As the spring passed it became clear that Zelda had definitely improved. The tone of her letters changed and her relationship to Scott was slowly evolving into one more loving and less charged with bitterness and recrimination. She thought back on good times they had shared together.
I keep thinking of Provence and thin brown people slowly absorbing the deep shade of Aix—the white glare on the baking dust of a country pounded into colorless oblivion by an incessantly rotating summer—I’d like awfully to be there—Avignon must be perfect now, to feel the wide quiet of the Rhone, and Aries obliterating its traces with the hum of cafes under the great trees— I’d like to be eating the lunch we had at Chateau Neuf du Pap, where the air was not vibrant and full of the whole spectrum—looking over a deep valley full of grape-vines and heat and far away the palace of the Popes like a mirage—
I would like to be walking alone in a Sirocco at Cannes at night passing under the dim lamps and imagining myself mysterious and unafraid like last summer—
At the end of the letter her tone changed into something other than poetic reminiscence, as if she were trying to ascertain what degree of change comparable to her own might have taken place in Scott.
I would like to be working—what would you like? Not work, I know, and not lone places. Would you like to be in New York with a play in rehearsal like you always said? and to have decorative people about you—to be reading Spengler, or what? It is not possible that you should really want to be in the hurry and disorder of the Ritz Bar and Mont Matre and the high excitability of scenes like the party we went to with McGowan where you passed so much of your time recently—
She asked that Scott send her books to read; she wanted Spengler’s The Decline of the West and a book on playwriting that he had once promised her. “I have been reading Joyce and find it a nightmare in my present condition….” She did not want anything in French, “since I have enough difficulty with English for the moment and not Lawrence and not Virginia Wolf or anybody who writes by dipping the broken threads of their heads into the ink of literary history, please—”
Throughout the spring and into June she and Scott were able to see more of one another without the side effects of eczema or irritation that their earlier meetings had provoked in Zelda. It rained steadily on the lake now, and the dreariness of the days made her a little sad.
I can’t write. I tried all afternoon—and I just twisted the pencil round and round…. When you can’t write you sit on the bed and look so woebegone like a person who’s got to a store and can’t remember what they wanted to buy—
Good-night, dear. If you were in my bed it might be the back of your head I was touching where the hair is short and mossy or it might be up in the front where it make[s] little caves about your forehead, but wherever it was it would be the sweetest place, the sweetest place.
When they met now, there were day trips taken together at Lausanne and Geneva for shopping, or luncheons of hot chocolate and apricot tarts and whipped cream at the cafes. When they could not meet, Zelda wrote to him telling him how she felt and what she was doing, and how much she missed him.
And theres always my infinite love—You are a sweet person—the sweetest and dearest of all and I love you as I love my vanished youth— which is as much as a human heart can hold—
It continued to rain and the sky, Zelda wrote, was
filled with copper clouds like the after-math of cannon-fire, pre-war, civil-war clouds and I feel all empty and bored and very much in love with you, my dear one, my own. I wish you were here so we could stretch our legs down beside one another and feel all warm and hidden in the bed, like seeds beaten into the earth. Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world, and why is there a sleepy tremulo in the air when you are near that’s promising and living like a vibrating fecundity?
And then her last line, to tease and please him: “excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.”
Gerald Murphy, who was living with his family in Switzerland, recalled Fitzgerald’s coming to see him that spring: “Scott called me and said, ‘At last she is asking to see someone. She wants to see you, Gerald.’ We knew how important that was. It was a breakthrough. But he warned me that it might be a terrible experience and he didn’t want to press me into going if I felt I couldn’t. I remember telling him that of course I would go—and feeling absolutely terrified at the same time.”
Dr. Forel screened him carefully before letting him see Zelda. He explained what she had been through and cautioned Gerald against mentioning certain things that were known to upset her.
“She had chosen basket therapy when she was well enough and she was outside in a courtyard working on one when I went to visit her. I remember spotting her near a lovely old house—there was a fig tree near her and I noticed that she was watching me without seeming to do so. I had to cross the entire courtyard and that was the most God awful long walk that I have ever made. She looked altered, distrait. I moved as calmly as I could and when I reached her I smiled and said that all my life I had wanted to make baskets like hers—great, heavy, stout baskets. She accepted that, smiled back at me and asked, ‘Where did you come from?’ I told her where we were living and that I was on my way to Geneva, I had just stopped to say hello. Actually, I stayed less than five minutes with her, but it was a harrowing experience.”
Zelda began to take trips with other patients (rather than in the company of nurses) into Berne and Geneva, and she asked Scott how he could love “a silly girl who buys cheese and plaited bread from enchanted princes in the public market and eats them on the streets….” As her world expanded she tried to let Scott know how-delicious her freedom was, as well as how much she missed his presence.
Darling—
I went to Geneva all by myself with a fellow maniac and the city was thick and heavy before the rain…. and I wanted to be in Lausanne with you— … Have you ever been so lonely that you felt eternally guilty—as if you’d left off part of your clothes—
I hope you know they are kisses splatterring you[r] balcony to-night from a lady who was once, in three separate letters, a princess in a high white tower and who has never forgotten her elevated station in life and who is waiting once more for her royal darling
Good-night, honey—
In July there were two idyllic weeks that Zelda spent with Scott and Scottie at Annecy. They said they would “never go there again because those weeks had been perfect and no other time could match them.” They played tennis and fished and danced in the warm nights by the lake, “white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. It was like the good gone times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs.”
When she was back she teased him playfully, lovingly:
My dearest and most precious Monsieur,
We have here a kind of maniac who seems to have been inspired with erotic aberrations on your behalf. Apart from that she is a person of excellent character, willing to work, would accept a nominal salary while learning, fair complexion, green eyes would like correspondance with refined young man of your description with intent to marry. Previous experience unnecessary. Very fond of family life and a wonderful pet to have in the home. Marked behind the left ear with a slight tendency to schitzoprenie.
Toward the end of the summer Dr. Forel suggested that the Fitzgeralds take another trip together—a trial run so that Zelda might work her way back into society. The Murphys had taken up residence at an old manor house in the Austrian Tyrol; they likened it to a hunting lodge, with its sanded floors and white walls. It was simple and solid and it stood amid beautiful fields of grain. As it was not far from Switzerland, the Fitzgeralds decided to visit them there. Zelda would be with people she liked, she could relax, and the atmosphere was both refreshing and calming. “At first we were petrified at the idea of their coming,” Gerald Murphy said. “But once she was there sh
e enjoyed it so, relished it, really. Scott was delighted with the place and enormously reassured by Zelda’s behavior.” One incident marred the long weekend that the Fitzgeralds spent with them, but it had nothing to do with Zelda. The Murphys had brought with them their nursemaid for their own three children. In the evening when it was time for their baths the nurse asked Scottie (who was nearly ten) if she wanted her bath as well. Scottie rebelled. “She was sure the bathwater was dirty; she thought Mademoiselle had used the same water to bathe each of the three Murphy children. It was cloudy and she ran and told her mother and father. Zelda took it beautifully, but Scott—well, Scott behaved like a child, he made a great deal of fuss over the whole thing.” Bath salts, which clouded the water, had been used to soften it, and Scottie thought it was dirty. Scott may also have been more worried than he let on about the tuberculosis of one of the Murphy sons. He had always thought of himself as tubercular and he must have been anxious about Scottie’s coming in contact with it. Gerald Murphy said: “Well, it’s all written into Tender Is the Night— changed a little of course. But we were stunned, we would never have dreamed of washing them all in the same water!”
Zelda had passed those various tests of her ability to cope with her life with Scott and her child. She was now able to reassure Scott when he felt blue about their future together.
Please don’t be depressed: nothing is sad about you except your sadness and the frayed places on your pink kimona and that you care so much about everything— You are the only person who’s ever done all they had to do, damn well, and had enough left over to be dissatisfied…. Can’t you possibly be just a little bit glad that we are alive and that all the year that’s coming we can be to-gether and work and love and get some peace for all the things we’ve paid so much for learning? Stop looking for solace: there isn’t any, and if there were life would be a baby affair….
