It was too late also for me to recoup the damage—I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years till my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.
The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds—she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage—sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy—she’s passed that failing on to you.
For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit—nothing but “getting by” and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don’t want to change you. But I don’t want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energies and my earnings for people who talk my language.
I have begun to fear that you don’t. You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this. People like Rosalind and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.
You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore—(and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you)—represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother’s illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that. There began to be an unsympathetic side to you that alienated first Mrs. Owens, then your teachers at Bryn Mawr. The line of those who felt it runs pretty close to you—adults who saw you every day. Among them you have made scarcely a single close friend, with all your mastery of the exterior arts of friendliness. All of them have loved you, as I do, but all of them have had reservations, and important ones: they have felt that something in you wasn’t willing to pull your weight, to do your part—for more than an hour.
This last year was a succession of information beginning as far back as December that you were being unfair to me, more frankly that you were cheating. The misinformation about your standing in your class, the failure to tutor at the Obers at Christmas, the unwillingness to help with your mother at Easter in golf or tennis, then the dingy outbreak in the infirmary at the people who were “on to you”, who knew you had none of the scholar in you but lived in a babyish dream—of the dance favors of a provincial school. Finally the catastrophe which, as far as I am able to determine, had no effect except to scare you because you knew I wouldn’t maintain you in the East without some purpose or reason.
If you did not have a charm and companionability, such a blow might have chastened you, but like my Uncle Phil you will always be able to find companions who will reassure you of your importance even though your accomplishment is a goose-egg. To the last day of his life Phil was a happy man, though he loafed always and dissipated a quarter of a million of his own and his sisters’ money and left his wife in poverty and his son as you saw him. He had charm—great charm. He never liked me after I was grown, because once he lost his charm in front of me and I kicked his fat backside. Your charm must not have been in evidence on the day Mrs. Perry Smith figuratively did the same to you.
All this was the long preparation for the dispair I experienced ten days ago. That you did or did not know how I felt about Baltimore, that you thought I’d approve of your meeting a boy and driving back with him unchaperoned to New York by night, that you honestly thought I would have permitted that—well, tell it to Harold, who seems to be more gullible.
The clerk from the Garden of Allah woke me up with the telegram in which I mistook Simmons for Finney and I called the Finneys—to find them gone. The result was entirely a situation of your own making—if you had any real regret about the Walker episode you’d have respected my wishes for a single week.
To sum up: what you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been.) In your career as a “wild society girl”, vintage of 1925, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it—it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere”, your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life—a real dream of your own—and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late—as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge—now your conversation is as commonplace as if you’d spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School—what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.
I shall come East in September to meet your boat—but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn’t likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will—or want to—remains to be seen.
Daddy
P. S. If you keep the diary, please don’t let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I’m not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don’t try to be witty in the writing, unless it’s natural—just true and real.
P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time—I wrote it over twice.
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
Sept. 19th
19 38
Dearest Pie:
Here are a few ideas that I didn’t discuss with you and I’m sending this to reach you on your first day.
For heaven’s sake don’t make yourself conspicuous by rushing around inquiring which are the Farmington Girls, which are the Dobbs Girls, etc. You’ll make an enemy of everyone who isn’t. Thank heaven you’re on an equal footing of brains at last—most of the eventual leaders will be high school girls and I’d hate to see you branded among them the first week as a snob—it’s not worth a moment’s thought. What is important is to go to the library and crack your first book—to be among the 5% who will do this and get that much start and freshness.
A chalk line is absolutely specified for
you at present—because:
A. The Walker episode will necessarily remain for awhile in the Vassar authorities’ minds. (It reached me for the first time last week in a rather garbled form.) But if there is no sequel it will die a natural death in six more months. Your bearing my name gives longevity to any such episodes whether they’re grave or trifling—it makes them better morsels of gossip.
B. My second reason for the chalk line is allied with this last—beside the “cleverness” which you are vaguely supposed to have “inherited”, people will be quick to deck you out with my sins. If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty, I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest nonstop binge, and the world also will have an interest in the matter of your behavior. It would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: “There she goes—just like her papa and mama.” Need I say that you can take this fact as a curse—or you can make of it a great advantage?
Remember that you’re there for four years. It is a residential college and the butterfly will be resented. You should never boast to a soul that you’re going to the Bachelors’ Cotillion. I can’t tell you how important this is. For one hour of vainglory you will create a different attitude about yourself. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck. And while I’m on this: You will notice that there is a strongly organized left-wing movement there. I do not particularly want you to think about politics, but I do not want you to set yourself against this movement. I am known as a left-wing sympathizer and would be proud if you were. In any case, I should feel outraged if you identified yourself with Nazism or Red-baiting in any form. Some of those radical girls may not look like much now but in your lifetime they are liable to be high in the councils of the nation.
