A Life in Letters
Page 30
With gratitude for that necessity in you which made you take the special trouble, the extra steps, which reassured me that even at the moment of popping out something new I was reaching someone by air mail—and with the added declaration that I want to see you,
I am
Yours most cordially,
P.S. My excuse for dictating this is a sprained arm.
TO: Ernest Hemingway
TLS & AL, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
May 10, 1934.
Dear Ernest:
Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers jargon out of my head.
Ever Your Friend
Scott
All I meant about the editing was that if I’d been in Max’s place I’d have urged you to hold the book for more material.1 It had neither the surprise of I.O.T (nessessessarily) nor its unity. And it did not have as large a proportion of 1st flight stories as M.W.W. I think in a “general presentation” way this could have been attoned for by sheer bulk. Take that opinion for what it’s worth.
On the other hand: you can thank God you missed this publishing season! I am 5th best seller in the country + havn’t broken 12,000.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
RTLS, 6 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
May 15, 1934.
Dear Max:
In reference to our conversation: I have roughly about four plans for a book to be published this autumn.2 Now I think that we must, to some extent, set aside the idea that a diffuse collection stands much chance of a decent sale, no matter what previous records Ernest and I have made. Of course I shall make every attempt to unify what I prepare by an inclusive and definitive title, which is even more important with short stories than with a novel, for it is necessary to bind them together and appeal to one mood in a buyer. Moreover, with so much material to choose from I think the collection should have some real inner unity, even in preference to having it include selected stories of many types. Roughly here are my ideas:
Plan 1. The idea of a big omnibus including both new stories and the pick of the other three collections. You must tell me what luck you’ve had with the omnibus volumes of Lardner, Galsworthy, etc.
Plan 2. The Basil Lee stories, about 60,000 words, and the Josephine stories, 37,500—with one or two stories added, the last of which will bring Basil and Josephine together—making a book of about 120,000 words under some simple title such as “Basil and Josephine.” This would in some ways look like the best commercial bet because it might be taken like Tarkington’s “Gentle Julia,” “Penrod,” etc. almost as a novel, and the most dangerous artistically for the same reason—for the people who buy my books might think that I was stringing them by selling them watered goods under a false name.
Plan 3. A collection of new short stories. Of these there are about forty, of which about twenty-nine are possible and say fifteen might be chosen, with the addition of one or two very serious non-commercial stories, which I have long planned but have yet to write, to heighten the tone of the volume. This might be unified under some title which would express that they are tales of the golden twenties, or even specifically, “More Tales of the Jazz Age.” The table of contents would be something like this:
The dates are not the dates written but the period each story might represent.
1918 -
The Last of the Belles or else
The Love Boat
1919 -
Presumption
1920 -
The Adolescent Marriage or else
One Trip Abroad
1921 -
Outside the Cabinet Makers or else
A Short Trip Home
1922 -
Two Wrongs or else
A Freeze-out
1923 -
At Your Age or else
In a Little Town
1924 -
Crazy Sunday or else
Jacob’s Ladder
1925 -
Rough Crossing or else
Family in the Wind
1926 -
The Bowl or else
Interne
1927 -
Swimmers or else
A New Leaf
1928 -
Hotel Child or else
1929 -
Change of Class
Majesty or else
1930 -
The Bridal Party
I Got Shoes
1931 -
Babylon Revisited or else
More Than Just a House
1932 -
Between Three and Four
and three others, Two for a Cent, The Pusher-in-the-Face and One of My Oldest Friends which makes up the twenty-nine, excluding the Basil and Josephine stories, the unwritten ones and a couple of new ones I have just finished + can’t judge.
I don’t know how many of these you remember but of course I would ask you and perhaps a few other people to read over a selection and give some opinions, though among these twenty-nine there is scarcely one which everybody has enjoyed and scarcely one which nobody has enjoyed.
