Fitzgerald, F. Scott | An autograph manuscript fair copy of Edgar Fawcett’s “The Other Side of the Moon,” written for his nurse, Carma Kaufman Freeman

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Autograph manuscript fair copy of Edgar Fawcett’s poem “The Other Side of the Moon,” in Fitzgerald’s hand, 4 pp., on a single bifolium of Cedar Top / Ruxton stationery (each page 160 x 128 mm), [Summer 1934], in dark ink; folds marks, a few marginal smudges.

A moving and scarce manuscript from the grim Baltimore summer of 1934, written for the young nurse who cared for Fitzgerald during multiple hospitalizations.

A touching poem gifted to the nurse who cared for Fitzgerald during his Baltimore hospitalizations in the summer of 1934. During this bleak period Zelda was institutionalized at Sheppard-Pratt; Scottie was staying with cousins in Norfolk; and Fitzgerald himself moved between the Marburg Building at Johns Hopkins and stretches of fragile recuperation at home, cared for by Carma Kaufman Freeman.

Written on Cedar Top letterhead, the Ruxton, Maryland house where Fitzgerald was a guest late that summer, this manuscript transcribes in full Edgar Fawcett’s poem “The Other Side of the Moon,” a dialogue between an adult and an eight-year-old girl with golden hair ("Is it true,” she asked, “that nobody ever yet has seen the other side of the moon?”). The poem echoes Fitzgerald’s anxieties about Scottie—reflected also in Amalie, the abandoned daughter in “Her Last Case,” drafted that same August, and in part inspired by Carma.

“Are you talking of heaven?”

she whispered now,

as she nestled against my knees;

and I said as I stroked her

white, wide brows,

“You may call it that if you please.

For if ever such wonderful land

there be,

and we journey there late or soon

from Heaven, I’m sure, we

may look & see

the other side of the moon.”

This transcription captures Fitzgerald at a moment when illness, debt, and emotional strain had constricted his life to a handful of caretakers. Even then, he still found the strength to look upward toward the stars.

REFERENCES

Bruccoli, Matthew J., Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; Daniel, Anne Margaret. "Medical advances: How F. Scott Fitzgerald's nurse inspired a fictional romance." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6224, 15 July 2022, p. 13

PROVENANCE

Carma Kaufman Freeman; thence by descent