Love to you all and dearest love to you.
P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs. McKinney.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
c/o Phil Berg Agency
9484 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, Calif.
May 20, 1940
Dear Max:-
I’ve owed you a decent letter for some months. First—the above is my best address though at the moment I’m hunting for a small apartment. I am in the last week of an eight week movie job for which I will receive $2300. I couldn’t pay you anything from it, nor the government, but it was something, because it was my own picture Babylon Revisited and may lead to a new line up here. I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practised excellence—
The radio has just announced the fall of St. Quentin! My God! What was the use of my wiring you that Andre Chamson has a hit when the war has now passed into a new stage making his book a chestnut of a bygone quiet era.
I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. It is certainly no fault of yours. You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these five years. It’s funny what a friend is—Ernest’s crack in The Snows, poor John Bishop’s article in the Virginia Quarterly (a nice return for ten years of trying to set him up in a literary way)1 and Harold’s sudden desertion at the wrong time, have made them something less than friends. Once I believed in friendship, believed I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.
Professionally, I know, the next move must come from me. Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye—or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp—in a small way I was an original. I remember we had one of our few and trifling disagreements because I said that to anyone who loved “When Lilacs last—” Tom Wolfe couldn’t be such a great original. Since then I have changed about him. I like “Only the Dead” and “Arthur, Garfield etc.”, right up with the tops. And where are Tom and I and the rest when psychological Robespierres parade through American letters elevating such melo as “Christ in Concrete”2 to the top, and the boys read Steinbeck like they once read Mencken! I have not lost faith. People will buy my new book and I hope I shan’t again make the many mistakes of Tender.
Tell me news if you have time. Where is Ernest and what doing? How about Elizabeth Lemmon, the lovely, & unembittered and sacrified virgin, the victim of what I gradually and depressingly found was the vanity of her family. How I disliked them—the heavily moustached Mrs. Doctor, the panting Virginian hausfrau sister who fancied herself an aristocrat, the Baltimore bond-salesman who will inherit. And, in the midst, the driven snow of Elizabeth. It was too sad to bear.
Love to all of you, of all generations.
Scott
TO: Lester Cowan
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
May
28
1940
Dear Lester:
My idea is to lie up in Santa Barbara or Carmel for a week or ten days. Bill Dozier will give you the addresses and when I have a permanent one I will wire it to you myself. I don’t know how anybody can get away from anything these days and I’m even taking a radio. But just the idea of having the house off my back is a relief.
The picture was fun to write. The only snag was in the final Swiss Sequence. I found out that there is no trace of winter sport in Switzerland before the middle of December and the stockmarket crash occurred very definitely the last part of October so, instead of a routine based on bobsleds such as we talked about, I had to resort to an older device. I think this sequence carries the emotion of the others but it is the one with least originality of treatment, and audiences are more and more responding to originality after five years of double-feature warm-overs.
Sheilah has several times mentioned to me a little actress named Mary Todd (aged eight). She was the child who played the piano in “Intermezzo” and also did a touching scene in George Cukor’s “Zaza”—when the child had to receive her father’s mistress not understanding the situation at all. She is certainly somebody to keep in mind, though I can’t seem to visualize her face at this moment.
Also the actor1 who played the chief commissar in “Ninotchka” and the bookkeeper in “Shop Around the Corner”, might be worthy of consideration for Pierre, though the types he has played so far are largely South European. And for this he would have to be a sprucer and more attractive man externally to match up with Marion.
Lester, I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t get around to reading the Hilton script. I did actually go through it quickly and enjoyed it—but not enough to give any constructive suggestions. I wish it the greatest success.
There are so many new things in our script that I thought it best to deliver it to Bob under seal. So many of the scenes are easily repeated in the most innocent way, and the ear of Hollywood is notoriously hungry. I think you will like the title.1 It is an unusual name with a peculiarly sonorous quality and so many of the more popular pieces—Babbitt, Rebecca, David Copperfield—have been only names. I think it you sleep on it, it will grow on you.
Looking forward to seeing your face or hearing your voice. Best to Ann.
With warm personal regards
P.S. This of course, is the best and final version of the 1st draft.
Encino, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TL, 3 pp. Princeton University
1403 Laurel Avenue
Hollywood
California
(new address)
June 7, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
Thank you for your letter. Planning from week to week, I am not quite sure yet about anything, but go ahead about the Summer School, make reservations and so forth. I think it can be managed all right. I went to San Francisco with some friends for one day, and found it much too long to see that singularly second-rate and uninspired Fair—though they had some good Cranachs and El Grecos in the art exhibition.
Vassar’s only fault to the outer world is the “Vassar manner”—which of course is founded on the sense of intellectual intensity that you mention. I found it particularly annoying in Margaret Culkin Banning’s daughter in Tryon some years ago. She told me all about American literature in the first half hour I met her—I believe she had been editor-in-chief of the Miscellaeni, the year before. Of course it does not usually show itself like that, but, like the Harvard manner of 1900 which gave Harvard a country-wide unpopularity, makes itself known in a series of smug silences. Southern manners are better—especially the rather punctilious deference to older people. The chances are that some toothless old codger who doesn’t open his mouth may turn out to be the greatest authority in the world on some recondite subject, and you feel rather a fool when you have judged him and settled his hash with the glossy learning of a year or so. So be careful of it, especially this summer when you will meet many idiots, some in hysterical panic about the war and others too dumb to know what is going on.
You credit me with a gift of prophecy I don’t have. I did feel the war was coming in ’39 and said so to a lot of people, but it was calculated by the time when Germany would have several new replacement classes to make up for the decreased birth-rate from 1915 to 1918. We all knew the German army wasn’t beaten and Woodrow Wilson didn’t want it to be beaten, not appreciat
ing the utter helpless decadence of the English—something that has been apparent to even English intellectuals for twenty years. The intellectuals, those few who ever dabbled in military affairs, knew that the war was lost at Munich and that the Germans would tear the Allies to pieces, in Europe at least. And the American rich will try to betray America in exactly the same way as the British conservatives. A pogrom could be organized over-night against all the “subversive elements” (whose power is tremendously over estimated at the moment) but the rich will have to have the pants scared off them before they stop skulking in their tents and begin to get their boys safe jobs in the quarter-master department.
The Comrades out here are in a gloomy spot; Donald Stewart goes around groaning how “the Revolution will have to come the hard way,” in other words the party line is to let National Socialism (Nazism) conquer us and then somehow milk Marxism out of Hitler’s sterile teats! Stalin has pulled another boner just as he did in Finland. He had no intention of letting Hitler go this far.
With the situation changing as fast as it does now, it is difficult for Liberals to have a policy. The war may lead to anything from utter chaos to a nonComintern American Revolution, but the world that I knew and that you have had eighteen years of will never exist again in our time. On the other hand I do not think it possible for the Germans to win the South American war against us. The native Yankee is still the most savage and intelligent fighter in the world. He plays the toughest, hardest games with a cooler head and it is simply unthinkable that an oppressed stock could be whooped up in one decade to conquer him. Still I think many of your friends will probably draw their last breaths in Paraguay or the forests of the Chaco. Did you see that Lehman has called for anti-aircraft defense for New York? What a cowardly panic! Next we will have Louis B. Mayer calling for antiaircraft guns to defend Metro.
This letter has turned into gossip, and I have much to do. I finished the picture and am doing a short story. Had intended to rest for a week, but there wasn’t a chance. Dear, I have had a very depressed letter from your mother and another from your grandmother—the second told me in cautious language that your mother had had a “toxic attack.” I know what this means, only I expected her to hold out at least two months. She seems to be recovered from that, but her own letter shows a great deal of despair, and your grandmother’s has a defeatism that I have never seen before. I don’t know what is going to happen, but as this may be the last time you have a chance to see your mother in a sane period, I want you to find ten days to spend with her this June. This may bust hell out of your plans, but remember that for ten months you have lived for yourself and you owe this to me. I don’t care when you go, except it is to be before Summer School opens, and not just three or four days.
