Life has its defining moments, pivotal events that change people forever when nothing remains the same. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald had three: a sexual assault in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was fifteen; her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald; and a brief affair with the French aviator Edouard Jozan. When my last book on the Fitzgeralds was published, critics generally agreed, it was the most authoritative and complete account of their tortured marriage. However, there was one important aspect I did not fully explore. That was Zelda’s affair with the Frenchman, its impact on the couple’s life and work, and the role it played in her mental breakdown. Although Edouard has always interested Fitzgerald followers, there has been little agreement about his impact on their lives, and in an otherwise well-researched case history, the pilot has remained a mystery.
In his groundbreaking biography The Far Side of Paradise, Arthur Mizener ignored Edouard completely, commenting instead on Zelda’s infatuation with another Frenchman, Rene Silvy. Andrew Turnbull, who knew the Fitzgeralds when they lived on his parents’ property, in his study, Scott Fitzgerald, only conjectured that either she was bored, trying to make Scott jealous, or the seduction of the moment proved too strong. By the time Nancy Milford interviewed Edouard for her 1970 book Zelda: A Biography he could not, or would not, recall details of their relationship. The only other interview he gave, three years later, to Zelda’s Montgomery friend Sara Mayfield for Exiles from Paradise, provided little new information. While Sara had the advantage of being Zelda’s confidant, Edouard remained circumspect in his answers and shared only the scantiest of details. Silence over the liaison remained intact. Later studies, including those by Scott Donaldson, Andre Le Vot, James Mellow, Jeffrey Meyers, Sally Cline, and Linda Wagner-Martin, offered no additional insights. Nonetheless, fascination with the Frenchman persisted, with the interlude making its way into literary narrative. Tennessee Williams dramatized it on Broadway in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, and French author Gilles Le Roy drew on the affair for his steamy novel Alabama Song, which won France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt. Most recently, Therese Fowler renewed interest in Edouard by fictionalizing him in Z: A Novel of Zelda, which topped best seller lists.
The pilot remained a shadowy figure until I heard from his daughter, Martine, who had read my earlier biography and wanted to share information about her father. “Of all the books I have read so far about the Fitzgerald saga,”1 she wrote,
this is the one which gives a true insight into the complexity of Zelda’s personality, her intelligence and most of all an insight about her alleged mental illness. As I read your book, it made me understand how Zelda would have fascinated my father; her beauty surely, because my dad always had an eye for beautiful women, and had an incredible charm because of his good looks, but I also think that what captured his attention was not only the great intelligence of Zelda, but also her absence of conformism, her appetite for life, and really her tendency to live dangerously, a trait my father possessed also and which put him in all sorts of troubles. The daring qualities of Zelda must have fascinated him, and he must have been amused, entertained and ready to play.
Martine’s acute observations began an exchange that has continued over the years, and she and her brother, Pierre, provided important biographical information about the Jozan family, access to their father’s papers, and insights into his character.
Zelda met Edouard Jozan in 1924, while he was a flight instructor at Frejus near the Fitzgeralds’ villa on the French Riviera. Southern France seemed the ideal place for Scott to finish writing The Great Gatsby. After arriving that June, he established a strict work schedule and forbade interruptions. Zelda accommodated by going to the beach, where after a swim in the Mediterranean, she would practice her French with some naval pilots from the nearby base. Edouard was the handsomest of the group, and she was instantly attracted. In contrast to Scott, who was slight with an almost feminine face, Edouard was square-jawed, athletic, and muscular. Confident and charismatic, he exuded dominance, which benefited him as a naval officer and made him attractive to women. Accustomed to their attention, he was experienced in his response. Zelda and Edouard were soon observed together, strolling through the marketplace and drinking aperitifs at seaside bistros. When Gerald and Sara Murphy saw them at the beach, they suspected an affair, but Scott seemed oblivious to what was happening and later would say, “I liked [Edouard] and was glad he was willing2 to pass the hours with Zelda. It gave me time to write. It never occurred to me that the friendship could turn into an affair.” Given Zelda’s previous history with men, this seems hard to believe.
