Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Hemingway scolded him: ignore your emotional traumas. You’re not a drama queen. You, like me, are just a writer. What writers do is write. You lack focus. An encouraging wife could have helped your self-discipline. Instead you chose Zelda: a jealous, competitive, destructive woman.71

  A week before Tender appeared the Menckens returned from a Mediterranean cruise. Sara, feverish with an infection she had picked up in Algeria, read Tender in hospital. She admired its prose but told Sara Mayfield how angry she was on behalf of Zelda and the Sayres.

  Scott, meanwhile, leant on Mencken for consolation. On 26 April Mencken told him not to fret over ‘a few silly reviews … The quality of book reviewing in the American newspapers is really appalling. Reviews are printed by imbeciles that know nothing about the process of writing and hence miss the author’s intentions completely. I think your scheme is a capital one, and that you have carried it out very effectively … Please remember me to Zelda. I surely hope that she is making good progress.’72

  But she was not.

  By May 1934 her condition had become critical. She was not responding to medication, she was not responding to the doctors. Though Scott told Mencken that Zelda was ‘katatonic’, the only supporting evidence is her submission to the medical profession’s treatment of her. Occasionally she was hysterical, and often despairing about her hospital costs. ‘I cannot see why I should sit in luxury when you are having such a struggle. Since there seems to be no way I can hasten my recovery, maybe it would be wise to try a cheaper place … I will not be discouraged by any such change you might make and, of cource, will do the best I can, anywhere.’ The following month she wrote: ‘I do not see how you can reasonably expect me to go on unworriedly spending god-knows-how-much-a-day when we haven’t got it to spend …’73

  On her better days she had been trying to improve their finances by writing two autobiographical articles for Esquire, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number–’, published May-June, and ‘Auction – Model 1934’, published July.

  Those essays were a farewell to her life with Scott. ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. –’ was a nostalgic travelogue of hotel rooms they had shared from 1920 until Bermuda in 1933.

  Scott edited ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. –’. His most striking amendment was to cut Zelda’s use of ‘I’, changing every first person pronoun to ‘we’. This not only weakened her style but also recalled his angry interjection in their discussion with Rennie: ‘Can’t you stop your “I”s’? Who are you?’

  Scott did no editorial work on ‘Auction – Model 1934’, Zelda’s inventory of the few possessions they had collected over those years to be sold at a mock auction. Most objects were broken, dirty, flawed, useless. Only the memories were intact and precious. The Fitzgeralds open their packing cases, look over their heirlooms, and ultimately decide that ‘the tangible remnant of the four hundred thousand we made from hard words and spent with easy ones’ should be kept in their attic.74

  Both articles again, though written by Zelda, were published under joint names.

  On 19 May Scott transferred Zelda to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt, a cheaper hospital in Baltimore, where she would spend the next two years.75 The primary reason was not medical but financial. Although his novel had been on the Publishers Weekly April and May bestseller lists, Scott could no longer afford Craig House fees.

  Zelda wrote in a shaky hand to console him: ‘D.O. you know that I do not feel as you do about state institutions – … many excellent doctors did their early training there. You will have to conceal as much of this from Scottie as you can, anyway. So, in the words of Ernest Hemmingway, save yourself … I am so glad your book is on the list of best sellers … Devotedly Zelda.’

  She had already assured him: ‘Ill as I am, one place is not very different from another … I would appreciate your making whatever adjustments would render your life less difficult.’76

  However, this place was tragically different from Craig, or Phipps, or Prangins.

  Mayfield described her first visit: ‘Zelda had a horror of the place – a sinister-looking sanitarium with enclosed passageways joining its buildings, barred windows, locked doors, and dismal rooms that appeared to have been done by a decorator with a depressive psychosis.’

  Zelda’s first shock was her reception. There was a rough search of her body. Her money, make-up and cigarettes were confiscated. She told Sara that attendants callously took away her clothes then doused her in a disinfectant bath. She realized immediately her hopeless situation: ‘locked in a bare ward’, Sara recalled, ‘with no means of communicating with her family and friends – literally buried alive in a strange place – [it] was too much for her. This time there was no doubt about it; she had broken down – or, perhaps, more accurately, after four years between the upper and nether millstones, she had been ground down.’77

  In addition to a balanced diet and much sleep her new physician, Dr Chapman, tried out new drug therapies. Zelda received morphine for sedation, stramonium for mania, digitalis for depression and tranquillizers including the first synthetic sedative, chloral hydrate, and the new discovery, sodium amytal. During her incarceration at Sheppard Pratt the hospital experimented with insulin shocks and Metrazol convulsive treatment, which produced shocks akin to epilepsy seizures. Dr Oscar Schwoerer, hired to oversee this process, had trained in the use of insulin coma therapy with Manfred Sakel whose most noteworthy patient was the dancer Nijinsky. Twice a week patients – including Zelda – were injected with a 10 per cent aqueous solution of Metrazol. Within seconds a thirty-to sixty-second violent seizure would follow. Some patients had to be held down for fear of hipbone, jaw or spinal fractures. After an explosion in the head Zelda and other patients would be given intravenous injections of sodium pentothal to counteract sensory fears.78

  Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘The Sheppard-Pratt hospital is located somewhere in the hinterlands of the human consciousness and I can be located there any time between the dawn of consciousness and the beginning of old age. Darling: life is difficult. There are so many problems. 1) The problem of how to stay here and 2) The problem of how to get out.’ She concluded with a sketch of Scott in Guatemala and a request for him to take her there.79

  The hospital grounds adjoined La Paix’s, which Zelda found difficult to bear. ‘Yesterday’, she wrote to Scott, ‘we took a long ride around familiar roads and it seemed so unreal not to be going home to La Paix.’ In June she walked under the tulip trees by the dank little bridge which made her homesick. ‘Will we be close again and will I feel the mossy-feeling back of your head and will I share those little regulations by which you keep your life in order: the measured drinks, the neatly piled papers.’ Her letters were desolate. ‘Darling I feel very disoriented and lonely. I love you, dear heart. Please try to love me some in spite of these stultifying years of sickness.’ Then not knowing that he had long stopped being faithful, she added, ‘I will compensate you some way for your love and faithfullness.’80

  Zelda began hallucinating. She heard Scott’s voice over and over. Sometimes he repeated her name. Sometimes he said, ‘O, I have killed her!’ Other times he cried, ‘I have lost the woman I put in my book.’ Zelda told the doctors she was terrified of Scott because he interpreted life for her. Dr William Elgin, one of her current physicians, initially forbade Scott to visit her.81

  For weeks she became incoherent with despair; once she tried to strangle herself. With what little was left of her spirit Zelda hated Elgin, while he found Zelda inaccessible and stony.

  Guilt suffused her: ‘I am heart broken that I should have trailed this disaster through your life. Scottie writes me vague notes sometimes. I am so sorry for her. She has always been so brave and made her effort in spite of an inevitable sense that all was not as it might have been … There is an irrelevant, though welcome sunshine.’82

  Most things, not merely the sun, became irrelevant. Zelda’s letters were despatches from the edge of the abyss. She wrote as if she was searching for something she had left behind o
n the outermost fringes of life. The meaning of her communications resided in the interstices. She now suffered from severe loss of memory and an apathetic personality due to constant shock therapies.83

  She had nothing but her shared memories with Scott to cling to. She recalled boathouses in Atlanta, pinewoods in Alabama, blistering bath-houses, dead moons, relics from the Deep South, mementoes from the Riviera, phantoms and conspiracies from past times they would never recapture. She coded even those memories as if she was an informant taking material across the border.

