Happy Birthday, Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald’s description of her life in the 1920s:

Spinach and champagne. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef’s headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives.

Excerpt of letter from Zelda to Scott Fitzgerald:

Scott – there’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love – All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me less – and less – and I’d do anything – anything – to keep your heart for my own – I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally – Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting – I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready – Don’t – don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me – You’ve trusted me wiht the dearest heart of all – and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had –

How can you think deliberately of life without me – If you should die – O Darling – darling Scot – It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too – I’d have no purpose in life – just a pretty – decoration. 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, like a watch-charm or a button hole bouquet – to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help – to know that you can’t do anything without me.

Watercolor done by Zelda Fitzgerald, 1944 – Times Square

Excerpt of Zelda’s writing – this from her novel. A description of a summer dusk in Montgomery Alabama:

There exists in Montgomery a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the great incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called into bed from the dusty streets … The drug stores are bright at night with the organdie balloons of girls’ dresses under the big electric fans. Automobiles stand along the curbs in front of open frame houses at dusk, and sounds of supper being prepared drift through the soft splotches of darkness to the young world that moves every evening out of doors. Telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one. Nothing seems ever to happen.

Excerpt of review Zelda wrote about her husband’s book The Beautiful and Damned:

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.

Excerpt from Zelda’s essay “Eulogy on the Flapper”:

How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends – it needs only crowds …

Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a one-act by Tennessee Williams, begins with Scott coming to the asylum to see Zelda – who has gone mad – and who believes she will be a great ballerina, even though she is way too old and has no talent. (Geraldine Page played Zelda in the premiere production of this play) Scott, meanwhile, is whoring out his talent in Hollywood and his body is already deteriorating from his liquor intake. He has quit drinking, but the damage has been done. Zelda and Scott haven’t seen each other in a year. Scott is horrified at her condition. She dances around in a bedraggled tutu. But because this is a ghost play, and people move in and out of different time zones, etc., there are premonitions of what is to come for both of these people.

From Clothes for a Summer Hotel, by Tennessee Williams

[The intern exits into the asylum closing the doors behind him. Zelda begins a slow descent and moves downstage. Despite her increase of weight and the shapeless coat, her approach has the majesty of those purified by madness and by fire. Her eyes open very wide. Scott is barely able to hold his ground before their blaze. Zelda has to shout above the wind]

ZELDA. Is that really you, Scott? Are you my lawful husband, the celebrated F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of my life? Sorry to say you’re hard to recognize now. Why didn’t you warn me of this — startling reunion, Scott?

SCOTT. I had to come at once when the doctors advised me of your remarkable improvement.

ZELDA. — Not exactly an accurate report. — Aren’t you somewhat unseasonably dressed for a chilly autumn afternoon?

SCOTT. When I got the doctors’ report, well, I forgot the difference in weather between the West Coast and here, just hopped right onto the first plane — bought a spare shirt at a shop at the airport.

ZELDA. I see, I see, that’s why you’re dressed as if about to check in at a summer hotel.

SCOTT. It’s all right, Zelda.

ZELDA. Is it all right, Scott?

SCOTT. Since I have to fly back tomorrow. — Don’t be so standoffish, let me kiss you.

[He goes to Zelda and tentatively embraces and kisses her in a detached manner]

ZELDA. — Well.

SCOTT. I would describe that as a somewhat perfunctory response.

ZELDA. And I’d describe it as a meaninglessly conventional — gesture to have embraced at all — after all … [He draws back, wounded: she smiles, a touch of ferocity in her look] — Sorry, Goofo. It’s been so long since we’ve exchanged more than letters … And you fly back tomorrow? We have only this late afternoon in which to renew our — acquaintance.

SCOTT. [uncomfortably] Work on the Coast, film-work, is very exacting, Zelda. Inhumanly exacting. People pretend to feel but don’t feel at all.

ZELDA. Don’t they call it the world of make-believe? Isn’t it a sort of madhouse, too? You occupy one there, and I occupy one here.

SCOTT. I’m working on such a tight schedule. Never mind. Here’s the big news I bring you. I’m completing a novel, a new one at last, and it will be one that will rank with my very best, controlled as Gatsby but emotionally charged as Tender Is the —

[Pause]

ZELDA. — Good … will I be in it?

SCOTT. Not — recognizably …

ZELDA. Good. — So what is the program for us now? Shall we make a run for it and fall into a ditch to satisfy our carnal longings, Scott?

SCOTT. That was never the really important thing between us, beautiful, yes, but less important than —

ZELDA. [striking out] What was important to you was to absorb and devour!

SCOTT. I didn’t expect to find you in this — agitated mood. Zelda, I brought you a little gift. A new wedding band to replace the one you lost.

ZELDA. I didn’t lose it, Scott, I threw it away.

SCOTT. Why would you, how could you have –?

ZELDA. Scott, we’re no longer really married and I despise pretenses.

SCOTT. I don’t look at it that way.

ZELDA. Because you still pay for my confinement? Exorbitant, for torture.

SCOTT. You always want to return here, you’re not forced to, Zelda.

ZELDA. I only come back here when I know I’m too much for Mother and the conventions of Montgomery, Alabama. I am pointed out on the street as a lunatic now.

SCOTT. Whatever the reason, Zelda, you do return by choice, so don’t call it confinement. And even if you don’t want a new marriage ring, call it a ring of, of — a covenant with the past that’s always still present, dearest.

ZELDA. I don’t want it; I will not take it!

SCOTT. [with a baffled sigh] Of course we do have nonmaterial bonds, memories such as — “Do you remember before keys turned in locks — when life was a close-up, not an occasional letter — how I hated swimming naked off the rocks — but you liked nothing better?”

ZELDA. No, no, Scott, don’t try to break my heart with early romantic effusions. No, Goofo, it’s much too late!

SCOTT. I wasn’t warned to expect this cold, violent attitude in you!

ZELDA. Never in all those years of coexistence in time did you make the discovery that I have the eyes of a hawk which is a bird of nature as predatory as a husband who appropriates your life as material for his writing. Poor Scott. Before you offered marriage to the Montgomery belle, you should have studied a bit of ornithology at Princeton.

SCOTT. I don’t believe a course in ornithology was on the curriculum at Princeton in my day!

ZELDA. [distracted, looking vaguely about] What a pity! You could have been saved completely for your art — and I for mine …

SCOTT. Didn’t hear that, the wind blows your voice away unless you shout. Is it always so windy here?

[The wind blows]

ZELDA. Sunset Hill on which this cage is erected is the highest to catch the most wind to whip the flame-like skirts as red as the sisters’ skirts are black. Isn’t that why you selected this place for my confinement? [Scott moves toward her, extending his arms and gesturing toward the bench] Are you studying ballet, too?

SCOTT. [attempting to laugh] Me, studying ballet?

ZELDA. You made a gesture out of classic ballet, extending your arms toward me, then extending the right arm toward that bench which I will not go near — again.

SCOTT. Now, now, Zelda, stop play acting, come here!

ZELDA. I won’t approach that bench because of the bush next to it. Besides I’m only taking a little recess from O.T.

BECKY. [offstage voice] The head of the Harlow, the platinum of it, the bleach! — My personal salon was only a block from Goldwyn’s …

[Zelda starts drifting back to the doorway of the asylum. Scott grabs her]

SCOTT. Zelda, don’t withdraw! — What are you — Tell me, Zelda, what are you working on mostly in Occupational Therapy now, dear?

ZELDA. The career that I undertook because you forbade me to write!

SCOTT. Writing calls for discipline! Continual!

ZELDA. And drink, continual, too? No, I respect your priority in the career of writing although it preceded and eclipsed my own. I made that sacrifice to you and so elected ballet. Isadora Duncan said, “I want to teach the whole world to dance!” — I’m more selfish, just want to teach myself.

