Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘professional’ in Zelda’s time rested, as it does today, on the way artists could or could not define themselves by their work, I have examined how Zelda fought for that self-definition.
    I was also curious about why one writer’s silencing of another writer’s voice should have been labelled by critics as ‘artistic rivalry’. Artistic rivalry implies a competition between equals, as opposed to ‘silencing’ which implies one artist has more power than the other, so it seemed worth exploring not only the definitions butalso the effects of this ‘rivalry’ on the Fitzgeralds’ domestic partnership .
    Living with a famous artist can make for a tough relationship. In the Fitzgeralds’ case Scott’s fame rested on his writing while Zelda’s ambition rested on her writing; thus they fought on the same ground. Zelda inevitably experienced feelings of admiration and frustration, rivalry and invisibility. Living with a man of publicly acknowledged talent who was necessarily self-focused engendered in Zelda a real desire to protect and support that man’s talent, but also provided little breathing space in which to nurture her own.
    Although this aspect of their story parallels late twentieth-century gender roles, I have attempted consistently to see Scott and Zelda within their own period.
    Previous writers have focused a spectacular white spotlight on this particular literary controversy. 8 I aimed to view it within the context of the whole of Zelda’s art and life. I have concerned myself as much with the rest of her painting and writing as with the literary row which brought her prominently to public attention. There was no lack of material. I have been fortunate in having access to everything she wrote, published and unpublished, a literary legacy which includes two novels, a dozen short stories, a galaxy of sketches, essays and magazine articles, spiritual and artistic notebooks , a stage play, and autobiographical and fictional fragments in the Princeton University Library, where there are also scrapbooks, albums and a monumental archive of letters.
    I trawled through hundreds of unpublished painful illustrated letters, many from Zelda to Scottie which show an absentee mother’s story not previously told in full. I was fortunate in being given Scottie’s own unpublished memoir about Zelda by Scottie’s daughter Cecilia Ross.
    Zelda’s hospital letters, haunting for their traumatic honesty, are particularly startling less for Zelda’s awareness of what she sees as an unjust incarceration than for her pragmatic acceptance of hospital censorship. If she was ever to be released she was forced to write in an acceptable way. Untwining these two positions has been a hard task.
    This Letters Archive allowed me to engage with Zelda’s relationship to her mother, Minnie (a more ambivalent one than the legend logged), and with her women friends, few of whom are mentioned in earlier biographies, especially Sara Murphy, Sara Mayfield and Xandra Kalman. By good fortune I was generously offered a whole file of largely unpublished letters between Zelda and the Kalmans. 9 I was also given an unpublished manuscript of Sara Haardt’s which contained conversations and an interview with Zelda.
    Though an important diary of Zelda’s and eight further stories have been lost, evidence of their themes and content has been helpful.
    Fitzgerald biographies have given the impression that after the tragedy of Scott’s early death in 1940 absolutely nothing else happened to Zelda until her own tragic death in 1948. Plenty happened to her. I suggest she came into her own artistically during those eight years.
    I have faced several problems. One problem was that a few of my older interviewees found it hard to distinguish between their memories and their readings of what has become an abundance of Fitzgerald material A second problem was the delicate issues which have surrounded biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald. For more than thirty