Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (46 page)

Fitzgerald makes a connection between insomnia, frequent changes of drenched pajamas and the torment of writing that Lowell adopts and elaborates in “Night Sweat”:

for ten nights now I’ve felt the creeping damp

float over my pajamas’ wilted white . . .

Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet,

everything streams and tells me this is right;

my life’s fever is soaking in night sweat—

one life, one writing!
¹⁵

Fitzgerald’s “dark night of the soul” also foreshadowed the mood of Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” And, following Fitzgerald’s example of sacrificing human feelings on the altar of art by using Zelda’s diaries and letters in
Tender Is the Night,
William Carlos Williams wove his mistresses’ love letters into
Paterson
(1946–51) and Lowell quoted the anguished correspondence of his former wife in
The Dolphin
(1973).

IV

On April 8, 1936, when Fitzgerald was publishing his third “Crack-Up” essay in
Esquire
and had decided to leave Baltimore for North Carolina, he transferred Zelda to Highland Hospital in Asheville. This move made his visits to Zelda and her short trips outside the hospital much easier, and brought her much closer to her mother in Montgomery. Located at an altitude of 2,500 feet in the healthy mountain country in the western part of the state, Highland—with swimming pool, tennis courts and buildings scattered throughout the spacious grounds—resembled a small college campus. The hospital had been opened in 1904 when Asheville had a number of tuberculosis clinics and many wealthy people spent their holidays at the Grove Park Inn, about four miles away. An advertisement in a contemporary brochure on mental clinics described Highland as “an institution employing all rational methods for the treatment of Nervous, Habit and Mild mental cases; especially emphasizing the natural curative agents—Rest, Climate, Water, Diet and Work.”

The director of the hospital, Dr. Robert Carroll, was a friend of Adolf Meyer (head of Zelda’s alma mater, Phipps Clinic) who referred many difficult patients to Highland. Born in Cooperstown, in western Pennsylvania, in 1869, the son of a minister, Carroll began his career as a pharmacist in Cleveland. After graduating from Marion Sims College of Medicine (later St. Louis University Medical School) in 1893, he started a general practice in medicine and surgery in Calvert, a small town in central Texas. He took psychiatric training at Rush Medical College in Chicago (where Hemingway’s father had studied) and practiced in a small sanatorium near Columbus, Ohio, before coming to Highland.

The forceful and aggressive Dr. Carroll—a bald man with wire spectacles, large nose and ears, and a long, thin mouth—was a strong believer in a strict diet that would eliminate “toxic conditions of the blood”; in outdoor exercise and physical work; in hiking, camping, sports, crafts and music. He offered dancing classes to all patients and employees, held a religious service in the hospital every Sunday, and took patients on trips to the World’s Fair and around the world. He also invited successfully cured patients to join his staff.

Dr. Carroll also wrote
The Grille Gate
(1922), an autobiographical novel of hospital life, as well as a number of popular books on medical subjects whose spiritually uplifting subtitles suggest his heartening and commonsensical approach to mental illness:
The Mastery of Nervousness: Based Upon Self Reeducation
(1917),
Our Nervous Friends: Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
(1919),
The Soul in Suffering: A Practical Application of Spiritual Truths
(1919),
Old at Forty or Young at Sixty: Simplifying the Science of Growing Old
(1920) and—imitating the title of Anderson and Stallings’
What Price Glory?
(1924)—
What Price Alcohol?
(1941). In his Preface to the latter, Adolf Meyer praised Carroll’s success with patients and said he had “proved his hospital one of the most effective systematic agencies in the treatment of the victims of alcohol.” Like Forel and Meyer, Carroll also scrutinized Fitzgerald and saw that he was desperately in need of treatment.

Reminiscing in the hospital magazine, a former nurse described the vigorous routine of the clinic and the formidable personality of Dr. Carroll:

[The patients] started with calisthenics; volley ball in the morning, then gardening for two hours. Then they came in and had lunch around a quarter to one. The patients were always served meals on trays with nice linen tray covers and linen napkins. Each one had a napkin ring and flowers on every tray. . . .

