The Legend of Zelda...Queen of The Jazz Age (Zelda: A Biography - Nancy Milford)

Member Name: snowbunni

Product:	Zelda: A Biography - Nancy Milford
Date:	16/01/06 (289 review reads)
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Advantages: A Detailed, Interesting & Well-Researched Biography

Disadvantages: Tale Of A Short & Tragic Life

‘I don’t want you to see me growing old and ugly…we’ll just have to die when we’re thirty.’ Zelda Fitzgerald, 1919.



Zelda Fitzgerald, whose sentimental mother had named her after a gypsy queen she’d once read about in a novel, became royalty of her own sort at the height of the decadent twenties. As muse to and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she presided over a generation of Jazz Age flappers, and her beautiful, bobbed profile epitomised an era. Scott Fitzgerald found inspiration for his fiction in the hedonistic whirl around him. His subsequent fame allowed the Fitzgeralds to join the party, but ultimately, it was a lifestyle destined to destroy them both. Their glamorous hay-day was short-lived, and within less than two decades both were dead, annihilated by a combination of madness and alcoholism.


Nancy Milford’s biography is a sympathetic and detailed work, drawing heavily from Zelda’s and Scott’s own letters, diaries and other writing. She traces Zelda’s progression from the Country Clubs of the South to the cocktail parties of New York, the beaches of the Riviera, and finally, to the asylums in which she spent her desolate, final years. A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about the Jazz Age in general and the Fitzgeralds in particular, and in many cases they have been glorified & lionised beyond all recognition. Milford’s biography does succumb to a degree of this. On the whole, however, it is a raw account, faithful to both the charms and failings of its subject, and presented in a way that makes it both exceptionally interesting and engaging to read. It seems extraordinary to note that ‘Zelda’ was first published almost thirty-six years ago, in 1970. Its prose is so fresh and contemporary, and its subject matter still so compelling, that it might easily have been written last year.


Four central and inseparable themes dominate Milford’s biography, running through it concurrently; the Fitzgerald’s relationship, Zelda’s relationship to her art, Zelda’s madness, and Scott’s alcoholism. Milford’s prose urges forward with a disturbing force, towards its inevitable conclusion. It is almost like watching a terrible accident in slow motion. We know all along what will happen, what will become of them both, and yet Milford breathes such life into these long dead characters that one almost hopes to find the ending altered, or finds oneself willing the past to re-arrange itself to accommodate their unfulfilled dreams.

***

Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, at the very dawn of the Twentieth Century. Her background was unimpeachably upper class, in so far as such terms applied in the New World, and she grew up in the fold of a Confederate Establishment, whilst the Old South drew its final gasp around her. Zelda’s childhood was characterised by romance and affluence. Her father was a Supreme Court Judge, a model of reserve and respectability. Milford describes Zelda’s mother as an intelligent and eccentric woman, who, in her youth, had nurtured dreams of appearing upon the stage, dreams which her social position had precluded.

We learn that Mrs. Sayre allowed Zelda and her older sisters a great deal of freedom, often to the outrage of her conservative neighbours, who were generally too intimidated to remark upon it. A group of Montgomery’s respectable ladies did complain, however, when Zelda’s sisters took to bathing nude on their back porch, attracting the attention of several young men. It was suggested that they bathe elsewhere, to which Mrs. Sayre had simply replied, ‘Why should they? God gave them beautiful bodies.’ However it was Zelda who was the chief recipient of her mother’s permissiveness, and by her teens she had become extravagantly wild. She was notorious for her daring, her exploits and her pranks.

In the course of her research for the biography, most of which was undertaken in the late 1960’s, Milford was able to interview a number of Zelda’s early friends and contemporaries. She cites several conversations with stout old men in Alabama, men who had known Zelda in her teens. One of them said of her, ‘Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything, of boys, of being talked about; she was absolutely fearless. She had no more worries than a puppy would have, or a kitten…she did have a bad reputation. But Zelda didn’t seem to give a damn.’

Zelda’s beauty and charm meant that she managed to get away with most things, and this instilled a careless and casual sort of confidence that would prove fatal later on. In her final, unpublished (and frankly un-publishable) novel, Caesar’s Things, written shortly before her death, Zelda wrote, ‘…(she) wished that her mother had told her not to go like that with the boys; she wished that there had been rules and prescriptions for right. But there wasn’t.’ Zelda was highly intelligent, but her thoughts were undisciplined. She was creatively gifted, but her gifts had no productive outlet. She devoted herself to a flurry of frolics, swimming in her flesh-coloured costume and dancing at the country club. She was the archetypal Southern Belle, like a Queen Bee, forever encircled by a buzzing swarm of beaux, and the country club was her sugary hive. Until a summer evening in 1918, that is, when in walked F. Scott Fitzgerald.

***

The Fitzgerald’s were married in 1919, the year after the Great War ended. Milford notes that at the end of his life, when Scott spoke of his tragedy, he ‘made a fetish of their love and called it the mating of the age. She was the golden beauty of the South and he was the great success of the North.’ This romantic notion was in fact largely true. Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, had been a runaway bestseller, and by 1920 the Fitzgerald’s had become the toast of New York City, at the centre of a wild group of artists, writers, and drinkers. They were acquainted with celebrities including Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Their wild parties, binge drinking, and explosive fights are described as both comical and tragic. By 1924, they had left for Paris with a young baby in tow, leaving a trail of glory and devastation behind them. Milford evokes the drama of this period with exceptional verve. Her research is impeccable, and one senses that no stone has been left unturned, no source unexplored or witness un-accosted. She gently and skilfully draws various myths and legends into her account, addressing or debunking each by turn. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s antipathy towards Zelda is well known, and his contempt for her was given a boisterous airing in his posthumous memoir ‘A Moveable Feast’ which concerned his time in Paris in the 1920’s. Zelda thoroughly reciprocated his dislike, and was always convinced that Hemingway was a poseur and a fraud, something those around her considered laughable at the time. Milford addresses this issue when interviewing a friend of the Fitzgeralds, a Miss Mayfield, who had visited them in Paris. According to her, Zelda had called Hemingway “as phoney as a rubber cheque,” an accusation which, much later, was shown to have a good deal of substance to it. When it came to people, Zelda’s instincts were very rarely wrong.

Despite such sound instincts, Zelda’s mind was becoming increasingly unstable, and she had her first serious breakdown towards the end of 1924. In the years that followed, Zelda was sent to various clinics, and placed in the care of an assortment of doctors, some of whom appear to have been at best well meaning, and at worst, delusional charlatans. One of her doctors believed he could cure insanity by dispatching his patients off on long daily hikes. In the beginning, there were reprieves, but these grew more brief and less frequent as the years went on. Zelda’s illness was no doubt exacerbated by her thwarted attempts at both literature and dance. Although she did have one very good novel published, ‘Save Me The Waltz’, Fitzgerald himself was not supportive of his wife’s gifts and even dictated the ‘love-letters’ he sent to Zelda in the asylum. Although Scott drew heavily upon Zelda’s ideas, and shamelessly pilfered her letters to him in his own fiction, he regarded their ‘mutual’ experiences as his own literary property. Scott sabotaged any attempts Zelda made to write about their life together, and bewilderingly, his notion of their ‘mutual’ experience encompassed even Zelda’s own madness. Somewhat surprisingly, Milford presents this more alarming aspect of the Fitzgerald dynamic without any real bias or closer examination.


The road of excess does not always lead to the palace of wisdom, as Blake once inferred. Occasionally, it leads more directly to the gates of hell. Zelda’s insanity left her with only fragmentary moments of insight, but on those occasions when she considered the past, it seemed to contain ‘only the seeds of future decay and corruption.’ Milford, in contrast, is able to evoke the past precisely as it was, full of hope, romance and possibility. In Milford’s 1970 prologue she writes; ‘When I was young…and had dreams of my own, it seemed to me a fine thing to live as the Fitzgeralds had, where every gesture had a special flair that marked it as one’s own. Together they embodied the immense lure of the East, of young fame, of dissolution and early death.’ Zelda may have died young, but her legend lives on, even recently inspiring the title for an unrelated computer game. And when Kate Moss celebrated her 30th birthday last year, she rather aptly chose one of Scott Fitzgerald’s novels for her theme, the awful, tragic heroine of which had once been modelled upon Zelda; The Beautiful and The Dammed.


ISBN 037001345X 425pages.

Available from Amazon.com. RRP $16.00.

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Summary: The Myth & The Madness of Scott Fitzgerald's Tragic Wife