Zelda
57. TO SCOTT
[June 1930]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
Your letter is not difficult to answer with promptitude since I have done nothing but turn over cause and effect in my mind for some time. Also your presentation of the situation is poetic, even if it has no bearing on the truth: your working to preserve the family and my working to get away from it. If you so refer to giving your absolute minimum of effort both to your work and to our mutual welfare with no hope or plans for the future save the vague capricices which drive you from one place to another, I envy you the mental processes which can so distort conditions into a rectitude of attitude for you. You have always told me that I had no right to complain as long as I was materially cared for, so take whatever comfort you may find in whatever self-justification you can construct. Also, I quite understand the restless dissatisfaction which drives you from exiting conditions since I have been through it myself, even to the point of being completely dependent on a mentality which had neither the desire nor the necessity of touching mine for the small crumbs of beauty that I found I must have to continue. This is not a treatise of recrimination, but I would like you to understand clearly why there are certain scenes not only towards the end which could never be effaced from my mind. I am here, and since I have no choice, I will try to muster the grace to rest peacefully as I should, but our divergence is too great as you must realize for us to ever be anything except a hash to-gether and since we have never found either help or satisfaction in each other the best thing is to seek it separately. You might as well start whatever you start for a divorce immediately.
When you saw in Paris that I was sick, sinking—when you knew that I went for days without eating, incapable of supporting contact with even the servants—you sat in the bathroom and sang “Play in your own Backyard.” Unfortunately, there wasn’t any yard: it was a public play-ground apparently. You introduced me to Nancy Hoyt and sat me beside Dolly Wilde4 one moment and the next disparaged and belittled the few friends I knew whose eyes had gathered their softness at least from things that I understood. Some justification has always been imperative to me, and I could never function simply from the necessity for functioning not even to save myself as the King of Greece once told Ernest Hemmingway was the most important thing of all as you so illuminatingly told me.
You will have all the things you want without me, and I will find something. You will have some nice girl who will not care about the things that I cared about and you will be happier. For us, there is not the slightest use, even if we wanted to try which I assure you I do not—not even faintly. In listing your qualities I can not find even one on which to base any possible relationship except your good looks, and there are dozens of people with that: the head-waiter at the Plaza del Funti[?] and my coiffeur in Paris—as you know, my memories are mostly lost in sound and smell, so there isn’t even that. I’m sorry. In Paris, I hope you will get Scottie out of the city heat now that she has finished school.
Zelda
58. TO ZELDA
[c. July 1930]
AL (draft), 4 pp.
[Switzerland]
When I saw the sadness of your face in that passport picture I felt as you can imagine. But after going through what you can imagine I did then and looking at it and looking at it, I saw that it was the face I knew and loved and not the mettalic superimposition of our last two years in France. When Scotty left me to go to you she said “I love you better than anyone in the world. I love you better than Mummy.” (I said naturally that I didn’t like that sort of talk)—but when she’d been with you she said “I hate leaving my darling Mummy more than anything that has ever happened to me in my life.”
The photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. The rotten letters you write me I simply put away under Z in my file. My instinct is to write a public letter to the Paris Herald to see if any human being except yourself and Robert McAlmon has ever thought I was a homosexual. The three weeks after the horror of Valmont when I could not lift my eyes to meet the eyes of other men in the street after your stinking allegations and insinuations will not be repeated. If you choose to keep up your wrestling match with a pillar of air I would prefer to be not even in the audience.5
I am hardened to write you so brutally by thinking of the ceaseless wave of love that surrounds you and envelopes you always, that you have the power to evoke at a whim—when I know that for the mere counterfiet of it I would perjure the best of my heart and mind. Do you think the solitude in which I live has a more amusing decor than any other solitude? Do you think it is any nicer for remembering that there were times very late at night when you and I shared our aloneness? I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach and grasp. I can only bring you the little bit of hope I have and I don’t know any other hope except my own. I have the terrible misfortune to be a gentleman in the sort of struggle with incalculable elements to which people should bring centuries of inexperience; if I have failed you is it just barely possible that you have failed me (I can’t even write you any more because I see you poring over every line like Mr. Sumner6 trying to wring some slant or suggestion of homosexuality out of it)
I love you with all my heart because you are my own girl and that is all I know.
59. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[August 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear:
I hope it will be nice at Caux.7 It sounds as if part of its name had rolled down the mountain-side. Perhaps when I’m well I won’t be so afraid of floating off from high places and we can go to-gether.
Except for momentary retrogressions into a crazy defiance and complete lack of proportion I am better. It’s ghastly losing your mind and not being able to see clearly, literally or figuratively—and knowing that you can’t think and that nothing is right, not even your comprehension of concrete things like how old you are or what you look like—
Where are all my things? I used to always have dozens of things and now there doesn’t seem to be any clothes or anything personal in my trunk. I’d love the gramophone—
What a disgraceful mess—but if it stops our drinking it is worth it—because then you can finish your novel and write a play and we can live somewhere and have a house with a room to paint and write maybe like we had, with friends for Scottie and there will be Sundays and Mondays again which are different from each other and there will be Christmas and winter fires and pleasant things to think of when you’re going to sleep—and my life won’t be up the back-stairs of music halls, and yours won’t keep trailing down the gutters of Paris—if it will only work, and I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac—
I will be so glad to see you—I hope most of the poison will be gone by then.
Please be good, Dear. It’s so much better to love the things you’ve always loved if you can just remember about them—
60. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[August/September 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
Thank you for coming to see me. I love you Dear, but there wasn’t any use in trying to work the electricity plant by gas, was there? I realize the horror and humiliation completely and I’m sorry it happened. You said the water was dirty. I asked that it be cleaned up before you came, but they wouldn’t. You opened the window and said you’d teach me to play—Well, now I suppose I’ll end back in that horrible insane asylum.8
Please help me. Every day more of me dies with this bitter and incessant beating I’m taking. You can choose the conditions of our life and anything you want if I don’t have to stay here miserable
and sick at the mercy of people who have never even tried what its like. Neither would I have if I had understood. I can’t live any more under these conditions, and anyway I’ll always know that the “door is tacticly locked”—if it ever is.
There’s no justice—no quiet place of rest left in the world, and the longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get—
You do not want me to write Newman. You said he said I was bluffing. What he said was that it was a straight 8 and that he had only been up in an open plane.
Please. Please let me out now—Dear, you used to love me and I swear to you that this is no use. You must have seen. You said it was too good to spoil. What’s spoiling is me, along with it and I don’t see how anybody in the world has a right to do such a thing—
61. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
The panic seems to have settled into a persistent gloom punctuated by moments of bombastic hysteria, which is, I suppose a relatively wholesome state. Though I would have chosen some other accompaniment for my desequalibrium than this foul eczema, still the crises of the sinking bed and the hydraulic heart have been more or less mastered and I am waiting impatiently for when you can come to see me if you will—Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?
Yesterday I had some gramophone discs that reminded me of Ellerslie. I wonder why we have never been very happy and why all this has happened—It was much nicer a long time ago when we had each other and the space about the world was warm—Can’t we get it back someway—even by imagining?
The book came—thanks awfully—
Dear, I will be so glad to see you—
Sometimes, it’s desperate to be so alone—and you can’t be very happy in a hotel room—We were awfully used to having each other about—
Zelda
Dr. Forel told me to ask you if you had stopped drinking—so I ask—
62. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dearest, my Darling—
Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself. At seven o:clock I had a bath but you were not in the next room to make it a baptisme of all I was thinking.
At eight o:clock I went to gymnastics but you were not there to turn moving into a harvesting of breezes.
At nine o:clock I went to the tissage and an old man in a white stock [smock?] chanted incantations but you were not there to make his imploring voice seem religious.
