Readsday

Readsday! Man, this just never gets old. Maybe now we'll see a resurgence in bookblogging since Amazon and GoodReads joined up in unholy matrimony? Can we get Anton Scalia to be unhappy about that? No? Right, right.

What did you just finish reading?
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler. Flat-out terrible. Full of anachronisms and totally wrong speech patterns, and even worse, Scott and Zelda don't sound like themselves at all. (SAMPLE DIALOGUE: "I went to the window. 'I never woulda thought it. Not like this.' I turned back toward him. 'You're sorta impressive.'") There's really no excuse for this, since so many letters and stories and novels by both Fitzgeralds have been published, as well as an infinitude of biographies. As near as I can tell most of the good parts are pretty much straight out of Sally Cline's Zelda biography, anyway. Too much of it reads like a bad movie script: flat dialogue, lots of summary instead of action, and barely any description.

More seriously, Fowler also has the main acrimony between Hemingway and Zelda start after he makes a pass and she turns him down -- which is really off, Hemingway wouldn't have made a pass at her when Fitzgerald was cultivating him, AND he tended to let women make passes at him, which they frequently did. This is more important than it sounds because in the book, Hemingway is the reason the marriage fails, and Scott denies his homoerotic attraction, and expects Zelda to be more "wifely," and then she goes off to the asylum.

How much better would it have been if Fowler had stuck to the facts -- from the first, Zelda thought Hemingway was overly macho and "phony" (anticipating feminist 20th century criticism by how many decades?) and this shocked everyone. (She told Gerald Murphy -- another male artist in denial about his sexuality who was in thrall to Ernest -- that Hemingway was "bogus.") Hemingway's "proof" in his memoir of Zelda's insanity is when she asks him if Al Jolson isn't greater than Christ; the Murphys, who knew her much better, also heard her say that and never thought she was crazy. It was the era of the shocking wisecrack, and both she and Scott delighted in showing off how much they didn't give a damn. Zelda never took any shit from anyone and said exactly what was on her mind. Sometimes, the mentally unstable have a weird kind of absolute radar for lying and bullshit -- they're very sensitive to it. All that meant she and EH were trouble from the start. I think it does injustice to both of them to blame it all on EH making a pass at her.

Worse, Fowler omits a lot of Zelda's actual bad behaviour -- some of which was high spirits, some of which was bad behaviour on purpose (she and Scott putting purses and wallets into sauce, &c) especially when drunk, and some of which was clearly erratic. Zelda was self-destructive and talented and frustrated and ambitious and more than a bit nuts, and she deserves so much more than either the stereotype of "mad bitch of a wife" or "victimized genius." She loved daring fearless pranks, but this author makes them into hollow performances Scott forced her into. There's just so little of Zelda's actual vitality and amazing boldness in this book. It's sad.  

What are you reading now?
For ONCE, this neatly segues into: Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, by Sally Cline. This is only the second full-length biography of Zelda since Nancy Milford's 1970 book, which was groundbreaking but frequently sentimental, and of necessity partial. Cline has access to far more unpublished writing of Zelda's, especially letters, and fascinatingly parallels Zelda and Scott partisans with "Plath and Hughes camps" -- if, as Beauvoir reportedly said, "marriage is a dangerous thing for a woman," it seems perilous indeed for a creative woman to marry a creative man (as Anne Sexton wrote about her own affair with another poet: "There is too much food and no one left over / to eat up all the weird abundance"). This book has all the advantages of new scholarship plus the social impact of feminism since 1970, and while there are odd errors here and there, Cline is certainly more rigorous than Milford.

However, if Milford's writing was often florid, Cline is dry, dry, dry. It is just about as hard to get a sense of Zelda's boldness and bright spirit from this biography as from Z, which is a real shame. I'm chewing through it, but it's going very slowly. It's one of those books you only read for the information in it, which is sort of like chewing through raw asparagus to make sure you get enough fiber in your diet.

What do you expect to read next?
This always stumps me (as indeed, it stumps most of my friends). Probably something lighter?.....I do have Red Doc, and Custom of the Country, and The Illness Narratives, and Holograms of Fear, and and and....


-- Damn, I forgot to write up Peter Dickinson, who is really something. And I'm sparing you all the RADICAL changes in diet I have made since being terrified by Salt Sugar Fat: BE GRATEFUL. Fruit! Vegetables! No cheese! Perhaps no more cheese ever again! .....God, I miss cheese.