Such a parodox — this kingmaking campaign, all while we are struggling with illegitimacy. All while we are trying to get our little texts published.
I wonder if a reason I feel such a communion with Zelda is because her career mirrors mine as a small-press writer. Save Me the Waltz was printed on cheap paper and bound in green linen with a print run of 3,000 copies, which is still more than the run of most small press books today, which usually print 1,000 copies and sometimes much less. Hers sold 1,392 copies, and she earned $120.73. I too am viewed by the outside world as an amateur not a professional, because I make very little money off of my writing, because my books are not available in the (disappearing) megastores. So many of us small-press writers are viewed as failures, especially by our families.
The girl perhaps is the amateur.
I remember my mother taking me to lunch at Marshall Field’s, when I am out of college and waiting tables, convinced that I was going to be a writer, even though I hadn’t yet written anything. She wanted me to get a real job. I remember her telling me that if I cannot claim it on my taxes writing is a hobby. Yet later on, she was so supportive, so convinced, that I could write, although her idea of writing novels was still connected to the world of Jonathan Franzen and Oprah’s couch, as it is for most: Franzen not Fitzgerald the new model of the successful writer, who can claim being a writer on his tax forms, who pumps out an accessible, bourgeois, recognizable world.
The distinction between amateur and professional, between major and minor, so tied to capitalism, who is published by the big houses. In a way Fitzgerald fucked everything up by connecting wealth to great writing. “I am the highest-paid short story writer in the world,” he bragged. I am often stricken with these feelings of inferiority (Zelda diagnosed with feelings of inferiority towards her husband), the strange alienation and invisibility of a small-press writer, where you are a name in a very small world, yet elsewhere you are absolutely nobody. And there is still this sense in our culture of writing as connected to fame, and that when one does make it big, get the BIG BOOK, the agent, the press, the publicity, blah blah, that it is deserved. That if one is really good enough — one will get discovered. Whatever that means.
But how does all this affect how I view myself as a “writer”—how society views me? We are weighted down in society by the expectation of capital, an advance or salary proves our worth and value. And what effect can that have on one’s own sense of self-esteem — the sense of invisibility coupled with an always desirous need for recognition — which mirrors Zelda’s plight of being labeled an amateur, married not only to an economic success, but also to the Novelist Of His Generation?
I think of the absolute conviction of a writer like Fitzgerald, who felt certain that he was going to belong someday in that tradition, his inflated sense of importance that helped serve him through years of anonymity and rejection when he was still unpublished. Scott papering his wall in his New York apartment with all of his rejections—122 for 19 stories! — they were the fuel that fed him. The drive was always not only fame but immortality. Fitzgerald seemed always aware that his story would be told by biographers. He reacted to rejection with a fuck-you bravado — this is perhaps a masculine impulse, the triumph of the ego. Contrast this with Vivien(ne) who stopped trying to publish entirely when The Dial rejected her story — or Zelda, whose esteem for her writing collapsed after the supposed failure of Save Me the Waltz (a failure read in reviews written by men and by sales figures).
That pivotal scene in The Bell Jar where Esther is riding in the backseat of her mother’s station wagon, defeated and small after her ego-crushing adventures in the gloss and lies of Manhattan, watching the telephone poles of the suburbs drift by which remind her of the dread and monotony of an unfree life, and then her mother drops what she doesn’t realize is a bomb, that Esther did not gain access to the writing seminar at Harvard that she had pinned all her hopes on for escape that summer. What I’ve always found so real and poignant about The Bell Jar is that her breakdown was catalyzed by a crushing creative rejection. That Esther felt she would never write again.
For the most part, I have become inured to rejection. I experience a small prick, a stab, and get over it. Yet certain rejections still hit me hard. I tend to react to these more major rejections passively, my shoulderblades go in, as if I already expected the blow. Sometimes a particularly dismissive rejection of a manuscript or a bad review will make me scratch out a day, where I indulge in feelings of futility. This is the reaction of the depressive — to take it inward, to swallow these great big feelings of shame and failure, these feelings I have carried around with me ever since I started to write and tried to publish. I think of all the strength it takes to be an artist — Mademoiselle Reisz feeling Edna’s shoulderblades to make sure she’s strong enough.
There’s such a masochism to publishing — we are begging to be loved, to be seen, to be recognized, to be heard. Some of us take rejections of our writing as rejections of our selves. And perhaps we are setting ourselves up, we as women are bred to look for self-identification from the outside world. We are supposed to aim for that sticker of approval. Yet now some of us externalize our rejections by blogging about them, about how it makes us feel, the viscera and volitility of our emotions.
I think of the marriage counseling sessions between Zelda and Scott as an involved, bloody, wrestling match between the heavyweight male author and the potential woman writer (viewed as ephemeral, lightweight, minor, as opposed to canonical), the professional and the amateur, as Scott himself put it. Zelda who became entrapped when she dared to write the personal.
The transcript externalizing this great debate about what constitutes literature, and who is allowed to write it. In the battle of words and wills between them, absolutely everything is brought to the surface, all the stuff unsaid in the cultural unconscious. The elaborate campaign to undermine her authority and confidence. His methods of shame and manipulation. Scott confirms what she dreaded/suspected: she is not her own author. She is a character. The alchemy of art, that mysterious voodoo, is too much for her. He condescendingly explains to Zelda in a letter: “What one experiences in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown — you came to the threshold of that discovery + then decided in the face of all logic you would crash the gate.”
He wired Scribner’s that the novel would “seriously compromise what literary future she may have and cause inconceivable harm in its present form…” What was the real danger here? I think she disturbed what was considered the privilege of the (male) creator — to draw vampirically from another’s life and pretend that it’s pure fiction. She disturbs this notion of fiction as sacred alchemy, which is in itself largely a fiction. For Scott drew from real life as well — his elaborate chart he entitles “Classification of the Material on Sickness” where he charts Nicole’s versus Zelda’s case histories for Tender Is the Night.
But if Zelda wrote about the same period, if she circled around the French Riv, around the Swiss asylum, and provided her own version, this makes Fitzgerald less of the genius author. Somehow to say This Happened — some sort of crime. One must hide, shade, fictionalize.
Why is this role-playing seen as essential to Great Literature? What is the purpose of literature? (To reveal the human condition, to explore, to agitate, to experience recognition, to escape, to cause intense pleasure or feeling, to make you reconsider your existence, or reconsider language. There are many potential purposes, none of them specific to the experience or the pretense of being entirely manufactured.)