Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. Be careful about showing my letters—I mean to your mother for instance. I write you very freely.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
August
14
1940
Dearest Ceci:
Aunt Elise’s death was a shock to me. I was very fond of her always—I was fond of Aunt Annabel and Aunt Elise, who gave me almost my first tastes of discipline, in a peculiar way in which I wasn’t fond of my mother who spoiled me. You were a great exception among mothers—managing by some magic of your own to preserve both your children’s love and their respect. Too often one of the two things is sacrificed.
With Father, Uncle John and Aunt Elise a generation goes. I wonder how deep the Civil War was in them—that odd childhood on the border between the states with Grandmother and old Mrs. Scott and the shadow of Mrs. Suratt.1 What a sense of honor and duty—almost eighteenth century rather than Victoria. How lost they seemed in the changing world—my father and Aunt Elise struggling to keep their children in the haute bourgeoisie when their like were sinking into obscure farm life or being lost in the dark boarding houses of Georgetown.
I wrote Scottie to stop by and say hello to you on her way south to see her mother next month. I would so like to see you all myself. Gi-gi wrote me such a nice letter from Richmond.
With Dearest Love Always
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Gerald Murphy
TLS, 1 p. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Twentieth Century–Fox stationery.
Hollywood, California
September
14
1940
Dear Gerald:
I suppose anybody our age suspects what is emphasized—so let it go. But I was flat in bed from April to July last year with day and night nurses. Anyhow as you see from the letterhead, I am now in official health.
I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack soft place—even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence—that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as “progress” is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs. Except for the stage-struck young girls people come here for negative reasons—all gold rushes are essentially negative—and the young girls soon join the vicious circle. There is no group, however small, interesting as such. Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent—by whom I mean the spoiled writers, Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dotty, Dash Hammet2 etc. That Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference. She is one type of commy Malraux didn’t list among his categories in Man’s Hope—but nothing would disappoint her so vehemently as success.
I have a novel pretty well on the road. I think it will baffle and in some ways irritate what readers I have left. But it is as detached from me as Gatsby was, in intent anyhow. The new Armegeddon, far from making everything unimportant, gives me a certain lust for life again. This is undoubtedly an immature throw-back, but it’s the truth. The gloom of all causes does not affect it—I feel a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses—however misdirected.
Zelda dozes—her letters are clear enough—she doesn’t want to leave Montgomery for a year, so she says. Scottie continues at Vassar—she is nicer now than she has been since she was a little girl. I haven’t seen her for a year but she writes long letters and I feel closer to her than I have since she was little.
I would like to have some days with you and Sara. I hear distant thunder about Ernest and Archie1 and their doings but about you I know not a tenth of what I want to know.
With affection,
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, California
TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
ALS, 1 p. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
September
14
1940
Dear Gerald and Sara—
I can’t tell you how this has worried me. This is the first personal debt I’ve ever owed and I’m glad to be able to pay back $150 out of the $350.
Your generosity made me able to send Scottie back to Vassar last Fall. This year she is the Harper’s Bazaar representative and has sold stories to various magazines and things are in every way easier. But she was the type to whom a higher education meant everything and it would have been heartbreaking not to give it to her.
With love to you both and so much
gratitude,
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
September
14
1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Am sending you a small check next week which you should really spend on something which you need—a winter coat, for instance—or if you are equipped, to put it away for a trip when it gets colder. I can’t quite see you doing this, however. Do you have extra bills, dentist’s, doctors’, etc., and, if so, they should be sent to me as I don’t expect you to pay them out of the thirty dollars. And I certainly don’t want your mother to be in for any extras. Is she?
This is the third week of my job and I’m holding up very well but so many jobs have started well and come to nothing that I keep my fingers crossed until the thing is in production. Paramount doesn’t want to star Shirley Temple alone on the other picture and the producer can’t find any big star who will play with her so we are temporarily held up.
As I wrote you, Scottie is now definitely committed to an education and I feel so strongly about it that if she wanted to go to work I would let her really do it by cutting off all allowance. What on earth is the use of having gone to so much time and trouble about a thing and then giving it up two years short of fulfillment. It is the last two years in college that count. I got nothing out of my first two years—in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially), it carried me full swing into my career. Her generation is liable to get only too big a share of raw life at first hand.
Write me what you do?
With dearest love,
P.S. Scottie may quite possibly marry within a year and then she is fairly permanently off my hands. I’ve spent so much time doing work that I didn’t particularly want to do that what does one more year matter. They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
October
5
1940
Dearest Scottie:
Glad you liked Death in Venice. I don’t see any connection between that and Dorian Gray except that they both have an implied homosexuality. Dorian Gray is little more than a somewhat highly charged fairy tale which stimulates adolescents to intellectual activity at about seventeen (it did the same for you as it did for me). Sometime you will re-read it and see that it is essentially naive. It is in the lower ragged edge of “literature,” just as Gone with the Wind is in the higher brackets of crowd entertainment. Death in Venice, on the other hand, is a work of art, of the school of Flaubert—yet not derivative at all. Wilde had two models for Dorian Gray: Balzac’s “Le Peau de Chagrin” and Huysman’s “A Rebours”.
After which literary le
cture I can only sympathize with the practically desolate state of Vassar and assure you that many of those that have left will lament through their lives that they didn’t go on. In that connection, by the way, aren’t there many transfers from other colleges in junior year? I should think after this past year everything would indeed be anti-climax. You’ve had almost everything you wanted—in Vassar, in Baltimore, and in general. But it’s rather lucky that in life we don’t go on repeating. Certainly you should have new objectives now—this of all years ought to be the time of awakening for that nascent mind of yours. [Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.]1
You speak of how good your generation is, but I think they share with every generation since the Civil War in America the sense of being somehow about to inherit the earth. You’ve heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Well, and fare the well. You never answer the specific questions in my letters. You tell me about your courses in general, but not in particular. And that was an important question about your literary name—I’m against your using two names of mine, like in the College Bazaar.1
With dearest love.
Daddy
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
October
11
1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended, as if they were being bombed.
A letter from Gerald yesterday. He has no news except a general flavor of the past. To him, now, of course, the Riviera was the best time of all. Sara is interested in vegetables and gardens and all growing and living things.
I expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish, a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years’ away. I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because, after fifty one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.
My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing—but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmastime this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man—a label which I had done nothing to deserve.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
October
19
1940
Dearest Zelda:-
I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on “Tender is the Night” at the end—I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in “Little Eva,” which reminds me that I saw the two Duncan Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?
My room is covered with charts like it used to be for “Tender is the Night” telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short, as I originally planned it two years ago, and more on the order of “Gatsby”.
Dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, Calif.
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
October
23
1940
Dearest Zelda:-
Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carrol matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money. I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th to last until December 15th so I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once (except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.
I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.
It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.
Two thousand words today and all good.
With dearest love
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
Retyped letter, 1 p. Princeton University
November
2
1940
Dearest Scottina:—
Listening to the Harvard-Princeton game on the radio with the old songs reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and that you are living now. I picture you as there though I don’t know whether you are or not.
I remember once a long time ago I had a daughter who used to write me letters but now I don’t know where she is or what she is doing, so I sit here listening to Puccini—“Someday she’ll write (Pigliano edda ciano).”1
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Ernest Hemingway
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
November 8, 1940
Dear Ernest:
It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication.2 I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the side shows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death—and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.
I never got to tell you how I
liked To Have and to Have Not either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance—paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoiefski in their undeflected intensity.
Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoiefski with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.
With Old Affection,
P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November—you can’t flunk out in November) and how I am an awful suck about the rich and a social climber. What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit—how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anybody. Not even Allan Campbell1 who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.
P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.2
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
November
23
1940
Dearest Zelda:
Enclosed is Scottie’s little story—she had just read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha on my recommendation and the influence is what you might call perceptible.
The odd thing is that it appeared in eastern copies of the New Yorker and not in the western, and I had some bad moments looking through the magazine she had designated and wondering if my eyesight had departed.
The editor of “Collier’s” wants me to write for them (he’s here in town), but I tell him I’m finishing my novel for myself and all I can promise him is a look at it. It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I’m digging it out of myself like uranium—one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas. It is a novel a la Flaubert without “ideas” but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods.
A Life in Letters Page 55