Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Scott wrote Judge and Mrs. Sayre telling them of the consultation with Bleuler. He was careful to give all of the details of both Forel’s and Bleuler’s professional standing. “… Forel’s clinique 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.” Bleuler had been chosen after careful consideration. Dr. Jung was Scott’s alternative choice, but Jung handled cases of neurosis primarily. The consultations were expensive ($500) and Scott did not want questions of medical etiquette to complicate an already thorny case.

  Bleuler spent an afternoon with Zelda and the evening with Forel and Scott. Zelda’s personal reaction to Bleuler was succinct; she thought him “a great imbecile.” Bleuler told Scott that three out of four cases such as Zelda’s were discharged as cured, “perhaps one of those three to resume perfect functioning in the world, and the other two to be delicate and slightly eccentric through life—and the fourth case to go right down hill into total insanity.” Zelda must absolutely not be moved from the clinic to America at the risk of her sanity. Bleuler additionally felt that Zelda’s re-entry into the world was going perhaps a little more quickly than it should and that she must be brought along slowly. He reassured Scott (and Scott reassured the Sayres, as well as himself):” ‘This is something that began about five years ago. Let us hope it is only a process of re-adjustment. Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded it but you couldn’t have prevented it.’” Scott asked both doctors if a change in his attitude toward Zelda would help her since, as he explained, Zelda had always shown a preference “for men of a stable and strong character.” They told him that it was “possible that a character of tempered steel would help, but that Mrs. Fitzgerald loved and married the artist in Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  Once Scott took up residence in Lausanne he began to see Zelda for brief visits once every two or three weeks as Dr. Bleuler had reccommended. He planned to visit Scottie in Paris once a month for four or five days. It was unsatisfactory, but her life had to continue with as little interruption as was possible under the circumstances of her mother’s illness. It was best for her to remain in Paris and continue her schooling there among her friends.

  Zelda was not able to write often and her letters to her daughter were therefore few. Her world was not comprehensible to a child and Zelda must have realized how distant she had become from Scottie. She wrote that she wanted Scottie to continue her dancing lessons:

  It is excellent to create grace and interest in the arts and I was not pleased that you had to stop, and I hope in the spring you will be capable of going on again as you did before— The saddest thing in my life is that I was no good at it having begun so late—but thats only an excuse on my part, as you have easily guessed I suppose.

  She said she missed her “darling baby” and she was tired of the Swiss landscape, the endless winter, and her own sickness.

  If Scott did not actually blame himself for Zelda’s collapse he was nevertheless aware of having contributed to it. The very style of their life together was conducive to instability; they had lived hard amidst increasing disorder. It was necessary for Scott to try to comprehend in the most personal terms the calamity that had befallen them. In order to do that he had to write about it. In a manuscript or a letter which was intended for Zelda, or at any rate addressed to her (“Written with Zelda gone to the Clinique”), he attempted to recover those days from their past when things had first begun to go wrong. It is not simply a recapitulation, but the cri de coeur of a man who while wounding had been himself deeply wounded.

  I know this then—that those days when we came up from the south, from Capri [February-March, 1925; Scott had completed Gats by in November, 1924], were among my happiest—but you were sick and the happiness was not in the home.

  I had been unhappy for a long time then—when my play failed a year and a half before, when I worked so hard for a year twelve stories and novel and four articles in that time with no one believing in me and no one to see except you and before the end your heart betraying me and then I was really alone with no one I liked. In Rome we were dismal and [I] was still working proof and three more stories and in Capri you were sick and there seemed to be nothing left of happiness in the world anywhere I looked.

  Then we came to Paris and suddenly I reallized that it hadn’t all been in vain. I was a success—the biggest one for the moment in my profession everybody admired me and I was proud I’d done such a good thing. I met Gerald and Sara who took us for friends now and Ernest who was an equal and my kind of an idealist. I got drunk with him on the Left Bank in careless cafes and drank with Sara and Gerald in their garden in St Cloud but you were endlessly sick and at home everything was unhappy. We went to Antibes and I was happy but you were sick still and all that fall and that winter and spring at the cure and I was alone all the time and I had to get drunk before I could leave you so sick and not care and I was only happy a little while before I got too drunk. Afterwards there were all the usual penalties for being drunk.

  Finally you got well in Juan-les-Pins and a lot of money came in and I made [one] of those mistakes literary men make—I thought I was a man of the world—that everybody liked me and admired me for myself but I only liked a few people like Ernest and Gerald and Charlie McArthur and Sara who were my peers. Time goes bye fast in those moods and nothing is ever done. I thought then that things came easily—I forgot how I’d dragged the great Gatsby out of the pit of my stomach in a time of misery. I woke up in Hollywood no longer my egotistic, certain self but a mixture of Ernest in fine clothes and Gerald with a career—and Charlie McArthur with a past. Anybody that could make me believe that, like Lois Moran did, was precious to me.

  Ellerslie, the polo people and Mrs. Chanler, the party for Cecilia were all attempts to make up from without for being undernourished now from within. Anything to be liked, to be reassured not that I was a man of little genius but that I was a great man of the world. At the same time I knew it was nonsense—the part of me that knew it was nonsense brought us to the Rue Vaugirard.

  But now you had gone into yourself just as I had four years before in St. Raphael—and there were all the consequences of bad appartments through your lack of patience (“Well, if you want a better appartment why don’t you make some money”) bad servants through your indifference (“Well, if you don’t like her why don’t you send Scotty away to school”) Your dislike for Vidor, your indifference to Joyce 1 understood—share your incessant enthusiasm and absorption in the ballet I could not. Somewhere in there I had a sense of being exploited, not by you but by something I resented terribly no happiness. Certainly less than these had ever been at home—you were a phantom washing clothes. … I remember desolate trips to Versaille to Phienis, to LaBaule undertaken in sheer weariness of home. I remember wondering why I kept working to pay the bills of this desolate menage I had evolved. In despair I went from the extreme of isolation, which is to say isolation with D, or the Ritz Bar where I got back my self esteem for half an hour, often with someone I had hardly ever seen before. On the evenings sometimes you and I rode to the Bois in a cab—after awhile I preferred to go to Cafe de Lilas and sit there alone remembering what a happy time I had had there with Ernest, Hadley, Dorothy Parker and Benchley two years before. During all this time, remember I didn’t blame anyone but myself. I complained when the house got unbearable but after all I was not John Peale Bishop—I was paying for it with work, that I passionately hated and found more and more difficult to do. The novel was like a dream, daily farther and farther away.

  Ellerslie was better and worse. Unhappiness is less acute when one lives with a certain sober dignity but the financial strain was too much. Between Sept when we left Paris and March when we reached Nice we were living at the rate of forty thousand a year.

  But somehow I felt happier. Another Spring— I would see Ernest whom I had launched, Gerald and Sarah who through m
y agency had been able to try the movies. At least life would [seem] less drab; there would be parties with people who offered something, conversations with people with something to say. Later swimming and getting tanned and young and being near the sea.

  It worked out beautifully didn’t it. Gerald and Sara didn’t see us. Ernest and I met but it was a more irritable Ernest, apprehensively telling me his whereabouts lest I come in on them tight and endanger his precarious lease. The discovery that half a dozen people were familiars there didn’t help my self esteem. By the time we reached the beautiful Rivierra I had developed such an inferiority complex that I couldn’t face anyone unless I was tight. I worked there too, though, and the unusual combination exploded my lungs.*

  You were gone now—I scarcely remember you that summer. You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you.— You didn’t need me and it was easier to talk to or rather at Madame Bellois and keep full of wine. I was grateful when you came with me to the Doctors one afternoon but after we’d been a week in Paris and I didn’t try any more about living or dieing. Things were always the same. The appartments that were rotten, the maids that stank—the ballet before my eyes, spoiling a story to take the Troubetskoys to dinner, poisening a trip to 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 presentations of ourselves guessed at your almost megiomaniacal 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] that I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine but now whatever you said aroused a sort of detached pity for you. For all your superior observation and your harder intelligence I have a faculty of guessing right, without evidence even with a certain wonder as to why and whence that mental short cut came. I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves— I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other

  The letter breaks off here, incomplete. Zelda was in even less of a position to cope with the fissures within their marriage than Scott. In a letter that may have been a reaction to this one of Scott’s, she struck back.

  Your letter is not difficult to answer with promptitude since I have done nothing but turn over cause and effect in my mind for some time. Also your presentation of the situation is poetic, even if it has no bearing on the truth: your working to preserve the family and my working to get away from it. If you so refer to giving your absolute minimum of effort both to your work and to our mutual welfare with no hope or plans for the future save the vague capricices which drive you from one place to another, I envy you the mental processes which can so distort conditions into a rectitude of attitude for you. You have always told me that I had no right to complain as long as I was materially cared for, so take whatever comfort you may find in whatever self justification you can construct. Also, I quite understand the restless dissatisfaction which drives you from existing conditions since I have been through it myself, even to the point of being completely dependent on a mentality which had neither the desire nor the necessity of touching mine for the small crumbs of beauty that I found I must have to continue. This is not a treatise of recriminations, but I would like you to understand clearly why there are certain scenes not only toward the end which could never be effaced from my mind. I am here, and since I have no choice, I will try to mister the grace to rest peacefully as I should, but our divergence is too great as you must realize for us to ever be anything except a hash to-gether and since we have never found either help or satisfaction in each other the best thing is to seek it separately. You might as well start whatever you start for a divorce immediately.

