Zelda Fitzgerald
So at Valmont I was in torture, and my head closed to-gether. You gave me a flower and said it was "plus petite et moins entendue"--We were friends--Then you took it away and I grew sicker, and there was nobody to teach me, so here I am, after five months of misery and agony and desperation. I'm glad you have found the material for a Josephine story and I'm glad that you take such an interest in sports. Now that I can't sleep anymore I have lots to think about, and since I have gone so far alone I suppose I can go the rest of the way--but if it were Scottie I would not ask that she go through the same hell and if I were God I could not justify or find a reason for imposing it--except that it was wrong, of course, to love my teacher when I should have loved you. But I didn't have you to love--not since long before I loved her.
I have just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other. When I came to you twice last summer and asked you to start over it was because I thought I was becoming seriously involved sentimentally and preparing situations for which I was morally and practically unfitted. You had a song about gigolos: if that had ever entered my head there was, besides the whole studio, three other solutions in Paris.
I came to you half-sick after a difficult lunch at Armonville and you kept me waiting until it was too late in front of the Guaranty Trust.
Sandy's tiny candle was not much of a strain, but it required something better than your week of drunkenness to put it out. You didn't care: so I went on and on--dancing alone, and, no matter what happens, 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--
-Letter from Zelda Fitzgerald to her husband, July 1930, Prangins Clinic (from Matthew Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur)
I have just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other. When I came to you twice last summer and asked you to start over it was because I thought I was becoming seriously involved sentimentally and preparing situations for which I was morally and practically unfitted. You had a song about gigolos: if that had ever entered my head there was, besides the whole studio, three other solutions in Paris.
I came to you half-sick after a difficult lunch at Armonville and you kept me waiting until it was too late in front of the Guaranty Trust.
Sandy's tiny candle was not much of a strain, but it required something better than your week of drunkenness to put it out. You didn't care: so I went on and on--dancing alone, and, no matter what happens, 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--
-Letter from Zelda Fitzgerald to her husband, July 1930, Prangins Clinic (from Matthew Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur)