Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [28]
Zelda’s furious obsession with ballet was not just a desire for order, it was also a futile attempt to stop time. She and Scott had always held that youth and beauty were the altars on which any considerations of the future must be sacrificed. Fear of losing the looks and attitude which had set her apart haunted Zelda. Like Nicky in Noel Coward’s The Vortex, she was straining “every nerve to keep young.”
More and more in the late 1920s there was the sense with Zelda that something wasn’t right. The novelist John Dos Passos said that looking into her eyes during this period was “like peering into a dark abyss.” In the spring of 1930 Zelda had her first breakdown and that summer was institutionalized and later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In 1932, during a six-week period of feverish lucidity, Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz, a barely-fictionalized account of her relationship with Scott, her brief affair with another man and her failing struggle against mental illness set against their shared backdrop of literary life in New York and as prosperous Americans in Europe. Hardly coincidentally, much of it was similar to Tender Is the Night, the novel Scott was working on at the same time. Knowing this, Zelda deliberately provoked Scott’s fury by sending her manuscript to his editor without showing it to him first. This was her account of the shared experiences that had made them both rich, famous, envied and unhappy—her defense against being made into just another flawed character in one of her husband’s books—and she was determined to tell it to the world.
During their life together Zelda had provided Scott with inspiration and living material for his female characters—he had lifted long passages straight from her diary for The Beautiful and Damned—and written occasional articles and short stories which they had published either jointly or under Scott’s name. “I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole world to myself if I didn’t like living in Daddy’s better,” says Zelda’s self-portrait, Alabama, to her daughter. Since Scott was the literary celebrity, it made sense to capitalize on his fame; Zelda writing alone could command a fraction of the sum a Scott Fitzgerald piece might bring in. Reading her book, it is hard not to feel that at last—and too late—Zelda had decided that her life was her own material, not her husband’s.
Zelda spent her remaining years, on and off, in asylums, still fueled by the urge to create. She had always had a striking and highly unusual visual sense, but when her schizophrenia set in it became ever more hallucinatory and intense. “There was a new significance to everything,” she wrote in Save Me the Waltz. “Stations and streets and façades of buildings—colors were infinite, part of the air, and not restricted by the lines that encompassed them and lines were free of the masses they held.” During her last years she painted these strange visions.
As a girl, Zelda had identified with the heroine of Owen Johnson’s best-selling novel and movie of the 1910s, The Salamander, its title taken from the lizard thought in classical times to be able to pass untouched through fire: “I am in the world to do something unusual, extraordinary. I’m not like every other little woman.” Looking back on her life, Zelda sadly acknowledged that her “story is the fault of nobody but me. I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.” In 1948 a fire razed her sanatorium to the ground and she died in the blaze—no salamander, after all. She was forty-eight years old.
For most women of Zelda’s generation, being a Flapper was a stage rather than a Faustian pact. Even in literature and the movies, however wildly they danced or however many cigarettes they smoked,