Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (37 page)

Zelda herself was highly critical of the novel. Though it had an extremely idiosyncratic and sometimes brilliant style, it imitated both Fitzgerald and Hemingway. “It is distinctly École Fitzgerald,” she told Scott, “though more ecstatic than yours. Perhaps too much so. Being unable to invent a device to avoid the reiterant ‘said’ I have emphasized it à la Ernest much to my sorrow.” Hemingway wrote of Brett Ashley, for example, “She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht”; Zelda elaborated his simple but effective simile into her own baroque cadenza: “[Alabama] was gladly, savagely proud of the strength of her Negroid hips, convex as boats in a wood carving.”
²⁵

Scott was deeply wounded by Zelda’s novel. He felt she had not only stolen the clinical material and European locales of the novel he had been working on for seven years but also, during the illness that had delayed the completion of
Tender Is the Night,
had completed her own work, in the spring of 1932, in only six weeks. She had sent it to Perkins without showing it to Scott, and had it accepted for publication by his own faithful editor at Scribner’s. Fitzgerald later told Ober that
Save Me the Waltz
was “a bad book” because the potentially promising material lacked artistic focus, structure and control: “By glancing over it yourself you will see that it contains all the material that a tragedy should have, though she was incapable as a writer of realizing where tragedy lay as she was incapable of facing it as a person.”
²⁶

Scott’s just criticism of Zelda’s uneven but always lively and perceptive novel raises the question of the comparative merit of their work. Fitzgerald undoubtedly used Zelda’s speech, diaries, letters, personal experience and mental illness in his fiction, and published her lively but derivative stories and essays under his own name. Though Zelda had ideas, style and wit, she did not have the professional knowledge and discipline to perfect her stories and novel. Her stories would not have appeared in print if she had not been married to Fitzgerald and if he had not revised them for publication. Zelda’s best stories may have been equal to Scott’s mediocre tales, but she was utterly incapable of equaling his finest work. There is a vast qualitative difference between the deeply flawed
Save Me the Waltz
and the high art of
Tender Is the Night.

On June 26, 1932, after four and a half months in Phipps, Zelda was discharged from the clinic. Though Scott retrospectively felt she was “not one whit better than when she went in,” her doctors thought she was well enough to go home. After her treatment in Prangins, Zelda had managed to survive in Montgomery for only five months before suffering her second breakdown. After a much shorter and less successful treatment at Phipps, she remained relatively well for twenty more months before experiencing her third mental breakdown. Zelda’s phases of remission aroused Scott’s hope that she would recover. But she spent eight out of the last ten years of Fitzgerald’s life in mental hospitals.

Photograph Insert

1. E
DWARD
F
ITZGERALD
WITH
S
COTT
, B
UFFALO
, C
HRISTMAS
1899:

A small, inarticulate, ineffectual man with well-cut clothes and fine Southern manners.
(Princeton University Library)

2. M
OLLIE
F
ITZGERALD
,
C
. 1905:

“The most awkward and the homeliest woman I ever saw.”
(Princeton University Library)

3. F
ATHER
S
IGOURNEY
F
AY
,
C
. 1917:

The huge, eunuch-like priest, almost a pure albino, had a shrill, high-pitched, giggling voice.
(Princeton University Library)

4. G
INEVRA
K
ING
,
C
. 1915:

“Flirt smiled from her large brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.”
(Princeton University Library)

5. E
DMUND
W
ILSON
, 1930:

The stocky, auburn-haired Wilson was intellectual and sternly rational, stiff and self-conscious.

6. J
OHN
P
EALE
B
ISHOP
,
C
. 1922:

His self-mastery “gave him the poise and bearing of a young English lord.”
(Jonathan Bishop)

7. F
ITZGERALD
AT
P
RINCETON
, 1915:

Wearing a blonde wig, glamorous hat, tulle shawl and flowered gown, Fitzgerald looked for all the world like a charming drag queen.
(Princeton University Library)