by You know Doug loves visiting homes of authors, but this time we kicked it up a notch by not only visiting the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum but also spending the night there!
The museum is located in Montgomery, Alabama, not far from the home where Zelda grew up. Scott met her while stationed in the Army in Montgomery, and courted her incessantly until she agreed to marry him.
The Fitzgeralds only lived here a short time from October 1931 to April 1932. It was not a happy time in their marriage. But both of the Fitzgeralds wrote portions of novels while living here, Save Me The Waltz (Zelda) and Tender Is The Night (Scott).
The museum is a collection of memorabilia, books, furnishings, and ephemera related to the Fitzgeralds and to their time in this home. Scott (1896-1940) and Zelda (1900-1948) had a turbulent marriage thanks to his drinking and her schizophrenia (both of these at a time when neither disease was well understood).
They were perpetually short of money, often quarreling, and frequently living apart (sometimes for years at a time) while she was institutionalized and/or he was off trying to earn money. You don’t get much a sense of this from the museum visit, though.
Scott died at just 44 years of age of a heart attack. Although he had some early success with This Side of Paradise (1920), he was not recognized as one of the greatest American writers until after his death. Zelda died eight years later in a fire while locked in a room in a psychiatric hospital.
The upstairs rooms of the Montgomery house have been converted into two suites, the Scott Suite and Zelda Suite, and are available on AirBnB for a reasonable price. We stayed in the Scott suite, and it was nicely decorated in a period appropriate theme. Unusual artifacts were on the walls, such as razor blades that were uncovered from inside the bathroom walls during a later renovation that date to the time when the couple lived here.
Doug and I listened to Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (affiliate link), a collection of the couple’s letters during the lengthy periods when they were living apart. They were mostly Zelda’s letters to Scott, mostly not what you’d call love letters (lots of “please send money”, with the emotional highs and lows of schizophrenic writing).
All in all, the correspondence was not cheerful, and unless you knew the background of their lives, the letters didn’t reveal much about the couple. But given Scott’s despair when living in Hollywood at the end of his life, in ill-health and constantly scrambling to sell stories and screenplays and dreaming of writing another novel, and Zelda’s permanent residence in a series of psychiatric hospitals, the letters take on plenty of hidden meaning.
