Zelda (44 page)

Scott arrived in Baltimore to hunt for a house, and until he found one he stayed at the Rennert Hotel in the center of town, a few minutes from Phipps. He spent a great deal of time trying to provide the psychiatrists with his own point of view on Zelda’s breakdown. In this effort, he had written a sketch about Mrs. Sayre pinpointing the significance of her relationship to Zelda, which he sent to Dr. Squires on April 4, 1932. He felt that their early attachment gave a clue to Zelda’s troubles.

“It all went back to Zelda whom she [Mrs. Sayre] suckled until, as Zelda afterwards remarked she could probably have chewed sticks. Zelda was a beauty—a wild, gallant child, precociously passionate because of the early cultivation that her mother had made of her nervous system, lazy and half contemptuous of her own talents and
selfish up to a point where the other members of the family, Judge Sayre and Zelda’s sisters, refrained from a constant protest that would have amounted to echolalia, only because of the strange mystic power of her mother’s fixation upon her.” He insisted that Zelda had learned very early to assert herself even when that assertiveness was inappropriate and without motivation. As an adolescent she had naturally begun to pull away from her mother, but rather than accept this, Mrs. Sayre had cultivated her position as confidante; she waited on Zelda, and tried to act as her conscience. “…it destroyed Zelda’s personal integrity (in later years she was never able quite to comprehend the meaning of the phrase) and it attached her by the silver cord forever.” Zelda had learned to “beguile,” Scott said, rather than stand on her own.

By mid-April Scott was able to visit Zelda daily at the clinic, but their meetings were spoiled by constant quarreling. The visits began to have a pattern. Scott behaved badly and grew insulting and angry when Zelda would refuse, for example, to show him a story she was writing. They would quarrel and Zelda would put up a good front at the time, then weep during the night. She was sleeping only four to six hours out of twenty-four.

Zelda gave no details of their quarrels to her doctors, whereas Scott was quite willing to discuss them. He struck the doctors as acting martyred, lacking in understanding, and uncertain of himself. After their quarrels they would write remorseful letters to each other.

Scott would try patiently to explain to Zelda what was the matter with her:

Honey, when you come out into the world again I wish you would try to realize what I can only describe as the:

Nub (NUB) of Experience

The fact that in your efforts you have come up
twice
against insuperable facts 1st against L. 2nd against me—both times against long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we…were seven, probably.

There has never been any question as to your “value” as a personality—there is however a question as to your ability to use your values to any practical purpose. To repeat the phrase that became an athema in my ears during the last months of our trying to make a go of it
“expressing oneself”
I can only say there isn’t any such thing. It simply doesn’t exist. What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible,
unknown—you came to the threshold of that discovery and then decided that in the face of all logic you would crash the gate. You succeeded merely in crashing yourself, almost me, and Scotty, if I hadn’t interposed.

Zelda would, equally patiently, try to tell Scott that she was not reacting against him, but an uncontrollable part of her illness objected to his advice and struck out against Doctor Fitzgerald. Writing to Scott to say that she would rather stay at Phipps for a while until she was better, she added: “We have been so close this last year and have so many pleasant memories of things we’ve done that I’d hate to spoil it in any way. I think we’re all agreed that your role is
not to be that of a doctor
and in my present condition you have to mother me and bear with a lot of unpleasantness which is not part of how I feel towards you at all but the result of my health, simply—”

As their correspondence continued Scott kept returning to the issue of her writing, and in an unpublished sketch, which he probably wrote at this time, he made the basis for his objections quite clear.

ANALOGY

Supposing Nikitma was going to create La Chatte in London. Supposing she had for many years supported a younger sister, a neophyte of the ballet but much less experienced and probably less talented. The performance has been delayed and will indeed be still longer delayed from Nikitma’s necessity of taking care of her sister.

Suddenly she finds that the sister has been secretly rehearsing La Chatte with the idea of giving it in London.

“That’s out,” says Nikitma. “Rehearse anything else and I’ll back you but not that. If your London performance comes before mine, with the name I’ve made I’m done. Nobody could beat that handicap.”

Sister: “But I want to express myself.”

Nikitma: “Nevertheless that’s out.”

Sister: “But I saw the script the same day you did.”

Nikitma: “But I chose it and bought it and paid for it.”

Sister: “But I would if I could.”

Nikitma: “But I did.”

Sister: “You’re horrid. You have bad habits.”

Nikitma: “So would you if I didn’t watch you.”

Sister: [“]Besides I’ve seen you rehearse so many times I think I could do it nearly as well as you.”

Nikitma: “When I’ve tried it you can try it. Not till then.”

Sister: “But I’m going on rehearsing.”

Nikitma: “Not on this stage. Not with these lights and this music.”

Sister: “I promise I won’t do it until you do.”

Nikitma: “Then why are you so eager to rehearse at once. No, no,

little girl, I’ve been in this game too long.”

Sister: “But I want to express myself.”

Nikitma: “All right. Whatever that means. But you can’t exploit your relation to me to do me harm.”

Scott gave an interview to the Baltimore
Sun
in which he mentioned Zelda’s forthcoming novel. The headline for the article ran, “He Tells of Her Novel,” with the subtitle, “Work Sent to Publisher Is Autobiographical at Suggestion of Her Husband.” That must have been hard for Zelda to swallow. Actually, he said next to nothing about
Save Me the Waltz
and talked about the economic health of the nation. But he had covered himself.

Dr. Meyer continued to try to tell Zelda some of the things he felt she had to learn in order to exist successfully again in the outside world. And Zelda at Scott’s urging tried to be more open with Meyer. But communication between them always fell short of the trust that had to exist if she was to make significant progress under his care. Dr. Meyer wanted Zelda to face her sickness squarely, not passively in the fixed terms of dementia praecox and schizophrenia that she would prattle about as an evasive tactic. He wanted her to avoid the terrific strain she had felt when she was involved in the ballet and seek a middle course. That was not a line of argument congenial to Zelda’s temperament and she once told him flatly to stop insisting upon it. “I went into dancing because I was miserable in my personal life and I thought I could dance—that was a delusion.” That was as far as they got. A colleague of Dr. Meyer’s who would one day work closely with Zelda at Phipps says: “It is easy to understand why Dr. Meyer never got close to her; he was too heavy and ponderous and germanic…none of the quick comeback and wit that appealed to Zelda. I don’t think Zelda’s responses to Dr. Meyer or me were of a psychotic nature. I think she would have turned away from both of us before she was ever ill.”

Dr. Forel had suggested that if Zelda did not seem to be improving at Phipps Scott should transfer her to a private and elegant nursing home in New York State, Craig House, under the direction of a friend of his, Dr. Slocum. Forel knew that there was a certain bias against such places by psychiatrists like Meyer (who had received
his training at a state institution), but he felt certain that Zelda would profit by the environment that Craig House could offer. Phipps, in the center of Baltimore, could not provide the same air of gracious country living. But for the time being, although Scott investigated other clinics, Zelda remained at Phipps.

On the 20th of May, 1932, Scott found a house on the outskirts of Baltimore, in Towson. It was called La Paix, and Zelda described it as “a very feminine [house]—dowager grandmother,” adding that she had always chosen “masculine houses with staring windows.” Scott wrote Dr. Squires that he wanted Zelda to take the move very slowly. For the first week she should spend only the mornings at the house and return to Phipps at 1:30 to resume her routine, and “when she comes to the house for good, on, let us say, the 8th of June it will be with an absolutely air-tight schedule agreed upon for the summer.” One reason Fitzgerald wanted these precautions was to avoid fatiguing Zelda; another was “the fact that since the whole burden of a mistake falls on me
I
should be able to dictate the conditions…
”

By the beginning of June Zelda was able to spend half of her time at La Paix and the remainder at Phipps. Aside from a few outbursts of temper she was doing quite well. There was of course a certain strain in resuming her normal life with Scott.

Scott felt he had to have some authority over Zelda to use as leverage if she fell off stride; Zelda resented his exercising any authority over her whatsoever. Dr. Meyer urged Zelda to resist an all-or-nothing attitude toward her work, which created yet another strain between her and Scott. But she said she had to contribute something to life; if one didn’t one was “as useful as an appendix. My work is unproven. My work is not a strain. All I ask to do is to work.” On the 26th of June Zelda was discharged from Phipps. Her condition was unimproved.

La Paix was what was once called a Victorian cottage. It had gables and porches, fifteen or sixteen rooms, and it was full of night sounds, dark, and rather down at the heels. But it was set on the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, and the grounds surrounding it were handsome. Zelda described it in a letter to John Peale Bishop.

We live in a nice Mozartian hollow disciplined to elegance by imported shrubbery of the kind which looks very out of place anywhere. In this
very polite Maryland atmosphere we write things. We have black-gums over the tennis court and pink dogwood trees over the pond and the place looks as if it were constructed to hide bits of Italian marble from the public. Scott likes it better than France and I like it fine…We are more alone than ever before while the psychiatres patch up my nervous system.

This “they say” is the way you really are—or no, was it the other way round?

Then they present you with a piece of bric-a-brac of their own forging which falls to the pavement on your way out of the clinic and luckily smashes to bits, and the patient is glad to be rid of their award.

Don’t
ever
fall into the hands of brain and nerve specialists unless you are feeling very Faustian.

Scott reads Marx—I read the Cosmological philosophers. The brightest moments of our day are when we get them mixed up.

The Turnbulls’ son Andrew, who was eleven then, remembered when Zelda first came to La Paix; he watched a taxi coming out from Phipps with a form in the back seat and someone said, “That’s Mrs. Fitzgerald; she’s sick.” His impression was of someone for whom everything was organized. He remembered her sitting under the oak trees in high laced white shoes, biting her lips, picking at her face. There was something not wholesome about her,” he said. When she went swimming at the quarry she wore a two-piece maroon suit, but her figure seemed peculiar to him. “She was odd; she had to be explained.” Zelda would dance around the living-room table to the tune of her gramophone and her face twisted quirkily. She was a frail and somehow pathetic figure to the little boy. “When things were going well for them [the Fitzgeralds] you sensed it immediately; they possessed a sort of very clean fragrance, as though they were fresh from the bath, and then theirs was a bandbox freshness, a daintiness. She played a better game of tennis than Scott, but as might be expected, hers was an uneven game.”

She talked very little to anyone, and nothing stuck in the memory of Andrew or his mother. It was Scott who made the more vivid impression on the Turnbulls. Mrs. Turnbull found him a charming man: “He was the only man I’ve ever known who would ask a woman a direct question about herself… He did seem to care and he always told you plain truths about yourself.” She remembers him playing with their children and Scottie, the “marvelous quality of his voice when he recited poetry to the children. How magical that voice was, how it held one—he could have been an excellent actor.” His drinking had bothered her, for the Turnbulls were teetotalers,
but a respect for his literary genius eclipsed her memory of that. Mrs. Turnbull remembers, “He was terribly sensitive to criticism— perhaps he was a little guilty about Zelda… he talked a lot about Zelda; she was his invalid. But he only spoke of her charm, her appeal for men, and her brilliance.” She said that he often spoke of Zelda’s great fascination and magnetism—“a true admiration of her judgment.” He seemed sometimes to depend upon her approval. But Mrs. Turnbull could remember no evidence of Zelda’s revealing herself to her. “Oh, she spoke a great deal about trees and used the same words to describe them—repeated herself a good deal. But then we never really spoke to each other. She stayed very much to herself. I used to see her walking like a small shadow along the path by the flower garden. She often walked there, quietly and alone. I thought of her as an invalid. She struck one like a broken clock.”