Black Milk

reached the address, they found little Zelda sitting on the roof waiting for them. After a lot of hassle, they managed to get her down. The truth behind the story was discovered a bit later. It was Zelda who had called the police. First she had made the phone call, then climbed onto the roof, crept right to the edge and sat down and waited to be rescued. This, more or less, remained the modus vivendi in her life. Even as a grown-up woman, she continued to go to the edge and then calmly watch the panic she had caused.

The essays and books written about Zelda Fitzgerald almost always revolve around three points:

1. She was the wife and greatest love of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

2. She was a gifted artist herself.

3. She had extensive therapy, suffered from depression and ended up dying in a mental institution.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald met toward the end of the Great War. Each had a different memory of their first encounter. The man found the woman attractive and smart, but he was disturbed by the way she constantly flirted with other men. His first impression of her was a mixed one.

The woman, on the other hand, found the man charismatic and talented with a dazzling mind. Zelda was the kind of woman who had to love a man’s brain before she could fall for him.

They got married in April 1920, carried by the winds of mutual attraction and passion. When asked by a journalist what his greatest ambition in life was, Scott Fitzgerald said it was to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his beloved wife forever. Yet from the very start, they saw each other as potential rivals. The fact that both had a tendency to take to the bottle at the sight of the slightest distress did not help their marriage. In time, their disagreements grew more violent and hurtful.

Alcohol, cigarettes, night life… They were no strangers to life in the fast lane. But perhaps their greatest addiction was to their love. Zelda and Scott adored, fought and marred each other in a roller-coaster relationship. They were aware of each other’s weaknesses and knew how to hurt. One moment they would scream war cries and the next they would jump into the car and drive dangerously fast on sharpcurved roads. They loved to challenge fate. Being a creative, famous, high-flying and self-destructive couple, they became the focus of the media. Unsurprisingly, not everything written about them was true. There was much gossip and speculation, and few reporters had the time or the will to separate the facts from the lies.

In the years that followed, Scott Fitzgerald became increasingly famous, swiftly climbing up the glass staircase of the literary pantheon. Strikingly, the characters he wrote about and the themes he tackled were often inspired by Zelda. Some of his characters spoke just like Zelda. Did he “steal” ideas from his wife? Did he pilfer parts of her writing? From time to time Zelda would mockingly talk about how entries in the diaries she kept at home would end up in her husband’s novels-sometimes entire paragraphs. In a review she wrote of The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune, she made this insinuation public: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald-I believe that is how he spells his name-seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” [8]

Perhaps every writer is a pickpocket of some sort, stealing inspiration from real life. Like magpies that can’t resist making off with shiny objects, authors flap their wings across the boundless sky looking for themes to write about. And when they find one, they snatch it up. Whichever way we see it, the extent of the “literary patent” between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald has not been fully resolved even today.

Fame and recognition brought little happiness for Scott Fitzgerald. Surrounded by women who admired him, critics who applauded him and reporters who saw in his every move juicy material to write about, he began drinking heavily. When not thinking about his next novel, he was shutting his mind off to the world; when not writing, he was imbibing, sometimes falling asleep in random places. Zelda was at least as unhappy as he was. They couldn’t make each other happy, but they could not possibly let each other go their own separate ways. Like two kites whose strings had intertwined, they kept twisting and turning in each other’s arms.

The friendship that grew between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway during this time is something that bemuses literary historians. The two of them were inseparable for a while-two bohemian writers who would pass out together. It was the kind of friendship that did not sit well with Zelda. She found Hemingway too macho, his ego too inflated. She believed he wasn’t a good companion for her husband. In time, the friendship fell apart.

Zelda’s jealousy was legendary. In fit after fit of envy, she burned her clothes, destroyed her possessions and even damaged her surroundings. Once at a crowded, chic party, she took off the jewelry she was wearing and threw it into hot water in an attempt to make “jewel soup.” She was often blinded by rage. Another night, after she noticed her husband paying lavish attention to the famous Isadora Duncan, she made a scene by throwing herself down a set of marble stairs. When they picked her up off the floor, she was covered in blood.

They had one daughter whom they both loved dearly-Scottie, who was born in October 1921 and was given to the care of a nanny. While she was still partly anesthetized, Zelda murmured, “I hope it is beautiful and a fool-a beautiful little fool.” The same expression would be repeated in The Great Gatsby when Daisy talked about her own daughter. As always, life inspired fiction.

After Scottie, Zelda had three abortions. As much as she loved her daughter, she did not want to have another child, at least not so soon. The baby neither slowed down their lifestyle nor tempered their arguments. In the later stages of their marriage, Zelda always searched for something she could do that would be outside the realm of her husband’s interests. For a while she tried taking ballet classes. Her husband scorned her interest, calling it a waste of time. In the end ballet couldn’t make Zelda happy. [9]

That was when she started to feel jealous-not of another woman this time, but of her husband’s writing. More and more often she tried to distract him during the hours he was working on his fiction. It was obvious to everyone but them that they could not stay in the same house any longer. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to keep his wife at home. He was worried that if she went out alone, she would flirt or even find a lover-just to get back at him, to relieve the pain in her heart.

Rumi likens the mind to a guesthouse. Every morning we have a new, unexpected visitor, sometimes in the form of joy, sometimes dressed up as sorrow. For Zelda Fitzgerald her guesthouse entertained all kinds of unpleasant guests: Mr. Anxiety, Miss Panic Attack, Mrs. Resentment, Sir Bitterness…

Finally, in June 1930, after months that included a nervous breakdown, hallucinations and an attempted suicide, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to a hospital. She spent the rest of her eighteen years under psychiatric care. There is a letter she wrote to Scott shortly afterward that says a lot about not only her psychology at the time but also her vivacious and tempestuous style: “No matter what happens, I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game: that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth…” [10]

Nonetheless, staying at the clinic seemed somehow to have triggered her productivity. She wrote constantly during this period-diaries, stories, letters. Not only did she make beautiful paintings, but she also wrote a semiautobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. In utmost sincerity she wrote about the fun-loving, inventive, but also hardworking Southern belle she had been, and the inner transformation that came with marriage. She also elaborated on the two conflicting sides of her personality: one independent and carefree, the other in need of love and security.

As soon as she finished the novel Zelda sent it to Scott’s publisher. Her husband had not seen it yet and when he found out, he was furious. At the time he was working on Tender Is the Night. As they had made use of similar material (the story of Zelda’s mental illness and the years they had spent together in Paris and on the Riviera), the two books largely overlapped. A great fight ensued, with marital and artistic repercussions, at the end of which Zelda agreed to revise her manuscript. When the book came out it was not well received by literary critics, selling only a limited number of copies. Demoralized, Zelda did not publish another novel.

Her husband rented houses near the various clinics she resided in so that he could still be close to her while he was writing. They spent the following years seeing each other only on visiting days, between pills and doctors and treatments. He died in 1940 from a heart attack. Eight years later a fire erupted in a mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina. Among the patients who lost their lives in that fire was Zelda Fitzgerald.

Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should be simple. “He wrote books, then he died.” But what about a woman writer like Zelda Fitzgerald: She sat on the edge, danced herself to heartbreak, painted the world in