Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  In the meantime think of me as you are able; and I know always your generosity of soul and of material blessings.

  And I am grateful to God for your goodness to me—

   Love

   Zelda

  165. TO SCOTT

  [Summer 1936]

  ALS, 1 p.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  There is an abstract time outside the windows. It is summer time and past time—and I am very young when I didn’t care. There are meadows—not fields, or farms but meadows out of books. You are such a nice Do-Do. I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.

  I think of boat houses in Atlanta with scaffolding and big dead moons and a drink behind the boats. I thought I was happy, or, at least, there was some pleasurable sense of things being in the world to conquer.

  Do-Do—you are so nice a Do-Do, though I myself am so bad I hate to write to you.

  I know Ashville is nice. The mountains mean cabins to me; and old abandoned mills and a little mountain boy named Jim Bob—who used to meet me by a spring all bedded about with moss. There was an owl who scared me at night, and a corn shuck mattress and I was very homesick. Now I am desolate. I thought I was so happy. The Rocky Broad River was where I was scared of so much rushing water.

  You have been so good to me. My Do-Do. I wish I had not caused so much disaster. But I know you will be happy someday.

   With whatever of nice emotions there are—

   with love and peace and a hope that

   you will soon be well—

   Zelda

  166. TO SCOTT

  [June 1936]

  ALS, 2 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Scott—

  I[’m] glad that life still prepares itself on the outskirts of Metropoles—and that our growing daughter is on her way to typical American womanhood. The school sounds grand. Atmospheres of formalized appreciation are always impressive.

  I envy the Murphys their trip, and everybody else who is en route. I started some minor agitation that Dr. Suitt133 would let me go home. He’s not unconvincible, but wants all sorts of affadavits and my prospects for a ticket. Won’t you let me spend a week rowing in the Oak Parc aquarium, riding a rented bicycle and living casually on bread and iced-tea and black-berry jam? When the emotional sequence of a spiritual evolution disappears, the soul seems somewhat arbitrary at times and I would give anything nearly to renew the tangible evidence of having lived and cared—for June sun over the scraggly thickets and the heat gathering outside to make a summer day in Alabama.

   Devotedly

   Zelda

  167. TO SCOTT

  [June/July 1936]

  ALS, 1 p.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do, Darling:

  It was so nice to see you and to be walking in the bright sunshine to-gether. Maybe in two weeks we can go to a little sandy beach where there are deep poetic shadows under the pines and a shining musical lilt to the water—

  Please take care of yourself; it would be good if we could be taking care of each other once again—it always created such a delightful confusion.

   Darling, Darling—

   Love to the Boo

      and

   I love you

   Zelda

  168. TO SCOTT

  [Summer 1936]

  ALS, 3 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  I’m sorry your mother is sick. The threatened loss of an anchor to life brings poignancy to the forgotten facets of life evolved within other horizons. Anyway, I hope your mother will be better, and I’m sorry that I can’t be with you to help you, maybe, if I could. I think of you, Do-Do—and if there’s any comfort in a waxen wild-rose along a brambled path I send it. The doves are condolent; and a sweetness under the translucent foliage of late afternoon would rest you and be sorry.

  Ashville’s hot. Pale blue crowds watched the rhododendrun parade to-day. Under an impervious Italianate sky the blaring of the bands poured forth from the hills. From the top of the building, Ashville in the midst of God’s grandeur of mountains and valleys and far distances, seemed complete and self-sustained—isolated and timeless and Biblical in the tufted vastness of rolling mountain forests. It is good to see and close to our beginnings when people come from miles about, to a festival—

  Scottie wrote me a sweet letter of innumerable activities of fabulous pools and miles of dances festooned about the moon—I’m so glad she’s happy—

  And so grateful to you for all the good things you’ve given to her + me—

   Devotedly

   Zelda

  169. TO ZELDA

  TL (CC), 1 p.

  Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N. C., July 27, 1936.

  Dearest,

  It was too bad on your birthday that everything went so badly. I left the hotel for the hospital that morning fully intending to be back here in time to lunch with you as it looked at first like merely a severe strain that could be cured with hot applications and rest and a sling, but the x-ray showed that there was a fracture in the joint of the shoulder and a dislocation of the ball and socket arrangement of the shoulder so that it looked in the x-ray as though it were an inch and a half apart.

  They sent for a bone specialist and he said it would have to be set immediately or else I would never be able to raise my arm as high as my shoulder again so they gave me gas about like when they pulled your tooth and I fell asleep thinking you were in the room and saying, “Yes, I am going to stay; after all it’s my husband.” I woke up with a plaster cast that begins below my navel, extends upward and goes west out an arm. I am practically a knight in armor and only this afternoon have been able to get out of or into a chair or bed without assistance. It has postponed all my plans a week so I will not leave here until next Sunday, the second, instead of tonight as I had planned and this will of course give me a chance to see you before I go. I am sorry your mother had indigestion the same day and served to make our birthday utterly incomplete.

