Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Though all psychiatric episodes and all mention of homosexuality have been expunged, the novel is a transparent reworking of the Fitzgeralds’ early years.

  The establishment of the interior lives of her characters, as well as the atmosphere of the places they visit, is achieved partially through a suffusion of flower images. Zelda was also painting daily, and while imprisoned in this Baltimore clinic she recreated on canvas the same wild Montgomery blossoms that flourished in her novel. Whether in print or oils, plants explode with emotion. In the paintings geometric, angular flowers allow the viewer to feel Zelda’s spikiness, while curled, layered flowers are uncontrollably sensuous. Most flowers are magnified so that, impossible to ignore, they startle the viewer. The mounds and buds have both the fragile beauty of those Zelda picked as a girl, but also the iron strength she had drawn on during the previous two years. There was a cyclical process between the flowers she gathered in armfuls, the flowers that hurtled from her paintbrush on to canvas and the flowers in her richly descriptive prose which synthesized the senses.

  In chapter 3, in Paris, dancer Alabama’s fatigued feet are too sore to wear new shoes which she would have liked to buy, nor does she feel comfortable purchasing new dresses, so in a moment of wild extravagance she spends every cent of the hundred franc notes in her purse on flowers. Most of them are for Madame. As Alabama endows the flowers with the qualities of the material possessions she might have bought, Zelda pours out a rich surrealistic litany whose metaphors would ambush the most jaded reader.

  Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like molded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing … malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs … She gave Madame gardenias like white kid gloves … threatening sprays of gladioli, and the soft, even purr of black tulips. She bought flowers like salads and flowers like fruits, jonquils and narcissus, poppies and ragged robins, and flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh.28

  During April, a month when Scott described Zelda as ‘strange’,29 he wrote a decidedly fictional response to the crisis over Zelda’s novel in the guise of a Post story, ‘What A Handsome Pair’.30 The protagonists are a young sporting couple who become bitter rivals, counterbalanced by a second couple where the man is a musician and his wife ‘merely’ a homemaker. Scott posits the idea that for a creative man to enjoy a good marriage he needs a non-competitive, unambitious wife. Scott does not deal with the needs of a creative woman.

  He wrote two more stories that year, but the Post cut his fees from $4,000, first to $3,500, then to $3,000, then to $2,500, his 1925 rate. Again the Post complained about the low level of his stories to Ober, who subsequently found it impossible to sell ‘Nightmare’, set in an insane asylum, to any reputable magazine. That year Scott’s earnings dropped to $15,832.40, his lowest annual total since 1919.

  In mid-April Scott visited Zelda daily at Phipps, where they quarrelled constantly. Often their rows were rooted in Zelda’s refusal to show him her latest story. Scott retaliated by providing her psychiatrists with his views on Zelda’s breakdown, focusing particularly on what he considered her detrimental relationship with Minnie Sayre. He saw mother and daughter unhealthily attached by a silver cord. Zelda objected to her husband trying to play Dr Fitzgerald. Scott objected to the patient continuing to write.31

  Dr Meyer, meanwhile, was having severe problems communicating with Zelda, who still refused to moderate her desire to work (‘My work is not a strain. All I ask to do is to work’32), and getting Scott to see that his drinking and dictatorial attitude was further damaging Zelda.

  On 20 May 1932 Scott, who had been house-hunting from his base at the Rennert hotel, rented La Paix, a house set in 28 acres on the Bayard Turnbull estate in Towson, Baltimore, where the Fitzgeralds lived until November 1933. Zelda told Max the house was soft and shady like ‘a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up … surrounded by apologetic trees and meadows and creaking insects.33 Sara Mayfield described the ‘fantastic exterior’ as a veritable Mad Hatter’s Castle, rusty grey, with gingerbread arches, bays thrown at random and a porch decorated with jigsaw scrollwork. Scott, said Sara, ‘had outdone himself this time’. Zelda remarked wittily to Sara that had she named the house she would have called it ‘Calvin Coolidge, Jnr because it was so mute’.34

  Initially Zelda spent mornings there, returning to Phipps after lunch. Scott was determined that when Zelda rejoined them full-time she would follow a disciplined schedule, ordered by the doctors but controlled by him. He believed a strict routine would tire her less, but he also felt that as he would be blamed for any mistakes he ‘should be able to dictate the conditions’.35 Zelda wrote to Bishop:

  We are more alone than ever before while the psychiatres patch up my nervous system … they present you with a piece of bric-a-brac of their own forging which falls to the pavement on your way out of the clinic and luckily smashes to bits … Don’t ever fall into the hands of brain and nerve specialists unless you are feeling very Faustian. Scott reads Marx – I read the Cosmological philosophers. The brightest moments of our day are when we get them mixed up.36

  Zelda startled visitors by floating through La Paix in a tutu, for she still practised ballet regularly. Eleven-year-old Andrew Turnbull (later Scott’s biographer) saw Zelda, biting her lip, picking at her face, dancing round the living-room table to the tune of her gramophone. He felt she was not quite wholesome. Though Scott’s drinking bothered the teetotal Turnbulls, Mrs Margaret Turnbull affectionately recalls the patience he exercised with her three children, Eleanor, Frances and Andrew, who became firm playmates of Scottie’s. Scottie also made another local friend, Margaret ‘Peaches’ Finney, daughter of Scott’s Princeton classmate Eben Finney. Peaches and Scottie both attended Calvert School, then became day students at Bryn Mawr. Whenever tension arose in the Fitzgerald household Scottie would stay with the Finneys.

  Margaret Turnbull thought Scott felt guilty about Zelda, needed her approval, talked warmly of her charm, brilliance and appeal to men. But, said Mrs Turnbull, ‘she was his invalid’, and it was as an invalid Margaret viewed her. ‘She struck one like a broken clock.’37

  At La Paix Zelda’s relationship with Scottie worsened as Scott tightened his hold on his daughter’s education and social routines. Though fiercely authoritarian he gave Scottie a great deal of attention, thereby cutting Zelda out of the family picture while upbraiding her for her lack of interest in Scottie’s progress. By treating Zelda as ‘sick’, Scott effectively prevented Scottie from turning to her mother for help or advice.

  A new young doctor, Thomas Rennie, with whom Zelda felt some rapport, had taken charge of her case. Zelda confessed to Rennie she feared her child was growing away from her. ‘I can’t help her at all … I’m like a stranger in the house.’ She admitted she was unable to control temper outbursts against Scottie. ‘I lose my temper when I get up. It’s awfully unfair to my husband and child.’38

  In May, Scott hired his first fulltime secretary, Isabel Owens (who worked for him until 1938), for $12 a week. She quickly became a surrogate mother to Scottie and a companion to Zelda. She chauffeured them everywhere, swam with them, bought Zelda’s art materials and, carefully chosen by Scott as the kind of woman with whom he would not fall in love, she never became embroiled in the Fitzgeralds’ emotional tangles.

  On 26 June Zelda was discharged from Phipps to join the family. As Squires, Meyer and Rennie did not see her as cured, both she and Scott attended regular sessions at the clinic. Despite Zelda’s release from hospital disciplines, to her chagrin Scott predictably began to wield authority over her. Aided by Meyer, who had angered Scott by encouraging Zelda’s creativity, Scott also put restraints on her writing. He feared Zelda would write about psychiatry which he intended to keep for exclusive use in Tender. He had dropped both the Melarky matricide and the Kelly shipboard plot and had
constructed a draft centred on the ruination of an American psychiatrist by his marriage to a rich mental patient. Entwined with this plot were his recent emotions of loss and damage.39

  Zelda had begun a new novel with insanity as its theme. She divulged to Rennie that she wanted to create a view of madness so close to normality that readers would not see the difference. The clever plot shows a married couple driven to a mental clinic by their scheming daughter, but not till the conclusion do readers discover that the couple are already patients inside the asylum. Later Zelda refocused the novel on the schizophrenia of Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover and main male dancer with his Ballets Russes.40

  Determined that Zelda should not proceed with this book, Scott encouraged her to paint. It was at La Paix that Zelda had her first professional painting studio, where many of her strongest ballet paintings were done between 1932 and 1934.

  Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt, who visited La Paix, were shocked both by their friends’ appearances and by Zelda’s paintings. ‘Both Scott and Zelda had lost the fresh, well-scrubbed look that marked them in their youth,’ said the younger Sara. ‘[Scott had] developed flabby arms and a fat pot … Zelda was immaculate … [but] [h]er once lustrous blond hair had taken on a dull red-gold tint; her skin, a grayish pallor.’ Zelda found it hard to converse with her friends. ‘Beyond an exchange of Confederate amenities with Sara and me and an occasional inquiry about her family and friends in Montgomery, Zelda’s conversation was confined almost wholly to her painting. A corner of her eye twitched, and her mouth twisted from nervous strain when she spoke,’ said young Sara:

  as she showed us her canvases, I gathered that Scott must be cavilling that she was now becoming as obsessed by her painting as she had been by her dancing …. Among the sketches of New York, of Paris, of ballet dancers, and dream gardens stacked against the wall there were two crucifixions. The face on the cross in one of them was unmistakably Zelda’s. As Scott saw that Sara and I recognized the likeness, he turned abruptly and walked out of the room. If he could not face it, I could not forget it.41

  Both Saras felt that to see the Fitzgeralds at La Paix while remembering early days in Montgomery was ‘like reading a palimpsest on which a stark Greek tragedy had been written over the faint traces of a romantic comedy … it was not the way to spend a pleasant afternoon.’42

  Scott later sold two of Zelda’s paintings from this period to Sara Haardt on Zelda’s behalf. Though Sara Mayfield later saw the receipt, dated 1932, amongst Sara Haardt’s papers, the paintings were never recovered. Whether Zelda knew is not clear. Judging by her generous gifts to other friends, including the Murphys and Sandy Kalman, she would have been more likely to have given them to Sara.

  Zelda’s most important oil painting to date, the mannerist Ballet Figures, was to be shown at New York’s Anderson Galleries for the American Art Association’s Spring Salon in May 1933: the first known public showing of her art. That afternoon, when Zelda was excitedly telling her friends about the event, Scott interrupted them, and asked Sara Haardt to look over his manuscript of Tender (currently called ‘Dr Diver’s Holiday’). Sara Mayfield remembers him pounding on the table as he shouted: ‘And it’s good, good, good!’ She said he spoke ‘as if he were whistling in a cemetery to bolster his own morale …. As if to reassure himself, he said, “It is good, isn’t it, Zelda?”’ Scott’s thoughtlessness in inviting praise for fiction centred on Zelda’s mental condition became obvious to her friends only later. At the time they heard Zelda’s peal of irrelevant, mirthless laughter. ‘For a moment,’ recalled Sara Mayfield, ‘I thought Scott was going to slap her. Their eyes met and locked in a conflict that had rent them both … Anger flashed in the dead silence between them and then paled into inward desolation and despair.’ Scott, worried that Zelda’s friends would be embarrassed, said huskily: ‘She’s mad,’ then seeing their shocked faces, he quickly added: ‘Schizophrenia, the doctors say.’43

  Driving the women back to town, he attempted to justify himself. ‘He began by disparaging Zelda. Then he blamed her illness on her family, whom he taxed with bringing her up to be spoiled, selfish, and dependent … We tried half a dozen times to change the subject, but it was impossible to stop his scathing criticisms of Zelda and her family.’44

  In Baltimore Scott had taken to bursting in on Sara and Mencken at 704 Cathedral Street. Because of Sara’s operation they were not able to have children but, deeply in love, they had settled quietly into an affectionate routine. Mencken rose early and breakfasted alone at eight, believing that breakfasting with one’s spouse imposed an unnecessary hazard on marriage. Then they both wrote in separate rooms, Sara writing articles for Country Life, before lunching together, after which Sara napped. Early evening provided them with what Mencken called ‘philosophical belching’ before dinner. Sara Mayfield said that they never exchanged a cross word. If an argument seemed imminent, they each retreated in silence to a separate room until calm could be restored.45 Nothing could be more different from the Fitzgeralds’ row-riven lives.

  Though Scott’s noisy drunken visits began to irritate the Menckens, as they had the Murphys and Hemingways, his alcoholic ravages concerned them.46 Mencken managed to interest a doctor friend, Benjamin Baker, who tried to stop Scott drinking. Initially Scott entered Johns Hopkins in August 1932 with a tentative diagnosis of typhoid fever,47 but between 1933 and 1937 he was re-hospitalized eight times for alcoholism and for suspected inactive fibroid tuberculosis.

  In September 1932 Scott summed up the year as a ‘strange year of Work & Drink. Increasingly unhappy – Zelda up and down. 1st draft of novel complete Ominous!’

  While Scottie started a new dancing school in the fall, Zelda, waiting anxiously for the publication of Save Me The Waltz, worked on a lighthearted farce called Scandalabra, turning to it in relief when either her new novel or Scott’s criticisms became too heavy.

  On 7 October Save Me The Waltz was published at $2 with a minimum of publicity, printed on cheap paper, bound in green linen, with a tiny print run of 3,010 copies. The poor proofreading formed the bulk of the New York Times’s negative criticism among mixed reviews.48

  Dorothea Brande in The Bookman enlarged on this: ‘It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing … but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader.’ Brande said if one persisted past the mistakes one came upon an earnest, honest, good story of a girl trying desperately to make a character for herself which will carry her through life. In the Judge Zelda had ‘drawn with loving care as fine a man as we have had in fiction for many a month’.49

  Several critics, ignoring the proofreading defects, gave it good reviews. William McFee in the New York Sun told readers: ‘here is a peculiar talent, and connoisseurs of style will have a wonderful time … there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction’. McFee, whose review Zelda considered ‘the only intelligible (to me) criticism of the book’, suggested that the effect of the accumulated fantastic metaphors was fascination. ‘Veteran wordmongers will read [it], with envy and a kind of dizzy delight … the book [has] an almost alcoholic vitality. Mrs Fitzgerald’s next novel will be an interesting event.’ Like most reviewers McFee thought the ballet sections towered above the rest, whilst the character of Alabama was insufficiently developed, resembling rather ‘an insane child’.50

  Some critics saw the novel as the last will and testament of a departed era that began as a bar-room ballad and ended as a funeral oration. The New York Herald Tribune perceived Alabama as a heroine who ‘somersaults through the pages’ with a hardboiled experimentalist surface concealing an uncompromising sentimentalist. The Tribune suggested ‘the writing has a masculinity that is unusual: it is always vibrant and always sensitive’.51

  The subhead above a review that amused Zelda immensely ran ‘Mrs Fitzgerald’s First Novel Places Her On Scott’s Level’,52 but amusement was curtailed by a realistic appraisal of the b
ook’s finances. Fitzgerald’s contractual clause stipulating that half Zelda’s royalties up to $5,000 were to be credited against his publishing debt did him little good, for the novel sold fewer than 1,400 copies. Its earnings totalled a mere $120.73, for Zelda had to pay expensive proof revision costs. When Max sent Zelda the cheque he wrote: ‘Maybe I ought to have warned you about corrections for they came to a great deal. I knew they would, when the proofs began coming back, but I knew you wanted to get the book the way you thought it ought to be.’ This was a slight slip of the truth, for most of the revisions were incurred because Scott wanted to get the book the way he thought it ought to be. Max realized Zelda was sad: ‘The result won’t be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask you whether you were writing any more … but I do think the last part of the book in particular, was very fine; and that if we had not been in the depths of a depression, the result would have been quite different.’53

  Some of their established writer friends thought highly of the book. Malcolm Cowley wrote to Scott: ‘It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before. The women who write novels are usually the sort who live spiritually in Beloit, Wisconsin.’54

  Despite this praise, the overall financial failure of the book sent Zelda spiralling down again. She locked herself in her room and drove Scott mad with fury as she threw herself into her new novel, based on her own asylum experiences. Angrily Scott wrote to Dr Rennie that Zelda had negated her promise not to write any more fiction until he had finished his novel.

  He drank instead of writing. She wrote instead of submitting, locking up her manuscript after every day’s work. They were building towards their biggest confrontation yet.

  Notes

  1 Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ‘Art as Woman’s Response and Search: Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz’, Southern Literary Journal, vol. XI, No. 2, spring 1979, Department of English, University of North Carolina, p. 23. The phrase ‘complementary intelligence’ is a quotation from the three-way conference between ZSF, FSF and Dr Rennie, 28 May 1933.