Free Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell

Lake Como she not only blamed him for the failure of their reconciliation, but even heaped abuse on Kizette for failing to give her proper support. Compromise and sympathy had never really counted in the family narrative constructed by Tamara; Tadeusz and Kizette had been given their allotted roles, and when they didn’t play them as expected she was furious.
    Tamara could be selfish, narcissistic and cruel, but she continued to justify her behaviour on the grounds that her life was essentially in the service of her work. It was her duty, she believed, to bend the world to her creative will. And she was far from alone in that notion. In this decade of rapid social change, the borderline between freedom and selfishness, ego and egotism was hotly contended ethical ground.
    For male artists and writers, the supremacy of the individual over society was one of the clarion themes of the Twenties. The question of what constituted the moral self had taken on a new urgency after the war. Scott Fitzgerald argued that ‘character was the only thing that did not wear out’ in the face of collapsing ideologies and broken dreams; for D.H. Lawrence the self was a mystical flame, set against a disintegrating modern world.
    Most women, however, were experiencing the dichotomy between individual liberty and society in far more practical, problematic and domestic ways. In theory they were living in an era of emancipation – many had the vote, many were attaining financial independence and every flapper image that featured in the movies or magazines seemed a celebration of their freedom of choice. Yet women were presented with few narratives of what to do with those choices. Most of the feckless flapper heroines of the 1920s, from Betty Lou in It Girl, to Monique in La Garçonne, ended up being rewarded by – or corralled into – marriage. And at that point their stories typically came to an end. If ever a liberated girl failed to get her man, the alternatives were nearly always tragic, like Iris March driving herself into an ancient elm tree in a last, lonely gesture of integrity.
    The practicalities of how grown-up, married flappers might balance independence and family life were much less documented. Zelda might be commissioned to write an article or two on modern marriage and in Britain an assortment of writers from D.H. Lawrence to Violet Bonham Carter penned newspaper columns on the same subject. But these barely touched on how hard and confusing a project it was for women to combine the ambitions of their single selves with the compromises required by husbands and children. Diana and Zelda knew they didn’t want to be like their mothers, but they had no other blueprint on which to model themselves. As for Tamara, she had lost Tadeusz because she had conceded to so few of his needs. And however self-righteously she had tried to justify her behaviour, she still felt diminished and exposed by his departure. She had been bred to believe that any woman abandoned by her husband was a failure.
    The only thing she could do to counter that sense of failure was to make herself a better painter. During this period Kizette recalled Tamara veering between listless depression and ‘frantic’ work; 16 she was already exhibiting symptoms of the bipolar behaviour that would worsen in middle age, although, unlike Zelda, she could still turn her ‘manic’ phase to professional advantage. Significantly, one of the best portraits she produced during this period was of Tadeusz himself. It was both a homage and a critique, for while Tamara made her husband look dangerously handsome, capturing the dark, charismatic beauty with which she’d first fallen in love, the left hand, on which he would have worn his wedding ring, was left deliberately unfinished. The title she gave the canvas – Portrait d’homme inachevé – implied all her dissatisfactions with Tadeusz as a weak man and an inadequate husband.
    In late 1927 or early 1928 they began divorce