Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Scott’s ill-health, alcoholism and waning confidence heightened his desperation. He boasted to Rennie that Zelda did not understand concepts of human justice or morality that professional writers use. ‘Hers is just automatic writing.’ To Zelda he said: ‘You have one power. You can ruin us. To make us or help us, you have not got that power. I am the only person in the world that can make us. And I can share with you the honor and the glory that I make, and the money.’

  That, said Zelda courteously, is not what I want. She wanted to live by her writing, not least because Scott had reproached her all year for draining his resources. ‘When you have that thrown in your face constantly, day after day, naturally there is some impetus to try to do something about it.’ She determined to write about her asylum experiences because they had consumed her. It was what she knew about. Scott, boiling like a cauldron, shouted: ‘She does not know anything about it. I have a dozen books on psychiatry.’ Zelda appealed to the moderator. ‘Dr Rennie, it is what I want to write. It is a very emotional novel, and that is the whole purpose of the thing, and the reason for it … I had to lay it there because I never had the material for laying it any place else.’

  Scott could not contain himself. ‘So you are taking my material, is that right?’

  ‘Is that your material?’ Zelda asked. The asylums? The madness? The terrors? Were they yours? Funny, she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Everything we have done is mine. If we make a trip … and you and I go around – I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.’

  Rennie did not make a good job of impartiality. There could be no more secrecy on Zelda’s part. No more attempts at independence. No more dabbling with psychiatric material. ‘If in the future you attempt to bring out a novel, it ought to go through his [Scott’s] hands.’ How, he asked her, did she rate herself in comparison with Scott? ‘I do not rate myself as anything compared to him, Dr Rennie, but I certainly want to write.’ Rennie replied: ‘If you believe that, you have got to grant him the first opportunity.’ ‘I have never argued about it,’ said Zelda. ‘That is what I cannot understand, why he is making such a stew about it. If I can write the story at all I want to write it as a story of defeat … [but] I cannot get the thing in print if he does not want it published.’

  Scott could not stand her repeated use of the first person. ‘Can’t you stop your “I”s? Who are you? You are a person of six or seven different parts. Now, why don’t you integrate yourself? … you [have] let yourself become such a mess.’

  Zelda burst out: ‘Listen, Scott, I am so God damned sick of your abuse that honestly I don’t know what I will do … It is terrible. One reason why I have to do things behind your back is because you are so absolutely unjust and abusive and unfair, that to go to you and ask you anything would be like pulling a thunderbolt down on my head.’

  As the terms of this marital contest became increasingly embittered, the state of Zelda’s mental health became increasingly endangered. Scott suffered blows to his ego while Zelda’s fragile identity was further stripped.

  ‘What is your life now?’ Scott asked her. ‘Are you a dead person?’ Without a pause she said: ‘I suppose I am. I would rather be dead.’ She reminded him that the previous fall he had said she’d ruined his life. ‘You were drunk … you did not love me and you were sick of me and wished you could get away … that is the kind of life I am expected to live with you, and make whatever adjustment I can … It is impossible to live with you. I would rather be in an insane asylum, where you would like to put me.’ She told Rennie that Scott’s drinking was the root of their troubles. To Scott she said: ‘You are a rotten neurasthenic about two-thirds of the time … I may be crazy, but … I certainly am sane to more people than you.’ Scott refuted the accusation by saying their child didn’t think Zelda was sane. Zelda was bitter. ‘You said to that child, twelve years old, “Your mother is crazy, and you are bad, and I wish I was dead, and I may kill myself.”’ Zelda insisted she had been close to Scottie in Paris, but after Scott had described her as crazy she could not make the child do anything she wanted.

