Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (51 page)

On another occasion she threw herself at Egorova’s feet after class. Egorova, disturbed by this display, felt Zelda’s affection was becoming unhealthy.
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Zelda was clear about her feelings. ‘My
attitude
towards Egorova has always been one of intense love. I wanted
to help her in some way because she is a good woman … I wanted to dance well so that she would be proud of me and have another instrument for the symbols of beauty that passed in her head that I understood.’
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Later, time in asylums and re-educative treatment would insist Zelda’s feelings were evil.

‘Perhaps it is depraved,’ she wrote later to Scott. ‘I do not know, but at home there was an incessant babbling … and you either drinking or complaining because you had been. You blamed me when the servants were bad, and expected me to instil into them a proper respect for a man they saw morning after morning asleep in his clothes.’
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In 1930 Edmund Wilson, now recovered from
his
nervous
breakdown
and married to Margaret Canby, asked solicitously after Zelda’s health. By this time at a flower market she had told Scott the flowers were talking to her and she was hearing voices not available to others.

Scott tried to hold
his
world together by writing a new series of
Post
stories set during the First World War, about a Chicago
debutante
, Josephine Perry, based on Ginevra King. On 5 April 1930 ‘First Blood’, the first of his five tales, was published. The remaining four (‘A Nice Quiet Place’, ‘A Woman with a Past’, ‘A Snobbish Story’ and ‘Emotional Bankruptcy’) followed.
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The concept of emotional bankruptcy, a financial metaphor close to Scott’s heart and pocket, became a key notion.

During 1930 Scott wrote eight stories altogether which secured him $32,000, but yet again he had to borrow $3,700 from Scribner’s against his by now mythical novel. He blamed Zelda for ruining one of his stories because she wanted them to take Madame out to dine. He felt the apartment was foul, the maid stank and Zelda was ‘going crazy and calling it genius – I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand’.
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When the Kalmans lunched at their apartment in March Zelda, terrified she would miss her dance class, leapt from the table and rushed out, followed by Oscar who took her in a cab. Increasingly distressed, she changed into dancing clothes in the taxi, then when stuck in traffic opened the door, hurled herself out and ran to the studio. Oscar told Scott he thought Zelda was on the verge of a breakdown.

In April Zelda, in great distress, burst into the flat where Scott was drinking with Michael Arlen. She needed Scott but felt he preferred drinking with the playwright. So distraught was she that Arlen
suggested
she should try a clinic. She was in no state to resist. Nor could Scott resist the parallels between the narrative of his wife’s life and that of her era. As Zelda succumbed to her first crack-up, Scott, noting the Wall Street crash, assiduously observed in his Ledger: ‘The Crash! Zelda and America’.
72

On 23 April 1930, Zelda entered the ominously named Malmaison Clinic near Paris. Predictably her first agitated words were about work: ‘It’s appalling, it’s horrific, what’s going to become of me, I have to work and I can’t any more. I have to die, and yet I must work. I shall never be cured, let me go, I must go and see “Madame” … she gave me the greatest joy there can be, it is comparable to sunlight falling on a piece of crystal, to a symphony of scents.’
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Professor Claude, who reported these words, said she was in such a state of anxiety she was unable to keep still.

On her admission, Zelda, slightly tipsy, told the doctors she found alcohol stimulated her dancing. The doctors saw drink as one cause for her anxiety attacks.
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Zelda’s later letter to Scott recalled:

Professor Claude decided ‘it is a matter of an anxious young woman exhausted by her work in the world of professional dancers. Some obsessive ideas, the main one being the fear of becoming homosexual. She believes she is in love with her dance teacher … She believes that in the past she has been in love with another woman.’ The medical report mentioned ‘Violent reactions, several suicide attempts, never carried through to the end …’ and said her periods were regular, her blood pressure low, her pulse faint and she had a moderate appetite.

On 2 May, after ten days, she left Malmaison against her doctor’s wishes.
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She returned to ballet, but within a fortnight was hallucinating, seeing horrific phantoms everywhere whether awake or asleep, and in terror tried to kill herself. Scott felt he could not leave her side – a sensible precaution but it increased Zelda’s feelings of
imprisonment
. After she had collapsed into hospital, Scott’s May 1930
Ledger records: ‘Zelda weak and tired … Emily … Zelda
everyday
’. In June Mayfield reported that Scott’s ‘anxiety did not prevent him from beauing Emily Vanderbilt around Paris’.
77

Zelda’s friends Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt in Montgomery had not been told about Zelda’s breakdown. Ironically they were rejoicing that there was a temporary improvement in Sara Haardt’s own health. She arrived in Montgomery to tell her father she was marrying Mencken,
78
then excitedly called Sara Mayfield in Tuscaloosa to say her novel
The
Making
of
a
Lady
had been accepted by Doubleday Doran for publication in 1931. By the time that Zelda’s two friends heard about her illness Zelda had already entered Valmont Clinic, Glion, near Montreux, Switzerland, on 22 May 1930.

