Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  It was evident that the relationship between the patient and her husband had long been weakened, and because of that the patient had not only tried to create a life for herself through the ballet (since family life and her duties towards her daughter were not enough to satisfy her ambition and her artistic leanings) but had also taken flight into homosexuality in order to distance herself from her husband.

  When Trutmann asked her what role eight-year-old Scottie played in her life, she responded in English: ‘That is done now, I want to do something else.’84

  Nobody in either Malmaison or Valmont picked up on the effects that the consistent denial of her ambitions and exploitation of her talents might have had on her psyche. Uncovering and re-interpreting them would be left for the battery of psychiatrists who followed.

  After two weeks Dr Trutmann called in Dr Oscar Forel of the Prangins Clinic, near Nyon, as a consultant. Forel said he would accept Zelda if she agreed to go there of her own free will and on condition of a temporary separation from Scott. Forel specified the treatment could only be psychotherapy based on analysis of causative factors in her case. On 3 June, the evening of the consultation, Trutmann said: ‘the patient herself said she felt very tired and ill and that she was in great need of being cared for. She gave the impression that she would agree to go to Prangins. The next day she was again … unapproachable. She is leaving the clinic with her husband.’85

  Mayfield suggests that though Zelda initially agreed to go to Prangins, after a violent scene with Scott in Lausanne, in which she accused him of abusing, humiliating and breaking her, she refused to be re-hospitalized. Scott immediately sent for Zelda’s brother-in-law Newman Smith, who with Rosalind was living in Brussels. Smith arrived the next day, helped to quiet Zelda, and persuaded her to put herself under Forel’s care.86 The Smiths continued to represent the Sayre family during Zelda’s Swiss hospitalization. Rosalind, never fond of Scott, was convinced his drinking caused Zelda’s breakdown. She wrote to him: ‘I would almost rather she die now than escape only to go back to the mad world you and she have created for yourselves.’87 Scott retaliated that the Sayres had a history of nervous illnesses, that Zelda had always been reckless and that she had long refused to take domestic responsibility. It is symptomatic of the period that a woman’s domestic role as a symbol of sanity was so enshrined in popular culture that Scott felt entitled to use its lack as a symptom of Zelda’s instability.

  The doctors and Scott told the Smiths that Zelda’s efforts to make a professional career as a writer and dancer were motivated by obsessive illness. Rosalind told Sara Mayfield her impression was, on the contrary, ‘a clear-eyed realization of the financial uncertainties of her life with Scott and, perhaps, also by her unhappiness over their marital difficulties’. Rosalind believed Zelda had brilliant gifts, an unconquerable urge to express herself and a very sensible desire to earn a living. ‘Unfortunately, according to Rosalind,’ reported Sara, ‘Scott refused to see it that way. He wanted her … to be dependent upon him, and he insisted upon treating her like a wayward child.’88

  On 4 June Zelda entered Prangins, which resembled a country club in the midst of a 100-acre park on the shore of Lake Geneva. She would stay there for fifteen and a half months, until 15 September 1931. Later she described her journey to this expensive asylum:

  Our ride … was very sad … we did not have each other or anything else and it half-killed me to give up all the work I had done … I had wanted to destroy the picture of Egorova that I had lived with for four years and give away my tou-tous and the suitcase full of shoes and free my mind from the thing … I had got to the end of my physical resources.89

  In what is probably her first letter to Scott from Prangins she returned to their row in Lausanne:

  Won’t you please come and see me, since at least you know me and you could see, maybe, some assurance to give me that would counteract the abuse you piled on me at Lausanne when I was so sick. At any rate one thing has been achieved: I am thoroughly humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted.

  Scott ruthlessly reproduced Zelda’s sad phrases in Tender Is The Night, where Nicole writes to Dick Diver:

  I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my head is curable.

  Zelda, like the fictional Nicole, said she had a constant presentiment of disaster; that it was cruel that he would not explain to her what is the matter,

  since you will not accept my explanation. As you know, I am a person, or was, of some capabality … and if I could grasp the situation I would be much better able to handle it. Under existing conditions, I simply grovel about in the dark and since I can not concentrate either to read or write there does not seem to be any way of escape. I do not want to lose my mind.90

  To the visitor, the external ‘existing conditions’ at Prangins had a resort atmosphere, with music rooms, billiard rooms, riding stables, winter gardens, hothouses, farms, tennis courts, a bathing beach and ateliers for occupational therapy. There were seven private villas, three occupied by the staff, four reserved for wealthy ‘guests’. Scott assured the Sayres that the newly opened clinic was ‘the best in Europe’, that Dr Oscar Forel’s father Auguste Forel, Professor of Psychiatry at Zurich University, had ‘an extraordinary reputation as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry’, while Oscar was talented, versatile, and ‘universally regarded as a man of intelligence and character’.91 The tall, skinny, well-dressed Oscar, who was to have great influence on both Fitzgeralds, was born 1891, studied at the Sorbonne and Lausanne’s Faculty of Medicine and became a faculty member of Geneva University for twenty-five years. Though sensitive he had the dictator’s qualities of crafty persuasion and an ability to impose his will on others.92

  The ‘existing conditions’ maintained by the sensitive Oscar which the visitor did not see included the forcible restraint on Zelda for her first month. There were two types of control methods: the ‘two-point restraint’ which tied her wrists to the bed and the ‘four-point restraint’ which bound her ankles and wrists to the bed. Her hallucinations were treated with shots of chloral hydrate which completely tranquillized her.

  The cost of Forel’s clinic during that first year of the Depression was gigantic: $1,000 a month.93 Scott, determined to spare no expense to provide the best for Zelda, and worried that the stock market crash would diminish his earning facilities, decided in June 1930 to invest $212 in a Northern Pacific Railway bond and an American Telephone and Telegraph debenture. Though Scott would make many grave errors during the next ten years over decisions regarding Zelda’s hospitalization and treatment, and would put control of Zelda consistently ahead of understanding or releasing her, he never shirked his financial obligations to her and to Scottie.

  For several weeks Zelda refused to partake in the activities provided and shunned contacts with other patients. Then she developed an intense emotional attachment to another woman patient and also – as at her previous hospital – became involved with several nurses.94

  Mayfield satirically suggests that a ‘puzzling’ aspect of the case for Forel ‘was that Zelda showed no erotic feeling for her husband’95 while simultaneously Scott told the doctors he was extremely anxious to resume sexual relations. Dr Forel, however, forbade him to visit her until a treatment course which included a ‘re-education programme’ had been maintained.

  During Zelda’s stay in Prangins Scott stayed in the nearby Swiss towns of Glion, Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux and Vevey. About four days a month he went to Paris, where Scottie lived with her governess at 21 rue des Marionniers and attended the Cours Dieterlin. Zelda was distressed Scottie had been left alone in Paris (she did not count the nurse), but Scott reported that she had already won a first prize at school96 and Alice and Dick Myers would keep an eye on her.

  During the Prangins incarceration Zelda and Scott exchanged more than a hundred letters explaining themsel
ves, offering recriminations, attributing blame. As they rarely dated letters establishing a correct chronology is an enormous challenge, but a definite pattern can be observed that runs parallel to Zelda’s psychological ‘re-education’ towards femininity, good mothering and the revaluing of marriage and domesticity.

  In mental hospitals of that period,97 patients eventually learned what was in their ‘best interests’ to say to staff or to write to intimates outside. By ‘best interest’, what most of them meant was their interest in being judged sufficiently ‘sane’ to be released. All letters were opened, in some hospitals censored, in every hospital assessed. In Zelda’s case the need to ‘re-educate’ her into being ‘a good wife’ was paramount. So her initial letters of anger, betrayal, distrust, resentment, which were seen by the medical establishment as signs of ‘instability’, ultimately gave way to more conciliatory, affectionate letters which were viewed as signs of ‘improvement’.

  What strikes the reader at once is that in Prangins Zelda is aware of how she needs to behave if she is to be relabelled stable. But as her treatments intensify in four more clinics, she becomes as much a victim of the treatments as of the illness, and this awareness – or any written evidence of it – drops away.

  If this were the only motive for the first discernible hostility/affection pattern, the letters would be simple to analyse. But running parallel is a second motive. This is the alternating mixture of genuine resentment Zelda held against Scott (and he against her) and the memory (if not the current activity) of the strongest passion and the deepest emotional bond either had ever found or would ever find with anyone.

  A second batch of letters, from Zelda to Scottie, shows Zelda’s constant devotion to her daughter, but with their increasing separation and her own wavering sense of self, the letters progressively reveal a woman in retreat from, even terrified by, motherhood.

  A third group of letters, from Fitzgerald to Zelda’s psychiatrists, shows how Fitzgerald was intimately involved in Zelda’s treatment and how important it was to him to see himself, and to be considered by the medical establishment, as a junior consultant almost on a par with her doctors.

  These letters tell the next stage of Zelda’s story.

  Notes

  1 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 198. Scott was now worried that people, even if unaware of his youthful cross-dressings, might believe those stinking accusations because when acquaintances told him he looked like someone else, that ‘someone else’ usually turned out to be homosexual. Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 159.

  2 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. To Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 427.

  3 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, pp. 194–5. Scott’s Ledger May 1929 mentions ‘Lucien again’ – probably another reference to Lucienne.

  4 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194. Scott’s Ledger dates the Nancy Hoyt dinner as 30 March 1930. Subsequently Elinor became a close friend of Dos Passos. Elinor Hoyt Wylie and Nancy Hoyt were sisters of Morton Hoyt who was married to Eugenia Bankhead, Tallulah’s elder sister, with whom Scott had an affair. In 1922 Wilson continued his flirtation with Elinor Wylie but she became more seriously involved with John Peale Bishop. At Bishop’s wedding to Margaret Hutchins the bride’s father tried to rape Elinor Wylie. Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 157.

  5 Natalie had lived at 20 rue Jacob, Paris, since 1909. She told Zelda she staged tableaux vivants and held pacifist meetings in the garden where Racine was supposed to have strolled with his mistress La Champsmesle. A tiny Doric temple fronted a disused well which led to an underground cave below which was a passage under the Seine to the Louvre.

  6 Dolly (Dorothy Ierne Wilde) was the daughter of Oscar’s elder improvident brother Willie who died in 1899, the year before Oscar. She was born 11 July 1895 in Oakley Street, Chelsea, London.

  7 The drugs included cocaine and morphine. See Joan Schenkar, Truly Wide, Virago Press, London, 2000.

  8 Bettina Bergery (1902–1993) was one of the three beautiful American Jones girls for whom the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ was invented. She worked for Schiaparelli and was one of Paris’s finest raconteuses. Victor Cunard (1898–1960), writer Nancy Cunard’s witty cousin, was the London Times correspondent in Venice, at twenty had an affair with Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West’s husband, and was one of Dolly’s closest friends.

  9 Janet Flanner (1892–1978) wrote the New Yorker’s bi-monthly ‘Letter from Paris’ column under the nom de plume Genêt.

  10 Schenkar, Truly Wilde, p. 116.

  11 Rosamund Harcourt-Smith in Natalie Barney, ed., In Memory of Dorothy lerne Wilde, Darentière, Dijon, 1951, pp. 28–9, quoted in Schenkar, Truly Wilde, p. 117.

  12 ZSF to FSF, probably June or July 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 53. Nancy Milford (Zelda, p. 138) suggests this letter was in answer to one from Scott headed ‘Written with Zelda gone to the Clinique’; the handwriting, notepaper, style and content are similar to correspondence dated early June/July. The reference to Scottie having finished school and the heat of the city would fit this author’s dating.

  13 The two versions are: cancelled drafts of early versions of Tender Is The Night, ‘The Melarky Case’ (MS versions), chs III to IV, CO187, Box 10, Folder 7, PUL; and The Melarky and Kelly Versions. A Facsimile Edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts, ed. Matthew j. Bruccoli, associate ed. Alan Marjolies, A Garland Series, Garland Publishers, New York and London, 1990 (based on MSS in PUL).

  14 ‘Melarky Case’ MS version.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Melarky/Kelly facsimile version.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid. Scott crossed out that sentence and substituted: ‘The sight of this legendary aberration in action had spoiled some quiet series of human facts for him as it had when he had first become aware of its other face some years before.’

  20 Ibid.

  21 Diana McLellan, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, Robson Books, 2001.

  22 Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations, Martin Seeker, London, 1928. On Capri the circle included Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes. When the circle regrouped in Paris it included Dolly Wilde, Elisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, Esther Murphy, Emily Vanderbilt and Zelda Fitzgerald. Mackenzie’s view of the women was a mild form of late Victorian patriarchal superiority.

  23 Mackenzie to Meryle Secrest. Secrest, Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks, Macdonald & Jane’s, London, 1976, p. 302.

  24 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, Jonathan Cape, London, 1928.

  25 Hall became known as a one-book polemicist.

  26 When Tallulah came to London in tine Twenties, although she was said to have seduced half a dozen Eton boys who had then been expelled, a damaging Scotland Yard report said there were rumours about her sexual perversion with her own sex. Another informant wrote to Scotland Yard that ‘she is both a lesbian and immoral with men’. The informant reported she ‘keeps a girl in London’ as formerly it had been suggested that before she came to the UK in 1925 she ‘kept a negress in USA’.

  27 Camella Mayfield, series of conversations and taped interviews with the author, Princeton, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and from the UK, 1999, 2000, 2001.

  28 Mayfield also wrote a biography about Tallulah Bankhead.

  29 Author’s conversations with Camella Mayfield and with Rebecca Roberts, Public and Outreach Services Coordinator, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1999, 2000.

  30 Rebecca Roberts said the fact that ‘Sara Mayfield destroyed all of her correspondence with Zelda in order to protect Zelda’s privacy is an honorable act, but a great loss for researchers’. (Letter to author, 18 May 1999, and in several conversations with the author 1999.) Roberts said the university received Sara Mayfield’s materials in 1955, but between 1955 and 1965 they were allowed only to house them,
not to offer access to them. Papers arrived piecemeal, were edited in the late 1950s and early 1960s and officially ‘given’ to them in 1980.

  31 Camella spent a summer typing the first draft of Mayfield’s biography of Tallulah, ‘but when the publishers asked Sara to make it spicier she refused. She would not put in new facts that she was aware of, she would only put in was what already acknowledged. Sara did know new negative things but she refused to use them.’ Camella Mayfield to the author as before.

  32 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 151.

  33 Camella Mayfield to the author. Sara’s self-protection may have included her relationships with Montgomery women Elizabeth Thigren Hill (who looked after Rosalind Sayre in the latter’s last years) and Wilda Malloy Williams, both women from highly reputable well-established families. These two affairs appear to be ‘common knowledge’ among locals in Montgomery. Several residents talked to the author openly about them.

  34 Camella Mayfield to the author.

  35 ZSF to FSF, summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 51, PUL. Same blue squared paper, emotional tone and continuance of ideas as letters the author has dated June and July. Author’s suggested date for this letter is July.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Interestingly, in about 1930 when Scott listed those people who had responded to his bad behaviour by snubbing him, Emily Vanderbilt featured on his list. Also on the snub list were Tallulah Bankhead, Ada MacLeish, Bijou O’Conor, John Barrymore, Tommy Hitchcock, Ruth Vallombrosa and the Murphys. Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, pp. 321–2.

  38 In Nov. 1934.

  39 Lillian Hellman, Pentimento, written 1973, Macmillan, London, 1974.

  40 ZSF to FSF, no date, CO187, Box 44, Folder 27, PUL.