Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  By this time, my grandfather’s alcoholism was also full-blown. It’s no secret that F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most famous alcoholics who ever lived. But he was a “high-functioning” alcoholic, which made it even more difficult for him to acknowledge or treat his problem. In 1931, little insight had been gained about the negative effects of alcohol. Alcoholism was not regarded as a disease so much as a shameful weakness of character. The AA program, as millions now know it, wasn’t founded until 1935, and it did not become widespread until several years after Scott’s death.

  Although no one knew the cause or cure for either of their maladies, there was much reproach. Mrs. Sayre blamed Scott for drinking too much and for not providing stability for her daughter. Scott blamed Zelda’s mother for spoiling her. He also blamed Zelda for being too preoccupied with ballet, while she blamed him for his drunken carousing. Their confusion is poignant, especially when Zelda begged forgiveness for whatever mysterious part of it was her own fault.

  * * *

  The myth persists that Scott drove Zelda crazy. My mother, who was eight years old when Zelda was first hospitalized, and who visited her mother in various clinics over the next seventeen years, wrote to a biographer: “I think I think (short of documentary evidence to the contrary) that if people are not crazy, they get themselves out of crazy situations, so I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father’s drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking. I simply don’t know the answer, and of course, that is the conundrum that keeps the legend going. . . .”

  In 1932, Zelda, yearning to earn her own way in the world, wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz. Before showing it to Scott, she rushed it to his agent. Scott was understandably irate. It had taken her only a few months of furious activity to write the book. He had been working on Tender Is the Night for several years, had torn up draft after draft, and had read her various passages from it. Clearly, Zelda anticipated that Scott would not want her to use exactly the same material that he was using in Tender Is the Night—the years they had spent in France and her own mental breakdown.

  Her project inspired their most fierce territorial struggle. At issue was their individual right to use their shared autobiographical material. Scott was also furious that Zelda had named a character Amory Blaine, after the protagonist in This Side of Paradise. He was certain, as the bill-payer of the family, that her wholesale borrowing would lead to ridicule from his readers and financial ruin. In the end, Zelda removed the parts of her manuscript that overlapped (or, to Scott’s mind, were directly imitative of) Tender Is the Night.

  One admirable thing about my grandparents was their ability to forgive infinitely. In the end, Scott helped Zelda with revisions of her novel. He also arranged publication of various articles she wrote and helped produce her play, Scandalabra, written when she was an out-patient in Baltimore. When Zelda began painting seriously, he arranged an exhibition of her work at a New York gallery.

  I don’t purport to understand my grandparents better than they did themselves. Nor do I believe in latter-day diagnoses, based only on letters and art. Nonetheless, I’ve been exposed to many amateur diagnoses of my grandmother: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or simple depression. A therapist at a panel I recently attended took the microphone and proceeded to give definitive diagnostic code numbers for my grandparents’ disorders, apparently comfortable diagnosing both of them on the basis of letters and biographies. Perfect strangers have volunteered with straight faces that Zelda had all the talent and Scott simply stole her ideas—an injustice that, of course, drove her crazy!

  Zelda had many periods of lucidity and she was never declared legally insane. Her illness had many phases. When she was well, she wrote lyrical, haunting, loving, and nostalgic prose. When she was ill, she sent terribly convoluted warnings to friends about the Second Coming. The strain on Scott was enormous. He tried to be both father and mother to his daughter, to provide the best possible treatment for his wife, and to keep the family financially afloat. But, as he admitted publicly in The Crack-Up, he now faced his own emotional bankruptcy. The wellspring of his story ideas had dried up. Until he was hired as a scriptwriter by MGM, he faced despair.

  A trait of Scott’s, made crystal-clear in these letters, was his tendency to overmanage, and, occasionally, to be downright domineering. My mother felt he would have made a fine headmaster of a school. The summer before she entered Vassar College, he warned her:

  You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. . . .

  To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a “wild society girl,” vintage of 1925, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it—it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere,” your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I would prefer.

  Scott wrote weekly to my mother at college. Rather than send her $50 allowance once a month, he insisted on sending her a check for $13.85 every week, probably as a vehicle for his missives. He told her which courses to take, what extracurricular activities were worthwhile, whom to date, her duties toward Zelda, what to read, and how to wear her hair. He critiqued her behavior, her academic performance, and her choice of roommates. Clearly, he loved Scottie very much and his self-confessed desire to preach now had an outlet.

  From California, Scott also wrote to Zelda, loyally, warmly, and sometimes perfunctorily. During the last three years of his life, while working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and, later, on his fifth novel, he began an affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Sheilah gave a healthy structure and domesticity to Scott’s last years, but he never completely relinquished his love for Zelda. “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known,” Scott wrote to her after their last trip together in 1939, “but even that is an understatement.”

  I believe, as did my mother, that Scott and Zelda stayed in love until the day they died. Perhaps it became an impossible and impractical love—part nostalgia and part hope. Perhaps it was a longing for a reunion of all the best qualities in each other that they had once celebrated, and the happy times they had shared, but it was a bond that united them forever. This collection, at last, allows Scott and Zelda, two magnificent songbirds, to sing their own duet.

  Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, as they looked when they met at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama, in July 1918. Photograph of Zelda Sayre courtesy of Princeton University Library

  PART I

  Courtship and Marriage: 1918–1920

  The good things and the first years . . . will stay with me forever. . . .

  —SCOTT TO ZELDA, APRIL 26, 1934

  Scott and Zelda first met in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda’s hometown, in July 1918, probably at a country club dance. Zelda, who had just graduated from high school and was still the town’s most popular girl, turned eighteen that month; Scott, who had attended Princeton and was now a lieutenant in the infantry, would be twenty-two that fall. In her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932), Zelda recalled that Scott, so handsome in his tailor-made Brooks Brothers uniform, had “smelled like new goods” as she nestled her “face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar” while they danced (Collected Writings 39). Just two months later, Scott recorded in his Ledger the event that would shape the rest of his life and much of his work: “Sept.: Fell in love on the 7th”(Ledger 173). That same month, Scott summed up his twenty-first year: On
his birthday, he wrote, “A year of enormous importance. Work, and Zelda. Last year as a Catholic” (Ledger 172). The major decisions that a young man coming of age makes—matters of vocation, love, and faith—had been decided.

  Scott, although still untried and immature in many ways, had adamantly committed himself to becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (as he told his college friend Edmund “Bunny” Wilson) and to having the “top girl” at his side to share the storybook life he envisioned. During his years at Princeton University, his academic life had taken a backseat to his social ambitions; realizing that he probably would never graduate, Scott had enlisted in the army in October 1917. His military training eventually brought him to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, and to Zelda—the most beautiful, confident, and sought-after girl in town. Scott then devoted himself to becoming the “top man” among her many suitors, intending to vanquish the other young college boys and soldiers by marrying this most desirable girl.

  Zelda, being younger, was less clear about particulars, but she certainly shared Scott’s romantic sense of a special destiny. Other than teaching, careers for women were still discouraged. Courtship and marriage were the areas in which young women such as Zelda, the daughter of a prominent judge, were expected to achieve distinction. Her three older sisters, Marjorie, Rosalind, and Clothilde, were already married; Zelda intended to make the absolute most of her own days as a southern belle, relishing her role in the spotlight. Montgomery may have been a small, provincial city, but it was surrounded by college towns, as well as being crowded with young soldiers from nearby training camps. The war imbued the local courtship rituals with an even greater sense of urgency and romanticism than usual. The crowds of young people necessitated numerous forms of entertainment—parties, dances, sports, plays, and Friday-night vaudeville shows—to keep them occupied. The Sayres’ front porch, replete with every sort of southern flower and a porch swing for Zelda and her beaux, was locally famous. Zelda had already filled a glove box with the small colorful badges of masculine honor the young soldiers took from their uniforms and gave to her as tokens of their affection. Scott soon added his own insignia to this collection. Young aviators from Taylor Field executed dangerous stunts as they flew their airplanes over Zelda’s house to impress her. Scott competed with such exploits by bragging about the famous writer he was going to become. Although Scott did not “get over” to fight the war, that summer and fall, as he vied for Zelda’s heart, the two no doubt believed that he would be sent overseas and perhaps face death. He continued to write, hoping that in the event of his death, he would become the American counterpart of Rupert Brooke, the handsome young English poet, who in death had become the romantic hero— forever young, beautiful, and full of promise.

  The war, however, ended just as Scott was preparing to embark for France. When he was discharged in February 1919, he went to New York City to find a job and to become a famous living writer, instead of a dead one. He hoped to find work with a newspaper but had to settle for a low-paying job with an advertising firm. He missed Zelda terribly, told his family about her, and asked his mother to write to Zelda, which she did. Then, on March 24, Scott sent Zelda the engagement ring that had been his mother’s. Zelda couldn’t have been more thrilled. But although her letters are full of enthusiastic assurances of her love, her life in Montgomery continued pretty much the same as before—a whirlwind of social engagements, which included continuing to go out with other boys—and she wrote Scott all about it. Zelda especially loved the rounds of college parties, dances, and commencement activities beginning in May and the exciting football weekends in the fall. Scott’s daily life, on the other hand, was at total odds with his idealized conception of himself. He hated his job, hated having so little money, and especially hated how his clothes were becoming threadbare. And, worse yet, his stories weren’t selling. Later, in “My Lost City” (1936), he would look back and write, “. . . I was haunted always by my other life . . . my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama—would it come and what would it say?—my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. . . . I was a failure— mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer” (Crack-Up 25–26).

