Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  In the December issue of Scribner’s Magazine a story of Zelda’s appeared, “Miss Ella” (sometimes referred to as “Miss Bessie,” possibly its title in manuscript), which had been written in Switzerland. It was an ambitious story and as closely constructed as Zelda could make it at that time.

  “Miss Ella” was one of Zelda’s Southern stories, and it is hard to imagine either the situation of the story or its central character as existing in any other area of the world than the American South. Ella is a Victorian spinster who lives a highly ordered life in which everything has its proper place. She keeps fit by standing up twenty minutes after each meal; she naps until the hot midday sun has cooled, and at five she goes for a drive in a carriage with her ancient aunt. The grounds of her home are hidden behind a high wall, which the children of the neighborhood climb only after the departure of Miss Ella. On the other side of the wall is a wooden playhouse which charms them. The playhouse is half hidden in a thicket by masses of overgrown flowers and it conceals inside a rusting shotgun and some dried apple blossoms pasted to the walls. A proprietary Negro tends the gardens and scolds the children severely when he catches them invading the grounds around the playhouse.

  Miss Ella’s life seems as orderly as her garden; she has, however, a story, “which like all women’s stories was a love story and like most love stories took place in the past.” In her youth she had been engaged to a Mr. Hendrix, who courted her formally and conventionally. After a proper length of time he asked her to marry him and she agreed. At Christmastime during a Sunday school party to which they had all gone, Andy Bronson lighted a firecracker and from its explosion a spark caught fire to Ella’s dress. Instantly her skirts flamed up and Andy dashed to her side, the first to reach her, smothering the flames with his hands. In the weeks that followed the accident he began to send Miss Ella gifts of flowers, and silks and beads, a fan, and “an exquisite miniature of himself when his face was smaller than his great soft eyes—treasures.” Ella discovered that “she loved him with desperate suppression. One night he kissed her far into the pink behind her ears and she folded herself in his arms, a flag without a breeze about its staff.” They planned to marry, but Ella had of course to break her engagement to Mr. Hendrix, “saving and perfecting dramatically the scene she hopefully dreaded.” He took it wordlessly and stiffly and she was relieved when he left.

  The following spring on the afternoon of her marriage to Bronson, while she was upstairs dressing, Mr. Hendrix quietly entered her garden and shot his head off on the steps of the playhouse. “Years passed but Miss Ella had no more hope for love. She fixed her hair more lightly about her head and every year her white skirts and peek-a-boo waists were more stiffly starched.” The story ends by repeating an image from the opening paragraph: the rims about Miss Ella’s eyes “grew redder and redder, like those of a person leaning over a hot fire, but she was not a kitchen sort of person, withal.” She avoids all contact with heat, that of the day as well as that of love. In fact, carefully placed images of heat and fire establish and underline the motion of the story, which is a glimpse of a frustrated woman. “Bitter things dried behind the eyes of Miss Ella like garlic on a string before an open fire” is the first sentence of the story. Her memories have “acrid fumes”; her hair is red. When Miss Ella is first introduced by the narrator of the story she is “dodging the popping bits of blue flame” from the coal fire before the hearth. It is a flame which ignites Ella’s skirts and draws her into contact with Andy Bronson. Even he is first seen by the reader in “The church [which] was hot…. There in the smoky feminine confusion stood Andy Bronson.”

  Zelda had read Faulkner before she wrote this story (we know she was reading him in Switzerland before her return to America in the fall of 1931); she was nurtured by a kindred South. She had also been reading psychological studies while at Prangins and what she had learned about repression informed her description of this Victorian spinster. “Even her moments of relaxation were arduous, so much so as to provoke her few outbursts of very feminine temper and considerable nervous agitation.” Zelda was also sharply aware of those disguises of self that mask the neurotic feminine personality. The apparent orderliness of Miss Ella’s person matches the orderliness of the grounds of her home, yet both are façades: the one for the erotic attraction she has felt toward the flamboyant Bronson, the other as a mask before the playhouse, the scene of violent and self-inflicted death.

