Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Scott’s December 1924 Ledger reported before the movie party ‘depression’, after the movie party a ‘row in café’, an ‘Xmas row’ and a ‘reconciliation’ followed by a period on the water wagon in order to be sober for revising the Gatsby proofs.

  This Christmas, always a significant celebration for them, they had a glittering tree in their hotel room hung with silver bells.16 But they expected too much from Christmas, tried too hard, drank too much, destroyed their festivities.

  In January 1925 Scott as well as Zelda was sick but despite his influenza he managed the final revisions to Gatsby which would be published in April. He had already converted a discarded portion of Gatsby’s opening into ‘Absolution’, a story which dealt sensitively with the sensuous experiences of an imaginative boy, Rudolph Miller, who lies in the confessional to Father Schwartz, an ageing priest, who then faces his own sexual temptations.17

  ‘Absolution’ had been published the previous June by Mencken and Nathan in their newly founded American Mercury. Sara Haardt, who had accompanied Mencken to the launch party after her recovery from pleurisy and bronchitis,18 was suddenly taken seriously ill with tuberculosis. While Zelda battled with ovarian attacks, Sara was forced to give up her doctorate and spend most of 1924 isolated in Baltimore’s Maple Heights Sanitarium. Her illness served to increase Mencken’s devotion and when Peyton Mathis, one of the Gold Dust Twins, returned enthusiastically to wooing Sara, Mencken competitively stepped up his courtship. Romantic feelings had not stopped Mencken earlier from rejecting Sara’s story, ‘Miss Rebecca’, for The Smart Set on the ‘dubious ground’ that it dealt with old maids. Editors, he said, were tired of old maids and their moonings. However one prestigious female editor, Emily Clark, immediately accepted it for The Reviewer.19 Mencken and other male critics at that time had a specific analytical approach to good fiction which favoured writers like Scott and penalized writers like Sara and Zelda. To meet standards of Northern male literary gurus, fiction had to be simultaneously a psalm and a criticism of life. Zelda and Sara with their shared Southern background wrote fiction that more often probed Southern passions and resentments through description and surface tracings; that revealed convoluted emotional relationships through appearances rather than through analysis.

  During summer 1925 both Zelda and Sara had work published. In June, Zelda’s ‘Our Own Movie Queen’ (written in November 1923) appeared in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. In September, Mencken did publish Sara’s ‘Alabama’ and did accept her story ‘Mendelian Dominant’ for the American Mercury, both written whilst she was very ill in Montgomery. Yet again Sara’s work appeared under her own name. Yet again Zelda’s appeared under her husband’s name.

  During 1924, nineteen-year-old Sara Mayfield married the other Gold Dust Twin, John Sellers. Zelda’s attitude towards Sellers, curiously in view of his abusive behaviour, had a fierce push-and-pull intensity. She never entirely lost interest in Sellers. When she met young Sara in Paris a few years later her first question was: ‘What’s going on at home? Tell me about John Sellers.’ Sara explained that in 1924 she hadn’t known that Sellers, like Scott, drank heavily. ‘I married him – in the time of my innocence … and divorced him when I came of age.’20 In 1924 Sara’s innocence shielded her from the problem of Sellers’ drinking while Zelda, no longer innocent, daily faced Scott’s alcoholism.

  Scott’s drinking and Zelda’s fragile health caused winter in the Holy City to turn sour. In January 1925 they took excursions to Tivoli, Frascati and Naples, then in February, with Zelda still sick,21 they decided to flee to sunny Capri. They took a suite in the Tiberio Palace high on a hill overlooking the sea. The sun shone, their hopes were high, but frequent rows spoilt much of their two months’ stay. Scott wrote to Bishop:

  Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married couple I know … The cheerfulest things in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again.22

  After five weeks in bed with her abdominal infection, Zelda recovered and began daily climbs up to the ‘scalloped … high white hotel’ through ‘devious dark alleys that house[d] the island’s Rembrandt butcher shops and bakeries’.23 Her solitary walks were broken by Scott’s Aunt Annabel, who arrived in Capri to spend time with them.24

  Scott finally met his former literary idol Compton Mackenzie, whose influence on his work according to Wilson ‘can’t be over-estimated’ and whose influence on Zelda’s style, also according to Wilson, was considerable.25 Scott told Bishop that the author of the much-admired Sinister Street was merely polite, handsome and pleasantly monotonous. Scott felt Mackenzie had been wrecked by the war in the way Wells had been. Yet Mackenzie appeared not to be aware his work had degenerated.

