Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (6 page)

Montgomery gossip thrived on the show. Zelda thrived on the gossip. Years later, she told a doctor that as a child she did not have ‘a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles’.
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This allowed her to run counter to the repressive Southern ideology about women at the turn of the century. Elaborate male courtesy masked rigid restrictions. Women, expected to see domesticity as paramount, had to exhibit ladylike behaviour. So Zelda’s mother tried to instil the ‘No Ladies’ rules into her brood. According to Sara Mayfield, five years younger than Zelda and her devoted follower, there were six cardinal maxims.

No lady ever sat with her limbs crossed. Young ladies said ‘limbs’ instead of the crude four-letter word ‘legs’. Ladies’ backs did not touch the backs of chairs. Ladies never went out without clean linen handkerchiefs. No lady left the house until the last button on her gloves was fastened. No lady ever let her bare feet touch the bare floor.

Zelda, unlike the other girls, flouted all six. She used cruder words than ‘legs’. She swung on the chairs, didn’t bother with buttons because she didn’t bother with gloves, climbed trees with bare feet and with bare hands fought Tony’s male friends. To
entertain
the boys she double-somersaulted, cartwheeled and competed with daredevil Tallulah ‘Dutch’ Bankhead in backbends. Tallulah, the only girl to rival Zelda’s flamboyance, bent so far backwards she could pick up a handkerchief with her teeth, rousing the boys to cheers. While Zelda, determined to be a dancer, started ballet in 1909,
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and took billing in young people’s recitals at the Grand Theatre, Tallulah was preparing herself for an acting career.

Crowds of youngsters gathered to watch Dutch and Zelda hold court in the appropriately named Court Square where both Zelda’s and Sara Mayfield’s fathers, who served on the Alabama Supreme Court for twenty years, had offices. Presiding over the Department of Archives and History in the square was Tallulah’s uncle Dr Thomas Owen, Sara Mayfield’s cousin. Tallulah and her sister Gene (Eugenia), left motherless early, had run wild at their grandparents’ in Fayetteville until their aunt Marie Bankhead took them back home to Montgomery.
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Zelda’s set also hung around the State Capitol, spellbound by the Greek Revival building with its imposing dome and gleaming white porticoes supported by Corinthian and Doric columns.
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Sara Haardt, who would major in English and history at Goucher College, stood awed, with her poetry book, beside the brass star that marked the spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as President of the Confederate States. Zelda, never awed, flashed past the star, raced to the top of the stone steps that led to the dome, then, as defiant as Davis himself, sat astride the guns before sliding down the banisters of the famous rotunda circular staircase.
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Zelda’s defiance conflicted at all times with Southern society’s protective attitude towards all its women and in particular with her father’s protective attitude towards her: ‘it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected’.
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More often she saw herself as confident: a child in motion. ‘I walked on the open roofs … I liked to dive and climb in the tops of trees.’
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Zelda used her backyard swing like a circus trapeze artist. When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to Montgomery she raced down to Judge Sayre’s office to hang out of his window and watch the gaudy painted parades pass by. Years later she would paint circus artists from those memories. The acrobats she drew turned the somersaults she had turned. ‘I was a very active child and never tired, always running with no hat or coat even in the Negroid
district
and far from my house,’
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an act of daring at a time when there was considerable if unofficial geographical segregation in Montgomery. The blacks (only one-tenth of the population) still
suffered
the indifference to their injuries of the largely white North and the hatred of the largely white South.
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This had produced an almost mythic terror of black sexuality amongst white Southern adults. Though that fear affected most of Zelda’s young girlfriends, she herself responded boldly. In
Caesar’s
Things
she writes about her child-heroine Janno’s ‘fear of the black-hand’,
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yet one of the
least
aggressive scenes in the novel, which is saturated with images of mutilation and death, is Janno’s accidental meeting with a negro man. He is patently more scared than Janno of the consequences to
him
if he behaves badly. The child registers that she
should
feel terror, yet this interaction of a black man and a small white girl seems
relatively
safe to both Janno and the readers.

