Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 410
Under a white moon —
I heard Helena
In a haunted doze
Say: “I know a gay place
Nobody knows.”
Her voice promised
She’d live with me there,
She’d bring everything -
I needn’t care:
Patches to mend my clothes
When they were torn,
Sunshine from Maryland,
Where I was born.
My kind of weather,
As wild as wild,
And a funny book
I wanted as a child;
Sugar and, you know,
Reason and Rhyme,
And water like water
I had one time.
There’d be an orchestra
Bingo! Bango!
Playing for us
To dance the tango,
And people would clap
When we arose,
At her sweet face
And my new clothes.
But more than all this
Was the promise she made
That nothing, nothing,
Ever would fade —
Nothing would fade
Winter or fall,
Nothing would fade,
Practically nothing at all.
Helena went off
And married another,
She may be dead
Or some man’s mother.
I have no grief left
But I’d like to know
If she took him
Where she promised we’d go.
OUR APRIL LETTER
This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly down the street.
Your voice far away on the phone.
Once I would have jumped like a clown through a hoop — but.
“Then the area of infection has increased? … Oh … What can I expect after all — I’ve had worse shocks, anyhow, I know and that’s something.” (Like hell it is, but it’s what you say to an X-ray doctor.)
Then the past whispering faint now on another phone:
“Is there any change?”
“Little or no change.”
“I see.”
The roller skates rain down the streets,
The black cars shine between the leaves,
Your voice far away:
“I am going with my daughter to the country. My husband left today… No he knows nothing.”
“Good.”
I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in.
Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.
But your voice on the telephone. If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories…
April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint-box.
SAD CATASTROPHE
We don’t want visitors, we said:
They come and sit for hours and hours;
They come when we have gone to bed;
They are imprisoned here by showers;
They come when they are low and bored -
Drink from the bottle of your heart.
Once it is emptied, the gay horde,
Shouting the Rubaiyat, depart.
I balked: I was at work, I cried;
Appeared unshaven or not at all;
Was out of gin; the cook had died
Of small-pox — and more tales as tall.
On boor and friend I turned the same
Dull eye, the same impatient tone —
The ones with beauty, sense and fame
Perceived we wished to be alone.
But dull folk, dreary ones and rude -
Long talker, lonely soul and quack —
Who hereto hadn’t dare intrude,
Found us alone, swarmed to attack,
Thought silence was attention; rage
An echo of their own home’s war —
Glad we had ceased to ‘be upstage.’
— But the nice people came no more.
ONE SOUTHERN GIRL
.
Lolling down on the edge of time
Where the flower months fade as the days move over,
Days that are long like lazy rhyme,
Nights that are pale with the moon and the clover,
Summer there is a dream of summer
Rich with dusks for a lover’s food —
Who is the harlequin, who is the mummer,
You or time or the multitude?
Still does your hair’s gold light the ground
And dazzle the blind till their old ghosts rise?
Then, all you care to find being found,
Are you yet kind to their hungry eyes?
Part of a song, a remembered glory —
Say there’s one rose that lives and might
Whisper the fragments of our story:
Kisses, a lazy street — and night
TO BOATH
There was a flutter from the wings of God + you lay dead.
Your books were in your desk I guess + some unfinished chaos in your head
Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies
THE POPE AT CONFESSION
The gorgeous Vatican was steeped in night,
The organs trembled on my heart no more,
But with a blend of colors on my sight
I loitered through a somber corridor;
When suddenly I heard behind a screen
The faintest whisper as from one in prayer;
I glanced about, then passed, for I had seen
A hushed, dim-lighted room — and two were there.
A ragged friar, half in dream’s embrace,
Leaned sideways, soul intent, as if to seize
The last grey ice of sin that ached to melt
And faltered from the lips of him who knelt,
A little bent old man upon his knees
With pain and sorrow in his holy face.
RAIN BEFORE DAWN
The dull, faint patter in the drooping hours
Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair
With damp; the burden of the heavy air
In strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,
Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers
Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:
The pounding broad wings drifts down the stair
And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.
I lie upon heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn
Tears from her wetted breast the spattered blouse
Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o’er the lawn.
