Well thank you for a very happy day and numerous other favors and let me know if I’ve any possible chance for earlier publication and give my thanks or whatever is in order to Mr. Scribner1 or whoever else was on the deciding committee.
Probably be East next month or Nov.
(over for P.S.)
Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. Who picks out the cover? I’d like something that could be a set—look cheerful + important like a Shaw Book. I notice Shaw, Galesworthy + Barrie do that. But Wells doesn’t—. I wonder why. No need of illustrations is there? I knew a fellow at College who’d have been a wonder for books like mine—a mixture of Aubrey Beardsly, Hogarth + James Montgomery Flagg. But he got killed in the war.
Excuse this immoderately long and rambling letter but I think you’ll have to allow me several days for recuperation.
Yrs.
F.S.F.
TO: Alida Bigelow2
Postmarked September 23, 1919
ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University
1st Epistle of St. Scott to the Smithsonian
Chapter the I
Verses the I to the last—
(599 Summit Ave.)
In a house below the average
Of a street above the average
In a room below the roof
With a lot above the ears
I shall write Alida Bigelow
Shall indite Alida Bigelow
As the worlds most famous gooph
(This line don’t rhyme)
Most beautiful, rather-too-virtuous-but-entirely-enchanting Alida:
Scribner has accepted my book. Ain’t I Smart!
But hic jublilatio erat totam spoiled for meum par lisant une livre, une novellum (novum) nomine “Salt” par Herr C. G. Morris1—a most astounding piece of realism, it makes Fortitude2 look like an antique mental ash-can and is quite as good as “The Old Wives Tale.”3
Of course I think Walpole is a weak-wad anyhow.
Read Salt young girl so that you may know what life B.
In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod—always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults—rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my chrystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.
Before we meet again I hope you will have tasted strong liquor to excess and kissed many emotional young men in red and yellow moonlights—these things being chasterners of those prejudices which are as gutta percha to the niblicks of the century.
I am frightfully unhappy, look like the devil, will be famous within 1 12 month and, I hope, dead within 2.
Hoping you are the same
I am
With Excruciating respect
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. If you wish, you may auction off this letter to the gurls of your collidge—on condition that the proceeds go to the Society for the drownding of Armenian Airedales.
Bla!
F.S.F.
TO: Robert Bridges
1919
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
599 Summit Ave
St. Paul, Minn
Oct. twenty-5th
Dear Mr. Bridges:
This is a query. I have a project. It is a work of about 20,000 words and more on the order of my novel than like these stories I’ve been doing. But its the sort of thing that will require a full months work and as The New Republic, Scribners + possibly the Atlantic Monthly are the only magazines that would publish it I don’t want to start until you assure me that there’s nothing in the project which seems to bar it from Scribner’s if it be suffiently interesting and well done.
It is a literary forgery purporting to be selections from the note-books of a man who is a complete literary radical from the time he’s in college thru two years in New York—finally he goes to training camp, gets bored and enlists as a pvt. This is the end of the book—a note by me will say that he served in Companies E and G of the twenty-eighth Infantry and died of appenditis in Paris in 1918.
It will be in turns cynical, ingenious, life saturated, critical and bitter. It will be racy and startling with opinions and personalities. I have a journal I have kept for 3 1/2 yrs. which my book didn’t begin to exhaust, which I don’t seem to be able to draw on for stories but which certainly is, I think, highly amusing. This thoroughly edited and revised, plus some imagination + 1/2 doz ingredients I have in mind will be the bulk of it. It would take 2 or possibly 3 parts to publish it.
The tremendous sucess of Butler’s note books and of Barbellions (Wells?) Disappointed Man1 makes me think that the public loves to find out the workings of active minds in their personal problems. It will be bound to have that streak of coarseness that both Wells + Butler have but there won’t be any James Joyce flavor to it.
Of course you can’t possibly commit yourself until you’ve seen it but as I say I’d want to know before I start if a work of that nature would be intrinsicly hostile to the policy of Scribner’s Magazine. With apologies for intruding apon your patience once again I am
Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Harold Ober
1920
ALS, 2 pp. Lilly Library
Dear Mr. Ober—
You could have knocked me over with a feather when you told me you had sold Myra—I never was so heartily sick of a story before I finished it as I was of that one.
Enclosed is a new version of Barbara, called Bernice Bobs Her Hair to distinguish it from Mary Rineheart’s “Bab” stories in the Post. I think I’ve managed to inject a snappy climax into it. Now this story went to several Magazines this summer—Scribners, Woman’s H. Companion + the Post but it was in an entirely different, absolutely unrecognizable form, single-spaced and none of ’em kept it more than three days except Scribner, who wrote a personal letter on it.
