Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise
Page 43
41 ZSF to FSF, late summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 52, PUL.
42 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194.
43 FSF to EH, 23 Aug. 1929.
44 EH to FSF, 4 Sep. 1929, EH, Selected Letters, Swallow Press, Chicago, 1975, pp. 304–5. Part of Scott’s trouble, Hemingway thought, was that Scott believed because of Gatsby’s reviews he must write a masterpiece. However ‘nobody but Fairies’ could write masterpieces, Hemingway intoned, the rest of their crowd ‘can only write as well as they can’.
45 The Kellys would finally be deleted from the novel but would become the main characters in his story ‘One Trip Abroad’. Rosemary however would be kept for Tender Is The Night.
46 Ober to FSF, telegram, 21 Sep. 1929, As Ever, Scott Fitz–, ed. Bruccoli with Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, p. 146.
47 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194. The yacht was the Murphys’ Honoria; Dotty was Dorothy Parker.
48 Quoted in Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 159.
49 ‘Melarky Case’ MS version (CO187, Box 10, Folder 7, PUL). The phrase ‘satyrs whose lips curled horribly’ is scored through. In another version of the same scene Francis Melarky looks around this fairy world with ‘an angry shocked expression’. ‘“Is this real?” he demanded. “Or a sort of show?”’ He is assured by a character called Horseprotection that it is real, and that Horseprotection will show him how the scene works. ‘He got up and spoke to a man painted, bewigged and attired in a woman’s evening dress at the next table. The man fluttered and presently they were dancing together …, Horseprotection winking at us over the man’s shoulder. Francis got up saying “Let’s get out of this dump!”’ (Melarky/Kelly facsimile version).
50 Sara Murphy to FSF, no date, CO187, Box 51, Folder 15, PUL.
51 FSF, Ledger, Sep. 1929.
52 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 189.
53 This biographer dates this as late November; as do Mellow and Donaldson. Allen Tate dates it early December. Previous biographers dated it as October but internal evidence rules out October.
54 Allen Tate, Memoirs and Opinions 1926–1974, Swallow Press, Chicago, 1975, p. 62. Tate told Scott to mind his own business.
55 In response Hemingway repeated that Stein had been admiring of Scott’s work which he himself continued to admire, but added sensibly that comparison of hypothetical flames was ‘pure horseshit’. EH to FSF, c. 5 or 12 Dec. 1929, EH, Selected Letters, pp. 309–11.
56 In his Ledger Scott left the first redheaded woman anonymous but the second was a nurse in Zelda’s first hospital.
57 EH, Moveable Feast, quoted in Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p. 153.
58 ZSF fictionalized the flowers as having ‘the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh’. Save Me The Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 130.
59 Painting undated but c. 1929 (author’s dating).
60 Undated oil on canvas, c. 1929/1930 (author’s dating).
61 ZSF to FSF, 1932 (no date), CO187, Box 44, Folder 15. Zelda had been reading Jan Gordon’s book Modern French Painters (J. Lane, London, 1923). As well as a chapter on Van Gogh there were chapters on Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Art and the New Civilization, the Designing Instinct, Rousseau and Utrillo, Savage Art and Modigliani, ‘Space’ and ‘Life’ in Painting, the Value of Art, Derain and Vlaminck, Cubism, the Modern Realists, the Women Painters, and the Slavonic Influence. Art historian Carolyn Shafer believes Zelda was very familiar with Van Gogh’s art which she probably encountered first while in France. In June 1943 Zelda renewed this acquaintance at a major travelling exhibition of Van Gogh paintings in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery Advertiser, 7 June 1943).
62 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 428.
63 Another snap of Zelda huddled inside a huge fur coat at the top of a slope, labelled ‘Have I got to go down?’, is meant to be witty but Zelda’s frozen gaze belies any humour.
64 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194.
65 ZSF to FSF, late summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 52, PUL.
66 Vaill, So Young, p. 219.
67 Milford to the author, New York, 1998.
68 ZSF to FSF, c. July 1930 (author’s dating), co187, Box 42, Folder 57, PUL.
69 Ibid.
70 Scott’s five-story series appeared in the Saturday Evening Post between 5 Apr. 1930 and 15 Aug. 1931.
71 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 189.
