A Life in Letters
Page 54
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
June
15
1940
Dearest Scottie:
Here is your round trip fare to Montgomery. I’m sorry it can’t be more but, while my picture is going to be done, the producer is going to first do one that has been made for the brave Laurence Olivier who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back by the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby Esquire.
Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss Le Grand and her fellow feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr. Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.
Anyhow they need you. I will dig you out in time for the summer school.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. As I said, I am trying to give you $30. a week this summer, and when there is a lot of traveling to be done will increase this somewhat. For instance, I gave you $20. extra to get out of Vassar and there is $10. extra in this check which makes $30. and which will cover a good deal of transportation to date (including the round trip fare to Montgomery). Will send the next check there.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. University of Michigan
July
15
1940
Dear Arnold:
My name is Paul Elgin and Paul will presently send you some contributions.
I see that your next scheduled story is “Pat Hobby Does His Bit”1 and I hope that the one after that is “No Harm Trying”.2 It certainly seems to me next in order of merit. You didn’t comment on “Fun in an Artist’s Studio”.3 Perhaps if your secretary told me in which order the remaining stories are scheduled I might be able to make some changes in one or two of them before they go into type. There are a couple there that don’t please me at all.
Thanks for your note. Best wishes.
Ever your friend,
Scott Fitzg
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
Retyped letter, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
July
18
1940
Dearest Scottie:
This summer has shown among other things that your education to date is entirely theoretical. I have no general quarrel with this and I believe it is as it should be in preparing for any sort of literary work. However the odds are against your having the type of talent that matures very quickly—most of my contemporaries did not get started at twenty-two, but usually at about twenty-seven to thirty or even later, filling in the interval with anything from journalism teaching sailing a tramp-schooner and going to wars. The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors—assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
Looking at the problem from short range only, you see how difficult it was to get a job this summer. So let’s see what Vassar’s got. The first thing that occurs to me is Spanish, which is simply bound to be of enormous value in the next ten years. Every junior-high-school child in California gets a taste of it and could beat you out of a job in South America if we expand that way. It is enough like French so that you have few alphabetical troubles, is pronounced as written, and has a fairly interesting literature of its own. I mean it’s not like studying Bulgarian or Chippewa or some strange dialect in which no one had ever had anything to say. Don’t you think this would be a much wiser move than the Greek and Latin culture?—the which shocks me that Vassar has such a namby-pamby “course”.
I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer—I mean any one good book like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Ten Days That Shook the World” or Renan’s “Life of Christ”. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer—then I have heard nothing from you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read “Pere Goriot” or “Crime and Punishment” or even “The Doll’s House” or “St. Matthew” or “Sons and Lovers”? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese.
Don’t be too hard on Princeton. Harvard produced John Reed1 but they also produced Richard Whitney2 who I like to believe would have been spotted as a punk at Princeton. The Honor System sometimes has a salutary effect on light-fingered gentry.
With dearest love,
Daddy
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
July
29
1940
Dearest Zelda:—
The Temple1 thing is this: she’s too old to have a child’s appeal and though they’ve put everything in her last pictures—song, dance, sleight of hand, etc.,—they fail to hold the crowd. In fact the very last is rather nauseous in its sentimentality.
So this “independent” producer Cowan, now of Columbia, shortly to be at Paramount, had the idea of a romantic drama for her and bought my Babylon Revisited last year for $900. for that purpose. I should have held out for more but the story had been nearly ten years published without a nibble. So then, in a beautifully avaricious way, knowing I’d been sick and was probably hard up, Mr. Cowan hired me to do the script on a percentage basis. He gives me—or gave me—what worked out to a few hundred a week to do a quick script.2 Which I did and then took to bed to recuperate. Now he says he wants me to do another, and I’m supposed to be grateful because since I haven’t done a movie for so long the conclusion is easy for this scum that I can’t write. If you could see and talk for five minutes with the People I deal with you’d understand without words how difficult it is to master a bare politeness.
Anyhow I think it’s been a good thing except for the health angle and if and when he sells Mrs. Temple and Paramount the script there’ll be a little more money—if he doesn’t think of a way to beat me out of it.
So that’s the story. Tell me—did the watch come? You never mentioned it.
With Dearest Love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 2pp.3 Princeton University
Hollywood, California
July 29, 1940
I am still on the Temple picture and will continue on if a very avaricious gent named Cowan will loosen up. If he doesn’t, I will rest for a week, and can stand it as my cough has become a public nuisance.
I wonder who was the ex-Westover woman you met. I wasn’t responsible for Ginevra getting fired but that’s the way of a legend—it was some Yale boys.
This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it’s come so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like “English Prose since 1800.” Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal—and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction—something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once—there’s some in your diary—and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry which is the most concentrated form of style.
Example: You read Melantha which is practi
cally poetry and sold a New Yorker story—you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-Diary level of average performance.1 The only sensible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry—Blake to Keats. (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above teatable level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O’Hara.
Strange Interlude2 is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it and called it Candida. On the other hand you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s Doll’s House. Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House—all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes.
Well, the old master wearies—the above is really good advice Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. Understand me, I think the poetry courses you took in school (and I read the booklets) were utterly sissified drool. But a real grasp of Blake, Keats, etc. will bring you something you haven’t dreamed of. And it should come now.
TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
Summer 1940
ALS, 5 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Hollywood, California
Honey—that goes for Sara too:
I have written a dozen people since who mean nothing to me—writing you I was saving for good news. I suppose pride was concerned—in that personally and publicly dreary month of Sept. last about everything went to pieces all at once and it was a long uphill pull.
To summarize: I don’t have to tell you anything about the awful lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poisoning effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up + down and a stabilization at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed—and now for 21/2 months and one short week that may have been grip—nothing at all. With it went a psychic depression over the finances and the effect on Scotty and Zelda. There was many a day when the fact that you and Sara did help me at a desperate moment (and remember it was the first time I’d ever borrowed money in my life except for business borrowings like Scribners) seemed the only pleasant human thing that had happened in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten. The thousands that I’d given and loaned—well, after the first attempts I didn’t even worry about that. There seem to be the givers + the takers and that doesn’t change. So you were never out of my mind—but even so no more present than always because this was only one of so many things.
In the land of the living again I function rather well. My great dreams about this place are shattered and I have written half a novel and a score of satiric pieces that are appearing in the current Esquires about it. After having to turn down a bunch of well paid jobs while I was ill there was a period when no one seemed to want me for duck soup—then a month ago a producer asked me to do a piece of my own for a small sum ($2000) and a share in the profits. The piece is Babylon Revisited, an old and not bad Post story of which the child heroine was named Honoria! I’m keeping the name.
It looks good. I have stopped being a prophet (3d attempt at spelling this) but I think I may be solvent in a month or so if the fever keeps subservient to what the doctors think is an exceptional resistance. Thank heaven I was able to keep Scottie at Vassar (She came twice to the New Weston to call but found you gone) because there was no other place for her. I think she will go on now for the four years.
Zelda is home since this week Tuesday—at her mothers in Montgomery. She has a poor pitiful life, reading the Bible in the old fashioned manner walking tight lipped and correct through a world she can no longer understand—playing with the pieces of old things as if a man a thousand years hence tried to reconstruct our civilization from a baroque cornice, a figurine from Trojans columns, an aeroplane wing and a page of Petrarch all picked up in the Roman forum. Part of her mind is washed clean + she is no one I ever knew (—This is all from letters and observations of over a year ago—I haven’t been East since Spring.)
So now you’re up to date on me and it wont be so long again. I might say by way of counter reproach that there’s no word of any of you in your letter. It is sad about Pauline.1 Writing you today has brought back so much and I could weep very easily
With Dearest Love
Scott
TO: Lester Cowan
c. August 1940
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Monday night.
Dear Lester:
I phoned but you were gone. I saw the Great McGinty2 and heard the crowd respond and I think your answer is there and not in this wretched star system. When you said you were not going to begin with the prologue and seemed to give credence to some director’s wild statement that Petrie was the best character—I felt that you were discouraged about the venture and it was warping your judgment. If it is such a poor script that it can be so casually mutilated then how will it be improved with two slipping stars?
The virtue of the Great McGinty was one and singular—mark this—it had only the virtue of being told to an audience as it was conceived. It was inferior in pace, it was an old story—the audience loved it because they are desperately tired of s——put up every week in new cans. It had not suffered from compromises, polish jobs, formulas and that familiarity which is so falsely consoling to producers—but read the last Variety (N. Y. edition) and what the average man gives as his reason for staying away. That scene of familiarity which seems to promise out here that old stuff has made money before, has become poison gas to those who have to take it as entertainment every night—boy meets girl, gang formula, silk-hat western. The writing on the wall is that anybody this year who brings in a good new story intact will make more reputation and even money, than those who struggle for a few stars. I would rather see new people in this picture than Gable and Temple. I think it would be a bigger and better thing for you.
Ever your Friend,
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
August
3
1940
Dear Scottie:
Jane Perkins1 passed through and happened to mention that she had taken that Blake-to-Keats course—I became less enthusiastic about it because she said they studied Amy Lowell’s biography which is a saccharine job compared to Colvin’s.2 However, in the catalogue I see a course called #217 in verse writing. It says, “limited to twelve members—permission required” and it gives only one point. Is that at all practical? I imagine there would be some latitude in the poets that you would read. There is also that Shakespeare course (165) and one in French Poetry (240), one point. Some of the history and philosophical courses look good to me but—oh, hell I can’t advise you from this distance. I’m just sorry you can’t read some poetry.
It isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around—John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in “verse” but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non-poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and exp
lanations. The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with The Nightingale which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the Pot of Basil with its great stanzas about the two brothers, “Why were they proud, etc.”; and The Eve of St. Agnes, which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, Bright Star and the others.
Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
You still have that French typewriter in storage, haven’t you? Would it be any good? We rent one here and it costs only $5. for three months. You threaten to send me money! If you have any extra, pay your bills in Poughkeepsie. My suggestion is that after you visit Miss Doyle, you go to Lake Forest and from there go South to Montgomery. I’m afraid the latter seems to be necessary. Your mother most particularly asked to see you again and the only alternative would be to send her North to see you, which means sending two people. I know it will be dull going into that hot little town early in September—but you are helping me. Even invalids like your mother have to have mileposts—things to look forward to and back upon. It gives her more pride there in Montgomery if you come to see her, something to talk about. Only think how empty her life is and you will see the importance of your going there. Will you figure out what the fare to Chicago will be?
You wrote me such a full letter that I haven’t answered it all even now. When we get some breathing space here I’ll have Frances figure how much you cost this year.