Scott—there’s nothing in all the world I want but you—and your precious love—All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence—because you’d soon love me less—and less—and I’d do anything—anything—to keep your heart for my own— I don’t want to live—I want to love first, and live incidentally— Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting— I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready— Don’t—don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me— You’ve trusted me with the dearest heart of all—and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had—
How can you think deliberately of life without me—If you should die— O Darling—darling Scot— It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too,—I’d have no purpose in life—just a pretty—decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered—and I was delivered to you—to be worn— I want you to wear me, like a watch—charm or a button hole boquet—to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help—to know that you can’t do anything without me.
I’m glad you wrote Mamma.* It was such a nice sincere letter—and mine to St Paul was very evasive and rambling. I’ve never, in all my life, been able to say anything to people older than me—Somehow I just instinctively avoid personal things with them—even my family. Kids are so much nicer.
It was an extraordinary letter, for it revealed Zelda’s perception of Scott in relation to herself and to money; they were inextricably bound together. That she seems to have understood something of that link was remarkable. Scott was far more aware of the power of money than Zelda; he wanted it badly. Once he had it he would treat it with indifference, but its possession, as well as the people who possessed it, would become major elements of his fiction. Zelda’s letter reassures Scott that while money, or “All the material things,” didn’t matter to her, she knew that they did to him, and that because they did so deeply he would love her less were she not embellished by them. The extravagant language of Zelda’s letter also expressed her feeling that without Scott she was nothing. It was through him, through private possession of him (“to know that you can’t do anything without me”), that she spoke of their love. It was unfortunate that she thought of herself as having been “ordered… to be worn” by Scott. She would accept being his creation, his fictional girl; she would match his ideal to the letter, if she could.
Buoyed by her letter, Scott offered Zelda an engagement ring which had been his mother’s. On March 22 he wired her: “DARLING… THE RING ARRIVED TONIGHT AND I AM SENDING IT MONDAY I LOVE YOU AND I THOUGHT I WOULD TELL YOU HOW MUCH ON THIS SATURDAY NIGHT WHEN WE OUGHT TO BE TOGETHER DONT LET YOUR FAMILY BE SHOCKED AT MY PRESENT.” When the small package arrived Rosalind inadvertently opened it. Enclosed along with the ring was Scott’s calling card with this note written across it: “Darling—I am sending this just the way it came—I hope it fits and I wish I were there to put it on. I love you so much, much, much that it just hurts every minute I’m without you—Do write every day because I love your letters so—Goodbye, My own Wife.” Scott had also written a letter to Judge Sayre, which he rather inappropriately intended Zelda to deliver for him. She read it and wrote Scott: “I like your letter to A. D. and I’m slowly mustering courage to deliver it— He’s so blind, it’ll probably be a terrible shock to him, but it seems the only straightforward thing to do.” Scott again wired her: “… BETTER GIVE LETTER TO YOUR FATHER IM SORRY YOURE NERVOUS DONT WRITE UNLESS YOU WANT TO I LOVE YOU DEAR EVERYTHING WILL BE MIGHTY FINE ALL MY LOVE.”
Zelda was delighted with the ring and told Scott it was beautiful. “Every time I see it on my finger I am rather startled— I’ve never worn a ring before, they’ve always seemed so inappropriate— —but I love to see this shining there so nice and white like our love— And it sorter says ‘Soon’ to me all the time— Just sings it all day long.” That Saturday night she wore it to a dance at the country club to everyone’s astonishment. “You can’t imagine what havoc the ring wrought,” she reported. “A whole dance was completely upset last night—… I am so proud to be your girl—to have everybody know we are in love— It’s so good to know you’re always loving me—and that before long we’ll be together for all our lives—”
Opinion in Montgomery was, however, by no means as simple as Zelda expressed it to Scott. Privately more than one swain wondered just how long their long-distance romance would endure. Zelda was not known for the longevity of her amours and Scott had already been gone for more than a month. The Sayres did not consider Zelda seriously engaged to Scott, and among themselves hoped that she wouldn’t be. Although Mrs. Sayre genuinely liked Fitzgerald, her notes to Zelda about impoverished writers unable to make their way took the effect they were intended to. Fitzgerald was a charming and attractive but uncertain young man; he had not graduated from Princeton, he was Irish, he had no career to speak of, he drank too much, and he was a Catholic.
Still, their correspondence flourished. Zelda wrote Scott that she hoped his mother would like her. “I’ll be as nice as possible and try to make her—but I am afraid I’m losing all pretense of femininity, and I imagine she will demand it—” Then, because he wanted to know exactly what she did with her time, she told him about a “syndicate” she and Eleanor Browder had formed: “…we’re ‘best friends’ to more college boys than Solomon had wives—Just sorter buddying with ’em and I really am enjoying it—as much as I could anything without you— I have always been inclined toward masculinity. It’s such a cheery atmosphere boys radiate— And we do such unique things—” The day before, a good friend of hers from the University of Alabama, John Sellers, was short of his return train fare. Zelda helped him collect what he needed by dressing up in long skirts, with a floppy old hat pulled low over her eyes, and carrying a tin cup at the railroad station while they begged for alms. She was having a grand time “acquiring a bad name,” as she put it, and thrived on the sensation she created.
As though to pacify any reaction to her cutting up, she added in one letter: “… every night I get very loud and coarse, and then I always wish for you so—so I wouldn’t be such a kid—” But this did little to assuage his feelings about her adventures, and wild letters again crossed between New York and Montgomery. Zelda was obviously having fun, and even as she assured him of her love she was also writing him: “The Ohio troops have started a wild and heated correspondence with Montgomery damsels.… I guess the butterflies will flitter a trifle more—It seems dreadfully peculiar not to be worried over the prospects of the return of at least three or four fiancées. My brain is stagnating owing to the lack of scrapes— I haven’t had to exercise it in so long—” And in her fashion she added: “Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth—and I want to be married soon—soon— Lover— Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic— You ought to know—” But Scott was beginning to wonder; April began and he visited Clothilde in New York in order to search for a suitable apartment for himself and Zelda.
Meanwhile Zelda was growing impatient in Montgomery; she was tired of waiting for Scott to make his fortune, and her petulance began to show in her letters. Writing about a woman she knew, she told Scott that all women “love to fancy themselves suffering— they’re nearly all moral and mental hypo-crondiacs—If they’d just awake to the fact that their excuse and explanation is the necessity for a disturbing element among men—they’d be much happier, and the men much more miserable—which is exactly what they need for the improvement of things in general.” It was a nearly perfect summary of Zelda’s own attitude toward men and Scott did not miss it. He put her letter almost verbatim into his novel This Side of Paradise as a pertinent description of “Rosalind,” who was partly patterned upon Zelda: “Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.”
Scott, you’re really awfully silly— In the first place, I haven’t kissed anybody good-bye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place— You know, darling, that I love you too much to want to. If I did have an honest—or dishonest—desire to kiss just one or two people, I might—but I couldn’t ever want to—my mouth is yours.
Maddeningly, she went on:
But s’pose I did— Don’t you know it’d just be absolutely nothing— Why can’t you understand that nothing means anything except your darling self and your love— I wish we’d hurry and I’d be yours so you’d know— Sometimes I almost despair of making you feel sure—so sure that nothing could ever make you doubt like I do—
It was definitely not the sort of letter that would reassure Scott and, afraid that other men were seeing Ze!da often, too often, on the 15th of April he took a few days’ holiday and went to Montgomery. After the trip he wrote in his Ledger: “Failure. I used to wonder why they locked princesses in towers.”
But, if Scott considered the trip a failure, Zelda did not seem to.
Scott my darling lover—
everything seems so smooth and restful, like this yellow dusk. Knowing that I’ll always be yours—that you really own me—that nothing can keep us apart—is such a relief after the strain and nervous excitement of the last month. I’m so glad you came—like Summer, just when I needed you most—and took me, back with you. Waiting doesn’t seem so hard now. The vague despondency has gone— I love you Sweetheart.
He’d apparently brought some gin when he came, the “best at the Exchange,” and Zelda told him, “I’d rather have had 10¢ a quart variety— I wanted it just to know you loved the sweetness— To breathe and know you loved the smell—” Then, abruptly, the transition being perhaps the aroma of the gin, she added:
I think I like breathing twilit gardens and moths more than beautiful pictures or good books— It seems the most sensual of all the senses— Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell—a smell of dying moons and shadows—
I’ve spent to-day in the grave-yard— It really isn’t a cemetery, you know, trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes—sticky to touch with a sickening odor— The boys wanted to get in to test my nerve to-night— I wanted to feel “William Wreford, 1864.” Why should graves make people feel in vain? I’ve heard that so much, and Grey is so convincing, but somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived— All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances—and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue—of cource, they are neither— I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it— Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss? Old death is so beautiful—so very beautiful—We will die together—I know—
Sweetheart—
Touched by the beauty of her letter, he sent her a marvelous flamingo-colored feather fan. It was the perfect gift for Zelda, frivolous and entirely beautiful; she was delighted by it.
Those feathers—those wonderful, wonderful feathers are the most beautiful things on earth—so soft like little chickens, and rosy like firelight. I feel so rich and pompous waving them around in the air and covering up myself with ’em ….
