We first meet Zelda in 1940, now she can maybe consider herself to be the adult that she could never quite be in her twenties. She is away from her husband, who is in California, and writing to him asking if she could maybe come see him, and then they could be "quite the pair" again. At this point she's in her forties and has had plenty of time to look back on their life together. She has already been in and out of various mental hospitals, and perhaps has been deemed "crazy" by those around her. She wants to go to Scott, who's in Hollywood at the moment, and "take care of him, for a change." She says that it's time. "That commodity, once so plentiful that we spent it on all-day hangovers and purposeless outings with people I've long forgotten, has become more precious than we ever imagined it could be. Too many of our dear ones are ruined now, or gone. Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe ... We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed." At this point, Zelda is from all points considered ... destroyed. We find out here in 1940 from Zelda that Ernest Hemingway himself has played a role in the ever-widening rift that grew between Zelda and Scott. We don't find out immediately why this is, but we can see plainly from her tone that Zelda hates Hemingway, and that Scott seems to enjoy him. As Zelda sets herself up to tell us her story, she says "look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed." And indeed, through this historical fictional account of life as a Fitzgerald from Zelda's eyes, we see immediately that nothing is ever as it seems.
With Hemingway's name mentioned within the first 5 pages of the novel, my mind immediately swept back to the novel The Paris Wife, where we heard about Ernest's first wife, Hadley. In The Paris Wife, Hadley told us from her point of view what her relationship with Ernest was like. The two fell in love despite a vast age difference (Hadley being about 8 or so years older than Ernest), and whilst Ernest had a violent love for writing and a vigorous personality, Hadley was much more dull, complacent, caring, and frumpy. I loved The Paris Wife and immediately recognized the strength Hadley must have had to have been married to such an egotistical brute, and so I felt that seeing the Fitzgerald marriage through Zelda would also prove that I would fall in love with her, and indeed I have. The two books are similar, and both worthwhile reads. Let's get back to Zelda's tale, though.
They flirt, they dance the southern Alabama night away, and when her friends come to join her they discuss the value of smoking, where Zelda proclaims "It's good for making you feel good, which is why the law and my daddy have always been against women doing it." Here we go, we see what this young vixen is all about. Feeling good and making daddy angry, breaking laws and living life. We see the themes of her times emerging rapidly, politics, the first world war, feminism, anti-feminism, young love, ideals being broken and reshaped, and a young woman ready to break free of the bonds that can never hold a free spirit like hers.
Immediately, Zelda's parents dislike F. Scott Fitzgerald, this dashing writer from the north. Her father bluntly points out that she does not ever want to have to work for her support, and she can't deny her father is right. She, as a young southern woman, wants nothing more than to be married to a rich man who will take good care of her, but she comes to the conclusion that she must prove daddy wrong, and make sure that Scott is right. She starts the fight against the strict southern culture to which she was brought up in by falling in love with a Yankee, and a writer at that.
Still fighting against the deep southern culture, she views Scott as a man she wants to be with, but she has trouble imaging what it feels like to really be in love; she has trouble imagining leaving her home. Who will she be, away from Montgomery? Either way she keeps falling in deeper with this soldier, and her black nanny warns her that trouble doesn't need an engraved invitation. Her sister Tilde sits down with her at one point to express the family's worry that the two of these young lovers would wear each other out, and maybe, just maybe he isn't the one for Zelda. But our young narrator's mind had already been made up. She knew without Scott her life would be simpler, but all she could say was "I wish he wasn't [the one], but I'm afraid he probably is." Scott proposes, Zelda accepts. Zelda waits and waits, knowing that she can't possibly meet him up in New York until she knows he can support her. Now that the war has ended and he's up there trying to make his writing career take off, Zelda looks forward to their union, but the longer it takes the more impatient she gets. She survives a pregnancy scare between the two of them and constant chiding by her father, but eventually she gives up on Scott, and the two break up. He comes to visit her, but still they fight and can't agree to keep it going. But Scott has an impossible plan, he will make everything happen at once - new job, new wife, time for writing, theater, parties, great book, literary fame - or he will die trying. "We're not going to do things the same old way," Zelda eventually says to her mother. And her mother says "Honestly, I don't know whether to envy your optimism or pity it."
