and I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac
and the blind of necessity must be led
a woman in Paris who knew the night should be just beginning
death was not in the air as it was in autumn
every day it gets harder to think or live
Hemingway’s prose sounded pretty damned biblical
I am thoroughly and completely humiliated and broken if that was what you wanted
I began to see all red while I worked or saw no colors –
I saw humanity as a bottle of red ants
I believed I was a Salamander and it seems that I am nothing but an impediment.
(mythical salamander, which was able to live in fire without harm)
I cannot be anybody
I can’t do anything for you anymore
I’m trying to save myself
I can’t seem to get well enough to be of any use in the world
I could never function simply from the necessity for functioning
not even to save myself
I don’t seem to know anything appropriate for a person of thirty
if I couldn’t be great it wasn’t worth going on with
I had the impression that I was an old person living very quietly in winter.
I lived a quiet
ghostly hypersensitized world of my own.
it’s dreadful,
it’s horrible,
what’s to become of me,
I must work and I won’t be able to,
I should die,
but I must work
it looks as if we’ll never stay anywhere long enough to see how we like it
I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me
Mamma does not know what’s the matter with me
She wrote me she did
You can put that in your story to lend pathos
Bitched once more
music that fell into my stomach from a high parabola
now I see odd things:
people’s arms too long or their faces as though they were stuffed
and they look tiny and far away
once a proper horror for the accidents of life has been instilled into me,
I have no intention of joining the group about a corpse.
our house is full of every ghost that Fanny Ward and Conan Doyle imagined
and I hope that I will never again feel attractive.
Little Bright Eyes.
one illusion is as good as another
{What role did her child play in her life?}.
that is done now
I want to do something else
the only consolation I know is that my intuitions are always wrong.
there is no use in my trying to write to you because if I write one thing one day I think another immediately afterwards.
when you can’t write you sit on the bed and look so woe-begone
like a person who’s got to to a store
and can’t remember what they wanted to buy
there were times very late at night when you and I shared our aloneness.
why did we lose peace and love and health one after the other?
If we knew,
if there was anybody to tell us,
I believe we could try
I’d try so hard
without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.
you either drinking or complaining because you had been
you will have some nice girl who will not care about the things that I cared about and you will be happier
you working to preserve the family and my working to get away from it
of zelda :
‘can you imagine her suspecting that they were talking about her?
I mean, she was standing right there with them!’
he had to identify his brother at the morgue before he came,
but he said it merrily without a trace of sadness or seriousness.
Zelda and he seemed quite fond of each other
each time someone was brought in to be introduced, she would smile at them sweetly, and as she took their hands say under her breath,
I hope you die in the marble ring
her sudden bursts of laughter for no discernible reason..
more as spasm of reaction then from enjoyment
perpetually uncertain of herself, she accused Scott of having homosexual relations with Ernest Hemingway
‘quite nonchalantly an octopus,
using its tentacles to propel himself moved diagonally across the screen.
Zelda shrieked and threw herself all across my lap..
screamed ‘what is it? what is it!’..
It was perfectly obvious that it was an octopus –
but it had nevertheless frightened her to death.
She was hardly a timid woman..
absolutely fearless..
she had seen it as a distortion of something horrible.’
‘she kept saying, what’ll we do? Let’s do something..’
she was easily distracted and even the simplest conversations were difficult for her to maintain
she grabbed the steering wheel of their car and tried to put them at the cliff..
to her it seemed that the car had a will of its own,
that it swerved as though by its own volition
the only person she had ever been attached to was her mother,
toward whom she was extraordinarily loving
Christmas 1930:
Zelda asked to see Scottie and behaved badly when confronted by her,
breaking the ornaments on the tree and talking incoherently
her behaviors toward Scott vacilitatedbetween being loving and being nasty.
She was impulsively affectionate..
yet she might turn on him as he responded to her affection
she described him (her father) exclusively in terms of what he was and did
an eliminated poison attacks the nerves
‘I considered her a constitutional emotionally unbalanced psychopath.’
Zelda’s fiction:
(the characters) wish to distinguish themselves without fully knowing how to do so –
what they suffer from is a boredom of spirit.
The girls do not interact with Life.
Rather, they are moved through it.
Dialogue is always non existent –
what she does is to describe the characters,
not develop them..
Their carelessness,
we are told,
is only a decoy for their total control of social situations
“at first there had been Nanny but Nanny and I quarreled and we sent her back to France and the baby had only its mother after that,
and a series of people who straightened its shoes.”
The Melarckey case and the Boy Who Killed His Mother
Dorothy Ellingson- a sixteen year old girl who murdered her mother in January of 1925 during a quarrel about the girl’s wild ways.
Whorehouse Mirror
they seemed to friends to be two children playing together
as desperately as they needed each other,
they blindly strove to disentangle themselves from each other –
they became engaged in a contest for personal survival.
since they were fleeing from themselves,
they did not find respite.
their very identities were in peril.
Scott:
does this sound like a long polemic composed of childish stubborness and ingratitude?
‘Hackwork’ for the cinema ect.
Ha’nts.
I was going to take your arm Morley.
Metallic Superimposition?
My wife –
who had never tried to use her talents and intelligence..
People respected her because I concealed her weakness.
The cri de couer of a man who while wounding had been himself deeply wounded.
we have ruined ourselves –
I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.
what I gave up for Zelda was women.
you were a phantom washing clothes.
you were going crazy and calling it genius.
at various periods of his life Fitzgerald referred to having tubercolosis..
usu. as a pretext to cover his drinking.
‘all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself.’
Scott’s Novel Idea:
About a woman who wants to destroy a man because she loves him too much..
All women commit suicide,
by drinking,
by sleeping around,
by being impolite to friends
To be a tall rich American girl is a form of hereditary achievement (Vivian Taube)
hexafu 