Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  In Prangins Zelda found it impossible to write to Scottie. As her sense of self wavered, who she was as a mother became unclear. It was as if the free expression of her devotion to Scottie had closed down. There was little information inside an asylum that made good reading for a child.

  In August Scottie made a four-day visit to Zelda. We cannot know which of them found it harder. They had little in common now, certainly no daily routines. Zelda’s parental role had virtually disappeared and Scottie’s anxiety to please made her behave unnaturally. Throughout the visit their pain was exacerbated by their awareness that soon they were again to be separated. Trying in her turn to please her daughter, Zelda wistfully urged Scottie to continue dancing. When she next visited New York she should go to Cappezio’s on 44th Street to find some dance shoes. Zelda herself would like a pair of ‘aesthete sandals size 5D’.36

  On 27 August 1930 Sara Haardt married H. L. Mencken, but Zelda was too ill even to pen a line to her friend. It was October before Scott could write: ‘Dear Menk and Sarah: Excuse these belated congratulations, which is simply due to illness. Zelda and I were delighted to know you were being married and devoured every clipping sent from home. Please be happy. Ever Your Friend Scott (and Zelda) Fitzgerald.’37

  In September Scott renewed his acquaintance with Thomas Wolfe, who would later use him in a novel.38 Scott, who had assured Forel he had given up other women for Zelda while still seeing Emily Vanderbilt,39 now started sleeping with Bijou O’Conor, whom he had met in the Twenties in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Born in Bulgaria in 1896, English granddaughter of the second Earl of Minto, she had been widowed at twenty-eight, but preferred a scandalous reputation to remarriage.40 Scott was attracted to this brilliant linguist whose reckless disposition, financial carelessness and independent spirit had the wildness of the young Zelda. Bijou, herself an alcoholic, led Scott into uncontrollable gin binges while he typed in her hotel room.41 Bijou claimed she and Scott visited Zelda in Prangins, which if true was potentially destructive, for if Zelda had suspected they were lovers it could have precipitated a further breakdown.42

  Fortunately in September came Zelda’s first breakthrough. Forel decided to treat the eczema by hypnosis. In her trance Zelda recognized connections between the rash and her marital conflicts. The eczema virtually disappeared the next day, to return only intermittently. Yet not much else changed. She was still depressed; she still had infatuations – another in October, with ‘the red headed girl’ as Scott called her (the second of the two redheads), who resisted. Scott thought Zelda’s ‘initial shame … and the consequent struggle’ caused a third attack of eczema. But when the eczema disappeared the infatuation continued. Scott recorded a second female infatuation in November which again did not produce eczema, but his appearances did.43 Confused, his pride hurt, he reported: ‘Eczema spasmodic. Lesbianism mild but constant – (they change the house of one girl after whom she tags, though now there are no more offences in that direction). Indifferent to husband. Appearance of unmotivated smile.’44

  Scott had told Rosalind about Zelda’s ‘lesbian complex’. Rosalind, who immediately expressed the Southern horror of homosexuality, remembered that when Tallulah’s lesbianism was mentioned at Ellerslie, her sister’s reaction had ‘made me think sex was preying on her mind’.45 Rosalind thought it safer to send Zelda helpful suggestions about treating eczema. ‘It’s almost gone now,’ Zelda replied, ‘and, unfortunately, never was the sort that Cuticura Soap could help. The Brussels fire brigade might have skirted the edges.’46

  But on 10 November another attack occurred and Forel, determined to discipline Zelda also for uncontrollable masturbating, moved her back to Eglantine. He told Scott they could not stop her wilful self-abuse unless she was locked up and observed. Scott’s princess was strait-jacketed by facial bandages for eczema and bound hands so she could not touch herself. This merited Scott’s terse line: ‘Short confinement for refractoriousness’.47 Forel, who found Zelda ‘sneaky’ because she tried hard to avoid discipline,48 wrote to Scott: ‘L’Eglantine is, from our point of view, a good thing … For too long your wife has taken advantage of our patience. For her health, for her treatment, L’Eglantine is indispensable, and I am happy, even, that the patient’s conduct should have obliged us to try this … she sees that there are limits and that she must give in’.49

  Zelda was administered insulin shock treatments which were continued for ten years.50 Substantial evidence shows that more female than male patients were given insulin in that period, as much to realign their behaviour as to act as a therapy.

  Zelda did not improve in Eglantine. Scott wrote to the Sayres: ‘Zelda was acting badly and had to be transferred again to the house … reserved for people under restraint.’51 He told them that dissatisfied with Zelda’s progress, he had suggested calling in either Dr Bleuler or Dr Jung, and Forel agreed.

