Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (review)

allows friendless Thomas a little of her pity and affection. The Moss family is interesting enough—each member blessed with goofy charm and a hopefulness of doing great things—but Byers's novel is most successful in its quieter moments spent with William Durbin. Without gross sentimentality, the novel throws us into the heartbreaking culture of his sickness. Here's a boy who has always had to deal with syringes and hospital rooms and a rapidly degenerating body. He is mature beyond his years, and there's a frightening weight to much of his speech—sometimes to a fault. All of this, we are reminded, happens in the midst of unreal economic vigor, in a boomtown. While William is fighting for his life, the Mosses' neighbors are all selling their homes for three times their worth. Amazon and Microsoft are on an exponential rise, apparently without a ceiling. (But we know better.) Even William Durbin knows a bubble when he sees one. When everyone believes something is never going to end, he says, "That's a perfect signit's almost over." He's talking about the stock market, of course, but also about much else. William earns our respect and maybe our awe with such statements, but we are realistic enough to have only modest hopes for him: not immortality , just a little more time. (RS) Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline Arcade, 2003, 492 pp., $27.95 Southern beautyZelda Sayre finally consented to marry struggling writer beau F. Scott Fitzgerald after he amassed fame and fortune for his first novel, This Side ofParadise. In life and death both have come to personify the "Roaring Twenties": she the cheeky flapper and he the charming, extravagant party boy. The standard version of their twenty-year marriage is that they got drunk every night, tried to one-up each other's outrageous stunts and were thrown out of hotels for disturbing the peace. Despite their shocking antics, the public still considered Scott a hardworking writer and Zelda his zany but supportive wife. In private, though, they swung between violent quarrels and loving reconciliations. Finally, believing that they had destroyed each other, they both ended up exhausted and broken. Zelda succumbed to mental illness and spent the last nineteen years of her life in and out of sanatoriums, while Scott resorted to churning out second-rate stories for slick magazines and trying to write Hollywood scripts to pay the bills. Following Nancy Milford's still popular Zelda (1970) and Sara Mayfield 's 1971 memoir about Zelda Fitzgerald, Sally Cline, a Cambridge scholar and biographer of Radclyffe Hall, reexamines the Fitzgerald myths to reveal a talented woman who resented living in her famousauthor husband's shadow. In her late twenties, after she tired of parties and globe trotting, she strove to be a successful writer, painter and dancer. Though Zelda had a long family history ofmental illness, ranging from depression to suicide, Cline sees her subject's madness as a case of denied ambition and exploited talent. She blames Scott for his wife's inability 196 · The Missouri Review to fulfül her artistic dreams. He stole material from her journals, letters and conversations for his stories and novels. Under pressure from publishers , he published her magazine articles under his or both of their names, and he refused to let her work on her novel about mental illness , Caesar's Thing, until after he published his own novel on the subject , Tender Is the Night. Today, according to Cline, Zelda's talent still goes unrecognized because she was an amateur who worked in three mediums rather than one. While many of Cline's anecdotes of the Fitzgeralds' marriage are typical biography fare, what's new is her access to Zelda's medical records. Cline describes the wide range of experimental medical treatments at the time—"injections of placental blood, honey and hypertonic solutions , and of horse blood into the patients' cerebrospinal fluid"—used to reeducate women patients. Cline does not find it surprising that many patients became as much "victims of the treatments as of the illnesses." In 1921, Scott remarked that he and his wife were themost envied couple. Ten...