Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  On Zelda’s arrival in Montgomery the oak-vaulted streets were garlanded with purple and white wisteria, the gardens blazed with hydrangeas, azaleas and flowering quinces, and pink primroses clothed the fields.

  During the early months Zelda worked in Minnie’s garden, building a patio where she could listen to the white doves while she painted flowers which she saw as a spiritual expression of turmoil and hope. She hired a bicycle and rode regularly through town, attracting attention in new exotic coloured clothes, for Scott provided her with a small board and dress allowance of $30 a week. She restarted dance lessons, resumed her regime of long walks, invited her old friends Livye Hart and Julia Garland to join her on excursions. Evenings she spent with her mother quietly reading, cooking or at the movies. But the tranquillity of this limited life was insufficient to throw off the effects of ten years’ institutionalization. Initially she wrote to Scott: ‘I don’t write; and I dont paint: largely because it requires most of my resources to keep out of hospital … making the social adjustment is more difficult tha[n] I had supposed.’ Though Zelda acknowledged the challenge: ‘I am conversant with the difficulties which probably confront me: middle aged, untrained, graduate of half-a-dozen mental Institutes’, she was not prepared for its toughness.30

  Setbacks occurred in June when according to Minnie, shocked at the severity of Zelda’s suffering, her daughter suffered a ‘toxic attack’.31 Scott urged Scottie to spend part of her summer with Zelda. But on the morning of 18 June Zelda telegraphed Scott: ‘I wont be able to stick this out. Will you wire money immediately that I may return Friday to Ashville. Will see Scottie there. Devotedly Regretfully Gratefully – Zelda.’ However, in a renewed burst of optimism that afternoon, she wired again: ‘Disregard telegram am fine again. Happy to see Scottie.’

  When Scottie arrived on 20 June both mother and daughter were determined to make the visit a success. Scottie reported to Scott that she had been an angel and they had ‘really gotten along rather well’. But Scottie had been unprepared for her mother’s elaborately worded ideas and lack of energy. She saw Zelda as a ‘fish out of water’.32 Whereas Zelda was in truth a patient who’d swum out of a hospital tank and was in danger of drowning in the sea. Scottie knew too little to take into consideration how a decade of insulin shocks had altered her mother’s personality.

  What the hospital had failed to tell the Sayres, what even Scott had failed to take into account, were the side-effects of her electro-shock therapy, which were evident in Scott’s description to the Murphys of Zelda’s changed persona. ‘Zelda is home … She has a poor pitiful life, reading the Bible in the old fashioned manner walking tight lipped and correct through a world she can no longer understand … Part of her mind is washed clean + she is no one I ever knew.’33

  But part of Zelda’s mind was still functioning well, if not consistently. She was determined that with God’s help she would regain a hold on a normal, if much more ordinary, existence. After a few months she began exhibiting art works locally, and made a serious sustained attempt at her last novel with its ironic title Caesar’s Things.

  When Sara Mayfield saw her in late summer Zelda confessed how devastating it was to have returned to Montgomery as a semi-invalid. She told Sara that most weekdays she sat ‘in peace and serenity’ in St John’s Episcopal Church because there was ‘no place else to go and think unless I take a streetcar and ride to the end of the line and back’. On Sundays she went to the Church of the Holy Comforter where, watched by old friends, she would make notes for her novel, with its religious theme. Religious convictions had become increasingly a source of strength for Zelda.

  She drew strength also from the regular correspondence with Scott which, with the safety of thousands of miles between them, had again become affectionate. Scott however still avoided two subjects: his mistress, Sheilah Graham, and his worsening health. To deny illness to Zelda perhaps allowed him to deny it to himself.

  Scott’s first heart spasm took place in January 1940, while opening a jammed window in his Belly Acres cottage. Dr Clarence Nelson scared him with warnings of worse to come, so Scott moved back to a city apartment on North Laurel Avenue, West Hollywood, just one block from Sheilah. He still kept his address hidden from Zelda. In March 1940, on a flight to Tucson, he felt sick, panicked and asked for a doctor, nurse and ambulance to meet him at the airport. When they landed he had miraculously recovered. But his illness was not merely a fantasy. At Dorothy Parker’s cocktail party in September 1940, playwright Clifford Odets observed ‘Fitzgerald, pale, unhealthy, as if the tension of life had been wrenched out of him’.34 Forty-eight drops of digitalis to keep his heart working properly, as well as potentially dangerous doses of barbiturates, became insufficient.