Stop thinking about our marriage and your work and human relations—you are not a showman arranging an exhibit— You are a Sun-god with a wife who loves him and an artist—to take in, assimilate and all alterations to be strictly on paper—
On September 15, 1931, after a year and three months of treatment, Zelda was released from Prangins. Her case was summarized as a “reaction to her feelings of inferiority (primarily toward her husband) ….” She was stated to have had ambitions which were “self-deceptions” and which “caused difficulties between the couple.” Her prognosis was favorable—as long as conflicts could be avoided.
The Fitzgeralds motored directly to Paris and from there went on to board the Aquitania for the United States. On a sunny day during the crossing, with Scottie playing shuffleboard next to them, Scott took a snapshot of Zelda sitting on a canvas deck chair. She is wearing sturdy low-heeled shoes and her hair is pushed back clumsily beneath a pale beret. She is smoking a cigarette and on her lap balances a large sketching pad. She is not smiling, but scowls against the sun. If it were not that the photograph is included in the Fitzgeralds’ scrapbook and labeled “Homeward bound on the Aquitania” one could not identify Zelda, for she is altered and aged beyond recognition. She had lost her good looks and what remained was a face hardened by suffering and despair.
Earlier that year when it had seemed to her that she might recover she had written Scott: “I can’t make head or tails out of all this dreary experience since I do not know how much was accidental and how much deliberate—how big a role circumstance played and what proportion was voluntary—but if such a thing as expiation exists it is taking place and I hope you will forgive me the rest of my part—”
* See Notes for Chapter 8.
* Zelda may have been referring to the mythical salamander, which was able to live in fire and endure it without harm.
* At various periods in Fitzgerald’s life he referred to having had tuberculosis. Usually it was a pretext to cover his drinking. And because he was something of a hypochondriac it is difficult to decide if he suffered from tuberculosis to the degree that he thought he did. According to his biographer Arthur Mizener, Scott did suffer a mild attack in 1919, and in 1929 “he had what subsequently proved to have been a tubercular hemorrhage….”
12
THEY STAYED IN NEW YORK ONLY A few days before traveling to Alabama to see Zelda’s anxious family. They were considering settling in Montgomery, perhaps even buying a house. At last Scott would be able to return to his novel, which he had not touched thus far in 1931, while Zelda set up housekeeping.
Montgomery was a haven from the Depression, which seemed to have had no effect upon life there, and even the passage of time left the city unaltered. Zelda wrote, “In Alabama, the streets were sleepy and remote and a calliope on parade gasped out the tunes of our youth.” “Nothing,” she added, “had happened there since the Civil War.”
The Fitzgeralds searched for a house and found one at 819 Felder Avenue, which was on the edge of Montgomery’s first suburb, Cloverdale. It was, as usual, an improbable place, far too large for them. They hired a Negro couple to take care of housekeeping and cooking as well as the secondhand Stutz they had just bought. They acquired a white Persian cat, which they called Chopin, and a bloodhound, named Trouble. Life settled down to a quiet routine of football games, tennis, and golf, and visiting old friends. By October Scott was bored and wrote in his Ledger, “life dull.”
Zelda seemed peculiar to her friends, few of whom knew about her recent breakdown, and her appearance startled them. She was haggard and her mouth fell into a slight smile, as if she were permanently amused. The Fitzgeralds had always provided Montgomerians with a topic of conversation and gossip, but now it was no longer entirely out of envy that their names came up. Someone overheard them quarreling about a suicide pact made in the early days of their marriage when they had promised that at thirty-five they’d call it quits. The notion had definitely lost its appeal for Scott, who turned thirty-five that September. He wrote at the top of his Ledger, “Recession and Procession,” adding, “Zelda well, worse, better. Novel intensive begins.”
