Zelda Fitzgerald
The Passion of Madness
Sep 3, 2009 Paula Marie Deubel
Wife of famous novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda was a talented novelist, painter, writer of articles, short stories, and a play. She claimed that her husband plagiarized her work. Both were highly resentful of each other's literary talents.
Zelda was a Wild Child
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre (named after a gypsy) was raised in a prominent southern family, and possessed a soft angelic beauty despite her tomboyish ways. Zelda was a dynamic dare-devil who loved to shock people. The conventions of the times certainly did not apply to her.
In 1920, against her family's wishes, she married Scott (later famous for novels including The Great Gatsby). They made a very glamorous pair. Zelda once wrote him: “Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered—and I was delivered to you—to be worn—I want you to wear me […] — to the world.”
Their union produced a volatile mixture of vengeful passion, undying friendship, and blatant cruelty. In retrospect, their own story was fated to become an American legend painted over in golden hues. As Scott grew rich and famous they became poster children of the Jazz Era.
The Roaring Twenties Became Them
It’s not surprising Zelda chose a kindred spirit, like herself, in the form of flamboyant Scott Fitzgerald. He referred to Zelda as the original flapper girl.
They lived extravagantly in New York and Paris, flaunting high spirits by Zelda jumping fully clothed into Union Square fountain, Scott and Zelda riding down Fifth Avenue on top of a taxi, or diving from great heights into the Mediterranean Sea. They were kicked out of two different hotels on their honeymoon because of loud, all-night parties.
One can imagine the youthful excitement and abandoned laughter. These colorful memories are nostalgically incorporated over and over in many of Scott’s novels; Zelda became his vital literary muse.
Dark Passions
There was a dark side to this union, though. Scott drank heavily (often with author Ernest Hemingway, a man Zelda disliked), and perhaps did not notice Zelda was more fragile than she seemed. Mental illness and depression ran in her family and she had tried to overdose on sleeping pills.
Both Zelda and Scott flirted outrageously, often arguing, and once Zelda was so jealous she flung herself down a stone stairway. She felt ignored by long hours Scott spent writing, and, perhaps in her desperation, began practicing ballet to the point of total exhaustion.
Zelda's Talents
Zelda’s paintings (mostly water colors) include curios of distorted figures with a delusive, chimerical quality and eye-catching color.
Ballet inspired Zelda’s Save Me the Dance (1932), a novel written with enormous attention to detail, which defines its beauty. The story, itself, seems less important than the way it’s told, although is a disguised portrait of her marriage. Brilliant originality glows beneath her luminous metaphor and almost hallucinatory use of imagery. The novel reads like a poem:
“(...) insects swarm to the golden holocaust of the hall light.”
Despite it appearing as a very laborious work, Zelda wrote the novel in only two months.
Artistic Jealousy
Save Me the Waltz enraged Scott; he felt it was too personal and contained biographical material for a novel he'd been working on four years. He insisted Zelda delete large segments of her book, which she did (plausibly explaining its somewhat weak plot). Scott angrily accused her of being a third-rate writer and a failure. Zelda - already broken and emotionally fragile - was crushed and never published another book.
A revised version was published in 1932, but the original manuscript no longer exists. Zelda’s novel found its place in contemporary American literature after her death, although met no success in its time.
Zelda’s trust in her husband must have greatly eroded when she found passages from her letters, and diary (which was missing), incorporated into her husband’s famous novels, parts even written in verbatim. Scott also published Zelda’s articles under his own legendary name (this act would bring money now desperately needed), with no credit assigned to her. Indeed, one sometimes feels a brush with Zelda in Scott’s writing; then again, his novels were largely inspired by her spirit.
Downfall
Zelda was institutionalized in Paris, 1930, at the La Sanitarium de la Malmaison. Previous symptoms culminated into hallucinations and delusions; for the remainder of her life (eighteen years) Zelda would be in and out of asylums. Sometimes violent, she believed she was in contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, and Apollo. People appeared distorted to her and she heard deafening sounds.
Diagnosed schizophrenic, her last psychiatrist, Dr. Irving Pine, believed she was bi-polar (consistent with a fast and florid writing ability in mania). She may have also had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since she experienced obsessions (her breakdown occurred worrying about being late to dance class) and, later, experienced what could be obsessive religious scrupulosity.
In her lucid hours, endearing letters were continually exchanged with Scott, although he moved on to another lover. Yet, reflecting over their relationship in later years, Scott said, “I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of it.” Zelda and Scott never divorced, though both felt their literary and personal lives had come to ruin and failure.
In 1948 Zelda was locked on the top floor of Highland Hospital in North Carolina, awaiting electroshock treatment for the following day. After midnight a terrible fire broke out. While inmates screamed from the barred windows, Zelda burned to death in her bed.
Zelda came both into, and out of, this world in a flame. Scott, undermined by alcoholism and forgotten by the public, was already dead. Both believed they had failed in all their dreams. They left behind one daughter, “Scottie.” On their tombstone is written an apropos verse from The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Intoxication
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles