Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  She snuggled into a small world with Scottie and her family, telling Scott they were not afraid, but felt so lonely without him they seemed like wet paper dolls. In Prangins during the summer Zelda had drawn and painted more paper dolls of the Fitzgerald family, giving Scott ‘doggy green socks’ to match his eyes.38 Now she closely observed her child’s similarities to Scott. She told him that Scottie had a ‘coating of moon-light for a skin and I watch her and think of you’.39

  Scott sent news of Hollywood stars. Zelda did not want to hear about them. She wanted Scott in Montgomery. She wanted ‘for us to have a son and lots of vital things we own’. After a shopping trip with Scottie when they saw some ‘sweet baby dolls’, she instantly wrote: ‘Deo, we really do need a baby.’

  Suddenly ominous symptoms recurred. Zelda suffered bad insomnia, then renewed asthma attacks. Against Scott’s advice she decided to go to Florida to escape the damp, finally compromising by taking along a trained nurse.

  On her return, slightly better, ‘Miss Ella’ was published in December. Montgomery residents read it enthusiastically. ‘My story made quite a sensation. People seem to like it,’ she wrote Scott. Though she had sent a copy to Dr Forel ‘from sheer vanity’, she added self-deprecatingly: ‘I do not dare read the story. Knowing it is not first rate, I don’t want to be discouraged – I wish you could teach me to write.’ Dick Knight, Scott’s bête noire who constantly charmed Zelda, sent her a wildly appreciative telegram. Though she lost the cable she paraphrased its contents for Scott: ‘“Am moanin’ low over your story. You are the swellest short-story writer living as I have just found out from Scribner –” words to that effect – I was very tickled about the story, naturally.’40

  One of her survival techniques after her father’s death was to prepare a Christmas surprise for Scottie. The huge historical panorama that greeted her daughter made it a Christmas she never forgot: ‘Weeks before Christmas the sun porch of our house was shut off. When it was opened on Christmas Eve the tree stood in the center of the room and around it my mother had constructed the whole history of mankind, with a little electric train that started its journey in Egypt and went on to Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the War of the Roses.’41

  Scott returned for Christmas. His screenplay had not been used.42 Apart from making an exhibition of himself at one of Thalberg’s parties where he sang a foolish sophomore song about a dog, he had behaved well and had not been fired as he later claimed. Never one to waste a degrading experience, he turned his doggerel behaviour into the central episode of an excellent story, ‘Crazy Sunday’, about the marital problems of a Hollywood movie director. It was published by Mencken in American Mercury in 1932.43

  Scott had earned $6,000 which he hoped would buy him time to work on the novel. By the end of 1931 he had sold nine stories, but the Post complained to Ober they were not up to Fitzgerald’s usual standard.44 Scott immersed himself in what was now a painful novel focusing on Dick and Nicole Diver’s troubled marriage, the apparently charmed life of the rich on the Riviera and Swiss psychiatric sanatoriums. He utilized every scrap of what he had learnt about Zelda’s mental breakdowns, remorselessly pilfering her letters, her fears, her punishments. Her madness became his new material. It was, and is, of course not unusual for writers to exploit family and friendship sources for their fictions. However, what is reprehensible is Scott’s high disregard for Zelda’s mental frailty or the possible psychological consequences.

  Scott’s Ledger recorded the arrival of Rosalind after Zelda’s asthma worsened and he had decided to take his wife first on a trip to the Gulf Coast, and from there to the empty Don Ce-Sar hotel in St Petersburg, Florida. She was still writing her novel, while Scott worked what he saw as Zelda’s madness into his new version of Tender. His habit was to read material aloud to Zelda, and Zelda would have heard and read that version in Montgomery as well as in Florida. It was one thing to have your husband turn you into a flapper, quite another to have him display your mental illness as the raison d’être of his main female character. Zelda’s shock and consequent emotions can only be surmised, as we have no evidence of any conversation between Zelda and Scott about this appropriation of the most vulnerable part of her life. What we do know is that the Fitzgeralds had a violent conflict, that soon after their arrival in Florida in January 1932 a spot of eczema appeared on Zelda’s neck, that another spot appeared, that she was terrified. She was away from her family, there were no other witnesses to the events that followed. Scott reported that on their way back to Montgomery she drank the contents of his flask, that she believed terrible things were being done to her with his knowledge, that she insisted on being hospitalized.