Zelda began to feel increasingly uncomfortable in Montgomery. She felt surrounded by women of limited horizons. “You know the kind: women of fifty still known as ‘Baby.’” She gave a friend a copy of Faulkner’s new novel, Sanctuary, and was delighted when she learned that the woman was sleepless after reading it. She wondered if it mightn’t do many of the women in Montgomery good to be shocked out of their complacency.
Judge Sayre was gravely ill. He had not recovered from the influenza of the previous spring and the strain of his long sickness exhausted Mrs. Sayre. Outwardly she was composed, even calm, but she tended to reminisce more than she had before, as if her memories gave her comfort. It was in the midst of this atmosphere of illness and impending death that Scott announced his plans to go to Hollywood. An offer came via Harold Ober to work on a film script under the direction of Irving Thalberg, and Scott felt he could not turn it down. The money was good and he was eager to try his hand at films again after his rankling failure in 1927. He would be gone no more than eight weeks and be home by Christmas.
Even before Scott left, Zelda had begun to work on her writing. It was the only field she felt remained open to her in which she might be able to accomplish something professionally. Dancing was now permanently out of the question, for she was no longer in top physical condition and she realized the limitations of both her age and her ability. She felt her talents as a painter were second-rate and, besides, her poor eyesight made painting difficult and tiring. She had attracted a modest amount of attention as a short-story writer in the College Humor pieces and she hoped there would be a market for the kind of stories she wanted to write. Writing regularly, with an astonishing degree of self-discipline and speed, she finished at least seven stories and began planning a novel during the period Scott was in Hollywood. Only one of the stories was a revision from the previous summer, and they were usually mailed to Harold Ober just as soon as they were typed. Unfortunately, only one of the stories was published an
d none survive in manuscript. The synopses kept by Ober give us our only clue to their general content.
Two stories were Southern in their locale and in both there was a clutter of sensational events: miscegenation, attempted incest, a shooting, and automobile accidents were elements about which the stories turned. The others centered on the chic worlds of Long Island and Europe. But no matter what their themes were, Ober could not sell them.
In notes accompanying the stories, Zelda asked Ober what he thought about them and suggested where they might be published. “Please tell me your frank opinion. … I wish we could sell something. Can’t we give them away? I feel sure ‘Nuts’ is a good story, why won’t Scribner’s take it? It’s so satisfactory to be in print.” Scribner’s did eventually take it (if “Nuts” refers, as it seems to, to “A Couple of Nuts”) and it was published the following summer. It was a good story, possibly the best of Zelda’s short fiction. It possesses a Fitzgeraldian aura of romance falling apart but it is unmistakably Zelda’s. All too frequently her stories had failed because they became homilies on conduct overly laden with description of setting. Her characters froze into prototypes rather than growing as memorable and separate people. But in “A Couple of Nuts” Zelda was in control of her talent.
The story is about a young American couple, Larry and Lola, who play the banjo and sing in a club in Paris. They are “young and decorative” and “In those days of going to pieces and general disintegration it was charming to see them together.” Their innocent youthfulness and good looks soon make them a fashionable pair among the rich. They attract a patron who introduces them on the Riviera, where they become a success. “Their stuff was spectacularly American and they made a killing at it, being simple kids.” Within a year they are a vogue, but they’ve also become calculating. Lola is romantically involved with their patron and careless; Larry’s role is to ignore the situation, which he does. There is a casual reference to an abortion, which they have to borrow money to cover. Eventually Larry persuades Lola to leave with him for America, where, he believes, they can make a name for themselves. We learn of their flop in the States through the patron, who had been instrumental in providing them with an introduction to the smart club in America where they failed. The plot becomes complicated at this point as Mabel, the patron’s ex-wife, falls for Larry. Lola retaliates by bringing a lawsuit for a hundred thousand dollars against them. It saddens the narrator to think back on the couple, for “They had possessed something precious that most of us never have: a jaunty confidence in life and in each other. …” At the end of the story Larry and Mabel are drowned on Mabel’s yacht. Lola survives with a lonely existence before her. The narrator remembers the times they had shared together and the night he was given their Paris address: “I had promised to send them some songs from home—songs about love and success and beauty.”
Zelda Page 24