by Sally Cline
Though she read a great deal, not surprisingly she preferred books with action. ‘The fairy tales were my favourite,’ she said, because their creatures twisted, contorted and rushed through the pages. The three little pigs, Hansel and Gretel and Alice in Wonderland, which she copied as a child, she later formally painted. In Judge Sayre’s extensive library she dipped into his encyclopaedias, Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Wilde, Galsworthy, Kipling, Plutarch, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Gibbons. She read Victorian children’s books, gobbled up fiction slightly too old for her: ‘popular tales for boys, novels that my sisters had left on the table … all I found about the civil war’.62
However, books alone could not replace a sound education, and in her late twenties Zelda regretted her inattention to early school life. Judge Sayre, a member of the Montgomery Board of Education, felt his children should be educated in public schools, so Zelda did not go with Tallulah Bankhead and Sara Mayfield to Miss Gussie Woodruff’s Dame’s School. Instead her mother sent her at six to the Chilton Grammar School behind Zelda’s home.63 Zelda did not like school, came home, told her parents it was worse than prison, and refused to return. Although Minnie Sayre, a student of theosophy, valued education – she had herself graduated from Montgomery Female College on 26 June 1878 and ‘spent a winter being “finished” in Philadelphia’64 – she indulgently allowed her daughter to stay off school until she was seven, after which Zelda returned until her graduation.
Scott Fitzgerald believed that Minnie’s indulgence65 had spoilt Zelda’s character and encouraged what he saw as her selfish recklessness. Zelda’s friends and relations sturdily refuted this perspective. Their view was that while Zelda received Minnie’s constant praise, she was also taught to be kind and considerate. Sara Mayfield, who became her biographer and knew her for forty years, delineated her as compassionate, thoughtful and tender. Zelda never patronized anyone younger or weaker and protectively showed youngsters how to skate or dive. She was generous with time and money and never condescended. As one Montgomery child said: ‘She didn’t look down on me as little but made me feel as big as she.’66
From her father Zelda inherited secrecy and reflectiveness, for she was not always the madcap of legend. Zelda carried about her an air of urgency and mystery that made her elusive,67 dreamy and sensual.68 She would go on solitary walks, veer into strange silences or bubble out a stream of free association that whizzed through her brain, which later characterized her remarkable epistolary technique.
Even with friends she spent some evenings in reverie. In the powder-blue dusk that replaced the scorching sultry afternoons, Zelda, the Haardt sisters, Katharine Elsberry and her schoolfriend Eleanor Browder would catch lightning bugs. The others talked as they put them in bottles to make lamps, while Zelda’s silence seemed louder than their conversations.
When she felt most unsettled or most alone, Zelda wandered down to Oakwood’s Confederate Cemetery, where many of her ancestors lay. In that place of memories and secrets she would smell the lush decay from the bruised petals of poppies and roses which drifted over the grey headstones and grey gullies. Southerners still see those short-lived tissue-paper poppies and parchment magnolias as nostalgic reminders of lost childhood, fallen dead and family silences. It was Zelda’s inheritance from a land of unlayable ghosts.
Sara Haardt’s mother used to tell the girls: ‘The South wants to forget.’69 But the South never forgot. ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’70
Consequently the cemetery, in Zelda’s youth, was a place people treated like a park, bringing flowers, chatting to the dead. Today Old Montgomerians take researchers around the cemetery and point proudly to the six gleaming white graves that relate to Zelda, their local heroine. That the bodily remains of the Sayres lurk inside is not disputed; but the accuracy of the inscriptions is as puzzling as the portions of their lives that are omitted.
The first tombstone, adorned with fresh flowers, is Minnie’s: the gravestone merely informs visitors she was born in Eddyville 23 November 1860, died 13 January 1958 and was the Judge’s wife.
