SALLY CLINE TALK (7th November 2002)
ZELDA (& SCOTT) FITZGERALD: TWO LIVES BENEATH ONE LEGEND
(This is an edited version of a talk Sally Cline gave at the Biographers’ Club, London. Nov. 7th 2002. based on research for her biography “Zelda Fitzgerald : Her Voice in Paradise”)
I want to discuss firstly how myth and legend affect the lives of biographical subjects involved in the legend. Secondly I shall talk about how legends can skew the facts so that it makes it harder to achieve a balance in one’s research …which seeks to establish several faces rather than the legend’s single face. Thirdly if there is time, I want to look briefly at the treatment meted out to so-called disinterested biographers by the families, the estates or other interested parties (sometimes publishers or agents) intent on preserving the legend.
1stly: How legend affects the lives of people subjected to legendary status.
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald achieved legendary status both as a Jazz Age couple and also in different ways as individual 20th century icons. But before I even started researching this biography I had become interested in this matter of how legends work. This was partly because my personal experience in the 60s meant that I had learnt at first hand about domestic and artistic life in the land of legends. For some years I lived with a legend…unlike Zelda who lived with a literary legend, I lived with a musical legend, whose legendary status was built on the fact that he was not merely the best in his field, at his instrument, the harmonica) but was in fact the best in the world. So I started by listening to a few legendary performances. But then Reader I married him. In many ways I had a great time …(we produced a wonderful daughter who is here at the Biography Club tonight) ..but creatively I discovered that if you have a modest or even an excellent talent but live with a partner of extraordinary talent, someone who is indisputably a legend in their own time, then two things happen. The first ..if you genuinely respect your partner’s overwhelming genius (as I did and as Zelda did) , if you in fact believe the media hype that he or she is the best in their field (as I did and as Zelda did) you are likely to find a) you want to help, to be of service, to feed that talent even if it is at your own expense and or b) more dangerously to your personal identity, you might want to become a minor part of that legend, again at your own expense.
Secondly, as an artist yourself you might find creatively that you cannot breathe in the same air as the legend who shares your bed.
Here seems to be no space for your own creativity.
This is possibly because artists who are legends have, or are made to have, intense self-focus and often very large egos (as Scott and Hemingway did) either by definition or as a consequence of their mythical status. In some sense whether emotionally or physically and geogr4aphically the person living with the Legend…if they want to find artistic fulfillment…..may have to get out, find their own space, in order to create successfully.
This was one of the emotions Zelda struggled with as an artist and several times she tried for her own place, her own space, she attempted to get out. She failed for several complex reasons of which financial dependence was a strong one. I shall return to that point later in the talk.
My own experience had a certain usefulness when I began to research; although I had to throw off all personal experiences, and curtail any kind of identification with my subject , when I started writing. What I discovered was:
Other women who have lived with Legends, many of those women attached to the Fitzgerald, Hemingway circle, found a similar challenge in terms of their creativity. I shall offer you two small examples.
Picasso of course was a key part of the dazzling set on the Riviera, organized and held together, by Gerald and Sara Murphy, a circle in which the Fitzgerald’s became enmeshed in 1923. The woman who lived with Picasso for ten years from 1946 to 1953 and who bore him 2 children, the brilliant French artist, Françoise Gilot, has talked about Legends and their challenges. Today having produced more than 1500 paintings, 5000 works on paper and having written 7 books herself, is a much acclaimed artist who says confidently in all here contemporary interviews: “I was always my own self.” But years ago, after she had left Picasso, she talked about how difficult it had been, to be just that, to be your own self, when you had incredible talent of your own, but you were living with and working alongside someone like Picasso.
Martha Gellhorn, novelist and journalist, famed today as a first class war reporter, was also the 3rd wife of Scott’s hero and Zelda’s enemy, Ernest Hemingway. She was a fine writer but she lived with another fine writer who believed he was amongst the finest and more significantly contributed heavily to becoming a literary legend in his own time. After Martha Gellhorn left Hemingway, she fought the myth makers, year after year, because they automatically restricted her from being her own self by describing, any and every chance they got, as Hemingway’s 3rd wife. Because that is what legend makers do.