  When you saw in Paris that I was sick, sinking—when you knew that I went for days without eating, incapable of supporting contact with even the servants—You sat in the bathroom and sang “Play in your own Backyard.” Unfortunately, there wasn’t any yard: it was a public playground apparently. You introduced me to and sat me beside one moment and the next disparaged and belittled the few friends I knew whose eyes had gathered their softness at least from things that I understood. Some justification has always been imperative to me, and I could never function simply from the necessity for functioning not even to save myself as the King of Greece once told Ernest Hemmingway was the most important thing of all as you so illuminatingly told me.

  You will have all the things you want without me, and I will find something. You will have some nice girl who will not care about the things that I cared about and you will be happier. For us, there is not the slightest use. even if we wanted to try which I assure you I do not— not even faintly. In listing your qualities I can not find even one on which to base any possible relationship except your good looks, and there are dozens of people with that: the head-waiter at the Plaza and — and my coiffeur in Paris—as you know, my memories are mostly lost in sound and smell, so there isn’t even that, I’m sorry. In Paris, I hope you will get Scottie out of the city heat now that she has finished school.

  Later, in a calmer mood, she wrote again:

  I am tired of rummaging my head to understand a situation that would be difficult enough if I were completely lucid. I cannot arbitrarily accept blame now when I know that in the past I felt none. Anyway, blame doesn’t matter…. Try to understand that people are not always reasonable when the world is as unstable and vacillating as a sick head can render it—that for months I have been living in vaporous places peopled with one-dimensional figures and tremulous buildings until I can no longer tell an optical illusion from a reality—that head and ears incessantly throb and roads disappear, until finally I lost all control and powers of judgement and was semi-imbecilic when I arrived here.

  At the end of November Zelda wrote Dr. Forel:

  Can’t you please explain to me why I should spend five months of my life in sickness and suffering seeing nothing but optical illusions to devitalize something in me that you yourself have found indespensible and that my husband has found so agreeable as to neglect shamefully his wife during the last four years. … I am forced to bear the hopeless months of the past and God knows what in the future. Exalted sophistries are not much of a prop. Why do I have to go backwards when everybody else who can goes on? … and if you do cure me whats going to happen to all the bitterness and unhappiness in my heart— It seems to me a sort of castration, but since I am powerless I suppose I will have to submit, though I am neither young enough nor credulous enough to think that you can manufacture out of nothing something to replace the song I had.

  Christmas, 1930: the nightmare darkened. Although Zelda had asked to see Scottie, she behaved badly when confronted by her, breaking the ornaments on their tree and talking incoherently. Scott took Scottie skiing at Gstaad to try to mitigate what must have been a painful and upsetting scene for the child.

  Suddenly, at the end of January, Scott’s father died in Washington. Deeply sorrowful at the loss, he planned to return to America immediately for the funeral. Before he left there was a final meeting with Zelda. In his detailed report to Dr. Forel, he said that, although a first-year medical student could phrase it better than he could, he had a theory about Zelda which he wished to put forth. He then plotted the course of her illness in outline form from age fifteen to the present. His notion was that some “uneliminated poison attacks the nerves.”

  In brief my idea is this. That the eczema is not relative but is the clue to the whole business. I believe that the eczema is a definite concurrent product of every struggle back toward the normal, just as an alcoholic has to struggle back through a period of depression. … I can’t help clinging to the idea that some essential physical things like salt or iron or semen or some unguessed at holy water is either missing or is present in too great quantity.

  Scott felt that Zelda needed some intense form of physical activity to aid her in the cu
re. Her poor eyesight and her highly developed artistic sense made embroidery, carpentry, and bookbinding insufficiently involving; nor were these activities, he felt certain, any real substitute for sweating.

  Zelda, too, was moved by his father’s death, as well as by Scott’s grief. He said she literally clung to him for an hour.

  Then she went into the other personality and was awful to me at lunch. After lunch she returned to the affectionate tender mood, utterly normal, so that with pressure I could have manoeuvred her into intercourse but the eczema was almost visibly increasing so I left early. Toward the very end she was back in the schizophrania.

  Zelda realized that their meeting had not been satisfactory and wrote him a note in an effort to reach him before he was at sea. “I would have been so happy to help you. A neurose is not much good in times of distress to others. …”

  With Scott in America Zelda suddenly began to improve. No one on the staff linked her beginning recovery to Scott’s absence, but it must have been related for it was astonishing how rapidly she now began to take hold. She ate her meals at the table regularly with the other patients, and the odd little smile which had uncontrollably marked her expression from the beginning of her illness disappeared. She also began to ski every day at nearby St. Cergues when the snow was good. There were photographs taken of her smiling happily in her chamois jacket, her hair flying. It was as if the skiing itself were an indication that the tide of her illness had turned in her favor. Scott had guessed right when he said that she needed physical exercise. She also apparently needed distance from him.

  During Scott’s stay in America he managed a brief trip to Montgomery to see the Sayres about Zelda. The Judge was ill with the flu, and the visit was only a partial success. It did, however, serve to reassure Mrs. Sayre about Zelda’s recovery, and she was grateful to Scott for having come.