Dust jacket photograph for Save Me the Waltz; this may be the photograph Zelda asked Scott to send her in Letter 124 (p. 161). Courtesy of Princeton University Library
When you’re worried about one thing, think of how far ahead on worry you were from the last time you felt as strongly—
Love, dear
Zelda
In May 1932, Scott rented a fifteen-room Victorian house called La Paix in Towson, Maryland, outside of Baltimore. At first, Zelda’s doctors allowed her to spend her mornings there and return to Phipps in the afternoon, making her transition from the hospital to her new home a slow and carefully monitored one. On June 26, she left Phipps and joined Scott and Scottie at La Paix, where they lived for the next year and half. Far from well, Zelda remained under the care of her Johns Hopkins doctors, even though she was no longer in residence. Her pride over her novel, which was published in October, was soon dampened, however, by harsh reviews and poor sales. Zelda earned only $120.73 from the 1932 sales of the novel, a sum she received nearly a year later.
For all the hope Scott and Zelda still held for restoring their lives together, the next months saw them deteriorate further. Scott, tired and discouraged, drank more; furthermore, he suffered from recurring chronic tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized. Zelda hated his drinking and resented and resisted the hypervigilance with which he tried to schedule her days and tell her what she could and could not write about. They often fought bitterly. Yet, as Matthew J. Bruccoli writes in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, their astonishing closeness was still apparent: “At ‘La Paix’ there were frequent arguments during which the Fitzgeralds shouted at each other, but there were also interludes of tenderness. Visitors were impressed by the Fitzgeralds’ enjoyment of each other’s wit and the way they responded to recollections of past happiness” (330).
Problems continued to plague the Fitzgeralds in 1933. In June, there was a fire at La Paix, which apparently started when Zelda burned some old clothes in a neglected upstairs fireplace. Although the house was badly damaged, Scott did not want to move until he finished his novel. Working diligently, in nearly uninhabitable surroundings, he completed the first draft in September, made revisions, and sent the manuscript off to Maxwell Perkins at Scribners at the end of October. That summer and fall were all the more difficult for the Fitzgeralds because of personal losses. In August, Zelda’s brother, Anthony, committed suicide, and in September, the Fitzgeralds’ close friend Ring Lardner died. In addition, when Scott and Zelda, following Dr. Meyer’s recommendation, took a brief vacation to Bermuda, Scott came down with an inflammation of the lungs and had to finish the revisions to his novel in bed. In December, the Fitzgeralds moved to 1307 Park Avenue in Baltimore. Although the trip to Bermuda temporarily revived Zelda, the return to Baltimore saw her decline once again.
The three letters from Scott to Zelda that follow all were apparently written during the period they lived together at La Paix. The second of these appears to be in response to Zelda’s desire to have more control over her routine. She resented Scott’s watchful attention to the daily details of her recovery; he, on the other hand, remained fearful that Zelda would repeat her pattern of manic work, followed by depression and psychosis. This letter also appears to be an attempt to challenge some of Zelda’s thoughts and actions, ones that he believed led to her relapses. Whether or not he gave this letter to Zelda is unknown. In the third letter, from 1933, Scott again emphasized the importance of a schedule and suggested that returning to the clinic for a few days might be an option when Zelda felt the need to withdraw from the family for short periods.
AL (fragment), 2 pp. |
|
[1932] |
[La Paix, Towson, Maryland] |
Honey, when you come out into the world again I wish you would try to realize what I can only describe as the:
Nub (NUB) of Experience.
The fact that in your efforts you have come up twice against insuperable facts[,] 1st against Lucienne[,] 2nd against me—both times against long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we ie Lucienne + I were seven, probably;
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 repeat the phrase that became anathema in my ears during the last months of our trying to make a go of it “expressing oneself[.]” I can only say there isn’t any such thing. It simply doesn’t exist. What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown—you came to the threshold of that discovery + then decided in the face of all logic you would crash the gate. You succeeded merely in crashing yourself, almost me, + Scotty, if I hadn’t interposed.
129. TO ZELDA |
AL, 11 pp. |
[1933?] |
[La Paix, Towson, Maryland] |
Do you feel that you are now able to be your own doctor—to judge what is good for you?
If no—do you know what should be done?
Should you be in a clinic do you think?
Would a trained nurse help?
An experienced one?
An inexperienced one?
If you were really not yourself and in a fit of temper or depression would you ask the judgement of such of [a?] woman or would you come to me?
Are these bursts of temper part of the “derangement” you mentioned?
Or are they something that is in your surroundings?
If they are in your sickness how can you accept another’s opinion when the nature of your attack has taken away your power of reasoning?
If they are in your home surroundings in what practical ways would you like your home surroundings changed?
Must there [be] big changes which seriously affect the life of husband and children?
If you feel that you are now able to be your own doctor—to judge what is good for you.
Of what use would a nurse be?
Would she be a sort of clock to remind you it was time for this and that?
If that function in your husband is annoying would it not be more annoying in the case of a stranger in your own house?
Is there not an idea in your head sometimes that you must live close to the borders of mental trouble in order to create at your best?
Which comes first your health or your work?
Are you in delicate health?
If a person sacrificed some of their health to their work is that within their human rights?
If a sick person sacrificed some of their health to their work is that within their human rights?
If a sick person sacrificed some of their health to their work and sacrificed others also would that be within their rights
If the other people felt that they would not willingly be sacrificed could they refuse?
What recourse would the determined worker have if well?
What recourse if sick?
Must he not wait until he is well bringing such matters to a decision, because being sick he will be inevitably worsted in trying to infringe on the rights of others?
Is there any enlightened opinion which considers that you are liable to be strong for another year?
Can you make yourself strong by any means except the usual ones?
Are you an exceptional person who will be cured differently from anyone else
Will you make the usual return to society for its protection of you during your sickness and convalesence
Is the return usually the virtues of patience and submissiveness in certain important regards?
In case the ill person (suppose a man with small pox) runs around hurting and infecting others will society tend to take stern measures to protect itself?
Are you ill?
Are your husband and child, in their larger aspects, society?
If one of them were contageously sick and wanted to return to the home during convalescence would you let him infect the other and yourself?
Who would be your natural guides in determining what was the end of convalescence?
Did “good behavior” in the clinic preceed your previous recovery?
Was it better behavior than any other?
Did not furious activity and bad behavior preceed the previous denoument at Valmont and Prangins?
Are you or have you been ill?
Does furious activity lead often to consequent irritability even in well persons?
Would not this be terribly accentuated by an ill person?
Does a person recovering from heart trouble start by moving boulders
Is “I have no time” an answer to the previous questions?”
What is the order of importance of everything in your mind—
Is your health first?
Is it always first?
Is it first in the midst of artistic creation when the two are in conflict?
If it is not, and you should be well, should society coerce you into putting health first?
If you should be ill should society so act upon you?
Does your child have the same priviledges when ill as when well?
Are not lessons stopped?
Is this logical?
What does logic mean?
Is it important to be logical?
If not, is it important to be dramatic?
Is it important to have been dramatic?
If an illness becomes a nuisance to society does society act sternly?
Is it important to be dramatic or logical in the future?
Is an ill person or a well person more capable of being logical or dramatic?
Can a very ill person try to be only a little ill?
Why does madness not enlarge the artistic range?
What is disaccociation of ideas?
How does it differ in an artistic person and in a mentally ill person?
Who pays for illness?
Who pays in suffering?
Does only the ill person suffer?
When you left Prangins would you have taken any patient there into your home if they came in a refractory way
Would you constitute yourself a doctor for them?
Suppose the choice was between two patients and one patient would accept your judgement while the other one said he would not[.] Which would you choose
When doctors recommend a normal sexual life do you agree with them?
Are you normal sexually?
Are you retiscent about sex?
Are you satisfied sexually with your husband?
Newspaper picture of the Fitzgeralds on their lawn after the fire at La Paix in June 1933; manuscripts and paintings were destroyed. Courtesy of Princeton University Library
130. TO ZELDA |
ALS, 2 pp. |
[Summer 1933?] |
[La Paix, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest: I’m writing because I don’t want to start the day with an arguement—though I had thought that what has become controversial was settled before you left the clinic.
Darling when you shut yourself away for twenty four hours it is not only very bad for you but it casts a pall of gloom and disquiet over the people who love you. To spend any reasonable time in your room has been agreed upon as all right, but this shouldn’t be so exagerated that you can’t manage the social side any further than sitting at table. It would help everything if you could enter a little into Scotty’s life here on the place, and your reluctance to play tennis and swim is a rather reckless withdrawal; for whatever of the normal you subtract from your life will be filled up with brooding and fantasy. If I know that there is excercise scheduled for morning and afternoon and a medical bath in the afternoon + that you have half an hour for us after supper and you stop work at ten, my not very exigent list, insisted on by Dr. Myers, is complete. When you throw it out of joint I can only sit and wait for the explosion that will follow—a situation not conducive to work or happiness. If this week has been too much it is easy to return to the clinic for three days and it needn’t be done in a spirit of despair any more than your many returns to Prangins.
I believe however you are not giving it, giving us, a fair trial here. If I didn’t love you so much your moods wouldn’t affect me so deeply and excitedly. We can’t afford scenes—the best protection is the schedule and then the schedule and again the schedule, and you’ll get strong without knowing it.
S.
CRAIG HOUSE, BEACON, NEW YORK, MARCH—MAY 1934
On February 12, 1934, Zelda suffered her third nervous breakdown and was readmitted to Phipps Clinic. Dangerously thin, she required almost complete bed rest and was under continuous observation to prevent possible suicide attempts. She failed to improve at Phipps, and, at Dr. Forel’s suggestion, she was transferred to Craig House on March 8. It was an expensive country club-like hospital, occupying 350 acres on the Hudson River, in Beacon, an hour-and-a-half drive north of New York City. That spring, despite ill health and every possible strain, both Scott and Zelda achieved important professional accomplishments: Scott saw the novel he had been struggling with for almost ten years, Tender Is the Night, published; Zelda, who had begun to take her artwork more seriously, had a small exhibit of her paintings in New York City, arranged by art dealer Cary Ross, a friend of the Fitzgeralds.
The letters that follow discuss these events. Tender Is the Night first appeared in four installments in Scribner’s Magazine; the book itself was published on April 12, 1934. Zelda read the serialized version, then the published book. Her letters give her responses to the novel as she read it; she encouraged Scott when the mixed reviews disappointed him. She also wrote about her own aspirations—writing and painting. Although appreciative of the lovely Craig House estate and grateful to Scott for providing so generously for her, she often insisted that the accommodations were far too extravagant and encouraged Scott to place her in a less expensive institution.
Wire [Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
BRM16 38 DL=BEACON NY 12 1023A
SCOTT FITZGERALD=
1307 PARK AVE=
WOULD MRS OWENS PACK ALL MY CLOTHES INCLUDING RIDING THINGS TENNIS AND GOLF CLUBS FIRST I WANT MY OIL PAINTS FROM HOPKINS ALSO TEXT BOOKS ON ART AND THE DANTE LOVE AND THANKS THIS IS A LOVELY PLACE=
ZELDA.
132. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 2 pp. |
[March 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do.
Please ask Mrs. Owens to hurry with my paints. There are so many winter trees exhibiting irresistible intricacies, and there are many neo-classic columns, and there are gracious expanses of snow and the brooding quality of a gray and heavy sky, all of which make me want terribly to paint.
I have been working on the hotels,62 and will mail them as soon as they’re finished. Also what of my book I get done for you to have typed.63 Be sure to write me what you think of the chapters you read.
Do-Do:
It was so sad to see your train pull out through the gold sheen of the winter afternoon. It is sad that you should have so many things to worry you and make you unhappy when your book is so good and ought to bring you so much satisfaction. I hope the house won’t seem desolate and purposeless; if you want to, you could board Scottie at Bryn Mawr,64 or maybe even the Turnbulls65 and stay in New York with the people you’re fond of.66
This is a beautiful place; there is everything on earth available and I have a little room to paint in with a window higher than my head the way I like windows to be. When they are that way, you can look out on the sky and feel like Faust in his den, or an alchemist or anybody you like who must have looked out of windows like that. And my own room is the nicest room I’ve ever had, any place—which is very unjust, considering the burden you are already struggling under.
Dear—I will see you soon. Why not bring Scottie up for Easter? She’d love it here with the pool and the beautiful walks. And I promise you absolutely that by then I will be much better—and as well as I can.
Dear:
Please remember that you owe it to the fine things inside you to get the most out of them.
Work, and don’t drink, and the accomplished effort will perhaps open unexpected sources of happiness, or contentment, or whatever it is you are looking for—certainly a sense of security—If I were you’d [you], I’d dramatize your book—yourself. I feel sure it contains a good subtle drama suitable to the purposes of the theatre Guild: a character play hinging on the two elements within the man: his worldly proclivities and his desire to be a distinguished person—I wish I could do it.
Love, dear—
Zelda
133. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 6 pp. |
[March 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dear Scott:
I quite realize the terrible financial pressure of the last year for you, and I am miserable that this added burden should have fallen on your shoulders. All the beauty of this place must cost an awful lot of money and maybe it would be advisable to go somewhere more compatible with our present means. Please do not think that I don’t appreciate the strain you are under. I would make the best possible effort to rehabilitate myself under any less luxurious conditions that might be more expedient.
Please don’t give up Scottie’s music. Though she is at an age when she resents the practice, I feel sure that later she will get an immense satisfaction out of the piano. About the French, do as you think best. She will never forget it at her age and could pick it up again quickly as soon as she heard it around her
It’s too bad about Willie[.] She was the best cook we’ve had in years and I’ve always held Essie in suspect: there’ve been such a long succession of rows over missing things since she became part of the household.
The trunk arrived. I am very much oblidged. However, I would also like my blue bathing-suit which may be in the box with moth balls in the back room on the third floor, and also the rest of my clothes: a blue suit, a green checked skirt and the evening clothes. Also please ask Mrs Owens to send me a $2 pointed camel’s hair brush from Webers and the two unfinished canvases from Phipps, and a pound can of Weber’s permalba.
Dear: I am not trying to make myself into a great artist or a great anything. Though you persist in thinking that an exaggerated ambition is the fundamental cause of my collapse, knowing the motivating elements that now make me wa[nt] to work I cannot agree with you and Dr Forel—though, of cource, the will-to-power may have played a part in the very beginning. However, five years have passed since then, and one matures. I do the things I can do and that interest me and if you’d like me to give up everything I like to do I will do so willingly if it will advance matters any. I am not headstrong and do not like existing entirely at other peoples expense and being a constant care to others any better than you like my being in such a situation.
If you feel that it is an imposition on Cary to have the exhibition, the pictures can wait. I believe in them and in Emerson’s theory about good-workman-ship. If they are good, they will come to light some day.
About my book: you and the doctors agreed that I might work on it. If you now prefer that I put it aside for the present I wish you would be clear about saying so. The short story is a form demanding too concentrated an effort for me at present and I might try a play, if you are willing and don’t approve of the novel or something where the emotional purpose can be accomplished by accurate execution of an original cerebral conception. Please say what you want done, as I really do not know. As you know, my work is mostly a pleasure for me, but if it is better for me to take up something quite foreign to my temperament, I will—Though I can’t see what good it does to knit bags when you want to paint pansies, maybe it is necessary at times to do what you don’t like.
Tilde ’phoned that she and John would drive over to see me. I will be very glad to see them.
Love
Zelda
AL, 3 pp. |
|
[March 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dear, Monsieur, D. O;
The third installment is fine. I like immensely that retrospective part through Nicole’s eyes—which I didn’t like at first because of your distrust of polyphonic prose. It’s a swell book.
It seems very careless of the Murphy’s to have got old; like laundry in the corridors of a pleasure-resort hotel. They could get tragic, or join a curious sect, or escape to islands strung on strange parallels of latitude but to expose the mechanics of the glamour of life in slowed-up motion rings of indecency.
I am sorry Charlie67 is still so charming. I have never felt Charlie to be a legitimate attraction somehow and suspect him of not really being from Borneo at all, though no amount of research yields up the slightest false whiskers. However, he has a parasitical flavor—
I am glad you are a lion. Dr. Rennie says you are a lion so I am glad. You deserve to be. I hope there will be enough Christians left to make it worth while; though there is some talk amongst the lions of eeking out the winter with Barnum Bailey—just for the experience—
Borrow $1000 from your mother and write a play. It will make her feel very virtuous and will become what she has been waiting for all these years. The play will be a big success; if it isnt you can stick in some propaganda. Then you can support Mr. Lorimer68 in his old age without the stories.
I wish I could write stories. I wish I could write something sort of like the book of revelations: you know, about how everything would have come out if we’d only been able to supply the 3-letter word for the Egyptian god of dithryambics. Something all full of threats preferably and then a very gentle confession at the end admitting that I have enfeebled myself too much by my own vehemence to ever become very frightened again.
If Scottie sneezes you will find the proper method of preceedure in Louis Carrol; the Katzenjammers also are full of constructive ideas about bringing up children. Only you have to have children who explode when banged with a stick to use the latter as a text book—
Please ask Cary to come to see me if he wants to. And tell him that I am sorry I was rude and that if he will lend me the Satie69 I will make him a pink and dreamy picture filled with the deepest appreciation of the most superficial emotions—
D. O:
You don’t love me—But I am counting on Pavloff’s dogs to make that kind of thing all right—and, in the mean-time, under the added emotional stress of the break-up of our state, perhaps the old conventions will assume an added poignancy. Besides, personal love should be incidental music, maybe. Besides, anything personal was never the objective of our generation—we were to have thought of ourselves heroicly; we agreed in the Plaza Grill the pact was confirmed by the shaking of Connie Bennets70 head and the sonority of Ludlow’s71 premature gastritis—
135. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[March 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do—
Mrs Owens wrote me that she’d sent everything I asked for including the Key Memorial,72 which was very nice of her. I hope your story goes well and is not too terrific an effort. D. O—I wish you didn’t have to write what you don’t want to—I do the thing for the New Yorker and it grows longer and longer but maybe you can sell it to something. Of cource, I will send it to you to have typed.
Yesterday Mrs Killan and I dug a few holes in some golf balls and I almost uprooted a gigantic oak with what used to be a chip-shot. Next week, the course opens, and we will get in some practice of some sort even if we have to use La Crosse nets.
Also we play bridge. You know how I play: I sit and wait for Divine Guidance to show me the difference between a finesse and a (insert any technical term you know here). Then when I’ve made the mistake I pretend I was thinking of something else and utter as convincing lamentations as I can at my absent-mindedness.
It’s so pretty here. The ground is shivering with snow-drops and gentians. I suppose you wouldn’t like to rest, but I wish you could for a while in the cool apple-green of my room. The curtains are like those in John Bishop’s poem to Elspeth and beyond the lawn never ends. Of cource, you can walk to where young men in bear-cat roadsters are speeding to whatever Geneva Mitchell’s73 dominate the day—but mostly we walk the other way where tumbling villages prop themselves on the beams of the afternoon sun. We have tea, and many such functions to fulfill. It’s an awfully nice place.
Please send the book.74
Love
Zelda
136. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[Early April 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I have now got to the Rosemary-Rome episode. It makes me very sad—largely because of the beautiful, beautiful writing. Recapitulation of casual youth in the tenderer terms one learns to cling to later is always moving. You know I love your prose style: it is so fine and balanced and you know how to achieve the emphasis you want so poignantly and economicly. It’s a fine book, suggestive to me of these black tree formations, aspiring or despairing, scattering their white petals to make another valley spring.
Please don’t be alarmed if I don’t write; there is much outside to look at, and my room inside reflects the softness of new greens and harbors the squares of mountain sun—
I’m so happy that it is hot again.
Mrs Killam and I hammered at golf-balls yesterday, taking enough swings to have built the Roxy Center—at least I did. She plays very well. You know my psychological attitude toward golf: it was just the sort of thing they would have brought into England during the reign of Chas. II. The French probably played it in high-heels with stomachs full of wine and cheated a little—
I hope all goes well at home. All you really have to do for Scottie is see that she does not go to Bryn Mawr in dirty blouses. Also, she will not voluntarily wash her ears: I noticed when she was here and hope Louise Perkins75 didn’t. I can’t say that I blame her but some people might, so am afraid you will have to go through a thorough inspection every now and then—
Love
Zelda
137. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 1 p. |
[Early April 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Mr. Scott Fitzgerald
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Md.
Dear—The book is grand. The emotional lift sustained by the force of a fine poetic prose and the characters subserviated to forces stronger than their interpretations of life is very moving. It is tear-evoking to witness individual belief in individual volition succumbing to the purpose of a changing world. That is the purpose of a good book and you have written it. Those people are helpless before themselves and the prose is beautiful and there is manifest an integrity in the belief of both those expressions. It is a reverential and very fine book and the first literary contribution to what writers will be concerning themselves with some years from now.
Love
Zelda
138. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[c. April 12, 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do.
I watch the papers and no reviews. I can hardly wait to know what the critics will say of those “excursions into the frontiers of a social consciousness.” No matter what they say, it’s exquisite prose and a trip into unexploited fields so far as the material is concerned—So if Bunny76 wants to go on thinking about what he’s read of communism, don’t mind. Cadenced adventures of the human heart and an accurate picutre of the end of an era are, I imagine, what animated you to write the book and I wouldn’t care much about an opinion founded on a devitalized version of Christianity. He will think differently when Pavloff and people like that have opened up as mechanistic a universe as the Greek Atomists ever dreamed, only with proofs for everything. Yours is a beautiful and moving book. The man I meant for the clinician in the movies turned out to be Ratoff;77 and the leading man I liked was Paul Lukas,78 but maybe they aren’t famous enough. They’re swell actors, though.
I’m sorry about the income tax and the money I’m spending. I cannot see why I should sit in luxury when you are having such a struggle. Since there seems to be no way in which I can hasten my recovery, maybe it would be wise to try a cheaper place. I promise you I will not be discouraged by any such change you might make and, of cource, will do the best I can, anywhere. Beauty on display costs money, but, as Tolstoi discovered long before Einstein all things are relative and the universal qualities which really count are inherent in everything, individually. Tolstoi said, I believe, that when Peter was tired from the wars, his army palette felt as soft and sweet as the rose-leaves to which he had accustomed himself under more prosperous conditions.
I will send the New Yorker article as soon as I’ve corrected it— probably Tuesday. If they won’t take it maybe it will give you some pleasure to know what a lady thinks about while opening a barrel— an old barrel filled with long-forgotten contents
Love
Zelda
139. TO SCOTT (Mid-April 1934) |
ALS, 3 pp. [Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest D. O.:
I was afraid you might worry about some of the silly reviews which I have not seen until to-day. Please don’t. All the opinion which you respect has said everything you would like to have said about the book. It is not a novel about the simple and the inarticulate, nor are such a fitting subject for literature one of whose primary functions is to enrich the human mind. Anybody granted a certain talent can express direct action, or even emotion segregate[d] from the activities of the world of their day but to present the growth of a human tragedy resultant from social conditions is a big feat. To me, you have done it well and at the same time preserved the more simple beauties of penetrating poignancy to be found in the use of exquisite prose.
Don’t worry about critics—what sorrows have they to measure by or what lilting happiness with which to compare those ecstatic passages?
The atomists who followed Democritus said that quantity was what differentiated one thing from another—not quality—so critics will have to rise one day to the high points of good books. They cannot always live on reproductions of their own emotions in simple enough settings not to distract them: the poor boy having a hard time which is all very beautiful because of the poverty, etc.79
It’s a swell heart-breaking book, because the prose compels you to respond to the active situations—which is as it should be.
I am very worried about the finances. Please don’t hesitate to do anything that would relieve the strain on you.
Love
Zelda
140. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[Mid-April 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I was so worried that you would be upset about some of those reviews—What critics know about the psychology of a psychiatrist, I don’t know, but the ones I saw seemed absurd, taking little account of the fact that a novel not in 18 volumes can’t cover everything but must rely on the indicative[.] You know yourself that as people yours are moving and heart-rending creations; as instruments of your artistic purpose they arrive at an importance which they would otherwise not have had, and that is the function of characters in a novel, which is, after all, a way of looking at life[.] Do you suppose you could get Menken80 to write an intelligent review? The rest do not seem to know what they think beyond the fact that they have never thought of such problems before. And don’t let them discourage you. It is a swell evokation of an epoch and a very masterly presentation of tragedies sprung from the beliefs (or lack of them) of those times which bloomed from the seeds of despair planted by the war and of the circumstance dependent on the adjustment of philosophies. Woolcot81 might be good to review it, since he had some appreciation of the spectacle which it presents, but I have seen some very silly and absurd commentaries of his lately, and he may have succumbed to the pseudo-radical formulas of Kaufman and Gershwin82 by now.
Let Bromfield83 feed their chaotic minds on the poppy-seed of farm youth tragedies and let them write isolated epics lacking any epic quality save reverence[.] Yours is a story taking place behind the scenes, and I only hope that you will not forget that most of the audience has never been there.
Anyway, they all seem to realize that much thought and a fine equipment has gone into its making and maybe—if they only could understand—
D. O.—darling—having reached the people you wanted to reach, what more can you ask?84 Show man ship is an incidental consideration, after all—they have its glittering sequins in the circus and the Hippodrome and critics yelling for more in literature seems a little like babies crying for things they can’t have between meals—put cardboard cuffs on their elbows—Those antiquated methods are the only ones I know.
xxxx
Since writing your letter has come. Of cource, I missed all but a few reviews. Bill Warren has a swell sense of the dramatic and I hope he’ll separate out the points that will appeal to Mr. Mayer.85 My advice is to revert to the money-triangle as you can’t possibly use the incest. Or make the man a weak and charming figure from the first, always gravitating towards the center of things: which would lead him, when he was in the clinic, to Nicole and later to Rosemary. Regret could be the motif of the last section—Naturally, it’s only advice, and I don’t know if a male star would like to play something so far removed from Tarzan and those things about the desert where people are so brave, and only minor figures make mistakes
Love
Zelda
141. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[Mid-April 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Scott:
I am glad you did not let those undiscerning reviews upset you. You have the satisfaction of having written a tragic and poetic personal drama against the background of an excellent presentation of the times we matured in. You know that I have always felt that the chief function of the artist was to inspire feeling and certainly “Tender” did that. What people will live on for the next ten years I do not know: because, with the synchronization of light and sound and color (still embryonicly on display at the world’s Fair) there may be a tremendous revision of aesthetic judgments and responses. Some of the later movies have cinematic effects unachievable with a brush— all of which tends to a communistic conception of art, I suppose. In this case, I writing might become the most individualistic of all expressions, or a sociological organ.
Anyway, your book is a sustained and exalted piece of prose—
Bill Warren, in my opinion, is a silly man to get to transcribe its subtleties to a metier that is now commanding the highest talents: because people will be looking thus expecting to be carried along by visual emotional developments as well as story and you will be robbed of the inestimable value of your prose to raise and cut and break the tension. But you know better than I. In the movies, one symbolic device is worth a thousand feet of explanation (granted you haven’t at your disposal those expert technicians who have turned out some of the late stuff)[.] Go to see Ruth Chatterton and Adolph Menjou in that last thing about murder.86 It’s a swell straight psychological story—I simply thought that with all the stuff in your book so much could have been done: the funicular, the beach umbrellas, the garden high above the world, and in the end the two people swimming in darkness.
When Mrs O. sends
1) Dramatic Technique
2) Golden Treasury
3) Pavlowa’s87 Life
4) The Book on Modern Art, I will return Scottie’s Treasury. Until then, I have nothing to read as I can’t stand the Inferno or the pseudo-noble-simplicity of that book Dorothy P.88 gave me.
Won’t you ask her to? Also the paint from Webers. She said she would—They would mail it.
Love
Zelda—
142. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[Late April 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I’m so glad all the good people liked your book. It’s swell about Mary Column89 and Seldes90 and I can’t understand your not using Elliot’s opinion of your works91 in the adds. That man J. A. D. in the Times92 is the one I told you dismissed a novel completely on moral grounds not long ago. He is an imbecile and it would be a good thing if somebody attacked him. He knows nothing of art, aestheticly or sociologicly, or of anything that’s going on in the world to-day. However, you had already had a good review in the Times93 so what ho! Only it does make me sore to give people books to review who have no idea of the purpose behind them or of their artistic intent. I Hope you didn’t mind; it is such a fine book, as everybody else seems unanimously agreed.
Cary wrote that Ernest was back in N.Y.; that he had been to see my pictures. Why don’t you ask him down? You’ve got more room than people in the house and Mrs. Owens would get you a maid. He also said the Murphys bought the acrobats.94 I am going to paint a picture for the Murphy’s and they can choose as those acrobats seem, somehow, singularly inappropriate to them and I would like them to have one they liked. Maybe they aren’t like I think they are but I don’t see why they would like that Buddhistic suspension of mass and form and I will try to paint some mood that their garden has conveyed.
I wish I could see the review in the New Republic, Forum, etc. Won’t you send them? I’ll mail them back immediately.
And don’t pay any attention to that initialled moth-hole in the Times.
Apparently the Tribune man95 still believes that movie stars got there via the gutters of Les Miserables—But we can’t buy him a ticket to Hollywood, and, on the whole, it was an intelligent and favorable review—and he liked the book even if he didn’t know what it was about psychologicly. He will like it better when be reads it again.
I hope Ernest liked it; I guess Morley Callaghan is sore at having his adds reduced.96 Please send me a copy—
Love
Zelda
TL (CC), 3 pp. 1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, April 26, 1934. |
Forgive me for dictating this letter instead of writing it directly, but if you could see my desk at the moment and the amount of stuff that has come in you would understand.
The thing that you have to fight against is defeatism of any kind. You have no reason for it. You have never had really a melancholy temperament, but, as your mother said: you have always been known for a bright, cheerful, extraverting attitude upon life. I mean especially that you share none of the melancholy point of view which seems to have been the lot of Anthony and Marjorie.97 You and I have had wonderful times in the past, and the future is still brilliant with possibilities if you will keep up your morale, and try to think that way. The outside world, the political situation, etc., is still gloomy and it does effect everybody directly, and will inevitably reach you indirectly, but try to separate yourself from it by some form of mental hygiene—if necessary, a self-invented one.
Let me reiterate that I don’t want you to have too much traffic with my book, which is a melancholy work and seems to have haunted most of the reviewers. I feel very strongly about your re-reading it. It represents certain phases of life that are now over. We are certainly on some up-surging wave, even if we don’t yet know exactly where it’s heading.
There is no feeling of gloom on your part that has the slightest legitimacy. Your pictures have been a success, your health has been very much better, according to the doctors—and the only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice with its particular intimacies of inflection.
You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that the spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too— the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only. But, Swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fractured it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward. Forget the past— what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.
This sounds allegorical but is very real. I want you here. The sadness of the past is with me always. The things that we have done together and the awful splits that have broken us into war survivals in the past stay like a sort of atmosphere around any house that I inhabit. The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever, and you should feel like I do that they can be renewed, if not in a new spring, then in a new summer. I love you my darling, darling.
P.S.98 Did I tell you that, among others, Adele Lovett came in and bought a picture and so did Louise Perkins and the Tommy Daniels from St. Paul? Will see that the Dick Myers get one free.99
144. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[After April 26, 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Thanks for your long sweet letter: I have just finished part I of your book again. It is the most beautiful prose, without a wasted or irrelevant word. It is also very moving and a fine presentation of those sunlit places, which its bright glare finally faded and streaked—perhaps to dimmer nuances. In fact, Do-Do, it’s a swell book and well imbued with that sense of impersonal tragedy, as good books should be: of individual happiness drained to fill out the schemes for momentary pleasure-theories. Also, you have kept beautifully intact the personalities against so vivid a mise-en-scene that any lesser creations would have been submerged in the glitter. It is a beautiful book.
You seem afraid that it will make me recapitulate the past: remember, that at that time, I was immersed in something else—and I guess most of life is a re-hashing of the tragedies and happinesses of which it consisted in days before we started to promulgate reasons for their being so. Of cource, it is a haunting book—everything good is haunting because it calls to light something new in our consciousness
Scott: this place is most probably hidiously expensive. I do not want you to struggle through another burden like the one in Switzerland for my sake. You write too well. Also, you know that I live much within myself and would feel less strongly now than under normal circumstances about whatever you wanted to do. You have not got the right, for Scottie’s sake, and for the sake of letters to make a drudge of yourself for me.
I’m awfully glad the pictures go well: you know the ones that are yours and I gave those white anenomies to Dr. Rennie. Also I do not want that portrait of Egorowa sold. Cary has been so nice—Ask what he would like and I will try to paint it for him. I have just finished one of the Plage at Antibes. Maybe you’d like to swop it for your foot-ball players—though it is not so good—
Love
Zelda.
145. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[May 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest:
You sounded so all-in over the telephone. Please don’t. If you want to ally yourself with a progressive aesthetic movement, you will have to not pay any attention to those static commentaries on the moment which is the business of newspaper critics, etc. I read you that lovely passage from Aristotle about men loving their reasons for living more than what they loved. It was like Dick Diver. There is also a beautiful and moving passage in Plato concerning the political unsuccess of the oligarchy, tunocracy[?] etc; which seems relevant to your particular purpose. You will find the page turned down if you want to read it. It concerns the fallibility of human nature. It is very poignant and is what killed my curiosity to read Karl Marx. Your book is a beautiful and moving story of a man’s disillusionment and its relative values against the social back-ground in which he counts most. So don’t pay any attention to the people who have never felt the individual responsibility of conforming to opinions dealing in futures[?] or the necessity of passing judgment on the present but be glad that you have successfully recorded our times and an ego meeting as best it could the compromises that killed it, eventually.
Besides all of which, it is expressed in an ecstatic and aspirational prose that I guess most critics are too absorbed in earning a living to yield the tempo of journalism to—
It was silly to get Bill Warren to work on the scenario—but I hope it will be good. Having a certain flare for the dramatic the boy has chosen to use it for theatrics. Yours, is a psychological drama and I’m sure Dr. Rennie would have been of lots more help—because the material is all there: “the difference between what is and what might have been,” says Baker, makes a play.
However, it’s none of my business. What is my business is that, under the circumstances, I do not see how you can reasonably expect me to go on unworriedly spending god-knows-how-much-a-day when we haven’t got it to spend. You must realize to that one as ill as I am, one place is not very different from another and that I would appreciate your working whatever adjustments would rend[er] your life less difficult—
Love Zelda
146. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 3 pp. |
[May 1934] |
[Craig House, Beacon, New York] |
Dearest Do-Do
Whenever you are ready to make the change, I will be ready to go. I am awfully home-sick in spite of the beauties of this place. If you do not feel up to making the trip, I am sure Dr. Slocum100 could arrange some way that might spare you the expense of coming up after me.
Although Zelda’s letter reads lucidly, her handwriting reveals that her condition was worsening. Courtesy of Princeton University Library
D. O: you know that I do not feel as you do about state institutions. Dr. Myers and, I suppose, many excellent doctors did their early training there. You will have to conceal as much of this from Scottie as you can anyway. So, in the words of Ernest Hemmingway, save yourself. That is what I want you to do. You have had a terrible financial struggle lately, and if there were any way that I could relieve you of any part of the burden, you know how gladly I would contribute any cooperation—which seems[?] to be all I have to offer.
I am so glad your book is on the list of best sellers.101 Maybe now you will have some measure of that ease and security you have so long deserved. Anyway, I hope it sells and sells
Devotedly
Zelda
SHEPPARD AND ENOCH PRATT HOSPITAL, TOWSON, MARYLAND,
On May 19, 1934, Zelda transferred from Craig House to Sheppard-Pratt, where she would remain for nearly two years. The hospital grounds actually bordered the Turnbull estate and La Paix, where Zelda and Scott had lived earlier. Therefore, the countryside was familiar and reassuring to her; and Scott, who was still living at 1307 Park Avenue in Baltimore, was only a few minutes away. Unhappy that he had seen Zelda only twice while she was at Craig House, he reluctantly agreed to Zelda’s doctors’ request that he not visit her during the first two weeks. Zelda was deeply depressed, appeared apathetic, and began slipping into a frighteningly disoriented condition in which she experienced aural hallucinations. Empathizing with Zelda’s despair—which resembled his own, the publication of his novel having failed to lift him out of his depression—Scott tried to draw her back into sanity by encouraging her to organize her work.
Two gaps exist in this section of letters: first, from the fall of 1934 until February of 1935, during which Scott was allowed to make frequent visits to the hospital and Zelda was able to spend Christmas at home with Scott and Scottie, making letters unnecessary; and then again from the fall of 1935 to April 1936, when Zelda began alternating between a religious mania, during which she was often incoherent, and a depressive silence in which she spoke to no one. Meanwhile, Scott went through the motions of living and even had a brief affair with Beatrice Dance, a wealthy married woman he met in Asheville, North Carolina. But his own already problematic health weakened as he continued to drink. An April 1936 Ledger entry—“Me caring about no one nothing” (Ledger 197)—summed up his despair.
147. TO ZELDA |
TL (CC), 4 pp. 1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, May 31, 1934. |
Talked with Dr. Murdoch102 on the phone and he thought that you were worrying about my worrying about you—if you can get that complicated point. I am always worrying about you and Scottie when you are not near me but that is simply a temperamental peculiarity that I have gotten used to. It is just worrying for worrying’s sake and is not founded on any reality. Actually I am very cheered by the thought that you are within hearing distance again and am looking forward to the time when you will be closer than that. Life here has been very tranquil. Have made one of my usual mistakes in judgment in embarking on about five mutually exclusive enterprises: 1. a Post story,103 2. a second story for the Red Book,104 3. a funny offer from United Artists to jazz up some episode from Cellini’s biography to help the sale of the picture release which is imminent,105 4. an idea of staging Ring’s short plays— which has just come out with Gilbert Seldes doing the editing.106 I am thinking of lopping off the two last and getting down to business.
The trip to Virginia Beach was a complete flop as far as weather was concerned—we ran into what amounted to a very dismal mistral—and while, as you know, I always love to see the Taylor clan,107 things were all indoors. Perhaps it was just as well because Scottie, being inflicted with poison ivy on her bottom, didn’t have to see other people using the surf for a good time. However, I sat around and smoked too much and got no special profit out of the trip.
While I think of it I am enclosing a letter from Tommy Hitchcock108 which came with his check for the drawing he bought. I opened it by mistake.
To go back to domestic matters, Scottie is in good health generally and my plan is, roughly, to send her for a week that will elapse between her examinations and the beginning of a camp down to Norfolk with Cousin Ceci who would devote good attention to her and to board them at some reasonable hotel at Virginia Beach. That is to avoid a whole week here where I would have to spend much of my time playing nurse maid for her because I do not entirely like the way the children of this neighborhood behave when they run loose and the business of transportation out to the suburban districts is a little onerous especially on Saturday afternoons and Sundays when Mrs. Owens is not here. By the way she has just been invited to spend the week-end after examinations with the Ridgelys. About the camps, she seems to want to go to one of the bigger ones so I suppose she will go to either Aloha or Wyonegonic, both of which I started to investigate last year. I am still hoping that we can go to Europe toward the latter half of the summer, even if only for six weeks, whether we decide to go alone or leave Scottie in camp.
We went to tea at the Woodwards yesterday. I got into a heavy political argument with a Hitlerite. Then our incessant friend, Madam Swann,109 telephoned for Scottie and me to come there for dinner, which we did and which reinforced my feeling that she is a beheaded poullet trying to do her best but without any consistent method.
Honey, may I ask you seriously to control your reading, not going in so much for heavy books or books that refer you back to those dark hours in Paris? I know what ill effects on my ease, sleep, appetite, etc. can be caused by getting disturbed by something I’ve read and I should guess that would be doubly true in a case like yours where you are trying to get a real rest cure. However, the doctors will probably keep an eye on that.
148. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 2 pp. |
[Early June 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest:
I am so glad all goes as well as could be expected—and I am miserable in thinking of the unhappiness my illness has caused you. I will cooperate to the best of my ability with the doctors and do all that I can to achieve a quick recovery.
Darling—I feel very disoriented and lonely. I love you, dearheart. Please try to love me some in spite of these stultifying years of sickness—and I will compensate you some way for your love and faithfullness.
I’m sorry Scottie has had poison ivy. The other day when I kissed her good-bye the little school-child scent of her neck and her funny little hesitant smile broke my heart. Be good to her Do-Do.
Dr. Murdock tells me you will be here until fall. Darling: I want so to see you. Maybe sometimes before very long I will be well enough to meet you under the gracious shadows of these trees and we can look out on the distant fields to-gether. And I will be getting better—
Dearest Love
Zelda
ALS, 2 pp. |
|
[After June 9, 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do—
I was amused to read in the New Yorker the praise of Gilbert for his recognition of Ring.110 Never mind: your biography will be written. Dr. Ellgin111 said you wanted me to read more so I am reading: The Alchemist and Edward II—also I am absorbed in the travel adds. For $600 (2) dollars we could go to Oberamagau, tourist class via Berlin + Munich—including all expenses for a 3 wks trip. We could! I look nostalgicly on all the sun-burned people in the advertizements lolling on boats and beaches and think of the good times we only half appreciated. They are so young and soignées in the pictures.
It seems rather Proustian to be rambling these deep shades again so close to La Paix. It makes me sad, but it is a lovely landscape—the trees, and clouds like cotton-candy, very still and festive about the clover. And I think of your book and it haunts me. So beautiful a book.
I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest troubles were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot-dogs and dopes112 and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering bath-houses. Or we could go to the Japanese Gardens with Kay Laurel and waste a hundred dollars staging conceptions of gaiety. We could lie in long citroneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves. Dust and alfalfa in Alabama, pines and salt at Antibes, the lethal smells of city streets in summer, buttered pop-corn and axel grease at Coney Island and Virginia beach—and the sick-sweet smells of old gardens at night, verbena or phlox or night-blooming stock—we could see if all those are still there.
It is rather disquieting to read of the importance of bangs and linen handkerchiefs, new brands of perfume and new lines to bathing-suits in the papers. I wish I had something—D. O!
When are you coming to see me?
Love, darling, and love to my sweet little Scottie
Zelda
150. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 1 p. |
[June 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do—
I miss you so. I look out over this dreamy summer panorama and I miss you. I think of the leaves rustling about the top of the gums at “La Paix” and I am so sorry for the unhappy times we had in that house and I am lonesome for the sense that you are near. These billowy blue skies dragging the hot fields behind like some fantastic dredge for the June hours and the rhodendrun so pompously bursting the shadows overwhelm me with a sense of how many nice things there are. And I wish we could be going some place together—
Mrs Turnbull sent me a lovely basket of flowers a couple of weeks ago. Could Mrs. Owen’s phone and thank her for me?
I suppose Scottie has gone. I hate to think of you all alone in the house. Why don’t you go some nice place for summer? All gay with guitars, a world swung above black, reflecting water beneath a dance pavillion would make you feel young again—or maybe some new way.
If you’ll send Scottie’s address I’d like to write her when I’m better. I hope she didn’t disappoint you in school.
Love, my darling—
Zelda
TL (CC), 4 pp. |
|
|
1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, June 13, 1934. |
Dear Zelda:
I am dictating this letter because there is so much that it’s got to cover and I want you to have it there for reference because each point is important.
First and foremost I called Perkins this morning on an idea that I have had for a long time which is the publication of a representative group of your short pieces.113 I want to do this if only for the salutary effect on you of keeping your hand in during this period of inaction. I did not call Max with the idea of getting him to publish such a collection which, since he is committed to an amalgamation of mine for the same season,114 he naturally would shy away from it but with the idea that he could suggest a publisher who would take a chance on the idea. I break off here to include a suggestion for the general line up of the book:
Table of Contents
Introduction by F. Scott Fitzgerald (about 500 words)
I. Eight Women |
(These character sketches and stories appeared in College Humor, Scribner’s and Saturday Evening Post between 1927 and 1931, one of them appeared under my name but actually I had nothing to do with it except for suggesting a theme and working on the proof of the completed manuscript. This same cooperation extends to other material gathered herein under our joint names, though often when published in that fashion I had nothing to do with the thing from start to finish except supplying my name.) |
(about 2000 words) |
|
The Girl the Prince Liked |
" 2500 " |
The Southern Girl |
" 2250 " |
The Girl with Talent |
" 3500 " |
The Millionaire’s Girl |
" 8000 " |
Miss Bessie115 |
" 4000 " |
A Couple of Nuts |
" 4000 " |
(There will also be joined to this two hitherto unpublished stories which are also character studies of modern females.)116
II. Three Fables117 (estimated about 5000 words)
The Drought and the Flood
A Workman
The House
III. Recapitulation
Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—
Auction Model 1934
All in all about 50,000 words. This will give you plenty of work for the next three or four weeks if you can find time for it, especially that item of the two possible stories which I am afraid will have to go through some more revision to measure up to the rest. I am having Mrs. Owens send you (a) All living copies of your Mary McCall story.
(b) All living copies of your Katherine Littlefield story.118
In the first case I think you have got to cut out the mystical element about the dogs because the story itself is so haunted by suggestion of more or less natural vice that the introduction of the supernatural seems excessive and breaks the pattern. In the second case my feeling is that it is largely a question of cutting “down to its bare bones.” I am seldom wrong about the value of a narrative and feel that my continued faith in this one is not misplaced. It may take two workings over, but the first one is undoubtedly stripping it to its girders and then seeing what, if any, plaster you want to slap on it. These two stories would seem to be necessary to make up the bulk of a volume, the aim of which is to compete with such personal collections of miscellany as Dorothy Parker’s, etc. The very fact that the material is deeply personal rather than detached and professional make it expedient that it be presented in some such way as this.
This letter has been interrupted by having a phone conversation with the small publisher (respectable, but with119
152. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 3 pp. |
[After June 14, 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Do-Do you are so sweet to do those stories for me. Knowing the energy and interest you have put into other people’s work, I know how much trouble you make appear so easy. Darling—
I will correct the stories as soon as I can—though you know this is a very regimented system we live under with every hour accounted for and not much time for outside interests. There was a better, later version of the dance story—but maybe I can shift this one since I remember it.
You talk of the function of art. I wonder if anybody has ever got nearer the truth than Aristotle: he said that all emotions and all experience were common property—that the transposition of these into form was individual and art. But, God, it’s so involved by whether you aim at direct or indirect appeals and whether the emotional or the cerebral is the most compelling approach, and whether the shape of the edifice or the purpose for which it is designated is paramount that my conceptions are in a sad state of flux. At any rate, it seems to me the artists business is to take a willing mind and guide it to hope or despair contributing not his interpretations but a glimpse of his honestly earned scars of battle and his rewards. I am still adamant against the interpretive school. Nobody but educators can show people how to think—but to open some new facet of the stark emotions or to preserve some old one in the grace of a phrase seem nearer the artistic end. You know how a heart will rise or fall to the lilt of an aladen troche or the sonorous dell of an o—and where you will use these business secrets certainly depends on the author’s special evaluations. That was what I was trying to accomplish with the book I began: I wanted to say “This is a love story—maybe not your love story—maybe not even mine, but this is what happened to one isolated person in love. There is no judgment.”—I don’t know—abstract emotion is difficult of transcription, and one has to find so many devices to carry a point that the point is too often lost in transit.
I wrote you a note which I lost containing the following facts
1) The Myers have gone to Antibes with the Murphys—
2) Malco[l]m Cowley arrested for rioting in N.Y.