They were doing it in the London Times this morning when they headed an article about Posh Spice with the line “Beckham’s Wife Spooked by Book.”
I am sure that you all remember that after the split Martha Gellhorn insisted that her publicity agents made absolutely sure that in any interview she undertook for radio, television or print, she was never to be asked about her private life with Ernest. She did not want to be bracketed as an accessory to Hemingway.
LEGEND AS A TITLE
The very title of my talk: “Zelda BRACKET (and Scott) BRACKET Fitzgerald: Two Lives Beneath One Legend” bears out this theme and immediately lends itself to a comment:
I chose to put the brackets around Scott’s name because I was still after six years research all too aware that either the legend focuses on Scott and Zelda is bracketed or it focuses on a single bracketed structure called Scott-and-Zelda.
My title also opens up 2 key questions. First if a legend has become established about one of the two people in a private/public partnership, can the 2nd person, the non legend, or the lesser legend, exist independently with equal validity? Or does that person’s life automatically fall within the framework of the Legend?
The 2nd question is whether if a legend has grown up around both partners, is it possible for either one of them to transgress the boundaries of myth? Can either one easily perform autonomous or contradictory actions, that do not feed the legend, that may indeed conflict with it? Or do both parties constantly frame and reframe their behaviour and attitudes to match up to the myths, which in Zelda and Scott’s time and even more in this century are largely constructed and communicated by the media. If the participants, the biographical subjects, do behave in that legend-restricted way, then if they themselves, subsequently read about their adventures , which now fall in line with the myth, does that further reinforce and reconstruct their identities and actions?
Let us look at the case of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, born in 1900, and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald born four years earlier in 1896.
During their chequered lives these two impossible people wore each other out with their impossible passions and impossible escapades but they rarely wore out the media. Newspapers loved them. Because with each adventure they built another brick into the legend.
When as a young bride, Zelda jumped, fully dressed, into the Washington Square fountain, or danced on tables in public restaurants, or performed cartwheels in a New York city hotel lobby, or when Scott undressed at George White’s “Scandals” (a top New York theatrical revue) it was not surprising that the press filled their pages with the Fitzgerald ‘s exploits. What could be better for headlines than a couple who did not go in for self-preservation?
So, in the 20s, journalists turned the Fitzgeralds’ bizarre behaviour into myth and that in turn encouraged Scott and Zelda to invent further extreme or extravagant antics. It also encouraged them to flourish as capricious merciless self-historians who wrote and rewrote their own and each other’s exploits.
For years they used their stormy partnership as a basis for their fiction, then that fiction became a form of private communication, which stood as a method of discourse about their marriage. Subsequently that private discourse, reworked under the guise of novels and stories , was subjected to public scrutiny, to critical appraisal, and was then rewoven into the legend.
Scott's Princeton friend , the critic Edmund Wilson said: “If ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched, it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald “.
But what is more significant is that these fantasies, and the way they acted them out, matched precisely those of the media, who saw Scott and Zelda ‘s celebrity, inevitably followed by crack up, or glamour followed by tawdriness, as the paradigm of the 20th century’s version of the old idea of the Wheel of Fortune.
So we have the glitter of the Roaring 20s, Scott's literary successes, their idealized marriage, the birth of baby Scottie, Zelda as High Priestess of the Jazz Age , This was swiftly followed by the wreckage of the 30s, Scott's descent into alcoholism and Hollywood hack-writing. Alongside these events ran Zelda’s possibly inaccurate diagnosis of schizophrenia, ten years inside and outside mental hospitals, their extra-marital romances, marriage breakdown, their conflict over their fiction writings.
Fortunately for the legend, under all that stress,, both these impossible people…like Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe, died impossibly young. Scott died first when he was only 44 then eight years later Zelda died when she was 48.
But in their early days before they messed up, he with alcohol, she with acute mental illness, the Legend saw the Fitzgeralds simply as Enfants Terribles, dreadful children who provoked everyone but got away with it.
