Zelda
Page 22
Where are all my things? I used to always have dozens of things and now there doesn’t seem to be any clothes or anything personal in my trunk— I’d love the gramophone—
What a disgraceful mess—but if it stops our drinking it is worth it—because then you can finish your novel and write a play and we can live somewhere and have can have a house with a room to paint and write maybe like we had with friends for Scottie and there will be Sundays and Mondays again which are different from each other and there will be Christmas and winter fires and pleasant things to think of when you’re going to sleep—and my life won’t lie up the back-stairs of music-halls and yours won’t keep trailing down the gutters of Paris—if it will only work, and I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac—
Dear Scott:
I wish I could see you: I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning intelligence. It was fine to have your post-card with your special reaction to Caux on it. Your letters are just non-commital phrases that you might write to Scottie and they do not help to unravel this infinite psychological mess that I’m floundering about in. I watch what attitude the nurse takes each day and then look up what symptom I have in Doctor Forel’s book. Dear, why has my ignorance on a medical subject which has never appeared to me particularly interesting reduced me to the mental status of a child? I know that my mind is vague and undisciplined and that I only know small smatterings of things, but that has nothing to do with cerebral processes….
I don’t know how we’re going to reverse time, you and me; erase and begin again—but I imagine it will be automatic. I can’t project myself into the past no matter how hard I try. There are lots of days when I think it would have been better to give me a concise explanation and let it go—because I know so much already. One illusion is as good as another.
Write me how you are and what you do and what the world is like at Caux— and Love Zelda
As the summer passed Zelda wavered between a seeming recuperation and yet deeper illness. Once when things seemed very black indeed for her recovery Dr. Forel asked her as part of his therapy to write out a summary of the way she felt about her family and herself. In this document she was able to reveal something of herself to Forel for the first time, with fewer of the restraints and disguises she usually employed. She wrote quickly and in a highly idiosyncratic French. (The following are excerpts from a translation of that record, which in the original runs to about seven pages.) Dr. Forel asked Zelda to describe her parents. She remembered her mother as being extremely indulgent of others’ faults, an artistic woman who wrote, played the piano and sang. Zelda said Mrs. Sayre had a passion for flowers and birds. She saw her mother in terms of a mood photograph: “I can always see her sitting down in the opalescent sunlight of a warm morning, a black servant combing her long grey hair.” But no such images of her father came to mind. She described him exclusively in terms of what he was and did. She said he was a man without fear—intellectual, silent, serious. He was a man of “great integrity.” “I had an enormous respect for my father and some mistrust.” Then he asked her about their marriage.
When I was a child their relationship was not apparent to me. Now I see them as two unhappy people: my mother dominated and oppressed by my father, and often hurt by him, he forced to work for a large family in which he found neither satisfaction nor a spiritual link. Neither of them complained.
When asked about her parents’ influence on her, Zelda insisted that they had had absolutely none.
Her relationship toward her brother and sisters she simply described as “vague.” She was a great many years younger than they and did not have memories of a youth passed together. Her sisters were pretty; she quarreled with them constantly. Her favorite was Rosalind, who “appeared elegant, perfumed, sophisticated.”
The great emotional events of her life were:
My marriage, after which I was in another world, one for which I was not qualified or prepared, because of my inadequate education.
And:
A love affair with a french aviator in St Raphael. I was locked in my villa for one month to prevent me from seeing him. This lasted for five years. When I knew my husband had another woman in California I was upset because the life over there appeared to me so superficial, but finally I was not hurt because I knew I had done the same thing when I was younger.
Minnie Machen,
“The Wild Lily of the Cumberland”
Zelda Sayre
Anthony Dickinson Sayre, age 19
Zelda, age 15
Zelda, age 16
At the swimming pool
“Folly,” 1919
Zelda Sayre, 1919
Scott Fitzgerald in front of 6 Pleasant Avenue, May 1919
Zelda’s scrapbook, 1918
A page of telegrams from Scott in Zelda’s scrapbook
Mr. and Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, February 1921, New York
West port, Compo Beach, 1920. From left: Tanaka, John D. Williams, Zelda, George Jean Nathan, Scott, and Alexander McKaig.
First trip abroad, 1921
Scott and Zelda, Dellwood, September 1921, the month before Scottie’s birth
Zelda and Scottie, summer of 1922, White Bear Lake, Minnesota
A baby party in St. Paul, from Zelda’s scrapbook, 1922
The F. Scott Fitzgeralds, 1923. Zelda always called this portrait her “Elizabeth Arden Face.”
