Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  In April, Zelda was allowed trips to Geneva and Montreux with Scott, with Rosalind, even with some patients: ‘I went to Geneva all by myself with a fellow maniac,’ she reported wittily.84 She sent Scott ‘kisses splattering you[r] balcony tonight from a lady who was once, in three separate letters, a princess in a high white tower and who has never forgotten her elevated station in life and who is waiting once more for her royal darling.’85

  During the spring the re-education programme deleted and rewrote her past. She was ‘waved and manicured to a chic and elegant turn’ for Scott’s visit, she had a ‘more feminine’ room in a new villa which lacked corners like ‘a phrase without adjectives or a woman without a past’.86

  The Fitzgeralds saw each other more often. Zelda also began to see Scottie more frequently. She found her ‘such an amusing person’, reflected ‘it’s rare to find the appropriate emotion going toward the appropriate object’.87 Scottie ‘was darling … not a bit boyish’. They’d had a good picnic. ‘She is a dear girl close to my heart – so close.’88

  Although Zelda let slip she was still angry because ‘people wont let me be insane’,89 most of her letters to Scott reached new heights of outrageous dependency. One of Scott’s biographers takes a typical line, ‘I realize more completely than ever how much I live in you and how sweet and good and kind you are to such a dependent appendage’, and suggests that Zelda had ‘burned out her bitterness and achieved new insight … accepted rather than resented her inevitable dependence on Scott, and expressed gratitude for his sacrifice and support’.90 This simplistic view fails to acknowledge that Zelda had pragmatic reasons for reconciliation which certainly allowed Scott to become contrite, devoted and to send flowers.

  Together they planned Zelda’s first long trip, an idyllic two weeks in July with Scottie in Annecy. They stayed first at the Hôtel Beau Rivage, garlanded in roses, on Lake Annecy’s Western shore. Then they moved to Menthon on the east bank, where Zelda recalled long cool shadows shelving the precipice of the Hôtel Palace. They fished, played tennis, danced Viennese waltzes, ate in a café lit by Japanese lanterns and celebrated Zelda’s thirty-first birthday. Zelda wrote happily to her father: ‘It is as peaceful inside its scalloped mountains as a soup-ladel full of the sky.’91 It was a rare moment in the Fitzgerald family history of happiness, relaxation, peace. The time they spent there was so perfect they decided they would never return, because no other time could ever match it.

  News from the Murphys was better. Patrick was considered sufficiently well for them to leave the US in July and move into Ramgut, a hunting lodge in Bad Aussee in the Austrian Alps. Earlier that year when Zelda was permitted visitors, the first person she had asked to see was Gerald. Though ‘absolutely terrified’, he had gone to Prangins and made elegant small talk about the basket Zelda was weaving. ‘I said that all my life I had wanted to make baskets like hers, great heavy, stout baskets.’92 It mattered little that their conversation was desultory, for underneath lurked a bond based on a shared sense of black demons, of unreality, of an awareness that they had both been haunted by feelings of otherness, of difference, some sexual, some social, many personal, few expressed.93 Gerald once tried to explain himself: ‘For me only the invented part of life is satisfying, the unrealistic part … sickness, birth, Zelda in Lausanne, Patrick in the sanatorium … these things were realistic … [I] accepted them but I didn’t feel they were the important things … the invented part, for me, is what has meaning.’94 Scott made a good shot at understanding Gerald, but with Zelda Gerald did not need to list ‘real’ versus invented events; like him she fictionalized even her emotions.

  In August Scott suggested he and Zelda should visit the Murphys. On arrival, as Scott told their good friend Alice Lee Myers, ‘Scotty + the little Murphys begin to glare as soon as they’re in a radius of a hundred yards from each other,’95 but only one incident literally clouded the waters, taking place, inevitably, in a bathroom. The children’s nurse put bath salts in Scottie’s bath water. Scottie, thinking it had been used to bathe all the Murphy children, complained to her parents. Scott, fearing Patrick had used it, made a scene, which he used later in Tender. Zelda, however, found the Murphys’ ambience healing.

  On 15 September 1931 Zelda was released from Prangins. Her case was summarized as a ‘reaction to her feelings of inferiority (primarily towards her husband)’. She was said to have had ambitions which were ‘self-deceptions’ and ‘caused difficulties between the couple’. Her prognosis was favourable as long as all conflicts could be avoided.96 Scott summarized his thirty-fourth year: ‘A Year in Lausanne. Waiting. From Darkness to Hope.’97

  Excitedly they drove to Paris, then, after four and a half years abroad, they returned to America permanently. A photo of Zelda on board the Aquitania, ironically labelled ‘Recovered’, shows her as tense, coarse-skinned and ugly. She looks ten years older than thirty-one.

  Briefly they paused in Washington, saw Ring in New York and then headed for Montgomery. They began a new sleepy Southern life of tennis, golf, old friends and house-hunting.98 They settled on 819 Felder Avenue in the prestigious Cloverdale district. The house was half-shingled, with a rose garden at the side and in the front yard an exquisitely scented magnolia tree, whose pink blossoms still bloomed seventy years later when their house became the Scott and Zelda Museum. They acquired a bloodhound called Trouble, a white Persian called Chopin, a black couple called Freeman and Julia to cook and clean, and sent Scottie, now almost ten, to the Margaret Booth School. By October Scott was bored; even Zelda felt out of place amongst Southern women with small horizons. She gave one friend Faulkner’s new novel Sanctuary to wake her up.

  What they did most of the time was write. Scott worked furiously on Tender, hardly noticing that Zelda, intent on new stories, was also planning a novel. She was about to move into his professional territory.

  Notes

  1 These three stories were among the set of Zelda’s stories submitted to Ober that were subsequently lost. ‘Drouth’ is sometimes spelt ‘Drought’.

  2 FSF to MP, c. 8 July 1930, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 166.

  3 MP to FSF, 5 Aug. 1930, ibid., p. 168.

  4 FSF to MP, c. 1 Sep. 1930, ibid., p. 169.

  5 ZSF to FSF, late summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 52, PUL.

  6 ZSF to FSF, Aug./Sep. 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 60, PUL.

  7 ZSF to FSF, late summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 52, PUL.

  8 Ibid.

  9 FSF to MP, c. 20 July 1930, Life in Letters, p. 186.

  10 MP to FSF, 5 Aug. 1930, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 168.

  11 Wilson to FSF, 8 Aug. 1930, Wilson, Letters, pp. 201–2.

  12 FSF to MP, c. 20 July 1930, Life in Letters, p. 186.

  13 Katy Smith had introduced Hadley to Hemingway. Katy became a close friend of Pauline Hemingway too.

  14 Dos Passos, Best Times, pp. 209–10.

  15 They also gave up their Paris apartment and sold their boat Honoria. However, in October Zelda heard that with Murphian style they had built a new seagoing schooner 27 metres long to use as a floating villa and Mediterranean classroom for their children.

  16 Zelda wrote seven pages in French. The following quotations are from the translation used in Nancy Milford, Zelda, pp. 174–6.

  17 Zelda’s reference to the salamander, the domestic deity that Plato said could pass unscathed through fire, is an allusion to Owen Johnson’s 1914 bestseller The Salamander which Zelda read. The play based on it starring Nathan’s girlfriend Ruth Findlay (which opened at the Harris Theatre, New York, 23 Oct. 1914), came to Montgomery when Zelda was in her junior year at Sidney Lanier High School. The heroine, Dore Baxter, sees herself as an extraordinary woman who like Zelda adores precipices, danger and the forbidden and has a desire to experience everything. For a useful account see Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 5.

  18 ZSF to FSF, Sep. 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 66, PUL.

  19 ZSF to FSF, c. Sep. 1930 (author’s dating), co187, Box 42, Fold
er 67, PUL.

  20 FSF to Dr Oscar Forel, c. summer 1930 (author’s dating), co187, Box 49, Folder 2A, PUL.

  21 ZSF to FSF, c. July 1930 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 42, Folder 64, PUL.

  22 FSF to Forel, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, pp. 196–7.

  23 ZSF to FSF, June/July? 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 53, PUL.

  24 FSF to Forel, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 197.

  25 She had seen her mother accept poverty and family illnesses with stoicism. Her adult resignation is the more interesting because as an adolescent Zelda had rebelled against the Southern female training that was a crash course in self-denial.

  26 ZSF to FSF, c. July 1930 (author’s dating on grounds of handwriting, notepaper, internal evidence), col 87, Box 42, Folder 53, PUL.

  27 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 161–2.

