Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (545 page)

Perhaps I was unwise in telling her so succinctly that she had no home except Vassar. On the other hand, she doesn’t see the matter in relation to the past. When I tried to make a home for her she didn’t want it, and I have a sick-man’s feeling that she will arrive in a manner to break up such tranquillity as I have managed to establish after this illness. Perhaps she has changed - but this is the first time in many years that you yourself have expressed pleasure in her filial behavior. I, too, have had that, though in short doses, ever since the spring of 1934. Perhaps the very shortness of the doses has been the fault and I hope this visit will be a remedy.

In theory I tend to disagree with you about doing her harm to know where she stands. Scottie at her best is as she is now with a sense of responsibility and determination. She is at her absolute worst when she lies on her back and waves her feet in the air - so incapable of gratitude of things arranged for (the golf at Virginia Beach, for instance, or the moving picture stuff here, has been accepted as her natural right as a princess). I was sorry for the women of fifty who applied for that secretarial job in Baltimore in 1932 - who had never before in their lives found that a home can be precarious. But I am not particularly sorry for a youngster who is thrown on his own at 14 or so and has to make his way through school and college, the old sink or swim spirit - I suppose,
au fond,
the difference of attitude between the North and the old South.

Anyhow, we shall think of you and talk of you a lot and look forward to seeing you and wish you were with us. I will have done something by the time you get this about your expense money there. — Dearest love.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California August 18, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Got your letter from Saluda. Will absolutely try to arrange the Montgomery trip early in September. Your letter made me sad, and I wish I could say ‘Yes, go where you want right away’ - but it doesn’t take into consideration the situation here. I will be much better able to grapple with the problem and with Dr Carroll two weeks from now.
A
severe illness like mine is liable to be followed by a period of shaky morale and at the moment I am concerned primarily with keeping us all alive and comfortable. I’m working on a picture at Universal and the exact position is that if I can establish their confidence in the next week that I am of value on this job it will relieve financial pressure through the fall and winter.

Scottie is very pleasant and, within the limits of her age, very cooperative to date - on the other hard, she’s one more responsibility, as she learns to drive and brings me her work and this summer there is no Helen Hayes to take her on a glamor tour of Hollywood. All of which boils down to the fact that my physical energy is at an absolute minimum without being definitely sick and I’ve got to conserve this for my work. I am as annoyed at the unreliability of the human body as you are at the vagaries of the nervous system. Please believe always that I am trying to do my best for us all. I have many times wished that my work was of a mechanical sort that could be done or delegated irrespective of morale, for I don’t want or expect happiness for myself - only pence enough to keep us all going. Put your happiness I want exceedingly, just as I wart Scottie’s safety.

I am writing Dr Carroll a long letter in a week’s time of which I will send you a carbon. I have already written Dr Suitt about the swimming.

With dearest love,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California
October 6,
1939

Dearest Zelda:

Living in the flotsam of the international situation as we all are, work has been difficult. I am almost penniless - I’ve done stories for
Esquire
because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances. You will remember it took me an average of six weeks to get the mood of a Saturday Evening
Post
story.

But everything may be all right tomorrow. As I wrote you - or did I? - friends sent Scottie back to college. That seemed more important than any pleasure for you or me. There is still two hundred dollars owing on her tuition - and I think I will probably manage to find it somewhere.

After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you - but not enough to go overboard. For you to go on your first excursion without a nurse, without money, without even enough to pay your fare back, when Dr Carroll is backing you, and when Scottie and I are almost equally as helpless in the press of circumstances as you - well, it is the ruse of a clever old lady whom I respect and admire and who loves you dearly but not wisely —

I ask only this of you - leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and what eventually will fight through as the right to save you, the
permission
to give you a chance.

Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.

With dearest love always,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California
January
31, 19
40

Dearest Zelda:

The article arrived and from a first brief glance I shall say that it is going to be rather difficult to sell. However, I will read it thoroughly tonight and report. Even a very intellectual magazine like the
Forum
or the Atlantic Monthly prefers their essays to contain some certain number of anecdotes or some dialogue or some cohesive and objective events. Of course, you might claim that vour whole article was conversation and in a sense it is, but it is one person’s conversation and thus does not contain much conflict. However, I think it is damn good considering that your pen has been rusty for so long. Shall I suggest you some ideas which yoa might handle with more chance of realizing on them? Tell me.

Dear, I know no one in Asheville except a couple of secretaries and nurses and the clerks at the hotel. I was ill at the time I was there and confined to mv room most of the time so I have no idea how you would make business contacts. This seems to be a great year for art and I wish you would drop a line to Cary Ross or someone about your new paintings and see if there is some interest. That would be a more practical way of getting things in motion than taking up something you’re unfamiliar with.

All is the same here. I think I have a job for next week. I know I’ve finished a pretty good story - the first one adequate to the Post in several years. It was a hard thing to get back to. My God, what a fund of hope and belief I must have had in the old days! As I say, I will write you more about the story tomorrow.

Dearest love.

Scott

552 1 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California February 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I understand your attitude completely and sympathize with it to a great extent. But the mood which considers any work beneath their talents doesn’t especially appeal to me in other people, though I acknowledge being sometimes guilty of it myself. At the moment I am hoping for a job at Republic Studios, the lowest of the low, which would among other things help to pay your hospital bill. So the fact that anything you do can be applied on your bill instead of on our jaunt to the Isles of Greece doesn’t seem so tough.

However, I am disappointed, with you, that the future Ruskins and Elie Faures and other anatomists of art will have to look at your windows instead of the mail hall. But something tells me that by the time this letter comes you will have changed your point of view. It is those people that have kept your talent alive when you willed it to sink into the dark abyss. Granted it’s a delicate thing - mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear. (God, what a mess of similes.) But the awful thing would have been some material catastrophe that would have made it unable to run at all.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California
March
19, 1940

Dearest:

It seems to me best not to hurry things.

(a) — I’d like you to leave with the blessings of Dr Carroll (you’ve consumed more of his working hours than one human deserves of another - you’d agree if you’d see his correspondence with me.) Next to Forel he has been your eventual best friend - better even than Meyert (though this is unfair to Meyer who never claimed to be a clinician but only a diagnostician).

But to hell with all that, and with illness.

(b) — Also, you’d best wait because I will
certainly
have more money three weeks from now than at present, and (c) —
If
things develop fast Scottie can skip down and see you for a day during her vacation - otherwise you won’t see her before summer. This is an if!

I don’t think you fully realize the extent of what Scottie has done at Vassar. You wrote rather casually of two years being enough but it isn’t. Her promise is unusual. Not only did she rise to the occasion and get in young but she has raised herself from a poor scholar to a very passable one; sold a professional story at eighteen; and moreover in very highbrow, at present very politically minded Vassar she has introduced with some struggle a new note. She has written and produced a musical comedy and founded a club called the Omgim to perpetuate the idea - almost the same thing that Tarkington did in 1893 when he founded the Triangle at Princeton. She did this against tough opposition - girls who wouldn’t let her on the board of the daily paper because, though she could write, she wasn’t ‘politically conscious.’

We have every reason at this point to cheer for our baby. I would do anything rather than deny her the last two years of college which she has now earned. There is more than talent there - a real genius for organization.

Nothing has developed here. I write these ‘Pat Hobby’ stories - and wait. I have a new idea now - a comedy series which will get me back into the big magazines - but my God I am a forgotten man. Gatsbv had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.

With dearest love always,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California
April 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I got your wire today asking for $5.00 and simultaneously one came from Dr Carroll saying you were coming out. I don’t know what the rail fare to Montgomery is, but I am sending you herewith $60.00, which I hope will take care of your ticket, baggage, etc. You are leaving bills behind you, I know, which I will try to take care of as soon as I can. I have sent Jean West $25.00 on account. Moreover I have sent a check to your mother for your expenses when you get to Montgomery.

Now as to the general arrangement: I am starting to work on this ‘speculation’ job. That is, they are giving me very little money but if the picture is resold when finished the deal will be somewhat better. I hesitated about accepting it but there have been absolutely no offers in many months and I did it on the advice of my new agent. It is a job that should be fun and suitable to my still uneven state of health. (Since yesterday I seem to be running a fever again.) In any case we can’t go on living indefinitely on those Esquire articles. So you will be a poor girl for awhile and there is nothing much to do about it. I can manage to send you $30.000 a week of which you should pay your mother about $15.00 for board, laundry, light, etc. The rest will be in checks of alternately $10.00 and $20.00 - that is, one week the whole sum will amount to $35.00, one week $25.00, etc. This is a sort of way of saving for you so that in alternate weeks you will have a larger lump sum in case you need clothes or something.

You will be cramped by this at first - more so than in the hospital, but it is everything that I can send without putting Scottie to work which I absolutely refuse to do. I don’t think you can promise a person an education and then snatch it away from them. If she quit Vassar I should feel like quitting all work and going to the free VeteransHospital where I probably belong.

The main thing is not to run up bills or wire me for extra funds. There simply aren’t any and as you can imagine I am deeply in debt to the government and everyone else. As soon as anything turns up I will naturally increase your allowance so that you will have more mobility, clothes, etc.

I am moving in town to be near my work. For the present, will you please address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California? If you forget, ‘General Delivery, Encino’ will be forwarded to me also. As soon as I have a new permanent address I will write to you. I do hope this goes well. I wish you were going to brighter surroundings but this is certainly not the time to come to me and I can think of nowhere else for you to go in this dark and bloody world. I suppose a place is what you make it but I have grown to hate California and would give my life for three years in France. So bon voyage and stay well.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521
Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California
May 4, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I sympathize with your desire to do something. Why can’t you hire a cool room somewhere for a studio? All you’d need is an easel, a chair and a couch and I think you have an easel somewhere. I think with Marjorie’s help you could get it for almost nothing and perhaps after next week I can help more (I go according to the fever - if it stays around 99 I feel rash, if it runs up over a degree at a daily average I get alarmed and think we mustn’t get stony broke like last fall). My ambition is to pay the government who’ve laid off me so far. I don’t know what they’d annex except my scrapbook.

Will return the clipping Monday - she’s a smooth enough kid* (for which I take most of the credit except for the mouth, legs and personal charm, and barring the wit which comes from us both) - anyhow she’s the best kind a good deal of figuring out could do. She’s not as honest as either you or me but maybe she didn’t have as much to conceal.