A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  June 1930

  ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

  Beau-Rivage Palace stationery.

  Ouchy-Lausanne, Switzerland

  Adress Paris

  Dear Mother:

  My delay in writing is due to the fact that Zelda has been desperately ill with a complete nervous breakdown and is in a sanitarium near here. She is better now but recovery will take a long time I did not tell her parents the seriousness of it so say nothing—the danger was to her sanity rather than her life.

  Scotty is in the appartment in Paris with her governess. She loved the picture of her cousins. Tell Father I visited the

  “—seven pillars of Gothic mould in

  Chillon’s dungeons deep and old,”1

  + thought of the first poem I ever heard, or was “The Raven.” Thank you for the Chesterton.

  Love

  Scott

  TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

  June 1930

  ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

  Montreux, Switzerland

  Dear Mother:

  I’ve thought of you both a lot lately and I hope Father is better after his indigestion. Zelda’s recovery is slow. Now she has terrible ecxema—one of those mild but terrible diseases that don’t worry relations but are a living hell for the patient. If all goes as well as it did up to a fortnight ago we will be home by Thanksgiving.

  According to your poem I am destined to be a failure. I re-enclose it

  (1) All big men have spent money freely. I hate avarice or even caution

  (2) I have never forgiven or forgotten an injury

  (3) This is the only one that makes sense.

  (4) If its worth doing. Otherwise it should be thrown over immediately

  (5) No man’s critisism has ever been worth a damn to me.

  These would be good rules for a man who wanted to be a chief clerk at 50.

  Thanks for the check but really you mustn’t. I re-enclose it. The snap I’ll send to Scotty. The children are charming. Adress me care of my Paris Bank though I’m still by father’s Castle of Chillon. Have you read Maurois’ Life of Byron?1 And Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel?2

  Much love to you both

  Scott

  TO: Madame Lubov Egorova3

  CC, 2 pp.4 Princeton University

  HOTEL RIGHI VAUDOIS, GLION

  June 22, 1930

  Dear Madame Egarowa,

  Zelda is still very ill. From time to time there is some improvement and then all of a sudden she commits some insane act. Unfortunately, complete recovery seems to be still far away.

  As you know, one of the things which prevents her from getting better, and goes against all of the doctors’ efforts, is her continuous fear that she is wasting time required for her dancing class and that she has no time to lose. This fear makes her nervous and unsettled, and it postpones her recovery every time she thinks about it. It is for this reason that she left Malmaison much too soon.

  It is doubtful—though she is unaware of it—that she could ever return to her dancing school; in any event, she will never be able to work with the same intensity, even though to my mind her appearing on stage could do her a lot of good.

  Moreover, doctors would like to know what her chances were, what her future was like as a dancer, when she fell ill. She does not know it herself: one minute she says one thing, the next another. Her situation being critical, it is rather necessary that she should know the answer, despite all the disappointment it could cause her. That is why, knowing the affection you bear her and all the interest that you take in her ambitions I have come to ask you for a frank opinion.

  It may be that in answering the following questions we would succeed in finding a solution.

  1.- Could she ever reach the level of a first-rate dancer?

  2.- Will she ever be a dancer like Nikitina, Danilowa etc.?

  3.- If the answer to question number 2 is yes, then how many years would be required for her to achieve this goal, based on the progress she was making?

  4.- If the answer to question number 2 is no, then do you believe that through the charm of her face and that of her beautiful body she could manage to get important roles in ballets such as Massine, for example, produces in New York?

  5.- Are there things such as balance, etc. that she will never achieve because of her age and because she started too late?

  6.- Is she as good a dancer as “Galla,” for example? To give me an idea of her position in your school, are there many students who are better than she?

  7.- On the whole, do you believe that if she had not taken ill, she could have achieved a level as a dancer that would have satisfied both her ideal and her ambitions?

  Have you ever thought that, lately, Zelda was working too much for someone her age?

  I understand that all these questions are importunate but the goal of this is to save her sanity, and the truth about her career is necessary. You are the only person whom I can ask because you have always been very good to my wife, and you have always been interested in her work.

  With all my apologies for the bother I may cause you, please rest assured of my admiration and of my respectful feelings.1

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  c. July 20, 1930

  ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

  Switzerland

  Dear Max:

  Zelda is still sick as hell, and the psychiatrist who is devoting almost his entire time to her is an expensive proposition. I was so upset in June when hopes for her recovery were black that I could practically do no work + got behind—then arrived a wire from Ober that for the first time he couldn’t make me the usual advance up to the price of a story. So then I called on you. I am having him turn over to you 3000. from the proceeds of the story I am sending off this week, as its terrible to be so in debt. A thousand thanks + apologies

  Yours As Ever (if somewhat harrassed and anxious about life)

  Scott

  TO: Zelda Fitzgerald

  Summer? 1930

  AL, 7pp.1 Princeton University

  Paris or Lausanne

  Written with Zelda gone to the Clinique

  I know this then—that those days when we came up from the south, from Capri, were among my happiest—but you were sick and the happiness was not in the home.