  On 28 November at Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard he suffered his first serious attack of angina pectoris.35 He was ordered bedrest and wrote on a lap-board. He told Zelda the cardiogram showed his heart was repairing itself, and that by writing 1,750 words a day he hoped to finish the first draft of The Last Tycoon by 15 January.

  He was weaving the tale of his romance with Sheilah into the novel, but like his protagonist Stahr, Scott was in love with the memory of his wife – though by now only with the memory. He was also half in love with death. It haunted his thoughts, for he felt more fragile than he admitted. He wrote to Scottie: ‘You have two beautiful bad examples for parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother at Xmas … Her letters are tragically brilliant in all matters except those of central importance.’ Remember, he told Scottie, ‘the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read’.36

  At the same time as his reflection about Zelda, only one week before his own death, Scott was still ruminating over his friendship with Emily Vanderbilt. He wrote two letters mentioning how well Tom Wolfe had captured Emily’s character in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. ‘I’ve read … most of Tom Wolfe’s [novel]’, he wrote to Perkins. ‘The portraits of the Jacks … [and] Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.’ Two days later he wrote to Scottie: ‘I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel & can’t finally report it but the picture of “Amy Carlton” (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our appartment in Paris – do you remember?) with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom – sans succes – and finally ended by her own hand in Montana … in a lonely ranch house.’37

  Then he put his will in order and instructed his executor to destroy all documents relating to Zelda’s illness unless she proved still to be ill, in which case they must be handed to a responsible doctor and kept out of Scottie’s reach. In December, recurrent dizziness made him vacate his second floor apartment and move into Sheilah’s ground floor flat on North Hayworth. Again he reassured Zelda: ‘I’m quite able to work, etc., if I do not overtire myself.’38

  However, on Friday 20 December, while he and Sheilah were leaving the Pantages Theatre after seeing a film, dizziness turned into a second heart attack, and he stumbled to the car. The following day at three o’clock in the afternoon he suffered his third, this time fatal, attack. He was propped up on Sheilah’s green armchair, munching a chocolate bar as he worked on a feature for the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Suddenly he jerked like a puppet out of the chair, fell against the mantelpiece, clutching at it in terror, then silently slumped on to the floor. Though Sheilah summoned medical aid it arrived too late to save him.39 He died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis, aged forty-four, with 44,000 words of his last novel written.

  John Biggs, Scott’s executor, asked Frances Kroll, Scott’s young secretary, to call a Los Angeles mortician to take Scott’s body to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary in a seedy part of town at 720 West Washington Boulevard. A cosmetic mortician did his worst and Scott, with rouged cheeks and flushed temples, was put on view in the William Wordsworth room. A visitor recalled he was laid out to look l
ike a cross between a floor-walker and a wax dummy. ‘Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company except his casket.’ Dorothy Parker, one of the few friends present, ironically quoted Owl-eyes’ comment on Gatsby: ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch.’40

  Ober called Zelda to tell her that Scott had died, but she was out walking with Julia Garland. It was Minnie who broke the devastating news when she returned. Zelda found the idea of a world without Scott Fitzgerald inconceivable. According to Gerald Murphy, she ‘seized upon his death as the only reality that had pierced the membrane since they separated … [she] gave weird orders for the disposition of the body … then collapsed. She is not allowed to come to the funeral.’41

  Scottie, staying with the Obers over the Christmas vacation, was at a dance in Poughkeepsie so Harold sent his son Dick to tell her. How did nineteen-year-old Scottie react? Fanny Myers was shocked to discover that on the day her father died Scottie also went to the opera. At the time Fanny felt this was insensitive, but in conversation many years later she and Honoria Murphy concluded that Scottie’s lifelong habit of distraction and denial had operated at this most severe crisis of her young life.42 Certainly, the day before the funeral, Gerald Murphy reported that ‘Little Scottie is tragic and bewildered tho’ she says that she has thought for so long that every day he would die for some reason.’43

  The decision to send the body east was made by Zelda, in telephone discussions with Biggs, who felt Scott would like to be buried where his father was buried.