Five weeks into the affair, Zelda confessed that she loved the Frenchman and asked Scott for a divorce. He was dumbstruck. There had been other dalliances on both sides, but this was different. Offering no excuses or apologies, Zelda was prepared to abandon her family for Edouard. That was unfathomable to Scott, who never ceased agonizing over her betrayal or punishing her for it. He demanded they both come before him and profess their love, but Edouard was unwilling to jeopardize his military career and promptly left. The confrontation that never took place in life made its way into Scott’s first draft of The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby tells Nick Carraway that Daisy suddenly had appeared with packed suitcases wanting them to run off together. “I tried to explain to her that we couldn’t do that3, and I only made her cry.” It was a mistake for someone like him with lofty ambitions to fall in love, but he had let himself go, and that was it. Likely, this is what Edouard told Zelda during their final days together. That she hardly knew French and he barely spoke English contributed to Zelda’s misinterpretation of his intentions, but she also was blinded by passion and embroiled in something completely unfamiliar.
To a degree the affair was also a creation of Zelda’s and Scott’s imaginations. Scott encouraged it to generate a love triangle that would infuse The Great Gatsby with emotional tension, and Zelda was testing her appeal on a new conquest. None of this was lost on the Frenchman, who later observed, “They both had a need of drama4; they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.” Nonetheless, from the moment Zelda asked Scott for a divorce, the power shifted in their marriage and he grasped control.
That Zelda loved the Frenchman is apparent, but how could a five-week affair become such a tipping point? Partially, because the emotional upheaval Zelda experienced after the affair’s wrenching conclusion was magnified by something else, a traumatic memory of the brutal side of passion. It had remained dormant until resurrected by Edouard’s rejection and magnified her response to his sudden departure. “She had forgot all about that year5 of her life until she was grown and married,” Zelda wrote, “and tragedy had revivified its traces, as she then saw, from the beginning.” Trauma can generate psychoses, sometimes the brain’s way of coping, and in this instance calamitous forces were released, a Greek tragedy—French style—triggering profound depression that culminated in Zelda’s first suicide attempt. By the time she questioned how much a heart can hold, she had ample time to experience its capacity for pain. “When one really can’t stand it anymore,”6 she wrote, “and the limits are transgressed and one thing has become another, poetry registers itself on the hospital charts and heartbreak has to be taken care of, but heartbreak perishes in public institutions.” There was before Edouard and after, simple as that.
Old wounds also opened for Scott. His first love, Ginevra King, had rejected him for a naval pilot, and once again, he was vanquished by a more powerful suitor. Unable to undo Zelda’s infidelity, he assumed ownership and incorporated the betrayal into stories and novels, exploiting in fiction what he could not control in life. What Edouard would not say to his face—“Your wife doesn’t love you. She loves me.”—repeatedly was played out as a stand-alone scene. Jay Gatsby makes this declaration to Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and Tommy Barban announces it to Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. With authorial agency, Scott now could wield power over circumstances, have characters make different choices and alter outcomes; it took the sting out of a compromised marriage.
For some writers the separation between personal and literary life is indistinguishable. That was the case for Zelda and Scott, who continually rewrote their personal histories. For Scott, nothing was off limits, whether his wife’s affair with Edouard or the names of her sedatives, and he looked for material in every detail of life, observing in one notebook entry that if you found a drug good for two things—for example, if paraldehyde or choral were also ink eradicators—then you had a climax. The incidents of each day were memories for tomorrow. Much of Scott’s fiction stemmed from a few powerful experiences, expressed in different guises, and he believed there were only two or three great and moving experiences in our lives, so extraordinary that it didn’t seem anyone else has been so dazzled and astonished before, and we tell those two or three stories repeatedly in some new disguise as long as people will listen. The Jozan affair became that singular event for the Fitzgeralds, a decisive and determining experience continually revisited. It played a pivotal role in Zelda’s two novels, and but for it, The Great Gatsby would be more about lost illusions than adultery and betrayal, and Jay Gatsby, initially based on Edouard Jozan, a different character.
