Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
There’s something seductive about the legacy of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald that makes them the perfect subjects for fiction. Beautiful and volatile, the novelist and his muse were icons of the 1920s Jazz Age, where everything seemed shimmering and decadent and reckless. But the aftermath of youth hit them hard, and their story quickly became a tragedy. Beautiful Fools is one of three novels released this year imagining the lives of Scott and Zelda, and of the three is the most accomplished. With a masterful sense for the nuances of characters, R Clifton Spargo creates an intimate, startlingly human portrait of two people and the end of their love.
Beautiful Fools imagines Scott and Zelda long after the glamour of the 1920s has faded, focusing on a few days they spent in Cuba in April 1939. At this time, Zelda was living in a mental institution as she had for much of the past decade, while Scott was living in Hollywood with his latest lover, struggling to relieve his growing debt and to write a novel that might restore him to fame. The wild romance they once shared had been ripped to tatters by jealousy, resentment, alcoholism and mental illness. This trip to Cuba was likely one last attempt to salvage their marriage. It was also the last time they ever saw each other.
Strangely – given how thoroughly Scott and Zelda’s lives have been raked over by scholars and biographers – this is one if the most sparsely documented episodes of their history, providing Spargo with a luxurious fictional space in which to imagine the famous couple removed from the more familiar anecdotes and settings. What emerges is a tender, wistful story of two dysfunctional lovers who can’t quite let go of the life they once had together. “Being in love with you,” Zelda tells Scott, “is like being love with one’s own past.”
From the beginning of the trip, the sultry atmosphere is charged with the threat of something violent and uncertain. On their first night in Havana, Scott and Zelda witness a stabbing in a nightclub and flee to a beach resort outside the city. Still, even this quiet paradise is saturated with a potent sense of unease. The blistering heat of the Cuban sun is vividly evoked. There are shady characters who may be friends or foes. Zelda is distressed by a witchy fortune-teller who recognises the “great sorrow” within her. Scott’s tubercular cough racks his sickly, wrecked body, and he continues to drink heavily.
Even as they frustrate each other, there is a romantic tenderness always present between them. Far removed from the clichés and caricatures of Scott and Zelda’s story, Spargo creates an image of two beautiful, ruined people who share a love that may be too large for them to handle. It’s a hopeless love, but it is what sustains them, providing a strange kind of solace right to the end.