Cautionary Tale From the<i> Other</i> Fitzgerald : ZELDA FITZGERALD:: The Collected Writings, <i> Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli,</i> Charles Scribners Sons, $24.95; 488 pages

We can learn a lot from the collected works of Zelda Fitzgerald. We can either fall into the heavy drama of taking sides between her and her famous husband, Scott: He was a genius; she was a nut case. Or, alternately, she was a genius; he was a tiresome drunk who wrote one great book.

Or we can tsk-tsk about drinking and spending money and we can congratulate ourselves on how far we are from all that now.

(The editor here, Matthew J. Bruccoli, is so into the alcoholism of it all that when 19-year-old Zelda thanks her bashful beau in a love letter for a bottle of perfume, Bruccoli explains the girl’s reference to the “dusky, dreamy smell--a smell of dying moons and shadows” as a description of “a bottle of liquor.”)

This book is really a study of what New Age people might refer to as “a scarcity consciousness.” When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about emotional and spiritual bankruptcy late in his life, he wasn’t exaggerating. He was a man who had always thought there was never enough, and he was convinced that whatever little he had, people were going to take it away from him.

Those familiar with “Save Me the Waltz” recall it as Zelda Fitzgerald’s first and only novel. They will also remember that in 1931-32, Scott had a conniption fit when he read the manuscript because he was convinced that his wife was stealing his own material, which he intended to use in “Tender Is the Night.”

Rereading “Save Me the Waltz” again, 38 years after it was reprinted in 1953, a more sobering fact becomes evident: It was scarcely about their life at all. It was about her life.

“Save Me the Waltz” divides into three parts: the first about Zelda’s Southern childhood, a smaller middle part about her marriage and her lover, and then a very long section about the heroine’s struggle to become a ballet dancer--to master her body and the concomitant agony that came from being separated from her daughter.

In other words, in terms of pure page-counting, Scott and Zelda’s life-as-a-couple is very dimly realized. How much easier it must have been for Scott Fitzgerald to accuse his wife of “stealing his material” than to admit cheerfully to his friends and enemies: “Hey! According to my wife here, I’m kind of a minor, second-rater. I bitch about baby-sitters and missing buttons, and I don’t have any good conversation!”

Zelda bought into his fears. Her play, “Scandalabra,” should be read by every writing student. It is a perfect example of the horror that can result when you don’t write about what you know.

(Bruccoli writes: “Fitzgerald had forbidden her to write fiction that would preempt material he wanted for ‘Tender Is the Night.’ If she wrote a play, it must not be about psychiatry, nor should its locale be the Riviera or Switzerland; moreover, Fitzgerald must be given the right to approve her idea.”)

“Scandalabra” is, then, about nothing at all. Scott robbed Zelda of her life, and later stole her stories, putting his byline on stories that she wrote.

But the point is not that he was a mean drunk and that she was a victim; that is to say, one of them was right, the other one was wrong. Rather, the point was and is: Writers and artists and husbands and wives don’t get anywhere trying to destroy each other.

Fitzgerald got his karmuppance by running out of subject matter and money and friends. It’s not that what he (or she) did was wrong; it’s that destruction for the sake of destruction simply doesn’t work.

Thank God for Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. For Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich. For Lionel Rolfe and Nigey Lennon. For all those married writers who have learned in the last 20 or 30 years that you don’t have to succeed artistically by destroying somebody else.

Life is so large, and human experience so varied and amazing, that we all could write a hundred novels and there would be more--so much more--that would not have even been touched. You don’t have to be a mean, self-serving, self-destructive beanbag to be a great artist, either.

Maybe they still teach that in English classes, but in what we are pleased to think of as the real world, it’s well known that the worse the writer is, the worse his disposition. The better the writer is, the nicer it is to be in his or her company.

Read these works of Zelda Fitzgerald as a cautionary tale--an example of how not to behave, an example of how not to get trampled into extinction.

NEXT: John Wilkes reviews “The Bird of Light” by John Hay (W.W. Norton).