March 10, 1948
On this day in
1948, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, and eight other patients were killed
in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda's
first breakdown in 1930 resulted in a sixteen-month stay in a Swiss clinic, and
she spent six and a half of the next eight years in American institutions.
Though discharged to her mother's care in the Spring of 1940 -- Fitzgerald was
in Hollywood, and just months away from a fatal heart attack -- she would
periodically readmit herself to Highland. It was during one of these stays that
she and the others died, unable to flee the rooms into which they had been
locked for the evening.
While the
popular press had elevated them to the legendary glitter-couple, and then
reduced them to a Jazz Age parable, the Fitzgeralds themselves spent their last
decade struggling towards a clearer understanding of what had happened to the
people they had once been. In one letter to Zelda after her first breakdown in
1930, Fitzgerald's attempts to find cause and blame arrive at this: "You
were going crazy and calling it genius -- I was going to ruin and calling it
anything that came to hand." One letter from Zelda five years later --
after countless pleas to her husband that he "Please, please let me out
now," or that he "come to me and tell me how I was" -- seems to
finally accept defeat:
Dearest and
always Dearest Scott:
I am sorry too
that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell.... Had I any
feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that all of
my life there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty that
we started with to offer you at the end.... It is a shame that we should have
met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so
many dreams.... I love you anyway -- even if there isn't any me or any love or
even any life.
Fitzgerald kept
writing to her until the end, and writing whatever else he could manage in
order to support her. Two last letters, both written on the same day a week
before his death, are to the taxman and to daughter Scottie. The first asks for
more time, the second says that "the insane are always mere guests on
earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot
read." Zelda's autobiographical novel, "Save Me The Waltz,"
tries to get some perspective on what happened; over her last years she
struggled with a novel about Jacob and Janno, another two who were beautiful
and self-damned. In one fragment Janno talks of her husband's death, though
"He had been gone all summer and all winter for about a hundred
years":
She remembered
the ragged edges of his cuffs, and the neatness of his worn possessions, and
the pleasure he always had from his pile of sheer linen handkerchiefs. When she
had been away, or sick or something, Jacob never forgot the flowers, or big
expensive books full of compensatory ideas about life. He never forgot to make
life seem useful and promising, or forgot the grace of good friendship, or the
use of making an effort. . . .
Nobody has ever
measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold. . . . When one really
can't stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become
another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to
be taken care of. . . . But heartbreak perishes in public institutions.