I have just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other. When I came to you twice last winter and asked you to start over it was because I thought I was becoming seriously involved sentimentally and preparing situations for which I was morally and practicly unfitted. You had a song about Gigolos: if that had ever entered my head there was, besides the whole studio, 3 other solutions in Paris.
I came to you half-sick after a difficult lunch at Armonville and you kept me waiting until it was too late in front of the Guaranty Trust.
Sandy’s3 tiny candle was not much of a strain, but it required something better than your week of drunkenness to put it out. You didn’t care: so I went on and on—dancing alone, and, no matter what happens, I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post-cards—
TO: Dr. Oscar Forel1
Summer? 1930
AL (draft), 6 pp. Princeton University
Switzerland
For translation with carbon. But
not on hotel stationary.
This letter is about a matter that had best be considered frankly now than six months or a year from now. When I last saw you I was almost as broken as my wife by months of horror. The only important thing in my life was that she should be saved from madness or death. Now that, due to your tireless intelligence and interest, there is a time in sight where Zelda and I may renew our life together on a decent basis, a thing which I desire with all my heart, there are other considerations due to my nessessities as a worker and to my very existence that I must put before you.
During my young manhood for seven years I worked extremely hard, in six years bringing myself by tireless literary self-discipline to a position of unquestioned preeminence among younger American writers, also by additional “hack-work” for the cinema ect. I gave my wife a comfortable and luxurious life such as few European writers ever achieve. My work is done on coffee, coffee and more coffee, never on alcohol. At the end of five or six hours I get up from my desk white and trembling and with a steady burn in my stomach, to go to dinner. Doubtless a certain irritability developed in those years, an inability to be gay which my wife—who had never tried to use her talents and intelligence—was not inclined to condone. It was on our coming to Europe in 1924 and apon her urging that I began to look forward to wine at dinner—she took it at lunch, I did not. We went on hard drinking parties together sometimes but the regular use of wine and apperatives was something that I dreaded but she encouraged because she found I was more cheerful then and allowed her to drink more. The ballet idea was something I inaugurated in 1927 to stop her idle drinking after she had already so lost herself in it as to make suicidal attempts. Since then I have drunk more, from unhappiness, and she less, because of her physical work—that is another story.
Two years ago in America I noticed that when we stopped all drinking for three weeks or so, which happened many times, I immediately had dark circles under my eyes, was listless and disinclined to work.
I gave up strong cigarettes and, in a panic that perhaps I was just giving out, applied for a large insurance policy. The one trouble was low blood-pressure, a matter which they finally condoned, and they issued me the policy. I found that a moderate amount of wine, a pint at each meal made all the difference in how I felt. When that was available the dark circles disappeared, the coffee didn’t give me excema or beat in my head all night, I looked forward to my dinner instead of staring at it, and life didn’t seem a hopeless grind to support a woman whose tastes were daily diverging from mine. She no longer read or thought or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites People respected her because I concealed her weaknesses, and because of a certain complete fearlessness and honesty that she has never lost, but she was becoming more and more an egotist and a bore. Wine was almost a nessessity for me to be able to stand her long monalogues about ballet steps, alternating with a glazed eye toward any civilized conversation whatsoever
Now when that old question comes up again as to which of two people is worth preserving, I, thinking of my ambitions once so nearly achieved of being part of English literature, of my child, even of Zelda in the matter of providing for her—must perforce consider myself first. I say that without defiance but simply knowing the limits of what I can do. To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens, even to continue the experiment thereafter if successful—only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot. My vision of the world at its brightest is such that life without the use of its amentities is impossible. I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocense in myself that could make it that possible, and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not with renunciation. For me it would be as illogical as permanently giving up sex because I caught a disease (which I hasten to assure you I never have) I cannot consider one pint of wine at the days end as anything but one of the rights of man.
Does this sound like a long polemic composed of childish stubborness and ingratitude? If it were that it would be so much easier to make promises. What I gave up for Zelda was women and it wasn’t easy in the position my success gave me—what pleasure I got from comradeship she has pretty well ruined by dragging me of all people into her homosexual obsession. Is there not a certain disingenuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her relatives, and our friends that it was my drinking that had caused this calamity, and that I thereby admitted it? Wouldn’t she finally get to believe herself that she had consented to “take me back” only if I stopped drinking? I could only be silent. And any human value I might have would disappear if I condemned myself to a life long ascetisim to which I am not adapted either by habit, temperment or the circumstances of my metier.
That is my case about the future, a case which I have never stated to you before when her problem needed your entire consideration. I want very much to see you before I see her. And please disassociate this letter from what I shall always feel in signing myself
Yours with Eternal Gratitude and Admiration
FIN
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
Summer? 1930
AL (draft), 4 pp. Princeton University
Switzerland
When I saw the sadness of your face in that passport picture I felt as you can imagine. But after going through what you can imagine I did then and looking at it and looking at it, I saw that it was the face I knew and loved and not the mettalic superimposition of our last two years in France. . . .1
The photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. The rotten letters you write me I simply put away under Z in my file. My instinct is to write a public letter to the Paris Herald to see if any human being except yourself and Robert McAlmon has ever thought I was a homosexual. The three weeks after the horror of Valmont when I could not lift my eyes to meet the eyes of other men in the street after your stinking allegations and insinuations will not be repeated. If you choose to keep up your wrestling match with a pillar of air I would prefer to be not even in the audience.
I am hardened to write you so brutally by thinking of the ceaseless wave of love that surrounds you and envelopes you always, that you have the power to evoke at a whim—when I know that for the mere counterfiet of it I would perjure the best of my heart and mind. Do you think the solitude in which I live has a more amusing decor than any other solitude? Do you think it is any nicer for remembering that there were times very late at night when you and I shared our aloneness?
I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach
and grasp. I can only bring you the little bit of hope I have and I don’t know any other hope except my own. I have the terrible misfortune to be a gentleman in the sort of struggle with incalculable elements to which people should bring centuries of inexperience; if I have failed you is it just barely possible that you have failed me (I can’t even write you any more because I see you poring over every line like Mr. Sumner2 trying to wring some slant or suggestion of homosexuality out of it)
I love you with all my heart because you are my own girl and that is all I know.
TO: Edmund Wilson
Summer 1930
ALS, 2 pp. Yale University
c/o Guaranty Trust
4 Place de la Concorde
Paris
Dear Bunny:
Congratulations on your marriage1 and all real hopes for your happiness. We heard through Mary,2 long after the event of your collapse3 and the thought that you’d survived it helped me through some dispairing moments in Zelda’s case. She is now almost “well”, which is to say the psychosis element is gone. We must live quietly for a year now and to some extent forever. She almost went permanently crazy—four hours work a day at the ballet for two years, and she 27 and too old when she began. I’m relieved that the ballet was over anyhow as our domestic life was cracking under the strain and I hadn’t touched my novel for a year. She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely unpregnable safe inside her that it was months after the break before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.
I have seen no one for months save John in Paris—he is now more in prison than ever + the brief spell of work I nagged him into during Margaret’s pregnancy has now given way to interminable talk about a well on their property. What an awful woman. Also a man named Thomas Wolfe, a fine man and a fine writer. Paris swarms with fairies and I’ve grown to loathe it and prefer the hospital-like air of Switzerland where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs. Met your friend Allen Tate,4 liked him + pitied him his wife
A Life in Letters Page 22