Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  “‘That sounds like something from one of your own stories,’” Cowley said.

  “‘Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself. And you know, she’s cuckoo, she’s crazy as a loon. I’m madly in love with her.’”

  Madly in love with her or not, Scott was fuming about the direction Zelda’s relationship to Dr. Rennie seemed to be taking. Both of the Fitzgeralds were drawn to the doctor by his warmth and youth, but Zelda had been, according to Scott, duping him. Scott wrote Rennie saying she was selling the naive young psychiatrist (as Scott liked to think of him)

  the small accumulation of personal charm that she ought to be selling in the house.… Can’t you imagine that every single judgment upon my drinking that could be made has been made, every struggle tried, won or lost, in detail and the fight continues and will continue?…Maybe I’m ruined and could never again pose as a cinema hero or a social success, but these have not recently figured among my ambitions. My line is to do a certain amount of straight thinking and observation, embody them in as perfect a technique as I can master.

  Rennie, it seemed to Scott, was making judgments about his drinking as well as about Zelda.

  conditioned on the charm of a very shrewd and canny woman, whose motives, both healthy and pathological, can stand a good examination.… You have indicated, merely from your interest, that you realize the importance of the factors with which you are dealing. Which, then, is more important? Responding to the mood of a psychopath or aiding someone to bring off what promises to be a work of art? (I hate like hell to make such a guess!) I couldn’t think that there should be much choice on your part.… I am fighting my way through an old American tendency toward puritanism, not during the frequent insomnia involved wondering whether I will get through to the end, I worry sometimes whether you, Tom Rennie, or all your generation will laugh yourselves out of existence before you have begun to think. I think you think— but, I’m not absolutely convinced, because you, I am speaking of you personally, can be distracted by stray bits of color.… This lecture is worth a thousand dollars, but I don’t regret it because you have sent in no bills. Why don’t you?… I think we should split up.…

  In closing Scott added that he had “no more to be ashamed of than the average human being.”

  Neither of the Fitzgeralds could bear living at La Paix any longer, for the house had taken on for them the shapes and shadows of their troubles. In June Zelda had tried to burn some old clothes in an unused fireplace upstairs, inadvertently starting a fire, ruining several of the rooms on the upper floor, and leaving a permanent haze of sepulchral gloom over the rest of the house. The newspapers covered the fire and said it was due to defective wiring. Scott asked the Turnbulls to postpone having repairs made, for he was deep in his manuscript and did not want to be interrupted. But by November living at La Paix made them both jittery and they moved to a smaller place in town at 1307 Park Avenue, which was also less expensive. At the end of the month, at the suggestion of Dr. Meyer, who insisted that a respite was necessary, the Fitzgeralds took a brief trip to Bermuda. Unfortunately, constant rain spoiled their holiday and after a week they returned unrested, with Scott suffering from pleurisy.

  Scott had toyed for some time with the idea of exhibiting a selection of Zelda’s paintings in New York. He would hire a gallery and test her work in a professional milieu. A friend of theirs, Cary Ross, talked Scott out of renting space for the show, for he felt that Zelda’s work was good enough to interest a gallery without Scott’s having to pay for the showing. Eventually Ross exhibited the paintings at his own gallery on East Eighty-sixth Street. At first Zelda was thrilled by the prospect of such an exhibition, but as the details of the arrangement were being worked out by Scott and the art dealer, she became irritated and refused to discuss anything with either of them. She said something about her paintings being too personal to her and went to bed. No one was quite certain what precipitated her relapse, but after this scene with Scott and Ross she was sent back to Phipps. She re-entered on February 12, 1934, exactly two years after her first entry. Zelda told her doctor, “I don’t think I could paint myself anyway if it weren’t for— it’s my way of communicating with someone.” The doctors realized that her relapse was a serious one, and Zelda was put under constant observation as a precaution against suicide, required to stay absolutely at rest in bed, and given sedatives each day. On her re-entry she was fifteen pounds underweight. This time she did not make the slightest effort to cooperate with the doctors or the other patients. The only exception to her generally hostile behavior was that in a dancing and exercise class she was later able to attend she would walk over to those patients in the group who were most ill and try to help them.

  The serial version of Tender Is the Night was running in Scribner’s Magazine throughout January, February, March, and April, 1934. On Zelda’s re-entry to Phipps she had probably read at least the first half of the novel, and it affected her profoundly. In a sense this was her most thorough confrontation with the Doctor Diver material Scott had been working on since 1932, for although she had seen and heard portions of the various drafts this was perhaps the first time she had seen it in its entirety.