  An official at Baltimore Diocese refused permission for a Catholic funeral service and burial at St Mary’s Church, Rockville, Maryland, because Scott had not been a practising Catholic at his death. Instead the burial was at Rockville Union Cemetery, on 27 December, following an Episcopal service at the Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethseda. Although too ill to attend, Zelda was involved in all the arrangements and asked her brother-in-law Newman Smith to act in her place. Sheilah Graham was asked not to attend out of respect for Zelda. About twenty loyal friends supported Scottie. They included Sara and Gerald Murphy, Louise and Max Perkins, Anna and John Biggs, Anne and Harold Ober, Ludlow Fowler and the Turnbulls. Cousin Cecilia Taylor and her four daughters came, so did Newman Smith but not Rosalind, and, most curiously, Dick Knight, the man Scott had detested. Max Perkins thought of telegraphing Hemingway in Cuba but instead wrote to him after the funeral: ‘it didn’t seem as if there were any use in it, and I shrank from doing it.’44

  Zelda, who wanted the occasion filled with flowers, sent a basket of pink gladioli, which exactly matched Ludlow Fowler’s spray. The Sayres sent red roses, the Bishops white chrysanthemums, the Turnbulls a white rose wreath, Honoria Murphy a mixed rose wreath, the Princeton Class of 1917 provided yellow roses and John and Anna Biggs showered the room with snapdragons, red roses and Zelda’s favourite lilies.

  The newspaper obituaries and articles recalled Scott as the symbol of the Jazz Age. The New York Times, acknowledging that Fitzgerald had ‘invented a generation’, said Fitzgerald was ‘better than he knew’. The New York Herald Tribune called up the glamorous world of Fitzgerald novels before the Depression: ‘the penthouses, the long weekend drunks … the vacuous conversations, the lush intoxication of easy money’.45 Budd Schulberg wrote: ‘He was not meant, temperamentally, to be a cynic … But Scott made cynicism beautiful, poetic, almost an ideal.’46 Edmund Wilson edited tributes by Scott’s friends, who included John O’Hara, Dos Passos, Glenway Westcott and John Peale Bishop, for two issues of The New Republic.47

  John O’Hara wrote: ‘He was professionally one of the most generous artists I’ve ever known … He kept his integrity … And he kept it in death … F. Scott Fitzgerald was a right writer … the people were right, the talk was right, the clothes, the cars were real, and the mysticism was a kind of challenge … the man could do no wrong.’ O’Hara recalled telling Dorothy Parker: ‘The guy just can’t write a bad piece,’ and Parker replying: ‘No. He can write a bad piece but he can’t write badly.’48

  Scott wrote his own accurate epitaph in a conversation he had in Hollywood with Budd Schulberg Jnr.

  I used to have a beautiful talent once, Baby. It used to be a wonderful feeling to know it was there, and it isn’t all gone yet … I have enough left to stretch out over two more novels … maybe they won’t be as good as the best things I’ve done. But they won’t be completely bad either, because nothing I ever write can ever be completely bad.49

  Nor can it.

  For Zelda, in the dark night of her soul, it was always three o’clock in the morning. Some of her emotions were shared by John Peale Bishop in his obituary poem ‘The Hours’:

  All day, knowing you dead,

  I have sat in this long-windowed room,

  Looking upon the sea and, dismayed

  By mortal sadness, thought without thought to resume

  Those hours which you and I have known –

  Hours when youth like an insurgent sun

  Showered ambition on an aimless air,

  Hours foreboding disillusion,

  Hours which now there is none to share.

  Since you are dead, I live them all alone.50

  Did she fill those hours with memories of him as a wild child or a scapegrace wit, did she momentarily put aside his dissipations, his wasteful despairs, did she recall all he did and all he might have done before undone by death?

  It seems she did, for what she wrote to Scottie, with forgivable exaggeration, was: ‘Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his generation and deserves remembrance as such since he dramatized the last post-war era + gave the real signifigance to those gala and so-tragicly fated days.’51

  Before the funeral Zelda wrote to Ober: ‘In retrospect, it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read – places to go. Life seemed so promisory always when he was around: and I always believed that he could take care of anything. It seems so useless and purposeless that I wont be able to tell him about all this. Although we were not close any more, Scott was the best friend a person could have [been] to me.’52

  Her best friend who was also her worst friend was dead. His voice might continue to sound in her head but if she herself was not to remain silent she had at last to fill those unshared hours with sounds of her own. She started by looking back on the years she had shared with Scott. She recalled New York and Paris. Her love for both had been evident in Save Me The Waltz but she had never visualized it. Grieving for Scott, she saw dreamy flashbacks through cobwebs to a remembered (or newly reconstructed) happy past. But as Gatsby discovered, you can’t repeat the past. If a future was to be created out of her solitary present, if she was to earn a solo credit, she had to write and paint in her own voice.

  Notes

  1 The spun glass phrase was used by Scott reporting Carroll’s words to Minnie Sayre, 3 Jan. 1939, CO187, Box 53, Folder 13, PUL.

  2 The idea that Zelda should live with a companion near her family was impractical as a companion’s fee was beyond anyone’s means; that Zelda should reside alone in a Montgomery cottage to give her a sense of responsibility was equally impractical because Zelda was an undomesticated artist.

  3 Rosalind also reported Dr Carroll’s view that a trained nurse was unnecessary.

  4 FSF to Marjorie Brinson, c. end Dec. 1938, CO187, Box 53, Folder Marjorie Brinson (Sayre), PUL. The letter is marked in pen ‘unsent’.

  5 FSF to Rosalind Sayre Smith, c. end Dec. 1938, CO187, Box 53, Folder 14, PUL.

  6 FSF to Dr R. Burke Suitt, 5 July 1939, CO187, Box 53, Folder Burke Suitt, PUL. Scott wrote this after he had registered Minnie Sayre’s comment that though Zelda’s ‘visit came at the time of the month that is most trying (I mean menstruation) … there was no undue nervousness’ (Minnie Sayre to FSF, 26 Apr. 1938, CO187, Box 53, unnumbered folder, PUL).

  7 FSF to Suitt, 27 July 1939, CO187, Box 53, Folder Burke Suitt, PUL.

  8 FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, July 1939, C
O187, Box 40, PUL.

  9 ZSF to FSF, July 1939, CO187, Box 47, Folder 48, PUL.

  10 FSF to ZSF, 6 Oct. 1939, Life in Letters, pp. 412–13.

  11 ZSF to FSF, Oct. 1939, CO187, Box 47, Folder 70, PUL.

  12 FSF to ZSF, unsent letter, c. late 1939, PUL.

  13 Thalberg had died in 1936.

  14 John O’Hara, ‘In Memory of Scott Fitzgerald: II’, The New Republic, 3 Mar. 1941.

  15 Zelda’s Montgomery friend and biographer Sara Mayfield saw it simply as a study in blue and white of a planter’s cotton bolls.

  16 Quoted in Koula Hartnett, ‘Zelda Fitzgerald and the Failure of the American Dream’, paper presented at Southern Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, 1981, p. 142.

  17 ZSF to FSF, c. winter 1939–40 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 48, Folder 10, PUL.

  18 ZSF to FSF, c. Jan./Feb. 1940 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 48, Folder 7, PUL.

  19 ZSF to FSF, 31 Dec. 1939, CO187, Box 48, Folder 4, PUL.

  20 ‘Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish’, the first of seventeen stories, was published in Esquire, Jan. 1940.

  21 ‘Meantime: it is good to be able to receive uncensored mail.’ ZSF to FSF, 31 Dec. 1939, CO187, Box 48, Folder 4, PUL.

  22 ZSF to FSF. c. mid-late Feb. 1940 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 48, Folder 17, PUL.

  23 FSF to Dr Robert Carroll, 8 Mar. 1940, CO187, Box 39, Folder 45, PUL.

  24 FSF to ZSF, 8 Mar. 1940, Life in Letters, p. 438.

  25 FSF to Minnie Sayre, 8 Mar. 1940, CO187, Box 53, Folder 13, PUL.