One of their friends who was still alive told me: “I couldn’t get mad at them. There was a golden innocence about them and they were both so hopelessly good looking. “
We need to hang on to that word ‘golden’ as it became a key symbol of their myth. The Legend gives us the Golden couple. I noticed that almost all the headlines attached to recent reviews of my biography , contained the phrase “the golden couple” so patently it is a label that has stuck.
The legend also gives us Zelda, the “golden girl” of Scott's fiction. From the start Zelda's life story seemed to be made for fiction which had page turning qualities, even before Scott and Zelda amended it for the legend. Her tale began with dramatic thespian timing. Her birth in 1900 coincided with the start to a new century. This allowed Scott as well as Zelda to see the theatrical possibilities of a life that paralleled an era. When for instance in 1930 the year which followed the Stock Market crash, Zelda had her first terrible breakdown , Scott carefully wrote in his Ledger: “The Crash: Zelda and America!”
She was christened Zelda Sayre, because her 40 year old mother Minerva, herself named for a myth, and an avid reader of romantic novels, had during her pregnancy, come across the unusual name Zelda twice in two different novels. Both romantic heroines were so beautiful that they “drew upon themselves a hundred stares”’ just as Zelda did. Strangers constantly stared at her when she was a child . In the legend her appearance is always described poetically as rhapsodic. Legend writers comment on the long loose hair, so blonde that it was no colour at all merely a reflector of light.
Legend gives us Zelda, the spoilt blonde baby of the family, who acts like a wild child and gets away with it. Myth makers see her as a tomboy, a rebel, impetuous, strong willed. Indeed she posse4d all of those characteristics. But the legend misses the fact that she was also reflective, quiet, philosophical, a loner, who would sit brooding in the cemetery where she would write love letters or invent stories. The legend fails to inform us that she haunted her father’s excellent library, reading the classics, gobbling up encyclopaedias, always excited by the politics of the Civil War, the bravery of the white Southern men.
I wanted my biography to give us something else that was not merely golden. I tried to pare back what Michael Holroyd called “history’s cuticle of lies.”
So legendary however is Scott's status, that mystery writer Raymond Chandler pointed out that Scott “had one of the rarest qualities in all literature ,….. the word is charm ….charm as Keats would have used it….it’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.”
Those of us who have been enthralled by “The Great Gatsby” or “Tender is the Night” would agree. The magic of Scott’s prose was echoed by the magnetism of his personality which his friends including Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Gerald and Sara Murphy described and admired. The golden image of Scott Fitzgerald’s charm and of his heroic struggle against adversity and dreadful debt, made Alice B Toklas call him “one of those great tragic American figures.”
And that sad but golden image has outlasted the catalogue of ills and frustrations, despairs and bitterness, of the last decade of his life.
But one wonders, if one is a biographer, what lay beneath the charm, the control, the magic, that Scott was exercising? What was going on under the glittery surface?
When I decided to find out, I discovered to my horror, that Raymond chandler had issued a severe warning to biographers. It went like this: “Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him.”
In the past Scott's biographers took heed. Raymond Chandler was not a man to tangle with. None of the many biographers before me felt they had the right to mess up Fitzgerald, meaning of course Scott Fitzgerald. There was no similar embargo on messing up any other Fitzgerald’s life. Raymond Chandler had never instructed biographers not to play havoc with Zelda’s existence. No instructions came from anyone else. Zelda remained fair game. She was also a legend but she was not sacrosanct. Indeed NOT being sacrosanct was part of her legend.
The result has been that over the years we have heard a great deal about Scott that generally is only the nest.
That Scott was a man who wrote extraordinary prose. Which he did. And that mattered.
That Scott was a man who drank extraordinary amounts. Which he did. And that did not matter.
Well, it doesn’t matter much, to those of us today who only have to read his books. But it might have mattered , a great deal more, then to the woman who had to share the life of the man with the Keats’ charm, the man who was writing the magical prose, the man who was drinking the exquisite alcohol. The man who didn’t know when to stop.
OK. This woman. This Other Fitzgerald. Who was she?
The first time I heard anything about my primary biographical subject was in 1970 , well over 30 years ago, when I was lying in a hospital bed feeling very sorry for myself, wondering if I would ever feel sunny or sensible again. Let alone write another word.
A friend came to the hospital to cheer me up. “I have brought you just the book “ she said waving a big hardback about. “It is a riveting biography of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. She went mad you know! Utterly bonkers. Genuinely crazy! She was MUCH worse than you! She was locked up, in and out of hospitals for ten years. “ (She paused) “It’s a great read!”
My first instinct was to show her the door. But in those days as a nice Jewish girl I was very well brought up. So instead politely I inquired; “Does she have a name, this crazy wife of the famous novelist? Did she ever get out of the asylums? Did she ever DO anything apart from being the wife of a genius.?” My friend looked doubtful. “Well the important thing in her life, obviously, was that she was lucky enough to be Scott Fitzgerald’s wife! That must have been quite something you know! She and Scott were wildly in love, couldn’t live together though, she got labeled a schizophrenic, she wrote a bit I think or possibly drew, no didn’t draw, played a musical instrument, no er maybe, yes she danced or something. She did finally get out of the asylums but when a few years later she returned to the last hospital for a brief recuperation, she got locked in to a bedroom high up on the fifth floor....they said it was an accident…..well they would say that…but a terrible fire broke out…swept through the hospital…she perished! The only way they could identify her was by a single charred slipper beneath her burnt body She was only 48. Terrible story. Ever so sad. You will just love the book!!”
“Name?” I said patiently. “Did she have a name, this woman?”
“Oh yes, she did have a name. Now what was it. Tilda? No. Imelda? No. “
She glanced down at the book she had brought me. “Sorry Sal, yes, she did have a name. She was called Zelda.”
At that moment, in 1970, in my hospital room, when my friend gave me that first biography by Nancy Milford, which I still have, I made a vow that one day I would rise up off my bed, re enter the word of print and I would find out all the things that made Zelda who she was, other than her ‘madness’, other than her marital relationship. Other than the few pieces of information which the legend has allowed us.
As a slow moving writer, but a very persevering one, it took me until 1996 to convince a publisher that commissioning me to write a biography of Zelda was the best idea they had ever had.
What was somewhat disturbing in literary terms when I began my research, 26 years after that first biography, most people with whom I talked , still held the view of my hospital visitor, that Zelda’s major achievement was being Scott’s wife. They also believed that her defining characteristic was clinically diagnosed madness.
When I began research I was very fortunate in that I was given access to all the previously restricted materials, including all the medical reports and correspondence, so I was able to sort through all the available information. I was also able to be more forthright than previous biographers both about Zelda’s condition and about her very early and very late sexual experiences and her intermittent lesbian feelings and behaviour.
I made two particularly painful discoveries. The first was an incident of sexual abuse in the school playground when Zelda was an adolescent. The second many years later when she was a patient in her final hospital where she sexually abused by her chief psychiatrist Dr Robert Carroll, an eminent doctor who was later involved in a rape case with patients in that ward.
Those facts which lay in old letters, papers, newspapers, were then confirmed for me by her very last psychiatrist Dr Irving Pine, who though an old man when I met him was highly intelligent and completely coherent. He had already mentioned these appalling facts to one previous biographer but he had never allowed her to put it on the record. He did allow me.
Dr Irving Pine also talked to me about Zelda’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. Dr Pine said that he and several other doctors had thought for many years that Zelda was suffering from what today might be termed manic depression but she had been inaccurately diagnosed as schizophrenia, then treated for many years and in their view treated wrongly that after ten years of mistreatments, she had begun to exhibit a bewildering array of symptoms, several of them similar in form or style to schizophrenia. He felt she had been consistently misdiagnosed. Although there was a genetic component towards mental illness in her own family, he believed that much of her depression came from her domestic and emotional situation and from professional artistic frustration. As those elements accelerated so did her depression.
