The Books: Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford

How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends – it needs only crowds …
— from “Eulogy on the Flapper”, by Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald wrote:

I was a very active child and never tired, always running with no hat or coat even in the Negro district and far from my house. I liked houses under construction and often I walked on the open roofs; I liked to jump from high places … I liked to dive and climb in the tops of trees – I liked taking long walks far from town, sometimes going to a country churchyard where I went very often by myself… When I was a little girl I had great confidence in myself, even to the extent of walking by myself against life as it was then. I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.

I have read a couple of Nancy Milford biographies and will continue to keep my eye out for her next projects. Her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay is magnificent, and so is this one on Zelda Fitzgerald. I like a biographer who is confident enough in her subject that she lets the subject mainly speak for herself. The biography of Zelda Fitzgerald has more quotes and excerpts from letters/journals/unpublished essays than most biographies. I haven’t counted up the excerpts but it seems to me that there are more excerpts of other people’s writing in this biography than Nancy Milford’s own writing. I like that a LOT. What ends up happening is that Milford disappears into the background a little bit. Her job then becomes to highlight the person that actually existed, through their own words (and the words of her family and friends)… rather than to present a thesis and back it up with extensive philosophizing of her own. Zelda herself emerges, very very clearly, in this book. Zelda, who has become a bit of a myth, was actually a real person, and while we have seen her mostly through the eyes of her famous husband (who wrote about her a lot), here we get to meet her on her own terms.

I am not big on “the woman behind the man” biographies, so I will admit a bias. The recent biography of Lucia Joyce, positing that she was somehow the main inspiration for Joyce’s work, actually made me angry. Of course he loved her, and cared for her, and worried about her (there are many many similarities, by the way, between Lucia Joyce and Zelda Fitzgerald, including a dangerous obsession with ballet, and also the institutions they were placed in), and of course she probably figured in his work in some way, but so did everyone he had ever met. To say that her madness was somehow the inspiration for Finnegans Wake. Ugh. Don’t try to DIMINISH James Joyce by making a vast ridiculous claim that he looked up from his desk, saw his schizophrenic daughter flitting around in a tutu in the other room, and got the idea for Finnegans Wake. How dare you! Are you writing fiction or a biography? Now his relationship to Nora (his wife) is another story. He stole from her repeatedly. “The Dead” is actually a story from Nora’s life. The unpunctuated flow of Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Ulysses was, in some part, inspired by how Nora talked, and also how she never used punctuation (something Joyce found fascinating and very female). Everyone naturally assumed that Molly was Nora and Nora Molly (her verdict? “I’m nothing like Molly. Molly’s fat.”). Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Joyce (which I’ll get to) is well-done, and doesn’t try to overstate Nora’s influence, doesn’t try to diminish Joyce. But Nora was a huge figure in the landscape of Joyce (he admitted it himself), so I don’t mind so much exploring a little bit who the woman was on her own terms. But Lucia? That book was rightly mocked and I’m glad of it.

HOWEVER. This biography of Zelda Fitzgerald is different for many reasons. First of all, F. Scott Fitzgerald, similar to Joyce, found his wife to be the most interesting woman in the world, and utilized her repeatedly in his books and stories. Zelda even accused him (jokingly, yet with an undertone of seriousness) of plagiarizing. Here is an excerpt of a published review Zelda wrote about The Beautiful and Damned:

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald – I believe that is how he spells his name – seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Zelda, too, fancied herself a writer. I don’t mean to sound condescending. She published one novel, and wrote stories, and there are also fragments of unfinished novels and stories, some published pieces, and her letters – which show her to be a passionate and unique writer, with a slapdash romantic quality. Her descriptions are often meandering and lack focus, she does have a gift of description. You can see why Scott encouraged her. But it’s kind of like Courtney Love with Kurt Cobain back in the day. How do you fancy yourself a rock star when your husband is Kurt Cobain? There has to be some jealousy going on there, some feeling of being left behind. “But … but … I can write too!” Zelda had that in spades. And it did anger her when Scott would expressly use one of her phrases, or excerpt her letters, in one of his books or stories. He was pillaging her own material. What would be left for HER? He was stealing her best bits! Her novel Save Me the Waltz was written during one of her many stays in a mental institution. It caused a huge rupture with her husband, because, interestingly enough, she used much of the material in their marriage and in her life that he had assumed was his. She had wrecked the book HE was working on. How DARE she? He had always tried to be supportive, he was quite at a loss what to do with her after she started breaking down … but the writing thing was his game. She was encroaching on his territory, she had written a semi-autobiographical novel about their marriage. She had no business stepping into his territory. HE was the REAL writer. (I happen to believe that, although I can certainly understand her anger at having her life and sometimes her words being pillaged. But I’d rather read one paragraph of Scott Fitzgerald’s than an entire novel of Zelda’s any day. There is no comparison.) But that’s neither here nor there. Zelda’s talent was mercurial, inconsistent, and impulsive. She had no discipline. She couldn’t stick to anything. And then when she did, finally, stick to something – ballet – it was the cause of her first major breakdown. Delusions and psychosis set in. She was in her thirties and she was convinced she could be a prima ballerina. (Another similarity with Lucia Joyce.)

Joan Acocella, in a provocative essay on Lucia Joyce first published in The New Yorker, which also mentions Zelda Fitzgerald, writes:

Many people are brilliant, and from that you may get one novel, as Zelda Fitzgerald did. But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov) – to make a career – you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage. Lucia Joyce encouraged obstacles and threw up her hands; James Joyce faced worse obstacles – for most of his writing life, publishers ran from him in droves – but he persisted. When the critics made fun of Zelda’s novel, she stopped publishing; when Scott had setbacks – indeed, when he was a falling-down drunk – he went on hoping, and working.

A brutal assessment, perhaps, but it’s the truth. Zelda Fitzgerald, because of her mental illness (which probably went undiagnosed for many years, hidden under her youth and her vibrant manner), found life to be a burden, and she couldn’t gather her forces together enough to stick to the writing. She lacked the strength and the discipline. It doesn’t matter if you have excellent raw material if you can’t get yourself together to write it all down. F. Scott Fitzgerald was also an alcoholic, as Acocella notes, but he never stopped working. It takes sheer will power to keep going. Zelda’s story is a tragic one and this book, a rarity among biographies, actually brought me to tears. If she had been born 30 or 40 years later, her mental illness could have been treated more effectively. She might have had more of a fighting chance. After six years of being in and out of institutions (mostly in), she was placed in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. She had become completely uncontrollable. Scott, who had had his battles with Zelda, agonized over his decision, and in a letter he wrote at the time of her commitment to the hospital, you can feel his pain, how entwined they were, the codependence, I suppose – but also the anguish:

Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages) … I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her.

Scott was out in Hollywood, writing screenplays and falling into an abyss of his own. Zelda was released from the hospital. The two took a trip together, which did not go well. Both were tailspinning. Scott himself was hospitalized. He died in 1940. A young man still. Devastated, a hollow shell of his former self. He died convinced that he would be forgotten. After all, he already was forgotten. His essay called “The Crack Up” is one of the most brutally honest and frightening essays on the topic of breakdowns I have ever read (and believe me I have read a ton). I had never read it before, and in 2009, right before – as in – 3 weeks before I started cracking up for real at an accelerated pace – I tried to read his essay “The Crack Up” as well as a couple of essays including in the book of the same title. It was really the last thing I was able to read before I was submerged for the next 5 months, and in looking back on the post I wrote at the time … I can feel my mental distress.

