Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  When Scottie came Zelda said she’d “never seen her so pretty before.…” Their round-faced little girl had become a lively slim blond. Scottie recovered quickly and spent most of the month swimming and taking long walks with her mother; she was also working on a novel she had just begun.

  Scott, who was undergoing financial and health troubles on the West Coast, wrote Scottie that she was welcome to come and visit him for the rest of the summer, but he warned her that she might find him “depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic.…” Above all he wanted to avoid any situations of excitement. Somewhat gruffly he told her that he’d rather not see her at all, “than see you without loving you.” He felt it was imperative for her to realize that her home now was Vassar.

  Scottie let her mother read this letter, and Zelda tried to explain to Scott what a burden he put on Scottie, who was, after all, not yet eighteen.

  Dearest: I trust that you will not resent this.… [Scottie] bears the best morale a child could possibly have considerring the fact of that absence of the moral support that a conventionally established family conveys, and I think it’s rather a needlessly painful punishment to remind her of the absence of material attributes which to a person of twenty-one every child has a right to the sense of safety.… She is such a particularly brave and self-reliant child that it would be lamentable to allow a sense of the absence of stability to twist her mind with neuroses concerning the necessity to make a living.…

  I do not criticize your letter: but I believe that the only right of a parent to share his tragedies with children under age is of a most factual nature—how much money there is and the technical name of his illness it about the only fallibilites that debutantes are equipped to encompass…and it doesn’t do any good to let them know that one is harassed. Nobody is better aware than I am, and, I believe, so is Scottie, of your generosity, and the seriousness of your constant struggle to provide the best for us. I am most deeply grateful to you for the sustained and tragic effort that you have made to keep us going.… I wasn’t critical, only trying to remind you of the devastating ravages that a sense of insecurity usually manages to establish when theres nothing to do about it.

  During Scottie’s period of recovery with her mother she decided Zelda was well enough to live with Mrs. Sayre and no longer needed to remain in the hospital. After all Scott had been through on this score he impatiently wrote Dr. Suitt, who assisted Dr. Carroll with Zelda at Highland Hospital, and suggested that he have a talk with Scottie. He wanted the doctor to mention to Scottie how adversely the menopause could affect Zelda’s mental balance; he warned that Scottie’s attitude toward Zelda could affect “my whole future relation with my daughter.” He did not want her to swing over to the Sayres’ side. It was one of the reasons he hesitated to have her come out to California. “She is a dominant little girl in a polite way and to have her appear here now as a sort of ambassador of what I call the Montgomery point of view—‘throw Zelda on her own immediately’—would be much more than upsetting.”

  Although Scottie and Zelda got on well enough that summer, the visit was really only a qualified success. For one thing Scottie was still too young to realize how deeply Zelda resented any advice from her, no matter how harmless it appeared to be on the surface. Zelda concealed her reactions from Scottie, but not from her doctors. For her part Zelda tried very hard, too hard, to quickly re-establish with Scottie a relationship which was largely nonexistent, and which between any mother and seventeen-year-old daughter would have been difficult. Scottie was not, and had probably never been, dependent upon her mother for either direction or emotional sustenance. During Scottie’s visit Zelda wanted to share, as well as oversee, Scottie’s attentions from young men, and when Scottie left Asheville Zelda began referring to herself as “the glamorous Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

  But to Scott she confided her aloneness: “My tennis progresses— by which I mean that I can play about half as well as I can play— Its almost demoralizing to have attained the age where all ones attributes are visibly retrogressing: speed, volume…Ashville regales itself on 3 days of folk dance.… I wish I had a beau but I haven’t got any beaux.…”

  By late summer Zelda’s letters to Scott were marked by a forlorn sadness. She wrote about the only things that happened to her, her walks, five miles each day, through fields of phlox and marguerites in the mountains. “Roads lace the mountains to earth, far below and leading home and nowhere, and the people are tan and brown and wreathed in lonliness.” But it was her own loneliness that pierced these letters to Scott.

  Writing to Scottie she tried to remind her of times they had shared in the past and of her dreams for her: “Be brown and happy.… Buy yourself a white dress with a long and lovely sash, an ashes of roses sash or a sash as pale and chrystalline as a Greek ocean—and buy yourself a leghorn hat—and you will be as picturesque as a summer path over the meadows.” Zelda was saying—be me, my daughter, as I was.

  Time passed slowly for Zelda and she grew more and more aware of its passing, not in any anxious way, but aware of it as a pastoral stream, with seasons changing, flowers to be watched and painted, flowers marking the changes of season, breaking time into rhythms. Scott once wrote Scottie, “Think of the enormous pleasure amounting, almost, to the consolation for the tragedy of life that flowers have been to your mother and your grandmother.”

  Again and again Zelda would appeal to him and let him know how much she missed him. “If you flew East I’d be glad—and if I flew West so would I.” She wanted to meet him again, to try for something they had had which she remembered, but which they had lost. Perhaps she was trying to win him back, but only the disadvantages were on her side. She was truly alone now.

  When you come won’t you bring me another pair of mocassins because I’m a very good little Indian girl, sometimes, and I deserve them.

  And don’t let yourself get drowned in the perfect California climate—We got sunshine here—And springtime too, and weather that’s mostly a raison d’etre—

  May I go to France and Greece and Italy? At once, next week—Devotedly, Dear. I wish that I could see you—

  Zelda

  She also began, cautiously at first but with increasing fervor, to prod Scott on every occasion with what she considered to be constructive suggestions for leaving Highland. To a certain degree she was echoing her family’s advice to her, but undoubtedly she shared their opinions: “If Alabama should prove an unfortunate venture I can always come back; which I assure you I would do most gratefully rather than run the risk of any further debacles. Having accepted the concept of me as a precarious and dangerous experiment at best, am I to be relegate, at considerable inconvenience to both yourself and myself to invalidism for the rest of my life?”

  Dr. Carroll had not heard from Scott for nearly two months. On September 27, 1939, he did. Scott had been ill and was without money. Harold Ober, who had always generously lent him whatever he needed, no longer felt that he could. Consequently, Fitzgerald broke with him, insisting that Ober no longer believed in him. Scott asked Dr. Carroll to trust him for another month and not have Zelda deprived of anything she needed. “As you know I tried to give Zelda every luxury permissible when I could afford it (the trip to Florida, etc.) but it is simply impossible to pay anything, even on installments when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer.” Grimly he added that the hospital could reimburse itself out of his life insurance if things continued downhill.

  October was worse than September and he wrote Zelda: “I am almost penniless—I’ve done stories for Esquire because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances.” Friends of theirs had helped him send Scottie back to Vassar.

  After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you—but not enough to go overboard.… I ask only this of you—leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and
what eventually will fight through as the right to save you, the permission to give you a chance.

  Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.

  In the following letter, which is undated, Zelda answered Scott.

  Needless to say, your letter somewhat hurt me. Very possibly you do not give thought to the fact that this hospital regimentation, while most excellent for whipping into shape, is very gruelling over long periods of time.… I am now well able to make a social in the bigger sense effort: Mamma would be happy to have me: if any trouble arose I could and would return here—and short of your possible paranoiacal self-defensive reflex I cant see any legitimization of keeping me under hospitalization much longer.… There is every reason to believe that I am more able to observe the social dictats than yourself—on the evidence of our “vacations” from the hospital—which have been to date a dread affair of doctors and drink and confirmation of the impossibility of any equitable reunion. Although you know this—and that the probabilities are much against our ever having any life together again—you are persistent in not letting me have a chance to exist alone—at least in comfort—in Alabama and make my own orientation. Or even in Ashville. I might be able to get a job:…Won’t you, in fairness, please consider this letter from some other basis than that I am your possible enemy and that your first obligation is self-defensive.…

  It was in October, 1939, under enormous duress, that Scott began in earnest to write his novel The Last Tycoon. It would be about Hollywood, which he would view with a basilisk eye. He wrote Scottie:

  Look! I have begun to write something that is maybe great, and I’m going to be absorbed in it four or six months. It may not make us a cent but it will pay expences and it is the first labor of love I’ve undertaken since the first part of Infidelity [a movie starring Joan Crawford].… Anyhow I am alive again…with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don’t drink. I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

  Dr. Carroll had answered Scott’s plea by trusting him and waiting. He assured Fitzgerald that he would not let the Sayres talk him into releasing Zelda to their care. Scott thanked him and wrote explaining that his first allegiance (and therefore what little money he had or could raise) was to Scottie; he could not back down on her education. “For better or worse Scottie and I form a structure.… For me, life goes on without very much cheer, except my novel, but I think if there is any way to stop this continual nagging through Zelda it will be a help.” Scott sent Collier’s magazine the first section of The Last Tycoon and a synopsis; if they liked it they might back him. (As it turned out they wanted to see more before they paid him.) He also sent it to Scribner’s, and as soon as Perkins read the first part of the manuscript he committed himself: he told Scott it was wonderful writing, and he sent him $250 out of his own pocket. Although Scott’s finances were still tight, under these improved circumstances some of his old feeling for Zelda crept back into his next letter to Dr. Carroll. “She doesn’t complain… in fact her last letter is awfully sweet, and not restless and demanding, which I know indicates that you have talked with her and which I hope indicates that the Sayres have found some other mischief with which to occupy their idle hands. My God, how I detest ‘good people.’ I mean people that are good and think it is quite sufficient as a career.” Zelda wrote him: “I’m sorry about our present estate. So many years ago when we were first married and making Holiday about the Biltmore corridors, money was one of the things one simply stated the necessity for, went through the requisite ritual and waited.”

