A Life in Letters
Page 59
2Brother of Ludlow Fowler.
3The Story of San Michele (1929), by Axel Munthe.
1Callaghan, Strange Fugitive (1928).
2The Cabala (1926) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder; The “Genius” (1915) and An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser; The Wisdom Tooth (1926) and The Green Pastures (1929), by Marc Connelly.
3The Woman of Andros (1930), by Wilder; The 42nd Parallel (1930), by John Dos Passos.
1Thomas B. Costain, Saturday Evening Post editor, who later became a popular historical novelist.
1From “The Prisoner of Chillon,” by Byron.
1André Maurois, Byron (1930).
2Look Homeward, Angel had been published by Scribners in 1929.
3Zelda Fitzgerald’s ballet teacher in Paris.
4Fitzgerald sent Egorova a French translation of his letter; the text printed here was translated by Eric Roman.
1On July 9, 1930, Egorova replied that Zelda would never be a first-rate dancer because she had started too late. Egorova added that Zelda could become a good to very good dancer and that she would be capable of dancing important roles in the Massine Ballet Company.
1Draft for a letter that may not have been sent.
2Charles MacArthur, playwright and screenwriter; married to actress Helen Hayes.
3Young movie actress whom Fitzgerald had met in Hollywood in 1927; she provided the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night.
4Probably Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, a wealthy friend of Father Fay’s.
5Daughter of Fitzgerald’s cousin Cecilia Taylor.
1Scottie’s governess.
2Gerald Murphy had worked with movie director King Vidor on Hallelujah.
1This letter by Zelda Fitzgerald provides her history of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage up to the time of her hospitalization in Switzerland.
2Newman Smith, Zelda Fitzgerald’s brother-in-law.
3Townsend Martin.
4Ludlow Fowler.
1Alexander McKaig and possibly William Mackie.
2George Jean Nathan, co-editor of The Smart Set.
3Playwright Zoe Akins; Botticelli is a parlor game.
4Theatrical producer.
5Lynne Overman, stage and screen actor.
6John Peale Bishop.
1A comic song Fitzgerald had written.
2Xandra Kalman.
3Possibly tetany, a condition resembling tetanus.
4Oscar Kalman.
5Prince Vladimir N. Engalitcheff, son of the former Russian vice consul in Chicago and a wealthy American mother; E. E. Paramore.
6Charles Cary Rumsey, sculptor and polo player who had an estate at Westbury, Long Island.
7Probably financier Clarence MacKay.
8Actor Glenn Hunter appeared in Grit (1924), a silent movie for which Fitzgerald wrote the scenario.
9Edouard Jozan, French naval aviator with whom Zelda Fitzgerald was romantically involved in the summer of 1924.
1In the fall of 1924 Fitzgerald was jailed in Rome after a drunken brawl.
2A Christmas party for the cast of Ben-Hur.
3Howard Coxe, journalist and novelist.
4Possibly composer Theodore Chanler.
5Producer Dwight Wiman.
6Preparation containing alcohol; used as a sedative.
7Probably piqûres (“injections”).
8Spa in the Pyrenees where Zelda Fitzgerald took a “cure” in January 1926.
9Raquel Meller, internationally known Spanish singer.
10A beach at Cap d’Antibes.
11Opera singer and actress whom the Fitzgeralds knew on the Riviera.
12Ruth Ober-Goldbeck-de Vallombrosa; Charles MacArthur.
1Walker Ellis, Princetonian with whom Fitzgerald had worked on Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!
2St.-Paul-de-Vence, a town in the mountains above the Riviera where Zelda was angered one night by Fitzgerald’s attentions to Isadora Duncan.
3Zelda resented Fitzgerald’s friendship with Lois Moran.
4Carl Van Vechten.
5New York lawyer Richard Knight.
6French diplomat and author; best known for Open All Night (1923) and Closed All Night (1924).
7Paris taxi driver whom Fitzgerald brought to “Ellerslie” in 1928 to serve as chauffeur.
1Fitzgerald had come home after a drinking session with Hemingway and passed out. In his sleep he said “No more baby,” which Zelda interpreted as evidence that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were engaged in a homosexual affair.
2Playwright Philip Barry.
3Dorothy Parker.
4Prima ballerina Nemtchinova.
5Fitzgerald believed he had tuberculosis.
6French medical term for cupping.
7Novelist; sister of Elinor Wylie.
8Ballerina in Madame Egorova’s studio.
1Fitzgerald used this phrase in one of Nicole’s letters from the sanitarium in Tender Is the Night.
2 In 1930 Fitzgerald began a series of five stories for The Saturday Evening Post about Josephine Perry, a teenage girl who undergoes a process of “emotional bankruptcy.”
3The Kalmans were in Paris at the time of Zelda Fitzgerald’s breakdown in the spring of 1930.
1Head psychiatrist at Les Rives de Prangins clinic.
1Sixty-two words omitted.
2John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
1To Margaret Canby.
2Wilson’s first wife, actress Mary Blair.
3Wilson had suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1929.
4Poet and critic married to fiction writer Caroline Gordon.
1Laments for the Living (1930).
2Charles Scribner II.
1Line drawn to the top margin indicates the words: “I mean cash advance, not price advance.”
1Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler.
1Dr. Adolf Meyer, psychiatrist at the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital, who later treated Zelda Fitzgerald.
1House at Prangins clinic for the most severely disturbed patients.
1Irving Thalberg, legendary movie producer; he became the model for Monroe Stahr, protagonist of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.
2Probably the one-volume abridgment of Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, published by Scribners in 1931.
3Of the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University; Zelda Fitzgerald dedicated Save Me the Waltz to Dr. Squires.
1The original draft of Save Me the Waltz, written while Zelda Fitzgerald was in the Phipps Clinic, has not survived.
2Bell was a British art critic; Fernand Léger was a French painter.
1The original title of Save Me the Waltz is not known. The male protagonist was renamed David Knight.
1There is a note in the margin beside this paragraph: “(as relations are now).”
1The story was never published.
1How to Write (1931). The inscription reads: “To Fitzgerald and I hope you did not mind my putting you in from Gtde Stn.” Bruccoli.
1Psychiatrist at Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
1It is not known whether any version of this document was sent.
1Chase was a political writer; Browder was the head of the Communist Party in America; Lenin was the founder of Bolshevism and a leader of the Communist revolution in Russia.
1Wilson had put a stamp with the head of Lenin on his letter to Fitzgerald.
2Anatoly Lunacharsky had directed arts and education in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1921.
1Two words omitted by the editor.
1O’Hara, whose first novel, Appointment in Samarra, would be published in 1934, had written Fitzgerald a fan letter about one of his Saturday Evening Post stories.
2Eton, prestigious English school; Magdalen, a college of Oxford University; The Guards, a socially prominent British regiment; Plantagenets, English royal house from 1154 to 1399.
1Between September 1933 and January 1937 Fitzgerald checked into Johns
Hopkins Hospital eight times to taper off from alcohol and receive treatment for tubercular fevers.
1Tender Is the Night was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (January–April 1934).
2The novel was a Literary Guild alternate for June 1934.
1The Great Gatsby, with a new introduction by Fitzgerald, was published by Modern Library in September 1934.
1Harry Burton, editor of Hearst magazines.
2“Crazy Sunday” appeared in the October 1932 American Mercury.
1William Randolph Hearst, magazine and newspaper publisher.
2“Ring,” New Republic (October 11, 1933).
1The one and one-half pages that contained the first eight blurbs are missing from this letter.
1For the Tender Is the Night serial.
2Alfred Dashiell was managing editor of Scribner’s Magazine.
1Of Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.
2Probably “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” St. Paul Academy Now and Then (February 1910).
1Edward Shenton’s pen-and-ink illustrations were retained in the book.
1Tender Is the Night was published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1934.
1Perkins had asked Fitzgerald whether the scene could be condensed for the magazine installment.
2Alfred Dashiell.
1Playwright Owen Davis.
2Popular British espionage novelist.
3Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel was published by Scribners in 1933.
4Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver are central figures in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911).
5The scene was printed in its entirety in the magazine installment.
1Frank A. Munsey, American publisher.
1Held at Cary Ross’s gallery in New York City, March 29 to April 30, 1934.
2The Scribners bookstore display window at 597 Fifth Avenue.
1Tender Is the Night.
2Conrad wrote: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
1American Presidents treated in Wolfe’s story ‘The Four Lost Men,” Scribner’s Magazine (February 1934).
2Fitzgerald claimed that the tall Wolfe broke power lines in Switzerland while gesticulating.
1French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891).
1Brother and sister of Zelda Fitzgerald.
1Wealthy patroness of the arts.
2Luhan’s letter to the editor (May 6, 1934) praised Tender Is the Night.
1Fitzgerald is referring to Hemingway’s story collection Winner Take Nothing (1933), which he compares to Hemingway’s earlier collections In Our Time and Men Without Women.
2Taps at Reveille was published in March 1935.
1“One Trip Across.”
2Dos Passos.
1“The Sailor,” Good-bye Wisconsin (1928).
2British novelist David Garnett, whose best-known work was Lady into Fox (1922).
1Fitzgerald is punning on McAlmon and Callaghan; McKisco is a character in Tender Is the Night.
2Malcolm Cowley was the book-review editor of The New Republic.
1According to an undated newspaper clipping in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University, Fitzgerald spoke at a Johns Hopkins University Liberal Club antiwar rally on the subject “How the War Came to Princeton.”
2Zelda Fitzgerald’s sister.
3The Cours Dieterlin was a Paris school that Scottie Fitzgerald attended; Mlle. Sereze was one of her governesses.
1Drama teacher.
1Robert K. Root, Princeton English professor.
2Fitzgerald had previously gotten drunk when invited to speak at the Cottage Club.
1Fitzgerald was not invited to give lectures.
1 Francis Scott Key.
1The Art of the Novel, by Henry James, and At Sea, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, were both published by Scribners in 1934.
2Perkins’s cousin Elizabeth Lemmon lived at “Welbourne” in northern Virginia.
1Stein had remarked that sentences must not have bad plumbing and must not leak.
1Bishop’s novel Act of Darkness (Scribners, 1935).
1Richard Krafft-Ebing, German psychiatrist who was an authority on sexual behavior.
1James Boyd, historical novelist published by Scribners.
2Elizabeth Lemmon.
3V. F. Calverton, born George Goetz, wrote and edited books on political and sociological subjects.
4Wolfe’s eloquently grateful dedication of Of Time and the River (Scribners, 1935) to Maxwell Perkins had attracted considerable notice.
1By William Troy (April 17, 1935).
1Elizabeth Lemmon.
2Green Hills of Africa was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (May-November 1935).
3Fitzgerald was working on a cycle of stories set in ninth-century France. He intended to combine them into a novel, but only three of the “Philippe, Count of Darkness” stories were published in his lifetime.
1“Circus at Dawn.”
1Baltimore writer Robert Spofford seems not to have completed his play.
2Perkins had invited Fitzgerald to meet British publisher Jonathan Cape.
3Nora Langhorne Flynn, who with her husband, former Yale football star Lefty Flynn, entertained Fitzgerald and Scottie in Tryon, North Carolina, during February of 1935.
1Isabel Owens.
2Probably published as “Fate in Her Hands,” American Magazine (April 1936).
1Edwin Balmer of Red Book.
1From Rupert Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.”
1Scottie’s close friend Peaches Finney.
1Fitzgerald is referring to the last line of the verse in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.”
2“Let’s Go Out and Play,” an antiwar drama broadcast on the “World Peaceways” program, October 3, 1935.
1Broadway producer Sam H. Grisham took an option on the dramatization of Tender Is the Night and wanted Jack Kirkland and Austin Parker approved as dramatists for the project.
2Mrs. Guthrie served as confidante of and typist for Fitzgerald in Asheville.
3Beatrice Dance, a married woman with whom Fitzgerald had a brief affair during the summer of 1935.
1The Magnate: William Boyce Thompson and His Time (1935), by Hermann Hagedorn.
2“Gods of Darkness.”
3“I’d Die for You,” unpublished.
4Probably “Image on the Heart.”
1Possibly “The Crack-Up,” Esquire (March 1936).
2Bartlett Cormack, Hollywood agent, was trying to sell film rights for “Head and Shoulders.”
3“Too Cute for Words,” The Saturday Evening Post (April 18, 1936); the first story in an unsuccessful series about Gwen Bowers, a thirteen-year-old girl.
1Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire. The article was “The Crack-Up.”
1On December 26 and 27 Ober proposed that a portion of the $3,000 Saturday Evening Post check for “Too Cute for Words” be used to reduce Fitzgerald’s debts.
1Richard Ober, Harold Ober’s son.
2“Thousand and First Ship,” first published in The Crack-Up (1945).
3L. G. Braun, manager of ballerina Olga Spessivtzewa, asked Fitzgerald to write a movie for her. Fitzgerald’s treatment for the ballet movie was entitled “Ballet Shoes” or “Ballet Slippers.”
4Fitzgerald collaborated with Robert Spafford on a treatment for a George Burns and Gracie Allen movie, “Gracie at Sea,” which was never made.
5French-American opera singer and movie star.