Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (33 page)

At the end of June, on a visit to town with her nurse, Zelda tried to run away. Restrained and brought back to Prangins, she was transferred from the main building to the Villa Eglantine and, ill with the other ill, confined with the most disturbed and intractable patients. While she was locked up, Zelda sent Scott some despairing letters that intensified his guilt and misery, and shattered his hopes for her quick recovery: “I never realized before how hideously dependent on you I was. . . . Every day it seems to me that things are more barren and sterile and hopeless. . . . At any rate one thing has been achieved: I am thoroughly and completely humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted.” Villa Eglantine and Zelda’s last sentence would reappear in
Tender Is the Night.

Zelda’s nervous disease now began to have physical manifestations. She lost her old vivacity, seemed to age suddenly and sat like a listless invalid in a long, blank trance. From June until August her face, neck and shoulders were covered with severe eczema, which made her existence a living hell. “For two months she had lain under it,” Scott wrote in his novel, comparing the skin disease to a medieval instrument of torture, “as imprisoned as in the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.”

Though Dr. Forel eventually cured Zelda’s eczema by hypnosis, her hallucinations, depression and mental anguish continued unabated. She poured out her sorrows in letters to Scott, who was powerless to help her:

For months I have been living in vaporous places peopled with one-dimensional figures and tremulous buildings. . . .

I wish I could see you: I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning intelligence. . . .

Dancing has gone and I’m weak and feeble and I can’t understand why I should be the one, amongst all the others, to have to bear all this—for what? . . .

I can’t read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead. Mamma does know what’s the matter with me. She wrote me she did. You can put that in your story to lend it pathos. Bitched once more. . . .

I wonder why we have never been very happy and why all this has happened. . . .

Please
help me. Every day more of me dies with this bitter and incessant beating I’m taking.
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After Zelda’s breakdown Fitzgerald had to remain close to her for consultations and visits as well as protect Scottie from the effects of her mother’s illness, support the family by writing stories for the
Post
and try to finish the long-neglected
Tender Is the Night.
Fitzgerald inevitably suffered the consequences of Zelda’s prolonged psychotherapy. He found it intensely unpleasant to have her doctors probing and analyzing every aspect of their emotional and sexual life, and to endure frequent recriminations as her therapy uncovered their past. In the late summer of 1930, for example, Zelda reminded him, in vague but suggestive terms, of an occasion when he had deeply wounded her. Referring to the time they had “slept together” at the Hotel Miramare in Genoa in November 1924, she bitterly declared: “I think the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happened to me in my life is a scene that you probably don’t remember even, in Genoa.” She also said that the incident had brought on an attack of asthma and that she had “almost died in Genoa.” Perhaps Scott did not remember this incident because he was drunk at the time. But he probably wanted to take revenge on Zelda for her recent affair with Jozan. In his drunken state, his sexual inhibitions released, he may have attempted a sexual act—possibly sodomy—that they both considered unnatural. In any case, Zelda associated it with homosexuality and with animals, and found it “humiliating and bestial.”

Scott had to defend himself yet accept responsibility, and try to explain “why all this has happened” without accusing her. Old friends like John Peale Bishop, who had often seen the Fitzgeralds during the 1920s and remained loyal to Scott, blamed Zelda for the disaster that had overwhelmed them. Bishop later told Edmund Wilson, who seemed to share his views: “I agree with you as to Zelda’s partial responsibility for the earlier debacle. In those years in Paris, I came to detest her. She was really a very evil creature and like all evil people, deficient in the common emotions.”

Troubled by his own guilty conscience, Scott was more sympathetic to Zelda. But he also blamed her for not taking responsibility for her own actions—even when she tried to kill others by driving a car over a cliff: “Never in her whole life did she have a sense of guilt, even when she put other lives in danger—it was always people and circumstances that oppressed her.” Mentioning another flaw in Zelda’s character, he also told Scottie: “the insane are always mere guests on the earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.” In this cryptic statement, Scott meant that Zelda had rejected the moral laws (her “broken decalogues”) that were universally accepted by mankind and had always tried “to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own.”
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In her more lucid moments Zelda realized that mental illness was always worse for the family of the patient than for the person who was ill. Like Miranda in
The Tempest,
Scott could truly say: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” He even felt in danger of losing his own reason when torn by the agonizing, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair. Paradoxically, however, his participation in Zelda’s treatment matured and strengthened Fitzgerald’s character. Though he could be irritating and self-indulgent, he now achieved, through emotional isolation and intense self-scrutiny, a sweeter temperament, a deeper understanding of others and a more dignified demeanor.

As she burned out her bitterness and achieved new insight, Zelda gradually accepted rather than resented her inevitable dependence on Scott, and expressed gratitude for his sacrifice and support: “I realize more completely than ever how much I live in you and how sweet and good and kind you are to such a dependent appendage.” Many years later, after his death, Zelda finally realized how much he had loved her and had done for her when she was ill, and praised him for “keeping faith” and remaining loyal under the pressure of her inescapable necessities. John Dos Passos, who had perceived Zelda’s insanity before her breakdown and criticized Fitzgerald’s madcap life at Ellerslie, spoke for most of Scott’s friends who discerned his nobility of character when faced with personal tragedy: “Scott was meeting adversity with a consistency of purpose that I found admirable. He was trying to raise Scottie, to do the best possible thing for Zelda, to handle his drinking and to keep a flow of stories into the magazines to raise the enormous sums Zelda’s illness cost. At the same time he was determined to continue writing firstrate novels. With age and experience his literary standards were rising. I never admired a man more.”

Scott always wanted to give Zelda the very best medical care that was available. In late November 1930 Dr. Forel wished to call in Dr. Eugen Bleuler—a professor at Zurich (and teacher of Carl Jung), who had coined the word “schizophrenia” in a famous paper of 1911—to confirm his diagnosis and treatment. Scott agreed to pay the five-hundred-dollar consultation fee, a staggering sum at that time. Bleuler agreed with the current treatment and said Zelda had borderline insanity. No one knew the cause of her illness or how to cure it. He vaguely suggested rest and re-education, and said Zelda should be allowed to go skiing in the nearby mountains and to visit the shops, theater and opera in Geneva. Bleuler also told Fitzgerald that three out of four patients like Zelda were eventually discharged: one recovered completely and two others remained delicate and slightly eccentric. Zelda, however, eventually joined the unfortunate quarter who never recovered. Though discharged from three mental institutions, she had three more breakdowns and would end her days in an insane asylum.

Bleuler thought Zelda was crazy; she thought he was a “great imbecile.” But after the confusion, pain, bitterness, anguish, accusations, she slowly got better and, with zany humor, even began to joke about her illness. She said she had gone to Geneva with a “fellow maniac,” signed her letter “Zelda, the dowager duchess of detriment” and said they could give their next child the Latin name for schizophrenia: “Dementia Praecox Fitzgerald—Dear how gruesome!”

But Scott’s meetings with Zelda, during which he tried to ease her back into normal social and sexual life, were often much worse than not seeing her at all. In January 1931, after nine months of treatment, he told her doctors that when they spent time together she unnervingly slipped in and out of moods and madness, that seeing him had a bad effect on her and that he was repelled by her appearance and behavior: “Then she went into the other personality and was awful to me at lunch. After lunch she returned to the affectionate tender mood, utterly normal, so that with pressure I could have manoeuvered her into intercourse but the eczema was almost visibly increasing so I left early. Toward the very end she was back in the schizophrenia.”

The doctors did not know what caused her illness. But in the summer of 1930, Fitzgerald had an artist’s brilliant intuition about the etiology of her disease, which he described in the same terms he had used to explain the genesis of his best stories (“there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed . . .”): “I can’t help clinging to the idea that some essential physical thing like salt or iron or semen or some unguessed at holy water is either missing or is present in too great quantity.”
⁸
Fitzgerald rightly perceived, before the doctors discovered it, that a great deal of mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the body. The drug lithium, for example, which is a salt, corrects this imbalance and is now used to control the cycles of manic depression.

III

“One Trip Abroad” contains one of Fitzgerald’s finest, and saddest, aphorisms: “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.”
⁹
Sensitive to the accusations of Zelda and of Robert McAlmon that he was a homosexual, and associating Paris with “swarms of fairies,” he now came to loathe that city. As he told Edmund Wilson, he preferred the straightforward clinical air of Switzerland, “where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs.” “One Trip Abroad” also describes the gentle and rather moribund life he tried to share with Zelda on the days when she was well enough to leave the hospital, visit the Casino and read popular novels in English that were printed in Germany. Their life turned “on the daily visits of their two doctors, the arrival of the mail and newspapers from Paris, the little walk into the hillside village or occasionally the descent by funicular to the pale resort on the lake, with its
Kursaal,
its grass beach, its tennis clubs and sight-seeing buses. They read Tauchnitz editions and yellow-jacketed Edgar Wallaces; at a certain hour each day they watched the baby being given its bath; three nights a week there was a tired and patient orchestra in the lounge after dinner, that was all.”

Fitzgerald’s routine life in Switzerland was frequently interrupted, however, by moves to various hotels around the lake and in the mountain villages, by two encounters with Thomas Wolfe, by a love affair and by an unexpected voyage to America. In June 1930, soon after Zelda entered Prangins, Fitzgerald, on his monthly trip to Paris to see Scottie, ran into Thomas Wolfe—who had published
Look Homeward, Angel
with Scribner’s in 1929—in the Ritz Bar. Wolfe, who had been to Harvard, found Fitzgerald’s collegiate coterie both snobbish and superficial. “I finally departed from his company,” Wolfe wrote, “at ten that night in the Ritz Bar where he was entirely surrounded by Princeton boys, all nineteen years old, all drunk, and all half-raw. . . . I heard one of the lads say ‘Joe’s a good boy, Scotty, but you know he’s a fellow that ain’t got much background.’ ”

In July the two novelists met again in Vevey on Lake Geneva. Fitzgerald was impressed by the six-foot-six-inch-tall Wolfe, whom Sinclair Lewis described as “a Gargantuan creature with great gusto of life.” Hemingway had more caustically called him “a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice.”
¹⁰
While Fitzgerald and Wolfe were arguing about books in a mountain village above the town, Wolfe gesticulated so vigorously that he snapped an electric power line and plunged the whole place into darkness. In September 1930 Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, their “common parent,” that he found Wolfe comparable to Hemingway: “You have a great find in him—what he’ll do is incalculable. He has a deeper culture than Ernest and more vitality, if he is slightly less of a poet that goes with the immense surface he wants to cover. Also he lacks Ernest’s quality of a stick hardened in the fire.”

In July 1937 Fitzgerald resumed their literary debate in a letter to Wolfe. Focusing on the issue he had often discussed with Hemingway, Fitzgerald urged Wolfe, whose sloppy works were put into coherent order by Perkins, to become a more conscious artist. Echoing Hemingway’s famous theory of omission (in which the seven-eighths of the iceberg hidden below the surface of the water give full strength to the essential tip that shows), Fitzgerald allied himself with Flaubert and Hemingway, as opposed to Zola and Wolfe, and expressed an important aesthetic principle: “The more, the stronger, man’s inner tendencies are defined, the more he can be sure they will show, the more necessity to rarefy them, to use them sparingly. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said: that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe (in his case, Zola) will come along and say presently. He will only say the things that he alone sees. So
Madame Bovary
becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age.”

Wolfe, unhappy about being relegated with Bill and Joe to antiquated Zolaesque fiction, replied by portraying Fitzgerald as Hunt Conroy in
You Can’t Go Home Again
(1941). Speaking to Foxhall Edwards (based on Perkins), Wolfe’s hero George Webber clearly dissociates himself from the American expatriate writers of the 1920s. Gertrude Stein had called them the Lost Generation and Hemingway popularized the phrase by adopting it as one of the epigraphs of
The Sun Also Rises.
Webber says: “You have a friend, Fox, named Hunt Conroy. You introduced me to him. He is only a few years my senior, but he is very fixed in his assertion of what he calls ‘The Lost Generation’—a generation of which, as you know, he has been quite vociferously a member, and in which he has tried enthusiastically to include me. Hunt and I used to argue about it.”
¹¹