Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  “We went to Paris. You have the history of the studio there in my book. It was like living in a dream. Scott drank almost always… I thought always of my dancing and of Egorova. I wanted to do something for her terribly. I was very tired and cried once for 2 hours when she asked me to work with a girl who did not dance as well as I. The girl came dressed in a new cerise ballet-dress which faded afterwards on the chair of the dressing room. I could not get it off, the stain, with eau-do-cologne.

  “Scott went out with King Vidor and Andre Champson and hated the apartment and our dreary lunches. I was working and unattractive. We bought a black cat that had diarrhea and had to give him back…I didn’t think much about him [Scott] because I felt like a priest about my work. We went once to church. I hated taking his money for my lessons: I wanted my dancing to belong to me, so I wrote to pay for them.

  “He came out with me to Egorova’s to dinner. He passed out. It was an awful meal. I adored her. She lived in poverty and seemed very poignant. Once we took her to a Russian cabaret and I filled her champagne glass with daisies. She was a great artist. I used to carry lemonade to the hot studio…She seemed to me like a gardenia, so I gave her gardenias and found some Oriental gardenia perfume for her. She was reticent and I don’t know what she thought. She was very good and kind and always gave me lessons, the famous dancers clamored for her hours.

  “Scott and 1 went to Cannes. We quarrelled there that year: everybody did. It was a nightmare. I worked everyday in Nice, largely to escape…

  “Scott had half a novel done. It was fine. He brought some friends home with him drunk, and I found it all over the floor the next morning. He was sick with tb and drank. I drank sherry and ginger-snaps—not much after swimming. I wrote a ballet called ‘Evolution’ and made the scenery and costumes on the beach. I hardly saw my child because I hated the nurse she had, who snored and was mean to Scottie. Scott did not want to fire her. I was half-crazy and thought the people looked like embryos, and wanted to get back to Paris. Scott and I were completely alienated. He went some with his friends, exotic, interesting people who sat up all night. I couldn’t: I was working on grand pirouettes…He talked and talked and talked at table with the governess about French politics. I couldn’t stand much talking.

  “We came back to Paris through the Cévennes. The trip was fun and we would have been closer but when the car swerved to the crest of a hill, it seemed to me it was going into oblivion beyond and I had to hold the sides of the car. I wrote a story about those mountains. I felt like Cardinal Ballon in the car and wanted to leave him at Tours, but I felt too sorry to think of his driving alone thru the rain—or maybe I did come home on the train: I can’t remember. Anyway, I was very sorry for Scott.

  “In Paris I worked and wrote and went to Algiers. In Algiers I thought of my teacher always and wrote many letters from Biskra and Bou Saad and was miserable in the gorge of Constantine and unhappy at Tungaad and nervous in the big, tearing bus. There were apple trees in bloom on the bleak hills and velvet nights and wonderful smells and goat cheese and lamp-light along the way at dusk.

  “On the boat coming home, I was sick. An English lady called out ‘Cheerio’ with every rock of the boat, and I was utterly alone and thought the boat was sinking. Scott had found companions. He is a popular man. The stewards were sick; everybody was sick. We ate Brioche and marmalade on the pier, when we landed. I brought Egorova a bandana handkerchief filled with perfume and silk for a green dress and amber chips from Africa. The moon in Bou Saada had been white and hot and the Ouled-Naïls had brown bodies to churn when they danced. Soft cries muffled the night; the Arabs ate nougat under the gas flares and the streets were baked and caked with dust… It was an awful trip, though there was a pleasant half-hour with Scott in Biskra. Somehow those dreadful passages have a way of assuming qualities that they did not possess at the time, in retrospect. It is one of the places I should like to go again. Algiers will always remain colored for me by my impatience and drive to get back, my jealousy of Scott’s ability to amuse himself, and an implacable sense of desperation that haunted me constantly like a person crossing a dangerous stream, not daring to look further ahead than the next stone

  “In Paris again, I saw a great deal of Nemtchinova after classes and my friend of the Opera. I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work, full of presentiments about the sun and the rain and the wind. I lived in a quiet ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank. One night he told me that he had spit up a cup of blood. I cried all night and next day he said it wasn’t true. He said he was sick and that he couldn’t work and we lived like strangers. He had other friends and so did I. I had grown to resent the people we knew who did not work, no matter how attractive they were and to feel contemptuous of them.

  “We went to a party somewhere that ended at Maximes…All this time passed in A DAZE.

  “… I was sick…All I cared about was my lessons. Every day I took flowers to the studio…Then at four o’clock one afternoon, after my lesson, Michael Arlen was at home drinking with Scott. He was very pleasant and told me to go to a clinic. I quarrelled with Scott violently because I felt that I needed him and he so obviously preferred being with Michael.

  “I went to MalMaison and flirted outrageously with the Doctor.

  “I came back and went to work. Egorova came to see me and gave me a present. I knew I could not dance again and I was utterly heartbroken when I told her goodby…”

  She said that from the dance she had learned exaltation “and a feeling for the flights of the human soul divorced from the person.” When she found that she could not understand something she had only to transpose it into choreographic terms and it became clear. At the end of what she called “this…fairy tale” she left five blank lines for the psychiatrist to fill in with her opinions. Zelda had again disdainfully eluded those she called The Authorities. But had she? What was clear to them now was her refusal to confront her illness directly; she would neither admit nor accept their assistance.

  At about the same time this document was written, Zelda wrote Scott in an entirely different mode:

  Darling, Sweet D.O.—

  … I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning. Goofo—I adore you and worship you and I am very miserable that you be made even temporarily unhappy by those divergencies of direction in myself which I cannot satisfactorily explain and which leave me eternally alone except for you and baffled. You are absolutely all in the world that I have ever been able to think of as having any vital bearing on my relations with the evolution of the species… I love you and I would like us to be covered with the flake of dried sea water and sleeping to-gether on a hot afternoon. That would be very free and fine. Dear Heart!

  I have got so fetid and constantly smell of the rubbery things about here— It’s ghastly, really. I do not know to what depths the human soul can sink in bondage, but after a certain point everything luckily dissolves in humor. I want to fly a kite and eat green apples and have a stomachache that I know the cause of and feel the mud between my toes in a reedy creek and tickle the lobe of your ear with the tip of my tongue.

  If Trouble still bites give him a good kick in the ass for me.

  Darling, I love you so.

  Zelda

  Zelda was far more upset by her second collapse than she revealed to the doctors or to Scott, and she tried to hide from all of them her fury toward Scott for holding up her novel. She was overheard saying to herself, “I have always done whatever I wanted to do, whenever I could possibly manage it. My book is none of my husband’s Goddamned business.”

  Scott arrived in B
altimore to hunt for a house, and until he found one he stayed at the Rennert Hotel in the center of town, a few minutes from Phipps. He spent a great deal of time trying to provide the psychiatrists with his own point of view on Zelda’s breakdown. In this effort, he had written a sketch about Mrs. Sayre pinpointing the significance of her relationship to Zelda, which he sent to Dr. Squires on April 4, 1932. He felt that their early attachment gave a clue to Zelda’s troubles.

  “It all went back to Zelda whom she [Mrs. Sayre] suckled until, as Zelda afterwards remarked she could probably have chewed sticks. Zelda was a beauty—a wild, gallant child, precociously passionate because of the early cultivation that her mother had made of her nervous system, lazy and half contemptuous of her own talents and selfish up to a point where the other members of the family, Judge Sayre and Zelda’s sisters, refrained from a constant protest that would have amounted to echolalia, only because of the strange mystic power of her mother’s fixation upon her.” He insisted that Zelda had learned very early to assert herself even when that assertiveness was inappropriate and without motivation. As an adolescent she had naturally begun to pull away from her mother, but rather than accept this, Mrs. Sayre had cultivated her position as confidante; she waited on Zelda, and tried to act as her conscience. “…it destroyed Zelda’s personal integrity (in later years she was never able quite to comprehend the meaning of the phrase) and it attached her by the silver cord forever.” Zelda had learned to “beguile,” Scott said, rather than stand on her own.

  By mid-April Scott was able to visit Zelda daily at the clinic, but their meetings were spoiled by constant quarreling. The visits began to have a pattern. Scott behaved badly and grew insulting and angry when Zelda would refuse, for example, to show him a story she was writing. They would quarrel and Zelda would put up a good front at the time, then weep during the night. She was sleeping only four to six hours out of twenty-four.

  Zelda gave no details of their quarrels to her doctors, whereas Scott was quite willing to discuss them. He struck the doctors as acting martyred, lacking in understanding, and uncertain of himself. After their quarrels they would write remorseful letters to each other.

  Scott would try patiently to explain to Zelda what was the matter with her:

  Honey, when you come out into the world again I wish you would try to realize what I can only describe as the:

  Nub (NUB) of Experience

  The fact that in your efforts you have come up twice against insuperable facts 1st against L. 2nd against me—both times against long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we…were seven, probably.

  There has never been any question as to your “value” as a personality—there is however a question as to your ability to use your values to any practical purpose. To repeat the phrase that became an athema in my ears during the last months of our trying to make a go of it “expressing oneself” I can only say there isn’t any such thing. It simply doesn’t exist. What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown—you came to the threshold of that discovery and then decided that in the face of all logic you would crash the gate. You succeeded merely in crashing yourself, almost me, and Scotty, if I hadn’t interposed.

  Zelda would, equally patiently, try to tell Scott that she was not reacting against him, but an uncontrollable part of her illness objected to his advice and struck out against Doctor Fitzgerald. Writing to Scott to say that she would rather stay at Phipps for a while until she was better, she added: “We have been so close this last year and have so many pleasant memories of things we’ve done that I’d hate to spoil it in any way. I think we’re all agreed that your role is not to be that of a doctor and in my present condition you have to mother me and bear with a lot of unpleasantness which is not part of how I feel towards you at all but the result of my health, simply—”

  As their correspondence continued Scott kept returning to the issue of her writing, and in an unpublished sketch, which he probably wrote at this time, he made the basis for his objections quite clear.

  ANALOGY

  Supposing Nikitma was going to create La Chatte in London. Supposing she had for many years supported a younger sister, a neophyte of the ballet but much less experienced and probably less talented. The performance has been delayed and will indeed be still longer delayed from Nikitma’s necessity of taking care of her sister.

  Suddenly she finds that the sister has been secretly rehearsing La Chatte with the idea of giving it in London.

  “That’s out,” says Nikitma. “Rehearse anything else and I’ll back you but not that. If your London performance comes before mine, with the name I’ve made I’m done. Nobody could beat that handicap.”

  Sister: “But I want to express myself.”

  Nikitma: “Nevertheless that’s out.”

  Sister: “But I saw the script the same day you did.”

  Nikitma: “But I chose it and bought it and paid for it.”

  Sister: “But I would if I could.”

  Nikitma: “But I did.”

  Sister: “You’re horrid. You have bad habits.”

  Nikitma: “So would you if I didn’t watch you.”

  Sister: [“]Besides I’ve seen you rehearse so many times I think I could do it nearly as well as you.”

  Nikitma: “When I’ve tried it you can try it. Not till then.”

  Sister: “But I’m going on rehearsing.”

  Nikitma: “Not on this stage. Not with these lights and this music.”

  Sister: “I promise I won’t do it until you do.”

  Nikitma: “Then why are you so eager to rehearse at once. No, no,

  little girl, I’ve been in this game too long.”

  Sister: “But I want to express myself.”

  Nikitma: “All right. Whatever that means. But you can’t exploit your relation to me to do me harm.”

  Scott gave an interview to the Baltimore Sun in which he mentioned Zelda’s forthcoming novel. The headline for the article ran, “He Tells of Her Novel,” with the subtitle, “Work Sent to Publisher Is Autobiographical at Suggestion of Her Husband.” That must have been hard for Zelda to swallow. Actually, he said next to nothing about Save Me the Waltz and talked about the economic health of the nation. But he had covered himself.

  Dr. Meyer continued to try to tell Zelda some of the things he felt she had to learn in order to exist successfully again in the outside world. And Zelda at Scott’s urging tried to be more open with Meyer. But communication between them always fell short of the trust that had to exist if she was to make significant progress under his care. Dr. Meyer wanted Zelda to face her sickness squarely, not passively in the fixed terms of dementia praecox and schizophrenia that she would prattle about as an evasive tactic. He wanted her to avoid the terrific strain she had felt when she was involved in the ballet and seek a middle course. That was not a line of argument congenial to Zelda’s temperament and she once told him flatly to stop insisting upon it. “I went into dancing because I was miserable in my personal life and I thought I could dance—that was a delusion.” That was as far as they got. A colleague of Dr. Meyer’s who would one day work closely with Zelda at Phipps says: “It is easy to understand why Dr. Meyer never got close to her; he was too heavy and ponderous and germanic…none of the quick comeback and wit that appealed to Zelda. I don’t think Zelda’s responses to Dr. Meyer or me were of a psychotic nature. I think she would have turned away from both of us before she was ever ill.”

  Dr. Forel had suggested that if Zelda did not seem to be improving at Phipps Scott should transfer her to a private and elegant nursing home in New York State, Craig House, under the direction of a friend of his, Dr. Slocum. Forel knew that there was a certain bias against such places by psychiatrists like Meyer (who had received his training at a state institution), but he felt certain that Zelda would profit by the environment that Craig House could offer. Phipps, in the center of Balt
imore, could not provide the same air of gracious country living. But for the time being, although Scott investigated other clinics, Zelda remained at Phipps.

  On the 20th of May, 1932, Scott found a house on the outskirts of Baltimore, in Towson. It was called La Paix, and Zelda described it as “a very feminine [house]—dowager grandmother,” adding that she had always chosen “masculine houses with staring windows.” Scott wrote Dr. Squires that he wanted Zelda to take the move very slowly. For the first week she should spend only the mornings at the house and return to Phipps at 1:30 to resume her routine, and “when she comes to the house for good, on, let us say, the 8th of June it will be with an absolutely air-tight schedule agreed upon for the summer.” One reason Fitzgerald wanted these precautions was to avoid fatiguing Zelda; another was “the fact that since the whole burden of a mistake falls on me I should be able to dictate the conditions…”

  By the beginning of June Zelda was able to spend half of her time at La Paix and the remainder at Phipps. Aside from a few outbursts of temper she was doing quite well. There was of course a certain strain in resuming her normal life with Scott.

  Scott felt he had to have some authority over Zelda to use as leverage if she fell off stride; Zelda resented his exercising any authority over her whatsoever. Dr. Meyer urged Zelda to resist an all-or-nothing attitude toward her work, which created yet another strain between her and Scott. But she said she had to contribute something to life; if one didn’t one was “as useful as an appendix. My work is unproven. My work is not a strain. All I ask to do is to work.” On the 26th of June Zelda was discharged from Phipps. Her condition was unimproved.