Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  “The Swimmers,” like “One Trip Abroad,” sacrifices intensity by portraying events that occur over a period of several years. The three accidental meetings with the American girl (who may have been based on Lois Moran) and the contrived happy ending are rather implausible. Fitzgerald forfeits dramatic potential by not describing Marston’s sons, by not developing the character of the American girl (who is merely the symbol of a happier life), by not portraying the emotional confrontation when he discovers his wife’s first lover and, most importantly, by not explaining why Marston tolerates his wife’s infidelity or if he is in any way responsible for it. Despite these considerable flaws, “The Swimmers” effectively contrasts the European and American settings, describes the failing marriage and—through the metaphor of swimming—convincingly suggests the possibility of a “clean” new life.

  “One Trip Abroad” has a darker mood and a different pattern. In “The Swimmers” Marston moves from breakdown to health, from an adulterous wife to a revitalized existence. “One Trip Abroad” follows a downward curve as Nelson and Nicole Kelly move from happiness and health to decline and drink. The story charts the degeneration of their marriage as the Kellys travel to Algeria, Italy, France and Switzerland. Adopting the theme of the double that had been used from Hoffmann and Poe to Dostoyevsky and Stevenson, Fitzgerald has the Kellys see their own doom reflected in another shadowy but recurrent couple. But (like the Fitzgeralds) they are powerless to avoid it. The biblical plague of locusts at the beginning of the story, and the storm at the end, are—like the odor of gasoline at the beginning of “The Swimmers”—an ominous symbol of the characters’ fate.

  Fitzgerald’s brief evocations of the various locales of the story are quite brilliant: from the suggestive sounds of the Algerian oasis: “drums from Senegal, a native flute, the selfish, effeminate whine of a camel, the Arabs pattering past in shoes made of old automobile tires, the wail of Magian prayer,” to the dreary sanatoriums incongruously placed amidst the natural splendors of Switzerland: “a backdrop of mountains and waters of postcard blue, waters that are a little sinister beneath the surface with all the misery that has dragged itself here from every corner of Europe.”

  Fitzgerald also portrays incisive incidents that reveal the Kellys’ differences, disappointments and dissipations. Nelson wants to watch the naked Algerian dancers, Nicole is repelled by them. He stays, she leaves, they both become anxious and angry, and “were suddenly in a quarrel.” In Sorrento they have an unpleasant encounter with General Sir Evelyne and Lady Fragelle, who object to Nelson playing the electric piano and rudely unplug it without asking his permission. In Monte Carlo they join a crowd of drunks and parasites; and when Nicole discovers Nelson kissing another woman, they fight and he gives her a black eye. In Paris their drinking increases, and they are exploited by a Hungarian count who steals Nicole’s jewel box and tries to make Nelson pay a huge bill for the count’s boat party. On Lake Geneva, where Nicole has two operations and Nelson suffers an attack of jaundice, they are finally overcome by “the unlucky destiny that had pursued their affairs.” They now need “half a dozen drinks really to open the eyes and stiffen the mouth up to normal.”15 They do not understand why they have lost peace, love and health. But they finally begin to comprehend their fate when they recognize themselves in the elusive but persistent doubles, who have followed them through Europe.

  VI

  In October 1929, as Zelda headed for her breakdown, Scottie, an exceptionally beautiful child, was eight years old. She had been largely raised by nurses and nannies, both English and French. She had been carried from house to house, state to state, country to country. And she had been left with family or servants, paid to take care of her, when her parents took off on their travels. The Fitzgeralds loved their child and rose to grand occasions like birthdays and Christmas, but they had very little to do with Scottie’s day-to-day life.

  In Paris Scottie attended catechism classes, took dancing lessons and became fluent in French. Fitzgerald complained that during the fall and winter of 1929–30 Zelda had lost interest in the child. Zelda agreed that she hardly saw Scottie because she hated her nurse, who snored and was mean. Yet she feared that Scottie “was growing away from her before she had ever known her, that she no longer had any voice in her daughter’s life.” When asked, later on, what she thought of her mother, Scottie replied: “I didn’t know her very well.”

  Though Scottie’s relations with her father were also rather “remote,” Fitzgerald supervised her schoolwork and disciplined her when necessary. After Zelda’s breakdown, he tried to protect Scottie from the effects of that illness, and became both father and mother to her. Fitzgerald’s subtle and sensitive story, “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” (1928), illuminates his relations with the young Scottie.

  In the story, while the mother is ordering a doll’s house for the child, the father and daughter are left alone in the car. The father tells a fairy story to pass the time, to exercise his imagination, to amuse the child and, most significantly, to express his intense love for her. But the little girl is naturally more interested in the fairy tale (which she continues when he leaves off) than in her father’s feelings. When he declares his love openly instead of through the tale he invents for her, she responds dutifully rather than emotionally:

  “Listen,” said the man to the little girl, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” said the little girl, smiling politely. . . .

  “Oh, I love you,” he said.

  “I know, Daddy,” she answered, abstractedly.16

  These two brief but telling exchanges, in which the adverbs are crucial, express Fitzgerald’s fear that he could not reach his daughter’s deepest feelings, and emphasize the fragility—and possible loss—of her love.

  In February 1930 the Fitzgeralds crossed the Mediterranean to Algiers and traveled 250 miles southeast to the desert oases of Bou Saada and Biskra—the setting of André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902). This journey, during which they saw the naked Arab dancers, provided the background for “One Trip Abroad” and was mentioned in Tender Is the Night. Zelda also described the Arabian Nights setting, which reminded her of Valentino’s The Sheik, in an essay of 1934:

  The Hôtel de l’Oasis was laced together by Moorish grills; and the bar was an outpost of civilization with people accentuating their eccentricities. Beggars in white sheets were propped against the walls, and the dash of colonial uniforms gave the cafés a desperate swashbuckling air. . . . The streets crept through the town like streams of hot white lava. Arabs sold nougat and cakes of poisonous pink under the flare of open gas jets. . . . In the steep cobbled alleys we flinched at the brightness of mutton carcases swung from the butchers’ booths.

  This journey was meant to help them forget the bad times and perhaps avert the impending crisis. But Zelda was seasick on the way home, and the trip merely delayed the inevitable tragedy.

  Many of Fitzgerald’s friends—besides Dos Passos, Hemingway and the Murphys—had observed Zelda’s increasingly strange and disturbing behavior. Ellen Barry, a Riviera friend, said: “Zelda was thought to be outrageous, like a child, but not crazy.” Morley Callaghan noticed that she was extremely restless and had the unnerving habit of laughing to herself for no apparent reason. One evening she came down the stairs in a lovely gown, stood staring at John Biggs, stepped out of her evening slippers and “asked in indescribably ghastly tones: ‘John, aren’t you sorry you weren’t killed in the war?’” And Rebecca West, an acute observer, recalled: “There was something very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.”17

  Sometimes, however, she did frighten others and put their lives in danger. In September 1929, driving on the steep and curving Grand Corniche near Cannes, Zelda suddenly exclaimed: “ ‘I think I’ll turn off here,’ and had to be physically restrained from veering over a cliff.” This terrifying incident inspired one of the greatest scenes in Tender Is the N
ight when Nicole, after riding on a ferris wheel (as Zelda had done with Dos Passos), cracks up and tries to drive the car, with Dick and their children, off a high road. On another occasion, Zelda “lay down in front of a parked car and said, ‘Scott, drive over me.’ ” Fitzgerald, drunk and angry enough to call her bluff, “started the engine and had actually released the brake when someone slammed it on again.”

  Zelda’s breakdown finally occurred in April 1930 when they were living in the rue Pergolèse. Early that month, when she began to panic about being late for her dancing lesson, Oscar Kalman, who was lunching with them, offered to take her to the studio in a cab. But she remained extremely anxious, shook uncontrollably and tried to change into her ballet costume in the narrow taxi. As they ran into a traffic jam, she leapt out of the cab and started running toward the distant studio. Fitzgerald persuaded her to stop the lessons and rest for a while. But she soon returned to them and, at the end of April 1930, broke down completely.

