F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

“I used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers,” the romantic and possessive young officer F Scott Fitzgerald wrote to the Alabama belle Zelda Sayre. Zelda was charmed at first, but quickly noticed that he seemed obsessed with the image. “Scott, you’ve been so sweet about writing,” she replied, “but I get so damned tired of being told that – you’ve written that verbatim, in your last six letters!”
Generally biographers and friends have taken the side of one of the partners, at one extreme endorsing Hemingway’s view that Zelda was a madwoman who undermined Scott’s sexual and artistic self-confidence and drained him emotionally and economically, and at another seeing Scott as a monster who drove Zelda mad and destroyed her chances to succeed as an artist in her own right. Both of these books take a more balanced approach, blaming neither partner; but the selection from the Fitzgeralds’ correspondence edited by Jackson Bryers and Cathy Barks, and pre-emptively called “love letters”, repeats the legend of a great and timeless romance, while the exhaustively researched biography by Sally Cline powerfully undermines it.
Without making Scott the villain, Cline argues that both partners were victims of a social system and psychological practice that punished creative women, especially those married to creative men. Cline points out that Zelda’s hospital letters – which form the bulk of her side of the correspondence – were censored by her caretakers, and have to be seen as written by a prisoner to her jailer.
Although she often expressed an extravagant love for Scott, and he loyally supported and wrote affectionately to her, they quarrelled bitterly and endlessly over her ambitions as a writer and painter, her sexuality, and her right to work and to be independent. Zelda repeatedly said that she wanted a divorce, but without any money of her own, and without the means of earning any, she was utterly powerless in the relationship.
Named for the gypsy heroine of a sensational novel, Zelda had been the most popular and daring girl in her set back in Montgomery, Alabama – a “top girl”. By winning her, Scott also engaged in an unconscious merger with his male rivals, perhaps a version of the homosexuality he wrote about (through Nick Carraway’s pick-up in The Great Gatsby, for example), and violently repudiated. Zelda was also original and imaginative: “I’m so full of confetti I could give birth to paper dolls,” she declared at a ball. Paper dolls were a metaphor for the hyper-feminine domestic art of American women to which she was destined by her birth and class.
The crack-up of the marriage and their lives came quickly; by 1930, after less than a decade of fame and high living in New York, the Riviera and Paris, they had entered what would become a long decline. Just as their married life had been lived in hotels, Zelda’s post-1930 life became an odyssey between hospitals and clinics; some were four-star European establishments with all the luxuries of a spa resort, some much more basic and punitive with cold baths, strait-jackets and long hikes.
A belated effort to became a ballerina in Paris had driven her to anorexia and obsessive behaviour, but Scott’s chief reasons for having her committed were sexual; she declared an attraction to her ballet teacher, and, in the asylum, was caught masturbating. Her sexual frankness conflicted with his anxieties and pruderies, especially with his own fascinated dread of homosexuality. “The nearest I ever came to leaving you,” he told her, “was when you told me that I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine.”
Zelda felt that she had lived the life of a pampered child: “I don’t seem to know anything appropriate for a person of 30.” Confinement in a series of institutions certainly made it hard for her to grow up. Scott was a control freak who wanted to arrange and order every detail of her life, as he would also for their daughter, but he also did his best to find her the most advanced care.
Zelda’s doctors included many of the famous names of psychiatric medicine of her day, but their understanding and treatment of women’s psychological conflicts was lumbered with traditional expectations that healthy, normal women should be content to limit themselves to secondary domestic roles. Zelda was forced to restrict or give up her dancing, painting and writing and to submit to versions of the rest cure that made her worse. As she wrote: “Enforced inactivity maddens me beyond endurance.”
Diagnosed as schizophrenic, although she did not meet most of the criteria for the illness, Zelda was regularly subjected to insulin shock therapy, which induced memory loss and weight gain, and dosed with a battery of drugs including morphine, belladonna, potassium bromide and horse serum. From the beginning, Zelda perceived her treatment as “a sort of castration”. Scott, meanwhile, was not institutionalised for his drinking. Moreover, he insisted that she was the real drunkard, while he needed drink in order to work.
The biggest crisis in their marriage and its tenuous balance of power came in 1932, when Zelda wrote an autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, drawing on the same material with which he was struggling in Tender is the Night. Scott was outraged that Zelda should presume to poach on his territory. He wrote in fury to his publisher Max Perkins, to whom she had sent the manuscript, telling him not to publish.
In May 1933, the Fitzgeralds sat down with Zelda’s doctor for a debate on the subject which was transcribed by a stenographer and ran to 114 pages. The transcripts, Cline says, read more like a trial than a negotiation. Scott demanded “unconditional surrender” – he accused Zelda of being an opportunist and called her “a third-rate writer” and a “useless society woman” with an “amazonian and lesbian” personality. “It seems to me that you are making rather a violent attack on a third-rate talent then,” Zelda replied. She wanted a divorce and stressed her need to be independent.
In a journal entry outlining his divorce strategy if Zelda insisted on continuing to write fiction, Scott noted: “Attack on all grounds. Play (suppress), novel (delay), pictures (suppress), character (showers), child (detach), schedule (disorient to cause trouble), no typing. Probable result – new breakdown.” In the event, Zelda capitulated and Scott allowed the novel to be published with several cuts.
Zelda’s letters are saturated with the need to find meaningful work and to support herself. But Scott could not consent, and gradually Zelda developed symptoms of religious mania and suicidal depression.
In the late 1930s, when Scott was too hard up to pay her hospital fees, he moved her to Highlands Hospital in North Carolina, where Dr Robert Carroll believed in vigorous physical activity and reprogramming rebellious women through electro-shock treatments into “wholesome” wives and mothers. Although Carroll eventually relented enough to support Zelda’s painting, he was also involved in a case of raping a female patient. Another psychiatrist, Dr Irving Pine, told Cline that “Dr Carroll took advantage of several women patients, including Zelda”.
Scott predeceased her, in 1940, and after his death, Zelda spent much of her time in Montgomery with her family. Cline argues that the years until her death in 1948 were among Zelda’s most creative, although her unfinished novel from the period, Caesar’s Wife, is the product of her religious obsessions.
In 1975, the Catholic archdiocese overturned an earlier decision and allowed Scott and Zelda to be buried together in St Mary’s Church cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. Their inscription quotes the last line of Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The Fitzgeralds had many admirable qualities, and, separately and together, exhibited far more of Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” than Hemingway did himself. But Cline’s clear-headed and careful study should make clear that their relationship can no longer be regarded as a great love story. Instead, it demonstrates the terrible danger of such romantic fairytales, and the melancholy dangers of a culture, like that of the American South or the Lost Generation, that sacrifices the present to the imagined glories of the past
Elaine Showalter on the sordid power struggles behind the decline of the Jazz Age’s golden couple, Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald, The Guardian

P.S.: Coming soon a film by John Curran THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED- the untold story of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who became Jazz Age icons known for living large, soaring high, and crashing hard. Envied, admired, and emulated by generations, the lives of this so-called “perfect couple” were not always as they appeared. In this revealing, true account, we get an inside look at their infamous relationship as their passionate love drove them to brilliant madness.
A period love story based on the love story between writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. The film revolves around the Jazz Age icons Fitzgerald, famed for writing “The Great Gatsby,” and Zayre known for living large, soaring high and crashing hard. Although they were both the toast of the town during the roaring ’20s, their courtship and marriage was festooned with jealousy and acrimony with both parties using the relationship as the basis for their various novels.
Enjoy!

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