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.
Third Breakdown
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 accompli
shments: 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.
131. TO SCOTT March 12, 1934
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
Scott and Scottie in Baltimore, while Scottie was a student at the Bryn Mawr School
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
134. TO SCOTT
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—
If we had $500 we could all go to Greece—The Vale of Shalimar still settles to earth somewhere in the east; capitals with short bombastic names drown in the tides of the Black sea; metro polese of many syllables are being mispronounced by travellers like missionaries in Cook’s most inefficient out-posts[.] In Indo-Chine in the newsreels the clouds are full as treasure-sacks. Natives all over those foreign places treaddle, and migrate, and think of the world as a very big place. If only the signifigance of roads had not left the western hemisphere!
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 20