Dear Scott:
Please, out of charity write to Dr. Forel to let me off this cure.11 I have been 5 months now, unable to step into a corridor alone. For a month and a week I’ve lived in my room under bandages, my head and neck on fire. I havent slept in weeks. The last two days I’ve had bromides and morphine but it doesn’t do any good.—All because nobody ever taught me to play tennis. When I’m most miserable there’s your game to think of.
If you could see how awful this is you could write lots more stories, light ones to laugh about. I want to get well but I can’t it seems to me, and if I should whats going to take away the thing in my head that sees so clearly into the past—into dozens of things that I can never forget. Dancing has gone and I’m weak and feeble and I can’t understand why I should be the one, amongst all the others, to have to bear all this—for what?
You said you did not want to see me if I knew what I know. Well, I do know. I would have liked you to come to me, but there’s no good telling lies.
I can’t read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.
Mamma does know whats the matter with me. She wrote me she did. You can put that in your story to lend it pathos. Bitched once more. If I have to stand much more to take away the thing in me that all the rest of you find so invaluable and superior, when I get out I’m going to have Scottie at least.
It’s so hard for me to understand liking a feeling without liking the person that I suppose I will be eternally confined.
67. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Late November 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
Your letter astonished me: for a month and two weeks I have been three times outside my room and for five months I have lived with my sole desire that of death. If you are coming here under the illusion that I am well, or even better, you will have to wait another year or so since I can see no possibility of escape from here.
Granted that in another six months, the Teutonic sophistries of Dr. Forel, could render inactive the element in me which so many others have not found undesirable, there is still a perfectly good lesion, of which I am quite conscious.
I want to leave here. I have spent as much time as I intend to unable to step into a corridor alone. I am thirty years old and quite willing to take full responsibility for myself. Neither you nor Dr. Forel has any legal right to keep me interned any longer. If you prefer, I will ask that Newman come and make the necessary arrangements. The pathological element has completely disappeared; my attitude is simply this: I do not consider it worth while, at my age, to pass any more time in a questionable attempt at remaking a figure that would always be humpbacked. If you want to communicate with my father you are at liberty to do so—or an alienist, if you are in any doubt as to my equilibrium. On the other hand, any amicable arrangement that you want to make, needless to say I am more than willing to agree to. But I am not going to stay here any longer, and if you make a row about it there are lots of things that will be aired in the courts that won’t do anybody any good, now or later.
In the meantime, it will be pleasant to see you again. I have missed you enormously.
Devotedly
Zelda
Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler, the foremost authority on schizophrenia, the term Bleuler coined for dementia praecox, was called in for a consultation by Scott and Dr. Forel. Despite financial pressure, Scott was adamant that Zelda receive the best care possible. He had originally wanted Carl Jung, but Jung’s specialty was neurosis, rather than psychosis. From Paris on December 1, Scott wrote a long letter to Judge and Mrs. Sayre explaining their daughter’s condition and treatment and letting them know that, based on her doctors’ advice, Zelda would remain in Prangins for the time being. He also explained Zelda’s treatment in detail. The letter concluded with Scott, who felt that the Sayres blamed him for Zelda’s breakdown, trying to restore their faith in him:
. . . I know you despise certain weaknesses in my character and I do not want during this tragedy that fact to blur or confuse your belief in me as a man of integrity. Without any leading questions and somewhat to my embarrassment Blenler12 said “This is something that began about five years ago. Let us hope it is only a process of re-adjustment. Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded it but you couldn’t have prevented it.[”]
My plans are as follows. I’m staying here on Lake Geneva indefinately because even if I can only see Zelda once a fortnight, I think the fact of my being near is important to her. (Life in Letters 203–204)
68. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[December 1930]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
You told me I might send you a letter if I needed something. I would like some books of your choosing—and for a present I want a silver ring for my little finger—a heavy masculine kind with a red stone—ruby or garnet or something like that. Clothes I need desperately but I’ll get them in the spring when things are brighter and less hopeless than just now and when it seems probable that we can travel home—if ever.
