by Sally Cline
Subsequently Carroll wrote to Minnie to say that no matter how normal Zelda’s behaviour appeared, her psyche was shattered: she was mentally damaged goods. She would always live in a house of thinly spun glass.1 Scott and Minnie just about managed to keep their correspondence cordial, but Scott’s fury and Zelda’s desperation broke out time and time again.
With Zelda confused, Scott enraged, the Sayres frustrated and Carroll implacable, the battle continued for months. Studying some of the battle-ground communiques reveals the state of emotions on both sides.
War had started slowly in 1938.
26 April: Minnie wrote to Scott: ‘I am not trying to combat the doctors. I’m thinking of my child’s happiness … I feel that contact with those she loves is good for her and gives her a sense of protection … If Zelda can live here with me I am not afraid to try it.’
27 May: Scott replied, but to Rosalind: ‘I want more trial of Zelda’s capacities but I will not override Carroll … the idea of your mother assuming responsibility is, of course, fantastic – it would simply mean turning Zelda loose.’
29 May: Rosalind disregarded Scott’s reported prescription from Carroll, that the best life for Zelda would be ‘attractive quarters’ in hospital and ‘frequent travel for diversion’. As a luxury Scott could no longer afford, ‘it can be dismissed from consideration’. The Sayres wanted a ‘practicable plan whereby she could live outside the hospital relieving you of the expense of her staying there and allowing her a chance to re-establish herself’. Rosalind outlined the cheapest alternative. ‘If you cannot afford an attendant for her … I feel she is entitled to it [release] under the only other arrangement open to her, which is sharing Mama’s roof … denying her this without offering her something better would be condemning her arbitrarily to permanent hospitalization without giving her a trial, and neither you nor the rest of us would be willing to do that.’
Rosalind fired her ‘final word’ to Scott: ‘As you wrote Dr Carroll, you realize the time has gone when you can undertake Zelda’s supervision, and you must now find another way for her. Why not give her back to us, with allowance enough for normal support, and let us do the best we can for her.’2
18 September 1938: Rosalind informed Scott that Zelda wished to experiment in the new year in an Asheville apartment with a companion. The Sayres felt that as Zelda had not once slipped during the summer, ‘continued hospitalization, against her will, will be detrimental’.3 Scott, furious, ignored Rosalind’s letters.
7 December: Rosalind wrote again. Scott, who had asked for her advice, had neither acknowledged nor taken it. ‘We want something done about re-establishing Zelda in the world, and would appreciate your co-operation.’
21 December: Scott finally picked up his pen.
You seem to believe that the business of ‘re-establishing Zelda’ consists of signing a lease on a house in Asheville! … never for a moment did he [Carroll] take [your suggestion] seriously … what he told me is … 1) that Zelda is incurable though her disease is arrested for the present … 2) that she will never be able to live alone … 3) that her condition will inevitably move downward …. [if] Zelda comes into the world [with] no governing force upon her – with her damaged equipment she faces … not one chance in 10,000 – in order that Mrs Sayre can pass her last years in peace! … Imagine Zelda running amuk in Montgomery! I saw your mother when Zelda had the public masturbation illusion – she went very quickly home …
Scott told Rosalind the Sayres’ personal charm and tea-table ideas would not talk away dementia praecox. ‘Cure her I cannot and simply saying she’s cured must make the Gods laugh.’
When the Sayres refused to reduce their pressure Scott wrote to Marjorie, as ‘the only member of your family that has ever treated this business with ordinary human decency’.
‘I have taken the whole thing pretty well from Rosalind’s first accusation in 1930 that I “drove Zelda crazy” through your mother’s accusation that I sent her to Johns Hopkins in 1932 for ulterior motives.’ He reminded Marjorie it was Minnie’s ‘rotten care’ that allowed John Sellers to seduce Zelda at fifteen. ‘Your mother is a sort of typhoid Mary projecting her own defeated egotism … [it is a] preposterous idea that Zelda’s sanity can be bought with a one way ticket to Montgomery … You have nothing to offer. Why don’t you, for god’s sake, shut up! Any further communication from any of you will be returned unopened.’ Minnie’s long-distance thrusts would drive Zelda to suicide. She was behaving like the wicked mother in the Judgement of Solomon: ‘better the baby dead than not the baby at all’.4
Some remnant of sense made Scott file that letter instead of mailing it. But that same week he wrote Rosalind a sarcastic appreciation of her sanctimonious advice; then told her that if she wanted him to resist the temptation to pass her down to posterity for what she was, she should never communicate with him again. On top of the letter he scrawled: ‘When you people stink you certainly stink.’5
There is something deeply dispiriting about a bunch of well-meaning people, each genuinely concerned about the welfare of one of their number, quarrelling over treatment methods and release time. The possessiveness shown by both the Sayres and Scott over the rights to Zelda’s recovery is akin to the controlling way families sometimes behave over a dying member.
Not even Scottie was excluded from battle. In July 1939, after an appendix operation in Asheville when she was spending recovery time with her mother, who now appeared stable, seventeen-year-old Scottie entered the fray on the Montgomery side.
Scott immediately asked Carroll’s deputy, Dr Suitt, to inform Scottie that though her mother might hold up for short periods she would never be able to operate in the world without guidance. Suitt was to stress the onset of menopause was likely to cause Zelda derangement. Scott, determined to control his family’s relationships, warned Dr Suitt that Scottie’s new attitude towards Zelda could affect ‘my whole future relation with my daughter’.6
When Scottie asked Scott if she could join him in California that summer, her positive attitude towards Zelda’s release made him hesitate. ‘She is a dominant little girl in a polite way and to have her appear here now as a sort of ambassador of … the Montgomery point of view … would be much more than upsetting.’7 So Scott told Scottie he was depressed and nervous. He would rather not see her ‘than see you without loving you’. She must now realize that her home was Vassar.8 Scottie, distressed, showed Zelda the letter.
Zelda wanted Scott to understand that his note might have further endangered Scottie’s sense of safety. ‘She is such a particularly brave and self-reliant child that it would be lamentable to allow a sense of the absence of stability to twist her mind with neuroses.’9
On 27 September 1939, after two months’ illness, Scott wrote to Carroll saying he had run out of funds. Would Highland credit him for another month without depriving Zelda of necessities? Carroll agreed to trust Scott and not to release Zelda to her family. Harold Ober, who for years had generously lent Scott money, was less gracious, and finally refused. Scott, believing Ober had lost faith in his talents, broke with him. This had severe repercussions on Scottie’s relationship with the Obers, who had acted as her most immediate kin since she first went to the Ethel Walker School. Firing Ober also made Scott financially worse off in October. ‘I am almost penniless,’ he told Zelda, informing her that their friends were helping to pay for Scottie’s return to Vassar. ‘Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.’ Zelda must stop harassing him with requests for freedom and must leave him in peace with his haemorrhages and his hopes. He had a new novel to write and a child to rear.10
Zelda wrote back reasonably:
your letter somewhat hurt me … you do not give a thought to the fact that this hospital regimentation, while most excellent for whipping into shape, is very gruelling … Mamma would be happy to have me: if any trouble arose I could and would return here … I cant see any legitimization of keeping me under hospitalization mu
ch longer …. There is every reason to believe that I am more able to observe the social dictats than yourself – on the evidence of our ‘vacations’ from the hospital – which have been … a dread affair of doctors and drink and confirmation of the impossibility of any equitable reunion. Although you know this – and that the probabilities are much against our ever having any life to-gether again – you are persistent in not letting me have a chance to exist alone at least in comfort – in Alabama and make my own orientation. Or even in Ashville, I might be able to get a job … Won’t you, in fairness, please consider this letter from some other basis than that I am your possible enemy and that your first obligation is self-defensive.11
Furiously he retorted that only if they were divorced would he agree to her request, as that way he would have no further responsibility for her. His anger escalated in a nine-page aggressive letter which a moment’s diplomacy stopped him from mailing.
