Free Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers

ceremony with heartfelt insincerity: “I can’t tell you how I feel about Monsignor Fay’s death.—He was the best friend I had in the world and last night he seemed so close and so good that I was almost glad—because I think he wanted to die. . . . Your letter seemed to start a new flow of sorrows in me. I’ve never wanted so much to die in my life. Father Fay always thought that if one of us died the other would, and now how I’ve hoped so. . . . This has made me nearly sure that I will become a priest. I feel as if in a way his mantle had descended upon me.” 8 But the momentarily pious Fitzgerald had no more intention of becoming a priest than he did of becoming a professional soldier. Fay’s death meant that he would now have to find his own way to wealth and fame. In any case, he had already come under the powerful secular influence of Zelda Sayre.
    III
    Except for a brief time at Camp Mills on Long Island, Fitzgerald was stationed from June 1918 until February 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama. In that hot, static little town of forty thousand souls, nothing much had happened since the Civil War. In “The Ice Palace” (1920) Fitzgerald described Montgomery as a “languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy, niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who [unlike Ginevra King] were brought up on memories instead of money.”
    At a country club dance on one of those “firefly evenings” in July 1918 Fitzgerald met a gracious, soft-voiced girl named Zelda Sayre. She let her long hair hang down loose and wore a frilly dress that made her look younger than eighteen. She came from a prominent though not wealthy family and had just graduated from Sidney Lanier High School.
    The solid respectability of the Sayres disguised the dangerous currents swirling beneath the calm surface of their lives. Zelda’s father, Anthony Sayre, son of the editor of the Montgomery Post, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1858, graduated from Roanoke College in Virginia and was admitted to the bar in 1881. He married three years later, and was elected and reelected associate justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 1909 until 1931. A man of fanatically regular habits, Judge Sayre always took the streetcar to and from work at exactly the same time every day and always retired for the night at exactly eight o’clock. Cold, humorless and hypercritical, the judge became increasingly unsociable and remote from his family. Zelda considered him inhumanly perfect and desperately tried to penetrate his stony reserve. The first time Fitzgerald was invited to dinner at the Sayres’ house at 6 Pleasant Avenue, Zelda goaded her father into such a rage that he picked up a carving knife and, while the rest of the family ignored them, chased her around the dining room table. Fitzgerald, nervous and infatuated, failed to perceive that this was a familiar occurrence, that the judge was not as self-controlled as he appeared to be and that all was not well in the Sayre family.
    Zelda’s mother, Minnie Machen, the daughter of a Kentucky senator, was born in 1860 and had in her youth cherished hopes of an operatic career. The Sayres had three older daughters—Marjorie, Rosalind and Clothilde—whose ages ranged from nine to eighteen when Zelda was born, and a son, Anthony, who was then six. Minnie nursed Zelda, her youngest and favorite child, till the age of four.
    Minnie’s mother and sister had both committed suicide. Marjorie had had a mental breakdown and suffered from nervous illness throughout her life. Young Anthony became notorious for his dissolute behavior and left Auburn University without earning his degree. In 1933, after recurrent nightmares about killing his mother, he would also commit suicide by leaping from the window of his hospital room in Mobile. No one ever told Fitzgerald, when he was courting Zelda, about the terrifying history of insanity and suicide in her family.
    Four years