Not So Tender Was the Night

ZELDA by Nancy Milford. 424 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

"All I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible," Zelda once wrote Scott Fitzgerald.

It was a charming idea, of course, and one particularly apt to the Jazz Age. But it must have been a bit unsettling to find such a statement in a letter from one's fiancee. By anybody's judgment, Scott Fitzgerald made a disastrous marriage. As this painstakingly researched biography shows, though, he was thoroughly forewarned. He met Zelda in 1918 when she was the belle of Montgomery, Ala., society and he was an Army lieutenant. The very first time Scott was invited to dine with her parents, Zelda so goaded her father that he chased her around the dining table waving a carving knife.

Worse shocks were to follow. After they became engaged, Scott went to New York to launch his writing career. Zelda stayed home and continued to accept prom invitations from all over the South. On one foray to Georgia Tech she was met at the train by four students, each of whom she had told was to be her escort. During the same weekend she got "pinned" to a young golfer. Back in Montgomery, she thought better of it and sent the pin back with a nice note, which she absentmindedly addressed and mailed to Scott. There is plenty of reason to believe the Southern gentlemen who confessed that until Zelda's wedding day they confidently thought she would marry one of them.

The story of Scott and Zelda is one of the genuine literary legends of the century, recounted in several full-length biographies of Scott and mentioned in countless memoirs. Nancy Milford's book retraces all the familiar territory--the marathon drunks, the dips in public fountains--and adds poignant new testimony from diaries and letters concerning Zelda's schizophrenia. The book, though, is yet another proof that to know all is not to forgive all.

On All Fours. There is no doubt that Zelda loved Scott after her fashion. Yet from the beginning her grasp of any emotion except jealousy seemed tentative. "I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters," she wrote. The pitiful fact was that she could neither understand nor relate to much of anything outside herself.

In the first years of their marriage, the Fitzgeralds managed to live a life fit for her fantasies. He was the precocious, popular author. Her slogan was Let's do something! and Scott was only too glad to comply, whether it was carousing all night or arriving at Sam Goldwyn's party on all fours, barking. There was no room in this private playground for a real child, and the birth of Frances ("Scottie") complicated their lives. Zelda had no maternal feelings--especially for a little blonde girl.

Then two episodes helped destroy the mutual trust upon which the Fitzgeralds' odd domestic alliance was based. When they were staying on the Riviera in 1924, Zelda had a love affair with a French aviator, Jozan. Shortly afterward in Hollywood, Scott developed a crush on a 17-year-old starlet named Lois Moran. He managed to remark in Zelda's presence that here, at least, was a girl who was trying to make something of herself. Stunned, Zelda determined to become a ballerina--"a Pavlova, nothing less." It was too late for her to become even an acceptable dancer, but what began as jealous rage turned into obsession. She practiced all day to The March of the Wooden Soldiers until Scott said the ditty was "engraved on every organ he possessed."

It was actually Zelda herself who was etched inside his skull. All Fitzgerald's work was a transmuted biography. Zelda is the spoiled Gloria Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, the callous Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, and most poignantly, the fond yet mad Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, which also draws on Lois and Jozan. Her letters and diaries, her rash actions and rejoinders were dug up by her husband, fussed with a bit and then carefully replanted in the novels.

Gradually, Zelda's obsessive excitement turned into hysteria and delusion. Ten years after they married, she checked into her first mental hospital. Thereafter, like Nicole, she spent most of her time in institutions, writing long letters alternately berating her husband and begging for his love.

It was a bitter story, and one without any clear, cleansing calamity. At various times Zelda's mental condition improved, and she tried earnestly to reintroduce herself into Scott and Scottie's lives. The results were usually dismal. One Christmas she smashed all the ornaments on the child's tree. At another point she confessed, "My child is gone from the present--out of my life. If I approach her and her hair smells bad and I get nauseated--I just have to go away from her. I know her hair doesn't smell bad, but it makes me sick anyway."

Zelda is full of such stark statements as it moves along, documenting her decay, including her howling profusion al jealousy of Scott and the one stilted novel that she wrote. Zelda said of herself that she had "a terrible inferiority complex that drives one to attempt anything ... A feelin.R of being thrown into complete pandemonium when you see someone who can do more." Unfortunately, Author Milford, an English instructor at Columbia, is satisfied to lay her evidence out chronologically with little comment or assessment. Until the day--long after Scott's death--when she was burned to death in a hospital fire, in 1948, Zelda was an impulsive, deadly mercurial woman who seldom could or did analyze her own actions. She would be better served by a biographer who attempted the exacting task of bringing order out of madness.

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