Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  It was a good story. A clever photo. As Zelda had pointed out, they were good showmen. But La Paix had lost its charm. Scott told Andrew Turnbull they were moving into Baltimore as ‘Zelda needed to be near her art school’.17 The truth was, neither of them wished to stay longer in a house with burnt and gloomy edges. By November their residence would be a townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue.

  Zelda’s hopes were pinned to the Baltimore production of Scandalabra from 26 June to 1 July by the Vagabond Junior Players, and on the acting of Zack Maccubbin playing the hero Andrew Messogony, whose name was Zelda’s play on the words misogyny and misogamy.18 The farce was a comic inversion of The Beautiful and Damned. In Scott’s novel, Grandfather Patch refuses to will his wealth to his nephew Anthony and his wife Gloria because they are dissipated and extravagant. In Zelda’s play, her hero will inherit his uncle’s millions so long as he lives a life of wicked debauchery. The idea was zany, some lines were witty, but the sets, some designed by Zelda, were considerably more exciting than the play, whose exhausting length and hectic style reflected the current turbulence of their marriage and of Zelda’s mind.19

  Zelda’s determination not to let Scott view her work meant he did not see it until the dress rehearsal, which ran from 8.15 p.m. till 1.00 a.m. Obviously the play could not open in that state at that length. Scott assembled the cast, worked them through the night, drastically revised and cut the script – to no avail. It lacked action, said some reviewers. Highly confusing, muttered others. ‘Much credit’ went to the director, Mrs Nicholas Penniman. No credit went to the playwright.20

  On 31 July Minnie Sayre wrote to Zelda that her beloved brother Anthony, who had recently lost his job and was already in debt, was desperately ill with depression. Edith, Anthony’s young wife, always deemed ‘unsuitable’ by the Sayres, took him to the coast near Charleston, but neither this nor the nerve specialist in Asheville who advised rest and no visitors helped.21 Minnie told Zelda instability was the curse of their family’s bloodline. She felt the family should visit, so she and their cousin Dr Chilton Thorington, who knew Anthony’s ‘constitution better than strange doctors’, were going to North Carolina.22 Anthony begged Thorington to let him go to Johns Hopkins, where Zelda was still an outpatient. But in August he was hospitalized in Mobile where a nerve specialist, Dr Eugene Bondurant, Judge Sayre’s friend, treated him for toxic poisoning caused by bile and malaria, but did not treat his depression.23 Edith, sick with strain herself, suddenly gave up on Anthony, and went to Rome to stay with her mother.24 Thorington wrote to Scott that Anthony’s condition had been diagnosed as ‘neuro-psychosis – possibly familial’. Anthony’s symptoms were of the ‘melancholic type, with obsessions of suicidal and homicidal inclinations, however, I do not believe he would actually do acts of violence’.25 The doctor was wrong. Anthony, suffering from recurrent nightmares of killing his mother, decided to kill himself. In an indisputable act of violence he leapt out of a hospital window to his death. The Sayres concealed most of the horrific facts about his suicide from the Fitzgeralds.26

  Zelda, dazed with miserable disbelief, threw herself into her painting. In October she exhibited a strange and powerful still life at the Independent Artists Exhibition at Baltimore’s Museum of Art.27 The oil, Tiger Lilies, is now missing, but a black and white photograph still exists. The way in which the brushstrokes are ruled by a massive emotional energy rather than by detached construction resembles Van Gogh’s Four Cut Sunflowers. Zelda deliberately chose a peaceful plant then painted it like a creature ready to devour anyone foolish enough to pick it. Newspaper photographers took photos of Zelda at her easel.

  Malcolm Cowley visited Zelda’s studio. He remembered those paintings years later: ‘They had freshness, imagination, rhythm, and a rather grotesque vigor, but they were flawed … by the lack of proportion and craftsmanship.’ Cowley was shocked at Zelda’s appearance. Deep lines above her mouth fell into unhappy shapes. Her face was emaciated and twitched as she spoke, reflecting her recent suffering.28

  Within a few months she had experienced three intense blows: emotional destruction during the conference, the failure of Scandalabra, and now her beloved brother’s death. She held on courageously, but would be unable to sustain further strain. At her side Scott was preparing Tender Is The Night for its January serialization in Scribner’s Magazine. He had sold Scribner’s the serial rights for $10,000 (for four instalments, January to April 1934). Zelda knew the heroine was largely based on herself. She knew the source for Nicole Diver’s behaviour was what Scott saw as her own insanity. But she had no idea of the further shock concealed in Scott’s fiction.

  Notes

  1 Ober submitted it October 1932.

  2 Isabel Owens typed three final versions this year.

  3 Isabel Owens to Milford, 12 Oct. 1963, Milford, Zelda, pp. 268, 267.

  4 FSF, ‘One Hundred False Starts’, Saturday Evening Post, 4 Mar. 1933.

  5 FSF, Ledger, Jan. 1933.

  6 FSF to MP, 29 Sep. 1933, Life in Letters, p. 239.

  7 FSF to Meyer, 10 Apr. 1933, CO187, Box 51, Folder 10A, PUL. Scott believed that whereas Forel held an admirable ‘teutonic idea of marriage’, Meyer’s more liberal stance encouraged Zelda to negate all her marital duties.

  8 Meyer to FSF, 18 Apr. 1933, CO187, Box 51, Folder 10A, PUL.

  9 FSF to Meyer, undated pencil draft, probably Apr. 1933, ibid.

  10 In his Ledger Scott lists ‘The typescript of Zelda conversation’ in June.

  11 Every one of those 40,000 words has been ‘lost’.

  12 This notion has subsequently been echoed by most Fitzgerald critics.

  13 Poe had helped Scott find La Paix.

  14 Though Scott did not pursue Poe’s plan for divorce, in his Notebook he outlined a divorce strategy should Zelda continue to write fiction. ‘Attack on all grounds: Play (suppress), novel (delay), pictures (suppress), character (showers), child (detach), schedule (disorient to cause trouble), no typing. Probable result – new breakdown.’ Quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 86.

  15 I am indebted to writer Rebecca Stott for discussions on this point. Again there is a strong similarity between Zelda’s actions and those of Sylvia Plath, who also sloughed off a former self in order for a new self to rise from the ashes.

  16 Report and photograph, Baltimore News, reproduced in Romantic Egoists, ed. Bruccoli et al., p. 192.

  17 Shafer, ‘To Spread a Human Aspiration’, p. 47; Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 242. André le Vot also mentions that Zelda was improving her painting technique at ‘the Fine Art School’ in Baltimore (Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 275).

  18 Zelda had met Maccubbin in spring 1933, walking near the grounds of La Paix, and had persuaded him to suggest the play to his company. Maccubbin was ‘consistently the best performer’.

  19 The uncut version runs to 91 pages while the shorter version is still 61 pages. The undated 61-page version is at PUL (CO183, Box 3, Folder 33); the 91-page typescript was deposited for copyright on 31 Oct. 1932. Both have a prologue and three-act structure.

  20 Scrapbook of reviews of Scandalabra, CO183, Box 2, Folder 6, PUL.

  21 Anthony was first taken to Edith’s brother-in-law’s coastal house, then to a sanatorium on Black Mountain.

  22 Minnie Sayre to ZSF, 31 July 1933, CO183, Box 5, Folder 21, PUL.

  23 Minnie Sayre to ZSF, 1 Aug. and 6 Aug. 1933, ibid. She could not afford to move Anthony to Baltimore.

  24 As Edith gave up her apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, before leaving it seemed unlikely she would return. After Anthony’s death she disappeared and was never mentioned again by the family.

  25 Dr Chilton Thorington to FSF, 11 Aug. 1933, CO745, Box 1, Folder 1, PUL.

  26 The Sayres told people Anthony had died from malaria contracted when surveying a swamp at Mobile as a civil engineer. They said in his delirium he rushed out of bed thinking he was playing football and accidentally fell through an open window.

  27 The Society of Baltimore Indep
endent Artists fourth annual no-jury exhibition, Baltimore Museum of Art.

  28 Malcolm Cowley, ‘A Ghost Story of the Jazz Age’, Saturday Review XLVII, 25 Jan. 1964. pp. 20–21.

  CHAPTER 22

  Scott was staking everything on Tender Is The Night. That he might be staking Zelda’s well-being was probably not part of his calculations. His 1933 income of $12,000 was his lowest since the start of his career. Existing on borrowed money, he needed a commercial success.1

  By November 1933, having corrected the January/February serialization proofs, he took Zelda to Bermuda where it rained continuously. Scott caught pleurisy but Zelda, fresh from Baltimore’s Fine Art School, sat on the rain-soaked beach sketching shipyard workers, ballerinas, and women by a banyan tree, using new figurative techniques.

  Though she and Scott exhumed their old affection, a sepulchral sadness persisted. ‘For years we had wanted to go to Bermuda,’ Zelda wrote wistfully in an Esquire article. ‘We went. The Elbow Beach hotel was full of honeymooners, who scintillated so persistently in each other’s eyes that we cynically moved.’ Perhaps she had a premonition, for she wrote: ‘Maybe this would be the last trip for a long while.’2

  On their return to Baltimore the galleys of Tender arrived, followed by the first two serialized instalments. Zelda read them, deeply shocked. She collapsed. On 12 February 1934 she re-entered Phipps Clinic for the start of her third breakdown. It would last until 1940.

  As a measure of self-protection Scott informed John Palmer, Clothilde’s husband, ‘merely as a matter of record and not with any idea of alarming any member of Zelda’s family’. Zelda had suffered a ‘slight relapse’, he assured them. Scott asked John not to tell Minnie, Marjorie or even Clothilde as it would take five years off Minnie’s life, for she would immediately link Zelda’s collapse to Anthony’s troubles.3

  Scott’s optimism was misplaced. Far from ‘slight’, Zelda’s relapse was serious. Initially under constant observation for fear of suicide, she lost a further 15 lb, looked malnourished, was given daily sedatives and restricted to total bedrest, and silently eluded medical ministrations.

  Mayfield believed that reading the first half of Scott’s novel ripped open the wound inflicted by the synopsis Zelda had scanned in Florida. Certainly it was the first time Zelda had seen her husband’s merciless use of her most despairing hospital letters. Now everyone could read her profoundly private thoughts. Scott did not merely paraphrase Zelda’s anguished epistles, he efficiently pasted her phrases together with his stylish prose glue.

  Zelda, attempting grim humour, had written to Scott: ‘The farcicle element of this situation is too apparent for even a person as hopeless and debilitated as I am.’ Scott rewrote it for Tender: ‘it seems to me if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you.’4 After months with no progress and little hope, Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I will more than gladly welcome any alienist you may suggest.’ Scott hardly changed this: ‘I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest.’5 Zelda admitted to Scott she was ‘completely humiliated and broken’, Nicole, scripted by Scott, was also ‘completely broken and humiliated’.6

  Zelda’s first encounter with Scott’s explosive Dr Diver material disturbed her even more. Initially Nicole Diver has Sara Murphy’s lyrical glow, but as the novel progresses and Scott draws on Zelda, we learn that as a child Nicole was raped by her father.

  Scott’s sketch for Nicole, the rich mental patient, stated that the rape occurred at fifteen

  under peculiar circumstances … She collapses, goes to the clinic and there at sixteen meets the young doctor hero who is ten years older. Only her transference to him saves her – when it is not working she reverts to homicidal mania and tries to kill men. She is an innocent, widely read but with no experience and no orientation except that he supplies her. Portrait of Zelda – that is, a part of Zelda.7

  Scott ‘authenticated’ his novel by using direct quotes from Bleuler’s diagnosis of Zelda.8 Moreover, under the heading ‘Classification of the Material on Sickness’, he included reports from Malmaison, Valmont and Prangins.9

  Zelda, in bed at Phipps, admitted she was ‘a little upset about it [Tender]’, then said bitterly: ‘What made me mad was he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his life and I couldn’t help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences.’ Loyally she insisted any author had the ‘right to interpret … it really doesn’t matter’. Then, unable to deal with the material, she began to cry: ‘It was a chronological distortion … I don’t think it’s true – I don’t think it’s really what happened.’10 Despite her distress she never referred directly to the effect on her of the fictionalized father-daughter rape, for which there is no biographical evidence, merely a series of rumours.’11 Her eerie passivity over this character violation may have been related to her constant sedation. Zelda was of course aware that Scott knew about the childhood sexual violence on which she based her fictionalized abuse of Janno by the Magnetic Twins in Caesar’s Things.

  Whether Scott borrowed and extended a known event in childhood or later, or whether he invented Nicole’s traumatic rape, he must have been aware it would cause Zelda intense pain. Although he knew he risked increasing Zelda’s instability he did not see himself as heartless. He always cared for her, even though care had largely degenerated into financing her hospitalization. He kept his novel from her for as long as possible, he warned her against projecting too much of herself into it. He saw the book as melancholy, even haunted, but he saw it also as something they could put behind them before they moved on.12 But at Phipps Zelda was not moving anywhere. Sobbing uncontrollably, she told the nurses: ‘I can’t get on with my husband and I can’t live away from him – materially impossible … I’m so tired of compromises. Shaving off one part of oneself after another until there is nothing left.’13

  She behaved as if she was indeed invisible. Her silences grew palpable. She shivered in the heat, she laughed when most sad, she kept her distance from everyone, including Scottie.

  She is about as far away from me as anyone can be … She’s just like her father, she’s a cerebral type … she rather looks down on me … I’ve never interfered [in her education] … because I realized that eventually Scott and I would have to separate and she is his child … It would just be the undoing of him to take her away from him.14

  Still she dwelt on separation. Mayfield, who understood this, said: ‘many people who know the circumstances under which Scott labored over it [Tender] found that its chief flaw lay in the fact that it was written with one eye on the Book-of-the-Month Club and the other on the divorce court.’ Sara, invariably Zelda’s partisan, felt that either the writing stood as a psychological defence should Zelda make good her threat of divorce, or the offensive passages were written as self-justification.15 It is possible that Scott wrote the most wounding parts in retaliation for those sections in Save Me The Waltz which had disturbed him, but it is more probable artistically that Diver, the psychiatrist-hero, had to deal with explosive material. Scott needed a spoiled priest, a man replacing idealism and talent with drink and dissipation. As both husband and psychiatrist Dick fails to maintain professional perspective. By sharing Nicole’s family’s wealth, his commitment to medicine is finally eroded. When Nicole recovers her sanity and independence and leaves him for Tommy Barban, a French/American soldier of fortune, Dick dwindles into a corrupted small-town doctor.16

  Ironically, despite the authentic psychiatric source material, Edmund Wilson, who read the serialization, thought that though Scott had achieved something ‘real’ in his protagonists’ marital relationship, he had failed to establish Diver’s professional credibility.17 Scott himself acknowledged he must be ‘careful not to reveal basic ignorance of psychiatric and medical training yet not [be] glib’.18 Diver, of course, plays the role Scott had tried to play: fellow-psychiatrist and husband. In Tender, Scott tried to resolve in literary terms the i
ssues remaining unresolved in his life.

  The earliest reactions came from kind friends who had read either the serialization or an inscribed pre-publication copy. Bishop assured him: ‘The first installment of the novel confirms what I have long thought, that your gifts as a novelist surpass those of any of us.’19 Robert Benchley said: ‘I would have given my two expensivly-filled [sic] eye-teeth to have written just one page of the book … it is a beautiful piece of work, not only technically, but emotionally.’20 Tom Wolfe offered cautious praise: ‘It seems to me you’ve gone deeper in this book than in anything you ever wrote,’21 while Archie MacLeish threw caution away: ‘Great God Scott you can write. You can write better than ever. You are a fine writer. Believe it. Believe it – not me.’22 Scott needed to believe this in the light of later criticisms.

  Zelda, feeling better at Phipps, demanded to be released. As she was not committed, theoretically she could leave when she wished, but in practice could not depart without money. Scott, busy with his galleys, was not prepared to cope with a sick wife. He transferred Zelda to Craig House, Beacon, where she stayed from 8 March to 19 May. In upstate New York, two hours by train from Manhattan, on the Hudson River, the sanatorium was recommended by Forel, who was a friend of the director, Dr Clarence Slocum.23 The resort-like grandeur of Prangins was repeated in a golf course, tennis courts, bowling green, two swimming pools, bridge, backgammon and table-tennis games rooms. An emphasis on patients’ freedom, no locks and keys, and a private nurse for each patient meant attendant heavy costs of more than $750 a month. Scott, already $12,000 in debt, plunged still further.