I want you to be happy—if there were justice you would be happy—maybe you will be anyway—
Oh, Do-Do
Do-Do—
Zelda.
I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life—
I love you.
159. TO SCOTT
ALS, 1 p.
[Summer 1935]
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland]
My dearest Sweetheart:
There is no way to ask you to forgive me for the misery and pain which I have caused you. I can only ask you to believe that I have done the best I could and that since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with. You are always my darling. I want you to be happy again with Scottie—someplace where it is bright and happy and you can have some of the things you have worked so hard for—always all your life and faithfully. You are my dream; the only pleasant thing in my life.
Do-Do—my darling! Please get well and love Scottie and find something to fill up your life—
My Love,
my Love
my Love
Zelda.
160. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp.
[Summer 1935]
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland]
Dearest Do-Do:
Sometimes, at this dusty time of year the flowers and trees take on the aspect of flowers and trees drifted from other summers: the dusty shuttered back of the hotel at Antibes, those roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago. I wish we could go there again. Of cource if you invited me to North Carolina it would be very nice too. In my last despair of ever being asked any place I am going to write Mamma and ask if I can visit.
Wouldn’t you like to smell the pine woods of Alabama again? Remember there were 3 pines on one side and 4 on the other the night you gave me my birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best. Remember the faded gray romance. And the beneficence of the trees which sighed together that they would or they wouldn’t for we could never make out inform[?] the fates for or against us—Darling. That’s the first time I ever said that in my life.
I hope you are better—I hope so—and I hope you are—For all I know is that you are a darling—
Zelda
161. TO SCOTT
ALS, 1 p.
[September 1935]
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland]
Dearest Do-Do:
Since writing you, Dr. Murdock has been here. He says:
1) He does not advise my coming to Ashville but
2) He will permit my going to see Mamma. The implication was for a short visit—but
Some arrangements have got to be made for this winter. You forgot or something to tell me what Scottie is going to do and as she will soon be back, I would like to know.
Do you think I could take her to Ala. for the winter? Of cource I only want to on the condition that we cant possibly any way in the world be to-gether—
In fact, Do Do, I don’t know what’s happening any more and
I wish you could arrange at least a week-end to-gether. The Dr. seemed to feel that you weren’t well enough—and of cource I trust his judgment but somebody’s got to see her in school somewhere
Darling Darling
I love you—
Please write me as soon as you can
Love
Zelda
162. TO SCOTT
ALS, 1 p.
[Fall 1935]
[Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland]
Dearest Do-Do—
From such an empty world there seems nothing to send beyond the jaunty decolade of turning falling first autumn leaves. From everywhere a vast echo vibrates—strange familiar twang, but one only vaguely distinguishes the sounds. That is because autumn is a sad time and all times are sad from their transience.
It was so good to see you fatter and wood-land-y in silver green and gray, the colors of an olive grove—and will always be so. We have shared so many words and hopes and phrases for the outwitting of things we haven’t shared—you must know how I miss the games we played.
Won’t you send me some condensed versions of Aristotle and again the chronological list you promised? So I can get on with wisdom—
Love, darling—Love—
Zelda.
Notwithstanding the nostalgic moments Scott spent with Zelda, his health problems made it necessary to relocate. In November 1935, Scott wrote to Harold Ober from Hendersonville, North Carolina, near Asheville: “I am here till I finish a Post story. . . . I was beginning to cough again in Baltimore . . . also to drink . . . I am living here at a $2.00 a day hotel . . .” (Life in Letters 292). By early December, he wrote Ober, he had decided to move to Asheville as soon as possible:
. . . I shall move to Asheville . . . + have the doctor go over me while I write. I arrived here weak as hell, got the grippe + spat blood again (1st time in 9 months) + took to bed for six days. . . . I’m grateful I came south when I did though—I made a wretched mistake in coming north in Sept + taking that apartment + trying 1000 things at once. . . . How that part (I mean living in Balt.) is going to work out I don’t know. I’m going to let Scotty finish her term anyhow. For the rest things depend on health + money + its very difficult. I use up my health making money + then my money in recovering health. (Life in Letters 293)
HIGHLAND HOSPITAL, ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA,
APRIL 1936–DECEMBER 1938
In the 1930s, Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area were considered a fashionable vacation spot. Luckily, an innovative facility for the mentally ill, the Highland Hospital, had been established there. Zelda’s doctors in Baltimore were well acquainted with the hospital’s founder and director, Dr. Robert S. Carroll, and agreed that it would be an ideal setting for her. Zelda had gone to nearby Saluda—a historic Victorian summer retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains—with her family while growing up. Her mother and her sister Rosalind continued to vacation there, making summer visits with Zelda, once she was settled into Highland, something to which everyone looked forward.
After a period of severe depression, Zelda experienced a religious mania that would characterize much of the rest of her life and become the dominant theme of her later paintings, many of her letters to Scott, and her subsequent attempts at fictions. During the last years of her life, Zelda worked on a novel she entitled “Caesar’s Things,” in which she once again fictionalized the same autobiographical events as in Save Me the Waltz, this time imposing a biblical pattern on them. There were times when Zelda would dress only in white, and when visitors came, she would insist on dropping to her knees and praying with them. Rather than offering genuine comfort, such religious zeal served only to isolate her further from family and friends.
Scott candidly conveyed his view of Zelda at this time in a letter to Sara and Gerald Murphy:
I am moving Zelda to a sanitarium in Asheville—she is no better, though the suicidal cloud was lifted. . . . Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Appollo and all the stock paraphanalea of insane asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child . . . my child in a sense that Scotty isn’t, because I’ve brought Scotty up hard as nails. . . . Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s “terribly dangerous secret thoughts” I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her— (Life in Letters 298–299)
Meanwhile, however, Scott’s circumstances were dire and quickly becoming worse; virtually every aspect of his life collapsed. He worried constantly about Zelda. Though she had periods of improvement, she got worse overall, a process both sad and frightening, and one wholly beyond his control. He paid endless medical bills, continually wrote letters to Zelda’s doctors and family about her illness, and answered friends’ inquiries about her, expressing little hope for her recovery. He reluctantly faced the possibility that he and Zelda might never be able to live together again. Even though their relationship was at times a mutually destructive one, Scott’s loss of Zelda’s companionship was immeasurable. He mourned her lost vitality and his own. Bills continued to pile up, Scott found it increasingly hard to earn money, and, placing himself under additional strain, he borrowed against future work.
In addition, his alcoholism accelerated and his tuberculosis became active again, resulting in the onset of rapid physical deterioration. He repeatedly entered the hospital for treatment, but any small progress was soon blotted out by painful relapses. In 1935, Scott began a long period of depression, one that would last until sometime in 1937. He had somehow endured all his previous disappointments and frustrations, but with his depression came a loss of emotional intensity, a dearth of all feelings save worthlessness, and this was beyond all endurance. Fearing that he would never again be able to write, he experienced a complete collapse of identity. It was at this point that Scott withdrew to a cheap hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and, while living off apples and tin cans of meat, wrote the three essays that make up “The Crack-Up” sequence: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care,” published in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire.
Scott’s motive for writing the essays was, in part, to end the painful sense of isolation he felt: “I wanted to put a lament into my record,” he wrote in “Pasting It Together,” “without even the background of the Euganean Hills to give it color” (Crack-Up 75). In other words, he wanted to represent himself in the clutches of despair, offering neither heroics nor the hope of transcendence. Placing the essays in Esquire in the 1930s was the adult equivalent of putting information about oneself or one’s peers in the college yearbook. All of Scott’s friends and fellow writers read the magazine. Though he soon regretted the articles, at the time Scott needed to communicate at least indirectly with his former social network (which in itself is a sign he was struggling to find his way out). Identity, for Scott, was not detached from others and was not a private concern; personal identity was directly tied to the process of creating a self within a chosen social context. What is remarkable is that a man so intent on popularity would have revealed so much of his humiliation. But if self-assessment was one of Scott’s trademark habits, so was communicating his discoveries to his contemporaries. Few of his friends recognized the courage it took.
In the first essay, Scott wrote that his “nervous reflexes” had been broken by “too much anger and too many tears,” that he “was always saving or being saved,” an understandable situation, and one perpetuated by the continued crisis brought about by Zelda’s illness and his own drinking (though he was careful in the essay to deny any recent drinking). “I began to realize,” he went on in “The Crack-Up,” “that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt” (Crack-Up 71–72). In “Handle with Care,” Scott deftly summed up the emotional tone, or tonelessness, of his depression: “. . . I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy”; he went on to say that he “had become identified with the objects of [his] horror or compassion.” This loss of objectivity and motivation, he decided, helped to explain why it had become so hard for him to write: “identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. . . . I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself” (Crack-Up 80–81).
Even at this low point, Scott’s circumstances continued to decline. Negative, sometimes cruel, responses to “The Crack-Up” essays further weakened his morale. Furthermore, he and Zelda were both simply too ill for either of them to provide a real home for their daughter. That fall, Scottie, who was almost fifteen, entered the Ethel Walker School, a boarding facility in Connecticut; the Ober family become her guardians, and she lived with them when not at school. In addition, Scott’s mother, who was living in Rockville, Maryland, was gravely ill, which delayed his move to Asheville. After transferring Zelda to Highland Hospital in April 1936, Scott returned to Baltimore to be near his mother. In July, when he finally made the move and settled into the Grove Park Inn, just before Zelda’s thirty-sixth birthday, he broke his right shoulder while diving into the hotel pool. After that incapacitating accident, he had another one, falling on the bathroom floor at the inn and lying there until a cold and arthritis set in. His mother died at the end of the summer, but he was still too incapacitated to go to Maryland for her funeral. She left him a little over twenty thousand dollars, money that he sorely needed; however, legal matters having to do with her estate prevented him from claiming the money for several months. When he finally did receive his inheritance and had paid off some of his debts, he was left with only about five thousand dollars. Scott summed up his situation that October in a letter begging a well-to-do friend for a loan:
I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered. . . . I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda . . . to a pool near here and tried a high dive . . . and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings. . . . It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing call “Miotosis” which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate. . . . The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. . . . You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking. . . . (Life in Letters 310–311)
To make matters still worse, on September 24, Scott’s fortieth birthday, a reporter visited him in his room at the Grove Park Inn and wrote a devastating article for the New York Post, making public one of the lowest moments in Scott’s life. The headline read: THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: SCOTT FITZGERALD, 40, ENGULFED IN DESPAIR; it painted a vivid portrait of the drunken author stumbling over to the highboy to pour more drinks. Scott was so upset by the story and its prominent display that he, most likely halfheartedly, attempted suicide. He explained the dark episode in a letter to Ober:
I was in bed with temp about 102 when the . . . phone rang and a voice said that this party had come all the way from N. Y to interview me. I fell for this like a damn fool, got him up, gave him a drink + and accepted his exterior manners. He had some relative with mental trouble (wife or mother) so I talked to him freely about treatments symtoms ect, about being depressed at advancing age and a little desperate about the wasted summer with this shoulder and arm. . . . I hadn’t the faintest suspicion what would happen. . . . When that thing [the newspaper article] came it seemed about the end and I got hold of a morphine file and swallowed four grains enough to kill a horse. . . . I vomited the whole thing and the nurse came in + saw the empty phial + there was hell to pay. . . . I felt like a fool. (Life in Letters 308–309)
While Scott struggled, Zelda settled into the new routine at Highland, where slowly she began to show signs of improvement. Dr. Carroll was a firm believer in the vigorous life as treatment for mental illness. The hospital took only a small number of patients and carefully
monitored their diet and exercise. The lovely grounds, nestled in the Smoky Mountains, provided an ideal place for daily hiking. After Zelda had been at Highland three months, Scott wrote Scottie: “Your mother looks five years younger and prettier and has stopped that silly praying in public,” and he added hopefully, “Maybe she will still come all the way back” (Milford, Zelda 311). Zelda’s letters from this period are full of descriptions of nature, memories of the past, and, above all, heartfelt expressions of gratitude to Scott for continually providing for her.
163. TO SCOTT
ALS, 1 p.
[Spring 1936]
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
Dear Goofo—
I am coming to life—Thanks ever so much for the canvas—There’s a magnificent patch of blue sky drifting through some pines here that I’m going to paint—These open fields seem more like summer and a rich dreamy warmth of youth than toy villages on the mountain side—
Devotedly, Zelda
164. TO SCOTT
ALS, 2 pp., on stationery embossed ZSF vertically along top right edge
[Spring 1936]
[Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]
My dearest, Dearest Do-Do:
A crab apple blooms in stolid pink elegance—the elegance of efficiency outside my window; and the late sun is beneficent; and the soft benevolent hour of five is here. I was so happy with you yesterday. It was good to be sharing your work; the sense of finishing up in a hurry that we might start somewhere on time—so happy to be going.
You are so good to me always. And, although my acknowledgment is perhaps inadequate, still my heart knows how much you do for me. And I wish I had something to bring you in return. Some lovely precious thing that you would be glad about.
Anyway, I think of you—and my constant prayer is that I shall be able to convey to you the Beauty of God—of God’s concepts and of the patterns thereof in which the race is cast. Maybe some day.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Page 24
