Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  During the last week of May Zelda seemed to be slipping into complete confusion. Her face was without expression. While talking to a doctor she would suddenly stop and ask him if he heard anything; he would assure her that he did not. But it was quite clear that Zelda was listening to hallucinated voices. Once she admitted that she was and said that she had heard them at Prangins too. Then they were her family’s cries for help. Now it was Scott’s voice she heard; it came to her out of walls, up from drain pipes, it seemed both near and far away. She said that she realized the voices were within herself, and hearing them alarmed her but was also a pleasant sensation. She said she was terrified of Scott; she said that he interpreted life for her. Sometimes his voice called her name over and over again, or repeated what she was saying, or said: “Please, please, don’t be in an insane asylum.” “O, I have killed her!” “I have lost the woman I put into my book.”

  In a dream she saw herself asleep in the top room of a large, bright insane asylum, which was situated out in a broad field. It seemed to be a pleasant sort of place. But Scott was on the roof of the hospital and he was hunting for her, calling for her. In the dream she woke up and thought she recognized some nurses from the Phipps Clinic. The guards had left and all the patients of the asylum were together in a confused mob indulging in a sort of orgy. She watched but did not take part; she was amused and frightened. Zelda admitted to not being certain whether this was a dream or a hallucination. She said that she sometimes saw things—objects, her own face, distorted and discolored—or double images of things. Abruptly she said she was not thinking of killing herself, but that death was the only way out.

  Deeply moved by Zelda’s feelings of helplessness, Scott was trying to find a refuge for her in work. His own morale had flagged, for Tender Is the Night was not doing as well as he had hoped; it was on the best-seller lists for several weeks, but its sales fell short of fourteen thousand copies. It was not only that he was disappointed by the failure of his novel to find a larger public, but that failure severely damaged his already wobbly self-esteem. Scott could understand Zelda’s collapse of spirit—it was kindred to his own—but he fought against her resignation with plans that would stimulate her. About the collection of her short pieces, he wrote her, “I want to do this if only for the salutary effect on you of keeping your hand in during this period of inaction.”

  Fitzgerald outlined the form her book could take. He would write a five-hundred-word introduction to be followed by her stories. The book would be divided into three parts, the first to be called “Eight Women”; this would include the sketches and stories Zelda had written between 1927 and 1932, primarily her College Humor pieces. Part II was to include three unpublished fables, and Part III, called “Recapitulation,” would be composed of Zelda’s autobiographical articles for Esquire that Scott had helped her with earlier in the spring. (Those were “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—__,” published in May, 1934, and “Auction—Model 1934,” scheduled for July publication.) In Scott’s opinion this sort of collection would nicely “compete with such personal collections of miscellany as Dorothy Parker’s etc. The very fact that the material is deeply personal rather than detached and professional make it expedient that it be presented in some way as this.” He did not think Scribner’s should take it on, as a collection of his own stories, Taps at Reveille, was in the works for the same season, but he thought Perkins might suggest another publisher who would be interested.

  Zelda responded with something of the zest Scott had counted on reviving in her; she was excited by the prospect of such a collection, and made plans to design the jacket. In good spirits she wrote him immediately;

  1) The Myers have gone to Antibes with the Murphys—

  2) Malcolm Cowley arrested for rioting in N.Y.

  3) I drink milk, one glass of which I consider equal to six banannas under water or two sword-swallowings—…We have a great many activities of the kind one remembers pleasantly afterwards but which seem rather vague at the time like pea-shelling and singing.

  She was afraid the title “Eight Women” was “too big a steal from Dreiser—I like, ironicly, ‘My Friends’ or ‘Girl Friends’ better.”

  The “Recapitulation” articles are worth looking at more closely, for they were both in a vein that Scott himself would mine deeply within the next eighteen months in his Crack-Up articles. He edited the first one, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number “, but there are few markings on “Auction—Model 1934,” and those are in Zelda’s hand.

  Together the pieces reviewed the Fitzgeralds’ life from their marriage to 1934. “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number “moves through the years 1920 to 1933 by reciting the hotel rooms the Fitzgeralds occupied in the various places where they lived and visited. In it there is a general air of nothing going right: there are fleas at the Grand Hotel in Rome; and in London, at Claridge’s, there are strawberries in a golden dish, but the room is an inside room, and the weather is gloomy, as is their waiter. In a squib about the authors (the pieces were published under both Fitzgeralds’ names) in “Backstage with Esquire” the reader is invited to think of the Fitzgeralds in their familiar slick magazine role: classy models of American marrieds, with smart-alecky copy to back the role up: “Anything you don’t know about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, after reading this month’s intimate addition to their joint journal, is certainly none of your business.” All that was missing was the sepia photograph from the twenties. But the tone was completely out of place. Zelda’s entry for 1929 in “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number “was more to the point. “The night of the stock-market crash we stayed at the Beau Rivage in St. Raphael in the room Ring Lardner had occupied another year. We got out as soon as we could because we had been there so many times before—it is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

  Still, the tone of the past she evokes seems to contradict the content of the article; on the surface it is a rather flip and impersonal enumerating of the years. No one who is mentioned in the course of the article comes to life, the places the Fitzgeralds visited do not take on the glow of remembering, and the reader is not left with a sense that the author wishes to return to any of the scenes described. The motions of the Fitzgeralds’ lives have been nicely recorded, dates are in their rightful places and so are the Fitzgeralds, but we are not permitted to enter into their lives. It is a cardboard telling. We sense great spaces of their lives left unmentioned, an urge toward revealing unfulfilled. It is only if we pay attention to the small words, the adjectives, that we sense the reality Zelda skirted. Cafes have a “desperate swashbuckling air,” the moon falls over sand in a “dead white glow,” fidelities are “savage,” the pink of Arabian nougat and cakes is “poisonous.” There is an interior meaning to the piece which lies in the slant of its style.

  Scott’s editing of the article was to Zelda’s advantage, for he tightened and sharpened it. In a passage that is frequently quoted one can see how effectively he pared her prose into more striking shape. Her typescript read:

  We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an unimperative invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs. Another night, we learned to Wiener waltz, and once we regimented our dreams to the imperative commands of a nostalgic orchestra floating down the formal paths of the garden of a better hotel.

  In Scott’s revision:

  We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns, white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. It was like the good gone times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs. Another night we danced a Wiener waltz and just simply swep’ around.

  But
also he cut from it Zelda’s use of I, which weakened the article by further depersonalizing it.

  In the second essay, “Auction—Model 1934,” Zelda again reviews their shared past. This time her tone is more ironic. The Fitzgeralds are moving and the move gives her a chance to sort out their possessions. From them she will select only those objects worth keeping; the rest will be sold at auction. Among the souvenirs of their pasts were “Twelve scrap books, telling us what wonderful or horrible or mediocre people we were.” The objects that she finds as she makes ready to pack them are used to refresh her memory and provide her with an opportunity to comment upon the circumstances in which they were acquired. Presumably it is through these objects that the reader is intended to be led into a rapport with the Fitzgeralds. But the tone of the piece is chill and mocking. In the second packing case are fifty photographs and drawings of the Fitzgeralds. “In some of the pictures we are golfing and swimming and posing with other people’s animals, or tilting borrowed surf-boards against the spray of younger summers. There are also many impressive photographs of old and very dear friends whose names we have forgotten.” Living always in houses that are rented and usually furnished, they have accumulated few permanent possessions; their china is broken, there are tops to jars, but no longer the jars themselves. Their treasures are chipped, worn, or moth-eaten, all flawed and unusable. In the end we realize that the article is not straight; it is a tease with the objects as bait. The narrator has no intention of selling anything. If their possessions are useless, they are nevertheless as good an example of their lives, as valuable, Zelda writes, “as the Polish and Peruvian bonds of our thriftier friends.” They will keep diem all, “the tangible remnant of the four hundred thousand we made from hard words and spent with easy ones these fifteen years.”

  Scott had early in his career consciously created an aura of legend about himself and Zelda. Articles like “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” published in November, 1931, and “My Lost City,” which was sent to Harold Ober in July, 1932, were efforts he made to come to terms with the heady glamour of his past. Emotions of loss, of time and feeling unrecapturable, infused his writing, as they did not Zelda’s. Her lucid self-revelation was matchless in her private letters to Scott, but it was Scott who could, so to speak, use himself publicly. For the Christmas issue of Esquire he would write an essay about his own insomnia, called “Sleeping and Waking,” and it was yet another exercise in self-analysis and revelation touched by confession. Toward its end the essay comes close to the tone he will use effectively in The Crack-Up. He tries to put himself to sleep with his own dreams of glory, but he has used his dreams and they are as depleted as he is. When at last they work they are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.

  In the fall of’16 in the cool of the afternoon

  I met Caroline under a white moon

  There was an orchestra—Bingo-Bango

  Playing for us to dance the tango

  And the people all clapped as we arose

  For her sweet face and my new clothes—

  Life was like mat, after all.…

  Neither of Zelda’s articles has this sting of emotion, of nostalgia held close, as if the act of remembering were a restorative. It may have been that Zelda’s dreams were never as potent as Scott’s, but it is more likely that her gift of communicating feeling was simply less than his.

  By the end of the summer it was clear to all concerned that Zelda’s condition had taken another downward turn. As early as July the doctors were finding it futile to get her to discuss her illness, and her behavior fluctuated wildly between violence and seclusiveness. She would have nothing to do with the other patients. There was no longer, even on Scott’s part, any pretense about her ability to pull together a collection of her writings. In August he spent an hour and a half with her. “She seemed in every way exactly like the girl I used to know. But, perhaps for that reason, it seemed to both of us very sad and she cried in my arms and we felt that the summer slipping by was typical of the way life is slipping by for both of us.” He wanted to believe that Zelda could be back with him on any basis for at least part of the time, and he was willing to have her living with him taking rest cures or visiting clinics when it was necessary to do so, rather “than have her remain for long years of our lives in hospitals on the faint chance that when she came out she would suddenly become completely social.”

  Scott visited Sheppard-Pratt frequently, and Dr. William Elgin, Zelda’s doctor, says it is Scott whom he remembers more clearly; he felt that it was really Scott whom he treated. While Fitzgerald said he came to discuss the cost of Zelda’s treatment, he talked about himself. Eventually, he talked about everything. Zelda, on the other hand, was completely uncooperative and inaccessible. She left the impression of being colorless, a “blob,” with everything about her slowed down. Her face was expressionless. “Once she condescended to tell me something about a painting. Usually her paintings were blobs—lines and squares. This one was simple—a streak of brown at the bottom, a blue streak in the middle and a little brown object up in the corner. I asked her what it was about. She said, ‘Oh, that’s a table in Spain.’ I must have looked puzzled, for she then said, ‘Seen from the coast of the United States.’ “Dr. Elgin laughs. When asked if Zelda was perhaps putting him on or inviting his own response, he says that in those days he wouldn’t have thought of that.

  As usual Zelda spent Christmas with Scott and Scottie, but it was a sad reunion in the small row house in Baltimore, for they shared the knowledge that she must return to the hospital. Nineteen-thirty-five began with no reprieves for Zelda, no brighter future for the Fitzgeralds. Always now there was the pungent aroma of gin about Scott. The entries in his Ledger grew more despairing: “…work and worry…Zelda seems less well.… Debts terrible…Zelda very bad on return. Terrible worry…Zelda in hell.”

  Zelda’s letters to Scott were talismans of their past, lucid and touching. If her mind was broken, the spell it cast was not. Her life was now truly that of an invalid, and her mood was locked in elegy, confined to remembering. Her letters became her refuge, shared with Scott alone. “Wouldn’t you like to smell the pine woods of Alabama again? Remember there were 3 pines on one side and 4 on the other the night you gave me my birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best. Remember the faded gray romance.”

  She read magazines and books to fill her time, and even people in advertisements looked enviable to her, for they were “so young and soignées in the pictures.” Her letters were filled with wishing.

  It seems rather Proustian to be rambling these deep shades again so close to La Paix. It makes me sad.… And I think of your book and it haunts me. So beautiful a book.

  I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest troubles were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot-dogs and dopes and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering bath-houses.… We could lie in long citroneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.

  Once when Scott came to visit her and she was desperate about the hopelessness of her condition, she ran from him toward railroad tracks that separated the grounds of Sheppard-Pratt from La Paix. Scott raced after her and caught her by the wrist moments before she would have thrown herself beneath the rushing train. It was not the only instance of attempted suicide.

  Summer, another summer has gone—faded and wilted—and why can’t we spend the fall together? After all, we might as well be taking care of each other.

  She signed this

  For I am yours forever—whether you still want me or not—

  and I love your />
  Finally she admitted to one of her doctors that she thought her condition was hopeless; she intended to take her life. He tried to tell her that as an agent of society he could not allow her to do so. Furious, Zelda asked how he justified taking such an attitude when he knew the pain of her existence. Throughout June, July, and August she persisted in whatever ways were open to her to try to harm herself. She refused to talk about herself to anyone on the staff—her letters to Scott were her only release.

  It is summer time and past time—and I am very young when I didn’t care.… I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.

  I think of boat houses in Atlanta with scaffolding and big dead moons and a drink behind the boats. I thought I was happy, or, at least, there was some pleasurable sense of things being in the world to conquer.… You have been so good to me. My Do-Do. I wish I had not caused so much disaster. But I know you will be happy someday.

  Over and over, endlessly repeating those tokens from a time irretrievable, Zelda tried to apologize for the destruction of their life together. She clung to the remnants of that life with what little hope she had to spare. Sometimes it ran out.

  My dearest Sweetheart:

  There is no way to ask you to forgive me for the misery and pain which I have caused you. I can only ask you to believe that I have done the best I could and that since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with. You are always my darling. I want you to be happy again with Scottie—someplace where it is bright and happy and you can have some of the things you have worked so hard for— always all your life faithfully. You are my dream; the only pleasant thing in my life.