As you have probably guessed, this has been an uneventful day, because loving is not an even but sort of a piston rod to force them to work the engine.
A wild telegram from Ober: which I answered placatively—
O Dudo—
Zelda
84. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp.
[November 11, 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling—
Four days have gone so now we have only thirty-eight ’till you’ll be home again. We are like a lot of minor characters at table waiting for the entrance of the star. It’s very lonely in the morning and afternoon and at night. I had the rubbeuse last night but it was only half a massage—since you weren’t there to have the other half. I keep the light burning on your desk so I’ll think you’re there when I wake up, but then it’s awful to have to turn it out when it’s day. Your room is warm and fuzzy with you and I sit and look where you left things.
There was a parade to-day but I didn’t go. I love the still desertion of the back streets when men are marching. The weather here is a continual circus day—smoky with the sun like a red balloon and soft and romantic and sensual. I hope it’s as nice in California
I found the old blind buglar from the Civil War that used to sell me candy when I was a child. I said “Uncle Bob I used to buy your candy twenty-five years ago” and he said “That’s nothing new”—So I felt very part of the generations, struggling and pathetic. I bought Scottie a cream bar. It tasted of buried treasure so we gave it to the cat who has reappeared.
I am send[ing] off the murder story again. There is no word from “Nurts”17 and I’m afraid I am just “writing for myself”
Va. Browder phoned me about Sanctuary.18 Said she couldn’t sleep for three nights it gave her the horrors so terribly. Do you think we should give it to all these people? Two came last night for Mathilde (her aunts) of the clever type: when the word “year” comes up they say “a year has twelve months, you know”—or a person has only to say “Sat.” to bring forth “that’s after Sunday”—God! You know the kind: women of fifty still known as “Baby.” Darling; I am escapeless in an awful world when you are not here.
If I could only someway make you feel how much I love you—
Zelda.
I read “The Off Shore Pirate” to-day. You were younger than anybody in the world once—what fun you must have had in that curious place that’s younger than life—It’s a good story[.] Can they make clocks out of cellos in Hollywood?19
85. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp. At 819 Felder St.
[November 13, 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
There once upon a time lived a very lonesome old peasant woman, or maybe it was a faithful St. Bernard. Anyway something very lonesome lived at the above address and had great difficulties pushing its thoughts out swiftly enough so they would arrive fresh in California. These thoughts were just silly little things with practically no sense to them. They were mostly “I love you”, so one day on the thirteenth of November they went walking in the woods and there they met a great big strong post-man who gave them a letter from El Paso and they all went home and married Dudo and lived very happily in the pocket of the King of the Roses for ever and ever and ever afterwards.
I have stopped my dancing lessons since I had a violent quarrell with Amalia this morning. She called me a cow because I told her I couldn’t do steps that neither fit the time nor the spirit of the music. I even bought a book of Shubert waltzes and took them up there thinking she could conceive them but she evidently has impedimented hearing—so that’s off your mind. Being a creature of habit I suppose I shall miss it for awhile—but not after you come home. So I said she was a cow, too, and she said she couldn’t be if she tried and Mamma and Marjorie said I was perfect and so will all the people at lunch to-morrow—though I do not want to tell them.
Goofo, my darling—
Absolution is one of the best stories I ever read and the Baby Party is a wonderful story. I will never never be able to write like that. Help, Deo.
Scottie says she won’t do acrobatics any more. I persuaded her to go to-day. Does she have to? She is a darling and behaving very well. We have a reverse to Bridge that we play called “Queen of Spades” in the evening.
Riding thru these woods now is like tumbling down a copper cascade. They are as glitterring as medieval soldiers in this champagne sunshine.
Freeman has actually got four pages written on a story. Old Man River still rakes the lives and doubtless buries bones behind the barn. Julia has adopted me in your place so she says and is about to hatch me with her constant clucking and brooding. She is perfect.
Mlle. B. is most agreeable and really awfully nice and considerate and pleasant.
But we miss you so its practically unendurable. I think of you always.
Love—O so much love
Zelda
86. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[Mid-November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dearest:
I fell down to-day and sprained my ankle: I won’t be able to walk for a week but luckily it isn’t very swollen so perhaps it will be well quicker: Scottie stumbled and burnt her arm very slightly on the stove and has a bandage—and this is accident prevention week. The Boy-Scouts are tormenting innocent pedestrians with ropes and flags and the police look very stylish in their badges for afternoon wear. Perhaps I will be able to write while my foot subsides
That’s a fine article:20 I hope it cured you of some of your loss of confidence. Deo, my Darling—You are the best of all.
I’m sorry your work isn’t interesting. I had hoped it might present new dramatic facets that would make up for the tediousness of it. If it seems too much drudgery and you are faced with “get to-gether and talk-it-over” technique—come home, Sweet. You will at least have eliminated Hollywood forever. I wouldn’t stay and waste time on what seems an inevitable mediocrity and too hard going.
Scottie and I are hideously lonesome for you: I have sunk into a conservative apathy and can’t seem to produce anything at all. I worked on the automobile story, changed the name to “Sweet Chariot”21 and sent it off. Also Elsa Maxwell, which, in spite of your criticism, still seems good to me. Thought of calling it “Foie Gras”—What do you think? The plot is banal, but the writing is the best I ever did—22
I don’t know what to think about with you away—My mind stumbles about the shadows of your room and thinks of nothing at all except that you were there a week ago—
Darling my own my love—Don’t stay if you’re miserable. There’s warmth and content and happiness waiting here and you don’t have to struggle through experimental mazes with all you’ve got behind you—
I love you so—I wish I could do all the badness for you—
A very nice man I don’t remember said he was in the army with you and asked very cordially after you—as do all our friends—
Mr. Indespensable Dudo, I love you.
Zelda.
87. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp.
[Mid-November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling:
This has been one of those days of sodden missing you. I feel very poor and as if life were comprehensive. I’d like to put on my old clothes and dig a field.
The woods here are molten and shivered into golden splinters by the autumn sun and sometimes they’re as red and gray as Santa Claus under the Spanish moss. I think of you and want to live in a velvet riding habit and recite Swinburne and be a ghost in every crumbling brick house on the country roads. I don’t know why you are such a love. The farms are charred and the dust is as prodigious as if an army on the march had just gone by and the cotton-ginning has begun.
Daddy is terribly sick, but Mamma seems calm and reconciled.
I forgot to tell you I named my story
All About the Down’s Case!
; I will be glad when your mother comes. There will be a little more of you about. Scottie peoples the house with flashes of Dudo, but I would like to be drowned in your image. I am writing a one-act play about children for reasons incomprehensible to myself.
The cricketts sizzle outside your window and the leaves float peacefully off the trees. I’m afraid it will be all bare and indolent by the time you get back. But it won’t matter because we will have each other and we can be safe and warm—
I haven’t seen a soul since you left so there’s no gossip—My friends telephone but the house is a bee-hive and I haven’t felt like fiddling around.
I read one of your stories every night. We are in the doldrums of Time and I can’t get very much done.
Deo—bring some camera films home so we can make some more movies of us.
Darling I love you love you love you
Good-night, sweetheart
Zelda
88. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp.
[Mid-November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling, my Dearest:
The air blows warm and soft as the swirl of a painter’s brush outside and the dry leaves sink in a slow nocturne. There is a frustrated melancholy floating on the wind in stagnant spirals and it feels like the nights in “This Side of Paradise.” Effulgent voluptuous rain smothers the tree tops and the darkness shoves along the street in scandalized puffs[.] I love you so and I hate you to be away when things are nice.
I have finished my one-act play and got all the rest of my things off to Ober so there’s no excuse for not working, unfortunately. The house goes fine and the faithful servitors are industrious and polite. Mlle is really a very nice person to have about and Scottie is—well, everything but you. I’m mostly so lonesome that I thought of asking your mother down now, just to make you seem not so entirely far away. Goofo— even after this one there are four weeks more—It’s too awful.
We rode to Pickett Springs and there is a lovely house where old head-quarters used to be and a big cotton gin on the site of your tent. It was very nostalgic. At the Fair Grounds a lone elephant takes his winter siesta and three lions shake the moths from their manes. It is somehow very glamorous and we are going Sunday to watch the acrobats practice. It’s such a bizarre way of existence—under half-shelter out in the picked cotton fields with the evening sky running red lava down the dirt roads as if they were all about to be buried under a furious glory.
My foot is a considerable nuisance—Since I can’t get much exercise I sleep lightly and last night I had a cavalcade of police-men out here at three o’clock to scare the cat off your tin roof—But it was not schitzophrenic, however: I just went to bed reading the O’Brien collection.23 Never have I seen so much solid and sordid insistence upon the macabre and the abnormal, the melo-dramatic and the unpromising. What is this leaden disenchantment that has fallen on the soul of man and mashed it shapeless and thin? Deo—do drive the steam-roller off our pulverized egos—
I love you so—Every five minutes I want to send you a brilliant telegram to make you Darling-Conscious but I never can think of anything except that I love you—and you must be rather used to that by now—
Dear—
Zelda
89. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp.
[Mid-November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dearest, my love:
I had the most horrible dream about you last night. You came home with a great shock of white hair and you said it had turned suddenly from worrying about being unfaithful. You had the big leather carry-all trunk you have always talked about buying and in it were two huge canvasses, landscapes, with the trees stuffed and made of cloth and hanging off like doll’s arms. O Goofo! I love you so and I’ve been mad all day because of that dream.
