Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (66 page)

Scott, apoplectic, had the last line: ‘Well, that is all, you need not write any more.’

Several features stand out in this transcript. Scott set the frame of the discussion which made it hard for Zelda to bring up new material. Scott used a patronizing tone throughout, as if Zelda were his child: for instance, he often called Zelda’s novel ‘the thing’ or ‘that thing’. (Rennie and even Zelda followed his use of the word.) As ‘things’ are worthless, Scott’s novel was never called a thing. Scott’s own vehement display of insecurity, both extraordinary and unnecessary, illustrated how threatening Zelda’s writing was to him.

Though Scott’s identity was intricately tied into ‘being himself’, he was opposed to any suggestion that Zelda might create her own identity. That placed him in a strange position from which he railed against Zelda for being ‘irresponsible’ yet refused to allow her to undertake certain responsibilities.

Zelda’s biggest challenge was that she had bought into the notion of Scott as professional genius and herself as gifted amateur.
12
  Against that context she had to set her own needs. According to Scott’s theory any unacceptable behaviour on his part could be excused in the cause of his art, which allowed him to operate a double standard.

Though Zelda resisted Scott’s assumption that his earnings gave him rights of control over her health and her writing, at no point did Rennie support her, or even remain neutral. Rennie’s acquiescence to Scott’s view that all the psychiatric material belonged to him was not merely outrageous in literary terms but could have been
dangerous
to Zelda, his patient. Though Rennie and Meyer agreed that Scott’s alcoholism endangered Zelda’s health, when she called into question not only his obsessional drinking but
his
sanity, again she received no medical backing.

Throughout the conference, both Scott and Rennie saw Zelda as
competing artistically with Scott. Zelda believed she was doing something for herself. To some extent their disagreement lay in
prevailing
cultural notions that married women doing something
artistic
for themselves might be seen as infringing on male-owned territory.

What were the consequences of this three-way conference?

For the first time Scott seriously considered divorce. He consulted a Baltimore lawyer, his former Princeton friend Edgar Allan Poe Jnr.
13
Poe assured him that if he resided in Nevada state for six weeks he could speedily gain a divorce. Scott decided against it and continued to live on the battlefield that had become their marital terrain.
14

Zelda instigated something more dramatic. A few days after the conference, she systematically burnt her old clothes in an upstairs fireplace at La Paix.
15
While she returned to her typewriter to revise
Scandalabra
(finally to be produced locally the following week), the fire spread swiftly through the house. Several top-floor rooms were ruined. Many of Scott’s valuable books and manuscripts were damaged, many of Zelda’s paintings were destroyed. The local newspaper, unaware of the conflict preceding the fire, ran a
romantic
story. ‘Mr Fitzgerald dashed to save his wife’s manuscripts and paintings, while her first thought was for his manuscript. After leading their eleven year old daughter, Frances, to safety, the couple carried out several valuable pieces of furniture.’ Scott discreetly told reporters faulty wiring had short-circuited the system and caused the ‘accident’. News photographs show the Fitzgeralds on the lawn surrounded by books and furniture saved from the blaze, looking brave.
16

It was a good story. A clever photo. As Zelda had pointed out, they were good showmen. But La Paix had lost its charm. Scott told Andrew Turnbull they were moving into Baltimore as ‘Zelda needed to be near her art school’.
17
The truth was, neither of them wished to stay longer in a house with burnt and gloomy edges. By November their residence would be a townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue.

Zelda’s hopes were pinned to the Baltimore production of
Scandalabra
from 26 June to 1 July by the Vagabond Junior Players, and on the acting of Zack Maccubbin playing the hero Andrew Messogony, whose name was Zelda’s play on the words misogyny and misogamy.
18
The farce was a comic inversion of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned.
In Scott’s novel, Grandfather Patch refuses to will his wealth to his nephew Anthony and his wife Gloria because they are
dissipated and extravagant. In Zelda’s play, her hero will inherit his uncle’s millions so long as he lives a life of wicked debauchery. The idea was zany, some lines were witty, but the sets, some designed by Zelda, were considerably more exciting than the play, whose exhausting length and hectic style reflected the current turbulence of their marriage and of Zelda’s mind.
19

Zelda’s determination not to let Scott view her work meant he did not see it until the dress rehearsal, which ran from 8.15 p.m. till 1.00 a.m. Obviously the play could not open in that state at that length. Scott assembled the cast, worked them through the night,
drastically
revised and cut the script – to no avail. It lacked action, said some reviewers. Highly confusing, muttered others. ‘Much credit’ went to the director, Mrs Nicholas Penniman. No credit went to the playwright.
20

On 31 July Minnie Sayre wrote to Zelda that her beloved brother Anthony, who had recently lost his job and was already in debt, was desperately ill with depression. Edith, Anthony’s young wife, always deemed ‘unsuitable’ by the Sayres, took him to the coast near Charleston, but neither this nor the nerve specialist in Asheville who advised rest and no visitors helped.
21
Minnie told Zelda instability was the curse of their family’s bloodline. She felt the family
should
visit, so she and their cousin Dr Chilton Thorington, who knew Anthony’s ‘constitution better than strange doctors’, were going to North Carolina.
22
Anthony begged Thorington to let him go to Johns Hopkins, where Zelda was still an outpatient. But in August he was hospitalized in Mobile where a nerve specialist, Dr Eugene Bondurant, Judge Sayre’s friend, treated him for toxic poisoning caused by bile and malaria, but did not treat his depression.
23
Edith, sick with strain herself, suddenly gave up on Anthony, and went to Rome to stay with her mother.
24
  Thorington wrote to Scott that Anthony’s condition had been
diagnosed
as ‘neuro-psychosis – possibly familial’. Anthony’s
symptoms
were of the ‘melancholic type, with obsessions of suicidal and homicidal inclinations, however, I do not believe he would actually do acts of violence’.
25
The doctor was wrong. Anthony, suffering from recurrent nightmares of killing his mother, decided to kill himself. In an indisputable act of violence he leapt out of a hospital window to his death. The Sayres concealed most of the horrific facts about his suicide from the Fitzgeralds.
26

Zelda, dazed with miserable disbelief, threw herself into her painting. In October she exhibited a strange and powerful still life at the Independent Artists Exhibition at Baltimore’s Museum of
Art.
27
The oil,
Tiger
Lilies,
is now missing, but a black and white photograph still exists. The way in which the brushstrokes are ruled by a massive emotional energy rather than by detached
construction
resembles Van Gogh’s
Four
Cut
Sunflowers.
Zelda deliberately chose a peaceful plant then painted it like a creature ready to devour anyone foolish enough to pick it. Newspaper photographers took photos of Zelda at her easel.

Malcolm Cowley visited Zelda’s studio. He remembered those paintings years later: ‘They had freshness, imagination, rhythm, and a rather grotesque vigor, but they were flawed … by the lack of proportion and craftsmanship.’ Cowley was shocked at Zelda’s appearance. Deep lines above her mouth fell into unhappy shapes. Her face was emaciated and twitched as she spoke, reflecting her recent suffering.
28

Within a few months she had experienced three intense blows: emotional destruction during the conference, the failure of
Scandalabra,
and now her beloved brother’s death. She held on
courageously
, but would be unable to sustain further strain. At her side Scott was preparing
Tender
Is
The
Night
for its January serialization in
Scribner’s
Magazine.
He had sold
Scribner’s
the serial rights for $10,000 (for four instalments, January to April 1934). Zelda knew the heroine was largely based on herself. She knew the source for Nicole Diver’s behaviour was what Scott saw as her own insanity. But she had no idea of the further shock concealed in Scott’s fiction.

Scott was staking everything on
Tender
Is
The
Night.
That he might be staking Zelda’s well-being was probably not part of his
calculations
. His 1933 income of $12,000 was his lowest since the start of his career. Existing on borrowed money, he needed a commercial success.
1

By November 1933, having corrected the January/February
serialization
proofs, he took Zelda to Bermuda where it rained
continuously.
Scott caught pleurisy but Zelda, fresh from Baltimore’s Fine Art School, sat on the rain-soaked beach sketching shipyard workers, ballerinas, and women by a banyan tree, using new
figurative
techniques.

Though she and Scott exhumed their old affection, a sepulchral sadness persisted. ‘For years we had wanted to go to Bermuda,’ Zelda wrote wistfully in an
Esquire
article. ‘We went. The Elbow Beach hotel was full of honeymooners, who scintillated so
persistently
in each other’s eyes that we cynically moved.’ Perhaps she had a premonition, for she wrote: ‘Maybe this would be the last trip for a long while.’
2

On their return to Baltimore the galleys of
Tender
arrived,
followed
by the first two serialized instalments. Zelda read them, deeply shocked. She collapsed. On 12 February 1934 she re-entered Phipps Clinic for the start of her third breakdown. It would last until 1940.

As a measure of self-protection Scott informed John Palmer, Clothilde’s husband, ‘merely as a matter of record and not with any idea of alarming any member of Zelda’s family’. Zelda had suffered a ‘slight relapse’, he assured them. Scott asked John not to tell Minnie, Marjorie or even Clothilde as it would take five years off Minnie’s life, for she would immediately link Zelda’s collapse to Anthony’s troubles.
3

Scott’s optimism was misplaced. Far from ‘slight’, Zelda’s relapse was serious. Initially under constant observation for fear of suicide,
she lost a further 15 lb, looked malnourished, was given daily
sedatives
and restricted to total bedrest, and silently eluded medical ministrations.