  Despite his sense of failure, Scott was actually quite productive. Although he sold only one story in the spring of 1919—“Babes in the Woods,” for which The Smart Set paid him thirty dollars—he continued his apprenticeship and produced over nineteen stories that winter and spring. All were rejected by the magazines to which he submitted them; many, however, were later revised and published. Although Scott was being unrealistic in his expectations of immediate fame—who, after all, is a blazing success at the age of twenty-two?—his sense of failure, anxiety, and loss was keen and would remain with him the rest of his life. When Scott visited Zelda in Montgomery in mid-April, he was depressed and losing confidence in himself. Zelda tried to reassure him in her letters, but she also continued to report on all the fun she was having.

  By June 1919, Scott and Zelda’s engagement was in serious jeopardy. When Scott received a note that Zelda had written to another suitor and then accidentally put into the wrong envelope, one addressed to Scott, he was enraged and ordered her never to write to him again. But as soon as he received Zelda’s brief explanation, he went to Montgomery and begged her to marry him right away. Zelda cried in his arms, but she turned him down and broke the engagement. Scott returned to New York feeling utterly defeated as a writer and a lover. He wrote to a friend: “I’ve done my best and I’ve failed—it’s a great tragedy to me and I feel I have very little left to live for. . . . Unless someday she will marry me I will never marry” (Letters 455–456). He quit his job, went on a three-week bender, returned to his parents’ home in St. Paul, and went to work revising “The Romantic Egotist,” the novel that had been rejected by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1918. During this period of a little over two months, Scott and Zelda exchanged no letters. But when Scribners accepted his novel, now entitled This Side of Paradise, on September 16, 1919, Scott immediately wrote to Zelda again and planned a visit to Montgomery; the couple soon resumed their engagement. More letters and visits to Montgomery followed, and Zelda and Scott were married the following April, only one year after Scott had first sent Zelda the engagement ring.

  In his imagination, Scott attached the acquisition of Zelda to the acquisition of material success, thereby identifying what were already the twin themes of his writing—love and money—as the twin themes of his life, as well. Later, he looked back on the summer of his broken engagement in “Pasting It Together” (1936) and wrote, “It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money” and that although when he became “the man with the jingle of money in his pocket,” he “married the girl” after all, he would never trust either money or love—the same elements of life to which he was most drawn (Crack-Up 77). Zelda’s imagination, however, was committed solely to the enchantment of love. Her letters from this period offer evidence that dispels two enduring but misleading myths about her marriage to Scott: first, that Zelda would not marry him until he had money; second, that one of the reasons Scott interested her was because she was eager to leave her small town for the larger social stage of New York City. It is true that Zelda’s parents certainly had reservations about their daughter marrying a young man with no secure prospects for the future, but Zelda repeatedly reassures Scott in these letters that love, not money, is what she wants most out of life. Although they resumed their engagement after Scribners accepted Scott’s novel, it hadn’t been published yet and there was no assurance that it would be a moneymaker. Once the engagement was settled, Zelda eagerly anticipated joining Scott in New York, but her enthusiasm again was for being with Scott and not the larger possibilities the so-called glittering city offered. Zelda loved Montgomery, especially its beautiful flowers, and she knew she would miss the way of life she had always known.

  While these letters challenge the myths, they also offer a vivid portrait of Zelda at eighteen—a
flirtatious, audacious young woman, whose life was full of friends, practical jokes, and parties. Her letters indicate that although she believed that provoking jealousy was an important ritual in courtship, she did not feel that she was being unfaithful to Scott by dating other men; they also reveal that she felt no hesitation in reporting it all to him. In addition to telling Scott about an endless stream of social engagements, she also articulated her ideas about life and love—that women were intended be “a disturbing element among” men and that even though she loved to appear all “pink and helpless,” the men who thought her “purely decorative” were “fools for not knowing better” (letters 16 and 28). Scott, who had a wonderful ear for words, freely borrowed passages from these letters for his fiction.

  Certain themes emerge from the events and letters of this period that foreshadow characteristics and conflicts that will persist throughout the Fitzgeralds’ lives together. Jealousy was certainly a factor. According to Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener, when Scott and Zelda first started seeing each other, she pulled another date into a lighted phone booth and initiated a spirited kissing session, which ended when she said, “Scott was coming and I wanted to make him jealous” (83). As Scott Donaldson and others have suggested, one of the reasons Scott was attracted to Zelda (as well as to earlier girlfriends, such as the Chicago socialite Ginevra King) was because of their many suitors. In order to be the “top girl” he wanted, she had to be popular with other men. Yet when Scott tried to play the same game and wrote to her from New York that he found a young woman very attractive, Zelda called his bluff, giving him the go-head to kiss the girl, a response guaranteed to turn the tables and make Scott worry even more about what Zelda herself might be doing in Montgomery. When Scott looked back on this period in “Early Success” (1937), he recalled that some of his friends had “arrangements with ‘sensible’ girls,” but he noted, “Not I—I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it . . .” (Crack-Up 86). The great paradox of their love affair is that the same traits that attracted them to each other would also create chaos and conflict in their lives. Just as the jealousies so playful during courtship would take on a more destructive role in their marriage, alcohol, considered a harmless rite of passage for the young, would become an increasingly destructive factor, one that would continue to haunt them.