  Mackenzie introduced the Fitzgeralds to Norman Douglas, E. F. Benson, Somerset Maugham and his friend John Ellingham Brooks, all prominent among Capri’s thriving colony of literary homosexuals.26 Scott, not having known of the circle’s existence, felt his habitual curiosity and escalating repulsion towards the men.27 This place is full of fairies,’ he complained to Max Perkins.28 Scott’s tedious tallying of ‘fairies’ and his increasing voyeuristic interest in their sexual habits is at odds with the fact that he was often outrageously camp in his own letters to Bunny Wilson.29 The previous year Scott had written to Bunny: ‘I long to go with a young man … for a paid amorous weekend to the coast … Deep calling to deep.’30 Nor was this a new habit, for when Wilson was serving in France during World War One, Scott had sent him some glossy photos of himself labelled: ‘Give one to some poor motherless Poilu fairy who has no dream.’31 Scott’s contradictory feelings about homosexuality would soon intrude on his relationship with Zelda.

  It was on Capri that Zelda first met forty-four-year-old Romaine Brooks, the wealthy, talented painter, who had just finished her affair with pianist Renata Borgatti. Romaine and American novelist Natalie Barney, her lifelong friend and often lover, were at the centre of the prominent artistic intellectual élite who became Zelda’s friends. The group, who wrote and painted on Capri, also met regularly in Paris at Barney’s rue Jacob salon.

  Amidst Capri’s breathtaking scenery, while Scott drank, Zelda drew. Infused by the creative stimuli of other artists, in February 1925 she took her first formal painting lessons. In March Scott notes in his Ledger ‘Zelda’s lessons’. In April he records ‘Zelda painting, me drinking.’ After five weeks she had learnt colour theory.32 It is likely that before she left Paris Gerald Murphy, who acted as Zelda’s informal painting mentor, suggested she begin instruction, although it is not known how many lessons she took or with whom. The art critic Carolyn Shafer thought it possible that Zelda had more than one tutor and that Romaine Brooks might have suggested a second instructor. Shafer also thought Dos Passos and Ogden Stewart, both painters themselves, might have helped Zelda to make a formal start on her painting.33 Evidence relating to the obsessive feverish quality with which she worked at any art makes it almost certain that she painted daily.34

  None of Zelda’s Capri paintings are known to survive but several oils on canvas provide substantial hints of the work inspired by Capri and the Riviera. Shafer suggests Capri’s tropical vegetation, dramatic vistas and colourful characters could have produced images similar to Zelda’s undated vivid blue and orange Mediterranean Midi.35 This painting depicts a typical Murphy picnic on a stretch of tan sand beneath a startling blue sky marked by wispy white clouds. In the top right corner a vivid orange beach canopy juts out. In the bottom left corner a still life of fresh fruit and wine goblets sits on a white blanket under a massive tree which stretches up the left side of the canvas. The giant trunk has the muscularity which from early on Zelda used for her figures’ knotted legs and arms. For her still life, canopy and tree Zelda adopts the Parisian Cubist technique of fracturing then reassembling forms and surfaces from
different angles so that even her modest Mediterranean beach scene jolts and surprises the viewer.36

  An undue emphasis has been placed on the influence on Zelda’s art of the Parisian Modernists she knew personally, mainly because she did know them personally.37 In fact, the more she painted the fewer links there are between their work and hers, but initially she would have picked up two distinct styles from Picasso, who in Paris in the Twenties was still creating multiple perspectives that challenged the idea of coherent space. One style affected the way Zelda ordered pictorial space; the other style helped her to shape figures which occupied that space. Zelda also adapted the lustrous energy and colours which Picasso and his artist colleague Mikhail Larionov used for the sets and costumes Picasso designed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in which his first wife Olga was a ‘deuxiéme ballerina’.38

  On Capri Zelda probably began her first formal flower paintings which became one of two recurrent themes, the other being dance figures. Sara Murphy recalled Zelda’s passion for flowers after the sojourn in Capri. ‘She used to wander for hours through our garden by herself – touching or picking a flower here and there – once she wore a huge pink peony as a hat.’39 Scottie, recalling Zelda’s attraction to nasturtiums which Zelda constantly painted in Italy and on the Riviera, told a friend later: ‘I can still see the nasturtiums on the [lunch] table.’40

  Though Zelda painted several floral compositions under Italy’s hot sun, her consistent and striking influence is the Deep South. They show the twin hallmarks of many Southern artists’ primal sensuous pictures: fiery Southern light and exotic flowers that are passionately groomed and coddled in Southern neighbourhood gardens.41

  The other notable element in Zelda’s depiction of Italian, French and Deep Southern blossoms is that she painted them as a woman familiar with her subject. Minnie, a lifelong gardener, had taught Zelda the horticultural skills that grounded the hectic symbolism of her flower paintings.

  Although Zelda continued formal art lessons in Philadelphia when she returned to the US, there is no evidence of instruction in the proper techniques for preparing canvases. Eddie Pattillo points out that as so many of her oil paintings have required extensive conservation it seems unlikely she was trained in glazes and varnishes.42 Shafer’s view is: ‘Certainly she liked thick paint but I think her painting was guided more by her emotions than by any concern for conservation.’43 – Further confirmation of Zelda’s line to Sara Murphy that she and Scott took terrible risks because they didn’t believe in conservation.44

  While Zelda painted, Scott neurotically drank his way through the short time left before Gatsby’s publication on 10 April. Despite Perkins’s earlier praise, Scott fermented with nerves. He felt the novel might fail on two grounds. Firstly critics might dislike it because it dealt with the rich and contained no peasants borrowed from Tess. Secondly women readers might dislike it because it contained no important woman characters. Although Daisy Fay Buchanan is never as important as the male heroes she does bear interesting resemblances to Zelda, on whom, together with Ginevra King, she is based.45 Daisy’s two betrayals of Gatsby were based on Zelda’s broken engagement to Scott and her romance with Jozan. The confrontation scene at the Plaza between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom has strong echoes of Zelda, Scott and Jozan. Gatsby tries to force Daisy to deny the past, to tell her husband she never loved him, but Daisy, perhaps like Zelda after the Jozan episode, says ‘the sensible thing’: ‘“Oh, you want too much! … I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once – but I loved you too.”’46 Gatsby is incredulous, desperate to repeat their first moments when Daisy loved only him.47

  Several of Zelda’s Montgomery friends who had upset Scott through perceived disloyalty or infidelity provided names for characters in Gatsby. Jordan Baker, Daisy’s golf champion friend, was possibly based on one of Zelda’s girlfriends, Jordan Prince, who had provoked Scott’s jealousy by inviting Zelda to accompany her on a midterm date.48 Dan Cody, Gatsby’s drunken patron, is linked to an early ‘infidelity’ of Zelda’s. Mayfield suggests Scott irritably lifted the name from Dan Cody, son of a wealthy banker, one of Zelda’s Montgomery beaux. Scott dedicated the novel, with its ironic connections and undertones, ‘Once Again to Zelda’.

