Now, confidential. T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he’s the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he’d read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James.
Wait till they see the new novel!
Did you get Hemmingway?
There was something else I wanted to ask you. What was it? damn it!
We’re coming home in the fall, but I don’t want to. I’d like to live and die on the French Rivierra
What’s the inside dope on the Countess Cathcart case?3
I can’t remember my other question and its driving me frantic. Frantic! (Half an hour later) Frantic!
FRANTIC!!!
If you see anybody I know tell ’em I hate ’em all, him especially. Never want to see ’em again.
Why shouldn’t I go crazy? My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them they havn’t and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge.
If I knew anything I’d be the best writer in America.
Scott Fitzg——
Eureka! Remembered! Refer my movie offers to Reynolds.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. March 1, 1926
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Hotel Bellevue
Saliés-de-Béarn
Dear Max:
Ernest will reach N. Y. as soon as this. Apparently he’s free so its between you and Harcourt. He’ll get in touch with you.
There are several rather but not very Rabelaisian touches in Torrents of Spring (the satire) No worse than Don Stuart or Benchley’s Anderson parody.1 Also Harcourt is said to have offerred $500. advance Torrents and $1000. on almost completed novel. (Strictly confidential.) If Bridges takes 50 Grand I don’t think Ernest would ask you to meet those advances but here I’m getting involved in a diplomacy you can handle better. I don’t say hold 50 Grand over him but in a way he’s holding it over you—one of the reasons he verges toward you is the magazine.
In any case he is tempermental in business made so by these bogus publishers over here. If you take the other two things get a signed contract for The Sun Also Rises (novel) Anyhow this is my last word on the subject—confidential between you + me. Please destroy this letter.
Zelda liked Biggs wrapper2—I didn’t, much.
I “ Ring’s “ 3—Zelda didn’t much.
Niether of us thought mine was a success4—a fair idea but drab and undistinguished—the figure might be a woman. I think it would have been much wiser to have just printing as I suggested. In fact its much the least satisfactory jacket I’ve had. However, after Gatsby I dont believe people buy jackets any more.
Will you send me a sample copy of this McNaughts magazine some time?
You havn’t mentioned Bigg’s book—is it the migrations of the Dunkards or something new. And is it good?
As Ever
Scott Fitzg—
How about Tom and Peggy?
TO: Harold Ober
Received March 15, 1926
ALS, 1 p. Lilly Library
Salies. de. Béam
God knows where
Dear Ober:
This1 is one of the lowsiest stories I’ve ever written. Just terrible! I lost interest in the middle (by the way the last part is typed triple space because I thought I could fix it—but I couldn’t)
Please—and I mean this—don’t offer it to the Post. I think that as things are now it would be wretched policy. Nor to the Red Book. It hasn’t one redeeming touch of my usual spirit in it. I was desperate to begin a story + invented a business plot—the kind I can’t handle. I’d rather have $1000, for it from some obscure place than twice that + have it seen. I feel very strongly about this!
Am writing two of the best stories I’ve ever done in my life.
As Ever—Scott Fitz—
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. March 15, 1926
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
Dear Max:
Thanks very much for your nice letter + the income blank. Im delighted about the short story book. In fact with the play going well + my new novel growing absorbing + with our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Rivierra (between Cannes and Nice) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. Its one of those strange, precious and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well.
Thanks for the Arthur Train legal advice.1
I’m glad you got Hemmingway—I saw him for a day in Paris on his return + he thought you were great. I’ve brought you two successes (Ring + Tom Boyd) and two failures (Biggs + Woodward Boyd)—Ernest will decide whether my opinions are more of a hindrance or a help.
Why not try College Humor for his story. They published one thing of mine.
Poor Tom Boyd! First I was off him for his boneheadedness. Now I’m sorry for him.
Your Friend Scott
I am out of debt to you for the first time in four years.
Think of that horse’s ass F.P.A. coming around to my work after six years of neglect. I’d like to stick his praise up his behind. God knows its no use to me now.
Will you get the enclosure for me, open it + write me what it is.
TO: Harold Ober
Received May 3, 1926
ALS, 3 pp. Lilly Library
Villa Paquita
Juan-les-Pins
Alpes Maritime
(After May 3d adress me
Villa St. Louis
Juan-les-Pins
Alpes Maritime
Dear Ober:
Naturally I was very excited about the movie opportunity. As I’ve heard no more I fear its fallen through—I’.m anxiously awaiting news.2
I have your two letters in regard to Liberty. Now as to the short story business alone I would rather, without qualification, stay with the Post at $2500. than go to Liberty at $3500. Not only that but I shall probably write no short stories of any kind until next autumn.
But there is another element which might force me to leave the Post and that is the novel serialization. The novel is about one fourth done and will be delivered for possible serialization about January 1st. It will be about 75,000 words long, divided into 12 chapters, concerning tho this is absolutely confidential such a case as that girl who shot her mother on the Pacific coast last year.1 In other words, like Gatsby it is highly sensational. Not only would this bar it from the Post but also they are hostile, as you know, to the general cast of thought that permeates my serious work.
