Those sudden switches in midstream of her thoughts had always been characteristic of her, and when they were noted as examples of formal thought disorder, for the purposes of classifying her psychosis, the judgment was perhaps only partially right. Not knowing Zelda well, the doctors could not yet perceive the kinds of connections she was able to make from within her apparent disorder. Scott, for example, who knew Zelda better than anyone else, very rarely had trouble following her. Her earliest letters to him, written when she was eighteen and nineteen, were marked by a similar lack of conventional continuity and were full of sudden turns. But they were also marked to an extraordinary degree by special insights into herself and Scott. Even then she did not rely entirely upon the logical linking construction of language. Her thoughts moved rapidly by description and an appeal to the senses. She felt the death of a Confederate soldier; she could smell the aroma of loss that pervaded the South. If her thoughts were unruly, they nevertheless carried enormous meaning to Scott and it was from an emotional rather than a rational language of meaning that she wrote. Its limits, and they were severe, were that she depended on too private a mode of communication. In the end it severed her from ordinary communication with other people. It could be argued that this is precisely the limitation of the insane: they have withdrawn into a mode, habit, or even style of thought so exclusive that it seals them within their own interior, out of which they are no longer able to escape.
Now Fitzgerald kept in constant touch with the clinic, serving as a commentator on Zelda’s illness. Later in the same week, although she remained largely uncommunicative about her illness, she admitted to having had hallucinations in the form of optical illusions at Prangins; “you know just schizophrenia,” she remarked nervously. When pressed to describe her relationship to Scott, she said: “We are both monogamists so far as I know. We have both been absorbed in our love for each other and our hatred for each other. I am not a monogamist in theory.”
Soon Zelda had settled into the routine deemed necessary for her recovery. She pointedly refused to discuss her problems, but she was sleeping well, painting and writing two hours of each day. There was, however, a marked difference between the self she presented to the doctors and the self she revealed to the nurses who observed and assisted her daily. She was apt to be coy with the young resident, Dr. Mildred Squires, and epigrammatic with Dr. Meyer. And she was not beyond putting him on. For instance, Meyer would ask her about her friends. Had she made many? “Good Lord, no. There is no one I distrust like my friends— Oh, no! [a long pause] I have cat thoughts that chase the mouse thoughts and sometimes they will get all the mouse thoughts caught and I read Aeschylus to put myself to sleep.”
She remarked later to a friend that Dr. Meyer wouldn’t be able to do anything for her and she thought she’d spend the rest of her life in sanitariums. She smiled at inappropriate times and tried to cover it by pretending she had thought of something funny, but in reality that smile was uncontrollable and it terrified her. She insisted that the nurses walk on her left side, for she said she couldn’t see them if they were on her right.* She continued sketching and writing, spending more and more of her free time working on her novel.
It is a classic symptom among schizophrenics that they are rarely able to form intimate relations with people and are generally quite isolated from ordinary human contact. Dr. Meyer repeatedly asked about her friends; one suspects that he was trying to bring Zelda into some sort of admission of her isolation to herself. Exasperated by his insistence upon this theme she said: “I can’t tolerate my friends. I hate them—the ones I used to love. I can only tolerate my acquaintances and enemies. So you see where that puts me. It makes me unfit to live in the world, but I’m not unhappy.”
She asked Dr. Squires to read her novel, a section of which she had just had typed. The doctor wrote Scott saying she found the style very similar to that of “Miss Ella”; it was vivid and it had charm, but it noticeably tended to break off and leave the reader stranded. However, she expected that Zelda would revise this first draft. So far, on the surface, things were going smoothly.
At the end of February Zelda wrote Scottie:
I am very glad that you and Daddy have found something to do in the evenings. Chess is such a good game—do learn to play it well. I have never been able to endow it with much of an existance apart from Alice-in-Wonderland and my pieces usually spend most of the game galloping in wild pandemonium before the onslaughts of Daddy. But we must play when I get home. You will soon be an accomplished damede-compagnie for him and I shall have to sit cutting paper-dolls and doing my chemical experiments while you two amuse yourselves…. I expect you to keep the house supplied with soap, flowers and tap- dancers during my absence…. Take care of Daddy. See that there’s plenty of spinach and Dinasaurus meat for Sunday. And profit by my absence to be as bad as you can get away with.
You are a darling and it is very, very, very lonely not to be able to work myself into a grouch by coming into cover you up when I think you’re cold.
