May 4, 1940
You are always welcome in California, though. We are even opening our arms to Chamberlain in case the British oust him. We need him for Governor, because we are afraid the Asiatics are going to land from Chinese parasols. Never mind—Santa Barbara will be our Narvik and we’ll defend it to our last producer. And remember, even England still has Noel Coward.
I actually have a formulating plan for part of your summer—if it pleases you—and I think I’ll have the money to make it good. I’m working hard, guiding by the fever which now hovers quietly around the 99.2 level, which is fairly harmless. Tell Frances Kilpatrick that, though I never met her father, he is still one of my heroes, in spite of the fact that he robbed Princeton of a football championship single-handed—he was probably the greatest end who ever played football. In the future please send me clippings even though you do crack at me in the course of your interviews. I’d rather get them than have you send me accounts of what literary sourbellies write about me in their books. I’ve been criticized by experts including myself.
I think I’ve about finished a swell flicker piece. Did you read me in the current Esquire about Orson Welles? Is it funny? Tell me. You haven’t answered a question for six letters. Better do so or I’ll dock five dollars next week to show you I’m the same old meany.
May 7, 1940
You asked me whether I thought that in the Arts it was greater to originate a new form or to perfect it. The best answer is the one that Picasso made rather bitterly to Gertrude Stein:
“You do something first and then somebody else comes along and does it pretty.” . . .
In the opinion of any real artist, the inventor—which is to say Giotto or Leonardo—is infinitely superior to the finished Tintoretto, and the original D. H. Lawrences are infinitely greater than the Steinbecks.
May 11, 1940
I’m glad you didn’t start going to Princeton at sixteen or you’d be pretty jaded by this time. Yale is a good year ahead of Princeton in sophistication, though—it should be good for another year. Though I loved Princeton, I often felt that it was a by-water, that its snobby institutions were easy to beat and to despise, and unless a man was a natural steeplechaser or a society groom, you’d find your own private intellectual and emotional life. Given that premise, it is a lovely quiet place, gentle and dignified, and it will let you alone. Of course, it is at its absolute worst in the * * * * atmosphere you described. Some time go down with a boy on one of those weekends when there’s almost nothing to do.
June 12, 1940
I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting “B’s.” Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for “A’s”—don’t take the things in which you can get “A,” for you can learn them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you can get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry—you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel— and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.”
June 15, 1940
Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss * * * * and her fellow feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr. Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.
June 20, 1940
I wish I were with you this afternoon. At the moment I am sitting rather dismally contemplating the loss of a three year old Ford and a thirty-three year old tooth. The Ford (heavily mortgaged) I shall probably get back, according to the police, because it is just a childish prank of the California boys to steal them and then abandon them. But the tooth I had grown to love. . . .
In recompense I found in Collier’s a story by myself. I started it just before I broke my shoulder in 1936 and wrote it in intervals over the next couple of years. It seemed terrible to me. That I will ever be able to recover the art of the popular short story is doubtful. At present I’m doing a masterpiece for Esquire and waiting to see if my producer can sell the Babylon Revisited screen play to Shirley Temple. If this happens, everything will look very much brighter. . . .
The police have just called up telling me they’ve recovered my car. The thief ran out of gas and abandoned it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The poor lad was evidently afraid to call anybody to help him push it to the curb. I hope next time he gets a nice big producer’s car with plenty of gas in it and a loaded revolver in each side pocket and he can embark on a career of crime in earnest. I don’t like to see any education left hanging in the air.
July 12, 1940
Haven’t you got a carbon of the New Yorker article? I’ve heard that John Mason Brown is a great favorite as a lecturer and I think it’s very modern to be taking dramatic criticism, though it reminds me vaguely of the school for Roxy Ushers. It seems a trifle detached from drama itself. I suppose the thing’s to get really removed from the subject, and the final removal would be a school for teaching critics of teachers of dramatic criticism. . . .
Isn’t the world a lousy place—I’ve just finished a copy of Life and I’m dashing around to a Boris Karloff movie to cheer up. It is an inspirational thing called “The Corpse in the Breakfast Food.” . . .
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.
July 18, 1940
I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer—I mean any one good book like The Brothers Karamazov or Ten Days That Shook the World or Renan’s Life of Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer—then I have heard nothing from you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Père Goriot or Crime and Punishment or even The Doll’s House or St. Matthew or Sons and Lovers? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.
July 29, 1940
This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it comes so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like English Prose since 1800. Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal— and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction—something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once—there’s some in your diary—and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style. . . .
Example: You read Melanctha, which is practically poetry, and sold a New Yorker story—you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-Diary level of average performance. The only sensible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry—Blake to Keats (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for Clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O’Hara. . . .
Strange Interlude is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it an
d called it Candida. On the other hand you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s Doll’s House. Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House—all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes. . . .
Well, the old master wearies—the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little, it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.
August 3, 1940
It isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around—John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in “verse,” but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non-poetry. After that, one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them, so that finally I dropped English altogether. . . .
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you— like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist— or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore, around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful, with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with the Nightingale, which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the Pot of Basil with its great stanzas about the two brothers: “Why were they proud, etc.”; and The Eve of Saint Agnes, which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets: Bright Star and the others. . . .
Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
August 12, 1940
Working among the poor has differing effects on people. If you’re poor yourself, you get their psychology and it’s broadening—for example, when a boy of the bourgeoisie ships before the mast on a tramp schooner where he has to endure the same privations as the seamen, undoubtedly he achieves something of their point of view forever. On the contrary, a Bennington girl spending a month in slum work and passing the weekend at her father’s mansion in Long Island gets nothing at all except a smug feeling that she is Lady Bountiful.
August 24, 1940
I can imagine the dinner party. I remember taking Zelda to the young * * * *’s when we were first married and it was a pretty frozen dish, though in general the places we went to even from the beginning were many flights up from the average business man’s ménage. Business is a dull game, and they pay a big price in human values for their money. They are “all right when you get to know them.” I liked some of the young Princeton men in business, but I couldn’t stand the Yale and Harvard equivalents because we didn’t even have the common ground of the past. The women are empty twirps mostly, easy to seduce and not good for much else. I am not talking about natural society women like * * * * and * * * * and some others, who made their lives into pageants, almost like actresses.
However, you seem wise enough to see that there is something in * * * *’s angle. College gives you a head start, especially a girl, and people are not in any hurry to live and think your way. It’s all a question of proportion: if you married an army officer you would live half a lifetime of kowtowing to your inferiors until your husband made his way to the top. If, as the chances are, you marry a business man—because for the present business absorbs most of the energetic and attractive boys—you will have to play your cards properly in the business hierarchy. That was why I have always hoped that life would throw you among lawyers or men who were going into politics or big time journalism. They lead rather larger lives.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. It is simply a means of making dubious promises to a credulous public. (But if you showed this letter to * * * *, it would be the end of everything in short order, for a man must have his pride, and the more he realizes such a situation, the less he can afford to admit it.) If I had been promoted when I was an advertising man, given enough money to marry your mother in 1920, my life might have been altogether different. I’m not sure, though. People often struggle through to what they are in spite of any detours—and possibly I might have been a writer sooner or later anyhow.
October 5, 1940
Glad you liked Death in Venice. I don’t see any connection between that and Dorian Gray, except that they both have an implied homosexuality. Dorian Gray is little more than a somewhat highly charged fairy tale which stimulates adolescents to intellectual activity at about seventeen (it did the same for you as it did for me). Sometime you will re-read it and see that it is essentially naïve. It is in the lower ragged edge of “literature” just as Gone With the Wind is in the higher brackets of crowd entertainment. Death in Venice, on the other hand, is a work of art, of the school of Flaubert—yet not derivative at all. Wilde had two models for Dorian Gray: Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin and Huysmans’ A Rebours.
December, 1940
My novel is something of a mystery, I hope. I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do, you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
FROM UNDATED LETTERS
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
I felt all my life the absence of hobbies, except such for me abstract and academic ones as military tactics and football. Botany is such a definite thing. It has its feet on the ground. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.
So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
One time in sophomore year at Princeton, Dean West got up and rolled out the great lines of Horace:
“Integer vitae, scelerisque purus
Non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu”—
—And I knew in my heart that I had missed something by being a poor Latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a great human experience I had rejected through laziness, through having sown no painful seed.
It has been so ironic to me in after life to buy books to master subjects in which I took courses at college and which made no impression on me whatsoever. I once flunked a course on the Napoleonic era, and I now have over 300 books in my library on the subject and the other A scholars wouldn’t even remember it now. That was because I had made the mental tie-up that work equals something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something to be postponed. These scholars you speak of as being bright are no brighter than you, the great majority not nearly as quick, nor, probably, as well endowed with memory and perception, but they have made that tie-up, so that something does not stiffen in their minds at the mention that it is a set task. I am so sure that this is your trouble because you are so much like me a
nd because, after a long time milling over the matter, I have concluded that it was mine. What an idiot I was to be disqualified for play by poor work when men of infinitely inferior capacity got high marks without any great effort.
I never blame failure—there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
The first thing I ever sold was a piece of verse to Poet Lore when I was twenty.
While my picture is going to be done, the producer is going to first do one that has been made for the brave * * * *, who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back by the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby Esquire.
How you could possibly have missed the answer to my first question I don’t know, unless you skipped pages 160 to 170 in Farewell To Arms. There’s nothing vague in these questions of mine but they require attention. I hope you’ve sent me the answer to the second question. The third question is based on the Book Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is fifteen pages long and since you have it in your room you ought to get through it carefully in four or five days. As far as I am concerned, you can skip the wise-cracks in italics on pages 766, 767 and 768. They were written by somebody else and just stuck in there. But read carefully the little introduction on 754 and note also that I do not mean Ecclesiasticus, which is something entirely different. Remember when you’re reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world. Notice that Ernest Hemingway got a title from the third paragraph. As a matter of fact the thing is full of titles. The paragraph on page 756 sounds like the confession of a movie producer, even to the swimming pools.
The Crack-Up Page 26