• 7 •
On April 23, 1929, Scott took Zelda to Le Sanitarium de la Malmaison, a private hospital ten kilometers outside Paris at Rueil that occupied a nineteenth-century mansion in which Empress Josephine Bonaparte had lived, and now was a sanitarium specializing in nervous disorders. Five years earlier, T. S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, also had arrived there exhibiting erratic behavior. One of the “river girls” who punted on the Cherwell to meet Oxford boys, Vivienne encountered T. S. in March of 1915 and married him three months later. She always suffered from “nerve storms,” as she called them, which worsened after marriage, and besides being confined to the same hospital, shared some other commonalities with Zelda. Also an excellent swimmer, she entered the dance world late, studying with Isadora Duncan’s older brother, Raymond, and was foisted by her husband onto another man, T. S.’s Harvard professor, Bertrand Russell.
Like Vivienne, Zelda appeared in a highly agitated state, not having slept for days. She paced the room and insisted that Scott was involved in a sexual relationship with Ernest Hemingway. Concerned that the attending physician, Dr. Claude, might believe her, Scott insisted that Zelda was delusional and nervous disorders were endemic in her family. To support this, he explained that her father, along with two of her sisters, had experienced breakdowns, and another suffered from a nervous affliction of the neck. Her maternal grandmother had committed suicide, as had her mother’s sister. The family was certifiably crazy; it was all quite evident. In his admission report, Professor Claude diagnosed her symptoms as a case of nervous exhaustion: “It is a question of a petite anxieuse, worn out by her work1 in a milieu of professional dancers. Violent reactions, several suicide attempts never pushed to the limit.” After being kept under observation for ten days, she discharged herself, explaining to Scott, “I went of my own free will2. . . . You also know that I left (with the consent of Professor Claude) knowing that I was not entirely well, because I could see no use in jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.” To put herself under control of the nerve doctors seemed a dangerous proposition.
When Zelda returned to their Paris apartment she found it in disarray, with Scott celebrating the impending marriage of Ludlow Fowler’s brother, Thomas, to Virginia Megeur. Many of his Princeton classmates had arrived for the festivities, and days leading to the May 10 nuptials were occupied with bachelor dinners, receptions, and parties. Ludlow had been Scott’s model for The Rich Boy and again would be portrayed in a story about these wedding festivities called “The Bridal Party” published that August by the Saturday Evening Post. The commotion at home only aggravated Zelda’s fragile state, and after experiencing a week of terrifying nightmares, she attempted suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. It was the second time she had tried to end her life. On May 22, Scott brought her to Valmont Clinic in Glion, Switzerland, outside Montreux, known for treating gastrointestinal problems but familiar with the correlation of physical ailments to nervous conditions. She told doctors she was unable to eat or sleep, became hysterical without warning, and heard menacing voices, in itself not symptomatic of mental disease, but something that caught their attention. Placed under observation, she was sedated with Garderal and given Medinale to sleep. After several meetings, the attending physician, Dr. H. A. Trutman, wrote a detailed report describing her symptoms and evaluating their causes.
Two sisters have nervous break-downs3, a third suffers from a nervous affliction of the neck. At twenty-four in Europe, has a near peritonitis caused by inflammation of the right ovary and is practically disabled for a year. The matter is cleared up by an operation for appendix. (Dr. Gross and Dr. Martell) Dr. Martell finds appendix in bad shape but ovary fundamentally healthy. Morphine taken for two weeks during peritonitis attack.
Becomes depressed in Hollywood by the fact that younger girls than herself have attained a position of their own, and a relative importance. At twenty-seven takes up an old ambition, ballet dancing—her first really serious effort. Three hours a day, six days a week. Stops drinking. Till the time of taking up ballet work, she has been a heavy but intermittent drinker, and inclined to hysteria when drunk. Violent hysteria—occasionally even suicidal, occurred perhaps four to seven times a year, when she could only be calmed by a minimum dose of morphine. Capacity to hold liquor diminishing; while dancing, drinks half a pint of wine at meals and either an aperitif or a nightcap. During times of enforced idleness on shipboard, it becomes more and more obvious—that all capacity to use liquor has departed. Hysteria almost sure after two days of, what would usually be considered the most moderate drink. Never in danger of dipsomania, because after two days, she collapses. Understands this herself, and avoids alcohol except when circumstances force it on her.
