In 2014 my wife, Jennifer Horne, published a volume of short stories, “Tell the World You’re a Wildflower.” I was faced with a dilemma. Could I review a book by my own spouse? Then I recalled, in 1922 Zelda Fitzgerald was asked to review “The Beautiful and Damned” by her husband Scott. She agreed and encouraged the public to buy Scott’s book because if it sold enough, she knew where there was the “cutest cloth of gold dress for three hundred dollars, in a store on Forty-second street.” So, I reviewed Jennifer Horne’s collection, but we were still unable to buy a beach house.
But now Ms. Horne is back—this time with a large, hugely impressive and thoroughly researched biography of the brilliant and eccentric Alabama writer Sara Mayfield. Raised in Montgomery in the first years of the last century, she was the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice and good friends with other bright, privileged, vivacious, Alabama girls: Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Talullah Bankhead.
After Margaret Booth’s school in Montgomery, Sara started at Goucher College, but dropped out to marry John Sellers, a local playboy who had courted Zelda. It was a small world. After the marriage collapsed, probably because of Sellers’ excessive drinking and philandering, Sara returned to Goucher, graduated and went with her brother James on bicycling trip through Europe. Her journal of that trip was entitled “The Odyssey of a Wandering Mind.” It is apt in many ways.
Sara Mayfield had a wandering, restless, inquisitive mind. Here in Alabama in the 30’s she conducted experiments in creating new plastics and hardening compounds. At different times she worked as a radio and newspaper journalist, covering the formation of the U.N. in San Francisco. During the war Sara may have been involved in propaganda and counterintelligence, but it is unclear how.
Whatever she undertook, she did it with an unnatural intensity, all the way to exhaustion, and this may have led to her bouts of instability. In 1948, in Tuscaloosa, she was committed to Bryce for what would turn out to be 17 years. After her release in 1965, she would claim it was all a kind of charade, a misunderstanding. The doctors she said, knew she was perfectly well. Her family, she said, had been unwilling to put up with her eccentricities; or, it had been about money.
As with all things Mayfield, it is more complicated. Medical records show she suffered from paranoia, but perhaps not all the time, so she was granted privileges, trips to the store, even overnight visits to friends. But, at times, she was also certain she was being spied upon and the authorities meant to poison her.
Many strings of narrative can be simultaneously true with Mayfield but what is indisputable is her literary production. After her release, she published well-received books on the Fitzgeralds, the Menckens and a novel about the Mona Lisa. These books are still read and admired. Sara Mayfield, writer, had the last word.