I love you most of everything on earth, and somehow you [your] visit made things so much saner, and I do believe in you— Just the wild rush and knowing what you did was distasteful to you—made me afraid— I’d die rather than see you miserable.… I want to go to Italy—with you, Darling— It seems so yellow—dull, mellow yellow—and that’s your color—
Each year a secret society called Les Mysterieuses, which was composed of sixty socially prominent young matrons and girls, gave a ball. That April it was a “Folly Ball,” and Mrs. Sayre and Rosalind wrote the playlet that preceded it. The auditorium in which it was presented was covered with a canopy of yellow and black ribbons intertwined and baskets of yellow roses. The part of Folly was played by Zelda, who, dressed in a costume of black-and-gold malines trimmed with tiny bells, danced upon her toes, “using numbers of small balloons as she went through the mazes of the dance.” Zelda had Kodak snapshots taken of herself for Scott, as she posed in her costume among her mother’s roses in their back yard. Her face had taken on a haunting prettiness; she was slimmer than she had ever been before (she said in a letter to Scott that she wanted to be “5 ft. 4″ x 2″”), and with her piercing eyes, high cheekbones and straight nose she looked very much (as John Peale Bishop was later to describe her) the “barbarian princess.”
Zelda continued to cut up and just for the fun of it she and Eleanor Browder talked a streetcar conductor into letting them drive his trolley, and before the poor man realized what he’d done the girls had run it off the track, or so Zelda wrote to Scott.
Then we got fired—but we were tired, anyway! Mothers of our associates just stood by and gasped—much to our glee, of cource— Things like the preceeding incident are our only amusement—
Darling heart, I love you—truly.… I must leave or my date (awful boob) will come before I can escape—
Good Night, Lover
She closed her letter with a pencil drawing of the outline of her lips; “This is the biggest kiss of any on earth—because I love you.” Some of the fun was not so innocent, however:
Look at this communication from Mamma—all on account of a wine-stained dress— Darling heart—I won’t drink any if you object— Sometimes I get so bored—and sick for you— It helps then—and afterwards, I’m just more bored and sicker for you—and ashamed—
When are you going to marry me— I don’t want to repeat those two months—but I’ve just got to have you— When you can—because I love you, my husband—
Zelda
The enclosed note read:
Zelda:
If you have added whiskey to your tobacco you can substract your Mother.… If you prefer the habits of a prostitute don’t try to mix them with gentility. Oil and water do not mix.
In May the 4th Alabama regiment arrived in Montgomery from France, and the town turned itself into a colorful Mardi Gras to welcome them. There were large booths built along the streets, decorated with flags and confetti and streamers, and all the houses including the Governor’s were opened to welcome the returning heroes. Old costumes and masks were taken out of chests and dusted off and refurbished for the celebration. Rosalind’s husband’s company was going to march with the ranks unfilled; twenty-three of his men had been lost. Zelda wrote: “It almost makes me cry— I would if I weren’t expending all my energy on gum.
“I’ve started a continuous chew again—Your disapproval used to put me on the wagon, but now I’ve got the habit again—” Scott had written her that he wanted to come to Montgomery again the middle of the month, and she replied, “Darling Sweetheart, I’ll be so glad to see you again—” But she didn’t leave it at that; she told him that if he waited until June he could accompany her as far as Atlanta, where she was to attend the commencement at Georgia Tech. “I’m going to… try my hand in new fields,” she added with a stunning insensitivity to his feelings. Ruthlessly she stimulated his already intense sense of competition for her.
In a rather pathetic attempt to keep her home, Scott had sent her Compton Mackenzie’s book Flasher’s Mead to read. But she didn’t like it: “Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.” She said the heroin
e was “ATROCIOUSLY uninteresting” and maybe she’d save the book and try to read it again in rainy weather. But she also tipped her hand more than she may have intended, for in the same letter she told him, “People seldom interest me except in their relations to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters—” Everything, it seemed, had to revolve around her, her perceptions, her games, or she was not interested and refused to play. Certainly that letter carried a note of warning about herself, if Fitzgerald had been in any condition to receive it. But he was not. He knew the terms, they were remarkably like his own, and that exquisite egotism drew him even more completely to her.
But what he did not fully perceive, perhaps because Zelda did not, was the uncertainty within his girl. For, as worldly as she loved to seem to be, as reckless and ebullient as she was, Zelda knew nothing first hand of any world other than the protected Southern one of provincial towns and families who knew one another and were kin. For all her banter, New York, chic and fabulous, must have seemed as remote to her as the Orient.
Scott had sent Zelda a map of Manhattan, which she said might just as well have been China. “All I saw was the dot where we would live— I couldn’t help wondering over the fact that two rooms and bath took up the same space as Washington Square and Statue of Liberty.” In a last-ditch effort to arouse Zelda’s jealousy, Scott told her a story about an attractive girl he had met in New York, an actress, but it backfired when Zelda replied quite seriously, “Anyway, if she’s good-looking, and you want to one bit—I know you could and love me just the same.” That was not the reaction he had bargained for, and he was left without a rebuttal. If she was faking, she cleverly made it sound as if she meant what she said—and, if she approved such behavior for him, might she not intend to do the same herself?
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