Book Review: The Far Side of Paradise, a Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Arthur Mizener (1951, updated edition 1965)

The dust jacket of The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, 1951.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. He feared that he was a forgotten writer, and in many respects he was. He hadn’t published a novel since 1934. The New York Times obituary of Fitzgerald said “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the 1920’s.” By the time the first biography of Fitzgerald appeared in 1951, The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald was on his way to the pantheon of literary greats. The Armed Services edition of The Great Gatsby, distributed to soldiers in World War II, greatly increased the readership of Fitzgerald’s classic novel. The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Crack-Up, both published in 1945, increased interest in Fitzgerald as well.  

The Far Side of Paradise is a superb book, and I was impressed by Mizener’s handling of the material. As I was reading The Far Side of Paradise, I would think to myself “Oh, yes, I know that quote from his letters.” But it’s easy for me to know all of this, all these many years later, as I sit in my office among my shelves of many books by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Mizener was the first person putting this material together, an impressive feat. Almost 75 years after it was first published, The Far Side of Paradise is an intelligent, penetrating look at Fitzgerald’s life. 

Mizener was a perceptive critic of Fitzgerald’s writing. He writes in the Introduction “Fitzgerald’s work is full of precisely observed external detail, for which he had a formidable memory, and it is this gift of observation which has led to the superficial opinion that he was nothing but a chronicler of the social surface, particularly of the twenties. Yet, for all its concrete external detail, his work is very personal.” (p.xiii) I think this is why Fitzgerald’s work has been so durable. He was capturing his own times as they happened, and yet he was also able to make his writing timeless, so it speaks to us, more than a century later.  

Mizener also does an excellent job of detailing Fitzgerald’s personality. His writing about Fitzgerald’s life still feels fresh. Mizener threads the needle of treating Fitzgerald sympathetically, but still detailing Fitzgerald’s behavior, which could be reckless and destructive when he was drunk.  

Because Fitzgerald died so young, there were still plenty of his contemporaries around when Mizener was doing his research and writing. Henry Dan Piper was also researching Fitzgerald at this same time, and Piper graciously shared his papers with Mizener. (Piper’s own book F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Guide, was published in 1965.) One of the best two-sentence summaries of Fitzgerald’s complicated personality came from a man who was at Officer’s Training School with Fitzgerald. He said of Fitzgerald, “he was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” (p.23) This captures Fitzgerald so well—he wanted to be liked, but he was far too intelligent to be a conformist.  

Mizener perfectly describes the duality of Fitzgerald’s nature: “He writes like some kind of impassioned and naive anthropologist, recording with minuteness and affection and at the same time with an alien’s remoteness and astonishment.” (p.99) As Nick Carraway tells us in The Great Gatsby, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (p.40) I suspect that was often how Fitzgerald himself felt.  

Scott and Zelda moved to France in 1924, hoping to escape their chaotic life in Great Neck, Long Island. Instead, they merely found more chaos and disorder. One night, the Fitzgeralds ran into Isadora Duncan, the ballerina. Isadora was flirting too much with Scott, so Zelda wordlessly threw herself down a flight of stone steps. She was unhurt. The Fitzgeralds then drove off, but they turned onto railroad tracks. They slept in their car and were saved from injury the next morning when a farmer woke them up, shortly before the trolley came along and destroyed their car. (p.188) What can you do with two people who were so bent on self-destruction?  

Mizener gives the reader glimpses of the charm and charisma that Scott exerted in person. He entertained people with card tricks; he created fun and intricate games for children. Robert Benchley wrote to Scott: “Anyone who gets down on his stomach and crawls all afternoon around a yard playing tin-soldiers with a lot of kids, shouldn’t be made unhappy. I cry a little every time I think of you that afternoon in Antibes.” (p.186) What a beautiful and touching letter.  

The Fitzgeralds were living outside of Baltimore in June 1933 when Zelda accidentally started a fire on the top floor of the house they were renting. No one was hurt, and the damage was contained to the top floor. Mizener writes of Scott: “He would never have the house repaired because, he said, he could not endure the noise, and the macabre disorder of the place with its burnt-out and blackened upper story was a kind of symbol of the increased disarray of his own life.” (p.230)  

Zelda’s mental breakdowns in 1930, 1932, and 1934 strained their marriage and their finances. After her third breakdown, Scott had to come to the realization that Zelda would never be cured. They saw each other occasionally, but they never lived together again. Scott’s sense of duty meant that he would not divorce Zelda. Nora Flynn observed Scott and Zelda at a party in the mid 1930’s. “They had loved each other. Now it was dead. But he still loved that love and hated to give it up—that was what he continued to nurse and cherish.” (p.264) Flynn’s observation reminds me of the end of Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story “Winter Dreams,” where Dexter Green says “Long ago...long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.” 