That a fifty dollar ticket to Montgomery would in some way purchase your eternal mental health is a proposition I will not debate. I won’t even debate it with Dr Carroll … Do you think she [your mother] cares or ever has cared about you …? Do you think she would ever quarrel with you for your impersonal good? She constructed herself on a heroic romantic model as a girl and you were to be the stuffed dummy … She chose me – and she did – and you submitted at the moment of our marriage when your passion for me was at as low ebb as mine for you – because she thought romanticly that her projection of herself in you could best be shown thru me. I never wanted the Zelda I married. I didn’t love you again till after you became pregnant … This is the very questionable element I bought and your mother asks to be given back … I’d like to discover the faintest basis for your family’s accusation that I drove you crazy … that old witch drove you crazy. You were ‘crazy’ in the ordinary sense before I met you. I rationalized your eccentricities and made a sort of creation of you … If it hadn’t been you perhaps I would have worked with more stable material. My talent and my decline is the norm. Your degeneracy is the deviation.12
Under considerable pressure and unusually nervous, in October 1939 Scott began to draft The Last Tycoon, in which his protagonist Monroe Stahr was based on director Irving Thalberg.13 When John and Belle O’Hara visited him for Sunday lunch that fall at Belly Acres in the San Fernando Valley, Scott showed O’Hara his manuscript: ‘Promise you won’t tell anyone about it,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell them what it’s about, or anything about the people … [don’t] even tell anyone I’m writing another book.’ While John read with a deadpan expression Scott sat tortured. Eventually his friend said: ‘Scott, don’t take any more movie jobs until you’ve finished this. You work so slowly and this is so good, you’ve got to finish it. It’s real Fitzgerald.’14
Heartened, he carried on with a taxing schedule against failing health. By contrast, Zelda’s health was holding up well.
During the fall she shopped alone in Asheville, directed gym classes, worked with other patients in athletics and art therapy. Her Southern flower painting Hope is characteristically not all that it seems. It might be a spiralling mass of soft blue bubbles or a hymn in praise of foetal unfurlings.15 Her paintings in two recent exhibitions had received good reviews: ‘There is an arresting and imaginative quality about this painter’s use of vivid color and abstract circular design to portray pure emotion that sticks in the observer’s mind … And there is a velvety effect about her handling of oil paint which suggests the visions one conjures up by pressing the palms of the hands over the eyeballs in a dark room.’16
This success was followed that winter by an invitation from Dr Carroll to paint floral scenes on large window screens for the new assembly building. She would be paid, her materials provided by Carroll, and when Duke University eventually took over Highland, her work would reach a wider audience. Though excited she feared professional exploitation. ‘I sent word’, she wrote Scott, ‘that I ultimately would not subscribe to the commandering of a professional talent. The fact that an artist is temporarily incapacitate ought not to make him fair game to anybody who is able. My talent has cost a lot in heart-ache and paint-bills; and I don’t want to compromise myself.’17
Her fear of exploitation was realized when she discovered the screens would be used not in the hall but in the patients’ bedrooms. Feeling betrayed, she wrote to Scott: ‘To waste a professional talent, the cumulate result of years of effort, aspiration and heartbreak on a venture which will never see the light of day but most probably will be maltreated by every manifestation of psychosis is, to me, an abuse of the soul, human faith, and metier that is almost beyond my capacity to envisage.’18
Even the payment for her work would be offset against her hospital bills, just as her royalties from Save Me The Waltz had been offset against Scott’s debt to Scribner’s. She felt strongly payment of hospital fees was Scott’s responsibility. ‘I dont want to pay these bills’, she told him, ‘because I do not need what they buy.’ She was, however, frightened that if she refused the art job she would be relabelled psychotic.
