Institutions, asthma, eczema, guilt, loneliness: none of this had subdued Zelda’s supernatural energy. She had always been able to call upon it, whether for swimming, dancing, or writing.
Her routine at the hospital in North Carolina was a Spartan one of hiking, calisthenics, abstemious diet, and promotion of modesty and nunlike submission by the absence of mirrors and cosmetics.
Zelda stayed in this odd place, endured it all, for years, always being reminded of her “limitations” and “permanent damage.” She died there and left in addition to her “legend” another memorial to her unkillable energy — an unfinished novel she intended to call Caesar’s Things.
What are we to make of all this? Zelda’s letters from the hospital are clear and courageous and searing to read. Certain schizophrenics make a strong appeal by the way in which the very limitations of their character remind harassed, responsible, intricately coping people of what they have lost — dreaminess, narrowness of concentration, inwardness, withdrawal.
Also these sick persons create guilt of a mysterious kind, whether by their own wish or merely by the peculiarities of their often luminous fixity. The will to blame, to hold them to account, soon appears futile to those closest.
Instead the mad entwine their relations in a unresolved, lingering, chafing connection, where guilt, exasperation, and grief for the mysteries of life continue to choke. Perhaps the nearest feeling is the immensely suffering and baffling connection between those living and those slowly dying.
Fitzgerald’s assumption of responsibility was woefully burdensome to him – and to his wife – but we feel, thinking of them together, that the burden and his bearing of it were at the very center of his moral being. It was his plot, his story, his symbol, image, destiny, obsession.
Very few lives are of a piece in the way the Fitzgeralds’ were; with them youth and middle age are linked not so much in the chain of growth as in the noose of cause and effect.
Middle age is a bill left by youth, and the idea of bankruptcy is a recurring one in their thoughts.
But the responsibility, the bearing of a burden, are important for Fitzgerald’s idea of himself, perhaps because of his shame for his many weaknesses.
He is never entirely free of the need to examine his case once more, never quite able to leave off weighing the cost to his best self, and, for that matter, his worst self. He is unimaginable to us without the weight of money to be made for others, memories to be faced in the middle of the night, the teasings of regret and the pleasures of loss.
Still, in taking the responsibility, however grumblingly and at whatever sacrifice, he was, unlike Zelda, able to find in it an action, a self-definition.
A burden accepted is both a hump on your back and a star in your crown.
To have disappeared, quit, even to have diminished his immense involvement would have left Fitzgerald with an unendurable emptiness and a feeling of masculine failure. For he not only worked in Hollywood and wrote for The Saturday Evening Post to support his wife and daughter, but he kept, week after week, month after month, this relentlessly punishing involvement of letters, arrangements, advice, complaints, nostalgia, new hope, new despair. (Hemingway, for instance, seems to have put aside his wives like last year’s tweed jacket. He is not even able to say why he left the beautiful Hadley and his charming son, Bumby. He speaks only, in that careless way he and the Fitzgerald generation share, of “new people” and in some way the never explained temptations to forgetfulness provided by “the rich.”)
The picture of Zelda we get from her letters is a disturbing one. The marriage was a misfortune, for they were prodigal partners, like a business marked for collapse because of the ghostly, paralyzing similarities of their natures. They enjoyed their exaggerations and follies when life worked; otherwise their compatibility was a disaster. Each needed just what the other lacked.
Zelda was, for all her beauty and daring, hiding a deep sense of personal ambition, a feeling that there was something unique and possible inside her if only she could get at it, use it. Her energy and discipline never came to much.
There was nothing she had mastered at quite the right time in her life, and perhaps it was, in the end, her suffering and madness, her breakdowns that frightened her finally into seeking some sort of health through these frantic artistic efforts.
Naturally, the brilliance could not flower. The efforts to live, be reborn, to be free, were at war with her nature and the twisted love that burned out both of these lives.
Zelda’s talents were in no way comparable to Fitzgerald’s. Does this make a difference? Is it to the point? Art was the religion of the 1920s, and thus there were many women married to the tempestuous gods of the period, women called to share the thunder and lightning. Zelda’s case was special. She too was anarchic, inspired, brilliant, unsteady, very much in her own way like the gods of the arts, like the spoiled, gifted, and famous all around her. In her, alas, the madness was real rather than an indulgence.
It is sad that her wish to learn, to struggle up to a higher skill and seriousness only seemed a threat to others. Her ways of trying to get well were always strenuous and they seemed to others merely an additional illness, or a deeper falling.
What other ways than writing, dancing, or painting were open to her? In any case, failure in these hopes is ordinary and no dishonor lies in the effort. If she had not been married to Fitzgerald her “ambition” would not have presented itself as a “competition.” Perhaps the result would have been the same; it would have been looked at differently, however.
Living as a sort of twin, as husband and wife or brother and sister, is a way of survival. In the case of artists these intense relations are curiously ambivalent, undefined collaborations — the two share in perceptions, temperament, in the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness — that especially. Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society.
Many writers seem to long for these trembling, gifted, outstanding hand-maidens, for they are aware that the prosaic, the withdrawn, the demanding, are terrible daily deterrents to art and that the presence of an intelligent, sympathetic, clever sensibility, always at hand, always bright and somehow creative, is a source, even a source of material.
With Zelda the collaboration was frenetic, almost a matter of essential being, of sharing of vices, arrogance, indulgence, as well as a central conception of themselves and their beautiful destructiveness as the core of Fitzgerald’s fictional idea. And, of course, Zelda was always an enormous problem to a man beset with problems.
In spite of the glaring differences, she can bring to mind the exalted twinness of Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the sadness that always stands there, threatening, at the end of a life lived so intensely and with such disturbing self-consciousness.
Mrs. Milford’s book about Zelda Fitzgerald has in it what one might speak of as considerable “woman interest.” A few years back the interest lay in the tragic grandeur and glamour of her love story. Now I should think it rests entirely in the heroism of her efforts and the bitterness of her defeats. She was flawed and rich with liability, but we suddenly find ourselves discontent and more than a little resentful that this strange, valuable girl from Montgomery, Alabama, had to endure unnecessary rebuffs and discouragements — in a life where so much suffering was foreordained and beyond repair.
In the end we feel about Zelda Fitzgerald just what De Quincey felt for Dorothy Wordsworth: “respectful pity.”
hexafu 