Monday, March 10, 2008

This Day in Literary History


March 10, 1948—In Asheville, North Carolina, Zelda Fitzgerald, widow and longtime muse of my favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, died in a fire that broke out in Highland Hospital, the sanitarium where she was confined for most of the last 16 years of her life.

I’ve always found it curious that the most perceptive biography I know of Fitzgerald, author of what I consider The Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby, was a Frenchman: Andre LeVot, a professor of American literature at the Sorbonne, whose consideration of Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1984. He made one particularly fascinating observation: Fitzgerald began his novels writing about someone else, but eventually the main characters came increasingly to resemble himself and Zelda.

The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel, was inspired by theater critic George Jean Nathan (also the model for the sardonic Addison DeWitt of All About Eve), until Fitzgerald turned it into the story of Anthony and Gloria Patch, a young couple who resembled Scott and Zelda. Tender is the Night started out as a fictional version of the golden Riviera couple Gerald and Sara Murphy until the plot had evolved, by its denouement, into something like a roman a cleft about Zelda’s mental breakdown and Scott’s resulting “emotional bankruptcy” (also, significantly, the title of a Fitzgerald short story).

The story of Scott and Zelda, the handsome alcoholic writer from St. Paul and his beautiful southern belle wife, and how they were undone by the Jazz Age and their own psychological issues, has been told so many times that it would seem that there would be little left for biographers to pick over.

However, the rise of feminism and the opening of source material about their lives have resulted in reevaluations of their relationship.

From early on, tensions between the couple grew, starting with the fact that Scott not only used Zelda as a never-ending source of character inspiration but even quoted directly from her own writing. This did not go unremarked by his wife, who, in a mock review in The New York Tribune, wrote: "[i]t seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

Scott and Zelda’s only daughter, Scott Fitzgerald Smith, limited the use of material on her mother’s psychological treatment by pioneering Zelda biographer Nancy Milford. But even in this case, the weight of sympathy had begun to shift toward Zelda. Subsequent biographies have increasingly taken Scott to task for abusing his wife, for keeping her from competition with him as a writer, and for negatively influencing the doctors and nurses who treated her after her nervous breakdown in 1930.

My own take on this complex situation is that there was no sole and simple victim in this volatile marriage of creative narcissists (in addition to writing, Zelda also took up dancing and painting). Their initial tendencies toward instability only worsened with age and exposure to a spouse who exacerbated their worst instincts. In the end, we are left with the recognition that their marriage was less a grandly doomed love affair but a train wreck of people who brought out the worst in each other.

For some fascinating examples of Zelda’s artwork, please click on this link, about an exhibition of her work.

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