Is there any money in collections of short stories?
This Post money comes in very handy—my idea is to go south—probably New Orleans and write my second novel. Now my novels, at least my first one, are not like my short stories at all, they are rather cynical and pessimistic—and therefore I doubt if as a whole they’d stand much chance of being published serially in any of the uplift magazines at least until my first novel + these Post stories appear and I get some sort of a reputation.
Now I published three incidents of my first novel in Smart Set last summer + my idea in the new one is to sell such parts as might go as units separately to different magazines, as I write them, because it’ll take ten weeks to write it + I don’t want to run out of money. There will be one long thing which might make a novellette for the Post called The Diary of a Popular Girl, half a dozen cynical incidents that might do for Smart Set + perhaps a story or two for Scribners or Harpers. How about it—do you think this is a wise plan—or do you think a story like C. G. Norris’ Salt or Cabells Jurgen or Driesers Jenny Gerhard1 would have one chance in a million to be sold serially? I’m asking you for an opinion about this beforehand because it will have an influence on my plans.
Hoping to hear from you I am
Sincerlerly
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. The excellent story I told you of probably wont be along for two or three weeks. I’m stuck in the middle of it.
F S F.
599 Summit Ave.
St. Paul, Minn
Jan 8th 1919.
TO: Zelda Sayre
Before January 9, 1920
Wire. Scrapbook. Princeton University
New York City
I FIND THAT I CANNOT GET A BERTH SOUTH UNTIL FRIDAY OR POSSIBLY SATURDAY NIGHT WHICH MEANS I WONT ARRIVE UNTIL THE ELEVENTH OR TWELFTH PERIOD AS SOON AS I KNOW I WILL WIRE YOU THE SATURDAY EVENING POST HAS JUST TAKEN TWO MORE STORIES PERIOD ALL MY LOVE
TO: Zelda Sayre
Wire. Scrapbook. Princeton University
NEW YORK NY
FEB 24 1920
MISS LIDA SAYRE
I HAVE SOLD THE MOVIE RIGHTS OF HEAD AND SHOULDERS TO THE METRO COMPANY FOR TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS1 I LOVE YOU DEAREST GIRL
SCOTT
TO: John Grier Hibben2
ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University
Wakeman’s, Westport, Conn, June 3d, 1920
My Dear President Hibben:
I want to thank you very much for your letter and to confess that the honor of a letter from you outweighed my real regret that my book gave you concern. It was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said “No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma” if you can’t do chemistry”—after that I retired. It is easy for the successful man in college, the man who has gotten what he wanted to say
“It’s all fine. It makes men. It made me, see”—
—but it seems to me its like the Captain of a Company when he has his men lined up at attention for inspection. He sees only the tightly buttoned coat and the shaved faces. He doesn’t know that perhaps a private in the rear rank is half crazy because a pin is sticking in his back and he can’t move, or another private is thinking that his wife is dying and he can’t get leave because too many men in the company are gone already.
I don’t mean at all that Princeton is not the happiest time in most boys lives. It is of course—I simply say it wasn’t the happiest time in mine. I love it now better than any place on earth. The men—the undergraduates of Yale + Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country. I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperment.
My view of life, President Hibben, is the view of Theodore Driesers and Joseph Conrads—that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men. My idealism flickered out with Henry Strater’s anticlub movement at Princeton.1 “The Four Fists” latest of my stories to be published was the first to be written. I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially nessesary for me to give the magazines what they wanted. The appreciation it has recieved has amazed me.
I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over accentuate the gayiety + country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the readers interest that part was much over stressed, and of course the hero not being average reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate. It is the Princeton of Saturday night in May. Too many intelligent class mates of mine have failed to agree with it for me to consider it really photgraphic any more, as of course I did when I wrote it.
Next time I am in Princeton I will take the priveledge of coming to see you.
I am, sir,
Very Respectfully Yours
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: David Balch2
ALS, 2 pp. Collection of Marcia and Maurice Neville
Westport, Conn
June 19th, 1920
Dear Mr. Balch:
I have unearthed so many esoteric facts about myself lately for magazines ect. that I blush to continue to send out colorful sentences about a rather colorless life. However here are some “human interest points”.
(1.) I was always interested in prodigies because I almost became one—that is in the technical sense of going to college young. I finally decided to enter at the conventional age of 17. I went in on my 17th birthday and, I think, was one of the ten youngest in my class at Princeton. Prodigies always interested me + it seemed to me that the Harvard prodigy, Boris Siddis, offerred grounds for a story. The original title of Head + Shoulders was “The prodigy” + I just brought in the chorus girl by way of a radical contrast. Before I’d finished she almost stole the story.
(2) I got four dozen letters from readers when it first appeared in the Post.
(3) It will be republished in my collection of short stories “Flappers + Philosophers” which The Scribners are publishing this fall.
(4) I’d rather watch a good shimmee dance than Ruth St. Dennis + Pavalowa combined. I see nothing at all disgusting in it.
(5) My story “The Camel’s Back” in The S.E.P. (which you may be buying) was the fastest piece of writing I’ve ever heard of. It is twelve thousand words long and it was written in fourteen hours straight writing and sent to the S.E.P. in its original form.
I can’t think of any thing else just now that hasn’t been used before. And I have no good picture. I expect to have some soon though + will send you one
Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Charles Scribner II
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
Westport, Conn.
Aug. 12th 1920
Dear Mr. Scribner:
Again I am immensely obiged to you. I should certainly feel much more business-like and less profligate if you would tell your book-keeper when our reckoning comes this autumn to charge me full interest on the advances you’ve made me.
My new novel, called “The Flight of the Rocket,”1 concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33d years (1913–1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book + I hope won’t dissapoint the critics who liked my first one. I hope it’ll be in your hands by November 1st
Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Maxwell Perkins
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
38 W 59th St.
New York City
Dec 31st, 1920
Dear Mr. Perkins:
The bank this afternoon refused to lend me anything on the security of stock I hold—and I have been pacing the floor for an hour trying to decide what to do. Here, with the novel within two weeks of completion, am I with six hundred dollars worth of bills and owing Reynolds1 $650 for an advance on a story that I’m utterly unable to write. I’ve made half a dozen starts yesterday and today and I’ll go mad if I have to do another debutante which is what they want.
I hoped that at last being square with Scribner’s I could remain so. But I’m at my wit’s end. Isn’t there some way you could regard this as an advance on the new novel rather than on the Xmas sale which won’t be due me till July? And at the same interest that it costs Scribner’s to borrow? Or could you make it a month’s loan from Scribner + Co. with my next ten books as security? I need $1600.00
Anxiously
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: John Biggs, Jr.
Winter 1921
ALS, 1 p. Bruccoli
38 W. 59th St.
New York City
Dear Jawn:
Wired you today for your adress which I’ve mislaid. The enclosure explains why I want it.
Glad you liked my suggestion. When Perkins comes to see you I shouldn’t tell him your plot but for God’s sake tell him the novel’s damn good! No decent workman belittles his own work unless, and until, its been overpraised.
When you finish it I have a brilliant scene for you. Let me hear from you soon
Scott F.
P.S. Perkins is one hell of a good fellow. He’s the one who stuck out for my 1st novel almost 3 years ago. He’s the editorial brain of The Scribner Co.
S.
P.S.2 Am writing a movie for Dorothy Gish by request of Griffith1 for which I hope to get ten thousand.
TO: Robert D. Clark2
1921
ALS, 4 pp.
Bruccoli
38 W 59th St.
New York City
Feb 9th 1920
Dear Bob:
Your letter riled me to such an extent that I’m answering immediatly. Who are all these “real people” who “create business and politics”? and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheapjacks who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections. I can’t pick up a paper here without finding that some of these “real people” who will not be satisfied only with “a brilliant mind” (I quote you) have just gone up to Sing Sing for a stay—Brindell and Hegerman, two pillars of society, went this morning.
Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry, Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley + Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn’t stand it And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust—and the others live on.
Just occasionally a man like Shaw who was called an immoralist 50 times worse than me back in the 90ties, lives on long enough so that the world grows up to him. What he believed in 1890 was heresy then—by by now its almost respectable. It seems to me I’ve let myself be dominated by “authorities” for too long—the headmaster of Newman, S.P. A, Princeton, my regiment, my business boss—who knew no more than me, in fact I should say these 5 were all distinctly my mental inferiors. And that’s all that counts! The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois—men of thought, mind you, “impractical” men, “idealist” have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars that strut for 20 yrs. or so mouthing such phrases as 100% American (which means 99% village idiot), and die with a little pleasing flattery to the silly and cruel old God they’ve set up in their hearts.
A letter
Stratford-on-Avon
June 8th 1595
Dear Will:
Your family here are much ashamed that you could write such a bawdy play as Troilius and Cressida. All the real people here (Mr. Beef, the butcher and Mr. Skunk, the village undertaker) say they will not be satisfied with a brilliant mind and a pleasant manner. If you really want to ammount to something you’ve got be respected for yourself as well as your work
A Life in Letters Page 5