Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Scott sent the Spengler and some perfume, but by the time they arrived the eczema had escalated. Doctors injected her with calcium and morphine, administered X-rays, placed her on a strict diet which excluded cheese, preserves, cooked pork and hors-d’oeuvre, but to no avail.24

  Despairingly she wrote: ‘If you don’t come take me out of this clinic I’m going crazy – swathed in embalming fluid all day and plastered with mud that decomposes and runs down my ears – I’d rather have hydro-phobia and all the plagues of the Holy Land and not be in captivity.’

  With a wrenching return to satire she added: ‘There’s so little variety in eczema.’25 In 1920 Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper.’26 Which of them remembered it now?

  One Sunday Zelda, taken for a walk by a dame de compagnie, suddenly broke away and fled.27 It took three trained nurses to bring her back, whereupon she was immediately transferred to Villa Eglantine, a unit reserved for highly disturbed patients, where she was isolated, locked in and forcibly restrained.

  In Tender Is The Night Scott uses the name Eglantine for a secure unit in the psychiatric clinic which housed ‘those sunk into eternal darkness’. His fictional Eglantine, based on the hideous reality into which Zelda was confined, had the same exterior cheerfulness, the same concealed grilles, bars and immovable furniture where ‘no uninstructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether’.28

  In 1919 Scott had written repeatedly to Zelda how much he wished his princess was locked up in a tower. Now she was: confined by forcible bonds, the label madness, hearing other voices than his. Although Scott’s Ledger entry records only the barest summary: ‘June 23rd Zelda confined Eglantine’, it cannot have made him feel good the way his 1919 fantasies had.

  Although not legally committed, every time Zelda attempted to leave Prangins she was forcibly brought back to Eglantine, where in a blackened room she was administered morphine and bromides rectally, preceded by an enema. These drugs induced a two-week-long narcosis within twenty minutes.29 Patients on this ‘Swiss Sleeping Cure’ were aroused only to relieve bladder or bowel or for minimal food. This narcotic procedure had several known side-effects, one of which was eczema, by which Zelda was again tortured from 15 July onwards.

  Zelda had already sent Scott desperate letters.

  I want you to let me leave here – You’re wasting time and effort and money to take away the little we both have left. If you think you are preparing me for a return to Alabama you are mistaken, and also if you think I am going to spend the rest of my life roaming about without happiness or rest or work from one sanatorium to another … you are wrong … two sick horses might conceivably pull a heavier load than a well one alone. Of cource, if you prefer that I should spend six months of my life under prevailing conditions – my eyes are open and I will get something from that, too, I suppose, but they are tired and unhappy, and my head aches always. Won’t you write me a comprehensible letter such as you might write to one of your friends? Every day it gets harder to think or live and I do not understand the object of wasting the dregs of me here, alone in a devasting bitterness.

  Now deteriorating rapidly, she begged Scott to write Egorova ‘a friendly impersonal note to find out exactly where I stand as a dancer’. In her postscript she repeated:

  Please write immediately to Paris about the dancing. I would do it but I think the report will be more accurate if it goes to you – just an opinion as to what value work is and to what point I could develop it before it is too late. Of cource, I would go to another school as I know Egorova would not want to be bothered with me.30

  Forel, convinced that if she continued to dance Zelda would not find stability, also wanted Scott to write to Egorova. He suggested that Scott write asking Egorova to discourage her pupil, even if it meant deceiving Zelda.31 Forel felt that Zelda must be made to give up any idea that ballet was her vocation. Scott was not prepared to play along with Forel’s fraudulent plan. He had written to Egorova on 22 June:

  Zelda is still very ill. From time to time there is some improvement and then all of a sudden she commits some insane act … It is doubtful – though she is unaware of it – that she could ever return to her dancing school … doctors would like to know what her chances were, what her future was like as a dancer, when she fell ill … Her situation being critical, it is rather necessary that she should know the answer, despite all the disappointment it could cause her.32

  Scott attached seven questions. Could Zelda achieve the level of a first-rate dancer; could she ever dance like Nikitina or Danilowa; how many years might that take if she could; if she couldn’t become first rate could her charming face and beautiful body land her roles in ballets such as those produced by Massine in New York; were there students in Egorova’s school better than Zelda; did she start too late to achieve good balance; was she working too hard for a woman her age; and if she had not fallen ill could she have satisfied both her ideal and her ambitions? On 9 July Egorova replied that Zelda had begun too late to become a first-rate dancer but she could become a very good dancer, capable of successfully dancing important roles in New York’s Massine Ballet Company.

  Scott and Forel saw this as positive, though they knew Zelda would be crushed.

  Meanwhile in order to make sense of her illness Zelda wrote a series of analytic letters to Scott. The most remarkable was a forty-two-page summary of their marriage which displayed her extraordinary memory for precise colourful detail of places, people and emotions. She recalled their early days in New York with reporters, fur-smothered hotel lobbies, the impressiveness of the Fowlers, tea dances at the Plaza, her eccentric behaviour at Princeton, Townsend’s blue eyes, the Biltmore’s marshmallow odour. She raced through absinthe cocktails, roadhouses where they bought gin, her startling white knickers, Scott’s affair with Gene Bankhead, their quarrels, their devilled ham, their trip to Europe where she was sick and he drank, Alabama’s unbearable heat, St Paul’s treacherous cold, the birth and wonder of Scottie. She dwelt on their adoration of the Kalmans, their dinners with Bunny, the intrusion of doctors, the encroaching disorder, the violent rows, her fantasy episode with Jozan, Scott’s flagrantly sentimental relations with Moran, their attempts for another child, his indifference to her sickness, the pleasure the Murphys brought them and her cascading into the twin worlds of art and ballet. She conjured up their life of too many parties, too many people, too much noise, too little sanity. In this rush through the years she paused at the problem with Ernest, then at the counter-problem with Dolly, and concluded:

  I have just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other. When I came to you twice last winter and asked you to start over it was because I thought I was becoming seriously involved sentimentally and preparing situations for which I was morally and practi cly unfitted … I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth.33

  Scott struck back with a seven-page memo called ‘Written With Zelda Gone To The Clinique’, which he may not have sent but which he kept for posterity. In it he tried to account for the interconnected collapse of his career and destruction of their joy. He revisited Capri, then Paris when he was a success, ‘the biggest man in my profession everybody admired me’. He was proud of his friendships with the Murphys and Ernest, then deflated by the penalties of constant drinking. He pondered the ‘time of misery’ when he dragged The Great Gatsby out of the pit of his stomach, and described how he woke up in Hollywood, ‘no longer my egotistic, certain self but a mixture of Ernest in fine clothes and Gerald with a career…. Anybody that could make me believe that, like Lois Moran did, was precious to me.’ On reaching Ellerslie he was prepared to do anything to be liked, to make up from without for being undernourished from within. At rue Vaugirard when he needed reassurance that he
was a great man of the world, Zelda had retreated. He felt exploited, not by her ‘but by something I resented terribly no happiness’. He remembered wondering why he kept working to pay the bills for his desolate menage. Worst of all, his novel was like a dream, further and further away. On the Riviera Gerald and Sara cooled towards him, Ernest became irritable, he drank to stave off his feelings of inferiority and Zelda had emotionally disappeared. ‘I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost meglomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered.’34

  Yet even now the Fitzgeralds were offering presentations to each other, some glib, some fanciful, many as honest as they could manage. Their tearing need was to explain themselves to one another.

  In July Zelda reproached him for failing to guide her prior to her illness: ‘… the obligation is, after all, with the people who understand, and the blind, of necessity, must be led’. As one of the blind, she felt ‘it is not astonishing that I should look on you with unfriendly eyes’.35

  Scott took the point. And the letter. It reappeared in Tender Is The Night as a letter from Nicole: ‘I kept waiting for some one to tell me. It was the duty of some one who understood. The blind must be led.’36

  At that stage Zelda did not know that her husband was still making literary use of her fractured life. She was busy looking for causes: ‘I have done nothing but turn over cause and effect in my mind … your presentation of the situation is poetic even if it has no bearing on the truth: your working to preserve the family and my working to get away from it.’ She felt he had given the ‘absolute minimum of effort both to your work and to our mutual welfare … I envy you the mental processes which can so distort conditions into a rectitude of attitude for you … so take whatever comfort you may find in whatever self-justification you can construct.’ Perhaps with conscious irony, she added: ‘This is not a treatise of recrimination, but I would like you to understand clearly why, there are certain scenes not only towards the end which could never be effaced from my mind.’37

  Scott felt a need both to defend himself yet also to accept responsibility for Zelda. What he failed to do was to accept any responsibility for the destructive effects on Zelda of his drinking. He also had to protect Scottie from the worst effects of her mother’s illness and support them as a family by endlessly writing saleable stories.

  He abhorred the psychiatrists’ investigation into the hidden places of their marital life and, as therapy revealed shaming aspects of their past, he found Zelda’s constant recriminations as unbearable as she found the reasons for them. Guilt and confusion left him tormented, which in turn made him vacillate between deep sympathy and profound irritation. Scott blamed Zelda for not taking responsibility for her own actions. He told Scottie that Zelda never felt a sense of guilt even when she put other people’s lives in jeopardy. She felt – according to Scott – that other people subjugated her or else situations beyond her control contrived against her. He felt Zelda ignored ordinary moral standards and tried to solve ethical problems independently. Years later he was still telling Scottie: ‘The insane are always mere guests on the earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.’38

  Zelda refused to feel guilty. ‘Please don’t write to me about blame. I am tired of rummaging my head to understand a situation that would be difficult enough if I were completely lucid. I cannot arbitrarily accept blame now when I know that in the past I felt none. Anyway blame doesn’t matter.’39

  But despite her brave words, Zelda did blame Scott for the months he had spent drinking and ignoring her. They were squabbling like children. A deep weariness overcame them. Zelda managed to lift herself from depression to resignation:

  Anyhow, none of those things matter. I quite realize that you have done the best you can and I would like you to realize that so have I, in all the disorder. I do not know what is going to happen, but since I am in the hands of Doctor Forel and they are a great deal more powerful than yours or mine, it will probably be for the best. I want to work at something, but I can’t seem to get well enough to be of any use in the world … Please send me Egorova’s letter – Zelda.40

  When Zelda read Egorova’s verdict she was devastated. She had been confident she could achieve distinction of the first rank. Her professional ballet career was over.

  Notes

  1 ZSF to FSF, c. late Aug. 1930 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 42, Folder 58, PUL.

  2 FSF to ZSF, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 198.

  3 FSF to Dr Oscar Forel, summer? 1930, Life in Letters, p. 196.

  4 Forel, psychiatric report on Zelda’s temperament, 15 Sep. 1931. Original French, translated by Marion Callen in conjunction with the author. CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  5 Psychiatric evaluation, patient’s temperament before marriage, Craig House medical records, ibid., PUL.

  6 ZSF to FSF, summer 1930 (author suggests late June), CO187, Box 42, Folder 64, PUL. Zelda began to alternate between three different states. The first one was of quiet depression in which she still had hopes on recovery for her future career; the second wild hysteria in which she blamed other people for her breakdown; the third less hysterical but her problems seemed insoluble and her only wish was to die.

  7 Forel, psychiatric report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  8 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 153. Several studies in Europe and North America show the illness runs in families and the concordance rate is higher in identical than non-identical twins. It has also been established since the 1950s that two drugs often used to increase the release of brain dopamine (amphetamines and levodopa) may worsen schizophrenia. Amphetamines have been known to produce in previously healthy volunteers a condition that is indistinguishable from acute paranoid schizophrenia. Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard L. Gregory with the assistance of O. L. Zangwill, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 698–9.

  9 Janie Wall to the author, Montgomery, 1999.

  10 Forel, psychiatric report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  11 At the time of Zelda’s birth, psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin had suggested that most forms of insanity were manifestations of two major disorders: dementia praecox and manic depressive insanity. Bleuler expanded and renamed Kraepelin’s dementia praecox.

  12 Forel, psychiatric report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  13 Psychiatric evaluation: patient’s temperament before marriage, ibid.

  14 Generally schizophrenic patients retain intelligence and memory but their personality as a whole seems affected. In 1930 environmental and emotional factors, which today play a large part in understanding schizophrenia, were seen as less significant. Because the causes of schizophrenia, despite extensive research, remain elusive, in more recent years the syndrome has engendered alternative theories. Psychiatrist R. D. Laing saw it as a rational response to an insane world and located it within the family; to many post-1960s sociologists it was merely a convenient label used by society to control troublesome deviants; and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in the late 1970s came up with the groundbreaking notion that the illness simply didn’t exist. There could have been useful elements for Zelda’s case in some of these theories had they been available.

  15 Forel, psychiatric report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL.

  16 FSF, Five Year Consultation Record (from middle of 7th year of marriage), Craig House Medical Records, ibid., PUL. FSF wrote this assessment of Zelda’s state to help the doctors who also wrote an assessment of Zelda’s state. Although Forel had not allowed Scott to send Zelda a story she had started in Valmont on the grounds that she was too ill to concentrate, Zelda actually began to write a ballet libretto.

  17 ZSF to FSF, c. Sep. (author’s dating) 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 67, PUL.

  18 FSF to Ober, received 13 May 1930, Lilly Library; to Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, June 1930, Life in Letters, pp. 183, 184.
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  19 Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 48.

  20 Mrs Sayre to FSF, 14 and 16 July 1930, CO187, Box 53, PUL.

  21 Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 45.

  22 FSF, Tender, 1986, pp. 202, 203.

  23 ZSF to FSF, 1930 (author’s dating on grounds of internal evidence), CO187, Box 43, Folder 4, PUL.

  24 Forel, psychiatric report, 15 Sep. 1931, CO745, Box 1, Folder 2, PUL. Scott had written to his mother: ‘Zelda’s recovery is slow. Now she has terrible ecxema – one of those mild but terrible diseases that don’t worry relations but are a living hell for the patient. If all goes well … we will be home by Thanksgiving.’ But they were not. FSF to Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, June 1930, Life in Letters, p. 184.

  25 ZSF to FSF, summer 1930, CO187, Box 42, Folder 55, PUL.

  26 ZSF to FSF, n.d. 1920, CO187, Box 42, Folder 32, PUL.

  27 The Sunday of the week before 23 June 1930.

  28 FSF, Tender, pp. 200, 201.

  29 The formula for inducing lengthy narcosis was Cloetta’s Mixture. This contained chloral hydrate, alcohol, digitalin, amylene hydrate, paraldehyde, barbituric acid and ephedrine hydrochloride. The mixture was diluted with water.

  30 ZSF to FSF, n.d., c. June 1930, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 449.