I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
This comes from a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to a friend. He was talking about Zelda, whom he met two years before in 1918. His friends were wary of their relationship. She was racy and unconventional and often compared to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby as the shallow and materialistic antiheroine who brought down Gatsby’s downfall.
But nothing could be further from the truth. While Scott and Zelda did have a turbulent marriage, it was from fighting their own share of demons. Sometimes, they hurt each other, and other times, they hurt themselves.
Life imitates art. Art imitates life.
Art isn’t meaningless. It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
In high school, Zelda read Owen Johnson’s The Salamander. Published in 1914, it featured the first flappers as protagonists in literature – small-town girls who come to New York to become modern women. They drink, smoke and flirt shamelessly, often seeing multiple men. They are assertive and expressive, free and exciting, and Zelda fashioned herself after them.
When she and Scott met, she was mischievous and quite wild. She defied societal expectations; perhaps this is why his friends didn’t trust her. But she was intelligent and interesting, vibrant and articulate. Even her manner of speaking was unique and spontaneous. She had a great sense of humor, and he often jotted down things she said on napkins or envelopes or whatever was on hand. Her antics provided him with even more material for his stories.
In courtship, they wrote letters to each other. He was in New York working for an advertising agency and trying to get his book published while she stayed in Montgomery. They were madly in love. Their letters were passionate, sometimes provocative. They talked of other people they were seeing or simply wanted – a dangerous game they would keep playing.
This Side of Paradise (1920)
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation – with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum.
They married in New York when his first book, This Side of Paradise, was published. It’s the story of a disillusioned young man and the women who break his heart. It was the first tale of what he christened the Jazz Age, and it sold out immediately. Scott, the youngest writer Scribner had published at that time, became an overnight literary sensation, and he and Zelda ushered in their marriage and the 1920s roaring.
Prohibition had come into effect that same year. It seemed to cause even more drinking, and the youth became even more rebellious. Values were shifting. This Side of Paradise introduced Sigmund Freud’s sexual theories, published in 1905 but not yet widely read. They changed traditional views on sexual relations and inspired a more hedonistic culture. Scott told the stories – an era of endless nights and reckless pleasure.
He and Zelda became legendary. If she personified the Jazz Age as the uninhibited and carefree flapper, he personified its rebellious spirit and excesses. He drank constantly, and while she flirted endlessly, he indulged in numerous affairs, including with her best friend’s sister.
The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness. Everything I do is in accordance with my ideas: to use every minute of these years when I’m young in having the best time I possibly can.
Free to do as they pleased and with Scott’s substantial earnings (he was making $2,500 each for his short stories, almost double for movie rights), they reveled in their newfound fame and status. Scott would get drunk at parties, flirt with other women, and sometimes start fights. Zelda would behave no better, drinking just as much, flirting just as much, and sometimes even destroying property. They loved to shock. Scott would strip off his jacket and shirt at the theater or laugh loudly at inappropriate times. Zelda would dance on tables at the Waldorf and jump into public fountains. They got banned from several resident hotels and country clubs.
They left Manhattan for the summer so Scott could focus on his next book. They found a cottage in Westport on Long Island where Zelda could swim. But the isolation and domesticity were unexciting. They would commute to the city for parties or host them for entire weekends, sometimes entire weeks. There were beach parties all over Westport that exceeded the wildness of Manhattan. Countless bootleg distilleries were nearby, and the Fitzgeralds always had gin and orange juice on hand. First-time guests would be shocked at the nudity and debauchery then come back to partake.
Zelda carried on infatuations simultaneously and Scott his affairs. Knowing he read her diaries, she never wrote any incriminating details. She filled him with anxiety, but he had also become reliant on her personality to help create the women in his novels. In The Beautiful and Damned, he wrote in almost autobiographical detail of a couple, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, who, after the marital bliss fades, resort to self-indulgence and sexual liberty and bring about their own physical and moral ruin.
It was brazenly honest in its telling and describing their lifestyle. Patch, like Scott, is wholly dependent on alcohol and Gilbert, like Zelda, is totally self-absorbed. It’s the least known of his novels but the most accurate. Here, again, it’s hard to separate life from fiction. Written in the first two years of their marriage, was it a premonition or manifestation of their future? Freud’s follow-up to Theory of Sexuality was Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which explored the human tendency towards self-destruction. Perhaps they read that, too.
A Young Girl’s Diary (Unpublished)
By Zelda Fitzgerald
Glittering dusk muffled the side streets of New York in truncate splendors; the whitest of mornings removed all personal implication from the scene. Many souls, unaccustomed to thinking of themselves in terms of such magnitude, turned to drink; it made the brooding more companionable.
Scott always found Zelda’s diary entries so evocative he often hid them away to use for his own. He admitted as much to publishers and would even show them the diaries. Scribner’s editor, Max Perkins, commented that Zelda had an original voice and real talent, and The Smart Set magazine showed interest in publishing them. But Scott refused, wanting to keep them for his inspiration. Zelda consented, knowing their finances depended on her husband’s success.
When she started receiving assignments from magazines, he was supportive, but many publications insisted on including both their names in the byline. Sometimes, they would offer more money to omit her name altogether. She had loved writing poetry and stories since she was fourteen and was happy to have an artistic outlet but was disappointed and resentful at the lack of recognition she was given.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.
Even before The Great Gatsby was published, Zelda had become the country’s most famous flapper. But the character of Daisy Buchanan is actually based on Ginerva King, Scott’s girlfriend before he met Zelda. Like Daisy, King was from an upper-class family, the daughter of a successful stockbroker. She left him to marry a much wealthier man.
What The Great Gatsby did perfectly capture was the atmosphere of an era. Even if you’ve never read the book, the term Gatsby summons Jazz Age romance, wild parties, underground speakeasies, flapper dresses and white suits, and the glitz, glamour, and excesses of 1920s New York. Scott had high hopes. “I want to be extravagantly admired again,” he said at its publication.
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
Unfortunately, sales floundered despite critical acclaim. He was completely disheartened by the commercial failure of the book. He had to work for magazines, which he felt inferior to novels and even took a job as a scriptwriter in Hollywood to support them. Zelda, too, was contributing by writing stories for both of them.
The Great Gatsby may have foretold their own downfall. They were only in their mid-twenties, but after all the drinking, parties, affairs and theatrics, their marriage was falling apart.
Looking Back Eight Years (1929)
By Zelda Fitzgerald
Success was the goal for this generation and to a startling extent, they have attained it. If intimately approached, nine in ten would confess that success was only a decoration they wished to wear: what they really wanted was something deeper and richer than that.
Scott was an accomplished and still promising young author. He and Zelda were celebrities of the Jazz Age. They reveled in the fame. But what did it all mean? They were young and had been so much in love. Now, they are still young but jaded. He over her endless theatrics mixed with his own insecurities and having to provide for their lifestyle, and she over his drinking, her own co-dependency and the limits set on her work. They’ve had so much fun, many affairs and countless flirtations – some as carefree as the times, others just blatant and hurtful. And it all took a toll.
At this point, Scott was drinking uncontrollably, albeit while working on his next novel, and at times, ending up in the hospital or even jail. He carried on affairs openly but jealously forbade Zelda from entertaining male guests. She threw all her energy into ballet training, still drank but stopped eating, and became self-destructive. Once, at a restaurant, when he flirted with an actress, she responded by throwing herself down the stairs.
Over the next year, her behavior became more erratic. She developed a lesbian infatuation with her ballet teacher, almost drove their car off a cliff, and started hearing voices in her head. They had been splitting their time between the U.S. and Europe, and in April 1930, she had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a sanitarium near Paris.
Save Me the Waltz (1932)
By Zelda Fitzgerald
But I warn you, I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
After attempting suicide, Zelda was referred to the care of Swiss psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler, whose specialty was dementia and psychosis. In 1911, he introduced the term schizophrenia – meaning split mind – to describe the severe mental disorder of people who suffer from delusions, hallucinations and a separate sense of reality.
She was transferred to Prangins, the best psychiatric hospital in Europe. She had a private villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, but this was the 1930s, and the treatments they had amounted to torture. When Zelda tried to escape, they tied her wrists and ankles to the bed. When she hallucinated, they gave her tranquilizing shots of chloral hydrate, a hypnotic sedative no longer in use. She was also placed in solitary confinement whenever they believed she might harm herself or others.
She underwent “Swiss sleeping cures,” an archaic treatment in which patients were given barbiturates and morphine to induce one to two weeks of sleep – believed to restore exhausted nervous systems. She was also given hydrotherapy, chemically induced seizures and insulin. Antipsychotic medications were not available yet, and people with schizophrenia were forcedly sedated and isolated. Many of the treatments caused cognitive impairment, memory loss and irreversible neurological damage. Zelda sank deeper into depression and desperately pleaded with Scott and the doctors to explain what was happening to her. She was released after fifteen months, and she and Scott returned to Montgomery to be close to her parents.
Zelda relapsed in January 1932 and was hospitalized in Baltimore. The resident psychiatrist was a female doctor who was able to build a therapeutic relationship and encouraged her to write. Save Me the Waltz, a semi-autobiographical novel about her childhood and marriage, was finished in six weeks.
Tender is the Night (1934)
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world.
Zelda was released in June. The doctors warned Scott not to put her under any strain and urged him to stop drinking. He refused, citing that alcohol helps him write. He was under enormous pressure to finish his next book to pay for her treatments and ongoing psychotherapy.
Tender is the Night was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1934. The story of a glamorous couple – a psychiatrist who falls in love and marries one of his patients – is again inspired by the details of their own lives. When Zelda was ill, Scott read all the information on diagnoses and treatments he could find, and his characterization of mental illness was seen as poignant and affecting.
But it filled Zelda with anxiety. In the past, she helped him with his manuscripts and edits, but she hadn’t read the new material and was horrified to see episodes of her nervous breakdowns in print. He had even taken entire sections of letters she had written him while she was committed. He always used personal details for his stories, but this was about a time when she felt the most broken and vulnerable. Feeling a strange sense of déjà vu, she relapsed once more and would spend the rest of her life in and out of asylums.
Parfois la Folie est la Sagasse (1934)
Exhibition of paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald
I wonder why we have never been very happy and why all this has happened. It was much nicer a long time ago when we had each other and the space around the world was warm. Can’t we get it back someway – even by imagining?
Scott arranged for an exhibition of Zelda’s paintings, hoping it might help her recover. She chose the title Sometimes Madness is Wisdom, and he wanted to change it. The curator, however, assured him the general public would not know the paintings were done in a sanitarium and would read the title as something symbolic.
But perhaps Zelda was trying to come to terms with her madness. She spent her lucid hours trying to understand it. Her predisposition came from a long family history of mental illness on both sides. Her maternal grandmother and aunt both committed suicide before she was born. Her father, a well-respected and successful judge, suffered from long periods of depression so debilitating he would isolate himself for months. Just the year before, her older brother leaped to his death from the hospital room where he was being treated after a nervous breakdown. And decades later, one of her grandchildren, an accomplished linguist, would also take his own life.
One of her doctors had diagnosed her and Scott with une folie à deux or shared delusional disorder (SDD). Their lives were so intertwined they developed the same obsessions, the same insecurities, the same psychoses. Analyses of their books and writings reveal that they had incalculable influence on each other’s work. It’s hard to separate them; one would not have existed without the other. Their marriage was a partnership of equals – in intellect, foolishness, love, passion and every essence. It is one of the greatest love stories ever told, albeit also tragic. Towards the end, Scott admitted himself eight times to try to stop drinking but died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Zelda perished seven years later in a hospital fire where she was locked inside her room.
But in their short lives amidst all that madness and wildness, Zelda published a book and magazine articles, wrote plays and short stories, danced and painted. They wrote hundreds of beautiful letters to each other – an almost grandiose chronicle of the entire Jazz Age. And despite his self-destructive alcoholism, or maybe because of it (the history of alcohol and writers is long, and the correlation documented), Scott wrote arguably the best American novel there is – The Great Gatsby now sells half a million copies a year. Maybe Zelda was right. Sometimes, madness is wisdom.