  The accident happened in a swan dive before I hit the water. It must have been the attempt to strain up in the first gymnastics I had tried for almost three years and the pull of the actual bone pressing against the feeble and untried muscles and ligaments. It was from a medium high board and I could feel the tear before I touched the water and had quite a struggle getting to the rail.

  However, I am in good hands and they have saved me from any permanent crippling of the arm though I am afraid I will have to spend the week dictating to Jim Hurley rather than scribbling the rest of my story in pencil which comes much more natural.

   With dearest, dearest love,

   Scott

  170. TO SCOTT

  [August 1936]

  ALS, 4 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest, dearest Do-Do:

  What a funny picture of you in the paper. I wish we had just been swimming together, the way it seems—I’ll be so glad when you come home again. When will we be three of us again—Do you remember our first meal in the Biltmore when you said “And now there’ll never be just two of us again—from now on we’ll be three—” And it was sort of sad somehow and then it was the saddest thing in the world, but we were safer and closer than ever—Oh, I’ll be so glad to see you on the tenth.

  Scottie was as sweet as I had imagined. She’s one inch shorter than I am and weighs four pounds more—and I am her most devoted secret admirer—

  Maybe I can come home—

  That’s what we said on the softness of that expansive Alabama night a long time ago when you envited me to dine and I had never dined before but had always just “had supper.” The General was away. The night was soft and gray and the trees were feathery in the lamp light and the dim recesses of
the pine forest were fragrant with the past, and you said you would come back from no matter where you are. So I said and I will be here waiting. I didn’t quite believe it, but now I do.

  And so, years later I painted you a picture of some faithful poppies and the picture said “No matter what happens I have always loved you so. This is the way we feel about us; other emotions may be super-imposed, even accident may contribute another quality to our emotions, but this is our love and nothing can change it. For that is true.” And I love you still.

  It was me who said:

  I feel as if something had happened and I don’t know what it is

  You said:

  —Well and you smiled (And it was a compliment to me for you had never heard “well” used so before) if you don’t know I can’t possibly know

  Then I said “I guess nobody knows—

  And

   you hoped and I guessed

   Everything’s going to be all right—

  So we got married—

  And maybe everything is going to be all right, after all.

  There are so many houses I’d like to live in with you. Oh Wont you be mine—again and again—and yet again—

   Dearest love, I love you

   Zelda

  Happily, happily foreverafterwards—the best we could.

  171. TO SCOTT

  [August 1936]

  ALS, 3 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  I’m sorry you’ve had such a funny-paper classic to happen to you; and I’m glad its over. Here the baked fragrance of the pine paths and the sad protestation of the sweeping oaks, and there are dusky wood doves in the early evening and an amber twilight floods the road. Little birds warble the sweetest and most Biblical of cadences, and the honey-suckle is as sensuous and envelopping as the heat of the day, from noon till two o’clock I’m very proud of Scottie; and such scholastic ambition deserves something—but then she has something—Anyway I’m glad she’s going to be the President of the United States when she grows up— and I wish I had a present to send her. Town has become as roseate and as remote a dream of unattainable glories as ever wound humanity round and round the paths of their own home garden.

  The sense of sadness and of finality in leaving a place is a good emotion; I love that the story cant be changed again and one more place is haunted—old sorrows and a half-forgotten happiness are stored where they can be recaptured.

  Please bring everything you can find—and a sense of the Baltimore streets in summers of elms and of the dappled shade over the brick, and of that white engulfing heat. And I will try to find from between the pine and oak and the scramble of phlox and under-brush up the hill-side, something to bring to you—

   Love

   Zelda

  172. TO SCOTT

  [August 1936]

  ALS, 3 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  I’m so sorry about your mother.134 As one grows older and faces one facet and another of the past in completion, the stories of lives we have shared is catalogued.

  Knowing—at the end of the patterns of tragedy or unfulfillment, of happiness, lives of service or of human balast, it’s sad to recreate the poignancy of those unconscious destines which touch our own.

  And its sad to recapitulate the eternal hope on which life is hung, to flaunt in the breeze of its happy security, or to wilt in the soft hot wind of human dreams.

  Scott and Zelda in North Carolina, 1936. Photograph of Scott courtesy of Princeton University Library

  Anyway, your mother is better than on earth. And the Beauty of Heaven is as we are able to appreciate.

  The summer’s all over out here. There were some golden apples of the Hesperides but the[y’]ve all seen their way to apple sauce. The woods are packed with September. The top of Sunset Mountain cradles itself in the tree tops and there are blue ranges stretched back to the Bible. The smell of dry dust and the dust-caked golden-rod and the smell of a fire and coffee smelling though the woods. There’s a happiness of lonliness and the beauty of summer renouncing its beauty. I wanted to grind my corn and stay there.

  I love the just and honored corn-field. The gourds are gold, and the morning sun splinters the world along the brook

  If you do go on to California, please send me a great stack of your most fashionable addresses. And where to address Scottie—

  Thank you for the check. Last year I spun enough cloth to smother Clotho135 and to disgust forever the three fates with their trade—So I’ll have it made into a nice Poiret suit or something indespensably useless enough to contribute a sense of great luxury.

  You look so rested and so unlike an invalid—I hope you’ll be soon well again—And for the comfort there is in a lasting appreciation and my gratitude forever and always always my devotion, I am Zelda

  173. TO SCOTT

  [September 1936]

  ALS, 2 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  The sadness of autumn + of things that are over lurks on the smoky horizons; one enters the morning reluctantly. It’s sad to know that another summer + vacation time and another years expectancies are accomplished. You were so sweet to take so long a trip for my sake and I know all the effort it cost you. When you leave I always look about me and catalogue your visits and render accounting of your eternal kindness.

  Scottie got off in happy estate—model travelling for girls of 15— Vogues + curl papers, kodak snaps + pockets full of preparations—I hope it will be a happy school year; she seemed prettier + sweeter than ever before.

  Thanks for the money. I have already apportioned its disposal—I think I’ll buy one presentable suit in case the house catches on fire and I have to help work the hose. It will be rather exciting to own an approved product again. I wish we were off on a glamorous twilight to christen it—It’s fun to be here before the curtains of a winter dusk.

   Love, Do-Do—and thanks again—

   Zelda

  174. TO SCOTT

  [After September 24, 1936]

  ALS, 2 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dear Scott:

  Happy Birthday to you. I remembered you; and wished you happiness—

  This attenuate land loses itself in the blue autumnal haze of withdrawing horizons; and a thin and concise sun fills the heavens to perhaps a more cerebral purpose. I regret the summer; but, to me, there isn’t a more fortunate union of nature and of poetic heritage than is between this country and these thin gold mornings and twilights husky with home-building.

  I’m manoeuvering an evening coat that is intended to be tried on before the mirror of Shalot; and was especially designed for the riding of magic carpets—and I bask in the heavenly hardi-hood of these woods and I long for a great many good things.

  I decided to refurbish my conversancy with the monde actuel by a garguantuan parcel of current publications which I find very absorbing. Before I see you again I will know practically everything about the discovering of unobtainable cures for uncatalogued maladies; about the lives of all famous men know[n] only to authors in need of pick-up money; and of the domestic habits of a few of our most select gangsters—and of how the emu rears his young

  Meanwhile, may you and your work prosper and many happy birthdays to you—

   Zelda

  That fall, as Scott mended, he was able to visit Zelda and take her to lunches at the Grove Park Inn, after which they went for walks around the resort’s lovely manicured grounds, nestled in the mountain valley. Zelda slowly improved under the hospital’s supervision. It was a quiet time, but not a particularly good one for Scott, since he continued drinking heavily. In December, Scott went to Baltimore to give Scottie a holiday tea dance at the elegant Belvedere Hotel, which he ruined by getting drunk and making an embarrassing scene. He spent the rest
of the holiday in Johns Hopkins Hospital, being treated for the flu and alcoholism. Scottie spent Christmas with a school friend, Peaches Finney, and her family, then went to visit Zelda in Asheville. In January, Scott moved to the Oak Hall hotel in Tryon, North Carolina. With his income at its all-time low, he struggled to stay on the wagon and to write, apparently with little success.

  175. TO SCOTT

  [January 1937]

  ALS, 1 p.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Dearest Do-Do:

  Dope: we left the picture at Pritchards art shop the day before you left for Baltimore so it must have been Dec 22 or so—That’s all I know about it, and was not with you when you gave instructions about its delivery. It may still be there.

  I paint and walk and am robust; I die of ennui; I long for your visit always and will be glad when its time again. You forgot to answer about the frame to render presentable a big picture for Ma—

  whom I sadly long to see?

   Ou travaille—

   With Love

   Zelda

  176. TO SCOTT

  [March 1937]

  ALS, 2 pp.

  [Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina]

  Do-Do:

  It rains—without lamentation. Easter accumulates in the pears; the trees make ready for glory. Abnegatory skies lie mirrored in the roads; and the houses are fine and etched against a silver time. That was a little while ago. Now there’s snow, and lightly laden branches and a puffed protected world for Sunday. Snow domesticates horizons; the world is a fine white boudoir; the world is cared-for and expensive. I hope always that you’ll show up in it soon.

  In the mean-time, I make red robes—of justice—I make pictures and cards and health and everything but magic—and I hope for a breath of that art in spring. The cold freezes me and leaves such a misery that I can’t stand it.