Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (53 page)

The three main characters in the Prangins drama staked out their painful positions.

From inside Prangins, Zelda wrote to Scott:

From outside Prangins, Scott wrote to Zelda, whose photo he held:

Scott the outsider wrote also to Dr Forel the insider:

At the heart of Prangins, its director Dr Forel wrote to Scott that he shared Scott’s ordeal, that he appreciated Scott’s co-operation, that his personal feelings were mixed with his professional role. Like Scott he wanted Zelda to become well.

Forel kept in close touch with Scott over Zelda’s diagnosis, treatment and progress, allowing him to feel responsible in his new role as unofficial co-consultant.

Dr Forel saw Zelda as ‘gay, playful, optimistic, artistic and
independently
minded’ but also ‘extremely irritable’.
4

Zelda saw herself as terrified.

Forel catalogued her symptoms: bizarre reactions, strange
interpretations
, inadequate responses, autism, insomnia, daydreaming, and smiling without cause. She also heard things, was hysterical, and had an inclination towards homosexuality which she projected on to her husband.

Zelda, too, catalogued her symptoms. She accepted that she was in a state of ‘continuous nervous horror’. She lived ‘in some horrible subconscious dream’.
5
She had hours of terrible ‘panic [which] settled into a persistent gloom punctuated by moments of
bombastic
hysteria’. Some days she wanted to die.
6

Patient and doctor
did
agree about the hysteria. They did
not
agree about her homosexuality. The patient did not think it was a symptom of illness, rather an expression of desire. The patient, according to the doctor, was out of line, had not read the medical books, must be re-educated.

Zelda, a fast reactor, a woman of rapier wit, suddenly exhibited such slow psychological and verbal responses that Forel suspected she had a brain tumour. But he could discover no physical evidence.
7

He considered schizophrenia, which in the Thirties had already been established as at least in part genetically transmitted. There appeared to be no history of schizophrenia in Zelda’s family.
8
  However, when the Sayres wrote to Forel in June, they did not furnish him with adequate information about the varied mental
illnesses
suffered by Zelda’s family. Whether any of them
had
produced
symptoms which a doctor at that time would have labelled schizophrenic is unknown.

The Sayres’ reluctance to divulge information was based on the Deep South view of mental illness. As one Montgomery resident said: ‘Every family in Montgomery has at least one mad person … But we never talk about it. Montgomery people didn’t (and don’t) talk about anyone’s “unusual” sexuality though there is a lot of that in our families too. In Zelda’s day sometimes they were said to be crazy when their families just couldn’t handle their views or their behaviour. You could be shut away just for talking about it.’
9

Forel felt Zelda’s ‘overweening inflated ambition’ had caused serious exhaustion. He did not take sufficiently into account the terrifying strains Scott’s alcoholism put on Zelda. He believed unspecified ‘marital difficulties’ had ‘provoked a depression with suicidal tendencies and a strong propensity for drug taking, which has developed into definite schizophrenia’.
10

This was a new term, meaning ‘split mind’, coined in 1911 by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist educated at Zurich University who became medical director of Zurich’s Burghölzli Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry. He redefined earlier views of madness by suggesting that dementia praecox, one form of insanity, could be expanded and renamed because its patients showed a split or loss of co-ordination between different psychic functions, such as
intellect
and emotions.
11
Bleuler was interested in Zelda’s case because he believed that it was a discrepancy between high aspiration and moderate achievement which precipitated delusions.

Symptoms varied with individual patients, but even in 1930 there were certain observable core symptoms, some of which Forel felt Zelda exhibited. All his schizophrenic patients believed their mental processes were no longer under their own control. Some insisted that alien forces put thoughts into their minds. Others heard voices telling them what to do or threatening to kill them. The most acute suffered delusions or hallucinations. How did Zelda match up to that measuring scale?

When she entered Prangins, Zelda had ‘imagined that there were corpses in the house, had thoughts of parricide, appeared to be sleepwalking’;
12
before that, she had felt people were criticizing her and had been unable to face dressmakers, shopkeepers or
servants
.
13

Forel informed Scott that key symptoms in the schizophrenic
repertoire
were vagueness of thought, illogicality and
incomprehensible
speech. Then they considered Zelda as a ‘case’. Zelda certainly had shifting thought patterns and made complex connections, but these were characteristics she had exhibited since childhood when
perfectly healthy. Another problem affecting her diagnosis, which Forel did not take into account, was that in Switzerland her doctors spoke little English and her French was mediated by a strong Deep Southern accent, complicated by her original turns of phrase, her non sequiturs and her extravagant hyperbole.

Most of Forel’s schizophrenic patients had lost their drive, were unable to respond emotionally to others and had become isolated and apathetic.
14
In June 1930 this was
not
true of Zelda, although as she became institutionalized for years a terrible apathy consumed her.

