Read Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Online
Authors: Sally Cline
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (52 page)
I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my head is curable.
Zelda, like the fictional Nicole, said she had a constant presentiment of disaster; that it was cruel that he would not explain to her what is the matter,
since you will not accept my explanation. As you know, I am a person, or was, of some capabality … and if I could grasp the situation I would be much better able to handle it. Under existing conditions, I simply grovel about in the dark and since I can not concentrate either to read or write there does not seem to be any way of escape. I do not want to lose my mind.
90
To the visitor, the external ‘existing conditions’ at Prangins had a resort atmosphere, with music rooms, billiard rooms, riding stables, winter gardens, hothouses, farms, tennis courts, a bathing beach and
ateliers
for occupational therapy. There were seven private villas, three occupied by the staff, four reserved for wealthy ‘guests’. Scott assured the Sayres that the newly opened clinic was
‘the
best
in Europe’, that Dr Oscar Forel’s father Auguste Forel, Professor of Psychiatry at Zurich University, had ‘an extraordinary reputation as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry’, while Oscar was talented,
versatile
, and ‘universally regarded as a man of intelligence and character’.
91
The tall, skinny, well-dressed Oscar, who was to have great influence on both Fitzgeralds, was born 1891, studied at the
Sorbonne and Lausanne’s Faculty of Medicine and became a faculty member of Geneva University for twenty-five years. Though
sensitive
he had the dictator’s qualities of crafty persuasion and an ability to impose his will on others.
92
The ‘existing conditions’ maintained by the sensitive Oscar which the visitor did
not
see included the forcible restraint on Zelda for her first month. There were two types of control methods: the ‘
two-point
restraint’ which tied her wrists to the bed and the ‘four-point restraint’ which bound her ankles and wrists to the bed. Her
hallucinations
were treated with shots of chloral hydrate which
completely
tranquillized her.
The cost of Forel’s clinic during that first year of the Depression was gigantic: $1,000 a month.
93
Scott, determined to spare no expense to provide the best for Zelda, and worried that the stock market crash would diminish his earning facilities, decided in June 1930 to invest $212 in a Northern Pacific Railway bond and an American Telephone and Telegraph debenture. Though Scott would make many grave errors during the next ten years over
decisions
regarding Zelda’s hospitalization and treatment, and would put control of Zelda consistently ahead of understanding or
releasing
her, he never shirked his financial obligations to her and to Scottie.
For several weeks Zelda refused to partake in the activities provided and shunned contacts with other patients. Then she
developed
an intense emotional attachment to another woman patient and also – as at her previous hospital – became involved with several nurses.
94
Mayfield satirically suggests that a ‘puzzling’ aspect of the case for Forel ‘was that Zelda showed no erotic feeling for her husband’
95
while simultaneously Scott told the doctors he was extremely anxious to resume sexual relations. Dr Forel, however, forbade him to visit her until a treatment course which included a ‘re-education programme’ had been maintained.
During Zelda’s stay in Prangins Scott stayed in the nearby Swiss towns of Glion, Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux and Vevey. About four days a month he went to Paris, where Scottie lived with her governess at 21 rue des Marionniers and attended the Cours Dieterlin. Zelda was distressed Scottie had been left alone in Paris (she did not count the nurse), but Scott reported that she had already won a first prize at school
96
and Alice and Dick Myers would keep an eye on her.
During the Prangins incarceration Zelda and Scott exchanged
more than a hundred letters explaining themselves, offering
recriminations
, attributing blame. As they rarely dated letters establishing a correct chronology is an enormous challenge, but a definite pattern can be observed that runs parallel to Zelda’s psychological ‘re-education’ towards femininity, good mothering and the
revaluing
of marriage and domesticity.
In mental hospitals of that period,
97
patients eventually learned what was in their ‘best interests’ to say to staff or to write to
intimates
outside. By ‘best interest’, what most of them meant was their interest in being judged sufficiently ‘sane’ to be released. All letters were opened, in some hospitals censored, in every hospital assessed. In Zelda’s case the need to ‘re-educate’ her into being ‘a good wife’ was paramount. So her initial letters of anger, betrayal, distrust, resentment, which were seen by the medical establishment as signs of ‘instability’, ultimately gave way to more conciliatory, affectionate letters which were viewed as signs of ‘improvement’.
What strikes the reader at once is that in Prangins Zelda is aware of how she
needs
to behave if she is to be relabelled stable. But as her treatments intensify in four more clinics, she becomes as much a victim of the treatments as of the illness, and this awareness – or any written evidence of it – drops away.
If this were the only motive for the first discernible
hostility/
affection pattern, the letters would be simple to analyse. But running parallel is a second motive. This is the alternating mixture of genuine resentment Zelda held against Scott (and he against her) and the memory (if not the current activity) of the strongest passion and the deepest emotional bond either had ever found or would ever find with anyone.
A second batch of letters, from Zelda to Scottie, shows Zelda’s constant devotion to her daughter, but with their increasing
separation
and her own wavering sense of self, the letters progressively reveal a woman in retreat from, even terrified by, motherhood.
A third group of letters, from Fitzgerald to Zelda’s psychiatrists, shows how Fitzgerald was intimately involved in Zelda’s treatment and how important it was to him to see himself, and to be
considered
by the medical establishment, as a junior consultant almost on a par with her doctors.
These letters tell the next stage of Zelda’s story.
1
FSF
to
ZSF
, summer? 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 198. Scott was now worried that people, even if unaware of his youthful cross-dressings, might believe those stinking accusations because when acquaintances told him he looked like someone else, that ‘someone else’ usually turned out to be homosexual. Donaldson,
Hemingway
vs.
Fitzgerald,
p. 159.
2
ZSF
, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. To Number –’,
Collected
Writings,
p. 427.
3
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
pp. 194–5. Scott’s Ledger May 1929 mentions ‘Lucien again’ – probably another reference to Lucienne.
4
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194. Scott’s Ledger dates the Nancy Hoyt dinner as 30 March 1930. Subsequently Elinor became a close friend of Dos Passos. Elinor Hoyt Wylie and Nancy Hoyt were sisters of Morton Hoyt who was married to Eugenia Bankhead, Tallulah’s elder sister, with whom Scott had an affair. In 1922 Wilson continued his flirtation with Elinor Wylie but she became more seriously involved with John Peale Bishop. At Bishop’s wedding to Margaret Hutchins the bride’s father tried to rape Elinor Wylie. Mellow,
Invented
Lives,
p. 157.
5
Natalie had lived at 20 rue Jacob, Paris, since 1909. She told Zelda she staged
tableaux
vivants
and held pacifist meetings in the garden where Racine was supposed to have strolled with his mistress La Champsmesle. A tiny Doric temple fronted a disused well
which led to an underground cave below which was a passage under the Seine to the Louvre.
6
Dolly (Dorothy Ierne Wilde) was the daughter of Oscar’s elder improvident brother Willie who died in 1899, the year before Oscar. She was born 11 July 1895 in Oakley Street, Chelsea, London.
7
The drugs included cocaine and morphine. See Joan Schenkar,
Truly
Wide,
Virago Press, London, 2000.
8
Bettina Bergery (1902–1993) was one of the three beautiful American Jones girls for whom the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ was invented. She worked for Schiaparelli and was one of Paris’s finest raconteuses. Victor Cunard (1898–1960), writer Nancy Cunard’s witty cousin, was the London
Times
correspondent in Venice, at twenty had an affair with Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West’s husband, and was one of Dolly’s closest friends.
9
Janet Flanner (1892–1978) wrote the
New
Yorker
’s
bi-monthly ‘Letter from Paris’ column under the
nom
de
plume
Genêt.
10
Schenkar,
Truly
Wilde,
p. 116.
11
Rosamund Harcourt-Smith in Natalie Barney, ed.,
In
Memory
of
Dorothy
lerne
Wilde,
Darentière, Dijon, 1951, pp. 28–9, quoted in Schenkar,
Truly
Wilde,
p. 117.
12
ZSF
to
FSF
, probably June or July 1930,
CO
187, Box 42, Folder 53. Nancy Milford (
Zelda,
p. 138) suggests this letter was in answer to one from Scott headed ‘Written with Zelda gone to the Clinique’; the handwriting, notepaper, style and content are similar to
correspondence
dated early June/July. The reference to Scottie having finished school and the heat of the city would fit this author’s dating.
13
The two versions are: cancelled drafts of early versions of
Tender
Is
The
Night,
‘The Melarky Case’ (MS versions), chs III to IV,
CO
187, Box 10, Folder 7,
PUL
; and
The
Melarky
and
Kelly
Versions.
A
Facsimile
Edition
of F
.
Scott
Fitzgerald
Manuscripts,
ed. Matthew j. Bruccoli, associate ed. Alan Marjolies, A Garland Series, Garland Publishers, New York and London, 1990 (based on MSS in
PUL
).
14
‘Melarky Case’ MS version.
15
Ibid.
16
Melarky/Kelly facsimile version.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid. Scott crossed out that sentence and substituted: ‘The sight of this legendary
aberration
in action had spoiled some quiet series of human facts for him as it had when he had first become aware of its other face some years before.’
20
Ibid.
21
Diana McLellan,
The
Girls:
Sappho
Goes
to
Hollywood,
Robson Books, 2001.
22
Compton Mackenzie,
Extraordinary
Women:
Theme
and
Variations,
Martin Seeker, London, 1928. On Capri the circle included Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes. When the circle regrouped in Paris it included Dolly Wilde, Elisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, Esther Murphy, Emily Vanderbilt and Zelda Fitzgerald. Mackenzie’s view of the women was a mild form of late Victorian patriarchal superiority.
23
Mackenzie to Meryle Secrest. Secrest,
Between
Me
and
Life:
A
Biography
of Romaine
Brooks,
Macdonald & Jane’s, London, 1976, p. 302.
24
Radclyffe Hall,
The
Well
of
Loneliness,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1928.
25
Hall became known as a one-book polemicist.
26
When Tallulah came to London in tine Twenties, although she was said to have seduced half a dozen Eton boys who had then been expelled, a damaging Scotland Yard report said there were rumours about her sexual perversion with her own sex. Another
informant
wrote to Scotland Yard that ‘she is both a lesbian and immoral with men’. The
informant
reported she ‘keeps a girl in London’ as formerly it had been suggested that before she came to the UK in 1925 she ‘kept a negress in USA’.
27
Camella Mayfield, series of conversations and taped interviews with the author, Princeton, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and from the UK, 1999, 2000, 2001.
28
Mayfield also wrote a biography about Tallulah Bankhead.
29
Author’s conversations with Camella Mayfield and with Rebecca Roberts, Public and
Outreach Services Coordinator, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1999, 2000.
30
Rebecca Roberts said the fact that ‘Sara Mayfield destroyed all of her correspondence with Zelda in order to protect Zelda’s privacy is an honorable act, but a great loss for researchers’. (Letter to author, 18 May 1999, and in several conversations with the author 1999.) Roberts said the university received Sara Mayfield’s materials in 1955, but between 1955 and 1965 they were allowed only to house them, not to offer access to them. Papers arrived piecemeal, were edited in the late 1950s and early 1960s and officially ‘given’ to them in 1980.
31
Camella spent a summer typing the first draft of Mayfield’s biography of Tallulah, ‘but when the publishers asked Sara to make it spicier she refused. She would not put in new facts that she was aware of, she would only put in was what already acknowledged. Sara did know new negative things but she refused to use them.’ Camella Mayfield to the author as before.
32
Mayfield,
Exiles,
p. 151.
33
Camella Mayfield to the author. Sara’s self-protection may have included her
relationships
with Montgomery women Elizabeth Thigren Hill (who looked after Rosalind Sayre in the latter’s last years) and Wilda Malloy Williams, both women from highly reputable well-established families. These two affairs appear to be ‘common
knowledge
’ among locals in Montgomery. Several residents talked to the author openly about them.
34
Camella Mayfield to the author.
35
ZSF
to
FSF
, summer 1930,
CO
187, Box 42, Folder 51,
PUL
. Same blue squared paper,
emotional
tone and continuance of ideas as letters the author has dated June and July. Author’s suggested date for this letter is July.
36
Ibid.
37
Interestingly, in about 1930 when Scott listed those people who had responded to his bad behaviour by snubbing him, Emily Vanderbilt featured on his list. Also on the snub list were Tallulah Bankhead, Ada MacLeish, Bijou O’Conor, John Barrymore, Tommy Hitchcock, Ruth Vallombrosa and the Murphys. Donaldson,
Hemingway
vs.
Fitzgerald,
pp. 321–2.
38
In Nov. 1934.
39
Lillian Hellman,
Pentimento,
written 1973, Macmillan, London, 1974.
40
ZSF
to
FSF
, no date,
CO
187, Box 44, Folder 27,
PUL
.
41
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer 1930,
CO
187, Box 42, Folder 52,
PUL
.
42
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194.
43
FSF
to
EH
, 23 Aug. 1929.
44
EH
to
FSF
, 4 Sep. 1929,
EH
,
Selected
Letters,
Swallow Press, Chicago, 1975, pp. 304–5. Part of Scott’s trouble, Hemingway thought, was that Scott believed because of
Gatsby’s
reviews he must write a masterpiece. However ‘nobody but Fairies’ could write masterpieces, Hemingway intoned, the rest of their crowd ‘can only write as well as they can’.
45
The Kellys would finally be deleted from the novel but would become the main
characters
in his story ‘One Trip Abroad’. Rosemary however would be kept for
Tender
Is
The
Night.
46
Ober to
FSF
, telegram, 21 Sep. 1929,
As
Ever,
Scott
Fitz–,
ed. Bruccoli with Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, p. 146.
47
ZSF
to
FSF
, late summer/early fall 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 194. The yacht was the Murphys’
Honoria
;
Dotty was Dorothy Parker.
48
Quoted in Donaldson,
Hemingway
vs.
Fitzgerald,
p. 159.
49
‘Melarky Case’ MS version (
CO
187, Box 10, Folder 7,
PUL
). The phrase ‘satyrs whose lips curled horribly’ is scored through. In another version of the same scene Francis Melarky looks around this fairy world with ‘an angry shocked expression’. ‘“Is this real?” he demanded. “Or a sort of show?”’ He is assured by a character called Horseprotection that it
is
real, and that Horseprotection will show him how the scene works. ‘He got up and spoke to a man painted, bewigged and attired in a woman’s evening dress at the next table. The man fluttered and presently they were dancing together …, Horseprotection winking at us over the man’s shoulder. Francis got up saying “Let’s get out of this dump!”’ (Melarky/Kelly facsimile version).
50
Sara Murphy to
FSF
, no date,
CO
187, Box 51, Folder 15,
PUL.
51
FSF
, Ledger, Sep. 1929.
52
FSF
to
ZSF
, summer? 1930,
Life
in
Letters,
p. 189.
53
This biographer dates this as late November; as do Mellow and Donaldson. Allen Tate dates it early December. Previous biographers dated it as October but internal evidence rules out October.
54
Allen Tate,
Memoirs
and
Opinions
1926–1974,
Swallow Press, Chicago, 1975, p. 62. Tate told Scott to mind his own business.
55
In response Hemingway repeated that Stein had been admiring of Scott’s work which he himself continued to admire, but added sensibly that comparison of hypothetical flames was ‘pure horseshit’.
EH
to
FSF
,
c
. 5 or 12 Dec. 1929,
EH,
Selected
Letters,
pp. 309–11.
56
In his Ledger Scott left the first redheaded woman anonymous but the second was a nurse in Zelda’s first hospital.
57
EH
,
Moveable
Feast,
quoted in Donaldson,
Hemingway
vs.
Fitzgerald,
p. 153.
58
ZSF
fictionalized the flowers as having ‘the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh’.
Save
Me
The
Waltz,
Collected
Writings,
p. 130.