In 1930, in a Swiss clinic following her first breakdown, Zelda wrote to Scott: "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- ights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway, I love you . . ."
Five years later, much - but not everything - had changed. From a psychiatric hospital in Maryland, Zelda wrote: "Now that there isn't any more happiness and home is gone and there isn't even any past and no emotions . . . I love you anyway - even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life - I love you".
Two new works on the Fitzgeralds have just been published - Sally Cline's biography of Zelda and a collection of Scott and Zelda's love letters. The books offer decidedly different slants on two preoccupying themes: Zelda's psychological problems and her clashes with Scott over her creative endeavours.
Cline, who has produced the first full-length biography of Zelda for more than 30 years, posits a link between the thwarting of Zelda's creativity and her mental problems. She also argues that Zelda may have been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, and that she suffered as much from the treatments she received - morphine, rectal bromides, wet packs, bound hands (to prevent masturbation), years of insulin shock, institutionalisation itself - as she did from any illness.
As the letters reveal, Zelda was indeed suffering: " . . . for months I have been living in vaporous places peopled with one-dimensional figures and tremulous buildings until I can no longer tell an optical illusion from reality . . ." But her final psychiatrist believed she was manic-depressive, and that her treatment for psychosis exacerbated a severe depression and produced characteristics of schizophrenia.
Cline attempts to "balance Scott's lifelong loyalty to a wife diagnosed as suffering clinical 'madness' with his constant refusal to take her out of hospital" for fear it would disrupt his work. (Scott had his own troubles; by the mid-1930s, he was landing repeatedly in hospital due to a combination of drink and fibroid TB.) Mindful of the couple's historical context, Cline is fair to Scott, viewing him as both victim and beneficiary of the times, while making clear how Zelda suffered from the chauvinism of those times: Scott was regarded by psychiatrists as a sane and serious professional, while Zelda suffered from "overweening inflated ambition" and should only engage in "activities appropriate to her talents and tastes".
Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia and identified the "split" in patients as a loss of co-ordination between different psychic functions (e.g. intellect and emotions), maintained that in Zelda's case, the discrepancy was one between high aspiration and moderate achievement. Zelda saw it differently. "I cannot possibly live in a world that is completely dependent on Scott . . ."
The debate over Zelda's writing came to a head following the completion in 1932 of her autobiographical first novel Save Me the Waltz. Written in four weeks while Zelda was in the Phipps Clinic in Maryland, it drew on much of the same material - namely her breakdowns - that Scott was using in his novel-in-progress Tender is the Night.
Scott was furious. According to Cline, he felt that because he had supported Zelda financially, her whole life belonged to him for literary purposes. Zelda mostly acquiesced to the cuts he demanded, though she defended her claim to certain material "which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary . . ."
Issues of authorship and ownership had already arisen between them. Stories written by Zelda had been published either under a joint byline or under Scott's byline. Scott's rationale was that his name fetched a higher price, a not irrelevant consideration, given the couple's often lean circumstances. But when he later writes to Zelda, "you've got to . . . live a literary life outside of mine", it rather leaves her between a rock and a hard place.
Scott also made use of her diaries and private letters, often written from hospital. (To his editor Max Perkins: "I'm just enclosing you the typing of Zelda's diary . . . You'll recognize much of the dialogue. Please don't show it to anyone else".) Cline views Scott's transcribing of the letters, sometimes practically verbatim, as a dangerous form of plagiarism - dangerous not because Scott was unusual in his writerly appropriation, but because he exhibited a "high disregard for . . . the possible psychological consequences" to his wife. (The editors of the letters take a sunnier view: "Scott, who had a wonderful ear for words, freely borrowed passages from these letters for his fiction".)
While Scott deemed Zelda's private writings good enough to copy, he was clear on the subject of who was fit to do the copying: "There has never been any question as to your 'value' as a personality - there is however a question as to your ability to use your values to any practical purpose". To her doctors, he stipulated: ". . . it is necessary for her to give up the idea of writing anything . . . she must only write when under competent medical assistance I say that she can write . . . "
Scott died in 1940, aged 44, of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis while living in Hollywood with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Zelda survived him by eight years, moving between her birthplace of Montgomery, Alabama, and Highland Hospital in North Carolina, where she died in a fire. Her last years were productive. Among the work she left behind are two series of paintings and an unfinished novel, Caesar's Things, to be published shortly.
Cline's biography achieves the balance she aims for. The editors of the letters, in their commentary, take a more saccharine view of this infamous relationship. The letters speak for themselves, and beautifully, leaving no doubt that Zelda could write.
The later letters are particularly poignant: Zelda talking about the lamp shades she is painting, asking Scott if he can spare $5; Scott tubercular, struggling with The Last Tycoon. The two of them solicitous, prematurely elderly, belatedly parental, distinctly un-Jazz Age. Cline describes them as "a beautiful pair who did appalling things with an air of breeding". John Dos Passos called them "celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word". And Scott, on Scott and Zelda: "You were going crazy and calling it genius - I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand". In the end, they weren't bad at deconstructing themselves.
Molly McCloskey's latest book, The Beautiful Changes, was published earlier this year by Lilliput
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. By Sally Cline. John Murray, 404 pp. £25
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. With an introductionby their granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks. Bloomsbury, 387pp. £20