People ask after you, but I am the most curious of all. May I be permitted to ask after you? I’d like a line about your health, your work, your morale, success or failure of the play and such affairs. If you will let me know when the play is, I will send you a message of congratulation or flowery tokens if you prefer.
I think of you always, darling, and will try to invent something very nice for Easter.
Just heard from Mrs Turnbull who said you had three especial qualities - loyalty and ambition were two, the third I’ll tell you later. She felt that would protect you from harm. I make no comment. She seemed very fond of you.
Also the Finneys have sent me the work of a musician to do something about, and I am taking the matter in hand.
With dearest love,
Daddy
The Garden of Allah Hotel
Hollywood,California March 11, 1938
Dearest Pie:
I’m glad you got 74. If you had gotten that the first term, we’d have something to start on now. A letter came at the same time from Miss Walker, in which she referred to your ‘low position in the class.’ Of course this is not at all what you implied to me where I saw you in January, and I do wish you would be more accurate. To suggest a state of affairs which doesn’t exist merely stalls off the final reckoning. The most important thing in your life now is to get good marks at school and pass the examinations for Vassar in June. It is so important that if you don’t, I am unable, offhand, to think of any satisfactory alternative. You will be exactly in the position of a man who has done a bad job and been fired, which will be a nice black mark against you at sixteen. You can’t and mustn’t let this happen. I am not going to spend Easter lecturing you and this is to forestall any attitude on your part that I am unreasonable not to be appeased by your success in other lines.
On the other hand, I am of course pleased that you did well as Mrs Bennett (Harold Ober wrote me that your acting stood out). Also, I am glad that the musical comedy you wrote was so successful at school. Why don’t you get a volume of Gilbert and Sullivan and read the extraordinary and amazing lyrics of Iolanthe and Patience. I used to study them like mad when I was writing the Triangle shows at Princeton. (I see, by the way, that a boy named James W. Huntley has been elected to the Cottage Club at Princeton. Did you know him in Baltimore?) I wish I could say as nice things about the poem after Ogden Nash (I dined with him and Bill Leonard night before last). It was a long way after. Ogden Nash’s poems are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line. Read over a poem of his and you will see what I mean. Your poem has every line in a different meter. One changes from a two-four rhyme to a gallop, to a waltz, and so forth, and the total effect is nil. I know you didn’t think much of it but you did send it to me, so I am telling you the truth.
I am glad you have gotten around to liking Dorothy Parker and that you had the good taste to pick out her ‘Diary of a New York Lady.’ It is one of her best pieces. As to knowing her, you do know ter, but that was in the days when you were a little weary of my literary friends. I knew Elizabeth Firestone’s father very well and liked him very much. What are you going to do for the Firestone Tire Hour? Thank God you got a credit for posture That’s really good news. I think you can have the suit that you want for spring. Shall I send you the money or what? Write me immediately.
I think your Pinehurst suggestion is rather good for Easter. Jim Boyd lives at Southern Pines next door; in fact, he owns most of it. We might do a few days there and a few days at Virginia Beach. However, the geographical part of our plans will depend on what the doctor will let your mother do.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
I liked the lyrics you told me last January - very well turned. I suppose they were in the show. Ordered none of those photos - they were so tight-lip one imagined that they concealed gold teeth. I heard there was a flood here but didn’t look out the window as I was busy.
The Garden of Allah Hotel
Hollywood, California
March, 1938
Dearest Pie:
Your letter was welcome but I’m sorry you waited to write me until you had nothing pleasant to say - all about hating people, and where you were going to college and how you were about to replace DeMille and Berlin next year. Together with some impertinent cracks about my absurd unreasonableness. I simply conclude that you were in a bad humor because none of it makes much sense.
As to Bryn Mawr, I am entering you at St Timothy’s next year so if you miss at Vassar you will be able to be near Baltimore, which I gather you want. If you thought you were going to spend next year weekending in Baltimore you must have suddenly come to one of those decisions of yours that I am a sucker. I have no such plans for you. Either you accept responsibilities and let me graduate from this unwelcome role of stern father or you stay another year in jail with the children. Your whole liberty turns on the question of your work and nothing else - the kind of talent in demand out here doesn’t walk out on a job.
In any case I’m coming East this month and we’ll go somewhere and we’ll find out your objections to this dog’s life you lead and if they’re valid we’ll change them.
Love,
Daddy
The Garden of Allah Hotel
Hollywood,California
April 18,1938
Dearest Pie:
Got your postcard. A couple of days ago got a wire from my old friend, Alice Lee Myers. You remember, the woman who took Honoria and some other girls abroad last summer. She is taking a party this year which will include Fanny, and I think it sounds very good. Traveling is always fun; you always meet young people on the boat and in hotels during the summer, and the trip itself would include a station wagon tour of France, Belgium, Holland, and perhaps a taste of England. I won’t mention that it would help your French, because that sounds too much like work, but I will say that if it works out you will be a very lucky girl, for quite possibly these are the last few years in which you will be able to see Europe as it was. Though I may add that if you get caught in a war this summer, I will simply deny knowing you and you will have to get out of it the best way you can; but please don’t start one.
God, how I’d like to go myself. Everything is work here, just as I expected, and of course I came back without any rest and it was two or three days before I was really able to get going again. I like the work part, but seem to have to do it in big, heartbreaking doses, which is bad for the constitution. Sorry we didn’t have as many talks as I had hoped for. You had no special plans for the summer, I gathered, except what general invitations might be available, and I really don’t want you out here for the whole summer because there is no Helen Hayes and really nothing much to do that would interest you except a repetition of last summer - only less interesting, as I am out of touch with Norma, Joan, etc. However, if you come for a week in June with Peaches, I will open up relations again and try to make an impression on her. I am writing the Finneys today. I wouldn’t talk around school about summer plans until they are more definite. I will have to bargain with Alice Lee Myers about the European trip, and for the Hollywood trip see if Pete will trust his precious into my hands. Your mother, Obers, etc., are to know nothing yet - the teachers nothing.
Now the European trip would be due to start either June 22 or July 2nd. I imagine that I could have the dates changed a little, or rather that, as you are one-fourth of the party, the time of your examinations would have to be a determining point in the itinerary. When will they be over? What are the actual dates? What would you say, if the European trip is decided on, to the idea of leaving school after graduation, coming out here and taking your boards here in Hollywood and then, if time is short, flying back to New York? I don’t mind your flying now as I did last summer. It is as nearly safe in Ju
ne as such things can ever be. Also, I want a truthful answer as to whether the school would rather you stayed there. Please don’t make me take this up with Miss Walker. If they would rather, by a margin of 60-40, that you stayed, I want to know, and I want to know now, by airmail. The marks were really so very mediocre that, if I was Vassar, I wouldn’t take you unless the school swore that you were a serious character - and the school is not going to swear you are a serious character if you let a prep school dance stand even faintly in the way of your success. Besides, if they don’t want you to stay, and the trip abroad works out, I would like to catch a glimpse of you during that time. I don’t want to come East in June if it can possibly be avoided. After all, you are going to college, so this is not your real graduation. Nobody came to mine, and I don’t remember being hurt. Nevertheless, if it were not for all the hazards involved, such as bringing your mother there or else hurting her feelings by not bringing her, and the fact that it may come right at the crucial point of this picture (due to roll in June, but perhaps not starting till the fifteenth), I would love to go and see you standing flowerlike among the other fashionable peonies. Moreover, if it means an overwhelming lot to you, I will try to arrange it, but you can well understand how I dread any repetition of this Easter trip.
I got a vague word from Harold that you were going to ‘study hard’ but I have no word from anybody about whether you took Latin and how many lessons you took. The report is the same in detail from all your teachers and it is too dispiriting to go into. If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration. It has been so ironic to me in after life to buy books to master subjects in which I took courses at college and which made no impression on me whatsoever. I once flunked a course on the Napoleonic era, and I now have over 300 books in my library on the subject and the other A scholars wouldn’t even remember it now. That was because I had made the mental tie-up that work equals something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something to be postponed. These scholars you speak of as being bright are no brighter than you, the great majority not nearly as quick nor, probably, as well endowed with memory and perception, but they have made that tie-up, so that something does not stiffen in their minds at the mention that it is a set task. I am so sure that this is your trouble because you are so much like me and because, after a long time milling over the matter, I have concluded that it was mine. What an idiot I was to be disqualified for play by poor work when men of infinitely inferior capacity got high marks without any great effort.
Write me what you think about the summer plans. The alternative is not sitting around in some attractive suburb with a bunch of GilmanSchool boys chewing on your ear, pleasant as the prospect might appear. I am afraid you would be somewhat second-hand by autumn, and I prefer you as you are for a little longer.
Dearest love.