I followed your suggestion and bought the decorations for a small tree for Scottie.13 It will seem curious to see her again after so long and I suppose I will hardly recognize her. Vacation time needless to say seems less exciting than in the past. There is nothing to look forward to that I can see—though I suppose the outlook on life will change as time goes on. I sincerely hope so because as things are lately it is not worth while carrying on—
Scott and Scottie skiing at Gstaad during her Christmas vacation in December 1930; caption supplied by Scott
Do answer me—I’m so lonesome all the time—
Devotedly
Zelda
In January 1931, Scott’s father died, and before he returned to the United States for the funeral, he visited Zelda to break the news to her in person. At that time, Dr. Forel was trying to discover the link between Zelda’s mental instability and the excruciatingly severe form of eczema that tormented her. Before he departed for home, Scott, eager to help, sent a seven-page typed letter to Dr. Forel, in which he painstakingly included all the details from Zelda’s past history that he could associate with her eczema. He also told Dr. Forel that, during their visit, Zelda “was enormously moved by my father’s death or by my grief at it and literally clung to me for an hour. Then she went into the other personality and was awful to me at lunch. After lunch she returned to the affectionate tender mood”—evidence that her moods were just as volatile in person as they were in her letters. Scott concluded the letter by telling Dr. Forel that he would be in the States for three or four weeks, and he asked the doctor to wire him each week about Zelda’s condition (Life in Letters 204–207).
Zelda wrote the following letter to console Scott as he departed for his father’s funeral:
69. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[January 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
Knowing that our meeting was inadequate and that the sympathy and tenderness that I would liked to have expressed more clearly were lost in the disorder of your sudden leaving I hope this note will reach you before you are on the sea. Once in America the loss of your father will seem closer home than it does from Europe. Reconstructing the scenes of your youth is going to be a painful affair and if I would like to offer you the little comfort there is in the knowledge that someone who is close to you appreciates the fullness of your heart in thinking of a definately finished part of your world. Your father was a happy man at the end. He liked Washington and his hotel friends and had grown to imagine himself a part of government machinery. You must not be too sorry for his lot. By the time the failures of his middle years had grown far enough away to be fitted retrospectively into his career he was already old and tired with life less pressing on his heels. Luckily they have a
lways had money and he did not feel the necessity to struggle and keep alert his intelligence in the great scramble for a place in the world. He was at any rate spared that in his old age and spent his time in a vague dream.
Don’t be anxious about us. Madamoiselle is exceedingly capable and can communicate with me when necessary.
I would have been so happy to help you. A neurose is not much good in times of distress to others. And its hard to extract solace from the past. I can only send my profoundest sympathy.
Zelda
Before returning to Europe, Scott visited the Sayres in Montgomery to reassure them that Zelda was receiving the best care possible. He returned in late February, to find that she had improved quickly and remarkably during his absence. Scott began a series of stories in which he departed from the exuberant tone of his twenties fiction and, drawing from recent experiences, produced more solemn work. “The Jazz Age is over,” he wrote; his stories—including, “A Trip Abroad” and “Babylon Revisited,” two of his best—reflected on his losses. In “Babylon Revisited,” an old acquaintance walks up to the protagonist, Charlie Wales, in the Ritz bar and says, “I heard that you lost a lot in the crash,” to which Wales replies, “I did . . . but I lost everything I wanted in the boom” (Stories 401)—an assessment clearly Scott’s own.
But Zelda’s improvement did promise a new beginning. That winter, she enjoyed skiing at St. Cergue and going on patient outings to nearby towns, such as Bern. By April, she was well enough to take brief vacations with Scott to Montreux and Geneva. Her letters to him during the spring and summer were clearly love letters, and the playful tone of their courtship days returned.
70. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Spring 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
I would like awfully to have something to read upon which my head will be able to make no conjectures whatsoever and something with ideas that I will not constantly think that I know where they originated—Will you send me “The Decline of the West” and “Technique of Playwriting” like you promised so that I can put my subconscious, or whatever it is, back where it belongs and be left in peace to formulate and organize and absorb things that could find themselves a form afterwards? Thanks. I have been reading Joyce and find it a night-mare in my present condition, and since my head evaporates in a book-store it would be much easier if you would send something to me. Not in French, since I have enough difficulty with English for the moment and not Lawrence and not Virginia Wolf or anybody who writes by dipping the broken threads of their heads into the ink of literary history, please—
Thank you ever so much.
Zelda
71. TO SCOTT
AL, 1 p.
[Spring 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear heart, my darling love,
This is no good—but nothing matters because after to-morrow I’m going to see you again—
What a dreary rain—I rowed on the lake. It was like being on a slate roof. When the boat is not pointed into the waves it goes up with them and you keep waiting for the bump of coming down but it doesn’t come so you just slide from one to another and have no sense of direction like being on one of those oily tin platforms at Luna Parc—
I can’t write. I tried all afternoon—and I just twisted the pencil round and round churning between my teeth, and I love you. You are a darling. When you can’t write you sit on the bed and look so woebegone like a person who’s got to a store and can’t remember what they wanted to buy—
Good-night, dear. If you were in my bed it might be the back of your head I was touching where the hair is short and mossy or it might be up in the front where it make[s] little caves above your forehead, but wherever it was it would be the sweetest place, the sweetest place
Darling
72. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Spring 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott:
Will you mail this to Sara please? I seem to have lost her address amongst other things. I wrote you a long rig-a-marole yesterday, I don’t know why, which you can believe or not as you choose—since I do not know whether it was true.