SCOTT. The strenuous exercises will keep your figure trimmer.

ZELDA. Than writing and drinking?

SCOTT. Oh, I’ve quit that.

ZELDA. Quit writing?

SCOTT. Quit drinking.

ZELDA. QUIT? DRINKING?

SCOTT. Completely.

ZELDA. Cross your heart and hope to die?

SCOTT. I cross my heart but I don’t hope to die until my new book is finished. [Scott has maneuvered Zelda toward the bench. He sits and gets her to sit] Zelda, I’ve had — several little heart disturbances lately …

ZELDA. You mean the romance? Or romances?

SCOTT. I mean — cardiac — incidents. At a movie premiere last week, as the film ended, it all started — fading out ….

ZELDA. Films always end with the fade-out.

SCOTT. I staggered so. I thought the audience would think I was drunk.

ZELDA. [sarcastically] Were they so foolish as that?

SCOTT. Luckily I had a friend with me who helped me out.

ZELDA. Oh, yes, I know about her.

SCOTT. You — she — you’d like her.

ZELDA. Certainly, if you do. Well — Scott? Let me say this quickly before I become disturbed and am hauled back in for restraint. You were not to blame. You needed a better influence, someone much more stable as a companion on the — roller-coaster ride which collapsed at the peak. You needed — her? Out there, utterly vulgar but — functioning well on that level.

SCOTT. Who are you, what are you — referring to, Zelda?

ZELDA. Who or what, which is it? Some are whats, some are whos. Which is she? — Never mind. You are in luck whichever … But can we turn this bench at an angle that doesn’t force me to look at the flaming bush here?

SCOTT. It’s such a lovely bush.

ZELDA. If you’re attracted by fire. Are you attracted by fire?

SCOTT. The leaves are — radiant, yes, they’re radiant as little torches. I feel as if they’d warm my hands if I —

ZELDA. I feel as if they’d burn me to unrecognizable ash. You see, the demented often have the gift of Cassandra, the gift of —

SCOTT. The gift of –?

ZELDA. Premonition! I WILL DIE IN FLAMES!

SCOTT. Please, Zelda, don’t shout, don’t draw attention. The doctors will think my visits disturb you — I won’t be allowed to come back.

ZELDA. Visits? Did you say visits? That is plural. I wouldn’t say that your presence here today qualifies as a very plural event.

[She starts toward the gates. Scott rises to follow]

SCOTT. You’re going inside?

ZELDA. I have my own little Victrola. Mama sent it to me for Christmas. I’m preparing for Diaghilev; he’s offered me an audition. I’m going to do a Bach fugue with almost impossible tempi I was told. Hah!

SCOTT. Zelda, I didn’t come all the way out here to listen to a Bach fugue, and watching you dance is a pleasure I’ve — exhausted …

ZELDA. Sorry. But I’m working against time!

Nostalgia is comforting to some, dangerous to others. It is a great mistake to try to sway others to your point of view on that score.

In 1930, Zelda Fitzgerald suffered her first breakdown. The Fitzgeralds were in Paris, and Zelda had become obsessed with ballet. She danced for six hours a day, and would answer the door in full tutu and toe shoes. It was far too late for her to be a ballerina, but Zelda could not stop. There was a compulsion in it. Her husband, desperate to help his wife, kept them traveling – to Africa, and their other haunts, but nothing stopped the breakdown. She was finally institutionalized. There she was treated by a man named Dr. Forel, who sensed her deep desire to be a writer, a chronicler, so he had her write down everything she thought and remembered. That record still exists. It is shattering to read. Zelda was not the writer her husband was, obviously, and she also lacked discipline. Her husband had some demons himself, but he was also a craftsman, and had the wherewithal to sit down and every day and keep working. Zelda did not. Regardless, I read some of her stuff and I think, “You know what … there is something there.” First of all, you can see why Fitzgerald was so inspired by her (in a similar way that Joyce was inspired by his wife Nora). Zelda was an original personality. The original flapper. The jazz baby. She didn’t participate in the zeitgeist. She WAS the zeitgeist. He ended up being the chronicler of it but much of his observations came from the fact that he lived at close range with someone who embodied the mores of the time. However, my point here is that I read Zelda’s description of what it was like for her breaking down, and tears flood my eyes. I wonder if I can do the same.

Here is an excerpt of the record she wrote for Dr. Forel in 1930:

When I returned to Paris I went again into the same school. I have worked four hours a day and in the evening, and Sundays, during the holidays, on the boat when I was travelling. I began to understand it.

Suddenly last spring I began to see all red while I worked or I saw no colors – I could not bear to look out of windows, for sometimes I saw humanity as a bottle of ants. Then we left for Cannes where I worked on technique and where after the lessons I had the impression that I was an old person living very quietly in winter. I loved my ballet teacher in Paris more than anything else in the world. But I did not know how. She had everything of beauty in her head, the brightness of a greek temple, the frustration of a mind searching for a place, the glory of cannon bullets; all that I saw in her steps. From Christmas on I was not able to work correctly anymore, but she helped me to learn more, to go further. She always told me to look after myself. I tried to, but it was worse. I was in a real “mess” … One day the world between me and the others stopped – I was dragged like by a magnet – I had headaches and I could jump higher than ever, but the day after I was sick. I left my lessons, but without them I could not do anything. It was Easter, I wanted to do something for my little girl, but I could not stop in a shop and Madame came to encourage me. Enough to give me the strength to go to Malmaison. There the doctors told me that I was well and I came back to the studio, unable to walk in the streets, full of medicine, trying to work in an atmosphere which was becoming more and more strange … My husband forced me to go to Valmont- and now I am here, with you, in a situation where I cannot be anybody, full of vertigo, with an increasing noise in my ears, feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.

I am dependent on my husband, and he told me that I must get cured. I accept, but as I am lost about anything without him, with his life in which there is nothing for me except the physical comfort, when I get out of your clinic it will be with an idea: to arrange myself in any condition to be able to breathe freely. Life, beauty or death, all that is equal for me.

I must add another thing: this story is the fault of nobody but me. I believed I was a Salamander, and it seems that I am nothing but an impediment.

I am heartsick reading that.

Here is an excerpt from an essay called “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number –“, and the authors are listed as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It is a list, broken up by specific dates, of all of the hotel rooms they have lived in. It’s a haunting piece of writing, full of fun and love and excitement, but with the breath of impending anxiety flapping over it. There is so much travel, and it sounds so romantic and exciting, but underneath it all is the sense that they may be running from something. Not only that, but the early dates are all from the 1920s, with the sense of irresponsibility, fun, and staved-off adulthood that that decade implies. But 1929 looms like a specter in the distance throughout this essay. It is a narrative spoken by an impregnable “We”.

In the Hotel des Princes at Rome we lived on Bel Paese cheese and Corvo wine and made friends with a delicate spinster who intended to stop there until she finished a three-volume history of the Borgias. The sheets were damp and the nights were perforated by the snores of the people next door, but we didn’t mind because we could always come home down the stairs to the Via Sistina, and there were jonquils and beggars along that way. We were too superior at that time to use the guide books and wanted to discover the ruins for ourselves, which we did when we had exhausted the night-life and the market places and the campagna. We liked the Castello Sant’Angelo because of its round mysterious unity and the river and the debris about its base. It was exciting being lost between centuries in the Roman dusk and taking your sense of direction from the Colosseum.

Another excerpt from “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number –“.

In Paris we economized again in a not-yet-dried cement hotel, the name of which we’ve forgotten. It cost us a good deal, for we ate out every night to avoid starchy table d’hotes. Sylvia Beach invited us to dinner and the talk was all of the people who had discovered Joyce; we called on friends in better hotels: Zoe Akins, who had sought the picturesque of the open fires at Foyot’s, and Esther at the Port-Royal, who took us to see Romaine Brooks; studio, a glass enclosed square of heaven swung high above Paris.

