Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Like Dr. Forel, Adolf Meyer wanted to treat both Zelda’s insanity and Scott’s alcoholism. Fitzgerald once again refused psychotherapy on the grounds that it would interfere with his creative work. But he was unable to give up drinking without psychiatric help. Dr. Meyer, despite his great reputation, had no more success with Zelda than he did with Scott. He was too heavy, ponderous and Germanic to establish an intimate rapport with her, and lacked the wit and humor that would have encouraged her sympathetic response. In a letter to yet another doctor, Fitzgerald unfavorably compared Meyer to Forel, criticizing the former’s vague, ineffective theories, and maintaining that he had not been able to help Zelda: “Dr. Forel’s treatment of this problem was very different from Dr. Meyer’s and all my sympathies were with the former. During the entire time with Dr. Meyer, I could never get from him, save in one letter, an idea of his point of view. . . . In Zelda’s case the first [treatment] worked because it gave her hope and refuge at the same time, while Dr. Meyer’s theoretical plan was, in her case, a failure. He gave back to me both times a woman not one whit better than when she went in.”

  Fitzgerald’s view of Dr. Meyer’s failure was confirmed in a characteristically disturbed letter from Zelda, written a month after she had entered the clinic. She recognized her own illness, and hinted that Scott was also in danger of cracking up. The oddities in her character that had once been attractive were now tragic, and her expressions of love were as painful as her bitter accusations: “I adore you and worship you and I am very miserable that you be made even temporarily unhappy by those divergencies of direction in myself which I cannot satisfactorily explain and which leave me eternally alone except for you and baffled.”

  After Dr. Meyer had failed to reach Zelda, she was also treated by two other doctors at Phipps—though he remained in charge of the case. She felt close to Dr. Mildred Taylor Squires, a woman thirty years younger than Dr. Meyer, who had been trained at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Dr. Squires, who did not specialize in psychiatry and left Phipps after a few years, practiced in New York until the early 1940s. Zelda was grateful for her help and dedicated Save Me the Waltz to her in 1932.

  Zelda’s third doctor at Phipps was Thomas Rennie. He was born in Scotland in 1904, came to America as a child in 1911 and earned a medical degree at Harvard in 1928. He wrote several books on mental illness and became professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School. Zelda, who had not had sexual relations with Scott since their unfortunate holiday in St. Petersburg, soon established emotional rapport with the warm, handsome, Nordic-looking young bachelor.

  Fitzgerald, who also considered Rennie a kindly friend during his own struggles, needed all the help he could get. During their joint interview with Dr. Rennie in May 1933, Zelda was in a very different mood than when she wrote her tender, grateful letters to Scott. She now bitterly accused him of hating her and prolonging her illness: “You sat down and cried and cried. You were drunk, I will admit, and you said I had ruined your life and you did not love me and you were sick of me and wished you could get away, and I was strained and burdened. . . . It is impossible to live with you. I would rather be in an insane asylum where you would like to put me.”24 While Zelda was still in Phipps, Fitzgerald traveled between Baltimore and Montgomery, where Scottie stayed until the end of the school year. At the end of March he left Alabama, moved into the Hotel Rennert, near Phipps and in the center of town, and began to look for a house on the outskirts of Baltimore.

  The prohibition of ballet, the death of her father, the separation from Fitzgerald, the renewal of psychotherapy, the boredom and isolation in the clinic, the mental turmoil, the rivalry with Scott and the desire for self-expression suddenly awakened Zelda’s creative impulse while she was being treated at Phipps in the spring of 1932. In Prangins in 1930 she had completed three stories (now lost) “in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown.” Fitzgerald told Perkins that they were beautifully written and had “a strange, haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new.” Though her stories were too strange for Scribner’s Magazine, she began a novel in Phipps—to control her feelings as much as to express them.

  Save Me the Waltz, which was aptly abbreviated to Save Me, faithfully relates the story of Zelda’s girlhood, marriage, husband’s youthful success, childbirth, travels in Europe, brief affair with a French aviator and husband’s retaliatory affair as well as her passion for dancing and invitation to the San Carlo Theater in Naples, where (in the novel) she gets blood poisoning from an infected foot and is forced to give up her ballet career. She returns to her home in the South and, after the death of her father, must begin her life again.