3) I drink milk, one glass of which I consider equal to six banannas under water or two sword-swallowings—
There didn’t seem to be anything else to write you except that I love you. We have a great many activities of the kind one remembers pleasantly afterwards but which seem rather vague at the time like pea-shelling and singing. For some reason, I am very attached to this country-side. I love the clover fields and the click of base-ball bats in the deep green cup of the field and the sky as blue and idyllic as parts of your prose. I keep hoping that you will be in some of the cars that ruffle the shade of the sycamores. Dr. Ellgin said you would come soon.
It will be grand to see Mrs. Owens—I wish it were you and Scottie. Darling.
Don’t you think “Eight Women” is too big a steal from Dreiser120—I like, ironicly, “My Friends” or “Girl Friends” better. Do you suppose I could design the jacket. It’s very exciting.
My reading seems to have collapsed at “The Alchemist.” I really don’t care much for characters named for the cardinal sins or cosmic situations. However I will get on with it—
Thanks again about the book—and everything—In my file there are two other fantasies and the story about the judge to which I am partial—and I would be most grateful if you would read “Theatre Ticket”121 to see if it could be sold to a magazine maybe—
Love
Zelda.
Why didn’t you go to reunion?
Do you think the material is too dissimilar for a collection? It worries me.
ALS, 2 pp. |
|
[Late June 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Mon chère Monsieur:
Here are some titles—Maybe you can paste them on the unidentifiable bottles in the medicine cabinet if they don’t seem to apply
1) Even Tenor
2) Rainy Sunday
3) How It Was.
4) Ways It Was—
I admit frankly that they are not much good, but then neither am I at quick invention. I will let you know if the next brain storm should bring to light something more pertinent—
“Authors Wife” sounds as if it’s an intimate revelation of the blacker side of how we writers live. Again I admit frankly it makes me sick. For your book,122 would it be a good idea to add up how much those stories brought in and call the book “Eighty Thousand Dollars”—ho! Or “Words”—(sounds to experimental)—and I don’t know what to call anything. Had I a pet canary, he should be nameless—Call it a day—There are some fine ideas for titles in the Victor record catalogue—which is where I found “Save Me the Waltz”—
Couldn’t Scottie come swimming next time with Mrs Owens—if she’s back? I keep hoping you’ll show up but you don’t—and neither does Christmas or other holidays before their time, I suppose.
I am become an expert seamstress and laundress and am, in fact, thoroughly equipped to make you exactly the kind of wife you most detest. However, I am going to read Karl Marx so we can give a parade if the day of exodus ever arrives—bombs on the house, and a cigar for every Lord Mayor you hit.
Well—
Recevez, Monsieur, mes felicitations les plus distinguées—
And many thanks for the perfectly useless check to Mrs Owens. Now that the blind tiger is no more, I couldn’t think of any place to cash it so I tore it up as emotionally and dramaticly as $34.50 seemed to warrant—Of cource, a hundred would have made a better scene—
With deepest devotion—
Love
Zelda.
154. TO SCOTT |
AL, 1 p. |
[Summer 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do—
I am so glad your letter sounded so well and cheerful. It made me very homesick—your sweet boyancy always holds so much promise of bright and happy things in such a vital world. It will be grand to see you and Scottie again. This month has begun, inevitably, to seem rather endless, though I realize that that is an ungrateful attitude.
Here, we pursue our ways. There is nothing to report—croquet in the late afternoon sun while the big trees swing, rocking shadows down the lawn. Life is idle. Yesterday we took a long ride around familiar roads and it seemed so unreal not to be going home to La Paix—Men rake the rhythm of summer through the clods of a new putting green; we play base-ball, and in the distance the fields conform to futurists patterns and mash each other lop-sided in their scramble down the valley.
I wrote Mrs. Turnbull; I wrote her an eulogy on the iris. Passing the old barn, the place has, in spite of everything, the pleasantest associations. I am sorry it was such a night-mare to you. I wish we knew what we were going to do—and when—and how long
It’s grand about the books. Judging from the papers, the British Empire seems to be succumbing to a cruel nemesis—I hope the book will have a big sale. Darling, darling,—you deserve something so nice. I wish I had it to offer you, and maybe I will find something inside myself for you to love—when I am better.123
ALS, 1 p. |
|
[Late Summer/Early Fall 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Darling:
I am so glad you went to Doctor Hamman124—Your legs were so thin that day and I hate to think of you working and working until your clothes seem so patheticly too big—I wish you’d go away with Max125 and fill them full of breezes from a cool nocturnal forest. You could have pine trees in a cloister and little inlays of the brightest saphire twilight and there could [be] cascades making vowel sounds for you to fish in. And the water could churn the light to a lovely foam—and you could be going through motions to which you are unused and that always makes the whole world seem an experimental process.
There’s nothing to put in a letter except the summer clouds and the sky billowing above the tennis courts. I play all day and am inaugurating the charming custom of paying no attention at all to the lines. The first leaves are falling on the waters of Meadowbrook—and I think of Gatsby on his fine pneumatic mattress—and of you writing in rooms in France with late fires burning till morning and in the stereotype blur of 59th street and at La Paix behind the vines
I’m sad because I can’t write—
Love and Love and Love,
darling
Zelda
156. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[October 1934] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do—
Thanks for your letter. Since you are slowly dissolving into a mythical figure over the long period of years that have elapsed since two weeks ago, I will tell you about myself:
2) I have no relatives or friends and would like to make acquaintance with a Malayian warrior.
3) I do not cook or sew or commit nuisances about the house
The Sheppard Pratt hospital is located somewhere in the hinterlands of the human consciousness and I can be located there any time between the dawn of consciousness and the beginning of old age.
Darling: Life is difficult. There are so many problems. 1) The problem of how to stay here and 2) The problem of how to get out. And I want so desperately to go to Guatemala still and ride a bicycle to the end of a long white road. The road is lined with lebanon cedars and poplars and ancient splendors crumble down the parched bleached hills and natives sleep in the shade beside a high grey wall. Whereas here Grace Moore126 sings very prettily over the radio and obscure kings get themselves killed by what I am convinced are Mussolinis henchmen so that Lowell Thomas127 will not disappoint the old ladies—It is all very depressing
We had a swell ride through the woods very proudly aflame with a last desperate flamboyance. The paths are like tunnels through the secrets of a precious stone, all green and gold and red and under the maples the world is amber.
Can we go to the Russian ballet? or can I go with Mrs Owens? or will you ask Father Christmas to bring me a Russian ballet—or have the cook put some in the next pudding—or something.
I liked New Types.128 The girl was nice with breezes in her bangs. Like all your stories there was something haunting to remember: about the lonliness of keeping Faiths—I love your credos—and your stories. I meant to write you about The Darkest Hour.129 It was sort of stark and swell and full of the pressure of history in the making— but I would have liked more description and less of the battle. Mrs. Ridgely took me to see the hunt start. There is a story in that atmosphere—There is a grandfather little and guarded like the Pope and Miss Leidy of the love letters here in the hospital and none of them fought in the Civil War. Of cource, it might not be Family history but its an awfully good story.130
The fourth page of Zelda’s letter, with her sketch, “Do-Do in Guatemala.” Courtesy of Princeton University Library
157. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 2 pp. (fragment) |
[After February 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
some forgotten nursery rhyme. There are human bodies without identities as I am myself. But I hope life is very important in your hotel; that the lobby is full of people making estimates of each one’s worldly goods. Places where life transpires under a cloud of suspicion are more exciting. Your interest, inexhaustible, tolerant and expansive, has always made anywhere a desirable spot.
D. O.—take care of yourself. I wish I could have done it better. You have never believed me when I said I was sorry—but I am.
Some day soon you will be well + happy again. Maybe you will be at Norfolk, salty and sun-burned. Your eyes will glow in the darkened room and the hum and drone of deepest summer will seep in under the blinds. Sand in the bath-tub, sticky lotion and a towel for your shoulders. I’ll have to sprawl on my stomach till this sun-burn clears away and cut the sleeves from my softest shirt. Your hair is so gold against your golden skin. And your legs stick to-gether as you sit with them crossed. The room is so still because of the vibrance of the heat outside. Have a good time. Of cource it’s cooler in the grill, and clandestine, and there are gusts of bottled breezes.
North Carolina should be pines and pebbles, geraniums and red tile roofs—and very concise. Breathe in the blue skies. It’s a good place to get up early; there’s a very polished sun to burnish the mountain laurel before breakfast. And the brooks gleam cold in the thin early shadows. Biscuits and grits all floating in butter; resin on your hands and frogs bouncing out of the twilight.
D. O.—
D. O.—
What is there to say? You know how much I have loved you.
Zelda
158. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 4 pp. |
[June 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest and always
Dearest Scott:
I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over me, the suffering this nothing has cost would be unendurable to any save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that of all 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.
You have been so good to me—and all I can say is that there was always that deeper current running through my heart: my life—you.
You remember the roses in Kinneys yard131—you were so gracious and I thought “he is the sweetest person in the world” and you said “darling.” You still are. The wall was damp and mossy when we crossed the street and said we loved the south. I thought of the south and a happy past I’d never had and I thought I was part of the south. You said you loved this lovely land. The wistaria along the fence was green and the shade was cool and life was old.
—I wish I had thought something else—but it was a confederate, a romantic and nostalgic thought. My hair was damp when I took off my hat and I was safe and home and you were glad that I felt that way and you were reverent. We were gold and happy all the way home.
Now that there isn’t any more happiness and home is gone and there isnt even any past and no emotions but those that were yours where there could be any comfort—it is a shame that we should have met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so many dreams. Your song.
I wish you had a little house with hollyhocks and a sycamore tree and the afternoon sun imbedding itself in a silver tea-pot. Scottie would be running about somewhere in white, in Renoir, and you will be writing books in dozens of volumes. And there will be honey still for tea, though the house should not be in Granchester—132
I want you to be happy—if there were justice you would be happy—maybe you will be anyway—
Oh, Do-Do
Do-Do—
Zelda.
I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life—
I love you.
ALS, 1 p. |
|
[Summer 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
My dearest Sweetheart:
There is no way to ask you to forgive me for the misery and pain which I have caused you. I can only ask you to believe that I have done the best I could and that since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with. You are always my darling. I want you to be happy again with Scottie—someplace where it is bright and happy and you can have some of the things you have worked so hard for—always all your life and faithfully. You are my dream; the only pleasant thing in my life.
Do-Do—my darling! Please get well and love Scottie and find something to fill up your life—
My Love,
my Love
my Love
Zelda.
160. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 2 pp. |
[Summer 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Sometimes, at this dusty time of year the flowers and trees take on the aspect of flowers and trees drifted from other summers: the dusty shuttered back of the hotel at Antibes, those roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago. I wish we could go there again. Of cource if you invited me to North Carolina it would be very nice too. In my last despair of ever being asked any place I am going to write Mamma and ask if I can visit.
Wouldn’t you like to smell the pine woods of Alabama again? Remember there were 3 pines on one side and 4 on the other the night you gave me my birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best. Remember the faded gray romance. And the beneficence of the trees which sighed together that they would or they wouldn’t for we could never make out inform[?] the fates for or against us—Darling. That’s the first time I ever said that in my life.
I hope you are better—I hope so—and I hope you are—For all I know is that you are a darling—
Zelda
161. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 1 p. |
[September 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Since writing you, Dr. Murdock has been here. He says:
1) He does not advise my coming to Ashville but
2) He will permit my going to see Mamma. The implication was for a short visit—but
Some arrangements have got to be made for this winter. You forgot or something to tell me what Scottie is going to do and as she will soon be back, I would like to know.
Do you think I could take her to Ala. for the winter? Of cource I only want to on the condition that we cant possibly any way in the world be to-gether—
In fact, Do Do, I don’t know what’s happening any more and
I wish you could arrange at least a week-end to-gether. The Dr. seemed to feel that you weren’t well enough—and of cource I trust his judgment but somebody’s got to see her in school somewhere
Darling Darling
I love you—
Please write me as soon as you can
Love
Zelda
ALS, 1 p. |
|
[Fall 1935] |
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland] |
Dearest Do-Do—
From such an empty world there seems nothing to send beyond the jaunty decolade of turning falling first autumn leaves. From everywhere a vast echo vibrates—strange familiar twang, but one only vaguely distinguishes the sounds. That is because autumn is a sad time and all times are sad from their transience.
It was so good to see you fatter and wood-land-y in silver green and gray, the colors of an olive grove—and will always be so. We have shared so many words and hopes and phrases for the outwitting of things we haven’t shared—you must know how I miss the games we played.
Won’t you send me some condensed versions of Aristotle and again the chronological list you promised? So I can get on with wisdom—
Love, darling—Love—
Zelda.
Notwithstanding the nostalgic moments Scott spent with Zelda, his health problems made it necessary to relocate. In November 1935, Scott wrote to Harold Ober from Hendersonville, North Carolina, near Asheville: “I am here till I finish a Post story. . . . I was beginning to cough again in Baltimore . . . also to drink . . . I am living here at a $2.00 a day hotel . . .” (Life in Letters 292). By early December, he wrote Ober, he had decided to move to Asheville as soon as possible:
. . . I shall move to Asheville . . . + have the doctor go over me while I write. I arrived here weak as hell, got the grippe + spat blood again (1st time in 9 months) + took to bed for six days. . . . I’m grateful I came south when I did though—I made a wretched mistake in coming north in Sept + taking that apartment + trying 1000 things at once. . . . How that part (I mean living in Balt.) is going to work out I don’t know. I’m going to let Scotty finish her term anyhow. For the rest things depend on health + money + its very difficult. I use up my health making money + then my money in recovering health. (Life in Letters 293)
HIGHLAND HOSPITAL, ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA,
In the 1930s, Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area were considered a fashionable vacation spot. Luckily, an innovative facility for the mentally ill, the Highland Hospital, had been established there. Zelda’s doctors in Baltimore were well acquainted with the hospital’s founder and director, Dr. Robert S. Carroll, and agreed that it would be an ideal setting for her. Zelda had gone to nearby Saluda—a historic Victorian summer retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains—with her family while growing up. Her mother and her sister Rosalind continued to vacation there, making summer visits with Zelda, once she was settled into Highland, something to which everyone looked forward.
After a period of severe depression, Zelda experienced a religious mania that would characterize much of the rest of her life and become the dominant theme of her later paintings, many of her letters to Scott, and her subsequent attempts at fictions. During the last years of her life, Zelda worked on a novel she entitled “Caesar’s Things,” in which she once again fictionalized the same autobiographical events as in Save Me the Waltz, this time imposing a biblical pattern on them. There were times when Zelda would dress only in white, and when visitors came, she would insist on dropping to her knees and praying with them. Rather than offering genuine comfort, such religious zeal served only to isolate her further from family and friends.
Scott candidly conveyed his view of Zelda at this time in a letter to Sara and Gerald Murphy:
I am moving Zelda to a sanitarium in Asheville—she is no better, though the suicidal cloud was lifted. . . . Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Appollo and all the stock paraphanalea of insane asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child . . . my child in a sense that Scotty isn’t, because I’ve brought Scotty up hard as nails. . . . Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s “terribly dangerous secret thoughts” I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her— (Life in Letters 298–299)
Meanwhile, however, Scott’s circumstances were dire and quickly becoming worse; virtually every aspect of his life collapsed. He worried constantly about Zelda. Though she had periods of improvement, she got worse overall, a process both sad and frightening, and one wholly beyond his control. He paid endless medical bills, continually wrote letters to Zelda’s doctors and family about her illness, and answered friends’ inquiries about her, expressing little hope for her recovery. He reluctantly faced the possibility that he and Zelda might never be able to live together again. Even though their relationship was at times a mutually destructive one, Scott’s loss of Zelda’s companionship was immeasurable. He mourned her lost vitality and his own. Bills continued to pile up, Scott found it increasingly hard to earn money, and, placing himself under additional strain, he borrowed against future work.
In addition, his alcoholism accelerated and his tuberculosis became active again, resulting in the onset of rapid physical deterioration. He repeatedly entered the hospital for treatment, but any small progress was soon blotted out by painful relapses. In 1935, Scott began a long period of depression, one that would last until sometime in 1937. He had somehow endured all his previous disappointments and frustrations, but with his depression came a loss of emotional intensity, a dearth of all feelings save worthlessness, and this was beyond all endurance. Fearing that he would never again be able to write, he experienced a complete collapse of identity. It was at this point that Scott withdrew to a cheap hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and, while living off apples and tin cans of meat, wrote the three essays that make up “The Crack-Up” sequence: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care,” published in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire.
Scott’s motive for writing the essays was, in part, to end the painful sense of isolation he felt: “I wanted to put a lament into my record,” he wrote in “Pasting It Together,” “without even the background of the Euganean Hills to give it color” (Crack-Up 75). In other words, he wanted to represent himself in the clutches of despair, offering neither heroics nor the hope of transcendence. Placing the essays in Esquire in the 1930s was the adult equivalent of putting information about oneself or one’s peers in the college yearbook. All of Scott’s friends and fellow writers read the magazine. Though he soon regretted the articles, at the time Scott needed to communicate at least indirectly with his former social network (which in itself is a sign he was struggling to find his way out). Identity, for Scott, was not detached from others and was not a private concern; personal identity was directly tied to the process of creating a self within a chosen social context. What is remarkable is that a man so intent on popularity would have revealed so much of his humiliation. But if self-assessment was one of Scott’s trademark habits, so was communicating his discoveries to his contemporaries. Few of his friends recognized the courage it took.
In the first essay, Scott wrote that his “nervous reflexes” had been broken by “too much anger and too many tears,” that he “was always saving or being saved,” an understandable situation, and one perpetuated by the continued crisis brought about by Zelda’s illness and his own drinking (though he was careful in the essay to deny any recent drinking). “I began to realize,” he went on in “The Crack-Up,” “that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt” (Crack-Up 71–72). In “Handle with Care,” Scott deftly summed up the emotional tone, or tonelessness, of his depression: “. . . I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy”; he went on to say that he “had become identified with the objects of [his] horror or compassion.” This loss of objectivity and motivation, he decided, helped to explain why it had become so hard for him to write: “identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. . . . I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself” (Crack-Up 80–81).
Even at this low point, Scott’s circumstances continued to decline. Negative, sometimes cruel, responses to “The Crack-Up” essays further weakened his morale. Furthermore, he and Zelda were both simply too ill for either of them to provide a real home for their daughter. That fall, Scottie, who was almost fifteen, entered the Ethel Walker School, a boarding facility in Connecticut; the Ober family become her guardians, and she lived with them when not at school. In addition, Scott’s mother, who was living in Rockville, Maryland, was gravely ill, which delayed his move to Asheville. After transferring Zelda to Highland Hospital in April 1936, Scott returned to Baltimore to be near his mother. In July, when he finally made the move and settled into the Grove Park Inn, just before Zelda’s thirty-sixth birthday, he broke his right shoulder while diving into the hotel pool. After that incapacitating accident, he had another one, falling on the bathroom floor at the inn and lying there until a cold and arthritis set in. His mother died at the end of the summer, but he was still too incapacitated to go to Maryland for her funeral. She left him a little over twenty thousand dollars, money that he sorely needed; however, legal matters having to do with her estate prevented him from claiming the money for several months. When he finally did receive his inheritance and had paid off some of his debts, he was left with only about five thousand dollars. Scott summed up his situation that October in a letter begging a well-to-do friend for a loan:
I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered. . . . I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda . . . to a pool near here and tried a high dive . . . and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings. . . . It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing call “Miotosis” which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate. . . . The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. . . . You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking. . . . (Life in Letters 310–311)
To make matters still worse, on September 24, Scott’s fortieth birthday, a reporter visited him in his room at the Grove Park Inn and wrote a devastating article for the New York Post, making public one of the lowest moments in Scott’s life. The headline read: THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: SCOTT FITZGERALD, 40, ENGULFED IN DESPAIR; it painted a vivid portrait of the drunken author stumbling over to the highboy to pour more drinks. Scott was so upset by the story and its prominent display that he, most likely halfheartedly, attempted suicide. He explained the dark episode in a letter to Ober:
I was in bed with temp about 102 when the . . . phone rang and a voice said that this party had come all the way from N. Y to interview me. I fell for this like a damn fool, got him up, gave him a drink + and accepted his exterior manners. He had some relative with mental trouble (wife or mother) so I talked to him freely about treatments symtoms ect, about being depressed at advancing age and a little desperate about the wasted summer with this shoulder and arm. . . . I hadn’t the faintest suspicion what would happen. . . . When that thing [the newspaper article] came it seemed about the end and I got hold of a morphine file and swallowed four grains enough to kill a horse. . . . I vomited the whole thing and the nurse came in + saw the empty phial + there was hell to pay. . . . I felt like a fool. (Life in Letters 308–309)
While Scott struggled, Zelda settled into the new routine at Highland, where slowly she began to show signs of improvement. Dr. Carroll was a firm believer in the vigorous life as treatment for mental illness. The hospital took only a small number of patients and carefully monitored their diet and exercise. The lovely grounds, nestled in the Smoky Mountains, provided an ideal place for daily hiking. After Zelda had been at Highland three months, Scott wrote Scottie: “Your mother looks five years younger and prettier and has stopped that silly praying in public,” and he added hopefully, “Maybe she will still come all the way back” (Milford, Zelda 311). Zelda’s letters from this period are full of descriptions of nature, memories of the past, and, above all, heartfelt expressions of gratitude to Scott for continually providing for her.
163. TO SCOTT |
ALS, 1 p. |
[Spring 1936] |
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Goofo—
I am coming to life—Thanks ever so much for the canvas—There’s a magnificent patch of blue sky drifting through some pines here that I’m going to paint—These open fields seem more like summer and a rich dreamy warmth of youth than toy villages on the mountain side—
Devotedly, Zelda
ALS, 2 pp., on stationery embossed ZSF vertically along top right edge |
|
[Spring 1936] |
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
My dearest, Dearest Do-Do:
A crab apple blooms in stolid pink elegance—the elegance of efficiency outside my window; and the late sun is beneficent; and the soft benevolent hour of five is here. I was so happy with you yesterday. It was good to be sharing your work; the sense of finishing up in a hurry that we might start somewhere on time—so happy to be going.
You are so good to me always. And, although my acknowledgment is perhaps inadequate, still my heart knows how much you do for me. And I wish I had something to bring you in return. Some lovely precious thing that you would be glad about.
Anyway, I think of you—and my constant prayer is that I shall be able to convey to you the Beauty of God—of God’s concepts and of the patterns thereof in which the race is cast. Maybe some day.
In the meantime think of me as you are able; and I know always your generosity of soul and of material blessings.
And I am grateful to God for your goodness to me—
Love
Zelda
165. TO SCOTT [Summer 1936] |
ALS, 1 p. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
There is an abstract time outside the windows. It is summer time and past time—and I am very young when I didn’t care. There are meadows—not fields, or farms but meadows out of books. You are such a nice Do-Do. I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.
I think of boat houses in Atlanta with scaffolding and big dead moons and a drink behind the boats. I thought I was happy, or, at least, there was some pleasurable sense of things being in the world to conquer.
Do-Do—you are so nice a Do-Do, though I myself am so bad I hate to write to you.
I know Ashville is nice. The mountains mean cabins to me; and old abandoned mills and a little mountain boy named Jim Bob—who used to meet me by a spring all bedded about with moss. There was an owl who scared me at night, and a corn shuck mattress and I was very homesick. Now I am desolate. I thought I was so happy. The Rocky Broad River was where I was scared of so much rushing water.
You have been so good to me. My Do-Do. I wish I had not caused so much disaster. But I know you will be happy someday.
With whatever of nice emotions there are—
with love and peace and a hope that
you will soon be well—
Zelda
166. TO SCOTT [June 1936] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott—
I[’m] glad that life still prepares itself on the outskirts of Metropoles—and that our growing daughter is on her way to typical American womanhood. The school sounds grand. Atmospheres of formalized appreciation are always impressive.
I envy the Murphys their trip, and everybody else who is en route. I started some minor agitation that Dr. Suitt133 would let me go home. He’s not unconvincible, but wants all sorts of affadavits and my prospects for a ticket. Won’t you let me spend a week rowing in the Oak Parc aquarium, riding a rented bicycle and living casually on bread and iced-tea and black-berry jam? When the emotional sequence of a spiritual evolution disappears, the soul seems somewhat arbitrary at times and I would give anything nearly to renew the tangible evidence of having lived and cared—for June sun over the scraggly thickets and the heat gathering outside to make a summer day in Alabama.
Devotedly
Zelda
167. TO SCOTT [June/July 1936] |
ALS, 1 p. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do, Darling:
It was so nice to see you and to be walking in the bright sunshine to-gether. Maybe in two weeks we can go to a little sandy beach where there are deep poetic shadows under the pines and a shining musical lilt to the water—
Please take care of yourself; it would be good if we could be taking care of each other once again—it always created such a delightful confusion.
Darling, Darling—
Love to the Boo
and
I love you
Zelda
168. TO SCOTT [Summer 1936] |
ALS, 3 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I’m sorry your mother is sick. The threatened loss of an anchor to life brings poignancy to the forgotten facets of life evolved within other horizons. Anyway, I hope your mother will be better, and I’m sorry that I can’t be with you to help you, maybe, if I could. I think of you, Do-Do—and if there’s any comfort in a waxen wild-rose along a brambled path I send it. The doves are condolent; and a sweetness under the translucent foliage of late afternoon would rest you and be sorry.
Ashville’s hot. Pale blue crowds watched the rhododendrun parade to-day. Under an impervious Italianate sky the blaring of the bands poured forth from the hills. From the top of the building, Ashville in the midst of God’s grandeur of mountains and valleys and far distances, seemed complete and self-sustained—isolated and timeless and Biblical in the tufted vastness of rolling mountain forests. It is good to see and close to our beginnings when people come from miles about, to a festival—
Scottie wrote me a sweet letter of innumerable activities of fabulous pools and miles of dances festooned about the moon—I’m so glad she’s happy—
And so grateful to you for all the good things you’ve given to her + me—
Devotedly
Zelda
169. TO ZELDA |
TL (CC), 1 p. Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N. C., July 27, 1936. |
Dearest,
It was too bad on your birthday that everything went so badly. I left the hotel for the hospital that morning fully intending to be back here in time to lunch with you as it looked at first like merely a severe strain that could be cured with hot applications and rest and a sling, but the x-ray showed that there was a fracture in the joint of the shoulder and a dislocation of the ball and socket arrangement of the shoulder so that it looked in the x-ray as though it were an inch and a half apart.
They sent for a bone specialist and he said it would have to be set immediately or else I would never be able to raise my arm as high as my shoulder again so they gave me gas about like when they pulled your tooth and I fell asleep thinking you were in the room and saying, “Yes, I am going to stay; after all it’s my husband.” I woke up with a plaster cast that begins below my navel, extends upward and goes west out an arm. I am practically a knight in armor and only this afternoon have been able to get out of or into a chair or bed without assistance. It has postponed all my plans a week so I will not leave here until next Sunday, the second, instead of tonight as I had planned and this will of course give me a chance to see you before I go. I am sorry your mother had indigestion the same day and served to make our birthday utterly incomplete.
The accident happened in a swan dive before I hit the water. It must have been the attempt to strain up in the first gymnastics I had tried for almost three years and the pull of the actual bone pressing against the feeble and untried muscles and ligaments. It was from a medium high board and I could feel the tear before I touched the water and had quite a struggle getting to the rail.
However, I am in good hands and they have saved me from any permanent crippling of the arm though I am afraid I will have to spend the week dictating to Jim Hurley rather than scribbling the rest of my story in pencil which comes much more natural.
With dearest, dearest love,
Scott
170. TO SCOTT [August 1936] |
ALS, 4 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest, dearest Do-Do:
What a funny picture of you in the paper. I wish we had just been swimming together, the way it seems—I’ll be so glad when you come home again. When will we be three of us again—Do you remember our first meal in the Biltmore when you said “And now there’ll never be just two of us again—from now on we’ll be three—” And it was sort of sad somehow and then it was the saddest thing in the world, but we were safer and closer than ever—Oh, I’ll be so glad to see you on the tenth.
Scottie was as sweet as I had imagined. She’s one inch shorter than I am and weighs four pounds more—and I am her most devoted secret admirer—
Maybe I can come home—
That’s what we said on the softness of that expansive Alabama night a long time ago when you envited me to dine and I had never dined before but had always just “had supper.” The General was away. The night was soft and gray and the trees were feathery in the lamp light and the dim recesses of the pine forest were fragrant with the past, and you said you would come back from no matter where you are. So I said and I will be here waiting. I didn’t quite believe it, but now I do.
And so, years later I painted you a picture of some faithful poppies and the picture said “No matter what happens I have always loved you so. This is the way we feel about us; other emotions may be super-imposed, even accident may contribute another quality to our emotions, but this is our love and nothing can change it. For that is true.” And I love you still.
It was me who said:
I feel as if something had happened and I don’t know what it is
You said:
—Well and you smiled (And it was a compliment to me for you had never heard “well” used so before) if you don’t know I can’t possibly know
Then I said “I guess nobody knows—
And
you hoped and I guessed
Everything’s going to be all right—
So we got married—
And maybe everything is going to be all right, after all.
There are so many houses I’d like to live in with you. Oh Wont you be mine—again and again—and yet again—
Dearest love, I love you
Zelda
Happily, happily foreverafterwards—the best we could.
171. TO SCOTT [August 1936] |
ALS, 3 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I’m sorry you’ve had such a funny-paper classic to happen to you; and I’m glad its over. Here the baked fragrance of the pine paths and the sad protestation of the sweeping oaks, and there are dusky wood doves in the early evening and an amber twilight floods the road. Little birds warble the sweetest and most Biblical of cadences, and the honey-suckle is as sensuous and envelopping as the heat of the day, from noon till two o’clock I’m very proud of Scottie; and such scholastic ambition deserves something—but then she has something—Anyway I’m glad she’s going to be the President of the United States when she grows up— and I wish I had a present to send her. Town has become as roseate and as remote a dream of unattainable glories as ever wound humanity round and round the paths of their own home garden.
The sense of sadness and of finality in leaving a place is a good emotion; I love that the story cant be changed again and one more place is haunted—old sorrows and a half-forgotten happiness are stored where they can be recaptured.
Please bring everything you can find—and a sense of the Baltimore streets in summers of elms and of the dappled shade over the brick, and of that white engulfing heat. And I will try to find from between the pine and oak and the scramble of phlox and under-brush up the hill-side, something to bring to you—
Love
Zelda
172. TO SCOTT [August 1936] |
ALS, 3 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I’m so sorry about your mother.134 As one grows older and faces one facet and another of the past in completion, the stories of lives we have shared is catalogued.
Knowing—at the end of the patterns of tragedy or unfulfillment, of happiness, lives of service or of human balast, it’s sad to recreate the poignancy of those unconscious destines which touch our own.
And its sad to recapitulate the eternal hope on which life is hung, to flaunt in the breeze of its happy security, or to wilt in the soft hot wind of human dreams.
Scott and Zelda in North Carolina, 1936. Photograph of Scott courtesy of Princeton University Library
Anyway, your mother is better than on earth. And the Beauty of Heaven is as we are able to appreciate.
The summer’s all over out here. There were some golden apples of the Hesperides but the[y’]ve all seen their way to apple sauce. The woods are packed with September. The top of Sunset Mountain cradles itself in the tree tops and there are blue ranges stretched back to the Bible. The smell of dry dust and the dust-caked golden-rod and the smell of a fire and coffee smelling though the woods. There’s a happiness of lonliness and the beauty of summer renouncing its beauty. I wanted to grind my corn and stay there.
I love the just and honored corn-field. The gourds are gold, and the morning sun splinters the world along the brook
If you do go on to California, please send me a great stack of your most fashionable addresses. And where to address Scottie—
Thank you for the check. Last year I spun enough cloth to smother Clotho135 and to disgust forever the three fates with their trade—So I’ll have it made into a nice Poiret suit or something indespensably useless enough to contribute a sense of great luxury.
