Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (68 page)

The Murphys, who represented the Divers’ dazzling side before their tragic fall, were negative in their response. Nor did they
appreciate
the dedication: ‘To Gerald and Sara Many Fêtes’. Sara was
outraged
about Scott’s portrayal. ‘I hated the book when I first read it,’ she said, ‘and even more on rereading. I reject categorically any resemblance to ourselves or to anyone we know.’
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More than twenty-five years later Sara was still furious. Was she angry because Scott had misread their characters and lives, or was it because he touched on truths she did not want aired? There were obvious visual parallels between the Divers and the Murphys. Dick, moving ‘gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel’ from their strip of beach; Nicole with ‘her bathing suit … pulled off her shoulders … set off by a string of creamy pearls’: these are precise verbal photographs of Gerald and Sara. The stimulating
conversations
in the Divers’ exquisite villa probably took place in Villa America. It was more likely that what upset Sara was Nicole’s decision to leave Dick for an adventurer like Ernest Hemingway, whom Sara adored, to whom Sara was sexually attracted, but for whom she would never have left Gerald. In the light of Gerald’s later
determination
to give up painting for ever, Dick’s renunciation of his family and his life’s work would have been equally frightening.
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Sara wrote bitterly to Scott that ‘consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is
completely
left out of your
make-up
– I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody but yourself is like.’ In that same irritated letter she spoke warmly about Zelda. ‘Please don’t think that Zelda’s condition is not very near to our hearts – and that all your misfortunes are not, in part, ours too.’
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Scott told Gerald the book ‘was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of
it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Gerald pointed out. Scott ‘never did really understand our life’.
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Yet in December 1935, when Gerald’s life had been torn apart, he changed his mind. ‘I know now that what you said in
Tender
Is
The
Night
is true. Only the invented part of our life – the unreal part – has had any scheme any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed.’
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Scott was even more anxious about Hemingway’s response. A month after publication Scott wrote fretfully: ‘Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers jargon out of my head.’
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Ernest had already told Max he disapproved of
Tender
because the Divers acted in ways the Murphys never would. Ernest said that Scott could not invent real characters because he knew very little about people: ‘he has so lousy much talent and … has destroyed himself and destroyed Zelda, though never as much as she has tried to destroy him.’
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  Hemingway finally sent Scott a three-page letter assuring him the writing was brilliant but the distortion of the Murphys had
invalidated
the novel: ‘faked case histories’ and ‘silly compromises’ as well as Scott’s use of the Murphys for the Divers’ glamour, and of himself and Zelda for the traumatized aspects, violated the book’s integrity.

Hemingway scolded him: ignore your emotional traumas. You’re not a drama queen. You, like me, are just a writer. What writers do is write. You lack focus. An encouraging wife could have helped your self-discipline. Instead you chose Zelda: a jealous, competitive, destructive woman.
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A week before
Tender
appeared the Menckens returned from a Mediterranean cruise. Sara, feverish with an infection she had picked up in Algeria, read
Tender
in hospital. She admired its prose but told Sara Mayfield how angry she was on behalf of Zelda and the Sayres.

Scott, meanwhile, leant on Mencken for consolation. On 26 April Mencken told him not to fret over ‘a few silly reviews … The quality of book reviewing in the American newspapers is really appalling. Reviews are printed by imbeciles that know nothing about the process of writing and hence miss the author’s intentions
completely
. I think your scheme is a capital one, and that you have carried it out very effectively … Please remember me to Zelda. I surely hope that she is making good progress.’
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But she was not.

By May 1934 her condition had become critical. She was not responding to medication, she was not responding to the doctors. Though Scott told Mencken that Zelda was ‘katatonic’, the only supporting evidence is her submission to the medical profession’s treatment of her. Occasionally she was hysterical, and often
despairing
about her hospital costs. ‘I cannot see why I should sit in luxury when you are having such a struggle. Since there seems to be no way I can hasten my recovery, maybe it would be wise to try a cheaper place … I will not be discouraged by any such change you might make and, of cource, will do the best I can, anywhere.’ The following month she wrote: ‘I do not see how you can reasonably expect me to go on unworriedly spending god-knows-how-
much-a-day
when we haven’t got it to spend …’
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On her better days she had been trying to improve their finances by writing two autobiographical articles for
Esquire,
‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number–’, published May-June, and ‘Auction – Model 1934’, published July.

Those essays were a farewell to her life with Scott. ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. –’ was a nostalgic travelogue of hotel rooms they had shared from 1920 until Bermuda in 1933.

Scott edited ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. –’. His most striking
amendment
was to cut Zelda’s use of ‘I’, changing every first person pronoun to ‘we’. This not only weakened her style but also recalled his angry interjection in their discussion with Rennie: ‘Can’t you stop your “I”s’? Who are you?’

Scott did no editorial work on ‘Auction – Model 1934’, Zelda’s inventory of the few possessions they had collected over those years to be sold at a mock auction. Most objects were broken, dirty, flawed, useless. Only the memories were intact and precious. The Fitzgeralds open their packing cases, look over their heirlooms, and ultimately decide that ‘the tangible remnant of the four hundred thousand we made from hard words and spent with easy ones’ should be kept in their attic.
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Both articles again, though written by Zelda, were published under joint names.

On 19 May Scott transferred Zelda to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt, a cheaper hospital in Baltimore, where she would spend the next two years.
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The primary reason was not medical but financial. Although his novel had been on the
Publishers
Weekly
April and May bestseller lists, Scott could no longer afford Craig House fees.

