Volume 41, Number 14 · August 11, 1994
Great Scott?
By Brad Leithauser
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography
by Jeffrey Meyers
HarperCollins, 400 pp., $27.50
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli
Scribners, 503 pp., $30.00
It's a testament to the power of images over words that an aura of glamour continues to embellish the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The black and white photographs of that handsome and dandyish young couple, Scott and Zelda, seem if anything to grow more beguiling over the years, as time overlays a tender quaintness upon all of their dramatically posed renderings of the bold and the chic. When documented in print, however, at least in Jeffrey Meyers's new Scott Fitzgerald, their lives are something else again. By and large, the intervals when they were together and the later, lengthy separations brought on by Zelda's madness and institutionalization alike appear squandered and dreary—when they were not altogether nightmarish. Jointly and singly, they lived with alcoholism, paranoia, sexual dysfunction, attacks of scarring eczema, colitis, bankruptcy, jail, brawls, drug abuse, premature aging, malaria, repeated suicide attempts, near-fatal accidents, religious mania…
Review, 3959 words
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