Their Better Halves
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Vera,” “Oona,” “Hadley,” “Nora,” and of course that perennial, “Zelda” – why this trend in lives of wives? – if it can be called a trend, given that it began as long ago as 1970, with Nancy Milford’s biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s troubled spouse. That year was a watershed for the women’s movement and the renaissance of feminism, which also kindled the publication of tracts such as “Sexual Politics” and “The Female Eunuch.” These books sold well – as I can testify myself. The hunger for feminist/revisionist biographies eventually provoked me to write a biography of Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn. My line was that this powerful woman with her own career deserved better than being treated as an adjunct to a great man.
Biography often arises as an impulse to do justice, or to pay homage, to a life. Milford saw Zelda as Fitzgerald’s equal in many respects. In their more recent biographies of her, Kendall Taylor and Sally Cline implied that the wife was, from certain angles, his superior. Linda Wagner-Martin’s new biography, “Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life,” reads rather like a synthesis of the Taylor/Cline line, although it is a mystery to me why Ms. Wagner-Martin frequently cites Ms. Taylor but never Ms. Cline, except in the bibliography.
Ms. Wagner-Martin is especially good on showing why biographers must rewrite one another and illuminate major subjects like the works of Fitzgerald from new vantage points. Thus she titles a section of the chapter on “Zelda as Patient,” “Problems of ‘Reading’ The Fitzgerald Story”: “One of the dilemmas throughout Zelda’s treatment had been the presumed definiteness of her diagnosis.” Like Ms. Cline, Ms. Wagner-Martin doubts the Milford/Taylor view that Zelda was a schizophrenic: “Zelda’s pervasive eczema and her battery of fatigue symptoms were more easily recognized as markers of systemic lupus erythematosus. Of lupus patients today, it is though that 15 percent of them have been erroneously diagnosed as schizophrenic.”
Even better is Ms. Wagner-Martin’s shrewd point that biographers have sometimes tried too hard to find sequence and pattern in meager evidence:
Another difficulty in telling the Fitzgeralds’ story accurately is tracking cause-and-effect relationships in the events of their lives through their chary record-keeping. Zelda seldom dated any of her letters; neither kept a journal or diary, and even Scott’s Ledger was to end in 1936. Combined with their frequent moves, which was their pattern long before Zelda’s illness, the paucity of accurate information keeps most conclusions tentative.
Zelda’s madness – if that is what it was – segued into her final intensely religious phase – one that, Ms. Wagner-Martin points out, made “others uncomfortable” (including certain biographers, I would add). But this religiosity, the biographer emphasizes, “added immensely” to Zelda’s own existence. Ms. Wagner-Martin honors the integrity of her subject’s experience by concluding her biography with Zelda’s letter to her daughter Scottie: “I simply must … offer you whatever tragic experience has mercifully indicated to be the best way of life: whatever will yield the deepest spiritual reward for what you put in. It isn’t just a frustrate [sic] inhibited desire to assert myself, but my deepest love that makes me want you to love God and pray.”
A cynic might contend that the trend in lives of wives is merely market-driven; such biographies are what publishers can sell and what biographers, looking for some new twist in familiar stories, can promote. Do we really need an other biography of Nabokov, Hemingway, Fitzgerald – why not shift ground and write about the wife? But in a sense the lives of wives return us to Samuel Johnson’s injunction to biographers: Abjure the obsession with “vulgar greatness” and focus on “domestick privacies.” He saw drama in the everyday that gives the lie to every book reviewer who begins plaintively: “Do we really need a life of so-and-so?”
Brenda Maddox recounts in her introduction to “Nora” (Dimensions, 512 pages, $14) that Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann had told her that no biography of Nora was needed. Indeed, he did not think Ms. Maddox could find enough material for a book. For one thing, Nora wrote no letters; Joyce himself said so. Well, Maddox discovered that Nora did write letters, and that this unliterary woman wrote as she talked, with a verve that not only entertained but also influenced her husband’s literary style. Although Ellmann died before he was able to read Maddox’s 500-plus page book, she had the satisfaction of hearing him say he had been wrong.
But why would Ellmann be so incurious about Nora to begin with? Certainly she is a considerable figure in his Joyce biography. But she is really presented there only as Joyce’s inspiration, as a way to bring out his many sided personality. There is a sense in which Ellmann never thought about Nora herself.
I do not point out Nora’s subordination in Ellmann as a fault. His main concern was Joyce and what those around him contributed to his being Joyce. Or, if Ellmann is at fault, then so are all biographers, who are obliged to subject everyone but the main character to secondary status.
At best, the biographer can portray the interplay of personalities, as Ann Waldron does in “Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance,” which is not only a vibrant portrait of Gordon’s marriage to Allen Tate but also a wonderful gallery of depictions that includes Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, John Peale Bishop, Donald Davidson, Malcolm Cowley, Ford Madox Ford, Josephine Herbst, Andrew Lytle, Katherine Anne Porter, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren.
In general, the husbands have not seen, or did not want to see, or did not wish others to see, how central their wives were to their work. Thus Stacy Schiff appended this epigraph to the introduction of her biography of Vera Nabokov (Modern Library, 480 pages, $14.95):
INTERVIEWER: Could you say how important your wife has been as a collaborator in your work?
NABOKOV: No, I could not.
– “The Listener,” October 23, 1969
Could not or would not? Vera, it is not an exaggeration to say, not only ran the business of her husband’s life, she translated for him and even in some cases provided the material for his work. He was uxorious, yet when it came to the moment when he might offer tribute or simple acknowledgment of her crucial role, he declined.
Perhaps Nabokov felt nothing he could say would be commensurate with Vera’s centrality. Perhaps, like many writers, he just did not want to discuss the behind-the-scenes activity that made his working life possible. Perhaps he wanted his books, not his biography, to shine.
But it is literary biography’s mission to construct the universe in which the writer operates. I would say, in fact, that it is more important to re-create that world than it is for the biographer to write even a word of literary criticism. W.A. Swanburg published a splendid biography of Theodore Dreiser without providing much, if any, of what could be termed literary analysis. To Modernist critics, this kind of biography is serviceable at best and expendable at worst, since it does not seem to acknowledge the importance of the work. They are wrong. But then they have not read – or they have forgotten – Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” and his incomparable biography of Richard Savage.
To take one final example, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti has just published the first volume of “Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life” (University of Missouri Press, 312 pages, $44.95), which seeks to emancipate this vivid artist – an accomplished painter, an observant travel writer, and a woman far more worldly than her husband – from the subordinate role Nathaniel and his biographers had accorded her. Perhaps Ms. Valenti pursues her thesis a little too strenuously – as does Sally Cline in her vindication of Zelda – but her evocation of Sophia as a woman who brought her reclusive husband into a much fuller engagement with life and literature now emerges far more clearly.
Vera’s and Sophia’s lives are of keen interest just now, as women more than ever seek their place both at home and in the world. Biography has its special role to play in the lives of these emerging selves. If I return to Stacy Schiff’s “Vera” as perhaps the model for future lives of women, it is because of the last paragraph in her introduction, which seems to strike exactly the right balance for a biography – one fraught with an irony even that old misogynist Samuel Johnson might savor:
This volume is not one of literary criticism. From the earliest to the final days, Vera Nabokov’s was a life steeped in literature, for which she had a supremely sensitive ear, a prodigious memory, and a near-religious appreciation. But she was not a writer. She was just a wife.