  Alabama’s physical illness obviously represents Zelda’s insanity, and estranges her both from her husband and from other people. For David “felt of a different world to Alabama; his tempo was different from the sterile, attenuated rhythms of the hospital.” The novel is not a personal attack on Fitzgerald, though it expressed considerable resentment, but a tragedy of stagnation and frustration. Its most remarkable feature is perhaps Zelda’s ingenuous portrayal of her own extravagance, domestic incompetence, recklessness, jealousy, infidelity, ambition and responsibility for the dissolution of their marriage. Save Me the Waltz, which suffered from over-writing and under-editing (Perkins’ weakest point), had mixed reviews when it appeared in October 1932, did not sell well and earned only $120 in royalties.

  Zelda herself was highly critical of the novel. Though it had an extremely idiosyncratic and sometimes brilliant style, it imitated both Fitzgerald and Hemingway. “It is distinctly École Fitzgerald,” she told Scott, “though more ecstatic than yours. Perhaps too much so. Being unable to invent a device to avoid the reiterant ‘said’ I have emphasized it à la Ernest much to my sorrow.” Hemingway wrote of Brett Ashley, for example, “She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht”; Zelda elaborated his simple but effective simile into her own baroque cadenza: “[Alabama] was gladly, savagely proud of the strength of her Negroid hips, convex as boats in a wood carving.”25

  Scott was deeply wounded by Zelda’s novel. He felt she had not only stolen the clinical material and European locales of the novel he had been working on for seven years but also, during the illness that had delayed the completion of Tender Is the Night, had completed her own work, in the spring of 1932, in only six weeks. She had sent it to Perkins without showing it to Scott, and had it accepted for publication by his own faithful editor at Scribner’s. Fitzgerald later told Ober that Save Me the Waltz was “a bad book” because the potentially promising material lacked artistic focus, structure and control: “By glancing over it yourself you will see that it contains all the material that a tragedy should have, though she was incapable as a writer of realizing where tragedy lay as she was incapable of facing it as a person.”26

  Scott’s just criticism of Zelda’s uneven but always lively and perceptive novel raises the question of the comparative merit of their work. Fitzgerald undoubtedly used Zelda’s speech, diaries, letters, personal experience and mental illness in his fiction, and published her lively but derivative stories and essays under his own name. Though Zelda had ideas, style and wit, she did not have the professional knowledge and discipline to perfect her stories and novel. Her stories would not have appeared in print if she had not been married to Fitzgerald and if he had not revised them for publication. Zelda’s best stories may have been equal to Scott’s mediocre tales, but she was utterly incapable of equaling his finest work. There is a vast qualitative difference between the deeply flawed Save Me the Waltz and the high art of Tender Is the Night.

  On June 26, 1932, after four and a half months in Phipps, Zelda was discharged from the clinic. Though Scott retrospectively felt she was “not one whit better than when she went in,” her doctors thought she was well enough to go home. After her treatment in Prangins, Zelda had managed to survive in Montgomery for only five months before suffering her second breakdown. After a much shorter and less successful
treatment at Phipps, she remained relatively well for twenty more months before experiencing her third mental breakdown. Zelda’s phases of remission aroused Scott’s hope that she would recover. But she spent eight out of the last ten years of Fitzgerald’s life in mental hospitals.

  Photograph Insert

  1. EDWARD FITZGERALD WITH SCOTT, BUFFALO, CHRISTMAS 1899:

  A small, inarticulate, ineffectual man with well-cut clothes and fine Southern manners. (Princeton University Library)

  2. MOLLIE FITZGERALD, C. 1905:

  “The most awkward and the homeliest woman I ever saw.” (Princeton University Library)

  3. FATHER SIGOURNEY FAY, C. 1917:

  The huge, eunuch-like priest, almost a pure albino, had a shrill, high-pitched, giggling voice. (Princeton University Library)

  4. GINEVRA KING, C. 1915:

  “Flirt smiled from her large brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.” (Princeton University Library)

  5. EDMUND WILSON, 1930:

  The stocky, auburn-haired Wilson was intellectual and sternly rational, stiff and self-conscious.