  Scott was keener to battle out their literary problems than to argue about parenthood. ‘I am asking her to give up the idea of writing on nervous energy … she should not write more than two hours a day … she should not take any long work … She should not attempt anything bigger than her strength. Who is the judge of what is bigger than her strength but me, who has to live here and see it.’ Rennie suggested Zelda put aside her novel. ‘Dr. Rennie, I am perfectly willing to put aside the novel, but I will not have any agreements or arrangements because I will not submit to Scott’s neurasthenic condition, and be subjected to these tortures … I cannot live in this kind of world. And I would rather live in an insane asylum. That is my ultimatum.’ Zelda claimed the right to go to an asylum because she would rather live anywhere on earth than the way she was living now. Then surprisingly, Scott revealed: ‘I was told by the doctors they did not want you to go into an asylum because you were not insane … Sometimes I am inclined to think you do these things because you are psychotic, and other times … because you are just wicked. But I know that the woman that hates her child and does things behind her husband’s back is either crazy or a criminal … Either you are sick … or you are responsible.’

  Zelda said she was responsible. If that was so, Scott said, if she was interested in the future then there were two choices: ‘here are the alternatives, either you be committed to a sanitarium, which is a scandal, a trouble and an expense, or you do differently.’

  The threat of committal was real yet, only ten pages earlier in the transcript, Scott had admitted the doctors did not believe she was insane. Her first sane task, said Scott, was to be kinder to him. ‘I have tried to be kind to you.’ she said, ‘and you have mistreated me continuously. There has not been one day since I have been in this house that you have not done something unpleasant to me.’ ‘I have supported you,’ he repeated like a robot. ‘Yes, you have supported me, and you have been reproaching me for that,’ Zelda retorted in the same mechanical manner. ‘Don’t you think,’ Scott asked, ‘that a woman’s place is with the man who supports her, that her duty is to the man who supports her? … I would like you to think of my interests. That is your primary concern, because I am the one to steer the course, and the pilot … I am just the captain of this ship, and as long as you watch with the captain the ship goes, and as soon as you stab the captain in the back the ship goes down, and you go down with it.’

  It was an issue they would never resolve. She too needed him to be different. He should either finance her with good grace or cease to do so. Neither were options Scott could countenance. He tried another tack. Until recently, he suggested, ‘Our sexual relations were very pleasant’. Ironically Zelda retorted, ‘I am glad you considered them satisfactory.’

  ‘You did not?’

  ‘No.’

  The possibility that he might have been a poor lover provoked another outburst.

  ‘When did you cease to enjoy them? You did not act as if you did not. Oh, you are lying … It is just like talking to a circus clown … What the hell, you can’t live without some kind of sexual life. At least I can not, and you can not.’

  ‘Well, I can very well.’

  She asked him if it meant anything to him that her life had been so miserable that she would rather be in an asylum. ‘It does not mean a blessed thing,’ he said curtly.

  Shocked, she said: ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘I want you to stop writing fiction … Whether you write or not does not seem to be of any great importance.’

  ‘I know, nothing I do seems to be of any great importance.’

  ‘Why don’t you drop it then?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to live with you. Because I want to live some place that I can be my own self.’

  ‘Would you go to law about it?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Yes
, I would … I am quite sure that I can not live with a person to whom neither my well-being or anything else makes the slightest bit of difference, and who has told me repeatedly that you don’t care anything about me, in spite of any efforts I have made to reestablish whatever little affection there was between us before.’ After a few minutes she said: ‘I think honestly the only thing is to get a divorce, because there is nothing except ill-will on your part and suspicion.’

  Zelda pointed out sadly that though she preferred an institutional life to one with him, they both knew she wouldn’t be able to write in an asylum.

  Dr Rennie intervened to suggest Scott only became aggressive when drunk. When Zelda wearily reminded him Scott was always drunk, Rennie said: ‘You have to discount that when he is drunk.’ Scott admitted that he was awfully sick of drinking, but ‘if I ever stopped drinking, her family and herself would always think there was an acknowledgment that I was responsible for her insanity, which is not so … I would rather die fighting until that selfish egotism comes out of her … Zelda is a selfish egotist.’

  Zelda suggested they put all their disagreements aside until he had finished his novel, after which they could institute a formal arrangement. Dr Rennie was pleased but surprised: ‘That means a complete abnegation of yourself, until this paramount thing is over. … You are willing to do that?’ She said she was. Rennie suggested she confine herself to a play until Tender was finished. But this still wasn’t enough for Scott. ‘It has got to be unconditional surrender on her part … Otherwise, I would rather go to law, because I don’t trust her … it is necessary for her to give up the idea of writing anything … she must only write when under competent medical assistance I say that she can write … it is the only way I can ever organize my life again.’

  Rennie asked Zelda which was paramount in her life: to create or to be married? There was a lapse of over a minute during which no one spoke. Then Zelda said: ‘I want to write, and I am going to write; I am going to be a writer, but I am not going to do it at Scott’s expense if I can possibly avoid it, so I agree not to do anything that he does not want, a complete negation of myself, until that book is out of the way, because the thing is driving me crazy … if he can not adjust it, and let me do what I want to do, and live with me after that, I would rather do what I want to do. I am really sorry.’

  Both Scott and Rennie constantly belittled Zelda’s ambitions, using the word negatively when applied to her writing, positively when applied to Scott’s. His literary ambitions were reasonable or good, Zelda’s insane or aggressive. Rennie told Zelda that if she could not write masterpieces then her ambitions would continue to depress her. ‘I will always be unhappy, then,’ she said, adding, ‘I was a good deal more unhappy when I did not want to write.’

  She tried to explain her motives. ‘I have always felt some necessity for us to be on a more equal footing … because I cannot possibly … live in a world that is completely dependent on Scott … I don’t want to be dependent just in every way … I just don’t want to be dependent on him.’ When Rennie inquired if she meant financial dependence Zelda, thoroughly exasperated, acknowledged that it was the great humiliation of her life that she couldn’t support herself but reiterated that she needed independence in every way. ‘I want to be able to say, when he says something that is not so, then I want to do something so good, that I can say, “That is a God damned lie” and have something to back it up.’

  Scott interrupted: ‘Now, we have found rock bottom.’ Rennie agreed. Zelda pressed on, telling them it was better to shut herself up in an institution than take Scott’s judgement on everything. She was determined to be a functioning unit with her own stamina and ability. ‘I don’t want to be a complementary intelligence.’ Scott, who had suggested that might suit her, said the discussion had been reduced to its fundamentals. ‘It is the simple issue of the wholly Amazonian and the Lesbian personality, when she expresses it that way.’

  Miserably they returned to the subject of their marriage, holding painfully different versions. Zelda saw it as hollow. ‘It has been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember.’ Scott refuted it. ‘We were about the most envied couple in about 1921, in America.’ Zelda with bitter accuracy said: ‘We were awfully good showmen.’ The years had brought her one certainty: ‘I can not live under the conditions we are living under.’

  Scott, however, had not finished with her. He had more conditions to impose. ‘If you write a play, it can not be a play about psychiatry, and it can not be a play laid on the Riviera, and it can not be a play laid in Switzerland; and whatever the idea is, it will have to be submitted to me.’

  What they were left with was nothing less than a battle for survival. If Scott came out as victor, Zelda could sink back into a delusionary state. If Zelda won back her sanity through fiction that used their joint raw material Scott, suffering delusions himself, feared his creative source would be cut off. ‘I am just fighting for my life,’ he confessed. ‘I want my own way. I earned the right to my own way.’ Zelda, too, demanded the right to her own way. ‘[Y]ou cannot have it without breaking me,’ Scott told her ‘… I have to sacrifice myself for you and you have got to sacrifice yourself for me, and no more writing of fiction.’

  ‘Sacrifice’ was one of three key words Scott used repetitively. He had sacrificed himself financially, she should sacrifice her spirit and talent. ‘Egotistic’ was the second word which Scott applied detrimentally to Zelda, but productively to himself. The third word, ‘logic’, held the most significance. In his view Zelda was incapable of logic, she could not follow an argument. Those differences in their speech and thought patterns echoed differences in their writing. Scott’s syntax and language was linear, logical, formal and shaped. Zelda’s was enigmatic, associative, fragmentary and modernist. Because Scott prioritized the linear as aesthetically superior it is no surprise that he failed to see the merits in Zelda’s writing.