Scott went to Hollywood in 1937, to work for MGM as a screenwriter. Mizener writes of the short stories Fitzgerald wrote in Hollywood, “These stories, in spite of their brevity—perhaps even because of it—are purer in motive and more directly and delicately written than any of Fitzgerald’s earlier stories.” (p.286)  

There are shortcomings of the 1951 text of The Far Side of Paradise. Mizener doesn’t cover Zelda’s death—even in the updated 1965 edition, Mizener gets the year of her death wrong—it was 1948, not 1947. In the Foreword to the updated 1965 edition of The Far Side of Paradise, Mizener explains that friends of Sheilah Graham had told him that she did not want to discuss her relationship with Fitzgerald, so he tactfully omitted her name from the original text. Mizener did give the reader hints that Scott had a significant relationship in Hollywood at the end of his life. After Graham published her 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel, which discussed her relationship with Fitzgerald, Mizener re-wrote the last two chapters of The Far Side of Paradise to include Graham’s relationship with Fitzgerald.  

There are many excellent biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, including Scott Donaldson’s Fool for Love, and Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Far Side of Paradise remains a key biography of Fitzgerald, and anyone who writes about Fitzgerald’s life owes Arthur Mizener a debt of gratitude.  

The Far Side of Paradise ends beautifully. “He died believing he had failed. Now we know better, and it is one of the final ironies of Fitzgerald’s career that he did not live to enjoy our knowledge...now, a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, more of his work is in print than at any time during his life, and his reputation as a serious novelist is secure.” (p.300) Mizener’s ending needs no revision—the only change would be to update that it has now been almost 85 years since Fitzgerald’s death.   

Book Review: Save Me the Waltz, a novel by Zelda Fitzgerald (1932)

My paperback copy of Save Me the Waltz, by Zelda Fitzgerald. Originally published in 1932, this paperback is from 1968. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Zelda Fitzgerald’s writing was inevitably overshadowed during her own lifetime by the writing of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but Zelda published several short stories of her own, and one novel in 1932, Save Me the Waltz.  

Save Me the Waltz tells the story of Alabama Beggs and her husband David Knight. The characters of Alabama and David are stand-ins for Zelda and Scott, and the novel closely parallels the Fitzgeralds’ married life. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing often drew from his own life experiences but Save Me the Waltz is nakedly autobiographical in a way that his writing seldom was. 

Zelda Fitzgerald’s writing style falls into the “you’ll either love it or hate it” category. Similes and metaphors collide and crash together, and there are times where the reader can barely hold on to what’s happening. Here’s an example: “A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebular hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.” (p.73) I can’t tell you what those two sentences mean. It’s surprising that Zelda never wrote poetry, because her writing style was quite poetic. Some of her more surreal flights of fancy, like the above passage, might have been more effective if set in a poem rather than in the framework of a novel.  

In Save Me the Waltz, Alabama and David, who is a painter, move to the south of France, where Alabama meets a handsome French aviator. In real life, Zelda and Scott moved to the south of France, where Zelda met Edouard Jozan, a handsome French aviator. Much ink has been spilled over whatever happened between Scott, Zelda, and Edouard Jozan during the summer of 1924. Fitzgerald biographer Scott Donaldson wrote an entire chapter in his book The Impossible Craft about how 14 different biographers, Donaldson included, treated the relationship between Zelda and Jozan. Was this merely a flirtation, or was it something more serious? Well, there are 14 different answers to that question. Donaldson points out some interesting differences: “A majority of the female biographers...tend to deny that the affair actually took place and assume that the crisis it generated was more or less fabricated by the Fitzgeralds. Most of the male biographers...follow the lead of Mizener and Turnbull in believing that Zelda and Josan’s relationship was indeed adulterous.” (p.175)  

Donaldson astutely writes of the differing accounts of the relationship, “It can safely be said that the single trait all biographers share is a certain arrogance as they undertake to understand how it must have been, say, for Zelda and Scott and Edouard a long time ago...This illustrates what has often been remarked: that every biography conceals within itself the autobiography of its author.” (p.187) 

Much of what biographers have theorized about Zelda and Jozan has come from Save Me the Waltz. Biographers often cite this passage: “He drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen. She didn’t think of David. She hoped he hadn’t seen; she didn’t care. She felt as if she would like to be kissing Jacques Chevre-Feuille on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.” (p.92) 

Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford thinks that Alabama does not sleep with the French aviator, therefore Zelda did not sleep with Jozan. But Milford oddly chose to ignore the above passage in her biography. Is the above passage proof that Zelda had sex with Jozan? Not really, it’s from a work of fiction. Maybe Zelda just imagined “feeling him naked underneath the starched linen.” But it’s certainly a steamy passage.  

The French aviator eventually has to go away. He writes Alabama a farewell letter. Does Alabama read the letter? Nope. “Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces...” (p.101) This drove me nuts. If you were in love with someone, even if you knew it was doomed, even if you couldn’t read French, wouldn’t you try a little harder to read the farewell letter they sent you? Or maybe find a French friend who could translate the letter for you?  

In retaliation for whatever happened between Alabama and the French aviator, David has an affair with Gabrielle Gibbs, who is an actress playing a dancer. Gibbs seems to be a stand-in for the ballerina Isadora Duncan. I don’t think any biographer has claimed that Isadora Duncan had a fling with Scott, but they apparently flirted so much when they met that Zelda threw herself down a flight of stone steps. Miraculously, Zelda was unharmed. 

Save Me the Waltz made me wonder if the Fitzgerald’s acquaintance with Isadora Duncan was the spark that re-ignited Zelda’s passion for ballet? It’s after David’s affair with Gabrielle Gibbs that Alabama throws herself into the ballet. For me, the novel improved once Alabama took up the ballet, as it gave the book more narrative focus.  

As in Zelda’s real life, the ballet becomes an all-consuming obsession for Alabama. In the novel, Alabama takes a job dancing in Naples, away from her husband and daughter Bonnie. The tragedy of Save Me the Waltz is that just as Alabama seems to find some meaning in her life through the ballet, she loses everything else. Her relationship with David becomes more strained. For me, the saddest part of the novel was when Alabama is with Bonnie in Naples, and she can’t relate to her daughter at all—the only thing she can think about is the ballet. Alabama has become a shell of a person. If this is any indication of what Zelda was actually like in 1929, it’s easy to see that she was headed towards a mental breakdown, which occurred in April of 1930.  

What is one to make of Save Me the Waltz? Zelda’s unorthodox writing style makes it a hard book to get into. But worse than that, Zelda has somehow made the story of Scott and Zelda dull. Alabama is a blank, a cipher that the reader has little access to, and David is an unappealing narcissist. 

Even Nancy Milford has trouble defending the novel on artistic grounds: “She has trouble sustaining a longer narrative and Save Me the Waltz is not an easy book to read.” (p.223) And Milford highlights the key flaw of the novel: “Perhaps that is the larger problem presented by this novel—that because it is so deeply autobiographical, the transmutation of reality into art is incomplete.” (p.224) Save Me the Waltz feels like a catalogue of events that happen, rather than a novel that has been shaped towards a definite end.  

All that being said, it’s a remarkable achievement for Zelda Fitzgerald that Save Me the Waltz was written at all. After her mental breakdown in April of 1930, Zelda spent 15 months in Swiss sanitariums, then returned home to Montgomery, Alabama. Her father died two months later. In February 1932, Zelda had her second mental breakdown. She finished the first draft of the novel very quickly, just a month later.  

And there are passages in Save Me the Waltz of clear writing and sharp dialogue, as when David says, “People are like almanacs, Bonnie—you never can find the information you’re looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.” (p.181) That’s just brilliant.  

After initially being rather perturbed that his wife had written a novel and sent it to his editor Maxwell Perkins without telling him, Scott had praise for Save Me the Waltz, writing to Perkins in May 1932, “It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to it to tell. It has the faults & virtues of a first novel. It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward, Angel than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemmingway. It should interest the many thousands interested in dancing. It is about something & absolutely new, & should sell.” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, p.176) Yes, Fitzgerald hardly ever spelled Hemingway’s last name correctly. And Scott was quite right to compare Save Me the Waltz to Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel, as both novels have the same quality of being nakedly autobiographical.  

In the same letter, Scott, knowing that Hemingway had a book in the works, had some advice for Perkins: “Ernest told me once he would ‘never publish a book in the same season with me,’ meaning it would lead to ill-feeling. I advise you, if he is in New York, (and always granting you like Zelda’s book) do not praise it, or even talk about it to him!...There is no possible conflict between the books but there has always been a subtle struggle between Ernest & Zelda & any opposition might have curiously grave consequences—curious, that is, to un-jealous men like you and me.” (p.176) This letter just makes me laugh, thinking about poor Scott, trying to keep both his friend and his wife happy, wanting to avoid the “curiously grave consequences.” As it happened, Save Me the Waltz was released just two weeks after Hemingway’s non-fiction book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.  

Save Me the Waltz was not a sales success. The first printing was roughly 3,000 copies, and slightly fewer than half of them were sold: 1,392, according to Nancy Milford’s biography. (p.264) The novel was out of print for many years, before finally being reissued in 1967. Save Me the Waltz remains essential reading for anyone interested in the life stories of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.