Your Progenitor in the Direct Line Will you kindly touch on every point in this letter when you answer it? I am keeping a carbon, hoping you will. This is a time when we ought to be able to communicate - we are unconflicting on 90% of things - all except your lazy belly which my thin guts shrinks from. Please work - work with your best hours.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
Spring, 1938
Dearest:
I hope Mary Earle won’t find the trip too expensive. It is if you are not going to Vassar, but if you are I think it will be such a worthwhile thing and I wish to God I could go over with you.
We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his Legion of Decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33 (remember I didn’t like you to see them?) but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes - so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children. Anyhow we’re starting a new story and a safe one.
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats”Eve of Saint Agnes.’ A line like ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,’ is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement - the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes. Would you read that poem for me, and report?
I’m having a controversy with the HighlandHospital. They want to keep your mother there with only six weeks out a year and a few trips with Dr and Mrs Carroll. I can’t see it - I think she should be out from one-fourth to one-half the time, using the hospital only as a base. If I insist, they threaten to release her altogether to me which would be simply a catastrophe - I can’t work and look after her. And she wouldn’t obey any companion unless the hospital has authority back of the companion. Mrs Sayre wants her to come and sit beside what will soon be a deathbed and I can’t see that as promising any future (I don’t mean Mrs Sayre is sick but she is almost so). She (your mother) wants to come to your commencement with Newman and Rosalind - O.K. if it can be arranged for a nurse to take her to and from N.Y.
I don’t dare at the moment to tell your mother about the Alice Lee Myers trip or the fact that I’ve taken a shack at the beach here (address Garden of Allah still). She would feel as if we were happy and she was in prison. If only old Carroll was less obstinate - however it should be solved within a few weeks - I may have to go East but God forbid.
A letter from Miss Walker. Never has my intuition so surely informed me of a thing than now - that you are walking on a most delicate line there. No matter how you feel I should play a ‘straight’ role for five weeks, lest they mistake any action for a frivolous attitude. All through life there are such games to play - mine for instance, when I first came here, to keep away from any bars, even though I wasn’t tempted to drink. The connection of ‘bar-drunk’ was too easy to establish in people’s minds after my past performances. But don’t tell your best friend that you are playing a sober role - such things travel fast and far. You will be smart in playing nun for the time being - five weeks will win you many months.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
May, 1938
Dearest Pie:
I’m glad you acted decently in the end about that infirmary affair. We’ll consider it closed.
About the college courses, in case you get in - for freshman year at least I want them to be subject to discussion between us - I don’t think, for example, that you are ready for philosophy. I made some bad mistakes in choosing my own curriculum on silly careless premises, because courses came at the right time, were rumored easy, etc. I thought I’d read Italian to read Dante and didn’t get to first base. I should have known from my wretched French that I had no gift for languages. Similarly you went into physics instead of taking more French and you must have been a considerable drag on the rest of the class. So we will discuss your curriculum when we meet. The enclosed is merely to indicate to you that a course in economics might be interesting in these troubled times. I am not insistent about science but at least one line you follow must be useful rather than cultural.
It’s been a bad year for you. I hope you’ll save the remnants by getting into college and I do wish you wouldn’t blame others ever for what happens to you. A famous gunman who was lately electric-shocked from among us said he only shot the policeman because he wasn’t let alone. Right up to the chair he thought he was being put upon. You were never anti-social in youth - it is one regard in which this year your r
easoning is more like your mother’s than mine. Never in her whole life did she have a sense of guilt, even when she put other lives in danger - it was always people and circumstances that oppressed her. I think, though, that you are walking towards some awful sock in the next few months that will have a sobering effect on you and I will be glad when it’s over and you are your old modest and charming self again.
Do try to make your mother happy for two days - excuse her enthusiasm. In her youth, she didn’t know such schools existed. Tell her you may go abroad if your exams are good.
If you do, and I am very anxious you should, I can’t bring you and Peaches out here this June - September would be better. I have no facilities for chaperonage at the moment but if there is cooperation in your heart this summer I will arrange it for next September. I gather Mary Earle’s mother wasn’t interested in the European trip.
The censors have stopped Infidelity as we were about to go into production. I am doing the screenplay of The Women for Norma Shearer. My God - what characters! What gossip! Let me remind you never to discuss my affairs with a living soul.
With dearest love,
Daddy
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
July 7, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
I don’t think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice - bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I’m talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an ‘authority,’ and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you - for the young can’t believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.
When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided - she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 434