Zelda Fitzgerald and Lucia Joyce: tragic heroines

Zelda Fitzgerald and Lucia Joyce: tragic heroines

“Farewell the tranquil mind. Farewell content!”  Othello

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48) and Lucia Joyce (1907-82) were close contemporaries and talented women.  Zelda was the wife, Lucia the daughter, of a great writer.  The American novelist Thomas Wolfe described the 19-year-old Lucia, following the fashion popularised by Zelda, as “rather pretty—I thought at first she was a little American flapper.”  These two beautiful women began ballet training when it was too late to start a career and hence failed as ballerinas.  Both turned down offers to dance professionally: Zelda in Naples, Italy, Lucia in Darmstadt, Germany.  But Zelda succeeded as a novelist, Lucia as an artist. They were extroverted and theatrical, and liked to shock people by their strange speech and erratic behavior.  Both women fell hopelessly in love and were crushed when they were rejected.

After several scandalous escapades, dangerous mental breakdowns and suicide attempts, they were each repeatedly forced to enter many different clinics.  They had to adjust to new hospitals and people, to various languages and strange surroundings, while suffering hallucinations, depression and catatonia.  Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, who cherished each woman’s most extravagant illusions, were deeply involved in their care and made desperate but hopeless attempts to cure them.

Both Zelda and Lucia had a startling facility with words.  In talk and letters their thoughts suddenly shifted into rapid and peculiar transitions.  A friend’s comment on Zelda’s strange but dazzling speech applies equally to Lucia: “If her remarks were occasionally non sequitur one didn’t notice it at the time.  She passed very quickly from one topic to another and you didn’t question her.  It wouldn’t occur to you to stop her and ask what she meant.”

Zelda had only her husband to care for her; Lucia had two parents.  But Fitzgerald and Joyce both became alcoholics who would collapse in public, pass out and have to be carried home.  When Fitzgerald quarreled with Zelda, and Joyce with Nora, their wives threatened to pack up and leave.  Zelda in 1930-31 and Lucia soon after in 1933 were treated at Prangins in Nyon, Switzerland, by Dr Oscar Forel, who failed to persuade Fitzgerald or Joyce to give up drinking.  Fitzgerald died aged 44 in December 1940; Joyce died aged 58 only a month later in January 1941.  During the writers’ lifetimes, Zelda and Lucia led tragic lives, remained incurably insane and died in asylums.

I

Zelda Sayre’s father—a cold, humourless and hyper-critical high-court judge—was the absolute antithesis of her character and behaviour.  Yet behind his severe facade was a secret and terrifying history of insanity and suicide in the family.  She was named after the romantic gypsy heroine in Robert Edward Francillon’s popular novel Zelda’s Fortune (1874), and took pleasure in that image.  Fitzgerald was also proud of his literary ancestor and namesake, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem, though it begins leadenly with “Oh say” and the stars on the banner are not spangled but arranged in neat rows.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, (1896-1940) in 1928.

The young Zelda had flawless skin and golden hair.  In his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald rapturously wrote of the heroine, “There was the eternally kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual and utterly disturbing.”  The astonishingly attractive couple had the same blond hair, fair skin, straight nose and sensual lips, and looked enough alike to be brother and sister.

As a child Zelda was uninhibited and absolutely fearless.  In one notorious prank she called the fire department, climbed onto a roof and waited to be rescued.  She took dangerous high dives into the water and dared others to follow her.  Her indulgent mother tried and failed to calm her down with ballet lessons.  Zelda attracted legions of suitors, kissed all her beaux and danced without a partner at society balls.  She was an Alabama belle: exotic, beautiful and witty.  She was also materialistic, unconventional, extravagant, competitive, reckless, exhibitionist, rude, selfish, unrestrained, hysterical, unpredictable and self-destructive.  Fitzgerald, who declared, “she is prone to make everyone around her pretty miserable when she doesn’t get her way,” found these qualities provocative and exciting.  Edmund Wilson, his Princeton friend, noted that their fantasies matched.

Zelda met Fitzgerald in July 1918 when he was an infantry lieutenant stationed near her home town, Montgomery. The military aviators did fancy stunts in their biplanes to attract her.  But she was attracted to Fitzgerald, and in April 1920 they had a Catholic marriage ceremony in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.  Their shocking and infantile behaviour aroused a great deal of attention and made them the leading couple of the Jazz Age.  Fully dressed, Zelda dived into the fountain in Union Square.  They went round and round the revolving doors of the Plaza Hotel while other guests waited to exit, and she tied open the gate of the caged elevator so it would be waiting for her when she was ready to descend.  But their idyll could not last and the golden couple were doomed.  Fitzgerald later recalled, “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings and under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

Zelda had refused to take pills to terminate her pregnancy before she was married.  But after the birth of their daughter Scottie in 1922 she decided to have an abortion in New York, the first of three traumatic episodes.  Fitzgerald’s Notebooks grimly stated, “His son went down the toilet of the hotel.”  In the mid-1920s Zelda suffered two years of colitis, appendicitis and gynecological problems resulting from her abortions.  They wanted a son but failed to have a second child.  The Fitzgeralds loved Scottie and rose to grand occasions like birthdays and Christmas.  But absorbed in their own problems, they had very little to do with Scottie’s day-to-day life, which was supervised by nursemaids and governesses.  Later on, when asked what she thought of her mother, Scottie replied, “I didn’t know her very well.”

In Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert rather casually discuss the crucial question of an abortion.  She generously and vainly says:

“I value my body because you think it’s beautiful.  And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless?  It’s simply intolerable.  Oh, Anthony, I’m not afraid of the pain.” . . .

“Well, for God’s sake don’t lie there and go to pieces.” . . .

“Do you want me to have it?” she asked listlessly.

“I’m indifferent.  That is, I’m neutral.  If you have it I’ll probably be glad.  If you don’t—well, that’s all right too.”

“I wish you’d make up your mind one way or the other!”

“Suppose you make up your mind.” . . .

“See here, Gloria, I’m with you whatever you do, but for God’s sake be a sport about it.”

“Oh, don’t fuss at me!” she wailed.

This scene is more like a domestic spat than a painful confrontation with tragic implications.  Gloria is more concerned about her figure than her baby, but wants to please Anthony and not lose him.  Anthony doesn’t seem to care either way about this vital issue and is willing to do whatever she wants.  But she wants him to make up his mind, take responsibility and decide what to do—so she can blame him later on if things go wrong.  They are surprisingly offhand and indifferent, and abortion does not seem to be a danger and a threat.

Their situation is a great contrast to the couple in Hemingway’s tragic story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), where the egoistic man, unaware of the woman’s feelings, tries to bully her into having an abortion so they can be exactly as they were before.  The woman, who finds it horribly unnatural, is frightened of killing the baby and hurting herself.  He forces her to agree to an abortion to regain his love, but asking her to make that sacrifice means she can never love him again.

Several close friends made perceptive observations about Zelda’s volatile and potentially tragic character.  Edmund Wilson was charmed by her and wrote, “I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly.  Even when her mind was going, the writing and painting she did had her curious personal quality of imaginative iridescence and showed something of real talent.”  Gerald Murphy shared her passion for sunbathing and swimming, and in Tender Is the Night (1934) his fictional model rakes the sacred Riviera beach as if it were a Zen garden in Kyoto.  He recalled that Zelda “had a rather powerful hawk-like expression, very beautiful features, not classic, and extremely penetrating eyes, and a very beautiful figure, and she moved beautifully.”  Her piercing eyes and expression unnerved other people.

Some friends were attracted to Zelda but also afraid of her.  John Dos Passos noted, “I had come up against the basic fissure in her mental processes that was to have such tragic consequences.  Though she was so very lovely, I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically.”  As early as 1923, Rebecca West predicted a tragic future and said that “Zelda reminded her of Gericault’s pictures of the insane.  There was something very appealing about her.  But frightening.  Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.”

Hemingway, who knew Fitzgerald most intimately, was the most penetrating observer.  His first wife, Hadley, was conventional, matronly and a good sport.  His second wife, Pauline, was more sophisticated and elegant than Hadley, but far from Zelda’s beauty.  Like most men, Hemingway was powerfully attracted to the wild and stunning Zelda, and thought he could tame her.  He envied Fitz’s possession of such a bewitching wife, but also felt she had a disastrous effect on him.  In May 1924 he emphasized her madness and Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, and told him with brutal honesty: “Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you.  It’s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and of course you’re a rummy.”  Zelda became increasingly frigid, attacked Fitzgerald’s sexual capacity and accused him of being a homosexual.  When he asked, “But why would she want to do it?” Hemingway truthfully explained and predicted, “To put you out of business.  Zelda wants to destroy you.”

In June 1924, on the Riviera beach at Saint-Raphaël, Zelda met a handsome French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan.  The antithesis of Fitzgerald, he was a dark, romantic man with curly black hair and a Latin profile.  He wore a smart uniform (as Scott had done when he first courted her), was muscular and athletic, and led the small group of officers who paid tribute to Zelda.  Infatuated by her, he impressed Zelda with dangerous aerial stunts above her villa, as American fliers had done to court her in Montgomery.

Using his French charm and aeronautic daring, he seduced her.  The crisis peaked in July when she told Fitzgerald that she loved Jozan and wanted a divorce.  When Jozan—who wanted a lover, not a wife—abandoned her, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.  Fitzgerald realized that Zelda would compare him to Jozan (who later had a distinguished naval career and became an admiral).  She was not absolutely committed to Fitzgerald, as he was to her, and he could no longer trust his wife to be faithful.  The purity of their marriage had been tainted, their innocence lost.

In Hollywood in 1927, Fitzgerald had a retaliatory affair with the 18-year-old actress, Lois Moran, the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night.  When Fitzgerald said that at least Lois “did something with herself”, Zelda burned all her own clothes in the bathtub.  Fitzgerald regretfully declared, “her affair with Edouard Jozan in 1924 and mine with Lois Moran in 1927, which was a sort of revenge, shook something out of us, but we can’t go on paying and paying forever.”

Instead of restraining her husband for his own good and allowing him to earn enough money to pay for their luxurious life, Zelda encouraged their hedonistic and dissipated habits.  Whenever Fitzgerald decided to work instead of drink, she treated him as a killjoy and a spoilsport.  “He would start to write,” Hemingway noted, “and as soon as he was working well Zelda would complain about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party.”  At a farewell party in January 1926 she announced: “Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them.  I’ll start off”—and she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw her precious gift to her grateful admirers.

Fitzgerald noted their disastrous decline but couldn’t stop it: “You were going crazy and calling it genius—I was going to ruin.  We were plagued by your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink.”

In 1928 Zelda’s late obsession with dancing led to reversal of roles in their marriage: she became ascetic and Scott plunged deeper into dissipation.  She equated dancing with exorcism and tried to control her wild emotions by disciplining her body. Gerald Murphy noted her faults: “Zelda was awkward, her legs were too muscular, there was something about her intensity when she danced that made her look grotesque.” Her frenzied obsession, which frustrated and tormented her, was like the dancing madness of the middle ages.  She became dazed and incoherent, had fainting fits, heard frightening voices and was tormented by nightmares.

Depressed and miserable, Zelda became suicidal.  She had tried to kill herself after her affair with Jozan had ended in 1924.  Now, dining in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1926, while Fitzgerald was talking to the famous dancer Isadora Duncan, Zelda suddenly stood up on her chair, leaped across Gerald Murphy and threw herself into the dark stone stairwell behind him.  Murphy thought she was dead, but she soon reappeared, wiping the blood off her knees and dress.  The mad bloodstained suicidal dance was her private performance for the great Isadora.

In September 1929, driving on the steep and curving Grand Corniche above Cannes, Zelda scared and nearly killed Fitzgerald by suddenly exclaiming, “I think I’ll turn off here,” and had to be physically restrained from veering over a cliff.  (Grace Kelly was killed in a car crash on that dangerous road in 1982.)  In February 1934, troubled by her older brother’s suicide, and suffering from hysteria and psychotic delusions, Zelda began to lose weight and again became suicidal.  She had to remain sedated and in bed, and was kept under constant observation.  After Zelda came out of her catatonic state she tried to commit suicide by strangling herself.  While walking uneasily with Scott on the grounds of a clinic, she tried to throw herself beneath a passing train and he caught her just in time.