  While Zelda and Scott were touring Europe in April 1925, in Washington Scott’s sister Annabel married Lieutenant Clifton A. Sprague of the US Navy. Scott missed seeing his sister, whose bad points as a girl he had enumerated as ‘Pale complexion’, ‘Teeth only fair’ and ‘Only fair figure’,49 blossom into a slim rosy-faced woman wearing a powder-blue chiffon gown with a matching picture hat, carrying an arm-bouquet of Killarney roses. Scott admired Clifton who later, as Admiral Sprague, became a hero of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War Two, but felt no rapport with his brother-in-law and saw less of Annabel after their marriage.

  In late April 1925 the Fitzgeralds left Capri. They sailed on the SS Garfield from Naples to Marseilles, where Scott received a cable from Perkins which announced that reviews for Gatsby were superb but sales were uncertain. The Fitzgeralds had put their Renault on board ship. The top had been damaged and Zelda, who preferred open-top cars, insisted it was removed. Zelda was not well enough to make a long car journey so when it broke down in Lyons they abandoned it and caught the train to Paris. By 1 May they had leased for eight months a gloomy furnished apartment on the fifth floor at 14 rue de Tilsitt on the Right Bank where Fitzgerald, equally gloomily, awaited reviews. They spent as much time as possible out of the apartment visiting Cole Porter, the Murphys and the Bishops, through whom they met the poet Allen Tate and his Southern novelist wife Caroline Gordon. Zelda marvelled at how those two married writers had established an equal supportive relationship.50

  Despite Max’s encouraging words, reviews were mixed. One critic said there was no ‘chemical trace of magic, life, irony, romance or mysticism in … “The Great Gatsby”’.51 An unsigned report in the New York World was headlined: ‘F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD’.52 The Herald Tribune argued that though Scott had managed the exact tone and shade of contemporary life he had not yet ‘gone below that glittering surface, except by a kind of happy accident’.53 Even Zelda’s fan Ring Lardner, who had read the book in page proofs, pointed out a series of inaccuracies and his praise was muted.54

  Scott’s ego was slightly appeased when the two critics whose words he most valued were approving. Wilson wrote to him: ‘It is undoubtedly in some ways the best thing you have done – the best planned, the best sustained, the best written.’55 Mencken wrote – ‘I think it is incomparably the best piece of work you have done. Evidences of careful workmanship are on every page …’ though ‘it reduces itself, in the end, to a sort of anecdote’.56

  Finally came unequivocal excellent reviews. In The Dial Gilbert Seldes concluded Fitzgerald had ‘more than matured, he has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders’.57

  When T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James’,58 Scott felt able to regard himself as ‘the biggest man in my profession … everybody admired me and I was proud I’d done such a good thing’.59

  Scott’s satisfaction was justified, for Gatsby was and has remained an incandescently fine work.60 At the time, however, it was not the financial success he had hoped for. He had predicted first-year sales of 80,000 copies but it sold fewer than 20,000. At one level prepared for this, he had written to Perkins that he had already prepared a book of fine stories for the fall. His next idea was to write some quick ‘smart’ stories to accumulate money for his next novel. If he failed at that then he would leave for Hollywood to learn to write movies. He loathed financial insecurity but he had no idea how to reduce their high living standards. He still felt that if you didn’t work your
hardest at your art there was little point in being an artist.

  Fortunately for Scott and Zelda the dramatic rights to Gatsby were sold,61 which meant they were temporarily released from financial anxiety and he could return to ‘The Rich Boy’, based on Ludlow Fowler; this would be published in Redbook in January/February 1926. With Gatsby behind him Scott continued to plan his next novel.62

  In May 1925 the Fitzgeralds met fifty-one-year-old Gertrude Stein, the experimental writer, and her companion Alice B. Toklas, who were at the heart of a celebrated Parisian literary salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. It attracted such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Edith Sitwell and Sherwood Anderson, and the writer-publisher Robert McAlmon, who had made a marriage of convenience to the British heiress, writer Winifred Ellerman (known as Bryher). Another habituée was Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, who also frequented the opposing literary salon in rue Jacob led by ‘The Amazon’, Natalie Barney.