Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (54 page)

One Sunday Zelda, taken for a walk by a
dame
de
compagnie,
suddenly
broke away and fled.
27
It took three trained nurses to bring her back, whereupon she was immediately transferred to Villa Eglantine, a unit reserved for highly disturbed patients, where she was isolated, locked in and forcibly restrained.

In
Tender
Is
The
Night
Scott uses the name Eglantine for a secure unit in the psychiatric clinic which housed ‘those sunk into eternal darkness’. His fictional Eglantine, based on the hideous reality into which Zelda was confined, had the same exterior cheerfulness, the same concealed grilles, bars and immovable furniture where ‘no uninstructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether’.
28

In 1919 Scott had written repeatedly to Zelda how much he wished his princess was locked up in a tower. Now she was: confined by forcible bonds, the label madness, hearing other voices than his. Although Scott’s Ledger entry records only the barest
summary: ‘June 23rd Zelda confined Eglantine’, it cannot have made him feel good the way his 1919 fantasies had.

Although not legally committed, every time Zelda attempted to leave Prangins she was forcibly brought back to Eglantine, where in a blackened room she was administered morphine and bromides rectally, preceded by an enema. These drugs induced a two-
week-long
narcosis within twenty minutes.
29
Patients on this ‘Swiss Sleeping Cure’ were aroused only to relieve bladder or bowel or for minimal food. This narcotic procedure had several known
side-effects
, one of which was eczema, by which Zelda was again
tortured
from 15 July onwards.

Zelda had already sent Scott desperate letters.

Now deteriorating rapidly, she begged Scott to write Egorova ‘a friendly impersonal note to find out exactly where I stand as a dancer’. In her postscript she repeated:

Forel, convinced that if she continued to dance Zelda would not find stability, also wanted Scott to write to Egorova. He suggested that Scott write asking Egorova to discourage her pupil, even if it meant deceiving Zelda.
31
Forel felt that Zelda must be made to give up any idea that ballet was her vocation. Scott was not prepared to play along with Forel’s fraudulent plan. He had written to Egorova on 22 June:

Scott attached seven questions. Could Zelda achieve the level of a first-rate dancer; could she ever dance like Nikitina or Danilowa; how many years might that take if she could; if she couldn’t become first rate could her charming face and beautiful body land her roles in ballets such as those produced by Massine in New York; were there students in Egorova’s school better than Zelda; did she start too late to achieve good balance; was she working too hard for a woman her age; and if she had not fallen ill could she have satisfied both her ideal and her ambitions? On 9 July Egorova replied that Zelda had begun too late to become a first-rate dancer but she could become a very good dancer, capable of successfully dancing
important
roles in New York’s Massine Ballet Company.

Scott and Forel saw this as positive, though they knew Zelda would be crushed.

Meanwhile in order to make sense of her illness Zelda wrote a series of analytic letters to Scott. The most remarkable was a
forty-two
-page summary of their marriage which displayed her
extraordinary
memory for precise colourful detail of places, people and emotions. She recalled their early days in New York with reporters, fur-smothered hotel lobbies, the impressiveness of the Fowlers, tea dances at the Plaza, her eccentric behaviour at Princeton, Townsend’s blue eyes, the Biltmore’s marshmallow odour. She raced through absinthe cocktails, roadhouses where they bought gin, her startling white knickers, Scott’s affair with Gene Bankhead, their quarrels, their devilled ham, their trip to Europe where she was sick and he drank, Alabama’s unbearable heat, St Paul’s
treacherous
cold, the birth and wonder of Scottie. She dwelt on their
adoration
of the Kalmans, their dinners with Bunny, the intrusion of doctors, the encroaching disorder, the violent rows, her fantasy episode with Jozan, Scott’s flagrantly sentimental relations with Moran, their attempts for another child, his indifference to her
sickness
, the pleasure the Murphys brought them and her cascading into the twin worlds of art and ballet. She conjured up their life of too many parties, too many people, too much noise, too little sanity.
In this rush through the years she paused at the problem with Ernest, then at the counter-problem with Dolly, and concluded:

Scott struck back with a seven-page memo called ‘Written With Zelda Gone To The Clinique’, which he may not have sent but which he kept for posterity. In it he tried to account for the interconnected collapse of his career and destruction of their joy. He revisited Capri, then Paris when he was a success, ‘the biggest man in my profession everybody admired me’. He was proud of his friendships with the Murphys and Ernest, then deflated by the penalties of constant drinking. He pondered the ‘time of misery’ when he dragged
The
Great
Gatsby
out of the pit of his stomach, and described how he woke up in Hollywood, ‘no longer my egotistic, certain self but a mixture of Ernest in fine clothes and Gerald with a career…. Anybody that could make me believe that, like Lois Moran did, was precious to me.’ On reaching Ellerslie he was prepared to do
anything
to be liked, to make up from without for being
undernourished
from within. At rue Vaugirard when he needed reassurance that he was a great man of the world, Zelda had retreated. He felt exploited, not by her ‘but by something I resented terribly no happiness’. He remembered wondering why he kept working to pay the bills for his desolate menage. Worst of all, his novel was like a dream, further and further away. On the Riviera Gerald and Sara cooled towards him, Ernest became irritable, he drank to stave off his feelings of inferiority and Zelda had
emotionally
disappeared. ‘I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost meglomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered.’
34

Yet even now the Fitzgeralds were offering presentations to each other, some glib, some fanciful, many as honest as they could manage. Their tearing need was to explain themselves to one another.

In July Zelda reproached him for failing to guide her prior to her
illness: ‘… the obligation is, after all, with the people who
understand
, and the blind, of necessity, must be led’. As one of the blind, she felt ‘it is not astonishing that I should look on you with unfriendly eyes’.
35

Scott took the point. And the letter. It reappeared in
Tender
Is
The
Night
as a letter from Nicole: ‘I kept waiting for some one to tell me. It was the duty of some one who understood. The blind must be led.’
36

At that stage Zelda did not know that her husband was still making literary use of her fractured life. She was busy looking for causes: ‘I have done nothing but turn over cause and effect in my mind … your presentation of the situation is poetic even if it has no bearing on the truth: your working to preserve the family and my working to get away from it.’ She felt he had given the ‘absolute minimum of effort both to your work and to our mutual welfare … I envy you the mental processes which can so distort conditions into a rectitude of attitude for you … so take whatever comfort you may find in whatever self-justification you can construct.’ Perhaps with conscious irony, she added: ‘This is not a treatise of recrimination, but I would like you to understand clearly why, there are certain scenes not only towards the end which could never be effaced from my mind.’
37

Scott felt a need both to defend himself yet also to accept
responsibility
for Zelda. What he failed to do was to accept any
responsibility
for the destructive effects on Zelda of his drinking. He also had to protect Scottie from the worst effects of her mother’s illness and support them as a family by endlessly writing saleable stories.

He abhorred the psychiatrists’ investigation into the hidden places of their marital life and, as therapy revealed shaming aspects of their past, he found Zelda’s constant recriminations as
unbearable
as she found the reasons for them. Guilt and confusion left him tormented, which in turn made him vacillate between deep
sympathy
and profound irritation. Scott blamed Zelda for not taking responsibility for her own actions. He told Scottie that Zelda never felt a sense of guilt even when she put other people’s lives in
jeopardy
. She felt – according to Scott – that other people subjugated her or else situations beyond her control contrived against her. He felt Zelda ignored ordinary moral standards and tried to solve ethical problems independently. Years later he was still telling Scottie: ‘The insane are always mere guests on the earth, eternal strangers
carrying
around broken decalogues that they cannot read.’
38

Zelda refused to feel guilty. ‘Please don’t write to me about blame.
I am tired of rummaging my head to understand a situation that would be difficult enough if I were completely lucid. I cannot
arbitrarily
accept blame now when I know that in the past I felt none. Anyway blame doesn’t matter.’
39

But despite her brave words, Zelda
did
blame Scott for the months he had spent drinking and ignoring her. They were squabbling like children. A deep weariness overcame them. Zelda managed to lift herself from depression to resignation:

When Zelda read Egorova’s verdict she was devastated. She had been confident she could achieve distinction of the first rank. Her professional ballet career was over.