The clinic, recommended by friends, specifically handled
gastrointestinal
ailments, so could do little for Zelda. She told the staff she was not sick, she did not want to be hospitalized, she had been brought there under duress. She also stated that ballet, her
compensation
for a miserable marriage, was her route to independence. She wrote to Scott later that ‘at Valmont I was in tortue, and my head closed together. You gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins etendue” – We were friends – Then you took it away and I grew sicker.’
79

Scott took the French phrase away too, and re-used it in one of the sanatorium letters from his heroine Nicole in
Tender
Is
The
Night.
‘One man was nice … he gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins entendue”. We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker.’
80

Zelda later described her entry to Valmont as ‘practically
voluntarily
but under enormous pressure … with the sole idea of getting back enough strenghth and health to continue my work in America as you had promised me. There, my head began to go wrong and the pristine nurse whom you accused me of attacking played almost constantly on the thing that I had assumed I was there to get over.’
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The doctors and Scott consistently emphasized that Zelda’s lesbian desires were evil and would not be countenanced. But in Valmont she was unable to stop herself responding to a nurse who flirted with her constantly. In the clinic Dr H. W. Trutmann gave this report on her stay there from 22 May to 4 June:

The doctor’s version of the nurse incident differed from Zelda’s: ‘Some over-affectionate behaviour towards the nurse was repulsed by the latter, who fell into disgrace.’
83

The doctors checked Zelda’s agitation with Garderal every one to two hours. They induced sleep with Medinale and a sleeping drug. Trutmann said that when Zelda was calm she was aware she needed both to take care and be taken care of, but an hour later would insist on returning to Paris. He was clear that ‘organically there was nothing to report, no signs of brain disorder’. But he felt a simple rest cure was insufficient, that she needed psychological treatment in a specialist nursing home.

When Trutmann asked her what role eight-year-old Scottie played in her life, she responded in English: ‘That is done now, I want to do something else.’
84

Nobody in either Malmaison or Valmont picked up on the effects that the consistent denial of her ambitions and exploitation of her talents might have had on her psyche. Uncovering and re-
interpreting
them would be left for the battery of psychiatrists who followed.

After two weeks Dr Trutmann called in Dr Oscar Forel of the Prangins Clinic, near Nyon, as a consultant. Forel said he would accept Zelda if she agreed to go there of her own free will and on condition of a temporary separation from Scott. Forel specified the treatment could only be psychotherapy based on analysis of
causative
factors in her case. On 3 June, the evening of the consultation,
Trutmann said: ‘the patient herself said she felt very tired and ill and that she was in great need of being cared for. She gave the
impression
that she would agree to go to Prangins. The next day she was again … unapproachable. She is leaving the clinic with her husband.’
85

Mayfield suggests that though Zelda initially agreed to go to Prangins, after a violent scene with Scott in Lausanne, in which she accused him of abusing, humiliating and breaking her, she refused to be re-hospitalized. Scott immediately sent for Zelda’s
brother-in-law
Newman Smith, who with Rosalind was living in Brussels. Smith arrived the next day, helped to quiet Zelda, and persuaded her to put herself under Forel’s care.
86
The Smiths continued to
represent
the Sayre family during Zelda’s Swiss hospitalization. Rosalind, never fond of Scott, was convinced his drinking caused Zelda’s breakdown. She wrote to him: ‘I would almost rather she die now than escape only to go back to the mad world you and she have created for yourselves.’
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Scott retaliated that the Sayres had a history of nervous illnesses, that Zelda had always been reckless and that she had long refused to take domestic responsibility. It is symptomatic of the period that a woman’s domestic role as a symbol of sanity was so enshrined in popular culture that Scott felt entitled to use its lack as a symptom of Zelda’s instability.

The doctors and Scott told the Smiths that Zelda’s efforts to make a professional career as a writer and dancer were motivated by obsessive illness. Rosalind told Sara Mayfield her impression was, on the contrary, ‘a clear-eyed realization of the financial
uncertainties
of her life with Scott and, perhaps, also by her unhappiness over their marital difficulties’. Rosalind believed Zelda had brilliant gifts, an unconquerable urge to express herself and a very sensible desire to earn a living. ‘Unfortunately, according to Rosalind,’ reported Sara, ‘Scott refused to see it that way. He wanted her … to be dependent upon him, and he insisted upon treating her like a wayward
child.’
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On 4 June Zelda entered Prangins, which resembled a country club in the midst of a 100-acre park on the shore of Lake Geneva. She would stay there for fifteen and a half months, until 15 September 1931. Later she described her journey to this expensive asylum:

In what is probably her first letter to Scott from Prangins she returned to their row in Lausanne:

Scott ruthlessly reproduced Zelda’s sad phrases in
Tender
Is
The
Night,
where Nicole writes to Dick Diver: