Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (57 page)

Forel’s re-education programme would, they hoped, check Zelda’s ‘incipient egomania’. Bleuler saw her as a woman
competing
publicly with her more famous husband in an inappropriate manner. That Zelda was also charged with ineptitude at
housework
, cooking and servant management was another example of
pronounced gender implications in the way the label schizophrenia was constructed in the Thirties.
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Bleuler insisted Zelda’s re-entry into the world must be slowed down. That Scott was paying the clinic extravagant fees was not voiced as a factor. Bleuler said Scott could not have prevented Zelda’s illness: ‘This is something that began about five years ago … Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded it but you couldn’t have prevented it.’
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Scott
immediately
told the Sayres ‘because I know you despise certain
weaknesses
in my character’ and he didn’t want that to blur their belief in him ‘as a man of integrity’.
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Zelda thought Bleuler ‘a great imbecile’, and refused to accept any of his recommendations. However, her despair deepened.

She wrote to her brother-in-law Newman Smith: ‘I write to you because I do not want to worry Daddy but if you do not come to me I am going to write to him.’
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Newman did not come for her.

To Scott she admitted: ‘now I am so frightened of the past that I am half afraid to think. There’s so much conditioning to be done.’
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  This incredible piece of self-awareness did not effect her release. She even wrote to Forel:

Zelda’s accusations shamed Scott. Her agony tortured him. But he did not ask Forel to free her. Instead, using those feelings, he
wrote what was probably his best story, ‘Babylon Revisited’, a tale of emotional bankruptcy, in which he transferred some of that guilt on to Charlie Wales, a rich alcoholic American businessman. Charlie goes to Paris with his wife Helen and child Honoria,
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then during a drunken row locks Helen out in the snow, after which she dies of heart disease. Scott’s enemy Rosalind, fictionalized as Wales’s sister-in-law Marion, had wished Zelda dead like Helen rather than see her return to dissipation. In ‘Babylon’ Marion’s vengeful role as Honoria’s guardian, because Charlie is too drunk to raise her, is based on Rosalind’s suggestion that, feeling the same about Scott, she should adopt Scottie.
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Rosalind’s concern was understandable. Scottie saw her father intermittently and rarely heard from her mother. When Zelda
did
write, the once warm, unrestrained notes had become distant, hesitant, awkward: each letter filled with longing but hard for a child to respond to.

In early fall: ‘Dear dear dear little Scottie, Mummy was so glad to get your sweet letter … it got to be the limit being sick for so long … I care dreadfully at your not being here with me. The times you spent with me in the summer were the happiest of the year.’ Zelda had apparently forgotten how unhappy Scottie’s August visit had been. ‘It would give me so much pleasure to see you paddling in the waters of the lake.’

But that pleasure was not to be had.

In late fall:

Fall again:

But in Scottie’s circle Mummies gave permission for treats, they did not seek it.

When Scottie and her governess moved outside Paris to Auteuil,
Zelda, feeling friendless, urged her daughter to remain friends with Fanny Myers. Go skating together. Have fun.
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Zelda, pleased when Scottie saw Fanny regularly, wrote: ‘The parents of Fanny are so agreeable that I knew she would be a companion that you would enjoy.’
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Zelda compensated for her lack of news with memories: Minnesota when Scottie was ‘the size of a dime and crawling over the carpet in rose gingham’. Anna, the raw-boned Swede who kept Scottie sitting on a pot one whole afternoon while Zelda raved outside her door. ‘Amuse yourself,’ instructed Zelda, ‘be sweet and obedient and a sensible child and I will be waiting anxiously and patiently to see to see you again in the spring … I do so hope you will be able to at least spend the night with me. With all my dearest love – Your delapidated Mother.’
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In spring 1931 Scottie appeared in a play. ‘The theatre is nice and in your place with all those years before you I would keep it in my thoughts and become a star later on. That is why you should keep up your dancing lessons.’ Zelda’s own news was minute: ‘We have had a [hospital] ball as well – I made myself a dress of paper to
represent
a lampshade.’
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Before their spring reunion there had been a disastrous Christmas visit. Zelda, unbearably keyed up, broke the ornaments on the tree, and made incoherent speeches. Scott hurried their daughter away to Gstaad to ski, recover and have some fun.

At the end of January 1931 Scott’s seventy-seven-year-old father died of a heart attack in Washington. Zelda, distressed for him, hugged Scott tenderly, then ‘she went into the other personality and was awful to me at lunch. After lunch she returned to the
affectionate
tender mood, utterly normal, so that with pressure I could have manoeuvred her into intercourse but the eczema was almost visibly increasing so I left early. Toward the very end she was back in the schizophrania.’
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Scott had tried for nine months to persuade Zelda to resume a sexual life with him, but when she saw him for any length of time he felt she still slipped in and out of ‘madness’. His insistence distressed her; her behaviour and her appearance repelled him.

On board the
New
York
on his way to his father’s funeral, Scott met a dark dramatic professional card sharp, Bert Barr, born Bertha Weinberg in a Brooklyn slum. Fascinated by her cleverness, he saw her again in New York and Paris, even suggested they collaborate on some stories, although nothing came of it.
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At Edward Fitzgerald’s funeral in Rockville, Maryland, Scott,
standing at the graveside, suddenly recognized that in his mind his father was linked irrevocably to his American past. In a draft of an essay, ‘The Death of My Father’, Scott assessed his influence: ‘I loved my father – always deep in my subconscious I have referred judgments back to him.’
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Scott hoped for an immediate letter of condolence from Ernest but initially nothing arrived. The Hemingways had bought a house in Key West
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and Scott and Ernest, now on the same continent, had talked of getting together, but it remained talk. Their once
blooming
friendship was reduced to memories. Scott later wrote sadly: ‘Four times in 11 years (1924–1940). Not really friends since ’26.’
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  Ernest finally wrote in April sending also deepest regrets about Zelda’s ‘rotten time’. He advised Scott to make good literary use of his father’s death. Acknowledging that authors’ parents only die once Ernest suggested that Scott should write it for a novel, not a magazine. The event was too valuable to be ‘pooped’ away. Hemingway’s warning was right on target, for Scott
had
tried to poop his feelings into the indifferent ‘On Your Own’ which Ober was unable to sell. Scott did however resurrect his best phrase: ‘Good-by, my father – good-by, all my fathers’ in
Tender
Is
The
Night,
where Dick Diver, like Scott, returns to the USA for his father’s funeral and there in the cemetery speaks his farewell to his past.
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Scott went to Montgomery to see Zelda’s parents, expecting their sympathy for his bereavement, but found instead deep hostility. They blamed him entirely for Zelda’s illness, seeing him not Zelda as insane. They accused him of placing her in an asylum to get rid of her. To the end of her days Minnie Sayre believed that Scott ‘was not good for my daughter … He was a selfish man. What he wanted always came first.’
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Rosalind, who had already exchanged acrimonious letters with Scott holding him responsible for Zelda’s breakdown, was more accusatory. Incensed, he had written (but had not sent) a vituperative letter in which he told her she packed under her ‘suave exterior’ such a ‘minor quantity of humanity’ that he demanded she ‘never communicate with me again in any form and I will try to resist the temptation to pass you down to posterity for what you are’.
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In Scott’s absence Zelda made an astonishing improvement. Her concentration sharpened. Her mind focused. Forel wrote
patronizingly
to Scott: ‘Mrs Fitzgerald takes her meals regularly from the set menu, and behaves well. She has begun skiing at St Cergues and is delighted with it.’
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Yet not one doctor or nurse linked her
unexpected
progress with Scott’s departure. By his return, Zelda was skiing daily and was translating Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Une Saison en
Enfer’. Scott’s optimistic assessment ran: ‘Forel hopeful … Good behaviour. Intermittent eczema, but hope – gradually fixing itself on husband and child … Becomes popular in clinic – no more
homosexuality
. Loves sports. Is somehow “good”. Unmotivated smile disappearing and normal relations with husband renewed at end of this period.’
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In April, Zelda was allowed trips to Geneva and Montreux with Scott, with Rosalind, even with some patients: ‘I went to Geneva all by myself with a fellow maniac,’ she reported wittily.
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She sent Scott ‘kisses splattering you[r] balcony tonight from a lady who was once, in three separate letters, a princess in a high white tower and who has never forgotten her elevated station in life and who is waiting once more for her royal darling.’
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During the spring the re-education programme deleted and rewrote her past. She was ‘waved and manicured to a chic and elegant turn’ for Scott’s visit, she had a ‘more feminine’ room in a new villa which lacked corners like ‘a phrase without adjectives or a woman without a past’.
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The Fitzgeralds saw each other more often. Zelda also began to see Scottie more frequently. She found her ‘such an amusing person’, reflected ‘it’s rare to find the appropriate emotion going toward the appropriate object’.
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Scottie ‘was darling … not a bit boyish’. They’d had a good picnic. ‘She is a dear girl close to my heart – so close.’
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Although Zelda let slip she was still angry because ‘people wont let me be insane’,
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most of her letters to Scott reached new heights of outrageous dependency. One of Scott’s biographers takes a typical line, ‘I realize more completely than ever how much I live in you and how sweet and good and kind you are to such a dependent appendage’, and suggests that Zelda had ‘burned out her bitterness and achieved new insight … accepted rather than resented her
inevitable
dependence on Scott, and expressed gratitude for his sacrifice and support’.
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This simplistic view fails to acknowledge that Zelda had pragmatic reasons for reconciliation which certainly allowed Scott to become contrite, devoted and to send flowers.

Together they planned Zelda’s first long trip, an idyllic two weeks in July with Scottie in Annecy. They stayed first at the Hôtel Beau Rivage, garlanded in roses, on Lake Annecy’s Western shore. Then they moved to Menthon on the east bank, where Zelda recalled long cool shadows shelving the precipice of the Hôtel Palace. They fished, played tennis, danced Viennese waltzes, ate in a café lit by Japanese lanterns and celebrated Zelda’s thirty-first birthday. Zelda
wrote happily to her father: ‘It is as peaceful inside its scalloped mountains as a soup-ladel full of the sky.’
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It was a rare moment in the Fitzgerald family history of happiness, relaxation, peace. The time they spent there was so perfect they decided they would never return, because no other time could ever match it.

News from the Murphys was better. Patrick was considered
sufficiently
well for them to leave the US in July and move into Ramgut, a hunting lodge in Bad Aussee in the Austrian Alps. Earlier that year when Zelda was permitted visitors, the first person she had asked to see was Gerald. Though ‘absolutely terrified’, he had gone to Prangins and made elegant small talk about the basket Zelda was weaving. ‘I said that all my life I had wanted to make baskets like hers, great heavy, stout baskets.’
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It mattered little that their conversation was desultory, for underneath lurked a bond based on a shared sense of black demons, of unreality, of an awareness that they had both been haunted by feelings of otherness, of difference, some sexual, some social, many personal, few expressed.
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Gerald once tried to explain himself: ‘For me only the invented part of life is satisfying, the unrealistic part … sickness, birth, Zelda in Lausanne, Patrick in the sanatorium … these things were realistic … [I] accepted them but I didn’t feel they were the important things … the
invented
part, for me, is what has meaning.’
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Scott made a good shot at understanding Gerald, but with Zelda Gerald did not need to list ‘real’ versus invented events; like him she fictionalized even her emotions.