Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Everyone I met in the Deep South (where I learnt more about Zelda than anywhere else) told me that ‘ultimately Zelda was a Southern lady’. Yet in the Deep South, in her childhood, Zelda behaved as no ladies dared. It was one of the contradictions in her character she would never lose.

  To understand Zelda and her work it is imperative to look closely at her roots. So it is in that place, the Deep South, at that time, the early 1900s, doing what ladies did not dare to do, that we first meet Zelda.

  Notes

  1 Though Scott took the credit, H. L. Mencken coined the term flapper fifteen years before This Side of Paradise. He said it originated in England and described adolescent girls who flapped awkwardly while walking. British shops sold flapper dresses with long straight lines to hide such gracelessness.

  2 Ironically, Zelda’s daughter Scottie most cogently expressed this view: ‘in defining genius as one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, Edison surely meant in one direction not in three. It was my mother’s misfortune to be born with the ability to write, to dance and to paint, and then never to have acquired the discipline to make her talent work for, rather than against, her.’ Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Abacus, Little, Brown, London, 1993, p. vi. (Prefatory comments based on Scottie’s Introduction to the exhibition catalogue for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts 1974 exhibition of Zelda Fitzgerald’s paintings.)

  3 I have followed the example of several contemporary art critics including Jane S. Livingston and Carolyn Shafer who have divided Zelda’s art by theme or subject, i.e. landscapes, cityscapes, paper dolls, figurative paintings, Biblical allegories, flowers, fairy tales etc. Some themes do fall into specific time periods. The romantic hazy watercolour cityscapes of Paris and New York were painted in the 1940s after Scott’s death to commemorate their visits together. Some nursery tales were painted during Scottie’s childhood; a further set were painted in Zelda’s last eight years, some for her grandchild Thomas Addison Lanahan.

  4 Eleanor Lanahan, Zelda’s artist granddaughter, pointed out to me in our first conversation that all Zelda’s paintings illustrate the idea of ‘no ground beneath our feet’. Scott himself used a similar phrase earlier when he wrote in his September 1922 Ledger that life though comfortable was ‘dangerous and deteriorating. No ground under our feet’. Scott’s Ledger was the 14½” by 95½” business ledger in which he methodically recorded his professional and personal activities. He maintained this record until the end of 1936. It divides into five sections: 1. ‘Record of Published Fiction’ (sixteen columns giving the publication history of each work); 2. ‘Money Earned by Writing since Leaving Army’; 3. ‘Published Miscelani for which I was Paid’ (including movies); 4. ‘Zelda’s Earnings’: 5. ‘Outline Chart of My Life’ (a month by month chronology beginning with the day of his birth, partly in the third person). He probably began the Ledger late in 1919 or early 1920, though he may have started it in 1922 when he wrote to his agent that he was ‘getting up a record of all my work’.

  5 At the time Rebecca West noticed there was something ‘frightening’ about Zelda, ‘not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers’. West to Nancy Milford, 10 Aug. 1963, Milford, Zelda, Harper & Row, New York, 1970, p. 99.

  6 Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (Penguin, 1985) shows explicitly and at length how this worked during the period of Zelda’s various hospital sojourns.

  7 Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore.

  8 I saw Zelda’s problem (relating to the contentious issues of the rightful distribution of credits and who-owns-whose autobiographical material) as similar to the one Radclyffe Hall faced when she wrote the controversial lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was taken to trial and banned as obscene. (Ironically, in America Scott Fitzgerald was among the impressive list of writers who came to the book’s defence.) Hall’s sensational martyrdom to a cause meant that a spotlight focused on one significant area of her life and rendered the rest unimportant by comparison.

  9 Xandra Kalman gave this file to St Paul historical researcher Lloyd Hackl who generously made it available to me.

  10 Ten years later Nancy Milford wrote in an essay about her experience with the biography: ‘before publication, when I was done writing, I had sent the Fitzgeralds’ daughter my manuscript and waited. She could not bear to read it, she said. She threatened suicide. I didn’t know what to do, for I could not have done without what she had given me. She turned upon me as if I had stolen her past.’ The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 1980, p. 35.

  11 This batch at PUL included some records which could not be photocopied, but I was able to read everything and take accurate notes. Zelda Fitzgerald Papers, CO183: Box 6 III, Miscellaneous Notes and related material; Folder 18; F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, CO187: Box 39, Folder 45; Box 40, Folder 4; Box 43; Box 49, Folders 2A, 6A; Box 51, Folders 7A, 10A, unmarked folder; Box 53 II, Folders 3A, 14A, unmarked folder; Box 54, Folder 10A; Craig House Medical Records, CO745: Box 1, Folders 1, 2, 3, 6A.

  12 Dr Irving Pine.

  PART I

  Southern Voice 1900–April 1920

  CHAPTER 1

  Zelda Fitzgerald’s life was made for story. It had page-turning qualities even before Zelda and Scott amended it for the legend.

  The tale begins with the indisputably Thespian timing of her birth, which coincided with the start to the new century. Later she saw the dramatic possibilities of a life that paralleled an era.

  Even her name had already been fictionalized. When Zelda was born on Tuesday 24 July 1900 at 5.40 a.m. in the Sayres’ house on South Street, Montgomery, her forty-year-old mother Minerva, herself named for a myth, was known locally as an avid reader. Perusing romantic novels, Minnie had twice run across the unusual name Zelda.1 In Jane Howard’s 1866 Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony the heroine was a beautiful gypsy. In Zelda’s Fortune, written in 1874 by Robert Edward Francillon, the second Zelda, again a gypsy, ‘could have been placed in no imaginable situation without drawing upon herself a hundred stares’.2 Francillon’s line could have been written expressly for Zelda Sayre.

  Zelda’s rhapsodic looks matched her artistic temperament. Her hair/long and loose, ‘was that blonde color that’s no color at all but a reflector of light’.3 And it was the lighthearted Machens, her sunny mother’s relations, that Zelda took after, while her brother and sisters were dark like her father’s temperament and Montgomery’s history.

  Zelda always said that her home town’s controversial history strengthened her. Although (or perversely because) prolonged civil war tore the South apart and massacred an entire generation of Southern men, Montgomery citizens were proud that a nation had been born there. Today, more than half a century after Zelda’s death, they still are. Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy and its first flag had been raised from the staff of the state Capitol.4 In Zelda’s girlhood ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through sleepy oak-lined streets.

  The Civil War, the defining historical event of the Deep South, still vibrated in people’s minds. It created a distinctive Southern culture often at odds with itself and the country. During this blood-letting of 1861–5 the Confederate states in the South which wished to secede from the Union fought to maintain certain rights, not least the right to determine state law on the institution of slavery, the mainstay especially in the South of an agricultural plantation economy. Thus the South ran counter to the moral beliefs of its time in perpetuating slavery just when the rest of the Western world was decisively giving it up. Traditionally there had been a gulf between black fieldhands and black house servants: black women for instance, in the houses of Zelda and her friends, cooked and wet-nursed and raised the children.

  In Zelda’s birth year, only thirty-five years after slavery was abolished in America, some historia
ns believe the secret heart of the South still carried an uneasy but powerful sense of the rightness of their nineteenth-century position on slavery. In adolescence Zelda saw period advertisements which proved lynching, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron had been incontestable methods by which black fieldhands and house servants were kept in check. But what Zelda heard was that these shocking brutalities disturbed the élan of white Montgomery families less than the tragedies that had befallen their own brave youths. For in this volatile environment, the resentments of the blacks were stifled beneath the white romanticization of antebellum plantation life built on slavery.

  In her childhood Zelda never questioned the fact that the respectable white families with whom she mixed had been instrumental in upholding laws that penalized Negroes. In her own family her father, Judge Sayre, had even created such laws. Zelda’s daughter Scottie later wrote: ‘I am sorry to say that while he was a just man, known for his unshakable integrity, he was probably one of the sturdiest pillars of the unjust society … he was author of the “Sayre Election law”, which effectively prevented Negroes from voting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So he was one of the heroes of the established order … but then if you weren’t, in those days and in this place, you would have been an outlaw from society.’5

  What Zelda learnt from the Judge and her mother, Minnie Sayre, was that Southerners were fanatical about their Southern beauties, the chivalry of their Southern gentlemen, Union General Sherman’s devastating raids which were instrumental in the Confederacy’s defeat.6 Because she came from an old-established white Southern family, she understood the symbolism of the South’s luxuriant blossoms which atrophied into perfumed decay. She grew up acutely aware that casualty and spoilage could always occur at a moment of great promise to any of the young men who courted her.7 Zelda’s heritage was the proximity of youth and beauty to death and annihilation.

  Talking about the dead was therefore common amongst Zelda’s circle. She knew her ancestors were spirited, quixotic and rash. Pioneers and speculators, politicians and lawyers, they raced to the brink and didn’t pull back. Zelda felt she took after them. The Sayres and the Morgans on her father’s side were illustrious and property-owning while the Cresaps and the Machens on her mother’s side were powerful and romantic.

  After Zelda’s death, when her daughter Scottie investigated the Maryland Cresap line that stretched from Zelda’s maternal grandmother Victoria Cresap Mims back to the seventeenth century, she said it became clear why Zelda emerged from a conservative Southern background as one of the Twenties’ most flamboyant figures: ‘my mother was descended from some of the most audacious, impetuous, picturesque and irrepressible figures in all of Maryland’s colorful history’.8

  The most audacious was Colonel Thomas Cresap, born 1694 in Skipton, Yorkshire. This quintessential frontiersman had emigrated to the York County side of the Susquehanna River in Maryland, where he ran a ferry across to the present-day town of Washington Boro. Cresap was known as ‘The Maryland Monster’ to the Pennsylvanians among whom he settled.9 Rumoured to be Lord Baltimore’s secret agent, he had been granted 500 acres and appointed surveyor, magistrate and captain of the militia in competition with the Pennsylvanian officials. So obnoxious was he to them that finally they sent him to jail. As he was led in chains to the courthouse hundreds gathered to see the infamous Maryland Monster.

  Once released, he impertinently borrowed from his lawyers to move his family to Oldtown, an abandoned Indian village near today’s Cumberland.10 He founded the massive Ohio Company and became guide, explorer, politician and protagonist in the wilderness drama. Depending on which version you credit, the Monstrous Frontiersman died at the age of 96, 100 or 102.

  It was Thomas’s ‘perfect mate’ Hannah Johnson, married to him in 1727, who particularly fired Zelda’s imagination. Born in Prince George’s County, Hannah, a ‘darkly handsome Amazon’, defended her disputed territory on the old Indian lands of Conejola. When arrested by Lancaster County’s sheriff in 1736 she ‘carried a rifle, two pistols, a tomahawk, a scalping knife, and a small dagger in her boot’.11

  Of Hannah’s three sons, one was killed by Indians and another died serving in George Washington’s army in 1775. Her oldest son, Daniel Cresap, fought in the French and Indian War and was buried in Maryland in 1798 at the foot of Dan’s Mountain, named after his own glorious exploits. His son Daniel Jnr, born 1753, who commanded a regiment to put down the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion,12 died from hardships on the campaign without the benefit of whiskey.

  The last of Zelda’s bold Maryland ancestors, Daniel Jnr’s eldest son Edward Otho, his courageous wife Sarah Briscoe13 and two small daughters travelled down the Ohio river on a flat boat to Kentucky. Within six years Sarah was widowed with five tiny children. A tame version of Edward’s death suggests he caught pneumonia but Zelda always preferred the version that he was killed by Chickasaw Indians. One anecdote on which all versions agree is that because of the tangled position in which his body was found he had to be squeezed into his coffin. Then when it was opened at the wake, out sprang the body of Edward Otho.14

  Sarah’s daughter Caroline Cresap, Zelda’s great-grandmother, who married John Mims of Kentucky, inherited the Cresap bravado. Caroline’s daughter Victoria married Confederate Senator Willis B. Machen, twenty-eight years her senior and already twice widowed, with whom she had two daughters: Zelda’s mother Minnie and the younger delicate Aunt Marjorie. Minnie would tell Zelda how during the Civil War her intrepid grandmother Caroline, on a visit to the Machens’ Kentucky home Mineral Mount, on the Cumberland River, insisted on flying the Confederate flag from the roof. A passing Yankee gunboat instantly splintered the house with shells.15

  In Zelda’s home in Pleasant Avenue, Minnie, five years old at the time of the incident, still kept Senator Machen’s carved mahogany secretaire whose corner had been blown off by the gunfire. She riveted young Zelda with tales of their Machen ancestors’ earlier exploits. There was John Machen, who boldly emigrated to Virginia from Scotland in the early seventeenth century.16 There was his son Thomas Machen, still restless, who left Virginia for South Carolina then finally settled to marriage with a Sayre cousin, Mary Chilton.17 There was Thomas’s son Henry Machen I, a man still on the move. A lieutenant during the Revolution, he went to Kentucky with an English immigrant, Grace Greenwood. By 1802 Zelda’s great-grandfather, tobacco planter Henry Machen III, and his wife Nancy Tarrant had formed a Scottish colony on Kentucky’s Cumberland River. Minnie showed Zelda a sepia photo of herself on which an admirer had scrawled ‘The Wild Lily of Cumberland’.

  Henry Machen III’s son Willis, raised in Kentucky when the state was a frontier, was energetic, enterprising and multi-talented like his granddaughter Zelda. Initially an iron-refiner, when his business failed, to everyone’s astonishment he became a successful lawyer in Kentucky’s South West, served in the legislature and helped frame Kentucky’s constitution.

  Willis’s major rebellion came during the Civil War when Kentucky’s allegiance to the Union was challenged by a provisional state government set up by secessionists, amongst whom Willis was pre-eminent. He was elected to the Confederate Congress18 and appointed President of the Council of Ten, the Governor of Kentucky’s advisory board.

  However, in 1865 as a secessionist he was forced to flee with a price on his head to Canada, where Victoria and their daughters joined him, until he was pardoned by President Grant in 1869 and returned to Kentucky to rebuild his plantation.

  In 1872 Willis served for four months on the US Senate, during which time young Minnie visited Washington with him. His name was presented by the Kentucky Democratic Delegation for the Vice Presidential nomination that year, though he did not win it. By 1880 he was a powerful member of the Kentucky railroad commission. Minnie, like Zelda a rebel, did not always agree with her father but remained proud of him.19 It was that pride which Zelda absorbed and which she saw in her home, a veritable seat of justice presided over by her father, Judge A
nthony Dickinson Sayre. Zelda learnt from her father that blood and breeding were more significant status symbols than house ownership. The Judge’s home became a ‘shining sword [which] sleeps at night in the sheath of his tired nobility’. In Zelda’s first novel, her father becomes a retributory organ, the force of law and order, the pillar of established discipline. He was a ‘living fortress’ who offered his children such a sense of security that it absolved them ‘from the early social efforts necessary in life to construct strongholds for themselves’.20 This made her despise ‘weaklings’ without the ‘courage and the power to feel they’re right when the whole world says they’re wrong’.21

  Yet when she was in the wrong her father’s reputation protected her from open criticism. In his thirties he was asked to serve as a member of the Alabama House of Representatives. Four years later he was elected President of the State Senate for a term. By 1897 he had become a City Court Judge in Montgomery.

  In 1909 he was appointed to the Alabama Supreme Court as Associate Judge. ‘Though judges were elected, he refused ever to campaign, which fortunately became unnecessary for he early on ceased having any opponents. The thing he is most famous for in legal circles is never having had an opinion overturned.’22 From 1910 he was re-elected each year, and by 1928 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws. Throughout Zelda’s childhood, ‘he was considered a great judge, so much so that when it rained, the conductor of the streetcar … which he caught every morning, would stop the streetcar and walk for two blocks with an umbrella to fetch him’.23

  Zelda’s father, Judge Anthony Sayre, had grown up in his father Daniel’s book-lined house on Court Street, Montgomery, where Daniel had inspired his children with a love of learning. Daniel Sayre had founded and edited a Tuskegee newspaper, then moved to Montgomery to edit the Montgomery Post. Anthony, his youngest son, was sent to a small private school, then in 1878 to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from where he graduated with honours in Greek and mathematics.24 He spent a year teaching at Vanderbilt University, then returned to Montgomery to read law and be admitted to the Bar. He earned little during his first few years as a practising attorney. However in 1883, at twenty-five, when he was appointed clerk of the city court he knew he was in a position to marry.