I think it would be wise to put on somewhat of an act in reference to your attitude to the upper classmen. In every college the class just ahead of you is of great importance. They approach you very critically, size you up and are in a position to help or hinder you in anything you try. I mean the class just ahead of you. A Sophomore class is usually conceited. They feel that they have been through the mill and have learned something. While this is very doubtful, it is part of wisdom to humor that vanity in them. It would pay dividends many times to treat them with an outward respect which you might not feel and I want you to be able to do such things at will, as it happens that all through life you may be in a position in which you will constantly have to assume a lowly rank in a very strict organization. If anybody had told me my last year at Princeton that I would stand up and take orders from an ex-policeman, I would have laughed. But such was the case because, as an army officer, he was several grades above me in rank and competence—and that is not the last time it has happened.
Here is something you can watch happen during your college course. Always at the beginning of the first term about half a dozen leaders arise. Of these at least two get so intoxicated with themselves that they don’t last the first year, two survive as leaders and two are phonies who are found out within a year—and therefore discredited and rated even lower than before, with the resentment people feel for anyone who has fooled them.
Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are and will do through life. Two years are gone and half the indicators already point down—two years are left and you’ve got to pursue desperately the ones that point up!
I wish I were going to be with you the first day, and I hope the work has already started.
With dearest love,
TO: Harold Ober
Received November 9, 1938
ALS, 2 pp.
Encino, California
Dear Harold:
Back at work on a new job that may be something really good—Mme. Curie for Gretta Garbo. It was quite a plum and I’m delighted after the thankless months spent on fixing up leprous stories. Knopff said I could do my original if I wanted but he strongly advised this.
Im sorry my concern about Scottie overcast that day at your house—I think Mr Haas1 thought it was all about a football game, which shames me for having shown in public my dismay about the child. There is nothing much to do except let it work itself out—but I must beg you again not to give her money. I know how you feel about it—that I am cruel and unjust but remember you’ve gotten all your ideas on the subject from Scottie. I am under the greatest obligation to you but, if I may say so, I think the headmistress and teachers at Walkers, the Dean + professors at Vassar and I, who have been in constant communication with them and have concerned myself deeply with the child since she was seven—that we are in a better position to evaluate her character than you. I have to deal in results—points of stability and honor—you touch Scottie only on the superficial points of charm. So I ask you to let me have a fair chance by not giving her cash or credit—which she uses, specificelly in the case of the evening dress—to come out into a frank defiance of me.
I do not want to bring her out here—I have written her a last letter asking for very simple concessions. We will see what we will see. So long as she lies it is all very difficult and tortuous from any point of view.
Ever Yours
Scott
TO: Frances Turnbull1
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
Encino, California
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that want the “works”. You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
November 11, 1938.
Dearest Scottie:—
I still believe you are swimming, protozoa-like, in the submerged third of your class, and I still think your chance of flunking out is all too rosy
—two ‘B’ tests in your easiest subjects are absolutely no proof to the contrary. You would have to be a complete numbskull to write a lower test than that in French or English. As a freshman at Princeton we had to struggle with Plautus, Terrence, Sallust and Integral Calculus.
However, the point of this letter is that I am compelled at last by this telegraph matter to dock your allowance. I pay you almost as much as some stenographers on this lot get for a hard week—and you treat me to this childish monkey business! You see I put a tracer on that call and the telegraph company reports that you told them the telegram was received by your roommate. Your letter tells quite another story. On the basis of it I am claiming damage from the Company for non-delivery, which unless your conscience is clear may lead to some trouble in Poughkeepsie. If your conscience isn’t clear you’d better come clean right away.
I’m habituated to the string of little lies (such as you telling Dorothy that you went to the Navy-Princeton game, telling me that Gordon Meacham was Captain of the Freshman football team) but this sort of thing can lead into a hellish mess. I once saw a pathological liar in police court, her face blazing with pimples, her blue eyes straight as a die, as she told the sargeant the most amazing circumstantial story about where her boy friend had been the night of the holdup. I knew that the sargeant had the proof of the guilt on his blotter but there was something admirable, even awe-inspiring, about the way the girl invented even though she must have been squirming inwardly. If you should happen to be there next term I want you to take music and continue making up your songs and plays, because I kept thinking how, if life had been a little kinder, that girl might have been a great creator of fiction.
Instead she got two years.
Anyhow, the allowance is definitely docked to $3.85 until you come clean on the following questions:
1. The telegram matter. I think it would be wiser to settle it with me instead of the Dean.
2. I wrote you a letter, unacknowledged, of which the purport was that I didn’t want you to go to debutant affairs in New York this year. I still don’t want you to go to them. That includes Dorothy Burns’ tea. My reasons are manifold and I will be glad to go into them with you further
A Life in Letters Page 43