I have been vastly enjoying the rather[?] alive air of having ten dollars. I am going to pay a luncheon obligation and maybe buy something with whats left. I have always felt mean about spending your money when there isn’t any; the conviction of the tragedy of human destinies has long haunted us both.
It is nothing short of miraculous that Scottie manages to fulfill her obligations with the days and months being told off on a rosary of day-coaches. It is a most impressive feat; and I’m so glad that scholasticly she is bringing more interest to bear on the situation; because she is so very alert and of such a comprehensive mind as goodness knows she ought to be considering the price of her education.
I had a very pleasant Christmas card from the Obers: and I believe that Scottie is still on amicable terms. I never quite knew what the row was about, but I suppose in these extremely difficult times agents also are having their bad moments.
Dont you know somebody in Ashville to whom you could give me an introduction and who might give me a job? It would be such salvation to be at work in any possible capacity.
Devotedly Zelda
261. TO SCOTT
[January 1940]
ALS, 3 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dear Do-Do:
The least terminable of winters spins itself out into shop-worn editions of what winters ought to be: snow drifts and freezes in embryonic designs around the edges of things and time stalls laconicly along the scraped road-bed. It must be wonderful to earn ones living; and to be a person of positive policies again. Dr. Carroll has apportioned me a job which is of the deepest interest, if of somewhat gargantuan proportions. The windows of the assembly room in the new building are to have flower screens 8 × 4 ft—The job will probably take years: but painting for a public building such as this will be when Duke takes over is an ambitious and very compelling project.
The doctor says that he will pay me something for the work. Of course, he furnishes the materials.
When I first came here, I engaged myself in controver[s]y on the same subject. Dr. Carroll wanted screens for Homewood and I sent word that I ultimately would not subscribe to the commande[e]ring of professional talent. The fact that an artist is temporarily incapacitated ought not to make him fair game to anybody who is able. My talent has cost a lot in heart-ache and paint-bills; and I dont want to compromise myself on such a major project that will make it difficult to get away, should such opportunity arise—
The money gives me the possibility of roaming and romancing around town at will—the speculative possibilities of the urban scene are so vastly enhanced by money. The right to window-shop is, I suppose, the possibility of buying, and so its more fun to promener with the social guarantee than without.
The little bar (Dont be alarmed; it would be as good as my liberty should I ever be tempted thus) is now an antique shop. Ashville desperately needs some-sort of rendez-vous. I wish we could get backing for a coffee-shop. The college kids go to the drug-store; and the other people go home to forage. However, the new auditorium flourishes. It’s a very impressive, very modern structure which bears a most official. All public structure is more appropriate if approaching the convertible barra[c]ks, assembly house nature, to me[?].
Scottie sent me a program of the Ballet Russe[.] This will never cease pulling at my heart-strings: not that I wish it would.
* * *
The news about your lungs is very gratifying. I’m so glad you’re well enough again that life will, at least intuitively, be less of a burden. If your novel is good, there are probably so many happy still somewhere to be had. Why dont you revise everything; be [illegible]; and see what happens?
Devotedly
Zelda
I’ll send on this article sometime this week.
262. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
January 31 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
The article arrived and from a first brief glance I shall say that it is going to be rather difficult to sell. However, I will read it thoroughly tonight and report. Even a very intellectual magazine like the Forum or the Atlantic Monthly prefers their essays to contain some certain number of anecdotes or some dialogue or some cohesive and objective events. Of course, you might claim that your whole article was conversation and in a sense it is, but it is one person’s conversation and thus does not contain much conflict. However I think it is damn good considering that your pen has been rusty for so long. Shall I suggest you some ideas which you might handle with more chance of realizing on them? Tell me.
Dear, I know no one in Asheville except a couple of secretaries and nurses and the clerks at the hotel. I was ill all the time I was there and confined to my room most of the time so I have no idea how you would make business contacts. This seems to be a great year for art and I wish you would drop a line to Carry Ross or someone about your new paintings and see if there is some interest. That would be a more practical way of getting things in motion than taking up something you’re unfamiliar with.
All is the same here. I think I have a job for next week. I know I’ve finished a pretty good story—the first one adequate to the Post in several years. It was a hard thing to get back to. My God, what a fund of hope and belief I must have had in the old days! As I say I will write you more about the story tomorrow.
Dearest love,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
263. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
February 6 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
I understand your attitude completely and sympathize with it to a great extent. But the mood which considers any work beneath their talents doesn’t especially appeal to me in other people, though I acknowledge being sometimes guilty of it myself. At the moment I am hoping for a job at Republic Studios, the lowest of the low, which would among other things help to pay your hospital bill. So the fact that anything you do can be applied on your bill instead of on our jaunt to the Isles of Greece doesn’t seem so tough.
