Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
Page 19
I can tell by your letters—but I am persistent and shall write you a love letter as soon as I can find enough phrases to express myself—
Darling
To-night, I feel very self-sufficient and want to be at home I suppose or doing something. Enforced inactivity maddens me beyond endurance.
125. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.54
[Late March 1932]
[Phipps Clinic, Baltimore, Maryland]
Dearest, my own Darling D. O—
I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to see you till night came and you had telegraphed your delay—Here, living so that every action is a ritual and every smallest bit of energy expended is of interest to somebody, there’s not much time left for projecting yourself into distant places and sp[h]eres of an ordinary existence. One day goes and then another and the cradle rocks on in the continuous lullaby of recapitulations. My heart fell with a thump that you didn’t come—So I have been very cross and rude and blaming the Sicilian Vespers and St. Bartholemew’s on Dr. Myers.55
Dearest:
Dr. Squires tells me you are hurt that I did not send my book to you before I mailed it to Max. Purposely I didn’t—knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a perious56 opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. Naturally, I was in my usual rush to get it off my hands—You know how I hate brooding over things once they are finished: so I mailed it poste haste, hoping to have yours + Scribner’s criticisms to use for revising.57
Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable. We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you. I was also afraid we might have touched the same material.58 Also, feeling it to be a dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you have mercilessly—if for my own good given my last stories, poor things. I have had enough discouragement, generally, and could scream with that sense of inertia that hovers over my life and everything I do. So, Dear, my own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you—but just time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max—
I have two stories that I save[d] to show you, and a fantastic sketch.
I am going to begin a play as soon as I can find out about length etc—for which I ordered Baker’s book—
Goofo, please love me—life is very confusing—but I love you. Try, dear—and then I’ll remember when you need me to sometime, and help.
I love you—
Zelda
Zelda’s letter, with notations by Scott. Courtesy of Princeton University Library
Although Scott’s letters to Zelda on the subject of her novel have not survived, the following excerpt from a letter he wrote to Dr. Squires and his wires to Maxwell Perkins indicate his initial anger and objections, but they also show that the revisions Scott finally demanded were actually relatively few, and that the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins.
Zelda’s novel, or rather her intention of publishing it without any discussion, has upset me considerably. First, because it is such a mixture of good and bad in its present form that it has no chance of artistic success, and, second, because of some of the material within the novel.
As you may know I have been working intermittently for four years on a novel which covers the life we led in Europe. Since the spring of 1930 I have been unable to proceed because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums. However, about fifty thousand words exist and this Zelda has heard, and literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythm, materials, even statements and speeches. Now you may say that the experience which two people have undergone is common is common property—one transmutes the same scene through different temperments and it “comes out different” As you will see from my letter to her there are only two episodes, both of which she has reduced to anecdotes but upon which whole sections of my book turn, that I have asked her to cut. Her own material—her youth, her love for Josaune, her dancing, her observation of Americans in Paris, the fine passages about the death of her father—my critisisms of that will be simply impersonal and professional. But do you realize that “Amory Blaine” was the name of the character in my first novel to which I attached my adventures and opinions, in effect my autobiography? Do you think that his turning up in a novel signed by my wife as a somewhat aenemic portrait painter . . . could pass unnoticed? In short it puts me in an absurd and Zelda in a rediculous position. If she should choose to examine our life together from an inimacable attitude & print her conclusions I could do nothing but answer in kind or be silent, as I chose—but this mixture of fact and fiction is simply calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can’t let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we have accumulated enroute—My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity. That’s why she sent the book directly to New York.
(FROM SCOTT’S LETTER TO DR.SQUIRES,
MARCH 14, 1932 [Life in Letters 209])
PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE OR IF NOT ALREADY DONE EVEN CONSIDER ZELDAS BOOK UNTIL YOU GET REVISED VERSION LETTER FOLLOWS
(SCOTT’S WIRE TO MAXWELL PERKINS, MARCH 16, 1932 [Life in Letters 210])
THINK NOVEL CAN SAFELY BE PLACED ON YOUR LIST FOR SPRING IT IS ONLY A QUESTION OF CERTAIN SMALL BUT NONE THE LESS NECESSARY REVISIONS MY DISCOURAGEMENT WAS CAUSED BY THE FACT THAT MYSELF AND DAUGHTER WERE SICK WHEN ZELDA SAW FIT TO SEND MANUSCRIPT TO YOU YOU CAN HELP ME BY RETURNING MANUSCRIPT TO HER UPON HER REQUEST GIVING SOME PRETEXT FOR NOT HAVING AS YET TIME TO READ IT AM NOW BETTER AND WILL WRITE LETTER TOMORROW IN MY OPINION IT IS A FINE NOVEL. . . .