  28 ZSF to FSF, n.d., c. summer/fall 1930, ZSF, Collected Writings, pp. 458–9.

  29 FSF, Five Year Consultation Record (from middle of 7th year of marriage), Craig House medical records, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  30 Wet packs involved patients being tightly rolled in wet cold sheets. Wrapped over these was a blanket to reduce loss of body heat. This treatment aimed to calm ‘uncooperative’ patients. Edmund Wilson told Zelda he had only just survived hydrotherapy and nearly became addicted to paraldehyde in Clifton Springs sanatorium. Spinal douches or hydrotherapy, introduced by Jacques Charcot, had been used since 1890 in French hospitals for hysteria. Cold water jets violently applied to the spine to agitate the neurovascular structure often caused tissue damage.

  31 The drug lithium which has salt as one component is a good example, for it is used to control manic depression cycles by correcting chemical imbalance.

  32 He also finished ‘A Snobbish Story’.

  33 ‘One Trip Abroad’, Afternoon of An Author, ed. Mizener, p. 161.

  34 ZSF to FSF, c. Aug./Sep. 1930, CO187, Box 43, Folder 19, PUL.

  35 ZSF to FSF, probably mid-Aug. possibly early Sep. 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 59, PUL.

  36 ZSF to Scottie, c. summer 1930, CO183, Box 4, Folder 14, PUL.

  37 FSF to Haardt and Mencken, 18 Oct. 1930, PUL, copy lent by Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.

  38 Scott had already met Wolfe in July. In September they met in Montreux, Vevey and Geneva. Scott also took a trip to Paris in fall 1930 to meet Wolfe after his 1929 success, Look Homeward Angel. Wolfe turned Scott into Hunt Convoy in You Can’t Go Home Again. Scott liked Wolfe but Wolfe was suspicious of Scott.

  39 FSF, Ledger, Aug. 1930. Bruccoli (Epic Grandeur, p. 364) suggests that Scott started sleeping with other women to counter Zelda’s accusations of homosexuality. As it was Zelda he wished to convince of his heterosexuality, and as he never told Zelda about his affairs, this seems unlikely. But Scott provoked Zelda’s anger by admitting he took Emily Vanderbilt out in Paris. Rebecca West saw Scott and Emily at Armenonville. West said Scott ‘was leaning towards her, sometimes caressing her hands.’ Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 56.

  40 Bijou’s real name was Violet Marie. A French nurse gave her the nickname. The daughter of a Calvinist Scot Sir Francis Elliot, in 1920 she married Lieut. Edmund O’Conor, a professional naval officer from Dunleer, County Louth, Ireland. She accompanied him to China, learnt Chinese expertly, stayed with him until he contracted TB and died of disease in 1924. She had one son Michael whom she abandoned.

  41 Scott deluded himself the binges were a way of escaping his pain.

  42 Bijou O’Conor, taped interview, Bijou O’Conor Remembers Scott Fitzgerald, Audio Arts, London, 1975.

  43 FSF to Forel, 29 Jan. 1931, Life in Letters, pp. 205–6.

  44 FSF, report on Zelda’s mental state Oct. 1930 – Feb. 1931, Five Year Consultation Record, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  45 Rosalind Sayre Smith to FSF, 21 Nov. 1930, CO187, Box 53, Folder 14A, PUL.

  46 ZSF to Rosalind, c. summer 1930, CO183, Box 5, Folder 11, PUL.

  47 FSF, Five Year Consultation Record, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  48 Forel, 15 Oct. 1930, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 179.

  49 Forel to FSF, 16 Nov. 1930, CO187, Box 49, Folder 2A, PUL (orig. in French, translated by Marion Callen and the author).

  50 Dr Irving Pine to the author, 1998, 1999.

  51 FSF to judge and Mrs A. D. Sayre, 1 Dec. 1930, Life in Letters, p. 202.

  52 He died in 1939.

  53 Forel to Milford, 6 May 1966, Milford, Zelda, p. 179.

  54 On 9 March 1966 Forel told Milford that schizophrenia had been his original assessment. But on 18 May that same year he acknowledged to Milford that privately he had later changed his diagnosis (Milford, Zelda, p. 161n.). Sara Mayfield, who also later talked to Forel, said that the doctor had been reluctant to diagnose Zelda as schizophrenic because she did not manifest enough of the stereotyped schizophrenic thoughts and actions (Exiles, p. 153).

  55 Dr Irving Pine to the author 1998, 1999. Some doctors have thought that had Zelda been treated twenty years later her diagnosis might have been ‘manic depression’. Others have felt that even if the diagnosis had been schizophrenia, the tranquillizing effects of certain drugs might have been beneficial in controlling acute illness or preventing relapses.

  56 Forel to Milford, 6 May 1966, Milford, Zelda, p. 179.

  57 In 1930–31 FSF sold seventeen stories. In 1931 he earned $37,599.

  58 Résumé of the consultation with Professor Bleuler and Doctor Forel, 22 Nov. 1930. Craig House medical records, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL. Translated from French by Marion Callen in conjunction with author.

  59 Ibid.

  60 Ibid.

  61 It was the first of two similar programmes on which Zelda was placed in two hospitals aimed at changing ‘inappropriate’ feminine behaviour into something nearer the conventional wifely model of the era. Like other women of her time including Vivien Haigh-Wood (wife of T. S. Eliot), Jane Bowles, Sylvia Plath, and her friend Sara May field, Zelda’s failure to live up to a traditional feminine role was to some extent buried within a diagnosis of mental disorder. Many women like Zelda, who were artists or married to artists, who were unwilling or unable to conform, whose behaviour or speech did not fit approved family patterns, were administered remedies or ‘cures’ in mental asylums that were often a method of containing them for long periods of time.

  62 Résumé of Bleuler/Forel consultation, 22 Nov. 1930, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  63 FSF to Judge and Mrs A. D. Sayre, 1 Dec. 1930, Life in Letters, p. 203.

  64 ZSF to FSF, fall 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 65, PUL.

  65 ZSF to Newman Smith, late summer 1930 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 43, Folder 21, PUL.

  66 ZSF to FSF, Nov. 1930 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 43, Folder 10, PUL.

  67 ZSF to Forel, c. Nov. 1930, CO183, Box 5, Folder 3, PUL.

  68 Named after the Murphys’ daughter.

  69 In later life Scottie herself, always close to Rosalind, had admitted she would have liked it but Scott never countenanced it.

  70 ZSF to Scottie, Oct/Nov.? 1930 (author’s dating), CO183, Box 4, Folder 10, PUL.

  71 ZSF to Scottie, spring 1931, CO183, Box 4, Folder 17, PUL.

  72 ZSF to Scottie, Oct./Nov.? 1930 (author’s dating), CO183, Box 4, Folder 10, PUL.

  73 ZSF to Scottie, spring 1931, CO183, Box 4, Folder 17, PUL.

  74 FSF to Forel, 29 Jan. 1931, Life in Letters, p. 207.

  75 She was sister to Sidney Weinberg, a wealthy Wall Street investment banker. She married prominent Brooklyn judge Louis Goldstein. Scott portrayed her as Evelyn, a girl burning with vitality, in his story ‘On Your Own’ (1931).

  76 The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kuehl, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1965, p. 178.

  77 In January 1931. They spent winters and springs in Florida and warmer months in the West, a pattern which enabled Hemingway to hunt, fish and finish his books.

  78 FSF, autobiographical note, 1940, PUL. During the 1930s he and He
mingway met only four times: once in 1931, once in 1933, twice in 1937.

  79 FSF, Tender, 1986, p. 224.

  80 Helen Blackshear, ‘Mama Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald’s mother-in-law’, Georgia Review, winter 1965, p. 467.

  81 FSF to Rosalind Sayre Smith, n.d. (c. June 1930), CO187, Box 53, Folder 14, PUL.

  82 Forel to FSF, 7 Feb. 1931, CO187, Box 49, Folder 2A, PUL. Translated from French by Marion Callen in conjunction with author.

  83 FSF, Five Year Consultation Record, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL. The period referred to is 1 Feb. – 1 Mar 1931.

  84 ZSF to FSF in Lausanne, early spring? 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 8, PUL.

  85 ZSF to FSF, c. early spring 1931, ibid.

  86 ZSF to FSF, c. spring 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 11, PUL.

  87 ZSF to FSF, late summer? 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 13, PUL.

  88 ZSF to FSF, early or late summer 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 15, PUL.

  89 ZSF to FSF, late summer? 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 13, PUL.

  90 Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 200.

  91 ZSF to Judge A. D. Sayre, c. July 1931, Romantic Egoists, ed. Bruccoli et al., p. 180.

  92 Vaill, So Young, p. 232.

  93 See Vaill’s analysis, So Young, pp. 221–6, which includes Gerald’s letter to Archie MacLeish, 23 Jan. 1929, with his detailed expression of his sense of unreality.

  94 Gerald Murphy/Calvin Tomkins interview notes, Honoria Murphy Donnelly Collection, quoted in ibid., p. 226. Murphy is here recalling his letter to FSF of 31 Dec. 1935.