CaliforniaSeptember 5,1940
Dearest Zelda:
Here’s ten dollars extra as I thought that due to Scottie’s visit it might come in handy. Also I’m sending you Craven’s Art Masterpieces, a book of extraordinary reproductions that is a little art gallery in itself.
Don’t be deceived by this sudden munificence - as yet I haven’t received a cent from my new job, but in a wild burst of elation of getting it, I hocked the car again for J 150.00.
With dearest love, always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaSeptember 14, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Am sending you a small check next week which you should really spend on something which you need - a winter coat, for instance - or, if you are equipped, to put it away for a trip when it gets colder. I can’t quite see you doing this, however. Do you have extra bills, dentist’s, doctors’, etc., and, if so, they should be sent to me as I don’t expect you to pay them out of the thirty dollars.
And I certainly don’t want your mother to be in for any extras. Is she?
This is the third week of my job and I’m holding up very well but so many jobs have started well and come to nothing that I keep my fingers crossed until the thing is in production. Paramount doesn’t want to star Shirley Temple alone on the other picture and the producer can’t find any big star who will play with her so we are temporarily held up.
As I wrote you, Scottie is now definitely committed to an education and I feel so strongly about it that if she wanted to go to work I would let her really do it by cutting off all allowance. What on earth is the use of having gone to so much time and trouble about a thing and then giving it up two years short of fulfilment. It is the last two years in college that count. I got nothing out of my first two years - in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially); it carried me full swing into my career. Her generation is liable to get only too big a share of raw life at first hand.
Write me what you do?
With dearest love,
Scott
P.S. Scottie may quite possibly marry within a year and then she is fairly permanently off my hands. I’ve spent so much time doing work that I didn’t particularly want to do that what does one more year matter? They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaSeptember 21,1940
Dearest Zelda:
So glad you like the art book. I would like to hear of your painting again and I meant it when I said next summer if the war is settled down you ought to have another exhibition.
Scottie went to Baltimore as she planned and I finally got a scrap of a note from her but I imagine most of her penmanship was devoted to young men. I think she’s going back with the intention, at least, of working hard and costing little.
I don’t know how this job is going. It may last two months - it may end in another week. Things depend on such hairlines here - one must not only do a thing well but do it as a compromise, sometimes between the utterly opposed ideas of two differing executives. The diplomatic part in business is my weak spot.
However, the Shirley Temple script is looking up again and is my great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not a novelist.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaSeptember 28, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Autumn comes - I am forty-four - nothing changes. I have not heard from Scottie since she got to Vassar and from that I deduce she is extremely happy, needs nothing, is rich - obviously prosperous, busy and self-sufficient. So what more could I want? A letter might mean the opposite of any of these things.
I’m afraid Shirley Temple will be grown before Mrs Temple decides to meet the producer’s terms of this picture. It wouldn’t even be interesting if she’s thirteen.
Tomorrow I’m going out into society for the first time in some months - a tea at Dottie Parker’s (Mrs Alan Campbell), given for Don Stewart’s ex-wife, the Countess Tolstoy. Don’t know whether Don will be there or not. Ernest’s book is the’Book-of-the-Month.’ Do you remember how superior he used to be about mere sales? He and Pauline are getting divorced after ten years and he is marrying a girl named Martha Gellhorn. I know no news of anyone else except that Scottie seems to have made a hit in Norfolk.
Dearest love.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California October 5, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Enjoyed your letter - especially the consoling line about the Japanese being a nice clean people. A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband, John Monk Saunders, committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor, whom I hadn’t seen twice since the days at Swope’s; Frank Tuttle of the old Film Guild. There was a younger generation there too and I felt very passé and decided to get a new suit.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California October 11, 1940
Dearest Zelda; Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended, as if they were being bombed.
A letter from Gerald yesterday. He has no news except a general flavor of the past. To him, now, of course, the Riviera was the best time of all. Sara is interested in vegetables and gardens and all growing and living things.
I expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish, a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years’ away. I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because, after fifty, one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think, except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.
My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing - but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmas-time this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man - a label which I had done nothing to deserve.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaOctober 19,1940
Dearest Zelda:
I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on Tender Is the Night at the end - I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in Little Eva, which reminds me that I saw the two — Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?
My room is covered with charts like it used to be for Tender Is the Night, telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short, as I originally planned it two yean ago, and more on the order of Gatsby.
Dearest love.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaOctober 23, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carroll matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money, I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th
Century-Fox to last until December 15th so I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.
