Who was Zelda?  If we start with the facts, she was born on the 24^th of July, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest of six children of Anthony and Minnie Sayre.  Her mother named her Zelda after an 1866 novel, Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony.  She was many things—a tomboy, a Southern belle, the Jazz Age’s preeminent flapper, an artist, a possible schizophrenic, and the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The truth is, Zelda has become the stuff of myth.  It’s no surprise, then, that St. Martin’s Press has just released Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler.  It’s a daunting enterprise, putting words in Zelda’s mouth, imagining her rich emotional life, whether jumping in a fountain in Washington Square, pinioned against a wall by Ernest Hemingway in a supposed sexual assault, painting watercolors from within sanitarium walls, or listening in bed to a husband’s cobbled dreams that may involve a sexual tryst with the same Hemingway.  Fowler has summoned the voice of Zelda, and who are we to argue her intent?

Even if the mystery of the woman herself will never be completely unraveled, especially in a fictional recounting, there’s a wealth of material to fit several library shelves. 

Sally Cline’s biography, Zelda Fitzgerald, clearly delineates just how devil-may-care Zelda was as a young girl.  The actress Tallulah Bankhead was a contemporary of Zelda’s and according to Cline, “To entertain the boys Zelda double-somersaulted, cartwheeled, and competed with daredevil Tallulah ‘Dutch’ Bankhead in backbends.”  Zelda’s father served on the Alabama Supreme Court for 20 years and she frequently hung around the Greek Revival building, where the Confederate Jefferson Davis, had taken his oath of office.  She would race to the dome, then “as defiant as Davis himself, sit astride the guns before sliding down the banisters of the famous rotunda circular staircase.”

Zelda loved to shock.  It was absolute taboo for a young unmarried woman to discuss childbirth, but not for Zelda.  On Armistice Day, 1918, in the midst of a confetti-showered crowd, she suddenly announced: “I’m so full of confetti I could give birth to paper dolls.”  She had the soul of a prankster. Calling the local fire department in Montgomery to falsely report her cousin Noonie was stuck on the roof, she climbed up herself to meet the arrivals.  In 1920, when the recently wedded Fitzgeralds were living in Westport, CT, she repeated the stunt, but this time when the fire brigade asked where the blaze was, she pointed to her breast.    

Zelda had always been quick to identify with her fictional heroines. Kendall Taylor in Sometimes Madness is Wisdom (Zelda and Scott Fitzegerald, A Marriage) describes Zelda’s identification with Owen Johnson’s 1914 bestseller, The Salamander. “I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.” Owen’s character declares:  “I am in the world to do something unusual, extraordinary.  I adore precipices!  It’s such fun to go dashing along the edges, leaning up against the wind that tries to throw you over.” As Taylor states, “Far from being an impediment, Zelda was the backbone of Fitzgerald’s fiction.”

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald  literally wrote themselves into existence.  In The Beautiful and the Damned, Gloria (a thinly-veiled Zelda) states: “What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages!  Mine is going to be outstanding…it’s going to be the live, lovely glamorous performance and the world shall be the scenery.” That was only one speech that was a direct lift from Zelda’s own diaries. Painfully, Scott’s plagiarism of her works became as commonplace in their relationship as his lifelong alcoholic dependency. 

Fragments of truth emerge through the prism of others.  James R. Mellow in his biography Invented Lives quotes from Alec McKaig’s diaries, a Princeton friend of Scott’s who knew them intimately.  “Trouble is—Fitz absorbed in Zelda’s personality—she is the stronger of the two.  She has supplied him with all his copy for women.”  McKaig goes from a snobbish rejection of Zelda to pure adoration:   “Temperamental small town Southern Belle—Chews  gum—shows knees.”  Later, he shaved the back of her neck to make her bob look better.  “She is lovely—wonderful hair—eyes and mouth.”

Edmund Wilson, another contemporary, observed in Cline’s book that “If ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched, it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitgerald.” He described a meeting Zelda had with a Theosophist who declared the two soulmates.  Zelda believed that two souls are incarnated together, not necessarily at the same time.

Sara and Gerald Murphy were perhaps the most sought-after couple whom the Fitzgeralds met while abroad.  They partied together, became fast friends, and took Zelda and Scott on their own terms.  It’s interesting to note Gerald’s comment about Zelda’s effect on him in Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After by by Honoria Donnelly:  “Her beauty was not legitimate at all.  It was all in her eyes.  They were strange eyes…almost masculine in their directness…one doesn’t find it often in women, perfectly level and head-on.”

It was during their 1924 summer with the Murphys that Zelda became infatuated with Edouard Jozan, a French aviator who dazzled her with his flying and good looks. The Murphys observed the progression of the friendship, but that is all.  In Linda Wagner-Martin’s biography, Zelda Sayre Fizgerald, An American Woman’s Life, she clearly states that “the silence that surrounds the end of the Zelda-Jozan friendship is impenetrable.” What Scott apparently did in response was to lock up Zelda in the villa where they were staying. (In Zelda’s unfinished novel, Caesar’s Things, begun after Scott’s death in 1940, she alludes to being locked up, as well as suffering a broken heart.)  A month later, Wagner-Martin details Scott showing up on the Murphys’ doorstep in the middle of the night, Zelda having overdosed on sleeping pills. 

In Fowler’s novel, the reader gets lips and hands and thighs alluded to between Zelda and her aviator but no consummation.  The fictional Zelda proclaims that she is “released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I’d ever been before.”  Fowler’s heroine goes home to Scott to ponder her choices, deciding that “Scott, for all his shortcomings, has my heart.” Though she doesn’t return to the beach for a week, she isn’t locked up and she doesn’t try to take her own life. 

Fowler also gives the relationship between Fitzgerald, Zelda and Ernest Hemingway a pivotal place.  She creates a melodramatic scene in the novel where Hemingway sexually accosts Zelda and she rejects his advances in her own provocative way. It’s unlikely that it ever happened, but it makes for good copy.  In Cline’s version, Zelda felt menaced by Hemingway’s brutish behavior.  She told the writer, “No one is as masculine as you pretend to be. In the same book, Cline tells us that years later, after Zelda had been in and out of several sanitariums, Hemingway confronted Scott.  “I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her.”  He also made unfounded accusations about her lesbian tendencies.  Zelda was acquainted with Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, but it was through her nascent talent as a painter.

As for Zelda’s mental instability, there were traces of it on her mother’s side of the family, and her brother Antonio committed suicide after a brief incarceration for neurasthenia.  Was she schizophrenic, as Scott had been led to believe?  Mary Parker, an art therapist who knew Zelda well and is mentioned in Cline’s biography, saw no signs of that illness.  “As for her speech it was not incoherent.  She was absolutely lucid…she merely spoke in an unusual way.”  But years of electroshock and experimental insulin therapies had taken their toll.  In Fowler’s afterword, she states that more recent medical opinions conclude that Zelda had a bipolar disorder, complicated by excessive physical activity and alcohol. 

Mellow’s account is probably the most telling in terms of the ultimate destruction of Zelda’s creative freedom.  In an interview with one of Zelda’s psychiatrists, Fitzgerald said that he and the doctors had agreed that “the unconditional surrender was that she would have to give up the idea of writing anything.”  (In an earlier breakdown, doctors had forced Zelda to give up her ballet lessons.)  That Zelda, in secret, managed to complete in a matter of weeks Save Me the Waltz, while Scott spent nine years struggling over Tender is the Night is its own testament to her resilience.

Zelda, or at least one of Scott’s inventions of her, can be seen in 3D in Baz Luhrmann’s revival of  The Great Gatsby.  The real Zelda undoubtedly took some of her secrets with her in the tragic fire at Highland Hospital in 1948.   But there’s another one who will always belong rightly to our imaginations. 

Author Bio:
Sandra Bertrand is a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine. 

For Highbrow Magazine

Photo: Kenneth M. Wright (Wikimedia.org, Creative Commons)