Next to Minnie’s grave is a tomb for two: Zelda’s eldest nervy sister Marjorie Sayre Brinson, born according to the tombstone in 1885 (but according to the Family Bible in 1886), who died two years after their mother in 1960, and her husband, Minor Williamson Brinson, who died in 1954. Locals say breezily: ‘It was Marjorie who went crazy you know not Zelda, but then you could say it ran throughout their family.’ Scottie recalled her Aunts Clothilde and Rosalind as constantly nervous and ailing, though not as depressed as Aunt Marjorie, who spent time in a sanatorium in 1945 with a nervous breakdown. When Marjorie’s daughter, little Marjorie, stayed with the Sayres during her mother’s breakdowns the child was told her mother was away on ‘visits’.71 Not until 1933, when Zelda’s brother Tony had his breakdown during Zelda’s own nervous illness, did their mother open up. She wrote to Zelda: ‘Morgan blood is a pest since it means unstable nerves,’ revealed how she had nursed Marjorie for two years ‘and was with Tilde at her worst last summer’.72 Scottie herself, determined to deny the family’s melancholy stain, remained relentlessly resilient.
Tony has the next grave, with a neat plaque recording his birth, 9 March 1894, and his death, 27 August 1933. One would not expect it to mention his dissolute behaviour or the fact that he left Auburn University without a degree. But curiously, it removes any trace of his marriage. Tony married Edith, known by locals as ‘a girl from the wrong side of the tracks’, who ‘disappeared’ after Tony’s final illness and was never spoken of again. The gravestone fails to record that Tony killed himself after many months of recurring nightmares of killing his mother.
The imposing grave next to Tony’s is that of Judge Anthony Dickinson Sayre, born 29 April 1858 in Tuskegee Alabama, died 17 November 1931. Visitors notice that seventy years after his demise this grave, too, is swept and the stone polished. Zelda’s friend Katharine reported that Minnie ‘had to keep an eye on the Judge because he was given to terrible dark depressions’.73 But no graveyard guides talk about this. They tell you proudly that the responsible Judge took several family members into his home, but they never mention that his subsequent anxiety led to a severe nervous breakdown. For fifteen years Minnie never mentioned it either, until she forced herself to tell Zelda she had nursed the Judge ‘through nine months of prostration in 1918’.74
Next to the Judge’s memorial is another twin tomb containing two of his brothers: Daniel Morgan, the second Sayre child and eldest boy,75 born 1839, whose death is shown by research to be 1862 but is given on the tombstone as 1888;76 and John Reid Stonewall Sayre, sixth child and third son, who died 17 February 1940.77 He was well known to Zelda, for the Judge had given him a home at 6 Pleasant Avenue.
The sixth Sayre tomb contains the Judge’s parents: Daniel, born Franklin, Ohio, 1808, and Musidora Morgan, whom he married on 26 November 1835 in Benton County, Alabama. Daniel the journalist, who died in 1888, was also a democrat and landowner.
The Sayres, early settlers on Long Island, had moved via New Jersey and Ohio to Alabama. By the time of the Civil War they had become completely Southern in outlook and politics. Daniel’s elder brother William had built the White House of the Confederacy for Jefferson Davis, and had become a founder of the first Presbyterian church in Montgomery.
Musidora’s death, recorded as 4 March 1907, is firmly established by research, but her birth, given on the tombstone as 1818, was in fact 1817. None of the townsfolk, however, care much about the birth date, as ‘Musidora wasn’t from here. Born in Huntsville you know.’ Zelda’s grandmother, a respected schoolteacher,78 was eccentric, forthright and didn’t care whom she upset. Locals still talk about the day the widowed Musidora, also given a home by the Judge, intentionally muddled up two friends of the Sayres, both called Mrs Bell. As the wealthier Mrs Bell walked past the Pleasant Avenue porch Musidora exclaimed: ‘Are you the nice Mrs Bell or are you the wealthy, ordinary and very common Mrs Bell?’
The second surviving child was John Reid Stonewall; the third, Zelda’s father, was treasured as the youngest. The miracle of his survival in part accounted for his overweening sense of responsibility.