Zelda, Scott and Scottie on the Riviera, 1924
The Fitzgeralds in Paris, 1925
Scottie and Scott on the plage, about 1925
Scott at Aries, 1929
ABOVE: Zelda at the gorge at Constantine, February 1930
RIGHT : Scott and Zelda in North Africa, February 1930
Christmas at Gstaad, 1930
“A Real Reunion,” taken shortly after Fitzgerald’s father’s death, January 1931
“Recovered,” 1931
Zelda at Prangins
Fitzgerald’s chart for Tender Is the Night
paralleling Zelda’s case and Nicole Diver’s
Self-portrait, probably done in the early forties
Mrs. Sayre, Scott and Zelda in North Carolina, about 1938
A late snapshot of Zelda, taken near Asheville
I determined to find an impersonal escape, a world in which I could express myself and walk without the help of somebody who was always far from me. I had begun dancing in Paris, with a great ballet dancer, but 1 was obliged to leave her because of my illness…. When I returned to Paris I went again into the same school. I have worked four hours a day and in the evening, and Sundays, during the holidays, on the boat when 1 was travelling. I began to understand it.
Suddenly last spring I began to see all red while I worked or I saw no colors— I could not bear to look out of windows, for sometimes I saw humanity as a bottle of ants. Then we left for Cannes where I worked on technique and where after the lessons I had the impression that I was an old person living very quietly in winter. I loved my ballet teacher in Paris more than anything else in the world. But I did not know how. She had everything of beauty in her head, the brightness of a greek temple, the frustration of a mind searching for a place, the glory of cannon bullets; all that I saw in her steps. From Christmas on I was not able to work correctly anymore, but she helped me to learn more, to go further. She always told me to look after myself. I tried to, but it was worse. I was in a real “mess.” … One day the world between me and the others stopped— I was dragged like by a magnet— I had headaches and I could jump higher than ever, but the day after 1 was sick. I left my lessons, but without them I could not do anything. It was Easter, I wanted to do something for my little girl, but I could not stop in a shop and Madame came to encourage me. Enough to give me the strength to go to Malmaison. There the doctors told me that I was well and I came back to the studio, unable to walk in the streets, full of medicine, trying to work in an atmosphere which was becoming more and more strange…. My husband forced me to go to Valmont—and now I
am here, with you, in a situation where I cannot be anybody, full of vertigo, with an increasing noise in my ears, feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.
Then, perhaps in a moment of recognition, she added:
I am dependent on my husband, and he told me that 1 must get cured. I accept, but as I am lost about anything with him, with his life in which there is nothing for me except the physical comfort, when I get out of your clinic it will be with an idea: to arrange myself in any condition to be able to breathe freely. Life, beauty or death, all that is equal for me.
I must add another thing: this story is the fault of nobody but me. I believed I was a Salamander* and it seems that I am nothing but an impediment.
That summer Scott sent Harold Ober three of Zelda’s stories, asking him to show them to Maxwell Perkins for possible publication in Scribner’s Magazine. After Perkins had seen them he wrote Scott,
I have read Zelda’s manuscripts over several times—they came to me while I was away—and 1 do think they show an astonishing power of expression, and have and convey a curiously effective and strange quality. But they are for a selected audience, and not a large one, and the magazine thinks that on that account, they cannot use them. One would think that if she did enough more they might make a book. Descriptively they are very rare, and the description is not just description. It has a curious emotional content in itself. But for the present I shall have to send them back to Ober. I think one of the little magazines might use them. I wish we could.
I am terribly sorry about Zelda herself. But if she has made progress maybe it should become more rapid, and everything will come out right.
Scott replied that he
was sorry of course about Zelda’s stories—possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a waste-land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College Humor and … I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during winter.
But that was wishful thinking, for Zelda was not able to concentrate on anything consistently throughout the rest of the summer and fall of 1930, so completely was she in the relentless grip of the eczema. She wrote Scott:
… Please help me. Every day more of me dies with this bitter and incessant beating I’m taking. You can choose the conditions of our life and anything you want if I don’t have to stay here miserable and sick at the mercy of people who have never even tried what its like. Neither would I have if I had understood I can’t live any more under these conditions, and anyway I’ll always know that the “door is tacticly locked” —if it ever is.
There’s no justice—no quiet place of rest left in the world, and the longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get….
Please Please let me out now—Dear, you used to love me and I swear to you that this is no use. You must have seen. You said it was too good to spoil. What’s spoiling is me, along with it and I don’t see how anybody in the world has a right to do such a thing—
Zelda needed Scott’s reassurance and, even more than that, she expected that he alone could explain to her the causes of her malady, and rescue her from them. She wrote desperately to him:
I seem awfully queer to myself, but I know I used to have integrity even if it’s gone now—You’ve got to come to me and tell me how I was. Now I see odd things: people’s arms too long or their faces as if they were stuffed and they look tiny and far away, or suddenly out of proportion…. Please explain— I want to be well and not bothered with poissons big or little and free to sit in the sun and choose the things I like about people and not have to take the whole person—because it seems to me that then you can’t see the parts so you can never write about them or even remember them very well—
In September the eczema had grown worse and Dr. Forel tried a completely different and experimental approach. He hypnotized Zelda and the results were dramatic. Zelda fell into a deep hypnotic sleep that lasted for thirteen hours and when she awoke the eczema was almost completely gone. It was to reappear again, but in a milder form. Immediately after the treatment Zelda told him that she had felt the eczema oozing in her trance, and she added that she thought there was a link between the eczema and her psychological condition. When she felt normal and realized the danger in her conjugal conflicts the eczema appeared. It came, she thought, as a sort of warning device. Her behavior toward Scott vacillated between being loving and being nasty. She was impulsively affectionate at moments when Scott least expected it, yet she might turn on him as he responded to her affection.
Looking at the letters which she wrote to Scott during the autumn, one catches the wild fluctuations of her moods. Scott was to incorporate portions of these letters into Tender is the Night to indicate the progress of the relationship between Nicole and Doctor Dick Diver. He moved freely among those letters of Zelda’s which were the most peculiarly disordered to those which were intensely loving. However, one notices that even among the latter letters there were often currents of strangeness. She seemed now to need to express her dependence upon Scott, as though it was proof of her sanity.
Goofy, my darling, hasn’t it been a lovely day? I woke up this morning and the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel on my table so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air: love to Doo-do and the remembered feel of our skins cool against each other in other mornings like a school-mistress. And you ‘phoned and said I had written something that pleased you and so I don’t believe I’ve ever been so heavy with happiness…. Darling— I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemie or a “grand patron”—or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of midnight or perhaps in the lux of noon— Anyway, I love you most and you ‘phoned me just because you ‘phoned me to-night— I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear—
I’m so glad you finished your story— Please let me read it Friday. And I will be very sad if we have to have two rooms. Please.
Dear. Are you sort of feeling aimless, surprised, and looking rather reproachful that no melo-drama comes to pass when your work is over— as if you [had] ridden very hard with a message to save your army and found the enemy had decided not to attack—the way you sometimes feel—or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands in the middle of the week—the way you sometimes are—or are you organizing and dynamic and mending things—the way you sometimes are—
I love you—the way you always are.
Dear—
Good-night—
Dear—dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear … [etc.]
Although by the end of October the eczema was nearly cured there was no essential change in Zelda’s mental attitude. She continued to complain about “something” in her head which was not normal. When she was left alone during the day she daydreamed, and she was unresponsive to questions put directly to her. She appeared dull and expressionless. Dr. Forel began to fear organic brain damage. By the 10th of November, 1930, the eczema had reappeared and Zelda grew worse. Dr. Forel transferred Zelda once again to the Eglantine. Scott considered this to be a major setback and he was dissatisfied with the progress of her treatment. He played what he called “a sort of American hunch” and asked Forel if something else couldn’t be tried to expedite her cure. On the 22nd Dr. Forel called in Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler for consultation. Bleuler was a distinguished authority on psychosis (specifically schizophrenia, which he had named) in Europe at that time.
Dr. Forel says he called in Bleuler to clear his own diagnosis. It w
as extremely important that he arrive at a correct diagnosis, for the treatment depended upon it. “The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time: she is neither a pure neurosis (meaning psychogenic) nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, never completely recover. It was a great help to discuss this difficult patient with Bleuler.” He also mentioned that he had not been able to psychoanalyze Zelda for fear of disturbing and perhaps sacrificing what precious little equilibrium she possessed. Dr. Forel wrote, “Mrs. Fitzgerald is more intuitive than intelligent, more brilliant than cultivated.” He noticed that she liked to pretend she was more childish than she actually was; she was also sneaky and, he said, always found ways of avoiding the discipline of the hospital.