His book, This Side of Paradise is published and he sends for Zelda to come to New York. Cue up the parental doubt at what will become their extravagant lifestyle, and plot events suddenly become rushed, and Zelda's sister remarks that Zelda has hot pepper rushing through her veins, and that hot pepper thrusts us into a whirlwind marriage at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, a place Zelda can hardly fathom in its immense and towering beauty, indeed the beauty of all New York. She wants to lie down right there on the floor and marvel properly at this strange new place. We continue reading about their constant parties, drinking (even though it's prohibition), and all this starts to occur through their charged honeymoon that lasts for months. They spend money, money they don't have, and Scott is determined to take care of his wife, and indeed exceed just caring for her by spoiling her.
Early on we see the pressure Scott places on himself to be an extraordinary author, and we see he has a need to keep Zelda playing the parts of the heroines in his novels. The two are constantly playacting, and some of the parts are ones that Zelda isn't sure she wants to play. They took the southern girl out of the south, and she doesn't know quite how to behave in the metropolis of New York City. She's stuck in some kind of Manhattan carnival and isn't sure she wants to ride the Ferris wheel, but was game enough to give it a try. She and Scott's constant influx of friends live life like it's going to end tomorrow, but they have no idea that "the future would be grander, stranger, and more precarious than any of us knew."
We're about 100 pages into the book ladies and gentlemen, and we can already see Zelda and Scott are both jealous, impulsive, unpredictable ... or rather predictable in that we know Scott expects Zelda to be his arm candy, his inspiration, his muse, his entertainment for his friends, and we know that Zelda will act out to ensure that Scott truly does love her joie de vivre (or joy of life). Their honeymoon starts to end as their constant partying leads to fighting, outrageous behavior, and black eyes. Their whirlwind romance is consistently impulsive, similar to Fowler's writing style. We see chopped memories, a scrap book of the start of the marriage, their quick life successes, their quick obstacles, a lack of sense when it comes to saving money; this starts as a moment to moment life, and indeed it begins as a moment to moment book - no true depth into who these two are. In reality, maybe they didn't even understand who the other person was. In the novel, they continue to fight, to push each other, to be better than the other, and finally they end up pregnant. They attempt to move back to Montgomery, but realize that now even to Zelda the south seems backward and slow. They move then to St. Paul, Minnesota where their daughter, Scottie, is born. Zelda now recognizes they are the people who move from place to place, never seeming to be able to settle down for long, and they can't seem to stay out of trouble. Any kind of trouble you can think of they've tried, and even become experts at some of it. Zelda says "I've come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flower turn their faces toward the sun." Even with the birth of their daughter, however, they fight. They fight over what to call her, and here Scott gets his way, he wins. And this is the start of many arguments where Zelda will be incapacitated in some way, and Scott has no trouble taking over the decision-making on her "behalf." Zelda starts to realize that even with a child, Scott continues to party on and invites drunk people over at all hours, and it's always Zelda who must go and calm the crying and disturbed infant. She knows that even the love for her daughter can't stop her growing resentment.
The two eventually move to Paris for good, after having visited Europe and particularly the Riviera before. Even in Paris, in the land of expatriates and art, their reputation proceeds them. They are known as the famed miscreants. Here, just as in The Paris Wife, we start the name dropping of famous writers, artists, singers, etc. from this era. People that the Fitzgerald's become friends with, party with, rely on. These people in Paris, they're cultured, they're intact, and Scott and Zelda are hooked. Here though, Scott's alcoholism becomes worse, the partying becomes obscene - for both of them. Scott starts to blame Zelda for sabotaging his work, and the fighting carries on, the drinking continues. Always drinking. At one point, Scott's remark that Zelda is bent on sabotaging his work after she chides him for drinking so heavily hurts her enough that she replies heatedly "That's right, I want you to fail at everything. That's why I followed you to New York, and Westport, and St. Paul, and Great Neck, and now France - all in what, four years? Yes, I gave up my family in Montgomery, gave up my house and my friends and everything that so good about our Great Neck life, in order to follow you halfway across the earth and then sabotage you." The two love each other deeply, but their love often is dangerously aflame.
I could continue to talk about this novel for hours, and give you the brilliant quotes, the brilliant resentments, the rapidly deeper holes that the couple digs for themselves. I could give you Hemingway and Zelda and show you the pure utter hatred they had for one another, and the poisonous words that Hemingway drips into Scott's ear about his crazy wife who drives him to drink and who makes him unable to finish his great work. I could give you Hadley, Ernest Hemingway's wife, who is dull and an event in the spring that appears both in this novel about Zelda, as well as The Paris Wife, where Hadley and her son are cast out of a Riviera villa because her son is sick, and where is Ernest? Out with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's soon to be second wife, once he tortures Hadley for a while before finally giving her a divorce. Zelda starts to see that these "artists" don't believe in fidelity, they don't believe in moderation, they live everything in excess, beyond their means. At one point, Zelda thinks that Hemingway and Scott are in love with each other, and breaks into her husband's chest to see if she can find any evidence that they're "fairies." Zelda also becomes sick with colitis, and overdoses on sleeping pills, and becomes more erratic in her motions. When Scott is working, she becomes bored, overly so, and falls in love with another man, asks for a divorce, isn't given one. She loses all chance at a normal life, and continues on a now forever changed path with Scott. They tell the Hemingway's that the man she loved killed himself over her, which, of course, is untrue. Zelda writes stories, they're published under Scott's name. She turns to ballet again, dancing up to 8 hours a day, eating little or nothing at all. She calls Hemingway's new lady, Pauline, a whore and never has trouble telling people what she's thinking. She becomes erratic, Scott becomes more jealous, they make horrible scenes of themselves at social events and alienate friends. She hates the way that Ernest Hemingway encroaches on their lives, and it's obvious that Hemingway and Fitzgerald on their own do not always like one another. She suffers from physical and mental exhaustion and gets sent away to a sanitarium that her husband most likely can't afford. She is "re-educated," told to be a good, faithful wife. They say she has schizophrenia which today many historians refute, and more likely she suffered from bipolar disease which was triggered by her alcoholism and stress.
It's a mess, their lives. It was complicated, fascinating, heartbreaking. They danced and wrote and painted and sang and drank until there was nothing else left to them. Hadley's divorce from Ernest Hemingway was perhaps a cautionary tale to Zelda. That the men they loved were egotistical, patriarchal, competitive, and their women were only good to them when they were supporting their impossible dreams. Hadley was set free, but when Zelda tried to divorce Scott she set up for them a path of despair and melancholia that they could never quite get over. Scott squashed her dreams and believed that she was impairing his. Zelda's twenties were insanely busy and bright, and then once she was sent to the mental hospitals she would be set free and be sent back again. When she tried to write her own account of their life, Scott was furious and edited it down to protect his own feelings, and it was a flop. She was forbidden then by her husband and doctors to ever write again (not that she heeded their "advice") and by 40 we see her again at the end of the book, living back in Montgomery waiting to see her beloved torrid love affair revived. She wanted her husband back. The Fitzgerald's lives were ones that make reality better than fiction. Issues of equality, of feminism, of freedom, of art, of social hierarchy, of economic status, of the times .... all this is explored in this fictional retelling of the life of Zelda by Zelda. A saying often repeats itself in the book, comes up again and again ... Zelda looks at Scott and recounts that someone once said "He's such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end." Read this book, and you'll find yourself finding an answer to the age old question of are you on Team Scott or Team Zelda? Did either one really ruin the other? Or were they just fated out to be lovers who could never quite get on the same page; they were destined to fall apart before they even really began.
This is not a "clean" review, it's messy, it's passionate, just like the characters I talk about. It took me two days to finish this novel. I finished it at 2:30 am, this morning. I loved it, simply put. Zelda was not as crazy as her critics paint her to be, and Scott was a man stuck in the same muck that she was. They couldn't really pull each other out. Ernest Hemingway makes frequent appearances in their life, and he always comes out to be a snake slowly choking the love out of Scott and Zelda's relationship. Ernest fans the flames of their distrust of one another, and Zelda can't stand a man like Ernest who would throw away a strong and sturdy wife like Hadley. Hemingway went on to be married four times and eventually committed suicide. Scott takes care of Zelda, that is true, but he also wants her to be two things at once - the crazy exciting woman who inspires him, whose words he writes down, as well as the traditional wife who follows his orders and yes, sits by bored as he often drinks and sometimes writes. Zelda is resentful of Scott, but also of herself. Scott curtails her dreams from coming true, and the both of them never truly understand one another. The book ends after Zelda has told us her story in parts and we flash back to her as an adult in the present (the two never really learned how to grow up). In reality, after Scott's death, Zelda's life became obsolete. It doesn't say so in the book, but Zelda eventually died in a mental hospital when it was set on fire, and she was one of the few patients locked inside. Her madness manifested itself in flames and engulfed her. The daughter made sure that the two of them, Zelda and Scott, were eventually buried together in the Fitzgerald family plot, and their gravestone says the last lines from Scott's The Great Gatsby, a book that only became popular after Scott's death.
So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment