I find that revising in this case is pulling up the weakest section of the book and then the next weakest, etc. First, Section III was the weakest and Section IV the strongest, so I bucked up III, then IV was the weakest and is still but when I have fixed that Section I will be the weakest. The section that has best held up is Section II.
I was tremendously impressed with “South Moon Under”3 until I read her prize short story, “Gal Young Un.” I suddenly saw the face of Ethan Fromme peering out from under a palmetto hat. The heroine is even called Matt in tribute to the power of the subconscious.4 Well, well, well, I often think of Picasso’s remark “You do it first then other people can come along and do it pretty and get off with a big proportion of the spoils. When you do it first you can’t do it pretty.” So I guess Miss Rawlings is just another writer after all, just when I was prepared to welcome her to the class of 1896 with Ernest, Dos Passos and myself.
Please wire about the inclusion of the Cannes episode,5 and don’t sidetrack these advertising points.
Ever yours,
Scott
TO: Harold Ober
February 21, 1934
Wire. Lilly Library
Baltimore, Maryland
WANT TO DECIDE NOW HOW TO RAISE MONEY TO TIDE ME OVER THE MONTH BEFORE FINISHING FINAL BOOK REVISION WITHOUT CONSULTING MAX CAN YOU GET OPINION OF ONE PROMINENT PLAYWRIGHT ABOUT POSSIBILITIES OF DRAMATIZATION OTHERWISE I WOULD RATHER SHOOT THE WORKS AND SELL TO THE PICTURES TO GET OUT OF THIS FINANCIAL HOLE IT MUST BE DECIDED IMMEDIATELY LUNCHING WITH CLARK GABLE TOMORROW AND WANT TO KNOW PRESENT STATUS OF GATSDY AS HE WOULD LIKE TO PLAY IT PLEASE WIRE IMMEDIATELY
F SCOTT FITZGERALD
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland
March 4, 1934
Dear Max:
Confirming our conversation on the phone this morning, I wish you could get some word to the printers that they should not interfere with my use of italics. If I had made a mess of a type face, that would be another matter. I know exactly what I am doing, and I want to use italics for emphasis, and not waste them on the newspaper convention laid down by Mr. Munsey1 in 1858. Of course, always you have been damned nice in having your printers follow my specifications, but in this case, and under the very pressing conditions under which we are working, it worries me that the book galleys came back with exactly the same queries that the magazine galleys had. Could you tip them the wink some way so that they would please follow my copy exactly as they used to, as this is my last chance at the book? Whoever has been in charge of it must be very patient because I know at the ninth revision that the very sight of any part of it fills me with nausea. However, I have to go on in this particular case while they don’t, and so are liable to get careless.
Going over the other points, I hope both (1) that the review copies will go out in plenty of time, and (2) that they will get the version of the novel as it will be published because there is no doubt that each revision makes a tremendous difference in the impression that the book will leave. After all, Max, I am a plodder. One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway, and I told him, against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I wanted to indulge that. I can do cheap things. I changed Clark Gable’s act at the moving picture theatre here the other day. I can do that kind of thing as quickly as anybody but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over every point until I have made myself into a slow-moving behemoth (if that is the correct spelling), and so there I am for the rest of my life. Anyhow, these points of proofreading, etc., are of tremendous importance to me, and you can charge it all to my account, and I will realize all the work you have had on it.
As I told you on the phone, I enjoyed Marjory Rawlin’s praise, but it was somewhat qualified by her calling my people trivial people. Other stuff has drifted in from writers from all over America, some of it by telegram, which has been complimentary.
Now, about advertising. Again I want to tell you my theory that everybody is absolutely dead on ballyhoo of any kind, and for your advertising department to take up any interest that the intellectuals have so far shown toward the book and exploit that, would be absolutely disastrous. The reputation of a book must grow from within upward, must be a natural growth. I don’t think there is a comparison between this book and The Great Gatsby as a seller. The Great Gatsby had against it its length and its purely masculine interest. This book, on the contrary, is a woman’s book. I think, given a decent chance, it will make its own way insofar as fiction is selling under present conditions.
Excuse me if this letter has a dogmatic ring. I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.
Zelda is better. There is even a chance of her getting up for the exhibition of her paintings1 at Easter, but nothing certain. Do you still think that idea of piling the accumulated manuscript in the window2 is a valid one? My instinct does not quite solve the problem. What do you think? Would it seem a little phony?
With best wishes,
Scott
TO: Edmund Wilson
Postmarked March 12, 1934
Wilson’s retyped copy, 2 pp. Yale University
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland
Dear Bunny:
Despite your intention of mild criticism in our conversation, I felt more elated than otherwise—if the characters got real enough so that you disagreed with what I chose for their manifest destiny the main purpose was accomplished (by the way, your notion that Dick should have faded out as a shyster alienist was in my original design, but I thot of him, in reconsideration, as an “homme epuisé,” not only an “homme manqué”. I thought that, since his choice of a profession had accidentally wrecked him, he might plausibly have walked out on the profession itself.)
Any attempt by an author to explain away a partial failure in a work is of course doomed to absurdity—yet I could wish that you, and others, had read the book version rather than the mag. version which in spots was hastily put together. The last half for example has a much more polished facade now. Oddly enough several people have felt that the surface of the first chapters was too ornate. One man even advised me to “coarsen the texture”, as being remote from the speed of the main narrative!
In any case when it appears I hope you’ll find time to look it over again. Such irrevelancies as Morton Hoyt’s nosedive and Dick’s affair in Ohnsbruck are out, together with the scene of calling on the retired bootlegger at Beaulieu, & innumerable minor details. I have driven the Scribner proofreaders half nuts but I think I’ve made it incomparably smoother.
Zelda’s pictures go on display in a few weeks & I’ll be meeting her in N.Y. for a day at least. Wouldn’t it be a good time for a reunion?
It was good seeing you & good to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out.
With affection always,
Scott Fitzgerald
TO: John Peale Bishop
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 2, 1934.
Dear John:
Somebody (I’ve forgotten who after an overcrowded and hectic twenty-four hours in New York) quoted you to me as saying that this current work1 is “no advance on what he’s done before.” That’s a legitimate criticism, but
I can’t take it as a slam. I keep thinking of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus Preface2—and I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring. And if the ending of this one is not effectual I should be gladder to think that the effect came back long afterwards, long after one had forgotten the name of the author.
All this makes it more necessary to see you and do some doping on the practise of the novel while you’re in process of revision. I’ll be up in New York toward the beginning of next week. Will you keep that in mind and if your plans change suddenly let me know.
Pleasant thoughts to you all.
As ever,
Scott
Two things I forgot to say—
1. There’s a deliberate choice in my avoidance of a dramatic ending—I deliberately did not want it.
2. Without making apologies, I’d prefer to fade off my book, like the last of The Brothers Karanzoff, or Time Regained, and let the belly carry my story, than to resort the arbitrary blood-letting of Flaubert, Stendahl and the Elizabethans.
You see we must talk—no room in a letter.
F.S F.
TO: Thomas Wolfe
TLS, 2 pp. Harvard University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 2, 1934
Dear Arthur, Garfield, Harrison & Hayes1:
Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome. It is hard to believe that it was in the summer of 1930 we went up the mountainside together—some of our experiences have become legendary to me and I am not sure even if they happened at all. One story, (a lie or a truth), which I am in the habit of telling, is how you put out the lights of Lake Geneva with a Gargantuan gesture,2 so that I don’t know any more whether I was with you when it happened, or whether it ever happened at all!
I am so glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish. Again thanks for your generous appreciation.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald + Arthur, Garfield, Harrison & Hayes
TO: John Peale Bishop
RTLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 7, 1934
Dear John:
On receiving your first letter with its’ handsome tribute and generous praise I realized that I had been hasty in crediting that you would make such a criticism as “this book is no advance on Gatsby.” You would be the first to feel that the intention in the two books was entirely different, that (to promote myself momentarily) Gatsby was shooting at something like Henry Esmond while this was shooting at something like Vanity Fair. The dramatic novel has cannons quite different from the philosophical, now called psychological novel. One is a kind of tour de force and the other a confession of faith. It would be like comparing a sonnet sequence with an epic.
The point of my letter which survives is that there were moments all through the book where I could have pointed up dramatic scenes, and I deliberately refrained from doing so because the material itself was so harrowing and highly charged that I did not want to subject the reader to a series of nervous shocks in a novel that was inevitably close to whoever read it in my generation
—contrariwise, in dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger-crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes; and I was thinking that in your novel I would like to pass on this theory to you for what it is worth. Such advice from fellow-craftsmen has been a great help to me in the past, indeed, I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who developed to me, in conversation, that the dying fall was preferable to the dramatic ending under certain conditions, and I think we both got the germ of the idea from Conrad.
With affection always,
Scott
TO: H. L. Mencken
TLS, 2 pp. Enoch Pratt Free Library
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 23, 1934.
Dear Menck:
I am afraid that I am going to have to violate your favorite code of morals—the breaking of engagements—because I’ve got to go to New York about trying to capitalize on my novel in the movies.
Without wanting to add to your mass of accumulated correspondence just as you’ve cleared it away, I would like to say in regard to my book that there was a deliberate intention in every part of it except the first. The first part, the romantic introduction, was too long and too elaborated, largely because of the fact that it had been written over a series of years with varying plans, but everything else in the book conformed to a definite intention and if I had to start to write it again tomorrow I would adopt the same plan, irrespective of the fact of whether I had, in this case, brought it off or not brought it off. That is what most of the critics fail to understand (outside of the fact that they fail to recognize and identify anything in the book) that the motif of the “dying fall” was absolutely deliberate and did not come from any diminuition of vitality, but from a definite plan.
That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemmingway and I worked out—probably from Conrad’s preface to “The Nigger”—and it has been the greatest “credo” in my life, ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known, except in so far as I have my natural obligation to my family—to provide for them. I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud,1 if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose—and that is no sentimental yapping about being disinterested. It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
With terrific regrets that I probably wont be back in time to hear your harrowing African adventures, and compare them with my own, and with best regards always to my favorite Venus, Sara, I am
As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 26, 1934.
Forgive me for dictating this letter instead of writing it directly, but if you could see my desk at the moment and the amount of stuff that has come in you would understand.
The thing that you have to fight against is defeatism of any kind. You have no reason for it. You have never had really a melancholy temperament, but, as your mother said: you have always been known for a bright, cheerful, extraverting attitude upon life. I mean especially that you share none of the melancholy point of view which seems to have been the lot of Anthony and Marjorie.1 You and I have had wonderful times in the past, and the future is still brilliant with possibilities if you will keep up your morale, and try to think that way. The outside world, the political situation, etc., is still gloomy and it does effect everybody directly, and will inevitably reach you indirectly, but try to separate yourself from it by some form of mental hygiene—if necessary, a self-invented one.
Let me reiterate that I don’t want you to have too much traffic with my book, which is a melancholy work and seems to have haunted most of the reviewers. I feel very strongly about your re-reading it. It represents certain phases of life that are now over. We are certainly on some upsurging wave, even if we don’t yet know exactly where it’s heading.
There is no feeling of gloom on your part that has the slightest legitimacy. Your pictures have been a success, your heath has been very much better, according to the doctors—and the only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice with its particular intimacies of inflection.
You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that the spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too—the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry
most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only. But, Swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fractured it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward. Forget the past—what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.
This sounds allegorical but is very real. I want you here. The sadness of the past is with me always. The things that we have done together and the awful splits that have broken us into war survivals in the past stay like a sort of atmosphere around any house that I inhabit. The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever, and you should feel like I do that they can be renewed, if not in a new spring, then in a new summer. I love you my darling, darling.
P.S. Did I tell you that, among others, Adele Lovett came in and bought a picture and so did Louise Perkins and the Tommy Daniels from St. Paul? Will see that the Dick Myers get one free.
TO: Mabel Dodge Luhan1
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,
May 10, 1934
Dear Mrs. Luhan:
I was tremendously pleased and touched by your letter and by your communication to the Tribune.2 It always strikes me as very strange when I find new people in the world, because I always crystallize any immediate group in which I move as being an all-sufficient, all-inclusive cross-section of the world, at the time I know it (the group)—this all the more because a man with the mobility of the writing profession and a certain notoriety thinks that he has a good deal of choice as to whom he will know. That from the outer bleakness, where you were only a name to me, you should have felt a necessity of communicating an emotion felt about a stranger, gave me again the feeling that Conrad expresses as “the solidarity of innumerable human hearts,” at times a pretty good feeling, and your letter came to me at one of those times. Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers, who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention. In the case of this book your appreciation has given me more pleasure than any other, not excepting Gilbert Seldes who seemed to think that I had done completely what I started out to do and that it was worth doing.
A Life in Letters Page 29