However I won’t bore you any longer. I expect to spend about two years on my next novel and it ought to be more successful critically. Its about myself—not what I thought of myself in This Side of Paradise. Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented.
With many, many thanks
F. Scott Fitzg——
P.S. This is simply an acknowledgment and expects no answer.
P.S. Italy (but not France) is full of Pilsen and Munich beer of fine quality. There is less than there was when I got there.
TO: Hazel McCormack
Postmarked May 15, 1925
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
14 Rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France
Dear Patsy—Thanks enormously for your kind note—One from Mencken and a handful of fairly intelligent reviews arrived in the same mail and did a lot to lift me up from the wearying fact that it isn’t going to sell. Not like the others, I mean, which automaticly condemns me to 6 months of canned rubbish for the popular magazines. Thank you for likeing Love in the Night too. I didn’t like it.
Gatsby was far from perfect in many ways but all in all it contains such prose as has never been written in America before. From that I take heart. From that I take heart and hope that some day I can combine the verve of Paradise, the unity of the Beautiful + Damned and the lyric quality of Gatsby, its aesthetic soundness, into something worthy of the admiration of those few——God, I am inextricably intangled in that sentence, and the only thing to do is to start a new one. Anyhow, thanks.
We have taken an appartment in the Rue de Tillsit near the Etoile for 8 months and I have taken a studio near by to write in. We’re glad to leave Italy and Paris in the Spring is no easy place to settle down to work. In fact most of our time is taken up in dodging our friends, most of whom seem to be over here. About July I’m starting a new novel.
About my life in general I can refer you to the following gems of biography.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
—by Edmund Wilson—In “The Literary Spotlight” (Doran)
"
— " Paul Rosenfeld—In “Men Seen” (Dial Press)
"
— " Ernest Boyd—In “Portraits Real + Imaginary” (Appleton) I think
"
— " Bee Wilson—In “Smart Set” early in 1924
"
— " Himself—In Who’s Who in Sat. Eve. Post late in 1920
or early ” 1921
And such articles of my own as you’ve seen like “How to Live on 36,000 a year”, its sequeal, “What I Think + Feel at 25” ect. not to mention a book called This Side of Paradise which is what a most egotistic young man thought of himself at twenty-two (or was it sixteen).
I enclose you a picture of a naked woman—who, much to my shame is not a member of the Folies Bergere but my own daughter.
Please send me any stories ect. that you publish and thanks again for the letter.
As Ever Your Friend
F Scott Fitzg
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. May 22, 1925
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
14 Rue de Tillsit
Paris
(Permanent adress)
Dear Max:
I suppose you’ve sent the book to Collins. If not please do and let me know right away. If he won’t take it because of its flop we might try Capes.1 I’m miserable at owing you all that money—if I’d taken the serial money I could at least have squared up with you.
I’ve had entheusiastic letters from Mencken and Wilson—the latter says he’s reviewing it for that Chicago Tribune syndicate he writes for. I think all the reviews I’ve seen, except two, have been absolutely stupid and lowsy. Some day they’ll eat grass, by God! This thing, both the effort and the result have hardened me and I think now that I’m much better than any of the young Americans without exception.
Hemminway is a fine, charming fellow and he appreciated your letter and the tone of it enormously. If Liveright doesn’t please him he’ll come to you, and he has a future. He’s 27.
Bishop sent me The Apple of the Eye and it seemed pretty much the old stuff that D. H. Lawrence, Anderson, Suckow and Cather did long ago and Hardy before them. I don’t think such a peasantry exists in America—Ring is much closer to the truth. I suspect tragedy in the American country side because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty. All the rest is pathos. However maybe its good; a lot of people seem to think so.
I will send All The Sad Young Men about June 1st or 10th. Perhaps the deferred press on Gatsby will help it but I think now there’s no use even sending it to that crowd Broun, F.P.A., Ruth Hale ect.2 Incidently my being over here + the consequent delay in the proofs and review copies undoubtedly hurt the effect of the books appearance. Thanks again for your kind letters and all you’ve done. Let me know about Collins.
Scott
Please let me know how many copies sold + whether the sale is now dead.
TO: Harold Ober
Received May 28, 1925
ALS, 1 p. Lilly Library
Dear Ober:
Thank you for selling those two stories and for the deposits and for the extra five hundred—it came in handy. We have decided that travelling saves no money, and taken an appartment here for eight months.
“What Price Macaroni?” and “The Rich Boy” (second and third versions respectively) are at the typist. Commercially the book has fallen so flat that I’m afraid there’ll be no movie rights. However a book always has a chance value as a movie property. I imagine that if one movie makes a strike they buy the rights of all the other books you’ve written. However I’m not depressed and intend to do about five short stories this summer.
