Perhaps SHE is not read as a Hemingway (or a Fitzgerald), these so-called Great Male American Novelists, because she took her life as her own subject. Inherent in any dismissal of women writers who draw from memoir is a bias against autobiography that comes out of modernism. The self-portrait, as written by a woman, is read as somehow dangerous and indulgent. Some sort of gag order from modernism that even Second-Wave feminist critics, reading Jean Rhys, reading Zelda, reading Anaïs Nin, have internalized — this idea of being self-indulgent, in indulging in the self as contrary to art. Toril Moi writing dismissively in her chapter on women’s writing in Sexual/Textual Politics, “This kind of narcissistic delving into one’s own self,” reflecting the dominant idea that it is dangerous for women to write too much in a mirror, to be too full of herself.
I think of this dismissal as girl-on-girl crime, an internalized bias against women being full of self, of writing their true experiences. SHE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES.
The charge against women writers so often is narcissism. This unconscious bias against women who are full of themselves bleeds into reactions against their literature. That it’s somehow cheating to draw from one’s OWN life, even if it’s with startling insight into the human condition, or more forbidden still, the complex and ambivalent feminine condition. This charge is almost never leveled at male writers.
Their mirrors taken away in the asylum. Their pens taken away. PHOTOGRAPHY, Pound the patriarch scrawled across the lines of marital trauma in “The Waste Land.” A prohibition against writing the self. The hysteric can be photographed, she is not supposed to take her own portrait. Ezra with his pen slicing away Tom’s hysteria from the poem, making it transcendent, epic, taking away anything that could be searched out, verified. Much the same way Tom would later edit Djuna Barnes’s Night-wood, taking out all the girl-on-girl. Bad to write the naked, to write the true.
Memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent. The threat perhaps is a woman writing her own narrative, being her own author. We are told continually in the criticism that comes out of modernism that a work of literature must transcend “self-expression.” Woolf writes to this in A Room of One’s Own, writing of Mary Carmichael, her future, fictionalized woman of genius: “The impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.”
Zelda’s alleged crime in writing Waltz is in being too autobiographical, taking her own self as her material. Scott glad Zelda revised “a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work.” (Honest, then, if she fictionalizes, but not honest, if she draws too nakedly from her own narrative.) Zelda’s first biographer, Nancy Milford, also plays into these prejudices. Of Waltz, she writes, “Her novel was intensely, even naively autobiographical, and as she drew on her own life, so she drew on her life with Scott, for it was her material as well as his.”
Why is this “autobiographical impulse” so taboo, seen as anathema to capital-L Literature? Milford goes on to write, “Perhaps that is the larger problem presented by this novel — that because it is so deeply autobiographical, the transmutation of reality into art is incomplete.” The audacity of this idea — that somehow Zelda’s breakdown, her own material, cannot be drawn from in her own novel.
Why is self-expression, the relentless self-portrait, not a potentially legitimate form of art? Why do we have this notion that to write the autobiographical (especially if you are a woman), even in the context of a novel, is to not write literature? This comes out of Eliot’s notion of New Criticism, or Flaubert’s earlier theories, that a novel must transcend the self. Yet of course HE can write the autobiographical, but his work is read as aspiring to something greater. The ruins of his self are the ruins of post-war society. SHE is read as simply writing herself, her toxic, messy self, and her self is not seen as legitimate as literature according to the theories their husbands espoused.
Don’t let them find the bodies. Take out anything that can be verified or named.
During our Asheville trip we took a trip to the Grove Park Inn, the massive stone mountain resort where Scott convalesced, his version of Eliot’s sanitorium, and then brought his wife from the expensive clinic in Baltimore, to seek “treatment” at the less costly Highland Hospital. Scott was perennially wasted while staying there, a total train wreck. To those acquainted with the Fitzgerald myth this is known as his “Crack-Up” period, named for the series of articles he wrote for Esquire magazine, drunk and deteriorating, living in a series of local hotels. As legend tells it, he fired off a gun in a failed suicide attempt and after that the hotel insisted he have a full-time nurse with him if he wanted to stay again the next summer. Now of course he has made the hotel a landmark — they book out his two connecting suites to Fitzgerald fanatics. There is a condo development next door called “The Fitzgerald.”
We go stand out on the terrace, along with one other girl-boy couple with a camera swung about his neck. I wonder whose idea this excursion was, perhaps when they met she carried with her a copy of The Beautiful and Damned, or maybe he always identified with Amory Blaine.
Yet I wonder if other girls also feel such profound ambivalence towards the author. I wonder if they have read his wife. I wonder if they know her story. I wonder if I know her story, her true story, and whether that is impossible, now, to ever really grasp, because of the way she was edited and censored. I wonder if they perhaps read Jean Rhys or Jane Bowles.
(I go to the Great Men to get at the wives and mistresses. They are the ghosts in the corner of these memorials, dismissed in a knowing parenthetical.)
Standing out at the terrace, the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the interior all wooden, country club. I can almost picture Scott stumbling by, bloated, a mess. “Do you think he drank out of guilt?” John asks. Guilty because he had his wife locked away, the Erinyes following him like the tortured husband in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, convinced he shoved his wife overboard. I don’t think so, I say. I do think he suffered — acutely. I know he suffered — poetically. “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” he wrote in his 1936 “Crack-Up” essay. Yes they both suffered. They both suffered so tremendously, I realize. He was just allowed to write his.
At the time Fitzgerald published these essays his fellow male genius contemporaries — Hemingway and Dos Passos and the rest — were like, what the fuck are you doing, Scott? This sort of ripped-from-the-heart memoir wasn’t considered real writing, the sense that to write of one’s feelings, so first person, so direct, wasn’t manly. Wasn’t manly? Wasn’t LITERARY. See also Sartre’s discomfort with the “fleshly promiscuity” of Breton’s essay “exhibitionism” or with Bataille’s emotionalism. Ezra Pound writing PHOTOGRAPHY on Eliot’s poem, making him cut away most of the personal parts. A fear of the feminine in writing Eliot himself internalized, distanced himself against, despite “The Waste Land” still being totally amazingly hysterical and emo.
Of course, like Eliot or Robert Lowell’s poetry, Fitzgerald’s essays are now seen as exemplars of the form.