Are you practicing standing up straight in your long hours of doing nothing—straight on your hands, I mean. You will be an unsuccessful debutante if it isn’t perfected by the time you’re twenty—
Send me a blossom from your garden—
With all my love—
Mummy
Scott returned to Montgomery feeling depressed about Zelda’s relapse and its meaning in terms of his novel. Certainly he found it difficult to write now, and he was simply waiting until the lease ran out on their house before he left for Baltimore to try to find them another there. He also wanted Scottie to finish the school year without further interruptions. In his Ledger he wrote, “Scotty sick, me sick, Mrs. Sayre playing the fool … everything worser and worser.” Worrying that Zelda’s illness might exhaust them financially, Scott again set about writing stories for the Post. Zelda seemed to understand how deeply disappointed he was: “It seems so awful that you should have to leave your novel. I’ve cut my cigarettes way down and am getting enough exercise to give me a muscular hemmorage and I can’t write very well, so I ought to be better soon. Darling, what an awful struggle you have.”
As unhappy as he was, early one evening he took Scottie to dinner at the country club, perhaps for company, perhaps for a treat. A friend of theirs remembers Fitzgerald gently leading Scottie out to the edge of the dance floor, talking to her quietly, and then very slowly swinging the little girl out in graceful arcs to a slow fox trot. They were not recognized in the dim light until someone pointed them out and said, “That’s Scott Fitzgerald and his little girl.” They stopped as quietly as they had begun and left the club arm in arm.
Zelda missed Scott and wrote to him:
We always have such fun pricking each others aesthetic pompousities, which we pretend to take very seriously. Sometimes I almost believe that our fundamental attraction is an intellectual suspicion…. Anyway, I am very lonely for you.
She mentioned her own writing and the two-hour limit she had to work within according to her doctors’ schedule for her.
I am reading Ian Gordon’s Modern French Painters. He speaks of the sense of growing things in Van Gogh’s work. Those crawling flowers and venomous vindictive blossoms are the hallucinations of a mad-man— without organization or rhythm but with the power to sting and strangle. … I loved them at Prangins. They reassured me…. Dearest—I suppose I will spend the rest of my life torn between the desire to master life and a feeling that it is, au fond, a contemptuous enemy. If there weren’t you + Scottie, melancholia is about as happy a state as any other I suppose. There’s a woman here who wanders tentatively about the halls like the ghost in a poor detective story. It is impossible to feel sorry for crazy people since their realities do not coincide with our normal conceptions of tragedy etc. And yet, a woman’s brother came to pay a visit. I thought how awful and poignant—that boney casket full of nothing that the man had ever loved and he was saying that he wanted her to come home again. It mad
e me feel very sorry. I presume he was addressing his past— … Anyway, there’s nothing so sordid as being shut up— When man is no longer his own master, custodian of his own silly vanities and childish contentments he’s nothing at all—being in the first place only an agent of a very experimental stage of organic free will—
I love you—
Dear, My Own—My love
March began with Dr. Squires feeling certain that Zelda was making definite progress. She wrote Scott saying that Zelda’s tenseness had decreased, and that she had completed the second chapter of her novel by March 2. Dr. Squires told Scott that this chapter was superior to the first and that if Zelda could keep it up the book would be a success. Working consistently, Zelda had made great strides toward its completion and wrote Scott:
I am proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it—It is distinctly École Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours—Perhaps too much so. Being unable to invent a device to avoid the reiterant “said” I have emphasized it a la Ernest much to my sorrow. He is a very determined writer, but I shall also the with my boots on.
Scott was naturally curious about the novel and Dr. Squires’s letter to him about it prompted him to write her back: “The lack of continuity in her novel doesn’t worry me. She isn’t a ‘natural story- teller’ in the sense that I am, and unless a story comes to her fully developed and crying to be told she’s liable to flounder around rather unsuccessfully among problems of construction. Anyhow the form of so many modern novels is less a progression than a series of impressions, as you know—rather like the slowly-turned pages of an album.” He added: “Like all Americans she is in some ways and to some extent a puritan and literally can’t survive without some code, and she has too much tendency to submerge herself in my turbulent Irish anarchism.”
Dr. Squires answered his letter the following day with the astonishing news that Zelda had, that morning, March 9, completed her novel. Zelda sent it immediately to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s with the following note: “Scott, being absorbed in his own [novel], has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits, but naturally, terribly anxious that you should like it…. As soon as I hear that you have safely received the copy, I want to mail the ms. to Scott, so could you wire?” Then Zelda wrote Scott. She told him she was sure Scribner’s would refuse it: she did not send the manuscript with her letter, but promised to mail it to him the following Monday.
On March 14 Scott wrote Dr. Squires in a fury. He had just received Zelda’s manuscript. For four years, he wrote, he had been forced to work intermittently on his novel, “unable to proceed because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums.” Zelda had heard fifty thousand words of his novel and “literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythm, materials … there are only two episodes, both of which she has reduced to anecdotes but upon which whole sections of my book turn, that I have asked her to cut. Her own material—her youth, her love for Josanne, her dancing, her observation of Americans in Paris, the fine passages about the death of her father—my criticisms of that will be simply impersonal and professional.” She had even named one of the main characters Amory Blaine (the name of Scott’s hero in This Side of Paradise).