72 Scott’s Ledger summary of the year Sep. 1929–Sep. 1930.
73 Doctor’s report, Malmaison, n.d., 1930. (Original in French; translation by author and Rosemary Smith). co187, Box 51, Folder 7A, PUL.
74 Ibid.
75 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 195.
76 Malmaison report.
77 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 155.
78 Her trip to Montgomery was April 1930.
79 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 195.
80 FSF, Tender, 1986, p. 137.
81 ZSF to FSF, c. July 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 57, PUL. This letter also includes the significant line: ‘Finally by constant references to … pronounced and vulgar symbollism [sic] I at last began to believe that there was but one cure for me: the one I had refused three times in Paris.’
82 In a later letter to Dr Forel Zelda wrote: ‘My husband forced me to go to Valmont. I am here with you, in a situation where I can not be anybody.’
83 Report on ZSF by Dr H. W. Trutmann, June 1930, CO187, Box 54, Folder 10A, PUL. (Translation from French by the author and Rosemary Smith.)
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 152–3.
87 Rosalind Sayre Smith to FSF, 8 June 1930, CO187, Box 53, Folder 14A, PUL.
88 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 151–2.
89 ZSF, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, 16 Mar. 1932, Johns Hopkins Hospital records.
90 ZSF to FSF, c. June 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 50, PUL.
91 FSF to Judge and Mrs A. D. Sayre, 1 Dec. 1930, Life in Letters, p. 202.
92 Forel saw religion as incompatible with science and was a highly cultured man fascinated by literature, art and music.
93 During 1930–31 Zelda’s treatment cost 70,561 Swiss francs, the equivalent of $13,000.
94 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 153.
95 Ibid., p. 154.
96 Ibid., p. 158.
97 Also still in many today.
CHAPTER 17
The three main characters in the Prangins drama staked out their painful positions.
From inside Prangins, Zelda wrote to Scott:
Please help me. Every day more of me dies with this bitter and incessant beating I’m taking. You can choose the conditions of our life and anything you want if I don’t have to stay here miserable and sick at the mercy of people who have never even tried what its like … I can’t live any more under these conditions, and anyway I’ll always know that the door is tacticly locked – if it ever is … There’s no justice … the longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get … Please, Please let me out now – Dear, you used to love me and I swear to you that this is no use … You said it was too good to spoil. What’s spoiling is me, along with it and I don’t see how anybody in the world has a right to do such a thing –.1
From outside Prangins, Scott wrote to Zelda, whose photo he held:
When I saw the sadness of your face in that passport photo I felt as you can imagine … The photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. The rotten letters you write me I simply put away under Z in my file. My instinct is to write a public letter to the Paris Herald to see if any human being except yourself and Robert McAlmon has ever thought I was homosexual … if you choose to keep up your wrestling mat
ch with a pillar of air I would prefer to be not even in the audience … I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach and grasp. I can only bring you the little bit of hope I have and I don’t know any other hope except my own … if I have failed you is it just barely possible that you have failed me …2
Scott the outsider wrote also to Dr Forel the insider:
When I last saw you I was almost as broken as my wife by months of horror. The only important thing in my life was that she should be saved from madness or death.3
At the heart of Prangins, its director Dr Forel wrote to Scott that he shared Scott’s ordeal, that he appreciated Scott’s co-operation, that his personal feelings were mixed with his professional role. Like Scott he wanted Zelda to become well.
Forel kept in close touch with Scott over Zelda’s diagnosis, treatment and progress, allowing him to feel responsible in his new role as unofficial co-consultant.
Dr Forel saw Zelda as ‘gay, playful, optimistic, artistic and independently minded’ but also ‘extremely irritable’.4
Zelda saw herself as terrified.
Forel catalogued her symptoms: bizarre reactions, strange interpretations, inadequate responses, autism, insomnia, daydreaming, and smiling without cause. She also heard things, was hysterical, and had an inclination towards homosexuality which she projected on to her husband.