Between the curtains brooding stares and stands
Like some drenched swimmer — Death’s within the house
The Non-Fiction
LIST OF ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
THE CLAIMS OF THE LIT
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND THEIR WORK
WHO’S WHO — AND WHY
“WHAT I WAS ADVISED TO DO — AND DIDN’T”
SOME STORIES THEY LIKE TO TELL AGAIN
10 BEST BOOKS I HAVE READ
THE PAMPERED MEN
HOW TO LIVE ON $36,000 A YEAR
HOW TO LIVE ON PRACTICALLY NOTHING A YEAR
HOW TO WASTE MATERIAL
PRINCETON
TEN YEARS IN THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS
ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE
MY LOST CITY
ONE HUNDRED FALSE STARTS
RING
SLEEPING AND WAKING,
MY TEN FAVORITE PLAYS
THE CRACK-UP
PASTING IT T
OGETHER
HANDLE WITH CARE
AUTHOR’S HOUSE
AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR
EARLY SUCCESS
PREFACE
MY GENERATION
THE CLAIMS OF THE LIT
This letter was published in The Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1917.
The Editor of
The Alumni Weekly,
Dear Sir,
I read with interest the letter of Mr. Edmund B. Wilson, Jr., ‘16, in The Alumni Weekly for Feb. 25, and I most heartily concur in his plea that the claims of the Nassau Literary Magazine to endowment should be prior to those of the Philadelphian Society. A scant fourth of every class, the more immature, impressionable, and timid fourth, are swept up yearly by the drag-net of the Philadelphian Society. By senior year most of them realize that the point of view therein camouflaged under the name of “social service” has little connection with modern life and modern thought — except with the present kill-joy spirit sweeping the Chautauquas — and the swarm of earnest youths diminishes to a mere scattering of mild and innocuous uplifters. But I believe that during the first three years inestimable harm is done to the impressionable fourth. Nothing could be less stimulating to that quickening of interest and intellectual curiosity which is the aim of all education than the depressing conviction of sin distilled by those prosperous apostles who go the rounds of the colleges frightening amiable freshmen. That a man such as the famous “bad example” should be permitted to sit smugly upon a Princeton lecture platform to be pointed at by the raucous lecturer as a reformed rake, and hence as an ideal, is a custom too ridiculous to be disgraceful but also too absurd to be endowed.
It seems inevitable that this herd of blue-nosed professional uplifters, at present at large in America appealing to the intellect of farmers’ wives and pious drug-clerks, shall have a breeding place in Princeton, but that men to whom such ideas are distasteful and revolting should have to contribute to keep it alive and bawling when the Lit. goes unendowed is really too much.
It is an unnecessary truckling to the mediocre religious fanaticism of a dull and earnest minority. Princeton lives by its statesmen and artists and scientists — even by its football teams — but not by its percentage of puritans in every graduating class.
F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘17.
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND THEIR WORK
The idea of “The Ice Palace” (Saturday Evening Post, May 22), grew out of a conversation with a girl out in St. Paul, Minnesota, my home. We were riding home from a moving picture show late one November night.
“Here comes winter,” she said, as a scattering of confetti-like snow blew along the street.
I thought immediately of the winters I had known there, their bleakness and dreariness and seemingly infinite length, and then we began talking about life in Sweden.
“I wonder,” I said casually, “if the Swedes aren’t melancholy on account of the cold — if this climate doesn’t make people rather hard and chill — “ and then I stopped, for I had scented a story.
I played with the idea for two weeks without writing a line. I felt I could work out a tale about some person or group of persons of Anglo-Saxon birth living for generations in a very cold climate. I already had one atmosphere detail — the first wisps of snow weaving like advance-guard ghosts up the street.
At the end of two weeks I was in Montgomery, Alabama, and while out walking with a girl I wandered into a graveyard. She told me I could never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper. Next day on my way back to St. Paul it came to me that it was all one story — the contrast between Alabama and Minnesota. When I reached home I had
(1) The idea of this contrast.
(2) The natural sequence of the girl visiting in the north.
(3) The idea that some phase of the cold should prey on her mind.
(4) That this phase should be an ice palace — I had the idea of using an ice palace in a story since several months before when my mother told me about one they had in St. Paul in the eighties.
(5) A detail about snow in the vestibule of a railway train.
