Zelda (49 page)

Although the Divers were at the simplest level a composite of the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds, and the lyric opening of the novel drew on the spell the Murphys cast, Scott moved from that blending of sources until he was drawing deeply upon Zelda’s and his life together. He mercilessly exposed Zelda in his characterization of Nicole Diver. He drew upon Zelda’s most terrible and private letters to him, written in the anguish of the early months of her illness in Switzerland, snipped and pieced them together in Book II with very little regard for Zelda’s reaction or for the precarious balance of her sanity.
Tender Is the Night
would not, of course, be recalled from Scribner’s
as Save Me the Waltz
had been because of Scott’s fictional exploitation of Zelda’s mental illness in the novel. There was no one to act in Zelda’s behalf, as Scott had once acted in his own. The letters written from Nicole to “Mon Capitaine” and “Captain Diver” were not simply echoes from Zelda’s letters to Scott; there were whole phrases used exactly as he had received diem. Among many examples are the following.

In
Tender Is the Night
Scott wrote:

Last year or whenever it was in Chicago when I got so I couldn’t speak to servants or walk in the street I kept waiting for someone to tell me. It was the duty of someone who understood. The blind must be led. Only no one would tell me everything—they would just tell me half and I was already too muddled to put two and two together. One man
was nice—he was a French officer and he understood. He gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins entendue.” We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker and there was no one to explain to me.

In one of Zelda’s letters from Prangins she had written Scott:

I could not walk in the streets unless I had been to my lesson. I could not manage the apartment because I could not speak to the servants…and still I did not understand what I was doing.… You have given me a flower and said it was “plus petit et moins entendue.” We were friends. Then you took it away and I grew sicker and there was nobody to teach me.

And there was this on the following page of the novel:

I write to you because there is no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you.

Compare with Zelda’s letter, which read:

I would always be more than glad to see you, and will always be devoted to you—but the farcicle element of this situation is too apparent for even a person as hopeless and debilitated as I am.

The next sentence in the novel was lifted from another of Zelda’s letters.

The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted.

Zelda had written Scott:

At any rate one thing has been achieved: I am thoroughly and completely humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted.

Scott wrote:

I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest.

And Zelda had written him:

I will more than gladly welcome any alienist you may suggest.

Fitzgerald even quoted directly in
Tender Is the Night
from Bleuler’s diagnosis of Zelda’s case.

Three days after Zelda went back to Phipps she admitted that she was “a little upset about it
[Tender].…
But a person has a right to interpret—But it really doesn’t matter. What made me mad was that he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his life and I couldn’t help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences.

“It was a chronological distortion and I suppose one has a right to do that in an artistic creation. But on the whole I don’t think it’s true—I don’t think it’s really what happened.”

Suddenly she began to cry uncontrollably. “I can’t get on with my husband and I can’t live away from him—materially impossible—so I think the only thing to do is to get my mind on something.… I’m so tired of compromises. Shaving off one part of oneself after another until there is nothing left.…”

Now Zelda did not show any signs of improvement. She began smiling to herself, she avoided answering questions put to her, and she laughed suddenly for no reason at all. In a coherent moment the sadness of her position in relation to Scottie came out. “She [Scottie] is about as far away from me as anyone can be. She doesn’t like any of the things I like although I’ve tried to interest her in them. She’s just like her father, she’s a cerebral type. She’s crazy about history, French and English—and I don’t know any so she rather looks down on me. Scott said he wanted to take her education in his hands so I’ve never interfered. I’ve kept out of it carefully because I realized that eventually Scott and I would have to separate and she is his child, she’s so like him and he adores her. It would just be the undoing of him to take her away from him.”

Each day her condition grew worse; she was preoccupied, moody, and irritable. She began to insist that she be allowed to leave Phipps. (Zelda was never confined, in a legal sense, to any hospital. She went of her own volition and was not therefore “committed”; if she asked to leave persistently enough, she had to be released.) She said she couldn’t work in the clinic; she was restless and antagonistic toward the doctors. She began to write a study of Aristotle, which rambled on peculiarly about abstract emotions; she was grasping at straws, anything that would compensate for the breakdown in her relationship with Scott.

Meanwhile, Scott worked on the final revision of galley proof for
Tender Is the Night.
(Because the book was going to be published in April it had to be set from the magazine galleys. In February
Scott was still reworking the last serial installment; at some points because of the time pressure he was probably, as Matthew Bruccoli suggests in his textual study of the novel, working on magazine and book galleys at the same time.) It was cold, painstaking labor and he wrote Perkins:

After all, Max, I am a plodder. One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway, and I told him, against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I wanted to indulge that…but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over every point until I have made myself into a slow-moving behemoth (if that is the correct spelling), and so there I am for the rest of my life.

That Scott managed to pull the galleys into shape at all under the circumstances is astonishing. At the close of the same letter he told Perkins that
Tender Is the Night
was “a woman’s book” and that he had

lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

Zelda is better.

But she was not. There were days when Zelda refused to get out of bed in the morning, and once she ran to her nurse and said she had to call Scott. She needed two hundred dollars immediately in order to leave for Europe; she decided that she absolutely had to leave Phipps.

At just about this point Zelda must have been reading the March issue of
Scribner’s Magazine
, for she wrote Scott:

Dear, Monsieur, D.O.;

The third installment is fine. I like immensely that retrospective part through Nicole’s eyes—which I didn’t like at first because of your distrust of polyphonic prose. It’s a swell book.… I wish I could write stories. I wish I could write something sort of like the book of revelations: you know, about how everything would have come out if we’d only been able to supply the 3-letter word for the Egyptian god of dithryambics.
Something all full of threats preferably and then a very gentle confession at the end admitting that I have enfeebled myself too much by my own vehemence to ever become very frightened again.…

DO.:

You
don’t
love me— But I am counting on Pavloff’s dogs to make that kind of thing all right—and, in the mean-time, under the added emotional stress of the breek-up of our state, perhaps the old conventions will assume an added poignancy—…Besides,
anything
personal was never the objective of our generation—we were to have thought of ourselves heroicly; we agreed in the Plaza Grill the pact was confirmed by the shaking of Connie Bennets head and the sonority of Ludlow’s premature gastritis—

A few days later, on March 8, 1934, after three and one-half weeks at Phipps, Zelda left. She was no better. In desperation Scott remembered Forel’s recommendation of Craig House in Beacon, New York. From a descriptive letter sent to Scott in 1932, when he first investigated Craig House, it sounded like a very handsome establishment for the wealthier of the mentally ill. Located on 350 acres on the Hudson River, about two hours above New York City, it had cottages and private nurses for each patient. The treatment aimed (and all the brochures of mental hospitals seemed to stress this, probably to relieve the minds of the relatives of the patients) to provide as much freedom and personal liberty as was possible; there were no locks and keys. There were indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a golf course with its own clubhouse and golf pro, tennis courts, a masseuse and a hostess who organized bridge, backgammon, and pingpong tournaments. The minimum rate without laundry or the use of the swimming pool was $175 a week. Scott took Zelda there quickly.

After he had left her she wrote to him.

Do-Do:

It was so sad to see your train pull out through the gold sheen of the winter afternoon. It is sad that you should have so many things to worry you and make you unhappy when your book is so good and ought to bring you so much satisfaction. I hope the house won’t seem desolate and purposeless.… This is a beautiful place; there is everything on earth available and I have a little room to paint in with a window higher than my head the way I like windows to be. When they are that way, you can look out on the sky and feel like Faust in his den, or an alchemist or anybody you like who must have looked out of windows
like that. And my own room is the nicest room I’ve ever had, any place—which is very unjust, considering the burden you are already struggling under.

Dear—I will see you soon. Why not bring Scottie up for Easter?…And I
promise
you absolutely that by then I will be much better—and as well as I can.

Dear:

PLEASE
remember that you owe it to the fine things inside you to get the most out of them.

Work
, and don’t drink, and the accomplished effort will perhaps open unexpected sources of happiness, or contentment, or whatever it is you are looking for—certainly a sense of security— If I were you’d, I’d dramatize your book [Scott was considering giving it to a young man he knew in Baltimore to do] yourself.… a character play hinging on the two elements within the man [Dick Diver]: his worldly proclivities and his desire to be a distinguished person. I wish I could do it.

Love, dear—

She said she played tennis almost every day and took long walks, but that she was homesick for La Paix

—and even for those lonesome bicycle rides when I would come in to find “the Baron” behind his rhodedendrons and his diamond-leaded windows. [Scott’s study at La Paix had a leaded-glass bow window.] You were so sad all year and I wanted so desperately for you to be happy. Will we be close again and will I feel the mossy feeling back of your head and will I share those little regulations by which you keep your life in order: the measured drinks, the neatly piled papers; to see you choose which shirt to please the day and hear you fuss about the fancy handkerchiefs.

Darling—

The initial opinion at Beacon about Zelda’s condition was that she was suffering from fatigue. She was described as mildly confused and mentally retarded—with a degree of emotional instability.

Thirteen of Zelda’s paintings and fifteen drawings were exhibited from March 29 through April 30 at Cary Ross’s studio. (There was a much smaller supplementary exhibit in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.) At the top of the red, white, and blue brochure for the show was a swan with a banner bearing the legend “Parfois la Folie est la Sagesse.” Zelda came down from Beacon for her exhibition accompanied by a nurse; she visited her show, saw an exhibition of Georgia
O’Keeffe’s paintings, and then attended a luncheon with Scott, Maxwell Perkins, and a few others from Scribner’s before returning to Craig House. On the train journeying back to Beacon she became hysterical and was given medication to quiet her.

Gerald Murphy, who went to her exhibit, and who had painted himself, felt that Zelda’s work was formed from a visual distortion. He talked about an oil painting he and Mrs. Murphy bought for $200 called “Chinese Theater.” “Those monstrous, hideous men, all red with swollen intertwining legs. They were obscene—I don’t mean sexually…and everyone who saw them recognized that quality of repellent human life; they were figures out of a nightmare, monstrous and morbid.”

Later when Zelda learned of the Murphys’ purchase, she wrote Scott:

Dearest Do-Do:…

Cary wrote that Ernest was back in N.Y.; that he had been to see my pictures. Why don’t you ask him down?…He also said the Murphys bought the acrobats. I am going to paint a picture for the Murphy’s and they can choose as those acrobats seem, somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked. Maybe they aren’t like I think they are but I don’t see why they would like that Buddhistic suspension of mass and form and I will try to paint some mood that their garden has conveyed.… And don’t pay any attention to that initialled moth-hole in the Times. [Earlier in this letter she had referred to a review of
Tender
by J.A.D., which she thought obtuse.]