  6. JOHN PEALE BISHOP, C. 1922:

  His self-mastery “gave him the poise and bearing of a young English lord.” (Jonathan Bishop)

  7. FITZGERALD AT PRINCETON, 1915:

  Wearing a blonde wig, glamorous hat, tulle shawl and flowered gown, Fitzgerald looked for all the world like a charming drag queen. (Princeton University Library)

  8. FITZGERALD IN MONTANA, 1915:

  Togged in tattered western clothes, Fitzgerald had a good time drinking with the cowboys and playing poker. (Princeton University Library)

  9. ZELDA, MONTGOMERY, 1918:

  “There was the eternally kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing.” (Princeton University Library)

  10. MAX PERKINS, 1920s:

  He had “a talent for diplomacy in difficult human situations, and a kind of nobility of spirit.” (John F. Kennedy Library)

  11. HAROLD OBER, C. 1930:

  “He was tall and lean, with deep-set, serious blue eyes, a big nose, a high color.” (Harold Ober Associates)

  12. FITZGERALD AND ZELDA, FEBRUARY 1921:

  They had the same blond hair, fair skin, straight nose and thin lips, and looked enough alike to be brother and sister. (Princeton University Library)

  13. RING LARDNER, CHICAGO, C. 1910:

  “A tall sallow mournful man with a higharched nose . . . dark hollow eyes and hollow cheeks.” (Ring Lardner, Jr.)

  14. TOMMY HITCHCOCK, C. 1933:

  “He was tall and his body was hard but overspare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms.” (Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock)

  15. FITZGERALD, NICE, C. 1924:

  Handsome, confident and poised, Fitzgerald was at the height of his powers while writing The Great Gatsby. (Courtney Vaughan)

  16. PAMPLONA, JULY 1925:

  Hemingway was balanced uneasily between his chic future wife Pauline Pfeiffer (center) and his matronly current wife Hadley (right), while Gerald and Sara Murphy, attended by three Spanish shoeshine boys, drank with them. (John F. Kennedy Library)

  17. HEMINGWAY, PRINCETON, OCTOBER 1931:

  A Herculean Hemingway, smartly dressed in a double-breasted wool suit, glowered at the camera for an unusually good snapshot. (John F. Kennedy Library)

  18. FITZGERALD, ZELDA AND SCOTTIE (biting her lip and looking a bit nervous), CHRISTMAS, 1925:

  The elegantly dressed family were doing a music hall turn in their Paris apartment. (Princeton University Library)

  19. LOIS MORAN, C. 1930:

  “Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks.” (Timothy Young)

  20. BIJOU O’CONOR (RIGHT) with her father, Sir Francis Elliot, c. 1925:

  Bijou, who resembled Edith Sitwell, was thin, chic and jolie-laide, with fine features and soft brown eyes. (Sir William Young)

  21. DR. OSCAR FOREL WITH HIS FATHER, AUGUSTE, AND HIS SON, ARMAND, C. 1930:

  The exceptionally talented and versatile Forel was a tall, thin, well-dressed and highly cultivated gentleman. (Armand Forel)

  22. FITZGERALD AND ZELDA, BALTIMORE, 1932:

  Zelda looked ravaged and Scott anxious after her mental breakdown. (Princeton University Library)

  23. FITZGERALD AND SCOTTIE, BALTIMORE, 1935:

  “Don’t let any unreliable Virginia boys take my pet around. Scottie hasn’t got three sisters, she has only got me.” (Harold Ober Associates)

  24. IRVING THALBERG AND NORMA SHEARER THALBERG, MID-1930s:

  “The intellectual high priest of Hollywood” had rare taste, self-assurance, decisiveness and respect for excellence.

  25. SHEILAH GRAHAM, C. 1930:

  “So much innocence and so much predatory toughness [went] side by side behind this gentle English voice.”

  Chapter Ten

  La Paix and Tender Is the Night, 1932–1934

  I

  In May 1932, a month before Zelda was discharged from Phipps, Fitzgerald found La Paix, a fifteen-room Victorian house on a large estate in Rodgers Forge, near Towson, just north of Baltimore. The dim, cavernous, rather run-down old place had gables, an open front porch and reddish brown paint fading on the gingerbread trimming. It also had a small swimming pond, a tennis court and a patch of grass, circled by a gravel driveway, that doubled as a boxing ring. Zelda captured the mournful mood of the house in an idiosyncratic letter to Max Perkins: “We have a soft shady place here that’s like a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up. It’s surrounded by apologetic trees and warning meadows and creaking insects and is gutted of its aura by many comfortable bedrooms which do not have to be floated up to on alcoholic inflation past cupolas and cornices as did the ones at Ellerslie.”

  The Fitzgeralds’ retreat to the quiet, isolated La Paix was, as Zelda remarked, a notable contrast to the wild weekend parties at Ellerslie. In the fall of 1933 Fitzgerald said they had dined out only four times in the last two years. Zelda remained near Phipps for frequent consultations with her doctors, and the Turnbull family, who owned the property and lived in the main house on the estate, provided another stabilizing influence. Bayard Turnbull, a wealthy architect and graduate of Johns Hopkins, was (according to his younger daughter) a rather distant Victorian gentleman who did not drink and was careful about money. He disapproved of Fitzgerald. But his wife, Margaret, a proper but cultured woman, shared Scott’s interest in literature and became a good friend. The Turnbulls had three children—Eleanor, Frances and the eleven-year-old Andrew, who was the same age as Scottie.

  Frances liked Fitzgerald, found him charming and felt he had the rare ability, when he spoke to her, of conveying the impression that she was the most important person in the world. But young Andrew—who became a surrogate son and later wrote a fine biography of Fitzgerald—was closest to Scott. They tossed around a football, went to Princeton football games and lunched at the Cottage Club, played erratic tennis, boxed with squashy gloves on the front lawn, shot a hairtrigger rifle, practiced card tricks, arranged battles with French lead soldiers, read and discussed books, and performed original plays. Fitzgerald even showed Andrew, after an unusually heavy snowstorm, how to make a little igloo—a Baltimore “ice palace” cut by a Minnesota pro. “He was the inventor, the creator, the tireless impresario,” Andrew wrote, “who brightened our days and made other adult company seem dull and profitless.”1

  When Fitzgerald moved to Baltimore he visited his old friend H. L. Mencken on several occasions, and asked him to recommend a bootlegger and a doctor (in that logical order). But Mencken, late in life, had married Sara Haardt, a girlhood friend of Zelda from Montgomery. Since Sara was an invalid and the Menckens had to live a quiet life, he disapproved of Fitzgerald’s drunken binges and eventually stopped seeing him. Though Fitzgerald continued to drink heavily, he also hired an efficient secretary, Isabel Owens, worked steadily on
Tender Is the Night and finally completed the book at La Paix.

  In February 1933, when T. S. Eliot was lecturing on the Metaphysical poets at Johns Hopkins University, the Turnbulls invited Fitzgerald to dine with him at their house. The Waste Land had influenced The Great Gatsby, and Eliot had warmly praised the novel. Fitzgerald behaved himself on this august occasion and their meeting was a success. As he told Edmund Wilson, “T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon and evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine.” But he was also somewhat disappointed, as he had been with John Galsworthy and Compton Mackenzie, when encountering the great man in person, and added that the forty-four-year-old Eliot was “very broken and sad & shrunk inside.”

  Eliot inscribed a copy of Ash-Wednesday “with the author’s homage,” and later provided a statement that was used on the dust jacket of Tender Is the Night: “I have been waiting impatiently for another book by Mr. Scott Fitzgerald with more eagerness and curiosity than I should feel towards the work of any of his contemporaries except that of Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” Eliot, a director of Faber & Faber, was interested in publishing the English edition of the novel but wary of poaching on his rival. So he wrote Fitzgerald a sly letter that left the initiative to him: “Chatto and Windus is a good firm, and it would in any case be contrary to publishing ethics to attempt to seduce you away from them, but of course you are quite free in this matter, it is up to you to send the manuscript first to whatever firm you elect.”2 In the end Scribner’s decided to stay with Chatto & Windus, which had published The Great Gatsby in England.