You look so rested and so unlike an invalid—I hope you’ll be soon well again—And for the comfort there is in a lasting appreciation and my gratitude forever and always always my devotion, I am Zelda
173. TO SCOTT [September 1936] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
The sadness of autumn + of things that are over lurks on the smoky horizons; one enters the morning reluctantly. It’s sad to know that another summer + vacation time and another years expectancies are accomplished. You were so sweet to take so long a trip for my sake and I know all the effort it cost you. When you leave I always look about me and catalogue your visits and render accounting of your eternal kindness.
Scottie got off in happy estate—model travelling for girls of 15— Vogues + curl papers, kodak snaps + pockets full of preparations—I hope it will be a happy school year; she seemed prettier + sweeter than ever before.
Thanks for the money. I have already apportioned its disposal—I think I’ll buy one presentable suit in case the house catches on fire and I have to help work the hose. It will be rather exciting to own an approved product again. I wish we were off on a glamorous twilight to christen it—It’s fun to be here before the curtains of a winter dusk.
Love, Do-Do—and thanks again—
Zelda
[After September 24, 1936] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
Happy Birthday to you. I remembered you; and wished you happiness—
This attenuate land loses itself in the blue autumnal haze of withdrawing horizons; and a thin and concise sun fills the heavens to perhaps a more cerebral purpose. I regret the summer; but, to me, there isn’t a more fortunate union of nature and of poetic heritage than is between this country and these thin gold mornings and twilights husky with home-building.
I’m manoeuvering an evening coat that is intended to be tried on before the mirror of Shalot; and was especially designed for the riding of magic carpets—and I bask in the heavenly hardi-hood of these woods and I long for a great many good things.
I decided to refurbish my conversancy with the monde actuel by a garguantuan parcel of current publications which I find very absorbing. Before I see you again I will know practically everything about the discovering of unobtainable cures for uncatalogued maladies; about the lives of all famous men know[n] only to authors in need of pick-up money; and of the domestic habits of a few of our most select gangsters—and of how the emu rears his young
Meanwhile, may you and your work prosper and many happy birthdays to you—
Zelda
That fall, as Scott mended, he was able to visit Zelda and take her to lunches at the Grove Park Inn, after which they went for walks around the resort’s lovely manicured grounds, nestled in the mountain valley. Zelda slowly improved under the hospital’s supervision. It was a quiet time, but not a particularly good one for Scott, since he continued drinking heavily. In December, Scott went to Baltimore to give Scottie a holiday tea dance at the elegant Belvedere Hotel, which he ruined by getting drunk and making an embarrassing scene. He spent the rest of the holiday in Johns Hopkins Hospital, being treated for the flu and alcoholism. Scottie spent Christmas with a school friend, Peaches Finney, and her family, then went to visit Zelda in Asheville. In January, Scott moved to the Oak Hall hotel in Tryon, North Carolina. With his income at its all-time low, he struggled to stay on the wagon and to write, apparently with little success.
175. TO SCOTT [January 1937] |
ALS, 1 p. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Dope: we left the picture at Pritchards art shop the day before you left for Baltimore so it must have been Dec 22 or so—That’s all I know about it, and was not with you when you gave instructions about its delivery. It may still be there.
I paint and walk and am robust; I die of ennui; I long for your visit always and will be glad when its time again. You forgot to answer about the frame to render presentable a big picture for Ma—
whom I sadly long to see?
Ou travaille—
With Love
Zelda
176. TO SCOTT [March 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Do-Do:
It rains—without lamentation. Easter accumulates in the pears; the trees make ready for glory. Abnegatory skies lie mirrored in the roads; and the houses are fine and etched against a silver time. That was a little while ago. Now there’s snow, and lightly laden branches and a puffed protected world for Sunday. Snow domesticates horizons; the world is a fine white boudoir; the world is cared-for and expensive. I hope always that you’ll show up in it soon.
In the mean-time, I make red robes—of justice—I make pictures and cards and health and everything but magic—and I hope for a breath of that art in spring. The cold freezes me and leaves such a misery that I can’t stand it.
Won’t you give me the O.K. for Mamma’s frame? I’d like to get the picture home by Easter
Always with Love
Zelda
177. TO SCOTT [Spring 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott:
The bus careened about the edges of a tired holiday; the lights went out but there weren’t any bandits.
I’ve been painting my peach blossoms all afternoon—they are such courageous flowers. I’ve got them in my stone jug, and the picture is another hope of producing one acceptable to the Museum.
There was still a faint aura of the world about my things to-day. It was happy seeing you. I love the quality of lost remote strange lands belonging to Tryon, and my homey tastes of dust and summer fields. I’ll be mighty glad when it’s time again to go.
Thanks for my two best days, and thanks that there is you. I’ll see you Monday, or when it so transpires—
’Till then,
Love and Devotion
Zelda
178. TO SCOTT [April 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Do-Do—
The picnic was a success. We lost ourselves in the mazes of a panorama and laced the lunch to earth with unexplored latitudes and longitudes. I wished for you; and await the day when we can tramp so high, because the trip in a car is somewhat alarming. The top of the world is an apple orchard, belongs partly to Dr. Carrol and responds to the term “campagna”—History trails over a white mountain road for me—
We have now been married most portentously seventeen years, rather an astounding accumulation of time. We should have had a cake.
1. Violets commence, pale + perfect along the road-side.
2. Aenemonies are a small and perfect flower made of finely chiselled fragility. They are powder-blue.
3. The birds are beginning to squabble over the rights to the first spring dawns
4. Dog-wood awaits a more expansive season whereon to spread its imperious flames—
Devotedly, and thanks
Zelda
179. TO SCOTT [May 31, 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Do-Do, sir—
It will be June again to-morrow—and the shadows skirt the lawn in fragrant elegance. Lets have the salmon fed on Chablis and spread the lunch on a white cloud and billow ourselves in the daisies. Are you bringing Scottie back with you? or will she be spending the summer in the outskirts of Madrid for atmosphere?
It is luxuriously hot with the promise of holiday heat in the air; and I want so to go to Alabama while the peaches are still bought on the street and while the heat is still a bright blue release.
I’ve had poison ivy in my eye, but now its over. Only I’ve been in abeyance for a week as a result.
Have fun—I envy you and everybody all over the world going and going—on no matter what nefarious errands.
With dearest love
Zelda
[Summer 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
Thanks for my telegram: every day I make ready for your return in all sorts of ways; by planning how I’ll be at the beach and hoping for all sorts of new adequacies for when we are to-gether.
I can’t think of more exciting auspices for crossing a continent than the 4 Marks Brothers however I’m glad you’re relieved—
Vines rust over the broken balconies of Tryon and in the evening deep wells of shadow absorb the world. It’s good to be there with Mamma, creaking through a summer noon in an old peeling rocker. Apple orchards slumber down the hill-sides and twist imperviously about the stem of Time—and every now + then a train shivers [in] the distance and distance is again glamorous + desirable.
I’m reading about what a remarkable sort of fellow you are from the pen of John Bishop.136 Like jonquils he acknowledges—but there isnt as yet any mention of my roses.
Love and
Love again
Zelda
In June, Scott received an offer to go to Hollywood and write for MGM. Despite his negative experiences with screenwriting in the past, he was excited, especially about the prospect of a regular salary—the studio offered him one thousand dollars a week for the first six months, with an option for renewal at a higher salary. In July 1937, Scott moved to Hollywood, where, under contract to MGM, he committed himself to digging his way out of debt while paying the bills to keep Zelda in the hospital and Scottie in school.
Enthusiasm aside, Scott still wasn’t well and couldn’t stay sober for any length of time. When he moved to Hollywood, he first settled into an apartment at the Garden of Allah, a hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where he was among old friends from New York—writers who had also gone to Hollywood to work in the movie industry, among them Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Robert Benchley. He soon met Sheilah Graham, an attractive young gossip columnist, who reminded him of Zelda; she would become his friend, his lover, and often his caretaker. Many credit Sheilah’s devotion to Scott and her steadying influence as the reason his last three years were relatively happy and productive. Nevertheless, he remained determined to do everything he could to give Zelda things to look forward to. He visited her whenever he could, took her on vacations, and, when he could not be there, tried to arrange visits from Scottie and trips to her mother’s home in Montgomery. In September, Scott returned to Asheville and took Zelda on a vacation to Charleston and Myrtle Beach. Meanwhile, they exchanged letters; Zelda shared the excitement of Hollywood and hoped for Scott’s success and happiness.
181. TO SCOTT [Summer 1937] |
ALS, 3 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
It made me sad to get your note the other day. I hate to think of your struggling with those awful corsets. It will be good when you are well again—and happy. In California it’s a very happy world. There are fluttery happy happinesses in the air and happiness waiting to burst into blossom on every bush and the air is blue and tremulous and the flowery earth is palely roseate. And you’ll write a good picture full of the newness of the land to you.
I’m sorry we didn’t get along very well—Because you know that I think this:
The soul of the artist is beautiful and precious and without the artist neither would we be able to decipher the purpose of life nor would we be able to correlate our lives with the cosmic patterns[.] And the best thing I love of this world is the beauty of a generous soul—and so Do-Do I pray for you.
Naturally, it isnt fair about the money; if you will let me leave with Mamma, or at least ask Dr. Carrol to let me go as soon as he can so he won’t just think we can go on forever in ease and prosperity—I will be glad when some of your burdens are less.
With unpersonal love and love of what you love—and my best good wishes with all my heart.
The pattern of your soul
is God’s Glory—
Zelda
Good-bye, Do-Do. Happiness to you for wherever you are forever.
182. TO SCOTT [July 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Do-Do, most eminent and
highly respected of
husbands—
So you escaped, so you are now all safe and happy in the land of glamour—and have fun.
Time continues to rotate round and round these wooded lanes. It rained and the world is deep and clear and of a new and greener concision. Daisies begin in the woods discs of mid-summer and augurs of a summer noon.
I hope Mamma will be along soon. She writes of Alabama heat which I envy her and writes of putting her house in order to depart.
Thanks for thinking of me. I will try to produce some cards which could be blazoned on any facade—and give my Love to Scottie.
And I will be looking forward to seeing you—and to hearing about life and the world and how things are when you get back
Devotedly,
Zelda
[July 1937] |
AL, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
I’m looking forward to to-morrow; there will be formalized informality under the pines and a politely rustling negation of the deep significance of a picnic plate.
It will be so good to see two people of my own again.
A rare may-pop explodes in pale exotic fanfare, and the weeds are raw and hot and high along the paths. Doves cradle a mellowing season and I will be always thinking of you.
It makes me happy that there should be new intangibilities for you to classify and more glamorous eventualities than lately.
Don’t worry about us here any more than you can’t help, because I promise
1) To mind the rules, which usually brings rewards.
2) Mamma’s close and I wont be lonely.
3) But will greet your return with all sorts of gleaming staminas and things to flash about the future.
Love, Do-Do, and good luck—
184. TO SCOTT [August 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do—
Scottie and I floated over the terrace of Grove Park Inn in a lovely summer sun and watched Time rejeuvenate itself in a valley resting there for the season.
She was pretty and gracious and a great pleasure to be with— though somewhat alarmed at her expenditures. Her clothes were lovely and appropriate, all except the hat, and very becoming to her, so the bill seemed not exhorbitant to me.
My family had generously remembered her, so the season arrived in as many papers + ribbons as lend a gala air[.] We went to Church, and to see “I’ll Take Romance”137—which is witty, sophisticated and as charming. Every year Grace Moore becomes more adequate, which must be very gratifying to her.
Thanks again for the money—
And needless to say a Florida shore is more than a temptation—a dream—or even delirium—
Can we be brown + baked and mica-flaked—
I’ll be expecting you—
Devotedly + gratefully
Zelda
185. TO SCOTT [Late Summer 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
It rains conscientiously every day and Time keeps vigil over a most bedraggled end of summer. I won the tennis tournament and am now[?] champion: it is such a beautiful game that I will be sorry when I am no longer able to play. The quickness of inter-dependent rhythms; the play of one set of reflex swung on another in a sustained volley are as compelling as the game itself. Artisticly the game is inexhaustible.
I wrote Rosalind for a hat, and evening dress: which were indispensible. She has promised to motor[?] me over from Atlanta when I go south, and I miss her presence very much. She contributes a sense of the grace of life in even the humblest of circumstance that is most edifying and pleasurable. Since there is rain every day in Atlanta also maybe she will come back again for the autumn haze and the harvest moon. No time is so appropriate to these regions as the blazoned skies of late September, the sensory somnolent mysteries of Indian summer and the bright brocaded hills streaming away under the power, and ominous possibilities of the hills.
I’m sorry Scottie is an effort. I wish I could have kept her here. She was so bored in Ashville, however, and hated it so passionately that I do not think any longer time here would have been to any advantage, save perhaps of reminding her of her parental obligation; and of keeping her in mind of the politesse necessary to live successfully in any sort of intimate relationship—
Zelda
[September 1937] |
ALS, 7 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
Thanks for such a nice trip: it was a good thing to be driving over those long sad roads, stopping for things that are not really needed, and good to arrive at night smelling of sweet dust and gasoline and to recapture again the sense of never being quite sure of where you are.
The intent of the hotel in Fredricksburg was dignity, security and mahogany; while the hotel at Richmond was certainly of dramatic purport.
Williamsburg, perfected and ready will still perhaps be awaiting the perfect fête next time we go there. That place so appropriately harmonizes its guests to its most ingratiating purpose. At Charlotte the hotel didn’t matter, but maybe its message was of the indispensibility of places to sleep: they didn’t want to be bothered with inadequacy.
I liked the gold trees, and this golden time of year: the smoky sun, and roads leading back into summer.
Mt. Vernon seemed frank + graceful and Monticello nicely compact: but I thought both places were of indirect planning, and that neither had the sweep nor conveyed the sense of captured space that such a structure might have. That the architechts economy is evident, places the house on a basis of self-justification (legitimate beauty, ultimately—but only of tradition). In absolute: the purpose of the house might swing from the beams of aesthetic aspiration rather than dissected to meet the yet unarisen contingencies of the passage of time; ie where to put the neighbors children, and what to do with the mother-in-law.
The weather was perfect, the car fun; the food of adequate vagabondage and I had a good time. The possibility of new purposes arising carries one happily enough through life and even the pursuance of old ones helps to evaluate enterprizes clung to as “direction.”
The roads smell of reminiscences, and of pursuit.
Although Scotties vagabondage is indubitably hereditary, I don’t want her to do that again: that vaguely flowing around the country to whatever pleasant endroit that intrigues her fancy—anyhow she’s the sweetest of babies + maybe the Pullman porters will help her to master the Greek + Latin roots which seem to require itinerant working-up.
Again thanks: it was a better vacation than before, and perhaps our holidays will grow up to a brilliant future
Someday.
Gratefully
Zelda
187. TO SCOTT [Fall 1937] |
ALS, 5 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
We got back just in propitious time: The wind seethes with malice and already the elements are of the cast of tragedy. I’m glad we had a good time.
I miss my honey in bed and the bright morning sun loitering inquisitively about my room; and a bright impassive hotel room to greet me.
Won’t you get Mr Goldwyn to send me the perfume, and junk? You must have a list of it somewhere? But my real ulterior motive is this:
These pictures and my screen which I love, still, ought to be stored in some worthier endroit. I know you gave me twenty dollars to do it; but now I dont know where the twenty dollars is, and the pictures are still here. So may I have
1) A note of authorization to Dr. Carroll that I may ship my chef-d’oeuvres home
2) A check to cover same. I’m doing some very good work since our constitutional, and may produce something to inspire your admiration.
This is circus day: already the radios have a tinny swing and there are echoes of gilt and routine in the air; and nobody wants to wait to go. I’ll sketch, and write you about the miraculous 4th dimensional exploits of the acrobats on Sunday.
To me, there is no more exalting moment than a tenuate body launc[h]ed on the strength of its concept, whirled through the air a preconceived purpose—studies in rhythm and balance that make the architraves of Notre Dame appear a simple achievement.
