Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
Page 39
I finally wired Scottie to reassure myself of her continued existence. It seems that there is such a person—of considerable social promise and superior acumen and that there is some vague and promisory reassurance of a letter in the near future. She is certainly to be envied the most felicitous of circumstances with which life is showering her of late.
Here: all goes well. Marjorie and Noonie leave for Carolina next week; so my presence may be a comfort to Mamma during vacance. I see nobody except Livy Hart, Amalia Rosenberg + Mrs McKinney occasionally, but have a sense, always, of friendliness and freedoms in the constant yet casual encountering of old friends and associations from other eras.
Affectionately Gratefully
Zelda
311. TO SCOTT
[September 1940]
ALS, 2 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dear Scott:
The book arrived. It is the most magnificent volume, and I am most deeply grateful to you for having remembered me so munificently. I thought of the many beautiful books on ballet, and pictures, and music that you have bought me and am grateful for you[r] so-constructive interest. The book is an education and I will cherish it as a most invaluable possession.
To-night is the first fall night[.] The moon is bright and cool and dispassionate and the shadows are remote and impersonally admonitory and the children have started to school; so the streets once more assume their academic context.
I always miss Scottie when she leaves, but am reluctant to try to prolong her visits as our hospitality is not as dynamic as the fun in Baltimore. She is a most gratifying companion; and brings a renewed appeal to the life of the rotogravures, a new faith in the advertisements and new desirabilities to the New Yorker et-cetera—besides the academic aspirations that accompany her sejours—
Again thanks—the book is a most invaluable acquisition.
Devotedly
Zelda
312. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
September 21 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
So glad you like the Art Book. I would like to hear of your painting again and I meant it when I said next summer if the war is settled down you ought to have another exhibition.
Scottie went to Baltimore as she planned and I finally got a scrap of a note from her but I imagine most of her penmanship was devoted to young men. I think she’s going back with the intention, at least, of working hard and costing little.
I don’t know how this job is going. It may last two months—it may end in another week. Things depend on such hair-lines here—one must not only do a thing well but do it as a compromise, sometimes between the utterly opposed ideas of two differing executives. The diplomatic part in business is my weak spot.
However, the Shirley Temple script is looking up again and is my great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not a novelist.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
313. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
September 28 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Autumn comes—I am forty-four—nothing changes. I have not heard from Scottie since she got to Vassar and from that I deduce she is extremely happy, needs nothing, is rich—obviously prosperous, busy and self-sufficient. So what more could I want? A letter might mean the opposite of any of these things.
I’m afraid Shirley Temple will be grown before Mrs. Temple decides to meet the producer’s terms of this picture. It wouldn’t even be interesting if she’s thirteen.
Tomorrow I’m going out into society for the first time in some months—a tea at Dottie Parker’s (Mrs. Allan Campbell), given for Don Stuart’s X-wife, the Countess Tolstoy. Don’t know whether Don will be there or not. Earnest’s book is the “book of the month.”54 Do you remember how superior he used to be about mere sales? He and Pauline are getting divorced after ten years and he is marrying a girl named Martha Gelhorn. I know no news of anyone else except that Scottie seems to have made a hit in Norfolk.
Dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
314. TO SCOTT
[After September 24, 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dear Scott:
Nobody knows what day, or time, it is here, in this dreamy world where days lose themselves in nostalgic dusk and twilights prowl the alleys lost in melancholic quest: so it is that your birthday passed before I thought to wire you.
Many happy returns of the day; and my deepest unpersonal[?] gratitude for the many happy times we spent to-gether—though it was long ago.—
For a long time I have had little sense of the passage of time due to being segregate[d] from life and its problems; now that I am once more in contact with routines, and rituals, that change, I witness so much of my generation (those that didn’t particularly distinguish themselves) on the verge of irrelevance. For a long time it was as if a great many more than is usual with generations were going to be leaders, and brilliant people and move in dynamic traditions: But life itself has become so dramatic, and so imperative, than [that] no individual destiny can stand against its deep insistencies—save Hitler, or Mussolini.
So here we all are doing whatever we can about whatever we are able and trying to stay out of jail—while the ego is orienting itself in these forceful worlds of less “free-will.”
Scottie seems to be happy about Vassar: most parents are happy in knowing that their children are categoricly provided for under the best of “pure-children” acts and life martials its resources. I pray in the name of justice[,] mercy and the beauties of a better-comprehended era. We have lived a long time amassing statistics and providing the means; and maybe sometime we shall have evolved a mete and reasoning appreciation of all this—
Scottie told me that your novel progresses—I am so glad that you are able—and know how much more life has to offer with something you care about to nurture.
The best of good luck for the coming year—
Thanks for all the nice things you’ve given me—
Devotedly Zelda
315. TO SCOTT
[October 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dear Scott
Thanks for the money. This is $20 weather and it’s good to be able to meet the exigence of nature. The skies crackle overhead and the streets echo staccato with the “alert” of children on their way to school. There isnt much to do but it requires a great deal more of attention than under a circumstance more exigent of its own.
Mamma and I have taken up a sporadic card-attack. We “fiddle” with bridge in the evenings and enjoy the peaceful de[s]cent of dusk over this long dreamy street so peaceful and remote from dissonance and congestion.
A lady is making me a deep-horizon blue suit and I am “secondarily” rummaging the town for a hat. There are always so many more “indespensibles” when one can afford—
Mary Goodwin Tabor took me on Sunday to the most heavenly hunting lodge, lethally floating through the dreamy pentameters of an Alabama pine-woods. It reminded me of Sheridan so many years ago—and its pale high academic concisions of summers long since absorbed by the history book. This war hasnt any romantic aspects and dreams arent being laid away in pine-fragrance and bird-song this time. I suppose the emotionalists have been unable to fabricate any super-structure of compensatory legend to sell the ghastliness of this debacle.
Surly nothing this country has done could deserve a Japanese invasion. Lets all go down to the Ritz and get some nice onion[?]-soup—
They say they are a nice-clean people.
—It must have been entertaining attending a conclave again. Are the people still as cultured as they are in Thomas Elliot55 and polite enough to meet the requirements of “Alice in Wonderland”? or doesnt anyone care what happened to the Rover-boys any more?
&
nbsp; Thanks again—
Zelda
316. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
October 5 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Enjoyed your letter—especially the consoling line about the Japanese being a nice clean people. A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband John Monk Saunders committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor who I hadn’t seen twice since the days at Swopes; Frank Tuttle of the old Film Guild. There was a younger generation there too and I felt very passé and decided to get a new suit.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
317. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
October 11 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended as if they were being bombed.
A letter from Gerald yesterday. He has no news except a general flavor of the past. To him, now, of course, the Riviera was the best time of all. Sara is interested in vegetables and gardens and all growing and living things.
I expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years away. I think the nine years that intervened between the Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because after fifty one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.
My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing—but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmas time this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man—a label which I had done nothing to deserve.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
318. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
October 19 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on “Tender is the Night” at the end— I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in “Little Eva” which reminds me that I saw the two Duncan Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?
My room is covered with charts like it used to be for “Tender is the Night” telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short as I originally planned it two years ago and more on the order of “Gatsby”.
Dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, Calif.
319. TO SCOTT
[October 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Dear Scott
Thanks for the money. You are so thoughtful to remember the costliness of the unusual—and in sending me the means of mastery. I am so happy to be able to show Scottie that I think of her always even if life has prevented of late the provision of a maternal and envelloping sanctuary as background and refuge. Still: Mamma’s little house is as bright and cheerful a refuge as any I know and all her off-spring are welcome and awaited.
Montgomery is lost on a quietly ecstatic autumn; gutters rattle with the punguency of dry leaves and pavements crackle under the crystalline mornings. Every day I expect the front page of the papers to burst into flames but the news still pursues its relentless policies—and people all over the world, I suppose, are trying to stay out of it all.
Meantime, I now have $283 dollars that Uncle Reid left me when he died. Twenty-nine dollars of it I want to give to charity; I would like to buy a nice suit ($60 or so); and I am going to buy Mamma a ton of coal. The two hundred, or $150 left I would like to pay on the account at Doctor Carrolls—unless he has already been paid. I dislike as deeply as you do being in debt to those scoundrels and scallywags and the sooner we clear ourselves of their traces the better—So shall I send him the money direct, or maybe it would better to send it to you. It will give me great pleasure to be able to make this slight contribution so dont protest. It is greatly to our mutual advantage to be free of such encumbrement—
Its grand about the novel. It will indeed seem fair and free to taste of fame again; certainly I will pray for the success of the project—and await with the utmost eagerness the proofes—
Devotedly
Zelda
320. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
October 23 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carrol matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money. I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th to last until December 15th so that I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once (except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.
I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.
It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.
Two thousand words today and all good.
With dearest love
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
321. TO ZELDA
TL (CC), 1 p.
October 26 1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Ernest sent me his book and I’m in the middle of it. It is not as good as the “Farewell to Arms”. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments. But I imagine it would please the average type of reader, the mind who used to enjoy Sinclair Lewis, more than anything he has written. It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does. I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat. But the point is he is making a fortune out of it—has sold it to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and as it’s The Book-of-the-Month selection he will make $50,000 from it in that form. Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.
No news except that I’m working hard, if that is news, and that Scottie’s story appears in the New Yorker this week.56
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
322. TO SCOTT
[October 1940]
ALS, 4 pp.
[Montgomery, Alabama]
D
ear Scott:
Thanks for the money. Atmosphere is very expensive in these times when breathing is become of more significance, and I always find plenty to buy—and lots of expenditures of irrelevant natures.
These day are lush and beneficent and steeped in the leas of summer-time. Childrens voices still flood along the dusk and Sundays bask before the church; and life floats gentle over the abeyance of Time and distress. I personally, am grateful to be warm, and out of the war.
Though I am vaguel[y] resentful of Earnests success (his work being neither as meritorious or as compelling as your own), I am also glad. Earnest also offer[s] at least a casual passing acknowledgment of the Christian Faith. I tried to get his book down town: 50 copies were out being rented, so we’ll wait till one turns up. Tarkingtons new story in the Post seems of very little significance against the back ground of these dynamic times. I wish I could write a story that would coordinate the dominant bitterness and courage and conviction of traged[y] with the return to religious truths and the necessity for religious guidance that animates this most precarious world.
People ask about you whenever I see any; though I seldom go anywhere save to church. Also Scottie seems to have quite a clientele. Everybody here improves things: their minds, and things as book-reviews and such—and I dont know what parties there are because I am not envited to any.
Miss Booth and I went to a show—and I had lunch today with Lee Charles[?] at the church—Mamma, the family + I go to town lots of times to gauge the prospective aspirations by the predominant silhouette.
It’s grand about your book. Please write—