  Scott informed Forel, who suggested readmitting Zelda to Prangins which was out of the question. Forel then recommended Dr Adolf Meyer of Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, another leading authority on schizophrenia.45 Scared that Zelda would again turn against him, Scott hurried her in to Phipps. On 12 February 1932, only five months after her release from Prangins, Zelda started her second breakdown in her fourth clinic.

  Scott did not get on with Meyer, a man of distinguished appearance, heavy moustache and white goatee beard, who refused to treat him as co-consultant and who implicated him in Zelda’s breakdown by diagnosing it as a folie à deux, a dual case. Dr Meyer infuriated Scott by insisting he should submit to psychoanalysis. Scott, who resisted any such treatment by asserting psychotherapy would ruin his creativity, returned to Montgomery. He spent the winter with Scottie, teaching her chess and reading her Great Expectations.

  Zelda also found Dr Meyer’s heavy Germanic ruminations distinctly off-putting but established a close relationship with her first woman doctor, Mildred Squires. Squires, trained at Pennsylvania Medical School, thirty years younger than Meyer and only four years older than Zelda, admired her talent and found her easy to talk to as long as they did not discuss the patient’s medical problems. Zelda resolutely refused to talk about her illness. Though she still smiled uncontrollably, she slept well, and was comfortable with the routine, which allowed her two hours a day to write and paint as part of her therapy. It is of considerable significance that this medical endorsement and validation of Zelda’s two arts led to a particularly intense period of creativity from 1932 to 1934. In Phipps Zelda achieved a novel, a play and a great many paintings.

  She read numerous theoretical art books, and began to employ a variety of visual styles. Hungry for experiment, her artistic aesthetic became increasingly more sophisticated. ‘When I was nineteen,’ she told a Baltimore news reporter, ‘I thought Botticelli was unbeautiful because the women in the Primavera did not look like the girls in the Follies. But now I don’t expect Ann Pennington to hold the same charm for me as a Matisse odalisque.’46

  Her artistic development was stimulated by art therapy with Dr Frederick Wertham, a special consultant on Zelda’s case. Eleven paintings attributed to Zelda were acquired by Wertham in the two years he worked with Zelda.47 Wertham had developed the mosaic test, in which patients assembled small multicoloured wooden pieces into free-form patterns from which psychiatrists could evaluate patients’ ego organizations. Zelda utilized Wertham’s diagnostic techniques in her watercolours.48 The constant exposure to unorthodox colour patterning enabled her to explore colour properties in her compositions, as she did in two watercolours over graphite, Rams and Le Sport. Both display an unusual use of colour in the background. Rams depicts two rams placed against a dazzling multicoloured patchwork like a rainbow jigsaw, the background shades so hectic that they overwhelm the central image. In the more muted Le Sport, areas of background colour fuse into one another around tennis rackets and golf clubs battling for priority. Zelda leaves a clear white space round the central figure, a sportsman with typically large curling fingers and feet. The curious element in these paintings is that unlike her previous emotionally expressive, thickly painted canvases these are linear, even in some cases minimalist. Their sharp lines encouraged Scott to suggest s
he might consider a career as a commercial artist.49

  But while Zelda was purposefully increasing her painting skills, in terms of a career she was still bent on writing. Mildred Squires’ active encouragement led Zelda to feel for the first time appreciated as an artist. It is hardly surprising that eventually she dedicated Save Me The Waltz to Squires.50

  Zelda wrote to Scott that she loved and was lonely for him, that she felt there was ‘nothing so sordid as being shut up’, but that she was reading contemporary French painting texts and particularly admired flower painters who could make blossoms seem malevolent like the hallucinations of the dead.51 She did not mention her novel.

  Scott, who communicated regularly with the clinic, learnt she was writing at an enviable speed. Zelda asked Dr Squires to read a section of her novel, after which Squires wrote to Scott describing it as vivid and charming, though it occasionally broke off abruptly. Squires found the style similar to ‘Miss Ella’ and believed once Zelda revised her draft it would be excellent. By 2 March Squires reported Zelda’s anxiety had decreased, her second chapter was finished, success was predicted. Nearing completion, Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘I am proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it – It is distinctly Ecole Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours … Being unable … to avoid the reiterant “said” I have emphasized it a la Ernest much to my sorrow. He is a very determined writer, but I shall also die with my boots on.’52

  Scott, sadly, had removed his own boots, halted his work on Tender and when the lease on the Montgomery house expired, trudged to Baltimore to find new accommodation nearer to Zelda. His Ledger reveals: ‘depression … Scotty and her friends, becomes a racket … Rosalind still there … Scotty sick, me sick, Mrs Sayre playing the fool … everything worser and worser.’53

  He had, however, become curiouser and curiouser about Zelda’s novel. On 8 March he wrote authoritatively to Squires that Zelda was not a ‘“natural story-teller” in the sense that I am, and unless a story comes to her fully developed and crying to be told she’s liable to flounder around rather unsuccessfully among problems of construction.’ But Zelda was not floundering around unsuccessfully. To Scott’s amazement, Squires wrote back on 9 March that Zelda had just completed her fiction.

  Zelda did not mail her manuscript to Scott for advice or guidance. Instead she sent it at once, deceiving the hospital by switching addresses, to Max Perkins. It arrived at Scribner’s with this note: ‘Scott, being absorbed in his own [novel], has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits, but naturally, terribly anxious that you should like it … As soon as I hear that you have safely received the copy, I want to mail the ms to Scott, so could you wire?’54

  Zelda wrote to Scott that she was sure Scribner’s would reject it, but still she held back the manuscript. Then a trifle apprehensively she posted it. How right she was to have apprehensions.

  When Scott finally received it on 14 March his rage was boundless.

  Notes

  1 Mrs George Mark Wood, Montgomery, Alabama.

  2 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 166.

  3 Mark Cross Company assets were $2,000,000. Their sister Anna was already provided for. The mistress was Lillian Ramsgate.

  4 ZSF to Mayfield, Exiles, p. 173.

  5 Ibid., p. 174.

  6 ZSF to FSF, early Nov. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 31, PUL.

  7 Her sister Marjorie’s daughter.

  8 She later amalgamated these into one tale.

  9 ZSF to FSF, early Nov. 1931 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 43, Folder 47, PUL.

  10 ZSF to FSF, late Nov./early Dec. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 43, PUL.

  11 ZSF to FSF, c. 13 Nov. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 49, PUL.

  12 Only in Ober’s note does ‘Downs’ have no apostrophe; where it occurs elsewhere it has one. The story was rejected by Harper’s Bazaar, College Humor and The Delineator.

  13 Ober’s memos on ‘Cotton Belt’ and ‘One And, Two And’ were dated 1932. Ober received some stories in 1931, some in 1932. Some had been written at Prangins and rewritten after Zelda left there.

  14 Zelda reported this in a letter to FSF, fall 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 64, PUL.

  15 All the above quotations are from Zelda’s letters to FSF, fall 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folders 37, 28, 25, 26, 43, 42, PUL. ‘Nuts’ may have been started or almost fully written in Prangins as Perkins was sent it by mid-Oct. 1931.

  16 MP to FSF, 21 Oct. 1931, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 172.

  17 W. R. Anderson said the story ‘displayed Mrs Fitzgerald’s mastery of irony as a device for control’, ‘Rivalry and Partnership: The Short Fiction of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1977, ed. Margaret M. Duggan and Richard Layman. A Bruccoli Clark Book, Gale Research Co., Book Tower, Detroit, Michigan, USA, p. 38. Bruccoli said it was ‘Zelda Fitzgerald’s best effort … closer to a real story than any of the others’, Preface, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Bits of Paradise, ed. Bruccoli, p. 17. Milford said in this story ‘Zelda was in control of her talent’, Zelda, p. 194.

  18 James Gray, ‘St Paul Family of Writers Have Almost Scribner’s Monopoly’, St Paul Dispatch, no date, clipping in Zelda’s album, CO183, Box 2, Folder 6, PUL.

  19 ZSF, ‘A Couple of Nuts’, Scribner’s Magazine, Aug. 1932, pp. 80, 82, 84.

  20 ZSF, ‘Miss Ella’, Collected Writings, pp. 345, 348, 343.

  21 Zelda’s use of this idea and setting is highly reminiscent of Faulkner; his setting for his Sartoris novels is called Jefferson, Zelda calls her Southern setting Jeffersonville. Quentin Compson first appears in Faulkner’s 1929 Sartoris, the start of a series describing decline of the Compson and Sartoris families who like Zelda’s Miss Ella’s family represented the Old South. Faulkner’s 1929 The Sound and the Fury, which illustrates the decline of the South through Benjy Compson’s eyes, has a similar context and Southern philosophy to Zelda’s work.

