be sending you a semi-permanent address any day now.
Dearest love.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California
June 14, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and well-informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten-year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have - which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, then perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August - by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with ‘Babylon Revisited’ - or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two-million-dollar tripe like All This and Heaven Too.
Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we Were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.
Love to all of you.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 6, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I enjoyed reading the interview given out by our learned Scottie. I’m glad to know she spends her time thinking about strikes, relief and starvation while feeling no slightest jealousy of the girls with silver foxes who choose to recline on country club porches. It shows that we have hatched a worthy egg and I do not doubt that someday, like George Washington, she will ‘raise that standard to which all good men can repair.’
Seriously, I never heard such a bunch of hokum in my life as she sold that newspaper reporter but I’m glad she has one quality which I have found almost as valuable as positive original’ty, viz.: she can make the most of what she has read and heard - make a few paragraphs from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and The New Republic go further than most people can do with years of economic study. That is one way to grow learned, first pretend to be - then have to live up to it.
She has just shown her keenness in another way by taking me for $100.00 more advance money for the summer school than I had expected to pay, leaving me with a cash balance of $11.00 at date. Don’t bawl her out for this. Leave it to me because it most certainly will come out of her allowance and it was honestly nothing but carelessness in getting the exact data from the summer school. However, it affects you to this extent - that I’m going to ask you that if these checks reach you Monday not to cash them until Tuesday. It will be perfectly safe to cash them Tuesday because I’m getting a payment on the story at which I am back at work. The majority of the payment ($900.00) goes to Uncle Sam. $300.00 goes against a loan already made against it and the rest will be distributed for our needs during the next three weeks - so please if you have any extra funds save them for any emergency. We have done our share of lending and giving over many years and we must all watch our money.
Tell me what you do. Cousin Ceci writes that my Aunt Elise died last April at the age of ninety. I was fond of that old woman and I hadn’t yet assimilated her passing.
With dearest love always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 12, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
You never tell me if you are painting or not, or what you are writing if anything. I spent a silly day yesterday with Shirley Temple and her family. They want to do the picture and they don’t want to do the picture, but that’s really the producer’s worry and not mine. She’s a lovely little girl, beautifully brought up, and she hasn’t quite reached the difficult age yet - figuring the difficult age at twelve. She reminds me so much of Scottie in the last days at La Paix, just before she entered Bryn Mawr. You weren’t there the day of the Maryland Hunt Cup Race in the spring of ‘34 when Scottie got the skirt and coat from my mother which suddenly jumped her into adolescence. You may remember that she wore the little suit till she was about sixteen.
It’s hot as hell here today and I haven’t been able to work. I too have had only one letter from Scottie, but she seems to like Boston.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 20, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Thanks for your letter about what you are doing. I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there. When times are a little calmer I think you ought to have a really inclusive exhibition of your pictures. Perhaps if the war is over next year it would be a good summer’s job for Scottie to arrange it - I mean fill the place that Cary Ross did six years ago. She would meet all sorts of interesting people doing it and I had an idea of suggesting it as her work for this August, but the war pushes art into the background. At least people don’t buy anything.
I am sending you Gertrude Stein’s new book which Max Perkins sent me. I am mentioned in it on some page - anyhow I’ve underlined it. On the back of the wrapping paper I’ve addressed it and stamped it to Scottie. She might like to look it over too. It’s a melancholy book now that France has fallen, but fascinating for all that.
Ten days more to go on the Temple picture.
With dearest love,
Scott
Please write me a few lines about your mother’s health. Is she well in general? Is she active? I mean does she still go downtown, etc., or does she only go around in automobiles? And tell me why you didn’t go to Carolina this year. Was it lack of funds or is the trip a little too much for her?
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California August 24,1940
Dearest Zelda:
By the time you get this Scottie will have leisurely started South - with two or three stops. I’ve missed seeing her this summer but we’ve exchanged long letters of a quite intimate character in regard to life and literature. She is an awfully good girl in the broad fundamentals. Please