  I had been unhappy for a long time then—When my play failed a year and a half before, when I worked so hard for a year, twelve stories and novel and four articles in that time with no one believing in me and no one to see except you + before the end your heart betraying me and then I was really alone with no one I liked In Rome we were dismal and was still working proof and three more stories and in Capri you were sick and there seemed to be nothing left of happiness in the world anywhere I looked.

  Then we came to Paris and suddenly I realized that it hadn’t all been in vain. I was a success—the biggest man in my profession everybody admired me and I was proud I’d done such a good thing. I met Gerald and Sara who took us for friends now and Ernest who was an equeal and my kind of an idealist. I got drunk with him on the Left Bank in careless cafés and drank with Sara and Gerald in their garden in St Cloud but you were endlessly sick and at home everything was unhappy. We went to Antibes and I was happy but you were sick still and all that fall and that winter and spring at the cure and I was alone all the time and I had to get drunk before I could leave you so sick and not care and I was only happy a little while before I got too drunk. Afterwards there were all the usuall penalties for being drunk.

  Finally you got well in Juan-les-Pins and a lot of money came in and I made of those mistakes literary men make—I thought I was “a man of the world—that everybody liked me and admired me for myself but I only liked a few people like Ernest and Charlie McArthur2 and Gerald and Sara who were my peers. Time goes bye fast in those moods and nothing is ever done. I thought then that things came easily—I forgot how I’d dragged the great Gatsby out of the pit of my stomach in a time of misery. I woke up in H
ollywood no longer my egotistic, certain self but a mixture of Ernest in fine clothes and Gerald with a career—and Charlie McArthur with a past. Anybody that could make me believe that, like Lois Moran3 did, was precious to me.

  Ellerslie, the polo people, Mrs. Chanler4 the party for Cecelia5 were all attempts to make up from without for being undernourished now from within. Anything to be liked, to be reassured not that I was a man of a little genius but that I was a great man of the world. At the same time I knew it was nonsense—the part of me that knew it was nonsense brought us to the Rue Vaugirard.

  But now you had gone into yourself just as I had four years before in St. Raphael—And there were all the consequences of bad appartments through your lack of patience (“Well, if you were [ ] why don’t you make some money”) bad servants, through your indifference (“Well, if you don’t like her why don’t you send Scotty away to school”) Your dislike for Vidor, your indifference to Joyce I understood—share your incessant entheusisam and absorbtion in the ballet I could not. Somewhere in there I had a sense of being exploited, not by you but by something I resented terribly no happiness. Certainly less than there had ever been at home—you were a phantom washing clothes, talking French bromides with Lucien or Del Plangue1—I remember desolate trips to Versaille to Rhiems, to La Baule undertaken in sheer weariness of home. I remember wondering why I kept working to pay the bills of this desolate menage. I had evolved. In despair I went from the extreme of isolation, which is to say isolation with Mlle Delplangue, or the Ritz Bar where I got back my self esteem for half an hour, often with someone I had hardly ever seen before. In the evenings sometimes you and I rode to the Bois in a cab—after awhile I preferred to go to Cafe de Lilas and sit there alone remembering what a happy time I had had there with Ernest, Hadley, Dorothy Parker + Benchley two years before. During all this time, remember I didn’t blame anyone but myself. I complained when the house got unbearable but after all I was not John Peale Bishop—I was paying for it with work, that I passionately hated and found more and more difficult to do. The novel was like a dream, daily farther and farther away.

  Ellerslie was better and worse. Unhappiness is less accute when one lives with a certain sober dignity but the financial strain was too much. Between Sept when we left Paris and March when we reached Nice we were living at the rate of forty thousand a year.

  But somehow I felt happier. Another spring—I would see Ernest whom I had launched, Gerald + Sarah who through my agency had been able to try the movies.2 At least life would less drab; there would be parties with people who offered something, conversations with people with something to say. Later swimming and getting tanned and young and being near the sea.