The people came in hoards, (each one) for lunch, ten, and it was very successful. Mrs McKinney, Eva Mae Clark (useful for golf), Marjorie Allen, Virginia Julia, Francis Stevenson and the director of the Little Theatre. He said he’d give Private Lives if I’d play it. I thought he would fly out the window, but he’s very pleasant.
Did you see this in the New Yorker?
Dear, I miss you more every day—These sultry days when everything feels like an interlude after a big event and the woods are introspective and the heavens old and sober I want you near so much. But one week has gone to-night—one week more to realize how much I love you. De-e-o.
Its wonderful that we have never had a cross word or done bad things to each other. Wouldn’t it be awful if we had? Dear—I can’t seem to get started writing. I havent got that inner happiness or desperation that leaves a person free in the external world of imagination, but just a sort of a plugging along feeling—When you come home we can be happy
If we seem dim and far away sometimes, dear please think of us anyway even if it should seem like a useless emotional disciplining. You are all I care about on earth: the past discredited and disowned, the future has doubled up on the present; give me the peace of my one certitude—that I love you. It’s the only instance in my life of my intelligence backing up my emotions—That was an awful dream— awful dear. I didnt want to live and you were only formally sorry—
Oddly enough, I always think of Dolf Patterson when I think of Hollywood—His illusions seem realer to me than my own sporadic despair of the time—
I don’t mean any of this: I want you to have a good time and take what you can from everywhere and love me if you want to and be kind—
But I Love you
Zelda
90. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp.
[Mid-November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling O my Own Love!
I wrote you such a silly egocentric non-sensical letter yesterday— I was haunted by the night-mare. To-day I played tennis from ten to twelve-thirty with Noonie and we swam about ten minutes and I am all cheerful and not a bit depressed anymore except by thinking that there might have been something in that absurd letter to worry you.
Dear, I’ve finished “All The Sad Young Men”24—except “The Rich Boy[”] that I saved for to-night. They are all so good—fine stories. I wanted to cry over the Sensible Thing. Reading your stories makes me curious more than ever about you. I don’t suppose I really know you very well—but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of you[r] sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.
Scottie and Mlle went on horse-back to-day. They are very enthusiastic—and Mlle has started lessons in ball-room dancing. I am so glad she has found some distraction. The house goes along listening for you and we are terribly lonely.
Daddy is sinking rapidly the Doctors say. I only go once a day and take Mamma for a long drive, since he is completely unconscious and does not know us or seem to want anybody about.
To-day I went to sleep on your bed. It was like dozing in a lullaby swung on the ends of time and space. Your cane is still always where you left it. Do you want it sent?
I had planned to spend Thanksgiving with the three of us and Noonie at a place near Dothan, Panama City, that they say is the equal of the Bay of Biscay. If Daddy’s condition permits we will go for the week-end and if its nice we can go when you’re back. Its only 150 miles, and perfect beach and bathing. Noonie plays fine tennis: she give me 30 but I won so she made me take 15. We are going to play every day so I can play with you—
Goofo, my dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning—
All my love and heart
and everything, everything
Zelda
91. TO SCOTT
Wire
DB687 21 MONTGOMERY ALA 17 1931 NOV 17 PM 10 54 SCOTT FITZGERALD=
HOTEL CHR
ISTIE HOLLYWOOD CALIF=
SORRY YOU ARE DEPRESSED COME HOME IF IT SEEMS TOO DIFFICULT WE ARE ALWAYS THINKING OF YOU LOVE TO MY SWEETHEART=
ZELDA.
92. TO SCOTT
Wire
SD1 10=MONTGOMERY ALA 18 950A 1931 NOV 18 AM 8 14 SCOTT FITZGERALD=
HOTEL CHRISTIE=
DADDY DIED LAST NIGHT DO NOT WORRY ABOUT US
LOVE=
ZELDA.
93. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[November 18, 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dearest:
This is all very sad: The struggle is over and this is the end of another brave, uncompromising effort to preserve conceptions—
Daddy died last night but I was not called till morning.
Anthony25 is here and Tilde arrives to-morrow—
Mamma is very brave and cheerful but it’s very sad.
I wonder what ironic sequence, what stamina of spirit Daddy has carried over that made him think so little of the world and so much of justice and integrity? I have not seen his body. But I am glad that he is released at last from a consciousness that knew only pain at the end. The last time I saw him he seemed glad to see Scottie and very gentle and glad of his flowers—and apart from that oblivious—
I am glad he is in peace—
All my love, my dear-dear-dear
Zelda.
94. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp.
[After November 18, 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dearest My Own:
The funeral is over. The State of Alabama sent a big wreath and the Supreme Court and the capitol employees sent all the roses off the Capitol grounds. We were all very proud of Daddy. He had expressed a wish to avoid manifestations of sentiment so just the burial service was read, and “Lead Kindly Light” was read. There were no hymns.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 14