An American Dream
Zelda. A Biography.
by Nancy Milford.
Harper & Row. 424 pp. $10.00.
Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald brings us into an awareness of its subject so intense it seems unmediated by the personality of a biographer. The book’s spellbinding power results from the way it makes the working out of Zelda’s tortured, enigmatic life a task which we ourselves must attempt to perform as well as a process which we helplessly witness. For even though the progressive revelation seems to be the work of fate, we are somehow convinced that it is also undeniably a product of our own efforts at comprehension: consequently, the act of finding meaning in Zelda’s experience serves to make that experience seem part of our own.
But that is not to say that Mrs. Milford has written a book about the Fitzgeralds that allows us to confuse ourselves with them. Nor is it to suggest that she has assembled one of those infinitely tedious and unwieldy compendiums (largely unreadable despite reliable testimony to their status as “definitive”) which we have come to accept in lieu of biographies in recent years. Mrs. Milford’s book is not exhaustive in that sense. Although the text incorporates a great deal of material (much of it never available before), one never has the sense that that material has simply been collected and exhibited. The pieces fit together, modifying one another, chiefly because the author remains alert and actively engaged in weighing contradictory evidence. She takes nothing for granted. By turns she agrees or disagrees with the sources she is citing; she is skeptical, perplexed, amused, enraged—but the drama of her own responses (which is certainly an important element in the experience of reading this book) goes on, for the most part, underground. Not that it is deliberately concealed: it is simply never meant to occupy the center of the reader’s consciousness. But anyone interested in that other story will find it, if he looks, running in phase with the main narrative and surfacing every now and then in arresting juxtapositions, traces of irony (“Hemingway answered Scott’s letter by reassuring him that the summer was a disheartening time of year to work. Death, he said, was not in the air as it was in autumn”), occasional repetitions of detail (whether intentional or not, since in either case it is clear that those details in particular have captured the author’s imagination), and in the footnotes at the back of the book, which serve to chronicle the process of composition in more than one way.
Mrs. Milford’s decision to keep her authorial intrusions to a minimum signals her clear refusal to yield to the temptation of self-aggrandizement through omniscience or association which must suggest itself to every biographer. But there are other reasons for her obvious restraint, which takes a variety of forms: for example, the form of her watchful prose, which has the effect of keeping order without seeming to impose it. Clear-sighted and tactful, her COMMENTARY slips in and out of the confused, excessive, sometimes bizarre outbursts and exchanges between the Fitzgeralds, providing perspective but not choking off the reader’s own response by giving him immediate cues as to what he should think and feel.
_____________
Like a fine instrument, Mrs. Milford’s text registers everything it is meant to, but the reader is usually left to read the gauges for himself. Whether she is recording the fact that Zelda’s mother nursed her until the child (the youngest in the family) was four years old, or quoting telegrams sent by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda during their courtship (“THE SATURDAY EVENING POST HAS JUST TAKEN TWO MORE STORIES PERIOD ALL MY LOVE.” “I HAVE SOLD THE MOVIE RIGHTS OF HEAD AND SHOULDERS TO THE METRO COMPANY FOR TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS I LOVE YOU DEAREST GIRL”), the author does not draw conclusions for the reader which he is capable of drawing for himself. The effect of compression thus achieved helps to explain the feeling of density and weight conveyed by the prose. A further reason for the economy is indicated by a sentence from the last page of the book; recounting Zelda’s death (in an accidental fire), Mrs. Milford writes: “Her body was identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it.” The essential power of that sentence lies in all that it does not state explicitly and consequently obliges the reader to imagine. But the technique here reflects more than the author’s insistence that the reader experience the raw materials of Zelda’s life for himself; it suggests that the author, as biographer, by transferring the exercise of imagination to the reader, is deliberately eschewing a traditional prerogative of the fabulist, the writer of fiction.
The significance of this refusal will be seen presently (it is also manifested in the author’s determination not to correct misspellings, grammatical errors, etc., in the letters she quotes, since in her view to make such emendations would be to transform the documents substantially). For the moment, one has only to recall Fitzgerald’s remark that at times he didn’t know whether he was real or a character in one of his own novels to get some idea of how essential Mrs. Milford’s tough-minded resistance to the fabulistic impulse might be to the telling of this story. Of course the tendency has always been to regard the Fitzgeralds more or less as if they were movie stars—no doubt because there was a time when they regarded themselves that way—as if they were Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, or William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. Mrs. Milford has had to overcome that tendency (which often takes subtler forms in highbrow circles: for example, the widespread habit of regarding the Fitzgeralds as no more or less than innocent victims of the American Dream of wealth, power, and success—a dream which is predictably seen as responsible for turning lesser beings into swine). One of her major tasks has therefore been to show precisely where in the Fitzgeralds’ lives reality and illusion fused, and where they came apart.
In doing so, she has chosen to focus her attention on the extraordinarily close relationship between the Fitzgeralds, man and wife. For although this book traces the life of Zelda Sayre from birth through childhood, marriage, psychosis, and death, it remains essentially a record of the metamorphoses of the relationship between Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, a meditation on what the author calls “that complex tangle of selves within wedlock.” By allowing that evolving relationship to serve as the book’s dynamic center, Mrs. Milford is able to add nuance and dimension to our understanding of a story which might otherwise divide too simply between light and darkness. When Fitzgerald made his famous remark that American lives have no second act, he must surely have been thinking about Zelda—and about his own life with her. Hence, it is not surprising that this biography’s four sections (“Southern Girl,” “The Twenties,” “Breaking Down,” “Going Home”), sections which correspond to distinct phases of Zelda’s life, also fall naturally into two groups of two: beginning and end. But Mrs. Milford’s narrative works against such a rigorous and ultimately misleading division by adjusting to the changing moods of the Fitzgeralds’ relationship, and the modulations of her prose also succeed in capturing Zelda’s alternations (she was at one time diagnosed as schizophrenic, a diagnosis recently altered by the physician who originally made it to a more noncommittal “schizoid”) between hallucination and lucidity.
By maintaining a tension between unrelenting chronological development and the uneven development of states of mind (a tension which reminds us that while times continue to change we are never completely done with the past), the book makes it possible for us to follow the tragic course of Zelda’s life without becoming lost, even though in retrospect there is no single incident that we can point to with assurance as the decisive turning point. (It is tempting to think that that point might have been reached with Zelda’s ambiguous “affair” with Edouard Jozan, a young French aviator, during the Fitzgeralds’ stay on the Riviera in the late spring of 1924. Despite Scott’s notebook entry years later, however—“That September 1924 I knew something had happened that could never be repaired”—whatever happened, though it undoubtedly had serious consequences, seems to have been less a cause than an effect of a process of disintegration which had already begun in the Fitzgeralds’ relationship, a disintegration evidenced in part by their habitual excessive drinking.)
_____________
What is most startling about the relationship revealed in this biography is that the Zelda who emerges within it, far from being simply the unfortunate and dangerous obstacle that Hemingway saw, or the “complementary intelligence” Fitzgerald once confessed he wanted her to be, seems altogether as substantial, compelling, and brilliantly imaginative in her way as her celebrated husband. Indeed, it is astonishing to learn how much Fitzgerald actually took from Zelda, how many of her stories he published under his own name (or with his name listed with hers as co-author), how much he depended on her for everything from dialogue and ideas for stories to thoroughgoing criticism of his work to (here, perhaps, from his viewpoint, the first shadow of danger falls) his sense of himself. For her part, Zelda seems to have found in her husband not only a reflection of her own impulse to flamboyance and recklessness, but also emphatic confirmation of the categories in which she always seemed inclined (if not destined) to comprehend her life. Not surprisingly, they were the categories of fiction.
For if, through everything, the Fitzgeralds remained inseparable, from the beginning it was as though they had imagined one another, sprung (as Gatsby does) from “[their] Platonic idea of [themselves].” As Mrs. Milford suggests, Fitzgerald’s first conception of Zelda seems virtually identical in many respects with his vision of Daisy Buchanan: “high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . .” And Zelda’s view of Scott was no less inclined to slip into fantasy. Moreover, it was also intimately related to the process of writing fiction; in Save Me the Waltz, for instance (her only published novel), she evokes her first meetings with Fitzgerald in the summer of 1918, when he was a first lieutenant in the 67th Infantry, stationed at Camp Sheridan, Alabama, and she a stunning, audacious Southern belle surrounded by admiring young officers: “Dancing with [him], he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury in bales.” And in the course of the same book: “‘But I warn you,’” she said, ‘I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.’”
