by Andrew Farah
Once the Allies controlled Italy, Pound was taken into custody by the U.S. military, which, misunderstanding his situation, was actually quite eager to help. Though he was handcuffed, he believed he was headed for a plane to the States, where he would aid his government by sharing his intimate knowledge of the Italian situation. He was instead imprisoned and charged with treason. When he was taken to his holding cage, he thought it was just a temporary stop. And, as he realized over the next few weeks that he was there to stay, he was truly mystified. The military had constructed a prison, the Disciplinary and Training Center, or DTC, outside Pisa, for its most recalcitrant offenders. It also served as a temporary jail for the most violent criminals, such as rapists and murderers who were awaiting transfer to the United States for federal trials.
Pound was held in a primitive “tiger cage,” which was essentially a dog kennel of only 100 square feet. It had a concrete floor and a sloped roof, so there was minimal protection from the elements. Though he was not a violent man, his cage was reinforced with metal strips used in the construction of runways. Other prisoners were given basic army pup tents to protect them from the rain and sun, but for a period of time Ezra was denied even this flimsy shelter, and he slept on a stack of rain-soaked blankets. The sun scorched him during the day, and searchlights kept him up at night. He was already delusional, and the brutal conditions forced a complete psychotic break. His head, he later reported, simply felt “empty.”29
Pound was eventually brought to U.S. soil. Though his holding conditions were more humane, he never fully recovered, and he still faced a serious charge. Many of the colleagues he had helped in the 1920s did not forget or betray him, and once Archie MacLeish had arranged for Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot to support Pound’s release, Hemingway also agreed to sign the letter. MacLeish then pleaded his case to the attorney general: “Sure I signed it,” Hemingway said. “Pound’s crazy. All poets are.… They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history’s sake we shouldn’t keep him there.”30 But Hemingway was too astute to accept the myth that all poets are by necessity psychotic, though this is a common defense of Pound—that his genius was so eccentric as to be otherworldly (even one of his psychiatrists described him as having been a “peculiar individual for many, many years”).31
Hemingway realized that Pound’s support of Mussolini and his misguided cheerleading for fascism were clear signs of illness, and the medical vocabulary with which he defined it was no less accurate than that of Pound’s own psychiatrists. In 1943, Hemingway wrote to MacLeish while Pound was still in Italy, engaged in rambling “anti-American” broadcasts, and asked MacLeish, “Will you please send the photostats of Ezra’s broadcasts that you have? Whenever the damned business comes up we will probably be called on, or should be called on, and I think should know what it is all about. If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto although maybe earlier. He has certainly lived with very little dignity for a man who gave his allegiance to a government simply because under that government he was treated seriously. But it is a pathological business all the way through and he should not be punished on any other basis” (emphasis added).32
When MacLeish had complied with Hemingway’s request, he wrote back, “Thanks for sending the [photo]stats of Ezra’s rantings. He is obviously crazy. I think you might prove he was crazy as far back as the latter Cantos. He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule. He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of. He has a long history of generosity and unselfish aid to other artists and he is one of the greatest of liveing poets. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warpeing and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgment should defend him and explain him on that basis. It will be a completely unpopular but an absolutely necessary thing to do. I have had no correspondence with him for ten years and the last time I saw him was in 1933 when Joyce asked me to come to make it easier haveing Ezra at his house. Ezra was moderately whacky then. The broadcast are absolutely balmy.… But you can count on me for anything an honest man should do” (emphasis added).33
Hemingway’s stance is clear. Being an “honest man,” he had not forgotten his debt to Pound, and ultimately he made good on his promise, signing MacLeish’s letter. But he also fully understood Pound to be psychotic and understood that his behaviors were driven by his illness. Hemingway even knew this was essentially Pound’s only defense. Yet, despite these insights, he wrote that Ezra was still deserving of “punishment, disgrace, and mostly ridicule.”
Hemingway also wrote to Pound’s lawyer, Julien Cornell, in 1945, telling him that he had known for many years that Pound’s mental condition was far from normal. Pound was deemed too psychotic to participate in his own treason trial and was never expected to recover. Thus, he was held for more than a decade on the basis of the Kafkaesque argument that he was awaiting a trial that could never occur because he would always be too insane to participate. Given the charge of treason, he simply couldn’t be released, though everyone involved agreed he posed no danger to the public. Pound suffered from a bipolar disorder, and he was one of the 5 percent of bipolar patients who spend their lives in a “hypomanic” state, an abnormal and expansive mood but still a blunted form of mania. He did have bouts of mania, as well as delusions, and his obsessions were more fodder for his pressured, restless mind. Later in Pound’s life, the manias burned out and left him facing depressive and catatonic phases. Though not a member of the Lost Generation, he functioned as Manet did for the Impressionists—as the older mentor. Yet he outlived Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway.
One year and nine months after Hemingway penned his reply to MacLeish, Pound would be caged, warehoused, and suffer more punishment, disgrace, and ridicule than Hemingway could imagine. Pound would sit for more than a decade in what Hemingway called “the loony bin.” However, true to his word, and helping in any way he could, Hemingway sent Pound a check for $1,000 in 1956. Pound had it set in Plexiglas to use as a paperweight. He said he didn’t need the money.
And, of course, there was Zelda Fitzgerald, who said she heard flowers talking to her and whose psychosis was evident to Hemingway from their first encounter; after spending time with her at the Fitzgeralds’ Paris apartment in 1925, Hemingway didn’t even wait for Scott to return. As they passed in the hallway of the building, he said, “But Scott you realize, don’t you, that she’s crazy?”34 He saw Zelda as poison to Scott: “A man who suffers from a woman … has a more incurable disease than cancer.… A woman ruined Scott. It wasn’t just Scott ruining himself. But why couldn’t he have told her to go to hell? Because she was sick. It’s being sick makes them act so bloody awful usually and it’s because they’re sick you can’t treat them as you should.… You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. Sick in the head or sick anywhere.”35
Ernest had no difficulties trading in perfectly healthy women for newer models. And, curiously, he had first elaborated this same theme as an even younger man, three years before meeting Scott and Zelda, when writing to his friend Ezra Pound in 1922. He knew that Ezra and T. S. Eliot were close. He also knew that Eliot had been recovering from depression and writer’s block in Lausanne and that Eliot’s wife suffered from a psychotic disorder (probably schizophrenia) when he wrote: “I am glad to read of Herr Elliot’s [sic] adventure away from impeccability. If Herr Elliot would strangle his sick wife … he might write an even better poem.”36
Zelda’s brother, Anthony, committed suicide by jumping from a hospital window in Mobile, Alabama, when Zelda was thirty-three.37 He had been hospitalized specifically for psychiatric treatment. And Zelda was frequently suicidal, attempting to throw herself in front of a train on one occasion and at times catatonic; she required multip
le hospitalizations through her life. To Hemingway, she was the ruin of Scott, forever trying to “put him out of business,” and not just because she was psychotic. He wrote to Scott just after the publication of Tender Is the Night, telling him that “I liked it and I didn’t like it.” And also: “Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It’s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course you’re a rummy.” It seems a letter from Ernest was worth a year of therapy.
And Zelda was no fan of Hemingway either, his machismo being a caricature to her (she even told Scott that his friend was “a phony”). Yet, when suffering from psychotic episodes, she often expressed her delusional belief that her husband and Ernest were guilty of an ongoing homosexual affair—perhaps fueled by the fact that Ernest and Scott frequently teased each other in public with homosexual innuendos in mockeffeminate voices.
The shorthand understanding of the Fitzgeralds was that Scott drank because Zelda was psychotic and that Zelda was psychotic because Scott was a drunk. Scott stated this plainly in a letter from 1932: “Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgment would mean anything. The former class would be composed of those who had seen me unpleasantly drunk and the latter of those who had seen Zelda unpleasantly psychotic. These two classes would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other—in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives. Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucination.”38
Zelda’s psychotic disorder would have manifested itself with or without Scott’s alcoholism, and Scott needed no excuses to lift a glass. The last sentence represents denial of delusional proportions. Scott was pretending he was not the very caricature of the drunkard who is alternately disruptive and pathetic—and he strangely romanticized his spouse, who had one of the most torturing of illnesses. In 1933, Scott told one of Zelda’s doctors that “I am perfectly determined that I am going to take three or four drinks a day.” If he followed doctors’ advice and quit drinking altogether, he explained, Zelda and her family “would always think that that was an acknowledgement that I was responsible for her insanity.”39
Zelda wrote to her sister in 1947: “I have not been well. I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly and faithfully asking God to help me, I cannot understand why He leaves me in suffering.” That same year she again sought treatment at a sanatorium familiar to her, Highlands Hospital, in Asheville, North Carolina.40
Her last doctor, Robert Carroll, had pioneered certain unique “therapies” such as administering a lumbar puncture in order to inject the spinal fluid of his patients with honey, placental blood, horse blood, and even hypertonic solutions (liquids with a greater salt concentration than normal bodily fluids).41 His patients who managed a recovery did so despite the odd toxic and physiological stressors he placed on their nervous systems. But he also administered insulin coma and electroconvulsive treatments. We know that Zelda received some ECT therapy while in Asheville, and though Dr. Carroll declared her well enough for discharge in early March 1948, she decided to stay on a bit longer to be sure of her recovery.
