Icons of the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, are remembered even today. Not just for their iconic love letters but for the immense talent they hold as creative artists. Fitzgerald, known for his magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, whereas Zelda was a well-known painter and writer. Today, we aren’t here to talk about their work. We are going to swoon and cry over the love letters they wrote to each other.
Their marriage was famously tumultuous, marked by passion, rivalry, mental illness, and literary ambition. These letters span their courtship, marriage, separation, and institutionalization era, which reveal their intense bond along with the toll their ambitions and illnesses took on their relationship. Let’s take a look at their lives through their own words and lines from the letters written in longing, in anger, in joy, and often in madness.
- I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
- I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses … We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.
- There’s nothing in all the world I want but you and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence because you’d soon love me less and less and I’d do anything — anything — to keep your heart for my own. I don’t want to live—I want to love first, and live incidentally… Don’t—don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me. You’ve trusted me with the dearest heart of all—and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had.
- All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms under the moon – the dearest arms in all the world – darling arms that I love to feel around me – How much longer – before they’ll be there to stay? When I do get home again, you’ll certainly have a most awful time ever moving me one inch from you.
- The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.
- 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.
- You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too – the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand – and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and – I find it to be you and you only…. Forget the past – what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever – even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you – turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back…
- I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post-cards.
- I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally
- I’m so damn glad I love you – I wouldn’t love any other man on earth – I b’lieve if I had deliberately decided on a sweetheart, he’d have been you.
3 Heartwarming Love Letters Written By Zelda To Scott From Switzerland
In the history of literature, only a few love stories are as poignant as Zelda and Scott’s. Their romance and passion can be felt just by reading the love letters they wrote to each other. Here are three letters written by Zelda when she was admitted at Les Rives de Prangins, a clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, where she was admitted after a series of mental breakdowns:
1. June 1930
AL, 8 pp. Princeton University
Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland
Dear Scott:
You said in your letter that I might write when I needed you. For the first time since I went to Malmaison I seem to be about half human-being, capable of focusing my attention and not walking in black horror like I have been for so long. Though I am physically sick and covered with eczema I would like to see you. I’m lonely and do not seem to be able to exist in the world on any terms at all. If you do not want to come maybe Newman would come.
Please don’t write to me about blame. I am tired of rummaging my head to understand a situation that would be difficult enough if I were completely lucid. I cannot arbitrarily accept blame now when I know that in the past I felt none. Anyway, blame doesn’t matter. The thing that counts is to apply the few resources available to turning life into a tenable orderly affair that resembles neither the black hole of Calcutta or Cardinal Ballou’s cage. Of cource, you are quite free to proceed as you think best. If I can ever find the dignity and peace to apply myself, I am sure there must be something to fill the next twenty years of a person who is willing to work for it, so do not feel that you have any obligations toward me, sentimental or otherwise, unless you accept them as freely as you did when I was young and happy and quite different from how I am now—
I am infinitely sorry that I have been ungrateful for your attempts to help me. Try to understand that people are not always reasonable when the world is as unstable and vacillating as a sick head can render it—That for months I have been living in vaporous places peopled with one-dimensional figures and tremulous buildings until I can no longer tell an optical illusion from a reality—that head and ears incessantly throb and roads disappear, until finally I lost all control and powers of judgement and was semi-imbecilic when I arrived here. At least now I can read, and as soon as possible I am going on with some stories I have half done. Won’t you send me “Technique of the Drama” please? I have an enormous desire to try to write a play that I have begun a little.
Scottie has not written but I know she is happy with Madamoiselle. I’m glad you are better. It seems odd that we were once a warm little family—secure in a home—
Thank you for the books—
Was it fun in Paris? Who did you see there and was the Madeleine pink at five o’clock and did the fountains fall with hollow delicacy into the framing of space in the Place de la Concorde, and did the blue creep out from behind the Colonades of the rue de Rivoli through the grill of the Tuileries and was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafes and were there lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play de Bussey—
I love Paris. How was it?
2. Fall 1930
AL, 3 pp. Princeton University
Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland
Goofy, my darling, hasn’t it been a lovely day? I woke up this morning and the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel on my table so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air: love to Doo-do and the remembered feel of our skins cool against each other in other mornings like a school-mistress. And you ’phoned and said I had written something that pleased you and so I don’t believe I’ve ever been so heavy with happiness. The moon slips into the mountains like a lost penny and the fields are black and punguent and I want you near so that I could touch you in the autumn stillness even a little bit like the last echo of summer. The horizon lies over the road to Lausanne and the succulent fields like a guillotine and the moon bleeds over the water and you are not so far away that I can’t smell your hair in the drying breeze. Darling—I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter [ ] or a grand patron—or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon—Anyway, I love you most and you ’phoned me just because you ’phoned me to-night—I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear—
I’m so glad you finished your story—Please let me read it Friday. And I will be very sad if we have to have two rooms. Please.
Dear. Are you sort of feeling aimless, surprised, and looking rather reproachful that no melo-drama comes to pass when your work is over—as if you ridden very hard with a message to save your army and found the enemy had decided not to attack—the way you sometimes feel—or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands in the middle of the week—the way you sometimes are—or are you organizing and dynamic and mending things—the way you always are.
I love you—the way you always are.
Dear—
Good-night—
Dear-dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear dear dear dear dear dear
3. After August 1931
AL, 6 pp. Princeton University
Prangins Clinic, Nyon, Switzerland
Dearest, my Love—
Your dear face shining in the station, your dear radiant face and all along the way shimmering above the lake—
It’s so peaceful to be with you—when we are to-gether we are apart in a high indominatable place, sweet like your room at Caux swinging over the blue. I love you more always and always—
Please don’t be depressed: nothing is sad about you except your sadness and the frayed places on your pink kimona and that you care so much about everything—You are the only person who’s ever done all they had to do, damn well, and had enough left over to be dissatisfied. You are the best—the best—the best and genius is so much a part of you that when you find a person you like you think they have it too because it’s your only conception—O my love, I love you so—and I want you to be happy. Can’t you possibly be just a little bit glad that we are alive and that all the year that’s coming we can be to-gether and work and love and get some peace for all the things we’ve paid so much for learning? Stop looking for solace: there isn’t any and if there were life would be a baby affair. Johnny takes his medicine and Johnny get well and a quarter besides. Think! Johnny might get some mysterious malady if left to develop and have it named for him and live forever, and if Johnny died from not having his syrup the parable would have been a moralistic one about his mother.
Dear, I’m tired and in an awful muddle myself and I don’t know what to tell you—but love is important and we can make life do and you are greater than any of them when you’re well and rested enough not to know they exist.
Stop thinking about our marriage and your work and human relations—you are not a showman arranging an exhibit—You are a Sun-god with a wife who loves him and an artist—to take in, assimilate and all alterations to be strictly on paper—
Darling, forgive me, I love you so. I can’t find anything to say beyond that and I’d like a wonderful philosophy to comfort you.
Dear, my love.
Think of me some—
It’s so happy to touch you.
Conclusion
Zelda’s letters to Scott reveal a glimpse into her heart, her undying love and devotion, her trust and affection. Even though they were separated from each other, distance didn’t come between their love. In the end, these letters are not just testaments to love, but to the way love shapes us, molds us, and sustains us through trials and uncertainties. Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from their eternal love.
