Behind Every Great Man
BOLGER, EUGENIE
Behind Every Great Man... Exiles from Paradise By Sara Mayfield Delacorte. 288 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger THE LITERARY species Fitzgerald-iana is growing at a prodigious rate. Some...
...Her hair had the sheen of spun gold...
...She is an innocent, widely read but with no experience and no orientation except that he supplies her...
...Miss Mayfield, who knew Fitzgerald, recalls seeing him fall while getting off a bus...
...the traditions that helped mold Zelda helped mold her...
...Portrait of Zelda—that is part of Zelda.' " Miss Mayfield then goes on to remark, "Was it...
...Nevertheless, Miss Mayfield does have serious things to say on several scores...
...She seems to have known the Sayres more intimately than Fitzgerald's other biographers...
...He landed "on his knees in the slush of dirty sherbet running in the gutters from yesterday's snow...
...She is determined to set the record straight concerning Zelda, especially her last years in Montgomery, Alabama...
...Since this happened at a time when Fitzgerald's fortunes were at their lowest, and his consumption of alcohol at its highest, one can only conclude the gods will use symbols most writers would hesitate to consider...
...Without minimizing Zelda's gifts, or questioning Miss Mayfield's veracity, one must at times dispute her judgments...
...She portrays a writer emotionally dependent on his wife, while Zelda's famed dependence on him, particularly in later years, is shown to have had its basis in economic necessity...
...The competitive spirit others perceived in Zelda's choice of pursuits is quickly glossed...
...And this portrait of Fitzgerald during the same period...
...Although Miss Mayfield offers us little of Fitzgerald's acknowledged charm, this neglect serves ironically to call attention to it...
...As story after story is told, all illustrating some aspect of Fitzgerald's boorishness and egotism, the certainty grows that only great personal charm could have persuaded others to tolerate him...
...All the old familiar incidents are here, in addition to a few I had never encountered before...
...Having presented us with a warts-and-all examination of Fitzgerald's character, Miss Mayfield proceeds to elaborate a theory concerning the source of his talent...
...We are shown the young man fabricating boastful tales about his ancestry for the benefit of some people he has just met...
...Incidentally, it is curious that biographers, when choosing titles for their own works, are drawn to This Side of Paradise, the title Fitzgerald finally selected for his first novel, rather than to the working title he discarded...
...A summer tan gave her skin the color of a rose petal dipped in cream...
...And it is hard to believe that this description could shock anyone...
...Later we see him carving his initials and Zelda's in a pillar on the country club porch...
...She enjoys setting a scene (the passage quoted above begins, "It was a bitter, bone-chilling winter in Baltimore"), and she takes pains to arrange her material dramatically rather than chronologically...
...Exiles from Paradise surmounts its defects, however, partly because the Fitzgerald story, like all legends, can survive a number of tellings, and partly because no one has ever told the story quite this way before...
...Miss Mayfield claims that when Zelda was gone as bulwark and inspiration, Fitzgerald ceased to create literature of the first rank...
...Only her transference to him saves her—when it is not working she reverts to homicidal mania and tries to kill men...
...Some of this growth is nourished by our prolonged romance with that age of wicked innocence, the '20s, but it is a safe guess that the taproots lie in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald themselves...
...There is no denying that bad lives make good reading...
...She collapses, goes to the clinic and there at sixteen meets the young doctor hero who is ten years older...
...with a flourish, he carves his own much larger than hers...
...This confusion between fluency and quality would hardly have been felt by so professional a writer as Fitzgerald...
...Incidents of this kind, while trivial, trouble the author as much as some of Fitzgerald's more famous drunken antics...
...A connection can be drawn between the idea of a woman with homicidal tendencies and one with a destructive need to compete with her husband, yet it is clearly the last sentence in Fitzgerald's sketch that applies specifically to Zelda...
...Miss Mayfield also asserts that Fitzgerald resented the facility with which Zelda turned out her novels and stories, taking it as a sign of superior talent and originality...
...a blond Adonis in a Brooks Brothers uniform...
...What it illustrates is the deliberate, self-conscious process of building an imaginative structure from scattered facts, a process suggested by the use of one small phrase ?work out...
...Fitzgerald's sketch is full of fantasies other than the ones Miss Mayfield cites...
...Miss Mayfield is adept at collecting such novelistic detail...
...Wide and dark lashed, her eyes seemed to change color with her prismatic moods...
...The great burst of literary activity that marked Zelda's postdancing and postbreakdown years is attributed to her wish to attain financial independence, and with it, freedom from her husband...
...His features were as regular and clear-cut as if they had been coined in a Greek mint...
...The summer maneuvers at Camp Sheridan had tanned his fair skin, but a small scar shone in the middle of his forehead as if the gods had marked him for a stellar role...
...It is common knowledge that Fitzgerald's life was grist for his novels, but it demeans his talent to dismiss the role of imagination in his work entirely...
...The Romantic Egotist seems much closer to his essence...
...Much of the credit for his success, she maintains, must go to Zelda...
...Long conversations are recorded verbatim...
...Sara Mayfield grew up with Zelda Sayre in Montgomery...
...Sara Mayfield's approach to her subject in Exiles from Paradise suggests she is not unaware of this fact...
...But where Nancy Milford, in Zelda, provided a careful study that restored balance to accepted interpretations of the Fitzgeralds' relationship, Miss Mayfield carries her sympathy for Zelda to the point of partisanship...
...One of Zelda's later breakdowns is blamed in part on a glimpse she obtained of Fitzgerald's notes for Tender Is the Night, including a preliminary sketch for the character of Nicole Diver...
...It is not only that Zelda's style and personality informed all Scott's heroines, and that she was, in fact, the prototype flapper, nor is it simply that he relied heavily upon her advice and judgment...
...Zelda was certainly never raped by her father nor did she ever show a homicidal mania or try to kill men...
...her portrait of them is imbued with an unusual warmth and credibility...
...Consider this description of Zelda Sayre at the time Fitzgerald first met her: "Her features were as perfect as those of a Gibson girl on a magazine cover...
...In spite of the distortions, Miss Mayfield does add to our knowledge and, ultimately, to our understanding...
...Other passages seem written in moonlight rather than ink...
...Like Zelda's family and friends, she takes a singularly unflattering view of Scott...
...Such literal-mindedness, alternating with flights of extravagance, should have proven a hopeless disability...
...At fifteen she was raped by her own father under peculiar circumstances—work out...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