On the other hand Liberty is evidently very much in my favor at the moment. And if they would give between $25,000 and $40,000 for the serial I’d be an idiot to throw it away. In other words with say about 30,000 for the serial + assurance that Liberty will have a stable editorial policy at least till Jan 1st 1927, I’d better swing over there. Frankly I’m at sea. Perhaps it had better depend on whether they would really contract for the novel in advance. I hope to bring it home completed next December.
Wire me your advice. The trouble is that if McCalls or Red Book ran it it would take a solid year and I hate that while Liberty would run it in 3 mos.
Oh, hell—I hate to leave the Post. What is Liberty like anyhow? Prosperous or just subsidized?
Anxiously
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Harold Ober
Received June 3, 1926
ALS, 1 p. Lilly Library
Dear Ober—
Well, its rather melancholy to hear that the run2 was over. However as it was something of a succés d’estime and put in my pocket seventeen or eighteen thousand without a stroke of work on my part I should be, and am, well content.
A thousand thanks for your courtesy to my father. You went out of your way to be nice to him and he wrote me a most pleased and entheusiastic letter. He misses me, I think, and at his age such an outing as that was an exceptional pleasure. I am, as usual, deeply in your debt, and now for a most pleasant + personal reason. Hi
s own life after a rather brilliant start back in the seventies has been a “failure”—he’s lived always in mother’s shadow and he takes an immense vicarious pleasure in any success of mine. Thank you.
Yours Always
Scott Fitzgerald
No stories sent since your way and mine.
TO: Ernest Hemingway1
June 1926
AL, 10 pp. John F. Kennedy Library
Juan-les-Pins, France
Dear Ernest: Nowdays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for awhile, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax (in one mysterious way or another)—not realizing the transitory quality of his glory because he forgets that it rests on the frail shoulders of professional entheusiasts. This should frighten all of us into a lust for anything honest that people have to say about our work. I’ve taken what proved to be excellent advice (On The B. + Damned) from Bunny Wilson who never wrote a novel, (on Gatsby—change of many thousand wds) from Max Perkins who never considered writing one, and on T. S. of Paradise from Katherine Tighe (you don’t know her) who had probably never read a novel before.
[This is beginning to sound like my own current work which resolves itself into laborious + sententious preliminaries].2
Anyhow I think parts of Sun Also are careless + ineffectual. As I said yestiday (and, as I recollect, in trying to get you to cut the 1st part of 50 Grand)3 I find in you the same tendency to envelope or (and as it usually turns out) to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke thats casually appealed to you, that I find in myself in trying to preserve a piece of “fine writing.” Your first chapter contains about 10 such things and it gives a feeling of condescending casuallness4
P. 1. “highly moral story”
“Brett said” (O. Henry stuff)
“much too expensive
“something or other” (if you don’t want to tell, why waste 3 wds. saying it. See P. 23—”9 or 14” and “or how many years it was since 19XX” when it would take two words to say That’s what youd kid in anyone else as mere “style”—mere horse-shit I can’t find this latter but anyhow you’ve not only got to write well yourself but you’ve also got to scorn notdo what anyone can do and I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to p. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going. And to preserve these perverse and willfull non-essentials you’ve done a lot of writing that honestly reminded me of Michael Arlen.
[You know the very fact that people have committed themselves to you will make them watch you like a cat. + if they don’t like it creap away like one1
For example.
Pps. 1 + 2. Snobbish (not in itself but because the history of English Aristocrats in the war, set down so verbosely so uncritically, so exteriorly and yet so obviously inspired from within, is shopworn.) You had the same problem that I had with my Rich Boy, previously debauched by Chambers ect. Either bring more thot to it with the realization that that ground has already raised its wheat + weeds or cut it down to seven sentences. It hasn’t even your rythym and the fact that may be “true” is utterly immaterial.
That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.
P.
3.
“Beautifully engraved shares” (Beautifully engraved 1886 irony) All this is O.K. but so glib when its glib + so profuse.
P.
5
Painters are no longer real in prose. They must be minimized. [This is not done by making them schlptors, backhouse wall-experts or miniature painters]2
P.
8.
“highly moral urges” “because I believe its a good story” If this paragraph isn’t maladroit then I’m a rewrite man for Dr. Cadman.3
P.
9.
Somehow its not good. I can’t quite put my hand on it—it has a ring of “This is a true story ect.”
P.
10.
“Quarter being a state of mind ect.” This is in all guide books. I havn’t read Basil Swoon’s4 but I have fifty francs to lose.
5[About this time I can hear you say “Jesus this guy thinks I’m lousy, + he can stick it up his ass for all I give a Gd Dm for his ‘critisism.’ “But remember this is a new departure for you, and that I think your stuff is great. You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe—and the last. (This latter clause is simply to balance the sentence. It doesn’t seem to make sense tho I have pawed at it for several minutes. Its like the age of the French women.6
P. 14. (+ therabout) as I said yesterday I think this anecdote is flat as hell without naming Ford7 which would be cheap.
