Elizabeth Hardwick once spoke of the twin impulses to write — desperation or revenge. Zelda started to write stories once she saw her husband use her letters and journals in his own novels. Also for the desire to have her own identity outside of her marriage, outside of her husband’s fictions. Fitzgerald who once said, presciently—“Sometimes I don’t know if Zelda and I are real or whether we’re characters in one of my novels.” One of his novels — not hers.
When she was a young girl it was okay to live as opposed to write — to allow others to take her as their muse.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. She is no one without him. She is subsumed under his name. He is the author, she a collaborating muse, a “complementary intelligence.” This was all fine until she wanted to be her own author.
When she was institutionalized at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, Save Me the Waltz comes out of her in six weeks — about the dancing, about the breakdown — the earlier institutions didn’t want Zelda to write or dance or paint, thinking it would be too much of a strain, but the Baltimore clinic allowed her a few hours every day, and she made the most of that time. She sends the manuscript to Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s without showing Scott first. And Scott goes absolutely bananas, launching in earnest an accelerating campaign to silence Zelda and block her literary efforts, a campaign in which Scott enlisted her doctors and his editor and all of his heft as a literary heavyweight to disenfranchise her nascent career as a writer. He insisted on, and got huge cuts from the manuscript, including all material dealing with psychiatry. (All of these letters demanding cuts, as well as the original manuscript and Zelda’s draft revisions have been “mislaid.”) Zelda fought against this, fought against him, but she was totally overpowered. From a letter she sent from the Baltimore clinic:
However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write.
Yes, it was legitimate, but she was illegitimate. Her husband was considered the real writer, and he won. After she is released from the clinic and back at the house in Delaware, she continues to write. They quarrel constantly over her refusal to show him what she’s working on. His main fear is that she would write about psychiatry before Tender came out. She had begun a new novel, also about her asylum experiences, albeit fictionalized, a work that morphed into being about the dancer Nijinsky’s madness. She locked herself in her room to work on her asylum novel, and locked up her manuscript after each day’s work. All along Scott is in his smoke-filled study and old robe, clutching his gin bottles, them screaming at each other, making up, screaming.
Then the final confrontation that effectually aborted Zelda’s career as a writer, before it ever began. A stenographer and doctor needed to be present, a 114 page transcript of this conversation which reads like some A&E reality show. It is brutal to read, the complete demolishing of a woman writer, bringing in both medical and literary authorities. Throughout Zelda is completely sane, logical, Scott is ranting, totally mad, paranoid, obliterating. Yet insisting that it is he who is being destroyed.
Scott: “Her theory is that anything is possible, and that a girl has just got to get along, and so she has the right, therefore to destroy me completely in order to satisfy herself.”
Zelda: “Dr. Rennie, that is completely unfair and it is not my theory. And I have never done anything against you, I have absolutely nothing to reproach myself with. And as far as destroying you is concerned I have considered you first in everything I tried to do in my life.”
The doctor as go-between tells Zelda that if she could not write “masterpieces,” like her husband, then her “ambitions” to write would only further “depress” her. “I will always be unhappy then,” she said. “I was a good deal more unhappy when I did not want to write.” She finally agrees to what the doctor prescribes in his own words as “a complete abnegation of yourself” (an obliterature). She is forbidden from writing fiction that draws on a shared biography (in other words, her own life):
“I want you to stop writing fiction…Whether you write or not does not seem to be of any great importance.”
“I know, nothing I do seems to be of any great importance.”
“Why don’t you drop it then?”
“Because I don’t want to live with you. Because I want to live some place that I can be my own self.”
Zelda begs to be put away again. Scott tells her that that can’t happen, as he doesn’t believe she’s actually “insane.” It is ultimately decided that until he is done with Tender she cannot write any more about psychiatry. Scott tells Zelda—“If you write a play, it cannot be a play about psychiatry, and it cannot be a play laid on the Riviera, and it cannot be a play laid in Switzerland; and whatever the idea is, it will have to be submitted to me.” He ends with: “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.”
Their marriage, his material, a communal banquet only he can draw from. She cannot say: I have begun writing seriously. He wanted her to exist in this way, as a “complementary intelligence,” he says. Her role is to be the Athena-muse who comes out of his head as if he has invented her. That was her role, a role she transgressed when she began to draw upon their common stock of material — not only the letters and diaries, but the raw material, her life.
The suppression of one’s first person in a literary marriage. Zelda’s use of the first person to state her case that she should be allowed to write of her own experience was a major point of contention during the Fitzgeralds’s numerous and escalating fights. He would yell at her — Who is this “I”? Scott also scratched out the first person in her articles. We know that she almost never got her own byline, and the ideology behind that, of course, was that she was never her own author.
SUPPRESS EVERYTHING SUPPRESSIBLE
In her essay on Zelda, Elizabeth Hardwick doesn’t find it particularly troubling that her letters and diaries are plagiarized, that the articles and stories are wrongly attributed. (But Zelda did, she who scrawled out Scott’s name on a story’s byline and wrote “No” and “Me.”)
This is astonishing to me, considering Hardwick’s words vampirized by her ex-husband in The Dolphin, and her essays in the same collection that are in a way a tacit act of revenge. Also considering that Hardwick never wrote first person during her entire marriage to Robert Lowell — her only first-person books, the novels, were written before and after his death.
Yet to Hardwick, the literary wife exists in collaboration, albeit an invisible one. Louise Colet, Vivien(ne) Eliot, and Zelda operating as midwives for these great texts — Zelda who drew the face of Gatsby over and over until Scott could see it, who copy-edited his work for him, who helped jog his memory over events and characters. She listened to his drafts at any hour of the evening. Henry Miller wanted Anaïs to be like Frieda Lawrence, first reader and helpmate. Hardwick writes:
Many writers seem to long for these trembling, gifted, outstanding hand-maidens, for they are aware that the prosaic, the withdrawn, the demanding, are terrible daily deterrents to art and that the presence of an intelligent, sympathetic, clever sensibility, always at hand, always bright and somehow creative is a source, even a source of material.