Zelda was brought up to be protected by men and lacked the resources to guard herself from those she charmed. From Scott’s perspective, she was soft where she needed to be hard and strong where she should have been yielding. Aware of this contradiction, Zelda readily admitted it was difficult to be someone who wanted to be a law unto herself but also kept safe and protected. When she selected Scott over other suitors, she had several objectives. He provided a way out of the South into the broader world she desired, and she believed she could help with his writing. Zelda had given considerable thought to matrimony and bemoaned the fact that, for the average woman, which she was not, one either became a man’s secretary or got married; it seemed the same to her. It was exciting to imagine that Scott might evolve into a celebrated author, and she become famous herself. And where better to accomplish that than New York City? Her Montgomery friend Tallulah Bankhead was already there appearing on Broadway, and Zelda considered herself equally talented. Until the last moment, however, she wavered. Her family vehemently opposed the marriage, and while she hated to admit it, she was not physically attracted to Scott. It was already clear he drank too much, and though her father brought this to her attention, she didn’t listen, probably because she was overdrinking herself. On the positive side, Scott appeared more worldly than her other beaux, had attended Princeton, and seemed to offer the best route to an urbane life.
What Zelda really wanted was a man with the strength and idealism of her father, but someone with whom she could find emotional fulfillment. Scott knew he was not that person: “All our lives, since the day of our engagement7, we have spent hunting for some man Zelda considers strong enough to lean on. I am not.” Throughout her youth, she had fantasized about finding such an individual and recognized him in Edouard. His heroic mind-set recalled a generation of courageous Southerners who had fought for the Confederacy, and she romantically compared their star-crossed tryst to that of Tristan and Isolde. While her intense feelings were authentic, the relationship she envisioned was not. Although Edouard cared about Zelda and was sorry to cause her pain, he considered their liaison a summer romance without obligations.
Named for a heroine in a romantic novel, Zelda grew up with dreamy notions about love. But after her sexual initiation through assault, she dispensed with sentimentality along with moral principles and gave little consideration to what others thought. That she was being adulterous with Edouard never crossed her mind, and what began as a harmless interlude set into motion a series of tectonic consequences that became a turning point in the Fitzgeralds’ life, with Scott writing in his notebook that what had happened never could be repaired. His Midwestern Puritanism and Catholic upbringing considered a woman’s adultery a mortal sin and grievous injustice to the spouse, punishable by the highest severity. In the catechism of the church, it not only broke the sixth commandment but also destabilized the institution of marriage and shattered the contract upon which it was based. Although twice in his ledger Scott remarks on his role in the affair, he would later place the blame on Zelda, accusing her of becoming involved with Edouard to sabotage his writing. He never forgave her, and she accepted the consequences, considering it one of two actions that had sealed her fate—the first being her marriage.
From this juncture, Scott set out to neutralize Zelda, so there would be no future incidences. In revenge, he began a relationship with seventeen-year-old Lois Moran, already a successful Hollywood actress and trained ballerina, and taunted Zelda by lauding the young star’s talent and ambition. Before marrying Scott, Zelda had assured him that she would never become personally ambitious, but now she plunged headlong into achieving something on her own, first as a ballet dancer, then a writer. Scott was so threatened by her determination that he continually placed obstacles in her path. One author in a literary family was enough, and having witnessed his value as a man challenged, he was not going to have his celebrity compromised. Unable to see her way out of the chaos she had created, and with little hope for the future, in spring of 1929, Zelda suffered her first psychic breakdown. Her symptoms were right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, that indispensable handbook for naming mental disorders. When she appeared for her initial psychological evaluation, her thinking was scattered, she was fraught with anxiety, she could not eat or sleep, and she was experiencing hallucinations. She had also attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler met with her for three hours before presenting his diagnosis of schizophrenia to Oscar Forel, director of Prangins, a sanitarium near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Bleuler had coined the term only ten years earlier, but it soon became the most common diagnosis on admission papers. It was so widely employed that by 1930 almost anyone could find themselves institutionalized under that rubric. What hysteria had been to the nineteenth century, schizophrenia became to the twentieth. Psychiatrists believed that women were more susceptible to this condition, based on their observation that many of their patients were sad and confused females, suffering from “lovesickness.” Generally, they were brought to sanitariums by fathers or brothers, as was the case for Zelda’s friend Sara Mayfield, for Vivienne Elliott married to T. S., and for Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, who also was evaluated by Bleuler, and as might be expected, diagnosed as schizophrenic and taken to Prangins Clinic.
Forel, who had opened Prangins only a year earlier, held patriarchal ideas about women’s roles and responsibilities in society. “Excitability” was always suspect, and he believed Zelda’s breakdown had been caused by negative effects of overreaching, along with the fact that she had inherited an emotionally fragile disposition. He was unwavering in his conviction that nervous people not be overstimulated and considered her efforts to become a celebrated dancer an obsessive illness. His treatment plan called for neutralizing those tendencies with rest therapies, medication, and reeducation, with the goal of shifting her into a range of acceptable behavior. If she wanted to maintain peace in the marriage, Zelda needed to focus on her principal role as wife and mother.
However, once forces aligned to bring the diagnosis of madness into play, and Zelda was reduced to a psychiatric label, every aspect of her life got interpreted according to this illness. The hasty diagnosis became a straitjacket, condemning her to a life in asylums, where she was repeatedly traumatized with interventions that worsened preexisting disorders and precipitated new ones. Her medical record followed her everywhere. After accepting Bleuler’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, Forel passed it on to Adolf Meyer at Phipps Clinic, who conveyed it to Charles Slocum at Craig House, who relayed it to William Worcester Elgin at Sheppard Pratt, who sent it to Robert Carroll at Highland Hospital. Although her diagnosis occasionally was questioned, medical loyalty trumped Zelda’s needs, and physicians were reluctant to countermand earlier opinions. This was especially true in the budding field of psychiatry where many doctors had studied together in Europe. Zelda’s psychiatrist at Phipps Clinic, Adolf Meyer, had spent his early career at Burgholzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, which Auguste-Henri Forel directed for twenty years, and it was Forel’s son, Oscar, who headed Prangins. When Oscar Forel requested assistance in diagnosing Zelda, he asked none other than Eugen Bleuler, his father’s successor at Burgholzli, who conferred the label of madness where there was no insanity, or only the most temporary kind, an infrequent but not unusual manifestation of the human condition.
Asylums disassemble people, seldom make them whole. Had Zelda returned to family and friends in Montgomery, she might have been able to grapple with her illness over time and achieve some measure of stability. Instead, her identity became invalidated at Prangins, as she battled for release with a justified sense of the wrong she was suffering. After fifteen months, she was discharged to Scott as an invalid, and he became a widower to her infirmity. Aware she would never recover her former self, Zelda told Sara Mayfield that she could never forgive Scott for institutionalizing her. Now each had something to hold against the other.
Like many women from her generation, Zelda was uncertain how to apply her many talents. Scott told their daughter that when her mother finally understood that work was the only dignity, it was too late. However, nothing could be further from the truth. From her mid-twenties, she worked steadily on stories, essays, and novels; created artwork; and trained in the most difficult dance aesthetic of the twentieth century, becoming an accomplished ballerina within five years. Although institutionalized, she continued to write and paint, and one of her most accomplished stories, “Miss Ella,” was begun at Prangins. She wrote her first novel, Save Me the Waltz, at Phipps Clinic; completed an impressive body of paintings and watercolors at Craig House for an exhibition in Manhattan; and was creatively productive the entire time she remained at Highland Hospital. When she finally was released and returned to Montgomery, she spent her final years working on Caesar’s Things, which initially incorporated Nijinsky’s similar experience of being diagnosed as schizophrenic by Bleuler but later concentrated on her own breakdown and hospitalization. Ultimately the brilliance of her life rests on how much she was able to accomplish, despite the odds against her, the most formidable being, to use her own words, that she was Scott Fitzgerald’s wife.