Whose Life Is It to Write About?

The other day Joyce and I were cruising along, and I recited for her (as I do now and then) a poem I'd memorized--this time, a very brief one by Emily Dickinson:

WE never know we go,—when we are going       

  We jest and shut the door;      

Fate following behind us bolts it,             

 And we accost no more.

She told me she was planning to use a line from it in the new book she's working on. I joked: "You're stealing from me--again!" (Yes, yes, yes--I was joking.)

And I remembered the contentious argument(s) that consumed Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald when she decided that she would like to do some writing. He claimed that their lives together were his to write about; he was the writer in the family; etc.

I guess that could be an issue if there were two writers in the family. As you travel through your lives together, wouldn't the question come up, Whose life is it to write about?

As Joyce and I near wedding anniversary number 50 (!), I have to say that question has never come up in our marriage, our professional lives. She's always let me know that I can write about whatever I want to--and the reverse is true, as well.

Our accounts, fictional or otherwise, would never be the same anyhow. Although the external events are often the same--say, our trip to Grand Manan Island to see where Willa Cather, later in her life, spent her summers writing--how those events drift through the mind and heart cannot help but be different. What I'm thinking, remembering, feeling, associating, etc. will resemble in some ways what Joyce is going through (after all, we have shared three-quarters of our lives together), but those thoughts, memories, etc. will also be fundamentally different. And, I believe, both valid and interesting and even unique.

That said, there are also things I don't really write about because I believe they are principally hers. I mean, I wouldn't write a book about John Brown (not that I could!) on the heels of hers. Nor do I expect to see under her name a new biography of Jack London.

On the other hand, as I think about it, why not? The experiences I had with John Brown--the experiences she had with Jack London--they are just different. I mean, I know Joyce could write a surpassing memoir about being with me through much of my London obsession--just as I could write a (less) surpassing one about being with her through much of her John Brown travels.

But I don't think either of us would do that, out of deference. But not--most assuredly not--out of the this-life-is-mine! concept of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda, by the way, wrote one novel--Save Me the Waltz, 1932--which deeply annoyed Scott, who insisted she revise it because it dealt in some ways with the experiences he was using in Tender Is the Night, 1934.

Zelda was very concerned about his reaction (she was in a ... facility ... at the time), and she wrote to him in March 1932: "We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you. I was also afraid we might have touched the same material" (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 289). (Italics in the original.)

Awkward.

But, as I've implied/said above, I have never felt for a single second that Joyce has used "my" story--for "my" story, you see, is also her story. And I know she feels the same--about "her" story and "my" story.