Then southward again, and wasting the dinner hour in an argument about which hotel: there was one in Beaune where Ernest Hemingway had liked the trout. Finally we decided to drive all night, and we ate well in a stable courtyard facing a canal – the green-white glare of Provence had already begun to dazzle us so that we didn’t care whether the food was good or not. That night we stopped under the white-trunked trees to open the windshield to the moon and to the sweep of the south against our faces, and to better smell the fragrance rustling restlessly amidst the poplars.

At Frejus Plage, they had built a new hotel, a barren structure facing the beach where the sailors bathe. We felt very superior remembering how we had been the first travelers to like the place in summer.

After the swimming at Cannes was over and the year’s octopi had grown up in the crevices of the rocks, we started back to Paris. The night of the stock-market crash we stayed at the Beau Rivage in St. Raphael in the room Ring Lardner had occupied another year. We got out as soon as we could because we had been there so many times before – it is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

And a final excerpt from “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number –“:

Back in America we stayed at the New Yorker because the advertisements said it was cheap. Everywhere quietude was sacrificed to haste and, momentarily, it seemed an impossible world, even though lustrous from the roof in the blue dusk.

In Alabama, the streets were sleepy and remote and a calliope on parade gasped out the tunes of our youth. There was sickness in the family and the house was full of nurses so we stayed at the big new elaborate Jefferson Davis. The old houses near the business section were falling to pieces at last. New bungalows lined the cedar drives on the outskirts; four-o’clocks bloomed beneath the old iron door and arbor-vitae boxed the prim brick walks while vigorous weeds uprooted the pavements. Nothing had happened there since the Civil War. Everybody had forgotten why the hotel had been erected, and the clerk gave us three rooms and four baths for nine dollars a day. We used one as a sitting-room so the bell-boys would have some place to sleep when we rang for them.

Here is an excerpt from Nancy Milford’s wonderful biography Zelda: A Biography (I’ll read any book Nancy Milford writes!):

Zelda was like a rush of air into the Sayre household, lively and irrepressibly gay and wayward. Her sisters and brother were too old to be true playmates and they remember her only in motion: running with a dog, flying on a swing hung from a magnolia tree in their back yard, racing on roller skates as soon as she could stand well enough to navigate on them, swimming and diving fearlessly. And dancing. Showing off new steps and imitating dances she had seen.

When Zelda was asked later in her life to describe herself as a child, she said she was “independent – courageous – without thought for anyone else.” But she also remembered herself as “dreamy – a sensualist”, who was bright and loved sports, especially imaginative, competitive games. “I was a very active child and never tired, always running with no hat or coat even in the Negro district and far from my house. I liked houses under construction and often I walked on the open roofs; I liked to jump from high places … I liked to dive and climb in the tops of trees – I liked taking long walks far from town, sometimes going to a country churchyard where I went very often by myself.” In summary she said: “When I was a little girl I had great confidence in myself, even to the extent of walking by myself against life as it was then. I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.”

Zelda, age 18

Dorothy Parker has a vivid (and oft-quoted) memory of meeting Zelda for the first time:

“Robert Sherwood brought Scott and Zelda to me right after their marriage. I had met Scott before. He told me he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia! … But they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.”

Fragment of a letter Zelda wrote to Scott in 1920, shortly after their marriage:

I look down the tracks and see you coming – and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me – Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It’s like begging for mercy of a storm or killing Beauty or growing old, without you. I want to kiss you so – and in the back where your dear hair starts and your chest – I love you – and I cant tell you how much – To think that I’ll die without your knowing – Goofo, you’ve got to try [to] feel how much I do – how inanimate I am when you’re gone – I can’t even hate these damnable people – Nobodys got any right to live but us – and they’re dirtying up our world and I can’t hate them because I want you so – Come Quick – Come Quick to me – I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper – if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me – I still would want you I know –

Lover, Lover, Darling –
Your Wife