By Christmas she had been well enough to travel alone to Montgomery, where she remained absolutely stable throughout the vacation. On her return she wrote to Scott determinedly: ‘There isn’t forever left for either of us … I have a home to turn to while I organize an existence … I ask you to acknowledge not only on the basis of your obligation to me – as your wife – but also on the terms of your social obligation.’19
Scott, occupied with his new Pat Hobby stories about an ex-Hollywood gag writer, ignored her.20
However, something was changing, even though Scott’s mind was not. For the first time since her initial hospitalization ten years ago, Zelda was able to send and receive uncensored mail.21 In February Carroll agreed to a compromise over the screens which were to be decorative only, so that as she explained with relief to Scott, her ‘best and most exacting talents [were not] being buried within the confines of psychotic morass’.22 She was convinced Carroll was on the point of letting her out. Scott treated her hunch as fantasy until suddenly he received a letter from Carroll, dated 4 March 1940, informing him Zelda had held to her routine in Montgomery and could be trusted to be self-sufficient, and suggesting she be released from Highland.
Scott, astonished, responded: ‘Your letter was a complete surprise, but of course I am delighted.’23 He gave Zelda the long-awaited news immediately: ‘It is wonderful to be able to write you this. Dr Carroll has for the first time and at long last agreed that perhaps you shall try to make a place for yourself in the world … you can go to Montgomery the first of April and remain there indefinitely or as long as you seem able to carry on under your own esteem … I can share your joy.’24 Simultaneously he wrote to Minnie: ‘This is a complete about-face for him [Carroll], but I do not think that his suggestion comes from any but the most sincere grounds.’25
Scott seemed more confused by the news than Zelda. It is not clear whether he had been exaggerating the hospital’s position to the Sayres in 1939 or whether Carroll had suddenly reversed his attitude. If so, why? It is possible that Zelda knew more about the reasons than she let on, and even – judging from a later event – might not have been above a bit of blackmail to secure her release.
During Zelda’s last months at Highland, Carroll had been involved in a rape case with one of his patients. There is strong evidence that the patient in question was not the only one subjected to sexual abuse, and that Zelda herself may have been an unfortunate victim of Dr Carroll’s mistreatment. Dr Irving Pine, Carroll’s colleague, said many years after Zelda’s release but without equivocation: ‘Dr Carroll treated his women patients badly including Zelda.’ Pine went further: ‘Dr Carroll took advantage of several women patients including Zelda.’26 This traumatic incident could have given a bright patient like Zelda a certain leverage.
That Zelda was prepared to use this advantage later when, out of hospital, she received a staggeringly expensive Highland bill, is shown in a letter s
he wrote to John Biggs, who had taken over the management of her financial affairs after Scott’s death.
My own attitude towards the hospital was one of complete compliance until August [1939] – after which time I resorted to my own discretion; having received no recognition of an impeccable record for two years. The proprietor [Carroll] has been implicated in a rape case (which could no doubt be substantiated from legal records) and might be willing to compromise; if I am in a position to protest this bill.27
In the event, it seems she had protested sufficiently to be allowed to leave Highland. At last Scott would be free of hospital bills. At last Zelda would be free. Scott, however, had made two provisions: one that she be paroled into her mother’s care; the other that if she became ill she could be readmitted to Highland. He asked Carroll for a written statement that would absolve him of any responsibility if Zelda relapsed. Carroll agreed and wrote a warning letter.
Mrs Fitzgerald’s history shows a definite cyclic tendency and we must look forward with apprehension to her inability to meet emotional situations, to face infections, or to indulge in alcohol, tobacco or drugs without a rapid return to her maniacal irresponsibility. Let it be known that Mrs Fitzgerald is capable of being absolutely irresponsible and intensely suicidal. Her present condition, however, is one of gentleness, reasonable capacity for cooperation and yet with definitely reduced judgment maturity.28
On previous departures from hospitals, Scott had fetched her in a car. Either he transferred her to another institution or he took her home, where Scottie awaited her. This time, on 15 April 1940, when after four years she left Highland it was entirely on her own. She climbed on an early morning bus to Montgomery, clutching not her husband’s hand but his cool letter which made it chillingly clear she was not welcome in Hollywood. ‘I do hope this goes well. I wish you were going to brighter surroundings but this is certainly not the time to come to me and I can think of nowhere else for you to go in this dark and bloody world … So Bon Voyage and Stay well.’29