At noon I played bridge and watched Dr. Forels profile dissecting the sky, contre jour—
All afternoon I’ve been writing soggy words in the rain and feeling dank inside, and thinking of you—When a person crosses your high forehead and slides down into the pleasant valleys about your dear mouth its like Hannibal crossing the Alps—I love you, dear. You do not walk like a person plowing a storm but like a person very surprised at their means of locomotion, hardly touching the earth, as if each step were experimental—
And you are a darling and it must be awful to have a person always trying to creep inside you the way I do—
Good-night, my Sweet Love
Zelda
63. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
I wish I could see you: I have forgotten what it’s like to be alive with a functioning intelligence. It was fine to have your post-card with your special reaction to Caux on it. Your letters are just non-commital phrases that you might write to Scottie and they do not help to unravel this infinite psychological mess that I’m floundering about in. I watch what attitude the nurse takes each day and then look up what symptom I have in Doctor Forel’s book. Dear, why has my ignorance on a medical subject which has never appeared to me particularly interesting reduced me to the mental status of a child? I know that my mind is vague and undisciplined and that I only know small smatterings of things, but that has nothing to do with cerebral processes.
The graphaphone is broken. It’s curious how Stravinsky sounds in this atmosphere. You feel like apologizing—It’s awfully exciting— Prokofieff is better. Are there any discs of “Fils Progique”?9 I’d like them awfully. I like visual music. I s’pose that’s why I like opera. Abstractions are too emotional, in any field, to be borne almost.
I don’t know how we’re going to reverse time, you and me; erase and begin again—but I imagine it will be automatic. I can’t project myself into the past no matter how hard I try. There are lots of days when I think it would have been better to give me a concise explanation and let it go—because I know so much already. One illusion is as good as another.
Write me how you are and what you do and what the world is like at Caux—
Love Zelda
64. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
SEND THE
PHONOGRAPH
PLEASE
Dear, I hope all that is true—I seem awfully queer to myself, but I know I used to have integrity even if it’s gone now—You’ve got to come to me and tell me how I was. Now I see odd things: people’s arms too long or their faces as if they were stuffed and they look tiny and far away, or suddenly out of proportion.
In all that horror Dolly Wilde was the only one who said she would do anything to be cured—How did Emily10 suddenly seem to represent order and indepandence to me? Last summer when we went with her to Natalie Barney’s I was sorry for her, she seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.
Is it true that its better to be well or is it that I am to have only one of Eddington’s tables, the physical one, so that there will be no place to put my papers when I want to write—Because if its true, why do people boast so of their strength when they are sick—because you know that I was much stronger mentally and physically and sensitively than Emily but you said at Valmont that she was too big a poisson for me. Why? She couldn’t dance a Brahm’s waltz or write a story—she can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking—
Please explain—I want to be well and not bothered with poissons big or little and free to sit in the sun and choose the things I like about people and not have to take the whole person—because it seems to me that then you can’t see the parts so you can never write about them or even remember them very well—
Zelda
65. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp.
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Goofy, my darling, hasn’t it been a lovely day? I woke up this morning and the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel on my table so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air: love to Doo-do and the remembered feel of our skins cool against each other in other mornings like a school-mistress. And you ’phoned and said I had written something that pleased you and so I don’t believe I’ve ever been so heavy with happiness. The moon slips into the mountains like a lost penny and the fields are black and punguent and I want you near so that I could touch you in the autumn stillness even a little bit like the last echo of summer. The horizon lies over the road to Lausanne and the succulent fields like a guillotine and the moon bleeds over the water and you are not so far away that I can’t smell your hair in the drying breeze. Darling—I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemie or a “grand patron”—or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway
, I love you most and you ’phoned me just because you ’phoned me tonight—I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear—
I’m so glad you finished your story—Please let me read it Friday. And I will be very sad if we have to have two rooms. Please.
Dear. Are you sort of feeling aimless, surprised, and looking rather reproachful that no melo-drama comes to pass when your work is over—as if you [had] ridden very hard with a message to save your army and found the enemy had decided not to attack—the way you sometimes feel—or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands in the middle of the week—the way you sometimes are—or are you organizing and dynamic and mending things—the way you sometimes are—
I love you—the way you always are.
Dear—
Good-night—
Dear-dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
66. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Fall 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 11