(FROM SCOTT’S WIRE TO MAXWELL PERKINS,
MARCH 25, 1932 [Life in Letters 211])
READ MANUSCRIPT BUT IF YOU HAVE ALREADY RETURNED IT WIRE AND ILL SEND MY COPY STOP IF YOU LIKE IT AND WANT TO USE IMMEDIATELY REMEMBER ALL MIDDLE SECTION MUST BE RADICALLY REWRITTEN STOP TITLE AND NAME OF AMORY BLAINE CHANGED STOP ARRIVING BALTIMORE THURSDAY TO CONFER WITH ZELDA WILL IMMEDIATELY DECIDE ON NEW TITLE AND NAME CHANGES REVISING SHOULD TAKE FORTNIGHT
(SCOTT’S WIRE TO MAXWELL PERKINS, MARCH 28, 1932 [Life in Letters 212])
126. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[April 1932]
[Phipps Clinic, Baltimore, Maryland]
Dearest:
Of cource, I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else. I felt myself the thing was too crammed with material upon which I had not the time to dwell and consequently lost any story continuity. Shall I wire Max to send it back? The real story was the old prodigal son, of cource. I regret that it offended you. The Pershing incident which you accuse me of stealing59 occupies just one line and will not be missed. I willingly relinquish it. However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass60 and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write. As you know my contacts with my family have always been in the nature of the raids of a friendly brigand. I quite realize that the quality of this book does not warrant so many excursions into the bizarre—As for my friends: first, I have none; by that I mean that all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners and invited “the Fitzgeralds” place[s]. You have always been and always will be the only person with whom I have felt the necessity to communicate and our intimacies have, to me, been so satisfactory mentally that no other companion has ever seemed necessary. Despised by my sup[e
r]iors, which are few, held in suspicion by my equal, even fewer, I have got all external feeding for my insignificant flames from people either so vastly different from myself that our relations were like living a play or I have cherished my inferiors with color; to wit; Still [page torn] etc. and the friends of my youth. However, I did not intend to write you a treatise on friendship in which I do not believe. There is enough difficulty reconciling the different facets in one single person to bear the context of all human communication, it seems to me. When that is accomplished, the resultant sense of harmony is what is meant by benevolent friendship.
D. O. I am so miserable at not being able to help you. I know how upset you get about stories. Don’t worry.61 If we have less money—well, we can always live. I promise to be very conciliatory and want nothing on earth so much as for you to feel that you can write what you want.
About my fish-nets: they were beautiful gossamer pearl things to catch the glints of the sea and the slow breeze of the weaving seaweed and bubbles at dawn. If a crab filtered in and gnawed the threads and an oct[o]pus stagnated and slimed up their fine knots and many squids shot ink across their sheen and shad laid comfortable row on their lovely film, they are almost repaired once more and the things I meant to fish still bloom in the sea. Here’s hope for the irridiscent haul that some day I shall have. What do you fish with, by the way? that so puts to shame my equipment which I seriously doubt that you have ever seen, Superior Being—
With dearest love, I am your irritated
Zelda
127. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[April 1932]
[Phipps Clinic, Baltimore, Maryland]
D. O, dearest:
I am utterly miserable that we should have parted so un-happily.
You have been working to hard. While I do not know what could possibly relieve the strain on you, I wish I could be of some help. Love and affection is not of much practical use but it may be of a little comfort to you to know it is there.
Dear—You know that if I could sell any of my stories I would not have written this book. Ober is swamped with my things, and it seems worthless to plague him with more. The fact that I have had time to write it while you have had to put aside your own is due to circumstances over which I had no control and cannot bring myself to feel a sense of guilt. You, of all people, certainly would not have preferred my folding my hands during my long unoccupied hours. You must not forget that that the Toxologic(?) part of my illness is cured and I can no long[er] sit for endless blank periods in a trance as I did with eczema at Prangins.
It was impossible to fulfill my obligations as a normal sane person at home with three hours sleep a night. It seems to me that, in spite of your obligations, I had no alternative but to come here.
It is dreadful that I am not un-happy, but I would not be away any sooner if I sat and cried.
Believe me, dear, I quite appreciate the strain and depression under which you are existing. If there is any way on earth in which I can speed matters up you have only to indicate it to me.
In the meantime, please try to be calmer. At present I realize that there is little that your life has to offer as a substitute, but I wish you could drink less—do not fly into a rage, I know you stay sober—but you need some rest and I can’t think how you can get it except by using those miserable moments that gin helps to dispel and turn into activity by resting.
I love you D. O—I would have collapsed years ago if I’d had me on my hands—but there’s Scottie and we can be happy—and about money: when there isn’t any will be time to be desperate. We never have more than we have now, really, only we usually have just finished spending so much that we feel God-awful rich and as if it were not actual, our constant and present poverty. Financially, we have trod our precarious path until it has become almost a high-way by this time—garnished by municipal bridges and garlanded by county lights and other public loot till you’d think the thing led somewhere—
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
LA PAIX, 1932–1933
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.
Scott and Zelda attending a theater performance of Dinner at Eight, Baltimore 1932
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.
128. TO ZELDA
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?