1For serialization of The Great Gatsby.
2John Fox, Jr. (1863?–1919), the author of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) and other popular novels, borrowed heavily from Scribners.
1In his February 24, 1925, letter Perkins had reported on a confrontation between New York Herald Tribune Books editor Stuart P. Sherman and H. L. Mencken.
2Popular 1924 novel by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
1Glenway Wescott, The Apple of the Eye (1924).
1See A Lost Lady (New York: Knopf, 1923), pp. 171–72.
1On April 28 Cather wrote Fitzgerald that she had enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby before receiving his letter and had detected no duplication of A Lost Lady.
2Grit (1924).
3Actor who was a partner with Townsend Martin in the Film Guild.
4Allan Dwan, James Cruze, and Cecil B. De Mille were movie directors.
1Fitzgerald sent Scribners inscriptions on slips of paper to be pasted in presentation copies.
2Literary historian and critic.
1Manhattan Transfer (1925).
21924 novel by Ford Madox Ford.
3Lines from Bishop’s poem “Plato in Italy.”
1Lardner’s story had appeared in the March 28, 1925 Liberty and would be collected in The Love Nest (1926).
2Wallace Meyer of the Scribners advertising department.
1William Rose Benet and Mary Colum.
2Perkins cabled Fitzgerald on April 20: “Sales situation doubtful. Excellent reviews.”
1Laurence Stallings reviewed The Great Gatsby in the New York World on April 22.
1Michael Arlen, author of English society novels; his best-known work was The Green Hat (1924).
2British novelist and critic.
3By British novelist Margaret Kennedy.
4Charles Kingsley ran the London office of Scribners.
5American publisher Horace Liveright.
1Poet John V. A. Weaver.
2Franklin Pierce Adams, newspaper columnist who signed his work “F.P.A.”
3Paul Rosenfeld.
1Novels by Joseph Hergesheimer.
2Rupert Hughes, The Thirteenth Commandment (1916), and Stephen French Whitman, Predestined (1910).
3Author of stories about Lawrenceville School and Stover at Yale (1912), Johnson also wrote adult novels about the privileged classes.
4Porter wrote popular fiction.
1Chatto & Windus published The Great Gatsby in England (1926).
2Heywood Broun, influential New York newspaper columnist; his wife, journalist Ruth Hale, gave The Great Gatsby a bad review in the Brooklyn Eagle.
1Boni & Liveright editor.
1Stein’s May 22, 1925, letter to Fitzgerald had praised his sensibility and prose style in The Great Gatsby (“that is a comfort”) and had compared the novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis and Vanity Fair in “creating the contemporary world” (“and this isn’t a bad compliment”).
1Reviews of The Great Gatsby by William Curtis and Carl Van Vechten.
2Broadway impresario William A. Brady and playwright Owen Davis; the play version of The Great Gatsby opened on Broadway on February 2, 1926, and ran for 112 performances.
3James Oliver Curwood, author of western adventure fiction.
4British novelist.
1Knut Hamsun and Johan Bojer, Norwegian novelists.
2American naturalistic writer.
3Francis Brett Young, British novelist.
4Midwestern novelist and humorist.
1Ferber’s So Big won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Charles H. Towne was a journalist and editor.
2Icebound, a play by Owen Davis, won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
3The Able McLaughlins, by Margaret Wilson, won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
1Samuel Drummond (1925), by Boyd.
1Jesse Lynch Williams, playwright and short-story writer.
2Butcher, book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune.
1John Black of the advertising department at Scribners.
2Publisher known for his parsimonious dealings with authors.
3Fitzgerald’s marginal note.
4The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925).
5The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920).
1Gerald and Sara Murphy.
1Working title for novel in progress.
21922 novel by e. e. cummings.
3New Criterion (January 1926).
1Edith Wharton’s letter was published in The Crack-Up (1945).
1Poet Archibald MacLeish.
2Composer and critic.
11924 play by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson.
21925 collection of stories by Boyd.
1British short-story writer.
2The Perennial Bachelor (1925), by Anne Parrish.
3Mannes, later a journalist, was the daughter of conductor and violinist David Mannes, whom Fitzgerald met on the Riviera.
1Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Hemingway’s first wife.
2Robert McAlmon, American writer and publisher in Paris. He had spread gossip that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.
1The Torrents of Spring (Scribners, 1926).
2The Knave of Hearts (1925), by Louise Saunders, Mrs. Maxwell Perkins.
3A burlesque biographical dictionary proposed by Perkins.
4The marriage of society writer Ellen Mackay and Irving Berlin was a sensation; Abie’s Irish Rose was a sentimental play by Anne Nichols about the marriage of an Irish Catholic girl to a Jew.
5The Penciled Frown (1926), by James Gray.
6By Lee J. Smits (1925).
1Lewis’s Arrow smith, Van Vechten’s Firecrackers, Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense, Dell’s This Mad Ideal, Boyd’s Points of Honor, and Anderson’s Dark Laughter.
2Cather’s The Professor’s House and Hume’s Cruel Fellowship.
3Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and Suckow’s The Odyssey of a Nice Girl.
4Frank Swinnerton, British novelist who was an editor at Chatto & Windus.
1Alfred Harcourt, a founder of the Harcourt, Brace publishing company; novelist Louis Bromfield, who lived in France.
2William Aspinwall Bradley, American literary agent in Paris.
1Manhattan Transfer.
2Poet and novelist Elinor Wylie had separated from her husband, critic William Rose Benet.
3Charles Dunn, editor at Scribners.
4Wife of Alfred A. Knopf and vice president of the Knopf publishing firm.
1Eighteenth-century pornographic novel by John Cleland.
2Zelda Fitzgerald had colitis.
1By Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews (1906).
2Unidentified; perhaps The Story of the Other Wise Man (1899 and 1923), by Henry Van Dyke.
3In a sensational 1921 British court case, Vera, Countess Cathcart, daughter of a South African diamond magnate, had been divorced by the Earl of Cathcart on grounds of adultery. In February 1926, when Countess Cathcart attempted to enter New York to stage a production of her autobiographical play Ashes, she was detained by immigration officials who contended that she should be barred from the United States because of her “moral turpitude.” The countess was admitted to the country, where she remained for only a few weeks; but her case stirred controversy over the nature and intent of American immigration laws.
1Both Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Benchley wrote popular literary parodies.
2For Biggs’s first novel, Demigods (1926).
3For The Love Nest and Other Stories (1926).
4For All the Sad Young Men (1926).
1“Your Way and Mine,” Woman’s Home Companion (May 1927), for which Fitzgerald received $1,750.
1Perkins had asked Train about the rights of Americans who commit murder on French soil—a plot element in Fitzgerald’s projected novel.
2A silent movie of The Great Gatsby was made by Famous Players in 1926.
1In January 1925 Dorothy Ellingson murdered her mother in San Francisco.
2Of the Great Gatsby play.
/> 1Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both on the Riviera, where Fitzgerald read the typescript of The Sun Also Rises for the first time.
2Fitzgerald’s brackets.
3Fitzgerald had persuaded Hemingway to cut an anecdote about Jack Brennan and Benny Leonard from “Fifty Grand.”
4The first chapter included a series of comments and anecdotes about the Paris Latin Quarter; Hemingway cut these in proof.
1Fitzgerald’s brackets.
2Fitzgerald’s brackets.
3Samuel Parkes Cadman, inspirational preacher.
4Basil Woon, author of The Paris That’s Not in the Guidebooks.
5Fitzgerald’s bracket.
6A reference to the epigraph for Hemingway’s in our time (1924).
7An anecdote about Ford Madox Ford, which Hemingway later used in A Moveable Feast.
8Aleister Crowley, English diabolist; Hemingway later salvaged the anecdote about him in A Moveable Feast.
1Harold Stearns, alcoholic American journalist in Paris; model for Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises.
2Hemingway made this cut.
3President Warren G. Harding, who often had trouble with his rhetoric.
4Duff Twysden, an alcoholic and promiscuous English woman; model for Brett Ashley.
5English society novelist.
6English actress Diana Manners.
7Beatrix Esmond, a worldly character in Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond and The Virginians; Elizabeth Bennet, spirited heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
8Ch. 5 scene in which Jake tells Cohn about Brett.
1Ch. 6 scene in which Frances Clyne, Cohn’s mistress, berates him for abandoning her.
2Ch. 7 scene in which Brett comes to Jake’s flat.
3Fitzgerald had written an essay-review of In Our Time for The Bookman (May 1926).
1ean de Pierrefeu, author of works about the Great War.
1Scribner’s Magazine (March 1927).
1The Hemingways’ son, John Hadley Nicanor.
1Fitzgerald’s flapper comedy “Lipstick,” for this silent screen actress, was rejected.
2First line of “In Another Country,” one of the two Hemingway stories published in the April 1927 Scribner’s Magazine.
3One hundred dollars loan.
1This story was not published, but was rewritten as “The Bowl,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 21, 1928.
1Parody of Hemingway by F.P.A.
11927 novel by Glenway Wescott.
2Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, Hemingway’s second wife.
1Written in response to the Lardners’ printed poem about their inability to find suitable Christmas gifts.
1Louis Bromfield.
2Volume of biographical essays by Harold Nicolson (1927).
3Play by e. e. cummings (1927).
1Refers to progress on the novel that became Tender Is the Night.
2Proprietor of Shakespeare & Company bookshop, a gathering place for expatriate writers in Paris. Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.
1Hobo writer.
2Hemingway became a practicing Catholic at the time of his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer.
3Possibly a reference to Mencken’s review of Men Without Women in the American Mercury(May 1928).
1The only French writer with whom Fitzgerald formed a friendship, Chamson became a Scribners author.
2American movie director.
1Fitzgerald sent only one installment of the novel.
2Harold Stearns, “Apology of an Expatriate,” Scribner’s Magazine (March 1929)—written in the form of a letter to Fitzgerald.
1I Thought of Daisy (1929).
2Fiction editor at The Saturday Evening Post.
3Hemingway’s father had committed suicide.
4A newspaper clipping, “Toreador Is Barred for Beating Up Critic.”
1The Decline of the West.
1Zelda Fitzgerald’s series of “girl” stories for College Humor.
2Unpublished work by Bishop.
3Bishop’s story “The Cellar.”
1In June 1929 Fitzgerald and Hemingway were in Paris when Fitzgerald read a typescript of A Farewell to Arms while the novel was being serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. The nine unnumbered pages of this memo are printed here as units in the order of the references to Hemingway’s typescript—except for the pages on which Fitzgerald departed from numerical order.
2Ch. 19, pp. 126–29, of A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1929): the meeting with Meyers and his wife through the conversation with the opera singers and Ettore Moretti. This material is crossed out on Hemingway’s typescript, perhaps indicating that he considered cutting it.
1Ch. 26, p. 189: possibly a reference to the priest’s statement “The Austrians are Christians—except for the Bosnians.”
2Ch. 19, pp. 134–35: Frederic and Catherine’s conversation about the rain: “I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”
3“Hills Like White Elephants.”
4Ch. 20, pp. 136ff.: the account of Frederic and Catherine’s day at the races.
1Ch. 22, pp. 152–55: Miss Van Campen’s discovery of the empty bottles in Frederic Henry’s hospital room.
2Ch. 21, pp. 142–43: Henry’s report of the British major’s analysis of the war. “Wops” refers to the Ch. VIII vignette of In Our Time or Ch. 9 of in our time.
3Ch. 21, pp. 146–51: the scene in which Catherine announces she is pregnant.
4Ch. 21, p. 147: “I’m going to have a baby, darling.”
5Ch. 23, pp. 158–59.
1Ch. 34, pp. 266–67: Frederic Henry’s night soliloquy after his reunion with Catherine at Stresa: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.” Fitzgerald wrote in the margin of the typescript: “This is one of the most beautiful pages in all English literature.” The note was erased but is still readable.
2Ch. 30, pp. 228, 238. The word was replaced with dashes in print.
3Ch. 30, pp. 237–41: Frederic Henry’s arrest by the carabinieri and his escape.
4Opening of Ch. 40. This passage was cut by Hemingway.
5Ch. 34. See note 1.
6Added by Hemingway.
1The Saturday Evening Post had raised Fitzgerald’s story price to $4,000 for “At Your Age.”
2The Hemingways were subletting a Paris apartment from Ruth Obre-Goldbeck-de Vallombrosa.
1Writer Dorothy Parker.
1Ober had left the Reynolds agency to form his own agency, Harold Ober Associates.
2“The Girl with Talent,” College Humor (April 1930). Published as “by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”
3H. N. Swanson, editor of College Humor.
1A Farewell to Arms.
2Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan was published by Scribners.
3Present-Day American Stories (Scribners, 1929).
1In Princeton Town (1929), by Day Edgar.
2Richard Hughes, author of High Wind in Jamaica (1929).
1Katharine Angell, an editor at the New Yorker.
2During the summer of 1929, Fitzgerald, acting as timekeeper for a sparring match between Hemingway and Callaghan, inadvertently allowed a round to run long, during which Callaghan knocked down Hemingway. This event was publicized and placed a strain on the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship. See Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (1963).
1Knopf did not publish Tender Is the Night in England.
1Bishop’s “The Cellar” had been rejected by Scribner’s Magazine, which then accepted “Many Thousands Gone” (September 1930). The novelette won the Scribner’s Magazine prize for 1930 and became the title story for Bishop’s first Charles Scribner’s Sons book in 1931.
Chapter 4
lThe following letter in this collection.
A Life in Letters Page 58