Plan 4. This is an idea founded on the success of such books as Alexander Woollcott’s “While Rome Burns.” As you know I have never published any personal stuff between covers because I have needed it all for my fiction; nevertheless, a good many of my articles and random pieces have attracted a really quite wide attention, and might again if we could get a tie-up of title and matter, which should contain wit and a soupçon of wisdom and not look like a collection of what the cat brought in, or be haunted by the bogey of all articles in a changing world, of being hilariously dated. It might be the best idea of all. Let me give you a rough idea as to what I have in that line:
There are my two articles for the Post which attracted such wide attention in their day that I have yet to hear the last of them, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year.” There are “Echoes of the Jazz Age” from Scribner’s and “My Lost City” which the Cosmopolitan has been holding up but wouldn’t sell back to me to publish in the American. Other articles which have attracted attention are “Princeton” in College Humor, “One Hundred False Starts” in the Post, “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk,” a long, supposedly humorous account of an automobile journey that appeared in Motor, an article called “Girls Believe in Girls” in Liberty, and two articles called “Making Monagomy Work” and “Are Irresponsible Rich?” published by the Metropolitan Syndicate in the early twenties, and an article called “On Being Twenty-five” in the American. And these also from the early twenties, “Wait till you have children of your own” (Woman’s Home Companion), “Imagination” and “A Few Mothers” in the Ladies Home Journal and “The Little Brother of the Flapper” in McCalls.
This, or a good part of it, would have to comprise the backbone of the book and would be about 57,000 words. In addition there are some literary reviews, etc. of which nothing should be preserved except the elegy on Ring and an article in the Bookman on “How to Waste Material” welcoming Ernest’s arrival. Beyond this there are a few hors d’oeuvres such as “A Short Autobiography” and “Salesmanship in the Champs Elysees” both in the New Yorker and a few other short sketches from Vanity Fair, College Humor, etc. and some light verse. There are also a couple of articles in which Zelda and I collaborated—idea, editing and padding being mine and most of the writing being hers—but I am not sure I would be justified in using it. Also I have some of my very first stories written at twelve and thirteen, some of which are funny enough to be reprinted.
Looking this over it doesn’t seem very voluminous. I haven’t seen Woollcott’s book (by the way, did he get a copy of the novel?) and don’t know how thick it is, but there seems to be some audience somewhere for co
llections (Dorothy Parker, etc.) as didn’t exist in the 1920s.
The above all that I could count on getting ready for next fall. The “dark age” novel could not possibly be ready inside of a year, that is to say, for the autumn of 1935.
Would you please think over this line-up carefully and let me hear your advice, also I will ask Zelda’s, which is often pretty good in what does not concern herself and which is always, strangely enough, conservative. A fifth idea of sandwiching some of my stuff in with hers, her old sketches of girls in College Humor, her short phantasies, etc. has occurred to me but I don’t know that I think it’s advisable.
I may come up but probably not. Thanks a lot for the money.
Ever yours,
Scott
TO: Ernest Hemingway
TLS, 6 pp. John F. Kennedy Library
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
June 1, 1934.
Dear Ernest:
Your letter crossed, or almost crossed, one of mine which I am glad now I didn’t send, because the old charming frankness of your letter cleared up the foggy atmosphere through which I felt it was difficult for us to talk any more.
Because I’m going egoist on you in a moment, I want to say that just exactly what you suggested, that the edition of that Chinamen-running story in the Cosmopolitan1 would have given Winner Take Nothing the weight that it needed was in my head too. Allow me one more criticism, that while I admire your use of purely abstract titles I do not think that one was a particularly fortunate choice.
Next to go to the mat with you on a couple of technical points. The reason I had written you a letter was that Dos2 dropped in in passing through and said you had brought up about my book what we talked about once in a cafe on the Avenue de Neuilly about composite characters. Now, I don’t entirely dissent from the theory but I don’t believe you can try to prove your point on such a case as Bunny using his own father as the sire of John Dos Passos, or in the case of this book that covers ground that you personally paced off about the same time I was doing it. In either of those cases how could you trust your own detachment? If you had never met any of the originals then your opinion would be more convincing.
Following this out a little farther, when does the proper and logical combination of events, cause and effect, etc. end and the field of imagination begin? Again you may be entirely right because I suppose you were applying the idea particularly to the handling of the creative faculty in one’s mind rather than to the effect upon the stranger reading it. Nevertheless, I am not sold on the subject, and especially to account for the big flaws of Tender on that ground doesn’t convince me. Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of the Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archeology, etc. upon the bible story; and in the second, of Shakespeare’s trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch’s Lives and Hollinshed’s Chronicles. There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. You can accuse me justly of not having the power to bring it off, but a theory that it can’t be done is highly questionable. I make this point with such persistence because such a conception, if you stick to it, might limit your own choice of materials. The idea can be reduced simply to: you can’t say accurately that composite characterization hurt my book, but that it only hurt it for you.
To take a case specifically, that of Gerald and Sara. I don’t know how much you think you know about my relations with them over a long time, but from certain remarks that you let drop, such as one “Gerald threw you over,” I guess that you didn’t even know the beginning of our relations. In that case you hit on the exact opposite of the truth.
I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over—in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that. (By the way, I didn’t read the Wescott story of Villefranche sailors1 till I’d done my own version. Think that was the wisest course, for me anyhow, and got a pleasant letter from him in regard to the matter.)
To go back to my theme song, the second technical point that might be of interest to you concerns direct steals from an idea of yours, an idea of Conrad’s and a few lines out of David-into-Fox-Garnett.2 The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which leave respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. The second contribution to the burglary was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very end of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draft—or at least the first one I saw—gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary of the future lives of the characters: “The priest became a priest under Fascism,” etc., and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this—nevertheless, you convinced me. The third piece of burglary contributing to this symposing was my admiration of the dying fall in the aforesaid Garnett’s book and I imitated it as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of Tender, telling the reader in the last pages that, after all, this is just a casual event, and trying to let him come to bat for me rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with MacCallagan or McKisco,1 Sweetie?)
Thanks again for your letter which was damned nice, and my absolute best wishes to all of you (by the way, where did you ever get the idea that I didn’t like Pauline, or that I didn’t like her as much as I should? Of all that time of life the only temperamental coolness that I ever felt toward any of the people we ran around with was toward Ada MacLeish, and even in that case it was never any more than that. I have honestly never gone in for hating. My temporary bitternesses toward people have all been ended by what Freud called an inferiority complex and Christ called “Let him without sin—” I remember the day he said it. We were justlikethat then; we tossed up for who was going to go through with it—and he lost.
I am now asking only $5,000 for letters. Make out the check to Malcolm Republic, c/o The New Cowlick.2
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. Did you ever see my piece about Ring in the New Cowlick—I think you’d have liked it.
P.S.S. This letter and questions require no answers. You are “write” that I no longer listen, but my case histories seem to go in largely for the same magazines, and with simple people I get polite. But I listen to you and would like damn well to hear your voice again.
TO: Cecilia Delihant Taylor
c. August 1934
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Baltimore, Maryland
Dearest Ceci
Mrs. Owens says you asked her about the picture—I did get it. Didn’t you get yours? Let me know.
Everything here goes rather badly. Zelda no better—your correspondent in rotten health + two movie ventures gone to pot—one for Gracie Allen + Geo. Burns that damn near went over + took 2 wks’ work + they liked + wanted to buy— + Paramount stepped on. It’s like a tailor left with a made-to-order suit—no one to sell it to. So back to the Post.
(By the way I have a new series in the Red Bk.)
Hope to hell the whoopies are we
ll, + all the kids.
Love Always
Scott
P.S. Appropos of our conversation it will interest you to know that I’ve given up politics. For two years I’ve gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in—considering at last such crazy solutions as the one I had in mind in Norfolk. I have become disgusted with the party leadership + have only health enough left for my literary work, so I’m on the sidelines. It had become a strain making speeches at “Leagues against Imperialistic War,”1+ their treatment of the negro question finished me. This is confidential, of course