Zelda Fitzgerald

Montgomery

Zelda Sayre was born on 24 July 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest of six children. Her father, Anthony Sayre, was a judge, later of the Alabama Supreme Court; her mother, Minnie, encouraged her dancing and her writing.

She was deliberately shocking as a teenager in a small Southern city, by every account including her own. She smoked, drank, stayed out late with soldiers from the local camps, and swam in a flesh-coloured bathing suit that started a rumour she swam naked. She was also a serious dancer, taking ballet from childhood and performing locally.

In July 1918 she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance. He was a lieutenant stationed at Camp Sheridan, twenty-one, and had written an unpublished novel. She was seventeen.

Marriage

Zelda broke off the engagement in 1919 because Fitzgerald could not support her. He went back to St. Paul, rewrote his novel, and sold it. This Side of Paradise was published on 26 March 1920, and they married in New York eight days later, on 3 April, in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

They became famous immediately, and for a specific reason: the novel had described a new kind of American girl, and readers took Zelda for the real-life version of her. Newspapers followed them. They rode on car roofs, jumped into fountains, drank continuously, and were photographed doing it.

Their daughter Frances, called Scottie, was born in October 1921. Zelda's remark on coming out of the anaesthetic — hoping her daughter would be a beautiful little fool — went into The Great Gatsby, given to Daisy Buchanan.

Her writing, and his

Fitzgerald used Zelda's diaries and letters in his fiction, at first with her permission and later without asking. She reviewed his novel The Beautiful and Damned in 1922 and pointed it out publicly, writing that she recognised portions of an old diary of hers that had mysteriously disappeared, and bits of letters, edited to make them more polished. It seemed, she added, that plagiarism begins at home.

She was also publishing. Magazines ran her essays and stories through the 1920s, and several appeared under his name, or under both names, because a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald earned several times what one by Zelda Fitzgerald did. The arrangement was financial, both of them said so, and it has made the authorship of some pieces hard to settle.

Paris and the ballet

The Fitzgeralds came to Europe in 1924 and spent much of the next seven years in France, on the Riviera and in Paris. They knew Gerald and Sara Murphy, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Both Fitzgeralds drank heavily throughout these years.

Zelda went back to ballet in America in 1927, at twenty-seven, with an intensity that alarmed everyone around her. In the summer of 1928, back in Paris and living at 58 rue de Vaugirard, she began training under Lubov Egorova, a former dancer of the Imperial Russian Ballet, and practised for ei[2]ght hours a day.

Twenty-seven is very late to try to turn ballet into a profession. She was good enough to be offered a place with a company in Naples in 1929, and she turned it down. She kept practising.

Illness

In April 1930 Zelda had a breakdown and entered a clinic outside Paris, then the Prangins clinic on Lake Geneva. Her diagnosis there was schizophrenia.

That diagnosis governed the rest of her life. She was hospitalised repeatedly for the next eighteen years — Prangins in Switzerland, the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Craig House in New York, Sheppard Pratt, and finally Highland Hospital in Asheville. Treatments included insulin shock and, later, electroconvulsive therapy.

Doctors reading the surviving records since have argued that her pattern of high energy and collapse looks more like bipolar disorder, and that schizophrenia was over-diagnosed in the period. Neither view can now be tested. What the record shows is a woman who was ill, who was treated by the methods available, and who was well enough between episodes to write, paint and correspond.

Save Me the Waltz

In 1932, at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, Zelda wrote a novel in six weeks and sent it directly to Maxwell Perkins, her husband's editor at Scribner's.

Save Me the Waltz follows Alabama Beggs, a Southern judge's daughter who marries a painter, follows him to Europe, and takes up ballet too late. It is closely autobiographical.

Fitzgerald was furious. He had been working on Tender Is the Night since 1925, using the same material, and he objected that she had taken it and that some passages described his own psychiatric history. He required cuts and rewrites before publication. The book appeared in October 1932, sold about 1,400 copies, and was reviewed badly, partly because the text had been cut in ways that damaged it.

She wrote a second novel, Caesar's Things, which she never finished. She also wrote a play, Scandalabra, staged by an amateur company in Baltimore in 1933 without success.

Painting

From the mid-1920s Zelda painted, and after 1932 it became her main work. She produced flower paintings, New York cityscapes, religious scenes, and a series of ballet figures with enormous distorted feet and legs.

She had a solo exhibition in New York in 1934, arranged by Fitzgerald while she was hospitalised. Reviewers treated it as a curiosity — the mad wife of a famous writer — and it sold little. Her paintings are now exhibited on their own terms, and the largest holding is at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in her home town.

The last years

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood in December 1940, aged forty-four. Zelda did not attend the funeral; she was too unwell to travel.

She spent her last eight years between her mother's house in Montgomery and Highland Hospital in Asheville, going into hospital when she got worse and coming home when she improved. She wrote letters, painted, and worked on Caesar's Things.

The fire

On the night of 10 March 1948 a fire began in the kitchen of the main building at Highland Hospital, in Asheville. It went up a dumbwaiter shaft and spread through the floors above.

Zelda was on the top floor, in a room that was locked, awaiting electroconvulsive therapy the next morning. Nine women died, including her. The bodies were burned beyond recognition, and she was identified by a slipper found beneath her body.

She was forty-seven. She is buried with Fitzgerald in Rockville, Maryland, under a stone carved with the last line of The Great Gatsby.

Why Zelda Fitzgerald matters

Zelda Fitzgerald matters first for the work: a novel, short fiction, essays, a play and several hundred paintings, made mostly during eighteen years of psychiatric illness and mostly dismissed at the time because of who her husband was.

Her life also shows how a woman's work could disappear into her husband's. From the 1970s onwards biographers reopened her story and found a writer whose material was absorbed into his books, whose one novel he cut before publication, and whose paintings were reviewed as evidence of her illness rather than as art. Some retellings make that case too simply; Fitzgerald also paid for her treatment for a decade and arranged her New York exhibition. The basic point stands. The material of her life was published under his name more often than under hers.

Whose name went on the stories

The question of what Zelda Fitzgerald wrote and who was paid for it has a documentary answer, and it is more specific than the argument usually allows. Between 1929 and 1931 College Humor ran five of her stories about young women, all bylined “by F.[3] Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald”: Original Follies Girl, Southern Girl, The Girl the Prince Liked, The Girl with Talent and Poor Working Girl. Matthew Bruccoli's judgement on them is that they were almost entirely hers.

The reason for the double byline was money. A story with Scott Fitzgerald's name on it sold for several times what one with hers alone would fetch. The scholar Kirk Curnutt puts the total at nearly two dozen stories and articles between 1922 and 1934 that carried his name or both names because the joint byline raised the price.

The clearest case is A Millionaire's Girl, which the Saturday Evening Post bought for $4,000 in May 1930 and published under Scott Fitzgerald's name alone. Their agent Harold Ober admitted in writing what had happened. He felt a little guilty about dropping her name from the story, he wrote, but using both names would have tied it to the College Humor pieces and might have caused trouble. Two later stories, Miss Ella and A Couple of Nuts, appeared in Scribner's under her name by itself.

The review she wrote of his novel, 1922

In April 1922 the New York Tribune asked Zelda Fitzgerald to review her husband's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. The literary editor intended it as a publicity stunt. What he got was a piece that has outlasted most of the criticism written about Fitzgerald that year.

She noted a new book with an orange jacket on the table beside her bed, and called it strange and uncannily fascinating. Then she said what she had recognised in it: a portion of an old diary of hers that had mysteriously disappeared shortly after her marriage, and scraps of letters which, considerably edited, sounded vaguely familiar. She recommended that everyone buy the book, on the grounds that she had seen a cloth-of-gold dress on Forty-second Street for three hundred dollars.

It is a joke that is also a receipt. The claim that Scott Fitzgerald used her private writing in his fiction is usually treated as a later feminist reassessment; she made it herself, in print, in 1922, and made it funny enough that nobody could object.

The painting

Zelda Fitzgerald painted seriously from the late 1920s and kept at it through the hospital years. In 1934, while she was a patient, Scott Fitzgerald arranged an exhibition of her work in New York at a gallery run by Cary Ross on East 86th Street. Reviewers treated it largely as a curiosity attached to a famous name, and it sold almost nothing.

Much of what she made has gone. Paintings sat in family attics for decades and a quantity was burned on her mother's instruction. What survives is scattered, mostly in private hands and in Montgomery, and it is enough to show a real painter. The figures are flattened, high in colour and unsentimental, and the New York and Paris cityscapes look nothing like anybody's idea of a society wife's watercolours.

She trained as a dancer with the same seriousness and started far too late for it. From about 1927 she worked with Lubov Egorova, formerly of the Ballets Russes, in Paris, sometimes eight hours a day. In September 1929 the San Carlo company in Naples wrote offering her a place. What happened next is not documented, and the page will not claim that she refused it.