Free Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers Page B

when he was trying to write. She had no ability to suffer adversity, and was unprepared for it when it came.
    Fitzgerald would have agreed with this analysis. He later told his daughter that Zelda had burnt herself out by refusing to accept ordinary norms of behavior: “She had no education—not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me—but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own.” 10
    Despite the contrast in their backgrounds—a lower-middle-class Irish Catholic from the Upper Midwest, who had lived in five different towns and had been to college, and an upper-middle-class Anglo-Protestant from the Deep South, who had spent her entire life in Montgomery and had just completed a patchy high school education—Scott and Zelda had a great deal in common. They were both spoiled children of older parents. They had the same blond hair, fair skin, straight nose and thin lips, and looked enough alike to be brother and sister. They even wore matching jackets and knickerbockers on their drive from Connecticut to Montgomery in the summer of 1920. Both liked to exchange sexual roles. Scott dressed up as a show girl for the Triangle Club. Zelda put on men’s clothing and went to the movies with a group of boys. Scott—who had a weak father, strong mother, younger sister and eventually a wife, daughter and several mistresses—was always surrounded by women. He believed: “I am half feminine—that is, my mind is.” Zelda told a friend: “I have always been inclined toward masculinity.” 11 Both spent extravagantly, drank heavily, behaved irresponsibly and did not care what people thought of them.
    Zelda’s volatile mixture of beauty and daring was fatally attractive to men. Officers gathered on her sagging veranda, which resembled an army recruiting station, and gladly surrendered their military insignia to express their esteem. Flyers from Camp Sheridan performed aerial stunts over her house and two planes crashed during these daring exhibitions. Admirers at Auburn University, where she was tremendously popular, founded a fraternity based on her initials, Zeta Sigma. To be admitted, potential members had to pledge their devotion to Zelda and offer proof that they had had at least one date with her in Montgomery. Fitzgerald was excited—and sometimes tormented—by other men’s love for Zelda, which enhanced her value in his eyes. And having lost Ginevra, he was determined to win Zelda from her Southern halfbacks and golfing beaux.
    During their parabolic courtship Zelda used her power over men to make Scott unbearably jealous. She once grabbed a boy and started kissing him just as Fitzgerald approached; and later “regretted having flirted so much with other men and never telling Scott how far she’d gone with them, letting him guess the worst and neither denying nor correcting his suspicions.” But selfishness in women had an irresistible appeal to Fitzgerald, and their fights (like those of Frieda and D. H. Lawrence) were a form of sexual foreplay that made their reconciliations and lovemaking even sweeter. “I love your tenderness—when I’ve hurt you,” Zelda confessed. “That’s one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels.” 12 The intensely romantic Fitzgerald had a Proustian impulse to construct an ideal image of the woman he loved—first Ginevra, then Zelda—to compensate for any defects in reality.
    Fitzgerald often pondered the differences between the woman lost and the woman won. Ginevra’s family was wealthy and socially prominent, Zelda’s was more intellectual and artistic. Ginevra was cool and distant, Zelda spontaneous and sensual; Ginevra poised and self-assured, Zelda vivacious and impulsive. Though Ginevra was more worldly and sophisticated, Zelda was more beautiful and