This tendency of the Fitzgeralds to fictionalize themselves and their life together forms the central theme of Mrs. Milford’s book. She traces its development from dreamy innocence through bitterness to helpless terror. “People seldom interest me,” Zelda writes in a letter to Scott during their February-June 1919 courtship, “except in their relations to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters—.” And Scott, almost as if replying to this assertion in an interview in early 1921, observes; “. . . I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman.” And still, twelve years later, after Zelda’s breakdown, Malcolm Cowley remembers Fitzgerald remarking, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself.”
Under such circumstances, it seems entirely consistent that when Fitzgerald “had difficulty visualizing Gatsby, [Zelda] drew pictures until her fingers ached, attempting to capture his image for Scott. The result was, he wrote Perkins, ‘I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.’” In this way the Fitzgeralds’ art eventually came to dominate their lives, until it became impossibly difficult for them to distinguish between the real and fictional personalities with whom they shared their days and among whom they divided their emotions: as a result, a book like The Beautiful and Damned came to seem like an irresistible prophecy, and the process of deterioration it records became a nightmare which they actually awoke to find themselves living. In Mrs. Milford’s view, so far as Zelda was concerned this progressive estrangement from reality was intimately related (although perhaps not causally) to her imaginative surrender of her own experience for approval and aesthetic ordering by her husband before she had begun to understand it for herself. In the course of time that early surrender (Zelda was just turning eighteen when the Fitzgeralds met) helped to produce the feeling that her husband had left her nothing of her own, not even a distinct personality. Once Zelda allowed herself to serve as a model for Fitzgerald’s wildly popular “flappers,” the author seems to be suggesting, she came to feel enslaved by the fictional creation: so thoroughly had she become identified with it that neither she nor her husband could say for certain where the copy ended and the living original began.
Moreover, since both of the Fitzgeralds were inclined to see art as a way of asserting imaginary dominion and control over their most intractable experience, it seems inevitable that sooner or later there would be a conflict between them about whose “material” their life together was, about who the real artist was, who had the right (and the power) to interpret the experience they shared. And indeed, anxiety about this question never ceased to plague the couple. On his side, Fitzgerald (who continued to complain bitterly about Zelda’s refusal to acknowledge him as a great writer) would maintain after her breakdown and withdrawal that “I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her—.” And Zelda, after the publication of Tender Is the Night, hospitalized again and hearing voices, “said that she realized the voices were within herself, and hearing them alarmed her but was also a pleasant sensation. She said she was terrified of Scott; she said that he interpreted life for her. Sometimes his voice called her name over and over again, or repeated what she was saying, or said: ‘Please, please, don’t be in an insane asylum.’ ‘O, I have killed her!’ ‘I have lost the woman I put into my book.’”
By following the thread of this argument between the Fitzgeralds—an argument that remained at the heart of their relationship—Mrs. Milford is able to keep from losing her subject once Zelda has become manifestly psychotic. As a consequence, her biography never collapses into case history, but remains accessible as the record of a conflict which, although intensely personal and specific, transcends simple personal (and possibly idiosyncratic) considerations.
_____________
When she begins working out the implications of the argument, Mrs. Milford’s understanding of Fitzgerald’s needs, both as a writer and as a man, is combined with her perception of a certain coolness and detachment in his character. Commenting on one of his most moving letters to his wife, for instance, the author notes: “At the beginning of this letter Scott had apologized to Zelda for dictating it; he said she would understand if she could see the clutter of unanswered mail on his desk. But, as authentic as the emotion of the letter was for Scott, there is something distasteful about his having dictated it.” A similar judgment is implicit in a remark about Zelda’s writing (which is accurately characterized as one manifestation of “her uncanny ability to express the undercurrent drift of her feelings”) as seen in contrast to her husband’s: “Her lucid self-revelation was matchless in her private letters to Scott, but it was Scott who could, so to speak, use himself publicly.” This judgment must be understood in the context of Fitzgerald’s tendency to feed his art with his own—and Zelda’s—life. (That tendency seems to have been what was on Zelda’s mind when, late in her life, in Caesar’s Things, a fragmentary, incoherent novel, never published, she wrote: “. . . He had planned his life for story anyway . . . he could weave his own romance and was well able to do so with what there was at hand. . . .”) For example, Zelda’s “groggy comment as she came out from under the anesthesia” after her long and difficult labor in giving birth to their daughter, Scottie (“. . . I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool”), is recorded by Fitzgerald and attributed to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. In this connection, while Mrs. Milford understands that after Zelda’s breakdown and the disintegration of the Fitzgeralds’ life together “it was necessary for Scott to comprehend in the most personal terms the calamity that had befallen them,” and “in order to do that he had to write about it,” she is also aware of the significance of some of the alterations and distortions of reality which were involved in the creation of Tender Is the Night. One example will suffice. A sentence from one of Zelda’s letters to Scott, written when she was being treated at Prangins, a sanitarium outside Geneva, reads as follows: “At any rate one thing has been achieved: I am thoroughly and completely humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted.” In the novel, the sentence becomes: “The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted.”
