by Marion Meade
It was untrue, he snapped. The man was just a friend.
That’s how it seemed to her, Zelda replied. This lover was a writer, too, a hairy-chested he-man novelist, a complete phony of course, but he had become quite successful.
She was a liar, insisted Scott, growing very angry.
Two weeks later, despite constant pleas for release, she was still at Valmont awaiting results of the testing. Her illness, the hospital finally determined, did not involve any physical disease, and so it would be necessary to summon an outside authority on nervous disorders for an opinion on whether psychiatric treatment was indicated. On June 3, Zelda was examined by Dr. Oscar Forel. A tall man in his late thirties, well dressed and cultured, Dr. Forel was at ease conversing about literature, art, and music. He even played the violin. He explained that he was the director of a new clinic near Geneva, one of the best-appointed facilities in Europe, where she might have superior treatment in tasteful surroundings. There were no barred windows, and she would not be closely confined. (That was not exactly true.) Should she agree to come of her own free will, and if her husband promised to stay away, he was inclined to believe she could recover. Zelda, favorably impressed, as much by Forel’s manner of presentation as anything else, agreed it sounded like a sensible plan.
That was Tuesday evening. The following morning she woke up in a panic and said she had changed her mind and wished to return to Paris. What appeared to be perfectly reasonable the night before seemed a very dangerous decision after all. She knew that her life had fallen apart. But how could she be mad, as everybody was implying? Her sanity had never been questioned; indeed, anybody in the world could tell that Scott was the insane one. Now he was in a great hurry to put her away in a madhouse.
Her brother-in-law hurried to Montreux from Brussels, where he worked for the Guaranty Trust Company. Throughout Wednesday and early Thursday, Newman Smith and Scott both tried to sway her. They warned her to be sensible and transfer to Oscar Forel’s sanatorium. Surely she could understand that she had no choice—caring for herself was no longer possible. With the proper treatment she could sort out her life and get well. While she did not disbelieve this, she did not believe it either, but she became tired of struggling. On Thursday afternoon the three of them finally departed for Nyon, some fifty miles away.
ON THE LAKESHORE south of Geneva, the elegantly appointed Rives de Prangins, whose château once belonged to Joseph Bonaparte, turned out to be more a five-star resort than a mental institution. There were a half-dozen villas and hundreds of acres of grounds at Prangins, a manicured oasis catering to rich foreigners suffering nervous breakdowns. Zelda’s sunny corner room on the second floor of the main building had a private bath, Oriental rugs, and windows overlooking the lake. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before she sized up the clinic as a “nut farm” and wanted to leave, despite the gentlemanly Oscar Forel.
Forel was born and raised at the renowned Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, where his father was the director. By virtue of his background and training, he belonged to the elite inner circle of Swiss psychiatry, the small group of physicians, including Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung, who were associated with the Burghölzli.
From the outset it seemed clear to him that Zelda’s case was complicated; that is, she was a patient likely to improve but never be cured. On his initial examination at Valmont, he diagnosed her as a schizophrenic. Some years later, however, he would become less certain and describe her as “a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath.” In his view, she was neither a pure neurotic nor a real psychotic.
Schizophrenia (“split mind”), once known as dementia praecox, had been relabeled by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. By any name, it was the most severe and complex of psychotic illnesses, because, unlike depression, it did not respond to treatment. Nineteenth-century physicians such as Emil Kraepelin held the psychosis to be incurable and degenerative, essentially a death sentence delayed. In 1930 this gloomy view—and the stigma attached to it—continued to prevail, and those afflicted could probably expect to be incarcerated in mental institutions. In later years schizophrenia would come to be considered a syndrome—not one disease but a group of related disorders—of genetic origin. But while heredity was thought to be a predisposing factor, environment could also play a role, along with vulnerability to psychological stresses. Generally the psychosis was believed to be triggered not by any single trauma but by a string of damaging events that accumulate over time.
Of all her talents, Zelda’s ability with speech, her use of language in grand theatrical manner, was probably the most dramatic. When Bunny met her for the first time at the Biltmore, where she was dressed in Southern-belle flounces and getting stewed on orange blossoms, he immediately noticed her unconventional use of non sequiturs and free association. Her conversation just overflowed with spontaneous color and wit, almost in the same way her writing did, and her ideas tended to ricochet around so wildly that you could “never follow up anything,” he remembered. There seemed nothing abnormal about it to him. On the contrary, her illogic offered proof of her originality, her palette of lush expressions deriving freshness from reluctance to copy “readymade phrases.”
This type of impaired thought process, however, is also a common symptom of schizophrenia. Others include episodes of hallucinations, delusions (voices, false beliefs), and bizarre thoughts. There is gradual deterioration in the person’s ability to perform ordinary daily activities and to distinguish the real from the unreal. In the months prior to her arrival at Prangins, Zelda seemed to be suffering from many such abnormalities. Was Forel’s diagnosis correct? At the time it certainly seemed justified by her mental symptoms. (Seventy-five years later, some thought that she may have been misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic when she actually suffered from severe depression, in which case aggressive treatments such as insulin and electroshock could only have been detrimental.)
Schizophrenics appear mostly normal during childhood because the disorder typically does not manifest itself until young adulthood, in women usually the twenties or early thirties. In Zelda’s case, the onset of the illness could have come several years before she was ever hospitalized. Scott, in the fall of 1928, had made a cryptic entry in his ledger: “Dirt eating in hotel.” (The psychiatric term is “stool smearing” or “stool eating.”) This incident must have happened on their return to New York, during a brief stopover before they went south to Ellerslie, and presumably nobody knew of it but Scott. Whatever he saw was so disturbing that he tried to block it from his mind.
During the course of that summer at Prangins, the details of Forel’s diagnosis were of little interest to Zelda. She was growing increasingly sick.
HARPER’S AND THEIR annoying Mr. Rushmore had been nagging Vincent for weeks. It was not a bit urgent either, only a new limited edition of her complete works, and yet he persisted in inundating her with rush requests. That summer, with so much on her mind, Vincent had no patience for Arthur Rushmore.
Even at Steepletop, semi-isolated among the hamlets and small farms of the Berkshires, Vincent and Gene were not insulated from ominous events in the rest of the world. In Gene’s opinion, prospects for an early economic recovery looked dim. He sent a thousand dollars to Cora, along with a warning to be extra careful and make the money last as long as possible. Don’t go haywire and buy any Rolls-Royces on the installment plan, he joked. But he and Vincent made no attempt to cut back on their spending. In June they began making plans for an old-fashioned house party in grand style to honor Art and Gladys Ficke. Actually, during the past two years Art had decided he did not care for the Berkshires, he did not care for his “silly life” partying with Gene (who just discovered a new cocktail, gin and bitters), and he did not care much for Vincent anymore either.
Apart from Gene’s tedious rhapsodies on bitters (available in any drugstore, he insisted), a far more serious problem was “Little Wince,” who mightily tried Art’s patience. It had become increasingly hard for him to make a di
stinction between the former “flawless goddess”—the “greatest woman poet who ever lived”—and the present Vincent, who, plainly put, tended to be a disagreeable drunk. She had changed drastically. After psychoanalysis with Dr. Karl Menninger in the late Thirties, he wanted to write a “very cruel” novel called The Mirror of the Huntress about a great genius who becomes “poisoned to the core by the worst Narcissus complex I have ever known” and who ruins her life from an “inability to love anybody or anything but the secret guarded image of herself.” At Hardhack, “frightfully bored,” Artie passed his time guzzling gin.
The house party for Artie and Gladdie was the high point of Vincent’s summer. In early June she began mailing out personal invitations, invariably addressing her friends, whatever their ages, as “Dear Kids.” From July 21 to 24, or longer than four days if the hosts and the liquor held out, she and Gene would be entertaining more than a dozen guests, and it was going to be “a hell of a lot of fun,” she wrote. They expected Floyd Dell and his wife, B. Marie, from Croton; Deems and Mary Taylor and perhaps baby Joan from Stamford; and Max Eastman and his lovely Russian wife, Eliena, the painter. Among the local gentry were Bill Brann, once in advertising but now the owner of a horse farm and a breeder of racehorses, and George and Emla La Branche, a couple of “old darlings” living nearby at High Holt in summer and Florida in winter. George was a highly successful stockbroker who raised pheasants as a hobby and had written a book on fly-fishing. And those were just the houseguests, because another forty or fifty visitors were expected to appear for a show performed by the Jitney Players, perhaps something amusing such as a Gilbert operetta. Vincent promised plenty of entertainment, both conversational and theatrical.
To George Dillon in Chicago, Gene composed a special invitation, one that would be hard to refuse. (Apparently he did, though.) Steeple-top was going to be crawling with beautiful girls, but there might be a shortage of beautiful men, Gene teased. Would he please agree to come and stay a day, a week, or a year? “Love, Eugen,” he signed himself.
Other than the house party, the subject on Vincent’s mind that summer was George, as usual. After eighteen months—a year and a half of frequent letters and all-too-few meetings—their romance was slowly souring, not just because of the geographic distance separating them, not even owing to the difference in their ages. It was the old trouble: George, in memory, was a lover without fault; George, in reality, left her crackling with anger and desperation because he did not love her as much as she loved him. Pigheaded, absorbed by his own affairs, her beloved went skylarking around Chicago. She told him he was destroying her sanity; he wanted her to stop controlling him. Later that year, stricken to learn he had lost his job and was considering a move to California, she threatened to board the next train for Chicago if he did not come to Steepletop at once. He ignored her.
By no means had she given up on George, still the darling of her heart, but she was able to step back and see a panoramic view of the unfolding affair, from its first wild blossoming, to the wilting and yellowing middle, to what would most likely be a lingering death. The complete precarious story, soup to nuts, she would relate in fifty-two sonnets, because the affair, for all its pain, had plunged her into one of her most prolific writing periods. Publication of the sonnets was bound to expose her personal life, including piles of dirty laundry, in a most disagreeable fashion: her adultery, her husband’s condonation, the boy plaything, altogether a spicy stew. On the other hand, she had been cautious to conceal the relationship not only from loose-tongued gossips but also from friends. When Esther Root, for one, later asked about the man in the sonnets, Vincent replied, “What makes you think that they’re all about the same person?” Former lovers were not fooled for a minute. Bunny understood immediately this was not an imaginary liaison but a specific individual, although he was never able to identify the secret lover. (George Dillon never occurred to him, because in 1950 he suggested George as a possible biographer of Vincent.)
Overriding all other considerations was the need to publish some of her best work, and so Gene informed Harper’s in May about the new poems. Miss Millay wanted him to say, he wrote to Eugene Saxton, that she will have a collection ready for publication in the spring of 1931. It was to be a major work comprising one long sequence of more than fifty love sonnets. Thirty were ready for publication and twenty more not quite finished.
Over the summer of the big house party Vincent began stewing about a title. Looking for a fitting line in one of the sonnets, she first considered A Garland for Your Living Hand and Love in the Open Hand, both of which were succeeded by Twice Required, which she also rejected. Her fussing soon got Gene’s goat. He was tired of hearing about “the god damn title for Vincent’s god damn book,” he sputtered to Artie. (Eventually it would be called Fatal Interview.)
In the meantime, there was the pestering Mr. Rushmore. According to his letters, which Vincent had been trying to ignore throughout the party preparations, she alone was responsible for holding up his production schedule. Only someone as pathologically rigid as Mr. Rush-more could make such a fuss over nothing. Harper’s, she finally told him, would simply have to make allowances for her personal situation. Of course she wished to make corrections to the new edition, but owing to circumstances beyond her control the house was “entirely upset” by workmen, and therefore supplying anything at that particular moment was out of the question. Surely he could appreciate her problem.
At last she must have made herself clear, because their Mr. Rush-more wrote back, acting offended but resigned. He would accept whatever cooperation he could get until such time as she was “freed of your building problems.”
. . .
THE BODY that Zelda had tortured into an instrument of beauty was dribbling “into the beets in the clinic garden.” Once she stopped exercising, the muscles began shrinking, and she felt stiff all over now. Her legs had become horribly flabby. Any prospects of joining Léonide Massine’s company in New York that fall would be out of the question. The missing months could never be recovered.
All she had left were memories of the dancer who came to class in a Rolls-Royce, the one who performed for the President of France, the one who stank up the studio by leaving a half-eaten can of shrimp behind a mirror, the chanting “failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli.” But most painful of all was the memory of Lubov Egorova. If ever she were to resume training, Madame would not want her back, Zelda believed. And yet, burning to know how Egorova rated her ability, she instructed Scott to write and ask how far she could develop “before it is too late.” Madame’s reply would be most honest if the question came from him, she told herself.
Other than a monthly visit to see Scottie in Paris, Scott was living in various hotels, in Geneva, Montreux, and Lausanne. He labored over stories for the Saturday Evening Post, his novel untouched for almost a year. (His previous seven books were bringing in royalties of roughly thirty dollars a year.)
Zelda’s “rotten” letters got a bare glance before being filed under Z. Scott had yet to recover from “the horror of Valmont” and Zelda’s “stinking” accusations about him and Ernest. He felt unable to lift his eyes to other men on the street. He tried to remember that she was “my own girl” whom he loved with all his heart despite everything.
The news of Zelda’s confinement in an asylum was greeted with incredulity by Bunny, who immediately wrote Scott an encouraging letter. Don’t let the neurologists depress him, he said, because they are a “funereal and unnerving” bunch. His own experience in Clifton Springs proved most people who break down generally recover. Less sympathetic was John Bishop, who felt Scott must surely be exaggerating about the severity of Zelda’s illness. “He lies so that I could only make out her state is serious,” John told the poet Allen Tate. His information was based on “Scott’s drunken gossip and that depends upon whether he’s trying to bolster himself up or make himself out a lowly Mid-Western worm.” It was easy to lose patience with Scott.
After s
everal weeks Madame Egorova replied to Scott’s letter. Zelda, in her expert opinion, would never be exceptional, never a soloist of the first rank, because she had begun too late. By the same token, however, there was no doubt she had advanced beyond the corps de ballet. She promised to be a “good to very good” dancer performing important roles in companies such as Léonide Massine’s.
In answering as she did, Egorova was mostly responding to Scott’s strong implication that Zelda’s doctors did not encourage further dancing, along with his detailed questions and his naming of specific ballerinas. Could Zelda, he wondered, ever be a Marie Danilova? (Comparing Zelda, almost thirty, with the greatest Russian dancer of the nineteenth century was ridiculous in the extreme.) Implied in Egorova’s analysis was an important observation: had Zelda been mentally healthy, had she gone on to pursue a career, she might have danced professionally, as others did, for another ten years. In a discipline in which newcomers expect a period of apprenticeship while they prove themselves and rise in the ranks to become, one day if they are lucky, principals, a good many students would have been pleased by such an appraisal.
Zelda, however, felt shame. She chose to believe that she was not good enough after all, “the saddest thing in my life.” Soon after she received Madame’s reply, the skin on her face, neck, and shoulders broke into a red rash, and then erupted in pus-filled blisters. While this was not her first attack of eczema, the itchy lesions were far more unbearable and proved immune to the standard treatments of topical medications, sedatives, and morphine. Before long, the terrible oozing sores were accompanied by mental deterioration, and it became necessary to transfer her to Villa Eglantine, a locked, barred residence for troubled patients. For five weeks she lay slathered in grease, a “living agonizing sore,” as Scott would imagine when he described a patient in Tender Is the Night. Zelda considered herself a “half human-being” imprisoned in bandages, and her only desire was to die. Finally Dr. Forel tried hypnosis, and she was able to find relief from the lesions. She slept for thirteen hours. When she awoke, most of the eczema had disappeared, and she was moved back to her bed in the main building.
