It’s been gay here but we are, thank God, desperately unpopular and not invited anywhere. See the Murphys once a week or so - Gerald is older, less gay, more social, but not so changed as many people in five years. D. Parker is on the crest - the I didn’t see her as much as I’d liked.
Now - Ruth Goldbeck Voallammbbrrossa not only had no intention of throwing you out in any case, but has even promised on her own initiative to speak to whoever it is (she knows her) has the place. She is a fine woman, I think; one of the most attractive in evidence at this moment, in every sense, and is not deserving of that nervous bitterness.
Not knowing whether you’ve left Spain I’m sending this to Paris. Hoping you’ll be here in September for a week or so.
Bunny Wilson’s book has a fascinating portrait of Dos in it, and is full of good things, and to me interesting throughout Oddly enough what it lacks is his old bogey, form. It is shapeless as Wells at his wildest, or almost Have read nothing good recently save a book on the Leopold- Loeb case and Harold Nicholson’s Trnnyson, neither recent.
This is a dull letter but it’s late and what’s left of the mind is tired.
Always afftly yours,
Scott
Best to Pauline.
Villa Fleur des Bois Cannes, France
September 9,1929
Dear Ernest:
I’m glad you decided my letter wasn’t snooty - it was merely hurried (incidentally I thought you wanted a word said to Ruth G. if it came about naturally - I merely remarked that you’d be disappointed if you lost your apartment - never a word that you’d been exasperated). But enough of pretty dismal matters - let us proceed to the really dismal ones. First the let me say that from Perkins’ last your book like Pickwick has become a classic while still in serial form. Everything looks bright as day for it and I envy you like hell but would rather have it happen to you than to anyone eke.
Just taken another chapter to typist’s and it’s left me in a terrible mood of depression as to whether it’s any good or not. In 2 12 months I’ve been here I’ve written 20,000 words on it and one short story, which is superb for me of late years. I’ve paid for it with the usual nervous depressions and such drinking manners as the lowest bistro (bistrot?) boy would scorn. My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current company - after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange places. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories - and realizing that anyone in my state of mind, who has in addition never been able to hold his tongue, is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.
Among them has been — . Naturally she, having been in an equivalent state, lacks patience - (this isn’t snooty - no one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived). Incidentally the Murphys have given their whole performance for her this summer and I think, the she would be the last to admit it, she’s had the time of her life.
We’re coming to Paris for 2 months the 1st of October.
Your analysis of my inability to get my serious work done is too kind in that it leaves out the dissipation, but among acts of God it is possible that the 5 years between my leaving the army and finishing Gatsby (1919-1924) which included 3 novels, about 50 popular stories and a play and numerous articles and movies may have taken all I had to say too early, adding that all the time we were living at top speed in the gayest worlds we could find. This au fond is what really worries me - the the trouble may be my inability to leave anything once started. I have worked for 2 months over a popular short story that was foredoomed to being torn up when completed. Perhaps the house will burn down with this ms. and preferably me in it.
Always your stinking old friend,
Scott
I have no possible right to send you this gloomy letter. Really if I didn’t feel rather better with one thing or another I couldn’t have written it. Here’s a last flicker of the old cheap pride: the Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions - in her youth one was enough.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 10,1934
Dear Ernest:
Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers’ jargon out of my head.
Ever friend,
Scott All I meant about the editing was that if I’d been in Max’s place I’d have urged you to hold the book t for more material. It had neither the surprise of I.O.T(nessessessarily) nor its unity, and it did not have as large a proportion of first-flight stories as M.W. W. I think in a ‘general presentation’ way this could have been atoned for by sheer bulk. Take that opinion for what it’s worth.
On the other hand you can thank God you missed this publishing season 11 am 5th best seller in the country and haven’t broken 12,000.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland June 1, 1934
Dear Ernest:
Your letter crossed, or almost crossed, one of mine which I am glad now I didn’t send, because the old charming frankness of your letter cleared up the foggy atmosphere through which I felt it was difficult for us to talk any more.
Because I’m going egoist on you in a moment, I want to say that just exactly what you suggested, that the addition of that Chinamen-running story in the Cosmopolitan would have given Winner Take Nothing the weight that it needed, was in my head too. Allow me one more criticism, that while I admire your use of purely abstract titles I do not think that one was a particularly fortunate choice.
Next to go to the mat with you on a couple of technical points. The reason I had written you a letter was that Dos dropped in in passing through and said you had brought up about my book what we talked about once in a café on the Avenue de Neuilly about composite characters. Now, I don’t entirely dissent from the theory but I don’t believe you can try to prove your point on such a case as Bunny using his own father as the sire of John Dos Passos, or in the case of this book that covers ground that you personally paced off about the same time I was doing it. In either of those cases how could you trust your own detachment? If you had never met any of the originals then your opinion would be more convincing.
