Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (40 page)

Despite his good intentions, Fitzgerald sometimes behaved as badly with Scottie as he did with Zelda. Like Sara Murphy, Scottie complained that he made her feel uneasy by constantly nagging, probing and criticizing; by trying to control every aspect of her life and refusing to give her the freedom to make her own mistakes. When the twelve-year-old Scottie wore a dress that Fitzgerald disliked, he got into a drunken rage and tore it right off her body. Scottie discreetly told Sheilah Graham, who knew her well in the late 1930s, that Fitzgerald was “a father I didn’t get along with.” And Sheilah, who knew how much he loved Scottie, more bluntly declared: “as the father of an adolescent girl, Scott Fitzgerald was a bust.”
⁴

Zelda left Phipps and moved into La Paix in late June 1932. She followed a strict regimen of exercise and rest, and occupied herself with swimming, tennis, horseback riding, ballet dancing and painting. Fitzgerald had told Margaret Turnbull about Zelda’s beauty, brilliance, courage and attractiveness to men. But all that was gone, and she now played the mad Ophelia to his tortured Hamlet. They still had bitter quarrels about their insoluble problems: financial, alcoholic, sexual and medical. They fought about their competitive careers, about Zelda’s desire to write of her illness while he was still working on
Tender Is the Night
and about his attempt to control her life. They also discussed the possibility of a divorce.

Zelda seemed, to Peaches Finney, cold, indifferent and withdrawn. She often wore a tutu and picked at the bits of eczema on her ravaged face. Andrew Turnbull remembered her “as a boyish wraith of a woman in sleeveless summer dresses and ballet slippers, with not much expression on her hawk-like face and not very much to say.” While at La Paix, Zelda told John Peale Bishop of the torments she had suffered and suggested, in her strange way, the profound confusion of their lives: “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 [mystical?] philosophers. The brightest moments of our day are when we get them mixed up.”

Zelda could say, as Shelley did in “The Witch of Atlas,” “Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is.” She had impulsively summoned the fire department during her childhood in Montgomery and during the early years of her marriage in Westport, and in 1927 had expressed her resentment of Lois Moran by burning her new clothes in the bathtub of their cottage at the Ambassador Hotel. In mid-June 1933, Zelda set fire to the roof and second story of La Paix while trying to burn things in a fireplace that was no longer used. The newspapers, following Scott’s attempt to cover up the real cause, tactfully reported that a short circuit in the wiring had started the fire. Scott rescued his manuscripts but lost his collection of books about ghoulish injuries in World War I. He and Zelda were photographed on the front lawn amidst her paintings and the books, cushions, lamps, mattresses and wicker furniture they had managed to salvage from the fire. Standing up and wearing an old overcoat, Scott looks wearily at the camera; the seated Zelda looks up at Scott with a glazed and guilty stare.

Their smoky, scattered possessions formed the core of the wasteful and expensive junk that Zelda catalogued in her autobiographical essay, “Auction—Model 1934.” The Fitzgeralds never owned a house, constantly packed and unpacked as they shifted their chaotic lives from place to place and, apart from jewelry and clothes, had very little to show for all the money Scott had once earned. “We have five phonographs, including the pocket one, and no radio,” Zelda wrote, with a characteristically
je m’en fiche
attitude, “eleven beds and no bureau. We shall keep it all, the tangible remnant of the four hundred thousand we made from hard words and spent with easy ones these fifteen years. And the collection, after all, is just about as valuable now as the Polish and Peruvian bonds of our thriftier friends.”

La Paix was damaged by fire, smoke and water, but did not burn down. Bayard Turnbull was not at all pleased by Zelda’s carelessness but, since he was covered by insurance, did not become angry about it. Fitzgerald, making the final push on
Tender Is the Night,
asked that repairs on the house be postponed so he would not be disturbed by the workmen. And so, Andrew Turnbull wrote, Scott labored on for the next six months “amid the waterstained walls and woodwork in that hulk of a house, whose bleakness matched the color of his soul.”