As Ever, Yours
F Scott Fitz—
TO: T. R. Smith1
Late May 1925
ALS, 1 p. Collection of Mania
and Maurice Neville
14 Rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France
Dear Tom:
Thank you many times for your kind letter about Gatsby. I’m afraid its not going to sell like the others but I’m delighted at the response from the people who care about writing.
Now as to the publishing business. Max Perkins is one of my closest friends + my relations with the Scribners in general have always been so cordial and so pleasant that I couldn’t imagine breaking them. But as I told you once before if anything should happen to make our relations impossible I should certainly come to your firm, and I know we’d get along.
TO: Gertrude Stein
ALS, 1 p. Yale University
14 Rue de Tilsitt
June 1925.
Dear Miss Gertrude Stien:
Thank you. None of your letter was “a bad compliment” and all of it “was a comfort.”1 Thank you very much. My wife and I think you a very handsome, very gallant, very kind lady and thought so as soon as we saw you, and were telling Hemminway so when you passed us searching your car on the street. Hemminway and I went to Lyons shortly after to get my car and had a slick drive through Burgundy. He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first rate.
I am so anxious to get The Makeings of Americans + learn something from it and imitate things out of it which I shall doubtless do. That future debt I tried so hard to repay by making the Scribners read it in the Transatlantic + convinced one, but the old man’s mind was too old.
You see, I am content to let you, and the one or two like you who are accutely sensitive, think or fail to think for me and my kind artisticly (their name is not legend but the word like it), much as the man of 1901, say, would let Nietche (sp.) think for him intellectually. I am a very second rate person compared to first rate people—I have indignation as well as most of the other major faults—and it honestly makes me shiver to know that such a writer as you attributes such a significance to my factitious, meritricous (metricious?) This Side of Paradise. Like Gatsby I have only hope. It puts me in a false position, I feel.
Th
ank you enormously for writing me
Scott Fitzg——
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. June 1, 1925
ALS, 8 pp. Princeton University
14 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France
Dear Max:
This is the second letter I’ve written you today—I tore my first up when the letter in longhand from New Cannan telling me about Liveright arrived. I’m wiring you today as to that rumor—but also it makes it nessessary to tell you something I didn’t intend to tell you.
Yesterday arrived a letter from T. R. Smith asking for my next book—saying nothing against the Scribners but just asking for it: “if I happened to be dissatisfied they would be delighted” ect. ect. I answered at once saying that you were one of my closest friends and that my relations with Scribners had always been so cordial and pleasant that I wouldn’t think of changeing publishers. That letter will reach him at about the time this reaches you. I have never had any other communication of any sort with Liveright or any other publisher except the very definate and explicit letter with which I answered their letter yesterday.
So much for that rumor. I am both angry at Tom who must have been in some way responsible for starting it and depressed at the fact that you could have believed it enough to mention it to me. Rumors start like this.
Smith: (a born gossip) “I hear Fitzgerald’s book isn’t selling. I think we can get him, as he’s probably blaming it on Scribners.
The Next Man: It seems Fitzgerald is disatisfied with Scribners and Live-right is after him.
The Third Man: I hear Fitzgerald has gone over to Liverite
Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. If you like I will sign a contract with you immediately for my next three books. The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
First. Tho, as a younger man, I have not always been in sympathy with some of your publishing ideas, (which were evolved under the pre-movie, pre-high-literacy-rate conditions of twenty to forty years ago), the personality of you and of Mr. Scribner, the tremendous squareness, courtesy, generosity and open-mindedness I have always met there and, if I may say it, the special consideration you have all had for me and my work, much more than make up the difference.
Second You know my own idea on the advantages of one publisher who backs you and not your work. And my feeling about uniform books in the matter of house and binding.
Third The curious advantage to a rather radical writer in being published by what is now an ultra-conservative house.
Fourth (and least need of saying) Do you think I could treat with another publisher while I have a debt, which is both actual and a matter of honor, of over $3000.00?
If Mr. Scribner has heard this rumor please show him this letter. So much for Mr. Liveright + Co.
Your letters are catching up with me. Curtis in Town + Country + Van Vetchten in The Nation pleased me.1 The personal letters: Cabell, Wilson, Van Wyke Brooks etc. have been the best of all. Among people over here Ernest Hemminway + Gertrude Stien are quite entheusiastic. Except for Rascoe it has been, critically only a clean sweep—and his little tribute is a result of our having snubbed his quite common and cheaply promiscuous wife.
Ring’s book has been a terrible disappointment to everyone here. He didn’t even bother to cut out the connecting tags at the end of his travel articles and each of the five plays contain the same joke about “his mother—afterwards his wife.” I shouldn’t press him about his new collection, if I were you, because if you just took the first nine stories he writes, they couldn’t be up to the others and you know how reviewers are quick to turn on anyone in whom they have believed and who now disappoints them. Of course I’ve only read Haircut and I may be wrong. I do want him to believe in his work + not have any blows to take away his confidence. The reviews I have seen of What of It? were sorry imitations of Seldes stuff and all of them went out of their way to stab Seldes in the back. God, cheap reviewers are low swine—but one must live.
