Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda Read online

  Turnbull, Andrew, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribners, 1963: Letters.

  Wilson, Edmund, ed. The Crack-Up. New York: New Directions, 1964; originally published in 1945: Crack-Up.

  The state of the previously published Scott and Zelda letters is as follows:

  Andrew Turnbull’s The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963) contains thirty-five letters from Scott to Zelda, many of which are not printed in their entirety; Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980) has twenty-three letters from Scott to Zelda and sixty-two letters from Zelda to Scott; Bruccoli’s The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (1991) reprints the same Zelda letters as Correspondence, plus an additional one; and Bruccoli’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (1994) contains twenty-four letters from Scott to Zelda, bringing the total number of published letters from Scott to Zelda to fifty-eight and those from Zelda to Scott to sixty-three.

  At the Princeton University library, there are twenty-two previously unpublished letters from Scott to Zelda, eleven previously unpublished telegrams from Scott to Zelda, and approximately 430 previously unpublished letters from Zelda to Scott. These deserve to be part of their story. All of Scott’s letters and telegrams to Zelda appear in this book, and 189 new letters from Zelda are included.

  As indicated by these statistics, many of Scott’s letters to Zelda have undoubtedly been lost. This is not surprising when one considers that Zelda, never highly organized, was in and out of hospitals during the 1930s and 1940s and that fires oddly punctuated her life— the fire at the Fitzgeralds’ Baltimore home in 1933; the fire at Highland Hospital that killed Zelda in 1948; and the fire in which her sister Marjorie burned many of Zelda’s possessions (including several of her paintings) at their mother’s home in Montgomery after Zelda’s death. Scott, however, was meticulous in keeping all correspondence that related in any way to his life, and his letters from Zelda were certainly central to that life. Despite the missing letters to Zelda, we know Scott’s side of the story from existing letters to friends and editors and to Scottie, all of which have been published. It is Zelda’s view of their lives that has been seriously underrepresented, and one of the purposes behind this book is to display her talents as a letter writer.

  The organization and breakdown of the letters is as follows:

  PART I Courtship and Marriage: 1918–1920 (letters 1–49) Eight telegrams from Scott to Zelda and six letters from Zelda to Scott from this period have been previously published. Scott’s letters to Zelda from these years are lost, but we have included twelve additional telegrams from him, which Zelda pasted in her scrapbook. We have also included twenty-three previously unpublished letters from Zelda to Scott during this period.

  PART II The Years Together: 1920–1929 (letters 50–51) The Fitzgeralds lived together throughout the twenties and therefore did not exchange letters. However, in 1930, the Fitzgeralds each wrote a long letter looking back on the twenties, in an attempt to discover why they faced the new decade in such terrible straits. Because these two letters are retrospective, lengthy, and contain references to many of the important events and people in the Fitzgeralds’ lives during the preceding decade, we have placed them in this section.

  PART III Breaking Down: 1930–1939 (letters 52–209) We have included two previously unpublished letters that Scott wrote to Zelda during the first eight years of the thirties, and we have selected 106 out of the 260 previously unpublished letters from Zelda to Scott to include in this section. These letters give a much fuller picture of Zelda’s life as she lived intermittently in a series of institutions and in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

  PART IV The Final Years: 1939–1940 (letters 210–333) From 1939, there are seven letters from Scott to Zelda and four letters from Zelda to Scott that have been previously published. We have included eleven additional letters from Scott to Zelda and sixty-nine previously unpublished letters from Zelda to Scott. From 1940, there are thirty-seven previously published letters from Scott to Zelda, and we have found an additional nine. Astonishingly, none of Zelda’s letters to Scott from 1940 has ever been published—only an unsigned Valentine’s Day card—thereby giving the impression that she no longer wrote to him. This impression is far from accurate; we have found fifty-seven letters and telegrams that Zelda wrote to Scott during the last year of his life, and we have selected thirty-three of them.

  We have followed two principles in selecting which letters to include in this book. First, we have included those letters that sustain the narrative—that tell what actually happened. Second, we wanted to include those letters that convey the varied and complex emotional nature of the Fitzgeralds’ relationship. Their letters to each other often communicate these difficult-to-describe emotional nuances in passages of startling beauty and clarity as they wrote about the present and reevaluated the past.

  INTRODUCTION

  Eleanor Lanahan

  To mention F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is to invoke the twenties, the Jazz Age, romance, and outrageous early success, with all its attendant perils. The names Scott and Zelda can summon taxis at dusk, conjure gleaming hotel lobbies and smoky speakeasies, flappers, yellow phaetons, white suits, large tips, expatriates, and nostalgia for the Lost Generation. And even though they are my grandparents, I can’t fail to mention that Scott’s alcoholism and Zelda’s madness are a powerful part of the myth.

  My grandparents’ lives are as fascinating to me as their artistic achievements. I’ve always been amazed by their ability to express their love for each other in original and poignant ways. Despite their short and nomadic lives—Scott was born in 1896 and died in 1940, at the age of forty-four, eight years before Zelda—they left an abundance of correspondence, a window into an extraordinary romance. Their letters reveal two people possessed of an incredible life force and an urge to communicate to the fullest of their powers. Scott’s are astoundingly intimate; they are testimony to his frankness, his caring, his extraordinary ear, and his virtuosity with the English language. Zelda’s are poetic, full of metaphor and descriptions. How they must have loved to open each other’s envelopes! Sometimes.

  Several collections of Scott’s letters have already been published, as have single volumes of letters to his agent Harold Ober, his editor Maxwell Perkins, and to my mother, Scottie. Scott and Zelda did not need to write to one another during the ten most famous years of their lives, and the idea of assembling both of their letters in one volume has always presented a problem. The editors of this book, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, have done a painstaking and graceful job of bridging this gap with letters, insights, and information from many sources.

  This compilation is timely. Now that Zelda’s role as wife, as artist, and as a person who struggled with mental illness can be viewed in a more modern and compassionate light, her talents are becoming more widely respected—although Scott apparently appreciated them all along. With this volume, he may regain some stature with his critics. The record confirms that he offered Zelda support and encouragement for her writing. He also shared his editorial skills, his high standards, and his hope when it was needed most. Scott is revealed as a man of profound loyalty and responsibility—far from his usual image.

  What emerges from this collection are the Fitzgeralds’ natural gifts, their charms, and their vast reservoirs of love, tenderness, and devotion. This is an emotional biography—a record of their successes and tragedies, as well as a firsthand glimpse at the first half of the twentieth century through the eyes of two people at the center of its artistic life.

  * * *

  I was two months old when my grandmother died in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda’s last letter to my mother in 1948 said that she longed to meet the baby. For me, that letter has been an important thread to the past, an almost accidental link between the generations; it’s a comfort that my grandmother knew of my existence.

  Zelda’s letters abound with metaphor. The sky ove
r a lake closes “like a gray oyster shell.” The mountains cover “their necks in pink tulle like coquettish old ladies.” Her prose is lush and multisensory, as when she reminds Scott of the smells of July by the sea. Occasionally, her persona gets scrambled with that of Daisy Buchanan, who appears in The Great Gatsby as a languid and careless member of the idle rich. But in the novel, please note, Scott saved his scorn for the Buchanans, whose vast resources allowed them to have other people clean up their messes. Scott, too, is often confused with his own creation, the ludicrously rich Jay Gatsby. But the novel is a cautionary tale, in which Gatsby tries to use his ill-gotten wealth to recreate the past. Although Scott frequently wrote about high society, to the end of his days he retained a firm midwestern belief in honesty and hard work, as well as a desperately low bank balance.

  These letters reveal how little money kept them afloat. And it’s miraculous how much they accomplished on such a tiny budget. When they had it, they spent it. The need for money motivated Scott to write much of his short fiction. Not until the depths of the Depression, when he was forced to take employment in the Hollywood screenwriting factories, did Scott waver from his true vocation. By the time he died, he had completed four novels, 160 short stories (including many self-described formulaic potboilers, which provided the major part of his sustenance), numerous essays and reviews, and a full-length play, The Vegetable—not to mention the hundreds of letters that consumed much of his creative energy, as well as his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

  At critical junctures, when Scott had no money at all, he borrowed from his agent, his editor, and his friends, which forced him into a cycle of writing to eradicate debt and then borrowing to write. In 1923, he reported that he had worked twelve-hour days for five weeks to “rise from abject poverty back into the middle class.”

  My mother, their only child, knew this cycle well. She described Scott’s relationship to money: “He worshipped, despised, was awed by, was ‘crippled by his inability to handle’ (as he put it), threw away, slaved for, and had a lifelong love-hate relationship with, money . . . money and alcohol were the two great adversaries with which he battled all his life.”

  Because Scott’s books were on a proscribed list at the time of his death, authorities of the Catholic St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland, denied him burial in ancestral plots. Instead, he was laid to rest in the nearby Rockville Union Cemetery. Eight years later, when Zelda died, the family decided they should be buried together in a double vault. My mother wrote to her grandmother Sayre just after Zelda’s funeral:

  I was so glad you decided she should stay with Daddy, as seeing them buried there together gave the tragedy of their lives a sort of classic unity and it was very touching and reassuring to think of their two high-flying and generous spirits being at peace together at last—Mama was such an extraordinary person that had things continued as perfect and romantic as they began the story of her life would have been more like a fairy-tale than a reality.

  The fairy tale began when Scott and Zelda met in 1918, at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama. Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the many soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Sheridan, awaiting orders to fight overseas. Zelda, gifted with beauty, grace, high spirits, and expert skills of flirtation, was one of the most popular belles in the region. Her earliest letters to Scott are distinctly girlish. She sounds awash, agoggle in love. Young women of the South, barely free of their Victorian chaperones, still cultivated an utter femininity, a “pink helplessness,” as Zelda calls it. She also refers merrily to her desire for merged identities, for Scott to define her existence. In taking a man’s name, a woman assumed his whole identity, including his career and his social standing—an abject dependency that today would make both sexes wary. Zelda’s declarations of loneliness, of her “nothingness without him” might be alarming to the modern reader, but they are reflections of the time. The Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was not even ratified until August 1920.

  In Montgomery the ratio of soldiers to young women was tipped heavily in favor of the women, and competition was fierce among suitors. Scott’s insecurity about losing the woman who had captured his heart is reflected in her mail. Because his side of the correspondence is underrepresented, I’m taking the liberty of including the poem that opens The Great Gatsby, one that few people know he wrote, because he attributed it to a fictitious poet, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers:

  Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

  Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

  I must have you!”

  To win her hand, Scott certainly wore the gold hat and bounced.

  The Fitzgeralds arrived in New York for the kickoff of the Roaring Twenties. In the boom years, it seemed, the entire city was having one big party. The ticker tape had barely settled along the Fifth Avenue parade route from welcoming the troops home from World War I when Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, astonished his publishers and sold out of its entire first printing. A week after publication, on April 3, 1920, he and Zelda were married.

  Twenty-three-year-old Scott, an overnight celebrity, told the press that his greatest ambitions were to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his wife forever. With instinctive media savvy, the newlyweds set about giving America a fresh image of itself as youthful, fun-loving, free-spending, hardworking, and innovative. And they weren’t too sophisticated to plunge in the Plaza fountain or to spin to their hearts’ content in the hotel doors. Scott described the excitement of those early days in the East: “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” And he recalled (an important and too often overlooked ingredient to this fairy tale) “writing all night and all night again.”

  My mother was born on October 26, 1921, and was immediately assigned to the care of a nanny. “Children shouldn’t be a bother,” Zelda explained. On the subject of the domestic arts, when Harper & Brothers asked Zelda to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women, she wrote:

  See if there is any bacon, and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.

  Scott’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published a few months after my mother’s birth. The Fitzgeralds were still enraptured. Scott inscribed his first edition to Zelda:

  For my darling wife, my dearest sweetest

  baboo, without whose love and aid

  neither this book nor any other

  would ever have been possible.

  From me, who loves her more

  every day, with a heartful of

  worship for her lovely self.

  Scott

  St. Paul, Minn.

  Feb 6th 1922

  A lock of Zelda’s hair, bound with a blue ribbon, was pressed inside the cover, where it remains to this day. During the early years of their marriage, Zelda seemed content to toss her talents aside and become a reckless and decorative wife, although a jovial strain of competition ran through a review she wrote of The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune:

  To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and also if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and also if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years. . . .

  It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably
edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

  Scott’s use of Zelda’s letters is sometimes cited as evidence of his gross misappropriation of Zelda’s talent. At the time, however, it was generally considered a husband’s job to be a provider, and a wife’s job to tend to amenities. Maybe Zelda wanted to give herself a bit of credit for authorship, but at this point there was no serious rivalry between them. A reporter interviewed Zelda a year and a half after the review appeared. For fun, Scott posed several of the questions:

  “What do you want your daughter to do, Mrs. Fitzgerald, when she grows up?” Scott Fitzgerald inquired in his best reportorial manner, “not that you’ll try to make her, of course, but—”

  “Not great and serious and melancholy and inhospitable, but rich and happy and artistic. I don’t mean that money means happiness, necessarily. But having things, just things, objects makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul.”

  Later, in France, where my grandparents were immersed in an entirely artistic crowd, Zelda’s ambitions sparked. For three agonizing years, she threw all of her creative energy into ballet. That a married woman would try to establish her own artistic identity was unusual, and the strain of such physical discipline, begun at the late age of twenty-seven, is thought to have contributed to Zelda’s exhausted mental state.

  When she suffered her first breakdown, ten years after the wedding, in 1930, the fairy tale ended. Her first letters from the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, and Scott’s first letters from Paris, are bitter, blameful reinterpretations of their whole relationship. Very little was understood about the nature of Zelda’s suffering. Treatment for schizophrenia, identified as an illness only nineteen years earlier, was in its infancy. No helpful drugs existed, only grim and largely ineffective therapies.