This is by Nancy Milford (1938-2022); the subject is Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48); the subtitle is A Biography; and it was published in 1970.

Reason for reading? Pretty obvious, really. Since February and A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway), I've been doggedly pursuing the little set that collided in Paris in the 1920s, and then dispersed to the four winds. It has been a bit of an anglophone theme, but very interesting for all that.

In the Fitzgerald corner so far, we've had The Beautiful and Damned (Scott), and Save Me the Waltz (Zelda), plus Superzelda, a quirky graphic biography by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta. (This latter, by the way, Milford's work showed to be highly accurate, as well as memorable. Often, reading about an incident, those cool blue pictures would trickle back into my mind...)

Milford has written a very good biography. Three reasons for saying that: 1. It's very readable. 2. She gives us LOTS of documents (the Fitzgeralds were prodigious letter-writers and diarists), and the extensive quotes make fascinating reading. 3. She's unobtrusive. Of necessity, every biographer editorializes, by the simple act of choosing and shaping the material, but Milford keeps herself largely in the background, laying out her exhibits, and leaving readers to judge for themselves.

The outlines of the life of Zelda Fitzgerald nee Sayre are known to most: Glittering career as a "flapper" and famous author's wife; horrifying descent into mental illness; tragic death in a hospital fire.


Scott didn't like the jacket sketch on the cover of The Beautiful and Damned. So Zelda drew her own version: "It was a nude kneeling in a champagne goblet, her blond bobbed hair flying, her apricot coloring remarkably similar to Zelda’s -- a childlike mermaid sloshing happily in a cocktail. But it was not used"

What stood out in that quite extraordinary life? Not necessarily chronologically, the following:

THE SOUTH

-- This book made me understand the significance of a southern background: "If there was a confederate establishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it." Her grandfather "had achieved the pinnacle of Southern society, for as both planter and lawyer he belonged to the ruling class". Her mother grew up in an "atmosphere of privilege". In light of southern history and the ingrained (therefore still existent) inequality it engendered, this all takes on a bit of a sulphurous hue. As does Milford's description of the bizarre ritual whereby southern frat boys pledge to defend the virtue and chastity of the "woman of the Southland": "This extravagant and somewhat sinister homage to Southern womanhood was the social context in which Zelda grew up, and against which she was reacting. Her family was firmly fixed in it, and if many of its tenets were more literary than practical it made little difference, for their acceptance in the Deep South was almost complete. Women were expected to be submissive, if not passive. The Southern belle had certain prerogatives that her more ordinary sisters were not granted, but she had won these by her beauty, her spirited veneer, and her ability to manage men without seeming to do so. The art of dissembling perforce became a valuable social asset for a girl."



SCOTTANDZELDA/ZELDAANDSCOTT

-- Central to Zelda's life, and Scott's, and therefore the book, is THAT relationship... Lots of pixels have been expended on it, and people tend to take up pro-Scott or pro-Zelda positions. I feel for both. They meant so much to each other, and yet they did such an expert job of destroying each other... What I will say, though, is that Scott seems to have lacked any facility for empathy. He regularly belittled Zelda; that casual contempt had very nasty consequences; and -- most insidious of all -- he didn't seem to realize he was doing it.

-- Scott developed at a very early stage in his writing a type of heroine who's responsible for everything bad that happens to the hero. He writes in Babes in the Woods, in 1917: "He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it." This sentence will echo down his fiction and his life: "He grants his girls," says Milford, "for all their potential ability to promote ruin among their men, their right to do it. And, more than that, he admires their destructive high-handedness, for it is that female quality which attracts him."

-- His last undergrad story imagines a woman who sounds SO like Zelda that it's uncanny: "All the time I was idealizing her to the last possibility, I was perfectly conscious that she was about the faultiest girl I’d ever met. She was selfish, conceited and uncontrolled and since these were my own faults I was doubly aware of them. Yet I never wanted to change her. Each fault was knit up with a sort of passionate energy that transcended it. Her selfishness made her play the game harder, her lack of control put me rather in awe of her and her conceit was punctuated by such delicious moments of remorse and self-denunciation that it was almost -- almost dear to me… She had the strongest effect on me. She made me want to do something for her, to get something to show her. Every honor in college took on the semblance of a presentable trophy." It's as though he is FATED to meet the person he conjured up...

-- From then on, the boundary between the fictional and the real becomes increasingly blurred. Scott reinvents Zelda's actions in retrospect, for example, to better fit his narrative of himself. When she doesn't initially accept his proposal of marriage, "he would in time explain it away by saying that she was afraid to risk a life with him until he was a moneymaker. But that was unfair; it was only as his own faith in himself waned that hers became increasingly unsure." It's a very effective form of gaslighting. When they do eventually marry, it's not so much because he is now making money, but rather that he has his self-confidence back. Later, of course, he compulsively writes the Zelda character into his books. On the subject of which...

-- Milford's book confirms, in great detail, how much Zelda contributed to Scott's writing. So many stories, signed by both, but actually written by Zelda... So much material borrowed from Zelda's diaries and letters (even -- and this really seems beyond the pale to me -- from letters written from the various clinics she attended in her long struggle with mental illness).

ZELDA'S WRITING

-- Zelda could write, that's for sure. (Neither of them, on the other hand, could spell...) Some of her letters are magical. One example is the rather Gothic one she wrote to Scott after spending the day in a graveyard: "Touched by the beauty of her letter, he sent her a marvelous flamingo-colored feather fan. It was the perfect gift for Zelda, frivolous and entirely beautiful; she was delighted by it."


The Fitzgeralds must, in all their later travels in the south of France, have seen the flamingos...

-- Her gift for writing, however, never really gets the opportunity to develop, because it's constantly in the shade of Scott's. Certainly, stories she wrote sold. Save Me the Waltz needs a darn good edit, but there's very definitely something to it. True, her play, Scandalabra, was a disaster. But, if all things had been equal, she could probably have achieved much more.

-- What makes things distinctly unequal, however, is Zelda's perceived need to compete with Scott, and the messed-up dynamic within the marriage. This is again apparent in the short-story writing she does during the phase when she's under treatment and in and out of clinics. At one point she stops showing her material to Scott: "The fact that Zelda did not show Scott her stories for his opinion or approval, while reiterating her deep need for him, is worth notice... It was not that she hadn’t ideas of her own; it was that she needed him to confirm them and herself." Even when a story called Miss Ella appears, and causes a gratifying stir in Montgomery, her pride is tempered by a kind of cringe in the direction of Scott: "I do not dare read the story. Knowing it is not first rate, I don’t want to be discouraged -- I wish you could teach me to write."

-- As we saw, there's a major bust-up between the two over Save Me the Waltz, which drew on material Scott wanted to use for Tender Is the Night: "Zelda had for the first time directly invaded what Scott considered his own domain, and the violence of his reaction was telling. Her novel was intensely, even naively autobiographical, and as she drew on her own life, so she drew on her life with Scott, for it was her material as well as his. Scott strenuously disagreed." He continues working on his own novel: "That it involved a use of Zelda, that she might object to it, be wounded by it, did not seem to have disturbed him. He saw it only from a writer’s point of view." Zelda writes a very apologetic letter to Scott. But he's having none of it. Certainly, her motives were mixed. "But Scott's reaction, especially since he was the more balanced of the two, was completely out of proportion."

-- You'd think Zelda would have deeply resented the way her husband cannibalized her writing and personality for his own ends, but maybe not. Shortly before she died, she offered advice to aspiring novelist Paul McLendon: "When Paul told her about a novel he wanted to write and about his fears that it might draw too deeply upon the lives of people close to him, Zelda, who understood such problems all too well, told him that 'the world is fair game to the greedy themes of the literary-minded. It is difficult to make one’s close associates realize that all things are meat to a writer’s imagination and that interpretation & transpositions are the biggest part of his game and are not always transgressions of devotion… I’d just go on & write & explain to my friends later, you’ll probably have to apologize anyway.'"



THAT COMPETITIVENESS THING

-- She didn't start out with that need to compare. She starts out very much her own woman, bold, unconventional, headstrong, independent. Very possibly annoying, but definitely bright and articulate and interesting. But moving to a new environment and a new role was a challenge. Understandably, she hated the idea of domesticity. But it was probably hard for her to carve out a path of her own. And Scott never seemed to understand that. He just blamed her for it. One of his most consequential goads, the import of which he didn't even seem to understand, was the gibe about 17-year-old actress Lois Moran, for whom, post-France, and working in Hollywood, Scott developed something of an infatuation. Initially, he insisted to his wife that he simply admired her, "but as they quarreled about her, he told Zelda that at least the girl did something with herself, something that required not only talent but effort". Given the lives the Fitzgeralds had jointly created, and the input Zelda had had into Scott's work, this seems very, very cruel. And it's one of the factors that drove her into her doomed pursuit of ballet fame.

-- Even there, though, he never truly respects her abilities. In September 1929, Zelda was offered a place with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples. Given her incredibly late start as a ballerina, this is an extraordinary achievement. But she turns it down. "Scott never acknowledged that Zelda had come this close to a serious career as a ballerina. As late as 1936 he was writing that Zelda had been hoping to get 'bits' in the Diaghilev Ballet and that the only people who came to the studio to watch her 'who she thought were emissaries of his and who turned out to be from the Folies Bergeres … thought they might make her into an American shimmy dancer.'"

-- Again and again, like a drumbeat, comes that sneering disparagement of her abilities and moral fibre. Here, for example (and remember that Zelda's struggling with mental illness at this point): "He even suggested that she try to write again, telling her that although she was completely unable to plot a story she might try something along the line of Chekhov’s The Darling. She did not answer that letter and Scott quickly apologized for having been snappish... 'I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.'" Brilliant. An object lesson in how to be destructive, patronizing, and infantilizing all in one fell swoop... And he's incorrigible. Here's a letter to Scottie, their daughter: "Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She has no education -- not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me -- but from some inner stubborness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing 'kinetic,' which, in physics, means internal driving force -- she had to be led or driven."

-- Is it any wonder that she felt she had to prove herself, and perished on that rock?

SCOTT'S PLIGHT

-- Milford makes no secret, on the other hand, of the difficulties Scott experienced in dealing with his wife's mental illness. That would be a tough road for anyone. Plus, his drinking was problematic all his life. And funding Zelda's treatment was costly. He starts working for MGM to raise money, and when photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten meets him in New York in 1937, he doesn't recognize him: "Completely changed... pale and haggard." This is all too apparent in the tragically expressive photo he takes:



-- But Scott blames Zelda in a way that doesn't acknowledge in the slightest his own contribution to the mess they're in. In an embittered letter to Scottie, after she is expelled from college, he writes: "When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided -- she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever… The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds -- she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage -- sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy -- she’s passed that failing on to you. For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit -- nothing but 'getting by' and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers."

ZELDA'S ILLNESS

-- It seems no-one really understood at the time the depth charge that failed affair with the French aviator set off in Zelda's life. September 1924, Scott will later realize, was the month when something important changed.

-- There is much material charting the tragic progression of Zelda's mental struggles. But this is 1970, so we can't expect the latest word on the exact nature of her psychiatric condition. Nor is the issue of sexuality fully explored, but only hinted at: "On the boat to Europe Zelda had mentioned to Scott that she thought a friend from the ballet was a homosexual. Now, desperately uncertain of herself, she accused Scott of a homosexual liaison with Ernest Hemingway." In an account for her therapist at the beginnings of her treatment, she writes: "I loved my ballet teacher in Paris more than anything else in the world. But I did not know how."

-- In her unfinished novel Caesar's Things, she refers to a mysterious schoolyard incident that befalls the heroine, Janno. "Later in the manuscript Zelda writes that what happened to Janno was 'the kind of thing one forgets… until years later… [when] this sort of thing looms up in a different light. It is then no longer a departure from an habitual rectitude, but a presage of the disasters which finally came; a monstrous weakness pervading life until finally it has prevailed, and declared that to corrupt and to degrade had always been its intent.'" There is apparently a lot that mirrors Zelda's life in this book, so you have to wonder... I think it would be interesting to supplement this excellent piece of groundwork with a more recent biography.

***

10 March 1948. The fire. "Nine women were killed, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died with them. Her body was identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it."