A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  There is another side of him that I find myself doubting, but this is something that no one could ever teach or tell him. His lack of feeling other people’s passions, the lyrical value of Eugene Gant’s love affair with the universe—is that going to last through a whole saga? God, I wish he could discipline himself and really plan a novel.

  I wrote you the other day and the only other point of this letter is that I’ve now made a careful plan of the Mediaeval novel as a whole (tentatively called “Philippe, Count of Darkness” confidential) including the planning of the parts which I can sell and the parts which I can’t. I think you could publish it either late in the spring of ’36 or early in the fall of the same year. This depends entirely on how the money question goes this year. It will run to about 90,000 words and will be a novel in every sense with the episodes unrecognizable as such. That is my only plan. I wish I had these great masses of manuscripts stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked I am afraid.

  A young man has dramatized “Tender is the Night” and I am hoping something may come of it.1 I may be in New York for a day and a night within the next fortnight.

  Ever yours,

  Scott

  Later—Went to N. Y. as you know, but one day only. Didn’t think I would like Cape that day.2 Sorry you + Nora Flynn3 didn’t meet. No news here—I think Beth is leaving soon.

  TO: John Peak Bishop

  May 1935

  ALS 6 pp. Princeton University

  Asheville, North Carolina

  Dear John:

  Here’s a letter of uncalled for advice. I think though it’s good. All right—into the lions mouth.

  Act of Darkness must be written off. It was a good novel—it had high points (I’m coming back to that), it showed that your long phase of being self-conscious in prose is over. You’ve got ten good years—two or three fine novels left. Now, here’s my inventory.

  From the wildest fantasy (which you did not + could not handle through lack of readiness + incisiveness of wit + profuseness of it and through other reasons like Hergeshiemeric tendency to take it easy doing still-lifes) you went (+ I was all for it) to the most complete realism, taking in passing the civil war. The part taken in passing came closest to being your natural field. You jumped over it too quickly—I don’t mean the war in particular—I mean the blend. Because you’re two people—you are not yet your work as in a sense I am mine

  You are

  a person of conventional background + conduct with tendency almost to drabness, non-resistance, uxoriousness, bourgeoise-respectable ect ect ect ect.

  a poet with sense of wonder and color of life expressed in men, women + words; + grand gestures, grand faits accomplis, parades.

  Setting. I should use a sensational set, probably costume set using some such character as the Lost Dauphin—I mean it—not a fulfilled rennaissanse character or you’ll just make a picture book; Something enormous, gross obvious, untouched by fine hands. Some great stone the schulptors have rejected. Your background had better shimmer, not be static or peaceful

  Plot Advice on this is no good. You handle it well but I advise a change of pace—I find so many good enough books are in the same key i.e. appointment in Sammara. Life is not so smooth that it can’t go over suddenly into melodrama. That’s the other face of much worry about inevitability Everything’s too beautifully caused—one can guess ahead. Even the movies know this + condemn a story as “too straight.” My own best solution to date is the to-and-fro, keep facts back mystery stuff, but its difficult. Of course its the Dickins Dostoieffski thing. Act of Darkness was much too straight, + tempo too even. Only a very short piece wants complete tempo, one breath, Ethan Fromme. It’s short story technique. Even Pride + Predjudice walks + runs like life

  Try and find more “bright” characters, if the women are plain make them millionairesses or nymphomaniacs, if they’re scrub women give them hot sex attraction + charm. This is such a good trick I don’t see why its not more used—I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a barbed one.

  There is tremendous comedy inherent in your relations with Hurlock + Feustman. You can do more with minor characters—your perverted negroes ect are good enough but you’re rich with stuff. You dredge yourself with difficulty.

  I’d like to see some gayiety in your next book to help sell it. Can’t you find some somewhere?

  Anyhow all this care for shimmering set, active plot, bright characters, change of pace + gayiety should all show in the plan. Leave out any two, + your novel is weaker, any three or four + you’re running a department store with only half the countirs open.

