Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband’s leading ladies

I've recently become part of the regular feature-writing team for Exeposé Books, which is very exciting! Here's one of my first two 'audition pieces', as like to call them.

With the recent release of Baz Luhrmann’s unspeakably glitzy take on The Great Gatsby, the unreachable Daisy Buchananfeels like a familiar character. But the rest of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels are studded with complicated female stars too. Brilliant yet flawed, each draws her inspiration from one source, tragically close to the author’s heart – ‘a vivacious blond who had hoards of suitors’ – Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda.

In Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, Gloria Patch is restricted by a role which would not have been unfamiliar to a woman of Zelda’s status.  As the wife of the heir to a phenomenal fortune, she has already achieved her sole aim in life: to snare a rich husband. Her subsequent, dangerous lack of occupation is questioned in the novel. Once Gloria has fulfilled her quest to marry into money, her life becomes empty and the only path open to her, at least in her mind, is the descent into alcoholism and idleness. Sadly, Fitzgerald saw this phenomenon of the rich and reckless in his own life, and particularly in Zelda. Gloria clearly shares his wife’s tendency towards reckless, irresponsible and selfish behaviour; the portrayal of the Patches’ idle lives evokesFitzgerald’s concern that, in the early years of the 1920s, their own lives were growing dangerously close to becoming a circus of bingeing and self-indulgence.

Perhaps the character who draws most on Zelda for inspiration is Nicole Diver of Tender is the Night, the last completed novel that Fitzgerald would write. Again, her only apparent vocation is to be one half of a rich and glamorous couple, but, like Zelda in reality, she is of course much more complex. In the novel, Nicole is admitted to a sanatorium in Switzerland with acute neurosis, where her future husband Dick is a psychoanalyst. It is clear that Fitzgerald is directly referring to one of Zelda's many admittances to sanatoria, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. During her stay at one institution, Zelda wrote her first and only published novel, a semi-autobiography, Save Me the Waltz. Although Scott was incensed that she had published such personal material, he would do exactly that with Tender Is the Night, even lifting extracts directly from Zelda’s own diary and letters she had written to him from the psychiatric ward. In spite of their challenging conditions, both Nicole and Zelda desired a career and independence from their husbands. For Nicole, this took the form of psychiatry; meanwhile, as the vivid, moving prose of Save Me the Waltz suggests, Zelda desired recognition of her own writing.

Each of Fitzgerald’s leading ladies is a reflection of his life with Zelda in some way, be it in the portrayal of her fragile mental state or of the hollow, frivolous lifestyle they shared. But most readers are of the opinion that none of his characters manage to capture her vivacity or her enormous complexity. There are naturally glimpses of her in her own novel, but as her husband forbade her to publish anything more and she never completed her second novel after his death, it seems unlikely that we can ever know or comprehend the real Zelda Fitzgerald.