Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (32 page)

Zelda’s breakdown finally occurred in April 1930 when they were living in the rue Pergolèse. Early that month, when she began to panic about being late for her dancing lesson, Oscar Kalman, who was lunching with them, offered to take her to the studio in a cab. But she remained extremely anxious, shook uncontrollably and tried to change into her ballet costume in the narrow taxi. As they ran into a traffic jam, she leapt out of the cab and started running toward the distant studio. Fitzgerald persuaded her to stop the lessons and rest for a while. But she soon returned to them and, at the end of April 1930, broke down completely.

A few months later, as Scott and Zelda struggled to understand what had happened to them, he recounted, in a poignant letter to her, the events that seemed to mark their mutual self-destruction. He refused to attach blame, however, and felt they had to take responsibility for their own behavior:

The apartments that were rotten, the maids that stank—the ballet before my eyes, spoiling a story to take the Trubetskoys to dinner, poisoning a trip to [North] Africa. You were going crazy and calling it genius—I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered. The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thought I was a fairy in the rue Palatine. . . . I wish
The Beautiful and Damned
had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I never honestly thought that we ruined each other.
¹⁸

Chapter Nine

Madness, 1930–1932

I

The Fitzgeralds married in April 1920, Scott published
The Great Gatsby
in April 1925 and Zelda—following this momentous five-year pattern—had her first mental breakdown in April 1930. Fitzgerald identified himself with the Jazz Age, which he helped to define and called “the most expensive orgy in history.” If, as Arthur Miller observed, “the 30s were the price that had to be paid for the 20s,” then that decade was much more costly than Fitzgerald had ever imagined. Just as his literary career spanned the Twenties and Thirties, so his personal life—which began to collapse at the same time as Zelda’s breakdown, soon after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929—ran precisely parallel to the boom and bust phases of the decades between the wars.

Fitzgerald felt partly responsible for Zelda’s illness and was intimately involved in her treatment. He was inextricably connected to her by bonds of love and guilt; by the hope that she would recover and they could resume their life together; by his fear that she would remain ill and he would continue to suffer with her. Scott’s artistic career was also bound up with Zelda, who had provided inspiration for so much of his work. His unfinished novel would soon focus on her insanity and his stories would be written to pay for her treatment. All paths seemed to lead to Zelda: the destructiveness of their past, the sterility of their present, the uncertainty of their future.

No matter how close to or far away from Zelda he might be during the next ten years, Fitzgerald lived in the phases of her madness and remained deeply involved in the specifics of her treatment: the individual doctors, the different psychiatric approaches, the particular setting and atmosphere of each clinic. Zelda—whose apparent recovery was always followed by another breakdown and who constantly sought a way back to sanity—was treated in seven different hospitals in only six years. She repeatedly had to adjust to new people and strange surroundings while suffering hallucinations, depression and suicidal impulses.

Fitzgerald also went through the anguish of the husband of a mental patient: the soul-searching and self-reproach, the loss of his wife and difficulty of bringing up his daughter on his own, the financial strain, loneliness, alcoholism and creative sterility. Gradually, he lost all confidence in the future and left his “capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.”
¹

Zelda’s first breakdown was so sudden (the warning signs only became clear retrospectively), the need for restraint and rest so urgent, that there was no time to make careful inquiries about the best psychiatric care. On April 23, 1930, she entered the ominously named Malmaison Hospital, just west of Paris, still desperately concerned about losing time in her ballet career. She was slightly intoxicated when she arrived at the hospital, confessed that she had recently drunk a great deal and explained that she needed alcohol to stimulate her work. Professor Claude—the doctor whom she tried to seduce—gave a vivid report of her mental condition:

[She entered] in a state of acute anxiety, unable to stay put, repeating continually, “It’s frightful, it’s horrible, what’s going to become of me, I must work and I no longer can, I must die and yet I have to work. I’ll never be cured, let me go, I have to see ‘Madame’ (the dancing teacher), she has given me the greatest joy in the world.” . . .

In sum, it is a question of a
petite anxieuse
worn out by her work in a milieu of professional dancers. Violent reactions, several suicidal attempts never pushed to the limit.

Professor Claude also reported that Zelda had an obsessional “fear of becoming a homosexual. She thinks she is in love with her dance teacher (Madame X) as she had already thought in the past of being in love with another woman.” Zelda’s breakdown forced her to admit, for the first time, her own homosexual desires. It seems clear from this confession that she had projected her own homosexual impulses onto Fitzgerald, and blamed him for her sexual frigidity.

On May 2, after only ten days in Malmaison, Zelda left the hospital, against the doctor’s advice, in order to resume the dancing lessons that had precipitated her breakdown. Alluding to Malmaison in
Tender Is the Night,
Fitzgerald wrote of her “unsatisfactory interlude at one of the whoopee cures that fringed the city, dedicated largely to tourist victims of drug and drink.”
²

Zelda tried to go back to dancing in Paris. But she became dazed and incoherent, had fainting fits, heard frightening voices and was tormented by nightmares. She had (as Professor Claude noted) previously attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills after her affair with Jozan ended in 1925, by throwing herself down the stone staircase in Vence in 1926 and by trying to drive a car off the steep cliffs above Cannes in 1929. Three weeks after leaving Malmaison, she became terrified by her hallucinations and again tried to kill herself. On May 22 she entered the Valmont Clinic in Glion, above Montreux, on the eastern end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

In early June Dr. H. A. Trutman wrote his report on Zelda. Though she was now more seriously ill than when she entered Malmaison, she denied her illness and still wanted to return to dancing. Ballet, she said, was a way to independence and a compensation for her unhappy marriage:

At the beginning of her stay Mrs. F. said she hadn’t been sick and had been brought to the sanatorium under duress. Every day she repeated that she wanted to return to Paris to resume the ballet in which she thinks she finds the sole satisfaction of her life.

From the organic point of view nothing to report, no signs of neurological illness. It became clearer and clearer that a simple rest cure was absolutely insufficient, and that psychiatric treatment by a specialist in a sanatorium was indicated. It was evident that the relations between the patient and her husband had been shaky for some time and that for this reason the patient had tried to create a life of her own through the ballet (since family life and obligations were not sufficient to satisfy her ambition and her artistic leanings).

Zelda did not mention her homosexual desires at Valmont. But one of the nurses at the clinic had to repulse her “overly affectionate” gestures, and in her next hospital she developed an infatuation for an attractive red-headed girl.

Since Valmont specialized in gastrointestinal illness and Dr. Trutman thought she needed psychiatric treatment, Zelda was examined by a specialist in nervous disorders from the nearby Prangins Clinic. On June 4 she transferred to her third hospital in six weeks. For the next fifteen months, while she was in Prangins, Scott lived near Zelda in Switzerland and visited Scottie, who remained with her governess in Paris, for four or five days every month.

II

Les Rives des Prangins was situated on the shore of the lake, fourteen miles north of Geneva, in Nyon. The grounds were spacious, the gardens immaculately tended; and it had farms, tennis courts and seven private villas for super-rich patients. “With the addition of a caddy house,” as Fitzgerald wrote of Dick Diver’s clinic in
Tender Is the Night,
“it might very well have been a country club.” The clientele was international, and many of the patients came from families of distinguished ancestry and great wealth. The cost of treatment at Prangins, during the first year of the Depression, was an astronomical one thousand dollars a month. Fitzgerald assured Zelda’s parents that Dr. Forel’s clinic, which had just opened that year, “is as I thought
the best
in Europe, his father having had an extraordinary reputation as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, and the son being universally regarded as a man of intelligence and character.”
³

Auguste Forel, the head of this eminent scientific family (his face appears on the Swiss thousand-franc note), was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich and an authority on the treatment of alcoholics. His son Oscar, Zelda’s doctor and the director of Prangins, was an exceptionally talented and versatile man. Oscar Forel was born in 1891 at Burghölzli, an insane asylum in Zurich where his father was director, and had five brothers and sisters. He studied at the Sorbonne and at the Faculty of Medicine at Lausanne, and believed that religion was incompatible with science. After marrying a lady from Riga, Latvia, he had a son and two daughters, but separated from his wife in 1932. A faculty member at the University of Geneva for more than twenty-five years, he published a number of books, including
La Psychologie des névroses
(1925) and
La Question sexuelle
(1931). Later in life he became a naturalist and a professional photographer; and he was awarded the Legion of Honor by Charles de Gaulle in 1945. Forel’s autobiography,
La Memoire du chêne
, appeared in 1980.

According to his son Armand (who was also a doctor as well as a member of the Swiss parliament), Oscar Forel was a tall, thin, well-dressed and highly cultured gentleman. He was very interested in literature, the theater, the arts and music, especially the violin, and gave concerts in the large hall at the clinic. Careful with money and susceptible to flattery, he surrounded himself with a court of sycophants, tended to impose his will on others and was a social dictator. But he was also very sensitive and persuasive, and had a remarkable organizational gift.

Dr. Forel used physical as well as psychiatric methods to cure mental illness, and introduced electric shock and insulin shock treatments at Prangins. Electroconvulsive therapy applies electricity to the brain in order to induce epileptic seizures that are supposed to unsettle whatever brain patterns have caused psychopathic behavior and allow healthier ones to take their place. During insulin shock treatment, the doctor injects insulin into the patient in order to reduce the bloodsugar level and induce a hypoglycemic coma, which also releases inhibitions and allows her to speak freely.
⁴
Since Oscar Forel cared for Zelda and employed these treatments, it is quite likely that she was subjected to the effects of electric and insulin shocks.

The Sayres, especially her sister and brother-in-law Rosalind and Newman Smith, deliberately misled Dr. Forel by stating that there was no history of insanity in their family. Dr. Forel, focusing on Zelda rather than on her heredity, believed that her recovery depended on her giving up ballet. With the help of a letter from Lubov Egorova, who said Zelda could never become a prima ballerina, she was eventually persuaded to abandon what she wanted most in life: a professional career in dance.

Like his father, Dr. Forel was a great fighter against alcoholism. He believed that Scott was involved in Zelda’s illness and wanted him to have therapy to cure his drinking. But Fitzgerald, who thought his mind was already too analytical and depended on intuition for his creative impulse, felt psychoanalysis would destroy his talent. When Dr. Forel treated James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, at Prangins in 1933, he also unsuccessfully urged Joyce to accept treatment for alcoholism.

Fitzgerald knew that his drinking haunted Zelda in her delirium, but excused himself by stating: “I was alone all the time and I had to get drunk before I could leave you so sick and not care.” In the summer of 1930 he sent Dr. Forel a long letter explaining why he could not give up alcohol. He said he was devastated by the effect of Zelda’s illness, had to struggle to support his family, experienced listlessness, distraction and dark circles under his eyes when he stopped drinking, and noticed a physical improvement when he took moderate quantities of wine. He also maintained that Zelda did not use her talent and intelligence, that she was interested in nothing but dance and dancers, that drink helped him endure her long, boring monologues on this subject as well as her wild accusations that he was a homosexual. Since they had had sexual problems before her breakdown, and he had not been allowed to see her from April to August 1930, it is not surprising that Fitzgerald now drank more than ever. Samuel Johnson once explained how alcohol compensated for sexual deprivation. When asked what he thought was the greatest pleasure in life, he replied: “Fucking; and the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho’ not all could fuck.”
⁵