I didn’t always like [Dr. Carroll] in every way, but I admired him. To tell you the truth, our class was a little frightened of him. He was always kind, considerate and very generous, but all of us were in awe of
Doctor.
¹⁶

Fitzgerald hoped that the sensitive and athletic Zelda would respond to Highland’s attractive setting and to Dr. Carroll’s emphasis on achieving physical well-being through diet, exercise and manual work. But, as Zelda herself realized after her third breakdown in February 1934, it was now harder than ever to escape the ravages of mental disease. She got no better during her two years in Sheppard-Pratt than she had in any of the other hospitals. When she entered Highland in the spring of 1936 she weighed only eighty-nine pounds and, instead of improving, had been going downhill fast.

In his first report to Fitzgerald, Dr. Carroll said that Zelda “was entirely irresponsible, highly excitable, and had just emerged from a three-month period of intense suicidal mania.” After two weeks at Highland, Fitzgerald told Beatrice Dance, Zelda had made some improvement but still had a dismal prognosis: “Zelda seems comparatively happy there. She is no longer in a suicidal state but has an equally difficult hallucination which I won’t go into. It seems pretty certain she will never be able to function in the world again.”

The once-beautiful Zelda, now dull-eyed and frazzle-haired, was a humiliated and broken figure. She had entered a phase of religious mania and become obsessed with the Bible; she believed she was in direct contact with God, imagined her friends were doomed to hell and was zealous in her efforts to save them. Her painting of a Deposition from the Cross (
Zelda
catalogue, no. 36), which she completed during this phase, portrayed herself as a tortured Christ figure and bore an uncanny resemblance to Stanley Spencer’s great
The Resurrection: Cookham
(1927).

One of Zelda’s nurses at Highland emphasized the conservative and “rational methods” that kept her from suicide and gradually diminished her hallucinations, but did not eliminate her mania nor enable her to regain her sanity: “We were careful with Zelda; we never stirred her up. She could be helped, but we never gave her deep psychotherapy. One doesn’t do that with patients if they are too schizophrenic. We tried to get Zelda to see reality; tried to get her to distinguish between her fantasies, illusion and reality.”

But during her stay at Highland Zelda was given (as she had probably been given at Prangins) a much more extreme form of therapy: thirty to ninety insulin shock treatments. These shocks produced convulsions or coma that lasted from twenty minutes to an hour and were supposed to jolt her out of psychopathic behavior. Her last doctor, Irving Pine, noted an “improvement” in Zelda after these shocks and felt she was “reborn.”
¹⁷
But she remained in Highland until April 1940 and, with periods of remission, for the rest of her life.

During the next few years Fitzgerald wrote to many of his friends about Zelda. He felt she was, more than Scottie, his child and that he “was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her.” For this reason, and as long as she was helpless, he would never leave her or allow her to feel she had been deserted. He praised the paternal Dr. Carroll for bringing Zelda, during a very difficult phase of her illness, to a certain level of stability. But when Scott faced reality, he knew her case was hopeless. “With each collapse she moves perceptibly backward,” he told Beatrice Dance in early 1937, “there is no good end in sight. She is very sweet and tragic. For the majority of creative people life is a pretty mean trick.”
¹⁸

V

After settling Zelda in Highland and moving back into the Grove Park Inn in July 1936, Fitzgerald once again came into conflict with Hemingway. Their relations had soured since the great days of their friendship in 1925–26, and he had seen Hemingway only twice since the ill-fated boxing match with Callaghan in 1929. In October 1931 they spent a congenial afternoon at a Princeton football game. But in January 1933, during dinner in New York with Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald got drunk and humiliated himself. In April 1935, a year after his harsh letter about
Tender Is the Night,
Hemingway asked their intermediary Max Perkins to tell Fitzgerald that the novel, in retrospect, got better and better. Delighted by Hemingway’s approval, Fitzgerald repeated to Perkins what he had told Hemingway a decade earlier, when leaving Europe in December 1926: “I always think of my friendship with him as being one of the high spots of life.”

In the spring of 1935 Perkins had urged Fitzgerald to accompany him on a visit to Hemingway in Key West. But Fitzgerald—drinking heavily and in poor health—was unwilling to compete with Hemingway on his own sporting turf and refused to see him except under the “most favorable circumstances.” Despite Hemingway’s attacks, Fitzgerald—who craved Hemingway’s good opinion and had been crushed by his criticism—praised him that summer to Tony Buttitta. Though Hemingway had mistreated him, Fitzgerald felt he deserved it. He believed that his own character and art, when measured against Hemingway’s, were not much good.

As Fitzgerald dropped into despair and Hemingway’s reputation continued to rise, Ernest’s criticism seemed to increase Scott’s admiration for his rival. He thought Ernest exemplified the highest standard of personal courage and would always be read for his great studies of fear. He urged the teenage Scottie to read
A Farewell to Arms
and then quizzed her on the poem (“Blow, blow, ye western wind”) that haunted Frederic Henry during the retreat from Caporetto. He considered Hemingway the “final reference” as an artist and called him, after the death of Kipling in 1936, the greatest living writer in English. But this generous praise had a discouraging effect on his own work. He believed that Hemingway had surpassed him and would last longer than Fitzgerald himself. “I don’t write any more,” he confessed to Thornton Wilder in 1937. “Ernest has made all my writing unnecessary.”
¹⁹

Just as Anthony Patch, the hero of
The Beautiful and Damned,
planned to devote his life to writing a history of the Middle Ages, so Fitzgerald—who was fascinated by Hemingway’s Byronic intensity—chose to glorify him in the Count of Darkness stories, which he forced himself to write in 1935. Yet, as Edmund Wilson observed, Fitzgerald also had a sharp eye for Hemingway’s weaknesses. Noting Hemingway’s tendency to attack rivals, especially those who had once helped him, Fitzgerald wrote that “Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.” Recalling how their fortunes had become reversed since their first meeting, and perhaps forgetting that he had crawled under the table during their last, embarrassing dinner, Fitzgerald also stated: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.” In September 1936—when Hemingway appeared to be at the height of his powers and had displayed his overweening ego in works like
Death in the Afternoon
(1932) and
Green Hills of Africa
(1935)—Fitzgerald made an astonishingly prescient remark about his friend’s psychological vulnerability: “He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”

Few writers were more accident-prone than Hemingway. But his injuries—from football and boxing, bulls, boats and bullets, car and plane crashes—always seemed testaments to his stoic heroism. In late July 1936, just before his conflict with Hemingway flared up in public, Fitzgerald had his own, distinctly unheroic accident, which made him more dispirited and vulnerable than ever. In “Winter Dreams” (1922), Dexter Green imagined himself “surrounded by an admiring crowd, [giving] an exhibition of fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft.” At Juan-les-Pins in the summer of 1926 Fitzgerald had accepted—and somehow survived—Zelda’s challenge to make dangerous dives from the high cliffs into the sparkling sea. At the end of
Tender Is the Night
(1934) Dick Diver avoids high diving, tries to show off for Rosemary by lifting a man on his shoulders while riding an aquaplane, but reveals his physical deterioration (and suggests his loss of sexual potency) by failing to perform the stunt he had once done with ease.

Two years later in Asheville, Fitzgerald tried to repeat his past performance. But alcoholism and tuberculosis undermined his attempt to show off for Zelda. He fractured his right shoulder while diving and woke up in a massive plaster cast that began below his navel, left his stomach bare, rose up to his neck and kept his right arm extended in a half-hearted salute. In September he told Beatrice Dance how the injury had been compounded by what seems to have been a drunken accident: “I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in the old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water—a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o’clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued.”
²⁰