  She truly had very little idea how difficult life was for Scott; she lived in isolation, insulated by her illness. But she let him know that she tried to understand, that she was not fighting against him. “Dearest: I am always grateful for all the loyalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us together so long: the belief that life is tragic, that a mans spiritual reward is the keeping of his faith: that we shouldn’t hurt each other. And I love, always your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life.”

  Late in November Mrs. Laura Guthrie Hearne at last met Zelda, about whom she had heard so much from Scott during the summer she was his secretary. There was a tea party in Asheville to which they were both invited. In her diary she described her impressions of Zelda.

  Zelda does not wear a bit of make up, which she needs. Her eyes have a sad and haunted look. She wears a straight bang and the rest of her dark hair falls just to her shoulders where it ends in a little curl. She wore a very simple black thin suit and white blouse with a black felt hat turned up all around. She had no overcoat though the rest of us wore our fur coats and did not feel too warm. Zelda began to talk brilliantly when I got her started on her greatest love, the ballet, and told how she studied with the Russians in Paris long ago. She has a brilliant mind and as we ate we all listened to her and watched her use her graceful arms and hands to illustrate what she was saying. She believes that all is rhythm, and that the ballet is the best exponent of life, also that we only need four hours of sleep a night, which is all they [dancers] get. The rest of the time we should work or practise and get more and more tense—or rather, full of the vibration of living.

  The other women listened respectfully, but, privately they considered Zelda’s opinions somewhat bizarre.

  At Highland she was considered well enough now to go into Asheville alone shopping or visiting; and she was also asked to assist in directing the morning gym classes. This reduced her expenses and made her feel that she was contributing something of value. Staff members remember Zelda at her best as an appealing person who could exercise considerable influence on other patients. It was amazing how well and patiently she worked with those patients who were mentally retarded or extremely ill, but she was not so good with those less ill than herself.

  That winter Dr. Carroll asked Zelda to paint large floral screens for the windows of the new assembly building at Highland. He would furnish the necessary materials and pay her something for her work. Zelda was extremely pleased, the more so when she learned that Duke University would eventually take over Highland Hospital and thereby ensure her work a larger audience. But she was edgy about being taken advantage of. She wrote Scott: “I sent word that I ultimately would not subscribe to the commandeering of a professional talent. The fact that an artist is temporarily incapacitated ought not to make him fair game to anybody who is able. My talent has cost a lot in heart-ache and paint-bills; and I don’t want to compromise myself on such a major project that will make it difficult to get away, should such opportunity arise.” Still, the idea intrigued as well as flattered her, and she began preliminary sketches for the design. Within a few weeks she found out that the screens would not be used in the assembly building, but instead in the patients’ bedrooms. She protested bitterly to Scott: “To waste a professional talent, the cumulate result of years of effort, aspiration and heartbreak on a venture which will never see the light of day but most probably will be maltreated by every manifestation of psychosis is, to me, an abuse of the soul, human faith, and metier that is almost beyond my capacity to envisage.”

  Of course she was still to be paid for her work, but even that irritated her, for what “the authorities” promised to pay her would be applied to her bill. Frustrated and hurt by what she considered to be the real motive behind asking for her work, to contribute to payment of hospital fees, she told Scott: “I feel that this is your obligation, as I myself have vent every resource towards getting out of here and have, to my most honest estimate been well able to leave for a year. I don’t want to pay these bills, because I do not need what they buy.” But what could she do? she asked him
; she was afraid that if she flatly refused to paint the screens her refusal might “come under one of their heads of psychosis.”

  That Christmas of 1939 Zelda was well enough to travel alone to Montgomery for the first time since her hospitalization. When she returned she renewed to Scott her pleas for release. “There isn’t forever left to either of us; and now, for the immediate instance I have a home to turn to while I organize an existence—which will not always be the case… I now have no resources left; can’t go to the movies because there isn’t any money. Under such circumstances, wouldn’t it be wiser and more economical that I should be at home.… I ask you to acknowledge not only on the basis of your obligation to me—as your wife—but also on the terms of your social obligation:…Meantime; it’s good to be able to receive uncensored mail—I do believe I’m growing up.”

  Fitzgerald tried to soothe her, tried to suggest that she make friends within the hospital. But she wrote him: “… a person could, as long as they followed the hospitals somewhat bigoted stipulations—I want to leave there. It’s a hospital for those who want to be absorbed into Dr. Carrolls, feudal, picturesque, and most restrictive formulas. Not that I am not grateful for all that he’s done for me:

  “because I am most deeply grateful of even the possibility of entering the world again—”

  Once after Scott had called her she told him: “Darling, you were sweet to ‘phone me. I am learning a speech to say when telephoned to. It is to be very formal and will include many invitations to parties which will never be given and balls that are long since over. And the response will be yes, yes, yes—”