The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald

Abstract

In Kendall Taylor's The Gatsby Affair, we find a biography that more carefully explores the life of Edouard Jozan, the French pilot who infamously had an “affair” of some sort with Zelda Fitzgerald in the summer of 1924 as her husband raced to complete The Great Gatsby, and who inspired numerous creative works from both Fitzgeralds while considerably impacting their marriage. Deborah Pike's The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald provides a serious treatment of Zelda's extensive writing and visual art, asserting her role as a legitimate modernist artist.Taylor's biography provides a detailed account of the lives of both Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, opening with a timeline that runs from 1896 to 2006, showing the progression of each individual's life—a helpful visual that traces when their lives met, overlapped, and diverged. Each dense chapter offers critical insights into the historical moment as well as compelling details about the lives of individuals who existed on the periphery of the famous duo, such as Jozan's friends Rene Silvy and Bobbe Croirer. Although every Fitzgerald biography offers its own interpretation of the minutiae of the Fitzgeralds' lives and complicated relationship, Taylor interviewed and carefully researched the family and friends of the Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, creating a more complete picture of the “affair” and its aftermath. As Taylor points out, “Although Edouard has always interested Fitzgerald followers, there has been little agreement about his impact on their lives, and in an otherwise well-researched case history, the pilot has remained a mystery” (xi). This book effectively fills that gap.Of course, in any discussion of the summer of 1924, one must put quotation marks around the word “affair” for the simple reason that available evidence neither confirms nor denies an actual physical relationship between the aviator and the 23-year-old wife who was bored and restless while her husband wrote. Were Zelda and Jozan lovers or was their five-week Riviera encounter a flirtation that trespassed into emotional adultery? Biographers typically take a stand at one extreme or the other and read texts such as The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz for corroboration. To a certain extent Taylor sidesteps the ambiguity of the evidence and simply asserts that the summer romance was indeed a “petite aventure, a brief affair with a willing partner” that left Scott “the proverbial mari trompé, or cuckolded husband” (71). Readers expecting a case to be made and a position staked against claims in previous Fitzgerald biographies may be thrown for a bit of a loop; for a measured assessment of clues and presumed proof (or the lack of it), one must turn to Scott Donaldson's chapter “Summer of '24: Zelda's Affair” (172–86) in his The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015).Refreshingly, Taylor does not come across as biased toward either of the Fitzgeralds, but instead offers an assessment that is critical and validating of both individuals' flaws, talents, aspirations, and misadventures. Following the contemporary trend, Taylor gives careful attention to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's upbringing in Alabama as well as to her time in various mental institutions at the end of her life, showing how her experiences run parallel to her husband's own pitiable downfall. She is not portrayed as secondary to her husband, and Jozan is also given substantial attention beyond his role in the couple's marital woes.Indeed, the major contribution of this book is its robust understanding of Jozan, including insights into his upbringing, disposition, romantic motivations, and career and marital aspirations. For this background, Taylor is deeply indebted to Jozan's daughter, Martine Jozan Work, who contacted the author shortly after the publication of her 2003 biography of Zelda, Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage, offering insights about her father, who died in 1981. Additionally, Taylor provides a clear discernment of the cultural context, a large contributor to the drama that ensued: “It was accepted that a young officer, unprepared to wed, would take a mistress. Wives held particular appeal, rivaling single women, by offering pleasure without responsibility” (71). Taylor provides a reasonable and insightful assessment of what Jozan's intentions were in his brief pursuit of Zelda, why the relationship inevitably had to end, and why the Fitzgeralds were never able to recover.For Fitzgerald, Taylor sees this event as opening old wounds, as “He had not forgotten Zelda's reluctance to marry and her involvement with the aviator replicated Ginevra King's selection of a naval pilot over him” (79). Taylor astutely assesses the motivations and reactions of the Fitzgeralds, substantially building on her previous Fitzgerald scholarship in Sometimes Madness is Wisdom. She also provides closure to the narrative by investigating the suspicious circumstances surrounding Zelda's tragic death, and by exploring the misfortunes and deaths of the Fitzgeralds' family and friends. She recounts the much later passing of Jozan, a life that after Nancy Milford publicly identified him as Zelda's elusive French aviator in Zelda: A Biography (1970) was continually overshadowed by his brief involvement with the Fitzgeralds: “Instead of being celebrated for his own impressive accomplishments, Edouard and his fame became linked to the Fitzgeralds in the literary cosmos” (205).The one weakness in The Gatsby Affair is its secondary focus on the supposed sexual assault of Zelda Sayre during her teens in Montgomery, Alabama; while other critics have acknowledged this possible attack, Taylor goes further to suggest that this trauma resurfaced after Edouard's rejection, thereby causing her mental breakdown: “Trauma can generate psychoses, sometimes the brain's way of coping, and in this instance calamitous forces were released, a Greek tragedy—French style—triggering profound depression that culminated in Zelda's first suicide attempt” (xiii). She provides support for these claims by offering a close reading of Zelda's often autobiographical writing and by identifying similar events in the lives of her adolescent friends John Sellers and Peyton Mathis (the possible assailants). But it is difficult to prove any causal chain, especially one tied to a precipitous mental break. Taylor goes on to examine the repeated misdiagnoses and mistreatment that Zelda faced while in various mental institutions: “Asylums dismantle people, rarely reassemble them, and Zelda's internment only worsened preexisting conditions, leaving deep psychic scars” (137). This investigation is an honest assessment of the shortcomings of the mental health system at this time as well as the damage it did to Zelda's life and art. However, it seems contradictory to assert the cause for a mental collapse and then to critique a system that offers rushed, generalized, and improper diagnoses.Overall, this biography is well worth reading for any seasoned Fitzgerald scholar or new enthusiast. It is carefully researched, and it delivers original considerations of the role Jozan played in the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, while also acknowledging how his brief encounter with the couple would come to overshadow his many achievements. It establishes the affair as a pivotal moment that would markedly influence the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, supplying new insight into a complex and often misunderstood relationship. As Pike claims, “Distinguishing fact from fiction is no easy task” (15), and Taylor provides a well-crafted biographical narrative.Pike's monograph offers a fresh and thorough interpretation of the life and works of Zelda Fitzgerald both in relation to her husband and as an artist in her own right. She contends that, “A serious artist on her own terms, rather than solely her husband's muse, she merits a place in literary modernism” (4). Pike's research is thorough, as is her knowledge of biographical, historical, and literary scholarship on both Fitzgeralds, making for a well-informed and nuanced analysis of Zelda's life, her published and unpublished writings, and her visual art.Pike employs Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor language and literature to support her claim that Zelda's writing from the margins, be that from her husband's shadow, from her position as a Southern wife and mother, or from her time in mental institutions, enables her to speak in a unique voice that breaks with the conventions of major literature—or to create work that truly encapsulates the modernist ideal to “make it new.” As Pike states, “I see her work as violently alive, experimentally modernist, and offering a new mode of experience” (31). In her overview of scholarship on Zelda, she singles out the lack of serious studies of much of her work and the tendency to look at her writing only in comparison with that of her husband. She additionally utilizes Hélène Cixous's theory of uniquely feminine writing and Julia Kristeva's conceptions of madness in her feminist and psychoanalytic analyses, as well as many cultural, historical, and literary critics to support and complicate her arguments. Her book offers a sophisticated and serious look at the complete range of Zelda Fitzgerald's work.In her examination of Zelda's texts as reactions to her position in her marriage and in society, Pike dissects a transcript of the famous May 28, 1933, meeting between the Fitzgeralds and Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie to address “the issue of Zelda's writing and its effect on their marriage” (121). This transcript is alluded to in Taylor's biography and elsewhere, but Pike offers numerous block quotations to show Fitzgerald's and Dr. Rennie's debasing of Zelda's art, especially for its lack of exchange value in a patriarchal, capitalistic society. She further uses this transcript to analyze the different depictions of madness in Tender Is the Night (glamorous) and Save Me the Waltz (experiential), affirming Zelda's writing in a minor language to validate her own experiences and assert her identity. Similarly, she frames Zelda's early letters and magazine publications in relation to modern capitalism and advertising, offering a close reading that boasts that “F. Scott Fitzgerald may have documented the Jazz Age, but it was Zelda Fitzgerald who defined the flapper through her keen journalistic observations” (60). Pike acknowledges Scott's contributions to major literature, but she also asserts Zelda's voice as a minor modernist.In her effort to position Zelda as an artist, Pike offers readings of many texts that have been critically neglected, markedly expanding Zelda's oeuvre. In Zelda's asylum letters, Pike finds that her “writing is subversive; it does not imitate current patterns but makes up a different language” (31); this language is uniquely her own, and through it “she reinscribes an authenticity into her being” (99). Pike examines Zelda's unfinished novel Caesar's Things as a surrealist autobiography that shares striking similarities to the autobiographies of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn in its unstructured depiction of madness, claiming that the text “shares the revolutionary potential of female surrealist writings” (152). She admits to the problem of Zelda not being a surrealist or her using methods of automatic writing, but her framework opens up new modes of analysis, and affirms that Caesar's Things has a critical place in Zelda's collected works. Pike identifies Zelda's artwork as “conservative American modernism” (183), and offers a fresh study of her drawings and paintings, which are provided as illustrations. In her examination of Zelda's diary from the last years of her life, Pike refuses to dismiss her religiosity as symptomatic of her madness, and contends that the diary is a mystic's “journey toward enlightenment, toward artistic and spiritual self-consciousness” (214). Pike is innovative in her approach to each of Zelda's texts, and while her readings are theoretically driven, they are also clear and compelling.Admittedly, some of the analyses in The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald become more difficult to follow as Pike focuses on works such as the unfinished novel and diary that are challenging to read and only available in the Princeton University archive. But her investigation provides a strong argument as to why these materials should be digitized or otherwise published for wider readership and additional scholarship. Moreover, her bibliography delivers a comprehensive list of valuable resources for Zelda scholars working across disciplines—including literature, women's studies, history, art, psychology, and linguistics. This monograph is a significant work that further legitimizes Zelda Fitzgerald as an artist and a modernist.