Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
Page 13
Dearest, my love—
What a dreary day except for your ’phone call—
I’m going to think of you floating about in the mist while I’m sleeping—
I’ve been writing long wordy diatribes about what happened to the two dullest people—but its really about Summer and some remembered sweetness so perhaps it will be all right—14
A metallic telephone is like an operating instrument to your dear voice—
“Private Lives”15 made me laugh so immoderately loud that I am afraid echos spattered the Eglantine—and “Sanctuary”16 is sheer horror! It’s so wonderful to be able to read again after two years of not being able to concentrate. The fertility of books—and the dark, stark new things[,] places, terror, of a human mind straying—how I am so frightened of the past that I am half afraid to think. There’s so much conditioning to be done—
You are a love and a darling—Did you tip-toe through the fog? Some people always tip-toe when there’s anything unusual, but my joints flap when I react strongly too and you get absent-minded, seeking associations.
Dearest heart, good-night. I’m sleepy and I wish you were here, excavating the bed—
Love
76. TO SCOTT
AL, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dearest My Love—
The sky closed over the lake like a gray oyster shell and pink pearls of clouds lay in the crease where the water met the Juras—still in the black iridescence and I wanted you to be there in the boat with me so I could watch the funny soft way you do things, so sweet, the way you move, like the tickling of a kitten’s whiskers on my neck Dear Love—I’ve made Scottie some wonderful paper-dolls, you and me and her, but they have no clothes yet—I had such fun imagining you while I drew. I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones so you were easy to make— and I gave you some very doggy green socks to match your eyes—
Winnie had tea with me, a fantastic affair built about a bowl of raspberries—I could sit ages over a rumpled tea-table, being Alice, being English, being a traveler, a Grand Duc—a person can be anything with the proper décor before their eyes: like Kant’s steeple.
Nordic people run about like a tired mother[?], saving cleaning up after the Latins—Just the crossing to Inoire[?] to-night one felt the difference between Swiss and French—I am luxury loving enough to like wasted energy like the French thinking they’re so thrifty and expending effort enough over being so to have accomplished double in original outlay—
O Dear How I love you.
I’m glad I stole your eraser—
Darling
77. TO SCOTT
ALS, 1 p.
[Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dearest:
I’m terribly sorry I was so unpleasant—I guess I was sore. I have such a profound intellectual conviction of the unhappy state of humanity that I always feel shocked and apologetic when I find myself momentarily in a calm mood—and you seemed outrageously content. I love you dear. Please forgive me. I hadn’t really expected you to be there. I wanted to see Scottie—she is such an amusing person, and its so rare to find the appropriate emotion going toward the appropriate object that I thought it would cheer up this perpetual gloom of mine to be with her a moment, and know that my instincts would be straight and not need discipl[in]ing—Restful, you know—
And then I’m rather angry because people won’t let me be insane. And I wish you could accept me without that feeling of yours of wanting to acquit yourself well at a social function and go out and get drunk when it’s over—
I love you, darling, and perhaps the boat will make us so sea-sick that we will be perfectly happy—
Devotedly
Zelda
78. TO SCOTT
ALS, 4 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[Summer 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
My dear—O dear—O dear—O dear—
I was glad to get your letter and amazed to hear that Vienna deceived you. I picture it as a lacy, hazy city of delicate gray— mirrors and carved wood, polished floors and ceiling lost in perspective and all strung along thick outrageous avenues like square crystals on a string—and people eating tentatively everywhere as people do who have long been poor—and starved—without emotion, even the epicures. The most striking thing in life is how much can be done without and it must have been intensely curious to see a race contemplating its own lost epoch—Caesar at Timgoad[?], effect.
Scottie was darling. I love her thin child’s legs and her suspended-motion way of walking. She is not a bit boyish—most children are at her age. We had a picnic under a tree growing out of the horizon with the road falling away like a scenic rail-way and the snow-washed fields soft and damp, anchored to the planet by a clear fringe of alps. She is a dear girl—close to my heart—so close—
If you think you would get any pleasure from a visit, do come Saturday. You have only to let me know. I am always waiting for you.
And
there’s always my infinite love—You are a sweet person—the sweetest and dearest of all and I love you as I love my vanished youth—which is as much as a human heart can hold—
Excuse this ordinary scribble—It’s hopeless to write this morning—
Devotedly
Zelda—
In July, Zelda (well enough to leave the hospital for a holiday), Scott, and Scottie vacationed at the lakeside resort of Annecy, where they swam, boated, played tennis, and celebrated Zelda’s thirty-first birthday. When Zelda returned to the hospital, she missed Scott more than ever and continued to write to him with the deepest love.
79. TO SCOTT
AL, 7 pp., on stationery embossed ZELDA at top center
[August 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dearest, my Love—
Your dear face shining in the station, your dear radiant face and all along the way shimmering above the lake—
It’s so peaceful to be with you—when we are to-gether we are apart in a high indominatable place, sweet like your room at Caux swinging over the blue. I love you more always and always—
Please don’t be depressed: nothing is sad about you except your sadness and the frayed places on your pink kimona and that you care so much about everything—You are the only person who’s ever done all they had to do, damn well, and had enough left over to be dissatisfied. You are the best—the best—the best and genius is so much a part of you that when you find a person you like you think they have it too because it’s your only conception—O my love, I love you so—and I want you to be happy. Can’t you possibly be just a little bit glad that we are alive and that all the year that’s coming we can be to-gether and work and love and get some peace for all the things we’ve paid so much for learning? Stop looking for solace: there isn’t any, and if there were life would be a baby affair. Johnny takes his medicine and Johnny get[s] well and a quarter besides. Think! Johnny might get some mysterious malady if left to develop and have it named for him and live forever, and if Johnny died from not having his syrup the parable would have been a moralistic one about his mother.
Dear, I’m tired and in an awful muddle myself and I don’t know what to tell you—but love is important and we can make life do and you are greater than any of them when you’re well and rested enough not to know they exist.
Stop thinking about our marriage and your work and human relations—you are not a showman arranging an exhibit—You are a sungod with a wife who loves him and an artist—to take in, assimilate and all alterations to be strictly on paper—
Darling, forgive me, I love you so. I can’t find anything to say beyond that and I’d like a wonderful philosophy to comfort you.
Dear, my love.
Think of me some—
It’s so happy to touch you.
80. TO SCOTT
AL, 3 pp.
[August 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Dearest, My Love—
Outdoors is glowing pale in a Narcissan moon—cradling and cuddling itself and smoothing out the surface of the lake and a luminosity spreads everywhere that must culminate in your balcony. Dear balcony, where you walk absent-mindedly and drop a cigarette and stand poised in the morning sun, just an answering flash. Caux is so far away, but I love thinking of you there above the heat and smells and white-pavement-grooming that borders the lake like a paper wrapping, pink and crisp. O dear Doo-do—You held me close beside the railing as if you needed me, and I love you so.
We are going to Berne to-morrow, so I won’t be able to work. I’m only happy when I’m doing what I think you’re doing at the time, and I like us to both be alone in our rooms, changing chairs and looking through the walls and staring in and out of the window.
You hold your cigarettes way down, wedged between your fingers, and you sometimes seem to be buttoning up yourself, slipping into you as if you were a freshly pressed suit, and your empty shoes lie expectantly on the floor as if they were waiting for Santa Claus, and all your things have touched you and reek of an irrealizable Sweetness—
Goofo, are you mine?
Please be—
I love you
Good-night
Doodo’s
Balcon—
Zelda drew this picture of “Doodo’s Balcon” at the end of the letter. Courtesy of Princeton University Library
81. TO SCOTT
AL, 2 pp.
[August 1931]
[Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland]
Darling, my love—
It’s so gloomy that my story should be no good, but I love you anyway even if you have got a stupid wife and it made me terribly happy to hear your voice enthusiastic and high over the ’phone.
It keeps on raining and the sky is filled with copper clouds like the after-math of cannon-fire, pre-war, civil-war clouds and I feel all empty and bored and very much in love with you, my dear one, my own. I wish you were here so we could stretch our legs down beside one another and feel all warm and hidden in the bed, like seeds beaten into the earth. Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world, and why is there a sleepy tremulo in the air when you are near that’s promising and living like a vibrating fecundity?
If I try to write to you, it won’t make sense because I love you too much and I am as monotonous as the cricket that thinks he’s a wireless apparatus outside my window, and I’m so lazy and sleepier than mid-night—
And very fond of Doo-do—
O dear—Kiss me good-night
Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate
That spring and summer, Scott happily wrote to friends that Zelda was nearly well and that they were skiing together often. By the end of summer, he looked forward to Zelda’s release from Prangins, to returning to the United States with her and Scottie, and to settling down to focus on his work. He wrote Perkins, “Zelda is well, thank God, and is writing some amazing stuff[.] We sail for America on the Aquitania Sept 19th . . . We are going to Alabama for the winter + there I hope to God to I’ll finish the novel” (Correspondence 266).
MONTGOMERY, NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1931
After spending a few days in New York seeing friends, the Fitzgeralds returned to Montgomery and set up housekeeping at 819 Felder Avenue, not far from the Sayres’ home. Just as the boom had not hit Montgomery, neither had the Depression. Only the natural rhythms of the changing seasons had any real effect on Zelda’s hometown. Zelda was glad to be near family, especially since her father had been ill for a year, and Scott was looking forward to a more settled period in which he could return to his novel. But money was tight, and when he received an invitation to write for Hollywood, the salary seemed too good to turn down. Reluctant to leave his family, and dreading even more a return to Hollywood, he nevertheless agreed to work for six weeks at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on a screen adaptation of RedHeaded Woman, a popular novel by Katherine Brush.