  Stories of suicide were a part of Zelda’s youth and natural material for her to draw on. Although Ella does nothing violent herself, she provokes violence. Just why she no longer believes in love after the suicide of Hendrix is never made clear. What is clear is the extent to which she lives within herself after the shock of drat suicide. She retires from anything that smacks of life. She swings herself in a hammock, dressed entirely in white, rocking herself as no lover would be permitted, yet “you would never have guessed how uncomfortable she was or how intensely she disliked hammocks.” Within this woman there is sexual energy in restraint that Zelda tries to depict, and to do so she reaches back in time, describing a woman familiar in the South but hardly one of the romantic figures of her own youth. Ella is not a belle; she is an ordinary, if neurotic, spinster who no longer likes or tolerates disorder within her person. Trying to seat herself comfortably in her hammock she “invariably loosened the big silver buckle that held her white-duck skirt in place”; she worries about an immodest showing of her legs and once in the hammock she tries to maintain “a more or less static position.”

  Zelda was no longer content to write the slight ironic and fashionable sketches she had written earlier. She was consciously trying to extend herself in her fiction. This story did not entirely flounder in an abundance of poetical description, and what descriptive materials were included had a cutting edge of meaning to them. The flaw was still a lack of sufficient development of the characters in terms of their relationships to each other. It was not enough to plant images; those images needed to accumulate into a fuller portrait of Miss Ella and her suitors.

  One of the things Zelda was trying to get at was the attempt at revolt of a conventional young woman. Ella’s alliance with Hendrix promised to be stifling from the beginning. Their plans for a life together were “modest stable plans…. He told her how things were to be, and she acquiesced.” She hears his quiet voice filling the air “like smoke in an airless room.” Her one chance to avoid suffocation is to love Bronson. He gives her exotic gifts: deep red roses whose petals “shone like the purple wings of an insect,” lavish silks from Persia, which underline the sexual and feminine aspects of Ella. Only an act of violence stops her from marrying him, but once stopped she never risks herself again. This aspect of the story never clearly emerges. We are told too many things at a remove, the characters are not allowed to speak for themselves, and finally the torpor that envelops Miss Ella envelops the reader.

  The publication of Zelda’s story caused a stir in Montgomery that delighted her. She wrote Scott that she had sent Dr. Forel a copy of Scribner’s Magazine “from sheer vanity.” Intoxicated with the pleasure of being published, she nevertheless fell back into her role of pupil-wife. “I do not dare read the story. Knowing it is not first rate, I don’t want to be discouraged—I wish you could teach me to write.”

  From Hollywood Scott wrote Zelda that if his film was really successful he might make $75,000. Zelda was ecstatic and immediately made plans about how to spend it. “We could build us a house. … A great denuded square I want with frank windows that frame the world in cold impersonal rigidity. And it is to be all over yellow. We will have all the children we can, and call them Dementia Praecox Fitzgerald—Dear, how gruesome!”

  Zelda wrote about how she sat with her mother in the parlor of her house during the long rainy afternoons, talking about the Civil War and Zelda’s grandfather, but she connected it all to something else. “It’s so nice to have important men and I’m so glad that you are one. I want you to come home and for us to h
ave a son and lots of vital things we own.”

  It rained nearly every day from the end of November to mid-December and Zelda wrote that she not only missed Scott and was lonely, but had a “sore throat, asthma, grippe and indigestion.” On the good days, she said, a joyous release of pent-up excitement was likely to overcome her. She had a pistol without any bullets that she kept in a bureau drawer for protection.

  I love climbing out on the tin roof and brandishing my empty pistol and yelling “Who’s there?” as if I had a mob at bay. But I am, secretly, always the escaping criminal. My bravado instincts do not function on the side of law and order, as do not also a great many other interesting facets of myself: i.e., to me, interesting, of cource.

  I miss my Daddy horribly. I am losing my identity here without men. I would not live two weeks again where there are none, since the first thing that goes is concision, and they give you something to butt your vitality against so it isn’t littered over the air like spray[s] of dynamite.