  Although the Divers were at the simplest level a composite of the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds, and the lyric opening of the novel drew on the spell the Murphys cast, Scott moved from that blending of sources until he was drawing deeply upon Zelda’s and his life together. He mercilessly exposed Zelda in his characterization of Nicole Diver. He drew upon Zelda’s most terrible and private letters to him, written in the anguish of the early months of her illness in Switzerland, snipped and pieced them together in Book II with very little regard for Zelda’s reaction or for the precarious balance of her sanity. Tender Is the Night would not, of course, be recalled from Scribner’s as Save Me the Waltz had been because of Scott’s fictional exploitation of Zelda’s mental illness in the novel. There was no one to act in Zelda’s behalf, as Scott had once acted in his own. The letters written from Nicole to “Mon Capitaine” and “Captain Diver” were not simply echoes from Zelda’s letters to Scott; there were whole phrases used exactly as he had received diem. Among many examples are the following.

  In Tender Is the Night Scott wrote:

  Last year or whenever it was in Chicago when I got so I couldn’t speak to servants or walk in the street I kept waiting for someone to tell me. It was the duty of someone who understood. The blind must be led. Only no one would tell me everything—they would just tell me half and I was already too muddled to put two and two together. One man was nice—he was a French officer and he understood. He gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins entendue.” We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker and there was no one to explain to me.

  In one of Zelda’s letters from Prangins she had written Scott:

  I could not walk in the streets unless I had been to my lesson. I could not manage the apartment because I could not speak to the servants…and still I did not understand what I was doing.… You have given me a flower and said it was “plus petit et moins entendue.” We were friends. Then you took it away and I grew sicker and there was nobody to teach me.

  And there was this on the following page of the novel:

  I write to you because there is no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you.

  Compare with Zelda’s letter, which read:

  I would always be more than glad to see you, and will always be devoted to you—but the farcicle element of this situation is too apparent for even a person as hopeless and debilitated as I am.

  The next sentence in the novel was lifted from another of Zelda’s letters.

  The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted.

  Zelda had written Scott:

  At any rate one thing has been achieved: I am thorou
ghly and completely humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted.

  Scott wrote:

  I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest.

  And Zelda had written him:

  I will more than gladly welcome any alienist you may suggest.

  Fitzgerald even quoted directly in Tender Is the Night from Bleuler’s diagnosis of Zelda’s case.

  Three days after Zelda went back to Phipps she admitted that she was “a little upset about it [Tender].… But a person has a right to interpret—But it really doesn’t matter. What made me mad was that he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his life and I couldn’t help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences.

  “It was a chronological distortion and I suppose one has a right to do that in an artistic creation. But on the whole I don’t think it’s true—I don’t think it’s really what happened.”

  Suddenly she began to cry uncontrollably. “I can’t get on with my husband and I can’t live away from him—materially impossible—so I think the only thing to do is to get my mind on something.… I’m so tired of compromises. Shaving off one part of oneself after another until there is nothing left.…”

  Now Zelda did not show any signs of improvement. She began smiling to herself, she avoided answering questions put to her, and she laughed suddenly for no reason at all. In a coherent moment the sadness of her position in relation to Scottie came out. “She [Scottie] is about as far away from me as anyone can be. She doesn’t like any of the things I like although I’ve tried to interest her in them. She’s just like her father, she’s a cerebral type. She’s crazy about history, French and English—and I don’t know any so she rather looks down on me. Scott said he wanted to take her education in his hands so I’ve never interfered. I’ve kept out of it carefully because I realized that eventually Scott and I would have to separate and she is his child, she’s so like him and he adores her. It would just be the undoing of him to take her away from him.”

  Each day her condition grew worse; she was preoccupied, moody, and irritable. She began to insist that she be allowed to leave Phipps. (Zelda was never confined, in a legal sense, to any hospital. She went of her own volition and was not therefore “committed”; if she asked to leave persistently enough, she had to be released.) She said she couldn’t work in the clinic; she was restless and antagonistic toward the doctors. She began to write a study of Aristotle, which rambled on peculiarly about abstract emotions; she was grasping at straws, anything that would compensate for the breakdown in her relationship with Scott.

  Meanwhile, Scott worked on the final revision of galley proof for Tender Is the Night. (Because the book was going to be published in April it had to be set from the magazine galleys. In February Scott was still reworking the last serial installment; at some points because of the time pressure he was probably, as Matthew Bruccoli suggests in his textual study of the novel, working on magazine and book galleys at the same time.) It was cold, painstaking labor and he wrote Perkins:

  After all, Max, I am a plodder. One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway, and I told him, against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I wanted to indulge that…but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over every point until I have made myself into a slow-moving behemoth (if that is the correct spelling), and so there I am for the rest of my life.

  That Scott managed to pull the galleys into shape at all under the circumstances is astonishing. At the close of the same letter he told Perkins that Tender Is the Night was “a woman’s book” and that he had

  lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

  Zelda is better.

  But she was not. There were days when Zelda refused to get out of bed in the morning, and once she ran to her nurse and said she had to call Scott. She needed two hundred dollars immediately in order to leave for Europe; she decided that she absolutely had to leave Phipps.

  At just about this point Zelda must have been reading the March issue of Scribner’s Magazine, for she wrote Scott:

  Dear, Monsieur, D.O.;

  The third installment is fine. I like immensely that retrospective part through Nicole’s eyes—which I didn’t like at first because of your distrust of polyphonic prose. It’s a swell book.… I wish I could write stories. I wish I could write something sort of like the book of revelations: you know, about how everything would have come out if we’d only been able to supply the 3-letter word for the Egyptian god of dithryambics. Something all full of threats preferably and then a very gentle confession at the end admitting that I have enfeebled myself too much by my own vehemence to ever become very frightened again.…

  DO.:

  You don’t love me— But I am counting on Pavloff’s dogs to make that kind of thing all right—and, in the mean-time, under the added emotional stress of the breek-up of our state, perhaps the old conventions will assume an added poignancy—…Besides, anything personal was never the objective of our generation—we were to have thought of ourselves heroicly; we agreed in the Plaza Grill the pact was confirmed by the shaking of Connie Bennets head and the sonority of Ludlow’s premature gastritis—

  A few days later, on March 8, 1934, after three and one-half weeks at Phipps, Zelda left. She was no better. In desperation Scott remembered Forel’s recommendation of Craig House in Beacon, New York. From a descriptive letter sent to Scott in 1932, when he first investigated Craig House, it sounded like a very handsome establishment for the wealthier of the mentally ill. Located on 350 acres on the Hudson River, about two hours above New York City, it had cottages and private nurses for each patient. The treatment aimed (and all the brochures of mental hospitals seemed to stress this, probably to relieve the minds of the relatives of the patients) to provide as much freedom and personal liberty as was possible; there were no locks and keys. There were indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a golf course with its own clubhouse and golf pro, tennis courts, a masseuse and a hostess who organized bridge, backgammon, and pingpong tournaments. The minimum rate without laundry or the use of the swimming pool was $175 a week. Scott took Zelda there quickly.

  After he had left her she wrote to him.

  Do-Do:

  It was so sad to see your train pull out through the gold sheen of the winter afternoon. It is sad that you should have so many things to worry you and make you unhappy when your book is so good and ought to bring you so much satisfaction. I hope the house won’t seem desolate and purposeless.… This is a beautiful place; there is everything on earth available and I have a little room to paint in with a window higher than my head the way I like windows to be. When they are that way, you can look out on the sky and feel like Faust in his den, or an alchemist or anybody you like who must have looked out of windows like that. And my own room is the nicest room I’ve ever had, any place—which is very unjust, considering the burden you are already struggling under.

  Dear—I will see you soon. Why not bring Scottie up for Easter?…And I promise you absolutely that by then I will be much better—and as well as I can.

  Dear:

  PLEASE remember that you owe it to the fine things inside you to get the most out of them.

  Work, and don’t drink, and the accomplished effort will perhaps open unexpected sources of happiness, or contentment, or whatever it is you are looking for—certainly a sense
of security— If I were you’d, I’d dramatize your book [Scott was considering giving it to a young man he knew in Baltimore to do] yourself.… a character play hinging on the two elements within the man [Dick Diver]: his worldly proclivities and his desire to be a distinguished person. I wish I could do it.

  Love, dear—

  She said she played tennis almost every day and took long walks, but that she was homesick for La Paix

  —and even for those lonesome bicycle rides when I would come in to find “the Baron” behind his rhodedendrons and his diamond-leaded windows. [Scott’s study at La Paix had a leaded-glass bow window.] You were so sad all year and I wanted so desperately for you to be happy. Will we be close again and will I feel the mossy feeling back of your head and will I share those little regulations by which you keep your life in order: the measured drinks, the neatly piled papers; to see you choose which shirt to please the day and hear you fuss about the fancy handkerchiefs.

  Darling—