The Great Gatsby had been published in 1925 to good critical reviews and so-so sales. Tender Is the Night came out nine years later. His reputation was shot, a reputation that had been made before he was even 25 years old. He died believing he had let his earlier talent down, that he had lost something precious, that he was a failure. It would be almost 2 decades before his reputation was re-established. Zelda, left adrift without her “great reality”, went back into Highland Hospital. The treatment there was often brutal, according to the practices of the day. She underwent electric shock therapy, she remained under lock and key. She had dreams of writing another novel. But she was never really well now, and she couldn’t get her head together to really work. In 1948, a fire broke out in Highland Hospital. Zelda was locked into her ward with 9 other women, and although they screamed to be let out, the fire was too intense, and the ward was consumed by fire. They all died. I cannot even imagine what her last moments must have been like, and I don’t want to imagine. Zelda had always had a primal fear of fire.

In reading about her life, as written by Nancy Milford, in a beautifully compassionate book that at the same time does not overstate Zelda’s talent, something that would have been dishonest – I mainly felt, “Wow. It’s damn UNFAIR what happened to this poor creature.” She was not a bad person. She had a zest for life, and she found her playmate in F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were lucky to have one another, rocky road though it was for the two of them. Their heyday in the 20s was the stuff of legends. They were like the Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton of their day. “What did those crazy kids get up to last night??” They kept a scrapbook of all of the tabloid clippings about their exploits.

Dorothy Parker wrote:

Robert Sherwood brought Scott and Zelda to me right after their marriage. I had met Scott before. He told me he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia! … But they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.

She was consumed by delusions and violent fantasies, and her dream of being a ballerina overtook her life to such a degree that she went mad. The signs had been there all along. But it was the ballet that tipped her over the edge. Her desire to escape from reality had always been present in this fizzy impulsive daring Jazz Baby, her insistence on living by her own rules was paramount … but when the tide washed back, when she realized the wreck she had made of everything, and when she tried to find solace in the one thing she really loved – ballet – it was her ruin. You know? You just read about it and you think, “That is a damn shame. This girl deserved a better break.”

Zelda wrote to Scott early in their courtship:

Scott – there’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love – All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me less – and less – and I’d do anything – anything – to keep your heart for my own – I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally – Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting – I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready – Don’t – don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me – You’ve trusted me wiht the dearest heart of all – and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had –

How can you think deliberately of life without me – If you should die – O Darling – darling Scott – It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too – I’d have no purpose in life – just a pretty – decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – and I was delivered to you – to be worn – I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a button hole bouquet – to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help – to know that you can’t do anything without me.

Here is one of the most heartrending sections of the book, and it’s because it’s in Zelda’s own words. She had her first breakdown in 1930. She was hospitalized in an institution on Lake Geneva, she went into an analysis with a Dr. Forel, who had her do a lot of writing, sensing that she needed to express herself. I can barely read some of her writing without an echo of pain.

This is a lovely book. I highly recommend you checking it out, as well as Nancy Milford’s other biographies.

Excerpt from Zelda: A Biography

For portions of August and mid-September Scott vacationed in Caux. He finished “Our Trip Abroad” and “A Snobbish Story” during those periods of relative peace. But he did nothing with his novel. He had begun to work on a sixth draft in the spring of 1930, but with Zelda’s illness he apparently put it aside and turned to writing short stories for quick cash. At the beginning of “Our Trip Abroad” (which Matthew Bruccoli rightly calls “a miniature of Tender Is the Night“) Fitzgerald wrote about “the young American couple” Nicole and Nelson Kelly: “Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions, but something was harmed, some precedent of possible non-agreement was set. It was a love match, though, and it could stand a great deal.” The Kellys, who showed signs of being modeled after both the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys, did stand a great deal, until restlessness and their own inner resources began to give way. At the end of the story Nicole says, ” ‘It’s just that we don’t understand what’s the matter . . . . Why did we lose peace and love and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I’d try so hard.’ ”

During that time Zelda wrote to Scott:

I hope it will be nice at Caux. It sounds as if part of its name had rolled down the mountain-side. Perhaps when I’m well I won’t be so afraid of floating off from high places and we can go together.

Except for momentary retrogressions into a crazy defiance and complete lack of proportion I am better. It’s ghastly losing your mind and not being able to see clearly, literally or figuratively – and knowing that you can’t think and that nothing is right, not even your comprehension of concrete things like how old you are or what you look like –

Where are all my things? I used to always have dozens of things and now there doesn’t seem to be any clothes or anything personal in my trunk – I’d love the gramophone –

What a disgraceful mess – but if it stops our drinking it is worth it – because then you can finish your novel and write a play and we can live somewhere and have can have a house with a room to paint and write maybe like we had with friends for Scottie and there will be Sundays and Mondays again which are different from each other and there will be Christmas and winter fires and pleasant things to think of when you’re going to sleep – and my life won’t lie up the back-stairs of music-halls and yours won’t keep trailing down the gutters of Paris – if it will only work, and I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac –

Dear Scott:
I wish I could see you: I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning intelligence. It was fine to have your post-card with your special reaction to Caux on it. Your letters are just non-commital phrases that you might write to Scottie and they do not help to unravel this infinite psychological mess that I’m floundering about in. I watch what attitude the nurse takes each day and then look up what symptom I have in Doctor Forel’s book. Dear, why has my ignorance on a medical subject which has never appeared to me particularly interesting reduced me to the mental status of a child? I know that my mind is vague and undisciplined and that I only know small smatterings of things, but that has nothing to do with cerebral processes . . . .

I don’t know how we’re going to reverse time, you and me; erase and begin again – but I imagine it will be automatic. I can’t project myself into the past no matter how hard I try. There are lots of days when I think it would have been better to give me a concise explanation and let it go – because I know so much already. One illusion is as good as another.

Write me how you are and what you do and what the world is like at Caux – and Love Zelda.

As the summer passed Zelda wavered between a seeming recuperation and yet deeper illness. Once when things seemed very black indeed for her recovery Dr. Forel asked her as part of his therapy to write out a summary of the way she felt about her family and herself. In this document she was able to reveal something of herself to Forel for the first time, with fewer of the restraints and disguises she usually employed. She wrote quickly and in a highly idiosyncratic French. (The following are excerpts from a translation of that record, which in the original runs to about seven pages.) Dr. Forel asked Zelda to describe her parents. She remembered her mother as being extremely indulgent of others’ faults, an artistic woman who wrote, played the piano and sang. Zelda and Mrs. Sayre had a passion for flowers and birds. She saw her mother in terms of a mood photograph: “I can always see her sitting down in the opalescent sunlight of a warm morning, a black servant combing her long grey hair.” But no such images of her father came to mind. She described him exclusively in terms of what he was and did. She said he was a man without fear – intellectual, silent, serious. He was a man of “great integrity”. “I had an enormous respect for my father and some mistrust.” Then he asked her about their marriage.

When I was a child their relationship was not apparent to me. Now I see them as two unhappy people: my mother dominated and oppressed my father, and often hurt by him, he forced to work for a large family in which he found neither satisfaction nor a spiritual link. Neither of them complained.

When asked about her parents’ influence on her, Zelda insisted that they had had absolutely none.

Her relationship toward her brother and sisters she simply described as “vague”. She was a great many years younger than they and did not have memories of a youth passed together. Her sisters were pretty; she quarreled with them constantly. Her favorite was Rosalind, who “appeared elegant, perfumed, sophisticated”.

The great emotional events of her life were:

My marriage, after which I was in another world, one for which I was not qualified or prepared, because of my inadequate education.

And:

A love affair with a french aviator in St. Raphael. I was locked in my villa for one month to prevent me from seeing him. This lasted for five years. When I knew my husband had another woman in California I was upset because the life over there appeared to me so superficial, but finally I was not hurt because I knew I had done the same thing when I was younger.

I determined to find an impersonal escape, a world in which I could express myself and walk without the help of somebody who was always far from me. I had begun dancing in Paris, with a great ballet dancer, but I was obliged to leave her because of my illness . . . . When I returned to Paris I went again into the same school. I have worked four hours a day and in the evening, and Sundays, during the holidays, on the boat when I was travelling. I began to understand it.

Suddenly last spring I began to see all red while I worked or I saw no colors – I could not bear to look out of windows, for sometimes I saw humanity as a bottle of ants. Then we left for Cannes where I worked on technique and where after the lessons I had the impression that I was an old person living very quietly in winter. I loved my ballet teacher in Paris more than anything else in the world. But I did not know how. She had everything of beauty in her head, the brightness of a greek temple, the frustration of a mind searching for a place, the glory of cannon bullets; all that I saw in her steps. From Christmas on I was not able to work correctly anymore, but she helped me to learn more, to go further. She always told me to look after myself. I tried to, but it was worse. I was in a real “mess” . . . One day the world between me and the others stopped – I was dragged like by a magnet – I had headaches and I could jump higher than ever, but the day after I was sick. I left my lessons, but without them I could not do anything. It was Easter, I wanted to do something for my little girl, but I could not stop in a shop and Madame came to encourage me. Enough to give me strength to go to Malmaison. There the doctors told me I was well and I came back to the studio, unable to walk in the streets, full of medicine, trying to work in an atmosphere which was becoming more and more strange . . . . My husband forced me to go to Valmont – and now I am here, with you, in a situation where I cannot be anybody, full of vertigo, with an increasing noise in my ears, feeling the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.

Then, perhaps in a moment of recognition, she added:

I am dependent on my husband, and he told me that I must get cured. I accept, but as I am lost about anything with him, with his life in which there is nothing for me except the physical comfort, when I get out of your clinic it will be with an idea: to arrange myself in any condition to be able to breathe freely. Life, beauty or death, all that is equal for me.

I must add another thing: this story is the fault of nobody but me. I believed I was a Salamander and it seems that I am nothing but an impediment.

That summer Scott sent Harold Ober three of Zelda’s stories, asking him to show them to Maxwell Perkins for possible publication in Scribner’s Magazine. After Perkins had seen them he wrote Scott,

I have read Zelda’s manuscripts over several times – they came to me while I was away – and I do think they show an astonishing power of expression, and have and convey a curiously effective and strange quality. But they are for a selected audience, and not a large one, and the magazine thinks that on that account, they cannot use them. One would think that if she did enough more they might make a book. Descriptively they are very rare, and the description is not just description. It has a curious emotional content in itself. But for the present I shall have to send them back to Ober. I think one of the little magazines might use them. I wish we would.

I am terribly sorry about Zelda herself. But if she has made progress maybe it should become more rapid, and everything will come out right.

Scott replied that he

was sorry of course about Zelda’s stories – perhaps they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a waste-land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College Humor and . . . I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during winter.

But that was wishful thinking, for Zelda was not able to concentrate on anything consistently throughout the rest of the summer and fall of 1930, so completely was she in the relentless grip of the eczema. She wrote Scott:

. . . Please help me. Every day more of my life dies with this bitter and incessant beating I’m taking. You can choose the condition of our life and anything you want if I don’t have to stay here miserable and sick at the mercy of people who have never even tried what it’s like. Neither would I have if I had understand I can’t live any more under these conditions, and anyway I’ll always know that the “door is tacitly locked” – if it ever is.

There’s no justice – no quiet place of rest left in the world, and the longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get . . . .

Please Please let me out now – Dear, you used to love me and I swear to you that this is no use. You must have seen. You said it was too good to spoil. What’s spoiling me, along with it and I don’t see how anybody in the world has a right to do such a thing –

Zelda needed Scott’s reassurance and, even more than that, she expected that he alone could explain to her the causes of her malady, and rescue her from them. She wrote desperately to him:

I seem awfully queer to myself, but I know I used to have integrity even if it’s gone now – You’ve got to come to me and tell me how I was. Now I see odd things: people’s arms too long or their faces as if they were stuffed and they look tiny and far away, or suddenly out of proportion.

Please explain – I want to be well and not bothered with poissons big or little and free to sit in the sun and choose the things I like about people and not have to take the whole person – because it seems to me that then you can’t see the parts so you can never write about them or even remember them very well –

In September the eczema had grown worse and Dr. Forel tried a completely different and experimental approach. He hypnotized Zelda and the results were dramatic. Zelda fell into a deep hypnotic sleep that lasted for thirteen hours and when she awoke the eczema was almost completely gone. It was to reappear again, but in a milder form. Immediately after the treatment Zelda told him that she had felt the eczema oozing in her trance, and she added that she thought there was a link between the eczema and her psychological condition. When she felt normal and realized the danger in her conjugal conflicts the eczema appeared. It came, she thought, as a sort of warning device. Her behavior toward Scott vacillated between being loving and being nasty. She was impulsively affectionate at moments when Scott least expected it, yet she might turn on him as he responded to her affection.

Looking at the letters which she wrote to Scott during the autumn, one catches the wild fluctuations of her moods. Scott was to incorporate portions of these letters in Tender Is the Night to indicate the progress of the relationship between Nicole and Doctor Dick Diver. He moved freely among those letters of Zelda’s which were the most peculiarly disordered to those which were intensely loving. However, one notices that even among the latter letters there were often currents of strangeness. She seemed now to need to express her dependence upon Scott, as though it was proof of her sanity.

Goofy, my darling, hasn’t it been a lovely day? I woke up this morning and the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel on my table so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air: love to Doo-do and the remembered feel of our skins cool against each other in other mornings like a school-mistress. And you ‘phoned and said I had written something that pleased you and so I don’t believe I’ve ever been so heavy with happiness . . . . Darling – I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemie or a “grand patron” – or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of midnight or perhaps in the lux of noon – Anyway, I love you most and you ‘phoned me just because you ‘phoned me to-night – I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear –

I’m so glad you finished your story – Please let me read it Friday. And I will be very sad if we have to have two rooms. Please.

Dear. Are you sort of feeling aimless, surprised, and looking rather reproachful that no melo-drama comes to pass when your work is over – as if you [had] ridden very hard with a message to save your army and found the enemy had decided not to attack – the way you sometimes feel – or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands in the middle of the week – the way you sometimes are – or are you organizing and dynamic and mending things – the way you sometimes are –

I love you – the way you always are.
Dear –
Good night –
Dear – dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear . . . [etc.]

Although by the end of October the eczema was nearly cured there was no essential change in Zelda’s mental attitude. She continued to complain about “something” in her head which was not normal. When she was left alone during the day she daydreamed, and she was unresponsive to questions put directly to her. She appeared dull and expressionless. Dr. Forel began to fear organic brain damage. By the 10th of November, 1930, the eczema had reappeared and Zelda grew worse. Dr. Forel transferred Zelda once again to the Eglantine. Scott considered this to be a major setback and he was dissatisfied with the progress of her treatment. He played what he called “a sort of American hunch” and asked Forel if something else couldn’t be tried to expedite her cure. On the 22nd Dr. Forel called in Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler for consultation. Bleuler was a distinguished authority on psychosis (specifically schizophrenia, which he had named) in Europe at that time.

Dr. Forel says he called in Bleuler to clear his own diagnosis. It was extremely important that he arrive at a correct diagnosis, for the treatment depended upon it. “The more I saw Zeldfa, the more I thought at the time: she is neither a pure neurosis (meaning psychogenic) nor a real psychosis – I considered her a constitutional emotionally unbalanced psychopath – she may improve, never completely recover. It was a great help to discuss this difficult patient with Bleuler.” He also mentioned that he had not been able to psychoanalyze Zelda for fear of disturbing and perhaps sacrificing what precious little equilibrium she possessed. Dr. Forel wrote, “Mrs. Fitzgerald is more intuitive than intelligent, more brilliant than cultivated.” He noticed that she liked to pretend she was more childish than she actually was; she was also sneaky and, he said, always found ways of avoiding the discipline of the hospital.