The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Any cleanness I have in my own life is due to my feeling for words.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
For days, weeks, and months now I can't do it.
You saw me in Paris this winter. I was in a dead, blank time. You have to live through such times all your life.
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
Such things as you suggested in your letter the other day. I said—“don't do what you would be ashamed to tell me about.”
I was wrong.
You can't depend on me. Don't do what you would be ashamed of before a sheet of white paper or a canvas.
The materials have to take the place of God.
About color. Be careful. Go to nature all you can. Instead of paintshops—other men's palettes, look at the sides of buildings in every light. Learn to observe little things—a red apple lying on a grey cloth.
Trees—trees against hill—everything. I know little enough. It seems to me that if I wanted to learn about color, I would try always to make a separation. There is a plowed field here before me, below it a meadow, half-decayed cornstalk in the meadow making yellow lines, stumps, sometimes like looking into an ink bottle, sometimes almost blue.
The same in nature is a composition.
You look at it, thinking—“What made up that color.” I have walked over a piece of ground, after seeing it from a distance, trying to see what made the color I saw.
Light makes so much difference.
You won't arrive. It is an endless search.
I write as though you were a man. Well, you must know my heart is set on you.
It isn't your success I want. There is a possibility of your having a decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a man of you.
S. A.
Tell Church that David Prall finally got the Cezanne prints.
Also tell the man at the shop where you go for the Picasso book—or if you have been there, drop him a note—the shop, I mean.
EUGENE O'NEILL TO SHANE O'NEILL
AND TO EUGENE O'NEILL, JR.
“You write as if these were normal times, in which a young man of twenty-one could decide exactly what job he should choose as offering him the pleasantest prospect for a normal peacetime career.”
During April of 1941, when Eugene O'Neill was completing revisions on The Iceman Cometh, he wrote to each of his sons, twenty-one-year-old Shane and thirty-one-year-old Eugene, Jr., about their respective careers and futures. The letters, written only ten days apart, are at opposite ends of a spectrum from one another—but then too it seems were O'Neill's sons. Shane, who had thought superficially about careers in fishing, horse-training, and art had been expelled from a number of schools and was using drugs. Eugene, Jr., on the other hand, earned a Ph.D. in Classics from Yale, knew six languages, and taught at his alma mater where recently he had been promoted from instructor to assistant professor. Signs of trouble, however, were becoming apparent. Drinking heavily, Eugene, Jr., was often disillusioned with his work and, at thirty-one years old, he was already on his third marriage.
Eugene, Jr., and Shane both ultimately took their own lives.
April 18th 1941
Dear Shane,
Your letter is comprehensable to me only if I assume that you have decided to forget every word I said to you when you were here a year ago. And it is pretty evident by what you haven't done in the past year that you did not think any of my advice worth taking. Well, that is your priviledge and I am not questioning your right to decide for yourself, but on the other hand you have no license to ask my help as long as you continue to live as you are living.
There is no use in my repeating all I said to you last year. You certainly remember the points I emphasized, because I know damned well you realized then that what I said was true. It is even truer now, considering the disasterous way the world crisis has developed since then. That's one thing I can't understand about your letter. You seem to have no realization of what is going on in the world. You write as if these were normal times, in which a young man of twenty-one could decide exactly what job he should choose as offering him the pleasantest prospect for a normal peacetime career. Don't you know the country will almost certainly be in the war soon? Don't you know that those who became twenty-one since the draft law passed will soon be included in the draft? Don't you know that if this country gets into the war, it will probably go on for years, and that no one can possibly predict what conditions will be like even a year from now? The one sure thing is that for years to come the big opportunities for young men will be in one of the branches of the United States Service or in the industries directly connected with the Defense Program.
Until you show you have some conception that all this affects you—as it affects me and every person in this country—and that you are making some decision which faces realistically the crisis we are all in, I simply don't know what to say to you. But I am absolutely certain that planning to start a career in the movies at this time is no answer to anything. In fact, at any time, I would not regard it as an answer for you. The farther you stay away from any job that has to do with the theater, the better off you will be. And I certainly will not give you a letter to Kenneth Macgowan. It wouldn't do you the slightest good, anyway. I happen to know something about Kenneth's job. It is extremely specialized and he has nothing to do with hiring anyone.
What happened to the job you were to get in Texas? Or was that just a phony tale?
I don't like to pan you but it is a big disappointment that after all the talk a year ago you have done so little to make yourself independent.
My health has been extremely poor during the past winter. It was the lowest I've felt since I was laid up in '37. The fact that the weather has been lousy, with record rains, had something to do with it. And, natually, like everyone else with any sense or imagination, I'm worried as hell about the future—which doesn't help any.
Carlotta joins me in love to you and please give our love to Oona. I owe her a letter and will write before long.
As ever,
Father
“Work you know is your work, which belongs to you!”
April the 28th 1941
Dear Eugene,
I am delighted to learn about the promotion. My sincerest congratulations! It is a deep pleasure and pride and satisfaction to know you are progressing steadily and that your fine work is appreciated. Work you know is your work, which belongs to you! That's the best thing about it. It seems to me I so rarely meet anyone who knows that the work he does is his work, a part of him, and not an extraneous support for his living. Even with people who are extremely successful, I feel this. Their work is an exterior job, not an inner necessity. They may possess a pleasant affection for it but no love and pain. I feel you love yours—in its deeper aspects, I mean, the devotion to knowledge and culture.
I hope you will be able to come out here this summer. There are a lot of things I'd like to say—and hear. I'm a louse not to have written you in so long. I meant particularly to tell you ages ago how deeply moved I was by the letter you wrote way back around my last birthday. “Deeply moved,” is right, not merely words! It was a grand letter to get from a son. I kept waiting for a mood in which I could answer as it should be answered, but the mood continued consistently indigo all winter. Poor health plus world crisis pessimism—but mostly poor health—the lowest prolonged period since my crack-up in '37. The weather was no help. For three months or more it rained four out of every five days, or more, and the flu epidemic closed the schools, etc.
This health business wouldn't bother me so much if it did not affect work. I've been able to get little done since last December except a lot of notes and outlines. However, the stride seems to be coming back now, with sun and warmth. And my work is one of the few things I don't feel depressed over. In the past two years I've written two plays I'm really enthusiastic about: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. They will rank among the finest things I've ever done, I know. But they—particularly the second—are emphatically not plays I want produced or published at this crisis-preoccupied time. They could not be understood. Not their real meaning or truth. The Iceman Cometh might be a big success, if done well, but it would be for its least significant merits and its finest values would be lost, or dismissed because the present psychology would not want to face them. Moreover, conditions in the New York theater are a mess, from all I hear, and due to grow increasingly worse. My health isn't up to bucking the strain of that kind of battle, even if there were no other reasons for remaining unproduced. So I'm staying partly aloof, and ignoring all Theater Guild persuasions.
In addition to the two plays, the Cycle, although on the shelf, is still very much alive. I constantly make notes of fresh angles I get on individual plays, or on the nine as a whole, and these will be a big help when I return to it. I've also written detached outlines for four new plays outside the Cycle (one, a comedy) which look damned good to me. So you see, crisis or no crisis, I don't feel blocked at all in my work, no matter what my intuitions are about its lack of timeliness! Bum health is my only real block—the periods when there just isn't the vitality for the grind of intensive day after day labor. When you live through the play you write, you have to have a lot of reserve life on tap.
I enclose a check for your birthday. Again, much paternal pride and congratulations! And love to you and Sally.
As ever,
Father
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO
FRANCES SCOTT “SCOTTIE” FITZGERALD
“Nobody ever became a writer
just by wanting to be one.”
At forty years old, drunk and defeated over the financial failure of Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald felt his life as a novelist was over. He retreated to North Carolina, lived in various hotels near the sanatorium where Zelda, his wife, was institutionalized for schizophrenia, and wrote a series of essays for Esquire about his failure and “emotional bankruptcy.” Echoing the title of his Esquire essays, the years 1936 and 1937 became known as “The Crack-Up.”
In September 1936, with a broken shoulder from a diving accident, Fitzgerald was emotionally devastated further by an article in the New York Post. The front-page headline read: “The Other Side of Paradise Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair, Broken in Health He Spends His Birthday Regretting That He Has Lost Faith in His Star.”
Here he writes to his nearly fifteen-year-old daughter, who had just begun at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut.
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936
Dearest Scottina:
I had already decided to go up Thanksgiving which I will do, God willing, and so on your own suggestion I have killed the idea of going up on your birthday. You seem to understand the fact that I cannot afford at the moment to make two trips within the same month; so I know you won't be unduly disappointed.
To finish up news of me, the arm is really definitely out of danger and I am going to be able to use it again, which I doubted for three or four weeks. Went out to football game with the Flynns last Saturday, the same sort of game exactly that we went to last fall at very much the same time. Lefty was his usual handsome self and Nora was charming as always. They asked about you repeatedly, and not because they thought they ought to but because they have a real affection for you, and I mean both of them. They were so happy to know that you are getting along so well at your school.