  After the line about ‘sacrifice’, Zelda seemed too strained to fight any longer. ‘Scott, you can go on and have your way about this thing and do anything until you finish the book. And when you finish the book I think we better get a divorce, and any decision you choose to make with regard to me is all right, because I can not live on those terms, and I can not accept them.’

  Despite Rennie’s view that nothing more could be achieved, Zelda made two further points. After the publication of Tender, she would no longer countenance Scott reserving the right to dictate the entire terms and attitude towards life for them both. She would make her own ‘honest attack’ on life.

  ‘I cannot give up the way I think,’ she said. ‘That is the one thing he wants me to give up.’

  Her second point refocused their central issue. ‘I have a feeling for prose, and I have something to say … I am perfectly sure I can write, and he knows that, too, or he would not be raising so much hell about it.’

  Scott, apoplectic, had the last line: ‘Well, that is all, you need not write any more.’

  *

  Several features stand out in this transcript. Scott set the frame of the discussion which made it hard for Zelda to bring up new material. Scott used a patronizing tone throughout, as if Zelda were his child: for instance, he often called Zelda’s novel ‘the thing’ or ‘that thing’. (Rennie and even Zelda followed his use of the word.) As ‘things’ are worthless, Scott’s novel was never called a thing. Scott’s own vehement display of insecurity, both extraordinary and unnecessary, illustrated how threatening Zelda’s writing was to him.

  Though Scott’s identity was intricately tied into ‘being himself’, he was opposed to any suggestion that Zelda might create her own identity. That placed him in a strange position from which he railed against Zelda for being ‘irresponsible’ yet refused to allow her to undertake certain responsibilities.

  Zelda’s biggest challenge was that she had bought into the notion of Scott as professional genius and herself as gifted amateur.12 Against that context she had to set her own needs
. According to Scott’s theory any unacceptable behaviour on his part could be excused in the cause of his art, which allowed him to operate a double standard.

  Though Zelda resisted Scott’s assumption that his earnings gave him rights of control over her health and her writing, at no point did Rennie support her, or even remain neutral. Rennie’s acquiescence to Scott’s view that all the psychiatric material belonged to him was not merely outrageous in literary terms but could have been dangerous to Zelda, his patient. Though Rennie and Meyer agreed that Scott’s alcoholism endangered Zelda’s health, when she called into question not only his obsessional drinking but his sanity, again she received no medical backing.

  Throughout the conference, both Scott and Rennie saw Zelda as competing artistically with Scott. Zelda believed she was doing something for herself. To some extent their disagreement lay in prevailing cultural notions that married women doing something artistic for themselves might be seen as infringing on male-owned territory.

  What were the consequences of this three-way conference?

  For the first time Scott seriously considered divorce. He consulted a Baltimore lawyer, his former Princeton friend Edgar Allan Poe Jnr.13 Poe assured him that if he resided in Nevada state for six weeks he could speedily gain a divorce. Scott decided against it and continued to live on the battlefield that had become their marital terrain.14

  Zelda instigated something more dramatic. A few days after the conference, she systematically burnt her old clothes in an upstairs fireplace at La Paix.15 While she returned to her typewriter to revise Scandalabra (finally to be produced locally the following week), the fire spread swiftly through the house. Several top-floor rooms were ruined. Many of Scott’s valuable books and manuscripts were damaged, many of Zelda’s paintings were destroyed. The local newspaper, unaware of the conflict preceding the fire, ran a romantic story. ‘Mr Fitzgerald dashed to save his wife’s manuscripts and paintings, while her first thought was for his manuscript. After leading their eleven year old daughter, Frances, to safety, the couple carried out several valuable pieces of furniture.’ Scott discreetly told reporters faulty wiring had short-circuited the system and caused the ‘accident’. News photographs show the Fitzgeralds on the lawn surrounded by books and furniture saved from the blaze, looking brave.16