Zelda Fitzgeral was dubbed by her husband the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night) as "the first American flapper" and is (or should be) for any aspiring flâneuse-eur a sort of inspiration. Any aspiring flâneuse-eur would be flattered to be the embodiment of an entire era in history. Non?
After her husband's success with the novel This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgeralds were nearly instant celebrities. Zelda had always welcomed the limelight, and welcomed the invitations and the parties - the jazz and the gin.
The Fitzgeralds were, colloquially speaking, drunks. An early version of Bonnie and Clyde except instead of robbing and stealing the Fitzgeralds drank to excess, took naps in chic Upper East Side sitting rooms, and went to party after party.
She was even drunk at the birth of her daughter and admitted as much."Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool".
The new father wasn't too inebriated to be present for his daughter's birth and the proof is in the plagarism. Daisy Buchanan would later utter the same words to her daughter in The Great Gatsby.
The Fitzgeralds quickly became accustomed to their new life as parents thanks to the extensive staff they employed of a nurse for Frances ("Scottie"), a couple who cleaned the house, and a laundress - who I like to imagine Zelda never once referred to as a laundry lady in the high-falutin' conversations she likely had with some of her top drawer chums.
It is Zelda's sort of exaggerated WASPishness that made me so curious about her in the first place. I Wiki'd her and my curiosity was rewarded with a sort of recette pour la vie, or Zelda's at least.
(Asked to submit a recipe for a book, she sent them the following.)
"See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy".
To be a true flâneuse or if the case applies, a flâneur - means deciding that life is to be lived. It is seizing a moment to be witty instead of admitting you don't know how to cook*. Of course you know what one should serve, but you wouldn't serve it yourself because that would be unspeakable. (GASP!)
But choosing the life of the flâneuse, the bohemian, the vagabond, the layabout, the dandy, the fop, the eccentric - it's not for everybody and it's not always a pretty picture either. Zelda was in many ways oppressed by her husband. When she asked for a divorce because she was smitten with another man, F. Scott locked her in the house and didn't let her out again until she agreed to not divorce him. His work isolated a woman who wanted nothing more than to find a creative outlet for herself. On top of everything Zelda grew increasingly resentful of all the things she'd written that found their way into her husband's work.
When she was approached to write a cheeky review of her husband's new book The Beautiful and The Damned, Zelda it seemed couldn't resist mentioning how her husband edited her words.
To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and, also, if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and, also, if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years ... It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
The review led to offers of work from other magazines, but in the end it was her husband who would be mentioned alongside Hemingway and the other greats of The Lost Generation that they had been a part of while living in France. Zelda would be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Their glamorous life was over. Their famous friends and wealthy admirers now considered them unpleasant company.
Zelda wrote her own book, Save Me the Waltz, in just six weeks and sent it off to the publisher. When her husband finally read the book he was furious. It was Zelda's autobiography and whilst writing it she had dared to use parts of her life and their life together that Fitzgerald himself had already planned on using for his book Tender is the Night.
In the end Zelda's book sold only a little over a thousand copies, less than half of the 3,010 books the publisher had printed because her husband would call her a plagarist (ha!) and a third-rate writer (insecure much?) and force her to revise it until it met his conditions.
The same man who locked Zelda in the house so she couldn't leave him would leave her in a mental hospital while he went off to Hollywood to write for TV, and where because there may actually be poetic justice in the world he would die from drinking before her and without her.
Eight years later Zelda died while waiting for electroshock therapy as the mental hospital she was living in burned to the ground. She never finished her last book.
Their daughter Scottie had the last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on their headstone - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", but I prefer this line that was 100% Zelda's - "I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally."
* Some flâneuse-eur like myself do like to cook and consider cooking extremely decadent things a school of philosophic thought of its own. It's called yumology.