  All this is presumption. Max Perkins told me the book hadn’t gone + while I know it had a good press + the season was bad still I do worry about you + would hate to see you either discouraged or apathetic about your future as a novelist

  Best to Yr. Huge Clan

  Scott

  Adress as on envelope

  till about June 25th.

  P.S. Havn’t had a drink this year—not even wine or beer—are you surprised?

  TO: Harold Ober

  Received July 2, 1935

  ALS, 5 pp. Lilly Library

  Adress Hotel Stafford not c/o Mrs Owens.1

  Dear Harold:

  I’m still here—at the last moment it appears that there is a suggestion about Zelda (three days ago was a most discouraged time) and it means finding a very special nurse. So I wont leave till tomorrow. On an impulse I’m sending you a letter from Zelda that came to day—a letter from which you can guage the awful strangling heart-rending quality of this tragedy that has gone on now more than six years, with two brief intervals of hope. I know you’ll understand the intrusion of sending it to you—please mail it back to me, with things so black I hang on to every scrap that is like things used to be.

  And with it’s precise irony life continues—I went to N. Y. after all Saturday afternoon to meet a girl—stayed 20 hrs. + got back here Sunday night to put Scotty on the train to camp.

  Now as to business—or rather finances. I owe you still somewhere around $6500. (?) + should be paying you back at the rate of $1500 per story. But this has been a slow 6 wks—1st illness, then unsuccessful attempt at revise of mediaval IV, then a false start, then What You Don’t Know.2 Considering that story alone for a minute + supposing it sold for $3000. You’ve given me

  $500

  advance

  $500

  "

  + $300

  Commission

  _______

  1300

  1700

  3000

  Normally that would leave me $1700. And I need $1000 for bills due (that doesn’t solve them but is “on account”) + I’ll need $700 on the 12th for Life Insurance. Of course I hope to have a new story in your hands by the 15th but I hope you can see your way clear to letting me have the whole sum this time—with the understanding that on the next story I will surely be able to reimburse you $1500. (Wont need the the 700 till the 12th but need the 1000 this week, by Friday, say, if the Post accepts + will put a check through.)

  All this raises the ugly head of Mediaval IV. Granted that Post pays 3000.00 + you can complete paying me the whole sum this time—that is $1700. more—

  Then shall I do Red Book revise IV first! (it’s, alas, paid for!) + make Balmer1 believe in me again? (He’s already published III + it reads well), or shall I do a Post story + begin to square things with you? Only you can decide this. I told you: Red Bk IV can’t be revised but must be rewritten, + that and a new Post story will take to the end of July. I can survive till then but will it be too much of a drain on you to wait till then for further payments.

  There is no use of me trying to rush things. Even in years like ’24, ’28, ’29, ’30 all devoted to short stories I could not turn out more than 8–9 top price stories a year. It simply is impossible—all my stories are concieved like novels, require a special emotion, a special experien
ce—so that my readers, if such there be, know that each time it’ll be something new, not in form but in substance (it’d be far better for me if I could do pattern stories but the pencil just goes dead on me. I wish I could think of a line of stories like the Josephine or Basil ones which could go faster + pay $3000. But no luck yet. If I ever get out of debt I want to try a second play. It’s just possible I could knock them cold if I let go the vulgar side of my talent.)

  So that covers everything. Will you let me know by straight wire as soon as you’ve read this if I can count on these advances ($1000 this wk—$700 on the 12th) if the Post buys.

  Then I can sign the checks + get off south with a clear conscience.

  I want to see you + have a long talk with you under better conditions than we’ve found of late. You havn’t seen me since I’ve been on my no-liquor regime.

  Yrs Ever

  Scott Fitzg—

  Hotel Stafford

  Baltimore

  Mail Zelda’s letter to Asheville. Thanks for yr. nice wire about story. It set me up.

  FROM: Zelda Fitzgerald

  June 1935

  ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

  Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital

  Towson, Maryland

  Dearest and always

  Dearest Scott:

  I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over me, the suffering this nothing has cost would be unendurable to any save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that of all my life there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty that we started with to offer you at the end.

