The Fitzgeralds: the beautiful and the damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life; Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2003 by Richard Whittington-Egan

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. Andrew Hook. Palgrave Macmillan. [pounds sterling]14.99 p.b. 194 pages. ISBN 0-333-73849. Sometimes Madness is Wisdom. Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage. Kendall Taylor. Robson Books. [pounds sterling]18.95. 442 pages. ISBN 1-86105-497-1.

Scott and Zelda, it sounds, and in many respects was, like a superior vaudeville act of the Roaring Twenties Jazz Age (Scott's own coinage) of America. And if the lepidopteran Scott has proved a difficult biographee to net, the even more fluttery Zelda is yet trickier to cabin and pin down. That, for Scott at least, the act was a balancing one, between the imperatives of the literary life and the demands of his mere human existence, is Professor Hook's earnest contention, and his book is an attempt to balance the ledgers; to account for 'the roller-coaster ride' that was Fitzgerald's career, by focusing upon the inevitable collision between the writer's requirements and the private man's needs.

It was his marriage, in April 1920, to Zelda Sayre, the delectable Southern belle daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, that set the lifelong seal upon Scott Fitzgerald's juggling act, keeping his two commitments safely up in the air, coexistence in unsettling disharmony. It is the close scrutiny of that highly complex and competitive marriage which is the primary concern of Kendall Taylor's book.

There is the temptation after Arthur Mizener's pioneering biography of the Fitzgeralds, The Far Side of Paradise (1951. Revised 1965), Nancy Milford's Zelda (1971), Matthew Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur(198 1), and Jeffrey Meyers' Scott Fitzgerald (1994), to question the necessity for yet another sizeable tome on this exceedingly well ventilated pair. The fact is that, not only has Zelda hitherto received the murine share of the biographers' attention, but after the death of the Fitzgeralds' daughter, Scottie, in June 1986, and the publication of her biography by her daughter, Eleanor Lanahan, in 1995, the recent release of Zelda's medical records from Craig House, the private mental institution at Beacon, New York, and newly discovered biographical material at Princeton, the considerable amount of new research data has made a fuller study of Zelda both possible and desirable.

While Professor Hook's volume confines itself with rigorous academic propriety within the parameters of documented fact, and allows only cautious and disciplined speculation, Kendall Taylor's portrait of a marriage is distinctly more reckless, permitting itself impressive artistic strokes of colour, as well as a degree of artistic licence which could, less generously, be identified as freehand assertions and free-ranging assumptions. There is also the odd small paint splash of factual error. Nothing really major to worry about though.

What does import unease, is the author's theory -- and it can be no more than a personally held theory -- that Zelda elected madness as her escape route from a 'control freak' husband. She was a very special person. When Scott first encountered her she was 'top girl', which is to say the prettiest and the most sought after young woman in Montgomery, Alabama. Scott, incurably competitive, always had to have the best, but he had to work hard to win her. They were married in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral, in New York, one week after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. The couple took Manhattan by storm. They were the icons of the New York of the Twenties. Their advent presaged the personality cult of our own footballer-and-pop-star-ridden day. Their images were even emblazoned on the overture curtain of the Greenwich Village Follies. Zelda was the prototype of the flapper. Scott became the laureate of the Jazz Age.

'All night the saxophones wailed their hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues, while five hundred pairs of gold and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor'. But, as time passed, the tempo lessened and the music slowed, became muted, Changed ... The wind of the wings of madness blew a terribly different tune. Zelda's remorseless descent began and continued through an endless-seeming succession of mental institutions, clinics, and psychiatric hospital wards.

Since reading Owen Johnson's best-seller novel, The Salamander back in 1914, Zelda had seen herself in similar role to that of its flapperish heroine, Dore Baxter, known as the Salamander. Zelda believed she was a salamander -- but, alas, whatever Plato said, she failed to pass through the fire unscathed. The flames, thrusting their questing red tongues through the locked door of her top-floor room in the Highland Hospital of Nervous Diseases, at appropriately named Asheville, North Carolina, on the night of the terrible conflagration, March 11th, 1948, claimed her. She was 47 years old. Scott had died, aged 43, eight years before. They lie, side by side now, more peacefully perhaps than ever before, 'snuggled up together under a stone', in St. Mary's Churchyard, in downhill Rockville, Maryland, stirring only when some new inquisitive would-be biographer comes to call.