Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (70 page)

Zelda was under a stone. She hardly spoke. That Scott’s health had been poor during the winter and spring passed her by. That he had left Baltimore for Tryon, Hendersonville and North Carolina several times was of little consequence.
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To his letter asking her what she needed, Zelda replied: ‘I don’t need anything at all except hope, which I can’t find by looking either backwards or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to shut my eyes.’
2
Visiting her was like visiting a ghost. Half-remembering his world, she wrote: ‘I want you to be happy again with Scottie – some place where it is bright … and you can have some of the things you have worked so hard for … Please get well and love Scottie and find something to fill up your life –.’
3
  But by midsummer she no longer wrote to him.

Scott had tried to fill up his life with new companions and
desultory
affairs. During summer 1935 in North Carolina he met Laura Guthrie Hearne, a Columbia Journalism School graduate and amateur psychic who told fortunes to guests at Asheville’s George Vanderbilt Hotel. Hired as Scott’s part-time secretary, she also became go-between and recorder of his affair with Beatrice Dance, a rich Texan, who like Scott was staying at the Grove Park Inn.
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  Beatrice fell histrionically in love with Scott, who rapidly finished the affair by telling Dance that he was unable to abandon Zelda.
5
  Scott, ever self-serving, accustomed to purloining Zelda’s intimate letters, now sent Beatrice one of Zelda’s saddest to justify his
ruthless
rejection of her.

Scott spelt out the implications for Dance: ‘There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them – and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty.’
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The rejected Beatrice was hospitalized with distress while Scott, lungs already inflamed by tuberculosis, went on an alcoholic bender until Dr Paul Ringer admitted him to hospital in Asheville as, in Rosalind’s words, a ‘floundering wreck’. Rosalind added later: ‘Poor devil! I always was sorry for him even while detesting him.’
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Minnie Sayre told Rosalind she was so crushed by Zelda’s hopelessness that she had to ‘[philosophize] herself into keeping cheerful’. After Rosalind had comforted the Sayres, she visited Zelda, who ‘was dressed in white and seemed very ethereal, somehow, like somebody not of this world’. Rosalind told Scott: ‘Most of the time … she was reproaching herself for having wrecked your life and having brought Scottie into the world … Her present condition was a great shock to me … and I feel
discouraged
about her.’ Zelda begged Rosalind to take her for a ride, but when Rosalind asked Dr Elgin he said Zelda was so
dangerously
ill he could not allow her out in a car for fear she would escape. ‘I pray’, wrote Rosalind, ‘that she will soon be quiet enough to have this little diversion from that horrible atmosphere in which she lives.’
9

Scott’s own diversions to avoid that ‘horrible atmosphere’ included a new friendship with twenty-nine-year-old writer Tony Buttitta, proprietor of Asheville’s Intimate Book Shop in the George Vanderbilt Hotel arcade. One night Buttitta heard a knock at his door.

That summer, Buttitta, trying to restore Scott’s self-esteem,
introduced
him to prostitute Lottie Stephens: a poor idea, for she
complained
about Scott’s lack of virility while Fitzgerald fretted about contracting syphilis.

Buttitta recalled how Scott would suddenly start sobbing: ‘He always sobbed about Zelda. He’d cry out: “We meant so much to each other in our early life. But Zelda wanted to be a star. She didn’t feel what I did was important to her.”’ Buttitta felt ‘Scott had to be the star. Scott wanted Zelda in the audience. He kept saying “I feel responsible because now she’s gone batty.”’
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What Scott saw as battiness was Zelda’s retreat from suicide into religious despair. ‘God has evolved us,’ she wrote to him, ‘that we may ennoble our souls until they shall have attained a spiritual stature.’

She had reverted to her preoccupation with homosexuality, with God on her side. ‘Since Eden, man has been endowed with a double sexual impulse. Complete sexual fulfillment between man and wife is homosexuality. It is God’s word that this is so.’ She knew Scott’s negative view of ‘fairies’, but hoped he would accept homosexual
practices
as part of their marital contract because God did. ‘God’s promise to man is emotional fulfillment … that is sucking the genital organs of your mate …’ Zelda hoped these ‘beautiful and honourable’ practices might stop married couples becoming
homosexual
, which she knew from her experience was always
punished
.
11

Scott had returned, debt-ridden and depressed, from Asheville to Baltimore’s Cambridge Arms where Isabel Owens was caring for Scottie. By November, finances and spirits sunk, he had moved them to cheaper accommodation at 3300 St Paul Avenue, where he wrote a series of mediocre stories about a widowed father and his teenage daughter Gwen; only two were sold. He gave Scottie ten
dollars, left her with Mrs Owens and the Finneys and headed for Hendersonville, North Carolina, where he rented a tawdry room at Skylands Hotel. Later he had to borrow $7,500 from Oscar Kalman.
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Only weeks into his fortieth year, suffering his own nervous breakdown, he wrote three wretchedly honest confessional essays: ‘The Crack-Up’, ‘Pasting It Together’ and ‘Handle With Care’. Ironically they were brilliant pieces of writing about a writer who can no longer write because he can no longer care. Scott felt they were creative attempts at examining his emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Perkins saw them as disgusting exercises in self-pity which would further ruin Scott’s disintegrating reputation. Hemingway saw them as shameful and cowardly. Only Sara Murphy understood Scott:

At Christmas 1935, Scott tried to cheer up fourteen-year-old Scottie by organizing a theatre party for her, Peaches Finney and friends, but his gloom disoriented them.

