Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  On Valentine’s Day she sent Scott a plain card, neglecting to sign it. A week later she sent him another, perhaps having forgotten about the first one, underlining a line in the text that read, “Here is my heart.” Beside it Zelda wrote, “The last thing you said to me before you left for the port of embarkation—”

  At Highland she and Dr. Carroll reached a compromise over the screens; they were to be in tempera and decorative only, “which is a less distressing entertainment than having to think of my best and most exacting talents being buried within the confines of psychotic morass.” She told Scott she had a hunch Carroll was going to let her out soon.

  On March 4, 1940, Dr. Carroll tentatively suggested to Scott that Zelda might be ready to fend for herself; he said she had spent a week on her own in Montgomery at Christmas and had held to her routine admirably. Mrs. sate wrote the doctor that Zelda might be able to find a part-time job in Montgomery if she continued to improve, adding as always that Zelda could live with her if everyone concerned was amenable. Dr. Carroll wondered what Scott’s attitude toward this arrangement might be—if a letter was sent to Mrs. Sayre outlining the danger signals of an approaching breakdown, so that it could be recognized and avoided.

  Scott replied, “Your letter was a complete surprise, but of course I am delighted.… The news that she had been home alone in December was a complete surprise to me though as you know I would have been in agreement if you had ever thought before that a journey without a nurse was desirable.” Inevitably he worried about Zelda’s ability to maintain her present level of sanity, “but since I am utterly unprepared to take on the job again I suppose it is lucky that there is any sort of home where she will at least be loved and cherished. The possibility of dissipation frightens me more than anything else—which I suppose is poetic justice.”

  Scott wired Zelda immediately about Carroll’s recommendation. Zelda’s reaction was that of a prisoner who has been punished and is now relieved beyond belief at her pardon. “I will be very, very happy to escape the spiritual confines of medical jurisdiction. Also, I will be very meticulous in my social conduct and promise not to cause any trouble: I will be able to have vacation with Scottie, maybe and do all sorts of half-forgotten pleasant things from such a long time ago.… This has been an awful time for you; and maybe, at last, we begin to emerge.”

  She then began to make plans for her life outside the hospital. It took no little courage to form these plans, for she was not completely unaware of the obstacles she would have to face. “As soon as I have renewed associations and found all the trees where I used to make play-house again, I will try to find a job. Needless to say I am conversant with the difficulties which will probably confront me: Middle aged, untrained, graduate of half-a-dozen mental Institutes. However, there may be something blow[n] in on a box-car or one of those things like that.”

  Four years and one week after Zelda’s admission to Highland Hospital she was released. Dr. Carroll wrote the letter concerning her case that he had mentioned to Scott. One copy was sent to Mrs. Sayre in Montgomery and another to Scott for safekeeping. The final paragraph stated the precariousness of Zelda’s mental condition: her history showed a tendency to repeat itself in cycles. She could be irresponsible and suicidal. Zelda might well be unable to face what was ahead of her in Montgomery. At present she was gentle and reasonable; her capacity for making mature judgments was, however. permanently reduced.

  FOUR

  Going Home

  .… Scott, the bright hotels turn bleak; The pace limps or stamps: the wines are weak; The horns and violins come faint tonight.

  EDMUND WILSON, “Dedication”

  19

  CAREFULLY SCOTT EXPLAINED TO Zelda the terms of their limited finances: “…you will be a poor girl for awhile and there is nothing much to do about it.” He would send her $30 a week, half of which was to go to Mrs. Sayre for Zelda’s board. The other half he would give her in amounts of $10 or $20 in alternating weeks; she would therefore receive $25 one week and $35 the next. He said it was away of saving for her so that in alternate weeks she’d have a larger sum for pocket money. He knew that she would be cramped, but he owed the government a considerable amount and he was deeply committed to having Scottie complete her education. He wrote Zelda that if Scottie were forced to leave Vassar, “I should feel like quitting all work and going to the free Veterans Hospital where I probably belong.”

  Alone at dawn Zelda boarded a bus for Montgomery. She believed that this was her chance for another beginning, and balancing a sheet of paper on her lap she wrote Scott: “I think of you and the many mornings that we have left believing in new places to-gether. This country is so nostalgic with its imperative possibilities of escape from the doom of the mountains.…” She did not know that she had been released with a letter which paroled her to her mother; she rode toward Montgomery completely unaware that it was the cul-de-sac of her life, that for her there were to be no more fresh starts.

  Zelda was nearly forty and she was largely alone. Friends stopped by to see her the first few days, but not many, and Zelda felt she had little in common with those who did. She was grateful for her mother’s company. Almost at once a tone of bewildered disappointment marked her letters to Scott, whom she had not seen for a year. She wrote him regularly each Monday and usually her letters began by thanking him for his check. She said there wasn’t much to do; she was not invited to parties and no one seemed particularly interested in her. “To this sort of town a beau is almost indespensible; but there don’t seem to be any left.” Soon the swimming pools would open, which she looked forward to, and she considered buying a bicycle. She told Scott she prayed for him, “for the just reward of your talent; and for a more proportionate acknowledgment of your contribution to American letters.” But she no longer addressed him as Dearest Do Do, or Goofo; from now on it was plain “Dear Scott.” Her letters were not signed “Love,” but “Devotedly.” It must have been clear to her that their estrangement was all but complete.

  With Zelda out of Highland, Scott’s expenses were considerably reduced. He tried to think of things for her to do; he suggested renting a cool room as a studio for painting; he hoped she was happy. “I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side)—I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics.” He even suggested that she try to write again, telling her that although she was completely unable to plot a story she might try something along the line of Chekhov’s “The Darling.” She did not answer that letter and Scott quickly apologized for having been snappish. He said he really did want to know about her life, and he questioned her relentlessly. How did she like her old friends; how was her mother’s health; did she have any plans for the hottest part of the summer? “I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.”

  He had no idea how difficult it was for Zelda to readjust herself to life outside a clinic. She put it plainly. “I don’t write; and I don’t paint: largely because it requires most of my resources to keep out of the hospital. I’ve had such a difficult struggle over the last ten years that making the social adjustment is more difficult than I had supposed.…”

  But she did garden and she had learned something about patience, if not equanimity, during these long years of illness. She could be amused at planting a garden “full of 250 worth of 150 worth of mustard,” and refer to herself as a failed truck farmer. She did not mind when the weeds turned out to be hardier than the plants. What disturbed her were the unavoidable things she faced every day reminding her of her own past: The young girls in their sheer summer dresses; the deep green alleys that made her think of Cannes. The landmarks of her youth were as altered as she was, some beyond recognition. She walked out to the spot where Camp Sheridan had been and found in its place a cotton mill. She continued to
walk five miles a day as part of her physical regimen, as she had promised Dr. Carroll. (She did, however, ask Scott if he thought Dr. Carroll would live forever holding her to that promise.) When friends saw her on the street they would stop their cars and offer her a ride, which she always refused. But they did not know why she refused and considered her walking a peculiarity. If they tried to engage her in conversation she would often seem uninterested, and although her eyes watched them as they spoke, they were left with the uncomfortable feeling that she did not quite take in what they said. Eventually they began to avoid her.

  Scott toyed with the idea of sending Scottie to relatives in Virginia for part of the summer and of letting her visit Zelda in Alabama for the latter half. But Scottie wanted to go to summer school at Harvard and that struck him as a better idea. He wrote Zelda: “You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness?… I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem to be the right note—however charming.” Later on the same day, June 7, Scott wrote Scottie telling her he had just received a very depressed letter from Zelda, as well as one from Mrs. Sayre: “the second told me in cautious language that your mother had had a ’toxic attack.’ I know what this means, only I expected her to hold out at least two months.” Although Zelda seemed to have recovered, Scott could not be sure what was about to happen and he insisted that Scottie spend at least ten days with Zelda. He told her, “this may be the last time you have a chance to see your mother in a sane period.…”

  Much as he had fretted over Scottie’s development in the past— that she was not tough enough, that she was prone to exhaust herself, overextend herself as he had at Princeton—he was now pleased with her. For it seemed to him that she was at last proving herself to be, his highest accolade, “a worker.…” Perhaps she would not turn out like Zelda, which was really his deepest fear. He wrote Scottie:

  Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She has no education—not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me—but from some inner stubborness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing “kinetic,” which, in physics, means internal driving force—she had to be led or driven.

  By the fourteenth it was settled that Scottie would visit Zelda briefly in Montgomery before summer school. Then in August, the worst part of the hot Alabama summer, if a movie script Scott had written from “Babylon Revisited” was produced, he might have enough money to send Zelda to the shore. In his letter to Zelda he explained the revised plans, then facing his own memories he wrote:

  Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early.

  At the last minute just before Scottie was to leave for Alabama, Scott received a wire from Zelda: I WONT BE ABLE TO STICK THIS OUT. WILL YOU WIRE MONEY IMMEDIATELY THAT I MAY RETURN FRIDAY TO ASHVILLE. WILL SEE SCOTTIE THERE. DEVOTEDLY REGRETFULLY GRATEFULLY ZELDA. In the afternoon of the same day Zelda wired again: DISREGARD TELEGRAM AM FINE AGAIN. HAPPY TO SEE SCOTTIE. DEVOTEDLY. ZELDA

  Immediately he notified Scottie that the situation looked black. If it was, she should talk it over with the doctor in Montgomery herself and leave. “There’s a point beyond which families can do nothing.” But by the twentieth when Scottie arrived everything seemed fine. Relieved, Fitzgerald wrote them that all he wanted was to think of the two of them together, swimming, “diving from great heights and being very trim and graceful in the water.”

