Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald A Marriage

Montgomery and All That Jazz Born on Tuesday, July 24, 1900, when her mother was nearly forty, Zelda was the youngest of Anthony and Minnie Sayre's six children. She was named for the gypsy heroine in Robert Edward Francillon's 1874 romantic novel Zelda's Fortune. Describing his heroine, Francillon could have been speaking of Zelda Sayre when he wrote, "Zelda's heart was of July, but her tears were of April, when her sun rose. There was more than a little of Marietta in her besides her trick of stamping on the floor. But it must not be thought that rippling waves are always the sign of a shallow sea. She had her mother's quickness and impulse, but her depths were her own." She was baptized in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter along with her three sisters: Marjorie, the oldest, born in 1882; Rosalind (called Tootsie), eleven years older, born in 1889; and Clothilde (called Tilde), nine years older and born in 1891. Her brother Daniel died of spinal meningitis at eighteen months, which left Anthony D. Sayre Jr., born in 1894, the only boy. By the 1600s, Sayres were prominent on Long Island and then in New Jersey and Ohio. They moved to Alabama in 1819 and became large landowners and prosperous planters, merchants, and respected citizens. Many streets bore their surnames, including a prominent one named for William Sayre, Zelda's great-uncle, who came to Montgomery with his brother Daniel in 1819 and played a leading role in the growth of the town. Daniel became a newspaper publisher in Tuskegee and Montgomery, and his private residence at 644 Washington Street was later used as the first White House of the Confederacy. Zelda's mother's family, from the Scottish MacHen clan, had emigrated to Virginia early in the seventeenth century and changed their name to Machen. They were prominent statesmen, farmers, and politicians. A descendant of early Maryland and Virginia settlers, Minnie Machen's father was an attorney and tobacco planter who owned three thousand acres on the Cumberland River, and represented Virginia in the Confederate Congress. After the Civil War he served as a U.S. senator. The Sayres had always resided in the western section of Montgomery, the oldest part of town, convenient to schools and serviced by the streetcar. While wealthier families built new homes in other sections, many of the old families remained rooted there. Though the Sayres moved several times within that neighborhood, Zelda's childhood was spent at 6 Pleasant Avenue in a rented gray frame house. It was built by one of the Judge's friends, whose family's preCivil War plantation had occupied that part of town. The square home faced their landlady's large white house across the street, left to her by ancestors; it was set amid a huge garden dotted with fruit and shade trees, boxwood, crepe myrtle, camellias, and kiss-me-at-the-gate that had been planted before the Civil War. At the rear of the Sayre house was a grassy, field-sized lot bordered by a ravine laced with wild grapevines on which Zelda spent hours climbing, and a great oak tree between whose roots spread carpets of moss on which she played endless games. It was a comfortable house surrounded by a spacious porch curtained with clematis vines and smilax to shield it from the western sun. On one side was a bench and chairs where Zelda and her friends gathered after supper; on the other hung a vine-laced swing where she and her sisters entertained male suitors. The large informal rooms were tastefully papered, and downstairs, furniture was set on polished pine floors centered with rugs. An expert gardener, Zelda's mother placed fresh flowers everywhere, and the rooms were always cheerful with sunlight and color. Tall glass-doored bookcases filled with Daniel Sayre's library linedTaylor, Kendall is the author of 'Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald A Marriage' with ISBN 9780345447159 and ISBN 0345447158.