One of the projects still on my list is a Broadway musical, set in Baltimore at the time Scott Fitzgerald was visiting his wife Zelda during one of her early hospitalizations for mental illness. Sounds fun, right? The kind of production where you leave the theatre in love with life!

The title of the piece was to be Gray, Faded Romance and I was very much intrigued by the idea of true love on the rocks as two people, who had once been among the most famous people in America faced nothing but bleakness: Scott’s talent was exhausted, his marriage had gone to less than nothing (he was Catholic, and couldn’t divorce). His career as a “rock star” of the literary world so far behind him that some people thought he was dead.

Now we have Sarah Churchwell’s book: the fruit of many hours paging through microfiche images of ancient newspapers: discovering that, in the fall of 1922—at the height of Scott Fitzgerald’s cultural fame—just when he’d started considering a story of a man pretending to be what he wasn’t, to win the heart of a woman he’d lost—he was reading about the Mills-Hall murders, a case now lost to us, but very famous at the time.

This book offers up the idea that some of the details of those murders—the details of the investigation appearing in the newspapers day after day after day—kinda-sorta-maybe made their way into The Great Gatsby.

This, in turn, gives the author the opportunity to draw a narrative parallel between the strangeness of one of the “Crimes of the Century” in New Jersey, and Scott’nZelda’s single-minded self-destruction over in New York City.

Careless People is brightly written, with some impressive passages, but basically what you have (again) is a Fitzgerald companion: telling the oft-told story that I was going to tell in that play I wanted to do: love dying out…going to a dark red ember…then turning completely dark.

After all: Romance is only “romance” because it ends. If what begins as Romance chugs on, indefinitely, it turns into something else.

Here’s the thing: as far as Scott’nZelda are concerned, I don’t think we’re talking Romance at all—but a vivid historical example of mutual enabling: one of the more glamorous chapters in the Codependency Handbook.

They brought out the worst in each other. They knew it. They tormented each other, all their married lives, and seemed to take a lot of satisfaction in doing it. A kind of joy in their anger: rage and recrimination and extravagance and hopelessness that mated so beautifully with the hangovers, the restlessness, the lost afternoons, the blackouts.

To be honest, I think this was intentional…at least on Scott’s part.

From the moment he met Zelda Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald knew that she would take him apart, piece by piece. That she would be the perfect alibi for a life surrendered to Despair: permission to be falling down, slobbering, violently, and ridiculously drunk almost every day of his life—and not infrequently drunk for days at a time.

He did the one great book, to be sure. Among the greatest. He went to France to do it, and managed to bear down: putting together a haunting story that has meaning for everyone who reads it, but so ethereal in its expression that you can’t film it.

Four different film have been created from it, but none of them have even come close.

One shining book, for all time. But otherwise: stories just written to stay ahead of creditors, epic failure as a playwright, a laughing stock in Hollywood where he managed to offend the Thalbergs themselves (might as well reach for the stars, huh?), and someone long thought to be dead before news of his death became official.

Zelda ruined Scott. But that’s the way he wanted it. The inevitable thought is: if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else.

Getting back to the unwritten musical: Zelda would be in the hospital, with Scott unable to make any progress on his novel, and the great theme, I guess, was going to be Regret.

They had seemed to bounce from mountaintop to mountaintop, but ended up enduring the kind of Regret that anyone might feel for a life that “falls short”—along with the Regret, the knowledge, that almost an entire generation of young men had been sacrificed, in Europe, for nothing—along with the Regret that the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald, himself, gave it that name) couldn’t have lasted a little bit longer. It was fun while it lasted, after all.

For those interested in the saga of Scott’nZelda, Churchwell’s book is a good place to start, although—as I said—it covers very little new ground. Otherwise, there are hundreds of other books describing the life and times of the Fitzgeralds: perhaps because we find self-destruction always intriguing.

I think will put that book on my list of 'to buy'. 

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I read, years and years ago, that when Zelda decided she wanted to write also, she complained, (this is not verbatim) he has stolen my life from me. I wonder if one of the her attractions was that he saw her as a rich source of inspiration. 

--edited by nate1952 on 6/21/2015, 6:00 PM--

We all have to use what we have at hand, this is what brings our characters to life. I base my MC on myself, and I draw heavily on my husband as well to furnish my guy with amusing traits. I have a checkered past, and will use a lot of that in book two of my series, part of which is set in low-life sixteenth century London. Imagination goes only so far. Real life experience, you can't beat it. If you shudder at the thought of having your life cannibalized, don't marry a writer.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 6/22/2015, 12:02 AM--