  In the wake of the Judge’s death she could bear reminiscences of her mother’s, for she knew they gave her relief from her grief, but she was bored and impatient with the conversation of friends from her girlhood.

  This place is like one of those cracked phonograph records that plays always in the same place where you have to push the needle over but each revolution it sticks till you push it again and you never can come to the tune. Save me, Deo, from the darkness and the blight. … I am drugged with atmosphere. It’s a shock moving about as we do—or is it growing old—suddenly finding yourself on unremembered corners surrounded by a flood of forgotten association.

  It was nearly Christmas, and the household was in a flurry of preparations for the holidays and Scott’s return on the 20th. The ornaments for their Christmas tree had been stored for so long that Zelda said they had lost their “sex appeal,” but they were unbroken and she decided not to buy any more, “though there’s nothing so beautiful as shining red balls dangling like the evolution of a jewel before your eyes. I s’pose thats why savages like things like that: they are both at the same level.”

  Scottie hung a sign on her door, “Void la chambre mystérieuse” and four red wreaths at her windows. Her closet was filled with gifts wrapped in silver paper. She was a little glum about her discovery that there was no Santa Claus and decided that she wanted an electric train to help soothe her disillusionment. With Scott away Zelda had drawn closer to Scottie. But closer in the rather special sense of observing her, rather than doing things with her. Scottie came sometimes to dress herself in front of the fire in Zelda’s room and Zelda wrote Scott, “… it’s a joy to watch her long sweet delicate body and the cool of her pale hair quenching the light from the flames.” Scottie was, Zelda decided, like her father, a moon person. Zelda never said what kind of a person she thought she was, but it is unlikely that she thought of herself in terms of the moon. Scottie, who was now ten, was already being consciously nurtured by her father in a manner that he hoped would help her to avoid the pitfalls of her mother’s character, as well as his own. He did not, for example, want her educated in the South. He was suspicious of the languidness he thought the climate encouraged. And he insisted upon a far more rigorous education than Zelda could possibly oversee. In the main Zelda agreed with him, but she left to Scott, as she always had, those important choices of education and direction.

  Scott was back. Christmas was more strenuous than they had planned, with many relatives in the house, and Zelda’s asthma grew ominously worse. Finally she and Scott decided to escape to Florida, where the clear, hot air might relieve her. They would both work on their novels. Their Negro chauffeur, Freeman, drove them to the Don Ce-Sar Hotel in Saint Petersburg.

  It was splendid in the sun. Zelda was gentle and loving toward Scott, they swam together, and Zelda tanned herself copper. She got the rest she needed and the asthma disappeared. Buoyed by their holiday, Scott wrote Maxwell Perkins: “At last for the first time in two years and a half I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead. Am replanning it to include what’s good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words and publishing. Don’t tell Ernest or anyone—let them think what they want—….”

  Without warning a spot of eczema appeared on Zelda’s neck. It left two hours later only to reappear in two days for another tense two hours. Scott thought it might have been due to a deep-sea fishing trip, which had made her seasick, “or worry about her novel which she thought was not going so well….” The eczema scotched all plans for remaining in Florida, and they prepared to leave for Montgomery at once. The first night spent on the road Zelda was sleepless. Moving restlessly about their room while Scott slept, she found a flask in his suitcase and drank everything in it. She woke Scott at 5 A.M. and told him that dark things were being done to her secretly. Finally, after hours of talking together, with Scott trying to calm her, Zelda said that she wanted to go to a clinic.

  They were desperately unhappy; it was a crushing blow to their hopes for a normal life together. They returned to Montgomery, with Scott hoping it had been just a passing attack brought on by the liquor. On February 1, 1932, Scott wrote Dr. Forel for advice about Zelda. Until the night before there had been no further trouble.

