The resemblance is rather to “Gatsby” than to anything else I’ve written. I’m so glad you’re well and reasonably happy.
With dearest love,
P.S. Please send Scottie’s story back in your next letter—as it seems utterly impossible to get duplicates and I shall probably want to show it to authors and editors with paternal pride.
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, California
TO: Edmund Wilson
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
November
25
1940
Dear Bunny:
I’ve been reading your new essays with interest and if you expect (as Max Perkins hinted) to republish them sometime, I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in “Mice and Men”. I’m sending you a marked copy of Norris’ “McTeague” to show you what I mean. His debt to “The Octupus” is also enormous and his balls, when he uses them, are usually clipped from Lawrence’s “Kangaroo”. I’ve always encouraged young writers—I put Max Perkins on to Caldwell, Callaghan and God knows how many others but Steinbeck bothers me. I suppose he cribs for the glory of the party.
Two years after it was published I ran across an article by John Bishop in the Virginia Quarterly. His war story about Ernest under the corpses is pure crap. Also he says that I flunked out of Princeton, though in the year referred to I went to my last class November 28th, when it is somewhat unusual to flunk out. Also he reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I’ve had this before but nobody seems able to name these rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction—Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in “Cafe Society.” It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more. Maybe it’s conscience—nobody ever sold himself for as little gold as he did.
I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.
With best to you both,
P.S. This sounds like such a bitter letter—I’d rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
November 29, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
I started Tom Wolfe’s book on your recommendation.1 It seems better than Time and the River. He has a fine inclusive mind, can write like a streak, has a great deal of emotion, though a lot of it is maudlin and inaccurate, but his awful secret transpires at every crevice—he did not have anything particular to say! The stuff about the GREAT VITAL HEART OF AMERICA is just simply corny.
He recapitulates beautifully a great deal of what Walt Whitman said and Dostoevski said and Nietzsche said and Milton said, but he himself, unlike Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, has nothing really new to add. All right—it’s all a mess and it’s too bad about the individual—so what? Most writers line themselves up along a solid gold bar like Ernest’s courage, or Joseph Conrad’s art, or D. H. Lawrence’s intense cohabitations, but Wolfe is too “smart” for this and I mean smart in its most belittling and most modern sense. Smart like Fadiman in the New Yorker, smart like the critics whom he so pretends to despise. However, the book doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live. But I’d like you to think sometime how and in what way you think it is superior to such a piece of Zolaesque naturalism as Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” or if it is superior at all. Did you like the description of Max Perkins as “Foxhall?” I believe Max had mixed emotions.
I’m taking a day off from my novel to go to the dentist, the doctor, and my agent, to the latter in order to discuss picture business when and if I go back to it in February. And I have saved an hour to rush in where angels fear to tread. I don’t know Bobby and have had to piece him together from what you have told me and from a letter you showed me and so forth. But it sounds to me as if he had a perceptible dash of lavender. I know exactly what you mean about the Dwight Fiske attitude—sometimes the Harvard manner approaches that deceptively as a pose—but when a man is tired of life at 21 it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself. One thing I’m sure of. There are plenty of absolutely first-rate men who will be within your range in the next two years. I remember that Lois Moran used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. She finally inverted it into the credo that if a man wasn’t married and inaccessible, he wasn’t a first-rate man. She gave herself a very bad time. The sea is still as full as ever of sharks, whales, trout and tuna. The real handicap for a girl like you would have been to have worn herself out emotionally at sixteen. I think we cut that by about two-thirds by keeping you comparatively busy in those two very crucial years. Life should be fun for you and there’s plenty of time. All I care for is that you should marry someone who is not too much a part of the crowd.
Lanahan1 is wrong about your disposition. You take adversity very well, but you are utterly dependent on sleep. Your extraordinary performance out here two years ago was directly attributable to the fact that you hadn’t slept since getting off the boat, if you slept on board of it! It amounts almost to an idiosyncracy in you and you should never make important decisions when you are extremely tired.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. It’s O.K. about the Xmas money but go slow. The phone rang after I finished this letter and the doctor after seeing my cardiogram has confined me to the house.2 So at this moment I couldn’t go to the studios if I wanted to. Try to save your fare to Baltimore and back.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
December
6
1940
Dearest Zelda:
No news except that the novel progresses and I am angry that this little illness has slowed me up. I’ve had trouble with my heart before but never anything organic. This is not a major attack but seems to have come on gradually and luckily a cardiogram showed it up in time. I may have to move from the third to the first floor apartment but I’m quite able to work, etc., if I do not overtire myself.