Previously a heavy smoker, but has reduced consumption to a minimum. Drinks 4–5 cups of coffee a day. Last Autumn made enormous progress. Two substantial offers to appear as ballet dancer, La Scala in Naples and as premiere dancer at Follies Bergeres. Writing only with a fixed obsession to pay, quite unnecessarily, for her dancing lessons herself and make her own career. Writing has never been a pleasure because one eye is practically blind and the other strained and she pays for it in agonizing headaches. Once a great reader, has given up reading.
Sequence of symptoms: no appetite, depression, quarrelsome, rude to old friends in curious ways, quarrels with Egorova and quits school, then on Egorova’s urgent request returns to school, drinks heavily and collapses, develops a curious horror of people—this produces a violent timidity in her, a horror and shrinking away from people, becomes silent with friends, pale and shaken in stores, becomes abnormally quiet with sudden outbursts of despair, hums to herself all the time, wants to be alone, music her only pleasure. Resents African trip husband forces on her; hysteria lasting 6 days, hears voices, imagines people are criticizing her and makes scenes about it, unable to face shopkeepers, servants etc., seems to live in some horrible, subconscious dream, more real to her than the real world, sleeps a good deal, honestly wants to die, hysteria breaks out without warning, can’t let Scott out of her sight, complete lack of control—picking at fingers.
After being observed for two weeks, no neurological or organic diseases were discovered, but Trutman felt an expert opinion was necessary. He contacted Dr. Oscar Forel, head of Prangins Clinic near Nyon on Lake Geneva and a member of the medical faculty at the University of Geneva. His father, Auguste Forel, had directed Burgholzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, and was a pioneer in the field of psychiatry. The specialty had only been formalized in the 1890s and was still poorly defined, in part because overlapping symptoms made emotional disorders difficult to diagnose.
The Swiss psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin advanced knowledge in the specialty by clarifying the general term hysteria in his authoritative textbook published in 1907, and while admitting its cause was still unknown, defined it as a neurosis linked with nervous exhaustion. He theorized that women were predisposed to hysteria because they experienced greater emotional fluctuations, were more susceptible to sentiment, and had weaker powers of resistance. Kraepelin identified twenty separate psychoses in his textbook, the most common being manic depression and dementia praecox, then divided them into four classifications: hebephrenic schizophrenia, in which patients experience language disorders and smile inappropriately or make grotesque gestures; catatonic, in which a patient is mute and rigid; simple schizoid, in which the patient shows lack of interest or drive; and paranoiac, characterized by delusions. Although he believed mental disease ran in families and a predisposition to it was inherited, he thought life crises or persistent negative situations were a major determinant. People susceptible to stress were at greater risk and more easily could become unstable. While his new classifications more precisely defined symptoms, they only made it easier for doctors to position indicators within a prevailing diagnosis. What had been labeled hysteria was now called schizophrenia as women became pathologized in a new way.
Although auditory hallucinations sometimes are indicative of schizophrenia, hearing voices is not always symptomatic of that disease, and Dr. Forel was uncertain if that was Zelda’s condition. Of one thing he was sure: a simple rest cure would not be sufficient. He agreed to accept her as a patient, and though she initially consented, after quarreling with Scott in Lausanne, Zelda changed her mind. Exasperated over what to do, Scott summoned her brother-in-law from Brussels. A pragmatic man, Newman considered all options before making a decision and came as a representative of the Sayre family. With her best interests at heart, he believed she would be safer in Montgomery surrounded by comfort of family and friends. However, doctors were against her traveling, having warned Scott that, even with a full-time nurse, making the journey to America would be risky. Although Prangins had only been open a year, it was considered among the most advanced psychiatric clinics in Europe, so Newman assumed she would be in good hands. Had he known of alternatives, he might have decided differently. The Quakers, for example, were promoting gentle care sanitariums and building retreats around the British countryside, where they treated mental patients with consideration and compassion. Although they didn’t know what caused madness, they reasoned that the afflicted needed to be treated with simple kindness. In such an environment or under the watch of family and friends, Zelda’s distress might slowly have dissipated over time without intervention.
But that was not the case, and whatever Newman said to her that afternoon convinced Zelda to become Forel’s patient, and the three left Valmont for Prangins early on June 5, arriving late in the day. Disheartened and exhausted, she considered that drive the end of life as she had known it. When Scott and Newman drove off, she was taken to her room and became so frightened she could hardly breathe. Her symptoms only worsened after she was incarcerated with others in emotional distress, and rather than being treated caringly, she was manhandled by attendants and forcibly restrained.
Les Rives de Prangins, more commonly referred to as Prangins, was situated by a lake in a hundred-acre park between Geneva and Lausanne. The main building had once been the château of another Bonaparte, Joseph, elder brother of Napoleon. The grounds contained tennis courts, a riding stable, golf course, and bathing beach, and its exorbitant fees reflected those amenities. Annual charges were 70,561 Swiss francs or $13,000, which in today’s money would amount to approximately $174,000.
Despite its services and facilities, Prangins was a dangerous place for Zelda. Most doctors and nurses spoke little English, and even those fluent had difficulty understanding her Southern accent and manner of speaking. Fearful of anyone’s help, she believed harm would come if she revealed anything, so kept to herself and schemed how to escape. During the first month, she made several attempts. Once, out walking with a nurse, she managed to break away, and only with the assistance of several attendants, was apprehended and dragged back to the clinic. Until she became compliant, she was placed in solitary confinement at Eglantine, the building used for disruptive patients. Restraint and isolation were standard procedures for reducing agitation and injury, and Dr. Forel had precise directives for dealing with unruly patients. Two or three large orderlies would grab the person, cover her hands with leather mitts to avoid being scratched, and forcibly carry her into a darkened room, where she would be straitjacketed and confined by leather straps, then given bromides and morphine. Without seclusion rooms and restraints, most sanitariums would have found it impossible to operate a program for severely symptomatic patients, and Prangins was prepared for such incidents. If Zelda needed taming, Eglantine would provide the way.
Like most doctors of his generation, Forel wielded complete autonomy over patients and believed authority immediately needed to be established. He used an authoritarian approach that was punctuated by his dictatorial way of speaking English with a heavy German accent. From a markedly different culture, he considered Zelda’s challenges to authority intolerable. Discipline was used when gentleness failed, and whenever she misbehaved, privileges were taken away and she was threatened with solitary. Obedience rebuffed in Montgomery was extracted here. Compared to many of his contemporaries, Forel was considered a modernist and highly respected in psychiatric circles. He had coauthored two books that pioneered the reform of asylums and transformed Switzerland’s mental health system. His publications also revolutionized the training of nursing personnel, altering their role from custodians to active members of the health care team. Besides supervising patients, their mandate was to observe them carefully and report back to doctors. Continuously watched, Zelda quickly learned to conceal her feelings and tell doctors only what they wanted to hear. She never cried when anyone could see her, since weeping was reported as a sign of depression, and saved tears for her pillow. Bereft of everything meaningful and outraged over her confinement, she wrote Scott, “You must try to understand how dreary and drastic is my present position4 . . . alone in a strange part of Switzerland with hardly a soul to speak English with. . . . For a month and two weeks, I have been three times outside my room, and for five months I have lived with my sole desire that of death.”
Before neuroleptic drugs were developed, sedatives were the primary way of treating psychiatric disorders, and most patients at Prangins regularly were given synthesized derivatives of barbiturates. Never regarded as therapeutic, and despite limited effectiveness and dangerous side effects, they served as medical restraints. Bromides and opium were prescribed to control behavior and reestablish calm, but at varying dosages could be used for insomnia and as a general anesthetic. Sleep medications like chloral hydrate and the highly addictive Bella Donna routinely were given to keep patients from causing disturbances at night, when there was less staff supervision. Bella Donna later was curtailed when it was found to cause psychiatric disorders. In spite of detrimental side effects, morphine and the powerful narcotic hyoscine routinely were injected, along with phenobarbital, which made patients lethargic and depressed. Dosages varied, with no standardized regulation and little knowledge about contraindications. Doctors were unaware that morphine could be fatal if administered with sleep medicines and that some drugs made patients more vulnerable to relapses. By the time Zelda entered Prangins, she already was addicted to sleeping pills, and the barbiturates she was given only exacerbated her symptoms of agitation and depression.
