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Painted Shadow. A Life of Vivienne Eliot

Carole Seymour-Jones

London: Robinson (2001)

Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

Sally Cline

London: John Murray (2002)

The roles of literature, sociology, social history and ethics, under the rubric of the medical humanities, have become of increasing importance in the past decade in the field of clinical medicine. There are now journals of medical humanities published here in the UK (http://mh.bmjjournals.com), in Europe (www.kluweronline.com/issn/1041-3545) and across the Atlantic in the USA (www.calliope.jho.edu). There is also a medical humanities website (http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/medhum.html). It is argued that the perspectives of the arts and humanities can complement the detachment and objectifying lens of the medical sciences by reintegrating the humanistic skills of recording and interpreting human narrative into the core of medical knowledge. Thus re-engaging the medical practitioner and other healthcare professionals with the subjective world of people who seek help.

In this regard literature in the forms of fictional narrative, autobiographical and biographical narrative has a particularly important place. DH Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley's Lover (Lawrence, 1928), compared the novel to eavesdropping on the private affairs of other people, thereby revealing the 'secret places of life'. Lawrence understood the way in which fictional narrative exposes how people feel and behave to our scrutiny, exploring what motivates and determines our goals. In this sense the idea that the arts can help to stimulate insight into common and shared modes of response to critical situations or into unique and individual responses to crises is understandable (Scott, 2000).

There is a rich tradition of fictional narrative dealing with emotional turmoil, mental illness, asylum and so on. These include the novels of Patrick McGrath, Asylum and Spider (McGrath, 1990; 1996), Janet Frame's Faces in the Water (Frame, 1980), and Sylvia Plath's The BellJar (Plath, 1963). There are also autobiographical accounts including JS Mill's Autobiography of 1873, Janet Frame's An Autobiography (Frame, 1990), Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness (Wolpert, 1999) and William Styron's Darkness Visible (Styron, 1990). These accounts locate the nature of disturbance and describe and explain its origins, moving away from the limiting confines of what medicine has to say about mental illness.

The two biographies that are the focus of this review, Seymour-Jones's Painted Shadow. The Life of Vivienne Eliot and Sally Cline's Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, are about two women who married talented men, namely TS Eliot and F Scott Fitzgerald respectively, but who were also talented and creative in their own right. Their contributions to their husbands' success have, until recently, been grossly underestimated. There are uncanny parallels between their lives. Vivienne Eliot loved dancing, had an ear for dialogue, wrote stories, and died in an asylum. Zelda Fitzgerald also loved dancing, had a gift for words, wrote short stories, painted, and died in a fire in an asylum. Both lived through the 1920s and in his writing Zelda Fitzgerald's husband is thought to have caught the spirit ofthat period, evoking it as 'an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire' (p 84).

Vivienne Haigh-Wood was born prematurely in England on 28 May 1888 to Charles Haigh-Wood, an artist and member of the Royal Academy, and his wife Rose Esther. She suffered tuberculosis of the bone as a child and underwent many surgical operations before the age of seven. She met Thomas Stearns Eliot when he was 26 years old. After knowing each other for only three months and without a formal engagement they were married on 26 june 1915. At the time of the marriage Eliot was not aware of his wife's history of illness and dependence upon doctors. By this time Vivienne was already being treated by doctors for mood instability and was receiving bromide administered as a preparation dissolved in alcohol. Her mother believed that she suffered from 'moral insanity' and was therefore unsuitable for marriage and not fit to have children. TS Eliot's family disapproved of the match, being ashamed of his spouse and rejecting her. Within a fortnight of the wedding it became clear that the couple were ill suited. After meeting Bertrand Russell in july 1915, Vivienne began an affair with him that lasted three years. The triangular relationship between Eliot, Russell and Vivienne was complex. Russell provided money and free accommodation for the impoverished couple, Eliot was relieved of not having to have sexual intercourse with his own wife, and Vivienne received the emotional intimacy with Russell that she lacked from Eliot. There is little doubt that Russell's acrimonious desertion of Vivienne contributed to her mental deterioration and subsequent fear of abandonment.

Vivienne Eliot's symptoms included difficulty in sleeping, migraines, physical exhaustion, bowel problems and general bodily aches and pains. Eliot described one of her episodes as follows: 'Have you ever been in such incessant and extreme pain that you felt your sanity going, and that you no longer knew reality from delusion? That's the way she is' (p 269). Virginia Woolf wrote of Vivienne: 'This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck' (p 474) and 'to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity' (p 473).

It is likely that Virginia Woolf had her own reasons for being unsympathetic to Vivienne Eliot; she herself had a history of mental illness and, fearing contagion, seemed determined to distance herself from Vivienne's illness. TS Eliot was also emotionally disturbed and Seymour-Jones said that the couple 'existed in a state of co-dependence in which psychological need and distress played a large part in illnesses which often had no organic basis. Many letters bear witness to the dance of disease the Eliots shared, taking it in turns to be ill, as one led and the other followed in a flight into ... illness' (p 319).

TS Eliot believed that some of Vivienne's treatments harmed her. One of her physicians was later exposed as a charlatan, his injections containing nothing but milk. She also took bromides, chloral hydrate (a sedative) and may have experimented with cocaine. Before Vivienne was finally admitted to hospital she was assessed for involuntary admission on at least one occasion but failed to meet the criteria for involuntary reception. She was shunned by society because she was perceived as 'mad' and Eliot was so embarrassed by her that he hid from public life, even though he had abandoned her by September 1932. She died on 22 January 1947 in Northumberland House, an asylum. Her headstone reads: 'In Loving Memory of Vivienne Haigh Eliot, Died 29th January 1947.' The stonemason had made an error that no one troubled to correct.

Zelda Fitzgerald was born Zelda Sayre on 24 july 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father Anthony Sayre, a judge of the Alabama Supreme Court, is reputed to have enacted the laws that prevented African Americans from voting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was a substantial history of mental illness in the family including her three sisters, father and brother as well as several suicides. This instability is attributed to Zelda's paternal grandmother, a Morgan: 'Morgan blood is a pest since it means unstable nerves' (p 27). Zelda met F Scott Fitzgerald in 1918 and they were married in 1920.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were the epitome of glamour and through his writing and their joint escapades their lives embodied the spirit of the age characterised by a dazzling effervescence of parties, high fashion and carefree attitudes. But the downside of this lifestyle was heavy drinking and Zelda had a number of abortions and made several suicide attempts. Like Vivienne Eliot, she made enemies with a number of her husband's literary friends, the most influential of whom was Ernest Hemingway.