Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (78 page)

Zelda showed Piper her manuscript, took him to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art to see her paintings, then to honour their new friendship gave him a self-portrait. Nor was he the only recipient of her paintings. She sent oils to the Kalmans, painted the Montgomery Capitol on a compact for Sara Mayfield, decorated a cocktail tray for Anna Biggs, gave Lawton Campbell a watercolour of a rhododendron in bloom and painted bowls with scenes of Great Neck, St Raphaël, Ellerslie, La Paix and Felder Avenue for Scottie.

In December 1941 the United States entered World War Two. Virginia Cody, sister of Zelda’s old beau Dan, who was organizing an élite Red Cross unit, asked Zelda to attend first aid classes then work for the unit.

The war, with its inevitable death toll of young people, made Zelda more conscious of her role as sole parent to Scottie, who in 1942 had graduated from Vassar to become a journalist on the
temporary
staff of the
New
Yorker.
After that she took a fulltime post at Radio City Hall as a publicist but lasted only ten weeks. Despite her ignorance about sports she braved a
Time
magazine job as sports reporter. After abysmal coverage of baseball, boxing, tennis, golf and harness racing she moved speedily to
Time
’s radio news
programme
, followed later by a spell on
Fortune
magazine.

Throughout her daughter’s ever-changing career Zelda struggled to establish an acceptable mother-role. She loved Scottie, she admired her, but she never quite got it right.

She begged Scottie to say her prayers, but in case she didn’t, she prayed for her. Tentatively she offered housekeeping advice: ‘In choosing arrangements, decide first on a theme … grandeur,
simplicity,
casualness or some studied harmony. These qualities are spiritual … Choose cheap Platonic concepts of furniture: split bottom chairs, kitchen chairs and wicker rather than imitation
decorators
items. A pewter pot or an earthenware crock is more
appropriate
to garden roses … Lamps are a major item: one should be able to see by them.’
54
All highly sound, but in Scottie’s view out of date and unasked for!

In 1942 they argued about Scott’s library (largely contemporary fiction), bequeathed to Zelda in his will. Zelda, impecunious, did not want ‘this testimonial of our generation to be moth eaten and worn away fruitlessly when it might be serving some purpose’ and wished to sell it to Princeton University Library. Scottie disagreed furiously. ‘Even millionaires are disposing of their goods,’ Zelda wrote in exasperation to Biggs. ‘When Christ taught “Store not up for yourselves treasures on earth” – He was not just making pretty phrases by giving us a way of salvation. He said: “Go sell
everything
and follow me” and that is what He meant.’
55
Scottie now had the Lord against her as well; and within days John Biggs also. He thought that Scott’s own papers should be sold to give Zelda
sorely-needed
funds as well as to provide a permanent memorial to Scott. Such an idea, he said, would have given Scott no end of a kick!
56
  Zelda, who agreed, generously asked John to send Scottie half the money.
57

Their relationship improved after Scottie married Ensign Samuel Jackson (Jack) Lanahan, whom she had dated since she was at Vassar and he at Princeton. Son of a wealthy stockbroker, like Scott a graduate of St Paul Academy, he was serving on the USS
Card
in the Atlantic as assistant navigator. During his leave, their wedding took place at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola, New York, on 13 February 1943. The Obers planned both the wedding, for which Anne bought Scottie’s dress and at which Harold gave Scottie away, and the reception at the Barclay Hotel. Shortly after the wedding Jack returned to overseas duty.

Although the wedding announcement, embossed with the Fitzgerald coat of arms, read: ‘Mrs Francis Scott Fitzgerald has the honor of announcing the marriage of her daughter …’ Zelda was
conspicuously absent. Most biographers write off her non-
attendance
as another sick episode. The truth is more complex. Scottie failed to invite her early enough. ‘I felt guilty’, Scottie wrote later, ‘about having left notifying my mother until it was too late for her to plan to come, but she was not well enough at the time and I feared that if she was in one of her eccentric phases it would cast a pall over the affair.’
58
It must have seemed to Zelda like a rerun of Scottie’s graduation where she was made to feel unwelcome, or even her own wedding. This was worse.

Zelda wrote one sad letter to Anne Ober thanking her for the wedding cake, which she had shared with Dos Passos who had briefly called on her in Montgomery. Zelda said how sorry she was ‘she couldn’t be of any service’ at her daughter’s wedding.
59

Then with great fortitude Zelda returned to forgiving her spirited daughter.
60
The hospital experiences Zelda had endured would have made many people bitter but astonishingly Zelda seemed to have become more compassionate. In June 1943 she asked Biggs to burn all the hospital correspondence, Scott’s copies of which were then in the estate files, as she thought they would upset her
daughter
. Her own distress at reading not only the medical reports but also Scott’s private letters about her condition can be imagined, but she never revealed it to Scottie.

