It seems that people think about Zelda Fitzgerald a lot less often than they did in the 1970s, when I first read Nancy Milford’s biography, Zelda (PS3511 .I9234 Z8 1983). Perhaps more than 60 years after her death, it’s just too hard to imagine anyone like Zelda anymore. Perhaps her story seems just too sad, today, to tell that much.
Known her beauty and vivacious personality, Zelda married F. Scott Fitzgerald when she was 19. Scott was already a successful writer, and the couple lived on about $20,000 a year at a time when the average annual income was less than $1,000. They had a lot of fun—drinking, dancing on tables, traveling—for awhile. Their marriage deteriorated. Ernest Hemingway suggested that Zelda was jealous of Scott’s success, and Scott was jealous of Zelda's possible interest in other men. At age 27, Zelda wrote and painted, and was very serious about ballet. However, 27 is too late to begin a dancing career. Scott attributed her first mental breakdown, where she heard voices and had waking dreams of phantoms and other horrors, to excessive devotion to dance. After 1931, Zelda spent as much time in asylums and sanitariums as she did with Scott and later with her mother in Alabama. She died horribly in 1948.
It seems likely that Zelda’s illness would have a bad outcome even today. However her diagnosis and treatment would have been different. When she left an asylum after a year and three months’ visit in 1931—it’s hard to imagine anyone staying in an asylum for that long today—“her case was summarized as a ‘reaction to her feelings of inferiority (primarily toward her husband). . . She was stated to have had ambitions which were ‘self-deceptions’ and which ‘caused difficulties between the couple.’” The doctor’s idea was that if Zelda could get rid of her artistic ambitions, her prognosis for full recovery was good.
While in the institution, Zelda wrote an autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. When Scott read it, he became furious, because he had been using the same events from Zelda’s life in his own novel. The idea seems to be that because he was the better writer, he deserved the material. He forced Zelda to eliminate scenes similar to those he had in mind for Tender is the Night. There is no doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a vastly better writer than Zelda—but does that mean she should lose the right to document her own life?
What can we learn from Zelda Fitzgerald’s sad life? That you can go from the top of the world to somewhere near the bottom awfully quickly? That doctors do not have all the answers? Zelda is an engrossing, thoughtful, and perhaps cautionary read even for those not interested in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