When I reached St. Paul I intrigued my family into telling me all they remembered about the ice palace. At the public library I found a rough sketch of it that had appeared in a newspaper of the period. Then I went carefully through my notebook for any incident or character that might do — I always do this when I am ready to start a story — but I don’t believe that in this case I found anything except a conversation I had once had with a girl as to whether people were feline or canine.
Then I began. I did an atmospheric sketch of the girl’s life in Alabama. This was part one. I did the graveyard scene and also used it to begin the love interest and hint at her dislike of cold. This was part two. Then I began part three which was to be her arrival in the northern city, but in the middle I grew bored with it and skipped to the beginning of the ice palace scene, a part I was wild to do. I did the scene where the couple were approaching the palace in a sleigh, and of a sudden I began to get the picture of an ice labyrinth so I left the description of the palace and turned at once to the girl lost in the labyrinth. Parts one and two had taken two days. The ice palace and labyrinth part (part five) and the last scene (part six) which brought back the Alabama motif were finished the third day. So there I had my beginning and end which are the easiest and most enjoyable for me to write, and the climax, which is the most exciting and stimulating to work out. It took me three days to do parts three and four, the least satisfactory parts of the story, and while doing them I was bored and uncertain, constantly re-writing, adding and cutting and revising-and in the end didn’t care particularly for them.
That’s the whole story. It unintentionally illustrates my theory that, except in a certain sort of naturalistic realism, what you enjoy writing is liable to be much better reading than what you labor over.
WHO’S WHO — AND WHY
This autobiographical essay was written for The Saturday Evening Post in 1920.
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
When I lived in St. Paul and was about twelve I wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems. Two years later a family congress decided that the only way to force me to study was to send me to boarding school. This was a mistake. It took my mind off my writing. I decided to play football, to smoke, to go to college, to do all sorts of irrelevant things that had nothing to do with the real business of life, which, of course, was the proper mixture of description and dialogue in the short story.
But in school I went off on a new tack. I saw a musical comedy called The Quaker Girl, and from that day forth my desk bulged with Gilbert & Sullivan librettos and dozens of notebooks containing the germs of dozens of musical comedies.
Near the end of my last year at school I came across a new musical-comedy score lying on top of the piano. It was a show called His Honor the Sultan, and the title furnished the information that it had been presented by the Triangle Club of Princeton University.
That was enough for me. From then on the university question was settled. I was bound for Princeton.
I spent my entire Freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene. But the Triangle Club accepted my show, and by tutoring all through a stuffy August I managed to come back a Sophomore and act in it as a chorus girl. A little after this came a hiatus. My health broke down and I left college one December to spend the rest of the year recuperating in the West. Almost my final memory before I left was of writing a last lyric on that year’s Triangle production while in bed in the infirmary with a high fever.
The next year, 1916 — 17, found me back in college, but by this time I had d
ecided that poetry was the only thing worth while, so with my head ringing with the meters of Swinburne and the matters of Rupert Brooke I spent the spring doing sonnets, ballads and rondels into the small hours. I had read somewhere that every great poet had written great poetry before he was twenty-one. I had only a year and, besides, war was impending. I must publish a book of startling verse before I was engulfed.
By autumn I was in an infantry officers’ training camp at FortLeavenworth, with poetry in the discard and a brand-new ambition — I was writing an immortal novel. Every evening, concealing my pad behind Small Problems for Infantry, I wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during study period.
This was a distinct complication. I had only three months to live — in those days all infantry officers thought they had only three months to live — and I had left no mark on the world. But such consuming ambition was not to be thwarted by a mere war. Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a roomful of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word novel on the consecutive week-ends of three months. There was no revising; there was no time for it. As I finished each chapter I sent it to a typist in Princeton.
Meanwhile I lived in its smeary pencil pages. The drills, marches and Small Problems for Infantry were a shadowy dream. My whole heart was concentrated upon my book.
I went to my regiment happy. I had written a novel. The war could now go on. I forgot paragraphs and pentameters, similes and syllogisms. I got to be a first lieutenant, got my orders overseas — and then the publishers wrote me that though The Romantic Egotist was the most original manuscript they had received for years they couldn’t publish it. It was crude and reached no conclusion.