In March of 1922, Zelda Fitzgerald published, in The New York Tribune, a cheeky and rather damning review of her husband’s newly published novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.
Here is a taste:
“The other things I didn’t like in the book—I mean the unimportant things—were the literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition. It reminds me in its more soggy moments of the essays I used to get up in school at the last minute by looking up strange names in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
And that’s just a bit. You can read more of the review on Gary Dexter‘s wonderful blog, “How Books Got Their Titles.”
Zelda had become pregnant early in the year, and had had an abortion that March: it would not have been a good month to be invited to the Fitzgeralds‘ to dine.
They were a vibrant, talented, beautiful couple, no doubt, but so self-destructive, the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. One wonders how they managed to carry on.
I regret to say that my sprint didn’t turn out to be so far-reaching. I miscalculated! I wrote just over 1500 words both yesterday and today. A mucky patch.