Scottie tells me she is arriving South Xmas day. I envy you being together and I’ll be thinking of you. Everything is my novel now—it has become of absorbing interest. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by February.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, Calif.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
December
13
1940
Dear Max:
Thanks for your letter. The novel progresses—in fact progresses fast. I’m not going to stop now till I finish a first draft which will be some time after the 15th of January. However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become—“a legend before it is written” which is what I believe Wheelock1 said about “Tender Is the Night”. Meanwhile will you send me back the chapters I sent you as they are all invalid now, must be completely rewritten etc. The essential idea is the same and it is still, as far as I can hope, a secret.
Bud Shulberg, a very nice, clever kid out here is publishing a Hollywood novel with Random House in January.2 It’s not bad but it doesn’t cut into my material a
t all. I’ve read Ernest’s novel and most of Tom Wolfe’s and have been doing a lot of ruminating as to what this whole profession is about. Tom Wolfe’s failure to really explain why you and he parted mars his book but there are great things in it. The portraits of the Jacks (who are they?) Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.
No one points out how Saroyan has been influenced by Franz Kafka. Kafka was an extraordinary Czchoslovakian Jew who died in ’36. He will never have a wide public but “The Trial” and “America” are two books that writers are never able to forget.
This is the first day off I have taken for many months and I just wanted to tell you the book is coming along and that comparatively speaking all is well.
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. How much will you sell the plates of “This Side of Paradise” for? I think it has a chance for a new life.
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald3
c. December 15, 1940
ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
There has reached you by this time I hope, a little coat. It was an almost never worn coat of Shielah’s that she wanted to send you. It seemed very nice to me—it may fill out your rather thin wardrobe. Frances Kroll’s father is a furrier and he remade it—without charge!
So you must at once please write the following letters.
(1.) To Shielah, not stressing Mr. Kroll’s contribution
(2) To Frances praising the style.
(3) To me (in the course of things) in such a way that I can show the letter to Shielah who will certainly ask me if you liked the coat.
You make things easier for me if you write these letters promptly. A giver gets no pleasure in a letter acknowledging a gift three weeks late even though it crawls with apologies—you will have stolen pleasure from one who has tried to give it to you. (Ecclesiases Fitzgerald)
Lastly drum up some story for Alabama that you bought the coat from some girl. Don’t say it came through me.
For the rest I am still in bed—this time the result of twenty five years of cigarettes. You have got two beautiful bad examples of parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas. Her letters are tragically brilliant in all matters except those of central importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law’s “Loyal Opposition”, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel + can’t finally report it but the story of the fire is magnificent. Only Im afraid that after the grand character planting nothing is going to come of it all. The picture of “Amy Carleton” (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our appartment in Paris—do you remember?) with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom—sans succes—and finally ended by her own hand in Montana in 1934 in a lonely ranch house. The portrait of Mrs. Jack is grand too. I believe her absolutely.
With Dearest Love
Daddy
PS. In the name of Somerset Maughn, the letter!1
Fitzgerald’s last letter to Scottie Fitzgerald (Princeton University).
ALSO BY MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI
The Composition of Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time (editor, with Jackson Bryer)
As Ever, Scott Fitz— (editor, with Jennifer Atkinson)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography; Revised Edition
The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (editor)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile (editor)
Bits of Paradise (editor, with Scottie Fitzgerald Smith)
The Romantic Egoists (editor, with Scottie Fitzgerald Smith and Joan P. Kerr)
“The Last of the Novelists”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Last Tycoon
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (editor)
Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Screenplay for Three Comrades (editor)
The Price Was High: 50 Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (editor)
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (editor, with Margaret Duggan)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Poems 1911–1940 (editor)
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald; Revised Edition
New Essays on The Great Gatsby (editor)
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (editor)
F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts, 18 vols. (editor)
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (editor)—The Great Gatsby and The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western published to date
Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings (editor)
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
John Biggs, Jr. (1895–1979) was Fitzgerald’s roommate at Princeton; they edited the Princeton Tiger and collaborated on a Triangle Club show. Biggs wrote novels while practicing law. Scottie Fitzgerald wrote: “ ‘He left the estate of a pauper and the will of a millionaire,’Judge Biggs growled when Fitzgerald died after naming him his Executor. Then he proceeded for ten years to administer the virtually non-existent estate as a busy Judge on the United States Circuit Court, selflessly and devotedly—the very incarnation of the words, ‘Family Friend.’ “See Seymour I. Toll, A Judge Uncommon (Philadelphia: Legal Communications, 1993).
John Peale Bishop (1892–1944) was Fitzgerald’s classmate at Princeton, and Fitzgerald credited Bishop with having taught him to understand poetry. Bishop became a respected poet and critic. Although Fitzgerald and Bishop maintained their friendship, their meetings became infrequent after Bishop married a wealthy woman the Fitzgeralds found uncongenial. See Elizabeth Carroll Spindler, John Peale Bishop: A Biography (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1980).
Scottie Fitzgerald (1921–1986), the Fitzgeralds’ only child, became a journalist and was active in the Democratic Party. Her gift of the Fitzgerald Papers to the Princeton University Library facilitated the extensive research and publication on her parents. Although she resisted publicity as what she referred to as “daughter of,” she generously aided students and scholars. She edited (with Bruccoli and Joan P. Kerr) The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1974). Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith was much loved and admired.
Sheilah Graham (d. 1988) was a Hollywood columnist when she met Fitzgerald in the summer of 1937. They became lovers; when Fitzgerald learned about her deprived London childhood and her invented background, he undertook to educate her in his “College of One.” Their relationship endured despite his alcoholism, and he died in her apartment at 1443 North Hayworth Avenue, Hollywood. Graham’s books about Fitzgerald include Beloved Infidel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958) and College of One (New York: Viking, 1967).
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) provided Fitzgerald’s most intense literary friendship, which involved Fitzgerald’s admiration for Hemingway and Hemingway’s rivalry with Fitzgerald. When they met in 1925 Hemingway had not yet published a book, and Fitzgerald worked to advance Hemingway’s career, bringing him to Scribners. Fitzgerald later wrote of him that “a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me—I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, w
as formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot.” See Bruccoli, Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success (New York: Random House, 1978).
Sir Shane Leslie (1885–1971) was an Anglo-Irish man of letters. Well connected (a first cousin of Winston Churchill) and well educated (a graduate of Eton College and Cambridge University), he was a convert to Catholicism. Through his friend, Monsignor Fay, he met Fitzgerald at the Newman School. Leslie encouraged Fitzgerald’s literary ambitions and sent Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Romantic Egotist, to Charles Scribner II. Reviewing Leslie’s The Oppidan in 1922, Fitzgerald declared:
He first came into my life as the most romantic figure I had ever known. He had sat at the feet of Tolstoy, he had gone swimming with Rupert Brooke, he had been a young Englishman of the governing classes when the sense of being one must have been, as Compton McKenzie says, like the sense of being a Roman citizen.
Also, he was a convert to the church of my youth, and he and another [Fay], since dead, made of that church a dazzling, golden thing, dispelling its oppressive mugginess and giving the succession of days upon gray days, passing under its plaintive ritual, the romantic glamour of an adolescent dream.
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was the most influential literary and social critic in America during the 1920s. With George Jean Nathan he edited The Smart Set, the first magazine to pay for Fitzgerald’s stories. Two of Fitzgerald’s best stories, “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set. Mencken later published “Absolution” and “Crazy Sunday” in the American Mercury. In his 1921 review of Mencken’s Prejudices Fitzgerald stated that “he has done more for the national letters than any man alive.”
Gerald Murphy (1888–1964) and Sara Murphy (1883–1975) were an affluent expatriate American couple the Fitzgeralds met on the Riviera in 1924. Gerald painted, and the Murphys were involved in the arts. They were fabled hosts at their Villa America on Cap d’Antibes. Fitzgerald wrote of Murphy that “a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy. . . . This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.” Tender Is the Night is dedicated “To Gerald and Sara Many Fêtes.” See Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After (New York: Times Books, 1982).
A Life in Letters Page 56