Inevitably the break came. During a luncheon party in April which the Kalmans, old friends of theirs visiting from St. Paul, attended, Zelda became afraid of missing her ballet lesson and abruptly left the table to catch a taxi. Kalman, noticing how nervous she seemed, went with her. In the taxi, while Zelda changed into her practice clothes, he tried to persuade her to take a rest from the ballet. But she did not appear to hear him and mumbled something unintelligible. As the taxi paused at a crossing, Zelda ran from the car toward her studio. Kalman returned to Scott, told him what had happened, and suggested that there was something seriously wrong with Zelda.
Madame Egorova, too, had begun to notice a change in Zelda. One afternoon Zelda invited her to tea. They were alone in the apartment and it became clear to the older woman that there was something strange happening to Zelda—her gestures, her face, and even her voice seemed increasingly peculiar. When they had finished their tea, Madame Egorova sat down on the couch facing Zelda. Suddenly Zelda threw herself down on her knees at Egorova’s feet. Trying to prevent the situation from going any further, Egorova rose calmly and told Zelda that it was late and that she had to go home, and quietly left the apartment.
On April 23, 1930, slightly more than a decade after their marriage, Zelda entered a hospital called Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris. She was in a state of extreme anxiety, and restlessly paced the room, saying: “It’s dreadful, it’s horrible, what’s to become of me, I must work and I won’t be able to, I should die, but I must work. I’ll never be cured. Let me leave, I must go to see ‘Madame’ [Egorova], she has given me the greatest possible joy; it’s like the rays of the sun shining on a piece of crystal, to a symphony of perfumes, the most perfect harmonies of the greatest musicians.” She was slightly intoxicated on her arrival and said that she found alcohol a necessary stimulant for her work. On the 2nd of May Zelda abruptly left the hospital against her physician’s advice.
Unfortunately, when she returned to their apartment, Scott was involved in a series of wedding parties and bachelor dinners for Powell Fowler (the brother of Ludlow Fowler). There was a lot of drinking and no time for convalescence. Scott wrote Perkins at the time that “Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven’t done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.” But Zelda’s collapse was far more serious than Scott implied. She returned to her ballet lessons with a frenetic exuberance. Less than two weeks later she was dazed and incoherent. She heard voices that terrified her, and her dreams, both waking and sleeping, were peopled with phantoms of indescribable horror. She had fainting fits and the menacing nature of her hallucinations drove her into an attempted suicide. Only an injection of morphine could comfort her. The demonic dreams which she experienced became more real for her than reality and Scott could not let her out of his sight. She entered Valmont, a clinic in Switzerland, on the 22nd of May. But Valmont handled gastrointestinal ailments primarily and the physicians there recognized that Zelda’s illness was of a deeply psychological nature. At the request of her physician, Dr. Oscar Forel was called in to examine her. The report from Valmont was ominous.
At the beginning of her stay Mrs. Fitzgerald declared that she had not been sick and that she had been taken by force to a sanitarium. She repeated daily that she wanted to return to Paris in order to resume her work in ballet, in which she believed she could find her only satisfaction in life…. The husband’s visits often were the occasion of violent arguments, provoked especially by the husband’s attempts to reason with the patient and to refute the patient’s insinuations suspecting the husband of homosexuality. Mrs. Fitzgerald became highly excited at the thought that … she was losing precious time….
At calm moments the patient understood quite well that she was at the end from a physical and nervous [psychological] standpoint and that she badly needed to take care of herself, but then an hour later she again wanted to know nothing about that and insisted on her return to Paris. Numerous discussions with her were fruitless because of all her real thoughts she expressed only a few incoherent ones.
From an organic standpoint there is nothing to report, no signs of mental illness.* It became more and more clear that a simple rest cure was absolutely insufficient and that psychological treatment by a specialist in a sanitarium was indicated. It was evident that the relationship between the patient and her husband had been weakened for a long time and that for that reason the patient had not only attempted to establish her own life by the ballet (since the family life and her duties as a mother were not sufficient to satisfy her ambition and her artistic interests) but that she also [had withdrawn] from her husband. As far as her 8 year old daughter is concerned she expressed herself as follows to the question: “What role did her child play in her life?”: [in English] “That is done now, I want to do something else.”
In view of the necessity of psychological treatment for this complicated case, a consultation with Dr. Forel of the Clinic of Prangins near Nyon was requested, with the request that he advise from a therapeutic standpoint. After he studied the case, Dr. Forel declared his willingness to receive the patient in his clinic if she wanted to go there of her own will. He insisted that treatment could only be psychotherapy, based on an analysis of all the factors which were able to lead the patient into such a complicated situation. Admission to Prangins would be possible only on the condition of a temporary separation from her husband.
On the evening of the consultation (3 June) the patient said herself that she felt very tired and sick and that she very much needed treatment. One had the impression that she agreed to go to Prangins. The next morning she was again in a bad mood and unreasonable. She is leaving the clinic with her husband.
On June 4 Zelda left Valmont. Rosalind’s husband, Newman Smith, who had been living in Brussels, arrived to try to help Scott cope with the situation. He not only lent his moral support but he tacitly represented Zelda’s side of the family. Somehow they persuaded Zelda to enter Les Rives de Prangins for extensive psychiatric treatment. Later she was to write of that journey to the asylum:
Our ride to Switzerland was very sad. It seemed to me that we did not have each other or anything else and it half killed me to give up all the work I had done. I was completely insane and had made a decision: to abandon the ballet and live quietly with my husband. I had wanted to destroy the picture of Egorova that I had lived with for four years and give away my tou-tous and the suitcase full of shoes and free my mind from the thing. The light in which the thing presented itself to me was: I had got to the end of my physical resources. … If I couldn’t be great, it wasn’t worth going on with though I loved my work to the point of obsession. It was all I had in the world at the time.
* In the sense of an ailment such as a tumor or injury to the brain.
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AHEAD OF THEM WOULD BE THE slow agony of putting the pieces of their lives together again. They did not yet realize the extent of Zelda’s breakdown, nor the amount of time that it would take to “cure” her, nor even if she could be cured. She was diagnosed by Dr. Forel as a schizophrenic, and not simply a neurotic or hysterical woman. It was as if once Zelda had collapsed there was no escape other than her spiraling descent into madness. Except, of course, it was not a simple descent; it was upheaval, spin and skid into a treacherous insanity where nothing was what it seemed. To record her breakdown is to give witness to her helplessness and terror, as well as to explore again the bonds that inextricably linked the Fitzgeralds.
Les Rives de Prangins was located on the shoreline of Lake Geneva near Nyon, twenty-two kilometers from Geneva. It had opened that year under the direction of Dr. Oscar Forel and was quickly becoming established as the foremost sanitarium for the treatment of mental illness in Europe. (James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic by Dr. Forel and was placed under his care at Prangins briefly in the summer of 1933 and again in 1934.) Prangins looked like a splendid resort hotel for the wealthy; most of its hundred
acres of grounds was immaculately groomed, with trees trimmed into cones and pyramids, and exact rows of sculptured hedges. There were winter gardens, tennis courts, farms, and seven villas (four of which were reserved for patients, who were called guests). The atmosphere was intended to be homelike rather than institutional and the number of patients admitted was limited to ensure close psychiatric care. The physicians and their families lived on the grounds and participated in the life of the institution.
Zelda arrived at Prangins late in the afternoon of June 5 with Scott and Newman Smith. She showed no signs of resistance to being there, but the first night was difficult, for she was naturally anxious and ill at ease. The following day she said that she wished to be cured and that she would cooperate with the doctors; she also said she wanted to paint outdoors. Dr. Forel noted that Zelda was afraid of contact with other patients and shied away from direct conversation about herself.
On the 8th of June the first in a series of ruminative letters from a member of Zelda’s family arrived for Dr. Forel, written in an effort to provide him with a picture of Zelda’s background and heritage. The Sayres were described as intellectuals of simple and temperate habits, and, the writer added, there was no history of insanity in their family. Zelda’s childhood had been entirely normal. The only person she had ever been attached to was her mother, toward whom she was extraordinarily loving. Although thoroughly spoiled by Mrs. Sayre, Zelda had been the most vigorous and healthy of the Sayres’ children, with the others inclining toward nervousness and depression. Perhaps those traits had developed because of the character of Judge Sayre and the tenseness that resulted from it in the family. The Judge was described as a solitary man in the most thoroughgoing sense; he was silent, not at all sociable, and possessed no sympathy toward youth. Their home life was consequently not happy. He was devoted to their mother, who was a gay and warm woman, but on his own terms; he did not show affection and his restraint eventually cast an oppressive aura over the entire family.
Scott wrote to Dr. Forel on the same day. He tried to give the background of Zelda’s life, but solely within the context of their marriage. The letter revealed more about his own attitude toward Zelda and their life together than it did about Zelda herself. Scott selected five elements that seemed crucial to him for an understanding of Zelda’s current condition, but he began by assuring Forel that he was in absolute agreement with him about her and that, as slow as her recovery might be, he would abstain from seeing her until “the moment when her attitude toward me will change.”
Zelda, he wrote, was the child of parents who were over forty years old when she was born. She had always been something of a defeatist, “or at least a fatalist, opposed to my ability of finding ways to fight against difficulties or obstacles.” He mentioned that they had tried several times to have more children, but always without success, and that the failure had deeply distressed him. The “lessening of our sexual relationship” was not due to “coldness” on his part, he wrote,
as she would have it understood … but rather to the facts of her growing absorption in the ballet, and that I have been drinking too much during the last 18 months, as well as to the animosities and hostilities caused by all of this. After having worked all day at home, I would want to go out at night—my wife, on the contrary, having been gone all day, wanted only to stay home and go to bed…. The last six months she did not even take any interest in our child…. Before she devoted herself to the ballet she took care of all her duties and more.
In closing he mentioned that he had a story with him that Zelda had written while at Valmont and he wondered if she was well enough to revise and correct it before he sent it off to America. If he could not see her, could he have flowers sent to her every other day? And lastly he asked, “When could I without danger start sending her short notes, mentioning neither the misunderstandings of these last days nor her sickness?”
In an undated, penciled letter (which may have been a draft of a letter never sent) he wrote to Zelda about how he felt while looking at a snapshot of her. The letter speaks for itself of how deeply wounded Scott was, and of how deeply he loved Zelda.
When I saw the sadness of your face in that passport picture I felt as you can imagine. But after going through what you can imagine I did then and looking at it and looking at it, I saw that it was the face I knew and loved and not the mettalic superimposition of our last two years in France…. The photograph is all I have; it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. The rotten letters you write me I simply put away under L in my file. … If you choose to keep up your wrestling match with a pillar of air I would prefer to be not even in the audience.
I am hardened to write you so brutally by thinking of the ceaseless wave of love that surrounds you and envelopes you always, that you have the power to evoke at a whim—when I know that for the mere counterfiet of it I would perjure the best of my heart and mind. Do you think the solitude in which I live has a more amusing decor than any other solitude? Do you think it is any nicer for remembering that there were times very late at night when you and I shared our aloneness? I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach and grasp, I can only bring you the little bit of hope I have and I don’t know any other hope except my own. I have the terrible misfortune to be a gentleman in the sort of struggle with incalculable elements to which people should bring centuries of inexperience; if I have failed you is it just barely possible that you have failed me … I love you with all my heart because you are my own girl and that is all I know.
Scott had written to the Sayres about Zelda’s breakdown as soon as it occurred, but he did not stress the seriousness of her collapse. He told them it was a case of nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork, and that she was taking a cure in Switzerland. Mrs. Sayre was not taken in by the evasion. Zelda had written to her mother regularly once a week and those letters had now stopped. She wrote Scott, “I get frantic for news from my little baby.” Although she was upset by her daughter’s breakdown, her reaction was one of resignation. She had gone through similar periods with, her oldest daughter, Marjorie, and with the Judge. Zelda, she realized, would have to remain in Europe and rest; they would all have to guard against relapses; and, she wrote Scott, “we might just as well face facts for there is no dodging them.”
At the end of June Zelda was no better and she wrote Scott:
Just at the point in my life when there is no time left me for losing, I am here to incapacitate myself for using what I have learned in such a desperate school—through my own fault and from a complete lack of medical knowledge on a rather esoteric subject. If you could write to Egorowa a friendly impersonal note to find out exactly where 1 stand as a dancer it would be of the greatest help to me— Remember, this is in no way at all her fault. I would have liked to dance in New York this fall, but where am I going to find again these months that dribble into the beets of the clinic garden? Is it worth it? And once a proper horror for the accidents of life has been instilled into me, I have no intention of joi[n]ing the group about a corpse. My legs are already flabby and I will soon be like A.___, huntress of corralled game, I suppose, instead of a human being recompensed for everything by the surety of a comprehension of one manifestation of beauty— Why can’t you write me what you think and want instead of vague attempts at reassurance? If I had work or something it would be so much decenter to try to help each other and make at least a stirrup cup out of this bloody mess.
You have always had so much sympathy for people forced to start over late in life that I should think you could find the generosity to help me amongst your many others—not as you would a child but as an equal.
I want you to let me leave here— You’re wasting time and effort and money to take away the little we both have left. If you think you are preparing me for a return to Alabama you are mistaken, and also if y
ou think that I am going to spend the rest of my life roaming about without happiness or rest or work from one sanatorium to another like K.___ you are wrong. Two sick horses might conceivably pull a heavier load than a well one alone. Of cource, if you prefer that I should spend six months of my life under prevailing conditions—my eyes are open and I will get something from that, too, I suppose, but they are tired and unhappy, and my head aches always. Won’t you write me a comprehensible letter such as you might write to one of your friends? Every day it gets harder to think or live and I do not understand the object of wasting the dregs of me here, alone in a devasting bitterness.
Zelda
In a postscript she added:
Please write immediately to Paris about the dancing. I would do it but I think the report will be more accurate if it goes to you—just an opinion as to what value my work is and to what point I could develop it before it is too late. Of cource, I would go to another school as I know Egorowa would not want to be bothered with me— Thanks.
Dr. Forel was absolutely certain that the way to Zelda’s recovery did not lie in further dancing, and he too thought that Scott should write to Egorova. But he suggested that Fitzgerald make clear to her their preference that in her answer she discourage Zelda, even if it was a gross deception. Zelda, Forel decided, had to be made to realize that dancing was not her vocation. She wanted to begin working again, but in Forel’s opinion it was medical treatment that she urgently needed rather than more dancing. The weekend before, Zelda had gone out with her nurse and tried to run away. It was only with the assistance of several nurses that she was brought back to Prangins and he found it necessary to transfer her to the Villa Eglantine, where patients were placed under restriction. It was a severe blow to both Zelda’s and Scott’s hopes for her rapid recovery.
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