Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Sayre in 1919

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was a novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she married in 1920. Her husband dubbed her "the first American Flapper"₁ She published an autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, in 1932.

In June 1930 she suffered her first mental breakdown; soon afterwards, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was required to live from then on in a mental hospital. She died at the age of 47 in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Eight other patients were also killed.

Biography

Family and early life

Born in 1900, Zelda was the youngest of six children. Her mother, Minerva Sayre (née Machen), known as Minnie (November 23, 1860 – January 13, 1958) named her after a Gypsy queen in a novel. She was spoiled and doted upon by her mother, but her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre (April 29, 1858 – November 17, 1931), a justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama and one of Alabama's leading jurists, was a stern and remote man. Her ancestors had been earlier settlers of Long Island, who had moved to Alabama before the Civil War. By the time of Zelda's birth, her family was a prominent southern family. Her great uncle, John Tyler Morgan, served six-terms in the United States Senate, her paternal grandfather edited a newspaper in Montgomery, and her maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen, who served a partial term as a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

As a child she was extremely active; she danced, took ballet lessons and enjoyed the outdoors. In 1914 Zelda began attending Sidney Lanier High School. She was bright but uninterested in her studies. Her ballet lessons continued into high school. During these years, she began an active social life. She earned a reputation as a "speed." She drank, smoked and spent time alone with boys. In a newspaper article about one of her dance performances, she is quoted as saying that she only cared about "boys and swimming." Her father's reputation was the only thing that saved her from social ruin.

As a southern woman growing up around the turn of the century, Zelda's antics were shocking to society. Southern women were expected to be delicate, docile and accommodating. Zelda commented on her struggle to be who she needed to be while living under stifling social pressures.

"It's very difficult to be two people at once, one who wants to have a law unto itself and the other who want to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Main article: F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1921

In July of 1918, at the country club where she often danced, Zelda met the man with whom she would forever be identified. She performed "Dance of the Hours" for the crowd—including a 21-year-old first lieutenant, F. Scott Fitzgerald who had been stationed at an army post near Montgomery the month before. Fitzgerald was enraptured and asked her to dance; Zelda too was entranced. "There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention."

He began to call her daily and came into Montgomery on his free days. He talked of his plans to be famous, and sent her a chapter of a book he was working on, telling her "the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four." Scott was not the only man courting Zelda, and the competition only drove Scott to want her more—in his ledger that he meticulously maintained throughout his life, he noted on September 7 that he had fallen in love. Her biographer Nancy Milford would write that, "Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own."

Their courtship was briefly interrupted in October when he was summoned North. He expected to be sent to France, but was instead assigned to Camp Mills, Long Island. While there the Armistice with Germany was signed. Fitzgerald returned to the base near Montgomery and by December they were inseparably, incautiously in love; Scott would later describe their behavior as "sexual recklessness." On February 14, 1919 he was discharged from the military and left to establish himself in New York City.

They wrote frequently and by March of 1919 Scott sent Zelda his mother's ring and the two became engaged. Many of Zelda's friends and members of her family were wary of the relationship. They did not approve of Scott's excessive drinking habits, and her Episcopalian family did not like that he was a Catholic. Zelda's continual flirtation with other men was a strain. She even accepted a pin from a young man at Georgia Tech. When returning the pin, however, Zelda—accidentally, she would insist—mailed the pin to Scott instead. They fought over the pin, Scott begged her to marry him immediately, she refused and broke off the engagement. Zelda returned to her Montgomery social life and Scott returned to work on his novel.

Marriage

By September Scott had completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and the manuscript was quickly accepted for publication. When Scott heard the novel had been accepted, he wrote to publisher Maxwell Perkins urging for quick publication, "I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl". In November he returned to Montgomery triumphant with the news of his novel. Zelda agreed to marry him; in turn, he promised to bring her to New York with "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, Zelda arrived in New York on the 30th and on April 3, 1920, before a small wedding party in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they married.

Scott and Zelda became celebrities of New York, as much for their antics as for the success of This Side of Paradise. They were kicked out of the Biltmore Hotel for their drunkenness; Zelda jumped into the fountain at Union Square; when Dorothy Parker first met the couple, Zelda and Scott were sitting atop a taxi. Parker said, "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him." To their delight, Zelda and Scott had become—in the pages of the New York media—icons of youth and success.

On Valentine's Day of 1921, while Scott was working to finish his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda discovered she was pregnant. They decided to go to Scott's home in St. Paul, Minnesota to have the baby. On October 26, 1921 she gave birth to Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, Scott recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope its beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." Many of Zelda's words found their way into Scott's novels; in The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Buchanan expressed the same hope for her daughter.

Once they married, Zelda was expected to be the witty and charming wife of an up-and-coming writer.

Zelda in 1922

Jealousy plagued their marriage. Zelda was jealous of Scott's literary success. Scott felt alienated by all of the male attention she received. Their excessive drinking often caused fights to get out of hand. There is some evidence that Scott became physically violent toward Zelda during drunken arguments.

But the endless round of parties and the massive quantities of alcohol they consumed began to take a toll on the couple's health and relationship; they squandered virtually all the money Scott made from his writing, spending as much as US$30,000 per year—a colossal figure for the time. By the mid-Twenties Scott had become a notoriously heavy drinker (he even had his own private bootlegger), and when not writing he would typically binge drink until he passed out and was sent home in a taxi.

Zelda never became particularly domestic. When Harper & Brothers asked her to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women she wrote: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy."

The first edition dust cover of The Beautiful and Damned with the main characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn to resemble Scott and Zelda

In 1922, Scott published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. Zelda wrote of the publication in the New York Tribune, though she makes joking reference to the use of her diaries in Scott's work, the lifted material was a genuine source of resentment for Zelda:

"To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and also if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and also if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years... It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

Expatriation

In 1924, during one of the first of their several trips to France, Zelda had a brief affair (or at least became infatuated) with a dashing young French pilot, Edouard Jozan. This prompted her husband to lock her in their house to keep her from seeing him again; later, they would embellish the story by claiming that Jozan had committed suicide. It is possible that Zelda's long descent into schizophrenia began during this period. She wrote a number of short stories beginning in 1925, but many of these were published under Scott's name, another possible factor of her growing discontent; three other stories, written just before her first breakdown, were later lost.

Lance Adell as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lauren Bloom as Zelda Fitzgerald in The Last Flapper, a dramatization of Zelda's life

While living in Paris, Scott Fitzgerald—by then an international literary star—met rising American author Ernest Hemingway, whose career he did much to promote. Hemingway and Fitzgerald became firm friends (although they later became estranged), but as biographer Nancy Milford reports, Zelda disliked Hemingway from the start, openly describing him as "bogus" and "as phoney as a rubber check", and considered Hemingway's domineering macho persona to be merely a posture. One of the most serious rifts between Zelda and Scott took place because Zelda became convinced (albeit with no credible evidence) that Hemingway was "a fairy" and that he and Scott were having a homosexual affair. For the most part, Zelda's dislike for Hemingway was perhaps due to jealousy -- she once threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Scott, engrossed in talking to Isadora Duncan, was ignoring her.

Obsession and illness

Though Scott drew heavily upon his wife’s intense personality in his writings, much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing – she would often interrupt him when he was working. Scott conversely became increasingly determined to keep Zelda at home, presumably because he feared that she might begin another affair. Zelda evidently had a deep desire to develop a talent that was entirely her own, perhaps a reaction to Scott's fame and success as a writer.

While in Paris, at age 27, Zelda became obsessed with ballet, which she had studied as a girl. She had been praised for her dancing skills as a child, and although the opinions of their friends vary as to her skill, it appears that she did have a fair degree of talent. But Scott was totally dismissive of his wife's desire to become a professional dancer, considering it a waste of time.

Zelda and Scott's grave in Rockville, Maryland.

She rekindled her studies too late in life to become a truly exceptional dancer, but she obsessively insisted on grueling daily practice (up to eight hours a day) that contributed to her subsequent physical and mental exhaustion. Her eventual breakdown included elements of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 1930, she was admitted to a sanatorium in France where, after months of observation and treatment and a consultation with one of Europe's leading psychiatrists, she was officially diagnosed as having schizophrenia. Her last psychiatrist, Dr. Irving Pine, believed (too late) that she may have actually had severe untreated bipolar disorder. He speculated after her death that the cause of her breakdowns may have been as much from her husband's mental bullying and her treatment for her disorder as the disorder itself.

Save Me the Waltz

Main article: Save Me the Waltz

In 1932, while being treated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital near Baltimore, Zelda had a swell of creativity. Over the course of her first six weeks at the clinic, she composed an entire novel and sent it to Scott's publisher, Maxwell Perkins. When Scott finally read Zelda's book, a week after she'd sent it to Perkins, he was furious. The book was a semi-autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' marriage. In letters Scott berated her and fumed that the novel had drawn upon the autobiographical material that he planned to use in Tender Is the Night, which he'd been working on for years, and would finally see publication in 1934.

Scott forced Zelda to revise the novel, to remove the parts which drew on shared material he wished to use. She complied. Though the Great Depression had struck America, Scribner agreed to publish her book, and a printing of 3,010 books was released on October 7, 1932. The book was not well received by critics, and to Zelda's dismay sold only 1,392 copies for which she earned $120.73. The failure of Save Me the Waltz, and Scott's scathing criticism of her having written it—he called her a "plagiarist" and a "third-rate writer"- crushed her spirits. It would be the only novel she ever published.

Remaining years

Zelda Fitzgerald spent the rest of her life in various stages of mental distress. Scott preceded her in death on December 21, 1940. She died in 1948, with her few remaining unpublished bits of work, her last letters to Scott before he died, the last remnants of her life. At the time of her death, she was writing a second novel, Caesar's Things, when a fire consumed the sanitarium where she lived, the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, on March 10, 1948.

Their daughter Scottie wrote, after their deaths: "I think (short of documentary evidence to the contrary) that if people are not crazy, they get themselves out of crazy situations, so I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."

Scott and Zelda had been originally buried in the Rockville Union Cemetery, away from his family plot. In 1975, Scottie successfully campaigned for them to be buried with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery. Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

References

• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (2002), Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.), Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 1570034559.
• Bryer, Jackson R.; Barks, Cathy W. (eds.). (2002), Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, New York: St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0312268750.
• Cline, Sally. (2003), Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1559706880.
• Meyers, Jeffrey. (1994), Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0060190361.
• Milford, Nancy. (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row.

External links

• Profile of Zelda Fitzgerald at Find A Grave