I just finished
Zelda by Nancy Milford. A billion (felt-like) page biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott and original flapper fiasco. I read the book out because I felt I owed it to her. I've heard of her my whole life. I knew she was supposedly beautiful and she died in a psychiatric hospital. I'd read
A Moveable Feast (which I am now re-reading post-Zelda to compare), where Hemingway blames her for all Scott's woes. I'd read
Great Gatsby (many many times) and likened her to Daisy as I'd been told to do. Now that I've been blogging for a while, I realize she fits some sort of mold in the females I thought I looked up to and I wanted to find out if that's true.
Once, my great friend Jess Pleasant owned a Che Guevera shirt. She never wore it. She told me she had to read his biography first and really decide if she should. You can't like someone because they're on a t-shirt.
Or because they're Daisy Buchanan. Or because you already like
Patti Smith and
Courtney Love.
Are they people or are they pop art? Let's find out.
Having already been familiar with Milford's writing style via her excellent biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I was okay with long passages devoted in very scholarly English-journal fashion to the writing of both Fitzgerald's--as well as how their place in culture and setting influenced their art and vice-versa. In fact, Zelda began as Milford's graduate thesis at Columbia. As a fan of language, especially Scott Fitzgerald's, this kept me pretty happy. As a non-literary nerd, you'd be okay to skip some of the passages that sound like an English paper and continue on when activities are taking place (Zelda's suitors, her swimming, his drinking, their marriage counseling sessions--lots of insider information here).
Milford is kind to her, which is appropriate when the final page is read and one sees how terribly sad her existence was. She's more Yoko than Yoko ever was. But not conniving. Her sickness worsened from 1930 until first Scott's death a decade later, and her's in 1948. The 1920s could have been her decade if they were a different decade. The literary world wasn't ready for a woman like her and (wildly) Milford shows over and over again how most of what we all love in the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald was really a combination of the two of them. They collaborated on many writings. Scott pulled pages upon pages from her diaries directly into his novels with no credit to her. Often, she wrote short stories for national publications completely on her own and they were published under F. Scott Fitzgerald because his name brought them more money.
Muse is too tiny a word for what this woman was. She was a kinetic force of creativity when, coupled with the elaborate-yet-raw emotion her husband could evoke, erupted into a large part of the 20th Century American literary canon. They were chemistry on more levels than any husband-wife or artist-muse relationship I've ever read about.
She was talented. Yes. But was she capable on her own? My takeaway is no. Her writing on its own has some of the best imagery available. You look at a picture when you read one of her sentences. You see it vividly. Character development, however, was nothing to her, which is where Scott really took over. I am drawn to her story and in the end, repelled by her. All the qualities in myself--the qualities I dislike about certain artistic friends of mine--the spattering of a million ideas, the prep, the hype--the laziness at execution which kills the whole shebang. She excelled in that detriment.
Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While excuse isn't the right word to use when faulting her lacks, it does give her leeway regarding the downfall of Scott Fitzgerald and the reputation she has grown to enjoy fifty-plus years later. In the end, I find the entire chronology, and its romance and gore, tragic. I don't look up to her now. I don't see her as influential to a movement, but rather a posthumous product used to discuss one after the fact. I don't find her likable or inspirational. I love her like a sister, though.
