Volume 15, Number 5 · September 24, 1970
Caesar's Things
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Zelda
by Nancy Milford
Harper & Row, 383 pp., $10.00
Zelda Fitzgerald's sad, wasted life seemed to have been buried beneath the ground, covered over by the desperate violets of Scott Fitzgerald's memories. It had gone by, we thought, interred in the mournful, expensive defeat of Fitzgerald's last years. 'I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitariums,' he wrote. And why dig it up again? For it is a more than twice-told tale, capped by Ernest Hemingway's contemptuous epitaph in A Moveable Feast. There had always been about Zelda's collapse, even her death at last in a fire at a nursing home in North Carolina—'her body was identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it'—something of a reckoning, the price to be paid for recklessness beyond endurance, for drink and arrogance and carelessness with one's own life and that of those nearest. Or, perhaps, the reckoning, which was breakdown, insanity, was merely mysteriously there, compelling the earlier transgressions and excesses.
Review, 4385 words
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