Piper began by assuring Zelda of his interest in Scott’s writing. He let her know he had read everything Fitzgerald had written and he was considering writing a biography. Then he tried to draw her out about their life together. He says: “Zelda was amazed and touched, I think, by my interest. She several times said to me, ‘Oh, how flattered Scott would be to think that people still remember him.’ “
Then she began to discuss her own writing. She told Piper she had been working on a novel which would be called Caesar’s Things, for she had learned to separate, she said, Caesar’s things from God’s. Their conversation moved quickly from one subject to another. On the whole it tended to be a theoretical and energetic, but abstract discussion, with neither of them, according to Piper, paying much attention to the other’s opinions. She asked him at one point if he didn’t believe in revelations, saying, “I know! I’ve had them! I have been dead and seen another world and come back again alive to this one.” Zelda was taken with the idea of Fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses. She told Piper she joined every organization she could “to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished.”
Relaxing with him at last she said: “Well, now, tell me about your work. I think it’s a fine idea, by all means. Surely a biography—He was so fine a person and had a really interesting life.
“Nora Flynn—he loved her I think—not clandestinely, but she was one of several women he always needed around him to stimulate him and to turn to when he got low and needed a lift. Sara Murphy was that way, too.”
Piper then told her about the collection of Scott’s personal and literary papers he had seen five years earlier at Judge Biggs’s. Shortly after he mentioned this Zelda seemed shaken and told him she had to lie down. She said that her mother would take care of him, and that although she regretted leaving him, when she was tired she had to rest. She invited him to return for lunch the following day. They went back and forth about the time, finally settling on twelve-thirty, and Zelda left the room.
Piper wrote this down about the last few moments of that first day:
In our brief talk of Scott, 1 had emphasized the disparity between his good and bad stories—some were full of poetry, others of forced writing and a concocted plot. But she didn’t get my point.
[Zelda said] “I always felt a story in the Post was tops; a goal worth seeking. It really meant something, you know—they only took stories of real craftsmanship. But Scott couldn’t stand to write them. He was completely cerebral, you know. All mind.”…Only when I mentioned the marvelous passages at the opening of Gatsby, with the wind rippling coolly and setting everything in motion was she really alert—listening to me with more than half an ear. At this delightful reference her eyes lighted up and smiled charmingly. She has suffered much around the eyes, but they are still grey and very alert.
The next day Piper came promptly at twelve-thirty only to find Zelda wringing her hands and quite distressed, insisting that they had set the time for twelve. She and Mrs. Sayre had already eaten. But they had saved dinner for him and out of the kitchen came delicious fried chicken, rice, candied yams, tomatoes and lettuce, with cake and plums for dessert.
It was during their second meeting that Zelda showed Dan Piper her portfolio of paintings, as well as some illustrations she was painting for her eleven-month-old grandson based on the Book of Genesis and Grimm’s fairy tales. A great many were paintings of flowers. All were in motion, it seemed to him. Zelda said to him about her art: “What I want to do is to paint the basic, fundamental principle so that everyone will be forced to realize and experience it—I want to paint a ballet step so all will know what it is—to get the fundamental essence into the painting.”
After lunch they walked to Montgomery’s art museum to look at Zelda’s paintings. Walking back she told him Scottie and her family were coming for a visit in June and that she knew she would be tired out afterward and have to return to Asheville to rest. She said it was good to know that she could go there to rest, that it reassured her.
Piper remembers the energy that radiated from her, her quick tenseness. She walked rapidly and gestured jerkily. Afterward they stopped at a small bar in town. He had heard that she must absolutely have no liquor, but she insisted on going into the bar. Piper ordered a beer, and Zelda to his relief ordered a vanilla soda, which had to be brought in from a drugstore. He remembers sitting opposite her, making small talk, wondering if the alcohol was a temptation for her, wondering if the entire two days had been a charade, but deciding that they couldn’t have been. For a moment he just enjoyed having her opposite him, the legendary and forgotten Zelda as his companion. When they were finished they returned to her little house and she gave him the portrait of herself.
