The Roaring Twenties brings to mind a sense of decadence. It was an age of glamour and excitement; women bobbed their hair and donned skirts with hems above the knee, jazz found its way from New Orleans clubs to the speakeasies of New York City and Chicago where young men and women drank and danced until dawn. It was new, it was excessive, it was fun. And perhaps no two people in the ‘20s had more fun than Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Zelda and Scott epitomized The Jazz Age, with the latter writing one of the most famous American novels that has become synonymous with the ‘20s—The Great Gatsby. While Scott’s contributions to the literary scene may be the most lasting aspect of the Fitzgerald legacy, there is no denying that the couple’s own story—the story of Zelda, in particular—is one for the ages.
Zelda Fitzgerald was born Zelda Sayre, the youngest of six children in a prominent Southern family in Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda was named for a character in a series of rather unknown books called Zelda: A Tale of The Massachusetts Colony by Jane Howard—an interesting bit of coincidence that one can’t help but feel foretold the literary path of her life. An active and spoiled child, Zelda grew up to be an active and spoiled teenager, one who was bright but decidedly more interested in her social life than school. She craved attention. As a child, she once called the fire department to come save someone stuck up on the roof, then climbed on the roof and waited for them to come get her. A shock to the demure, proper ladies of the South, teenage Zelda smoked, drank, and hung around with boys, even wearing nude-colored bathing suits to fuel rumors that she swam naked. Suffice it to say, she earned herself a steady place in the rounds of local gossip—a suitable beginning to the woman who would go on to be an icon of wild 1920s revelry.
In July 1918, Zelda and Scott met at a country club dance when she was just 18 years old after Scott, who was in the army, was stationed just outside of Montgomery. Their connection was instant; Scott began calling Zelda every day and visiting her in Montgomery on his free days. He was far from deterred by the other men who also had their eyes on Zelda. If anything, the sense of competition spurred him on. By September, just two months after first meeting her, Scott was proclaiming he’d fallen in love, at least within the privacy of his ledger. Zelda wasn’t far behind. Their courtship—an intense, reckless, exciting thing—was briefly interrupted when Scott was stationed in Long Island for two months. When he returned to Montgomery in December, the young couple became inseparable—at least until they separated for Scott to move to New York City. Writing letters back and forth, they stayed in touch as Scott tried to establish himself. He’d been working on his first novel, This Side of Paradise, since before he’d met her, and Zelda had said she’d marry him only once the book was published, not wanting a husband with no job or money. In March of 1920, Scott sent Zelda his mother’s ring and they were officially engaged. This Side of Paradise was published March 26, 1920. By March 30, Zelda had arrived in New York City. Wasting no time, they married on April 3rd.
Flush with the excitement of newlyweds and the success of This Side of Paradise, Zelda and Scott quickly got to work crafting their legend as emblems of the Jazz Age. They were everything we associate with the Roaring Twenties—young and free, partying and drinking excessively, living lives that would’ve had the town gossips back in Montgomery clutching their pearls. They were fabulous—a dazzling couple of personality, wit, and charm who everyone wanted to be around. They were also completely wild; it likely wasn’t a surprise when their friends caught wind of Zelda jumping into a fountain at Union Square then paying a taxi driver to let her ride around on the top of the car or when the couple got kicked out of classy hotels for drunkenness. Their life was one of reckless extravagance. Scott dubbed Zelda the “first American flapper” and his friends, with whom Zelda flirted openly, seemed just as enamored with her. She was irresistibly vibrant and bright, drawing all eyes towards her. She and Scott represented a new age not just of fun, but of possibility. With his literary career beginning with such success, Scott had to feel that the world was opening at his feet, especially with the resplendent Zelda on his arm—the woman who had become his muse.
The truth, however, is that Zelda was much more than a muse to Scott. From the time he met her—when she was just 18 years old to his 22—Scott had been working bits and pieces of her into his work. He’d sent her a chapter of This Side of Paradise early in their relationship and ended up redrafting the character of Rosalind Connage to be more like her. He’d said to Zelda, “the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four.” While this must’ve been nothing short of absolutely flattering to young Zelda, Scott went further than just taking inspiration in his new love. He took her words. Her diary and letters to him became a treasure trove to lift snippets from, including Amory Blaine’s soliloquy in the final moments of The Side of Paradise. In a move so selfish, uncaring and grotesque toward the woman he was in a relationship with as to be shocking, Scott also showed 18-year-old Zelda’s personal diary to a friend who then showed it to George Jean Nathan, a drama critic and magazine editor. It’s alleged that the three men actually considered publishing Zelda’s diary under the title “The Diary of a Popular Girl.” They, like Scott, recognized talent in Zelda’s personal pages and wanted to exploit it for themselves. Fortunately, it never came to fruition.