During the summer and fall of 1932 Zelda had written an unreadable and unactable “farce-fantasy” called
Scandalabra.
Her play reversed the plot of
The Beautiful and Damned
—in which millions are withheld by a puritanical grandfather because of his heir’s unconscionable waste and extravagance—and dealt with a pleasant young farmboy who is suddenly willed millions if he agrees to follow a life of wickedness and dissipation. The play was to be performed by the Junior Vagabonds, an amateur theater group in Baltimore, and run for six performances—one week after the fire—from June 26 to July 1, 1933.

The dress rehearsal of
Scandalabra
lasted nearly five hours, and the play had to be radically cut by Fitzgerald, with the aid of the cast, in an all-night session just before the opening. Despite his efficient surgery—and a character delightfully called Anaconda Consequential—the first performance, though fairly well attended (Fitzgerald stood out on the sidewalk like a circus barker and tried to draw innocent pedestrians into the theater), was an embarrassing failure. Subsequent audiences, after harsh and baffled reviews, dwindled to a few curious spectators. Scottie later defended her father (who felt Zelda had stolen “his material” in
Save Me the Waltz,
but allowed the novel to be published when he could easily have suppressed it at Scribner’s) against the charge that he was hostile to Zelda’s artistic careers. In her foreword to an exhibition catalogue of Zelda’s paintings, published in 1974, Scottie substantiated her belief that Fitzgerald “greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife’s unusual talents and ebullient imagination. Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934, he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play,
Scandalabra,
staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore; he spent many hours editing the short stories she sold to
College Humor
and to
Scribner’s
magazine; and though I was too young to remember clearly, I feel quite sure that he was even in favor of her ballet lessons.”
⁵

Fitzgerald’s failures in the early 1930s matched Zelda’s. The fees for his
Post
stories began to fall as rapidly as they had once ascended. After reaching a peak of $4,000 in 1929, they had dropped in increments of $500 to $2,500; and his income of $16,000 in 1932 was half what it had been the previous year. Not only was the quality of his stories falling (partly because he gave less attention to them as he got absorbed in the completion of his novel), but he was also, for the first time in his professional career, writing work he could not publish. In 1933 he made five false starts on stories, had another story rejected by the
Post,
wrote a long, unsold radio script for the comedienne Gracie Allen and completed a film treatment of
Tender Is the Night
that was rejected. Making the best of adversity, Fitzgerald composed an interesting essay about his difficulties, “One Hundred False Starts” (1933), which described his search for a meaningful emotion—“one that’s close to me and that I can understand”—that would spark his creative impulse.

II

In December 1933, after completing
Tender Is the Night,
Fitzgerald moved from the fire-damaged and rather spooky La Paix to a smaller and cheaper home in the center of Baltimore. The narrow, three-story house at 1307 Park Avenue, at the corner of Lanvale, had white steps, shuttered windows and a high front door, and was in a slightly rundown neighborhood. Fitzgerald thought the change of scene would help Zelda, but the move actually made things worse.

She had been relatively stable for the past twenty months, since leaving Phipps. But in August 1933, just after the performance of
Scandalabra,
Zelda’s brother Anthony—depressed about losing his job and worried about his lack of income—suffered a mental breakdown. He entered a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, and committed suicide by jumping out of a window in his room. (After Fitzgerald’s death, his brother-in-law Newman Smith also killed himself.) Troubled by Anthony’s suicide, Zelda began to lose weight and again became suicidal. She had her third breakdown in the Baltimore house and reentered Phipps Clinic on February 12, 1934. Kept under constant observation to prevent suicide, she had to remain in bed and under sedation. In the clinic she began smiling to herself, would not respond to questions and would suddenly burst out laughing for no discernible reason.

