Zelda (47 page)

Dr. Meyer answered Fitzgerald the next week. He too had sensed the futility of their joint conversations, but he felt that what was involved was not simply a question of Zelda’s
case;
it was Scott’s life as well. Zelda, of course, was his patient, but Meyer saw Scott as someone who, though unwilling, also needed help. He didn’t want Scott to function as a sort of boss to Zelda, nor as a psychiatrist-nurse. He wanted a closer understanding of both of the Fitzgeralds, but he was certain that could be achieved only if Scott gave up alcohol.

Scott thought that they were working together, bringing a
collaboration of perspectives to bear on Zelda’s illness. “I felt that from the difference between my instinctive-emotional knowledge of Zelda, extending over 15 years, and your objective-clinical knowledge of her, and also from the difference between the Zelda that everyone who lives a hundred consecutive hours in this house sees and the Zelda who, as a consumate actress, shows herself to you—from these differences we might see where the true center of her should lie, around what point it’s rallying ground should be.”

But Meyer had hit a nerve, and Scott had no intention of undergoing whatever kind of psychological care Meyer cautiously suggested. He also felt unable to relinquish liquor. He was ruffled by the suggestion that his abuse of alcohol might impede Zelda’s recovery, or in some way diminish his ability to handle her. He said: “I can only think of Lincoln’s remark about a greater man and heavier drinker than I have ever been—that he wished he knew what sort of liquor Grant drank so he could send a barrel to all his other generals.” He added that if Meyer considered him on the same level as a schizophrenic, he was rather alarmed about his role in the whole business.

On May 28, 1933, Zelda and Scott sat down at La Paix, with a stenographer, and Dr. Rennie as moderator, to discuss their troubles, or at least to air them again. The 114-page transcription of their talk provides another key to those “splits in the skin” of their marriage at this juncture. It was 2:30 on Sunday when they began and the afternoon sunlight fell short of the interior of the darkening room in which they sat. Scott began by saying he was being destroyed by the present situation of his marriage. “It is all unfair. It is all unfair.… I am paid those enormous prices, and not for nothing. I am paid for a continual fight and struggle that I can carry on.… the whole equipment of my life is to be a novelist. And that is attained with tremendous struggle; that is attained with a tremendous nervous struggle; that is attained with a tremendous sacrifice which you make to lead any profession. It was done because I was equipped for it. I was equipped for it as a little boy. I began at ten, when I wrote my first story. My whole life is a professional move towards that.

“Now the difference between the professional and the amateur is something that is awfully hard to analyze, it is awfully intangible. It just simply means the keen equipment; it means a scent, a smell of the future in one line.”

Zelda, Scott said, had written some “nice, little sketches” she
had a satiric point of view toward her friends, and she had certain experiences to report, “but she has nothing essentially to say. To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless motivation of a subject, and the endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice.”

As they talked one aspect of the problem became clear: Scott had not published a novel for eight years (in the transcript he said “seven years—six years”) and he blamed it on Zelda. “Three of those years were directly because of a sickness of hers, and two years before that indirectly, for which she was partly responsible, in that she wanted to be a ballet dancer; I backed her in that.”

Finally Zelda interrupted him: “You mean you were drinking constantly.… Well, that is the truth… it is just one of the reasons why I wanted to be a ballet dancer, because I had nothing else.”

Several pages later in the transcript Scott turned to Zelda and told her outright what he thought of her talents: “It is a perfectly lonely struggle that I am making against other writers who are finely gifted and talented. You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer.”

“You have told me that before.”

“I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world. I have at various times dominated…”

Zelda again broke in: “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”

Repeatedly throughout the afternoon, they came back to this point: Scott was the professional writer and he was supporting Zelda; therefore, the entire fabric of their life was his material, none of it was Zelda’s. He spelled it out: “Everything we have done is my…I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” Zelda told him he was “absolutely neurotic on the subject of your own work anyway. You are so full of self-reproach about not having written anything for that long period of time that you stoop to the device of accusing me.”

“One thousand dollars a month in Switzerland.”

“You did not do it for seven years.”

“Yes, seven years. Three years I took care of you. Three years I pulled up after
The Great Gatsby
, and two years we tried to be swell and live in a great mansion in Delaware.”

Scott had very fixed ideas of what a woman’s place should be in a marriage: “I would like you to think of my interests. That is your primary concern, because I am the one to steer the course, the pilot.”

“I tell you, my life has been so miserable that I would rather be in an asylum. Does that mean a thing to you?”

“It does not mean a blessed thing.”

What, then, Zelda asked him, did he want her to do.

“I want you to stop writing fiction.”

The novel that Zelda was working on, the one about psychiatry, touched too closely on Scott’s material for
Tender Is the Night;
he could not tolerate another encroachment, such as
Save Me the Waltz
had been, on his literary territory. Zelda had put a double lock on the door to the room where she wrote, because Scott said he would destroy her book. He said to her now, “I told you if I came in and found you writing on it, I would crumple it up.”

“I do not want you to tear it up. You know that some of it is awfully good prose; and you know it would break my heart to tear it up.”

“You know I would not do it.”

Zelda insisted that she did not want to be dependent on Scott. Dr. Rennie asked her if she meant financially dependent, and Zelda said: “Every way. I want to be, to say, when he says something that is not so, then I want to do something so good, that I can say, ‘That is a bad damned lie!’ and have something to back it up, that I can say it.”

Scott said, “Now, we have found rock bottom.”

Dr. Rennie said he thought they had.

“And I think it is better to shut yourself up in an institution than to live this way,” said Zelda.

Scott wanted her to be what he called a “complementary intelligence.” That was not at all what she wanted to be.

Finally, Dr. Rennie asked Zelda if being an outstanding woman writer would compensate for a life without Scott. Would being a creative artist mean enough to her if she were alone? “Would that mean enough to you when you were sixty?”

After a lapse of about a minute, during which no one spoke, Zelda replied: “Well, Dr. Rennie, I think perhaps that is sort of a silly question.… How can I tell what it would mean?” Even at this point in their lives, in the face of Scott’s denunciations, Zelda would not directly say that she could live without him. A few moments
later she turned to him and asked: “What is our marriage anyway? It has been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember.”

“I don’t know about that. We were about the most envied couple in about 1921 in America.”

“I guess so. We were awfully good showmen.”

“We were awfully happy,” Scott said.

The argument kept returning to the question of Zelda’s writing. Finally, Scott gave her an ultimatum; she had to stop writing fiction. She asked, “Of any kind?”

“If you write a play, it cannot be a play about psychiatry, and it cannot be a play laid on the Riviera, and it cannot be a play laid in Switzerland, and whatever the idea is, it will have to be submitted to me.”

Zelda said she was sick of being beaten down, of being bullied into accepting Scott’s ideas of everything. She would not stand it any longer; she would rather be in an institution. Their talk ended with nothing settled and a great deal of salt rubbed in their wounds. Scott for the first time seriously considered divorcing Zelda, and consulted a lawyer about the possible conditions under which he could be free of her. He found that in the state of Nevada with only six weeks’ residence he would have no trouble whatsoever accomplishing that end. He chose not to. They continued living together under the conditions of strain and distrust that the transcript makes painfully clear.

Scott felt cornered, as indeed he had been for some time, and when he talked about his equipment as a novelist, it was without fully realizing that it was just that equipment, his very real sensitivity to people, his ability to throw himself completely into the mood of a moment and charge it with himself, that made so hazardous his current relationship with Zelda. In a few more years, by 1936, he would understand it more clearly and write: “… what can you do for meddling with a human heart? A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.” The Fitzgeralds were no longer dazzling youngsters, charmingly self-promoting, with a cache of youth and stamina to rescue them. What Zelda needed was peace, calm, and reassurance of herself at every point of uncertainty. Scott could not give what he did not have. But it was asked of him again and again. He was asked to be—as the remarkably dedicated Leonard Woolf seems to have been so perfectly for his wife, Virginia—Zelda’s bulwark, her ballast. Scott
Fitzgerald was simply not equipped to play that sort of role for anyone; his courage was in trying so very hard against considerable odds to offer that kind of assistance to Zelda. In 1933 he was dangerously close to the end of his resources and he knew it. Always before this he had been able to recoup his losses, but his reserves were low. The Fitzgeralds were, in every sense, in the midst of a depression. Railing at Zelda would not help; it would in fact imperil the one thing Scott had believed in as a constant. But he seemed helpless against the potent tides of her illness: dragged into the quagmire of her puzzled existence, he fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.

The spring before this one, sixty young students from the Baltimore area had formed a group called the Vagabond Junior Players. They were an offshoot of the Vagabonds, which was a smart and active little-theatre group in Baltimore. The Junior Vags, as they were soon called, planned to produce three plays in the summer of 1933. Each play would run six nights. For their second play they chose Zelda’s
Scandalabra
, which would run from June 26 through July 1. She designed and executed the sets and screens for the production. A young man who starred in the production, Zack Maccubbin, remembered his unusual introduction to the author early in the spring of 1933. He was walking down a lane toward the gates of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt sanitarium. On his left was La Paix.

“Ahead of me, near the gate, was a woman going in the same direction that I was. However, I soon caught up with her and we said ‘Hello.’…She was a tall, slender blonde with a classic profile and other than a slight impediment in her speech, was obviously a ‘Southern Lady.’ As we approached the top of the hill she told me that she was from the Victorian house near the gate that I had so admired.” As they began to talk he found out drat Zelda was having treatments at Sheppard-Pratt, and without much prodding he told her he was an actor. Zelda was delighted with her discovery and told the young man she had a play she wanted him to read and perhaps act in. “Now we were at the top of the hill. The original buildings of the hospital were to our left. Great red brick Victorian buildings with towers, turrets and a look of having been there for years on end.… As we stood there the lady asked me to dinner the following
Sunday at La Paix. She charmed me. I accepted with great pleasure.… She walked slowly away to her appointment.”

The next Sunday Mr. Maccubbin came promptly at the right time and after several martinis dinner began, but it was interrupted when Scott learned that although the young man had gone to military school he had not learned to box. Scott decided “to give me a lesson right then and there. Zelda tried to stop us, but he paid no attention. I did think it damn peculiar, but went along with it. You know he taught Scottie to box, too. I remember a circle of green lawn between the driveway and the front entrance of the house. It was just a little larger than a ring. He’d have Scottie put her fists up and they’d circle around each other.” When the boxing lesson was over, they returned to dinner. Afterward Maccubbin was left alone to read
Scandalabra
, and when he was finished he read several scenes from it aloud to Zelda. It was, he remembers, “equally as strange as its title implies. However, I was too new in the theatre to be much of a critic and, at that time, a leading role impressed me more than the subject matter of the play. As I remember, it had dozens of scenes from the Riviera to New York City and back again.… Scott had never read the play and saw no rehearsals. Zelda had wanted this to be her own project…with no help from Scott or anyone else.”

The rehearsals began in June in a building that was a converted carriage house on Read Street. “I don’t think we ever got through the whole play in any one day prior to dress rehearsal. Mrs. Penniman [the director]…[was] a slow talker. Zelda’s impediment that I had noticed that first day turned out to be the result of having bitten the inside of her lower lip during the first illness in Europe, so that she had gotten in the habit of extending her lower lip even though it was now healed.” Her speech sounded rhythmic and she hit the s’s. Mrs. Penniman tried to cut the play, but Zelda would not yield; she would insist, “‘Mrs. Penniman, that is a very important part of the play. It is cleared up completely in the third scene of the second act!’ “They would then go into a huddle together and usually Zelda won her point and they stuck close to the original script.