Dr Pine like several of Zelda’s psychiatrists, (including Dr Meyer who treated Zelda in 1932) saw Scott and Zelda ‘s medical and psychological problems as a “folie a deaux”, a dual case. Their suggestion was that Scott's alcoholism had serious implications for Zelda’s breakdowns.
Dr Meyer had wanted Scott to submit to psychoanalysis but Scott had always refused on the grounds that such treatment might ruin his creativity. He said that if he gave up drinking, which Zelda and the doctors begged him to do, it would appear to justify Zelda’s family’s view that his alcoholism was a partial cause of Zelda’s mental instability. So Scott refused to take the doctor’s advice.
One interesting suggestion from Zelda’s final psychiatrist was that part of the failure of the psychiatrists in every hospital was their failure to take Zelda’s artistic talents seriously and to label them instead as obsessions.
There was one exception: Doctor Mildred Squires in Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1932 who positively encouraged Zelda to write. It was in that hospital under Mildred Squires’ encouragement that Zelda produced her first novel “Save Me the Waltz” which she dedicated to Squires.
Another fascinating area, which I discussed with her last psychiatrist, was the matter of Zelda's strange idiosyncratic speech patterns which according to legend were seen as another symptom of her insanity.
What I learnt from childhood friends and family in the Deep South was that from her childhood Zelda had always exhibited a convoluted vocabulary, her speech had from adolescence burst with high-flown metaphors, she constantly made free associations often severed linguistic clues, and would invent images sometimes using non sequiturs.
Because she lived in the Deep South (Montgomery Alabama) she was also given to sensuous Southern allegories and to Southern folk rhythms.
Those speech patterns never troubled her family, her friends, or Scott who had no difficulty in understanding her. But ultimately the way she spoke was labeled by her Northern doctors as further evidence of schizophrenia. They used her routine speech patterns to indicate disintegration of her thinking processes.
The problem with interviewees who had known Zelda, when asked many decades later, by biographers, to comment on her speech, was that by then a mental illness framework had been constructed.
Insanity had become an integral part of the Zelda legend, so the recollections by elderly friends who were interviewed many years (sometimes over 30) after the event, about the way Zelda spoke fell within or were conditioned by that mental illness framework.
In the biography I put together all the information I could find about the horrific treatment meted out to Zelda and other mental patients in that period and it is all there in heartbreaking detail both in the body of the book and in the footnotes.
Among the ‘milder’ treatments which were not mild, were the insulin shock treatments administered to Zelda for 10 years and also Metrazol convulsive treatment which produced shocks akin to epileptic seizures. These appear to have been given as much to realign the behaviour, usually of female patients, into what were considered acceptable patterns as to act as medical therapy.
There was as I said earlier a considerable albeit hidden history of mental illness in Zelda’s family so there was almost certainly some genetic inheritance.
My view however towards the end of the research was that Zelda's mental condition, like that of many patients in her situation at that time, was as much related to her medical treatment and to her constant artistic frustration as it was to certain well established genetic factors.
I want now to turn to the 2nd point.: How legends can skew the facts so that it makes it harder to achieve a balance in one’s research.
I discovered there were 3 important distortions due to legend construction. They were firstly the way in which Zelda as a product of the Deep South was treated by the myth-makers ; secondly the almost complete omission of Zelda's role as a mother ; and thirdly the way her status as an artist, in three different fields, painting, writing, and dancing, was selectively dealt with. I wanted to balance that most particularly to bring into focus Zelda as a painter.
1st. THE DEEP SOUTH
Readers knew from the legend that she was the daughter of a judge in Montgomery, Alabama. Legend told us she was a glamorous Southern Belle. But that was all it did tell us.
When I began the research I was not aware that being a Southerner was a crucial part of Zelda's identity and of her artistic expression. I found that the flowers she painted constantly were hot and Southern like those in her mother’s garden. I noticed that her fictional narratives were interlaced with the very Southern idea that youth and beauty blooms alongside death and destruction. Zelda always said that Montgomery’s controversial history strengthened her because prolonged Civil War tore the South apart and massacred an entire generation of southern men. Montgomery citizens were proud that a nation had been born there. Today they still are, Zelda had that pride in her bones.
