At times in the essay, Hardwick seems to sympathize with Zelda, especially her desire for sovereignty, and is certainly sympathetic to the manipulation and policing of Zelda by Scott and the doctors once she began to attempt a novel about her own experiences. However, she ultimately sides with the male genius, who has already proven his worth, as opposed to the less talented — in this case less experienced — writer. For what is genius but experience? Shakespeare’s Sister not given the time or luxury or permission to become Shakespeare. Scott writing to his daughter, Scottie, that maybe Zelda would have been a genius if they had never met. What does that mean? Perhaps that she would have been allowed to have become a genius, if she wasn’t swallowed whole by the great white whale of his literature. If she wasn’t suppressed by the husband-patriarch.
Critics often grant that This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned are flawed, juvenile work with promises of brilliance, all while the very same critics are likely to dismiss Zelda’s novel and the stories as a sign that she does not equal the later refinement and maturity of her husband’s apparent masterpieces. Why was Zelda not allowed to have a first, flawed yet brilliant novel?
In a way Hardwick’s essay reads as an elaborate defense of the supreme rights of the (male) artist. That, yes, perhaps Zelda is the victim, but also the necessary sacrifice. There can be, she writes, only one, overwhelming personality, only one, overwhelming genius, in a literary marriage. The brilliant works to her are Scott’s novels and stories — this to her is the textual phoenix, miraculous amidst such mutual debilitation (what constitutes WORKS for Hardwick, not letters or journals: anything that cannot be stolen or appropriated. This is all caught up in what Foucault calls the “author-function,” when one is considered an author, everything is the work, when one is not, it lacks legitimacy).
I wonder, did Hardwick feel this was the case in her own marriage? That Robert Lowell was the genius, and she was the quick-witted, talented, handmaiden, the necessarily sacrificial wife, who must not attempt to write literature during the marriage? If so, she was wrong. Jean Stafford thankfully knew that was not the case — she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of stories, AC of course. Or perhaps Hardwick was just being a pragmatist, a realist, as with her and Mary McCarthy’s stance on feminism — there is always a power differential in marriage, someone always wins (but does the Other need to be extinguished?).
Much like the transcript between the feuding Fitzgeralds, however, the denouement of Hardwick’s essay on Zelda is an infuriating take on what really constitutes an author in society as opposed to an “amateur” (Fitzgerald’s term, which Hardwick borrows). At the end, Hardwick doesn’t read Zelda’s narrative in the context of her own self creation, but in terms of her husband’s, in her culminating thesis on the artistic couple. She writes, “Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society.” Zelda, Hardwick writes in this disappointingly psychoanalytic reading, is the “half of himself ” now thankfully “subdued” in his last, unfinished but still feted work, The Last Tycoon. He has now been freed from his excessive self-indulgent side, which she characterizes as the Zelda side.
Ultimately, she writes, for the genius to realize himself, the “amputation” of this appendage is crucial and necessary. A sort of marital Oedipal, he needs to free himself from this twinning by a symbolic murder, or perhaps by making sure she’s locked away somewhere, depressingly the movement of much of modernism and beyond, the woman must be sacrificed for the art, the idea of the necessary sacrifice of Wife #1, the Lilith figure. William Burroughs, who killed his wife Joan in a game of William Tell (the apple, Eve, Edenic), said and acknowledged this most plainly when he gave advice to an aspiring novelist: SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK.
In the artist and sacrifice, who (or what) is sacrificed? She is asked to destroy herself, to sacrifice herself, for his art, an Iphigenia. And yet, when she attempts to progress as an artist, she is accused of being self-destructive, of self-immolating, of throwing herself headfirst into the fire.
The Oedipal-edible: she must devour herself. A war where one needs to be murdered. Besides the obvious discipline and punishment of Zelda, using all of the official channels of patriarchy, her spiritual struggle to overthrow the great author, her husband, also blocked her from creating herself as an author. Zelda and Viv in the shadow of their husbands’ genius in their early writings, which composed the majority if not the entirety of their visible efforts. Viv mimicking a Prufrockian malaise, even being able to channel her husband’s voice to write a (deleted) passage of “The Waste Land.” When Zelda began writing her stories she read one of her husband’s stories every night while he was away in Hollywood writing a screenplay, and even wrote him at first regarding her progress with Waltz: “It is distinctly L’École Fitzgerald, yet more ecstatic than yours — perhaps too much so.” The blockage that occurred, when she attempted to move initially beyond letter and diary writing to a more traditional narrative as a young girclass="underline"
Yesterday I almost wrote a book or a story, I hadn’t decided which, but after two pages of my heroine I discovered that I hadn’t even started her, and since I couldn’t just write forever about a charmingly impossible creature, I began to despair.
She was always measured and read within L’École Fitzgerald, the only school she tutored in. In the collection The Crack-Up that Edmund Wilson edited after Fitzgerald’s death, a couple of Zelda’s pieces are included with his and without her byline. If the work is very good, it is assumed he wrote it. If it’s not the height of brilliance, then he at least had a hand in the good parts. That’s how it goes with the Fitzgerald mythology. Foucault’s author-function, the tyranny and branding of the great author.
What spiritual effect must that have had, to have been a ghost-writer in the Fitzgerald factory?
Jane too felt overshadowed by her significant other’s status. Once Paul became an author, writing the novel of their marriage (Sheltering Sky as the companion to Jane’s Two Serious Ladies), and a bestselling author at that, Jane stops writing. “We can’t have two writers in the family,” she said to him. So much of writing is about declaring that as your identity. Although unlike Scott, Paul acted as the midwife to Jane’s work, typing it, editing it. Yet her block lasted decades, and never really ended.
These wives’ novels fetal or aborted, Sylvia’s revenge fantasy, Jane Bowles’ fragments trapped in a series of notebooks begging to be freed. Later after the stroke a mind trapped inside itself. Or delivered too young like Zelda’s, published by Scribner’s riddled with errors, not to be taken seriously. She is raw material, she is a messy, disordered girl, the worst sort of revenge on Scott’s part, as if his prose was delivered immaculately upon the heavens and read with reverence.
And yet once it’s out there in the world he must take ownership of it, as if he had produced it and signed it, approved it, through the Fitzgerald factory. He gives an interview to The Baltimore Sun. Headline: “He Tells of her Novel.” Subtitle: “Work sent to Publisher is Autobiographical at Suggestion of Husband.”
Zelda and Jane also blocked by the violence of being made a madwoman, a spiritual murder. Zelda insisted upon being institutionalized again after reading Tender in serial, Jane blocked after reading The Sheltering Sky. In Paul Bowles’s novel the husband Port, drawn to the infinite, the sovereign, who wants his wife Kit to be an adventurer like him — he prowls nights, streets alone, gets lost, experiments with prostitutes. She is a Madame Bovary hysterical and superstitious, who completely loses her mind at the end, after the death of her husband and after being subject to rapes and beatings. Although in the preface to The Sheltering Sky, Paul writes of Kit as his “invented wife,” his psychological voodoo must have felt surgical — the character portrait so close to the knife.