Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 432
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
Summer, 1935
Scottina:
It was fine seeing you, and I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do). You are nicer to adults - you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls, 12-15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early - probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but - well:
‘Daddy the prophet!’ I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you. When I wrote that ‘news-sheet’ with events left out, you know - the letter that puzzled you - and headed it ‘Scottie Loses Head,’ it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, and that you would ‘lose your head.’ What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn’t know - I couldn’t have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy and indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (Understand: I don’t blame Andrew too much - the fault was yours - he didn’t, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!).
However, that’s of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one - but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost have to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I’m not afraid of it for you. I don’t want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive and is fine if founded on positive virtues, work, courage, etc., but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always - and it is a nice thing to have. I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.
Signs and portents of your persistent conceit: Mrs Owens t said to me (and Mrs Owens loves you), ‘For the first time in a long while Scottie was nice, and not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.’
Because, I guess, for the first time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours - a chance they never had, of belonging to ‘high society.’ Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I’d have checked you on that) - but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all - your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you! You did not use one bit of y our mind, one little spot! to think what they were thinking, or help them!
You went to Norfolk and gave out the information (via the Taylors, via Annabel, via mother) that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn’t matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You know it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of ‘promoting yourself.’ But those signs of one big catastrophe (it’ll come - I want to minimize it for you, but it can’t be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are a young member of the human race, who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen ‘popular girls’ of 15 become utterly déclassé in six months because they were essentially selfish.) You and Peaches (who isn’t selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more and more that less pretty girls will be attaching the solider, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you and Peaches are intelligent but both of you will be warped by this early attention, and something tells me she won’t lost her head; she hasn’t the ‘gift of gab’ as you have - her laughter and her silence takes the place of much. That’s why I wish to God you would write something when you have time - if only a one act play about how girls art in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.
I grow weary, but I probably won’t write again for a month. Don’t answer this, justifying yourself - of course I know you’re doing the best you ‘can.’ The points of the letter are:
1st You did spill over, rashly!
2nd You are getting over the selfish period - thank God! 3rd But it’ll take one more big kick, and I want it to be mild, so your backside won’t suffer too much.
4th I wish you’d get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people - what they say and how they behave.
With dearest love, Your simply so-perfect too-too Daddy
Please, turn back and read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton - oh yeah!
New York City
July, 1935
Darlin’:
Am on a flying visit to New York. Spent yesterday afternoon with, of all people, Elissa Landi. She sailed for Europe last night. She is very nice.
I am not going to write you much this summer but you know my heart is with you always. Remember the one thing about riding - that you can’t be as reckless at it as you can about swimming, because there’s another factor besides yourself involved, the horse. So that no matter how good you were if the horse was bad there might be trouble. Different from diving, for example, where you have only yourself to blame. The point is, don’t do anything or try anything that the riding master doesn’t approve of. He knows just the point you’ve reached at handling the mount.
Good-by double durling. Aunt Rosalind, Mr Ober and Mr Perkins all invite you to spend a few days with them in N.Y. when camp is over. We shall see. I leave for the South Monday.
Your utterly irresistible,
Daddy
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina August 4, 1935
Darling:
I always thought the first book of that series was one of the most exciting books I ever read. Ernest Hemingway thought so too. Please read it with a view to a possible dramatization of it and tell me your opinion. I never went any further in that series than the first one on account of no English versions being available.
I am glad you fell off your horse. Here in Carolina the only conveyance is by zebra. I have one zebra named Clarence.
My correspondence is now limited to five people: Elissa Landi, Mrs Roosevelt, Aquilla, and a fourth whom I need scarcely mention, because I hardly know his name.
Darling, I am working hard and getting very well.
Please unleash yourself in your letters to your mother without mentioning riding catastrophies which might make her nervous.
Give my affectionate regards to Virginia, Helen and Betty and tell your counselor what a really obnoxious person you might turn out to be unless carefully watched.
Your stoogie —
Daddy
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina
July, 1936
Darling:
O.K. about the tutoring. Let it slide. But I hate to let one season slip by at your age without one difficult advance.
Do something for me! I’m proud of the swimming but summer’s only summer. Give me a time maybe, and know always I’m thinking of you and for you, and my plans will come to you as soon as crystallized, sometime in August. Slim chance of my getting up to Pennsylvania. All Europe ideas definitely out. Spain was what I wanted to see and Spain is in what the newsmen call the ‘throes of revolution.’
Your mother likes your letters so much. Hope you have nice tent mates. I don’t agree with Mrs Tappan on that subject, but that’s a whole story and I know whatever the situation is you’ll make the best of it in your own courageous way.
Oh darling Scottie - I don’t want to force you but it does please me when you can make a connection between the Louisiana Purchase and why Fred Astaire lifts up his left hind foot for the world’s pleasure. I want you to be among the best of your race and not waste yourself on trivial aims. To be useful and proud - is that too much to ask?
I enclose you the jacket of my latest book. I have decided to write
in Scandinavian from now on!
Your devoted
Daddy
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina July 31, 1936
Darling:
I am enclosing in this some pictures that tell a sad story. I had a terrific accident and broke my shoulder. I thought I would be very smart and do some diving and after a year and a half of inactivity I stretched my muscles too much in the air and broke my shoulder. It has all been very troublesome and expensive but I have tried to be as cheerful as possible about it and everyone has been very kind; the people here have rigged up a curious writing board for me so that I work with my hand over my head rather like this.
I enclose money for your present small needs. It may be that the expenses of this injury will preclude your going to an expensive school this fall but life sometimes does those things to you and I know you are brave and able to adjust yourself to changing
‘Fitzgerald had drawn a picture of himself seated at his writing board.
conditions and to know that all the effort that I have will be thrown into your education and the care of your mother. If I had not had this operation on my shoulder the doctor tells me I would never have been able to raise my arm above my shoulder again. It is still an open bet as to whether or not I will ever be able to raise it above my shoulder.
I am proud of you and I am only a little angered by the fact that you have not managed to read more than one of the French books.
Sunday night I leave for Baltimore and you can write me either there care of Mrs Owens or here where I am returning. Isn’t it lucky I did not go to Spain after all! Or maybe it would have been rather fun.
Your loving Daddy Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North CarolinaOctober 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 a 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 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 a 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 it 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 Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina November 17, 1936
Dearest Pie:
I got a School Letter saying that Thanksgiving Day is best, and it is better for me that way. There is no particular advantage in going out two or three times rather than one, without particular objectives; the idea is to go out once and have a good time. I’ll be delighted to meet whoever you want, and our engagement is on Thanksgiving Day.
(This is a parenthesis: I got the little charms that you sent me for my birthday, the bells dangling and the mule, and appreciated your thought of me - you little donkey!)
Park Avenue girls are hard, aren’t they? Usually the daughters of ‘up-and-coming’ men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It’s the ‘Yankee push’ to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of fay Gould who began by peddling bad buttons to a county and ended, with the same system of peddler’s morals, by peddling five dollar railroads to a nation.
Don’t mistake me. I think of myself always as a northerner - and I think of you the same way. Nevertheless, we are all of one nation and you will find all the lassitude and laziness there that you despise, enough to fill Savannah and Charleston, just as down here you will find the same ‘go getter’ principle in the Carolinas.
I don’t know whether you will stay there another year - it all depends on your marks and your work, and I can’t give you the particular view of life that I have (which as you know is a tragic one), without dulling your enthusiasm. A whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that it is your duty to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain esprit.
Now, insofar as your course is concerned, there is no question of your dropping mathematics and taking the easiest way to go into Vassar, and being one of the girls fitted for nothing except to reflect other people without having any particular character of your own. I want you to take mathematics up to the limit of what the school offers. I want you to take physics and I want you to take chemistry. I don’t care about your English courses or your French courses at present. If you don’t know two languages and the ways that men chose to express their thoughts in those languages by this time, then you don’t sound like my daughter. You are an only child, but that doesn’t give you any right to impose on that fact.
I want you to know certain basic scientific principles, and I feel that it is impossible to learn them unless you have gone as far into mathematics as coordinate geometry. I don’t want you to give up mathematics next year. I learned about writing from doing something that I didn’t have any taste for. If you don’t carry your mathematics such as coordinate geometry (conic sections), you will have strayed far afield from what I had planned for you. I don’t insist on the calculus, but it is certainly nothing to be decided by what is easiest. You are going into Vassar with mathematical credits and a certain side of your life there is going to be scientific.
Honey, I wish I could see you. It would be so much easier to go over these important matters without friction, but at a distance it seems rather tough that you are inclined to slide into the subjects that are easy for you, like modern languages.
No more until I see you Thanksgiving.
With dearest love,
F. Scott
Fitz
P.S. Sorry you are on bounds - feel as if I had been the same for six months. However I have bought an ancient Packard roadster and get out more now. I always allow for your exuberance but I hope this doesn’t come from a feud with any special teacher, or from any indiscretion of speech, a fault you should be beginning to control.
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina December 12, 1936
Dear Scottie:
As I wired you, there is no question of having ninety people. The most you can possibly ask is about sixty people; and even that is counting on ten or twelve refusals. If I had thought that the Ethel Walker School was going to give you a peculiar idea of what your financial resources are, it would have been far, far better to send you to a modest school here in the Carolina mountains. You are a poor girl, and if you don’t like to think about it, just ask me. If you don’t make up your mind to being that, you become one of those terrible girls that don’t know whether they are millionairesses or paupers. You are neither one nor the other. The dance for you in Baltimore is a very modest one. It will have dignity because it pretends to nothing that it isn’t. It will give you a certain amount of whoopee and it will probably lack a certain amount of things that you would expect. For instance, I am determined to have a hurdy-gurdy for the orchestra - you know, an Italian with a monkey, and I think the children will be very content with that. They don’t want much, children of sixteen or seventeen, and they will be amused by the antics of the monkey. Your idea of a swing orchestra seems zero to me.
However, in the next room I will have some of the older people with a swing orchestra that I have engaged, and from time to time you may bring some of your choice friends in there to dance.
- But remember that I expect you and your crowd to dance by the hurdy-gurdy during the whole afternoon, quietly and slowly and without swing music, just doing simple waltz dancing.
You can stay all night all you want with people up to the night of December 24th, when you and I are going to make a hop South.