The onset of schizophrenia is usually preceded by stressful events. In Zelda’s case her sexual anxieties and artistic frustration had become overwhelming immediately before her breakdown. Yet these instances were reinterpreted by Forel. Her specific sexual fear was relabelled a joint marital conflict, her loss of identity due to
misappropriation
of artistic credit was renamed ‘disappointed
ambitions
’, and her illness seen as a reaction to feelings of inferiority, particularly towards Scott. In Thirties society where Scott was seen as the professional and Zelda as the amateur, his artistic superiority would automatically be validated, as much by the largely male medical profession as by the literary élite, therefore Zelda’s
resentful
responses would be seen as inappropriate, even ‘crazy’.

Forel thought Zelda needed routine, avoidance of drink and drugs, and a ‘normal’ marriage in which she oversaw her child’s education. He felt Scottie should be put on her guard so that she did not seek to fulfil her mother’s unsatisfied desires and ambitions. He outlined a treatment programme of systematic workshop activity, sports, entertainment and above all ‘regular discipline’. His crucial recommendation was that Zelda should give up her ‘inflated
ambitions
’ and engage in ‘activities appropriate to her talents and tastes’.
15

Scott saw Zelda’s state between 15 May and 15 July 1930 as a ‘period of insanity obvious to any layman’. He characterized it as wild homosexuality, suicide threats, attempts at escape, delusions. But he admitted that Zelda was also writing and painting
furiously
.
16
She had told the doctors how eager she was to paint and Scott had obtained permission to send in art materials. But there were many days when she felt isolated and terrified. ‘I can’t read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead –’, she wrote.
17

For a time Scott tried to play down the gravity of Zelda’s
condition
. In May he had written to Ober: ‘Zelda’s been sick + not
dangerously but seriously’, but by June from Paris he wrote to his mother: ‘Zelda has been desperately ill with a complete nervous breakdown and is in a sanitarium near here. She is better now but recovery will take a long time. I did not tell her parents the
seriousness
of it so say nothing – the danger was to her sanity rather than her life.’
18
Scottie, who was still attending school at Paris’s Cours Dieterlin, visiting Rosalind in Brussels and taking weekend trips to her tutor Mlle Serez’s family home, was told
nothing
about her mother’s condition. ‘I knew she was ill,’ she said later, ‘but I didn’t know why.’
19

Scott, in residence at the Hotel Righi near Glion, still failed to tell the Sayres how seriously ill Zelda was. He described it as nervous exhaustion for which Zelda was taking a Swiss cure, but Minnie Sayre was not fooled. Zelda’s regular weekly letters had suddenly stopped. Mamma Sayre, who had already nursed Marjorie and the Judge through mental breakdowns, was familiar with the patterns. Although frantic ‘for news from my little baby’, she wrote to Scott with Southern stoicism: ‘we might just as well face facts for there is no dodging them.’
20
Rosalind, who held Scott responsible for Zelda’s condition, insisted he was too irresponsible to oversee Scottie. She repeatedly suggested the child live with her and Newman. Scottie later wrote: ‘[Rosalind’s] smouldering quarrel with my father broke out – she deemed him too unreliable to be in charge of me while my mother was in the hospital and demanded that he let her adopt me.’
21

Scott refused, and in mid-June took Scottie to visit her mother for the first time. In an effort to seem normal Zelda became terrifyingly tense. After Scottie’s departure Zelda suffered a virulent attack of eczema across her neck, shoulders and face, with unremitting pain. Scott, almost as appalled as Zelda herself, was deeply sympathetic but also made good use of her agony. In
Tender
Is
The
Night
his description of an American mental patient runs: ‘On her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty – now she was a living agonizing sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she had lain under it, as imprisoned as the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special
hallucinations
.’ With some insight Scott has his Zelda-model say: ‘I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.’
22

Zelda herself, still covered with sores, had been reading James Joyce but found ‘it a night-mare in my present condition’. She told
Scott her concentration was failing, the pain so extreme that ‘my head evaporates,’ but she was still determined to read something ‘upon which my head will be able to make no conjectures …
something
with ideas’. She fixed on the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. ‘Will you send me “The Decline of the West” … so that I can put my sub-conscious, or whatever it is, back where it belongs and be left in peace to formulate and organize and absorb things that could find themselves a form afterwards?’ She did not want anything in French because she was having sufficient difficulty with English ‘and not Lawrence and not Virginia Wolf or anybody who writes by dipping the broken threads of their heads into the ink of literary history.’
23

Scott sent the Spengler and some perfume, but by the time they arrived the eczema had escalated. Doctors injected her with calcium and morphine, administered X-rays, placed her on a strict diet which excluded cheese, preserves, cooked pork and
hors-d’oeuvre,
but to no avail.
24

Despairingly she wrote: ‘If you don’t come take me out of this clinic I’m going crazy – swathed in embalming fluid all day and plastered with mud that decomposes and runs down my ears – I’d rather have hydro-phobia and all the plagues of the Holy Land and not be in captivity.’

With a wrenching return to satire she added: ‘There’s so little variety in eczema.’
25
In 1920 Zelda had written to Scott: ‘I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper.’
26
Which of them remembered it now?