Meltdown of a golden couple Jonathan Bate on the marriage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, which descended from glitter into alcoholism and madness

• Published in: Sunday telegraph (London, England)
• Main Author: Bate, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Daily Telegraph 15.09.2002
• Subjects: Bate, Jonathan; Cline, Sally; Fitzgerald, Scott; Fitzgerald, Zelda; Taylor, Kendall
• ISSN: 0307-269X

With elegant timing, the publication of the letters coincides with [Sally Cline]'s new biography of Zelda. Cline has read all Zelda's surviving letters, to [Scott Fitzgerald] and to various female friends; she has also had access to an unpublished memoir by the Fitzgeralds' only daughter, Scottie. In contrast to the old image of the deranged wife whose antics drove her husband to drink, Cline emphasises Zelda's gifts as writer, dancer and above all painter. She makes a particularly strong case, supported by the book's illustrations, for the quality of the paintings and drawings that Zelda produced in the eight years after Scott's death, before she herself perished in a fire at a mental hospital. Cline also gives more attention and respect than previous biographers to Caesar's Things, a novel left unfinished at Zelda's death. On the basis of hitherto unexamined health records and an interview with Zelda's last doctor, Cline suggests that her condition was manic depression rather than schizophrenia. Posthumous psychiatric diagnosis is a tricky business and this argument left me unpersuaded - not least because Caesar's Things is shot through with a weird religious mania of a kind that is frequently characteristic of schizophrenia. Though clearly a biography of Zelda, [Kendall Taylor]'s book is dressed up as a life of the glamorous couple. And, as if to compensate for earlier biographers' underestimation of Zelda's contributions to Scott's fiction, both Taylor and Cline go too far in the opposite direction. Rather as in the case of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, the male writer has become the victim of a feminist reclamation of his wife.