In her girlhood , ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the oak lined streets. She grew up in a distinctive Southern culture, often at odds with itself and the rest of America. The South was running counter to the moral beliefs of its time in perpetuating slavery just when the rest of the Western world was decisively giving it up. In Zelda's childhood there was still a gulf between black field hands and black house servants. Zelda and her white friends were wet nursed, cooked for and raised by black women. But the undercover fears of black slaves that Zelda heard show up in her writing, particularly in her 2nd novel “Caesar’s things” where she refers several times to the fear of the “black hand”. In adolescence Zelda still SAW period advertisements of lynching, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron, the methods by which black field hands and servants had been kept in check. But what she HEARD was that those shocking brutalities disturbed the peace of the white Montgomery families much less than the tragedies that had befallen their own brave white youths.
Zelda's own father , respectable Judge Sayre, even created laws that penalized Negroes. But in her childhood Zelda is never known to have questioned those laws. Only later according to her daughter did Zelda begin to reflect upon them. And to co9ntrast the situation with what was always seen as the chivalry of white Southern gentlemen.
Zelda, as a product of an old established white southern family, understood the symbolism of the south’s luxuriant blossoms which atrophied into perfumed decay.
She grew up aware that casualty and spoilage could always occur at a moment of great promise to any of the young men who courted her. So her southern heritage was the proximity of youth and beauty to death and annihilation. The legend misses that out too.
It misses out Zelda's knowledge that in the local Oakwood cemetery where lay her ancestors, where she wandered when unsettled, the bruised petals of the tissue-paper poppies, and parchment magnolias, which drifted over the headstones, were reminders of lost childhood, fallen dead and family silences.
She was taught that though the South wants to forget it never does forget. The past is never dead. It is not even past.
The legend misses out that Southern awareness also.
So that was Zelda’s setting and when I stayed there in Montgomery, I lived in the house right next door to the house that Zelda and Scott and young Scottie had lived in for a short period during their marriage, 819 Felder Ave.
I went into their house, now the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum and saw that it had changed very little. I sat in a rocking chair on their porch, I sipped mint juleps as they had done. Local people came up to me and talked about Zelda and Scott as if they had just slipped out for a few minutes. I met their elderly friends. I met Zelda's relations. They all talked about the war but they meant the Civil War . I felt I was in a time warp. The place was like a Tennessee Williams movie or a Lillian Hellman Southern play.
I watched Zelda's magnolia tree bloom in the sun. I picked one of her blossoms and took it back to England. I saw the paper white narcissi that she had planted blow in the breeze. I smelt the Confederate jasmine perfume the night air.
I went from gallery to museum, house to house, looking at the very Southern very powerful paintings she had produced.
Then I started to track her movements, and discovered that after she had relocated she became gradually dislocated when she moved from Montgomery to marry Scott, the Yankee, the man from the North.
Her daughter Scottie and Zelda’s sisters always felt that if Zelda had remained in the South she may never have become so ill.
We cannot know that.
But we do know that she found the move to the North incredibly hard. We do know that she was very homesick. We know also that like Southern writers she learnt that once you leave the South you can never go home again.
During heir romance in the Deep South, Zelda as a Southern Belle was a local celebrity dominating a struggling writer. Not any more. Scott was no longer struggling. Zelda was no longer a celebrity. When she forsook Alabama Scott had just written "This Side of Paradise " which became an instant best seller right across the States.
By the end of 1921 12 printings totaled 49,075 copies. Although Scott ‘s earnings of $6200 for 1920 did not make him wealthy, his novel was reviewed everywhere. By the end of that year it had become a conversation piece. Considered ground-breaking it captured the essence of youth and so did the author.
He became famous. Zelda became his consort. For the first time in their relationship she was merely a decorative accessory. A woman in a bracket.
According to period newspapers Zelda became part of Scott ‘s legend: a Jazz Age flapper, the American Dream Girl but above all Mrs. Fitzgerald, the wife of the more famous Scott. Zelda found first that her identity became linked to his then gradually subsumed.
. The legend preferred to offer the glamour of Zelda ‘s new Northern life with the man of the moment than to portray its effect on an uprooted Southern girl. Zelda ‘s solution for a time was to buy into the legend about them both and help make it come true.
The 2nd and 3rd ways in which the ;legend deals selectively with the Fitzgerald s’ lives are linked.
They are Zelda's role as a mother and her achievements as an artist in 3 fields: writing, painting, dancing.
Zelda became pregnant and gave birth to their only child Scottie in Scott's hometown St Paul’s, a cold harsh wet city that Zelda hated.
After the birth the Fitzgeralds' trawled New York Paris the Riviera and in all those places they continued to love and to fight passionately . They fought over Hemingway , Scott perpetually torn between Ernest and Zelda. They fought over each other’s ambivalent sexuality. Most of all they fought about Zelda ‘s desire for creative self-expression.
Zelda had an impressive array of untamed talents. She was a strange interesting writer. She was a powerful painter. A good dancer. All of which artistic skills have been consistently undervalued by the legend for a variety of reasons.
DANCE
Zelda began her apprenticeship in the Diaghilev ballet tradition very late, aged 27. yet within a mere 3 years she was invited to perform a solo role with the Italian San Carlo Opera Ballet Company. It was an invitation which brought her the chance she had been awaiting for years. However for complex emotional and domestic reasons she turned it down. Her first doctor and Scott perceived her dance career as the cause of her first breakdown in 1930 so Scott and the doctors banned her from ever dancing professionally again. Because their viewpoint, was that Zelda ‘s ballet career was an obsession not an artistic commitment, that has been the biographical viewpoint adopted subsequently.
PAINTINGS
Zelda ‘s paintings are out of step. The legend does not mention this fact. Zelda’s granddaughter Bobbie Lanahan , herself an artist, generously showed me every Zelda painting in her collection and gave me access to almost all the rest throughout the states. She pointed out to me the hallucinatory connections between Zelda ‘s verbal and visual ideas which are unsettling. She showed me ways in which she found many of the paintings disturbing. Some were flower paintings, hectic tones, blinding colours, shades that shocked. Some were cityscapes in powdery pastels each with an unearthly mysterious feel. Some were children’s fairytale illustrations . Everyone of those paintings had an Alice –in-Wonderland upside down quality. Many were figures, ballerinas, nursing mothers, historical figures transformed into curious paper dolls.
None of the paintings had any ground beneath their feet.
Although they stirred my imagination they also gave rise to a terrifying anxiety. It was as if they had been painted by someone in the form of Salvador Dali crossed with Angela carter.
Part of the reason the legend does not focus on Zelda's paintings is related to the way we rate art. In general we like artists to produce work consistently , continuously, to date it, to give us a corporate body upon which to make judgments. This is impossible with Zelda's paintings. Very little is dated. The paintings lack the traditional “artistic progress” or linear development by which one can sometimes date paintings. I had to identify paintings by subject or theme, or match up pictures with life events or ideas occupying Zelda's imagination at a particular time.
She had more exhibitions than the legend allows her but mainly in the South, so perhaps that did not count. She had several exhibitions after Scott's death which to legend manufacturers certainly did not count. She produced her greatest number of paintings after Scott's death in 1940 and before her own in 1948.
There is not in existence a complete body of work. Although she produced paintings from 1925 until the day before her death, many are lost, destroyed or burnt.
The day after Zelda died in a fire, her mother Minnie Sayre, who hated and perhaps feared Zelda’s paintings, instructed her daughter Marjorie, to take every painting stored in the garage and burn them one by one in the yard. Though Zelda left a substantial legacy, over 100 paintings, it is only a small part of her total production.
Today we are remedying the legend’s omission of her as a painter and several exhibitions of her work have been on tour,
The paintings led me to the role of Zelda as a mother, the role the legend leaves out. The first agonized painting I saw was called Nursing Mother with Red Blanket. If ever a painting flew in the face of acceptable motherhood this one did.
The mother has half her head severed while the baby sucks at what looks like the mother’s entrails. Powerful but hardly comforting.
That painting alone set me off on the hitherto untrodden trail to discover Zelda ‘s utterly overlooked relationship with her child. What kind of mother was Zelda ? How did she get on with her daughter Scottie?
Zelda loved the child deeply but once she entered a series of hospitals and once Scott took charge of young Scottie, Zelda became more and more alienated from the child. Initially her letters to her daughter are signed; “your affectionate Mama’ or with “love…or kisses” . After she entered the first hospital, after Scott had told Scottie her mother was crazy, Zelda writes less often, and in one revealing letter she appears to forget that she is Scottie’s mother and signs it sadly “Zelda “.
Later on as Scottie becomes a young woman there were some tragic moments. Scottie did not want her mother at her Graduation. Zelda went anyway but Scottie ignored her. Scottie failed to invite Zelda to her own wedding until so late that Zelda was unable to come. When Scottie wrote her memoir of her own life she talks at length about her father Scott's death but she does not mention Zelda’s death at all.
ZELDA'S WRITINGS
When the legend looks at Zelda as a writer of two novels, several short stories, a stage play, a series of articles, and hundreds of letters, it ensures that we always see Zelda's role as artistic creator as secondary to her role as the object of Scott Fitzgerald ‘s literary creations, or as Scott’s muse.
Scott did of course base most of his heroines on Zelda. He did of course utilize or plagiarise Zelda's writings, initially with her permission later without.
The high point of their conflicts came in the 30s when Scott's fame rested on HIS writing and when Zelda's ambition rested on HER writing thus they fought on the same ground.
I explored in depth the way one hospital became in 1932 the setting for one of the most contentious battles in literary history between an artistic husband and wife. From her hospital bed Zelda completed her first novel “Save Me The Waltz” in a mere 4 weeks drawing on some of the same autobiographical material which Scott was trying to plot into “Tender Is The Night” which took him 9 years to complete. Scott, incoherent with fury, that Zelda should dare to use their joint life experiences for her fiction, first insisted that the publishers cut out large sections of Zelda's novel; then a year later during a 3 way discussion with Zelda and her psychiatrist, Scott forbade Zelda to write any more fiction which drew on their shared autobiographical incidents.
He had already banned her ballet, so this new edict meant that her rights to her own material and forms of self expression were severely limited.
Scott felt he had the artistic right to silence Zelda's ‘s voice because he was the “professional” and she the “amateur”.
Previous biographers have suggested that the interests of professionalism can be used to legitimize his actions.
Zelda herself internalised the idea that those who are not professional cannot be properly talented.
Today we recognize that professionalism has a great deal to so with financial rewards, status, and the way artists could or could not define themselves by their work, as much as it has to do with talent.
But biographers and legend makers until now have been able to subsume her three arts under the greater interest of her marriage,
Another reason that Zelda’s 3 artistic talents, all of which were enigmatic, have been overlooked, is partly their labyrinthine qualities but it is also due to the fact that she had 3 gifts rather than one. Our society awards a much higher status to artists engaged fulltime on one single creative pursuit than to artists engaged on multiple forms of art. So Zelda as an artist gifted in 3 different directions has always smacked of dilettantism.
I have already pointed out that usually we credit art higher if it is produced consistently and continuously. Zelda’s writing does neither. It was not continuous. She was most productive during two periods: 1929 to 1934 when she spent long periods in hospital away from home, away from Scott, away from young Scottie. 1940 to 1948 the period immediately after Scott's death in 1940. It is perhaps not insignificant that both creative periods occurred when her husband was absent. Between those two creative literary periods she was either ill or was prevented from writing.
What is fascinating is that the years of her greatest discipline as a writer, a painter and a dancer coincided exactly with those years when she hospitalised then diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
NB When I reached the 3rd part of talk to the Biography Club, the section relating to the issue of restraints imposed on the biographer from the family and the estate, due to constraints of time, we decided I would summarise the main issues then throw the discussion on to the floor. The audience was passionately interested in discussing this and the debate went on until the evening closed.