Following this out a little farther, when does the proper and logical combination of events, cause and effect, etc., end and the field of imagination begin? Again you may be entirely right because I suppose you were applying the idea particularly to the handling of the creative faculty in one’s mind rather than to the effect upon the stranger reading it. Nevertheless, I am not sold on the subject, and especially to account for the big flaws of Tender on that ground doesn’t convince me. Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of the Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archaeology, etc., upon the Bible story; and, in the second, of Shakespeare’s trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch’s Lives and Hollinshed’s Chronicles. There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. You can accuse me justly of not having the power to bring it off, but a theory that it can’t be done is highly questionable. I make this point with such persistence because such a conception, if you stick to it, might limit your own choice of materials. The idea can be reduced simply to: you can’t say accurately that composite characterization hurt my book, but that it only hurt it for you.
To take a case specifically, that of Gerald and Sara. I don’t know how much you think you know about my relations with them over a long tim
e, but from certain remarks that you let drop, such as one ‘Gerald threw you over,’ I guess that you didn’t even know the beginning of our relations —
I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over - in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that. (By the way, I didn’t read the Wescott story of Villefranche sailors till I’d done my own version. Think that was the wisest course, for me anyhow, and got a pleasant letter from him in regard to the matter.)
To go back to my theme song, the second technical point that might be of interest to you concerns direct steals from an idea of yours, an idea of Conrad’s and a few lines out of David-into-Fox- Garnett. The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. The second contribution to the burglary was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very end of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draft - or at least the first one I saw - gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary of the future lives of the characters: ‘The priest became a priest under Fascism,’ etc., and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this - nevertheless, you convinced me. The third piece of burglary contributing to this symposium was my admiration of the dying fall in the aforesaid Garnett’s book and I imitated it as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of Tender, telling the reader in the last pages that, after all, this is just a casual event, and trying to let him come to bat for me rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with McCallagan or McKisco, Sweetie?)
Thanks again for your letter which was damned nice, and my absolute best wishes to all of you. (By the way, where did you ever get the idea that I didn’t like Pauline, or that I didn’t like her as much as I should?) Of all that time of life the only temperamental coolness that I ever felt toward any of the people we ran around with was toward — , and even in that case it was never any more than that. I have honestly never gone in for hating. My temporary bitternesses toward people have all been ended by what Freud called an inferiority complex and Christ called ‘Let him without sin’ - I remember the day he said it. We were justlikethat then; we tossed up for who was going to go through with it - and he lost.
I am now asking only $5000 for letters. Make out the check to MalcolmRepublic, c/o The New Cowlick.
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. Did you ever see my piece about Ring in The New Cowlick - I think you’d have liked it.
P.S.S. This letter and questions require no answers. You are ‘write’ that I no longer listen, but my case histories seem to go in largely for the same magazines, and with simple people I get polite. But I listen to you and would like damn well to hear your voice again.
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina
August, 1936
Dear Ernest:
Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?
It’s a fine story t - one of your best - even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me.
Ever your friend,
Scott
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
On the train, traveling to some point in the South June 5, 1937
It was fine to see you so well and full of life, Ernest. I hope you’ll make your book fat -I know some of that Esquire work is too good to leave out. All best wishes to your Spanish trip I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.
Ever yours,
Scott
Going South always seems to me rather desolate and fatal and uneasy. This is no exception. Going North is a safe dull feeling.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California
November 8, 1940
Dear Emest:
It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you Brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the side shows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death - and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.
I never got to tell you how I liked To Have and Have Not either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance - paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoevsky in their undeflected intensity.
Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoevsky with his wide appeal more than any other European - and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.
With old affection,
Scott
P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November - you can’t flunk out in November) and how I am an awful suck about the rich and a social climber. What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit - how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry - I won’t tell anybody. Not even Alan Campbell who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.
P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.
To Frances Scott Fitzgerald
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland August 8, 1933
Dear Pie:
I feel very strongly about you doing your duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy - but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’
Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me ‘Pappy’ again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that? I will arrange the camp bill. Halfwit, I will conclude.
Things to worry about: Worry about cour
age Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Worry about... Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about: What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) — Scholarship
(b) — Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) — Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. ‘Egg Fitzgerald.’ How would you like that to go through life with - ‘Eggie Fitzgerald’ or ‘Bad Egg Fitzgerald’ or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?
Love anyhow.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 431