Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (60 page)

What are we to make of these letters which reek of overstated dependency and affection? How can we account for the fact that Scott said later this period was the happiest of his and Zelda’s life?
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  Were those notes Zelda’s intellectual attempts at supreme irony? Or were they written in another private code which amused them both yet neither took seriously? Was the language of passivity Zelda’s determination to be seen as sane, using dependency as the
measuring
stick? Or did acting passive make her feel more feminine,
therefore
more likeable?

The letters do
not
sound as if they were written for fun, as Zelda was becoming more apprehensive about her father’s illness and more insecure in Scott’s absence. Zelda told Sara Mayfield that she would never forgive Scott for immuring her in Prangins, that she still didn’t know whether Scott had called in psychiatrists to help her or to protect himself. Sara Mayfield believed the dependent letters were ‘obvious flattery’ as a means of temporary survival, while Zelda’s stories were an effort to overcome her financial dependence and gain her release. This is a reasonable view, but it omits the complexity of Zelda’s love–hate feelings for Scott, which mirrored precisely her love–hate feelings for the South.

There was another curious and contradictory aspect. At the same time as writing Scott such exaggerated lines as ‘we are like a lot of minor characters at table waiting for the entrance of the star’, Zelda
was
investigating divorce. She went to see Peyton Mathis, who had recently persuaded the husband of a friend of Zelda’s to give her an
uncontested divorce. Peyton, though willing to help, pointed out that Scott would never allow the public humiliation of losing Scottie. He would fight for custody, and on the basis of the Prangins report would claim she was mentally unfit as a mother. Zelda’s family had already sampled the vengeance Scott could reap with ‘Babylon Revisited’. What neither Zelda nor Peyton knew was that after refusing to allow Scottie to live with Rosalind in Brussels, Scott had written to his cousin Ceci that if anything happened to him while Zelda was still deemed ‘sick’, she was to take care of Scottie.
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Seeing no solution, Zelda concentrated her energies on her daughter, to whom in Scott’s absence she had become closer. She told Scottie she was ‘safer here [in Montgomery] than you’ve ever been in your life’.
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Although Scott did not want Scottie educated in the South, or to acquire any of Zelda’s effete Southern attributes which he felt were partly responsible for her breakdown, Zelda had insisted Scottie attend Margaret Booth’s, where she was doing well.

The Judge, charmed by ten-year-old Scottie’s shy manners and French, Yankee and Confederate patois, frequently asked to see her. Then came a change: ‘Daddy is … as oblivious to his surroundings as he always was when he is himself,’ Zelda reported, ‘and when he is not he is tormented by imaginary prisons.’
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On 17 November Judge Sayre died. On 18 November Zelda sent Scott a reassuring telegram: ‘
DADDY DIED LAST NIGHT DO NOT WORRY
ABOUT US LOVE ZELDA
’, which the same day she followed with: ‘
YOU
CANNOT ARRIVE FOR FUNERAL DO NOT WORRY ABOUT US WITH DEAREST
LOVE ZELDA
.’ Initially, though sad and lonely, she accepted her father’s death with great self-control.

Her letter on the 19th told Scott: ‘Daddy seemed so elegant and concise. I have never seen anything so beautiful. The Capitol flag is flying at half-mast and old grayheaded men seem terribly sad. But Daddy seems young and beautiful and somehow master of
everything
. He looks very little in his clothes.’
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The entrance to the Supreme Court chambers was hung with black crepe. Miss Minnie wore mourning with a widow’s veil around her black hat. Zelda did not take Scottie to the funeral but reported her mother was ‘
absolutely
amazingly courageous’. The State of Alabama sent a large wreath while the Capitol employees sent all the roses from the grounds. Zelda bought a blanket of flowers for the coffin, and decided that she and Scott should pay most of it, about $50, as Marjorie was crying because she could not afford a black dress and Anthony was very poor. ‘I knew how you felt towards Daddy and that you would have wanted us to.’
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As the sun set behind the Capitol dome, on a bleak November day, her father was buried under an ancient oak in Oakwood Cemetery, where the young Zelda had taken the young Scott to show him the Confederate graves, their iron crosses now
overgrown
with clematis. Zelda stood by the low wall crumbling under faded roses and ancient ivy and realized her father, who had guided her life, had left her no final word. She had searched through his papers in his Capitol office but there was nothing personal except the first three nickels he had earned, stuffed into a mildewed purse. ‘He must’, she told Sara sadly, ‘have forgot to leave the message.’
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She drove out frequently to sit by her father’s grave, recalling his good name, his high principles and intellectual doubts. She told Sara Mayfield she’d never entirely thrown those off despite her decadent life. She was a carrier, she said, a Typhoid Mary of Confederate tradition.
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She snuggled into a small world with Scottie and her family, telling Scott they were not afraid, but felt so lonely without him they seemed like wet paper dolls. In Prangins during the summer Zelda had drawn and painted more paper dolls of the Fitzgerald family, giving Scott ‘doggy green socks’ to match his eyes.
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Now she closely observed her child’s similarities to Scott. She told him that Scottie had a ‘coating of moon-light for a skin and I watch her and think of you’.
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Scott sent news of Hollywood stars. Zelda did not want to hear about them. She wanted Scott in Montgomery. She wanted ‘for us to have a son and lots of vital things we own’. After a shopping trip with Scottie when they saw some ‘sweet baby dolls’, she instantly wrote: ‘Deo, we really do need a baby.’

Suddenly ominous symptoms recurred. Zelda suffered bad insomnia, then renewed asthma attacks. Against Scott’s advice she decided to go to Florida to escape the damp, finally compromising by taking along a trained nurse.

On her return, slightly better, ‘Miss Ella’ was published in December. Montgomery residents read it enthusiastically. ‘My story made quite a sensation. People seem to like it,’ she wrote Scott. Though she had sent a copy to Dr Forel ‘from sheer vanity’, she added self-deprecatingly: ‘I do not dare read the story. Knowing it is not first rate, I don’t want to be discouraged – I
wish
you could teach me to write.’ Dick Knight, Scott’s
bête
noire
who constantly charmed Zelda, sent her a wildly appreciative telegram. Though she lost the cable she paraphrased its contents for Scott: ‘“Am moanin’ low over your story. You are the swellest short-story writer
living as I have just found out from Scribner –” words to that effect – I was very tickled about the story, naturally.’
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One of her survival techniques after her father’s death was to prepare a Christmas surprise for Scottie. The huge historical
panorama
that greeted her daughter made it a Christmas she never forgot: ‘Weeks before Christmas the sun porch of our house was shut off. When it was opened on Christmas Eve the tree stood in the center of the room and around it my mother had constructed the whole history of mankind, with a little electric train that started its journey in Egypt and went on to Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the War of the Roses.’
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Scott returned for Christmas. His screenplay had not been used.
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  Apart from making an exhibition of himself at one of Thalberg’s parties where he sang a foolish sophomore song about a dog, he had behaved well and had not been fired as he later claimed. Never one to waste a degrading experience, he turned his doggerel behaviour into the central episode of an excellent story, ‘Crazy Sunday’, about the marital problems of a Hollywood movie director. It was
published
by Mencken in
American
Mercury
in 1932.
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Scott had earned $6,000 which he hoped would buy him time to work on the novel. By the end of 1931 he had sold nine stories, but the
Post
complained to Ober they were not up to Fitzgerald’s usual standard.
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Scott immersed himself in what was now a painful novel focusing on Dick and Nicole Diver’s troubled marriage, the apparently charmed life of the rich on the Riviera and Swiss
psychiatric
sanatoriums. He utilized every scrap of what he had learnt about Zelda’s mental breakdowns, remorselessly pilfering her letters, her fears, her punishments. Her madness became his new material. It was, and is, of course not unusual for writers to exploit family and friendship sources for their fictions. However, what
is
reprehensible is Scott’s high disregard for Zelda’s mental frailty or the possible psychological consequences.

