Reading Zelda by Nancy Milford “flashbacked” me to catch the scent of something I had started to follow way back in our newlywed years more than fifty years ago, back in the days when we were reading authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who, with their wives and lives, we thought were GLAM – especially Zelda and Scott who were the exact opposite of the frumpy-dumpy-grumpy “grown-ups” with whom we had grown up. Except we hadn’t grown up and didn’t want to!
Not us. We were revilers of the duty-bound and the disappointed, like Peter Pan singing, “I Won’t Grow Up” with the Lost Boys. Our goal was to play as hard as we worked and to keep the torrid burning. Translation: we were aiming straight for the kinds of trouble that attended the Lost Generation as they sipped absinthe in Paris. Like them, we were on track to meet our share of demons which, eventually, we did.
In between, I met someone who had been employed at the psychiatric hospital where Zelda had been a patient. She knew Zelda! And said there was nothing glamorous about her by then. Gone were her days of wild and wonderful, and then, she died when Highland Hospital burned down to the ground, killing nine women, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died with them. When visiting Asheville recently, we took a trolley tour that stopped at the property where Highland Hospital had once stood. Now, only a few stone steps remain. That was the closest I ever got to Zelda, until Milford’s biography started raising the forgotten ways I had resonated with Zelda way back when:
• Like Zelda, I had chafed against the emotional restraint of my family and embraced the idea that anything done moderately was better left undone. Milford says that “Zelda intended to avoid at all costs her vision of the legion of unhappy women, saddled with domesticity, weary and yet resigned to it.” Me, too.
• Then she quoted a reporter who had once described Scott as “towering over his petite wife” which was pretty much us, too.
• A close friend of the Fitzgerald once described Scott as “nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful, almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive….”
I just kept saying “me too” as I read this book. There were so many intersections with Zelda that I felt like an echo of her, who had lived and died long before I ever showed up on earth. Apparently, she and Scott started out with “a jaunty confidence in life and in each other.” Once upon a time, that was us, too, back when we were so flagrantly determined to be like them: “a couple of nuts.”
Yet unlike them, we were pulled out of the swamp into which we had foolishly followed Alcohol. Our rescuers: a few of the Friends of Bill W. Reading this book was like reading the BEFORE to our AFTER, and it generated an increased dose of appreciation that what had happened to them did not end up happening to us. I thought the author captured it when she described the Fitzgeralds as “dazzling youngsters, charmingly self-promoting, with a cache of youth and stamina to rescue them.” But then, life happened, and issues, and illness about which Milford poignantly says, “What Zelda needed was peace, calm, and reassurance of herself at every point of uncertainty. Scott could not give what he did not have.”
All that could have become true for us and nearly has, more than once. For Zelda, marriage had involved a lot of fighting dirty, but she danced anyway -- plus God. And so, I say again: me, too, except for me, it has been about singing -- plus God. And now my goal is simply this: to not squelch the song.
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