It’s a good circus day: its a little bit windy, and bright and sunny.
Bronze leaves; and brown-woods lit with glints of glowings, and bright skies issuing commentary on the inexorable urgencies of life; and of the seasons.
Love
Zelda
188. TO SCOTT [Fall 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do—
Thanks for the money—When once it has seen the dark shades of these vaults, a fund is as inaccessible as the United States mint— However, with Christmas in the offing maybe there will be an earthquake or some such lubricating influence. Anyway thanks— again—
He won’t let me go home for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. But promises next spring.
I’m making cards—and painting Mamma some lillies which do not thrive in these rigorous hills—although to-day is lovely.
A bright + prosperous Sunday floods the bungalow with blocks of sunshine and the past hangs nostalgicly the splendour of its completed hopes along the roads—and I wish we were picnicing somewhere in these dry + punguent heavens
It would be heavenly if you could fly—to see me sometime
Devotedly
Zelda
[December(?) 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest D. O.
My latest news is from Jeremiah the prophet, and I mull over the Osiris cult in a book on dancing. This gives a more constructive air to the influenza which I have musterred, and routed. It’s a misery. I’m glad it’s over.
Hoorah about Florida. Bring everything you can find, and we will enjoy. Please bring the architecture book and we can study patios in case we exhaust the interest of the ocean.
Despite this kindliest of weathers the winter has grown homesick for something else, somewhere else—and seems as anxious to get away as everybody else is: mooning and moping and stalking the more “intimately” useful hours until it is distraction not to[o] identified with some very glamorous purposes about to flower into strings of happy times.
The papers are hot-beds of disaster: disasters of such cosmic proportions that one can no longer cho[o]se the more relevant. It keeps me in a dreadful estate of fearing the collapse of the public utilities and that we will never meet again—Maybe we ought to be equipping ourselves: breast-plates, and nose-guards and things.
Wont your secretary send me some more moccasins? Or why dont you just send me the secretary? Then I’ll never have to worry about where all my lovliness is to come from[.] Heavily beaded; 51/2—of Zodiac-al properties—please.
Devotedly
Zelda
190. TO SCOTT [December 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Do-Do
Joy + glad tidings! Dr. Carrol is taking a car-load of people to Sarasota Florida to-morrow, and I am at last a priviledged character. It’s five days en route and I can roll contentedly recapitulating through the Georgia clay-banks, and through the stark + lonely pines; and over long abandoned roads—the way I love to.
Thanks for the money. I havent yet got a chance to spend it—but will write you on the advent of my new cage.
There isnt any Christmas in the air. Despair blows the night chaoticly here + there and skies gape cosmic terror. I cant even make Christmas cards.
I’m in Highland Hall, and I’m very nice and pretty. It will be happiness to see you at Christmas, and where would there be a better fire than at Tryon or sweeter smelling woods about grow—and the promise + possibility of flowers + the dank of early spring along the roads.
Wont you send me a small picture of you? and thanks for rememberring me by Rosalind.
Devotedly +
gratefully
Zelda
191. TO SCOTT [December 1937] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-do—
Life has puffed + blown itself into a summer day, and clouds + spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.
Christmas already seems exciting; there are red + gold stores + stores glittering + ecstatic and streets done up in garlands. I’ll be mighty glad to see you, kind sir.
If you can stop the train at some of the more enterprising Indians, I still would love the mocassins—beaded all over + as near turquoise as they have had heaven enough to make. At Tuc[s]on maybe or one of those places where we bought bracelets a long long time ago.
I am busy at many small + inconsequent exploits, and feeling rather spiritually organized although without any Titanesque projects.
You say what can I do—I want to go home to Ala for a while to establish my capacity as an able + invaluable citizen. It’s a fine gratification to have something to offer when offerring. I could collect my tastes and objectives and meet life with a better sense of unity once habit again becomes volitional—
But we can discuss when you arrive—
Meantime the parties sound fun to be strung on an assurance that they are, after all, happiness—
And so—
Devotedly
Zelda
I wrote the man what to do about the skirt. Could he follow the letter? Because otherwise he may make me boat-rigging, i.e.; flaps + things. Thanks + thanks
During the Christmas holiday, Scott went to Asheville to visit Zelda and took her on a vacation to Florida and then to Montgomery to visit her mother. Writing to Scottie, he admitted that the trip wasn’t altogether successful: “Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasnt particularly” (Life in Letters 345). When Zelda returned from vacation, there was a New Year’s masquerade ball, the theme of which was Mother Goose; Zelda, who regardless of her illness kept her sense of humor, very much enjoyed going as “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” For Easter, Scott planned a family trip to Virginia Beach for Zelda, Scottie, and himself. Once there, the three of them bickered, and Scott and Zelda caused a scene at the hotel. When he returned to Hollywood, Scott arrived at the airport drunk and had to be placed under a doctor’s care. He was so ill that he had to be fed intravenously.
During the spring of 1938, he exchanged several letters with Dr. Carroll and urged the doctor to continue to allow Zelda vacations; otherwise, Scott feared, Zelda, with nothing to look forward to, would sink into despair. Meanwhile, in April, Scott moved from the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard (and its boisterous social set) to a quieter bungalow at Malibu Beach, and then in November (to escape the cold and damp) to a cottage at Belly Acres (the estate of the actor Edward Everett Horton) in Encino, where he would live until May 1940, when he moved to an apartment near Sheilah’s in Hollywood.
[February 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
February parades our miseries on as bleak a wind as ever seethed our hopes into necessities—and I long to be off for browner sunnier expectations.
Mamma sent me some calico to sew—already, it speaks of berrystains and the early suns of July mornings and birds perched along the dawn—summer’s so happy: its obscenity to have the highest expectations subservient to the hope of getting warm.
Thanks for your letter, and the money for the clothes. They are to travel in—and I know they’ll be pretty if Rosalind sends. You sent such amazingly adequate, and so sensorily gratifying a perfume that I wanted more of it. The name is Salud, Schiaperilli, and when you go to Mexico again, remember me.
I’m writing a paper for a class we have on whether our brains will work or not. It’s all about everything I know and ought to be very illuminating. I’ll lend it to you at Easter and we can use it as Scottie’s entrance speech into the world.
Meantime violets and lilies and pink beauty blows on my canvas and I hope and wait—
Devotedly
Zelda
193. TO SCOTT [March/April 1938] |
ALS, 4 pp., on stationary embossed MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, at top center |
Dear Scott:
I am a very extravagant woman; I am a jezebel—However, that may be, the money is gone, and so will I be in the morning, and I owe Mamma $10 for sundries—
It’s all very demoralizing; and I hate to call on you for more when you have so recently been so liberal—
But will you be kind enough to send her the check
If you could understand how desperately tired of medical routine, of inescapable suppressions[,] frustrations of my pleasures, suppressions of temper, of opinions with which we (you + I) have always subscribed and of any personal expression) which such a life prescribes, I’m sure you would be willing to let me try outside once more. For as long as a year, Highland Hospital is as excellent a regime as I know; but its the only hospital that I have ever been in that makes no provisions for any personal life—[leisure, right of opinion, liberties such as town etc.]138—and after three years of such, the soul begins to perish.
I beg of you not to leave me there after Easter.
Anyway—I am most grateful for your constant thoughtfullness, your generosity and for all the good things you’ve given me.
Devotedly
Zelda
Why don’t you let me close accounts in Ashville, come out to visit you for two weeks at Easter, and return to Ala—
If this project was successful I could make my own arrangements afterward; and maybe find a cottage somewhere where you could spend a happy month or so whenever you felt like it.
[April 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp.139 [Hollywood, California] |
I couldn’t bring myself to write you last week—I was plenty sore with myself and also a good deal with you. But as things settle down I can regard it all with some detachment. As I told you I was a sick man when I left California—had a beautiful little hemorage the end of March, the first in two years and a half—and I was carrying on only on the false exaltation of having done some really excellent work. I thought I’d just lie around in Norfolk and rest but it was a fantastic idea because I should have rested before undertaking the trip. There has been no drink out here, not a drop of it, but I am in an unfortunate rut of caffiene by day and chloral by night which is about as bad on the nerves. As I told you if I can finish one excellent picture to top Three Comrades140 I think I can bargain for better terms—more rest and more money.
These are a lot of “I’s to tell you I worry about you—my condition must have been a strain and I thought you had developed somewhat grandiose ideas of how to spend this money I am to earn which I consider as capital—this extravagant trip to the contrary. Dr. Carrol’s feeling about money is simply that he wants to regulate your affairs for the time being and he can do so if you live on a modest scale and within call. He doesn’t care personally whether you spend a hundred a month or ten thousand—doubtless for the latter you could travel in state with a private physician instead of a nurse. Here is the first problem you run up against trying to come back into the world + I hope you’ll try to see with us and adjust yourself. You are not married to a rich millionaire of thirty but to a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn’t a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body.
Any relations you want are all right with me but I have heard nothing from you and a word would be reassuring because I am always concerned about you
Scott
In June, Scottie graduated from the Ethel Walker School and applied to Vassar. Scott could not attend her graduation, but he arranged for Zelda and her sister Rosalind to go to New York and then Connecticut for the ceremony. His gift to Scottie was a trip to France, and she visited him in California that summer before leaving for Europe. When Scottie returned to the United States, Zelda met her in New York. Rosalind, Mrs. Sayre, and Zelda’s nurse accompanied her; since Zelda’s sister Clothilde lived near New York, Zelda enjoyed a family reunion. Being with family and being in New York again made her eager to leave the hospital permanently. These trips interrupted Zelda’s routine and made her less satisfied with the hospital regimen. Her success on these outings seemed proof to her family that she was ready to leave; they pressured Scott as well as Zelda’s doctors to allow her to do so. The doctors felt that only by spending the majority of her time in a therapeutic environment was she able to do as well as she did on the trips. A nurse traveled with her to act as a safety net.
During 1938, Scott worked on three films—Infidelity, Madame Curie, and Three Comrades. Zelda saw Three Comrades in June when she went north for Scottie’s graduation, whereupon she immediately sent Scott her congratulations. Later in 1938, his work on the screenplay for Madame Curie made it impossible to see Zelda for Christmas; he arranged for her and Scottie to spend the holiday in Montgomery with Zelda’s mother.
195. TO SCOTT [c. June 2, 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp., on stationery embossed HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, at top center |
Dearest Scott:
Scottie is the prettiest girl; of a stabilized ae[s]theticality and a plasticly tangible spirituality. She wore white gardenias and white flannel and white hopes and the freedom and grace of the best and we are very proud and devoted. She loved your flowers, which are magnificent, of yellow and ma[u]ve and pink and spontaneous impetus; and expanding expectantly to the brightest and happiest of mornings. Although the day was dark.
Thanks again for everything, and the goodness thereof—
Don’t send me the watch; I want to give the money to charity— because I’ve had such a happy time. So won’t you, please? Of cource, if there is any.
We’re going to the movie to-morrow, and I’ll write after.
Meanwhile—life is so nice, when one can have some. and meanwhile, good luck.
Scottie is a very good thing to have. I’m so glad we’ve got her.
Thanks again—
Zelda
I sent Scottie white flowers.
[After June 3, 1938] |
ALS, 4 pp.141 [New York City] |
The love scene on the beach was superb, acting, dialogue, set and direction
The street fighting was splendidly handled: a good suspense in the picking off of the lonely figure, and an adequately renderred sense of cavernous emptiness of cities deprived of their safety. The men are pretty good throughout, without much chance for moving acting.
The comedy is excellent all the way through; sophisticated, realistic, and of a bitter delight—The picture got lots of good sound laughs—
The girl was all that she could have been; and very convincing; and utterly charming and deeply moving when he carried her in in the blanket. She looked like a child. But somehow, it seemed rather arbitrary that 3 men should so have avowed their lives to her well-being—
The dialogue is par excellence; the individual sceens excellent; the acting excellent (Margaret Sullavan) and first rate (the men). The music adds lots—
But there isn’t any dramatic continuity—which robs the whole of suspense. I know its hard to get across a philosophic treatise on the screen, but it would have been better had there been the sense of some inevitable thesis making itself known in spite of the characters—or had their been the sense of characters dominated by some irresistibly dynamic purpose. It drifts; and the dynamics are scaterred + sporadic rather than cumulative or sustained.
The audience was most responsive, and applauded The music montage and technical side in general was beautifully handled.
—In casual vein, or what I would have said had it been the product of a stranger: beautifully adequate and intellectual dialogue (unusual)—fine acting from the heroine—of a convincing seriousness + portentuousness that was never realized because there wasn’t any plot: spiritual or material
Most of the scenes are gratifyingly strong + full—
Many congratulations.
Zelda
[July 1938] |
ALS, 3 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
It fill[s] me with dread to witness the passage of so much time: another summer is half gone, and maybe there’ll never be anymore sun-burns and high hot noons.
Do you suppose they still cook automobiles at Antibes, and still sip the twilight at Kaux [Caux], and I wonder if Paris is pink in the late sun and latent with happiness already had.
Anyway, I now know the address of summer, where it lives and breeds and makes its home, where daisy fields come from and bird-song is brewed, and where is the home of secret heavens[.] It’s not very far away, and Mamma and I may spend a couple of weeks there: if permission resolves
Meantime, Newman thinks Three Comrades one of the best picture’s he’s ever seen, and all sorts of scattered opinions are very pro—so maybe we’ll get some more money and more prestige and more liberties and all sorts of other desirable attributes
—and meanwhile Mamma is here; and lovely and eager as ever, but a year older than she was last year which makes me sad—
I hope she has a happy holiday—The mountains are very green and of as insistently splendid proportions as before—and Ashville is the highest point east of the Rockies. It says so on the radio—
Zelda
198. TO SCOTT [Late Summer 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Do-Do:
The deluge continues: yesterday we had supper in the sad silver reflections of a swelling river while the vaporous heat of a wet summer threatened to hatch all sorts of things.
Mamma is fine, and the Montgomery contingent of Sayres thrive at Saluda before facades like Appomatox Court House and under the trees of absolute actuality for beauty. “The Big Apple”142 sweeps the floor and is a most engaging entertainment. It’s full of all sorts of most expressive impersonal coquetry and engaging self-dramatization. Maybe Scottie can teach you.
Sir: The summer fades + wanes and I cant know where the daisies are or what has become of the ripe corn-tops.
Sir: I can turn back somersaults at will + ease and I can make a bridge
Sir: I sew two party dresses for when there is a fanfare on the mountain tops.
And I will be mighty glad to see you—
Babani—any or
Rosine—“Sur Mon Balcon”
either is cheap in Mexico.
Shoes: turquoise or red beads
belt: bright sets + brass nails—143
Love + many thanks
Zelda
199. TO ZELDA |
TL (CC), 2 pp. [Malibu Beach, California] Sept. 2nd 19 38 |
Dearest Zelda:
The situation is too difficult to explain in a telegram. It is briefly this:
As you know, the Finneys have taken Scottie not only for two Christmas vacations but for a total of about three odd months in the summer and, as you know also, I have really been able to offer nothing to replace this; that is to say, neither Norfolk, Montgomery, nor Scarsdale144 bear much resemblance to a home. While the Finney’s house—because of her great love for Peaches, and for the way they feel about her and make her feel and because of those formative years when she learned to love Baltimore—has been very much of a home.
Naturally, I have had a sense of guilt about this obligation, especially during the time I was ill, as I had no possible way to pay it back. I have long toyed with the idea of letting Scottie bring Peaches out here for a two or three day glimpse of Hollywood. But expenses have been so heavy, always something unexpected, that I decided to put it off. Then recently Mrs. Finney wrote me saying that Pete wanted to take Scottie to the Bachelors’ Cotillion in Baltimore a year from this fall and I really felt that it would be churlish not to make a gesture. So I have invited Peaches to come for two days with Scottie. It will mean that Scottie can freely accept invitations to Baltimore—a form of bargaining if you want to put it that way. In any case a thing that it seemed had to be done.
This will explain the following dispensations:
Scottie gets here in mid-September—will pick up Peaches—fly out here for three days—fly back—meet you in New York about the 20th so you will have three days of her too. I wish to God I could go up to Vassar with her also but unless the situation changes here I won’t be able to get away during September.
I am writing your Mother to be sure and get herself a drawing room or section and to have her meals there. Remember the trip up will be quite a strain for her in any case, so you must insist that she do this and not try to walk though the cars on that rocky roadbed either in the morning or evening. We will pay the expenses.
I will write Rosalind, also the doctors and make all the arrangements. I think a good time for you to leave would be the night of Sunday, the 19th, and plan to arrive back a week later. You should be able to do a lot in that time and as you say it will be appropriate that you should usher Scottie into this new phase of her life.
Dearest love, always—
[September 1938] |
ALS, 4 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
Item one, and of the most significance: Dr. Carroll agrees to the New York adventure, and we plan to leave here in time that I may accomplish
Item two: the buying of a presentable fall costume with which to greet Scottie.
Item three: May I charge to Rosalind, or will you send her money + authorization for the following
1) coat and shoes ensemble
hat + shoes
2) dinner dress
3) rain-coat
4) winter slack suit to trek these woods.
These things are indispensable. With all the good will, to be minus the necessities to meet ones most elemental social obligation, is a material incapacity that asks other ways of life than these.
Mamma is going with me—which makes me extremely happy. She will visit with Tilde, and we hope to get in some good matineés, and will be between times happily ensconced at the Irving145 as before.
I know Scottie will be a-glow from so much voyaging; and I wish we were enterring Vassar to-gether—but only vaguely.
Tennis batters these summer twilights, and the mornings fall fresh from the pines. The hardi-hood of mountain lonlinesses holds me in sway, and I begin to love the long roads leading to forgotten regretted nostalgias. The smoke smells good, and isolated figures wander off into pioneer tradition. The hill-sides bloom anyway, and nights are haunted with purpose.
If you dont get here before, Thanksgiving is a gold and august time about here with bright + wise + impervious blue skies, and grapes, warm and perfumed of a courageous sun.
Wont it be fun? Wont it be fun?
—I am most grateful about the trip; will, needless to say, be as impeccable as even Scottie could desire, and will reassure myself that life still goes on at a fitting pace—
Many thanks
Zelda
Wont you confirm by wire immediately, if you haven’t already done so, these plans?
201. TO SCOTT [After September 19, 1938] |
ALS, 8 pp., on stationery embossed HOTEL IRVING / 26 GRAMERCY PARK / EAST 20th STREET / NEW YORK at top center |
Dear Scott:
New York is bliss, again. The stores are selling all sorts of aspirations to all sorts of possibilities and being here in a land of so much promise—and so many promises—is to live in a dream.
Thanks for the trip; you know I am always grateful for the happinesses you give me.
Scottie looks prettier than ever; Scottie is on the brink of being ravishing; Scottie is most gratifyingly pretty and adequate. It’s good to see her so much master of her world problems.
Item one, on my spiritual economy program:
Although Dr. Carroll requested a list of what shopping expenditures I would be making, he gave the nurse only $100 for pleasure and for clothes. I dont know that you did, but sending money for my use to that hospital is to relegate it to limbo. The[y] wont give it to me, and indeed nourish an idea that anybody ought to be content with tourists-lodgings and cafeteria meals, no tipping, and evasions of all the customary largesses which keeps functioning an agreeable and easy social order.
On that trip to Florida which Dr. Carroll sent you a bill for $200 for, he spent half an hour one morning arguing the extra 50¢ that having separate beds had cost me and the nurse. I do not believe that institution to be strictly punctilious, either spiritually or materially.
Wont you always just give them the necessary money, and to Mamma or Rosalind, the rest?
There arent any shows but the streets glitter and scintillate with memories and endeavor, and on this Sunday morning an amber beneficence sheds its light. I wish you had been able to come East— It would be fun to meet you here again. The Murphys looked very engaging; age and the ages leaves them untroubled and, perhaps, as impervious as possible. That was, indeed, a remunerative relationship—If they knew how much of other peoples orientations that they had influenced, they would less resent any challenge to their own. Which is all from the most fleeting of impressions on a crowded dock.
To Mamma, this is a fairy-land. It must be with gratitude that you remember the many happinesses which you have contributed to others.
Again, thank you.
Rosalind leaves for Atlanta on the 24th. New York will be less pleasurable to think on without her. But good that she is nearer to home.
May I go home for Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and soon for ever?
I’m so sick of the moralistic tone and repressive atmosphere of that hospital that I dont know how to endure. At my most desirable of attainments, they would have classified me at best as suspect; and any spontaneous reaction of any category therein means a week without liberty. It’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life that I impersonally hated. And I tell you again that they cannot be trusted.
We’re driving Scottie to the Obers to-day—and pray that she wont arrive a frazzled wreck. When she meets you, she will have been half around the world.
With deepest gratitude and many thanks for the flowers, and for this refurbishing of my ego.
—As soon as you yourself are under less stress, wont you see if I cant leave with a nurse? It would be cheaper, and as practical—and it is so good to be able to choose your own tooth-paste.
Zelda
[September 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dear Scott:
New York completely ravished me as usual: clothes spoke of promise latent in a flare and a swirl, and the baubles have reached the abstract era, of almost an absolute value.
There werent any shows, and the Statue of Liberty was closed for repairs; but I went to two very compelling concerts, and tried to digest a few scaterred pictures.
We called on the Obers. Their house seemed straight out of Longfellow, or some fanciful and homely poet; dreamily spun into the fragrance of orchards and tumbled down the rocky hill-side. I never saw a more enchanting child than their lanky red-headed boy. How can we ever at least let them know our gratitude?
It was dreams, de luxe, to lie in bed again and expostulate the morning rolls + coffee; and its always good to reassure oneself of the passage of Time. Because in these hills, the summer explodes in a froth of purple asters and the glow of an ending summer survives in the golden-rod; and Time disseminates a friendly inaccuracy—
Thank you very much; thank you once again; and thank you over and over for a most desirable vacation.
Scottie was supposed to have met me at the train; but I couldn’t find Mrs. Finneys address—
It will be good to see you
Zelda
203. TO ZELDA |
TL (CC), 1 p. [Malibu Beach, California] Sept. 20th 19 38 |
Dear Zelda:
I am sorry things got mixed up about Scottie. Or rather I’m sorry the wind misbehaved and grounded her plane in Washington. I suppose you got information about it before you started to Newark; supposing you’d left New York at two-thirty she naturally didn’t go on but stayed in Baltimore.
She enjoyed her visit out here very much which is more than I can say. It was a great deal of strain and effort at a very busy time.
She seems to have good intentions about college but I am rather weary of her good intentions and will wait and see some results. She kept an interesting diary which I am going to have typed and send you a copy.
Hope you enjoyed New York and am looking forward to seeing you.
With love—
Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald
Highland Hospital
Asheville
North Carolina
204. TO SCOTT [November 1938] |
ALS, 4 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott:
Item one: I’d much much rather Scottie and I went to-gether to Alabama for Christmas—for myself, for as much time as can be arranged: for Scottie, for as long as she will stay. It’s an awfully good thing to keep her in touch with her family: I like her to know my people as well as what has been our mutual environment. I also feel rather strongly that a child who has had as much of the advantages of life as Scottie has had, should gratefully fulfill her parental obligation; and that she should not be encouraged to feel any “familial” effort a bore. If you don’t submit to this view-point, her life will eventually have become a complete subscription to material values, and there wont be any comprehension of spiritual effort and obligation. For some three years I have asked you to give us the priviledge of at least acquainting her with the temperaments that must surely have found echo in her own. It would make us very happy and anybody feels a gratification of being cared-about. However, as you know, I have always deferred to your judgment, both voluntarily and perforce. I am also well-cognizant of the efforts and responsibility that Scotties well-being has cost you and know that they are more than happily contributed.
We could have a happy time at Christmas—and why should she come here at New Year unless there isnt any other way of our being to-gether. [However, there is a very nice party here on New Years eve and I will be very grateful to have her. We could come up from Alabama together.]146
I want whatever you want to send me. I believe I’d rather have a week-end case than anything imaginable tan leather—I would also like a wrist watch—the smallest available, for outdoor use. If these cost too much, you know that I’d much rather have my trip than anything. How can I give you something for Christmas? If you want to send me a little present, send mocassins beaded all over for a 5 shoe. Nothing has given me more pleasure than the ones you gave me.
Madame Curie must be most interesting to be working on: but also difficult of dramatization[.] However, the race, under the administrations of this generation seem exceptionally interested in the wherefores of cerebral process, and I imagine that it will make a hit. Everybody wants to learn now-a-days, and are begun to realize that the deepest pleasures are those that increase the horizons. Therein lies the element of excitement + adventure, of purpose and promise, that is absent from the pleasure of distractions already familiar, i.e., from the school of a casual + mechanicly sensory pleasure upheld. Sports was their answer, and in this country there wasnt much premium on sports (too universal). Our rewards go to the experimental, dont you think?
Anyhow, Mme Curie is a significant figure + we’ve got to learn about her anyway and the movie will be a good chance to get the gold with-out the pan-handling: and I bet it will be a more than successful enterprize—
With Love
Zelda
Please do something about Christmas. Shall I wait to hear from you, or mail my presents?
Would you send me your address, I couldn’t reach you in a hurry if I had to.
[November 1938] |
ALS, 6 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest D.O:
Before us, we have one of the most impressive institutes of learning that I have ever yearned after. Duke University is as impressive, as highly organized, as aspirational a structure as ever lost its way to the lonely, pine-peopled hill-tops of this somewhat astounding country-side. Of its social atmosphere, the university was redolent of acuteness to values of mondiale significance, and teeming with all sorts of intellectual enterprize. It is the only college I’ve ever seen that is unflavored with nostalgias, perfect in the instant, and bustling with spiritual ambitions. I don’t see why Scottie doesn’t get herself sent there; and why every-body doesn’t arrange to pass at least some of their lives in an environment presenting more of the manifestations of civilization so tangibly, and adequately at hand. One could perform experiments in how to live.
Chapel Hill is nostalgic, gracious and dreamy and haunted. It’s peeling pink façades and elegant by-ways of laurel and magnolia, and twilight sprawled over the common remind me of Ellerslie and of all sorts of good things in retrospect. I thought of you, and thanked you, and returned well-renewed in aspirations. The youth was so young, and concise, and vital and seemingly of fine ambitions stature, and seemingly competent of many possibly intricate and undeclared exigencies.
We are steeped in the regrettful lovliness of Indian summer. November moons above the road and awaits as aftermath the rising of a full and ominous moon.
Shall I wait till Christmas, or try to get home for Thanksgiving? Depending, of cource, on our financial estate.
I am painting assiduously, and so less slowly if more meticulously than heretofore and love some good morning painting hours that have accrued to me.
Otherwise, Time is a matter of expectancies, and of remembrance—try as I will to perfect the day.
However, this year is far better than last year, and has held more goodly priviledges—so I am grateful—
Devotedly
Zelda
[Late November 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott:
Dr. Carroll has promised that I can go home: leaving the 19th, to stay till the 27th[.] I am deeply grateful to you; a visit will make Mamma so happy. Seeing people she loves in her house where she can dispense hospitality and happiness is, perhaps, as gratifying as anything life has to offer; and I know that she will rejoice over Christmas dinner; and my own rejoicing make resound from the Pacific slopes if my expectations are measure of my capacities. I seethe with ideas for trees: trimmed with only black + silver stars after the tone of the legends of Camelot, trimmed with only the tenor + shimmer of silver bells—trimmed with pale blue whisperings of all the other Christmas’s there ever have been. So thanks again.
Of cource, I will be grateful to have Scottie whenever and wherever you designate: it would be my greatest pleasure to have her at home.
I paint some scintillant attenuate griefs, in the nature of white carnations, and I absorb my philosophy with paramount interest—The early Greeks wrote such beautiful + compelling prose and speculated so musically
The first snow fall has embedded the world in a soft oblivion. Luckily, the cold is still endurable: but I wake up every morning dreading the testing of the thermometer. The radio indoors and the snow banks out, and I am ready for the house to take whatever flight it pleases—
Devotedly
Zelda
Did Mr. Goldwyn eat my slippers?
[December 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott:
Wont you do something about all the things? I believe I’d considerably rather the check for my Christmas presents went to Mamma: dependent upon what your intentions are concerning Scotties whereabouts. Please arrange, if its possible, that we spend at least a few days at home. Mamma will be heart-broken otherwise.
It’s cold here, and my soul grows less expansive hourly. There ought to be some procedure that could be instigated against the different weathers: its not cold anyway No matter what happens I paint, and read philosophy, and pose as a model patient but there doesnt seem to be much premium on such this year. Wont you send the book on architecture? I like accumulating vast amounts of things to which I subscribe; that I may watch them slowly fall to pieces from disuse.
Dont you think we ought to plan things? A trip to Greece, or some nice wise warm place in which to, at least, investigate the possibilities of possible happiness. Or will you advance the prospect of Bermuda at Easter? I’m doing a little spiritual gold-digging: to which I believe I am entitled considering how good I am
Meanwhile, Time hurries though the frosty mornings, and would like very much some more aggressive policy—perhaps—and Time is reluctant of comment—and Time is a happy thing to be able to get along with.
There isnt any news. How could there be? But one is not ill-disposed towards existence—its continuity + evenments.
Rosalind agrees that perhaps it wouldnt be a good plan to give Scottie a tea party at home. I still feel that it would be a very good plan however.
Devotedly,
Zelda
Please tell Mr. Goldwyn-Mayer that only two pair of three paid-for pairs of shoes arrived.
[December 1938] |
ALS, 2 pp. [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina] |
Dearest Scott:
There’s hardly anything to say save thank you; again. I’m leaving Tuesday—and vacation promises to jingle itself in on the silver-y tinkle of a family tree.
It’s cold; but Ashville scintillates of a dusky lovely aspiring glamour. The streets are ordered—of an impersonal good-will— and it seems a proud and an independent place. When I go into Faters, or somewhere, the stabbing smell of masculinity reminds me of the hours we relegated to some forgotten dream—I think of you, often.
One of the most spiritually remunerative of human efforts is the mobilization of memories: so I’m happy to be going home. Whole facets of life take on new + more tangible aspects with each new other orientation; and it is so good to feel the right of inheritance to the traditions of a place.
Mamma says some of Scottie’s friends have already called her—so maybe there will be a party.
Meantime: what is your actual address? Spose I wanted to phone you—or do something unprecedented like that?
Devotedly
Zelda
209. TO SCOTT [After December 25, 1938] |
AL, 3 pp. [Montgomery, Alabama] |
Dearest Scott:
The little house is so clean and sunny, and fragrant of the absence of odors. There is the faintest aura of morning dust, and the sparkle of well-polished obligations. Roses bloom and expand on pleasurable memories; we are warm and adequate to the grace bestowed. I’ve missed you many times. The sun disports itself in the wide streets and the stores are open to the breath of the semi-tropics. Montgomery makes up for many blessures.
Thank you once again for the happiness; and for so generous a remembrance. Mamma, needless to say, did not intend to cash your check (the one precedent to my arrival). However, the visit has been expensive: more fires than usual, and three extra people to feed, and Melinda,147 to take care of us, and so I am going to leave the money from your first check here with Mamma.
She asked me to say specificly that she did not cash the check herself, and that she considerred that you had most generously provided and that it was unnecessary, but if she uses the $50 for expenses she wont have any present.
The week has been a beneficence. One hour is as happy as another; I would want to wake up in the middle of the night to appreciate my happy estate.
Scottie arrived on the twenty-fourth. Jerry Le Grand, Betty Nicrosi, Ann Hubbard and Miss Flowers met her at the train and escorted her into an (even pictorially) adequate whirl. The girls were enchanting: it made me homesick for my youth. At so cursory a glance, they seemed very self-reliant, pretty and suspended to a gracious purpose.148