As I write word has just come by cable that Brady has made an offer2 for the dramatic rights of Gatsby, with Owen Davis, king of proffessional play doctors, to do the dramatization. I am, needless to say, accepting, but please keep it confidential until the actual contract is signed.
As you know, despite my admiration for Through the Wheat, I haven’t an enormous faith in Tom Boyd either as a personality or an artist—as I have, say, in E. E. Cummings and Hemminway. His ignorance, his presumptious intolerance and his careless grossness which he cultivates for vitality as a man might nurse along a dandelion with the hope that it would turn out to be an onion, have always annoyed me. Like Rascoe he has never been known to refuse an invitation from his social superiors—or to fail to pan them with all the venom of a James-Oliver-Curwood3-He-Man when no invitations were forthcoming.
All this is preparatory to saying that his new book sounds utterly lowsy—Shiela Kaye-Smith4 has used the stuff about the farmer having girls instead of boys and being broken up about it. The characters you mention have every one, become stock-props in the last ten years—“Christy, the quaint old hired man” after a season in such stuff as Owen Davis’ Ice Bound must be almost ready for the burlesque circuit.
History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer and his Hired Man Christy
(Both guaranteed to be utterly full of the Feel of the Soil)
1st Period
1855—English Peasant discovered by Geo. Elliot in Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner ect.
1888—Given intellectual interpretation by Hardy in Jude and Tess
1890—Found in France by Zola in Germinal
1900—Crowds of Scandanavians, Hamsun, Bojer1 ect, tear him bodily from the Russian, and after a peep at Hardy, Hamlin Garland2 finds him in the middle west.
Most of that, however, was literature. It was something pulled by the individual out of life and only partly with the aid of models in other literatures.
2nd Period
1914—Shiela Kaye-Smith frankly imitates Hardy, produces two good books + then begins to imitate herself.
1915—Brett Young3 discovers him in the coal country
1916—Robert Frost discovers him in New England
1917—Sherwood Anderson discovers him in Ohio
1918—Willa Cather turns him Swede
1920—Eugene O’Niell puts him on the boards in Different + Beyond Horizon
1922—Ruth Suckow gets in before the door closes
These people were all good second raters (except Anderson) Each of them brought something to the business—but they exhausted the ground, the type was set. All was over.
3rd Period
The Cheapskates discover him—Bad critics and novelists ect.
1923 Homer Croy4 writes West of the Water Tower
1924 Edna Ferber turns from her flip jewish saleswoman for a strong silent earthy carrot grower and—the Great Soul of Charley Towne1 thrills to her passionately. Real and Earthy Struggle
1924 Ice Bound2 by the author of Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model wins Pulitzer Prize
The Able Mcgloughlins3 wins $10,000 prize + is forgotten the following wk.
1925 The Apple of the Eye pronounced a masterpiece
1926—TOM, BOYD, WRITES, NOVEL, ABOUT, INARTICULATE, FARMER WHO, IS, CLOSE, TO SOIL, AND, HIS, HIRED, MAN CHRISTY!
“STRONG! VITAL! REAL!”
As a matter of fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% of the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English + Russian peasants were—and, if has any sensitivity whatsoever (except a most sentimental conception of himself, which our writers persistently shut their eyes to) he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking for the static in a world that for almost a hundred years has simply not been static. Isn’t it a
4th rate imagination that can find only that old property farmer in all this amazing time and land? And anything that ten people a year can do well enough to pass muster has become so easy that it isn’t worth the doing.
I can not disassociate a man from his work.—That this Wescott (who is an effeminate Oxford fairy) and Tom Boyd and Burton Rascoe (whose real ambition is to lock themselves into a stinking little appartment and screw each others’ wives) are going to tell us mere superficial “craftsmen” like Hergeshiemer, Wharton, Tarkington and me about the Great Beautiful Appreciation they have of the Great Beautiful life of the Manure Widder—rather turns my stomach. The real people like Gertrude Stien (with whom I’ve talked) and Conrad (see his essay on James) have a respect for people whose materials may not touch theirs at a single point. But the fourth rate + highly derivative people like Tom are loud in their outcry against any subject matter that doesn’t come out of the old, old bag which their betters have used and thrown away.
For example there is an impression among the thoughtless (including Tom) that Sherwood Anderson is a man of profound ideas who is “handicapped by his inarticulateness”. As a matter of fact Anderson is a man of practically no ideas—but he is one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today. God, he can write! Tom could never get such rythms in his life as there are on the pages of Winesburg, Ohio—. Simple! The words on the lips of critics makes me hilarious: Anderson’s style is about as simple as an engine room full of dynamoes. But Tom flatters himself that he can sit down for five months and by dressing up a few heart throbs in overalls produce literature.
A Life in Letters Page 13