  It worked out beautifully didn’t it. Gerald and Sara didn’t see us. Ernest and I met but it was a more irritable Ernest, apprehensively telling me his whereabouts lest I come in on them tight and endanger his lease. The discovery that half a dozen people were familiars there didn’t help my self esteem. By the time we reached the beautiful Rivierra I had developed such an inferiority complex that I couldn’t fase anyone unless I was tight. I worked there too, though, and the unusual combination exploded my lungs.

  You were gone now—I scarcely remember you that summer. You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you—You didn’t need me and it was easier to talk to or rather at Madame Bellois and keep full of wine. I was grateful when you came with me to the Doctors one afternoon but after we’d been a week in Paris and I didn’t try any more about living or dieing. Things were always the same. The appartments that were rotten, the maids that stank—the ballet before my eyes, spoiling a story to take the Troubetskoys to dinner, poisening a trip to Africa. You were going crazy and calling it genius—I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost meglomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered. The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thot I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine but now whatever you said aroused a sort of detached pity for you. For all your superior observation and your harder intelligence I have a faculty of guessing right, without evidence even with a certain wonder as to why and whence that mental short cut came. I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.

  FROM: Zelda Fitzgerald1

  Late summer/early fall 1930

  AL, 42 pp. Princeton University

  Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland

  Dear Scott:

  I have just written to Newman2 to come here to me. You say that you have been thinking of the past. The weeks since I haven’t slept more than three or four hours, swathed in bandages sick and unable to read so have I.

  There was:

  The strangeness and excitement of New York, of reporters and furry smothered hotel lobbies, the brightness of the sun on the window panes and the prickly dust of late spring: the impressiveness of the Fowlers and much tea-dancing and my eccentric behavior at Princeton. There were Townsend’s3 blue eyes and Ludlow’s4 rubbers and a trunk that exhuded sachet and the marshmallow odor of the Biltmore. There were always Ludow and Townsend and Alex and Bill Mackey1 and you and me. We did not like women and we were happy. There was Georges2 appartment and his absinth cock-tails and Ruth Findleys gold hair in his comb, and visits to the “Smart Set” and “Vanity Fair”—a collegiate literary world puffed into wide proportions by the New York papers. There were flowers and night clubs and Ludlow’s advice that moved us to the country. At West Port, we quarrelled over morals once, walking beside a colonial wall under the freshness of lilacs. We sat up all night over “Brass Knuckles and Guitar.” There was the road house where we bought gin, and Kate Hicks and the Maurices and the bright harness of the Rye Beach Club. We swam in the depth of the night with George before we quarrelled with him and went to John Williams parties where there were actresses who spoke French when they were drunk. George played “Cuddle up a Little Closer” on the piano. There were my white knickers that startled the Connecticut hills, and the swim in the sandaled lady’s bird-pool. The beach, and dozens of men, mad rides along the Post Road and trips to New York. We never could have a room at a hotel at night we looked so young, so once we filled an empty suit case with the telephone directory and spoons and a pin-cushion at The Manhattan—I was romanticly attached to Townsend and he went away to Tahatii—and there were your episodes of Gene Bankhead and Miriam. We bought the Marmon with Harvey Firestone and went south through the haunted swamps of Virginiia, the red clay hills of Georgia, the sweet rutted creek-bottoms of Alabama. We drank corn on the wings of an aeroplane in the moon-light and danced at the country-club and came back. I had a pink dress that floated and a very theatrical silver one that I bought with Don Stewart.

  We moved to 59th Street. We quarrelled and you broke the bathroom door and hurt my eye. We went so much to the theatre that you took it off the income tax. We trailed through Central Park in the snow after a ball at the Plaza, I quarrelled with Zoë about Bottecelli3 at the Brevoort and went with her to buy a coat for David Belasco.4 We had Bourbon and Deviled Ham and Christmas at the Overmans5 and ate lots at the Lafayette. There was Tom Smith and his wall-paper and Mencken and our Valentine party and the time I danced all night with Alex and meals at Mollats with John6 and I skated, and was pregnant and you wrote the “Beautiful and Damned.” We came to Europe and I was sick and complained always. There was London, and Wopping with Shane Leslie and strawberries as big as tomatoes at Lady Randolph Churchills. There was St. Johns Ervines wooden leg and Bob Handley in the gloom of the Cecil—There was Paris and the heat and the ice-cream that did not melt and buying clothes—and Rome and your friends from the British Embassy and your drinking, drinking. We came home. There was “Dog”1 and lunch at the St. Regis with Townsend
and Alex and John: Alabama and the unbearable heat and our almost buying a house. Then we went to St. Paul and hundreds of people came to call. There were the Indian forests and the moon on the sleeping porch and I was heavy and afraid of the storms. Then Scottie was born and we went to all the Christmas parties and a man asked Sandy2 “who is your fat friend?” Snow covered everything. We had the Flu and went lots to the Kalmans and Scottie grew strong. Joseph Hergesheimer came and Saturdays we went to the university Club. We went to the Yacht Club and we both had minor flirtatons. Joe began to dislike me, and I played so much golf that I had Tetena.3 Kollie4 almost died. We both adored him. We came to New York and rented a house when we were tight. There was Val Engelicheff and Ted Paramour5 and dinner with Bunny in Washington Square and pills and Doctor Lackin And we had a violent quarrell on the train going back, I don’t remember why. Then I brought Scottie to New York. She was round and funny in a pink coat and bonnet and you met us at the station. In Great Neck there was always disorder and quarrels: about the Golf Club, about the Foxes, about Peggy Weber, about Helen Buck, about everything. We went to the Rumseys,6 and that awful night at the Mackeys7 when Ring sat in the cloak-room. We saw Esther and Glen Hunter8 and Gilbert Seldes. We gave lots of parties: the biggest one for Rebecca West. We drank Bass Pale Ale and went always to the Bucks or the Lardners or the Swopes when they weren’t at our house. We saw lots of Sydney Howard and fought the week-end that Bill Motter was with us. We drank always and finally came to France because there were always too many people in the house. On the boat there was almost a scandal about Bunny Burgess. We found Nanny and went to Hyeres—Scottie and I were both sick there in the dusty garden full of Spanish Bayonet and Bourgainvilla. We went to St. Raphael. You wrote, and we went sometimes to Nice or Monte Carlo. We were alone, and gave big parties for the French aviators. Then there was Josen9 and you were justifiably angry. We went to Rome. We ate at the Castelli dei Cesari. The sheets were always damp. There was Christmas in the echoes, and eternal walks. We cried when we saw the Pope. There were the luminous shadows of the Pinco and the officer’s shining boots. We went to Frascati and Tivoli. There was the jail,1 and Hal Rhodes at the Hotel de Russie and my not wanting to go to the moving-picture ball2 at the Excelsior and asking Hungary Cox3 to take me home. Then I was horribly sick, from trying to have a baby and you didn’t care much and when I was well we came back to Paris. We sat to-gether in Marseilles and thought how good France was. We lived in the rue Tilsitt, in red plush and Teddy4 came for tea and we went to the markets with the Murphies. There were the Wimans5 and Mary Hay and Eva La Galliene and rides in the Bois at dawn and the night we all played puss-in-the-corner at the Ritz. There was Tunti and nights in Mont Matre. We went to Antibes, and I was sick always and took too much Dial.6 The Murphy’s were at the Hotel du Cap and we saw them constantly. Back in Paris I began dancing lessons because I had nothing to do. I was sick again at Christmas when the Mac Leishes came and Doctor Gros said there was no use trying to save my ovaries. I was always sick and having picqures7 and things and you were naturally more and more away. You found Ernest and the Cafe des Lilas and you were unhappy when Dr. Gros sent me to Salies-de Beam.8 At the Villa Paquita I was always sick. Sara brought me things and we gave a lunch for Geralds father. We went to Cannes and and listned to Raquel Miller9 and dined under the rain of fireworks. You couldn’t work because your room was damp and you quarrelled with the Murphys. We moved to a bigger villa and I went to Paris and had my appendix out. You drank all the time and some man called up the hospital about a row you had had. We went home, and I wanted you to swim with me at Juan-les-Pins but you liked it better where it was gayer: at the Garoupe10 with Marice Hamilton and the Murphys and the Mac Leishes. Then you found Grace Moore11 and Ruth and Charlie12 and the summer passed, one party after another. We quarrelled about Dwight Wiman and you left me lots alone. There were too many people and too many things to do: every-day there was something and our house was always full. There was Gerald and Ernest and you often did not come home. There were the English sleepers that I found downstairs one morning and Bob and Muriel and Walker1 and Anita Loos, always somebody—Alice Delamar and Ted Rousseau and our trips to St. Paul2 and the note from Isadora Duncan and the countryside slipping by through the haze of Chamberryfraises and Graves—That was your summer. I swam with Scottie except when I followed you, mostly unwillingly. Then I had asthma and almost died in Genoa. And we were back in America—further apart