Zelda
Please tell Mr. Goldwyn-Mayer that only two pair of three paid-for pairs of shoes arrived.
208. TO SCOTT
[December 1938]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dearest Scott:
There’s hardly anything to say save thank you; again. I’m leaving Tuesday—and vacation promises to jingle itself in on the silver-y tinkle of a family tree.
It’s cold; but Ashville scintillates of a dusky lovely aspiring glamour. The streets are ordered—of an impersonal good-will— and it seems a proud and an independent place. When I go into Faters, or somewhere, the stabbing smell of masculinity reminds me of the hours we relegated to some forgotten dream—I think of you, often.
One of the most spiritually remunerative of human efforts is the mobilization of memories: so I’m happy to be going home. Whole facets of life take on new + more tangible aspects with each new other orientation; and it is so good to feel the right of inheritance to the traditions of a place.
Mamma says some of Scottie’s friends have already called her—so maybe there will be a party.
Meantime: what is your actual address? Spose I wanted to phone you—or do something unprecedented like that?
Devotedly
Zelda
209. TO SCOTT
[After December 25, 1938]
AL, 3 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dearest Scott:
The little house is so clean and sunny, and fragrant of the absence of odors. There is the faintest aura of morning dust, and the sparkle of well-polished obligations. Roses bloom and expand on pleasurable memories; we are warm and adequate to the grace bestowed. I’ve missed you many times. The sun disports itself in the wide streets and the stores are open to the breath of the semi-tropics. Montgomery makes up for many blessures.
Thank you once again for the happiness; and for so generous a remembrance. Mamma, needless to say, did not intend to cash your check (the one precedent to my arrival). However, the visit has been expensive: more fires than usual, and three extra people to feed, and Melinda,147 to take care of us, and so I am going to leave the money from your first check here with Mamma.
She asked me to say specificly that she did not cash the check herself, and that she considerred that you had most generously provided and that it was unnecessary, but if she uses the $50 for expenses she wont have any present.
The week has been a beneficence. One hour is as happy as another; I would want to wake up in the middle of the night to appreciate my happy estate.
Scottie arrived on the twenty-fourth. Jerry Le Grand, Betty Nicrosi, Ann Hubbard and Miss Flowers met her at the train and escorted her into an (even pictorially) adequate whirl. The girls were enchanting: it made me homesick for my youth. At so cursory a glance, they seemed very self-reliant, pretty and suspended to a gracious purpose.148
Self-portrait of Zelda (1940). Courtesy of Princeton University Library
PART IV
The Final Years: 1939–1940
Dearest: I am always grateful for all the loyalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us to-gether so long: the belief that life is tragic, that a mans spiritual reward is the keeping of his faith: that we shouldnt hurt each other. And I love, always your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life.
—ZELDA TO SCOTT, MARCH 1939
In the spring of 1939, Scott embarked on a year of alcoholic benders. Attempting to make up for not getting the money to Dr. Carroll in time for Zelda to go to Havana with a group from Highland Hospital and also trying to act out the alcoholic’s illusion that he was still in control, in April 1939 Scott left Hollywood drunk, flew to North Carolina, and took Zelda with him on a vacation to Cuba. He drank during the entire trip. Zelda had to get him back to New York City so that he could be hospitalized, then had to find her own way back to Highland Hospital. This trip was the last time Scott and Zelda saw each other.
From April when Zelda left Scott in New York in the care of her sister and brother-in-law, who saw that he was placed under a doctor’s care, until December 1940, when Scott died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four, their relationship continued through letters only. Fortunately, neither of them could have known that after such a doomed trip there would never be another, and their subsequent letters are full of hopes and plans to see each other again.
The popular misconception remains that during this time Zelda languished in a mental institution while Scott (with the exception of working on his last and unfinished novel) did essentially the same in Hollywood. But the letters the Fitzgeralds exchanged during these last months of Scott’s life suggest quite the opposite. Previously, only four of Zelda’s letters from 1939–1940 have been published, while forty-four of Scott’s are in print, suggesting that he wrote to her far more frequently than she did to him. That is not the case: Zelda wrote at least 142 letters to Scott during the last two years of his life, and he wrote to her on at least sixty-four occasions. We are fortunate that, because he dictated many of his letters during this period to a secretary who kept carbon copies of them, much of Scott’s correspondence survives.
Although it is true that Zelda would not recover from her illness and would never be able to live on her own, she had some of her best, most admirable moments in 1939. And in 1940, she left Highland (after four years of hospitalization) and returned temporarily to Montgomery to live with her mother—a reward she had worked hard for and earned. Similarly, although his deteriorating physical condition certainly caused his death, Scott faced his last year of life sober and with dignity. It is one thing to face life with courage when at its pinnacle—young, talented, and healthy—but quite another when plagued by sickness, debt, and the sure knowledge that many important aspects of life will never again be under one’s control. In this sense, perhaps the final years of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage—those that have been the most neglected by biographers and scholars— reveal the couple at their best. The letters suggest that their accomplishments and admirable moments were many.
Not the least of these admirable moments was the grace with which Zelda saw Scott safely back to New York City at the end of their disastrous Cuba trip. After handing Scott over to her sister and brother-in-law, Zelda wrote to him continually—twice even before leaving New York, again during a stopover in Baltimore, and many times after making it back to Highland Hospital, where she covered for him with her doctors, hoping that she would be allowed to go away with him again. In these letters, Zelda, far from blaming Scott for all the disappointment and trouble he had caused, did not mention his drinking at all; she expressed only sincere concern over his health and provided constant reassurance that he was a wholly worthwhile person. She touchingly tried to persuade him to come to Asheville or Tryon to get well, and she hoped that they would live together again.
When Scottie (by then a Vassar College student) needed an appendectomy in June 1939, Scott, who was still sick, relied on Zelda to make arrangements in Asheville for her surgery and look after Scottie while she recovered. Zelda’s letters chronicle her time with her daughter that summer—one of the few occasions Zelda was well enough to be a real mother. The letters tell of their activities— lunches, swimming, tennis, golf, dances, and “economizing”—and they indicate how proud Zelda was of her daughter. That summer, Zelda was even well enough to intervene intelligently and insightfully on Scottie’s behalf when Scott wrote his seventeen-year-old daughter an unduly harsh letter, telling her that Vassar was her home. The Fitzgeralds noted the irony that just as World War I had been the larger historical circumstance of their youth, World War II was to be the dark historical force against which Scottie’s young adulthood would be lived.
The letters from this period also reveal the variety of activities Zelda participated in, all of which were funded by Scott—a vacation in Florida, art lesson
s, cooking lessons, hiking, painting, weekends at nearby Saluda, and a trip back home to visit her mother. They chronicle Scott’s serious health problems, his careful handling of his meager finances, his constant struggle to earn money by writing, and his unwavering commitment to providing for Zelda. The letters picture Scott planning and writing what was to be his final work, The Last Tycoon, from his sickbed. They also reveal not only how ill Scott was during his last year but how optimistically he worked on this last novel. They also chronicle his strenuous effort to clear past debts and meet all current financial obligations. In his letters to Zelda, Scott sometimes underplayed his physical problems, yet on other occasions he overdramatized them; but his heart attacks in December 1940, which led to his death, offer solemn evidence of the severity of his condition.
During this final year, the Fitzgeralds, although they lived separately (and despite Scott’s ongoing affair with Sheilah Graham), settled into a routine, and their correspondence became regular. After the spring of 1939, when Zelda still hoped that they would be able to live together, the focus of their letters shifted away from their own relationship to a mature concern about Scottie’s well-being and education and their roles as absent parents. Although the final letters of 1940 are no longer as intimate as the earlier ones, they still contain many expressions of the Fitzgeralds’ affection for and appreciation of each other; reading these letters adds another dimension to our understanding of the deep bond between them. During this period, when the Fitzgeralds’ circumstances were far-reduced from those of their former, financially successful days, their attention to mundane matters—such as purchasing painting supplies or a winter coat for Zelda—is touching and humanizes these often mythologized figures.
Yet the romantic, legendary status that surrounds the Fitzgeralds is in many ways appropriate—fitting, rather than strictly fanciful. During their last two years of correspondence, Zelda reassured Scott that even though their lives had not led them exactly where they had thought they were headed twenty-five years earlier, when they were young and healthy, they had nevertheless remained dedicated to each other and to the “romantic terms” they held in common. In one of the letters that follow, Zelda praised loyalty as their courageous companion while still concluding, “Nothing could have survived our life.” Their final letters present to us two mature individuals who dealt with later losses far better and more wisely than they had dealt with their early success; that they did so makes them not only tragic but heroic.
210. TO SCOTT
[January 1939]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dear Scott:
I lost your address: please send it again. What would I do if I should have a bad dream, or an inspiration? It’s much more conventional to know where your husband [is] when you’ve got one— besides I might have something to tell you.
Well, the ground is frosty outside; and I plough through styxican [Styxian] delusions of mist and poetry to the gym fields. I think the Elements resent us, and I think that They Themselves are none too well-disciplined. Any old thing ought to have better sense than to freeze people: unless, of cource, they like the vibration. Meantime, we are enjoying as nice a January as there is around here and no complaints.
Why do you think Scottie’s going to get fired? It’s just being arbitrary to think about it whether she is or not—she seemed interested in school, and not inclined to be too rebellious. If I were you, and such eventuality took place I’d put her in a reformatory for movie-stars or something. Her horizons are already considerable for one of her age, and will not, maybe, stand much more distension.
I hope you’ve got a good job, and I hope it gets better.1
Meantime: I’m feeling determined but not very lyrical. My pictures are “chic”—mais chic monsieur and I await your coming with a fervent enthusiasm: Don’t forget too.
Thanks again for my holiday. I still exult in the aroma of fire-side toast and the secrets of dusty dusks before an open fire, and I miss Mamma very much
Love
Zelda
211. TO SCOTT
[January 1939]
ALS, 2pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dearest Scott:
The weather does its eccentricities, and now its cold, and fair and a brittle and “unchosen” world confronts us again. I’ll be so glad when the winter desists from its barbarianisms and one can breathe again.
Meantime: I’m painting lampshades, instead of souls; just for a little while, and meantime I play the radio and moon about considerably and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935.2 Thats my chosen happiest equipment: to be 35, in the middle of summer forever.
Where is my book on architecture? Not that I would ever have time to master it, but it says in the funny-papers that a wife should follow her husbands interests so that she will be better material for the funny papers.
There’s nothing to write: shall I just ask you for things instead? The bad old shoe-maker poured glue in my moccasins, which I love, and so now—what days does Mr. Goldwyn do the shopping?
I’ve been very expensive lately and ought to be able to produce a glamorous chronicle. I long for home; for all the so-poignant indispensibilities of a life that cant have so much longer. Things that people have cared about, and places that have housed their aspirations are ceaselessly moving
with Love,
and gratitude
Zelda
212. TO SCOTT
[January 1939]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dearest Scott:
It was too late about Havanah—But Havanah is probably a substantial sort of place and maybe will stay there till next time. Anyway, its all very expensive, and we are so well adapted to spending money to-gether. When you come East there will be that much more justification for buying things. I am as grateful to you as if I were on board.
It’s raining here, and the panorama leaks, and a little black kitten yowls under the hedge. But January has held less against us than usual: and we are less attenuately frozen than for two years past. There’s some psychic phenomena on the dog-wood that looks as if it might burst into song at any sufficiently unpremeditated time though the sky is still on the bleak bergerie-side.
I pursue Scotties diary fervently; with envy and thinking what a cute girl she is. There’s a good deal more champagne in it than Mr. Bobby could digest, I suppose—but I suppose it was in good company.
Wont you send me to finishing school some day? The girls are so adequately equipped, or supplied with things to do. One wouldn’t even have to account for the passage of time. Well, life is miraculous; and maybe all these traditions owe us a living.
I’m glad your works interesting. And I well know the rage Mme Curie’s undeserving amant must have thrown you into.3
Come on! Let me see you fly East! We can go to Cuba ourselves, as far as that goes—
Love, and my deepest
gratitude
Zelda
213. TO SCOTT
[January 1939]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dearest Scott:
I’m sorry you’re tired. I wish I could offer you haven; whereas I have nothing save suggestions to divert the ravages of time and discouragement. 1) Tryon, as reconstituting a place to rest as any I know—dog-wood expanding under lethal heavens; woods sweet with violets and the secrets of 1900, the ruminative punguencies of an open fire; and the chic of a chocolate soda. Then there are islands off the Georgia Coast; and, as you say there’s Cuba: a body of land entirely surrounded by water etc. Why dont we go there? We might spend Easter in Mexico City. We never have, and it would be an illuminating experience with festivals like the one in Capri. I could join you in El Paso, or wherever you say. California is perhaps too full of spiritual-opportunists to be restful. The air
vibrates of arbitrary aspirations, of the pursuit of such, and maybe even of the means of gratification. Anyway, its not very relaxing, and there are probably too many minerals in the earth to permit of repose. All of which means, I’d like to see you.
Meanwhile, I paint fluorescent laurels over a lamp-shape for Mamma; I paint a picture of Passion; and I scheme fruitlessly all day about how to better estates + conditions here and there. Gone With the Wind ought to be a good thing to be concerned with: its indicative of salients, certainly. I’m glad you’ve got a good job.4
Thanks about Mamma. She’s tired, and discouraged; and I would hate to contribute to her worries. I know she’s hard-up; and that her bonds don’t pay.
With dearest love
Zelda
214. TO SCOTT
[February 1939]
ALS, 2 pp. [Sarasota, Florida]5
Dearest Do-Do:
A very impervious and distant crescent cooly illuminates the evening, and the world is lost in all the other times and places that haunt the pallid roads. This is such a good place: there are so many different kinds of people interested in so many different kinds of activities. Dr. Carroll most thoughtfully + kindly is sending me to Life Class at the Ringling Art school—also, clothes designing. For which I am most deeply grateful, to you and to him—Such a professional atmosphere ought to give my work a new impetus. From the Life, I’ll try to acquire the power of an exactitude of knowledge, and by clothes-designing to catalogue my selective faculties. To be doing something identified with a place gives one a sort of lien thereon which is a most gratifying right to its more recherché aspects.
I’m so sorry that you have been sick. Wouldnt this be a good time to come East for a little while? Florida is warm hot, and unharassed and punguent of orange groves still in faint flower.
I’m sorry about your work, Troubles always have piled up; we can only trust that they aren’t any worse than the troubles of other years.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 29