With hindsight, one might say: but of course.
But none of the decade's literary stars, flush with the exuberance
that followed what Edmund Wilson termed the Brown Decades (1865-1920),
could ever have predicted it at the time. And therein, I suppose,
lies the tragedy.
Fitzgerald is perhaps the writer most closely
linked to the 1920s. He gave it its popular name, the Jazz Age,
and wrote most memorably about the flapper as a central character,
and, perhaps as importantly, his career didn't popularly extend
well past the era's collapse. In some sense, Fitzgerald and his
wife were the Jazz Age, and as the country slipped into
the Depression and the notions of how one should live and what
one should write about began to change, Fitzgerald found himself
eclipsed by the younger writers (particularly Hemingway) who
adapted better.
In her new biography, Sometimes Madness
is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage, Kendall
Taylor argues strongly that--for all her husband's connection
to the 1920s--Zelda Fitzgerald herself was really at the center
of its self-absorbed, determined frivolity. It was, it seems,
almost a grim contest for the young Zelda to have the most profane
fun, from dancing with and kissing the most young men in high
school to insisting after her marriage that Fitzgerald's friends
watch her bathe. (Another Montgomery girl who happily matched
her act for act was Talluluah Bankhead; their competitiveness
drew Zelda to consider acting after Bankhead met with success
on the New York stage.) The daughter of a judge (he would eventually
serve on the Alabama Supreme Court), Zelda ignored his attempts
to curb her impulsive acts, and as Taylor astutely observes,
she self-consciously modeled herself on the heroine of one of
the period's most popular novels (and later a popular movie),
Owen Johnson's The Salamander. The salamander, according
to Plato, could pass through fire untouched, and Johnson's heroine
is likewise convinced she's invincible.
When The Salamander heroine Dore Baxter
declares on screen: "I am in the world to do something unusual,
extraordinary. I'm not like every other little woman....I adore
precipices! It's such fun to go dashing along the edges, leaning
up against the wind that tries to throw you over," it is
easy to imagine Zelda's delight and instant identification with
the character. For both, ordinary life "was too permissible
and lacked the element of danger, of the forbidden."
In Taylor's analysis, Fitzgerald himself was--for
all his party antics--often merely a determined observer, drawing
his characters and even their dialogues from Zelda's diaries,
letters and conversations. Initially, Zelda accepted that her
life story should rightly be Fitzgerald's to use as he saw fit.
He, after all, could make far more money from it than she could.
But as Fitzgerald's popularity waned and his descent into alcoholism
and Zelda's descent into schizophrenia began to warp and cripple
their lives, Zelda began to see her own creative expression as
a way out of her psychological crisis. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald
disagreed, persuading Zelda's doctors to discourage her writing
prose and push her into visual arts and ephemeral writing instead.
His reasons were fairly clear: Fitzgerald undoubtedly wanted
to keep his own problems secret, and he needed Zelda's life to
drive his fiction. "Fitzgerald wanted to approve all her
ideas," Taylor writes,
and insisted she not write fiction, and if
she wrote a play that it not be on a psychological subject, or
take place on the Riviera or in Switzerland. He claimed their
life as his exclusive literary property and demanded she neither
use the novel form nor write about her mental illness until Tender
Is the Night was completed. Instead, he suggested she go
to art school, study commercial design, become a cartoonist,
or perhaps write "a series of short observations on things
& facts, 'observed things' which she can sell and make money."
But Zelda did not consider these valid options, and when [Dr.
Thomas Alexander Cumming] Rennie asked what so fueled her ambition,
she cited the one crucial issue of her life she had not surmounted.
"It is the great humiliation of my life that I cannot support
myself....I don't want to be dependent just in every way, that
is all. I just don't want to be dependent on him....Here is the
truth of the matter, that I have always felt some necessity for
us to be on a more equal footing than we are now, because I cannot
possibly--I cannot live in a world that is completely dependent
on Scott."
At its most intriguing moments, Taylor's biography
raises a series of profoundly compelling, if troubling, questions:
what form would Fitzgerald's fiction have taken without Zelda
as his model? What might have become of their lives if Fitzgerald
had taken doctors' advice and stopped drinking? What might Zelda
have achieved if Fitzgerald had not so thoroughly blunted her
own struggle for creative expression?
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom is undeniably a fascinating pageturner, even for
readers familiar with the Fitzgeralds' story, and Taylor has
added considerably to our understanding of Zelda's mental health
and the various medical treatments applied to it. It inevitably
has a tragic, painful quality, though, and Taylor manages brilliantly
to win over even the most hard-hearted critic who is prone to
think the Fitzgeralds brought their problems on themselves. Whatever
their lives might have been like had they never met, an element
of fatalism crept into their marriage, given their inability
to move away from their greatest weaknesses. "Life moves
over me in a vast, black shadow," Zelda wrote in a letter
to Fitzgerald, "and I swallow whatever it drops with relish,
having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both
a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds
too fatalistic for even my disordered imagination to people with
meaning."
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