Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Her hopes collapsed with the failure of Save Me the Waltz, and, her small reserve of balance imperiled by her arguments with Scott, Zelda began to storm at Scottie. On the surface her complaint was that she thought Scottie was thoroughly spoiled, but shot through it all was Zelda’s fear that Scottie was growing away from her before she had ever known her, that she no longer had any voice in her daughter’s life. “I can’t help her at all,” she told Rennie. “I’m like a stranger in the house.” But recognizing her unfairness to Scottie didn’t seem to help her control herself. She told Rennie: “Instantly I lose my temper when I get up. It’s awfully unfair to my husband and child. It’s destructive to her…Our relationship has been very bad. In order not to think of her, I say I don’t care about her. That’s silly. Of course I care about her. But I give her nothing—have not for three years. It’s torture to her. My child is gone from the present—out of my life. It isn’t fair and I make terrible kicks against it.” Zelda’s position was made even more unbearable by her own knowledge of what she was doing. “If I approach her and her hair smells bad and I get nauseated—I just have to go away from her. I know her hair doesn’t smell bad, but it makes me sick anyway.”

  What she concealed from Dr. Rennie was the difficulty she was having keeping herself in hand at all times, and not only in connection with Scottie. When she sat down to dinner in the presence of guests, she found herself thinking about their feet or wondering if the women were pregnant. On the tennis courts she could no longer control her game, and would move drowsily, doing each of the actions as if something were curiously wrong, walking to the wrong court, thinking it was her own serve instead of Scott’s. Scott was impressed enough by the regularity of her wrongness to make a note of it to himself.

  When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own innards. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Notebooks, K

  16

  THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER AND FALL of 1932 Zelda had worked on a farce that she called Scandalabra. When she could not proceed on her new novel, either because of Scott’s objections or her own instability, she turned to her play for relief. In a rush of energy she completed it late in October and sent it off to Harold Ober, with a note suggesting who might produce it. She also wrote Perkins, saying that she’d “read every play ever written with the hope that some dramatic sense would seep into my nonsense.” The play made the rounds of producers for a few months, but no one in New York was interested in putting it on.

  Scott, harassed by his troubles with Zelda, drinking more than was good for him, also began to suffer from the tension of trying to pull his novel into shape. He fretted over every phrase of his manuscript-in-progress, for he staked his entire future on its success. Sitting at his table in an old bathrobe, toying with a pencil, the smells of gin and cigarette smoke filling the study, he worked. His secretary remembered those days of anxious writing. “He just wasn’t a stationary man—even when he wrote he kept moving around, walking back and forth.… Zelda kept out of the way while he wrote. I’ll never forget him wandering around that spooky house, talking all the time to himself.

  “I think I typed Tender Is the Night completely three times— and sections of it many more times than that. I can quote whole passages.… Zelda’s memory was good and he would go up to her room and ask advice about things they had done together, conversations they had.… He couldn’t write about anything he didn’t know. Some of those stories were terrible that he turned out during that time—we all knew it. He was convinced he was dead and buried.”

  In an article written during this period and published in the Saturday Evening Post, called “One Hundred False Starts,” he tried to pinpoint his problems as a writer; he said that he was thirty-six now and “For eighteen years, save for a short space during the war, writing has been my chief interest in life, and I am in every sense a professional.

  “Yet even now when … I sit down facing my sharpened pencils and block of legal-sized paper, I have a feeling of utter helplessness.” He said that writers repeat themselves, and that much as he tried to grapple with fresh plots, new material, or old notes jotted down to be resuscitated in bright settings, it was no good.

  We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

  Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.… Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.… What you aim at is to get in a good race or two when the crowd is in the stand.

  But the crowd no longer seemed to him to be in the stands; his income had dropped in 1932 to $15,823, less than half of what it had been in 1931.

  His mother would sometimes visit from Washington, where she lived after the death of her husband. She brought Scott little bags of candy that she thought he’d like, in the hope that sweets would make him drink less. But it never worked and he was infuriated by her simple ploy. Zelda was kind to her and took her side in disputes, but that only irritated Scott more. First he blamed his mother, then Zelda; he would draw his secretary aside, telling her, “I am as I am because of my wife.”

  But there were still good times together. His secretary remembered them talking to each other—“that seemed at the heart of the matter; they talked and talked and talked. One of them would remember something that had happened and off they’d go laughing and chatting.” It was just that the good times seemed brief in comparison to their states of siege. Their help learned to gauge what was going to happen by listening to their sounds as they retired for the night. They slept in the same room and Scott, who frequently had trouble falling asleep, would begin to pace the floor, talking. Their help could tell as soon as they entered the door in the morning if things had gone sour the night before. “It depended upon what kind of discussion they had had. You just sensed that they upset each other. She [Zelda] took a lot from him, it seemed to me, and I never remember her criticizing him. Of course, she had no say.” Scott felt that Zelda had to be protected from everything; she could not drink, for if she did she lost control completely, and she saw guests only on those occasions when it seemed unlikely that their presence would set her off.

  In December, 1932, Dr. Meyer wrote Dr. Forel in Switzerland, telling him of the progress of Zelda’s case. He felt that she was beginning to improve, but that Scott was headed downhill. His situation was, in the doctor’s opinion, worse than Zelda’s; he was drinking a lot and had begun treatment at Phipps with one of Meyer’s colleagues. The strain of trying to be a nurse to Zelda and a shield to Scottie, of maintaining a semblance of balance in the household as well as working to complete his final draft of Tender Is the Night, had taken its toll. He was also, as he told Dr. Rennie, possessed by the frightening knowledge that he could cause Zelda to become psychotic within fifteen minutes of “well-planned conversation…I would only need to intimate that I was interested in some other woman and bring on her insanity again.”

  As the erosion of their marriage continued Scott had to unburden himself to someone, anyone, and when he drank too much he would keep the cook or the nurse up all night telling her about himself and Zelda. His secretary says: “The next day they’d be gone. He’d said too much.… He’d talked about her all the time. I told him, ‘No woman could live with you!’ He’d laugh and look mischievously at me.” When he was sober, “he was charming and polite and as attractive as any man I’ve
ever met.”

  Zelda seemed to her a much more private person. “We had a formal relationship.… Zelda was a very, very polite person; terribly kind and generous.” She was still athletic, and it was part of her regimen to swim and ride or play tennis for a period each day. She enjoyed high dives that terrified the secretary. When they went horseback riding and took a jump, it suddenly became clear that Zelda hadn’t the slightest notion how to sit properly for jumping. Zelda wrote Maxwell Perkins: “I have taken, somewhat eccentricly at my age, to horseback riding which I do as non-committally as possible so as not to annoy the horse. Also very apologeticly since we’ve had so much of communism lately that I’m not sure it’s not the horse who should be riding me.”

  She was not pretty any more, but there was something fresh and clean about her looks still. Scott’s secretary remembers her as “skinny, and her skirts were never straight—shirttail-out type. She moved fast.… She looked like a harassed woman when I knew her.” She spent long periods in her room at the top of the house, dancing by herself, or writing or painting. She loved to take long walks within the grounds of La Paix, stopping by the flower garden to gather a bouquet.

  In the spring of 1933 the Fitzgerald marriage incurred another lesion which would leave them both permanently scarred. Scott once wrote: “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” Fitzgerald was at the end of his tether and felt he had been driven there by Zelda. Together they were visiting Phipps once a week for conferences with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Rennie. This had been going on for about six months and the effectiveness of these meetings was, in Scott’s opinion, negligible. Scott was drinking heavily and taking Luminal. Meyer kept trying to persuade him to get along without alcohol, and he told Fitzgerald flatly, “It would mean much for the ease of Mrs. Fitzgerald.” But Scott was at the point where he could not stand to see Zelda at the dinner table. “I’ve never forgotten the novel. Its terrible resentment.” Unless he kept persistently at Zelda, she broke her schedule, and he had come to hate the constant nagging. “Four days ago I told her I was trading my health for her sanity, and I was through. She could go to bed if she liked.”

  A few days after he made that remark, Scott wrote Dr. Meyer a long letter in which he said he could no longer stand up under the strain of living with Zelda. He said that when their “conversations” at Phipps had begun they worked beautifully “because she [Zelda] was still close to the threat of force and more acutely under the spell of your personality.… And I know also mat you were trying to consider as a whole the millieu in which she was immersed, including my contributions to it.…” He had brooded about her case for years, “arriving at the gate of such questions as to whether Zelda isn’t more worth saving than I am. I compromised on the purely utilitarian standpoint that I was the wage-earner, that I took care of wife and child, financially and practically, and beyond that that I was integrated—integrated in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that I might have two counts against me to her one.” He realized that Zelda was talented, that she somehow presented a “much more sympathetic and, superficially, more solid [picture of herself] than the vision of me making myself iller with drink as I finish up the work of four years.” He was, he knew, compromising himself in the eyes of the psychiatrists by his demonstrations of lack of self-control. “I will probably be carried off eventually by four strong guards shrieking manicly that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Zelda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract.”

  Scott felt that he needed some strongly enforced authority over Zelda, for there was no longer “a mutual bond between equals.” He wanted to be able to order her “to pack her bag and spend a week under people who can take care of her,” at Phipps. He wrote that if Dr. Meyer doubted his ability to judge when such a course of action was necessary, “then hasn’t the case reached such a point of confusion psychologically that I had better resort to legal means to save myself, my child and the three of us in toto” (Fitzgerald’s italics). He recognized two phases in Zelda’s illness. The first was one of intense self-expression when she indulged in an exaggeration of her physical and mental powers; the second was a period of “Conservatism, almost Victorianism, dread of any extremes or excess.…”

  “One of her reasons for gravitating toward the first state is that her work is perhaps at its best in the passage from the conservative to the self-expressive phase, just before and just after it crosses the line—which, of course, could be the equivalent of the period of creative excitement in an integrated person.” But she was not able to keep herself within those bounds, except when she was hospitalized and submitted to the imposed discipline of the clinic. “With much pushing and prodding she lived well, wrote well and painted well.” (He is referring to August and September of the previous year.) “Possibly she would have been a genius if we had never met. In actuality she is now hurting me and through me hurting all of us.” Zelda, Scott wrote, had again begun to believe “that her work’s success will give her some sort of divine irresponsibility backed by unlimited gold. It is still the idea of an Iowa high-school girl who would like to be an author with an author’s beautiful carefree life.” She used Scott’s sheltering (he called it “a greenhouse which is my money and my name and my love”) but at the same time felt no responsibility to him. He said it was her idea “that because some of us in our generation with the effort and courage of youth battered a notch in an old wall, she can make the same kind of crashing approach to the literary life with the frail equipment of a sick mind and a berserk determination.” He wanted Dr. Meyer to let Zelda feel the sting “of being alone, of having exhausted everyone’s patience” (Fitzgerald’s italics), and to know that Meyer was not just benevolently neutral, but would stand behind Scott’s exercise of authority. “Otherwise the Fitzgerald’s seem to be going out in the storm, each one for himself, and I’m afraid Scotty and I will weather it better than she.”

  Dr. Meyer answered Fitzgerald the next week. He too had sensed the futility of their joint conversations, but he felt that what was involved was not simply a question of Zelda’s case; it was Scott’s life as well. Zelda, of course, was his patient, but Meyer saw Scott as someone who, though unwilling, also needed help. He didn’t want Scott to function as a sort of boss to Zelda, nor as a psychiatrist-nurse. He wanted a closer understanding of both of the Fitzgeralds, but he was certain that could be achieved only if Scott gave up alcohol.

  Scott thought that they were working together, bringing a collaboration of perspectives to bear on Zelda’s illness. “I felt that from the difference between my instinctive-emotional knowledge of Zelda, extending over 15 years, and your objective-clinical knowledge of her, and also from the difference between the Zelda that everyone who lives a hundred consecutive hours in this house sees and the Zelda who, as a consumate actress, shows herself to you—from these differences we might see where the true center of her should lie, around what point it’s rallying ground should be.”

  But Meyer had hit a nerve, and Scott had no intention of undergoing whatever kind of psychological care Meyer cautiously suggested. He also felt unable to relinquish liquor. He was ruffled by the suggestion that his abuse of alcohol might impede Zelda’s recovery, or in some way diminish his ability to handle her. He said: “I can only think of Lincoln’s remark about a greater man and heavier drinker than I have ever been—that he wished he knew what sort of liquor Grant drank so he could send a barrel to all his other generals.” He added that if Meyer considered him on the same level as a schizophrenic, he was rather alarmed about his role in the whole business.

  On May 28, 1933, Zelda and Scott sat down at La Paix, with a stenographer, and Dr. Rennie as moderator, to discuss their troubles, or at least to air them again. The 114-page transcription of their talk provides another key to those “spli
ts in the skin” of their marriage at this juncture. It was 2:30 on Sunday when they began and the afternoon sunlight fell short of the interior of the darkening room in which they sat. Scott began by saying he was being destroyed by the present situation of his marriage. “It is all unfair. It is all unfair.… I am paid those enormous prices, and not for nothing. I am paid for a continual fight and struggle that I can carry on.… the whole equipment of my life is to be a novelist. And that is attained with tremendous struggle; that is attained with a tremendous nervous struggle; that is attained with a tremendous sacrifice which you make to lead any profession. It was done because I was equipped for it. I was equipped for it as a little boy. I began at ten, when I wrote my first story. My whole life is a professional move towards that.

  “Now the difference between the professional and the amateur is something that is awfully hard to analyze, it is awfully intangible. It just simply means the keen equipment; it means a scent, a smell of the future in one line.”

  Zelda, Scott said, had written some “nice, little sketches” she had a satiric point of view toward her friends, and she had certain experiences to report, “but she has nothing essentially to say. To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless motivation of a subject, and the endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice.”

  As they talked one aspect of the problem became clear: Scott had not published a novel for eight years (in the transcript he said “seven years—six years”) and he blamed it on Zelda. “Three of those years were directly because of a sickness of hers, and two years before that indirectly, for which she was partly responsible, in that she wanted to be a ballet dancer; I backed her in that.”