  You have been so good to me—and all I can say is that there was always that deeper current running through my heart: my life—you.

  You remember the roses in Kinneys yard—you were so gracious and I thought “he is the sweetest person in the world” and you said “darling.” You still are. The wall was damp and mossy when we crossed the street and said we loved the south. I thought of the south and a happy past I’d never had and I thought I was part of the south. You said you loved this lovely land. The wistaria along the fence was green and the shade was cool and life was old.

  —I wish I had thought something else—but it was a confederate, a romantic and nostalgic thought. My hair was damp when I took off my hat and I was safe and home and you were glad that I felt that way and you were reverent. We were gold and happy all the way home.

  Now that there isn’t any more happiness and home is gone and there isn’t even any past and no emotions but those that were yours where there could be any comfort—it is a shame that we should have met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so many dreams. Your song.

  I wish you had a little house with hollyhocks and a sycamore tree and the afternoon sun imbedding itself in a silver tea-pot. Scottie would be running about somewhere in white, in Renoir, and you will be writing books in dozens of volumes. And there will be honey still for tea, though the house should not be in Granchester—1

  I want you to be happy—if there were justice you would be happy—maybe you will be anyway—

  Oh, Do-Do

  Do-Do—

  Zelda.

  I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life—

  I love you.

  TO: Scottie Fitzgerald

  Summer 1935

  ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

  Grove Park Inn stationery.

  Asheville, North Carolina

  Scottina:

  It was fine seeing you, + I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do). You are nicer, to adults—you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls 12–15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early—probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but—well:

  “Daddy the prophet!” I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you. When I wrote that “news-sheet” with events left out, you know: the letter that puzzled you, + headed it “Scottie Loses Head”, it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, + that you would “lose your head.” What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn’t know—I couldn’t have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy + indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (understand: I don’t blame Andrew too much—the fault was yours—he didn’t, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!)

  However, that’s of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one—but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost have to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I’m not afraid of it for you. I don’t want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive + is fine is founded on positive virtues, work, courage ect. but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always—and it is a nice thing to have. I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, + it cost me plenty.

  Signs + portents of your persistant conciet: Mrs. Owens said to me (+ Mrs. Owens loves you)

  “For the 1st time in a long while Scottie was nice, + not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.”

  Because, I guess, for the 1st time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours—a chance they never had, of belonging to “high society.” Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing, (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I’d have checked you on that)—but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all—your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you! You did not use one bit of your mind, one little spot! to think what they were thinking, or help them!

  You went to Norfolk + gave out the information (via the Taylors, via Annabel, via mother that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn’t matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You knew it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of “promoting yourself.” But those signs of one big catastrophe (it’ll come—I want to minimize it for you, but it cant be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are a young member of the human race, who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen “popular girls” of 15 become utterly déclassé in six months because they were essentially selfish. You + Peaches1 (who isn’t selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more + more that less pretty girls will be attracting the soldier, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you + Peaches are intelligent, but both of you will be warped by this early attention, + something tells me she wont lose her head, she hasn’t the “gift of gab” as you have—her laughter + her silence takes the place of much. That’s why I wish to God you would write something when you have time—if only a one act play about how girls act in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.

  I grow weary, but I probably won’t write again for a month. Don’t answer this, justifying yourself—of course I know you’re doing the best you “can.”

  The points of the letter are.

  1st

  You did spill over, rashly!

  2nd

  You are getting over the selfish period—thank God!

  3d

  But it’ll take one more big kick, + I want it to be mild, so your backside won’t suffer too much.

  4th

  I wish you’d get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people—what they say + how they b
ehave.

  With dearest love,

  Your Simply So-perfect Too, too Daddy

  Please, turn back + read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton—oh yeah!

  TO: Sara Murphy

  August 15, 1935

  ALS, 4 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly

  Asheville, North Carolina

  Dearest Sara

  Today a letter from Gerald, a week old, telling me this + that about the awful organ music around us, made me think of you, and I mean think of you (of all people in the world you know the distinction). In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character—in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender: