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 Veterans Hospital 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.
I hope you’re happy. I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side) - I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics. If you did I d advise you to try some short stories. You never could plot for shocks but you might try something along the line of Gogol’s The Cloak’ or Chekhov’s ‘The Darling.’ They are both in the Modern Library’s Best Russian Short Stories which the local Carnegie may have in stock.
Don’t waste your poor little income on wires to me - unless the money doesn’t come.
Yours at about 99.7,
Scott
P.S. Love to all. Excuse the bitter tone. I’ve overworked on the goddamn movie and am in bed for the day.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
May 11, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Sorry I wrote you such a cross letter last week and I miss getting an answer from you. Things are better. The awful