Zelda wrote in a shaky hand to console him: ‘D.O. you know that I do not feel as you do about state institutions – … many excellent
doctors did their early training there. You will have to conceal as much of this from Scottie as you can, anyway. So, in the words of Ernest Hemmingway,
save yourself
… I am so glad your book is on the list of best sellers … Devotedly Zelda.’

She had already assured him: ‘Ill as I am, one place is not very
different
from another … I would appreciate your making whatever adjustments would render your life less difficult.’
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However, this place was tragically different from Craig, or Phipps, or Prangins.

Mayfield described her first visit: ‘Zelda had a horror of the place – a sinister-looking sanitarium with enclosed passageways joining its buildings, barred windows, locked doors, and dismal rooms that appeared to have been done by a decorator with a depressive psychosis.’

Zelda’s first shock was her reception. There was a rough search of her body. Her money, make-up and cigarettes were confiscated. She told Sara that attendants callously took away her clothes then doused her in a disinfectant bath. She realized immediately her hopeless situation: ‘locked in a bare ward’, Sara recalled, ‘with no means of communicating with her family and friends – literally buried alive in a strange place – [it] was too much for her. This time there was no doubt about it; she had broken down – or, perhaps, more accurately, after four years between the upper and nether
millstones
, she had been ground down.’
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In addition to a balanced diet and much sleep her new physician, Dr Chapman, tried out new drug therapies. Zelda received
morphine
for sedation, stramonium for mania, digitalis for depression and tranquillizers including the first synthetic sedative, chloral hydrate, and the new discovery, sodium amytal. During her
incarceration
at Sheppard Pratt the hospital experimented with insulin shocks and Metrazol convulsive treatment, which produced shocks akin to epilepsy seizures. Dr Oscar Schwoerer, hired to oversee this process, had trained in the use of insulin coma therapy with Manfred Sakel whose most noteworthy patient was the dancer Nijinsky. Twice a week patients – including Zelda – were injected with a 10 per cent aqueous solution of Metrazol. Within seconds a thirty-to sixty-second violent seizure would follow. Some patients had to be held down for fear of hipbone, jaw or spinal fractures. After an explosion in the head Zelda and other patients would be given intravenous injections of sodium pentothal to counteract sensory fears.
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Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘The Sheppard-Pratt hospital is located
somewhere in the hinterlands of the human consciousness and I can be located there any time between the dawn of consciousness and the beginning of old age. Darling: life is difficult. There are so many problems. 1) The problem of how to stay here and 2) The problem of how to get out.’ She concluded with a sketch of Scott in Guatemala and a request for him to take her there.
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The hospital grounds adjoined La Paix’s, which Zelda found
difficult
to bear. ‘Yesterday’, she wrote to Scott, ‘we took a long ride around familiar roads and it seemed so unreal not to be going home to La Paix.’ In June she walked under the tulip trees by the dank little bridge which made her homesick. ‘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.’ Her letters were desolate. ‘Darling I feel very disoriented and lonely. I love you, dear heart. Please try to love me some in spite of these stultifying years of sickness.’ Then not knowing that he had long stopped being faithful, she added, ‘I will compensate you some way for your love and faithfullness.’
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Zelda began hallucinating. She heard Scott’s voice over and over. Sometimes he repeated her name. Sometimes he said, ‘O, I have killed her!’ Other times he cried, ‘I have lost the woman I put in my book.’ Zelda told the doctors she was terrified of Scott because he interpreted life for her. Dr William Elgin, one of her current
physicians
, initially forbade Scott to visit her.
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For weeks she became incoherent with despair; once she tried to strangle herself. With what little was left of her spirit Zelda hated Elgin, while he found Zelda inaccessible and stony.

Guilt suffused her: ‘I am heart broken that I should have trailed this disaster through your life. Scottie writes me vague notes
sometimes
. I am so sorry for her. She has always been so brave and made her effort in spite of an inevitable sense that all was not as it might have been … There is an irrelevant, though welcome sunshine.’
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Most things, not merely the sun, became irrelevant. Zelda’s letters were despatches from the edge of the abyss. She wrote as if she was searching for something she had left behind on the outermost fringes of life. The meaning of her communications resided in the interstices. She now suffered from severe loss of memory and an apathetic personality due to constant shock therapies.
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She had nothing but her shared memories with Scott to cling to. She recalled boathouses in Atlanta, pinewoods in Alabama,
blistering
bath-houses, dead moons, relics from the Deep South,
mementoes
from the Riviera, phantoms and conspiracies from past times
they would never recapture. She coded even those memories as if she was an informant taking material across the border.

Scott urged the doctors to let him visit. He bargained that he could raise her spirits. Zelda seemed keen. ‘Darling: I want so to see you. Maybe … before very long I will be well enough to meet you under the gracious shadows of these trees and we can look out on the distant fields to-gather. And I will be getting better.’
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But she wasn’t. Once when he was allowed to visit, they strolled along a local railroad track separating the grounds of La Paix from the hospital As a train approached she broke away from Scott and dashed towards the rails. He managed to drag her back seconds before the train rushed by. This was one of several suicide attempts. She had given up hope of recovery. Her means of survival was
religion
and she read the Bible hour after hour. ‘It’s my only strength – my only strength … And I have to pray to – to live,’ she told Sara Mayfield.
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Scott too was in despair: ‘I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.’
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Frustration heightened Scott’s bouts of bad behaviour. John O’Hara remembered an
occasion
when he drove Zelda back to Pratt from Baltimore. ‘I had Scott and Zelda in my car and I wanted to kill him.
Kill.
We were taking her back to her Institution and he kept making passes at her that could not possibly be consummated … I wanted to kill him for what he was doing to that crazy woman who kept telling me she had to be locked up before the moon came up.’
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