Review: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

Remember when every party seemed to be a Great Gatsby theme party? While many people will be aware of the glitz and glamour that the author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda enjoyed, fewer will know of the heartbreak and tragedy that followed.

I revisited Fitzgerald’s work after watching Z: The Beginning of Everything, which tells the story of how the couple met and their early life together from Zelda’s perspective.  I went on to read The Beautiful and the Damned, which is Scott’s thinly veiled autobiography chronicling the early, hedonistic years of their marriage. The pair reel from champagne fuelled chaos to the trials of domestic life, keeping their heads above water between riotous parties and raising a young child.

I then skipped to Tender is the Night, in which Scott undertakes a much more complex narrative that he laboured over with agonised rewrites. This novel covers their time living in France, socialising with the greatest talents of the 1920’s artistic community– Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse and Gertrude Stein. During this period Scott’s relationship with alcohol becomes much more problematic, his behaviour ever more erratic and distressing for everyone involved. Their friends Sara and Gerald Murphy on the other hand, through Scott’s lens, seem to have cracked the code for living a beautiful and fulfilled life – ‘la belle vie.’  Wanting to know more about the people behind the literary façade, I read the fittingly titled New Yorker article ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge.’ A fascinating (but very long) read, the article uncovers the Murphies’ own perspective on their relationship with the Fitzgeralds and this time in France.

It was in France that their marriage began to break down. Zelda became obsessed with ballet, taking lessons with the great Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova and dancing obsessively eight hours a day. She became physically and mentally exhausted, was eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic and admitted to a psychiatric facility. She would spend the rest of her life in and out of these facilities and they would never live together for any extended period again. Scott’s own crisis would be explored in his three deeply personal essays – The Crack-Up, Pasting it Together and Handle with Care, as he began to lose confidence in his abilities and market worth.

This brings us, finally, to Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. This definitive collection of their letters to each other spans from their initial meeting up to Scott’s death in 1940, from a heart attack at the age of 44. There may have been infidelities on both sides, but their deep and enduring love for each other is apparent all the way through these letters. Scott never abandoned Zelda, in fact he constantly fretted over her care and wellbeing.

While they were known for flashing the cash in the early days, it becomes apparent that money was a constant worry for Scott as he tried to ensure that his daughter had the best possible education and his wife received the best care. He would be frustrated with Zelda’s frivolous spending habits, but also understood she had a very active mind that needed stimulation with artistic pursuits such as painting while held captive in an institution.

In one exchange Scott becomes exasperated that Zelda has beaten him to the pass with the completion of her novel on the same period of their lives that Tender is the Night covered. Save Me the Waltz was dashed off in a matter of months while she was reposing in hospital; Scott laboured over his novel for years while trying to pay the bills. We are lucky this extraordinary couple left so much behind – their charm, wit and charisma is brought back immediately to life through these letters.

There has been much debate over the years on who stifled whose creativity or even who ruined who. Scott didn’t have much faith that Zelda would become a prima ballerina while pushing thirty, and she became something of a burden as he tried to realise his literary potential while raising their child.  What did become clear, however, was that there would be no F. Scott Fitzgerald without Zelda Sayre – their life together was his greatest inspiration and Zelda his greatest muse.

Eight years after Scott’s death, Zelda died even more tragically in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Survived by their daughter Scottie, they were buried together. The final, immortal words of The Great Gatsby can be found inscribed on their tombstone: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.“
– F. Scott Fitzgerald