Zelda, too, catalogued her symptoms. She accepted that she was in a state of ‘continuous nervous horror’. She lived ‘in some horrible subconscious dream’.5 She had hours of terrible ‘panic [which] settled into a persistent gloom punctuated by moments of bombastic hysteria’. Some days she wanted to die.6
Patient and doctor did agree about the hysteria. They did not agree about her homosexuality. The patient did not think it was a symptom of illness, rather an expression of desire. The patient, according to the doctor, was out of line, had not read the medical books, must be re-educated.
Zelda, a fast reactor, a woman of rapier wit, suddenly exhibited such slow psychological and verbal responses that Forel suspected she had a brain tumour. But he could discover no physical evidence.7
He considered schizophrenia, which in the Thirties had already been established as at least in part genetically transmitted. There appeared to be no history of schizophrenia in Zelda’s family.8 However, when the Sayres wrote to Forel in June, they did not furnish him with adequate information about the varied mental illnesses suffered by Zelda’s family. Whether any of them had produced symptoms which a doctor at that time would have labelled schizophrenic is unknown.
The Sayres’ reluctance to divulge information was based on the Deep South view of mental illness. As one Montgomery resident said: ‘Every family in Montgomery has at least one mad person … But we never talk about it. Montgomery people didn’t (and don’t) talk about anyone’s “unusual” sexuality though there is a lot of that in our families too. In Zelda’s day sometimes they were said to be crazy when their families just couldn’t handle their views or their behaviour. You could be shut away just for talking about it.’9
Forel felt Zelda’s ‘overweening inflated ambition’ had caused serious exhaustion. He did not take sufficiently into account the terrifying strains Scott’s alcoholism put on Zelda. He believed unspecified ‘marital difficulties’ had ‘provoked a depression with suicidal tendencies and a strong propensity for drug taking, which has developed into definite schizophrenia’.10
This was a new term, meaning ‘split mind’, coined in 1911 by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist educated at Zurich University who became medical director of Zurich’s Burghölzli Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry. He redefined earlier views of madness by suggesting that dementia praecox, one form of insanity, could be expanded and renamed because its patients showed a split or loss of co-ordination between different psychic functions, such as intellect and emotions.11 Bleuler was interested in Zelda’s case because he believed that it was a discrepancy between high aspiration and moderate achievement which precipitated delusions.
Symptoms varied with individual patients, but even in 1930 there were certain observable core symptoms, some of which Forel felt Zelda exhibited. All his schizophrenic patients believed their mental processes were no longer under their own control. Some insisted that alien forces put thoughts into their minds. Others heard voices telling them what to do or threatening to kill them. The most acute suffered delusions or hallucinations. How did Zelda match up to that measuring scale?
When she entered Prangins, Zelda had ‘imagined that there were corpses in the house, had thoughts of parricide, appeared to be sleepwalking’;12 before that, she had felt people were criticizing her and had been unable to face dressmakers, shopkeepers or servants.13
Forel informed Scott that key symptoms in the schizophrenic repertoire were vagueness of thought, illogicality and incomprehensible speech. Then they considered Zelda as a ‘case’. Zelda certainly had shifting thought patterns and made complex connections, but these were characteristics she had exhibited since childhood when perfectly healthy. Another problem affecting her diagnosis, which Forel did not take into account, was that in Switzerland her doctors spoke little English and her French was mediated by a strong Deep Southern accent, complicated by her original turns of phrase, her non sequiturs and her extravagant hyperbole.
Most of Forel’s schizophrenic patients had lost their drive, were unable to respond emotionally to others and had become isolated and apathetic.14 In June 1930 this was not true of Zelda, although as she became institutionalized for years a terrible apathy consumed her.
The onset of schizophrenia is usually preceded by stressful events. In Zelda’s case her sexual anxieties and artistic frustration had become overwhelming immediately before her breakdown. Yet these instances were reinterpreted by Forel. Her specific sexual fear was relabelled a joint marital conflict, her loss of identity due to misappropriation of artistic credit was renamed ‘disappointed ambitions’, and her illness seen as a reaction to feelings of inferiority, particularly towards Scott. In Thirties society where Scott was seen as the professional and Zelda as the amateur, his artistic superiority would automatically be validated, as much by the largely male medical profession as by the literary élite, therefore Zelda’s resentful responses would be seen as inappropriate, even ‘crazy’.
Forel thought Zelda needed routine, avoidance of drink and drugs, and a ‘normal’ marriage in which she oversaw her child’s education. He felt Scottie should be put on her guard so that she did not seek to fulfil her mother’s unsatisfied desires and ambitions. He outlined a treatment programme of systematic workshop activity, sports, entertainment and above all ‘regular discipline’. His crucial recommendation was that Zelda should give up her ‘inflated ambitions’ and engage in ‘activities appropriate to her talents and tastes’.15
Scott saw Zelda’s state between 15 May and 15 July 1930 as a ‘period of insanity obvious to any layman’. He characterized it as wild homosexuality, suicide threats, attempts at escape, delusions. But he admitted that Zelda was also writing and painting furiously.16 She had told the doctors how eager she was to paint and Scott had obtained permission to send in art materials. But there were many days when she felt isolated and terrified. ‘I can’t read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead –’, she wrote.17
For a time Scott tried to play down the gravity of Zelda’s condition. In May he had written to Ober: ‘Zelda’s been sick + not dangerously but seriously’, but by June from Paris he wrote to his mother: ‘Zelda has been desperately ill with a complete nervous breakdown and is in a sanitarium near here. She is better now but recovery will take a long time. I did not tell her parents the seriousness of it so say nothing – the danger was to her sanity rather than her life.’18 Scottie, who was still attending school at Paris’s Cours Dieterlin, visiting Rosalind in Brussels and taking weekend trips to her tutor Mlle Serez’s family home, was told nothing
about her mother’s condition. ‘I knew she was ill,’ she said later, ‘but I didn’t know why.’19
Scott, in residence at the Hotel Righi near Glion, still failed to tell the Sayres how seriously ill Zelda was. He described it as nervous exhaustion for which Zelda was taking a Swiss cure, but Minnie Sayre was not fooled. Zelda’s regular weekly letters had suddenly stopped. Mamma Sayre, who had already nursed Marjorie and the Judge through mental breakdowns, was familiar with the patterns. Although frantic ‘for news from my little baby’, she wrote to Scott with Southern stoicism: ‘we might just as well face facts for there is no dodging them.’20 Rosalind, who held Scott responsible for Zelda’s condition, insisted he was too irresponsible to oversee Scottie. She repeatedly suggested the child live with her and Newman. Scottie later wrote: ‘[Rosalind’s] smouldering quarrel with my father broke out – she deemed him too unreliable to be in charge of me while my mother was in the hospital and demanded that he let her adopt me.’21
Scott refused, and in mid-June took Scottie to visit her mother for the first time. In an effort to seem normal Zelda became terrifyingly tense. After Scottie’s departure Zelda suffered a virulent attack of eczema across her neck, shoulders and face, with unremitting pain. Scott, almost as appalled as Zelda herself, was deeply sympathetic but also made good use of her agony. In Tender Is The Night his description of an American mental patient runs: ‘On her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty – now she was a living agonizing sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she had lain under it, as imprisoned as the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.’ With some insight Scott has his Zelda-model say: ‘I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.’22
Zelda herself, still covered with sores, had been reading James Joyce but found ‘it a night-mare in my present condition’. She told Scott her concentration was failing, the pain so extreme that ‘my head evaporates,’ but she was still determined to read something ‘upon which my head will be able to make no conjectures … something with ideas’. She fixed on the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. ‘Will you send me “The Decline of the West” … so that I can put my sub-conscious, or whatever it is, back where it belongs and be left in peace to formulate and organize and absorb things that could find themselves a form afterwards?’ She did not want anything in French because she was having sufficient difficulty with English ‘and not Lawrence and not Virginia Wolf or anybody who writes by dipping the broken threads of their heads into the ink of literary history.’23