Zelda (36 page)

Zelda was no longer content to write the slight ironic and fashionable sketches she had written earlier. She was consciously trying to extend herself in her fiction. This story did not entirely flounder in an abundance of poetical description, and what descriptive materials were included had a cutting edge of meaning to them. The flaw was still a lack of sufficient development of the characters in terms of their relationships to each other. It was not enough to plant images; those images needed to accumulate into a fuller portrait of Miss Ella and her suitors.

One of the things Zelda was trying to get at was the attempt at revolt of a conventional young woman. Ella’s alliance with Hendrix promised to be stifling from the beginning. Their plans for a life together were “modest stable plans…. He told her how things were to be, and she acquiesced.” She hears his quiet voice filling the air “like smoke in an airless room.” Her one chance to avoid suffocation is to love Bronson. He gives her exotic gifts: deep red roses whose petals “shone like the purple wings of an insect,” lavish silks from Persia, which underline the sexual and feminine aspects of Ella. Only an act of violence stops her from marrying him, but once stopped she never risks herself again. This aspect of the story never clearly emerges. We are told too many things at a remove, the characters are not allowed to speak for themselves, and finally the torpor that envelops Miss Ella envelops the reader.

The publication of Zelda’s story caused a stir in Montgomery that delighted her. She wrote Scott that she had sent Dr. Forel a copy of
Scribner’s Magazine
“from sheer vanity.” Intoxicated with the pleasure of being published, she nevertheless fell back into her role of pupil-wife. “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.”

From Hollywood Scott wrote Zelda that if his film was really
successful he might make $75,000. Zelda was ecstatic and immediately made plans about how to spend it. “We could build us a house. … A great denuded square I want with frank windows that frame the world in cold impersonal rigidity. And it is to be all over yellow. We will have all the children we can, and call them Dementia Praecox Fitzgerald—Dear, how gruesome!”

Zelda wrote about how she sat with her mother in the parlor of her house during the long rainy afternoons, talking about the Civil War and Zelda’s grandfather, but she connected it all to something else. “It’s so nice to have important men and I’m so glad that you are one. I want you to come home and for us to have a son and lots of vital things we own.”

It rained nearly every day from the end of November to mid-December and Zelda wrote that she not only missed Scott and was lonely, but had a “sore throat, asthma, grippe and indigestion.” On the good days, she said, a joyous release of pent-up excitement was likely to overcome her. She had a pistol without any bullets that she kept in a bureau drawer for protection.

I love climbing out on the tin roof and brandishing my empty pistol and yelling “Who’s there?” as if I had a mob at bay. But I am, secretly, always the escaping criminal. My bravado instincts do not function on the side of law and order, as do not also a great many other interesting facets of myself: i.e., to me, interesting, of cource.

I miss my Daddy horribly. I am losing my identity here without men. I would not live two weeks again where there are none, since the first thing that goes is concision, and they give you something to butt your vitality against so it isn’t littered over the air like spray[s] of dynamite.

In the wake of the Judge’s death she could bear reminiscences of her mother’s, for she knew they gave her relief from her grief, but she was bored and impatient with the conversation of friends from her girlhood.

This place is like one of those cracked phonograph records that plays always in the same place where you have to push the needle over but each revolution it sticks till you push it again and you never can come to the tune. Save me, Deo, from the darkness and the blight. … I am drugged with atmosphere. It’s a shock moving about as we do—or is it growing old—suddenly finding yourself on unremembered corners surrounded by a flood of forgotten association.

It was nearly Christmas, and the household was in a flurry of preparations for the holidays and Scott’s return on the 20th. The ornaments for their Christmas tree had been stored for so long that Zelda said they had lost their “sex appeal,” but they were unbroken and she decided not to buy any more, “though there’s nothing so beautiful as shining red balls dangling like the evolution of a jewel before your eyes. I s’pose thats why savages like things like that: they are both at the same level.”

Scottie hung a sign on her door, “Void la chambre mystérieuse” and four red wreaths at her windows. Her closet was filled with gifts wrapped in silver paper. She was a little glum about her discovery that there was no Santa Claus and decided that she wanted an electric train to help soothe her disillusionment. With Scott away Zelda had drawn closer to Scottie. But closer in the rather special sense of observing her, rather than doing things with her. Scottie came sometimes to dress herself in front of the fire in Zelda’s room and Zelda wrote Scott, “… it’s a joy to watch her long sweet delicate body and the cool of her pale hair quenching the light from the flames.” Scottie was, Zelda decided, like her father, a moon person. Zelda never said what kind of a person she thought she was, but it is unlikely that she thought of herself in terms of the moon. Scottie, who was now ten, was already being consciously nurtured by her father in a manner that he hoped would help her to avoid the pitfalls of her mother’s character, as well as his own. He did not, for example, want her educated in the South. He was suspicious of the languidness he thought the climate encouraged. And he insisted upon a far more rigorous education than Zelda could possibly oversee. In the main Zelda agreed with him, but she left to Scott, as she always had, those important choices of education and direction.

Scott was back. Christmas was more strenuous than they had planned, with many relatives in the house, and Zelda’s asthma grew ominously worse. Finally she and Scott decided to escape to Florida, where the clear, hot air might relieve her. They would both work on their novels. Their Negro chauffeur, Freeman, drove them to the Don Ce-Sar Hotel in Saint Petersburg.

It was splendid in the sun. Zelda was gentle and loving toward Scott, they swam together, and Zelda tanned herself copper. She got the rest she needed and the asthma disappeared. Buoyed by their
holiday, Scott wrote Maxwell Perkins: “At last for the first time in two years and a half I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead. Am replanning it to include what’s good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words and publishing. Don’t tell Ernest or anyone—let them think what they want—….”

Without warning a spot of eczema appeared on Zelda’s neck. It left two hours later only to reappear in two days for another tense two hours. Scott thought it might have been due to a deep-sea fishing trip, which had made her seasick, “or worry about her novel which she thought was not going so well….” The eczema scotched all plans for remaining in Florida, and they prepared to leave for Montgomery at once. The first night spent on the road Zelda was sleepless. Moving restlessly about their room while Scott slept, she found a flask in his suitcase and drank everything in it. She woke Scott at 5 A.M. and told him that dark things were being done to her secretly. Finally, after hours of talking together, with Scott trying to calm her, Zelda said that she wanted to go to a clinic.

They were desperately unhappy; it was a crushing blow to their hopes for a normal life together. They returned to Montgomery, with Scott hoping it had been just a passing attack brought on by the liquor. On February 1, 1932, Scott wrote Dr. Forel for advice about Zelda. Until the night before there had been no further trouble.

She had been working all day hard and complained of her eyes which are terribly strained. At dinner she was merry and a little excited. After dinner in the middle of a chess-game (which I was winning) she complained of her eyes, quit, began an arguement and for an hour behaved distinctly irrationally—I do not mean she behaved like last winter in Prangins. More as she did in Paris before she broke down two years ago. Each time the dominant idea is that someone is causing the eczema and the eye hurting, with my connivance. This has disappeared utterly in the morning (she wanted to work some more last night but I made her go to bed) but the asthma is bad and I dread the day and the evening. She is affectionate but this time is not sorry for last night or won’t admit it; I wanted her to walk rather than work or smoke but, she answers “Dr. Forel told me when I did not feel stable I ought to work.”

Scott was worried and told Forel: “For the first time in three years I have money enough to work on my novel on which my whole fortune depends.” Scott was willing to move in
the
spring, but he desperately wanted to stay put for the time being and not have to
break up housekeeping or put Zelda in a clinic, which would use all his reserves. “It seems terrible because we have both been so utterly happy, happier almost than we have ever been. What the moral effect on me would be, I do not know and I hardly dare to think what it would be on her.”

A week later, after spending some hours working on her novel, Zelda had another period of hysteria. It lasted no more than two hours, but it terrified both of them.

On February 10, Scott wired Dr. Adolf Meyer, the director of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, that he was bringing his wife to Baltimore for treatment. At Zelda’s suggestion they left Montgomery immediately by train. “My haste,” Scott later wrote Forel forlornly, “was that she begin to turn against me again. …”

^*
Zelda first developed asthma when she was twenty-three. Fitzgerald later told Dr. Forel she was allergic to moose hair.

No one has schizophrenia, like having a
cold. The patient has not “got” schizophrenia.
He is schizophrenic.

R. D. L
AING
,
The Divided Self

13

O
N FEBRUARY
12, 1932, ZELDA ENtered the Phipps Clinic. She spoke very little that first day, but what she did say supported Scott’s fears of her growing irrationality. Quietly, as if to herself, she asked: “Isn’t it terrible when you have one little corner of your brain that needs fixing—Dr. Meyer can do it, can’t he? It’s this asthma and eczema that has just disrupted our home when it was running so well.” She complained of not being able to sleep and of being under a terrific strain due to the death of her father during her husband’s absence. “I was left alone with my daughter and it was just too much.”

Scott gave the young resident physician who would be in charge of Zelda a detailed case history. He described Zelda’s youth as wild— she was “the town scandal”—and said that she had been his mistress for a year before their marriage. He stressed her relationship to her mother, saying that it was “unusual—she was spoiled and never thwarted in any way.” When asked about her family, Scott said that
Judge Sayre was a brilliant idealist and the only man he had ever admired without qualification, but he thought that Mrs. Sayre tried to have Zelda succeed where she had failed. Mrs. Sayre was the saint of the family, and its center.

He also tried to describe Zelda’s personality; he explained that Zelda, although outgoing and on the surface friendly, had never been able to establish any close friendships. Her friends were followers and as such her position in relation to them was a superior one. He said she was proud and vain and always jealous of him. He stressed his opinion that she could not take criticism of any sort and became obstinate in the face of it, then he contradicted himself and said that ultimately she could be reasoned with because of her logical mind.

He said almost nothing about himself in relation to Zelda, and he did not once mention his drinking. He told fairly sketchily about his romance in 1927 with Lois Moran in order to explain Zelda’s reaction to it. But he now considered the extremity of her reaction a forewarning of her first breakdown. His only other reference to himself was to state that he had been unjustly accused by Zelda of a homosexual attachment to Ernest Hemingway.

The following day Scott returned to Alabama. Zelda appeared to be cheerful and optimistic in his absence, but when she replied to questions put to her by the doctors her sentences were long and peculiarly involved. Upon occasion she would break off abruptly for no apparent reason and make plays on words which had no meaning the doctors could fathom. Her replies were nonetheless revealing. Routinely she had been asked how old she was when she began school. “Six, and then I left and then I—I know what keeps me from getting well is shyness, and then a terrible inferiority complex that drives one to attempt anything. … A feeling of being thrown into complete pandemonium when you see someone who can do more. I am not easy with people. I have never had any intimate friends. My husband and I have been very complete with each other. Everything is impersonal.”

Those sudden switches in midstream of her thoughts had always been characteristic of her, and when they were noted as examples of formal thought disorder, for the purposes of classifying her psychosis, the judgment was perhaps only partially right. Not knowing Zelda well, the doctors could not yet perceive the kinds of connections she was able to make from within her apparent disorder. Scott, for example,
who knew Zelda better than anyone else, very rarely had trouble following her. Her earliest letters to him, written when she was eighteen and nineteen, were marked by a similar lack of conventional continuity and were full of sudden turns. But they were also marked to an extraordinary degree by special insights into herself and Scott. Even then she did not rely entirely upon the logical linking construction of language. Her thoughts moved rapidly by description and an appeal to the senses. She felt the death of a Confederate soldier; she could smell the aroma of loss that pervaded the South. If her thoughts were unruly, they nevertheless carried enormous meaning to Scott and it was from an emotional rather than a rational language of meaning that she wrote. Its limits, and they were severe, were that she depended on too private a mode of communication. In the end it severed her from ordinary communication with other people. It could be argued that this is precisely the limitation of the insane: they have withdrawn into a mode, habit, or even style of thought so exclusive that it seals them within their own interior, out of which they are no longer able to escape.