Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  31 Forel to FSF at Hotel Righi Vaudois, Glion, 23 June 1930, CO187, Box 49, Folder 2A, PUL.

  32 FSF to Madame Lubov Egorova, 22 June 1930, CO187, Box 40, Folder 1A (in French); Eng. trans., Life in Letters, pp. 185–6, PUL.

  33 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, pp. 189–195, PUL.

  34 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, ibid., p. 189.

  35 ZSF to FSF, July? 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 57, PUL.

  36 FSF, Tender, p. 137.

  37 ZSF to FSF, c. June/July (author’s dating) 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 53, PUL.

  38 FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, c. 15 Dec. 1940, Life in Letters, p. 475. Broken decalogues meant in this case moral laws.

  39 ZSF to FSF, after June 1930, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 450.

  40 ZSF to FSF, c. July (after 9 July), 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 57, PUL.

  CHAPTER 18

  Zelda’s resilience was uncanny. Fiction instantly replaced ballet as her primary ambition. She wrote like the wind. By July 1930 she had completed ‘A Workman’, ‘The House’ and ‘The Drouth and the Flood’.1 Scott, perhaps wanting to compensate Zelda for the loss of her ballet, offered all three stories to Ober for Scribner’s Magazine. Subsequently they (and eight others) were lost; what survives is Scott’s critique to Perkins: ‘Zelda wrote [them] in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown … apart from the beauty & richness of the writing they have a strange haunting, evocative quality that is absolutely new … each of them is the story of her life when things … brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion they are literature.’2

  Max responded:

  I do think they show an astonishing power of expression … convey a curiously effective and strange quality. – But they are for a selected audience … the magazine thinks that on that account, they cannot use them … if she did enough more they might make a book …. I think one of the little magazines might use them. I wish we could.3

  Scott, deeply disappointed, replied: ‘Possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang.’ Then came his marvellous optimism: ‘I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during winter.’4

  Sadly his optimism was misplaced. Zelda’s creative energy had sapped her strength to a ‘childish, vacillating shell’.5 She told Scott: ‘I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning intelligence … I watch what attitude the nurse takes each day and then look up what symptom I have in Doctor Forel’s book … why has my ignorance on a medical subject … reduced me to the mental status of a child?’6 She said: ‘I don’t seem to know anything appropriate for a person of 30 … it’s because of … straining so completely every fibre in that futile attempt to achieve with every factor against me –’.7

  From that year onwards she was never free from the fear of mental illness nor, when released, from the greater fear of another asylum. That she wrote or painted at all when every factor was against her is a testament to her persistence and courage. But illness rattled her confidence: ‘Do you mind my writing this way?’ she asked Scott anxiously.

  Don’t be afraid that I am a meglo-maniac again – I’m just searching and its easier with you – You’ll have to re-educate me – But you used to like giving me books and telling me things. I never realized before how hideously dependent on you I was – Dr Forel says I won’t be after. If I can have a clear intelligence I’m sure we can use it – I hope I will be different … I can’t make head or tails out of all this dreary experience since I do not know how much was accidental and how much deliberate … but if such a thing as expiation exists it is taking place …8

  When Scott told friends Zelda was still ‘sick as hell’,9 Max and Wilson wrote sympathetically to Zelda. Max offered Scott hope: ‘If she has made progress maybe it should become more rapid, and everything will come out right.’10 Wilson, who had survived electric shock and hydrotherapy in a similar clinic, reassured Scott: ‘these breakdowns when people go off their heads aren’t necessarily serious’.11

  To Perkins, Scott confided his financial anxiety: ‘The psychiatrist … is an expensive proposition,’ and he had been unable to write. It was ‘terrible to be so in debt’. Zelda’s Prangins bills alone were 70,561 Swiss francs, over $13,000, without counting the costs of Scottie’s school, her Paris apartment and his own hotel. Worse still, Ober had refused him an advance. Could Max help him out? He’d promise him $3,000 from the next story. Little wonder Scott signed himself ‘harrassed and anxious’.12

  Support came from the Bishops, Townsend and the Murphys, whom Scott saw in Paris in July when visiting Scottie there. Dos Passos, who had married Katy Smith, Hadley’s friend,13 spoke for them all:

  Scott was meeting adversity with a consistency of purpose that I found admirable. He was trying to raise Scottie, to do the best possible thing for Zelda, to handle his drinking and to keep a flow of stories into the magazines to raise the enormous sums Zelda’s illness cost. At the same time he was determined to continue writing first rate novels. With age and experience his literary standards were rising. I never admired a man more.14

  There were two flaws in Dos Passos’s loyal statement. First, Scott was unwilling to handle his drinking; second, he was unable to touch his novel. Nevertheless his priority was to give Zelda excellent medical care and establish stability for Scottie. If Scott’s horizons were limited and his fears of delving inside himself as great as Zelda’s, he did the best he could at a time of despair and confusion.

  Like the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys were haunted with might-have-beens. Sara would be admitted to the American hospital with a gallbladder disorder. Drained by Patrick’s medical expenses and their three homes they decided to sell Villa America, where Patrick might never be sufficiently well to live.15

  Dr Forel asked Zelda to write an autobiographical sketch.16 Her mother she saw only in visual images: ‘I can always see her sitting down in the opalescent sunlight of a warm morning, a black servant combing her long grey hair.’ Her father, never visualized, was a man of ‘great integrity’, for whom she had ‘enormous respect and some mistrust’. Significant emotional events were her marriage, after which ‘I was in another world, one for which I was not prepared, because of my inadequate education’; her love for Jozan which ‘lasted for five years’, during which ‘I was locked in my villa for one month to prevent me from seeing him’; and Lois Moran whom she dismissed as part of a superficial Hollywood society. ‘I determined to find … a world in which I could express myself.’ She found Egorova whom she loved ‘more than anything else in the world … The brightness of a greek temple, the frustration of a mind searching for a place … all that I saw in her steps.’

  Then the world stopped, and now she was ‘where I cannot be anybody, full of vertigo … feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down … I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.’17

  That summer of 1930, Zelda’s eczema grew worse. Doctors administered Flemings solution, grease and powder. But, she told Scott, they were useless to ward off the ‘foul plague’. It ran, it made sores, it filled up the cavities at the back of her eyes with fire. It was like something that had rotted for centuries in the catacombs and poisoned the cellars of classic ruins.18 Incredibly, her gift for language never left her any more than the poison did. In desperation she begged:

  Please, out of charity write to Dr Forel to let me off this cure. I have been 5 months now, unable to step into a corridor alone. For a month and a week I’ve lived in my room under bandages, my head and neck on fire … The last two days I’ve had bromides and morphine but it doesn’t do any good – All because nobody ever taught me to play tennis. When I’m most miserable there’s your game to think of.

  Scott had taken up tennis to forget his troubles. But Zelda reminded him of hers. She recalled their arguments over her homosexuality. ‘You said you did not want to see me if I knew what I kn
ow. Well, I do know. I would have liked you to come to me, but there’s no good telling lies.’ Nothing could take away her clarity about the way she had felt and might feel again. ‘If I have to stand much more to take away the thing in me that all the rest of you find so invaluable and superior when I get out I’m going to have Scottie at least.’ Her threat was idle, because her ‘re-educative treatment’ to retrain her into what the doctors saw as ‘normal’ behaviour included the implied intimidation that women with abnormal feelings were unsuitable as mothers. If she refused to suppress emotions the doctors saw as evil, they would refuse to release her. ‘It’s so hard for me to understand liking a feeling without liking the person that I suppose I will be eternally confined.’19 Scott had already told Forel that over this issue, if necessary, he would abandon Zelda. ‘In no sense am I asking her forgiveness, I have long determined for the sake of the future of my child and myself that if there is any renewal of homosexuality in her, or any suspicion of me … it is much better that we never meet again.’20

  Scott did not answer Zelda’s charges. He sent her gladioli. She painted them. Then she softened: ‘Though I would have chosen some other accompaniment for my desequilibrium than this foul eczema … I am waiting impatiently for when you can come to see me … Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed? … It was much nicer a long time ago when we had each other and the space about the world was warm – Can’t we get it back some-way – even by imagining? … it’s desperate to be so alone – and you can’t be very happy in a hotel room – We were awfully used to having each other about – Zelda.’

  She added a tentative postscript: ‘Dr Forel told me to ask you if you had stopped drinking – so I ask –.’21

  Forel believed strongly that Scott’s drinking was a major contribution to Zelda’s illness, that he was in effect treating two people. Scott must stop drinking if Zelda was to recover and live with him. Scott refused to accept Forel’s viewpoint.

  During my young manhood for seven years I worked extremely hard … bringing myself by tireless self-discipline to a position of unquestioned preeminence among younger American writers; also by additional ‘hack-work’ for the cinema ect I gave my wife a comfortable and luxurious life My work is done on coffee, coffee and more coffee, never on alcohol. At the end of five or six hours I get up from my desk white and trembling and with a steady burn in my stomach, to go to dinner.

  More justification ensued:

  Two years ago in America, I noticed that when we stopped all drinking for three weeks … I immediately had dark circles under my eyes, was listless and disinclined to work … I found that a moderate amount of wine … made all the difference in how I felt … the dark circles disappeared … I looked forward to my dinner [Scott’s scarlet underlining] … and life didn’t seem a hopeless grind to support a woman whose tastes were daily diverging from mine. She no longer read or thought or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites. People respected her … because of a certain complete fearlessness and honesty that she has never lost, but she was becoming more and more an egotist and a bore.

  For Scott there was only room in their household for the one egotist who did not bore him. Then came the crux:

  Now when that old question comes up again as to which of two people is worth preserving, I, thinking of my ambitions so nearly achieved of being part of English literature, of my child, even of Zelda in the matter of providing for her – must perforce consider myself first.22

  Zelda’s assessment that ‘You have always told me that I have no right to complain as long as I was materially cared for’ was correct.23 He would always put himself first, but he would always provide for her.

  And his intentions? ‘To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens … only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot.’

  Was that childish? Stubborn? Without waiting for Forel’s answer he bowled into his most problematic remark: ‘What I gave up for Zelda was women and it wasn’t easy in the position my success gave me – what pleasure I got from comradeship she has pretty well ruined by dragging me of all people into her homosexual obsession.’

  He of all people then asked Forel if there was not ‘a certain disin genuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her relatives and our friends that it was my drinking that caused this calamity, and that I thereby admitted it? [Scott’s underlining].’24

  Zelda accepted privation with dignity as Southern women were schooled to do. ‘I am here,’ she wrote, ‘and since I have no choice, I will try to muster the grace to rest peacefully as I should, but our divergence is too great as you must realize for us to ever be anything except a hash to-gether.’25

  Her resentment surfaced:

  since we have never found either help or satisfaction in each other the best thing is to seek it separately. You might as well start whatever you start for a divorce immediately … You will have all the things you want without me, and I will find something. You will have some nice girl who will not care about the things that I cared about and you will be happier. For us, there is not the slightest use, even if we wanted to try which I assure you I do not – not even faintly. In listing your qualities I can not find even one on which to base any possible relationship except your good looks, and there are dozens of people with that: the head-waiter at the Plaza … my coiffeur in Paris.26

  According to Sara Mayfield, though Zelda wanted a divorce she recognized that her dependence on Scott meant only reconciliation would procure her release. She told Sara the psychiatrists would keep her at the ‘nut farm’ as long as Scott paid them. ‘Because her letters were censored she had no way of appealing to her family and friends; even if she could run away, she had no money and no means of earning any. The tone of her letters became more loving, and she showed more affection for him when they were together.’27

  One letter among many similar illustrates this dependent tone:

  Goofy, my darling … the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel … so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air: love to Doo-do and the remembered feel of our skins cool against each other … And you ‘phoned and said I had written something that pleased you and so I don’t believe I’ve ever been so heavy with happiness … I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me … Are you … looking rather reproachful that no melodrama comes to pass when your work is over … or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands … I love you – the way you always are.28

  Scott was relieved. In August, after their long separation, he wrote, ‘Husband finally sees her. She is still in bandages, shows lesbian tendencies and in spite of tenderness towards him makes irrational erotic remarks. But her violent feeling against him specifically has now abated.’29 Zelda’s doctors believed her recovery depended on a ‘successful’ marriage so they advised her against conflicts with Scott. In Forel’s time doctors thought the propensity towards homosexuality and menstrual disturbances noted in female schizophrenics indicated endocrine or chemical imbalance. They gave Zelda endocrine treatments using ovarian extracts and dried thyroid gland powders. Patients were also injected with their own blood, and given potassium bromide and a serum made from the brain of a mentally stable person. Forel injected Zelda with morphine to induce sleep, belladonna for pain and luminal to sedate her constantly. She was also given purges of seidlitz water, wet packs and hydrotherapy.30 The drugs alternately depressed and agitated her. Later Scott wrote to Forel about a hunch he had that Zelda’s eczema was caused by lack of elimination of poison. He believed that some crucial physical element such as semen, salt or holy water was either absent or there was too much of it. It was a clever guess, for later discoveries confirmed that some mental illness can be caused by the body’s chemical imbalance.31

  Scott vaca
tioned in Caux from 8 to 22 August, finishing the remarkable ‘One Trip Abroad’, based on his Kelly version of Tender.32 Wealthy Nicole and Nelson Kelly travel to France to study painting and music, become dissipated, end up as patients in a Swiss clinic. ‘Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end’: a poignant description of a disintegrating marriage.33

  While Scott, in Caux, was writing stories to explain the collapse of his life and career, Zelda’s hospital letters glowed with romantic feeling. She drew a balcony lit by a moon with two upright chairs, each of which held a heart shaped cushion. ‘Doodo’s Balcon’, she labelled it.

  Dear balcony, where you walk absent-mindedly and drop a cigarette and stand poised in the morning sun, just an answering flash. Caux is so far away, but I love thinking of you there above the heat and smells … O dear Doo-do … I love you so … I’m only happy when I’m doing what I think you’re doing at the time … You sometimes seem to be buttoning up yourself, slipping into you as if you were a freshly pressed suit, and your empty shoes lie expectantly on the floor as if they were waiting for Santa Claus.34

  Her health improved.

  Except for momentary retrogressions into a crazy defiance and complete lack of proportion I am better …. It’s ghastly losing your mind … knowing you can’t think and that nothing is right, not even your comprehension of concrete things like how old you are or what you look like.

  Suddenly she noticed the asylum had stripped her of possessions.

  Where are all my things? I used to have dozens of things and now there doesn’t seem to be any clothes or anything personal in my trunk. I’d love the gramophone – What a disgraceful mess – but if it stops our drinking it is worth it – because then you can finish your novel and write a play and we can live somewhere and have a house with a room to paint and write … with friends for Scottie and there will be Sundays and Mondays again which are different from each other … my life won’t lie up the back-stairs of music-halls and yours won’t keep trailing down the gutters of Paris – if … I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac.35