~This
essay originally appeared in The Southern Review (2013).
In the seventies,
my mother began storing paperbacks in an oval drum table kept in our basement.
As an only child, I had long claimed our downstairs as my sovereignty, and I
took great objection to this adult incursion into the kingdom of my toys,
especially after I was issued explicit orders not to go anywhere near her
books. At ten or eleven I already suffered from boring bouts of insomnia, so on
nights I could neither sleep nor relax, I would sneak out of my adjoining
bedroom to rifle this forbidden stack. I was curious to know what knowledge I,
the son of a teacher, could possibly be prohibited from learning.
The question
wasn’t long in the answering. Among the titles in my mother’s collection was Coffee, Tea, or Me?, a steamy pulp featuring
swinging stewardesses; a self-help manual called The Sensuous Woman by someone so salacious she could only publish
under the pseudonym “J”; and a memoir whose title deeply perplexed me because
it was the exact nickname my father gave me whenever I tried to shoot baskets,
one-handed, over his head: The Happy
Hooker. Needless to say, I found these books equal parts enthralling and
confusing.
The one that would
have the greatest impact on me wasn’t read until much later. I can remember flipping
through its pictures, however, because one specific image gave me nightmares. I’ve
since come across that photo countless times in my research, and never without
experiencing the same shock of recoil. The photograph is of a slightly stooped
woman with cadaverous cheeks bundled in a fur coat staring listlessly at the
camera. Her expression is forlorn and faltering, self-protectively irresolute,
as if by submitting to a pose she was relinquishing something of herself she
would never get back. I would need a poetry class or two to find a phrase to
describe that face: ’tis the distance on the look of death.
The picture wasn’t
of Emily Dickinson but of Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s not an especially famous
photo, but a telling one, taken in February 1930 during a vacation to the Constantine gorge in Algeria only a few months before
the breakdown that would land her in a Swiss sanitarium and thereafter render her
one of the more enduring cautionary tales in American literary history. The
book itself was Nancy Milford’s biography, simply titled Zelda. It recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary, and though not
as controversial today as it was in 1970, it still possesses the power to
polarize. In Telling Women’s Lives: The
New Biography, Linda Wagner-Martin summarizes its legacy: “What struck
readers in 1970 was that Milford ’s
story of Zelda’s life with F. Scott Fitzgerald had so often been told
inaccurately. By most accounts, Zelda’s drinking and bothering of her writer
husband had led to his drinking and his inability to get work done.” In
contrast, “Milford
enabled readers to find in her protagonist a woman that nearly everyone could
identify with. Zelda’s story became its own drama,” a story of “rebelling at
the prescribed roles beautiful women were made to play.”
For other
scholars, however, Zelda is the
source of the most pernicious canard to haunt Fitzgerald’s work—namely, that he
“plagiarized” her very essence in creating the iconic character of the flapper,
often stripping her letters and diaries of specific, enchanting passages. Every
so often I’m invited by a reading club or academic group to dilate on this
debate, and so I iron my tie and fire up the PowerPoint and do my best to be
balanced. I’ve also spent many a literary conference adjudicating the argument,
often unwillingly over dinner tables and bar tops where, honestly, I’d rather
be exploring topics that didn’t leave me wondering if I have a life outside of
work. In recent years I’ve actually grown less interested in the biography’s
influence on literary studies, and more intrigued by its sway on everyday
readers who sent it spiraling onto the bestseller lists.
Readers, in other
words, like my mother.