On a graveyard tour one hears of the prestigious reputations of Musidora’s brothers Irby and Philander, but most especially of the eminence of another brother, US Senator John Tyler Morgan.81 What one never hears is that in his blood, too, ran the nervous disposition that haunted both sides of Zelda’s family. After getting his Panama Canal scheme through the Senate he suddenly killed himself.82
In Oakwood Cemetery one gravestone is patently missing. That is the grave belonging to Marjorie Machen, Zelda’s aunt. After suffering a series of tragedies she too was invited by Zelda’s dutiful father to live with them. Had Aunt Marjorie died elsewhere, the absence of a grave would occasion no surprise. But Marjorie killed herself in the outhouse next to the kitchen of 6 Pleasant Avenue, the Sayres’ ‘pleasant house on a pleasant street, filled with pleasant people’.83 Katharine Elsberry said: ‘That suicide was hushed up even more than most of them were.’84
If you ask the graveyard guides where Aunt Marjorie’s grave is, or exactly what happened to Aunt Marjorie, they shake their heads and look surprised, as if vanishing graves or repressed insanities are nothing to do with them.
In Zelda’s favourite Oakwood Cemetery, there are as many omissions as there are memorials.
Zelda’s previous biographers have written very little about the strains that affected Zelda’s family because mental illness is one of the least discussed, if most common, occurrences in Old Montgomery. Zelda’s mother had never mentioned that her mother, Victoria, had suffered mental illness in the harsh Canadian conditions. Minnie never told Zelda that two years after Grandfather Willis’s death Victoria, griefstricken, committed suicide. It was one of several suicides not spoken of in Zelda’s family.
Montgomery people point out that ‘the Civil War did something terrible to Southern men’. Suicides were more common amongst Montgomery men than was ever publicly acknowledged. Sara Mayfield’s brother, and the father of Zelda’s cousin Katharine, both committed suicide. Both deaths were hushed up. This was the dark side to the vivid life of the South in which Zelda grew up.
‘In the South most of our good families are tainted with insanity. We handle it by thinking of the insane as “special”. But we don’t talk about anything considered “unpleasantness” and insanity would be unpleasantness. So Montgomery families create incredible facades. Entire blocks and neighbourhoods support each other in the lie of stability. Southerners don’t like those who are willing to wrestle with their demons in public. You can be sure if you don’t deal with the South it will deal with you.’85
But in the Northern life Zelda was to lead she would have to face those inherited troubling instabilities.
She would need great courage. How fortunate that from her ancestors Zelda also inherited resilience and a sense of the romantic.
Notes
1 Sara Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Dell Publishing, New York, 1971, p. 11.
2 Jeffrey Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, Papermac, Macmillan, London, 1995, p. 43.
3 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, Collected Writings, ed. Bruccoli, p. 293.
4 Sara Mayfield, The Constant Circle: H. L. Mencken and his Friends, Delacorte Press, New York, 1968, p. 21.
5 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir (holder Cecilia Ross). Also Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter of …: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, HarperCollins, New York, 1995, p. 20.
6 Union General Tecumseh Sherman is remembered for his ‘total war’ technique, an unprecedented assault on non-military targets. His Atlanta campaign was known as the ‘March to the Sea’. In Atlanta he defeated Confederate General John B. Hood in September 1864. Sherman’s capture of the Confederate capital Richmond, Virginia, on 3 April 1965 was a decisive turning point in the war; four days later Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Grant.
7 Most young women in Montgomery in the early part of the twentieth century recognized this aspect of their heritage. Zelda’s Montgomery friend Sara Haardt wrote before her death aged 37 on 31 May 1935: ‘Well, death, a full tropical death at the moment of greater promise, was the peculiar heritage of the South, and of all Southerners. I was merely coming into my own.’ Sara Haardt, ‘Dear Life’, Southern Souvenirs, p. 310. (‘Dear Life’ originally published as ‘Story’, Southern Album, Sep. 1934.)
8 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, ‘The Maryland Ancestors of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’, Maryland Historical Magazine 78:3, fall 1983, p. 217.
9 Thomas was known as ‘The Big Spoon’ by Indian friends because he fed them so well and as ‘The Rattlesnake Colonel’ by the British who came to fight the French.
10 Oldtown was later renamed Cresaptown.
11 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, ‘Maryland Ancestors’, p. 217.
12 A revolt of corngrowers and distillers against excise tax on whiskey.
13 Sarah inherited her bravery from her great-great-grandfather the infamous John Coode, leader of the 1689 Maryland Revolution.
14 It was of course a severe case of rigor mortis but it scared the wits out of poor widowed Sarah. However she ‘soon remarried, to a Mr Cobb’. Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, ‘Maryland Ancestors’, p. 227.
15 Ibid. Another version of this incident is given in a letter from Zelda to Scottie, c. 1947, quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1974, p. 39.
16 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 4.
17 This ensured that both Anthony Sayre and Minnie Machen had Chilton cousins and were therefore distantly related.
18 He was elected both by soldiers in the field and by residents in his district.
19 In Zelda’s first novel Save Me The Waltz she uses Willis’s last fatal adventure. Alabama asks her mother about her grandfather.’ “He was thrown from a race cart when he was eighty-three years old, in Kentucky.”’ This means something special to the young girl. ‘That her mother’s father had a graphic life of his own to dramatize was promising to Alabama. There was a show to join.’ (ZSF, Save Me The Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald: Collected Writings, p. 24). For Zelda there was always a show to join. Like Willis she had trouble picking which one. Though Willis the showman died seven years before Zelda’s birth, she remembered him gazing down at her from his portrait on the sitting room wall. She swore he was twinkling. Zelda gave the Adventurer’s portrait to Scottie, who hung it on her sitting-room wall until she died.
20 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 12,9.
21 Zelda Sayre to FSF, late fall 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 27, PUL.
22 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir.
23 Ibid.
24 Anthony D. Sayre graduated as valedictorian of his class. So excellent was his Greek that the previous year the College had awarded him a Maltese Cross, which his granddaughter Scottie kept for years under a towel in the guest room (Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir).
25 Helen Blackshear, ‘Mama Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald’s Mother-in-Law’, Georgia Review, Winter 1965. Helen Blackshear was a close friend of Minnie’s granddaughter Marjorie and knew Minnie well for ten years.
26 Ibid.
27ZSF, Waltz, p. 10.
28 ZSF, Caesar’s Things, ch. I, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 2, PUL. Zelda uses Scott Fitzgerald as well as Tony for her characterization of ‘Monsieur’.
29 Blackshear, ‘Mama Sayre’.
&
nbsp; 30 ZSF, Waltz, p.10.
31 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 15.
32 ZSF, Waltz, pp. 32, 21.
33 Given the Judge’s icy calm, this only seems possible if the visit had occurred at the time of the Judge’s nervous breakdown in 1918. The story originated with Gerald Murphy who had been told it by the Fitzgeralds as a racy part of their courtship.
34 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir. Also Lanahan, Scottie … p. 19.
35 ZSF, Waltz, p. 10.
36 Records kept by Dr Oscar Forel (trans. Mme Claude Amiel) during Zelda’s stay at Les Rives de Prangins clinic, Switzerland, 5 June 1930–15 Sep. 1931, p. 8. (Subsequently referred to as ‘Prangins records’.)
37 ZSF, Waltz, p. 10.
38 Ibid., p. 12.
39 Ann Henley, Introduction, Southern Souvenirs: Selected Stories and Essays of Sara Haardt, ed. Henley, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1999, p. 27.
40 Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1981, pp. 14–15.
41 There is a wonderful description of the town in Zelda’s story ‘Southern Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 299.
42 Ann Henley, Introduction, Southern Souvenirs, 1999, pp. 2–3.
43 Sara Haardt, ‘Southern Souvenir’ (short story), Southern Souvenirs, p. 298.
44 Sara Haardt interview with ZSF at Ellerslie, Delaware, 1928, accepted but unpublished by Good Housekeeping. According to H. L. Mencken this was because of editor W. F. Bigelow’s rage on discovering that Haardt was almost engaged to Mencken.
45 It was many years before Zelda’s sister Rosalind and Scott and Zelda were all able to live in the prestigious Cloverdale area. Rosalind later bought a house in Perry Street. Scott and Zelda rented 819 Felder Avenue in 1931.
46 Koula Svokos Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald and the Failure of the American Dream for Women, Peter Lang, New York, 1991, p. 10. See also Eddie Pattillo, ‘Last of the Belles: A Remembrance’, Montgomery, July 1994. Both Pattillo and Hartnett (p. 10) report that Zelda and Katharine Clitherall Elsberry Perkins Steiner May Haxton considered themselves soulmates. Zelda’s uncle Calvin Sayre married Katharine’s great-aunt Kate Elsbury (the name is spelt several different ways, the two most frequent being Elsberry and Elsbury).