The Harper’s business is all right for me if you can fit it in with everything else. Will you tell me what you are going to take at Summer School? I think I wrote you that I thought your next year’s Vassar course is fine, except for the Greek Civilization and Literature, which seems to me a profound waste of time. Your other three courses are so completely cultural that I wish that the fourth could be as practical a one as Vassar offers—I wish they had Business School—or else a supplementary French course or another language. Greek Civilization and Literature is something you cannot learn in nine months, and it seems to me a rather dilettantish way of wasting time.
I expect to hear in a day or so whether I am going back to work on my picture story—I told you once it was an old Saturday Evening Post story called “Babylon Revisited” that I wrote in 1931. You were one of the principal characters.
With dearest love,
Daddy
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 2pp.1 Princeton University
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
June 12, 1940
Dearest Scottina:
Thanks for your nice full letter—it made me happy, and I don’t doubt your sincerity about work. I think now you will always be a worker, and I’m glad. Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She had no education—not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me—but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing “kinetic”, which, in physics, means internal driving force—she had to be led or driven. That was the tired element that all Judge Sayre’s children inherited. And the old mother is still, at times, a ball of fire!
I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting “B’s”. Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for “A’s”—don’t take the things in which you can get “A”, for you can learn them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry—you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel—and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. [What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.”. . . .]
Please wire me what days you have chosen to go South so I can make financial arrangements.
Can’t you tell some story down there that it’s urgently necessary to go to summer school because you’ve been on the edge of flunking out? Otherwise they’ll wonder why the money couldn’t be spent for a seaside vacation for you all. I’m living in the smallest apartment here that will permit me not to look poor, which I can’t afford to do in Hollywood. If the picture goes through, I will give your mother a trip in August. At the moment I am keeping her on a slender allowance, as for ten years she has absorbed the major proportion of the family income.
I did listen to the radio all through my trip. Jesus! What a battle!
Please at least go in to see Gerald Murphy at Mark Cross for five minutes in passing thru N.Y. this summer!
Send me the details about Harvard Summer School. Can I pay in installments?
Even as a construction man, Pinero was inferior to both Shaw and Ibsen. What purpose is served in teaching that second rate Noel Coward at Vassar?
The ‘New Yorker’ story might hamper you if you attach too much importance to it. The play was an accomplishment—I admit it with pride and pleasure. I’d like to see the story. Can’t you send me a copy?
Reading over your letter, you don’t sound like an introvert at all. You sound a little flushed and over-confident, but I’m not worried.
With Dearest Love,
Daddy
P.S. You want to go to summer school. I will have to do extra work for that, and I’ll do it gladly. But I want you to spend ten days with your mother first. And please give me a full complete report on your mother’s condition. Your request for $15.00 just came as I was putting this in an envelope. To get it to you (Frances is away) cost me my morning. You must not ask me to wire you money—it is much harder to get than last summer. I owe thousands. I couldn’t have had this trip except that the Rogers were going + invited me. Sorry to close the letter this way but you must count your pennies.
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
June
14
1940
Dearest Zelda:-
At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and
well informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have—which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, than perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August—by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with “Babylon Revisited”—or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two million dollar tripe like “All This and Heaven Too”.
Twenty years ago “This Side of Paradise” was a best seller and we were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.
Love to all of you.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
June
14
1940
Dearest Scottie:—
By my mistake the money was not sent to Mary Law. I wired you $15. care of Ober and here’s another $15. The allowance for the week of June 17 will be sent you tomorrow and you can use it to get to Montgomery.
Things not so bright here.
Dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Gloria1 was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother. I can’t really say there was any resemblance except in the beauty and certain terms of expression she used, and also I naturally used many circumstantial events of our early married life. However the emphases were entirely different. We had a much better time than Anthony and Gloria had.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
A Life in Letters Page 53