But paradoxically, the cumulative effect of this series of judgments is not to diminish our sympathy for Fitzgerald. On the contrary: for even though we come to see him as a man who sometimes (almost certainly unconsciously) used his wife for his own emotional and imaginative advantage, we are never permitted to forget that in the Fitzgerald household that activity was hardly limited to Scott. Moreover, the account of Fitzgerald’s weaknesses, inadequacies, and defects of character serves to deepen our sense of awe and admiration for his achievement by placing that achievement in a convincing context against which it may at last be measured. In this respect Mrs. Milford’s book supersedes much of the previous biographical writing about the Fitzgeralds, writing which as a rule seems either excessively naive or lacking in intuition and drastically limited in its imaginative sympathies. There are, of course, certain exceptions: for example, Sheilah Graham’s Beloved Infidel, Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, Calvin Tomkins’s superb New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, and—whether one likes it or not—the relevant sections of Hemingway’s posthumous A Moveable Feast. These are works which succeed in suggesting the emotional milieu in which the Fitzgeralds moved at various times in their lives, and Mrs. Milford has used them all to full advantage. The full-length biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener and Andrew Turnbull also remain useful, in some ways indispensable—as does Matthew J. Bruccoli’s study of the composition of Tender Is the Night—but any fresh attempt to understand and judge Fitzgerald’s fiction must now begin with Mrs. Milford’s book.
_____________
Just before the end of her life in 1948, Zelda Fitzgerald gave some advice to an aspiring young writer who was worried about drawing his material for a novel from the lives of people close to him. “The world is fair game to the greedy themes of the literary-minded,” Zelda said. “It is difficult to make one’s close associates realize that all things are meat to a writer’s imagination and that interpretations and transpositions are the biggest part of his game and are not always transgressions of devotion. . . .” Not always, perhaps, but if not always, when? It is that immensely difficult and troubling question about the writer’s enterprise that Mrs. Milford has kept before her all through the writing of this book, and her attempts to come to terms with it have resulted in her general wariness about “interpretations and transpositions” since these constitute “the biggest part” of an activity that would result, if not deliberately checked, in the invention (or mere perpetuation) of seductive but treacherous fictions about Zelda’s life. Mrs. Milford’s distrust of the power of art—the power to transform reality, as any freshman will tell you without batting an eye—grows inevitably out of her contemplation of the life of the Fitzgeralds. For if the dream they shared was really the one which we have come to call the American Dream, then in the end that dream appears to be the furthest dream of art: the dream that one is actually free to create oneself as one creates a work of art.
And indeed it might be argued that, for a variety of reasons, ideas of art triumphant have always been more powerful in the American imagination than ideas of society and its demands. But Mrs. Milford has not chosen to understand these questions as cultural or philosophical abstractions: she has reached deep into the life of her subject to find their roots, and her overwhelmingly compassionate biography enables us, as if for the first time, to estimate the human cost of such ideas.
For more than almost anyone writing before her, Mrs. Milford has understood that “to record [Zelda’s] breakdown is to give witness to her helplessness and terror, as well as to explore again the bonds that inextricably linked the Fitzgeralds.” And Scott himself, with remarkable lucidity and tenderness, once described the nature of those bonds:
. . . Perhaps 50% of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgment would mean anything: . . . these two classes [of friends and relatives] would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other—in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives. Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucination.
Such a summary of the complexities of the Fitzgeralds’ relationship has the effect of breaking facile causal chains and canceling out smug judgments; it evokes what Mrs. Milford tells us always remained for the Fitzgeralds from their earliest days together as husband and wife, “the long talks throughout the night, those joint monologues like shared dreams which brought with them a closeness so binding that it was to last a lifetime.” In this regard, it is not the least of this biography’s achievements that by placing us face to face with two people so hopelessly in love, struggling to reclaim their lives from chaos, despair, and madness in a ceaseless attempt to make good on the broken promise of the past, in the end it reduces us to grief and silence.
_____________