  A few months later, as Scott and Zelda struggled to understand what had happened to them, he recounted, in a poignant letter to her, the events that seemed to mark their mutual self-destruction. He refused to attach blame, however, and felt they had to take responsibility for their own behavior:

  The apartments that were rotten, the maids that stank—the ballet before my eyes, spoiling a story to take the Trubetskoys to dinner, poisoning a trip to [North] Africa. You were going crazy and calling it genius—I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered. The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thought I was a fairy in the rue Palatine. . . . I wish The Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I never honestly thought that we ruined each other.18

  Chapter Nine

  Madness, 1930–1932

  I

  The Fitzgeralds married in April 1920, Scott published The Great Gatsby in April 1925 and Zelda—following this momentous five-year pattern—had her first mental breakdown in April 1930. Fitzgerald identified himself with the Jazz Age, which he helped to define and called “the most expensive orgy in history.” If, as Arthur Miller observed, “the 30s were the price that had to be paid for the 20s,” then that decade was much more costly than Fitzgerald had ever imagined. Just as his literary career spanned the Twenties and Thirties, so his personal life—which began to collapse at the same time as Zelda’s breakdown, soon after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929—ran precisely parallel to the boom and bust phases of the decades between the wars.

  Fitzgerald felt partly responsible for Zelda’s illness and was intimately involved in her treatment. He was inextricably connected to her by bonds of love and guilt; by the hope that she would recover and they could resume their life together; by his fear that she would remain ill and he would continue to suffer with her. Scott’s artistic career was also bound up with Zelda, who had provided inspiration for so much of his work. His unfinished novel would soon focus on her insanity and his stories would be written to pay for her treatment. All paths seemed to lead to Zelda: the destructiveness of their past, the sterility of their present, the uncertainty of their future.

  No matter how close to or far away from Zelda he might be during the next ten years, Fitzgerald lived in the phases of her madness and remained deeply involved in the specifics of her treatment: the individual doctors, the different psychiatric approaches, the particular setting and atmosphere of each clinic. Zelda—whose apparent recovery was always followed by another breakdown and who constantly sought a way back to sanity—was treated in seven different hospitals in only six years. She repeatedly had to adjust to new people and strange surroundings while suffering hallucinations, depression and suicidal impulses.

  Fitzgerald also went through the anguish of the husband of a mental patient: the soul-searching and self-reproach, the loss of his wife and difficulty of bringing up his daughter on his own, the financial strain, loneliness, alcoholism and creative sterility. Gradually, he lost all confidence in the future and left his “capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.”1

  Zelda’s first breakdown was so sudden (the warning signs only became clear retrospectively), the need for restraint and rest so urgent, that there was no time to make careful inquiries about the best psychiatric care. On April 23, 1930, she entered the ominously named Malmaison Hospital, just west of Paris, still desperately concerned about losing time in her ballet career. She was slightly intoxicated when she arrived at the hospital, confessed that she had recently drunk a great deal and explained that she needed alcohol to stimulate her work. Professor Claude—the doctor whom she tried to seduce—gave a vivid report of her mental condition:

  [She entered] in a state of acute anxiety, unable to stay put, repeating continually, “It’s frightful, it’s horrible, what’s going to become of me, I must work and I no longer can, I must die and yet I have to work. I’ll never be cured, let me go, I have to see ‘Madame’ (the dancing teacher), she has given me the greatest joy in the world.” . . .

  In sum, it is a question of a petite anxieuse worn out by her work in a milieu of professional dancers. Violent reactions, several suicidal attempts never pushed to the limit.

  Professor Claude also reported that Zelda had an obsessional “fear of becoming a homosexual. She thinks she is in love with her dance teacher (Madame X) as she had already thought in the past of being in love with another woman.” Zelda’s breakdown forced her to admit, for the first time, her own homosexual desires. It seems clear from this confession that she had projected her own homosexual impulses onto Fitzgerald, and blamed him for her sexual frigidity.