  She had been working all day hard and complained of her eyes which are terribly strained. At dinner she was merry and a little excited. After dinner in the middle of a chess-game (which I was winning) she complained of her eyes, quit, began an arguement and for an hour behaved distinctly irrationally—I do not mean she behaved like last winter in Prangins. More as she did in Paris before she broke down two years ago. Each time the dominant idea is that someone is causing the eczema and the eye hurting, with my connivance. This has disappeared utterly in the morning (she wanted to work some more last night but I made her go to bed) but the asthma is bad and I dread the day and the evening. She is affectionate but this time is not sorry for last night or won’t admit it; I wanted her to walk rather than work or smoke but, she answers “Dr. Forel told me when I did not feel stable I ought to work.”

  Scott was worried and told Forel: “For the first time in three years I have money enough to work on my novel on which my whole fortune depends.” Scott was willing to move in the spring, but he desperately wanted to stay put for the time being and not have to break up housekeeping or put Zelda in a clinic, which would use all his reserves. “It seems terrible because we have both been so utterly happy, happier almost than we have ever been. What the moral effect on me would be, I do not know and I hardly dare to think what it would be on her.”

  A week later, after spending some hours working on her novel, Zelda had another period of hysteria. It lasted no more than two hours, but it terrified both of them.

  On February 10, Scott wired Dr. Adolf Meyer, the director of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, that he was bringing his wife to Baltimore for treatment. At Zelda’s suggestion they left Montgomery immediately by train. “My haste,” Scott later wrote Forel forlornly, “was that she begin to turn against me again. …”

  * Zelda first developed asthma when she was twenty-three. Fitzgerald later told Dr. Forel she was allergic to moose hair.

  No one has schizophrenia, like having a

  cold. The patient has not “got” schizophrenia.

  He is schizophrenic.

  R. D. LAING, The Divided Self

  13

  ON FEBRUARY 12, 1932, ZELDA ENtered the Phipps Clinic. She spoke very little that first day, but what she did say supported Scott’s fears of her growing irrationality. Quietly, as if to herself, she asked: “Isn’t it terrible when you have one little corner of your brain that needs fixing—Dr. Meyer can do it, can’t he? It’s this asthma and eczema that has just disrupted our home when it was running so well.” She complained of not being able to sleep and of being under a terrific strain due to the death of her father during her husband’s absence. “I was left alone with my dau
ghter and it was just too much.”

  Scott gave the young resident physician who would be in charge of Zelda a detailed case history. He described Zelda’s youth as wild— she was “the town scandal”—and said that she had been his mistress for a year before their marriage. He stressed her relationship to her mother, saying that it was “unusual—she was spoiled and never thwarted in any way.” When asked about her family, Scott said that Judge Sayre was a brilliant idealist and the only man he had ever admired without qualification, but he thought that Mrs. Sayre tried to have Zelda succeed where she had failed. Mrs. Sayre was the saint of the family, and its center.

  He also tried to describe Zelda’s personality; he explained that Zelda, although outgoing and on the surface friendly, had never been able to establish any close friendships. Her friends were followers and as such her position in relation to them was a superior one. He said she was proud and vain and always jealous of him. He stressed his opinion that she could not take criticism of any sort and became obstinate in the face of it, then he contradicted himself and said that ultimately she could be reasoned with because of her logical mind.

  He said almost nothing about himself in relation to Zelda, and he did not once mention his drinking. He told fairly sketchily about his romance in 1927 with Lois Moran in order to explain Zelda’s reaction to it. But he now considered the extremity of her reaction a forewarning of her first breakdown. His only other reference to himself was to state that he had been unjustly accused by Zelda of a homosexual attachment to Ernest Hemingway.

  The following day Scott returned to Alabama. Zelda appeared to be cheerful and optimistic in his absence, but when she replied to questions put to her by the doctors her sentences were long and peculiarly involved. Upon occasion she would break off abruptly for no apparent reason and make plays on words which had no meaning the doctors could fathom. Her replies were nonetheless revealing. Routinely she had been asked how old she was when she began school. “Six, and then I left and then I—I know what keeps me from getting well is shyness, and then a terrible inferiority complex that drives one to attempt anything. … A feeling of being thrown into complete pandemonium when you see someone who can do more. I am not easy with people. I have never had any intimate friends. My husband and I have been very complete with each other. Everything is impersonal.”