Scott and Zelda

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Reading Matthew Bruccoli’s collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s correspondence, “A Life in Letters”, epistles from a time when even telegrams were longer and more well-thought-out than “tweets,” long letters had to be finished in haste before the ship sailed with the daily post, and writers like Fitzgerald displayed both their genius and their ruin. I picked it up not expecting much more than complaints about his sales and some bitchiness about other writers, and there’s a lot of that, but after the first third it begins to get into the terrible breakdown, perhaps insanity, of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, a story that even at a remove of 80 years is just a little heartbreaking. It’s a young, talented, beautiful couple who would seem to have everything, and it all goes rotten at the core and comes apart in a most awful way. That “The Beautiful and Damned” (my favorite Fitzgerald book) turned out to be both autobiographical and prophetic didn’t escape Scott’s notice, and, as ever, knowing it couldn’t prevent it. Scott’s letters to her doctors (for she spent extensive periods in the leading sanitariums of the day in Switzerland, Baltimore, and even Beacon, NY) are by turns concerned, angry, defensive, and touching. And there are some beautiful and terrible self-realizations that are touching even today, and among them perhaps the saddest and loneliest words I’ve ever read:

“Do you think the solitude in which I live has a more amusing decor than any other solitude?”