A Life in Letters
Page 44
3. I want you to go to Baltimore this Thanksgiving, leaving on the first day of vacation and remaining until Sunday. It shames me, and you too, to have to say that I must put a check on this, and that if you let me down I will consider that there is no use keeping you at Vassar another day.
4. I have asked you to stay at Vassar the week-end after the Yale game.
5. You can certainly find time to read eighteen Elizabethian lyrics. If I could spare the time and trouble to try to fix up the matter of the English course, what do you do with your hours?
On another slip I have listed these questions. Until I get a clear answer on every one, together with an affirmation that you intend to play square with me and stop this line of opposition, you will have to get along with pin money.
I know that you must have worries of your own and I hate to add to them. What I ask seems so very little. This year of many liberties is something I gave you with money and care (do you remember the schedules at Bryn Mawr?) Do you think it’s fair to use these privileges against me? I’ve made every sort of appeal to your more civilized instincts and all I get is the most insincere “Can’t we be friends?”—in other words, can’t we be friends on your terms.
Friends!—we don’t even speak the same language. I’ll give you the same answer my father would have given to me—at seventeen, eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Either you can decide to make concessions to what I want in the East or you can come out here Thanksgiving and try something else.
Since you’ve finished the “Farewell To Arms” the second bit of reading includes only the following poems. The reference is to the index of first lines in either the Oxford book or the Golden Treasury.
Come Unto These
Shakespeare
Tell Me Where
"
Hark, Hark the Lark
"
Take Oh Take
"
Go Lovely Rose
Waller
Oh Western Wind
Anon
Art Thou Poor Yet
Dekker
Fear No More
Shakespeare
My True Love
Sidney
Who is Sylvia
Shakespeare
The question will be along about Wednesday. If you read these ten poems you can answer it in a flash.
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
RTLS, 2pp.1 Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
November 18
1938
Dearest Scottie:
I’m certainly glad to catch a glimmer of wisdom in your attitude—even though you unveiled the story of the blow-away pink slip after the telegraph company had checked on you. And even though in one page of your letter you had intended to go to Baltimore from Thursday to Saturday, while in another part you hadn’t intended to go at all.
[I’m sorry about——’s tea. I’ve nothing against her except that she rather stuck her neck out about Vassar, which I suppose she is attending for the social prestige involved. She seemed very nice, quite transparent—a type that turned up all too frequently in the Cottage Club at Princeton. I do wish you would find some more interesting friends. To take the curse off your not going to her party I wrote a nice letter to her mother explaining my apparent tyranny in forbidding it. Same to the mother of——.
In answering my questions you asked some yourself. The one about Baltimore can be answered from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for weeping, a time for laughing,” etc. Fourteen was simply not the time for you to run around on evening dates—at least Pete Finney and I thought not in our erroneous ways. The parents of —— and —— thought differently. Who is interested in a girl with her bloom worn off at sixteen? The one thing you still reproach me for is letting you go, against my better judgment, to the dance at St. Andrew’s School.]
It is now perfectly sensible for you to go with college boys. (I didn’t want you to stay in Baltimore this fall because I felt it would shoot you into Vassar with your mind full of gayety or love, which it apparently did, for your first month there was a flat bust. Also, I did not want you to start with a string of football games this fall.) If you are invited to the Yale or Princeton Proms this winter or next spring by a reputable boy—and I’m entitled to the name, please—I’d have absolutely no objection to your going.1 The whole damn thing about going to the colleges is to keep it in proportion. Did you ever hear of a college boy, unless he were an idiot, racing from Smith to Vassar to Wellesley? There are certain small sacrifices for a college education or there wouldn’t be any honor in having gone to college.
But the New York thing is as wrong now as the auto date was at fourteen. I will quote you from a letter I wrote Harold Ober: “Those debutante parties in New York are the rendezvous of a gang of professional idlers, parasites, pansies, failures, the silliest type of sophomores, young customers’ men from Wall Street and hangers-on—the very riff-raff of social New York who would exploit a child like Scottie with flattery and squeeze her out until she is a limp colorless rag. In one more year she can cope with them. In three more years it will be behind her. This year she is still puppy enough to be dazzled. She will be infinitely better off here with me than mixed up with that sort of people. I’d rather have an angry little girl on my hands for a few months than a broken neurotic for the rest of my life.” But I don’t have to tell you this—you probably read the Life article on the dim-witted Frazier girl and the razz on her in The New Yorker.
As to the money. Your full allowance for next Monday, $13.85, will reach you almost as soon as this does. I’m sorry you were inconvenienced at the loss of the $10.00, but it is a trifle compared to the inconvenience you have caused at this end. I will also send an additional $5.00, which will make $18.85 for the Baltimore trip, but that $5.00 will come off the following week’s allowance. I want you to stay in Baltimore until Sunday, and I mean specifically in Baltimore, not at Vassar, not at Scarsdale. This money must absolutely take care of the Baltimore trip!
Yes, it is too bad you have to be checked up on like a girl of ten. I’d hoped you’d be rather different this year. If Peaches hadn’t been with you that first day in Hollywood I would have squelched the idea of rooming with a debutante as I had meant to. I let it go because I didn’t want to open her visit that way. I’m as sick of this bloody matter as you are. I can just see people pointing at you at New York dances and saying “That’s Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter. She likes her champagne young. Why doesn’t he do something about it?”
Even if your aims are the most worldly, the road that I am pointing out is the right one. A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Please address all future correspondence to my new address, 5221
Amestoy Ave., Encino, Los Angeles, California.
TO: Sidney Franklin1
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
MGM memo. Culver City, California
12/22/38
Dear Sidney:
Barring illness and (I have a sty as big as a Jefferson nickle—and less valuable) I will deliver you the stuff Tues. the 28th at midday. So save Tuesday afternoon! Singing! Dancing! Thorium! One of the Fitz Brothers in person! Soft-ball finals: Script vs. Sound!
I could give it to you Mon. the 26th at 11:45 P.M. but it would be an inferior script—hurried, careless and full of Christmas neckties. Wait till Tuesday for the genuine article.2
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzg.
P.S. Seriously I’m sorry it’s taken five weeks—I didn’t think it would be 75 pages.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
December 24, 1938.
Dear Max:
Since the going-out-of-print of “Paradise” and the success (or is it one?) of the “Fifth Column” I have come to feel somewhat negl
ected. Isn’t my reputation being allowed to let slip away? I mean what’s left of it. I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in Time and the New Yorker ect. make me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear—when there are memorial double deckers to such fellows as Farrel and Stienbeck.3
I think something ought to be published this Spring. You had a plan for the three novels and I have another plan, of which more hereafter, for another big book; the recession is over for awhile and I have the most natural ambition to see my stuff accessible to another generation. Bennet Cerf obviously isn’t going to move about Tender and it seems to me things like that need a spark from a man’s own publisher. It was not so long ago that “Tender” was among the dozen best of a bad season and had an offer from the Literary Guild—so I can’t be such a long chance as say, Callaghan. Either of the two books I speak of might have an awfully good chance to pay their way. A whole generation now has never read “This Side of Paradise”. (I’ve often thought that if Frank Bunn at Princeton had had a few dozen copies on his stands every September he could have sold them all by Christmas).
But I am especially concerned about Tender—that book is not dead. The depth of its appeal exists—I meet people constantly who have the same exclusive attachment to it as others had to Gatsby and Paradise, people who identified themselves with Dick Diver. It’s great fault is that the true beginning—the young psychiatrist in Switzerland—is tucked away in the middle of the book. If pages 151–212 were taken from their present place and put at the start the improvement in appeal would be enormous. In fact the mistake was noted and suggested by a dozen reviewers. To shape up the ends of that change would, of course, require changes in half a dozen other pages. And as you suggested, an omnibus book should also have a preface or prefaces—besides my proposed glossary of absurdities and inaccuracies in This Side of Paradise. This last should attract some amused attention.
The other idea is this:
A Big collection of stories leading off with Phillipe—entirely rewritten and pulled together into a 30,000 word novelette. The Collection could consist of:
1. Phillipe
2. Pre-war (Basil & Josephine)
3. May Day
4. The Jazz Age (the dozen or so best Jazz Stories).
5. About a dozen others including Babylon.
The reason for using Phillipe is this: He is to some extent completed in the 4th story (which you have never read) and in spite of some muddled writing, he is one of the best characters I’ve ever “drawn”. He should be a long book—but whether or not my M.G.M. contract is renewed I’m going to free-lance out here another year to lay by some money and then do my modern novel. So it would be literally years before I got to Phillipe again—if ever.
In my work here I can find time for such a rewrite of Phillipe as I contemplate—I could finish it by the first of February. The other stories would go in to the collection unchanged. Unlike Ernest I wouldn’t want to put in all the stories from all four books but I’d like to add four or five never published before.
I am desperately keen on both these schemes—I think the novels should come first and, unless there are factors there you haven’t told me about, I think it is a shame to put it off. It would not sell wildly at first but unless you make some gesture of confidence I see my reputation dieing on its feet from lack of nourishment. If you could see the cards for my books in the public libraries here in Los Angeles continually in demand even to this day, you would know I have never had wide distribution in some parts of the country. When This Side of Paradise stood first in the Bookman’s Monthly List it didn’t even appear in the score of the Western States.
You can imagine how distasteful it is to blow my own horn like this but it comes from a deep feeling that something could be done if it is done at once, about my literary standing—always admitting that I have any at all.
Ever your friend,
Scott
TO: Harold Ober
December 26, 1938
Wire. Lilly Library
Van Nuys, California
METRO NOT RENEWING TO MY GREAT PLEASURE BUT WILL FINISH CURIE THERMS LOTS OF OTHER WORK OFFERED STOP HOWEVER PLEASE SAY NOTHING WHATEVER TO PERKINS OR TO SCOTTIE WHO WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND STOP AM WRITING
SCOTT.
TO: Harold Ober
Received December 29, 1938
ALS, 1 p. Lilly Library
Los Angeles, California
Dear Harold:
As I wrote you the contract wasn’t renewed. Why I dont know—but not on account of the work. It seems sort of funny—to entrust me alone with their biggest picture, + continue me on it with a “your services will not be required”. Finally Eddie1 said that when I finished it he hoped he’d have good contract for me. O.K. If Curie is a hit I’d go back for $2000 a week. Baby am I glad to get out! Ive hated the place ever since Monkeybitch rewrote 3 Comrades!
Glad Scottie was nice.
Shielah sends her best
Ever
Scott
TO: Maxwell Perkins
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
January 4, 1939
Dear Max:
Your letter rather confused me. I had never clearly understood that it was the Modern Library who were considering doing my three books as a giant volume. I thought it was an enterprise of yours. If they show no special enthusiasm about bringing out Tender by itself, I don’t see how they would be interested in doing a giant anyhow. You spoke of it last year as something only the recession kept you from doing.
What I don’t like is the out-of-print element. In a second I’m going to discuss the Philippe business with you, but first let me say that I would rather have “This Side of Paradise” in print if only in that cheap American Mercury book edition than not in print at all. I see they have just done Elliot Paul’s “Indelible”.1 How do you think they would feel about it? And what is your advice on the subject?
Now about Philippe. When I wrote you I had envisaged another year of steady work here. At present, while it is possible that I may be on the coast for another year, it is more likely that the work will be from picture to picture with the prospect of taking off three or four months in the year, perhaps even more, for literary work. Philippe interests me. I am afraid, though, it would have to be supported by something more substantial. I would have to write 10,000 or 15,000 more words on it to make it as big a book as “Gatsby” and I’m not at all sure that it would have a great unity. You will remember that the plan in the beginning was tremendously ambitious—there was to have been Philippe as a young man founding his fortunes—Philippe as a middle-aged man participating in the Captian founding of France as a nation—Philippe as an old man and the consolidation of the feudal system. It was to have covered a span of about sixty years from 880 A.D. to 950. The research required for the second two parts would be quite tremendous and the book would have been (or would be) a piece of great self-indulgence, though I admit self-indulgence often pays unexpected dividends.
Still, if periods of three or four months are going to be possible in the next year or so I would much rather do a modern novel. One of those novels that can only be written at the moment and when one is full of the idea—as “Tender” should have been written in its original conception, all laid on the Riviera. I think it would be a quicker job to write a novel like that between 50 and 60,000 words long than to do a thorough revision job with an addition of 15,000 words on “Philippe”. In any case I’m going to decide within the next month and let you know.
Thanks for your letter. I wish you’d send me a copy of the Tom Wolfe article because I never see anything out here. John wrote about me in the Virginia Quarterly, too.
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. I hope Jane and Scottie see a lot of each other if Scottie stays in, but as I suspected, she has tendencies toward being a play-girl and has been put on probation. I hope s
he survives this February.
TO: David O. Selznick1
Typed memo, 1 p. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Selznick International Pictures stationery. Culver City, California
January 10, 1939
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
Just a word about the beginning. To suggest the romance of the old South immediately I should suggest borrowing from the trailers. Under the turning pages of the book I’d like to see a two or three minute montage of the most beautiful pre-war shots imaginable and played over it I’d like to hear the Stephen Foster songs right off the bat. I’d like to see young men riding, negroes singing, long shots of the barbecue, shots of Tara and Twelve Oaks and carriages and gardens and happiness and gaiety.
Otherwise, we open on an actress in a hoopskirt and two unknown young men. The great expectancy would be both assuaged and whetted by such a montage. Then we could go into the story of disappointed love, betraying overseers, toiling niggers and quarreling girls necessary to the plot because they’re just incidents against this background of beauty. It is against this background seen or remembered that we play the picture and what I missed from the very first was a sense of happiness.
TO: David O. Selznick
Typed memo, 6pp. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Selznick International Pictures stationery. Culver City, California
January 10, 1939
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
SLIGHT CHANGES AND CUTS
(Scene numbers refer to shooting script or yellows)
SCENE 19:
Pork (addressing Ellen as she mounts steps)
Miss Ellen—Mist’ Gerald tuk on bad at you runnin’ out ter hulp them Slatterys. Yo’ dint eat yo’ supper.