Though she read a great deal, not surprisingly she preferred books with action. ‘The fairy tales were my favourite,’ she said, because their creatures twisted, contorted and rushed through the pages. The three little pigs, Hansel and Gretel and Alice in Wonderland, which she copied as a child, she later formally painted. In Judge Sayre’s extensive library she dipped into his
encyclopaedias
, Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Wilde, Galsworthy, Kipling, Plutarch, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Gibbons. She read Victorian children’s books, gobbled up fiction slightly too old for her: ‘popular tales for boys, novels that my sisters had left on the table … all I found about the civil war’.
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However, books alone could not replace a sound education, and in her late twenties Zelda regretted her inattention to early school life. Judge Sayre, a member of the Montgomery Board of Education, felt his children should be educated in public schools, so Zelda did not go with Tallulah Bankhead and Sara Mayfield to Miss Gussie Woodruff’s Dame’s School. Instead her mother sent her at six to the Chilton Grammar School behind Zelda’s home.
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Zelda did not like
school, came home, told her parents it was worse than prison, and refused to return. Although Minnie Sayre, a student of theosophy, valued education – she had herself graduated from Montgomery Female College on 26 June 1878 and ‘spent a winter being “finished” in Philadelphia’
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– she indulgently allowed her daughter to stay off school until she was seven, after which Zelda returned until her graduation.

Scott Fitzgerald believed that Minnie’s indulgence
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had spoilt Zelda’s character and encouraged what he saw as her selfish
recklessness
. Zelda’s friends and relations sturdily refuted this
perspective
. Their view was that while Zelda received Minnie’s constant praise, she was also taught to be kind and considerate. Sara Mayfield, who became her biographer and knew her for forty years, delineated her as compassionate, thoughtful and tender. Zelda never patronized anyone younger or weaker and protectively showed youngsters how to skate or dive. She was generous with time and money and never condescended. As one Montgomery child said: ‘She didn’t look down on me as little but made me feel as big as she.’
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From her father Zelda inherited secrecy and reflectiveness, for she was not always the madcap of legend. Zelda carried about her an air of urgency and mystery that made her elusive,
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dreamy and sensual.
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She would go on solitary walks, veer into strange silences or bubble out a stream of free association that whizzed through her brain, which later characterized her remarkable epistolary technique.

Even with friends she spent some evenings in reverie. In the powder-blue dusk that replaced the scorching sultry afternoons, Zelda, the Haardt sisters, Katharine Elsberry and her schoolfriend Eleanor Browder would catch lightning bugs. The others talked as they put them in bottles to make lamps, while Zelda’s silence seemed louder than their conversations.

When she felt most unsettled or most alone, Zelda wandered down to Oakwood’s Confederate Cemetery, where many of her ancestors lay. In that place of memories and secrets she would smell the lush decay from the bruised petals of poppies and roses which drifted over the grey headstones and grey gullies. Southerners still see those short-lived tissue-paper poppies and parchment
magnolias
as nostalgic reminders of lost childhood, fallen dead and family silences. It was Zelda’s inheritance from a land of unlayable ghosts.

Sara Haardt’s mother used to tell the girls: ‘The South wants to forget.’
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But the South never forgot. ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
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Consequently the cemetery, in Zelda’s youth, was a place people treated like a park, bringing flowers, chatting to the dead. Today Old Montgomerians take researchers around the cemetery and point proudly to the six gleaming white graves that relate to Zelda, their local heroine. That the bodily remains of the Sayres lurk inside is not disputed; but the accuracy of the inscriptions is as puzzling as the portions of their lives that are omitted.

The first tombstone, adorned with fresh flowers, is Minnie’s: the gravestone merely informs visitors she was born in Eddyville 23 November 1860, died 13 January 1958 and was the Judge’s wife.

Next to Minnie’s grave is a tomb for two: Zelda’s eldest nervy sister Marjorie Sayre Brinson, born according to the tombstone in 1885 (but according to the Family Bible in 1886), who died two years after their mother in 1960, and her husband, Minor Williamson Brinson, who died in 1954. Locals say breezily: ‘It was Marjorie who went crazy you know not Zelda, but then you could say it ran throughout their family.’ Scottie recalled her Aunts Clothilde and Rosalind as constantly nervous and ailing, though not as depressed as Aunt Marjorie, who spent time in a sanatorium in 1945 with a nervous breakdown. When Marjorie’s daughter, little Marjorie, stayed with the Sayres during her mother’s breakdowns the child was told her mother was away on ‘visits’.
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Not until 1933, when Zelda’s brother Tony had
his
breakdown
during Zelda’s own nervous illness, did their mother open up. She wrote to Zelda: ‘Morgan blood is a pest since it means unstable nerves,’ revealed how she had nursed Marjorie for two years ‘and was with Tilde at her worst last summer’.
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Scottie herself, determined to deny the family’s melancholy stain, remained relentlessly resilient.

Tony has the next grave, with a neat plaque recording his birth, 9 March 1894, and his death, 27 August 1933. One would not expect it to mention his dissolute behaviour or the fact that he left Auburn University without a degree. But curiously, it removes any trace of his marriage. Tony married Edith, known by locals as ‘a girl from the wrong side of the tracks’, who ‘disappeared’ after Tony’s final illness and was never spoken of again. The gravestone fails to record that Tony killed himself after many months of recurring nightmares of killing his mother.

The imposing grave next to Tony’s is that of Judge Anthony Dickinson Sayre, born 29 April 1858 in Tuskegee Alabama, died 17 November 1931. Visitors notice that seventy years after his demise this grave, too, is swept and the stone polished. Zelda’s friend Katharine reported that Minnie ‘had to keep an eye on the Judge because he was given to terrible dark depressions’.
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But no graveyard
guides talk about this. They tell you proudly that the responsible Judge took several family members into his home, but they never mention that his subsequent anxiety led to a severe nervous
breakdown
. For fifteen years Minnie never mentioned it either, until she forced herself to tell Zelda she had nursed the Judge ‘through nine months of prostration in 1918’.
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Next to the Judge’s memorial is another twin tomb containing two of his brothers: Daniel Morgan, the second Sayre child and eldest boy,
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born 1839, whose death is shown by research to be 1862 but is given on the tombstone as 1888;
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and John Reid Stonewall Sayre, sixth child and third son, who died 17 February 1940.
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He was well known to Zelda, for the Judge had given him a home at 6 Pleasant Avenue.

The sixth Sayre tomb contains the Judge’s parents: Daniel, born Franklin, Ohio, 1808, and Musidora Morgan, whom he married on 26 November 1835 in Benton County, Alabama. Daniel the
journalist
, who died in 1888, was also a democrat and landowner.

The Sayres, early settlers on Long Island, had moved via New Jersey and Ohio to Alabama. By the time of the Civil War they had become completely Southern in outlook and politics. Daniel’s elder brother William had built the White House of the Confederacy for Jefferson Davis, and had become a founder of the first Presbyterian church in Montgomery.

Musidora’s death, recorded as 4 March 1907, is firmly established by research, but her birth, given on the tombstone as 1818, was in fact 1817. None of the townsfolk, however, care much about the birth date, as ‘Musidora wasn’t from here. Born in Huntsville you know.’ Zelda’s grandmother, a respected schoolteacher,
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was eccentric, forthright and didn’t care whom she upset. Locals still talk about the day the widowed Musidora, also given a home by the Judge, intentionally muddled up two friends of the Sayres, both called Mrs Bell. As the wealthier Mrs Bell walked past the Pleasant Avenue porch Musidora exclaimed: ‘Are you the nice Mrs Bell or are you the wealthy, ordinary and very common Mrs Bell?’

Graveyard guides inform visitors that such behaviour was due to Musidora’s many griefs. She bore nine children but saw four die very young and two in early adulthood. The girls were particularly vulnerable.
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Of the three surviving children, one was Zelda’s Uncle Calvin, a silversmith, whose silver was kept in Scottie’s closets until she died. In June 1871 Uncle Calvin married Zelda’s friend Katharine Elsberry’s great-aunt Kate. Zelda and Katharine were nine when he died in Los Angeles.
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