Mayfield believed that reading the first half of Scott’s novel ripped open the wound inflicted by the synopsis Zelda had scanned in Florida. Certainly it was the first time Zelda had seen her husband’s merciless use of her most despairing hospital letters. Now everyone could read her profoundly private thoughts. Scott did not merely paraphrase Zelda’s anguished epistles, he efficiently pasted her phrases together with his stylish prose glue.

Zelda, attempting grim humour, had written to Scott: ‘The
farcicle
element of this situation is too apparent for even a person as hopeless and debilitated as I am.’ Scott rewrote it for
Tender
: ‘it seems to me if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you.’
4
After months with no progress and little hope, Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I will more than gladly welcome any alienist you may suggest.’ Scott hardly changed this: ‘I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest.’
5
Zelda admitted to Scott she was ‘completely humiliated and broken’, Nicole, scripted by Scott, was also ‘completely broken and
humiliated
’.
6

Zelda’s first encounter with Scott’s explosive Dr Diver material disturbed her even more. Initially Nicole Diver has Sara Murphy’s lyrical glow, but as the novel progresses and Scott draws on Zelda, we learn that as a child Nicole was raped by her father.

Scott’s sketch for Nicole, the rich mental patient, stated that the rape occurred at fifteen

Scott ‘authenticated’ his novel by using direct quotes from Bleuler’s diagnosis of Zelda.
8
Moreover, under the heading ‘Classification of the Material on Sickness’, he included reports from Malmaison, Valmont and Prangins.
9

Zelda, in bed at Phipps, admitted she was ‘a little upset about it [
Tender
]’, then said bitterly: ‘What made me mad was he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his life and
I couldn’t help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences.’ Loyally she insisted any author had the ‘right to interpret … it really doesn’t matter’. Then, unable to deal with the material, she began to cry: ‘It was a chronological distortion … I don’t think it’s true – I don’t think it’s really what happened.’
10
  Despite her distress she never referred directly to the effect on her of the fictionalized father-daughter rape, for which there is
no
biographical
evidence, merely a series of rumours.’
11
Her eerie
passivity
over this character violation may have been related to her constant sedation. Zelda was of course aware that Scott knew about the childhood sexual violence on which she based her fictionalized abuse of Janno by the Magnetic Twins in
Caesar’s
Things.

Whether Scott borrowed and extended a known event in
childhood
or later, or whether he invented Nicole’s traumatic rape, he must have been aware it would cause Zelda intense pain. Although he knew he risked increasing Zelda’s instability he did not see himself as heartless. He always cared for her, even though care had largely degenerated into financing her hospitalization. He kept his novel from her for as long as possible, he warned her against
projecting
too much of herself into it. He saw the book as melancholy, even haunted, but he saw it also as something they could put behind them before they moved on.
12
But at Phipps Zelda was not moving anywhere. Sobbing uncontrollably, she told the nurses: ‘I can’t get on with my husband and I can’t live away from him – materially impossible … I’m so tired of compromises. Shaving off one part of oneself after another until there is nothing left.’
13

She behaved as if she was indeed invisible. Her silences grew
palpable
. She shivered in the heat, she laughed when most sad, she kept her distance from everyone, including Scottie.

Still she dwelt on separation. Mayfield, who understood this, said: ‘many people who know the circumstances under which Scott labored over it [
Tender
]
found that its chief flaw lay in the fact that it was written with one eye on the Book-of-the-Month Club and the other on the divorce court.’ Sara, invariably Zelda’s partisan, felt that either the writing stood as a psychological defence should
Zelda make good her threat of divorce, or the offensive passages were written as self-justification.
15
It is possible that Scott wrote the most wounding parts in retaliation for those sections in
Save
Me
The
Waltz
which had disturbed him, but it is more probable artistically that Diver, the psychiatrist-hero,
had
to deal with explosive material. Scott needed a spoiled priest, a man replacing idealism and talent with drink and dissipation. As both husband and psychiatrist Dick fails to maintain professional perspective. By sharing Nicole’s family’s wealth, his commitment to medicine is finally eroded. When Nicole recovers her sanity and independence and leaves him for Tommy Barban, a French/American soldier of fortune, Dick dwindles into a corrupted small-town doctor.
16

Ironically, despite the authentic psychiatric source material, Edmund Wilson, who read the serialization, thought that though Scott had achieved something ‘real’ in his protagonists’ marital relationship, he had failed to establish Diver’s professional
credibility
.
17
Scott himself acknowledged he must be ‘careful not to reveal basic ignorance of psychiatric and medical training yet not [be] glib’.
18
Diver, of course, plays the role Scott had tried to play: fellow-psychiatrist and husband. In
Tender,
Scott tried to resolve in literary terms the issues remaining unresolved in his life.

The earliest reactions came from kind friends who had read either the serialization or an inscribed pre-publication copy. Bishop assured him: ‘The first installment of the novel confirms what I have long thought, that your gifts as a novelist surpass those of any of us.’
19
Robert Benchley said: ‘I would have given my two
expensivly-filled
[
sic
]
eye-teeth to have written just one page of the book … it is a beautiful piece of work, not only technically, but emotionally.’
20
  Tom Wolfe offered cautious praise: ‘It seems to me you’ve gone deeper in this book than in anything you ever wrote,’
21
while Archie MacLeish threw caution away: ‘Great God Scott you can write. You can write better than ever. You are a fine writer. Believe it. Believe it – not me.’
22
Scott needed to believe this in the light of later criticisms.

Zelda, feeling better at Phipps, demanded to be released. As she was not committed, theoretically she could leave when she wished, but in practice could not depart without money. Scott, busy with his galleys, was not prepared to cope with a sick wife. He transferred Zelda to Craig House, Beacon, where she stayed from 8 March to 19 May. In upstate New York, two hours by train from Manhattan, on the Hudson River, the sanatorium was recommended by Forel, who was a friend of the director, Dr Clarence Slocum.
23
The resort-like grandeur of Prangins was repeated in a golf course, tennis courts, bowling green,
two swimming pools, bridge, backgammon and table-tennis games rooms. An emphasis on patients’ freedom, no locks and keys, and a private nurse for each patient meant attendant heavy costs of more than $750 a month. Scott, already $12,000 in debt, plunged still further.

Initially Zelda treated Craig as a country club. She dug holes in golf greens, almost uprooted a gigantic oak with what used to be a chip-shot, worked on a piece for the
New
Yorker
about hotels they had visited
24
and played bridge.

Her surroundings had charm: ‘The ground is shiverring with snow-drops and gentians … I wish you could [rest] for a while in the cool apple-green of my room. The curtains are like those in John Bishop’s poem to Elspeth and beyond the lawn never ends … we walk … [to] where tumbling villages prop themselves on the beams of the afternoon sun. We have tea, and many such functions to fulfill.’ She added irritably: ‘
Please
send the book.’
25

The costs distressed her: ‘You can imagine how I feel sitting here in this lovely place when I realize the worry and effort it is costing you … I feel very guilty: as if maybe I could have conformed more satisfactorily at home.’

Then suddenly her money and most activities were restricted.

On 12 March Scott had written to Slocum that Zelda had absolutely no sense of money, so he felt that every extra expense should be curtailed. Scott told Slocum that Zelda’s artistic materials alone came to about $50 a month without her typing costs. With her basic fees Scott estimated this at four-fifths of the household income. Slocum agreed to limit Zelda’s expenses, but reported that after he’d read aloud to her Scott’s letter Zelda had a ‘hysterical outbreak’.
26

Scott informed Slocum that the ‘nervous strain’ of creative work meant Zelda’s writing must be restricted. Zelda, he said, had an ‘extraordinary talent’ for metaphor and simile, was markedly
successful
with short character studies, might contribute regularly to the
New
Yorker,
but her nervous system could not stand criticism. Slocum agreed Zelda was ‘doing too much in her literary efforts’. He assured Scott he had made her promise after she had finished her latest story ‘to desist until we feel that it is wise for her to re-enter this field again’.
27

Zelda countered with another request: ‘Please ask Mrs Owens to rush my paints. I want them very badly. It’s such expensive
equipment
, I don’t want to buy another.’ She needed pastels to try
sketching
covers for the
Post.
Would Scott retrieve her oil paints and the Dante, still at Phipps?
28
When Slocum, deciding her flower
paintings
were ‘recreational’, relented, Zelda designed a floral
watercolour
Easter card with ‘Easter Greetings Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald’ looped inside. But she no longer felt part of the
contented
couple who sent friends home-made cards.

Later that March Slocum told Scott that though ‘prohibiting Mrs Fitzgerald’s writing has been helpful’, it was a struggle getting Zelda to breakfast in bed, or rest after her 11 a.m. massage. She was determined ‘to be as active as possible in her work’.

Slocum gave permission for Scottie to spend a day and night with Zelda before going with Scott to the Adirondacks for Easter.
29
‘She will like it here with the pool and the tennis,’ Zelda wrote excitedly to Scott, ‘and I will be awfully glad to have her … I wish I were well, and you could get something more out of life for all you put into it than bills, and more bills.’ It was unfair he ‘should have to shoulder the heavy debts necessary to reconstitute a member of a
disintigrated
family’.
30