I keep thinking of Provence and thin brown people slowly absorbing the deep shade of Aix—the white glare on the baking dust of a country pounded into colorless oblivion by an incessantly rotating summer—I’d like awfully to be there—Avignon must be perfect now, to feel the wide quiet of the Rhone, and Arles obliterating its traces with the hum of cafés under the great trees—I’d like to be eating the lunch we had at Chateau Neuf du Pap, where the air was not vibrant and full of the whole spectrum—looking over a deep valley full of grape-vines and heat and far away the palace of the Popes like a mirage—
I would like to be walking alone in a Sirocco at Cannes at night passing under the dim lamps and imagining myself mysterious and unafraid like last summer—
I would like to be working—what would you like? Not work, I know, and not lone places. Would you like to be in New York with a play in rehearsal like you always said? And to have decorative people about you—to be reading Spengler, or what?
It is not possible that you should really want to be in the hurry and disorder of the Ritz Bar and Mont Ma[r]tre and the high excitability of scenes like the party we went to with McGowan where you passed so much of your time recently—
73. TO SCOTT
AL, 3 pp.
[Spring/Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
My dearest and most precious Monsieur,
We have here a kind of a maniac who seems to have been inspired with erotic aberrations on your behalf. Apart from that she is a person of excellent character, willing to work, would accept a nominal salary while learning, fair complexion, green eyes would like correspondance with refined young man of your description with intent to marry. Previous experience unnecessary. Very fond of family life and a wonderful pet to have in the home. Marked behind the left ear with a slight tendency to schitzoprenie.
We thought it best to warn you that said patient is one of the best we have at present in the irresponsible class, and we would not like any harm to come to her. She seems to be sufferring largely from a grand passion, and is easily identifiable as she will be wearing the pink of condition and babbling about the 6.54 being cupid’s arrow. We hope this specimen will give entire satisfaction, that you will entrust us with all future orders and we love you with all all all our hearts and souls and body.
Wasn’t it fun to laugh together over the ’phone? You are so infinitely sweet and dear—O my dear—my love, my infinitely inexpressible sweet darling dear, I love you so much.
Our picnic was a success and I am cooked raw from the sun. A lady came with us who behaved about the row-boat like I used to about the Paris taxis so it was a lively expedition. What fun. God help us—
Goofy! I’m going to see you to-morrow to-morrow! You said you wouldn’t ’phone, so what time will I expect your call?
If all the kisses and love I’m sending you arrive at their destination you will be as worn away as St. Peter’s toe and by the time I arrive have practically no features left at all—but I shall know you always by the lilt in your darling person
Dearest!
74. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp.
[Spring/Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
“Yes I do—Ha! Ha!
Darling—
I went to Geneva all by myself with a fellow maniac and the city was thick and heavy before the rain. The gray sky trickled over the pavements like a pungent des[s]ert after a heavy meal, and I wanted so to be in Lausanne with you—Saturday on the way back from Bern[e], I searched each person in your station when we passed. It seemed incredible that anything so dear as your shining fac
e should not be where I last saw it. Have you ever been so lonely that you felt eternally guilty—as if you’d left off part of your clothes—I love you so, and being without you is like having gone off and left the gas-heater burning, or locked the baby in the clothes-bin. But I’m going to see you soon, and the rain pumps outside my window and squeezes the dripping trees and strains the gravel in the walk and I hope the earth will shrink with all this wetting so you will be closer.
I have a new room to-day. It’s bigger than my other (which was engaged[ )] and there are two windows with pleasantness sweeping through. There is a very curious conception of a bath. It looks like something children build in a running gutter and is that way I understand because the lady who built the house was too fat to climb in a real tub. So it will just suit me in another month, though it does give the effect of a dammed drain.
Dr. Forel’s father died this afternoon. I imagine he is terribly upset since he was very devoted. Old age is so hazardous, and youth as well and yet they are the only impervious states—In middle life, when one ought to be solid and content, one has bored so many vistas thru[?] to unhappiness, sickness and collapability that all our energy is spent turning our eyes away—
O Darling—my dear, I love you with all my heart forever and ever and ever—
I hope you know they are kisses splattering you[r] balcony tonight from a lady who was once, in three separate letters, a princess in a high white tower and who has never forgotten her elevated station in life and who is waiting once more for her royal darling
Good-night, honey—
75. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Spring/Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 12