Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (34 page)

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
‘deuxi
é
me
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.

When the Fitzgeralds arrived, Stein and Toklas were about to leave Paris for their annual vacation. Stein always demanded the undivided attention of gentlemen guests while females were handed over to Alice. One suspects strong-minded Zelda found this situation irritating. However, as Stein had become a pioneering collector of the modernist art of her vanguard painter-friends, Zelda was able to retreat from Toklas’s chit-chat to examine the paintings of Picasso, Matisse and Juan Gris adorning the walls.