However, I am disappointed, with you, that the future Ruskins and Elie Faurés and other anatomists of art will have to look at your windows instead of the mail hall. But something tells me that by the time this letter comes you will have changed your point of view. It is those people that have kept your talent alive when you willed it to sink into the dark abyss. Granted it’s a delicate thing—mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear. (God what a mess of similes)[.] But the awful thing would have been some material catastrophe that would have made it unable to run at all.
Dearest love,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
264. TO SCOTT
[February 1940]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dear Scott:
Thanks, again, for the money. I employ it very profitably buying “time” in Ashville. I sent Rosalind some flowers for Valentine: she remembered me so generously at Christmas; it gave me great pleasure to be able to let her know that I was thinking of her. I also sent Scottie two dollars; and I sent Mamma a present. So the money coverred rather more ground than usual.
About the screens: we have reached a compromise. I am now going to make them out of tempora; it [is] a manner sheerly decoratif—which is a less distressing entertainment than having to think of my best and most exacting talents being buried in within the confines of psychotic morass. No matter how I felt about the uselessness and inappropriateness of the task; the reason I wrote you so pressingly was this: I do not believe, and Dr. Carol has lead me to believe that he is not averse to the idea, that it is necessary for me to stay in the hospital[.] I do not willingly subscribe to helping, or trying to help to pay bills which are entirely unnecessarily encurred. We could more profitably employ that money other wise; and with such effort as the screens will demand I might even make a living.
I am
resentful; and within my right to resent this being buried alive when there isn’t any adverse social judgment to substantiate the proceeding any longer. However, I grant you that theres nothing I can do about it—
Meantime the weathers fairly decent; and I await the spring with whatever equanimity I can find—
Devotedly
Zelda
265. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
March 8 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
It is wonderful to be able to write you this. Dr. Carroll has for the first time and at long last agreed that perhaps you shall try to make a place for yourself in the world. In other words, that you can go to Montgomery the first of April and remain there indefinitely or as long as you seem able to carry on under your own esteem.
So after four years of Dr. Carroll’s regime interrupted by less than twenty scattered weeks away from the hospital, you will have the sense of being your own boss. Already I can share your joy and I know how Scottie will feel.
I am sorry your entrance will not be into a brighter world. I have no real finances yet and won’t until I get a job. We have to live on those little pieces in Esquire and you know how little they pay. Scottie speaks of getting a job in Lord and Taylor’s this summer but I do not want her to do that for all sorts of reasons. Maybe by the time you get home things will be brighter. So there we are.
With dearest love,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
266. TO SCOTT
[March 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dearest D. O
The afternoons are long, and bleak; the winds blows itself off on the traditions of the Brontes, and Edgar Allen Poe: and time is become interminable.
Mamma writes me, generously, again of defraying a trip home. I did not ask her; and since she is so spontaneously thoughtful and generous, I dont see why you wont let me accept a trip on a minimum scale.
I’m trying to write a short story. It is entertaining; but maybe not as professionally coordinated as it should be. I’ll send it to you as soon as its finished. I want to sell it to the American Magazine. The winter time is so much longer and more arduous than people of this tired uncatalogued era are equipped to bear with grace[.] The weather doesn’t need to prove itself to me any more. I live in dread and deploration of sticking my nose out; and breathe a prayer on mercy whenever its time to go any place.
Dear; since writing the above; your telegram has come. Needless to say, I rejoice at the prospect of thinking of myself in terms of capacity to aspirations again; instead of self-abnegation and obedience.
I will be very, very happy to escape the spiritual confines of medical jurisdiction. Also, I will be very meticulous in my social conduct and promise not to cause any trouble: I will be able to have vacation with Scottie, maybe and do all sorts of half-forgotten pleasant things from such a long time ago.
D. O: I am so deeply grateful to you for your constant thoughtfullness. This has been an awful time for you; and maybe, at last, we begin to emerge.
If what you do on Babylon is as significant as what you did for “Three Comrades” you probably wont have any more trouble.33 Life is still interesting; and could be replete; and I think that we both have earned some.
The woods about here are haunted with uncatalogued memories in this pregnant abeyance before spring. It seems as if there ought to be some overwhelming compelling significance to drive one blindly seeking. To write a poem, or a book would be substitute.
I hear very seldom from Scottie: She sent me a program of the Russian Ballet and every now and then she writes accounts of glamorous activities. I’m so glad that she is fulfilling her academic obligations, and not wasting the effort that it cost to keep her there.
She was tentatively planning to get a job this summer which I think is quite a major idea. Lots of enviable careers have started before hers, and as it become[s] increasingly difficult to orient oneself in the world, there is the more need to begin.
Again,
Gratefully
Zelda
Needless to say; I’ll be so happy to start as soon as I may—
Devotedly
Zelda
267. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
March 19 1940
Dearest:-
It seems to me best not to hurry things
(a) I’d like you to leave with the blessings of Dr. Carrol—(you’ve consumed more of his working hours than one human deserves of another—you’d agree if you’d see his correspondence with me.) Next to Forrel he has been your eventual best friend—better even than Myer. (Though this is unfair to Myer who never claimed to be a clinician but only a diagnostician.)
But to hell with all that, and with illness
(b) Also you’d best wait because I will certainly have more money three weeks from now than at present, and
(c) If things develop fast Scottie can skip down and see you for a day during her vacation—otherwise you won’t see her before summer. This is an if!
I don’t think you fully realize the extent of what Scotty has done at Vassar. You wrote rather casually of two years being enough but it isn’t. Her promise is unusual. Not only did she rise to the occasion and got in young but she has raised herself from a poor scholar to a very passable one; sold a professional story at eighteen34 and moreover in very highbrow at present very politically-minded Vassar she has introduced with some struggle a new note. She has written and produced a musical comedy and founded a club called Omgim to perpetuate the idea—almost the same thing that Tarkington did in 1893 when he founded the Triangle at Princeton. She did this against tough opposition—girls who wouldn’t let her on the board of the daily paper because, though she could write, she wasn’t “politically conscious”.
We have every reason at this point to cheer for our baby. I would do anything rather than deny her the last two years of college which she has now earned. There is more than talent there—a real genius for organization.
Nothing has developed here. I write these “Pat Hobby” stories— and wait.35 I have a new idea now—a comedy series which will get me back into the big magazines—but my God I am a forgotten man. Gatsby had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.
With Dearest Love Always
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, Calif.
268. TO SCOTT
[March 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dear D. O.
Life grows increasing[ly] involved. Dr. Carroll has written me from Florida that owing to my recent misdemeanor he doesnt know whether he will allow me to leave.36 I dont accept that medical jurisdiction has the right of social judgment, and punishment—but I suppose theres no way of defeating a psychiatric authority short of running away
I’m so sorry about the episode: it is impossible to exist under this severest of regimentation for as long as I have and not take a few liberties. These were my first indiscretions since I’ve been on the road to mending. If you knew how dreary and miserable it is to be held accountable for the least of ones ice-cream sodas I know that you would forgive the social indiscretion. Meantime: Rosalind sent me some pretty Easter finery; the box made me very happy: gloves and a flower, handkerchiefs, two shirts and some stocking[s]. So one is purring; and contentedly enumerating the possessions.
Suns shine in Carolina: the weather is bursting with all sorts of cosmic effects and everybodys is very happy about the coming of Easter. In a little while Tryon Valley will be lovely and hushed and lost in a Heavenly haze of blossom and of truncate[?] isolated bird-song. Those were such happy times roaming about the virginal interstices of that lost and waiting little village.
Devotedly
Zelda
Would you be upset if I asked you for $15 and just left? These procee
dings are so controversial that even the slightest move takes an eternity no matter what efforts one contributes[,] the individual, and mutual estates get worse: alas—the resources that were once at our disposition are dissipated by Time and other exigences. By now, you had a right to have contributed a classic of the most enduring proportions: and probably will yet.
By now: I had a right, just materially, to whatever rewards are still claimed by new prototypes.
They ought not to treat us like this—
I have never argued with you about Scottie: the fact remains that she has no expectations of a financial nature, and as little social security as is a tenable circumstance above absolute poverty: hence I think that she ought to at least be acquainted with the actuality; and look on work as a desirable and a progressive rather than as a social punishment.
* * *
Wont you send me $5 as soon as you can—
* * *
Devotedly
Zelda
269. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
[Encino, California] April 11 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
I got your wire today asking for $5. and simultaneously one came from Dr. Carroll saying you were coming out. I don’t know what the rail fare to Montgomery is, but I am sending you herewith $60., which I hope will take care of your ticket, baggage, etc. You are leaving bills behind you, I know, which I will try to take care of as soon as I can. I have sent Jean West $25. on account. Moreover I have sent a check to your mother for your expenses when you get to Montgomery.
Now as to the general arrangement: I am starting to work on this “speculation” job.37 That is they are giving me very little money but if the picture is resold when finished the deal will be somewhat better. I hesitated about accepting it but there have been absolutely no offers in many months and I did it on the advice of my new agent. It is a job that should be fun and suitable to my uneven state of health. (Since yesterday I seem to be running a fever again) In any case we can’t go on living indefinitely on those Esquire articles. So you will be a poor girl for awhile and there is nothing much to do about it. I can manage to send you $30., a week of which you should pay your mother about $15. for board, laundry, light, etc. The rest will be in checks of alternately $10. and $20.—that is one week the whole sum will amount to $35., one week $25., etc. This is a sort of way of saving for you so that in alternate weeks you will have a larger lump sum in case you need clothes or something.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 35