At the beginning of June, 1947, Scottie, her husband, and their baby did come South and Zelda gave a party for them at the Blue Moon restaurant. There were twenty at the table and the food was delicious, ample Southern fare. However, one of the women who was there commented about the guests: “If Charles Dickens had been present he would have written a sequel to Pickwick Papers. There was the oddest assortment of animals.” Nevertheless, neither Scottie nor Jack behaved as if that were the case. Jack stood and made a beautiful toast to his mother-in-law, which very much pleased Zelda.
But it was clear to everyone that Zelda was not well. By the end of the hot summer she was close to collapse, she grew weak and furtive, and she refused to see a doctor. Finally, Mrs. Sayre called Scottie. On November 2, 1947, Zelda returned to Highland Hospital for treatment and rest. A taxi was called to take her to the train. Mrs. Sayre, Marjorie, and Livye Hart stood on the sidewalk by the porch, having said their goodbyes. Suddenly, just as Zelda was about to enter the taxi, she turned and ran back up to her mother. She said. “Momma, don’t worry. I’m not afraid to die.” Then she left them.
At the beginning of 1948 Zelda was given a series of insulin treatments and was moved to the top floor of the main building at Highland, where patients stayed while recovering from them. In early March in a letter to her mother she wrote that in Asheville the jasmine was in full flower and crocuses dotted the lawns. She wanted to get home, she said, to see “our lillies and larkspur bloom in the garden and I’d like to be there to watch the fires die down.” She thought her bridge game was getting better and she played twice a week; she sewed and took long walks; she thanked her mother for her constant devotion.
On March 9 she wrote Scottie that the snow had fallen once again just as she thought winter was finally over. She had been at Highland four months and during that period Scottie’s second child, a daughter, was born. Zelda told her she had gained twenty pounds owing to the insulin treatments, “making a grand total of 130 lbs at which I shudder in the privacy of my boudoir.” Scottie’s maternity clothes would probably fit her perfectly, she said, and she would need something to travel home in when she would at last be released.
“Anyhow: to-day there is promise of spring in the air and an aura of sunshine over the mountains; the mountains seem to hold more weather than elsewhere and time and retrospect flood roseate down the long hill-sides.… I long to see the new baby, Tim must be phenomenal by this time.”
At midnight the following night, March 10, a fire broke out in the diet kitchen of the main building where Zelda was sleeping. The flames shot up a small dumbwaiter shaft to the roof and leaped out onto each of the floors. The stairways and corridors were filled with smoke. A pair of stockings pinned to a line on a porch on the top floor could be seen dancing wildly in the wind created by the heat of the fire. There was no automatic fire-alarm system in the old stone-and-frame building and no sprinkler system. The fire escapes were external, but they were made of wood and quickly caught fire. Firemen and staff members struggled valiantly to bring the patients to safety, but they were hampered by locked doors, and by heavy windows shackled with chains. Nine women were killed, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died wi
th them.
Her body was identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it. She was taken to Maryland for burial. It was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1948, and the day was warm and sunny, in striking contrast to the cold, raw afternoon when Scott was buried. The service was simple and a small group of friends stayed until her grave was filled in. Her death seemed a relief and they felt bound together by their memories of the Fitzgeralds; they shared a haunting intimacy in witnessing the last and mortal death of Zelda. Clusters of bright spring flowers were placed upon the raw turf of her grave, and Mrs. Turnbull brought two wreaths of pansies from La Paix and placed them over Scott and Zelda, who were at last in peace together.
Acknowledgments
THERE WERE MANY PEOPLE AND MANY SOURCES OF information that were of great help to me during the six years of research and writing of this biography. Some of them I can and will thank on these pages. But for various reasons I am not able to directly express my gratitude to others who were just as helpful. I was fortunate enough to have had certain rare privileges of research extended to me which enabled me to draw on materials previously unavailable.
If it had not been for the early encouragement and backing of Lewis Leary when I was a graduate student at Columbia University I might never have begun. I cannot thank him enough. Let me also thank Joseph V. Ridgely for his sound counsel and friendship. And William York Tindall, who, one spring when I needed it, gave me his office to work in; and John Unterecker, who read an early and somewhat informal draft of part of this manuscript.
Of the more than one hundred people I interviewed and corresponded with, I am especially indebted to Mrs. Harold Ober, the late Doctor John Neustadt, Mrs. Sara Murphy and her husband, the late Gerald Murphy, Arthur Mizener, Judge and Mrs. John Biggs, Jr., Paul McLendon, H. Dan Piper, the late Dorothy Parker, Mrs. Laura Guthrie Hearne, Georges Poull, Sheilah Graham, C. Lawton Campbell, Doctor Oscar Forel, Mrs. Eleanor Browder Addison, the late Carl Van Vechten, and to Robert Taft for the loan of and permission to quote from Alexander McKaig’s diary.
I am also grateful to people who were kind enough to share with me their impressions of the Fitzgeralds, among them: Admiral Edouard Jozan, the late Andrew Turnbull, Dame Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, Zack Waters, Sir Shane Leslie, Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, John Dos Passos, Mrs. Lois Moran Young, Gilbert Seldes, Princess Lubov Troubetskoy-Egorova, Mrs. Isabel Owens, Mrs. Robert S. Carroll, Miss Mary Porter, Landon Ray, Mrs. Livye Hart Ridgeway, Mrs. May Steiner Coleman, Mrs. H. L. Weatherby, Malcolm Cowley, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Durr, Mrs. C. O. Kalman, Gwinn Owens, Miss Sara Mayfield, Miss Lucy Goldthwaite, the late Leon Ruth, Fred Ball, Louis Whitfield, Mrs. Isabel Amorous Palmer, Mrs. John Hume Taylor, Calvin Tomkins, Mrs. Paul Scott Mowrer, Mrs. Helen F. Blackshear, Mme. Claude Amiel, Charles Angoff, and Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish.
The New York Public Library has generously granted me the privilege of working in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, and to the boys in that excellent back room, Peter Burchard, Bill Fisher, Jim Flexner, David Hawke, and Frank Lundberg, I can only say that my education was deepened and whatever art I have was sharpened by your good talk and company. I am also indebted to the Princeton University Library for extending all sorts of privileges to me during five summers of work. My thanks to Alexander P. Clark and Mrs. Wanda Randall for giving so freely of their knowledge and assistance.
To Vesta Svenson who first suggested that I read Fitzgerald, to Mrs. Toni Milford who offered intelligent advice, to Judith Gustafson who typed for more years than we like to recall and to Nancy Wechsler for her counsel in my behalf, my best thanks. A final note of gratitude to my editor Genevieve Young for her constant belief and her clear head.
And to the only person who was behind me the whole way, who lived with me as I lived with and tried to shape the materials of this book, Ich bin din….
Notes and Sources
The following abbreviations are used. My pagination is usually to the most available edition, which is indicated in parentheses.
B&D The Beautiful and Damned, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1922. (The Scribner Library paperback.)
CT Caesar’s Things, an unpublished novel by Zelda Fitzgerald.
CU The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New Directions, New York, 1945. (New Directions Paperbook, 4th printing, 1959.)
FSF F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby The Great Gatsby, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1925. (The Scribner Library paperback.)
Ledger Fitzgerald’s 189-page record book from which some pages have been torn and others are missing. It contains “Record of Published Fiction; Novels, Plays, Stories (Not including Unpaid for Juvenilia),” his “Earnings by years,” “Zelda’s Earnings,” and a 39-page “Autobiographical Chart,” or “Outline of My Life.”
Letters The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1963.
NM Nancy Milford
Scottie Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith
SMTW Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1932. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Hardcover.)
Tender Tender Is the Night, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1934. (The Scribner Library paperback of the original text.)
Cowley—Tender Three Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tender Is the Night, “The Author’s Final Version,” edited by Malcolm Cowley, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1953.
TSOP This Side of Paradise, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920. (The Scribner Library paperback.)
ZSF Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
It is difficult to imagine having had to work without the benefit of the two biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald—the excellent The Far Side of Paradise by Arthur Mizener, and the deeply moving Scott Fitzgerald by the late Andrew Turnbull. I am grateful for them both. Among the many books and articles that I read while preparing to write this book, the following were especially helpful: The Composition of Tender Is the Night by Matthew J. Bruccoli; That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan; The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash; Beloved Infidel and College of One by Sheilah Graham; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green; A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway; The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909–1917, edited by John Kuehl; The Divided Self, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by R. D. Laing; The Genain Quadruplets, edited by David Rosenthal; Schizophrenia as a Human Process by Harry Stack Sullivan; “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” Calvin Tomkins’ New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy; Patriotic Gore and The Shores of Light by Edmund Wilson.
Prologue
PAGE
xii I remember Gerald Murphy … : Gerald Murphy to NM, interview. April 26, 1963.
xii Sara Murphy caught something of it … : Sara Murphy to FSF, August 20 [no year].
xiv I remember talking to two old men…: Colonel Jesse Traywick to NM, interview, May 31, 1968.
xiv How curious that the same woman … : Letters, p. 173.
xiv Once Zelda asked the lady … : Mrs. Nash Read to NM, interview, July 27, 1963.
xiv Writing about Montgomery … : “Southern Girl,” College Humor, October, 1929. p. 27.
Chapter 1
3 If there was a confederate…: Sara Mayfield to NM, interview, March 16, 1965.
3 Willis B. Machen…: Cyclopaedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, Vol. IV, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1888. Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States, edited by John Howard Brown, Vol. V, Federal Book Company of Boston, Boston, 1903. W. H. Perrin, et al., Kentucky, A History of the State, 5th ed., Batten, Louisville, 1887.
5 Anthony’s mother, Musidora Morgan, was the sister of…: Senator Morgan became something of a national figure when he urged annexation of Cuba and the Philippines. He was an expansionist who envisioned an Isthmian canal as a gateway of Southern trade with the Pacific. See the Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Dumas Malone, Vol. XIII, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New
York, 1943, pp. 180–181. Zelda was also related through her paternal grandmother to the flamboyant and wily Confederate brigadier general “Raider” John Hunt Morgan. See Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, Oxford University Press, New York, 1962.
6 The first years of the Sayres’ marriage…: Helen F. Blackshear, “Mama Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald’s Mother-in-Law,” The Georgia Review, Winter, 1965, Vol. XIX, #4, Athens, Georgia.
7 He worked relentlessly and well…: Who Was Who in America, Vol. I, The A. N. Marquis Company, New York, 1942.
8 When Zelda was asked later…: The following quoted material is excerpted from records kept during Zelda’s stay at Les Rives de Prangins, June 5, 1930, to September 15, 1931, and was prepared and translated for the author by Mme. Claude Amiel at the direction of Doctor Oscar Forel, who first diagnosed Zelda Fitzgerald a schizophrenic. Hereafter this material will be referred to as Prangins.
9 The Pleasant Avenue house…: Mrs. Everet Addison to NM, December 8, 1965.
10 A younger friend of hers…: Sara Mayfield to NM, interview, March 16, 1965.
11 In 1909 Zelda’s father was appointed…: Elizabeth S. Fritz to NM, November 2. 1965.
12 Her schoolmates noticed…: Mrs. H. L. Weatherby to NM, August 12, 1963.
12 She read whatever she found…: Prangins.
13 Whether she was stylish…: Mrs. E. Addison to NM, September 15, 1965.
13 At fifteen Zelda was striking…: Mrs. E. Addison to NM, September 29, 1965.
Chapter 2
15 To make sure that all went smoothly…: Leon Ruth to NM, interview, July 30, 1963.
15 That summer a story appeared…: ZSF’s scrapbook. This is a personal scrapbook kept by ZSF which includes mementos from childhood through 1924.
Zelda Page 48