  On May 2, after only ten days in Malmaison, Zelda left the hospital, against the doctor’s advice, in order to resume the dancing lessons that had precipitated her breakdown. Alluding to Malmaison in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald wrote of her “unsatisfactory interlude at one of the whoopee cures that fringed the city, dedicated largely to tourist victims of drug and drink.”2

  Zelda tried to go back to dancing in Paris. But she became dazed and incoherent, had fainting fits, heard frightening voices and was tormented by nightmares. She had (as Professor Claude noted) previously attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills after her affair with Jozan ended in 1925, by throwing herself down the stone staircase in Vence in 1926 and by trying to drive a car off the steep cliffs above Cannes in 1929. Three weeks after leaving Malmaison, she became terrified by her hallucinations and again tried to kill herself. On May 22 she entered the Valmont Clinic in Glion, above Montreux, on the eastern end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

  In early June Dr. H. A. Trutman wrote his report on Zelda. Though she was now more seriously ill than when she entered Malmaison, she denied her illness and still wanted to return to dancing. Ballet, she said, was a way to independence and a compensation for her unhappy marriage:

  At the beginning of her stay Mrs. F. said she hadn’t been sick and had been brought to the sanatorium under duress. Every day she repeated that she wanted to return to Paris to resume the ballet in which she thinks she finds the sole satisfaction of her life.

  From the organic point of view nothing to report, no signs of neurological illness. It became clearer and clearer that a simple rest cure was absolutely insufficient, and that psychiatric treatment by a specialist in a sanatorium was indicated. It was evident that the relations between the patient and her husband had been shaky for some time and that for this reason the patient had tried to create a life of her own through the ballet (since family life and obligations were not sufficient to satisfy her ambition and her artistic leanings).

  Zelda did not mention her homosexual desires at Valmont. But one of the nurses at the clinic had to repulse her “overly affectionate” gestures, and in h
er next hospital she developed an infatuation for an attractive red-headed girl.

  Since Valmont specialized in gastrointestinal illness and Dr. Trutman thought she needed psychiatric treatment, Zelda was examined by a specialist in nervous disorders from the nearby Prangins Clinic. On June 4 she transferred to her third hospital in six weeks. For the next fifteen months, while she was in Prangins, Scott lived near Zelda in Switzerland and visited Scottie, who remained with her governess in Paris, for four or five days every month.

  II

  Les Rives des Prangins was situated on the shore of the lake, fourteen miles north of Geneva, in Nyon. The grounds were spacious, the gardens immaculately tended; and it had farms, tennis courts and seven private villas for super-rich patients. “With the addition of a caddy house,” as Fitzgerald wrote of Dick Diver’s clinic in Tender Is the Night, “it might very well have been a country club.” The clientele was international, and many of the patients came from families of distinguished ancestry and great wealth. The cost of treatment at Prangins, during the first year of the Depression, was an astronomical one thousand dollars a month. Fitzgerald assured Zelda’s parents that Dr. Forel’s clinic, which had just opened that year, “is as I thought the best in Europe, his father having had an extraordinary reputation as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, and the son being universally regarded as a man of intelligence and character.”3

  Auguste Forel, the head of this eminent scientific family (his face appears on the Swiss thousand-franc note), was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich and an authority on the treatment of alcoholics. His son Oscar, Zelda’s doctor and the director of Prangins, was an exceptionally talented and versatile man. Oscar Forel was born in 1891 at Burghölzli, an insane asylum in Zurich where his father was director, and had five brothers and sisters. He studied at the Sorbonne and at the Faculty of Medicine at Lausanne, and believed that religion was incompatible with science. After marrying a lady from Riga, Latvia, he had a son and two daughters, but separated from his wife in 1932. A faculty member at the University of Geneva for more than twenty-five years, he published a number of books, including La Psychologie des névroses (1925) and La Question sexuelle (1931). Later in life he became a naturalist and a professional photographer; and he was awarded the Legion of Honor by Charles de Gaulle in 1945. Forel’s autobiography, La Memoire du chêne, appeared in 1980.