  Scott urged the doctors to let him visit. He bargained that he could raise her spirits. Zelda seemed keen. ‘Darling: I want so to see you. Maybe … before very long I will be well enough to meet you under the gracious shadows of these trees and we can look out on the distant fields to-gather. And I will be getting better.’84

  But she wasn’t. Once when he was allowed to visit, they strolled along a local railroad track separating the grounds of La Paix from the hospital As a train approached she broke away from Scott and dashed towards the rails. He managed to drag her back seconds before the train rushed by. This was one of several suicide attempts. She had given up hope of recovery. Her means of survival was religion and she read the Bible hour after hour. ‘It’s my only strength – my only strength … And I have to pray to – to live,’ she told Sara Mayfield.85

  Scott too was in despair: ‘I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.’86 Frustration heightened Scott’s bouts of bad behaviour. John O’Hara remembered an occasion when he drove Zelda back to Pratt from Baltimore. ‘I had Scott and Zelda in my car and I wanted to kill him. Kill. We were taking her back to her Institution and he kept making passes at her that could not possibly be consummated … I wanted to kill him for what he was doing to that crazy woman who kept telling me she had to be locked up before the moon came up.’87

  Then a younger doctor, Harry Murdoch, made a small breakthrough and persuaded Zelda to talk to him.88 She told him she intended to kill herself, a remark that returned her to twenty-four-hour observation. Finally a glimmer of improvement occurred in her self-confidence, and she was allowed home some weekends. She saw Scottie, now twelve, who was preparing for summer camp. ‘When I kissed her good-bye the little school-child scent of her neck and her funny little hesitant smile broke my heart. Be good to her Do-Do.’89

  Scott had thought that lifting the ban on Zelda’s writing might help her. While working on a film script of Tender he wrote to Elgin, saying he had been mistaken about not allowing Zelda to write serious fiction. Now he recognized that Zelda ‘grew better in the three months at Hopkins where it was allowed’.90

  Zelda begged to be allowed to write another novel. Scott, still uneasy, tried instead to persuade Perkins to accept a proposal for a book of Zelda’s short stories and essays.91 Excitedly Zelda planned the book jacket then, without warning, suffered another collapse, became inaccessible, unco-operative, occasionally violent. There was no question of her writing.

  In July Rosalind suggested Scott consult Minnie Sayre and the family about Zelda. On 19 July Scott angrily responded, marking the letter ‘Not to be mailed. File only’: ‘I am not going to call your mother into consultation nor have I ever called anybody into consultation on this problem except trained technicians who are dealing with it.’ When he had telephoned Rosalind and Newman from Switzerland it was merely to have a family member aware of his actions. To suggest his conclusions were influenced by drink was as absurd as to think that Grant’s campaigns were influenced by the fact that he used stimulant. ‘Whenever I handle the case by myself it goes well; Whenever I … tell you about it I run into that same old Puritanism that makes drinking unmoral, that makes all thinking done with the help of a drink invalidated and I am put down to a level of a person whose opinion can’t be trusted and that reaches the doctors … they get confused … it all has to start over again.’

  Scott insisted, ‘Mrs Sayre is an old woman … you are irreparably prejudiced against me … It must all be left to me.’92 His job was to ‘reconstruct a broken egg shell’ that was Zelda’s mind; he had Scottie to think of, and he consistently ran up against obsolete family prides such as were shown over Anthony’s death when the real facts were concealed from him. He appreciated Rosalind’s help with Scottie but ‘on the problem of Zelda you are completely blinded, even I accuse you of being purposely blinded’.93

  Scott’s relationship with the Sayres never recovered from that summer’s series of confrontational letters. His bad mood infected Zelda, who occasionally rebelled. Bill Warren, a Baltimore friend who had worked with Scott on the Tender film script, recalled a scene at Pratt when Scott refused to play tennis with Zelda and asked him to substitute. Zelda acted as if Scott ‘were backing out of the honeymoon’, said Bill. Scott ignored her and climbed into the high referee’s chair, so Zelda retaliated by stripping as she played. ‘After the first point, Zelda took off her sweater … after the second point, she … unhooked her bra and tossed it away. Still Scott remained silent. After the third point, Zelda’s short white tennis skirt dropped like a hoop at her feet. After the fourth she freed herself from her panties. I was playing with a stark naked woman.’94 Warren said when you play tennis with a naked woman while her husband watches coolly, you try not to look at her! Scott never intervened, even when hospital attendants arrived, bound her in a cold wet-pack and carried her off, screaming hysterically.

  Christmas 1934, spent with Scott and Scottie, was one of Zelda’s unhappiest. On Christmas Eve Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas visited the Fitzgeralds. Scott insisted that Zelda show Stein her paintings then, without consulting his wife, invited Stein to choose what she would like. Stein chose two oils already promised by Zelda to her doctor. Though Scott tried to persuade Zelda that her art would become famous if hung on the rue de Fleurus apartment walls, Zelda would not budge. Stein was forced to select Tulips, an oil, and Crossing Roses, a drawing. A few days later Scott wrote to Stein: ‘It meant so much to Zelda giving her a tangible sense of her own existence, for you to have liked two of her pictures enough to want to own them.’95 There was no truth in this: being compelled to give, not even sell, two paintings to a woman she disliked meant nothing but frustration to Zelda. This interchange with Scott’s friends in Baltimore set Zelda back. On her return to Pratt in the new year her condition was so grave she was again placed in isolation.

  Throughout 1935 her condition was designated as suicidal. She took in almost no news from the outside world. But news there was. While the Murphys’ son younger Patrick was still gravely ill, suddenly in March their other son, fifteen-year-old Baoth, died of spinal meningitis.96 At the end of his memorial service at St Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Sara Murphy rushed out of the church cursing God. She never fully recovered.

  Two months later Mencken wrote: ‘My dear Scott, Poor Sara, I fear, is now gravely ill – in fact, the chances that she will recover seem to be very remote. After all her long and gallant struggles she has developed meningitis, and the doctors tell me that the outlook is virtually hopeless. You can imagine my state of mind.’97 Zelda’s Montgomery friend and fellow writer Sara Haardt, who had been typing throughout fevers and sickness all spring, died in Johns Hopkins on 31 May, leaving Mencken bereft and Zelda one less Southern ally. Two terrible deaths had occurred in Zelda’s close circle, but she neither noticed nor responded.

  Notes

  1 Scott had loans from his mother, a loan from Scribner’s at 5 per cent against possible screen rights, advances from Ober. Without another generous boost – a $4,000 Scribner’s advance on the hardcover – his finances would have been shakier still. $6,000 of his year’s income was withheld to pay off some of his debts to his publishers. The rest was given to Ober who gave Scott money as and when needed.

  2 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 431.

  3 FSF to John Palmer, 12 Feb. 1934, CO187, Box 51, Folder John Palmer, PUL.

  4 ZSF
to FSF, no date, CO187, Box 42, Folder 63, PUL; FSF, Tender, p. 138.

  5 ZSF to FSF, no date, CO187, Box 42, Folder 63, PUL; FSF, Tender, p. 139.

  6 ZSF to FSF, no date, CO187, Box 42, Folder 50, PUL; FSF, Tender, p. 138.

  7 FSF, General Plan and Sketch for Tender, CO187, Boxes 9–10, PUL.

  8 Bleuler’s report of 22 Nov. 1930, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  9 In his General Plan and Sketch FSF lists: ‘A. Accounts B. Baltimore C. Clinics and clipping. D. Dancing and 1st Diagnoses E. Early Prangins – to Feb. 1931 F. From Forel (include Bleuler Consultation) H. Hollywood L. Late Prangins M. My own letters and comments R. Rosalind and Sayre Family S. Squires and Schedule V. Varia’.

  10 ZSF, Phipps Clinic, Feb.–Mar. 1934, quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 286.

  11 Virginia Durr said that in later years Minnie Sayre confided to her that the Judge came to her bedroom and she locked him out. Some researchers have taken this as evidence that he might have turned to one of his daughters if he was refused sexual relations by his wife. This, together with Fitzgerald’s creation of a heroine based partly on Zelda who is raped by her father, accounts for a flurry of incest rumours. But this author found no definite supporting evidence for this allegation and many interviewees in Montgomery refuted the idea.