  When Scottie left for Cambridge Zelda felt that although she hadn’t been able to “open any deep chanels of ‘maternal advice’ I somehow seemed to have made a little headway as to ingratiating myself.” Zelda told Scott that Scottie seemed sorry to leave, and clearly she was pleased by that. Scottie discussed with Zelda the possibility of leaving Vassar, and Zelda told her Scott would never permit it, and would be deeply hurt by the suggestion. Still, Scottie turned the idea over in her mind; she could not help being keenly aware of the financial burden her education was to her father. And besides she half wanted to fend for herself. A sketch she wrote was published by The New Yorker that summer, and College Bazaar had taken a story, which was a promising start for an eighteen-year-old. She considered trying to find a job on the Baltimore Sun and she also thought of working in publishing in New York. Scott’s reaction was a predictable and succinct negative.

  As July and August passed, Scott complained that Zelda never wrote him what she was doing; had she begun to paint or write? “I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there.” He thought he could arrange an exhibition for her again. His letters to her were always alive with plans and questions. He realized that Zelda s life had slowed to a tempo that was as unacceptable to him as it once would have been to her. Her existence was now largely a matter of taking her five-mile daily walk, working her garden, and spending two days a week at the local Red Cross, where she folded bandages. Other than that, she sat with her mother on their front porch fanning herself and drinking crushed ice with fruit.

  On her fortieth birthday Scott sent a large box of dahlias and gladiolas. Her letter thanking him was to “Dearest Scott” and she said one of the hardest things about being in Montgomery again was that it reminded her of their early days together. She promised to paint “as soon as I attain the vitality to both live, and aspire.” But for once she did not mind playing casino with her mother, or lingering over dishes of peaches and fresh figs, or falling asleep in the rocker with only the thoughts of the tail end of the summer on her mind. She asked if Scottie could visit her again before fall term began at Vassar. Contact with Scottie was invigorating to her and she badly wanted another opportunity to strengthen their rapport.

  Scott, sympathizing with Zelda’s sense of isolation, wrote Scottie reminding her of her obligation to her mother. “I know it will be dull going into that hot little town early in September—but you are helping me. Even invalids like your mother have to have mileposts—things to look forward to and back upon.… Only think how empty her life is and you will see the importance of your going there.” Dutifully Scottie spent four days with Zelda in Montgomery at the end of the summer; to Zelda these days were filled with moments she clung to. She wanted a chance to be a parent and to show off her lovely and talented daughter. She could not help remembering herself when she was Scottie’s age. “Things are so different than when I was young when girls sat an hour on the curbing waiting for a ride in one of the few extant automobiles; nowadays nobody seems to know what a script-dance was, and the jelly bean lingo is indeed obsolete.”

  But for all Zelda’s good will there were still problems in her relationship to Scottie. Zelda was troubled when Scottie did not report her whereabouts to her and Scottie chafed at being continually checked up on like a child. In a letter to her father Scottie revealed how she felt about her visits.

  I have been as an Angel with Halo with Mama and we have really gotten along rather well.… I even went so far as to discuss marriage with her so’s she’d feel she had some ideas to contribute. She is really not unhappy… I always forget how people can dull their desire for an energetic life. She is nevertheless like a fish out of water. Her ideas are too elaborately worded to be even faintly comprehensible to anyone in the town, and yet too basically wrong to be of real in
terest to people who really know anything (I don’t mean me!).… I wonder what is ever to become of her when Grandma dies.

  It was Scott who had guided his daughter’s life; he and not Zelda who made lists of books for her to read, who wanted to be kept posted about life at Vassar. “What proms and games? Let me at least renew my youth! As a papa…what do you do? and how?” It was he who now offered her advice about men. She would have the best range of choice for marriage between “nineteen years, 6 months, to 20 years, 6 months—or so I figure,” he wrote seriously. Businessmen and their wives developed into bores, he advised, unless the women were extraordinary and of great natural charm like Sara Murphy. He wanted Scottie to find someone with whom she could share a larger life. He asked her to question herself about any specific man, “is he his own man? Has he any force of character? Or imagination and generosity? Does he read books?” All he really cared about, he told her, “is that you should marry someone who is not too much a part of the crowd.” Scott, at the same time he advised Scottie, was making plans for Zelda, and forming what Sheilah Graham has called their “College of One,” setting out to give Miss Graham a liberal education based upon carefully drawn lists of recordings, books, and paintings. In this Scott revealed a penchant for making Galateas of his women, simultaneously undertaking to stimulate and direct the lives of his daughter, his wife and his mistress. It took valuable time from his novel, but it was as if by educating his women he formed a buffer against his personal bogies of alcohol, debt, and sickness.

  What few suggestions Zelda made to Scott were along the lines of their old terms of success. Why, for instance, she asked, couldn’t he write for the Saturday Evening Post again? Patiently, Scott tried to explain to her that it was not only that magazine writing was a “very definite trick” and that editors had changed. The special touches he brought to his early short stories were no longer within his grasp. “It was partly that times changed…but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending.… essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.”