Prangins regularly employed hydrotherapy to counteract bouts of mania, and the use of hot and cold water at varying temperatures became their medical specialty. It was considered the best intervention for agitation, and entire hospital wings were devoted to it. Continuous tub immersions routinely were prescribed to promote calm by causing a diminution or increase in circulation. Very different from the mineral baths Zelda had undergone at Salies des Bearn, these were ordeals patients sought to avoid, where they were submerged in water temperatures ranging from 90 to 100 degrees for an entire day. More dreaded were ice water soaks intended to revitalize organic functions and restore equilibrium. To subdue uncooperative or severely agitated patients, water jackets also were used, which involved attendants dipping sheets in hot or cold water, then tightly binding patients, first in a rubber blanket; followed by a cold, wet sheet; then another wool blanket; and finally a second iced sheet. Kept wrapped this way for several hours, the procedure caused a contraction of the small arteries, capillaries, and veins. As water evaporated from the soaked sheets, patients initially felt cold, but as their body generated heat, the pack would warm and they would become drowsy.
When Zelda arrived, Prangins already was famous for its Swiss sleeping cures, popularized in the 1920s by Swiss psychiatrist Jacob Klasi, who instituted the Dauerschlaf while working with Eugen Bleuler at Burgholzli. The procedure resembled those rest cures developed by the American neurologist Weir Mitchell, a preeminent specialist in nervous diseases, who used them to treat depression and hysteria. He blamed worn-out nerves for psychoses, believing bad signals got transmitted to the brain and that relaxation healed a sick mind like inactivity cured a diseased lung. His rest cure involved total isolation and a fatty, milk-based diet that usually produced a weight gain of fifty pounds over six weeks. Patients remained in bed twenty-four hours a day for weeks at a time, supervised by a private nurse who cleaned and fed them. Most of Mitchell’s patients were female, and he attributed their neuroses to the mistake of entering a male sphere of intellectual labor. From his viewpoint, women needed to avoid overstimulation in order to remain stable.
Once the hypnotic properties of barbiturates were discovered, rest cures became easier to administer. After a shot of morphine and scopolamine, patients were injected with a mixture of diethyl and dipropylbarbituric acid that produced a prolonged narcosis, during which they slept for one or two weeks, roused only to eat and relieve bladder and bowel functions. This procedure was thought to relax a patient’s mind and some woke calmer, but this was not Zelda’s experience. She came out of the narcosis covered with eczema and in excruciating pain. Transferred from the sleeping ward to the main house, she was bathed in Fleming’s solution and swathed in bandages of grease and powder, neither of which had any therapeutic effect.
Intended to serve a physical purpose, rest cures also crushed a patient’s will and Zelda recognized this, writing Scott, “I am thoroughly humiliated and broken5 if that was what you wanted.” Her eczema persisted until Dr. Forel placed her in a thirteen-hour hypnotic trance, from which she woke improved, but with a fierce pounding in her head. Three days later the rash returned in a milder form. Forel had learned hypnotism from his father, Auguste, who trained with the renowned French doctor, Hippolyte Bernheim. His book on somatic techniques was popular with the European medical community early in the twentieth century, especially after Freud translated it into German. Forel soon observed that whenever Scott visited, Zelda’s eczema flared and she experienced severe mood swings, vacillating from warmth to bitterness in less than an hour. With this in mind and given Zelda’s fragile condition, Forel suggested Scott not visit until fall.
Sick as she was, Zelda remained convinced her recovery depended on personal achievement. She begged Scott to ask Lubov Egorova if she was talented enough to become a great dancer. Forel opposed the communication, feeling her obsession with ballet had contributed to her collapse, but to his credit, Scott wrote Lubov on July 9. Her response was more positive than he expected. In assessing Zelda’s ability, Lubov emphasized that she might become a very good dancer, performing important roles in repertory companies and smaller ballet groups, as well as secondary roles with larger companies. However, because she had started late, she would never become a prima ballerina like Vera Nemtchinova, Alice Nikitina, or Maria Danilova, among the greatest Russian dancers of the nineteenth century. Although generally positive, Lubov’s evaluation came as a crushing blow, since Zelda aspired to perform with a premiere group and abhorred the prospect of becoming a second-rate dancer in an inferior company. With despairing finality, she put away her ballet paraphernalia and declared that if she couldn’t be great, it wasn’t worth doing at all.
