet and an unfinished story about a Russian officer. In 1942 she met a number of the militia stationed in Montgomery, among whom might have been a Russian General. Most significantly, six months before her confession she told John that she wanted to ask him something that he might find ‘ridiculously unrealizable’:

  For some years now, I have longed to go to Russia: anyway, I have a spiritual mission in Russia. Of course I would never be able to save enough to get there … Therefore would you consider giving me my part of the proceeds of Tender Is The Night to this end & I will … write to Archie MacLeish and see if he will help me get a pass-port. I want to spend the summer there, going from Moscow to Sachi for nude bathing in the Black Sea, and visit the resorts of the Caucasus … I know that Russia is a big big country where bears eat people who stray off the highway; however, neuro-psychotic hospitals … are also soul-consuming; so it would probably come out about even. Won’t you seriously consider what I so prayerfully ask: the world probably isn’t going on much longer. Maybe you + Anna would also like to go to Russia.73

  No money was available for such a trip, but Zelda refused to drop the idea. In January she wrote: ‘Did you consider the idea of going to Russia about which I wrote you? this is probably the moment for cataclysmic action, if ever, now that the old order is done and the new one yet unasserted … maybe we had better go now.’74

  Zelda’s depression over the failed trip to Russia increased when tragedy struck several old friends that year. In June, Perkins died. ‘I can’t imagine why Max should die,’ she wrote to John Biggs. ‘He was so decorous + punctilious about keeping life in hand – It is so sad.’75

  In September 1947 a worse event befell Katy and John Dos Passos. On 12 September, driving from Cape Cod to Connecticut, Dos, blinded for a second by the setting sun, collided with a truck. Dos lost an eye, but also his wife. Katy’s head was sheared off by the windshield; she died instantly.

  The smell of fear, illness, death and political paranoia was everywhere. 1947 was the year the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives held their Hollywood hearings in which the Hollywood Ten (artists and writers) were all blacklisted. Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Don Ogden Stewart, now victims of the McCarthy regime, could no longer find work.

  Zelda’s third hospitalization, intermittent from 7 November 1947,76 was not entirely with her agreement but at Scottie’s repeated urgent requests. On 3 November Zelda wrote to Biggs: ‘Scottie (as of course you know) wants me to go to Highlands for a while. [Though] glad of a chance to straighten up again … I hope I won’t have to stay too long.’ Admitted for deep shock insulin and another ‘rehabilitation and re-education’ programme, she stayed only a few weeks before returning to Montgomery. During late fall her sadness increased. She knelt with her mother by her bed, praying as they had done when Zelda was a child. Nothing lifted her spirits. She told Rosalind: ‘I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly and faithfully asking God to help me … I cannot understand why he leaves me in suffering.’77

  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. Thoug
h 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 ashes88 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.

  Notes

  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, CO628, 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, CO628, 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, CO628, Box 2, Folder 13, PUL.