Their whole life from now on seemed to focus on Zelda’s tragic illness: the destructiveness of their past, the sterility of their present, the uncertainty of their future.  Fitzgerald lived in the phases of her madness and remained deeply involved in the specific details of her treatment: the individual doctors, the different psychiatric approaches, the particular setting and atmosphere of each clinic.  Zelda desperately declared, “It’s frightful, it’s horrible, what’s going to become of me.  I must work and I no longer can, I must die and yet I have to work.  I’ll never be cured.”

Zelda had three serious breakdowns and spent eight out of the last ten years of Fitzgerald’s life in mental hospitals.  During her first breakdown, from April 1930 to September 1931, she was treated at Malmaison west of Paris; at Valmont in Montreux; and at Prangins Clinic in Nyon, fourteen miles north of Geneva.  Zelda spent fifteen months in the luxurious Prangins.  The grounds were spacious, the gardens immaculately tended, and it had small farms, tennis courts and seven private villas for super-rich patients.  The cost of treatment, during the first year of the Depression, was an astronomical $1,000 a month.  She was subjected to shock treatments that applied electricity to the brain to induce convulsive epileptic seizures and even comas.  These severe shocks were supposed to unsettle her brain patterns, but failed to jolt her out of her psychopathic behaviour.

During her second breakdown, from February to June 1932, she was placed in the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  During her third breakdown in this grim chronology, during the six years from February 1934 to April 1940, she was confined at Craig House in Beacon, New York, on the Hudson above West Point, and at Sheppard and Pratt in Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore.  Finally, with three premature discharges and readmissions, she was confined at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, from 1943 to 1948.  Though deeply wounded by Zelda’s recurrent illness, Fitzgerald was inextricably connected to her by bonds of love and guilt.  Scottie later said, “he felt a sense of guilt at having led exactly the wrong kind of life for a woman with such a tendency.”

When Fitzgerald was at Princeton he had fallen madly in love with and then lost his idealised girl, the wellborn and wealthy Ginevra King.  Rejected by Gin-evra, he consoled himself with gin and became an alcoholic.  Drink helped him endure Zelda’s long boring monologues on dancing as well as her cruel and damaging accusations that he was homosexual.  Both Dr Oscar Forel at Prangins and Dr Adolf Meyer at Phipps wanted to treat both Zelda’s insanity and Scott’s alcoholism.  Like many writers, he refused psychotherapy on the grounds that it would inhibit his creativity, but could not give up drinking without psychiatric help.  Trying to explain their mutual destruction, he told one of her many doctors, “Perhaps 50% of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink.”  He was trapped in his alcoholism as Zelda was in her madness.  With hopeless insight, Zelda asked, “Isn’t it terrible when you have one little corner of your brain that needs fixing?”

Seeing her again after her breakdowns, some old friends failed to recognize the once dazzling Zelda, who had suddenly altered, aged and deteriorated: “She had lost her good looks and what remained was a face hardened by suffering and despair.”  Her expression, once romantic and innocent, was now cynical and embittered.  Her features, having lost their softness and gentleness, were now tense, coarse and severe.  Her hair was roughly cut, her clothes plain and she now looked institutional rather than chic.

No longer vivacious, she sat like a listless invalid in a long blank trance.  For several months at a time, her face, neck and shoulders were covered with severe eczema, which made her existence a living hell.  Fitzgerald compared her disease to a medieval torture instrument and wrote, “she seemed imprisoned as in the Iron Maiden,” and insisted that “she was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.”  When she entered Highland in the spring of 1937 she weighed only 89 pounds, and instead of improving she was going downhill fast.  The once-beautiful Zelda was now dull-eyed and frazzle-haired, a humiliated and broken figure.  She projected her own homosexual impulses onto Fitzgerald and blamed him for her sexual frigidity.  In the late 1930s he felt that making love to Zelda was like “sleeping with a ghost”.

He still insisted on keeping up the old standards, and nobly refused to put Zelda in a public insane asylum or place Scottie in a public [ie state] school.  In November 1930 he paid the eminent Dr Eugen Bleuler, Carl Gustav Jung’s teacher, a staggering consultation fee of $500.  But no doctor knew the real cause of Zelda’s illness or how to cure it. Though discharged from three mental institutions, she had three more breakdowns and ended her days in an insane asylum.  In “One Trip Abroad” the bitterly disillusioned Fitzgerald exclaimed, “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” Nevertheless, he preferred the straightforward Swiss clinical air, supposed to cure insanity and tuberculosis, “where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs.”

Their life was a constant struggle between two creative artists, each jealous of the other.  In the late 1920s Zelda began to publish talented and amusing stories and sketches.  With her permission, Fitzgerald usually published these pieces as his own and earned infinitely higher fees than if they’d been signed by Zelda.  Proud but also resentful that he was inspired by her diaries, she used the magazine fees to pay for her increasingly intense and exhausting ballet lessons.

Fitzgerald admitted, with a caustic twist, that “the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”  But he was deeply wounded by Zelda’s novel Save Me the Waltz (1932)—the first two words a covert plea for help.  The novel faithfully describes Zelda’s girlhood, marriage, youthful excess, childbirth, travels in Europe, affair with the French aviator and husband’s retaliatory affair, as well as her passion for dancing and illness that forced her to give up her career.  In an idiosyncratic and sometimes brilliant style, she portrays her own extravagance, domestic incompetence, ambition, recklessness, jealousy, infidelity and responsibility for the dissolution of her marriage.

Fitzgerald felt she had not only stolen the European locales and clinical material of the novel he had been working on for seven years but also, during her illness that had delayed the completion of Tender Is the Night, had in the spring of 1932 written her own work in only six weeks.  She had sent it to Maxwell Perkins without showing it to her husband, and his own faithful editor at Scribner’s had silently accepted it for publication.  Desperate to finish Tender Is the Night, he drew upon Zelda’s most anguished personal letters to him, written during her illness in Switzerland, and used them with little concern for Zelda’s feelings or for the precarious balance of her sanity.  She wrote, for example, with insight and fury, “what good can it be for me to stay here with the doctors harping constantly on the things I was here to get over. . . .  I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted.  My family have shamefully neglected me, there’s no use asking them for help or pity.”  (Robert Lowell used the agonising letters of his estranged wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin, 1973. Like Fitzgerald, he justified his appropriation in the name of art.)

On March 10,1948 a fire broke out at midnight in Highland Hospital in Asheville and quickly spread to the top floor where Zelda was sleeping.  She could not escape the flames and fumes because the doors were locked, and chains and padlocks prevented her from opening the windows.  As she choked and gasped for air the flames rose, absorbed all the oxygen and burnt the skin off her body.  Zelda died an agonising death, with eight other women, and was identified only by a charred slipper lying beneath her equally charred body.

As early as 1933, Fitzgerald told Zelda “I was trading my health for her sanity, and I was through.”  But he confessed that until the very end of his life, “I ached for the beautiful child that I loved and with whom I was happy as I shall never be happy again.”  Zelda both inspired and ruined Fitzgerald.  Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals destroyed, defined their marriage.  Tender Is the Night, created under searing conditions, was a heroic achievement.  As Samuel Johnson said of his foolish but talented friend Oliver Goldsmith, if only those who wrote as well as poor Goldy were allowed to abuse him “he would have few censors.  Let not his frailties be remembered.  He was a very great man.”

II

Lucia Anna Joyce was born in 1907 in Trieste, an Adriatic port in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, where Joyce taught English from 1904 to 1915.  In Trieste, Zurich and Paris she had to change schools and languages: from English and Italian to German and French.  Throughout Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom thinks about his daughter Milly, who’s studying photography in Mullingar, 50 miles west of Dublin.  Milly is fifteen years old in Ulysses and Lucia was fifteen when the novel appeared in 1922.  In the “Hades” chapter Bloom remembers: “Molly.  Milly.  Same thing watered down.  Her tomboy oaths.  O jumping Jupiter!  Ye gods and little fishes!  Still, she’s a dear girl.  Soon be a woman.”  The tension between Milly and her mother Molly reflects the real hostility between Lucia and Nora Joyce.  The heroine of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle, alludes to Joyce’s daughter by reversing the names of Lucia Anna and punning on pleurs, the French word for crying.

