Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
– PART SEVEN, Books Related to F. Scott Fitzgerald,
For the last few months I have examined all the novels and many of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Next posting I will give my final verdict on this works, then leave the man alone. But in this posting there is another matter to deal with – that is, the books that have been written about him. There are now at least a dozen biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, most of them being positive and praising his work. I looked diligently at the Cambridge Edition of his works with all its notations and commentary by the scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli. I dug into some biographies, but most of them didn’t appeal to me. They were too hagiographic. Finally I found a biography that was in part very critical of Fitzgerald and I pounced on it. Then I finally got hold of a work of fiction about him that I’d been seeking for quite a while… and I knew another fiction that was more glib. I begin with the more interesting fiction which was written in Fitzgerald’s life time.
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I am of course referring to Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda’s novel Save Me the Waltz. Zelda had been diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1930 and she was already (on and off) in psychiatric hospitals. She had attempted, without much success, to build a career as a ballerina and she had a major breakdown. In hospital, she wrote her only novel in a mere six weeks, in January and February of 1932. It was, quite blatantly, the story of herself and her husband. Fitzgerald was called “David Knight” and, as a fig-leaf disguise, was presented as a painter rather than as a writer. Zelda herself was called “Alabama”; and their little girl Scottie was called “Bonnie”. But few readers were fooled. This was clearly the life of the Fitzgeralds over about twelve years. Fitzgerald was furious and before the novel was published (in a comparatively small print-run) he persuaded Scribners’ reader Maxwell Perkins to help him edit the novel down. Fitzgerald protested that the novel’s “mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both” and he was afraid that his reputation would be destroyed by all the novel’s alcohol and “speakeasy nights” episodes. Perkins then asked Zelda to rewrite much of the novel, and so she did. The scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli makes it clear that the rewrites were Zelda’s own work, not Fitzgerald’s.
What are we to make of this novel? It begins in about 1919, with “Alabama” living in her Southern home with her strict father, a judge, and her sisters. Soldiers come into the town. She falls for Lieutenant “David Knight”. They marry and move to New York. [All these details were just like Fitzgerald and Zelda]. They have a little girl. They move to the south of France. “David” tries to paint. She almost has an affair with a French aviator. They move to Paris and enjoy the party life. [All these details were just like Fitzgerald and Zelda]. She takes lessons in ballet. She finds it is a strenuous life, there is rivalry and back-biting among the aspiring ballerinas, there is the sweat and smell of working dancers. She reluctantly accepts an offer to play a bit part in a ballet in Naples, which proves to be underpaid. She is stricken by fatigue and physical wear from practising dancing too long and too strenuously. She is hospitalised. [All true of Zelda except that she manages not to mention her psychological problems.] She goes back to where she came from, down South in Montgomery, when her father dies; and she identifies intensely with her old family home. But in the very last pages she makes it clear that she and her husband have wasted much of their life in frivolous things, and now they have to face the future as adults. Thus Zelda accounts for the years from about 1919 to about 1931.
“David” is strangely missing from much of the novel and I can only assume that this is the result of Fitzgerald and Perkins cutting out the episodes that Fitzgerald objected to. For the record, the parts that were excised no longer exist and Zelda’s original draft was destroyed. Having said that, I have to note that in the novel as we now have it, Zelda is far more forthright than her husband was in depicting American tourists making fools of themselves in Paris in the late 1920s. The denouement is more fully adult and mature than Fitzgerald’s endings often were. As it stands, her descriptions can sometimes be rather flowery, but no worse than descriptions in her husband’s earlier work. I would not rate Save Me the Waltz as a great novel, but it is certainly a competent novel, in spite of the way it often jumps awkwardly from one event to another. Put it simply, it is very readable. Given the circumstances and speed in which it was written, it's amazing that it was written at all. For years Save Me the Waltz was discarded. Only in the early 1950s did an English firm re-publish it. Then more recently it was re-discovered and re-published in America, especially by women who saw it as a document of a woman who was not used well by her husband. They take a very feminist attitude towards the Fitzgeralds and their marriage.
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Speaking of which, I turn to Kendall Taylor’s non-fiction book Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald – Sometimes Madness is Wisdom [note Zelda comes before Scott in the title]. It was first published in 2001. I read my way slowly through Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald – Sometimes Madness is Wisdom’s 400 pages of text, followed by 65 fine-print pages of references, sources and index. It also has a generous selection of relevant photos. Kendall Taylor is very thorough. In fact I think she often falls for “research-itis”, wherein she feels bound to use all the research she did and give us every last crumb, even about people who were only peripheral to the Fitzgeralds. I was going to give you one of my notorious overlong synopses, but I shall spare you by trying to keep it relatively short.
Kendall Taylor tells in detail the life stories of both Zelda and Scott, but leans towards Zelda. She was the youngest, and probably the most pampered, of the Sayre family, living in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father was a judge with strict ideas of the way young women should behave. Nevertheless young Zelda liked to party, to show off and to dance. It’s probable that she lost her virginity at high-school. She was the quintessential “flapper”. But there was a shadow over the family. One grandparent had committed suicide and much later in Zelda’s life her brother Anthony killed himself. Zelda herself once attempted to kill herself. Although Kendall often suggests that Scott triggered many of Zelda’s later psychological woes, she does also make it clear that most of those woes were built into Zelda’s genes. Scott first came into her life when he was in the army in Alabama and – after he was rebuffed a few times – they married (with few of their families present).
Zelda and Scott very quickly became what might now be called the “power couple” of America in the early 1920s on the basis of Scott’s bestselling novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned and his short-story collections Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. Zelda and Scott were narcissistic in their wild behaviours. They were already deeply into heavy drinking and showing-off with stunts to gain attention and be seen in the press. But their marriage was already becoming combative only two or so years after they were first wed. She had an affair with theatre critic George Jean Nathan. Later, when they moved to France, she had an affair with a French naval pilot. Meanwhile Scott had affairs with the film star Lois Moran and other women (all of this long before when the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham became his mistress in the late 1930s).
Kendall Taylor says in Chapter 2: “In less than three years, the union of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre had created a powerful myth that Fitzgerald dubbed the Jazz Age. With parenthood looming, common sense would have dictated that they should settle down to a more domesticated existence. But already they were careening out of control, blinded by the light of instant celebrity and captives of their own creation” This looming parenthood refers to the couple’s only child. Certainly Scott was exceptionally narcissistic when Zelda wanted to name their little girl Pauline. Scott insisted on having her named Frances (remember his full name was Francis Scott Fitzgerald) and routinely nicknamed her "Scottie". Both parents were often negligent in caring for their daughter, who was nearly always looked after by a nanny, although apparently the girl was able to weather their negligence and grow up in general happiness. Scott didn’t want any more children, and Kendall Taylor reports that Scott once arranged for Zelda to have an abortion. [Later biographers say Zelda had three abortions in all, and this was another factor leading to her physical and mental decline.]