Fitzgerald was angry and things had to calm down, he wrote, if he was to continue turning out his stories for the Post. “It is getting more and more difficult in this atmosphere of suspicion to turn out the convinced and well-decorated sophisms for which Lorimer pays me my bribe.” He was living in a state of “mild masturbation and a couple of whiskeys to go on” until his lease ran out in mid-April. His anger did not subside and two days later he wired Scribner’s that Zelda’s novel would “seriously compromise what literary future she may have and cause inconceivable harm in its present form….”
Zelda had for the first time directly invaded what Scott considered his own domain, and the violence of his reaction was telling. Her novel was intensely, even naively autobiographical, and as she drew on her own life, so she drew on her life with Scott, for it was her material as well as his. Scott strenuously disagreed. The psychiatrists at Phipps were surprised by the vehemence of his reaction and could only apologize for having allowed Zelda to mail the novel to Scribner’s without first gaining Fitzgerald’s release. They wired him to say that she had switched addresses at the last moment without their knowledge. They promised it would not happen again, but clearly no one had anticipated his fury.
It is probable that when in 1930 Scott abandoned his idea for a novel which would turn upon matricide, he was very much under the influence of Zelda’s first illness. In January, 1932, he proceeded to sketch out a longer novel than he had originally intended to write, salvaging what he could use from his earlier drafts, while immersing his fresh version in Zelda’s insanity and his own complex reactions to it. He called his seventh draft The Drunkard’s Holiday and it was about Nicole and Doctor Dick Diver. Zelda had undoubtedly heard or read portions of his revised plot in Florida and Montgomery as she worked on her own novel.
In early spring Scott drew up his “General Plan” (but it is unclear whether in Montgomery or in Baltimore, where he was to move in April, because none of the manuscript is dated); he wrote:
The novel should do this. Show a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest, giving in for various causes to the ideas of the haute Burgeoise, and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent and turning to drink and dissipation. Background one in which the liesure class is at their truly most brilliant & glamorous such as Murphys.
The hero born in 1891 is a man like myself brought up in a family sunk from haute burgeosie to petit burgeoisie, yet expensively educated. He has all the gifts and goes through Yale almost succeeding but not quite getting a Rhodes scholarship which he caps with a degree from Hopkins, & with a legacy goes abroad to study psychology in Zurich. At the age of 26 all seems bright. Then he falls in love with one of his patients who has a curious homicidal mania toward men caused by an event in her youth. Aside from this she is the legendary promiscuous woman. He “transfers” to himself & she falls in love with him, a love he returns.
In a “Further Sketch” he added, “The Drunkard’s Holiday will be a novel of our time showing the break up of a fine personality. Unlike The Beautiful and Damned the break-up will be caused not by flabbiness but really tragic forces such as the inner conflicts of the idealist and the compromises forced upon him by circumstances.” Later, he very carefully drew up outlines of Dick’s and Nicole’s lives. It is Nicole’s life that is of especial interest in relation to Zelda.
Nicole’s Age
Always one year younger than century.
Born July 1901
courtship for two and one half years before
that, since she was 13.
Catastrophe June 1917 Age almost 16
Clinic Clinic Feb. 1918 Age 17
To middle October bad period
After Armistice good period
He returns in April or May 1919
She discharged June I, 1919. Almost 18
Married September 1919. Aged 18
Child born August 1920
Child born June 1922
2nd Pousse almost immediately to October
1922 and therafter
Frenchman (or what have you in summer of
1923 after almost 4 years of marriage.
In July 1925 when the story opens she is just 24
(One child almost 5 (Scotty in Juan les Pins)
One child 3 (Scotty in Pincio)
In July 1929 when the story ends she is just 28
The heroine was born in 1901. She is beautiful on the order of Marlene Dietrich or better still the Norah Gregor-Kiki Allen girl with those peculiar eyes. She is American with a streak of some foreign blood. At fifteen she was raped by her own father under peculiar circumstances— work out. She collapses, goes to the clinic and there at sixteen meet
s the young doctor hero who is ten years older. Only her transference to him saves her—when it is not working she reverts to homicidal mania and tries to kill men. She is an innocent, widely read but with no experience and no orientation except what he supplies her. Portrait of Zelda—that is, a part of Zelda.
We follow her from age 24 to age 29
Then, after a brief description of “Method of Dealing with Sickness Material” and a “Classification of the Material on Sickness,” he charts in detail Nicole’s case history against Zelda’s. (The chart is reproduced in the section of illustrations.)
Various elements of Nicole’s background are pure invention. For instance, Zelda was not raped by her father, and she showed no homicidal tendencies toward men, but the degree to which Scott used Zelda in a fictional counterpart is otherwise explicit enough. How much of this was clearly worked out in 1932 we do not know, but the basic elements of Dick’s and Nicole’s characters probably were. At last Fitzgerald had found his theme. That it involved a use of Zelda, that she might object to it, be wounded by it, did not seem to have disturbed him. He saw it only from a writer’s point of view.
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