It’s flat because you end with mention of Allister Crowly.8 If he’s nobody its nothing. If he’s somebody its cheap. This is a novel. Also I’d cut out actual mention of H. Steams1 earlier.
__________
Why not cut the inessentials in Cohens biography?2 His first marriage is of no importance. When so many people can write well + the competition is so heavy I can’t imagine how you could have done these first 20 pps. so casually. You can’t play with peoples attention—a good man who has the power of arresting attention at will must be especially careful.
From here Or rather from p. 30 I began to like the novel but Ernest I can’t tell you the sense of disappointment that beginning with its elephantine facetiousness gave me. Please do what you can about it in proof. Its 7500 words—you could reduce it to 5000. And my advice is not to do it by mere pareing but to take out the worst of the scenes.
I’ve decided not to pick at anything else, because I wasn’t at all inspired to pick when reading it. I was much too excited. Besides this is probably a heavy dose. The novel’s damn good. The central theme is marred somewhere but hell! unless you’re writing your life history where you have an inevitable pendulum to swing you true (Harding3 metaphor), who can bring it entirely off? And what critic can trace whether the fault lies in a possible insufficient thinking out, in the biteing off of more than you eventually cared to chew in the impotent theme or in the elusiveness of the lady character herself.4 My theory always was that she dramatized herself in terms of Arlens dramatatization of somebody’s dramatizatatg of Stephen McKenna’s5 dramatization of Diana Manner’s6 dramatization of the last girl in Well’s Tono Bungay—who’s original probably liked more things about Beatrix Esmond than about Jane Austin’s Elizibeth7 (to whom we owe the manners of so many of our wives.)
Appropos of your foreward about the Latin quarter—suppose you had begun your stories with phrases like: “Spain is a peculiar place—ect” or “Michigan is interesting to two classes—the fisherman + the drummer.” Pps 64 + 658 with a bit of work should tell all that need be known about Brett’s past.
(Small point) “Dysemtry” instead of “killed” is a cliches to avoid a clichê. It stands out. I suppose it can’t be helped. I suppose all the 75,000000 Europeans who died between 1914–1918 will always be among the 10,000,000 who were killed in the war.
God! The bottom of p. 77 Jusque the top p. 78 are wonderful,1 I go crazy when people aren’t always at their best. This isn’t picked out—I just happened on it.
The heart of my critisim beats somewhere apon p. 87.2 I think you can’t change it, though. I felt the lack of some crazy torturing tentativeness or insecurity—horror, all at once, that she’d feel—and he’d feel—maybe I’m crazy. He isn’t like an impotent man. He’s like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt.
Oh, well. It’s fine, from Chap V on, anyhow, in spite of that—which fact is merely a proof of its brilliance.
Station Z.W.X. square says good night. Good night all.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. June 25, 1926
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Villa St. Louis
Juan-les-Pins
A-M.
Dear Max:<
br />
Thanks for both letters. We were in Paris having Zelda’s appendix neatly but firmly removed or I would have answered before.
First as to Ernests book. I liked it but with certain qualifications. The fiesta, the fishing trip, the minor characters were fine. The lady I didn’t like, perhaps because I don’t like the original. In the mutilated man I thought Ernest bit off more than can yet be chewn between the covers of a book, then lost his nerve a little and edited the more vitalizing details out. He has since told me that something like this happened. Do ask him for the absolute minimum of nessessary changes, Max—he’s so discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors. (Tho he loved your letter) From the latter he has had a lot of words and until Bridges offer for the short story (from which he had even before cut out a thousand words on my recommendation) scarcely a single dollar. From the Torrents I expect you’ll have little response. Do you think the Bookman article did him any good?3
I roared at the idea of you and the fish in the tree.
O.K. as to Haldeman-Julius.
Will you ask them (your accounts dept.) to send me an account the 1st of August. I’d love to see what a positive statement looks like for the first time in three years.
I am writing Bridges today. I have an offer now for a story at $3,500.00 (rather for six stories). To sell one for $1,000.00 would mean a dead loss of $2,500 and as I average only six stories a year I don’t see how I can do it. I hope he’ll understand
The novel, in abeyance during Zelda’s operation now goes on apace. This is confidential but Liberty, with certain conditions, has offered me $35,000. sight unseen. I hope to have it done in January.
Do send out a picture to everyone that got that terrible one.
Ever Your Friend
Scott
TO: Ernest Hemingway
September 1926
ALS, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library
Juan-les-Pins, France
Dear Ernest-Sorry we missed you + Hadley. No news. I’m on the wagon + working like hell. Expect to sail for N.Y Dec 10th from Genoa on the Conte Biancamo. Will be here till then. Saw Bullfight in Frejus. Bull was euneuch (sp.). House barred + dark. Front door chained. Have made no new enemies for a week. Hamilton domestic row ended in riot. Have new war books by Pierrefeu.1 God is love.
A Life in Letters Page 16