Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (64 page)

Fall came. The leaves drifted, so did Zelda, anxiously waiting as several New York producers rejected
Scandalabra.
1
She hid in her roof-top eyrie, writing, dancing and painting. Down below, Scott, nerves frayed, endlessly redrafted
Tender
Is
The
Night.
2
Isabel Owens recalled him in 1932 slouching in his smoke-filled study wrapped in an ancient towelling robe, clutching his gin bottle like a security blanket. Zelda and Scott, who both craved privacy and peace, could not leave each other alone. They trawled from room to room, rowing, repenting, screaming, making up. Mrs Owens remembers: ‘She took a lot from him … and I never remember her criticizing him. Of course she had no say.’ Zelda didn’t want him in her workplace but never refused her help. Scott, who protected her from drink and visitors, never understood that she also needed
protection
from
him.
‘He would go up to her room and ask advice about things they had done together, conversations they had.’ Scott, Mrs Owens said, ‘couldn’t write about anything he didn’t know … Zelda’s memory was good.’
3
In an interview in the
Saturday
Evening
Post
Scott admitted that, though highly professional, he now
experienced
feelings of ‘utter helplessness’. Where were his fresh themes or new plots? ‘We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives. Then we learn our trade … and we tell our two or three stories – each time in a new guise … as long as people will listen.’
4
  That year he feared people had stopped listening.

The New Year of 1933 rang in with sadness and continued
miserably
through to September. January brought ‘Quarrels’ with Scottie,
5
February saw a severe quarrel with Ernest, but neither proved as depressing to Scott as Ring Lardner’s death in September which he told Max was ‘a terrible blow’.
6
Earlier in the year, looking for cheer, Scott met Lois Moran in New York. It was but a temporary palliative. He turned to luminal and drink which necessitated further treatment at Johns Hopkins. Dr Meyer told Forel that Scott’s alcoholic deterioration was ruining Zelda’s slight improvement.

Weekly for six months the Fitzgeralds had visited Phipps for
discussions
with Doctors Rennie and Meyer. Scott, who found Meyer’s attitude disagreeable, decided these conferences were futile. Initially, Scott said, the Phipps discussions had worked because Zelda was ‘still close to the threat of force and more acutely under the spell of your [Meyer’s] personality’. Once again Scott needed the authority to control her. He wanted the ‘power of an ordinary nurse … over a child; to be able to say “If you don’t do this I shall punish you.”’ Meyer should authorize him to tell Zelda ‘when she is persistently refactory to pack her bag’ and return to hospital. Scott accepted that possibly Zelda ‘would have been a genius if we had never met’, but felt ‘In actuality she is now hurting me and through me hurting all of us’. Her Iowa schoolgirl ambitions to write made her think ‘her work’s success will give her some sort of divine
irresponsibility
backed by unlimited gold’. The gold was provided by him, while she worked ‘under a greenhouse which is my money and my name and my love … she … feels she can reach up and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment, yet she is shrewd to cringe when I open the door of the greenhouse and tell her to behave or go’. Scott knew ‘the picture of Zelda painting things that show a distinct talent, or Zelda trying faithfully to learn how to write is much more sympathetic and, superficially, more solid than the vision of me making myself iller with drink as I finish up the work of four years’. Eventually, he fantasized, he might ‘be carried off … by four strong guards shrieking manicly that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Zelda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract’. But was Zelda more worth saving than he was? As the wage-earner he must be worth more. Zelda had merely the ‘frail equipment of a sick mind and a beserk determination’, whereas he ‘was integrated – integrated in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that I might have two counts against me to her one’.

Scott believed a point had been reached where he would have to ‘resort to legal means to save myself, my child and the three of us in toto’. If Meyer didn’t agree that Zelda should be told she had exhausted everyone’s patience, that Meyer would not always be there as a prop for Zelda to lean on, then the Fitzgeralds would go ‘out in the storm, each one for himself, and I’m afraid Scotty and I will weather it better than she’.
7

Meyer, too, felt their conversations were futile. He pointed out that Zelda was not merely a patient as far as he was concerned and that Scott too was a potential patient, albeit an unwilling one. This opener did not
go down well with Scott. Nor did Meyer’s line: ‘The question of
authority
is simple. We have decided to relieve you of having to be the boss … But you have the right to say when things are to be referred to us … That saves you from having to be boss and psychiatrist.’ Meyer
reassured
Scott he was not trying to emasculate him; nevertheless his ‘instability with the alcohol’ prevented them from handing Zelda over to Scott. For progress there must be ‘a conjoint surrender of the alcohol’.
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Incensed that drinking had contributed to his poor image with Zelda’s doctors, Scott in an undated pencil draft raged at Meyer’s suggestion of ‘a dual case’. Until recently he had the strong drink matter in hand; he still needed no help; if Meyer checked with their friends and business associates he would find that though a good percentage liked Zelda better than they liked him, ‘on the question of integrity, responsibility, conscience, sense of duty, judgement, will-power … 95% of that group of ghosts would be as decided [in Scott’s favour] as Solomon pronouncing upon the two mothers’. Scott acknowledged his note was his ‘old plea to let me sit apon the bench with you instead of being kept down with the potential accomplices on the charge of criminal associations’.
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The Fitzgeralds and their doctors were at an impasse.

Finally, on 28 May 1933, Zelda and Scott decided to hold a
discussion
at La Paix with a stenographer and Dr Rennie as a moderator to try to reach the root of their troubles. The transcript runs to 114 pages.
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They began to talk at 2.30 on Sunday. Darkness fell before they had finished wounding each other.

Scott aimed the first shot. At seventeen Zelda was merely
boy-crazy
whereas at seventeen Scott wrote the Princeton Triangle shows. The whole equipment of
his
life was to be a novelist. He struggled. He sacrificed. He achieved. From age ten his life was a professional line towards writing. This made him artistically
different
from Zelda. ‘Her theory is that anything is possible, and that a girl has just got to get along, and so she has the right, therefore to destroy me completely in order to satisfy herself.’

Zelda, appalled, interrupted: ‘Dr Rennie, that is completely unfair and it is not my theory. And I have never done anything against you, I have absolutely nothing to reproach myself with. And as far as destroying you is concerned I have considered you first in everything I have tried to do in my life.’

Ignoring her, Scott dismissed her writing as a few ‘nice little sketches’ but as for being a novelist, ‘Did she have anything to say? No, she has not anything to say. She has certain experiences to report, but she has nothing essentially to say.’

Defensive about his own eight-year publishing delay – swiftly reduced to ‘seven years – six years’ – he blamed Zelda. ‘Three of those years were directly because of a sickness of hers, and two years before that … for which she was partly responsible, in that she wanted to be a ballet dancer; and I backed her in that.’

Zelda quietly interjected: ‘You mean you were drinking
constantly
… It is just one of the reasons why I wanted to be a ballet dancer, because I had nothing else.’

Any mention of drink infuriated Scott. ‘She wanted to be a ballet dancer because when we went out to Hollywood … I got interested in a girl … [who] seemed to me to be more honest and direct than Zelda, who … was trying to be just an average flirt, standing in my way every way she could … I never drank till I was 16 years old. The first time I met her I saw she was a drunkard.’

Scott accused Zelda of egotism, self-love, and feeling responsible only to herself: ‘the mentality of a very cheap prostitute’.

The transcript does not read like a ‘discussion’ between two people trying to work out their problems but as a trial, with Zelda as defendant. Scott allotted himself the role of prosecuting lawyer, using terms like ‘admission’ or ‘I have the documents’. Zelda in defence was forced to say: ‘Dr Rennie, I will have to interrupt that’, then wait for Rennie’s agreement.

Zelda explained Scott had restricted her mothering role. ‘He made it impossible for me to communicate with the child … [he refused] to take any of my judgments or opinions of people who were in charge of her … there was nothing in my life except my work.’ Later, when Scott said, ‘you know that Scotty relies on me utterly and completely,’ Zelda responded: ‘She has got nobody else to rely on. You alienated her affections from me years ago … [by] refusing to allow me authority on the job.’

Zelda, appalled at Scott’s accusation that she had called out nearly a hundred doctors to administer morphine injections, pointed out he was lying. Scott said: ‘I am trying to tell the truth. What you say does not happen to come in my story.’ Zelda’s
perceptive
response, ‘Oh, I see, you say the truth is your story,’ was lost on her husband.

The focus of their quarrel became Zelda’s novel. Scott considered it ‘plagiaristic, unwise in every way … should not have been written, because I have a certain public weight’. When Zelda asked: ‘Didn’t you want me to be a writer?’, first he said flatly ‘No’, then
aggressively
: ‘I do not care whether you were a writer or not, if you were any good … [but] You are a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer.’

Quietly Zelda said: ‘You have told me that before.’ Though Scott admitted ‘You may be a good painter’, he invoked Hemingway to attack her fiction: ‘But as far as writing is concerned, if I told you the opinion that Ernest Hemingway had …’ Zelda did not care a damn what Hemingway thought. By now Scott was beyond curbing his arrogant vitriol. ‘If you want to write modest things, you may be able to turn out one collection of short stories … [but] you as
compared
to me is just like comparing – well, there is just not any
comparison
. I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world.’

Zelda, feelings concealed, said: ‘It seems to me that you are making a rather violent attack on a third-rate talent then … Why in the hell you are so jealous, I don’t know. If I thought that about anybody, I would not care what they wrote.’

Scott’s violence stemmed from his belief that because he
supported
Zelda, her entire life belonged to him for literary purposes.

‘If you ruin me, what becomes of you?’ he shouted. ‘You could not sell a story … You could not make 50 dollars on your writing … You are just a useless society woman.’

‘That’, said Zelda, ‘is what you want me to be.’ But what Scott wanted was more than that. He was after complete capitulation. ‘I want you to do what I say. That is exactly what I want you to do, and you know it.’ Zelda did know it. ‘I have done that often enough, it seems to me,’ she said.

Scott fumed over the forty-thousand-word manuscript on Nijinsky and insanity she had been ‘sneakingly writing’ for months.
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‘You have tried to take every sneaking advantage of me, always, working behind my back.’ To Zelda it was almost
laughable
. ‘Oh, Scott I cannot accept that. That is silly.’ Scott stubbornly said he didn’t care whether or not she accepted it. ‘You damned well do care, it seems to me.’

Scott had indeed cared sufficiently to ‘sneakingly’ read parts of her new novel which he handed to Dr Rennie. ‘I have not opened it or read it, except just enough to check what you are writing about … I don’t want you … to write a novel about insanity, because you know there is certain psychiatric stuff in my books, and if you publish a book before me, or even at the same time, in which the subject of psychiatry is taken up, and people see “Fitzgerald”, why, that is Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, they read that, and that spoils the whole central point of being a novelist, which is being yourself. You pick up the crumbs I drop at the dinner table and stick them in books.’

Zelda, icily calm, retorted: ‘you have picked up crumbs I have dropped for ten years, too.’ But Scott was reluctant to acknowledge that Zelda had been his muse or his own writing difficulties related to her decline in that role. He needed to possess everything they had shared. Maybe experiences Zelda had used creatively would have her magic touch or give him back his.

Scott’s ill-health, alcoholism and waning confidence heightened his desperation. He boasted to Rennie that Zelda did not
understand
concepts of human justice or morality that professional writers use. ‘Hers is just automatic writing.’ To Zelda he said: ‘You have one power. You can ruin us. To make us or help us, you have not got that power. I am the only person in the world that can make us. And I can share with you the honor and the glory that I make, and the money.’

That, said Zelda courteously, is not what I want. She wanted to live by her writing, not least because Scott had reproached her all year for draining his resources. ‘When you have that thrown in your face constantly, day after day, naturally there is some impetus to try to do something about it.’ She determined to write about her asylum experiences because they had consumed her. It was what she knew about. Scott, boiling like a cauldron, shouted: ‘She does not know anything about it. I have a dozen books on psychiatry.’ Zelda appealed to the moderator. ‘Dr Rennie, it is what I want to write. It is a very emotional novel, and that is the whole purpose of the thing, and the reason for it … I had to lay it there because I never had the material for laying it any place else.’