Zelda Sayre to F. Scott Fitzgerald
    One hot Alabama night in July 1918, 23 year old Francis Scott Fitzgerald, First Lieutenant 67th Infantry and aspiring writer, met the beautiful young Zelda Sayre at a Country Club dance in her hometown, Montgomery. She was a teenage whirlwind, just out of high school, sweeping up the beaus of the town--the "jellybeans" as they were known--in her wake. As he danced with Zelda, the handsome Scott smelled to her:

"like new goods...luxury bound in bales."
Several weeks later Scott seemed to have made up his mind to marry Zelda. A diary entry for September 1918 reads:

"Fell in love on the 7th."
Other diary entries and reports from friends suggest that Scott rushed and dazzled her, calling almost daily and dating her regularly.
    When they met, Scott was stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, awaiting the call to the war in Europe. But the war ended in November, and Scott did not have to go. Instead, still deeply attracted to Zelda as she was to him, he went to New York to pursue the wealth and influence that success as a novelist would bring them both. It was a dream that Zelda shared, a way into a new life. The extracted letter printed here--passionate and edgy--was written just before they got engaged. Scott mailed Zelda his mother's engagement ring in late March 1919.
    Back in Montgomery, Zelda was surrounded by suitors whom she encouraged, young men spilling liquor in fast cars. Scott, who was not finding it easy to make a career out of writing advertising copy in New York, was distraught when Zelda broke off their engagement that June. It seemed she wanted their marriage to be founded on self-confidence and success, not failure and poverty. Scott quit his job in advertising and returned to his family home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to rewrite his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Scribner's accepted the book for publication in September. Over the next few months Scott visited Zelda several times. For all her reckless behavior, she was in love with him, and they renewed their engagement.
    They were married in New York at St. Patrick's Cathedral in April 1920, a month after This Side of Paradise had been published to rave reviews and big sales. They became the talk of the town, a golden couple who personified the stylish, reckless living of New York's "Jazz Age" in the Twenties. They were also complex and vulnerable people, who found their role bewildering. Back in 1915 Scott had dropped out of Princeton to write. He was extremely dedicated, working long hours and drinking heavily to relax. Paradoxically, his newfound success threatened the solitude he needed to write. Zelda's role was even more tangled. Just after the couple married, a friend of Scott's from Princeton, Alexander McCaig, described her as a,

"temperamental, small-town Southern belle,"
who chewed gum and showed her knees. A year later he had changed his mind. She was,

"without doubt the most brilliant and most beautiful young woman I've ever known."
Scott told him that her ideas figured large in the novel he was currently working on, The Beautiful and Damned. Zelda became, in effect, Scott's material. Nearly all his book described variations on their life together, sometimes incorporating bits of her diaries and letters as well. As Zelda said at the time,

"Plagiarism begins at home."
Their daughter, Scottie, was born in October 1921. Meanwhile the wear and tear of life on Long Island, with its heavy drinking and nonstop high living, began to show in the marriage.
    In January 1922, with clinical yet admiring detachment, Scott wrote to the literary critic Edmund Wilson that,

"the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda"
enormously influenced his writing. Perhaps the "selfishness" to which Scott referred was Zelda's struggle to realize herself beyond her role in Scott's fiction. She too began to write.
    In 1924, in an attempt to restore their disheveled lives and find space for Scott to write, they left New York for France, living first in Paris and then at St. Raphael, a small resort on the Riviera. There, within the beach community of bronzed young men, the Americans befriended a French aviator named Edouard Jozan. To Scott's outrage and shock, Zelda fell in love with Edouard and asked Scott for a divorce. At the beginning of September, just when their crisis seemed to have passed, she overdosed on sleeping pills. The does was not fatal, and in November, with Zelda recovered and Scott's new novel, The Great Gatsby, completed--they traveled together to Italy. There Zelda began to paint, a pastime she would maintain for life. Back in Paris in 1928, Zelda took up a new and compulsive interest--ballet. Much to Scott's distress and anger she practiced for hours at a time, straining for:

"the flights of the human soul divorced from the person."
She was 27, far too old to have any real success as a dancer. Not wanting Scott to pay for the ballet lessons, she wrote to earn the money for them. These twin pressures--along with the anxieties they concealed--exhausted her and in 1930 precipitated her first mental breakdown. Zelda moved from clinic to clinic in Europe and the United States with brief periods of fragile stability at home, increasingly apart from, but always in touch with, her husband. Many of their letters from this period are affectionate and nostalgic, Scott reminding her of old friends and Zelda thanking him for gifts of flowers, jewelry, and perfume. A few letters express Scott's fears for her recovery. He saw Zelda's writing as the most destructive of her bids to realize herself. Zelda was his raw material as well as her own, and who could use it better, the rambling amateur or the fine-honed professional? In the midst of her illness, he insisted,

"I want you to stop writing fiction."
Later, after his death, Zelda dreamed that his voice called to her,

"I have lost the woman I put in my book."
    Even when they were fighting a battle of wills, they were fighting more for each other than against each other. As Scott put it,

"Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations."
    Scott died of a heart attack in 1940, while Zelda was still in the hospital. Looking back, she remembered the best things about their time together,

"It seems as if he was always planning happiness for Scottie and me."
In the "golden boom" of Twenties' New York they got too much too soon. Zelda said in 1939,

"Nothing could have survived our life."





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin