A Yankee, a flapper and endless spats

IT'S June and warm enough for the devil to be let loose in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. Then again, the devil has been loose around here enough already. Montgomery was once the capital of the breakaway Confederate States, and within a few blocks we walk past their White House and capitol, a slave market and lynching ground, a memorial for the Selma civil rights march and a bronze statue of Rosa Parks at the exact spot where she waited for the bus.

A woman at Chris's Hotdogs says this heat is nothing and gives us a free soda. Southern hospitality, y'all. She's wearing a pink Martin Luther King T-shirt and speaks with a drawling, friendly accent that makes you want to listen to her.

And just to tempt the devil further, Montgomery is also a stop on the Southern Literary Trail, because it's here that Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald met and set up house for a while.

A Yankee and a southern belle

They met when Scott was a Yankee lieutenant stationed in Montgomery, where he was waiting to be deployed to the battlefields of World War 1. Zelda was Montgomery's most popular southern belle. Being a belle was a serious profession in the South, aimed at ensnaring a man within a certain social class, marrying him, and thereafter leading a life of comfort and abundance.

Although Zelda mockingly referred to belledom as “pink helplessness", she was also well-schooled in it — charming and casually manipulative, all doe-eyes and pure innocence with just enough coquetry to be interesting. She also made a few belle modifications of her own. She was far too gutsy to be submissive and never lost for words. “Don't treat me like a girl," warns a Zelda character in Scott's short story “The Jelly-bean" (1920).

Her parental home on Pleasant Avenue no longer stands. The plot is overgrown and the surrounding houses neglected and dilapidated. But we know there was a magnolia tree in the backyard and a creaky swing on the Victorian front porch where she and Scott spent evenings talking.

“… [A]nd you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best,” she wrote to Scott years later.

She wanted to get away from Montgomery's “sordid, colourless existence”. Scott promised her “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world". On April 3, 1920, they married in New York City. The sheltered southern belle shook off her frills and became a flapper, the Roaring Twenties' leading trendsetter. Thus legends begin.

The geography of love

In Scott and Zelda's fiction, Montgomery is variously called Black Bear Village, Tarleton and Jeffersonville. Here it's always warm, “a little hotter than anywhere else", according to Scott, and for Zelda “a drenching, blistering affair". It's this heat, Scott writes, that makes Southerners lazy and comfort-seeking — he calls them “idlers" and “loafers" in his letters — and makes his wife behave like a spoiled child.

In contrast to the sleepy lack of ambition in the South, Scott writes in “The Ice Palace" (1920) about the cold North's “energetic dignity", the quick and hard intelligence of long winters and thin, sharp light. The contrast and regional differences between Montgomery and the North are like Scott and Zelda, bacon, eggs and burnt toast versus “biscuits and peaches for breakfast".

To their daughter, Scottie, he later wrote: “The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds — she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden."

Sally Cline, one of Zelda's biographers, notes that “mental illness is one of the least discussed, if most common, occurrences in old Montgomery".

Felder Avenue and the Fitz

In 1931, after a diagnosis of schizophrenia and a few years of gruelling psychiatric treatment, Zelda was discharged from a Swiss clinic. She and Scott decided to create a home in Montgomery with their daughter. The South's close-knit community watched over its broken ones, and Scott hoped the proximity of family and friends, open windows and sunshine would bring Zelda stability.

They rented a house at 819 Felder Avenue (now 919). Scott tried to drink less and worked on Tender is the Night (1934), while Zelda wrote her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932). In front of the house still stands a magnolia tree, providing Zelda's “sweet smell of sleeping gardens".

The ground floor of this house is now the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum. Scott would probably have felt more at home with a museum in Manhattan, but here he is now with Zelda in the deep south of Alabama. Exhibits include his Norfolk jacket that surely smells of Chesterfields and gin, Zelda's fur coat and cigarette holder, his hip flask, her flapper hairpiece, their tennis racquets. Their letters and first editions are preserved behind glass. Zelda's vibrant paintings hang on the walls.

The upper floor is The Fitz, an Airbnb where we stayed for my birthday. I remembered that neither of them lived past 50. The rooms are furnished with sturdy 1930s dark wood and velvet furniture, and we drank wine from silver and red baroque glasses. The floors creaked all night and the water pipes wheezed. A few blocks away, church bells rang. Behind peeling paint, the original wallpaper of the Fitzgeralds is visible.

They are everywhere — photos of Zelda as a belle and as a flapper, above the fireplace an oil painting of Scott that doesn't really resemble him, Zelda and Scott in Paris, the French Riviera. On the walls are copies of their letters to each other, “dearest and always". A note next to a framed razor blade claims it was Scott's, found behind the sink years later. It's so easy to become sentimental.

Alabama for the last time

At 9.30pm, it was still a soggy 35ºC along the Alabama River. This heat doesn't break. It's hard on your body, making it difficult to breathe and testing your patience. I'd scratched my heat rash to shreds. Someday she's going to get away from this place, sang the guitarist in the bar, probably the theme of every song ever written in the South, and we gave her a big tip.

Back at Scott and Zelda's house, I leafed through a copy of Save Me the Waltz, a text that reads like fireflies in a swarm of bees. “The old town [...] spread before her protectively," Zelda writes when her protagonist returns to Montgomery, “... the threads would hold together better." Even through the closed window, I could smell the magnolias. And once upon a time Scott wrote to her: “The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever. [...] I love you my darling, darling."

They couldn't have known that Felder Avenue in Montgomery would be the last place they would live together as a family.

♦ VWB ♦

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