Book review: 'The Gatsby Affair' was not

I suppose the insertion of the word "affair" in the title of any book would help it sell better. Surely, a Ph.D. student has researched this matter.

The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic by Kendall Taylor is a misnomer since there is no proof that Zelda Fitzgerald had an affair with a French pilot which was "consummated." Is a summer fling of a few weeks an "affair"? Then I suppose most of us had had hundreds.  The author contends that Zelda's "affair" served as a springboard for much of her husband's book, The Great Gatsby.


Zelda's fling with Edouard Jozan consumes a small portion of Taylor's book, a few pages front and aft.

At the beginning of Affair, it was great fun to live vicariously with Zelda, being wined and dined by all her boyfriends, going to the parties, the dancing, the attention, the prom queen! Ahhhh...such is youth! 

It ends too soon.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
   The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.*

After she marries Scott, the book takes a turn from fun to depressing. (That's what marriage can do!)

He promises her a luxurious lifestyle which they lived for a while on his writing income in New York, on the edge, partying constantly late into the next day, doing crazy things and spending too much money which Scott did not have. He was constantly borrowing on his future earnings.

They take off for Europe which was a cheaper place to live, and their marriage continues its downward spiral.

He was mean; he was an alcoholic who stifled Zelda's creativity and forbade the publication of some of her works he wanted to use himself.  He was rude to friends. Here, he's the antagonist, a control freak when it comes to Zelda.

He stifled her creativity and kept her in hospitals. Some of the medical treatments she received are painful to read. He said he was due part of the money she earned from her few publications to pay for her medical bills. Fair enough.

They return to the U.S. In California Scott worked to earn more money as a script writer and...

The book is not so much fun any more.

After Scott failed again on writing assignments in Hollywood, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda's family's home, where she was furiously working on a story of their lives in Europe; he forbade her from writing her story because he wanted to use the material for his own.

About 20 years ago two friends and I took the day off from our jobs in Nashville to drive to Huntsville, Alabama to see a small exhibition of Zelda's works.  The Fitzgeralds' only child, Scottie, had loaned the pieces to, I think it was, the Huntsville Museum of Art. 

As I recall, the art on the walls was mainly line drawings of ballerinas in small frames, no larger than 8 x 10". In Europe Zelda prided herself on her constant feverish training to become a ballerina which Scott did not take seriously. That she was invited to participate in a professional production in Europe gives credence to her talent. (She did not join the company.)

The hospital fire in Asheville, N.C. which claimed her life in March, 1948 was likely caused by an arsonist. The hospital had no fire codes.

Rather than an "affair," this book is really about Zelda's personal crash and is very sad. May I suggest instead, Matthew Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur which is much better written, throughly documented (not denying Taylor's research), and about twice as long, well worth a serious reader's look at the Fitzgeralds' lives and careers.  (But if you're serious, you'll be reading Taylor's, too. Bruccoli died in 2008 and was considered "the preeminent expert" on F. Scott Fitzgerald [Wikipedia].)

In Affair, modifiers sometimes go AWOL and I found myself having to review previous sentences to find out what or whom the author was writing about.

Disjointed words are found scattered throughout, and often, pronouns and subjects don't match, which may be another example of a publisher's reduction in staff. Sigh. (This publisher is Rowman & Littlefield.) 

Until I read a little about the author, I thought she was British, and it was a British way of writing.  Seriously.

But, it's a great dream book to carry a reader away for a while, to the shore, the man, the fun, and the scenery. If it only had a happy ending, but it was not to be.

* To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

The graves of F. Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald, St. Mary's Catholic Church, Rockville, MD, Feb. 19, 2022/Photo by Patricia Leslie

The graves of F. Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald, St. Mary's Catholic Church, Rockville, MD, Feb. 19, 2022/Photo by Patricia Leslie

The graves of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, St. Mary's Catholic Church, Rockville, MD, Feb. 19, 2022/Photo by Patricia Leslie

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Today is the 372nd anniversary of the beheading of King Charles I

  

This anniversary of a king's beheading is not to be forgotten by supporters who will lay wreaths at the statue of England's King Charles I (1600-1649) today, not far from his execution site, says the Royal Encyclopedia.

Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I by Charles Spencer lays out all the gory details of his death and his trial, followed 11 years later by the worldwide manhunt for the regicides, conducted by Charles's son King Charles II when royalty was restored to the throne in 1660.

With his back to the viewer, Charles I, seated in the center, faces the High Court of Justice in 1649/Wikpedia, public domain.Engraving from "Nalson's Record of the Trial of Charles I" in the British Museum. Plate 2 from A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court / taken by J. Nalson Jan. 4, 1683 : with a large introduction. London: Printed by H.C. for Thomas Dring at the Harrow at the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, 1684.

It was treasonous to house the king's killers or even think about killing him and so, off with his head (sometimes hers)! 

Which is what happened to at least ten of them.

Charles was not a good king, he was not a great king but a greedy king, a king who was arrogant, extravagant, conceited and, to top it off, married to a Roman Catholic.

It was his way or the highway when it came to wars, the Scots, religion, and Parliament. He treasured his vast art collection, funded by his subjects about whom he cared little.

All the regicides were ordered to surrender, and some did, thinking their lives would be spared. Hell hath no fury like a son whose father has been beheaded.

Some were beheaded anyway, confound those promises!

In the first regicide trial, that of Colonel (later, Major General) Thomas Harrison, the judge ruled:

"'...you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and (you living) the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters...'"

to be disposed at the King's pleasure.

Well!

And that wasn't the end of it.

Preceding the butchering, the guilty were hauled in a sledge on the way to the gallows, wearing only a shirt to better receive the tossed objects and insults directed at them by Londoners and to ease the butcher's job of cutting off their privates after they had regained consciousness from hanging.

Until this reading, I had never thought too much about "drawn and quartered," but Readers, it was real and literal!

(The Capitol Hill insurrectionists should be thankful this is 2021 and not 1660 when the "regicides" were hunted throughout England and beyond.)

Head for the hills, man!

And that's what some did, to the Netherlands (those wretched Dutch who turned in the prey) and to New America where a hunt for Col. Edward Whalley and Lt. William Goffe was n'er successful, be that the two were hidden often by government officials and private individuals, on farms, in the wilderness, in basements (two years) until Mr. Whalley died and Mr. Goffe (his son-in-law) was never traced to his final "settlement" which, the author suggests, just might be in Virginia.

King Charles II was so mad that his New World subjects and huntsmen could not find "the most prominent" of his father's killers, Whalley and Goffe, that he took away New Haven's independence and made it part of Connecticut. Take that, you blarney killers!

(Streets in New Haven still bear the regicides' names like 10 Downing Street in London, named after a "first-rate traitor," one of King Charles II's men, who tricked the Dutch and captured three regicides, including his former commander. Samuel Pepys called Downing [doesn't deserve a first-name listing] "a perfidious rogue.")

Then there was Dame Alice Lisle, a mother of 11 and in her late 60s who had harbored two regicides and was the wife of the regicide John Lisle, already dead by 21 years, killed by an assassin in Switzerland, but don't hold that against her, and they did.

Off with her head!

The judge became part of her prosecution and the jury debated all of 15 minutes, and Dame Alice, a community pillar, became the last woman beheaded by order of the English government. (Her sentence had been commuted from burning at the stake, the usual death sentence given to women.)

One famous regicide (or regicide supporter, depending on what you read), and still known to us today was John Milton (1608-1674), the poet who was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a few weeks and penalized financially, but he was one of the lucky ones who kept his head. (Sometimes, the writing profession can be a lifeline.)

Charles II had the body of Oliver Cromwell (the chief insurrectionist who died in 1658) and others dug up, hung at the gallows, beheaded, and spiked on poles for the thousands to see, a lesson to all you commoners who even thought about killing a king. (Wikipedia's list of the regicides excludes Poet Milton.)

Reader, if you can get through all of the names at the beginning of the book, you've overcome the most boring parts, and the pace quickens to the actual trial of the king. (The index is excellent.)

And whether at the beginning you're unsure if you support the king or the regicides, by the end you'll be rooting for the latter as did I and also, the author who dedicates the book as tribute to them (and "Charlotte").

As usual, I am asking, please, for a glossary of the players with brief biographical sketches to help the reader keep them straight, and a map of escape routes would be useful, too.

Who's got the movie rights? I want to see it, but, no gory parts, please!

The chase! The chase!

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