Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (60 page)

Nancy spent the summer incarcerated in the Holloway Sanatorium, a few miles outside London. The combination of rest, sedatives and proper nutrition stabilized her condition, but it left her pitifully bereft. In July she wrote to Janet Flanner, mourning how little her life seemed to have amounted to: she was proud of
Negro,
she said, and of her reporting in Spain, yet she had failed to find love and she had failed as a poet.

When she was released in September, it was with a regime of anti-depressants and strict orders to avoid alcohol. But while she regained her old responsive alertness, Nancy’s physical health was now failing, and in 1963 she was diagnosed with emphysema. She had always depended on being fit, with a body that was responsive, light and free. As Michelet had observed, she needed to be able to outrun her demons. This new experience of being short of breath and unsteady on her feet was intolerable to her; and numbing her frustration with more and more alcohol, inevitably she took a bad fall in early 1965, when she tripped and broke her thigh. After being told by her doctors that she couldn’t move for three months, she had to allow herself to be taken care of by an old friend, the French painter Jean Guérin.

Guérin’s Riviera villa was delightful and he was a tender host, but Nancy was beyond taking any pleasure in either. Even before the fall she had been worrying about her independence: the capital she had inherited was fast diminishing and living costs were rising.
*
Now with her broken thigh she was terrified that she might never be able to travel again or to live on her own. And as she fecklessly mixed her prescribed drugs with consoling doses of alcohol, that fear pitched Nancy back towards madness.

She became impossible to care for, disobeying her doctors, refusing to eat and being vilely rude to those around her. After she had thrown one particularly distressing scene, Guérin suggested that she leave and Nancy, somehow impelled by the force of her own rage, managed to drag herself and her few belongings onto a train. She ended up on the doorstep of Solita Solano, who was living just outside Paris, but by this point she was raving and urgently in need of medical care. Solita had no room to accommodate her properly, and the next day arranged for her to go and stay with Janet Flanner in the centre of the city.

Nancy never arrived. For some reason she was determined to seek refuge with Raymond Michelet, even though his tiny apartment had even less room than Solita’s little house. Michelet was shocked by Nancy’s ravaged state, and with the help of Georges Sadoul (their mutual friend from the surrealist days), he begged Nancy to let him book her into a hotel where she could be properly examined by a doctor.

Sadoul doubted, however, that a doctor could do anything to help. Nancy seemed lost to them: ‘Her mind was cracked, her beautiful intelligence had clouded over and she hardly knew what to do but insult her best friends, present and absent.’
⁷
She trusted no one, and that night worked herself up to the conviction that the doctor summoned by Michelet was part of a fascist conspiracy against her. On the morning of 12 March she set fire to the few papers she had with her and tried to make her escape. The taxi driver she hailed outside the hotel took one look at her dishevelled clothing, trembling limbs and wild expression and drove her to the nearest police station.

Two days later, in the ward of a public hospital, Nancy died. It was a small and pitiful death, and to those who had known her, a tragic one. Yet even in those desperate straits she remained oddly true to her nature. Throughout her life she had followed the compass of her own convictions; and even though her mind and body had been battered to a point where she was barely recognizable, she had refused to conform to what others had wanted for her; the terms on which she died had somehow remained her own.

*   *   *

For Zelda Fitzgerald, all hope of freedom seemed to be stolen from her with the onset of her first breakdown in 1930. Confined in the Prangins clinic in Switzerland, she was not only suffering the mental anguish of hallucinations and depression, but was also tormented by the eczema, which now flared across her face, shoulders and neck. During the periods when she was well enough to write, she sent long letters to Scott, trying to understand how she had arrived at such a pass, begging for his help as she tried to ‘unravel this infinite psychological mess’.

She wavered between guilt and rage, sometimes berating herself for her ‘hideous dependency’ on Scott, sometimes railing against his drinking and self-absorption. He, in turn, was as gentle with her as he knew how: ‘I love you with all my heart,’ he wrote in one undated letter, ‘because you are my own girl and this is all I Know.’
⁸
Yet because he was wretched – and exhausted – he could not prevent himself retaliating, writing letters in which he angrily itemized all of Zelda’s crimes and derelictions. For more than a year, the two of them were in hell, stumbling and quarrelling through the wreckage of their past.

In the autumn of 1931, Zelda was well enough for them to sail back to America and, for a while, to live at home in Montgomery while Scott worked. But early in 1932 the shock of her father’s death precipitated another breakdown, and she was admitted to the Phipps clinic in Baltimore. It would, however, prove a very different experience from her time at Prangins, for it coincided with an intense period of creativity. Even though the doctors at Phipps found Zelda silent and withdrawn, inside her head she was flying, working for hours every day on her autobiographical first novel
Save Me the Waltz.

In purely therapeutic terms this was a critical project for her. She was narrating her own life in her own voice, rather than having Scott’s version superimposed on her. And through the character of her heroine, Alabama, she was able to question who she was and what she had done. She puzzled over her youthful determination to reject her father’s moral principles, his integrity and his work ethic; she also tried to imagine what it would have been like for her had she had been strong enough to accept Sedova’s invitation to dance with the San Carlo ballet two years previously. In the novel, she took Alabama as far as a cheap boarding house in Naples and to the threshold of success, performing a repertory of solo roles. But it was perhaps an indirect comment on Zelda’s own cowardice that she then invented an injury that terminated her heroine’s career. By the end of the novel she puts Alabama back with her husband David, sitting amidst the frowsty remains of yet another party.

Far more important to Zelda than the novel’s therapeutic logic, however, was the literary satisfaction it brought her.
Save Me the Waltz
may be technically flawed, its structure disjointed, its language both solipsistic and overwrought, yet it has passages of brilliantly visualized imagery and a precision of sensual detail that lends a near-hallucinatory clarity to some of Alabama’s experiences. When Zelda sent it to Scribners, she dared to hope it would be published.

She hoped even more for her husband’s admiration and support, but Scott was more anxious than he had ever been about his own writing, terrified that his talent was ‘dead and buried’ from the worry over Zelda’s health, the expense of her medical bills and the cost of Scottie’s education.
⁹
His agonizingly slow-burning fourth novel
Tender is the Night
was nearing completion, but the fact that Zelda’s book overlapped with much of his, that key images and descriptions echoed passages of his own, convinced him that she had made a terrible pre-emptive strike, and he saw her novel only as a betrayal and a threat. Impervious to her delicate state, he fired off excoriating letters to her, her doctor and Scribners, lost to everything but his fear of failure.

His anxiety was completely out of proportion. Years later,
Save Me the Waltz
would be placed within a tradition of women’s writing that encompassed the poetic narratives of Charlotte Perkins Gilmour and Virginia Woolf. At the time, however, it barely registered. Fewer than 1,500 copies sold, and while one or two critics noted the originality of Zelda’s voice, it was generally agreed that much of it was unreadable.

But even though the novel had no real power to hurt Scott professionally, it exposed, once again, the fundamental conflict of their marriage. The sparkling, money-making story on which they’d embarked in 1919 – the Fitzgerald love affair – had brought them opportunities and fame, but what had united them had, inexorably, imprisoned them. There simply wasn’t enough space in the legend they had created for them both to flourish as individuals. At his bleakest moments Scott began to toy with the idea of divorce – if he could not save them both, he had to save himself.

By now Zelda could not be mistaken for anything other than an invalid. Despite the intensity of her imaginative life, her skin was lined and dull; her lips bitten raw, her expression frequently skewed into a meaningless smile. For limited periods of time she was well enough to live with Scott in a rented house, and for there to be days when their old intimacy was almost restored. But her speech and movements were marked by unnerving slippages – to one of their Baltimore neighbours she seemed like ‘a broken clock’
¹⁰
– and between these periods of relative calm she was not only suicidal, but developed a new, and very unnerving, religious faith.

Scott’s ledger entries for 1935 were starkly despairing: ‘Work and worry … Debts terrible … Zelda in hell.’ Yet the following year saw a significant change. Scott had begun spending recuperative periods in rural North Carolina, and when he decided he might settle there, in Asheville, he had Zelda transferred to the nearby Highland Hospital. This monastically run institution took a brusque line with neurotic, ‘artistic’ women, but if Zelda was forced into bracing physical activity she was also allowed to paint, and during 1936 developed a new direction for her work.

She’d taken up her brushes again in Phipps, and Scott, perhaps in unconscious reparation for his assault on
Save Me the Waltz,
had organized a small exhibition of her work in New York. Zelda was disappointed by the degree to which the press focused on her as a ‘fabulous’, ‘almost mythical’ star of the 1920s, but
Time
magazine greeted the show as ‘the work of a brilliant introvert … vividly painted, intensely rhythmic.’
¹¹
In Highland, she pressed forward, distilling the exaggerated mass and energy of her portraits and landscapes into visionary abstracts, trying to find shapes and colours that corresponded to the intensities of her inner life.

Scott, meanwhile, was in Hollywood, writing scripts for MGM and earning a much needed weekly stipend of $1,000. He was also happier, having met and fallen in love with a young British journalist. Sheilah Graham was pretty, blonde and athletic; she reminded him physically of Zelda, yet she possessed what was to Scott an incredible reserve of pragmatism and kindness. He described her wonderingly as ‘one of the few beautiful women of Zelda’s generation to have reached 1938 unscathed’.
¹²

There was no question of Sheilah displacing Zelda from her central role in Scott’s life, yet it had been evident for a long time that the Fitzgeralds could not healthily spend more than a few days or weeks in each other’s company. When Zelda was finally allowed to leave Highland in the spring of 1940, it was to her mother’s house in Montgomery that she went. Scott lived quietly with Sheilah, drinking more than he should but far more in control of both his mood and his energy, as he worked on his fifth novel
The Last Tycoon.

He and Zelda wrote to each other every week – long, loving letters in which they lingered over their past and restricted most discussions of the present to the subject of Scottie, who had now finished boarding school and was a student at Vassar. Scott had fretted over their daughter during her adolescence, critical of any lapse in her studies or behaviour that might suggest she had inherited any of her parents’ traits. But Scottie had survived the dislocations of her family life; mature for her age, she was already showing signs of a literary talent, about which Zelda and Scott could correspond with pride. Through their letters, at least, they sustained the illusion that they were a family still.

They had not seen each other for eighteen months when, on 21 December 1940, Zelda received a telephone call from Harold Ober, informing her that Scott had suffered a massive, and fatal, heart attack. It was news for which she was helplessly unprepared. Even though Scott had experienced a minor cardiac episode the previous month, he had assured her he was recovering well, and had confidently resumed the final stretch of his novel. She had not even begun to imagine what her life would be like without him. Zelda and Scott had known and loved each other for over twenty years, and even when she believed she hated him, even when their marriage had foundered, he had remained her ‘best friend’, her confidante. Above all, he had retained the talismanic power to make her believe that there was always a fresh start just around the corner. As Zelda wrote to Edmund Wilson, she could not bear the idea that he would never again come to her ‘with his pockets full of promise and his heart full of new refurbished hopes’.
¹³

She was not well enough to go to the funeral, but she got through the next few months as best she could, immersing herself in a quiet domestic rhythm of gardening and cooking with her mother. By early 1942 she had moved into another creative cycle, starting her second novel,
Caesar’s Things,
and working hard on her art. Even though she still had to retreat to the Highland clinic for periods of time, she was well enough to sustain a new and careful relationship with Scottie, who got married in 1943 and, three years later, gave birth to her first child, Timothy.

Zelda had found stability of a kind. Yet a self-portrait that she painted in 1942 is evidence of what it cost both her and those around her. In that portrait her lips are clamped into a taut line of anguish, and her eyes burn as if the madness inside her is battling to get out – as it continued to do. She was back in Highland in 1948 when Scottie gave birth to her second child, a daughter, and on 9 March wrote a letter of poignant optimism, expressing the hope that she would be well enough to see them all very soon. The following night, however, a fire broke out in the hospital’s kitchen, and while all of the patients on the lower floors were taken out to safety, Zelda and six others sleeping on the top floor were apparently locked into their rooms, and could not be rescued in time. When Zelda was found the next day her body was so badly burned that she could only be identified by the charred slipper that had got caught beneath her.