Unfortunately, however, Scott’s penchant for plagiarizing his future wife did not stop with This Side of Paradise. He continued stealing from her letters in order to create the character Gloria Patch in The Beautiful and the Damned. As The Beautiful and the Damned’s release approached, Zelda was asked by the literary editor of The New York Tribune to contribute a fun review of her husband’s novel to entice readers. Zelda wrote this review, but not without a few well-aimed, though still humorous, digs at Scott.
“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”
-Zelda Fitzgerald, The New York Tribune
At around the same time as The Beautiful and the Damned’s publication, Zelda gave birth to her and Scott’s daughter, Scottie. Upon waking from anesthesia, Zelda said to Scott, “Oh, God, goofo I’m drunk. Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” Good thing Scott thought to bring a pen and paper along. Or perhaps he’d just taken to memorizing Zelda’s every comment by then.
Writing the review of her husband’s novel seemed to waken a literary desire within Zelda—or at least it woke a desire within the literary world to hear more from her. Magazines asked her to write for them, and she sold several articles and short stories. Things came to a crashing halt for the Fitzgeralds, however, when Scott’s 1923 play, The Vegetable, flopped. They were in serious debt. Scott wrote and sold short stories to pay it off, but found himself depressed and burned out. By April of 1924, the Fitzgeralds had moved to Paris.
The Fitzgeralds’ marriage was already tumultuous by this time, racked by problematic drinking, jealousy, and more. Scott had encouraged Zelda’s wild, attention-seeking behavior when it served him—bolstering his own place in the social scene and providing him with inspiration for characters and countless snippets of prose for his novels. Unsurprisingly, Zelda’s party girl personality and desire for all the attention to be on her wasn’t always convenient for Scott’s writing. Without constant attention, Zelda felt isolated when Scott was writing and sought comfort elsewhere. For six weeks upon their arrival in Paris, Zelda spent much of her time with another man. She wanted a divorce, but Scott locked her in their house until she relented and gave up the notion. According to the man she’d had the “affair” with, the whole thing was a fabrication for attention. Years later, he told Zelda’s biographer, “They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.” After their affair ended, whether true or the work of embellishment, Zelda tried to commit suicide. She’d overdosed on pills and had to be kept awake by friends and family. Extreme jealousy over Scott ignoring her in favor of renowned dancer Isadora Duncan at a party also led her to throw herself down marble stairs.
A year after moving to Paris, Scott met Ernest Hemingway. They were fast friends, but Hemingway and Zelda made no secret of their dislike for each other. Hemingway blamed her for Scott’s declining literary output and called her “crazy.” She, in turn, called him “phony as a rubber duck” among other things. During this time, when she and Scott struggled within their relationship and he struggled to write, Zelda, in her isolation, seemed struck by a desire to have a talent and passion of her own. She began painting, then turned to ballet. She’d been a talented dancer as a child, but at 27 years old, it was far too late to become truly spectacular. She threw herself into the effort completely, regardless. She trained relentlessly for 8 hours a day, ignoring Scott’s complete dismissal of her desire to be a dancer. Despite being older and her husband’s lack of support, Zelda was eventually asked to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples. For reasons that are still unclear, she declined.
By 1930, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown, attributed to her rigorous dance schedule and the knowledge that her husband had begun an affair with a 17-year-old actress in Hollywood. Scott remained attached to her during this time, writing to her from America. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ordered to stop dancing. By 1931, she was recovered enough to leave the hospital and returned to Montgomery. Some of her paintings were exhibited in 1932 at the New York Gallery of Carey Ross. Reception largely interpreted her paintings as an expression of her schizophrenia instead of artistic expression and intent. Unfortunately, she suffered another breakdown that led her to another psychiatric hospital. It was there, in a burst of creativity, that she wrote a novel of her own—Save Me the Waltz.
Zelda’s novel was semi-autobiographical, fictionalizing many real moments from her own marriage. When Scott eventually read it, he was livid. Not because she had used their marriage as material for a novel, exposing moments he’d rather keep private. No, he was just mad that she did it before him. He had planned to use some of the same moments throughout their marriage for his novel, Tender is the Night. Ultimately, Scott forced Zelda to revise her novel, removing the shared material he wanted for his own. Save Me the Waltz went on to be published, but was not well received by critics and was seen as inferior to Scott’s work. It only earned Zelda just over 120 dollars. By all accounts, the book was a failure. That combined with Scott’s ugly criticism of her—he called her “plagiaristic” and a “third rate writer”—no doubt played a role in Zelda never pursuing publication again.
Save Me the Waltz exposed much about Zelda’s own desires. Her protagonist, Alabama Beggs’s, desire to be more than a “back seat driver about life” is a major theme within the novel. She wanted to be respected for her own talents and accomplishments, to establish herself as independent of her husband. Alabama, like Zelda, threw herself into ballet in this effort. It’s such a clear view into Zelda’s emotions at the time, her dissatisfaction with her role in life and her desperation to have something of her own beyond being a good-time girl, something that would earn her respect. It is sad, but unsurprising, that the world brushed off her efforts as those of a party girl who was losing her shine, someone who could never compete with her husband.
Zelda died tragically in a psychiatric hospital fire in 1948, locked in a room awaiting electroshock therapy. Scott had passed away eight years earlier in 1940, three weeks after suffering a heart attack. They hadn’t lived together for years by then.
Since her death, Zelda’s life and art has been reevaluated by more modern thinkers who are more willing to see the full picture of her life and efforts. Her daughter, Scottie, lived to see the feminism of the 60s and 70s tackle the subject of her mother’s life, and disagreed with their evaluation. She did not think it was accurate to convey Zelda as a “classic ‘put down’ wife, whose efforts to express her nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband,” and insisted that her father was supportive of Zelda’s talents and “ebullient imagination.” Others in recent years have also questioned the idea of classifying Zelda in such a typical way. In a 2013 article for The New Yorker, Molly Fischer writes: “Saving Zelda Fitzgerald is no easy proposition…[she] does not want to be anyone’s pet, and there’s something disconcerting about the literary readiness to domesticate her, to transform an exasperating woman into an appealing heroine.” Therese Anne Fowler, author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, noted: “We do anoint her as a kind of proto-feminist heroine, even though she didn’t see herself as a feminist and didn’t fully succeed at anything. But her original reputation is based on conventional paternalistic standards of what a woman, mother and wife ought to be and do. Her ambitions and her insistence on pursuing them were considered inappropriate and unhealthy; after her psychotic break she was literally told that this insistence had created her ‘split mind’ and that the path to a cure lay in giving up all ambitions that didn’t conform to the paternalistic ideal.”
While there may be a tendency for modern people to categorize Zelda as a typical put-down woman of her time period in the process of viewing her as her own person who had her own ambitions, the insistence that she was in no way such a woman is pointless. Her husband plagiarized her and stole from her in order to inspire and fill out his own novels. When she tried her hand at sharing her perspective of their life in her novel, he dismissed and ridiculed her. The fact that she doesn’t fit into the mold of such a “classic put-down woman” doesn’t mean she wasn’t. While some seem to use her difficult, attention-seeking personality as a reason to further dismiss the desire to respect her as an artist independent of Scott, there’s no need. Zelda was a difficult personality, but it doesn’t mean she isn’t deserving of more understanding and recognition for her work than she was offered in her own time. And offering her such understanding does not dismiss who she was. Zelda can exist as a privileged, attention-seeking, fun-loving party girl and still be worth pointing out that she wasn’t exactly given a fair chance in her own artistic pursuits. Some have gone as far as discussing the merit of her writing and art, as if the fact that she wasn’t as practiced or talented as Scott and couldn’t have realistically had her own career as a writer or painter makes a difference in the conversation about how she is viewed today and whether we, viewing her life through a more feminist lens, shove her into a mold she doesn’t quite fit into. Zelda did feel at least somewhat stifled and, since we know Scott saw her fit to plagiarize from but insulted the work he couldn’t take from and diminished her ambitions, it’s clear that he wasn’t as supportive as his daughter would have us believe.
At the core of the disagreements about whether Zelda is made too much into an appealing feminist heroine is a simple truth: in the decades after her death, her work was reexamined and judged on its own merit. Her desire for something more, something of her own to be respected for, may have come too late in her life to truly make anything of it and she may have passed too early to see it, but Zelda Fitzgerald’s work is no longer dismissed and ignored. In 1974, her art was once again exhibited, this time at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. In 1992, she was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.
As Therese Anne Fowler said of Zelda: “Here we have a woman whose talents and energy and intellect should have made her a brilliant success, who was determined to be an accomplished artist, writer and ballet dancer in an era where married women were supposed to be wives and mothers, period. Her devotion to Scott was, in many ways, her undoing [although] he was just as imprisoned as she was. Had they loved each other less, they might have both come to better ends.”