He who drew upon his wife Zelda as his “collaborating muse”—to borrow a phrase from Robert Lowell’s “The Dolphin,” using many of her spoken utterances and diary entries for the voices of the flapper characters in his novels, all except The Last Tycoon (which he wrote in Hollywood, having a new mistress as muse, Zelda was by then out of the picture, no longer his actress). She played the parts so he could immortalize her.
He draws almost verbatim from her diaries and letters — turning down an offer to publish her journals. They were his material, he insisted. She was all raw and intense emotion. “I am not going to write you anymore. I am too unstable.”
In a mock-serious review of The Beautiful and the Damned, Zelda writes:
It 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.
Yet of course the flapper or Surrealist femme-enfant is not a writer. She might write love letters or keep a journal (whatever happened to Zelda’s teen-dream diary?) but she is not a serious writer or taken seriously, even when she eventually longs for this. Even if she could write her own life better than he could.
The Fitzgerald flapper is tale-teller, not author. Like a medieval mystic needing a male confessor (his Princeton hero Amory reading St. Teresa of Avila in This Side of Paradise). The masculine modernist process of creation (author/muse), mirrors not only the mystic-confessor relationship but also the doctor-patient relationship in the Freudian talking cure (in all three binaries, she is the raw material, who needs to be shaped and coaxed into a narrative, she spurts forth, she needs to be contained).
A haunting refrain: Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.
To be so compelled to save a heroine in a book that it makes you want to throw a book across the room. I feel this for: Breton’s Nadja, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.
The modernist work where the model of the case study is most apparent is Tender is the Night, which can be read on one level as a rewriting of Zelda Fitzgerald’s experiences in a Swiss sanitorium (the “raw material”—and Zelda wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz, of her experiences, albeit a censored one). But beyond this idea of Fitzgerald using Zelda’s text as raw material, like Freud did with Schreber’s autobiography, the novel itself takes on the model of the case study: the main character is a Freudian-styled analyst, Dick Diver, who has married his patient-wife, Nicole. (Hard to ignore the phallic imagery in the name Fitzgerald chooses for his hero: Dick is pen/penis, he is author, authority, dictator. “Diver” suggests a desired trip to the female unconscious, calling to mind Carl Jung’s statement about his analysand Lucia Joyce and her father: “They were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”)
In Tender Fitzgerald gives the reader only rare entrances into Nicole Diver’s interiority — her letters, or snatches of her dialogue, or the glorious monologue running for several pages in Book Two:
… Tommy says I am silent. Since I was well the first time I talked a lot to Dick late at night, both of us sitting up in bed and lighting cigarettes, then diving down afterward out of the blue dawn and into the pillows to keep the light from our eyes…Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick.
When he writes (or rewrites) a fragmented feminine voice it is most like the writing that Zelda performs herself in Save Me the Waltz: A case of possession, or perhaps, as is the case of Zelda’s mysteriously missing journals, a form of vampirism, of theft. Perhaps this is another meaning for Cixous’ La Genet, named after the thief — texts that are outlaw, criminal, stolen.
Nicole’s occasional speech in Tender is the Night has a convulsive beauty to it, an absurd cocktail banter:
“Naturally I wanted to see what was inside a waiter. Wouldn’t you like to know what was inside a waiter?”
“Old menus,” suggested Nicole with a short laugh. “Pieces of broken china and tips and pencil stubs.”
A throwaway, a toss-off, reminiscent of one of Zelda’s letters to Scott. (“Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?”)
Yet in Fitzgerald’s novel, as in real-life cases of these modern wives and mistresses, the woman’s “disordered language” is also used to convict her, to diagnose and name her—“Diagnostic: Schizophrenie.” The “case” is not an author, and so the letters, inspired by Zelda’s letters, are viewed not only as diagnostic examples but also the raw material for the book about the patient-wife that Dick is trying to write (the case study of a psychoanalyst, standing in for a novelist, although still with the resulting writer’s block which mirrors the one in real life, Fitzgerald taking nine years to finish Tender while Zelda wrote her version of their marriage and their life on the French Rivera in months, it unfurling from her).
In Tender Dick dissects his wife with his gleaming surgical language, committing them to the Realm of the Emotional and Irrational. When Nicole approaches him about a letter she received describing a seduction of a(nother) patient, he uses her diagnosis as a madwoman to dismiss her (even though we learn in the same paragraph that a kiss had taken place). She confronts him with the evidence (the written language) which he uses as proof to convict her.
“This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.”
“I was a mental patient.”
He stood up and spoke more authoritatively. “Suppose we don’t have any more nonsense, Nicole. Go and round up the children and we’ll start.”
At first Nicole throws one of her “scenes,” but then a power shift happens and she refuses to speak, couching herself in silence (she is the rebellious Dora, fighting with mute body).
This afternoon he would have been glad had she rattled on in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts. The situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself and closed the doors behind her.
This passage seems to suggest that perhaps it is the silence of the femme fatale that is most deadly. These mad women, these abstracted women are dangerous when they don’t speak, and their tales must be pulled from them, colonized, repeated and rewritten.
In This Sex which is Not One Luce Irigaray asks: “Does Woman have an unconscious or is she the unconscious?”
She who represents a primitive myth, something of the unre-pressed past. Blank, you can project anything onto her.
The threat of the femme fatale lingering through modernist texts. All the dark ladies of “The Waste Land,” wounding the impotent Fisher King. She is an excessive, castrating presence, threatening to sweep the subject up into sudden hysteria. Fitzgerald’s baby vamps and society vampires, the fast girl who kisses (the real danger is her mouth, Zelda’s mouth was selected in her high school composite of prettiest girl). Mythologizing the lives (wives) that catalyzed them. A DeKooning horror: FEMME. He who immortalized her in leatherbound.
In her journals, Anaïs Nin portrays June Miller, Henry’s wife and their shared muse, as a destructive, unearthly figure who possesses both of them. They were so enthralled with Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Bertrand Russell thought Vivien(ne) had a “Dostoevsky-like cruelty.”