Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (73 page)

Minnie Sayre, convinced that Scott had wrecked her daughter’s mind, started a series of strong petitions to Dr Carroll to release Zelda into her care. Angry notes flew in all directions.

The Sayre sisters wrote to Zelda assuring her she was well enough to come home; the family wrote to Scott urging him to provide his wife with an allowance to live in Montgomery. Zelda, feeling recovered, wrote to Scott begging for freedom. Scott wrote to everybody informing them Carroll would not sanction Zelda’s release and if she left against his advice would not take her back. Then Scott wrote to Carroll to confirm this
was
the position to which they would both hold.

Subsequently Carroll wrote to Minnie to say that no matter how normal Zelda’s behaviour appeared, her psyche was shattered: she was mentally damaged goods. She would always live in a house of thinly spun glass.
1
Scott and Minnie just about managed to keep their correspondence cordial, but Scott’s fury and Zelda’s
desperation
broke out time and time again.

With Zelda confused, Scott enraged, the Sayres frustrated and Carroll implacable, the battle continued for months. Studying some of the battle-ground communiques reveals the state of emotions on both sides.

War had started slowly in 1938.

26 April: Minnie wrote to Scott: ‘I am not trying to combat the doctors. I’m thinking of my child’s happiness … I feel that contact with those she loves is good for her and gives her a sense of
protection
… If Zelda can live here with me I am not afraid to try it.’

27 May: Scott replied, but to Rosalind: ‘I want more
trial
of Zelda’s capacities but
I will not override Carroll
… the idea of your mother assuming responsibility is, of course, fantastic – it would simply mean turning Zelda loose.’

29 May: Rosalind disregarded Scott’s reported prescription from Carroll, that the best life for Zelda would be ‘attractive quarters’ in
hospital and ‘frequent travel for diversion’. As a luxury Scott could no longer afford, ‘it can be dismissed from consideration’. The Sayres wanted a ‘practicable plan whereby she could live outside the hospital relieving you of the expense of her staying there and allowing her a chance to re-establish herself’. Rosalind outlined the cheapest alternative. ‘If you cannot afford an attendant for her … I feel she is entitled to it [release] under the only other arrangement open to her, which is sharing Mama’s roof … denying her this without offering her something better would be condemning her arbitrarily to permanent hospitalization without giving her a trial, and neither you nor the rest of us would be willing to do that.’

Rosalind fired her ‘final word’ to Scott: ‘As you wrote Dr Carroll, you realize the time has gone when you can undertake Zelda’s supervision, and you must now find another way for her. Why not give her back to us, with allowance enough for normal support, and let us do the best we can for her.’
2

18 September 1938: Rosalind informed Scott that Zelda wished to experiment in the new year in an Asheville apartment with a
companion
. The Sayres felt that as Zelda had not once slipped during the summer, ‘continued hospitalization, against her will, will be detrimental’.
3
Scott, furious, ignored Rosalind’s letters.

7 December: Rosalind wrote again. Scott, who had asked for her advice, had neither acknowledged nor taken it. ‘We want something done about re-establishing Zelda in the world, and would
appreciate
your co-operation.’

21 December: Scott finally picked up his pen.

Scott told Rosalind the Sayres’ personal charm and tea-table ideas would not talk away dementia praecox. ‘Cure her I cannot and simply saying she’s cured must make the Gods laugh.’

When the Sayres refused to reduce their pressure Scott wrote to
Marjorie, as ‘the only member of your family that has ever treated this business with ordinary human decency’.

‘I have taken the whole thing pretty well from Rosalind’s first accusation in 1930 that I “drove Zelda crazy” through your mother’s accusation that I sent her to Johns Hopkins in 1932 for ulterior motives.’ He reminded Marjorie it was Minnie’s ‘rotten care’ that allowed John Sellers to seduce Zelda at fifteen. ‘Your mother is a sort of typhoid Mary projecting her own defeated egotism … [it is a] preposterous idea that Zelda’s sanity can be bought with a one way ticket to Montgomery … You have nothing to offer. Why don’t you, for god’s sake, shut up! Any further
communication
from any of you will be returned unopened.’ Minnie’s long-distance thrusts would drive Zelda to suicide. She was
behaving
like the wicked mother in the Judgement of Solomon: ‘better the baby dead than not the baby at all’.
4

Some remnant of sense made Scott file that letter instead of mailing it. But that same week he wrote Rosalind a sarcastic
appreciation
of her sanctimonious advice; then told her that if she wanted him to resist the temptation to pass her down to posterity for what she was, she should never communicate with him again. On top of the letter he scrawled: ‘When you people stink you certainly stink.’
5

There is something deeply dispiriting about a bunch of
well-meaning
people, each genuinely concerned about the welfare of one of their number, quarrelling over treatment methods and release time. The possessiveness shown by both the Sayres and Scott over the rights to Zelda’s recovery is akin to the controlling way families sometimes behave over a dying member.

Not even Scottie was excluded from battle. In July 1939, after an appendix operation in Asheville when she was spending recovery time with her mother, who now appeared stable, seventeen-
year-old
Scottie entered the fray on the Montgomery side.

Scott immediately asked Carroll’s deputy, Dr Suitt, to inform Scottie that though her mother might hold up for short periods she would never be able to operate in the world without guidance. Suitt was to stress the onset of menopause was likely to cause Zelda derangement. Scott, determined to control his family’s
relationships
, warned Dr Suitt that Scottie’s new attitude towards Zelda could affect ‘my whole future relation with my daughter’.
6

When Scottie asked Scott if she could join him in California that summer, her positive attitude towards Zelda’s release made him hesitate. ‘She is a dominant little girl in a polite way and to have her appear here now as a sort of ambassador of … the Montgomery
point of view … would be much more than upsetting.’
7
So Scott told Scottie he was depressed and nervous. He would rather not see her ‘than see you without loving you’. She must now realize that her home was Vassar.
8
Scottie, distressed, showed Zelda the letter.

Zelda wanted Scott to understand that his note might have further endangered Scottie’s sense of safety. ‘She is such a
particularly
brave and self-reliant child that it would be lamentable to allow a sense of the absence of stability to twist her mind with neuroses.’
9

On 27 September 1939, after two months’ illness, Scott wrote to Carroll saying he had run out of funds. Would Highland credit him for another month without depriving Zelda of necessities? Carroll agreed to trust Scott and not to release Zelda to her family. Harold Ober, who for years had generously lent Scott money, was less
gracious
, and finally refused. Scott, believing Ober had lost faith in his talents, broke with him. This had severe repercussions on Scottie’s relationship with the Obers, who had acted as her most immediate kin since she first went to the Ethel Walker School. Firing Ober also made Scott financially worse off in October. ‘I am almost penniless,’ he told Zelda, informing her that their friends were helping to pay for Scottie’s return to Vassar. ‘Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.’ Zelda must stop harassing him with requests for freedom and must leave him in peace with his haemorrhages and his hopes. He had a new novel to write and a child to rear.
10

Zelda wrote back reasonably:

Furiously he retorted that only if they were divorced would he agree to her request, as that way he would have no further
responsibility
for her. His anger escalated in a nine-page aggressive letter which a moment’s diplomacy stopped him from mailing.

Under considerable pressure and unusually nervous, in October 1939 Scott began to draft
The
Last
Tycoon,
in which his protagonist Monroe Stahr was based on director Irving Thalberg.
13
When John and Belle O’Hara visited him for Sunday lunch that fall at Belly Acres in the San Fernando Valley, Scott showed O’Hara his
manuscript
: ‘Promise you won’t tell anyone about it,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell them what it’s about, or anything about the people … [don’t] even tell anyone I’m writing another book.’ While John read with a deadpan expression Scott sat tortured. Eventually his friend said: ‘Scott, don’t take any more movie jobs until you’ve finished this. You work so slowly and this is so good, you’ve got to finish it. It’s real Fitzgerald.’
14

Heartened, he carried on with a taxing schedule against failing health. By contrast, Zelda’s health was holding up well.

During the fall she shopped alone in Asheville, directed gym classes, worked with other patients in athletics and art therapy. Her Southern flower painting
Hope
is characteristically not all that it seems. It might be a spiralling mass of soft blue bubbles or a hymn in praise of foetal unfurlings.
15
Her paintings in two recent exhibitions
had received good reviews: ‘There is an arresting and imaginative quality about this painter’s use of vivid color and abstract circular design to portray pure emotion that sticks in the observer’s mind … And there is a velvety effect about her handling of oil paint which suggests the visions one conjures up by pressing the palms of the hands over the eyeballs in a dark room.’
16

This success was followed that winter by an invitation from Dr Carroll to paint floral scenes on large window screens for the new assembly building. She would be paid, her materials provided by Carroll, and when Duke University eventually took over Highland, her work would reach a wider audience. Though excited she feared professional exploitation. ‘I sent word’, she wrote Scott, ‘that I
ultimately
would not subscribe to the commandering of a professional talent. The fact that an artist is temporarily incapacitate ought not to make him fair game to anybody who is able. My talent has cost a lot in heart-ache and paint-bills; and I don’t want to compromise myself.’
17

Her fear of exploitation was realized when she discovered the screens would be used not in the hall but in the patients’ bedrooms. Feeling betrayed, she wrote to Scott: ‘To waste a professional talent, the cumulate result of years of effort, aspiration and heartbreak on a venture which will never see the light of day but most probably will be maltreated by every manifestation of psychosis is, to me, an abuse of the soul, human faith, and metier that is almost beyond my capacity to envisage.’
18