So Kendall’s narrative goes on. But holding together Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald – Sometimes Madness is Wisdom, there is a very feminist thesis. Kendall is telling us that Zelda was herself a very creative person, but she was thwarted by being overshadowed by her husband. Hence, when she was 30, she started to take lessons in ballet. She was trying to succeed in an art-form other than literature. But the hard fact is that successful ballerinas have to begin training when they are very young. 30 is far too old. In her introduction, Kendall declares “Far from being an impediment [for Scott], she provided the backbone for Fitzgerald’s fiction, irreparably damaging in the process her own fragile psyche. Her retreat into madness was how she arranged herself, as she said ‘in a condition to be able to breathe freely’.” This is where Taylor’s subtitle Sometimes Madness is Wisdom comes from. In her preface Kendall speaks of “Zelda’s superbly crafted letters to Scott. These number in the thousands, and Fitzgerald saved all of them… she gave life to all of Fitzgerald’s heroines, then [she] struggled to go beyond that person.” It is clear that in The Beautiful and Damned F. Scott Fitzgerald made much use of Zelda’s diaries and letters, lifting some of her writings word-for-word into his novel. In Chapter 3 Taylor says “Initially she had been flattered to have Scott appropriate her ideas for his fiction, and agreed that he, as the breadwinner, had earned the exclusive use of all creative materials. But that notion was gradually changing, and a reservoir of hostility mounting as she saw all the elements of their life together being used as raw material for his fictions.” So, says Taylor in Chapter 5, Zelda’s attempts to succeed separately from her husband were “her Herculean effort to become her own person, to identify and do valuable work, love who and how she pleased, and escape from being F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife and model for his heroines had ended in madness.” Did she succeed in all this? Partly. Ballet took her nowhere, but she did manage to write one novel and – as the photos in Taylor’s book show - her paintings and drawings showed a lot of talent.
Zelda was in and out of psychiatric hospitals from the early 1930s to her death in 1948, 8 years after Scott died. – but she was able to visit and stay with her siblings every so often. Kendall spends many pages on the type of therapy Zelda had in hospital, insulin injections and – what would now be banned - shock treatment. The manner of her death was appalling. She was locked in her bedroom on the night the hospital she was in burned down. She was burnt to death.
I do not believe that Zelda was an exceptional writer or painter and – for all the material Scott took from her - she was not the person who wrote the novels and short-stories that are remembered. On top of that, her mental decline and episodes of madness were not caused by her husband. They were built into her psyche and genes… but often Scott was no help and sometimes downright cruel. In many ways, you can’t help sympathising with Zelda.
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You might have noticed at the beginning of this review that I mentioned another fiction about the Fitzgeralds which I called “glib”. This was Therese Anne Fowler’s novel Z – A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald published in 2013. I now see this as leaning very much on the research done by Kendall Taylor’s non-fiction book Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald – Sometimes Madness is Wisdom which was published twelve years earlier, in 2001. I have now discovered that, as well as Therese Anne Fowler, other women novelists have also had a go at Zelda and Scott, always from a feminist perspective. I reviewed Z – A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald for the Sunday Star Times (21 April 2013). Reading it now, I think that I myself was glib – and rather insulting about Zelda. I present the review as I wrote without cutting the parts that now make me cringe.
F.Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda (nee Sayre) were America’s glamour couple of the early 1920s. Not only did he coin the term “Jazz Age”, but he was determined to live it and he took her along for the ride. He’d met her in 1918 when he was an army lieutenant and she was the daughter of a judge down in Montgomery, Alabama – a southern belle who was bored, and mildly rebellious, but still hoping to find a good husband.
So off he whisked her to New York where they married and then partied, partied, partied while he rapidly became America’s most highly-paid novelist via his first two efforts This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. If ever he was short of cash, he’d knock off another short story for The Saturday Evening Post and be sure of being paid more than any of his contemporaries. The Fitzgeralds never saved the proceeds. They drank and partied them away.
Scott and Zelda were feted like movie stars, endlessly interviewed, had their pictures appear on the covers of glossy magazines and mixed with the literati and glitterati.
But something began to go badly wrong with their marriage. The birth of a daughter didn’t heal it. Zelda had aspirations of her own and felt stifled. Scott knew he was throwing away his real talent on frivolous writing. He laboured long and hard over his third (and subsequently most famous) novel The Great Gatsby, but it was poorly received by some critics and didn’t sell as well as his earlier work had done.
At the age of only 28, was he getting past it?
In the later 1920s, they de-camped to Europe to revive his creative juices, but it didn’t really help. Zelda wanted to be recognized as a dancer, but couldn’t make the grade. As a writer, Scott first mentored, and was then outstripped by, the younger novelist Ernest Hemingway. Scott’s fourth novel just wouldn’t come. He drank more. It took him nine years to squeeze out Tender is the Night, and it simply wasn’t his best. And he declined into complete alcoholism. Always slightly crazy, Zelda’s mental health broke down. She went into psychiatric care and spent most of her last twenty years hospitalised. Scott died in 1940 at the age of 44. Zelda died in 1948, at the age of 48, in a hospital fire. Flaming youth had burnt itself out.
