ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609200003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELEANOR LANAHAN NEW YORK TIMES
My grandfather F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been 100 years old this month. But it's hard to imagine him being anything but young. Somehow Americans will always picture him and my grandmother Zelda as the footloose adventurers who rode down New York's Fifth Avenue on the tops of taxicabs, danced on tables at the Waldorf Hotel and took their famous plunge in the fountain at the Plaza.
Scott's instant success qualified him to define the Jazz Age, and Zelda, in particular, was one of the earliest tabloid personalities. They enjoyed the kind of press attention that today is reserved for music or movie stars. Their spirit has long since been incorporated into our national self-image. They gave us license, as Americans, to have some fun. They symbolized zestful youth, and the country has deified youth ever since. And they made celebrity, and our fascination with it, stylish.
They are an especially beloved pair because their story hinges so strongly on their great love for each other. But I am confident that they would be surprised to see what a large and lasting influence they had on popular culture in the 20th century. I know I am. They are a part of the language. A British journalist recently informed me that the expression ``a Scott and Zelda'' refers to a close but rivalrous relationship between two artists. ``Oh,'' one might say, ``they're having a Scott and Zelda.''
``Fitzgeraldian'' is now admissible as a crossword-puzzle clue. It is a broad adjective and can be applied to the Roaring '20s, to zany authors, to Ivy League haberdashery, to excessive drinking, to extravagance or to disillusionment.
I cannot think of a better one-word definition. In ``Echoes of the Jazz Age,'' Scott needed five words to describe the '20s as ``a whole race going hedonistic.''
And Zelda, reviewing Scott's second novel, ``The Beautiful and Damned,'' wrote a wonderful paragraph that inadvertently described the glamour and gaiety of their lives: ``Everyone 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 42nd Street, and also if enough people buy it, I know 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.''
But my grandparents might be confused by what people nowadays know about them, or think they know about them; their story has been merged so thoroughly with their own intensely autobiographical fiction.
And yet ``The Great Gatsby,'' the least autobiographical of Scott's works, is what informs much of the Fitzgerald legend. Scott is generally imagined in a white suit. It is true that he purchased white flannel with the proceeds of the sale of his first short story, ``The Debutante,'' but I have never seen a photograph of him wearing it. That image is most likely drawn from his slightly gangsteresque description of Gatsby wearing a ``white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie.''
At Princeton, Scott outfitted himself at Brooks Brothers. He was impeccably, aristocratically Ivy League. When he answered the call to the colors in 1917, he stopped again at Brooks Brothers to fill out his footlocker. In most of the early photographs I have seen, he is wearing a dark, finely tailored, three-piece suit.
Gatsby and Scott, to different degrees, invented their lives. Scott's family in St. Paul, Minn., had modest social credentials and financial resources. By age 9, Scott, who was born on Sept. 24, 1896, wondered if there hadn't been a mistake - if he hadn't been a royal foundling, left in a basket on his parents' doorstep. He had natural talent, good looks and an ease with people, but some aspects of his manner were consciously, if not painstakingly, cultivated.
As for Zelda, when people describe a woman as looking like her nowadays, they might mean Mia Farrow, who played Daisy in the Paramount production of ``The Great Gatsby,'' in layered chiffon and wide-brimmed hats. But in April 1920, when my grandmother arrived in New York from Montgomery, Ala., to become Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scott enlisted a female friend to help her select a more cosmopolitan wardrobe.
Zelda hardly needed his help - of her own free will, I am sure, she abandoned her Southern bows and frippery for the most sophisticated ornaments of the decade. Zelda stepped on the stage as the paradigm of a flapper. But the '20s went by fast, perhaps too fast.
``The flapper!'' she wrote in 1925. ``She is growing old. She has come to none of the predicted `bad ends,' but has gone at last, where all good flappers go - into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the pleasure of having children, having lent a while a splendor and courageousness and brightness to life, as all good flappers should.''
When my grandmother wrote that, my mother, Scottie, was 4.
I never knew my grandparents, though I am consoled that Zelda's last letter to my mother before she died in a hospital fire in Asheville, N.C., in 1948, mentioned that she longed to see me, ``the new baby.'' But I have been the secondhand beneficiary of Scott's pointed advice about style. At 19, he gave his 14-year-old sister Annabel a list of instructions for being more popular.
``You are, as you know, not a good conversationalist,'' he began, and suggested a number of opening lines, like, ``You've got the longest eyelashes.'' He informed her that ``boys like to talk about themselves - much more than girls.'' He advised her about carriage and poise: ``You smile on one side, which is absolutely wrong. Get before a mirror and practice a smile and get a good one, a radiant smile ought to be in the facial vocabulary of every girl.''
After outlining his sister's bad points and good, he advised, ``Exercise would give you a healthier skin. You should never rub cold cream into your face because you have a slight tendency to grow hairs on it. I'd find out about this from some Dr. who'd tell you what you could use.''
If only Scott had been able to follow his friends' advice as easily as he dispensed it. By the end of the '20s, many of Scott's expatriate companions in France were alarmed about his drinking. Scott's and Zelda's lives had become a cautionary myth, and like Icarus, they were punished for flying too close to the sun.
Their difficulties satisfied Americans' puritan streak and enhanced the poignancy of how hard they crashed. There are still questions that may never be put to rest: to what extent did Scott suppress Zelda's talent by forcing her to cut episodes from her novel, ``Save Me the Waltz,'' that overlapped with material he was using in his novel, ``Tender Is the Night''? To what extent did his drinking drive her crazy? To what extent did she drive him to drink and bear responsibility for their financial calamities? And was there a possible misdiagnosis of her schizophrenia?
Insistently as Scott tried to share in Zelda's therapy - and there are many letters delineating his problem and tendering advice - he was clearly a part of her problem. His own tribulations - a diminished readership during the Great Depression, drinking and stupendous debts - spilled over into his relations with my mother.
Scott redefined his heroines, and came to question the value of purely decorative women. Zelda herself was becoming a serious artist. Perhaps it comes with middle age, but Scott's focus shifted from the importance of perfecting one's charm to the importance of conserving one's emotional equipment.
My grandfather endured a literary eclipse in his lifetime and, swamped with bills for his wife's care and his daughter's education, barely scraped through financially. This was the age before Mastercard; he was forced to borrow from his agent, editor and friends and was constantly trying to write himself out of debt.
Another aspect of his romantic image, and somewhat on a par with Van Gogh's ear, was that he was the most renowned alcoholic who ever lived. I am sure many an extra martini has been downed in his memory.
Even more than for their glamour, though, Scott and Zelda are celebrated for their accomplishments. That is the part that impresses me most. Despite his excesses and troubles, Scott produced five novels and 160 short stories before his death in 1940 at 44. Zelda was a writer, a dancer and, in her last years, a dedicated artist. Her dreamlike cityscapes of New York and Paris and fabulous paper dolls redeem any ``decorative wife'' image I might have formed of her.
Scott's writing still runs as pure as poetry threaded with spirituality, sensuality and sociology. He has influenced many modern writers, but his unique grace cannot be counterfeited.
I endorse the fairly modest self-assessment he sent to my mother at Vassar College, and credit it most for the reason so many people still read his books: ``I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.''
Eleanor Lanahan is the author of ``Scottie, the Daughter of...'' (HarperCollins, 1995) and recently edited a book on her grandmother's art, ``Zelda: An Illustrated Life'' (Harry N. Abrams, 1996).|
LENGTH: Long : 160 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s.by CNB2. Fitzgerald, Zelda and their daughter, Scotty, in Paris.
3. AP Photo/File Robert Redford was Jay Gatsby, and Mia Farow,
Daisy, in the 1974 film ``The Great Gatsby,'' which was based on F.
Scott Fitzgerald's novel.