Scott’s Ledger recorded the arrival of Rosalind after Zelda’s asthma worsened and he had decided to take his wife first on a trip to the Gulf Coast, and from there to the empty Don Ce-Sar hotel in St Petersburg, Florida. She was still writing her novel, while Scott worked what he saw as Zelda’s madness into his new version of
Tender.
His habit was to read material aloud to Zelda, and Zelda would have heard and read that version in Montgomery as well as in Florida. It was one thing to have your husband turn you into a flapper, quite another to have him display your mental illness as the
raison
d’être
of his main female character. Zelda’s shock and
consequent
emotions can only be surmised, as we have no evidence of
any conversation between Zelda and Scott about this appropriation of the most vulnerable part of her life. What we do know is that the Fitzgeralds had a violent conflict, that soon after their arrival in Florida in January 1932 a spot of eczema appeared on Zelda’s neck, that another spot appeared, that she was terrified. She was away from her family, there were no other witnesses to the events that
followed
. Scott reported that on their way back to Montgomery she drank the contents of his flask, that she believed terrible things were being done to her with his knowledge, that she insisted on being hospitalized.

Scott informed Forel, who suggested readmitting Zelda to Prangins which was out of the question. Forel then recommended Dr Adolf Meyer of Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, another leading authority on schizophrenia.
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Scared that Zelda would again turn against him, Scott hurried her in to Phipps. On 12 February 1932, only five months after her release from Prangins, Zelda started her second breakdown in her fourth clinic.

Scott did not get on with Meyer, a man of distinguished
appearance
, heavy moustache and white goatee beard, who refused to treat him as co-consultant and who implicated him in Zelda’s
breakdown
by diagnosing it as a
folie
à
deux,
a dual case. Dr Meyer
infuriated
Scott by insisting he should submit to psychoanalysis. Scott, who resisted any such treatment by asserting psychotherapy would ruin his creativity, returned to Montgomery. He spent the winter with Scottie, teaching her chess and reading her
Great
Expectations.

Zelda also found Dr Meyer’s heavy Germanic ruminations
distinctly
off-putting but established a close relationship with her first woman doctor, Mildred Squires. Squires, trained at Pennsylvania Medical School, thirty years younger than Meyer and only four years older than Zelda, admired her talent and found her easy to talk to as long as they did not discuss the patient’s medical
problems
. Zelda resolutely refused to talk about her illness. Though she still smiled uncontrollably, she slept well, and was comfortable with the routine, which allowed her two hours a day to write and paint as part of her therapy. It is of considerable significance that this medical endorsement and validation of Zelda’s two arts led to a particularly intense period of creativity from 1932 to 1934. In Phipps Zelda achieved a novel, a play and a great many paintings.

She read numerous theoretical art books, and began to employ a variety of visual styles. Hungry for experiment, her artistic aesthetic became increasingly more sophisticated. ‘When I was nineteen,’ she
told a Baltimore news reporter, ‘I thought Botticelli was unbeautiful because the women in the Primavera did not look like the girls in the Follies. But now I don’t expect Ann Pennington to hold the same charm for me as a Matisse odalisque.’
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Her artistic development was stimulated by art therapy with Dr Frederick Wertham, a special consultant on Zelda’s case. Eleven paintings attributed to Zelda were acquired by Wertham in the two years he worked with Zelda.
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Wertham had developed the mosaic test, in which patients assembled small multicoloured wooden pieces into free-form patterns from which psychiatrists could
evaluate
patients’ ego organizations. Zelda utilized Wertham’s
diagnostic
techniques in her watercolours.
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The constant exposure to unorthodox colour patterning enabled her to explore colour
properties
in her compositions, as she did in two watercolours over graphite,
Rams
and
Le
Sport.
Both display an unusual use of colour in the background.
Rams
depicts two rams placed against a dazzling multicoloured patchwork like a rainbow jigsaw, the background shades so hectic that they overwhelm the central image. In the more muted
Le
Sport,
areas of background colour fuse into one another around tennis rackets and golf clubs battling for priority. Zelda leaves a clear white space round the central figure, a sportsman with typically large curling fingers and feet. The curious element in these paintings is that unlike her previous emotionally expressive, thickly painted canvases these are linear, even in some cases minimalist. Their sharp lines encouraged Scott to suggest she might consider a career as a commercial artist.
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