James Joyce (photo Bernice Abbott)

Just as Zelda suffered from eczema, Lucia had physical as well as psychological difficulties.  Like the half-blind Joyce, she had eye problems.  Her strabismus (crossed eyes) was caused by weak eye muscles or a nerve injury, and her operation in October 1929 failed to straighten her eye.  Despite this physical flaw, in her late teens and early twenties, from 1925 to 1929, Lucia danced frantically, even professionally.  She then decided she wasn’t strong enough to be a dancer and gave up her career.  In October 1929 Joyce, describing the consequences of her decision, wrote that Lucia had turned down an offer to join a dance troupe in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt.  She “seems to have come to the conclusion that she has not the physique for a strenuous dancing career, the result of which has been a month’s tears as she thinks that she has thrown away three or four years of hard work and is sacrificing a talent.”

Like Ophelia in Hamlet, Lucia talked in a strange disconnected way, slipping in and out of languages, and shifting from English to Italian to French in the same sentence.  Only Joyce could follow her sudden leaps of thought that startled and confused other people.  She described herself as a  “crossword puzzle”, hinting that she had crossed eyes but no cross word for Joyce, and was an enigma that he had to decipher.  Joyce insisted that “she is a fantastic being speaking a curious abbreviated language of her own.”  He comforted Lucia and told her that they bonded in obscurity: “if my prose is difficult to understand by Jove your handwriting is difficult to decipher.  Thus we make a pair.”

He told a friend, “maybe I am an idiot but I attach the greatest importance to what Lucia says when she is talking about herself.  Her intuitions are amazing.  My wife and I have seen hundreds of examples of her clairvoyance.”  He believed she was brilliant, not crazy, and compared her thoughts to electrical storms—which always terrified him: “She behaves like a fool very often but her mind is as clear and unsparing as the lightning.”

Lucia justly lamented “that despite her diligence, her talent and all her exertions, the results of her work have come to nothing.”  In 1929 Lucia felt she was sex-starved, was attracted to Joyce’s disciple Samuel Beckett; she made her feelings known and responded passionately to his apparent interest.  Frightened by the sexual aggression of this “tortured replica of genius”, Beckett rejected her.  He later confessed that “he was dead and had no feelings that were human and that is why he had not been able to fall in love with Joyce’s daughter.”  He bluntly told Lucia that he had no romantic interest in her and came to their Paris flat to see her father.  Joyce then temporarily banished him for bad behaviour.

In 1929 Joyce chose as her art teacher the young Alexander Calder, who created attractive “dancing” mobile sculptures.  When Calder left Paris after their brief liaison, the vague and puzzled Lucia recorded: “We were in love but I think he went away.  Anyway he never wrote to me and I don’t know what became of him.”  Joyce’s Russian-French friend Paul Léon then stepped into the breach and persuaded his young brother-in-law, the handsome and wealthy Cambridge graduate Alex Ponisovsky, to propose to Lucia.  She accepted him and should have been pleased, but couldn’t commit herself emotionally.  Instead of marriage, she had a mental breakdown that broke the engagement and destroyed her hopes.  In 1932 she had a lesbian liaison with one of her nurses.

Joyce’s emotions, worries, insomnia, health and mind were closely engaged with Lucia.  She wanted to have a husband, but her feelings were strongly tied to Joyce and she could not break away from him.  In July 1936 she wrote: “Father, if ever I

take a fancy to anybody I swear to you on the head of Jesus that it will not be because I am not fond of you.  Do not forget that.”

Lucia was hostile to her mother and obsessed with her father.  In a rare reprimand he said, “you have written a letter to Mamma which drove her half mad.  Doubtless that was your intention.”  On Feb 2, 1932 Beckett, pardoned for his rough treatment of Lucia and back in favour, was invited to celebrate Joyce’s 50th birthday.  Lucia felt her parents had been disloyal and, Richard Ellmann notes, “Lucia, whose signs of mental derangement were becoming increasingly apparent, turned in fury on her mother and threw a chair at her.”  Two years later, on Feb 2, 1934, she celebrated Joyce’s 52nd birthday by hitting Nora again.  Nora, the only one who ever disciplined and spanked Lucia, was severe; Joyce was indulgent.  Both mother and daughter competed with Finnegans Wake for his attention and love.

In December 1933, when Random House won its legal case and was finally allowed to publish Ulysses in America, many friends called to congratulate Joyce.  Lucia, exasperated by the noise proclaiming her father’s fame and drawing attention to herself, cut the telephone wires in their flat.  She later started a fire in her sanatorium room to escape solitary confinement, and when visiting her aunt in Ireland she built a fire on a bungalow floor to breathe the pleasant smell of burning turf.  In February 1935 she failed to come home one night and slept in the street like a beggar.  After another breakdown she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and carried out of the house compressed into a straitjacket, which was particularly horrible for a free-spirited dancer.  She was also placed in a camisole de force whenever she broke anything, attacked anyone or threatened to commit suicide.

Thinking of Lucia’s two-sided personality, Joyce affectionately referred to “that subtle and barbarous person—my daughter”.  In Finnegans Wake  he called her a neurasthenic nympholept with glandular difficulties and inverted parentage.  He never admitted that his daughter was mad and always thought her mental illness could be treated as a physical malady.  He believed she was merely a slightly confused but typical young woman and declared, “The poor child is not a raving lunatic, just a poor child who tried to do too much, to understand too much.”

She was, in fact, catatonic.  In 1932 Lucia began the long years of clinics, doctors, injections and operations that tormented her for the rest of her life.  In France, Switzerland and England she suffered solitary confinement and crankish seawater injections.  From July 1933 to September 1934 Lucia was confined in Zelda’s alma mater, Prangins sanatorium in Switzerland.  A year later, in August 1934, Dr Oscar Forel grimly reported: “Lucia was worse, and the several treatments attempted had all failed.  Besides her mental trouble, she suffered from an excess of white blood corpuscles [supposed to fight infection].  Their presence excited her to new outbursts of causeless fears and scenes of violence with doctors and nurses, shot through with flashes of lucidity.”  When Lucia left Prangins she seemed, like Zelda, to have lost her looks.  Her biographer writes that “Joyce was appalled by the meager young woman who stood  before him, a mere ghost of her former self.”  Joyce still hoped for a glandular cure for her mental disorders and hopefully predicted, “She’ll get all right they say.  One needs all Job’s patience with Solomon’s wisdom and the Queen of Sheba’s pin-money thrown in.”

After Prangins, Lucia was handed over to a world-famous doctor, despite his hostility to Joyce’s work, who tried a completely different but equally unsuccessful treatment.   In a public lecture of 1930 Carl Jung, with appalling ignorance, had condemned the author of Ulysses as “a proglottid [tapewormed] creature with severe restriction of cerebral activity.”  After psychoanalysing Lucia for four months, from September through December 1934,  Jung blamed Joyce for Lucia’s madness.  Her biographer concluded, “Jung’s immediate task was to try to break Lucia’s tight bond with her father. . . He considered it essential to delve into the unconscious [sexual] origins of the problem. . . Jung wrecked Joyce’s hopes by telling him that ‘nobody could make any head or tail of her but [Joyce himself] as she was a very exceptional case and certainly not one for psychoanalytic treatment which he said might provoke a catastrophe from which she would never recover.’ ”  After her treatment by Jung, her 20th doctor, Lucia shrewdly summed up the doctor’s defects: “To think that such a big fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul.”

Lucia was also frightened by the threat of physical illness.  She was afraid that one of her lovers had given her syphilis, she was falsely diagnosed with cancer and she became addicted to barbiturates.  Nevertheless, her letters continued to be witty and perceptive.  She sweetly wrote, “Father dear. I have had too nice a life.  I am spoiled.  You must both forgive me.” In October 1934 Lucia exclaimed that Joyce’s sister and another doctor seemed as crazy as she was: “He is a bit gaga like all his psychiatries.  Eileen is a bit loony.  So am I, they say.”  As Lucia scrutinised the bears in the Zurich zoo, she weirdly speculated about the spiritual life of the animals: “What sort of God does that fellow have, do you think?”  Desperate for a cure, Joyce even thought of sending her to Geel, a Belgian village that atoned for its past sins by caring for lunatics.

Joyce thought Lucia needed a new, therapeutic occupation “to persuade her that her whole past has not been a failure.”  In July 1932 Paul Léon reported: “For the last three months or more he has been under a terrible strain caused by his daughter’s health who is suffering from a severe breakdown.  In fact her nerves were in such condition that the utmost care and particular attention were necessary to bring her on the way to a speedy recovery.  [He wants] her to use her talents in any sort of applied art which would permit her to have a success of her own and thus recreate some confidence in herself.”

Encouraged by Joyce, Lucia created impressive drawings to illuminate his work.  For Pomes Penyeach (1932) she designed large ornate capital letters to accompany his short handwritten poems and signed copies.  A volume of this stringently limited edition of 25 copies, a father-daughter collaboration that Joyce called “Lucia’s book,” is now worth $60,000.  In A Chaucer A.B.C (1936) Lucia fancifully illustrated Chaucer’s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s “Hymn to the Holy Virgin.”  It was published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in an edition of 300 and a copy is now worth £2,000.

Like Jung, other doctors also blamed Joyce for Lucia’s madness (Nora was never accused).  Like a medieval saint, Joyce penitentially embraced his guilt.  In October 1934, two years after her first breakdown, he said, “whether I go or stay I shall be blamed as the culprit.”  Ellmann explains that “he punished his imaginary guilt for her illness by a subservience to her wishes.”  But unlike Fitzgerald, Joyce could get drunk and also continue to write: “he matched his irresponsibility by night with a tremendous concentration upon his work by day.”  Lucia was the only person Joyce didn’t exploit to help with his novel, and his provisional title, Work in Progress, continued to progress.  Nora thought he was wasting his time and disdainfully called Finnegans Wake “that chop suey he’s writing.”

In Ulysses, Milly Bloom has been studying photography.  In the dark months of 1935, when Lucia had refused to eat, Joyce sent her a camera and gave her tender encouragement: “You are wasting your breath always telling me you are stupid.  I don’t believe it. . . . Do not give way to moments of melancholy.  One fine day or other everything will change for you.  And sooner than you might believe. . . .  But you must know, dear Lucia, that you never are and never will be, absent from our loving thoughts.”  When Joyce died in January 1941, Lucia felt he was temporarily absent and still alive, and hoped for a timely resurrection: “What is he doing under the ground, that idiot?  When will he decide to come out?  He’s watching us all the time.”

Despite all the long years of expense, worry, doctors and treatments, Lucia’s mysterious illness was incurable and she remained insane.  In March 1951, a month before Nora died, Lucia, supervised by Joyce’s patron Harriet Weaver, entered St. Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, 70 miles northwest of London.  (The English poet John Clare had been confined there from 1841 until his death in 1864.)  In the 1950s, Lucia was treated with drugs that calmed her down.  She died there after a long confinement in 1982, exactly one hundred years after her father’s birth in 1882.

There were striking similarities between the pathetic lives and desperate madness of Zelda and Lucia.  Both families were plagued by insanity.  Nora Joyce had a nervous breakdown in the summer of 1917; Helen, the wife of Joyce’s son Giorgio, also suffered a mental collapse.  Lucia, like Zelda, was catatonic and set fires.  She suddenly ran away, experienced sexual mania, and tried to arouse men by sitting on their laps and unbuttoning their trousers.  Both Fitzgerald and Joyce tried to alleviate the pain by giving them luxurious presents: a jewelled watch for Zelda, a fur coat for Lucia.  They spent as much as three-quarters of their income on expensive medical treatments that always failed to cure the patients.  Each hopeless woman, as Joyce noted, has been “a victim to one of the most elusive diseases known to man and unknown to medicine.”

Joyce later lamented, “the medical faculty of half Europe has very considerately and very considerably lightened my bag of marbles to the extent of about £5000 in the last 4 1/2 years and see the result.  Un bel niente!” (“a beautiful nothing”).  During that time, her biographer writes, “she had had twenty-four doctors, twelve nurses and eight companions, and had been in three institutions.”  Like Fitzgerald, Joyce did not deny his guilt, but eagerly emphasised it.  Worries about their patients forced both writers into heavy drinking and alcoholism.  The wife and daughter both impeded and inspired their novels.  During his wild pas de deux with Zelda, Fitzgerald portrayed her in Tender Is the Night.  Joyce portrayed Lucia in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and many friends thought his last novel was as crazy as her behaviour.  When Fitzgerald met Joyce in Paris in July 1928 he expressed his adoration by offering to jump out of a window.  Rather alarmed, Joyce said, “That young man must be mad—I’m afraid he’ll do himself an injury some day.”

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024.  43 Ways of Looking at Hemingway will appear in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out in the spring of 2026.

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