A Fine Romance

Passion is a double-edged sword. As deeply and wholly as someone can love another, equally deeply and wholly can that someone come to hate the other. Either way, when two souls are inextricably linked, what is it that holds them together? Love? Hate? Or passion?

I’ve just finished reading Therese Anne Fowler’s most excellent novel Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Aside from being a deliciously descriptive dip into the literary world of the Jazz Age, it’s the story of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald as told by Zelda herself. And, boy, fictionalized or no, their relationship from first encounter to last vestiges was a wild, crazy, roller coaster ride through a rainbow of emotion that should have blown them apart—and almost did, except for one thing: as written by Fowler, they were utterly and completely devoted to each other. Despite the booze and excess, the flings and flops, despite her struggle to maintain a balance and his fight to remain famous at any cost, they stayed together for more than twenty years.

They never really stopped loving each other.

Nowadays, I suppose a divorce would be inevitable since it’s so easy. Back then, not so much. Zelda’s attempt to live her own life was thwarted by the laws of the time—if she left the marriage, she forfeited everything, including her daughter. So she stayed and lost herself instead, ending up in a series of sanitaria where most of the doctors declared the cure lay in devoting herself entirely to her domestic duties of wife and mother—“the centre of a woman’s happiness”. Forget that she was a creative soul in her own right, since everything she accomplished was perceived as an extension of or due to her husband’s influence.

Of course she resented it. She even resented him (with good reason, might I add), but she understood him, too. And she loved him, knowing that he loved her as well. It was a beautiful train wreck. The insanity of excess and the bittersweet ending, however, hardly detract from the romance. Something between them endured the chaotic run through two decades. It made the book’s ending so poignant that I needed time to process it.

Romance (and I may have said this before, so bear with me) might begin with chemistry and that giddy, unbridled riot in the heart. It’s brave and bold and daring—and it can, but often doesn’t, have a happy ending. True romance stays the course through rough waters and prevails against the darkest odds. It survives birth, death, and drama. It lasts beyond the final exhausted surrender. It’s the last man standing. Not a happy ending, perhaps, but a triumphant one if the pair involved can regard each other through jaded eyes and recognize the magic that drew them together in the first place.

Scott and Zelda had a great one.