During the spring when Arnold Gingrich made Scott’s
self-revelatory
articles public in
Esquire,
Scott’s health worsened
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as Zelda’s religious fervour increased. Rosalind, visiting Zelda in April, was horrified. ‘I found her at Sheppard Pratt weighing only 89 pounds and fast going downhill.’ Through regular conversations with God, Zelda believed she was in direct communication with Christ, Apollo and William the Conqueror. Dressed in white, she either prayed by her bed day and night or, convinced the end of the world was approaching, hastily wrote and distributed God’s word to their friends. On Rosalind’s insistence Scott removed Zelda from Pratt on 7 April 1936 and entered her into Highland Hospital, Asheville, the following day. ‘One of the saddest memories I have’, recalled Rosalind, ‘is of going through her trunk in Baltimore … to see what there was she might want to take with her. What I found was a bit of old clothing, a brass candlestick, and a musical
powder-box
with a Pierrot on top that turned with the tune.’
15

Scott had told the Murphys he now felt Zelda was his child, and that he acted as Zelda’s ‘great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her’.
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The hospital director, Robert Carroll, thought differently. After two weeks at Highland, during which Scott offered Zelda his version of reality, Carroll
suggested
Scott return to Baltimore. ‘You are her emotional
disorganizer
… We did not … organize her treatment until after you left.’
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The treatment was controversial, fierce and frightening. That it eventually reduced some of Zelda’s symptoms, many of which were the product of earlier treatments, did not outweigh new
devastating
side-effects. Carroll was pioneering injections of placental blood, honey and hypertonic solutions, and of horse blood, into patients’ cerebrospinal fluid. Horse serum caused aseptic
meningitis
with vomiting, fever and head pains, but Carroll used it on Zelda because it could induce long spells of lucidity. He also regularly gave Zelda the now standard electro-shock and insulin shock
treatments
, disregarding their known effects of memory loss.
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Dr Irving Pine (Zelda’s last psychiatrist) said she was given between thirty and ninety insulin shocks, producing convulsions followed by comas that lasted up to an hour.
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Mary Parker, assistant to Highland’s psychotherapist (later Zelda’s art therapist), though reluctant to discuss insulin treatment, admitted that ‘insulin was only supposed to be given to “difficult” patients because it shocked their brains so that they couldn’t be left on their own afterwards without a nurse. Though most recovered there
were
bad
after-effects
.’
20

Theorizing that toxic substances caused mental illness, Carroll placed patients on strict diets and regimented exercise routines. Every morning Zelda had outdoor gymnastics, then wholewheat peanut butter sandwiches, followed by occupational therapy (in her case painting), with a five-mile walk every afternoon. Parker recalled how well the schedule suited Zelda’s athletic nature. ‘Dr Carroll believed healthy bodies meant healthy minds, he wanted patients occupied so they couldn’t sit and mope. Zelda played
medicine
ball and volley ball. After the regulation five miles Zelda would climb a hill. Sometimes she’d have to climb the hill ten times! If she got a few minutes freedom she’d turn a dance step.’ But Carroll held more questionable views: the same questionable views as Forel and Slocum had held before him. ‘He believed in re-education for women patients,’ said Parker, ‘which meant redirecting them into wholesome normal values. It was taken for granted women would want to be good wives and mothers in a wholesome way.’
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Highland’s wholesome programme cost $1,200 a quarter but Scott, pleading poverty, paid only $240 a month plus extra for day trips, concerts, movies and art materials. Scott also sent $100 a month for Zelda’s personal expenses: chewing gum, flowers, fruit, clothes, dentistry and occasional telegrams. He paid for dance lessons and Zelda danced to the point of exhaustion unless
monitored
by nurses. Later she choreographed ballets for hospital events.
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Scott, increasingly pressured by debts, closed up the Baltimore house and moved to Asheville.
23
Despite the Fitzgeralds’
geographical
proximity they met seldom. Occasionally they lunched at the Inn where, removed from other guests, Zelda nibbled a cucumber salad. Although physically healthier, she told Scott the restrictions stifled her soul. Looking back, she wrote:

It is worth noting there is nothing incoherent in Zelda’s analysis.

That summer was exceptionally sad for them both. Gerald wrote grimly that young Patrick’s health had worsened. Hemingway attacked Scott publicly in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ in August’s
Esquire.
Then on 2 September Scott’s mother died of a cerebral
haemorrhage
. Unexpectedly moved, Scott told Oscar Kalman: ‘A most surprising thing in the death of a parent is not how little it affects you, but how much … there is a sense of being deserted.’
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To Beatrice Dance he went further: ‘She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her.’
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