Fitzgerald had never liked Dr. Meyer’s treatment of Zelda at Phipps. When she made no progress during February, Fitzgerald consulted Dr. Forel. The Swiss doctor suggested that Zelda transfer to a luxurious clinic on a large country estate that resembled Prangins. On March 8, after less than a month at Phipps, Zelda moved to Craig House Hospital in Beacon, New York, and was cared for by Forel’s friend, Dr. Clarence Slocum. Born in Rhode Island in 1873, Dr. Slocum had earned his medical degree at Albany. Craig House, located on 350 acres above the Hudson River near West Point, housed its patients in scattered cottages, each with an individual nurse. The hospital organized bridge and ping-pong tournaments, had indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts and a golf course with club house and pro, which made it seem even more like a country club than Prangins.

Soon after she arrived Zelda told Scott: “This is a beautiful place; there is everything on earth available and I have a little room to paint in. . . . [Scottie] would love it here with the pool and the beautiful walks.” Though not as expensive as Prangins, the cost of $175 a week was considerably more than at Phipps, and both Scott and Zelda worried about the drain on their dwindling resources. The initial report on Zelda’s condition was extremely imperceptive and might just as well have been made by the golf pro. Dr. Slocum thought she was suffering from fatigue, and described the bright, talented and suicidal Zelda as “mildly confused and mentally retarded—with a degree of emotional instability.” After two and a half months at Craig House Zelda fell into a catatonic state. On May 19, 1934, she moved to her third clinic in three months. Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, was—ironically—adjacent to the grounds of La Paix.

Zelda’s third breakdown, which coincided with the serialization of
Tender Is the Night
in
Scribner’s Magazine,
devastated Fitzgerald and destroyed his hopes for her recovery. Zelda had now become, for him, a case—not a person. Yet Scott emphasized his Faustian bond to her when he told a friend: “Life ended for me when Zelda and I crashed. If she would get well, I would be happy again and my soul would be released. Otherwise, never.” He continued to feel guilty about her illness, which was emotionally connected with his own perception of his drinking, his sexual inadequacy, and his use of Zelda as muse and subject of his fiction.

Most of Scott’s friends were married and he believed, despite his personal experience, that marriage was the best arrangement for a writer. But he complained that Zelda, even when well, never understood or helped him, never recognized his stature as an author. In the late 1930s, thinking bitterly of his relations with Zelda, he told an aspiring writer: “I think a great deal of your problem will depend on whether you have a sympathetic wife who will realize calmly and coolly, rather than emotionally, that a talent like yours is worth saving.”
⁶

After leaving his relatively structured life at La Paix, Fitzgerald felt depressed, isolated and adrift, and began a dangerous slide into uncontrolled alcoholism and his own milder form of mental illness. When asked in 1928 about his greatest interests in life, Fitzgerald had mentioned “scandal touching upon his friends, everything about the late war, discovering new men and books of promise, Princeton, and [thinking of the Murphys] people with extraordinary personal charm.” Nine years later, in response to
Contemporary American Authors,
his interests had dwindled (only military history remained from the previous decade) to “swimming, mild fishing, history, especially military, bucolic but civilized travel, food and wine, imaginary problems of organization, if this makes sense.” Since he rarely went swimming or fishing, traveled infrequently, cared very little for food or wine, this list was rather fanciful. His main interest, though he expressed it vaguely, was now aesthetic. He was primarily concerned with how to conceive and structure a work of art. In a private letter of September 1934 to Christian Gauss of Princeton, Fitzgerald let his guard down and said more frankly: “Outside interests generally mean for me women, liquor or some form of exhibitionism.”
⁷

Scott would have agreed with Zelda, who once replied, when asked why she drank: “Because the world is chaos and when I drink I’m chaotic.” While living in Baltimore Fitzgerald was treated for alcoholism by Mencken’s doctor, Benjamin Baker. Between 1933 and 1937, Scott entered Johns Hopkins Hospital eight different times to recover from alcoholic binges or to seek treatment for mild bouts of tuberculosis. According to Dr. Baker, Fitzgerald did not blame his drinking on Zelda’s illness and took responsibility for it himself. He did not deny that he was an alcoholic but, despite frequent medical treatment, was unable to control his drinking—or his behavior. During a dinner in West Chester, Pennsylvania, at the house of the novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, Fitzgerald “caused a sensation” by rising from the dinner table, dropping his pants and exposing his sexual parts.
⁸