  Scott decided on Paul Eugen Bleuler, born 1857,52 the psychiatrist who had named schizophrenia. Forel was keen on a second opinion because he had some hesitancy about his own diagnosis: ‘The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time: she is neither a pure neurosis (meaning psychogenic) nor a real psychosis – I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath – she may improve, never completely recover.’53

  Interviewed later, Dr Forel acknowledged that over the years he had changed his original assessment. He had ‘put aside’ the schizophrenic diagnosis because ‘apart from the clinical and classical forms … certain symptoms and behaviours or activities, are called schizoid and this does not mean that the person is schizophrenic.’54

  Dr Irving Pine, Zelda’s last psychiatrist, said he felt that Zelda had consistently been misdiagnosed. He disputed the label ‘schizophrenia’ and suggested that part of the failure of her psychiatrists was their failure to take her talents seriously. He believed much of her depression came from her family situation. As that accelerated, so did her depression. He and other doctors suggested that subsequently Zelda was treated for a psychosis, the treatment of which can cause patients to display some of the characteristics of schizophrenia when originally only severe depression was present. But by November 1930 Zelda was treading a path where she would become as much a victim of her treatment as of her illness.55

  As Forel had already labelled her a ‘difficult patient’ he was glad to discuss her case with Bleuler,56 who arrived on 22 November, charging Scott the exorbitant fee of $500.57 For that amount he would spend an afternoon with Zelda and the evening with Scott and Forel.

  Bleuler confirmed Forel’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. He said the homosexuality was not constitutional, but merely a symptom which would disappear with continued treatment. He reassured Scott that marital conflict was not a contributory cause of illness. He found Zelda’s emotional capacity impaired and advised against further dancing, since that ‘passion is also engendered by the illness; just as Mme Aegorowa was the first lesbian passion after the onset of the illness’.58

  Zelda was desperate to return to America but Bleuler forbade it. She must stay put, continue weaving, carpentry, and work in the greenhouses. She must rest but could make accompanied visits to shops, opera and theatre in Geneva and go skiing. He told Scott three out of four cases like Zelda’s could be discharged as cured. One of those would resume ‘perfect functioning’ in the world; two would be delicate and slightly eccentric through life; the fourth would hurtle into ‘total insanity’. To avoid that Zelda must submit to a master, who had to be a doctor. Scott asked if he should become more masterful but Bleuler replied: ‘It is possible that a cast-iron character would be propitious but Mrs Fitzgerald loved and married the artist in Mr Fitzgerald.’59

  Bleuler recommended Scott should not visit too often and Zelda should prepare presents for Scottie, write frequently but should not see her for several months as her child’s first visit had proved ‘her presence was undesirable’.60 Neither doctor looked for the motives behind that disastrous visit, nor took into account the distressing eff
ect separation would have on both mother and child.

  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.61 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.’62 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’.63

  Zelda thought Bleuler ‘a great imbecile’, and refused to accept any of his recommendations. However, her despair deepened.

  Dear Scott, You wrote you didn’t want me to suffer any more. Please please come here and see for yourself. I’m sick and beaten …. If there’s nobody in all this barren brothel who will look after me, I demand that I be allowed to go immediately to a hospital in France where there is enough human kindness to prevent the present slow butchery. Scott if you knew what this is like you would not dare in the eyes of God leave a person in it. Please help me.64

  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.’65

  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.’66 This incredible piece of self-awareness did not effect her release. She even wrote to Forel:

  please explain to me why I should spend five months of my life in sickness and suffering seeing nothing but optical illusions to devitalize something in me that you yourself have found indespensible and that my husband has found so agreeable as to neglect shamefully his wife during the last four years … if you do cure me what’s going to happen to all the bitterness and unhappiness in my heart – It seems to me a sort of castration, but since I am powerless I suppose I will have to submit, though I am neither young enough nor credulous enough to think that you can manufacture out of nothing something to replace the song I had.67

  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,68 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.69 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:

  Your card came with the pretty blowy lady on the back … when I don’t get mail from you the days seem awfully long and dreary … It seems ages and ages and ages that I haven’t seen you and I want dreadfully to be with you again and share your pleasures … What would you like Pere Noel to bring you? And are you going to have a tree like last time? Send me something from one of the branches to make you seem nearer, darling … I am awfully tired of the Swiss landscape and would like to be back in Paris with my baby girl.

  Fall again:

  Will your tiny apartment hold me for a little visit? Just a weekend, say, because if you can manage it I will slip away if I can get permission and come up and see you … With all the love in the heart of your Mummy.

  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.70 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.’71

  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.’72

  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.’73

  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.’74 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.75

  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.’76

  Scott hoped for an immediate letter of condolence from Ernest but initially nothing arrived. The Hemingways had bought a house in Key West77 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.’78 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.79

  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.’80 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’.81

  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.’82 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.’83