To compensate for the wedding debacle, Scottie invited Zelda to Scarsdale, New York, for a week during summer 1943. Zelda had to ask Biggs for $100 for the trip. She said she felt ‘very selfish at asking vacation while the Belgians die of starvation and degradation stifles the French and the British hang on by shell-shock and delusions of grandeur.’
61

When Scottie accepted another reporting job at the
New
Yorker
in February 1944, Zelda frequently sent her watercolours which Scottie showed to staff writer Brendan Gill. Though Gill tried to get them published, their ‘nonrepresentational diagonal slashes,
triangles
and other geometric forms … the expression of a violent,
undischarged
rage … [were] works radically unsuited to the
New
Yorker.’
62

Scottie herself suited the magazine very well. Gill described her as ‘exceptional in energy and in her sunny good nature – none of the series of misfortunes that had dogged her parents appeared to have cast the least shadow over her.’
63

Shadows that
did
lurk between mother and daughter were swept into the background by the news of Scottie’s pregnancy. On 26 April 1946, when Thomas Addison Lanahan was born, Zelda wrote:
‘Scottie darling, I am so
happy
about the baby; So glad he is a little boy and so rejoiced that you are well + going to be happy with a family + love + happiness which you deserve. It’s
wonderful
to be a grandmother. I haven’t been so beaming in years and I can’t wait to hold him and see how he works etc … isn’t it swell to have a grandson? I can’t think of anything more to the point and I am so full of happiness for you and all the love a heart can hold.’
64
She wrote proudly to Ludlow Fowler to announce her grandson’s arrival, reminding him of the excited telegrams they had exchanged at Scottie’s birth. Entirely positive about her new role, she decided that ‘without small children now one seems out of tempo with the world as human relationships seem to have survived the more pressingly than the impersonal aspects of civilization.’
65
In May she wrote to Biggs: ‘I long to see my grandchild who is surely
miraculous
and will try to get to New York this summer … human
relationships
mean more than they did.’
66

Before Zelda was able to see her grandson, again she grappled with ill health. During her hospitalization from 1 July to 23 September 1946, Zelda wrote to Biggs to say she was folk dancing and hiking outdoors while silver throated birds flew in protest over the mountains. ‘I will bend all my resources,’ she said stoutly, ‘to conforming and try to get off the debit-side as soon as I can.’
67
Her optimism increased when John sent her money from the movie rights of
Tender
Is
The
Night
and when Scottie sent her ‘darling
pictures
of the baby’. Highland told Scottie Zelda had adjusted well and ‘at no time [had they] had any trouble with her’.
68

They suggested it would be unwise for Zelda to live alone, but she should not be supervised so closely that she was unable to express her own personality.
69
After leaving hospital, Zelda stayed on in Asheville whence she wrote to Biggs that she was now ‘in wonderful physical shape’ and was sketching and played tennis with two entertaining friends.
70

On 3 October she visited Scottie at 310 West 94th Street, New York, and was so delighted with baby Tim that they arranged for Scottie and Jack to bring the baby to Montgomery the following June, when Zelda would give a party for them and twenty guests at the Blue Moon restaurant.

After seeing Scottie, on 10 October 1946 Zelda visited the Biggs family. During an otherwise agreeable visit there were two
discomfiting
moments. When Anna placed a bowl of fresh berries on the table Zelda said their thorns reminded her of Christ’s crown of thorns. Anna placatingly threw them out. Then John became worried that Zelda
would be late for her train back to Montgomery, and momentarily Zelda thought Scott was by her side reassuring her she wouldn’t miss it. She told John, and he anxiously hurried her off the premises.

A few months later, on 24 April 1947, Zelda confessed to Biggs something she had been holding back for years.

The next typed letter from Biggs, on 6 May, totally ignores the
reference
to Zelda’s romance. Either he did not take the remark
seriously
or he felt it wiser not to discuss it, but it is possible that he hand-wrote her an answer between 25 April and 5 May unseen by his secretary.
72
If so, Zelda destroyed it as she did most of her
correspondence
in the Forties.

Earlier clues offer evidence that this confession could have been rooted in reality. Zelda’s fascination with Russia began with her love for Egorova, after which she painted a
Russian
Stable
and at least two
Portraits
of
Russians,
one of which is now missing. In her last years she wrote an unfinished sketch about the Russian ballet and an unfinished story about a Russian officer. In 1942 she met a number of the militia stationed in Montgomery, among whom might have been a Russian General. Most significantly, six months before her confession she told John that she wanted to ask him something that he might find ‘ridiculously unrealizable’:

No money was available for such a trip, but Zelda refused to drop the idea. In January she wrote: ‘Did you consider the idea of going to Russia about which I wrote you? this is probably the moment for cataclysmic action, if ever, now that the old order is done and the new one yet unasserted … maybe we had better go now.’
74

Zelda’s depression over the failed trip to Russia increased when tragedy struck several old friends that year. In June, Perkins died. ‘I can’t imagine why Max should die,’ she wrote to John Biggs. ‘He was so decorous + punctilious about keeping life in hand – It is so sad.’
75

In September 1947 a worse event befell Katy and John Dos Passos. On 12 September, driving from Cape Cod to Connecticut, Dos, blinded for a second by the setting sun, collided with a truck. Dos lost an eye, but also his wife. Katy’s head was sheared off by the windshield; she died instantly.

The smell of fear, illness, death and political paranoia was
everywhere
. 1947 was the year the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives held their Hollywood hearings in which the Hollywood Ten (artists and writers) were all blacklisted. Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Don Ogden Stewart, now victims of the McCarthy regime, could no longer find work.

Zelda’s third hospitalization, intermittent from 7 November 1947,
76
was not entirely with her agreement but at Scottie’s repeated urgent requests. On 3 November Zelda wrote to Biggs: ‘Scottie (as of course you know) wants me to go to Highlands for a while. [Though] glad of a chance to straighten up again … I hope I won’t have to stay too long.’ Admitted for deep shock insulin and another ‘rehabilitation and re-education’ programme, she stayed only a few weeks before returning to Montgomery. During late fall her sadness increased. She knelt with her mother by her bed, praying as they had done when Zelda was a child. Nothing lifted her spirits. She told Rosalind: ‘I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly and faithfully asking God to help me … I cannot understand why he leaves me in suffering.’
77