Normally she slept in an unlocked room, but on the night of March 11, she was given sedatives and was drifting off in a locked room on the top floor when a fire broke out in the kitchen. The same nurse who had minutes before given Zelda her medication noticed the blaze and began evacuating patients on the lower floors. She called the fire department forty-five minutes later, but by that time the fire had spread upward through the dumbwaiter shaft, setting each floor ablaze all the way to the roof. The New York Herald Tribune reported that only one patient on the top floor was able to break out a window and leap to safety, while Zelda and the others perished. Her remains were identified only by her slippers.
Hemingway was aware of this tragedy, but it didn’t soften his opinion of Zelda. After his marriage to Martha Gellhorn had deteriorated, in 1948 he wrote to Charles Scribner, blasting Martha in a number of ways, but concluded, “[I]f she were ever burned alive like Scott’s poor bloody crazy career destroying wife I would just hope she took a good deep breath quick of the flames and think no more of it.”42 (A line from Brideshead Revisited explains perfectly Hemingway’s sentiment: “When people hate with all that energy, it’s something in themselves they’re hating.”)43 It has been suggested that Zelda and her destructive psychosis possessed archetypal power in Hemingway’s mind—and simply noting how many times her career-destroying abilities are mentioned in his Selected Letters makes this a convincing idea.44
Scott’s mental difficulties were viewed no more sympathetically than Zelda’s by Hemingway. Shortly after Scott published the second of his three essays concerning his depression in Esquire (“The Crack-Up” and “Pasting It Together” were the first two, with “Handle with Care” on the way), in which he described how he had mortgaged himself “physically and spiritually up to the hilt,” Ernest wrote to Maxwell Perkins: “Feel awfully about Scott … he seems to almost take pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming too. I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public. Good God, people go through that emptiness many times in life and come out and do good work.”45
Perhaps his cruelty toward Scott in A Moveable Feast can be partly explained by this resentment. Scott was gifted with the greatest of talent, a talent that Hemingway had had to earn. Scott’s talent could be liberating and profitable, and his work should have been his therapy and cure. Instead, he bellyached openly and became a public martyr. The lifelong relationship between the two was complex. Artistically, Fitzgerald was Pissarro, technically beautiful and colorful but lacking the weight and depth that the rugged Hemingway, the Cézanne, possessed. As Hemingway ascended in fame and self-confidence, Fitzgerald declined, as if their mutual gravitational fields gradually pushed them farther apart on opposite paths.
Fitzgerald, designated by scholars as Hemingway’s Dorian Gray,46 was certainly rock-bottom when he attempted suicide. He was alone and drunk in Asheville while Zelda was hospitalized at Highlands Hospital just after a stay at Sheppard-Pratt. Scott was also recovering from a dislocated shoulder he had sustained diving from a fifteen-foot springboard into a shallow pool eight weeks earlier. He had just read the front-page article about himself in the New York Post: “The poet-prophet of the postwar neurotics observed his fortieth birthday yesterday in his bedroom in the Grove Park Inn here. He spent the day as he spends all his days—trying to come back from the other side of Paradise, the hell of despondency in which he has writhed for the past couple of years.” The interviewer also described his “jittery jumping off and onto his bed, his restless pacing, his trembling hands, his twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child … his frequent trips to a highboy, in a drawer of which lay a bottle. Each time he poured a drink into the measuring glass beside his table, he would look appealingly at the nurse and ask, ‘Just one ounce?’”47
After reading these words, he overdosed on a phial of morphine, but the contents were mostly thrown up. The reason that the Grove Park Inn had ordered him to have a nurse in attendance if he wished to stay there was related an earlier clumsy attempt, which involved discharging a firearm in his rooms. Thus, even when he attempted suicide, Fitzgerald’s efforts were weak and ineffectual when contrasted with Hemingway’s.
Like many who contemplate suicide, Fitzgerald was deterred by considering his child, his daughter, Scottie: “seeing her,” he wrote to his St. Paul friend, Oscar Kalman, “you will see how much I still have to li
ve for, in spite of a year in a slough of despond.”48 And he was at least considering Ernest’s version of harsh reality-based therapy: “There has been some question in my mind whether I should ever have written the Esquire articles. Ernest Hemingway wrote me an irritable letter in which he bawled me out for having been so public about what were essentially private affairs and should be written about in fiction or not at all.”49
He left the Grove Park in December 1936 to lodge in a top-floor room at the Oak Hall Hotel, in Tryon, North Carolina, about forty-five miles southeast of Asheville. He had achieved sobriety for stretches of time in the winter and spring of 1935 in Tryon, and with the help of a local doctor he managed to stay sober again, indulging instead on milkshakes and coffee at the local drug store. It was during this period of recovery, when his agent was arranging his $1,000-a-week MGM contract, that he learned of the death of Gerald and Sara Murphy’s son, after they had already lost their only other son to tuberculosis. Scott sent the couple one of the most touching letters ever penned:
Dearest Gerald and Sara:
The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that [it] is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice. I can see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln’s in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.
But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria [their daughter] and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort of joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.50