Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48) is an undeniably fascinating character. Once you've read her only completed novel, Save Me the Waltz, you can't help but want to find out more.

And Superzelda offers a pleasantly quirky way to do that. It's a graphic novel by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta; it was published in 2011; and its subtitle is The Illustrated Life of Zelda Fitzgerald. (It is available in English, and in that version the subtitle is rendered as The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald. I think the word "graphic" introduces an ambiguity that is not present in the original. Correct me if I'm wrong...)


The Italian version is available from Internet Archive

I'm not a connoisseur of graphic novels. But I find these drawings really engaging. Just blue, black, and white. I don't know how it looks on the printed page, but the blue you see on screen is very cool. The frames are of varying sizes; they're assembled in a variety of layouts. Your eye is constantly pleased.

The text is very closely anchored to actual documents, quoting not only from Scott and Zelda themselves but also from the many contemporaries who recorded their impressions. Superzelda packs a lot into a small space.


These chapter-opening images change as Zelda ages

The book wafts us gently through her early days in Montgomery, Alabama (from a bright and headstrong child she morphs into a fearless and unconventional young woman), her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their subsequent wedding (on 3 April 1920).




"I was a hyperactive and tireless child. I was independent and courageous, and I didn't care about anything or anyone. Even though I almost always played alone."


The wedding

They're a notoriously colourful couple, and their relationship is tumultuous and unconventional. Zelda never pretended to want to play the housewife:


Asked to contribute a recipe to a celebrity cookbook, she offered this: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high..."

When she gives birth to Scottie, their daughter (in 1921), she famously hopes the little girl will be "a beautiful little fool", because that's the best way for females to get on in life.

But she also pushes back against the airhead image. "The strongest cry against Flapperdom," she wrote in an essay published in Metropolitan in June 1922, "is that it is making the youth of the country cynical." But she disagrees: "It is making them intelligent and teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young."


Eulogy on the Flapper



In the autumn of 1923, Zelda is interviewed by the Baltimore Sun. She talks about her writing ("I like to write. Do you know, I thought my husband should write a perfectly good ending to one of the tales, and he wouldn’t! He called them ‘lop-sided’ too! Said that they began at the end") and about Scott's ("I love Scott’s books and heroines. I like the ones that are like me! That’s why I love Rosalind in This Side of Paradise... I like girls like that... I like their courage, their recklessness, and spendthriftness. Rosalind was the original American flapper").

Zelda does write, but not much. Between 1922 and 1923, she publishes two stories, a review, and at least two articles, earning a total of USD 1300. Otherwise, it's party-going and drinking (how to make a gin rickey: Ice, the juice of half a lemon, add gin, soda, and the zest of a lime). But celebrity and parties don't make them happy. They fight. They make up. Rinse. Repeat.

As we've famously heard, from Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, from Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach and James Charters, the Fitzgeralds travelled to France in 1924, and moved backwards and forwards between Europe and the US for many years.


The Fitzgeralds' passport photo

During their first visit, Scott writes The Great Gatsby. Zelda swims, parties -- and gets bored. This is when she falls in love with French aviator Edouard Jozan. Nothing comes of it. In September Zelda attempts suicide. But by October everything is almost back to the way it was. With squabbles, of course.



Italy. More famous people. More parties. More drinking.

They return to France, and this is the time of Hemingway and Stein and all the others. Stein admires Scott's writing, and there's a nice little sketch of the six of them: Stein, Toklas, the Hemingways, and the Fitzgeralds. But I notice that they're all sitting round as a group, and as we know, this is an unlikely scenario, as wives were always given over to Alice's care...

But there's something fundamentally wrong with the Fitzgerald relationship. Zelda is jealous of Scott's work, and Scott is jealous of Zelda. Zelda tries to stop him writing, and Scott tries to stop Zelda meeting people.

In a summer of parties, Zelda perpetuates her flapper image. She says she wants to bring up her daughter to do what she likes, without worrying what other people will think: "I don't want Scottie to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful."

Their flamboyant lifestyle continues, likewise the drama. "The aftermath of an evening with the Fitzgeralds," says Edmund Wilson, "was a notoriously painful experience."

