Zelda

Today is the birthday of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, whose privilege and burden it was to be the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was born in Montgomery, Alabama and met Fitzgerald when he was a soldier, fresh out of Princeton. You can look at pictures of her when she was young and realize why she was Fitzgerald's Helen. She was very pretty. I think her beauty would be recognized today, even though our standards these days are somewhat different.

But she was not your typical Southern beauty queen, all beauty and flash and apple pie American ambition. I have always tried to recognize the inner beauty of the women around me and I have no doubt that Zelda's wit and intelligence caught that boy from the plains of Minnesota and anchored his heart in ways that mere physical beauty could not. Everything I have read has lead me to believe that their relationship was strong despite its self-destructive nature. She was his muse. They were the ideal of the beautiful people of their time. The Jazz Age couple.

Even Hemingway recognized the great talent that Fitzgerald had compared to the other writers of his day. And I think that Zelda had talent as well, although to a lesser degree. The Writer's Almanac had a blurb about Zelda Fitzgerald today and they quoted a letter she wrote to the parents of F. Scott Fitzgerald after he died. The writing that they quote is sublime and poetic.

It is so tragic that the couple died in the manners in which they passed. He in Hollywood, trying to make a living with his talent. She in a fire in a sanatorium in North Carolina. Perhaps the most tragic element of their deaths was the fact that they were separated at the end.