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

Zelda’s notebooks) as if by writing it she could realize it, I understood her feelings of being out of control which any prisoner or asylum resident would recognize.
    Another challenge was to balance Scott’s lifelong loyalty to a wife diagnosed as suffering clinical ‘madness’ with his constant refusal to take her out of hospital because he feared the disruption it would cause to his work.
    The biographer’s role is first to enter imaginatively into her subject’s world, then to recognize that writer and subject are separate people, and that her task is to provide one version of possibly significant events and possibly significant motives which have impelled the subject’s life and influenced their art.
    In threading the narrative of her life through her painting and writing, aided by the memories of those who knew her, I have tried to give Zelda a life of her own, separate from Scott Fitzgerald’s, but to acknowledge where the intertwining and complicity have been purposefully tangled by the two participants.
    In Paris and New York she was spoken of as aloof, yet in her home town I heard repeatedly how warm, accessible and loyal she was, how her character was ‘shot through to the bone with a strong vein of kindness’. Certainly during this research I have been most impressed by Zelda’s moral bravery. Throughout her troubled, sometimes tormented, life she exhibited qualities of endurance and courage with what her particular enemy and Scott’s friend, Ernest Hemingway, would have called grace under pressure if he could have brought himself to praise her at all.
    Zelda shared with all four of Hemingway’s wives, though not with his heroines, the qualities of resilience and relinquishment. But her graciousness and stoicism, unlike theirs, were those of a Southern lady. Though Zelda was sometimes more irritatingly confrontational than was appropriate in the South, where difficult issues are delicately approached by stealth, she was never once accused of vulgarity.
    Everyone I met in the Deep South (where I learnt more about Zelda than anywhere else) told me that ‘ultimately Zelda was a Southern lady’. Yet in the Deep South, in her childhood, Zelda behaved as no ladies dared. It was one of the contradictions in her character she would never lose.
    To understand Zelda and her work it is imperative to look closely at her roots. So it is in that place, the Deep South, at that time, the early 1900s, doing what ladies did not dare to do, that we first meet Zelda.
    Notes
    1 Though Scott took the credit, H. L. Mencken coined the term flapper fifteen years before This Side of Paradise. He said it originated in England and described adolescent girls who flapped awkwardly while walking. British shops sold flapper dresses with long straight lines to hide such gracelessness.
    2 Ironically, Zelda’s daughter Scottie most cogently expressed this view: ‘in defining genius as one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, Edison surely meant in one direction not in three. It was my mother’s misfortune to be born with the ability to write, to dance and to paint, and then never to have acquired the discipline to make her talent work for, rather than against, her.’ Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Abacus, Little, Brown, London, 1993, p. vi. (Prefatory comments based on Scottie’s Introduction to the exhibition catalogue for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts 1974 exhibition of Zelda Fitzgerald’s paintings.)
    3 I have followed the example of several contemporary art critics including Jane S. Livingston and Carolyn Shafer who have divided Zelda’s art by theme or subject, i.e. landscapes, cityscapes, paper dolls, figurative paintings, Biblical allegories, flowers, fairy tales etc. Some themes do fall into specific time periods. The romantic hazy watercolour cityscapes of Paris and New York were painted in the 1940s after Scott’s death