Shortly thereafter, she again was transferred to Eglantine because of her disregard for hospital rules and refusal to stop masturbating. Doctors then considered masturbation one cause of psychosis and blamed it for everything from cancer to epilepsy. Mental institutions imposed brutal punishments on female patients for masturbating, including the application of pure carbolic acid (Phenol) to the clitoris, which burned and caused numbness. Some institutions went so far as to remove the inner labia of the vulva. Interventions at Prangins were less severe but included laxatives with a cold enema and cool sitz baths (from the German word sitzen, meaning to sit). Chair-shaped tubs were filled with cold or hot water to which salts, vinegar, or baking soda were added, and women were forced to sit for hours with water covering their hips and buttocks. If that didn’t remedy the problem, it was off to Eglantine and reformative opiates, particularly a soluble form of morphine. Dr. Forel warned Scott that if nurses could not stop Zelda from masturbating, they were prepared to tie her hands to the bed. “For too long, your wife has taken advantage of our patience,”6 he wrote Scott. “For her health, for her treatment, L’Eglantine is, from our point of view, indispensable. She must see that there are limits and that she must give in.” There seemed no alternative; under control of the mind doctors, the mark of insanity was scattered abundantly over her every action. It became clear that only through compliancy would she gain release, and as long as Scott paid the bills, doctors would keep her there. She immediately assumed the role of good patient and began writing Scott conciliatory letters.
Rosalind wanted Zelda’s parents involved in her treatment, but Scott warned against that, saying it would slow progress. “I beg you to think twice, before you say more to them7. . . . Zelda at this moment is in no immediate danger. I have promised to let you know if anything crucial is in the air.” Eager to determine when her sister’s difficulties started, she wrote Scott,
You say you place the beginning of the change in her8, at about ten months before our visit to Ellerslie. That would be just about three years ago. You think the change began at Hollywood? Did anything happen out there to particularly disturb her? Were there any unhappy incidents? I seem to remember, also having heard something about Zelda throwing from the window of the train, en route to Hollywood, a wristwatch that you had given her as her Christmas present. Is that true, and if so, why did she do it, and wouldn’t it signify the trouble had already begun?
Although Rosalind placed the watch incident out of sequence, she did accurately recall that Zelda’s unstable behavior had started at Ellerslie. It was evident to her then that Zelda’s personality had greatly changed, and she was in need of medical attention.
With Zelda institutionalized indefinitely, Rosalind believed Scott was in no position to supervise Scottie’s needs and suggested she live with them in Brussels. “It was at this point that her smoldering quarrel with my father broke out9 into the open,” Scottie recalled, “because she deemed him too unreliable to be in charge of me while my mother was in the hospital and demanded that he let her adopt me.” Scott angrily responded to Rosalind’s accusations, writing, “I know your ineradicable impression of the life that Zelda and I led10, and evident your dismissal of any of the effort, and struggle success or happiness in it . . . but I have got Zelda and Scottie to take care of now as ever, and I simply cannot be upset and harrowed still further.” Shortly thereafter, he composed a harsher response, never sent: “Do me a single favor11. Never communicate with me again in any form, and I will try to resist the temptation to pass you down to posterity for what you are.” Scottie was placed under the care of an Alsatian governess named Mademoiselle Serze, and Scott rented an apartment for the two at 21 rue de Marioniere in Paris. Besides being privately tutored, Scottie attended school twice weekly at Cours Dieterle, with coursework equivalent to the third and fourth grades, and made weekend visits with her governess to her family in the Alsatian countryside.
One of Scott’s best stories, “Babylon Revisited,” stemmed from this controversy with Rosalind. In the narrative, Lincoln and Marion Peters, drawn from Rosalind and Newman, are guardians of Charlie Wale’s daughter, Honoria. Charlie’s wife, Helen, is dead, and after three years of separation from his daughter, he returns to Paris to convince Marion he can adequately care for her. Although Marion initially agrees, after two of Charlie’s drunken friends come to her apartment, she changes her mind. “He would come back some day12; they couldn’t make him pay forever,” Charlie declares. “But, he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, besides that fact.” Scottie loved her father but felt safer with Uncle Newman and Aunt Rosalind, and admitted “at one point, when things were not going well with my father13, wishing that they had adopted me!” Her feelings over her mother’s hospitalization were a mix of sadness, anger, and embarrassment, with Zelda slowly becoming a distant idea. Whatever relationship they had shared was fading fast.
To guarantee that Rosalind never would gain custody of his daughter, Scott wrote his cousin, Ceci, that if something happened to him while Zelda was institutionalized, she was to bring Scottie to maturity. Cecelia Delihant Taylor, “Ceci,” was the daughter of his father’s sister and raising her four daughters alone in Norfolk, Virginia, having been widowed as a young woman. To eight-year-old Scottie, Aunt Rosalind’s motivations seemed entirely reasonable. “She was concerned, quite simply14, that my father had driven my mother crazy. . . . It was all his fault because of his drinking and his terrible temper. . . . I can’t think of a worse life style for someone who was unstable to begin with than my father.”
