A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  And I believe she is considering making an attempt at such an idea. If her book goes well it may reinforce the idea and all my effort be reduced to a scrap of paper. So far as my own novel is concerned I am absolutely desperate and determined to finish it without interference from Zelda, sane or insane. Can’t we do something to forestall the dangers on the horizon?

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Talked over main ideas with Zelda. Didn’t read it to her.

  F.

  TO: Zelda Fitzgerald

  After 1932

  AL (draft)1, 11 pp. Princeton University

  “La Paix.” Towson, Maryland

  Do you feel that you are now able to be your own doctor—to judge what is good for you?

  If no—do you know what should be done?

  Should you be in a clinic do you think?

  Would a trained nurse help?

  An experienced one?

  An inexperienced one?

  If you were really not yourself and in a fit of temper or depression would you ask the judgement of such of woman or would you come to me?

  Are these bursts of temper part of the derangement you mentioned?

  Or are they something that is in your surroundings?

  If they are in your sickness how can you accept another’s opinion when the nature of your attack has taken away your power of reasoning?

  If they are in your home surroundings in what practical ways would you like your home surroundings changed?

  Must there big changes which seriously affect the life of husband and children?

  If you feel that you are now able to be your own doctor—to judge what is good for you.

  Of what use would a nurse be?

  Would she be a sort of clock to remind you it was time for this and that?

  If that function in your husband is annoying would it not be more annoying in the case of a stranger in your own house?

  Is there not an idea in your head sometimes that you must live close to the borders of mental trouble in order to create at your best?

  Which comes first your health or your work?

  Are you in delicate health?

  If a person sacrificed some of their health to their work is that within their human rights?

  If a sick person sacrificed some of their health to their work is that within their human rights?

  If a sick person sacrificed some of their health to their work and sacrificed others also would that be within their rights

  If the other people felt that they would not willingly be sacrificed could they refuse?

  What recourse would the determined worker have if well?

  What recourse if sick?

  Must he not wait until he is well bringing such matters to a decision, because being sick he will be inevitably worsted in trying to infringe on the rights of others?

  Is there any enlightened opinion which considers that you are liable to be strong for another year?

  Can you make yourself strong by any means except the usual ones?

  Are you an exceptional person who will be cured differently from anyone else

  Will you make the usual return to society for its protection of you during your sickness and convalescence

  Is the return usually the virtues of patience and submissiveness in certain important regards?

  In case the ill person (suppose a man with small pox) runs around hurting and infecting others will society tend to take stern measures to protect itself?

  Are you ill?

  Are your husband and child, in their larger aspects, society?

  If one of them were contagiously sick and wanted to return to the home during convalescence would you let him infect the other and yourself?

  Who would be your natural guides in determining what was the end of convalescence?

  Did “good” behavior in the clinic preceed your previous recovery?

  Was it better behavior than any other?

  Did not furious activity and bad behavior preceed the previous denoument at Valmont and Prangins?

  Are you or have you been ill?

  Does furious activity lead often to consequent irritability even in well persons?

  Would not this be terribly accentuated by an ill person?

  Does a person recovering from heart trouble start by moving boulders

  Is “I have no time” an answer to the previous questions?”

  What is the order of importance of everything in your mind—

  Is your health first?

  Is it always first?

  Is it first in the midst of artistic creation when the two are in conflict? If it is not, and you should be well, should society coerce you into putting health first?

  If you should be ill should society so act apon you?

  Does your child have the same priviledges when ill as when well?

  Are not lessons stopped?

  Is this logical?

  What does logic mean?

  Is it important to be logical?

  If not, is it important to be dramatic?

  Is it important to have been dramatic?

  If an illness becomes a nuisance to society does society act sternly?

  Is it important to be dramatic or logical in the future?

  Is an ill person or a well person more capable of being logical or dramatic?

  Can a very ill person try to be only a little ill?

  Why does madness not enlarge the artistic range?

  What is disaccociation of ideas?

  How does it differ in an artistic person and in a mentally ill person?

  Who pays for illness?

  Who pays in suffering?

  Does only the ill person suffer?

  When you left Prangins would you have taken any patient there into your home if they came in a refractory way

  Would you constitute yourself a doctor for them?

  Suppose the choice was between two patients and one patient would accept your judgement while the other one said he would not Which would you choose

  When doctors recommend a normal sexual life do you agree with them?

  Are you normal sexually?

  Are you retiscent about sex?

  Are you satisfied sexually with your husband?

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

  “La Paix,” Rodgers’ Forge,

  Towson, Maryland,

  January 19, 1933.

  Dear Max:

  I was in New York for three days last week on a terrible bat. I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for twenty-four hours groaning. Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks. Ernest told me he concealed from you the fact that I was in such rotten shape. I send you this, less to write you a Rousseau’s Confession than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years standing.

  Thanks for the books that you have had sent to me from time to time. They comprise most of the reading I do because like everybody else I gradually cut down on expenses. When you have a line on the sale of Zelda’s book let us know.

  Found New York in a high state of neurosis, as does everybody else, and met no one who didn’t convey the fact to me: it possibly proves that the neurosis is in me. All goes serenely down here. Am going on the water-wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don’t tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, tho even Post stories must be done in a state of sobriety. I thought he seemed in good shape, Bunny less so, rather gloomy. A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

  For God’s sake can’t you lighten that pall of gloom which has settled over Scribner’s?�
�Erskine Caldwell’s imitations of Morley Callaghan’s imitations of Ernest, and Stuart Chase’s imitations of Earl Browder imitating Lenine.1 Maybe Ring would lighten your volume with a monthly article. I see he has perked up a little in the New Yorker.

  All goes acceptably in Maryland, at least from the window of my study, with distant gun flashes on the horizon if you walk far out of the door.

  Ever your old friend,

  F Scott Fitzgerald

  TO: Edmund Wilson

  c. February 1933

  ALS, 3 pp. Yale University

  La Paix (My God!)

  Towson Md 1933

  Dear Bunny

  Your letter with the head of Vladimir Ulianov1 just recieved. Please come here the night of the inauguration + stay at least the next day. I want to know with what resignation you look forward to your rôle of Lunafcharsky2 + whether you decided you had nothing further worth saying in prose fiction or whether there was nothing further to say. Perhaps I should draw the answer to the last question from Axel’s Castle yet I remember stories of yours that anticipated so much that was later said that it seems a pity. (Not that I don’t admire your recent stuff—particularly I liked Hull House.

  We had a most unfortunate meeting. I came to New York to get drunk + swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation. I assume full responsibility for all unpleasantness—with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him; and as for bringing up the butcher boy matter—my God! making trouble between friends is the last thing I had ever thought myself capable of. Anyhow, plenty of egotism for the moment.

  Dos was here, + we had a nice evening—we never quite understand each other + perhaps that’s the best basis for an enduring friendship. Alec came up to see me at the Plaza the day I left (still in awful shape but not conspicuously so). He told me to my amazment that you had explained the fundamentals of Leninism, even Marxism the night before, + Dos tells me that it was only recently made plain thru the same agency to the editors to The New Republic. I little thought when I left politics to you + your gang in 1920 you would devote your time to cutting up Wilson’s shroud into blinders! Back to Mallarmé.

  —Which reminds me that T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon + evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine. Very broken and sad + shrunk inside.

  However come in March. Don’t know what time the inauguration takes place but you find out + tell us the approximate time of your arrival here. Find out in advance for we may go to it too + we might all get lost in the shuffle.

  Always Your Friend

  Scott

  P.S. Please not a word to Zelda about anything I may have done or said in New York. She can stand literally nothing of that nature. I’m on the water-wagon but there’ll be lots of liquor for you

  TO: Dr. Adolf Meyer

  CC, 7 pp. Princeton University

  “La Paix”

  Roger’s Forge, Md.

  April 10th, 1933

  Dear Dr. Myer:

  Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s case as it existed in a purer form—last October, say, when I was standing up under the thing—I would like to submit you some questions which might clarify things for me. I’ve had the feeling of a certain futility in our conversations with you and Dr. Rennie, though at first they did much good because she was still close to the threat of force and more acutely under the spell of your personality. Certain questions never really came to a head—no doubt you saw the thing in flux. And I know also that you were trying to consider as a whole the millieu in which she is immersed, including my contributions to it—nevertheless in one way or another our discussions have gotten so wide in scope that they would properly have to include the whole fields of philosophy, sociology and art to lead anywhere.

  This is my fault. In my own broodings about the case, I have gone through the same experience—arriving at the gate of such questions as to whether Zelda isn’t more worth saving than I am. I compromised on the purely utilitarian standpoint that I was the wage-earner, that I took care of wife and child, financially and practically, and beyond that that I was integrated—integrated in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that I might have two counts against me to her one.

  That fact has stood up for the last three years (save for her mother’s little diversion to the effect that I wanted to spirit away her daughter to a madhouse.) It began to collapse, bit by bit, six months ago—that is to say the picture of Zelda painting things that show a distinct talent, of Zelda trying faithfully to learn how to write is much more sympathetic and, superficially, more solid than the vision of me making myself iller with drink as I finish up the work of four years.

  But when I began to compromise my case by loss of self-control and outbreaks of temper, my own compensation was to believe in it more and more. I will probably be carried off eventually by four strong guards shrieking manicly that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Zelda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract. But to return to last October, may I ask my first categorical question.

  Does Dr. Meyer suspect, or did Dr. Squires lead him to suspect that there were elements in the case that were being deliberately concealed? I ask this because for a month Zelda had Dr. Forel convinced that I was a notorious Parisien homo-sexual.

  The second question also requires a certain introduction. It goes back to something we’ve talked about before and if I restate it in detail it is chiefly to clarify it in my own mind.

  All I ever meant by asking authority over her was the power of an ordinary nurse in any continental country over a child; to be able to say “If you don’t do this I shall punish you.” All I have had has been the power of the nurse-girl in America who can only say, “I’ll tell your Mama.”

  It seems to me that one must either have

  (1) A mutual bond between equals

  (2) Direct authority

  (3) Delegated authority

  To give responsibility without authority seems to me impossible. If a nurse can and does punish, or instead of “punish” let me say “enforce”—there is a certain healthy action and reaction set up between nurse and child, perhaps from the nurse’s remorse at her strictness or the child’s sense that the punishment was just—at the very worst, in the case of real injustice or over-punishment, the child has recourse to the parents. We once had a nurse of that sort—we were aware of it before the child was.

  Naturally I can’t rush in and turn out Zelda’s lights when its her bedtime. I can’t snatch strong cigarettes away from her, or countermand orders for a third cup of strong coffee given to a servant. Through moral suasion I might but more of that later.

  Here is my second question:

  Will Doctor Meyer give me the authority to ask Zelda when she is persistently refactory to pack her bag and spend a week under people who can take care of her, such as in the clinic?

  If Doctor Meyer is in doubt about my ability to decide when such force is necessary, then hasn’t the case reached such a point of confusion psychologically that I had better resort to legal means to save myself, my child and the three of us in toto.

  My third question:

  I have noted throughout our conversations a reluctance on your part to impose any ideas of morality upon her, save ideas of moderation in various directions. It has seemed to me that she has taken advantage of this difference of attitude from that of the continental physicians with whom she was most in contact to draw a false inference. Because Dr. Forel believes in the strictly teutonic idea of marriage and Dr. Meyer does not she imagines that the latter’s attitude is nihilistic and that it somehow negates all mutual duty between husband and wife except the most casual profession of it.

  Now this idea of mutual duty was, from. Zelda’s youth, the thing most lacking in her personality, much more lacking than in the average spoiled A
merican girl. So that it shocked other women, even gay society women and theatrical women, again and again. At the same time she is the type who most clearly needs a guiding hand. There is the predisposition of her family to mental troubles, and in addition her mother tried hard to make everlasting babies of her children. Zelda played the baby with me always except when an important thing came up, when she was like a fire-horse in her determination and on the principal occasion she ended in Switzerland. In that moral atmosphere—which I admit can’t be transported entire to the U.S.A.—she changed very much, became less dependent and more mature in smaller things and more dependent on my advise on a few main issues.

  The nine months before her second breakdown were the happiest of my life and I think, save for the agonies of her father’s death, the happiest of hers. Now all that is disappearing week by week and we are going back to the agonizing cat and dog fight of four or five years ago.

  To recapitulate—since her personality began to split about 1928, the two main tendencies have been:

  (1) Self-expression, extreme neglect of home, child and husband, exageration of physical and mental powers . . .1 bullheadedness (Beautiful psychiatric term!).

  (2) Conservatism, almost Victorianism, dread of any extremes or excess, real domesticity, absorbtion in child, husband, family and close friends, quick amenity to moral suasion.

  One of her reasons for gravitating toward the first state is that her work is perhaps at its best in the passage from the conservative to the self-expressive phase, just before and just after it crosses the line—which, of course, could be the equivalent of the period of creative excitement in an integrated person. Just before crossing it is better—over the line she brings that demonaic intensity to it that achieves much in bulk with more consequent waste. I could make you a list in parallel lines but refrain out of respect for your patience.

  Creatively she does not seem able to keep herself around that line. A healthful approach with all that implies, and a limited work time never to be exceeded, gives the best results but seems to be impossible outside of the dicipline of a clinic. We came nearest to this last August and September. With much pushing and prodding she lived well, wrote well and painted well.