The pursuit of excellence in ballet -- described so poignantly in novel form in Save Me the Waltz -- also comes to the fore here. Whether they're in the US or in France, Zelda dances. She dances, she says, to chase away her demons, to attain (through supreme effort) the peace that comes only with self-assurance. She dances to command her emotions.

But actually it's destabilizing her still further. By Chapter 12, we're in 1930, and into the first hospitalizations. There follows a round of temporary recoveries and discharges, followed by relapses, hallucinations, suicide attempts, and re-admissions. In the midst of all this, she writes her novel. Scott is anxious to police her writing. And he continues drinking. Tender is the Night appears, and it contains entire sentences taken from Zelda's letters.


A self-portrait

April 1940. Zelda is discharged yet again, and goes to live with her mother. She walks, she gardens, she helps out at the Red Cross. She doesn't write; she doesn't paint. The effort it costs her to stay out of the clinic exhausts her. She and Scott still write to each other (but they haven't seen each other since the previous year). He sends her flowers for her 40th birthday.

In December 1940, Scott has a series of heart attacks, and dies. He is buried -- but not in a Catholic cemetery, because his books are banned by the church.


"I miss him..." This image is very poignant. Isolated in space, it contrasts starkly with the busyness of the other pages

Zelda is too ill to stay out of clinics for long. And in 1948, she dies tragically in a fire at Highland Hospital, along with several other women.

In 1975, the Catholic Church annulled their decision not to bury Scott, and the remains of both Fitzgeralds were transferred to the cemetery of St Mary's, Rockville, Maryland. On the tombstone are engraved those poignant final words of The Great Gatsby: "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

***

I knew the bones of this story, but not much of the detail. I found it interesting. And I enjoyed the different format.

I suppose the question is this: Why a comic? What can a comic offer that a straightforward biography can't?

Aside from making Zelda's life accessible to a wider range of people, I think the format perhaps better reflects the playfulness, daring, defiance, and joie de vivre that are often submerged by accounts of the dark sides of her life.

I'm not sure I would have liked Zelda, but for sure she was a force of nature... Pictures can render this dynamism more easily than words.

An article by Erin Bass comments on the origins of Superzelda: "The idea came about after [Lo Porto] and Marotta created a graphic review of Alabama Song, a fictional biography of Zelda by French writer Gilles Leroy [wah... I didn't even know about that one...], for an Italian weekly newspaper. 'We totally fell in love with Zelda and came up first with the name Superzelda, then with the idea of writing a graphic novel about her life.'... Lo Porto researched Zelda’s life for six months... Marotta referenced period photographs to represent the characters, their clothing, surroundings and energy of the era."

Here, the creators explain: "It was immediately clear that any attempt to reduce Zelda to an image, to a figure, would have been pointless. Zelda has made herself elusive, never truly to be grasped even in part, always changing, like all of us, with only a few consistent hints: The minimal mouth, the strong posture, the round face and the hawk's eyes." Zelda avoided the Roaring Twenties cliches, they say. "Scott, on the other hand, was probably a drawing even in life. There's practically no image that portrays him without a suit, complete with waistcoat and tie, slicked hair parted in the middle and a few stray tufts on the back of his neck."

They're very conscious of the way Zelda infuses popular culture (did you know Being Boring by the Pet Shop Boys is inspired by a quote from Zelda Fitzgerald...?).

Designing Superzelda, they say, involved "a meticulous search for atmosphere, places, gestures, materials, and objects -- for light". They continue: "In Superzelda our heroine is related as a comic, but not with the aim of making her anything different from the irreverent and brilliant girl she was in reality. We drew her to make her adventures more authentic than those of the heroines in her husband's novel. The environments in which our characters move are authentic (whether hotels, psychiatric clinics, or cars). Authentic, too, is that she is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not, as happens with real people."

You can't help feeling that Zelda, who longed to be remembered, would have approved:


Zelda in a letter to Scott, 1919: "And in a hundred years' time, I think it will please me to know that young people are wondering if I had blue eyes or brown. Of course, they are neither one nor the other"