Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald - Softcover

Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Fitzgerald, Zelda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982117125 ISBN 13: 9781982117122

Publisher: Scribner, 2019

Synopsis

“Pure and lovely...to read Zelda’s letters is to fall in love with her.” —The Washington Post

Edited by renowned Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this compilation of over three hundred letters tells the couple's epic love story in their own words.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years, through the highs and lows of his literary success and alcoholism, and her mental illness. In Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, over 300 of their collected love letters show why theirs has long been heralded as one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century.

Edited by renowned Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this is a welcome addition to the Fitzgerald literary canon.

About this title

About the Author:

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s novels include The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
Scott and Zelda first met in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda’s hometown, in July 1918, probably at a country club dance. Zelda, who had just graduated from high school and was still the town’s most popular girl, turned eighteen that month; Scott, who had attended Princeton and was now a lieutenant in the infantry, would be twenty-two that fall. In her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932), Zelda recalled that Scott, so handsome in his tailor-made Brooks Brothers uniform, had “smelled like new goods” as she nestled her “face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar” while they danced (Collected Writings 39). Just two months later, Scott recorded in his Ledger the event that would shape the rest of his life and much of his work: “Sept.: Fell in love on the 7th”(Ledger 173). That same month, Scott summed up his twenty-first year: On his birthday, he wrote, “A year of enormous importance. Work, and Zelda. Last year as a Catholic” (Ledger 172). The major decisions that a young man coming of age makes—matters of vocation, love, and faith—had been decided.

Scott, although still untried and immature in many ways, had adamantly committed himself to becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (as he told his college friend Edmund “Bunny” Wilson) and to having the “top girl” at his side to share the storybook life he envisioned. During his years at Princeton University, his academic life had taken a backseat to his social ambitions; realizing that he probably would never graduate, Scott had enlisted in the army in October 1917. His military training eventually brought him to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, and to Zelda—the most beautiful, confident, and sought-after girl in town. Scott then devoted himself to becoming the “top man” among her many suitors, intending to vanquish the other young college boys and soldiers by marrying this most desirable girl.

Zelda, being younger, was less clear about particulars, but she certainly shared Scott’s romantic sense of a special destiny. Other than teaching, careers for women were still discouraged. Courtship and marriage were the areas in which young women such as Zelda, the daughter of a prominent judge, were expected to achieve distinction. Her three older sisters, Marjorie, Rosalind, and Clothilde, were already married; Zelda intended to make the absolute most of her own days as a southern belle, relishing her role in the spotlight. Montgomery may have been a small, provincial city, but it was surrounded by college towns, as well as being crowded with young soldiers from nearby training camps. The war imbued the local courtship rituals with an even greater sense of urgency and romanticism than usual. The crowds of young people necessitated numerous forms of entertainment—parties, dances, sports, plays, and Friday-night vaudeville shows—to keep them occupied. The Sayres’ front porch, replete with every sort of southern flower and a porch swing for Zelda and her beaux, was locally famous. Zelda had already filled a glove box with the small colorful badges of masculine honor the young soldiers took from their uniforms and gave to her as tokens of their affection. Scott soon added his own insignia to this collection. Young aviators from Taylor Field executed dangerous stunts as they flew their airplanes over Zelda’s house to impress her. Scott competed with such exploits by bragging about the famous writer he was going to become. Although Scott did not “get over” to fight the war, that summer and fall, as he vied for Zelda’s heart, the two no doubt believed that he would be sent overseas and perhaps face death. He continued to write, hoping that in the event of his death, he would become the American counterpart of Rupert Brooke, the handsome young English poet, who in death had become the romantic hero— forever young, beautiful, and full of promise.

The war, however, ended just as Scott was preparing to embark for France. When he was discharged in February 1919, he went to New York City to find a job and to become a famous living writer, instead of a dead one. He hoped to find work with a newspaper but had to settle for a low-paying job with an advertising firm. He missed Zelda terribly, told his family about her, and asked his mother to write to Zelda, which she did. Then, on March 24, Scott sent Zelda the engagement ring that had been his mother’s. Zelda couldn’t have been more thrilled. But although her letters are full of enthusiastic assurances of her love, her life in Montgomery continued pretty much the same as before—a whirlwind of social engagements, which included continuing to go out with other boys—and she wrote Scott all about it. Zelda especially loved the rounds of college parties, dances, and commencement activities beginning in May and the exciting football weekends in the fall. Scott’s daily life, on the other hand, was at total odds with his idealized conception of himself. He hated his job, hated having so little money, and especially hated how his clothes were becoming threadbare. And, worse yet, his stories weren’t selling. Later, in “My Lost City” (1936), he would look back and write, “. . . I was haunted always by my other life . . . my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama—would it come and what would it say?—my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. . . . I was a failure— mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer” (Crack-Up 25–26).

Despite his sense of failure, Scott was actually quite productive. Although he sold only one story in the spring of 1919—“Babes in the Woods,” for which The Smart Set paid him thirty dollars—he continued his apprenticeship and produced over nineteen stories that winter and spring. All were rejected by the magazines to which he submitted them; many, however, were later revised and published. Although Scott was being unrealistic in his expectations of immediate fame—who, after all, is a blazing success at the age of twenty-two?—his sense of failure, anxiety, and loss was keen and would remain with him the rest of his life. When Scott visited Zelda in Montgomery in mid-April, he was depressed and losing confidence in himself. Zelda tried to reassure him in her letters, but she also continued to report on all the fun she was having.

By June 1919, Scott and Zelda’s engagement was in serious jeopardy. When Scott received a note that Zelda had written to another suitor and then accidentally put into the wrong envelope, one addressed to Scott, he was enraged and ordered her never to write to him again. But as soon as he received Zelda’s brief explanation, he went to Montgomery and begged her to marry him right away. Zelda cried in his arms, but she turned him down and broke the engagement. Scott returned to New York feeling utterly defeated as a writer and a lover. He wrote to a friend: “I’ve done my best and I’ve failed—it’s a great tragedy to me and I feel I have very little left to live for. . . . Unless someday she will marry me I will never marry” (Letters 455–456). He quit his job, went on a three-week bender, returned to his parents’ home in St. Paul, and went to work revising “The Romantic Egotist,” the novel that had been rejected by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1918. During this period of a little over two months, Scott and Zelda exchanged no letters. But when Scribners accepted his novel, now entitled This Side of Paradise, on September 16, 1919, Scott immediately wrote to Zelda again and planned a visit to Montgomery; the couple soon resumed their engagement. More letters and visits to Montgomery followed, and Zelda and Scott were married the following April, only one year after Scott had first sent Zelda the engagement ring.

In his imagination, Scott attached the acquisition of Zelda to the acquisition of material success, thereby identifying what were already the twin themes of his writing—love and money—as the twin themes of his life, as well. Later, he looked back on the summer of his broken engagement in “Pasting It Together” (1936) and wrote, “It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money” and that although when he became “the man with the jingle of money in his pocket,” he “married the girl” after all, he would never trust either money or love—the same elements of life to which he was most drawn (Crack-Up 77). Zelda’s imagination, however, was committed solely to the enchantment of love. Her letters from this period offer evidence that dispels two enduring but misleading myths about her marriage to Scott: first, that Zelda would not marry him until he had money; second, that one of the reasons Scott interested her was because she was eager to leave her small town for the larger social stage of New York City. It is true that Zelda’s parents certainly had reservations about their daughter marrying a young man with no secure prospects for the future, but Zelda repeatedly reassures Scott in these letters that love, not money, is what she wants most out of life. Although they resumed their engagement after Scribners accepted Scott’s novel, it hadn’t been published yet and there was no assurance that it would be a moneymaker. Once the engagement was settled, Zelda eagerly anticipated joining Scott in New York, but her enthusiasm again was for being with Scott and not the larger possibilities the so-called glittering city offered. Zelda loved Montgomery, especially its beautiful flowers, and she knew she would miss the way of life she had always known.

While these letters challenge the myths, they also offer a vivid portrait of Zelda at eighteen—a flirtatious, audacious young woman, whose life was full of friends, practical jokes, and parties. Her letters indicate that although she believed that provoking jealousy was an important ritual in courtship, she did not feel that she was being unfaithful to Scott by dating other men; they also reveal that she felt no hesitation in reporting it all to him. In addition to telling Scott about an endless stream of social engagements, she also articulated her ideas about life and love—that women were intended be “a disturbing element among” men and that even though she loved to appear all “pink and helpless,” the men who thought her “purely decorative” were “fools for not knowing better” (letters 16 and 28). Scott, who had a wonderful ear for words, freely borrowed passages from these letters for his fiction.

Certain themes emerge from the events and letters of this period that foreshadow characteristics and conflicts that will persist throughout the Fitzgeralds’ lives together. Jealousy was certainly a factor. According to Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener, when Scott and Zelda first started seeing each other, she pulled another date into a lighted phone booth and initiated a spirited kissing session, which ended when she said, “Scott was coming and I wanted to make him jealous” (83). As Scott Donaldson and others have suggested, one of the reasons Scott was attracted to Zelda (as well as to earlier girlfriends, such as the Chicago socialite Ginevra King) was because of their many suitors. In order to be the “top girl” he wanted, she had to be popular with other men. Yet when Scott tried to play the same game and wrote to her from New York that he found a young woman very attractive, Zelda called his bluff, giving him the go-head to kiss the girl, a response guaranteed to turn the tables and make Scott worry even more about what Zelda herself might be doing in Montgomery. When Scott looked back on this period in “Early Success” (1937), he recalled that some of his friends had “arrangements with ‘sensible’ girls,” but he noted, “Not I—I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it . . .” (Crack-Up 86). The great paradox of their love affair is that the same traits that attracted them to each other would also create chaos and conflict in their lives. Just as the jealousies so playful during courtship would take on a more destructive role in their marriage, alcohol, considered a harmless rite of passage for the young, would become an increasingly destructive factor, one that would continue to haunt them.

In addition to jealousy and alcohol as troubling factors in their relationship, each had a distinct personality sharply divided and pulled in opposing directions. The split in Scott’s personality has been thoroughly analyzed and much written about. His contemporary Malcolm Cowley perceptively argued that Scott possessed a “double vision,” by which he meant that he had the ability to throw himself wholeheartedly into dissipation, despite his deeply embedded puritanism. Scott gave Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, this trait, as well: “I was within and without,” states Nick, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (40). Such double vision would help make Scott a great writer, but it would also allow him to become an emblem of the material excesses and moral corruption of the 1920s, at the same time that his writing provided a prophetic judgment against the period. The divided aspect of Zelda’s personality, however, has not been adequately recognized or analyzed.

Zelda most aptly described her own divided personality in Save Me the Waltz, saying that it was “very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to . . . be loved and safe and protected” (Collected Writings 56). Although Zelda, age thirty at the time she wrote the novel, was looking backward at the young girl she had once been, this conflicting pull between dependency and independence also emerges vividly in the letters she wrote at eighteen, in passionate declarations of love expressed by a willful, spirited young woman, but one who, in the ardor of youth, desired to merge with the beloved as closely and completely as possible. These expressions, along with her equally passionate expressions of independence, also represent a more deeply embedded aspect of Zelda’s personality, one that will reemerge in her letters in the 1930s, in which she vacillated between valiant struggles to establish herself as a writer (and therefore create economic independence) and her deeply felt gratitude for and need of Scott’s continued provisions for her care.

Sadly, Scott’s letters to Zelda from this period do not survive. We have only urgent telegrams he sent to Zelda (which she pasted in her scrapbook), announcing the numerous visits he hurriedly planned to make to Montgomery, afraid that if he was not around, another suitor would win her. Scott did express his view of her in a letter to a friend; writing in February 1920, just before his marriage, he admitted, “My friends are unanimous in frankly advising me not to marry a wild, pleasure loving girl like Zelda so I’m quite used to it.” Notwithstanding such warnings, Scott, in this same letter, clearly expressed his understanding of Zelda’s temperament and his commitment to her:

No personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting critisisms and as you say she is not above approach. I’ve always known that. . . . But . . . I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and its these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be.

But of course the real reason . . . is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. (Correspondence 53)

While the loss of Scott’s courtship letters to Zelda is a great one, perhaps there are some advantages to be gained from Zelda’s le...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1982117125
• ISBN 13: 9781982117122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Bryer Jackson R., Barks Cathy W.