  22 MP to FSF, 12 Nov. 1930, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 170. Zelda’s original name for Miss Ella was Miss Bessie.

  23 Ibid.

  24 ZSF to Ober, 21 Dec. 1931.

  25 ZSF to FSF, fall 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 27, PUL.

  26 ZSF to FSF, c. fall 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 25, PUL.

  27 ZSF to FSF, c. 25 Nov. 1931 (author’s dating), co187, Box 43, Folder 59, PUL.

  28 Her play was an untitled one-act play for children, ZSF to FSF, Nov. 1931, co187, Box 43, Folder 42, PUL.

  29 ZSF to FSF, c. Nov./Dec. 1931, co187, Box 43, Folder 47, PUL.

  30 Mayfield’s comment on this line of Scott’s was that from Zelda’s viewpoint it ‘was as far from truth as hypocrisy is from holiness’, Exiles, p. 181.

  31 Scott wrote from on board SS Olympic returning from his father’s funeral, Feb. 1931.

  32 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 165.

  33 ZSF to FSF, early Nov. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 35, PUL.

  34 ZSF to FSF, undated (author’s dating 19 Nov. 1931), CO187, Box 43, Folder 56, PUL.

  35 ZSF to FSF, c. 20 Nov. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 57, PUL.

  36 ZSF to Mayfield, Nov. 1931, Exiles, p. 176. She repeats this in Save Me The Waltz when her fictional Judge Beggs dies. ‘“He must have forgot,” Alabama said, “to leave the message”’ (Collected Writings, p. 188).

  37 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 177.

  38 ZSF to FSF, summer 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 12, PUL.

  39 ZSF to FSF, early Nov. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 35, PUL.

  40 ZSF to FSF. c. Dec. 1931, CO187, Box 43, Folder 24, PUL.

  41 Winzola McLendon, ‘Scott and Zelda’, Ladies Home Journal 91 (Nov. 1974), p. 62. Scott’s Christmas present initially was going to be a one-act play Zelda wrote for five of Scottie’s friends. She rented the Little Theatre, planned egg nog and cake for the twenty-strong proposed audience, and she’d sewn half the costumes. Then her father died and plans had to be abandoned.

  42 To his chagrin Anita Loos later wrote a script instead.


  43 In ‘Crazy Sunday’ Scott combined himself with screenwriter Dwight Taylor and exaggerated his humiliation at Thalberg’s party. The story was rejected by the Post as too sexually frank.

  44 The Post even rejected one called ‘Six of One’ which Ober sold to Redbook.

  45 Meyer, bom in Zurich, trained there as a neurologist/pathologist with Oscar Forel’s father Auguste. From 1892 in the USA Meyer worked as a pathologist at Kankakee Hospital, Illinois, taught at the University of Chicago and Clark University and worked at Worcester Hospital, Massachusetts. After a stint at the New York State Hospital he became director of Johns Hopkins Medical School and the esteemed dean of US psychiatry.

  46 Quoted in Carolyn Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 32.

  47 Wertham had come from Europe in 1922 to work with Dr Meyer. The eleven paintings of Zelda’s he acquired are now in the Frederick Wertham Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. How they came into Wertham’s possession is unclear.

  48 Shafer, To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 42.

  49 The Wertham paintings are undated and the authorship of some is disputed. The reason for the dispute is that larger La Paix canvases differ from the Wertham clinical drawings with their ambiguous subject matter and cleanly drawn outlines. That Scott suggested their suitability for commerce supports the Zelda-as-artist theory. A strong case can be made in favour of Zelda as artist of Rams and Le Sport, because Zelda worked closely with Wertham and was directly exposed to his mosaic test. Rams has a similar fantasy feel to her fairy-tale paintings and Le Sport has the characteristic elongated extremities.

  50 To express her appreciation Zelda also designed a Christmas card for Squires in black ink and white gouache on grey card. The card depicted a woman holding a lighted candle and wreath. On the card Zelda wrote ‘Mildred Squires wishes you A Merry Christmas’.