Confirming my Christmas plans, they are, briefly: that we shall have a party for you in Baltimore at the Belvedere or the Stafford, if we can afford it! Then the actual Christmas day will be spent either here with your mother (it won't be like that awful Christmas in Switzerland), or else you and your mother and the trained nurse will go to Montgomery and spend Christmas with your grandmother; perhaps with a little time afterwards in Baltimore before you go back to school.
Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
Why are you whining about such matters as study hall, etc. when you deliberately picked this school as the place you wanted to go above all places? Of course it is hard. Nothing any good isn't hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.
Scott
LAURA INGALLS WILDER TO
ROSE WILDER LANE
“To think that I could have forgotten all this which comes back to me now. That's why the sooner
I write my stuff the better.”
In 1932, Missouri farm wife Laura Ingalls Wilder had her first book published. She was sixty-five years old. Her Ma, Pa, and sister Mary were all gone, younger sisters Carrie and Grace lived far away and she was afraid the story of her family and the world of her childhood would be lost forever. She wrote, too, hoping her work “might sell a good deal more than farm stuff” as she and her husband, Almanzo “Manly” Wilder, weren't quite making it at Rocky Ridge Farm with their chickens and fruit alone.
Her books, eight in all, did sell—and they keep selling, some thirty million copies in twenty-six languages—and through her work Wilder gives us, perhaps better than any other, a sense of what it was like to have been an American pioneer girl. She crossed the prairie by covered wagon. She lived in Indian Territory, a dugout hut, a frontier hotel, and a log cabin. She knew what it was like to make her own clothes, to build a house, to survive a long winter in near-starving conditions and to celebrate with almost nothing. And she knew what it meant to move on to new land and new horizons.
It is hard to know whether Wilder's books would have come to pass without the help of her only surviving child, Rose Wilder Lane. It was she who first encouraged her mother, back on the farm in Missouri, to write, and it was she who diligently served as her mother's agent, editor, and teacher. The correspondence between mother and daughter reveals just how involved Rose was with the books—with story line, rhythm, point of view, and character development—and how much she supported her mother in her work. Here, on the eve of the publication of On the Banks of Plum Creek, with the work on By the Shores of Silver Lake under way, nearly seventy-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder writes to fifty-year-old Rose.
Feb 5, 1937
Rose Dearest,
I am going to write you a day by day letter. There is'nt enough in my head to make a letter but every little bit, I think of something I want to say to you. The letter will be like the
dictionary “fine reading, but the subject changes too often.”
Looking through my desk yesterday, I found a book Ma made of writing paper. When I put it there I couldn't bear to read it, but I am having to live over those days with Pa and Ma anyway, so I did.
Ma had written some of her own poetry in it and copied some that she liked.
And Pa had written two songs.
“The Blue Jaece Juniata” and “Mary of the Wild Moor.” Any time you want them, I'll send you copies.
He signed the songs and the date is 1860.
The whole songs are there. Blue Juniata is not much like the printed one we had when I used it, but is as I remember hearing it. So is the other but I have never seen or heard it anywhere else. “Oh father, dear father, come down and open the door. But the watch dogs did howl and the village bells tolled and the winds blew across the wild moor”
I am going to write to Grace about the wild flowers there and refresh our memories I'll be able, I think, to sort out the later imported ones from the old timers. I'll send them to you when I get them.
Bruce was over yesterday. Drove over after his day's work was done, to see if we were all right and if we needed anything.
Only stayed a minute for he had to hurry back to do his chores.
He asked if we knew Al was here. Said he hadn't seen him, but Mrs B. saw him go up to the house. She thought she was sure it was Al. I have not heard anything from him and sort of hate to phone anyone and ask. I'd have to ask Hoovers.
Just wondered how come if true.
You remember the old saying that “A man who wont steal from the R. R. Co aint honest.”
I am at present working on the R. R.
And here is something, I can't use in a child's story, but you could use it if you have a place for it.
On Uncle Hi's first contract he lost money. He had tried to his best to make a profit, been careful of expense, worked three of his own teams for which he could draw no pay. In the settlement the R.R. cheated him in measuring the yards of dirt moved. Their surveyors measured the finished grade and did the figuring. All goods for the camp, in the store, feed for the horses tools etc. were furnished by the R.R. but charged to the contractor. The Co. over-charged Uncle Hi on those.
Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children Page 10