Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (55 page)

Zelda’s resilience was uncanny. Fiction instantly replaced ballet as her primary ambition. She wrote like the wind. By July 1930 she had completed ‘A Workman’, ‘The House’ and ‘The Drouth and the Flood’.
1
  Scott, perhaps wanting to compensate Zelda for the loss of her ballet, offered all three stories to Ober for
Scribner’s
Magazine.
Subsequently they (and eight others) were lost; what survives is Scott’s critique to Perkins: ‘Zelda wrote [them] in the dark middle of her nervous
breakdown
… apart from the beauty & richness of the writing they have a strange haunting, evocative quality that is absolutely new … each of them is the story of her life when things … brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion they are literature.’
2

Max responded:

Scott, deeply disappointed, replied: ‘Possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang.’ Then came his marvellous optimism: ‘I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during winter.’
4

Sadly his optimism was misplaced. Zelda’s creative energy had sapped her strength to a ‘childish, vacillating shell’.
5
She told Scott: ‘I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning
intelligence
… I watch what attitude the nurse takes each day and then look up what symptom I have in Doctor Forel’s book … why has my ignorance on a medical subject … reduced me to the mental status of a child?’
6
She said: ‘I don’t seem to know anything
appropriate
for a person of 30 … it’s because of … straining so completely
every fibre in that futile attempt to achieve with every factor against me –’.
7

From that year onwards she was never free from the fear of mental illness nor, when released, from the greater fear of another asylum. That she wrote or painted at all when every factor
was
against her is a testament to her persistence and courage. But illness rattled her confidence: ‘Do you mind my writing this way?’ she asked Scott anxiously.

When Scott told friends Zelda was still ‘sick as hell’,
9
Max and Wilson wrote sympathetically to Zelda. Max offered Scott hope: ‘If she has made progress maybe it should become more rapid, and everything will come out right.’
10
Wilson, who had survived electric shock and hydrotherapy in a similar clinic, reassured Scott: ‘these breakdowns when people go off their heads aren’t necessarily serious’.
11

To Perkins, Scott confided his financial anxiety: ‘The psychiatrist … is an expensive proposition,’ and he had been unable to write. It was ‘terrible to be so in debt’. Zelda’s Prangins bills alone were 70,561 Swiss francs, over $13,000, without counting the costs of Scottie’s school, her Paris apartment and his own hotel. Worse still, Ober had refused him an advance. Could Max help him out? He’d promise him $3,000 from the next story. Little wonder Scott signed himself ‘harrassed and anxious’.
12

Support came from the Bishops, Townsend and the Murphys, whom Scott saw in Paris in July when visiting Scottie there. Dos Passos, who had married Katy Smith, Hadley’s friend,
13
spoke for them all:

There were two flaws in Dos Passos’s loyal statement. First, Scott was unwilling to handle his drinking; second, he was unable to touch his novel. Nevertheless his priority was to give Zelda
excellent
medical care and establish stability for Scottie. If Scott’s
horizons
were limited and his fears of delving inside himself as great as Zelda’s, he did the best he could at a time of despair and confusion.

Like the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys were haunted with
might-have
-beens. Sara would be admitted to the American hospital with a gallbladder disorder. Drained by Patrick’s medical expenses and their three homes they decided to sell Villa America, where Patrick might never be sufficiently well to live.
15

Dr Forel asked Zelda to write an autobiographical sketch.
16
Her mother she saw only in visual images: ‘I can always see her sitting down in the opalescent sunlight of a warm morning, a black servant combing her long grey hair.’ Her father, never
visualized
, was a man of ‘great integrity’, for whom she had ‘
enormous
respect and some mistrust’. Significant emotional events were her marriage, after which ‘I was in another world, one for which I was not prepared, because of my inadequate education’; her love for Jozan which ‘lasted for five years’, during which ‘I was locked in my villa for one month to prevent me from seeing him’; and Lois Moran whom she dismissed as part of a
superficial
Hollywood society. ‘I determined to find … a world in which I could express myself.’ She found Egorova whom she loved ‘more than anything else in the world … The brightness of a greek temple, the frustration of a mind searching for a place … all that I saw in her steps.’

Then the world stopped, and now she was ‘where I cannot be anybody, full of vertigo … feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down … I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.’
17

That summer of 1930, Zelda’s eczema grew worse. Doctors administered Flemings solution, grease and powder. But, she told Scott, they were useless to ward off the ‘foul plague’. It ran, it made sores, it filled up the cavities at the back of her eyes with fire. It was like something that had rotted for centuries in the catacombs and poisoned the cellars of classic ruins.
18
Incredibly, her gift for
language
never left her any more than the poison did. In desperation she begged:

Scott had taken up tennis to forget his troubles. But Zelda reminded him of hers. She recalled their arguments over her homosexuality. ‘You said you did not want to see me if I knew what I know. Well, I do know. I would have liked you to come to me, but there’s no good telling lies.’ Nothing could take away her clarity about the way she had felt and might feel again. ‘If I have to stand much more to take away the thing in me that all the rest of you find so invaluable and superior when I get out I’m going to have Scottie at least.’ Her threat was idle, because her ‘re-educative treatment’ to retrain her into what the doctors saw as ‘normal’ behaviour included the
implied
intimidation that women with abnormal feelings were unsuitable as mothers. If she refused to suppress emotions the doctors saw as evil, they would refuse to release her. ‘It’s so hard for me to understand liking a feeling without liking the person that I suppose I will be eternally confined.’
19
Scott had already told Forel that over this issue, if necessary, he would abandon Zelda. ‘In no sense am I asking her forgiveness, I have long determined for the sake of the future of my child and myself that if there is any renewal of homosexuality in her, or any suspicion of me … it is much better that we never meet again.’
20

Scott did not answer Zelda’s charges. He sent her gladioli. She painted them. Then she softened: ‘Though I would have chosen some other accompaniment for my desequilibrium than this foul eczema … I am waiting impatiently for when you can come to see me … Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed? … It was much nicer a long time ago when we had each other and the space about the world was warm – Can’t we get it back some-way – even by imagining? … it’s desperate to be so alone – and you can’t be very happy in a hotel room – We were awfully used to having each other about – Zelda.’

She added a tentative postscript: ‘Dr Forel told me to ask you if you had stopped drinking – so I ask –.’
21

Forel believed strongly that Scott’s drinking was a major
contribution
to Zelda’s illness, that he was in effect treating two people.
Scott must stop drinking if Zelda was to recover and live with him. Scott refused to accept Forel’s viewpoint.

More justification ensued:

For Scott there was only room in their household for the one egotist who did not bore him. Then came the crux:

Zelda’s assessment that ‘You have always told me that I have no right to complain as long as I was materially cared for’ was correct.
23
  He would always put himself first, but he would always provide for her.

And his intentions? ‘To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens … only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot.’

Was that childish? Stubborn? Without waiting for Forel’s answer he bowled into his most problematic remark: ‘What I gave up for Zelda was women and it wasn’t easy in the position my success
gave me – what pleasure I got from comradeship she has pretty well ruined by dragging me of all people into her homosexual
obsession
.’

He of all people then asked Forel if there was not ‘a certain disin genuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her
relatives
and our friends
that it was my drinking that caused this
calamity
, and that I thereby admitted it? [Scott’s underlining].’
24

Zelda accepted privation with dignity as Southern women were schooled to do. ‘I am here,’ she wrote, ‘and since I have no choice, I will try to muster the grace to rest peacefully as I should, but our divergence is too great as you must realize for us to ever be anything except a hash to-gether.’
25

Her resentment surfaced: