Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  43. A novelist and the sister of Elinor Wylie.

  44. A ballerina in Egorova’s studio.

  45. Scott began to write a series of short stories about an adolescent girl named Josephine Perry for the Saturday Evening Post in 1930.

  Part III: Breaking Down: 1930–1938

  1. The disastrous trip to North Africa the Fitzgeralds took in February 1930.

  2. Zelda’s first breakdown, when she entered the Malmaison clinic.

  3. In 1926, Zelda had her appendix removed, but she seemed to recover quickly. She nevertheless associated this illness with her inability to conceive another child during this period, which may explain why she remembered it as being so severe.

  4. Oscar Wilde’s niece, a lesbian who was a regular guest at Natalie Barney’s salon. During the summer of 1929, Dolly made advances toward Zelda, which infuriated Scott.

  5. One symptom of Zelda’s breakdown was her obsessive anxiety that she might have homosexual feelings for Egorova. She projected her anxiety onto Scott and made accusations that were unfounded but that hurt him terribly nevertheless and threatened any slim confidence he still had in himself.

  6. John Sumner, the head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York City, was notorious for bringing charges against the Little Review in 1920, when a bookstore sold a copy of the July–August issue, containing Episode Thirteen of James Joyce’s Ulysses, to a teenage girl, putting an end to publication of Ulysses in the United States until 1930.

  7. From parts of August through mid-September, Scott vacationed in Caux. Still too distracted to work on his novel, he nevertheless enjoyed a quieter period, in which he finished some short stories, including “One Trip Abroad” and “A Snobbish Story.”

  8. Twice while Zelda was at Prangins, she had to be confined in the Villa Eglantine, where the most serious cases were held under the closest supervision and restrictions.

  9. “Prokofieff” is Zelda’s misspelling of Sergei Prokofiev, and “Fils Progique” refers to his Symphony no. 4: The Prodigal Son.

  10. Emily Davies Vanderbilt.

  11. In November, Zelda’s mental state deteriorated further and she was again transferred to the Villa Eglantine. Scott, terribly concerned, began trying to find another specialist to consult to make sure that Dr. Forel’s diagnosis was correct and that Zelda was receiving the best course of treatment.

  12. Scott’s misspelling of Dr. Bleuler’s name.

  13. The Christmas visit did not go well. Zelda behaved irrationally and smashed the ornaments on the tree she had decorated for Scottie. Trying to salvage the vacation for Scottie, Scott took his daughter skiing.

  14. Possibly her short story “A Couple of Nuts,” which she revised and published the following summer.

  15. The 1930 play by Noël Coward known for its witty dialogue.

  16. William Faulkner’s self-proclaimed “potboiler” novel (1931). Noted for its violence and depraved sexuality, the novel created controversy and sold exceptionally well.

  17. “A Couple of Nuts,” published by Scribner’s Magazine in August 1932.

  18. Faulkner’s novel, which she referred to in earlier letters.

  19. Reference to a song in “The Offshore Pirate,” which was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1920.

  20. “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” published in the November 1931 issue of Scribner’s Magazine.

  21. Lost manuscript.

  22. Lost manscript.

  23. Perhaps a recent edition of Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of the year collections.

  24. Scott’s 1926 short story collection.

  25. Zelda’s only brother.

  26. Lost manuscript.

  27. Lily Dalmita and Constance Talmadge were movie stars.

  28. Bessie Love was a Hollywood actress who made the transition from silent films to talkies; she would later be called one of the “fast talking dames” who characterized the female roles of the period. She received an Academy Award nomination for The Broadway Melody in 1929, after which her career quickly diminished.

  29. Scott’s sister.

  30. Lost manuscript.

  31. Scribner’s Magazine published Zelda’s story “Miss Ella” in December 1931.

  32. This story was never published and no manuscript has been located.

  33. Most likely her story “A Couple of Nuts.”

  34. The note, perhaps a letter to Santa from Scottie, has been lost.

  35. Zelda appears to have added this note at the top of the page after she wrote the letter.

  36. It may have been Scott who underlined these words when he received the letter.

  37. A well-known Russian-born choreographer, Ida Rubenstein formed her own dance company and was touring with a production of Ravel’s Boléro.

  38. A 1700s plantation home, once owned by the Keys, Scott’s ancestors, which has since become the public library in Leonardtown, Maryland, the seat of the St. Mary’s County government.

  39. Scott and Zelda’s house outside Wilmington.

  40. The Fitzgeralds’ pet bloodhound.

  41. Zelda is referring to the Great Depression, during which it was common to see men who had lost their jobs trying to earn some meager living by selling apples on the street.

  42. This passage and the earlier one in this letter both may have been underlined by Scott.

  43. A 1932 horror film, directed by Tod Browning; the cast included a large number of actual circus “freak show” entertainers of the era.

  44. Scottie’s former governess in France.

  45. Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel, the title of which refers to the colloquial term for the balcony where African-Americans were required to sit in theaters.

  46. Unpublished.

  47. British Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones.

  48. Paul Revere Reynolds, a New York literary agent.

  49. Zelda’s short story, published in Scribner’s Magazine, August 1932.

  50. Die Walküre, an opera by Wagner.

  51. Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., impresario of the Follies, lavish musical revues designed to “glorify the American girl.”

  52. An actress and dancer, Hay appeared both in films and on the stage.

  53. Possibly George Pierce Baker, author of Drama Technique (1919), who at the time was directing and teaching theater at Yale University. Writers who studied under Baker include Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Thomas Wolfe, and John Dos Passos.

  54. Scott wrote checkmarks and the numbers 1 through 7 in the margins of this letter, possibly indicating points he wanted to discuss with Dr. Squires. See facsimile on p. 164.

  55. Zelda’s purpose here is hyperbole. “The Night of Sicilian Vespers,” also referred to as “The Night of the Long Knives,” was the culmination of the Castellammarese, or Masseria-Maranzano, gang war, a fourteen-month struggle in 1930 and 1931 between Italian and Sicilian gangs in the United States, in which up to seventy-two were murdered in one night, wiping out the last important members of the Sicilian Mafia in this country and establishing the so-called Cosa Nostra. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which took place in Paris in 1572 and then spread to the outlying regions, was a murdering spree intended to destroy the French Huguenots and their leadership.

  56. Scott wrote “(perilous?) FSF” in the margin. See facsimile. Zelda may well have intended to write “serious.”

  57. Scott wrote “This is an evasion” in the margin. He also added this notation: “(all this reasoning is specious or else there is no evidence of a tornado in the state of Alabama.” See facsimile.

  58. Probably underlined by Scott. See facsimile.

  59. Reference is to an episode in Chapter 28 of Tender Is the Night in which Abe North impersonates General Pershing in order to get better service at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

  60. Probably underlined by Scott.

  61. Probably underlined by Scott, who also possibly drew the brackets around the last paragraph of the letter.

/>   62. An autobiographical essay, entitled “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number—”; in it, Zelda outlines their lives together year by year, 1920–1933, by describing the hotels they stayed in, emphasizing how much they traveled. The essay appeared in Esquire in May and June of 1934; it bears the byline of both Zelda and Scott but appears to have been written by Zelda and polished and edited by Scott.

  63. Unidentified.

  64. The Bryn Mawr School was a day and boarding school in Baltimore when Scottie enrolled there.

  65. Family friends who owned the estate on which La Paix was located; the Turnbulls’ son, Andrew, who would later write a Fitzgerald biography, was around Scottie’s age.

  66. This letter was written when Zelda returned from a one-day leave from Craig House. She had joined Scott in New York to attend the opening of her art exhibit there. She encouraged Scott to stay on in New York among friends to await publication of Tender Is the Night on April 12, which he did.

  67. Possibly Charles MacArthur.

  68. George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, from whom Fitzgerald was then receiving three thousand dollars per story.

  69. French composer Erik Satie.

  70. Popular movie actress Constance Bennett, who later starred in Topper (1937) with Cary Grant.

  71. Ludlow Fowler, who was the best man at the Fitzgeralds’ wedding.

  72. Scott was related to Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which in 1931 became the official national anthem. Scott and his secretary, Mrs. Owens, were in Baltimore, where Key wrote the anthem in response to the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.

  73. Reference is to Scott’s teenage love, Chicago socialite Ginevra King, who married William Hamilton Mitchell.

  74. Tender Is the Night.

  75. Maxwell Perkins’s wife.

  76. Edmund Wilson, who was then working on To the Finland Station.

  77. Actor Gregory Ratoff, who made his film debut in 1932 and often played eccentric characters. He later played Count Mippipopolous in the 1957 film version of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

  78. Film actor.

  79. The mixed reception of Tender Is the Night was much more positive than negative, but it still disappointed Scott greatly. During the decade of the Great Depression, the literary world had turned away from the expatriates depicted in 1920s novels and favored fiction depicting social conditions of the time.

  80. Scott took Zelda’s advice and wrote a letter to H. L. Mencken on April 23, explaining the “deliberate intention” behind some of the choices he had made in the structure and design of the novel (Life in Letters 255–256). Mencken did not write a review.

  81. Alexander Woollcott, a well-known critic, wit, and radio personality, asserted much influence over the popular cultural scene.

  82. Playwright George S. Kaufman and composer George Gershwin, who collaborated on the Pulitzer Prize–winning musical Of Thee I Sing (1931).

  83. Novelist and screenwriter Louis Bromfield, who had just written a bestselling novel, The Farm (1933), and who soon wrote Scott a letter of praise regarding Tender Is the Night.

  84. Many of Scott’s friends and fellow writers immediately sent him letters of heartfelt praise—among them, John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, Archibald MacLeish, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Benchley, to name only a few.

  85. Charles “Bill” Warren, whom the Fitzgeralds met in Baltimore, collaborated with Scott on a screenplay for Tender Is the Night, but Louis B. Mayer of MGM was not interested in making the novel into a movie.

  86. Ruth Chatterton and Aldophe Menjou stared in the 1934 movie Journal of a Crime.

  87. Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.

  88. Dorothy Parker.

  89. Mary Colum reviewed Tender in Forum and Century (April 1934).

  90. Gilbert Seldes’s review in the New York Evening Journal on April 12 said: Fitzgerald “has stepped once again to his natural place at the head of American writers of our time” (Romantic Egoists 198).

  91. In a letter dated December 31, 1925, which Scott pasted in his scrapbook, T. S. Eliot had written that he had read The Great Gatsby three times and thought that Scott had taken the “first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (Romantic Egoists 135).

  92. J. Donald Adams, reviewing for the New York Times Book Review on April 15.

  93. By John Chamberlain on April 13.

  94. Zelda’s painting Chinese Theater.

  95. New York Tribune reviewer Horace Gregory.

  96. Canadian Morley Callaghan, who was a friend of Scott’s, had also just published a novel with Scribners, Such Is My Beloved (1934).

  97. Zelda’s brother and sister had nervous temperaments and suffered from depression; Anthony Sayre committed suicide in 1933.

  98. “cut” appears next to this P.S., indicating that perhaps Scott did not include it in the copy of this letter that he sent to Zelda.

  99. Eleanor Lanahan, in trying to locate her grandmother’s work for the book Zelda: An Illustrated Life, found that only one painting from this exhibit could be located; “apparently,” wrote Lanahan, “Zelda’s patrons pitied her and disposed of their purchases” (15).

  100. The head physician at Craig House.

  101. Even though Tender Is the Night made the top ten best-seller list, the royalties were meager and did little to help Scott pay his debts.

  102. Dr. Harry M. Murdock, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore.

  103. Possibly “No Flowers” published in the July 21, 1934, issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

  104. Scott was writing stories about a medieval soldier of fortune named Philippe. The second story, out of a series of four, was “The Count of Darkness,” which Redbook published in June 1935.

  105. Fitzgerald did not accept this offer.

  106. This project did not transpire.

  107. Scott’s cousin Cecilia Taylor’s family.

  108. A pilot and polo player, Hitchcock was also a war hero and was to have escaped German capture by jumping off a moving train; he was one of the models for the character Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night.

  109. Rita Swann, a newspaper journalist, theater enthusiast, and Park Avenue neighbor of Scott’s in Baltimore; she was the wife of artist Don Swann.

  110. Gilbert Seldes wrote the preface for Ring Lardner’s First and Last, a posthumous collection of his nonfiction work for newspapers and magazines. It was published in the spring of 1934. Clifton Fadiman reviewed the book in The New Yorker on June 9. Scott was approached about this project first, but, occupied with his own writing, he encouraged Seldes to promote Lardner’s work.

  111. Dr. William Elgin, Zelda’s doctor at Sheppard-Pratt.

  112. Southern slang for spiked cola drinks.

  113. The project Scott outlined in this letter never came to fruition, but it still served to improve Zelda’s mental state. In 1973, Scribners published Bits of Paradise, twenty-two uncollected stories by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, which included many, but not all, of the pieces Scott listed here.

  114. Taps at Reveille, a collection of Scott’s stories published in March 1935.

  115. Published as “Miss Ella.”

  116. Unidentified.

  117. Unpublished.

  118. McCall and Littlefield stories not published.

  119. The rest of the page has been torn off and is missing.

  120. Theodore Dreiser’s Twelve Men (1919).

  121. Unidentified.

  122. Taps at Reveille.

  123. The rest of this letter, if there was more, is missing.

  124. Unidentified.

  125. Maxwell Perkins.

  126. Opera singer and actress.

  127. Radio news commentator and author.

  128. “New Types,” Saturday Evening Post, September 22, 1934.

  129. “In the Darkest Hour,” a Philippe story that appeared in Redbook, October 1934.

 
130. The fourth page of Zelda’s letter is the sketch of Scott shown below, entitled “Do-Do In Guatemala.”

  131. Zelda is reminiscing about their courtship in Montgomery.

  132. The last line of Rupert Brooke’s 1912 poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” is “And is there honey still for tea?”

  133. Dr. R. Burke Suitt, a psychiatrist at Highland Hospital.

  134. Scott’s mother died in August.

  135. One of the three Fates in Greek mythology, the spinner of the thread of human life.

  136. Probably John Peale Bishop’s essay about Scott, “The Missing All,” which appeared in the Winter 1937 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

  137. 1937 film, starring Grace More.

  138. These brackets were supplied by Zelda.

  139. This letter may not have been sent. The original is in the Bruccoli Collection at the Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina.

  140. Scott worked on the screenplay adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Three Comrades from the fall of 1937 until February 1938; it was the only film for which he received screen credit.

  141. The beginning of this letter may be lost.

  142. 1930s swing dance.

  143. Zelda continued to ask Scott for small, fanciful and colorful presents—perfume, beaded moccasins, and a western-style belt, perhaps inspired by the square dances at Highland Hospital.

  144. Scottie generally spent vacations with Scott’s cousins in Norfolk, with Zelda’s mother in Montgomery, or with the Obers in Scarsdale.

  145. Hotel Irving, located on New York’s Gramercy Park.

  146. These brackets were supplied by Zelda.

  147. Mrs. Sayre’s housekeeper.

  148. The rest of this letter, if there was more, is missing.

  Part IV: The Final Years: 1939–1940

  1. Scott’s contract at MGM expired on January 27, but during January, he was briefly loaned out to producer David Selznick to work on the script of Gone With the Wind.

  2. Zelda’s birthday.

  3. The film about Madame Curie, which Scott was working on, was shelved because Scott and the producer were unwilling to make it into the love story the studio wanted.

  4. Scott’s work on Gone With the Wind lasted only three weeks and he did not receive screen credit.