Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [27]
Literature reinforced science’s arguments. In 1920, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay famously summed up her appetite for life and adventure in “A Few Figs from Thistles”:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
Millay’s hedonistic philosophy was an imperative for the young in the twenties: living in the present, as intensely as possible, was all that mattered.
Like Millay and Fitzgerald, the heroines of best-selling twenties novels were untamed and unsentimental. Yvonne, the flame-haired beauty in Kay Brush’s Glitter, says that if she were a man she would be a racing-driver and announces her intention of living—and dying—“sensationally.” In The Sheik, by Edith Hull, spoiled Diana Mayo declares with some pride that she hasn’t a heart. Their code was Zelda’s: “Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.”
Partly because of Scott’s portrayals of Zelda as the 1920s ideal, being called fast became almost a compliment, rather than a slur on a girl’s character. Journalists wrote in shocked tones about the prevalence of “petting parties.” It was well known that cars provided unchaperoned young couples with a boudoir on wheels. Magazines featured “sex adventure stories” called “Indolent Kisses” or “Watch Your Step-Ins”; movies advertised “things you’ve always wanted to do and never DARED.”
Although the Flapper was the product primarily of a youth movement, middle-aged women were also attracted by the lure of abandoned pleasure-seeking. Evalyn McLean, a generation older than Zelda, described the new morals to her friend Florence Harding, the First Lady, from a vacation in Florida in 1923. One was nobody there without a beau, she said: “You must never be seen with your husband, and never go to bed until morning!” According to Malcolm Cowley, the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village had died by the late 1920s “because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown”—in other words, because every woman in America had become a Flapper.
It was not so easy for the prototype. The Fitzgeralds’ friends had long predicted that disaster would be the result of their excessive lifestyle. Soon after they were married Alec McKaig lamented Zelda’s desire “to live the life of an ‘extravagant.’ No thought of what the world will think or of the future. I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate.” Even Fitzgerald recognized that increasingly their hedonism was just “despair turned inside out.” As the years wore on, Zelda found her life with Scott frustrating and meaningless, despite the glamour she had longed for as a girl. While other women of her generation had taken real advantage of the new freedoms available to them, she felt she had never been able to create an identity for herself as anything other than Scott’s wife—the outrageous and desirable Flapper incarnate. By her late twenties she was desperate to use her talents, to have something of her own, not to be merely what she called a “complementary intelligence.” She “felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment . . . she felt she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away.”
Lacking the career which both advertised Scott’s worth and provided his retreat from the world, in her late twenties Zelda rejected their past intemperance and took up ballet, her childhood ambition. She became consumed by the dream of becoming a professional