I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.
It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.
Two thousand words today and all good.
With dearest love.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaOctober 26, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Ernest sent me his book and I’m in the middle of it. It is not as good as the Farewell to Arms. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments. But I imagine it would please the average type of reader, the mind who used to enjoy Sinclair Lewis, more than anything he has written. It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does. I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat. But the point is, he is making a fortune out of it - has sold it to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and as it’s the Book-of-the-Month selection he will make $50,000 from it in that form. Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.
No news except that I’m working hard, if that is news, and that Scottie’s story appears in The New Yorker this week.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 2, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Listening to the Harvard and Princeton game on the radio reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and Scottie is living now. I hear nothing from her though I imagine she is at Cambridge today.
The novel is hard as pulling teeth but that is because it is in its early character-planting phase. I feel people so less intently than I did once that this is harder. It means welding together hundreds of stray impressions and incidents to form the fabric of entire personalities. But later it should go faster. I hope all is well with you.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 9, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Got into rather a fret about Scottie last week, which however came out all right. She went to the infirmary with grippe and then in spite of my telegrams to everyone there, including the dean, Scottie and the infirmary itself, darkness seemed to close about her. I could get no information. Her weekly letter was missing. As I say, it turned out all right. She had been discharged and was probably out of town but I wrote her a strong letter that she must keep me informed of her general movements - not that I have any control over them or want any because she is after all of age and capable of looking after herself but one resents the breaking of a habit and I was used to hearing about her once a week.
I’m still absorbed in the novel which is growing under my hand - not as deft a hand as I’d like - but growing.
With dearest love always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 16, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I’m still listening to Yale-Princeton, which will convince you I spend all my time on the radio. Have had to lay off Coca-Cola, hence work with an attack of avitaminosis, whatever that is - it’s like a weight pressing on your shoulders and upper arms. Oh for the health of fifteen years ago!
I’d love to see anything you write so don’t hesitate to send it. I got the doctor’s bill which has been paid today. I liked Scottie’s little sketch, didn’t you?
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 23,1940
Dearest Zelda:
Enclosed is Scottie’s little story - she had just read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha on my recommendation and the influence is what you might call perceptible.
The odd thing is that it appeared in eastern copies of The New Yorker and not in the western, and I had some bad moments looking through the magazine she had designated and wondering if my eyesight had departed.
The editor of Colliers wants me to write for them (he’s here in town), but I tell him I’m finishing my novel for myself and all I can promise him is a look at it. It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I’m digging it out of myself like uranium - one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas. It is a novel à la Flaubert without ‘ideas’ but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods.
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,
Scott
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 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California 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 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California December 13, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Here’s why it would be foolish to sell the watch. I think I wrote you that over a year ago when things were very bad indeed I did consider pawning it as I desperately needed $200.00, for a couple of months. The price offered, to my astonishment, was $20.00, and of course I didn’t even consider it. It cost, I believe, $600.00. The reason for the shrinkage is a purely arbitrary change of taste in jewelry. It is actually artificial and created by the jewelers themselves. It is like the Buick we sold in 1927 - for $200.00 - to come back to America in ‘31 and buy a car of the same year and much more used for $400.00. If you have no use for the watch I think it would be a beautiful present for Scottie. She has absolutely nothing of any value and I’m sure would prize it highly. Moreover she never loses anything. If you preferred you could loan it to her as I think she’d get real pleasure out of sporting it.
The novel is about three-quarters through and I thi
nk I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of the time in bed where I write on a wooden desk that I had made a year and a half ago. The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.
I had a letter from Katharine Tighe the other day, a voice out of the past. Also one from Harry Mitchell who was my buddy at the Barron G. Collier Advertising Agency. And one from Max Perkins who is keen to see the novel and finally one from Bunny Wilson who is married now to a girl named Mary McCarthy who was an editor of The New Republic. They have a baby a year old and live in New Canaan.
I will write you again early next week in time for Christmas.
Dearest love.
P.S. I enclose the letter from Max, in fact two letters only I can’t find the one that just came. They will keep you au courant with the publishing world and some of our friends.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaDecember 19, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
This has to be a small present this year but I figure Scottie’s present as a gift to you both and charge it off to you accordingly.
I am very anxious for Scottie to finish this year of college at least, so please do not stress to her that it is done at any inconvenience. The thing for which I am most grateful to my mother and father are my four years at Princeton, and I would be ashamed not to hand it on to another generation so there is no question of Scottie quitting. Do tell her this.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 429