Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (7 page)
Read Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Online
Authors: Sally Cline
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.
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,
CO
187, 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.
27
ZSF
,
Waltz,
p. 10.
28
ZSF
,
Caesar’s
Things,
ch. I,
CO
183, Box 2A, Folder 2,
PUL
. Zelda uses Scott Fitzgerald as well as Tony for her characterization of ‘Monsieur’.
29
Blackshear, ‘Mama Sayre’.
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).
47
Zelda Sayre to
FSF
, Feb. or Mar. 1919,
CO
187, Box 42, Folder 13,
PUL
.
48
Conversations between Ida Haardt McCulloch (Zelda’s classmate) and Janie Wall, and between Janie Wall and the author, June 1999, Montgomery.
49
Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir; also quoted in Lanahan,
Scottie
…, p. 19.
50
Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir.
51
ZSF
,
Waltz,
p. 32.
52
Prangins records.
53
Sara Mayfield,
Constant
Circle,
Delacorte Press, New York, 1968, ch. 2.
54
Tallulah’s mother, Adelaide, died of blood poisoning three weeks after Tallulah’s birth. Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were taken by their father, attorney and Congressman William Brockman Bankhead, to his parents in Fayetteville, Alabama. Tallulah, who always perceived herself as chubby and went on a lifelong series of diets, felt
overshadowed
in her youth by Gene’s good looks and well-proportioned body. Though Zelda saw herself as Tallulah’s rival in childhood, it was Gene who later attracted Scott.
55
Zelda found the Capitol’s green slopes, known locally as Goat Hill, more fascinating than the fairground, the zoo at Oak Park, or even the gypsy palmist at Pickett Springs whom Zelda and Sara Haardt occasionally consulted. Mayfield,
Constant
Circle,
ch. 2.
56
Ibid.; also author’s conversations with Camella Mayfield, Tuscaloosa, June, July, Aug. 1999.
57
ZSF
,
Waltz
, p. 56.
58
Prangins records.
59
Ibid.
60
The 1900s was an era when even the vote the blacks had gained in the Civil War was
exercised
under duress and in stringently reduced numbers after white supremacy had been restored. ‘Reconstruction’, which officially transformed slaves to citizens, left liberated
slaves landless, powerless, impoverished and with nothing but their ‘freedom’. By 1900 the strict social boundaries between blacks and whites in the South were still in force and would only gradually be eroded. These divisions helped to establish the American
convention
that the South
was another land.
61
ZSF
,
Caesar,
ch. I,
CO
183, Box 2A, Folder 2,
PUL.
62
Prangins records.
63
The school, later known as the Sayre Street Grammar School, was named after her
great-uncle
William Parish Chilton of Tennessee, twice brother-in-law of Zelda’s paternal grandmother Musidora Morgan. First he married Musidora’s eldest sister Mary Catherine. Then two years after Mary died in Talladeega in 1845, William married Musidora’s younger sister Elvira Frances, known as Ella, sixth in their family of ten
children
. The Chiltons like the Sayres, their cousins, were a distinguished family with
insufficien
t funds so Miss Chilton founded the school to find employment.
64
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 5.
65
Minnie Sayre had suckled Zelda until she was four and old enough to bite through a chicken bone.
66
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 13.
67
ZSF
, ‘The Original Follies Girl’,
Collected
Writings,
p. 295.
68
Prangins records.
69
Sara Haardt’s mother told her: ‘No Southerner has lengthened his life or his fame for a day by writing his memoirs. The South, my dear, wants to forget.’ Sara Haardt, ‘Southern Souvenir’,
Southern
Souvenirs,
p. 299.
70
William Faulkner,
Requiem
for
a
Nun
(1951), Act I.
71
Lanahan,
Scottie
…, p. 159.
72
Minnie Sayre to
ZSF
, 31 July 1933,
CO
183, Box 5, Folder 21,
PUL
.
73
Conversation between Katharine Elsberry Steiner and Eddie Pattillo, reported to the author by Eddie Pattillo.
74
Minnie Sayre to
ZSF
, 31 July 1933,
CO
183, Box 5, Folder 21,
PUL
.