I often feel so torn about Scott Fitzgerald, because he was able to channel the emotional, the destructed, while also playing patriarch in his life. He wrote his mad letters but Zelda was never allowed to — she was forbidden from writing a novel about psychiatry or madness. She was prohibited from writing her own breakdown: None of this was her material. Viv’s illness and madness stories self-censored. Often I think not of the works that have been written, but those that never were.
On that recent ridiculous list of the 75 “Greatest Books Ever Written” that Esquire put together (featuring one woman, Flannery O’Connor), Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up made the list. The reason given? “Because Fitzgerald knew Lindsay, Britney and the Olsens better than we do.” I get the quippiness of it, but Fitzgerald was not actually writing in his essay about the girl’s unraveling. This is crucial.
Despite his essays being really kind of femme, full of so much excess and emotions, Fitzgerald manages within his essays to place himself firmly within the tradition of a Hamlet, as opposed to an Ophelia (and to explain, justify, legitimize his objective correlative). He imagines in the essays his breakdown as one of disillusionment, of “all values.” He is only speaking of all the sad young and old men in his essays, even though his wife is institutionalized and experiencing great suffering at the time he is writing this, there is no mention of her. “Now a man can crack in many ways…” The man is in the universal category — she is erased. He alludes in the essay however to a friend (most likely John Bishop) being in an asylum, “unable to endure any contact with his fellow man.”
Zelda is not mentioned because Fitzgerald envisions his breakdown like Eliot’s in “The Waste Land”—impersonal, universal, philosophical. (“These fragments I have shorn against my ruins.”) His collapse is noble, religious, historical, and above all masculine: “It was very distinctly not modern — yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war.” Her crisis by contrast is not seen by him as spiritual, as she is not a great man or one with potential, her crisis is personal, petty.
The writers of Esquire are dead-wrong. Fitzgerald is not writing for the Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohans or their anonymous counterparts.
The girl is written, she is kept from writing.
She is interrupted.
Virginia Woolf once wrote in a letter to a friend that she wrote Room because she “wanted to encourage the young women — they seem to get fearfully depressed.” Yet how would an essay collection spiriting on the future women of potential literary genius serve as a balm, or a bandage, or a mirror, for the young women of Woolf ’s time? How does their depression connect to the lack of a literary tradition, the lack of being able to imagine themselves as authors?
The girl in my creative nonfiction workshop in Cleveland. A stress cadet. One of those students who take up a lot of energy during class, who are always ardently holding up a hand. But she also obviously had the gift of lyricism, and had the desire, the burn. However, in her autobiographical pieces she presented to workshop, I felt that she was holding something back, not releasing the real thing underneath. One time I spoke sternly to her during workshop, about a piece of writing she was supposed to really work on but didn’t, and she broke down into tears and ran out of the classroom. I came after her, admittedly rolling my eyes a little, having no patience at that moment for all the bubbling-over girl-drama. With my hands on her shoulders in the hallway, I spoke to her, very firmly, trying to be teacherly. And she told me that, at the age of 20, she didn’t feel she had the experience needed to write anything. The essay that she had submitted, twice, circled briefly around an obliterating love affair. This was the good stuff, the stuff I wanted more about. She also went on to tell me that she was on medication for an anxiety disorder, and that she had been institutionalized once, temporarily, following a breakdown. And that she had a grandmother, she had never met, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She wanted to write about this stuff she said, but she didn’t know if she could. Or should.
Shaking her just a little — she didn’t really want to look in my eyes — I said to her, firmly, to write, for fuck’s sake, to write, to fuck up and write about it and learn from it and never ever believe the bullshit that what she has experienced is not potentially all the valid stuff of literature. I don’t know if I got through to her. I wonder what would have happened if I had had those hands on my shoulder, shaking me the fuck up, at her age.
I realize, as I’m writing this, that the young woman is still so fearfully depressed. It just has a new name. She is given new medication, and sent on her way. But why is she still so stopped?
Perhaps she is struck by the sense that the only world she knows is not deemed as rich enough as her own, her first person not complex or fictionalized or universal enough, for literature. She is prohibited from writing her messy, emotional self. What about the literary canons shoved down the throats of students made this student of mine who had had breakdowns and her heart broken feel she didn’t have the experience to write? A fear and lack of egotism F. Scott Fitzgerald certainly never had.
Fitzgerald writing dismissively and furiously of his wife’s literary efforts to her doctors: “It is still the idea of an Iowa high-school girl who would like to be an author with an author’s beautiful carefree life.” A-ha. The high school girl shouldn’t write. Should be kept from writing. Also, the notion that girls don’t burn and suffer and twist themselves inside out with the desire to write.
(Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.)
The absolute sneer in which Fitzgerald dismissed Zelda’s novel as “automatic writing”—this is not purely a bias against Surrealism, like Truman Capote dismissing the Beats as not writing but typing, but the belief that her writing, her process, didn’t undergo the necessary fictionalizing alchemy. It is loud and clear in the Fitzgerald transcripts that Fitzgerald believes the entire world of the novelist is closed to Zelda.
He dismisses her writing as “sketches” (the term with which Viv’s stories are often dismissed). The “sketch” is immediate, automatic, autobiographical, diaristic. The quick conversion from feelings and memories into words. Fitzgerald playing Professor X espouses the idea that Zelda couldn’t handle the craft of fiction — he reads her as uncultivated. To him she is somehow untutored in the craft of fiction. She is naïve, illegitimate, intuitive (i.e. a girl). Save Me the Waltz is associative, emotional, messy, girly.
Zelda wrote Waltz in three months while Scott is stalling on Tender, it pours out of her, maybe because it’s her story that she needs to unfurl from within her, this is her Scroll like Kerouac’s tap-tapping away at his typewriter. Think of a young Jean Rhys, after her sugardaddy Lancelot Smith dumps her so ignomiously, her paralyzing post-break-up depression. Finally she peels herself out of bed and on a walk buys a set of exercise books at the stationary shop on a whim, and stays up at night filling them all up with the story of her life — the landlady said the neighbor below complained about sounds of laughter and tears through the night.
Jean Rhys pacing the floors, overcome with this freedom of writing, of telling her story, as opposed to having it told for her.
Jean Rhys who became an author out of heartbreak and intense emotion, like girls on their LiveJournals or Tumblrs.
Perhaps the young girl is still stricken with Gilbert and Gubar’s “anxiety of authorship”—the ghosts of modernism haunt our present-day through the books shoved down our throats, through the narratives we have been told, and we’ve still internalized these poisonous prejudices, of what and how we should write, should present ourselves.