The Women Behind the Men Month: Z A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

The Women Behind the Men Month continues with Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler.

This novel…is problematic.  Spanning the entirety of Zelda’s life with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, beginning on the day that Zelda receives word of Scott’s death, it then takes us through the years of the Fitzgerald’s marriage and tries to lend us insight into how Zelda ended up in a backwater Alabama town, wiling away her lonely hours beside her elderly mother, her daughter scattered far from her.

The biggest problem Is the novel’s base conceit:  that we don’t have any examples of Zelda’s ‘true’ voice, thus the author invented a voice for her to ‘allow her to speak out’.  This is an untrue and downright insulting idea; Zelda left several intact scrapbooks, a complete novel of prose and the original draft of said novel, reams of letters and interviews from Zelda to dozens of people exist (there are enough intact letters between herself and Fitzgerald to warrant a thick book) and batches of anecdotes by close friends have been recorded.  Using this information we can indeed glom together a fairly accurate portrait of who Zelda was: enough to base a full-length biography on, as Johanna Ward and Nancy Milford have done.  And because of this, we know that she definitely isn’t the woman Fowler gives us in her prose.

Fowler’s ascertain is that Zelda was truly a normal, everyday, run of the mill girl who treasured motherhood and home and hearth.   She declares that Zelda, once Fitzgerald has his first hit, decided to “become” Gloria, his devil-may-care heroine from The Beautiful and the Damned, putting on the persona to cover her shyness and give her something to say to the press when they clustered about her.  This is wholly false – Zelda’s personality was well set by the time Fitzgerald met her, and before him she was drinking spiked sodas, necking with boys and scandalizing the bourgeois of Alabama by swimming in a public pool while wearing a flesh-colored bathing suit (this incident rates only a mention in the book, with classmates clucking aloud at each other through awkward dialogue to tell us how outrageous but good-hearted Zelda can be. It seems bizarrely reluctant to show us Zelda's life without Fitzgerald even as it tried to 'give her back the voice he silenced').  She adored teasing and pushing and speaking her mind, reading ribald limericks aloud in her English classes and skipping school to take in movies; she once so upset her father that he chased her around the dining room table with a carving knife.   She did not adore the art of rolling bandages for the Red Cross as this novel insinuates.  She thought being decorous, fun-loving, flirtatious was the be-all of the female experience.

While Fitzgerald would later say Zelda never had the ‘stuff’ for the big stage, Zelda definitely had the gumption, daring and spirit – she just didn’t have the strength to carry on the façade due to mental illness.

That mental illness is given an alarmingly poor short shrift in the manuscript – understandable when writing from Zelda’s point of view, were we not left with the outrageous impression that if only poor Zelda had discovered feminism before her breakdown she would have been saved.    There is more attention paid to her gynecological problems than to the way her schizophrenia decimated her life and mind, and all of Zelda’s medical problems are made to be the fault of the dismissive and patronizing male doctors who treat her; the reader is given the impression that if only Zelda had had the luck of consulting with a good female doctor her life would have been much easier.  Fowler has clearly never experienced the discomfort of being served by a female doctor, and I certainly hope she never does.  I, however have, and can assure to my readers that bad female doctors do indeed exist, and are exactly as bad as their male-identified counterparts.  The author remains incorrect in her hypotenuse - religious mania and auditory hallucinations can’t be cured by the solidarity of sisterhood

Add onto this the fact that Fowler biffs a thousand little details in the process of writing out Zelda’s operatic, reasoned, almost ridiculously self-possessed musings – no, I’m fairly certain Zelda didn’t ‘release’ Fitzgerald from their initial relationship because she thought he was a genius who needed to fly – she screwed up by sending him the fraternity pin belonging to another guy, whom she had gone with while he was on another cost.  No, I’m sure Zelda also didn’t benevolently let Jozan go when their affair came to an end – viz-a-viz Milford, there was an ugly scene between the three, where Jozan made it clear he’d only trifled with Zelda for sexual purposes and was not interested in ‘taking her away’.  I’m certain that she had an abortion, not because of the inauspicious timing of the pregnancy and Fitzgerald’s unsuitability, but because she wanted an abortion and the daughter she already had was being raised by a succession of nannies as it was.   I’m almost entirely sure that she didn’t accidentally overdose on pills because she had intestinal pain and whoopsie, took a pill too many – I’m fairly certain it was a suicide attempt undertaken at the height of her theatrical misery with Scott.   I know this because I've absorbed multiple books about the Fitzgerald marriage and have a pretty decent portrait of how it went thanks to the bravery of multiple authors before me.

This is the biggest problem with Fowler’s Zelda: every misadventure she undertakes, every uncontrolled flight of fancy she embarks upon, every show of non-homogenized spirit she makes is written off as an act undertaken because Fitzgerald has put her through pain and she must 'prove' to Scott that she's willing to follow his death spiral to oblivion.   To do this is to completely ignore Zelda’s incredible drive, her impulsiveness, her daring nature, her sauciness, all of which were real parts of her personality, all of which were only slightly muted by her breakdown.   The real Zelda was a rebel who said she wanted to do as she pleased, was undomestic and as devoted to good times as her husband until she decided to find her dignity in work, too late.  Fowler’s Zelda comes on like a housewife from a sitcom with a bad head cold when the truth lies right in Fitzgerald's letters; they 'ruined each other', and themselves.   

You can tell that Z is an answer to Hemingway's A Movable Feast and its ugly and equally unbalanced portrait of Zelda; Hemingway, being a friend and hangaround buddy of Fitzgerald's during their Paris days - and frustrated by the fact that his drinking partner seemed 'emasculated' by Zelda's stronger drive - thought that  Scott was wasting his talents writing petty short stories to keep them living the high life and thought Fitzgerald ought to be concentrating on writing his next major novel; he thus chose to write Zelda as an insecure shrew (Zelda, meanwhile, thought Hemingway was full of shit and wasn't afraid to say so).  So Fowler in turn writes of an insecure Hemingway, suggesting that his bravado is an act concocted to cover up his homosexuality, allowing her to indulge in some figurative homophobic revenge in Zelda's name.  To blame everything that followed - Zelda's manic absorption with the ballet, her nervous breakdown, Scott's slow dissolution into petty affairs and alcoholism- is ludicrous, yet Fowler does it.

Perhaps the book’s biggest tragedy lies in how the author chooses to write Zelda’s relationship with her only daughter, Scottie.   When they're together, Zelda is a syrupy, doting mother whose most precious hours involve breakfasts with her infant.  That provides the audience with a wholly inaccurate picture of how the twosome got along.  Most accounts portray Zelda as a visibly reluctant mother, who obviously loved her child and got along with her to a degree – but who also had a level of detachment from her. She saw Scottie as a proving ground between herself and Scott, ultimately abandoned the raising of her to nannies and who ultimately and tragically lost common ground with the child as she entered adulthood, leaving Scottie to treat Zelda with the patient distance of a nurse during their frequent visits.  There was strained love there, but strained it was, and Zelda did not coo over her crib by most accounts.  

Perhaps this novel would have been better had it been watched over carefully by a more passionate editor.