And while Scott rejected Rosalind’s accusations, he felt partially responsible for Zelda’s breakdown and shared those feelings with her. Only, she cared nothing about fault: “Please don’t write to me about blame15. Blame doesn’t matter. The thing that counts is to apply the few resources available to turning life into a tenable, orderly affair.” Hardly the words of a mad woman, what concerned Zelda was getting free and she continually pleaded for release. “I am a woman of thirty17 and it seems to me, entitled to some voice in decisions covering me. I have had enough. . . . Will you make the necessary arrangements that I leave here and seek some satisfactory life for myself?” She insisted on the right to live as she wished. When Scott ignored her appeals, she asked to be transferred to another hospital. “I demand that I be allowed to go immediately17 to a hospital in France, where there is enough human kindness to prevent the present slow butchery.” After he didn’t answer, she threatened to get her parents involved. “Shall I write to daddy that he should come over18? They know what’s the matter with me, so do not think that I feel the slightest hesitancy in communicating with them.” As she vacillated between periods of lucidity and bouts of despair, she moved to have Newman intervene and wrote Scott, “If you think you are preparing me for a return to Alabama19, you are mistaken, and also if you think that I am going to spend the rest of my life roaming about without happiness or rest, from one sanatorium to another—you are wrong.” She then wrote a fragmentary letter to Newman, begging him to take her back to France, saying that Scott was ignoring her requests and implying he hadn’t time because of all his drinking and tennis, so there was no point in asking him for help or pity.
Since Zelda’s condition did not present as a pure neurosis or psychosis, and there had not been a formal diagnosis, Forel asked the assistance of Paul Eugen Bleuler, professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich and then head of Burgholzli. Oscar’s father, Auguste, had spent twenty years as director there, with the young Sigmund Freud as his assistant, and upon retiring had selected Bleuler as his successor. Under Bleuler’s leadership many exceptional psychiatrists were hired, including Abraham Brill, Adolf Meyer, and Carl Jung. Bleuler was an authority on psychoses and schizophrenia, having differentiated that disorder from what previously was called dementia praecox or paranoia. The term meant “split mind” and described someone with shifting affective states, not so much the popularized notion of a person hearing voices, as a lack of emotional affect. Its essential characteristic was emotional deterioration, evidenced by people becoming indifferent to their surroundings and unable to make reasonable associations. New diagnostic categories separated patients into groups so that doctors could more easily discuss them. Bleuler’s designation of schizophrenia quickly merged with more general definitions of psychoses, and by 1930 was the commonest diagnosis on admission papers. To the twentieth century, it became what hysteria had been to the nineteenth.
Freud added new dimensions to Bleuler’s categorizations, hypothesizing that early traumatic incidents contributed to the pathology of mental illness. He believed psychotic symptoms in women frequently could be traced back to a premature sexual trauma with another child or adult, and that auditory hallucinations usually were connected to these episodes. Difficult to integrate at the time, these ordeals remained buried until reawakened by another emotional disturbance, and this construct precisely mirrored Zelda’s situation.
Eugen Bleuler spent the afternoon of November 22 talking with Zelda, then met with Forel and Scott to present his diagnosis of schizophrenie. He identified three reoccurring states in her condition: a depressed but calm stage, a hysteric period when she blamed others for everything, and a desperate phase where her situation seemed hopeless. Like his predecessor, Krapelin, Bleuler felt schizophrenia ran in families, with a predisposition to it inherited, but believed traumatic events and negative situations could trigger the illness. Based on what Zelda had shared, he told Scott that her breakdown was connected to an occurrence five years earlier, placing it near the aftermath of the Jozan affair, and that an emotional trauma had generated the psychosis causing a downward turn. Although the breakdown might have been delayed, he assured Scott it could not have been prevented. Zelda took an instant dislike to Bleuler—who charged Scott $500 for the consult, about $7,000 in today’s money—and always referred to him as “that great imbecile.”
Although Forel told Scott it was a great help to discuss Zelda’s case with Bleuler, he was not entirely comfortable with the diagnosis, given its specificity and the speed with which it was delivered. He felt Zelda did not exhibit enough characteristics to be diagnosed in this way, given the relatively late onset of symptoms and alternation between psychosis and normality. Yet, he was reluctant to countermand his colleague’s verdict, and on the basis of one afternoon’s observation, Bleuler’s diagnosis became a conclusive straitjacket. Forel would later acknowledge that the identifying process was filled with error, an inexact and precarious science, and for many patients the process was risky, with the number of diagnoses made equaling the number of institutions to which they were sent.
In an effort to understand Zelda’s situation, Scott chose to rely on this expert opinion and hoped the specific diagnosis would offer a basis for effective treatment. On December 1, 1930, he wrote Zelda’s parents summarizing Bleuler’s evaluation and responded to their request about bringing her home. “He said it wasn’t even a question20. That even with a day and night nurse and the best suite on the Bremen, I would be taking a chance not justified by the situation—that a crisis, a strain, at this moment might make a difference between the recovery and insanity.”
Although psychotherapy for the treatment of schizophrenia was relatively new at mental hospitals, Forel had known Sigmund Freud at Burgholzi and believed in its benefits, but whenever he tried to engage Zelda, she grew evasive. Nevertheless, he continued observing her and kept detailed notes on her condition. One afternoon, he asked her to summarize the pivotal emotional events in her life, and when she agreed, it was the breakthrough he needed.
My marriage, after which I was in another world21, one for which I was not qualified or prepared because of my inadequate education. 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. . . . 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. . . . 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, fearing the vibrations of everyone I meet. Broken down.
Forel concluded that effects of overreaching had made Zelda vulnerable to stress and exhausted her nervous system. If she wanted to recover, he advised, she must surrender ambition to avoid conflict in the marriage. She dismissed his opinion, complaining, “Why do I have to go backward22, when everyone else who can—goes on? Why does my husband and other people find, that, what was so satisfactory for them, is not the thing for me—and if you do cure me, what’s going to happen to all the bitterness and unhappiness in my heart I am neither young enough to think that you can manufacture out of nothing something to replace the song I had.” Although Forel believed Zelda’s dance aspirations were fueled by her illness, Rosalind disagreed, considering her ambition a clear-eyed realization of her marital situation and uncertainties in life. She and the entire Sayre family agreed with Zelda, that doctors would never be able to restore what they were stealing from her.
By fall Zelda’s condition had turned into a continual flattened depression, and she told Scott that “panic seems to have settled23 into a persistent gloom punctuated by moments of bombastic hysteria.” By Christmas she felt well enough to see Scott, and he brought Scottie along to help trim her tree. Only, the excitement of seeing them proved too stressful, and after Zelda broke some ornaments and started acting oddly, attendants suggested they leave. Presents were deposited under the half-decorated tree, and father and daughter left for Gstaad, where Scottie took skiing lessons while Scott drank at the Alpine lodge.
Soon after New Year’s, Scott learned that his father had died of a heart attack, and he booked passage aboard the SS New York to attend the funeral in Maryland. Afterward, he headed to Alabama and steeled himself for a visit with Zelda’s parents. He anticipated hostility and got it, some relatives accusing him of institutionalizing Zelda to rid himself of a problem. As calmly as possible, he explained the situation and left. When he got back to Switzerland, Zelda had improved to where she was acting more normally and emerging from her shell. She had even attended a hospital dance. “I had a very nice time,”24 she told Scott, “and got myself stepped on a sufficient number of times to make it quite worthwhile.”
Forel allowed her to write for an hour or two most afternoons, and she began working on a story about a woman she had known in Montgomery. She also was reading again, selecting a novel by James Joyce to see if she could master it. The Fitzgeralds had met Nora and James Joyce in Paris and invited the couple to dinner at their rue Vaugirard apartment. Their daughter, Lucia, would arrive at Prangins two years later, similarly diagnosed as schizophrenic. During 1929 she also trained with Lubov, taking six hours of daily classes, so Zelda undoubtedly saw her at the studio. They may already have known one another, since Lucia taught dance classes for children on the beach at Juan-les-Pins during the summer of 1926. Like Zelda, she inherited eye problems from her father and experienced heartbreak. After falling in love with James’s writing disciple, Samuel Beckett, who rejected her, she was spurned again, this time by the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Carl Jung briefly treated her but considered the case too complex, believing her neurosis was tied to her father’s. As Jung put it, they were like two people heading to the bottom of a river, James diving and Lucia falling. The psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer, later made a similar observation about the Fitzgeralds, saying theirs was a folie a deux, or mutual madness, and that Scott was as much in need of treatment as Zelda.
Forel’s approach was to wean patients gradually from Prangins, initially allowing them short trips with a nurse, then with other patients or family members. If they did well, they could take longer trips, visit with family members in a hotel, and finally be allowed an extended holiday. Scott could now take Zelda on short outings to a café or museum, or on excursions into surrounding towns. From the terrace of the Restaurant du Parc des Eaux-Vives in Geneva, she wrote her mother a postcard filled with optimism. “Here is where Scott and I lunched yesterday25 in the soft Spring air—and I thought you would be proud to know: without a nurse—much progress.” Once they drove to Montreux and saw a performance featuring Serge Lifar, who had studied under Lubov and danced with the Ballets Russes. For Zelda’s thirty-first birthday, the family visited Annecy in the Haute-Savoie, where they sailed on the azure lake and picnicked in the gardens of the Hotel Palace. After traversing the countryside in an open car, Zelda wrote her father that the sky was so blue, it felt as if they were living in an aquarium. It was a welcome taste of freedom, and she described every detail. “We played tennis on the baked clay courts26 and fished tentatively from a low brick wall. . . . We walked at night toward a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns, white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness,” swirling to the same Viennese waltzes they had danced to a decade earlier in Montgomery.
The Annecy trip was followed by one to Munich, visits to Vienna and Caux, then an excursion to the Murphys’ mountain retreat in the Austrian Tyol at Montana-Vermale. No cure then was available for tuberculosis, and their son’s life could only be prolonged by exposure to mountain air, so they had gone to an Alpine resort near Sierre. A funicular brought the Fitzgeralds to the sanitarium perched on the mountainside, and it was a contemplative time for both couples upon whom fortune had turned its back.
Zelda dreaded returning to Prangins and wrote Scott about how much she missed Paris: “Was the Madeleine pink at five o’clock27, and did the fountains fall with hollow delicacy into the framing of space in the Place de la Concorde, and did the blue creep out from behind the Colonnades in the rue de Rivoli?” Before long she would know firsthand, since she was pronounced well enough to leave Prangins on September 15, 1931. After fifteen months of being hospitalized, she said good-bye to doctors and nurses, and drove with Scott to Lake Geneva, where they rested before continuing on to Paris and retrieving Scottie. They sailed for America aboard Cunard’s Aquitania, the same liner that had brought them to Europe ten years earlier. The ship held many memories and the couple grew nostalgic over dinner in the Palladian Lounge, under the architectural motifs of Christopher Wren. They had crossed the Atlantic often during the previous decade, but this would be their final farewell to Europe.
As the photo on Zelda’s reissued passport shows, the illness had taken its toll. Gone was her youthful beauty, the softness of her expression replaced by severity and coarseness. Poorly cut, her once stylish hair now was pulled back with a simple barrette, accentuating the angularity of her face. But, the alteration was more than skin deep. Asylums dismantle people, rarely assemble them, and Zelda’s internment only worsened preexisting conditions, leaving deep psychic scars. Any relief came at a steep price. The diagnosis of schizophrenia dehumanized her in a way that was impossible to correct, and she told Sara Mayfield, she could never forgive Scott for putting her there. Never could she be sure if he had called upon psychiatrists to assist her or protect himself.
Zelda needed help, but schizophrenic she was not, and the interventions prescribed for that disorder precipitated many of the symptoms associated with it. Had Freud done her consultation instead of Bleuler, and Scott initially considered using him, she might have been diagnosed with an alcohol-induced anxiety psychosis. The distinguishing of it from schizophrenia is particularly difficult, especially when mood disorders coexist. Its symptoms include later onset, higher anxiety levels, and better insight, all of which Zelda exhibited. Most importantly, an alcohol-related psychosis, unlike schizophrenia, remits with abstinence and resumes with exposure. Forel must have considered this a possibility, since he warned Zelda against drinking even the smallest amount of alcohol, saying it could trigger another episode.
However, once Bleuler’s hasty diagnosis was made and doctors closed ranks, every aspect of Zelda’s life got construed according to that disease. Instead of her breakdown being viewed as an extreme response to stress, sometimes the mind’s bizarre mechanism of coping, her sanity got brought into play and sealed her fate as a crazy person. From then on, her life took a downward turn, with relief sought but never found. But she did not know this then, and upon leaving Switzerland, assured Dr. Forel that in America, she was determined to create a life in which to breathe freely. She would have little time to inhale that blissful air.