All this is history and all this is recorded in Therese Anne Fowler’s novel Z. But there has to be something more to a novel than a repetition of the public record, which is already available in a dozen or so biographies and memoirs of the Fitzgeralds.
The “something more” is Fowler’s overtly feminist interpretation of Zelda Fitzgerald. Told in the first-person by Zelda, the novel presents what Fowler imagines to be Zelda’s perspective on her life. In this version, Scott is the man Zelda loves and a real creative talent, but he is self-centred and manipulative and won’t let his wife have a life of her own. He goes from being puppyish and eager to being tyrannical and domineering. And when she goes into psychiatric care, there is more male chauvinism, as her treatment is old-fashioned Freudianism, which interprets all her craziness as the result of her failure to be a good wife and mother.
Zelda Fitzgerald did write one (not very good) novel, and Fowler therefore wants us to see her as a case-study in woman’s creativity being stomped on by male insensitivity. I don’t think she really makes her case, though. There is a tension between the – clearly unbalanced – things Zelda does (which are part of the historical record) and the reasoned and often polemical voice Fowler gives her, which sometimes sounds jarringly like what a woman a couple of generations after her time might have said.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to enjoying this novel, though. Much of it has a gossipy verve as Zelda and hubby swing through the New York and Paris and Riviera literary scene and most of the celebrity writers of the age are name-checked.
And there’s at least one point where I felt like shaking Zelda’s crazy little hand in vigorous agreement. Zelda deeply resented young Hemingway’s influence over her husband and wondered vindictively if they were “fairies”. She was wrong about that. But she was dead right to intuit that there was something phoney about Hemingway. She interpreted him as a mummy’s boy who overcompensated by putting on a big macho act.
Damn right he was.
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And now I give you some bits and pieces before you kick me out the door.
First Frivolity: In one of Woody Allen’s movies (I don’t remember which), his character referred to a woman disparagingly as having “the maturity of Zelda Fitzgerald” – meaning she was a nitwit. This is still very much the received idea of Zelda in some circles.
Second Frivolity: Many years ago (about 1970) I went with my eldest brother to see a movie called Getting Straight. It starred Elliott Gould as a would-be academic who was facing a panel as he did his viva voce. He was quizzed about F. Scott Fitzgerald. One member of the panel wanted to insist that Fitzgerald was homosexual because one of the female characters in The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker, was presented very boyishly and this must have been attractive to Fitzgerald. Finally the Elliott Gould character wails “Well somebody ought to tell Sheilah Graham!” before he walks out, disgusted by the stupidity of academics. This was a big laugh at the time (Sheilah Graham was still alive) because it was so obviously ridiculous… and yet more recently a few academics have revived this argument, telling us that Fitzgerald was part of the drag-chorus in revues when he was a student at (then male-only university) Princeton, and noting that later he sometimes donned drag to amuse people at parties. Given, though, that Fitzgerald’s recorded sex-life was only with women it is hard to accept this theory.
Third Frivolity: Speaking of Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s mistress from 1937 to Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, I have on my shelf her College of One. She was essentially a gossip columnist dealing with sensational stories of Hollywood. College of One explains how Fitzgerald taught her (or tried to teach her) how to read better, more highbrow, literature and expand her vocabulary. Actually in her later years she made something of a cottage industry churning out books about her relationship with Fitzgerald. First was Beloved Infidel (1958) which was turned into a godawful film in 1959 (Gregory Peck as F. Scott Fitzgerald?? Gedda life!). Then there was College of One (1967). And then The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thirty-Five years On (1976). She might have been no intellectual, but she knew how to milk as much money as she could out of the three years she knew Fitzgerald.
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