Almanac Poetry: Three Photographs from the Early Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (1922-1986)
Scottie shows her children paper dolls her mother Zelda originally made for her. [Source: Life Magazine 1959 by Robert Phillips]
Three Photographs from the Early Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (1921-1986)
There you are,
coyly smiling,
only two years old,
hand in hand
with your father and mother,
high kicking in front of a Christmas tree,
typical expatriate
Americans in Paris
—hardly—
Scott writing Gatsby,
battling with his drinking,
Zelda madly practising,
far too late,
to be a ballerina.
In another photo
taken when you’re seven,
the three of you are in the shallows
at a beach on the Côte d’Azur:
Zelda in a stylish one-piece,
Scottie in the middle, paddling,
Scott lounging on the other side,
protectively near his daughter.
Possibly Gerald and Sara Murphy,
that highly glamorous pair,
sat watching from the sand,
the couple who invented sunbathing,
at least in the form
in which it has come down to us
in the Western world.
Fast forward to your Vassar
graduation portrait:
a pretty blonde twenty-one-year-old
with the fine features of her father,
two years dead,
and the darker mystery of her mother,
now locked behind an asylum’s walls.
One could be forgiven.
for wondering about the baggage
resulting from such parents
—Scott and Zelda, patron saints
of the decadent Jazz Age—
but instead their daughter wrote
of her childhood as idyllic,
to use her own word, golden.
(Acknowledgements: first published in Orpheus in the Undershirt, Ginninderra Press, 2018.)
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About
Kevin Densley is a graduate of both Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. He has taught writing and literature in numerous Victorian universities and TAFES. He is a poet and writer-in-general. His sixth book-length poetry collection, Isle Full of Noises, was published in early 2026 by Ginninderra Press. He is also the co-author of ten play collections for young people, as well as a multi Green Room Award nominated play, Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press. Other writing includes screenplays for educational films.
The couple who invented sunbathing.
How good is that.
Thanks Kevin. That thought will be with me all day.
What are you doing?
We’re lying here semi naked.
Really?
Yes. It’s called sunbathing.
One word…?
Yes.
Who told you that?
No one. We just made it up.
Thanks, Pards, for your amusing response. So pleased you appreciated the sunbathing line – apparently those wealthy expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy really were pioneers when it came to lying in the sun and burning one’s skin. The couple were the basic models for two of Fitzgerald’s main characters in his wonderful follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby – Tender is the Night, published in 1934.