than ever before. In California, though you would not allow me to go anywhere without you, you yourself engaged in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child.3 You said you wanted nothing more from me in all your life, though you made a scene when Carl4 suggested that I go to dinner with him and Betty Compson. We came east: I worked over Ellerslie incessantly and made it function. There was our first house-party and you and Lois—and when there was nothing more to do on the house I began dancing lessons. You did not like it when you saw it made me happy. You were angry about rehearsals and insistent about trains. You went to New York to see Lois and I met Dick Knight5 the night of that party for Paul Morand.6 Again, though you were by then thoroughly entangled sentimentally, you forbade my seeing Dick and were furious about a letter he wrote me. On the boat coming over you paid absolutely no attention of any kind to me except to refuse me the permission to stay to a concert with whatever-his-name-was. I think the most humiliating and bestial thing that ever happenned to me in my life is a scene that you probably don’t remember even in Genoa. We lived in the rue Vaugirard. You were constantly drunk. You didn’t work and were dragged home at night by taxi-drivers when you came home at all. You said it was my fault for dancing all day. What was I to do? You got up for lunch. You made no advances toward me and complained that I was un-responsive. You were literally eternally drunk the whole summer. I got so I couldn’t sleep and I had asthma again. You were angry when I wouldn’t go with you to Mont Matre. You brought drunken undergraduates in to meals when you came home for them, and it made you angry that I didn’t care any more. I began to like Egorowa—On the boat going back I told you I was afraid that there was something abnormal in the relationship and you laughed. There was more or less of a scandal about Philipson, but you did not even try to help me. You brought Philippe7 back and I couldn’t manage the house any more; he was insubordinate and disrespectful to me and you wouldn’t let him go. I began to work harder at dancing—I thought of nothing else but that. You were far away by then and I was alone. We came back to rue Palantine and you, in a drunken stupor told me a lot of things that I only half understood1: but I understood the dinner we had at Ernests’. Only I didn’t understand that it matterred. You left me more and more alone, and though you complained that it was the appartment or the servants or me, you know the real reason you couldn’t work was because you were always out half the night and you were sick and you drank constantly. We went to Cannes. I kept up my lessons and we quarrelled You wouldn’t let me fire the nurse that both Scottie and I hated. You disgraced yourself at the Barry’s2 party, on the yacht at Monte Carlo, at the casino with Gerald and Dotty.3 Many nights you didn’t come home. You came into my room once the whole summer, but I didn’t care because I went to the beach in the morning, I had my lesson in the afternoon and I walked at night. I was nervous and half-sick but I didn’t know what was the matter. I only knew that I had difficulty standing lots of people, like the party at Wm J. Locke’s and that I wanted to get back to Paris. We had lunch at the Murphy’s and Gerald said to me very pointedly several times that Nemchinova4 was at Antibes. Still I didn’t understand. We came back to Paris. You were miserable about your lung,5 and because you had wasted the summer, but you didn’t stop drinking I worked all the time and I became dependent on Egorowa. I couldn’t walk in the street unless I had been to my lesson. I couldn’t manage the appartment because I couldn’t speak to the servants. I couldn’t go into stores to buy clothes and my emotions became blindly involved. In February, when I was so sick with bronchitis that I had ventouses6 eve
ry day and fever for two weeks, I had to work because I couldn’t exist in the world without it, and still I didn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t even know what I wanted. Then we went to Africa and when we came back I began to realize because I could feel what was happenning in others. You did not want me. Twice you left my bed saying “I can’t. Don’t you understand”—I didn’t. Then there was the Harvard man who lost his direction, and when I wanted you to come home with me you told me to sleep with the coal man. At Nancy Hoyt’s7 dinner she offerred her services but there was nothing the matter with my head then, though I was half dead, so I turned back to the studio. Lucienne8 was sent away but since I knew nothing about the situation, I didn’t know why there was something wrong. I just kept on going. Lucienne came back and later went away again and then the end happenned I went to Malmaison. You wouldn’t help me—I don’t blame you by now, but if you had explained I would have understood because all I wanted was to go on working. You had other things: drink and tennis, and we did not care about each other. You hated me for asking you not to drink. A girl came to work with me but I didn’t want her to. I still believed in love and I thought suddenly of Scottie and that you supported me. So at Valmont I was in tortue, and my head closed to-gether. You gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et moins etendue”—1 We were friends—Then you took it away and I grew sicker, and there was nobody to teach me, so here I am, after five months of misery and agony and desperation. I’m glad you have found that the material for a Josepine story2 and I’m glad that you take such an interest in sports. Now that I can’t sleep any more I have lots to think about, and since I have gone so far alone I suppose I can go the rest of the way—but if it were Scottie I would not ask that she go through the same hell and if I were God I could not justify or find a reason for imposing it—except that it was wrong, of cource, to love my teacher when I should have loved you. But I didn’t have you to love—not since long before I loved her.