In his absence, Zelda seemed to enjoy Scottie, age ten, more than ever; she also kept busy, working briefly with a local ballet teacher, writing stories in hopes of having them published, and writing a oneact children’s play to amuse Scott when he returned for Christmas. She also reread many of Scott’s stories, such as “The Offshore Pirate,” “The Baby Party,” “Absolution,” and “ ‘The Sensible Thing,’ ” as a way to be close to him and as inspiration for her own writing. Judge Sayre died two weeks after Scott left, and Zelda reassured Scott that he need not return home. Under the strain, however, mild cases of asthma, eczema, and problems with her vision returned. In December, Zelda went to Florida for about three days to rest and soak up the sun. A nurse accompanied her. When she returned, she spent time with her mother, Minnie Sayre, whose courage in the face of loss Zelda admired. Listening to Minnie reminisce about the past and her own childhood, Zelda could sympathize with her mother’s need to remember when she had been more sheltered and protected.
Scott, busy with the script, did not write to Zelda often—and what letters he did send appear not to have survived. He did, however, send Zelda a recording—a kind of voice letter—which she played often and enjoyed. We know from his biographers that Scott was uncomfortable in Hollywood; he found the studio system of collaborative writing impossible and the social life intimidating. He began to drink again, embarrassing himself at parties, which added to his reputation as irresponsible. When Scott left Hollywood in December, he swore he would never return.
Despite the sadness of her father’s death and having to manage on her own in Scott’s absence, Zelda appears to have coped remarkably well during this period. She enjoyed the household staff: Julia, the cook and housekeeper, mothered her, and Julia’s husband, Freeman, whom Zelda referred to as “Old Man River” and “Father Time,” did the yard work and entertained them with his own writing ambitions. Zelda found Mlle. B., Scottie’s governess, a pleasant companion, as well. The first of Zelda’s letters to Scott indicates that they argued before he left; nonetheless, she wrote to him daily, counting off the days and weeks, saying how terribly she missed him, and keeping him abreast of everyone’s activities. She called him by endearing pet names—Goofo, and endless variations of Deo, such as Dudo, D. O., and Dee O.—and her letters from this period express the deepest love for her daughter and husband as she affectionately prepared for a family Christmas upon Scott’s return.
82. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp.
[Early November 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling:
It makes me so sad to sit at your desk. All day I have just walked around looking at things. Your cane is still on your bed. It’s unbearable to think that I was mean to you. I telegraphed to Lafayette La but the telegram was returned—
Dear I love you so. The emptiness and hopelessness without you are dead and still and unreal
—now a telegram has just come back from Houston. Did you miss you[r] train, sweetheart?
We are all working on a Christmas present for you—I hope it will be good—
There is absolutely nothing to live for or care about but you—We love you so—
Scottie cried all the way home because she said she knew we were quarrelling. Goofo please love me.
One of those gutta-percha Little Theatre directors who thinks everything is “swell” and ought to be confined in an art-colony called this afternoon, but I’m not going to be in his show. We will have fun when you get home. Also a girl like an amateur’s work in clay statuettes, all full of thumb-prints, and Mrs Reuben McKinney. They had grown a sort of protective encrustation over amorphous souls and I wanted to sprinkle salt on them and watch them melt. But I asked them to lunch Sat. so now I have to de
liver one of those telephone sermons about how serious life is and how I’m sorry that there is no premium on nervous manners and supercilious eye-lids hidden under the old spring house but only two old family servants and a guilty conscience—
Darling, I love you—Please take care of yourself. I want you back—you can choose your own terms
Zelda and Scottie
83. TO SCOTT
ALS, 3 pp.
[November 6, 1931]
[Montgomery, Alabama]
Darling, I love you and
Scottie says she will keep you posted by means of a weekly paper of all important events, so I have only to write the news:
Freeman is manifesting a profound interest in literature and tells me he wants to write the history of his marriage. His wife, it appears was not “the right sort of girl” and he himself was not at that time “a fast fellow.” I encouraged him.
We are very lonely for you and seem somehow like wet paper dolls without you.
I decided not to play in the foursome because I don’t want to and I wouldn’t like doing anything we did without you. Your greenish knickerbockers would grow on all the trees and fill up the bunkers and make me sad on a flat greenish plane.
I haven’t had time to do my stories because of your Christmas present—It feels very important to be in your room.
Your kimona has gone to the wash and the wash to the dry cleaners and I am getting the bills in a mess to-night. I will take Scottie to the Thanksgiving foot-ball.
Dawn has lasted all day and the air is heavy like a theatre in summer and a mist came in from England and the lights turned globular and mysterious.
Daddy is inevitably the same—He is as oblivious to his surroundings as he always was when he is himself and when he is not he is tormented by imaginary prisons—Poor Daddy!
We are not afraid or unhappy or anything but we miss you, Dear—Dear—Dear—Love. Scottie is sometimes like you—Anyhow, she has a coating of moon-light for a skin and I watch her and think of you—