Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (76 page)

Most descriptions of Zelda after Scott’s death see her as frail,
forgotten
, hopelessly unproductive, constantly ill and a religious maniac. She is shown spending her last eight years in and out of Highland Hospital or dragging through Montgomery’s sultry streets, lugging her Bible on a one-woman mission to convert the residents.

This overwhelmingly powerful myth sets her up as the left-over widow of the more famous Fitzgerald: pathetic, irrelevant, an
insignificant
epilogue to Scott’s life. Her first biographer suggested: ‘With Scott dead her life would become largely a matter of
recollecting
.’
1
Thereafter, ‘broken’ and ‘past’ became the two most popular epithets applied to her. She becomes the ‘once dazzling beauty, who … returned to Montgomery in a broken and pitiful state’.
2
We are told old Southern friends were kind to her with the kindness reserved ‘for the broken and helpless’.
3
Her life is condemned ‘rather like the marquee on a theatre that has closed down; the main attraction … a thing of the past.’
4

Many facts however do not support this myth. Nor do they support its attendant thesis that Zelda continued to wander in the borderlands between hysteria and insanity.
5
If we deconstruct the myth’s three central components: Zelda’s religious zeal as a symptom of madness, her invalidism and her creative stasis, we find evidence of clarity, healthy activity, above all enormous
creative
output.

During 1940–48 Zelda’s art and writing both flourished. After Scott’s death she produced a cycle of romantic watercolour
cityscapes
of New York and Paris to commemorate places they had visited together. By 1944, in seventeen nostalgic scenes, she
immortalized
New York’s Fifth Avenue, Grand Central Station, Grant’s Tomb, Times Square, Washington Square, the Big Apple and the New York Skyline. Her Parisian visualizations spanned the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Pantheon, Luxembourg Gardens, Place de l’Opéra and aperitifs in the Madeleine.
6
These landmarks are
arguably her most coherent and delicately assembled paintings. Yet amid the magic lurk two unsettling features: her beloved Paris
completely
lacks people, while busy Manhattan scenes show people with disconcertingly depressed faces. Is Zelda remembering a vacuum, acknowledging the cracks that showed through even their carefree times?

In the later 1940s, her mood strikingly different, Zelda embarked on her Biblical Tableaux, monumental in their brooding tragedy. Several, one critic suggested, displayed a quality bordering on
magnificence
through the sheer doggedness of their optical effect.
7
  Glaring lemon, blood red and royal blue paintings interpret the Commandments, or offer Zelda’s version of Christ’s miracles and martyrdom. They are both layered and laboured as if the artist is insisting the viewer grapples with some arduous truth.

Bearing injunctions like ‘Love One Another’ and ‘Do Not Steal’, Zelda devotedly designed them as moral tracts for her first
grandchild
,
8
but their fierceness expresses Zelda’s own dislocations of spirit. Fortunately her most tormented scenes are infused with
reassuring
symbols of hope: a trinity of white doves and a scattering of heavenly butterflies.
9
Autobiographical themes filter through
religious
references. Though it is too neat to see the Fitzgeralds as Eve and Adam, eyeing up temptation in the form of juicy red apples fallen at their feet, Zelda frequently indicated their marital tragedies were the consequences of their materialistic glossy lives.

These two significant series – cityscapes and religious renderings – marked the beginning and end of Zelda’s most artistically
productive
eight-year period. In between she created another set of
historical
paper dolls, made an imaginative foray into nursery rhyme illustrations and invented a fairy tale cycle.

During the 1940s, four exhibitions of her work were held in Montgomery. In August 1941 the Late Paper Dolls were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts. They were in no way ordinary paper dolls, said the
Montgomery
Advertiser,
but ‘paintings after the manner of modern French painters, which Mrs Fitzgerald believes is the best way to introduce children to the trends in contemporary painting’.
10
These paintings, based on Arthurian legends which conveyed moral values, Zelda later sent to her grandchild as a way of staking a place in Scottie’s family life.
11

In May 1942 the Museum exhibited a selection of twenty-six paintings and drawings, which garnered a review saying there had never been ‘seen in Montgomery a collection … showing a more exquisite feeling for color and design. She has evolved a style which
is a mixture of Surrealism, Abstraction and her own originality.’ Though several were portraits, Zelda did not attempt to produce likenesses, but turned her sitters into Surrealistic dreams.
12
The Museum hosted a reception for Zelda. She wrote excitedly to Biggs who, officially Scott’s executor and Zelda’s financial administrator, unofficially became her chief correspondent and confidant: ‘My exhibit was a great success … 300 people came to the tea.’
13

That November the Museum put on a third exhibition, followed in December by a show of watercolours and drawings at the Women’s Club, Montgomery, where Zelda’s new Chinese style dominated her flower sketches. The two most controversial
paintings
were a self-portrait, in which her intense strained gaze stares out stiffly, and an emerald green portrait of Scott with a cat
slithering
over his shoulder.

Wit took over when Zelda moved to fairy tales, using her
trademark
manneristic figures. Little Red Riding Hood loses her
innocence
to become an American baby doll with well developed breasts.
14
Liberating her characters from convention meant she transformed Wolf 1 with a screaming red jumpsuit and an
aggressive
scowl, while dressing Wolf 2 in menacing black hood and cape, with an arsenal of firearms. But Wolf 2 also owns a white flowing party frock, dainty elbow-length gloves and golden angel’s wings. Like Hansel, in a strawberry-pink dress, Wolf is typically bisexual, as are all Zelda’s male fairytale figures.

Her Three Piglets prance in front of a vista of three sweeping hills which are different shades of green so they recede shade by shade. There is nothing logical about Zelda’s perspective so large daisies, the same size as small flowers in the foreground, bounce around on faraway hilltops.
15
At the topsy-turvy heart of Zelda’s art lie the tragi-comic Alice-in-Wonderland illustrations she drew in her last years. Six watercolour and gouache works depict
The
Pool
of
Tears,
Advice
from
a
Caterpillar,
A
Mad
Tea-Party,
The
Queen’s
Croquet
Ground,
The
Lobster
Quadrille,
and
Who
Stole
The
Tarts?
which, wildly
theatrical
like an improbable stage set, flaunts reckless reds and yellows. Absurd birds and beasts dare viewers to take them seriously.

It is a striking coincidence that Alice’s creator and Zelda’s nemesis were both named Carroll. Her children’s art faithfully reflects the crazy nature of the adult’s hospital life.
16

That Zelda’s last eight years were far from passive is shown most significantly in her paintings. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are whimsical romps. These late paintings cavort, tumble and topple, though in a strictly disciplined fashion.

Zelda even ventured into painting and decorating bowls, trays and baskets which she was able to sell as a small source of income.
17
  Acknowledging that many artists were even poorer than she, in 1942 she donated a substantial number of paintings to the Federal Art Project of Alabama to be given to artists in need of painting materials. Curiously, she insisted the artists clean her canvases and paint over them: an exceptional act of spiritual generosity.
18

Despite Zelda’s publicly acknowledged talent, her mother and her daughter privately refused to accept her paintings. Scottie felt she had talent but no eye for the market place. She constantly urged Zelda to paint more commercial pictures or produce more bowls so that she could sell them. Minnie Sayre saw
no
merit in Zelda’s art, she quite simply hated the paintings. They were sick, tormented, ugly. She could not bear to hang them on her walls and would not go and see them displayed.
19

Zelda had another clash with Minnie. She remained grateful towards her mother but no longer found her compatible to live with. Part of their incompatibility was due to Minnie’s dislike of Zelda’s paintings which were her most precious works of art. By 1942 she desperately resented living in Minnie’s house. What would happen when Minnie, then eighty-three, died? Mama Sayre
possessed
only $15,000 plus her house, which would be divided between the the four remaining siblings. Worried that she would be made homeless, Zelda urged Biggs to let her buy a ‘shelter’ in North Carolina. Instead of her regular monthly sum could the estate turn over to her between $1,000 and $2,500?
20
When he pointed out the impracticality, she began a relentless campaign to leave Sayre Street.

In October 1943 she told Biggs she did not believe ‘that my
presence
here is a very equitable arrangement and I can pay Mrs Wolff $3.50 for a room in Ashville and stay up there … My mother … has her way of life arranged and I am sick some and not absorbable. The arrangement is not compatible …. Since my presence is … a burden … since I cannot keep from resenting the air of surveillance with which I am surrounded and since this evokes hostility … if it lies with[in] the realm of possibility, I want to go. I am too grateful to her and far too much in her debt to forward unpleasantness, if there is any means of doing it otherwise.’ She might get a job at one of the mills in Asheville ‘and eventually straighten out this morass of expensive malady, regrettable social exigence and general malheur’. She implored Biggs: ‘Won’t you answer?’
21

She even fretted over having no money for a burial fund for herself.

Biggs wrote back on 27 November: ‘I think it would be very much better for you to stay with your mother through Christmas and then go up to Asheville … I know from my own experience that family matters are often very disturbing, but that if one acts suddenly one never feels right about it thereafter.’ Zelda had no choice but to stay.

Zelda’s writing ran parallel to her painting. She worked
continuously
on her novel
Caesar’s
Things,
so that by the time of her death she left a 40,000-word manuscript, in need of as much revision and a great deal more ordering and interpreting than Scott’s
The
Last
Tycoon
had needed at his death. During summer 1942 she told Biggs: ‘I am writing a book about the social structure being only
manifestations
of the Christian precepts to show how
every
deed we do is included within some principle of Christ. It is not anywhere near as formidable as it sounds.’
23

But it
was
formidable, for two reasons. One was the lack of
discipline
and incoherence in part of the book, which showed the
disastrous
effects of insulin shock more obviously than did her paintings. The other was the complex layering of texts. For her ambitious design was to match a reworking of her initial autobiographical theme of childhood-marriage-aviator romance with a secondary theme of insanity (on which she had been working since 1933), then overlay both with a third theme of religious purpose.

Zelda saw her novel as heroic, with heroine Janno moving swiftly through events that closely mirrored the times the Fitzgeralds lived in. Childhood escapades, in a town most certainly modelled on Montgomery, are often violent and take place near a mental asylum which mends and punishes its residents. Under its brooding shadow, doom hangs latent in the air, while everyone waits for
cataclysmic
situations to develop. Janno grows up counselled by inner voices who urge her to obey authority figures. The child’s faith is constantly broken and courageously renewed. When she meets Jacob (modelled on Scott), momentarily the scenes in Paris and the
Riviera lighten until the incident with Jacques (Jozanesque hero) plunges them into dark power struggles.

The twin tools Zelda uses to reinvent the familiar narrative are religious parables and the vision of the sane through the eyes of those labelled insane. The silencing of Zelda’s fiction and the attempted murder of her literary creativity are repetitively pointed up in the novel. When Zelda handwrites the word ‘writing’ it comes out as ‘muting’ and when she uses the word ‘aspirations’ it is usually preceded by ‘lost’ or ‘truncate[d]’. The book asks a great deal of readers but it is possible to ‘read’ the text as a journey from sanity (childhood and Jozan days) through ‘madness’ (hospital days) to rehabilitation (religious days).