Am glad you were reading about Twentieth Century Sophists. You meet them every day. They see their world falling to pieces and know all the answers, and are not going to do anything about it.
Did the quilts come? The Baltimore stuff and also the one from New York, which, of course, was a duplication as it turned out. Isn’t it common courtesy to âcknowledge such matters? Also, Harold said he sent you that old Redbook story of mine. Did you read it?
Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. Your failure to send me that slip on the second page gummed up the list of Elizabethan lyrics I’d made, so that there was some repetition in the second list. Your teachers must love you for that splendid casual quality but I don’t think you’d hold a job five minutes.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
November 18, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
I’m certainly glad to catch a glimmer of wisdom in your attitude - even though you unveiled the story of the blow-away pink slip after the telegraph company had checked on you. And even though in one page of your letter you had intended to go to Baltimore from Thursday to Saturday, while in another part you hadn’t intended to go at all.
I’m sorry about — ‘s tea. I’ve nothing against her except that she rather stuck her neck out about Vassar, which I suppose she is attending for the social prestige involved. She seemed very nice, quite transparent - a type that turned up all too frequently in the Cottage Club at Princeton. I do wish you would find some more interesting friends. To take the curse off your not going to her party I wrote a nice letter to her mother explaining my apparent tyranny in forbidding it. Same to the mother of — .
In answering my questions you asked some yourself. The one about Baltimore can be answered from Ecclesiastes, ‘There is a time for weeping, a time for laughing,’ etc. Fourteen was simply not the time for you to run around on evening dates - at least Pete Finney and I thought not in our erroneous ways. The parents of — and — thought differently. Who is interested in a girl with her bloom worn off at sixteen? The one thing you still reproach me for is letting you go, against my better judgment, to the dance at St Andrew’s School.
It is now perfectly sensible for you to go with college boys. (I didn’t want you to stay in Baltimore this fall because I felt it would shoot you into Vassar with your mind full of gayety or love, which it apparently did, for your first month there was a flat bust. Also, I did not want you to start with a string of football games this fall.) If you are invited to the Yale or Princeton proms this winter or next spring by a reputable boy - and I’m entitled the name, please - I’d have absolutely no objection to your going The whole damn thing about going to the colleges is to keep it in proportion. Did you ever hear of a college boy, unless he were an idiot, racing from Smith to Vassar to Wellesley? There are certain small sacrifices for a college education or there wouldn’t be any honor in having gone to college.
But the New York thing is as wrong now as the auto date was at fourteen. I will quote you from a letter I wrote Harold Ober: Those debutante parties in New York are the rendezvous of a gang of professional idlers, parasites, pansies, failures, the silliest type of sophomores, young customers’ men from Wall Street and hangers-on - the very riff-raff of social New York who would exploit a child like Scottie with flattery and squeeze her out until she is a limp colorless rag. In one more year she can cope with them. In three more years it will be behind her. This year she is still puppy enough to be dazzled. She will be infinitely better off here with me than mixed up with that sort of people. I’d rather have an angry little girl on my hands for a few months than a broken neurotic for the rest of my life.’ But I don’t have to tell you this - you probably read the Life article on the dim-witted — girl and the razz on her in The New Yorker.
As to the money. Your full allowance for next Monday, $13.85, will reach you almost as soon as this does. I’m sorry you were inconvenienced at the loss of the $10.00, but it is a trifle compared to the inconvenience you have caused at this end. I will also send an additional $5.00, which will make $18.85 for the Baltimore trip, but that $5.00 will come off the following week’s allowance. I want you to stay in Baltimore until Sunday, and I mean specifically in Baltimore, not at Vassar, not at Scarsdale. This money must absolutely take care of the Baltimore trip!
Yes, it is too bad you have to be checked up on like a girl of ten. I’d hoped you’d be rather different this year. If Peaches hadn’t been with you that first day in Hollywood I would have squelched the idea of rooming with a debutante as I had meant to. I let it go because I didn’t want to open her visit that way. I’m as sick of this bloody matter as you are. I can just see people pointing at you at New York dances and saying, That’s Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter. She likes her champagne young. Why doesn’t he do something about it?’
Even if your aims are the most worldly, the road that I am pointing out is the right one. A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Please address all future correspondence to my new address, 5221 Amestoy Ave, Encino, Los Angeles, California.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
November 25, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
I’m concerned about the history test though I know the classroom work may have been better. However, at Walkers your tests ran almost equal to your classroom work, usually ahead of it, and finishing early rather indicates that you were out of material, doesn’t it? But I feel that if you like that work you can pass it. I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. That’s why I finally lost interest in — . I’m sending you a book that seems to have helped some people at Princeton. You might glance over it. You must admit that my prophecy has proven true. I said that to get decent grades you would have to study at least as hard as you did between leaving Walkers and taking the board examinations. I don’t mean that it will be tough sledding indefinitely but there will have to be a period of tough sledding before you come to Easy Street. Why don’t you let it be now? You can still pull out of this hole before Christmas - and put me in a most generous mood.
Knowing your character, here’s about the way things will go in the next month. You have four weeks before Christmas and probably you intend to try hard but at the moment you have gotten into some entanglement in Baltimore that you either want to go deeper into or get out of, or put on ice - in any case, that will require two or three days of letter writing and absorption. Then you will do well for three days - until the reply to your letter sets you off again. By now your impetus will be exhausted and you will have a good three-day low - the movies and New York, forget to hand in a theme, or something like that. Two weeks gone. Then, alas, one of those things will happen against which only the wisest will guard - a two-day cold, an unexpected change of Christmas plans, some personal trouble or upset. Then there’s only a week left and despite frantic hours you will have another failure on your hands. Don’t you see that this is just how it happens? Where’s that ‘common sense’ that you boast about?
I begin to wonder about the postal service there. I wrote you some weeks ago that the second question was:
During the retreat from Caporetto, Lieutenant Henry was haunted by one of the poems in the second list, which came into his memory in distorted form. What poem was it?
That should take you only a minute. Also, did you ever get my letter in which I included a letter you wrote me from Walkers last June?
The address given you before is incorrect. The right address is: 5521 Amestoy Ave, Encino, Los Angeles, California.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. $5.00 of the $10.00 advanced you is deducted from this week’s check, which please find enclosed.
> 5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
December, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
A letter from Miss Barber tells me you may very possibly be on probation. I am disappointed but not broken-hearted as it was on the cards from September. In one way you are like me - that when things seemed to be going oh so smoothly they were really slipping from underneath subtly and surely. But on the other hand remember that when you are struggling and fighting and perhaps feeling you are getting nowhere, maybe even despairing - those are the times when you may be making slow, sure progress. I hope December has been one of those times - I hope it is the beginning of an effort that, if the probation is imposed, will see it lifted very soon.
I thought the letter from Miss Barber had a somewhat impertinent tone. This is doubtless because you seem to have told her you were eighteen which of course would throw an entirely different light on my wishes about New York and make me rather silly. This rather detracted from the sympathy that I felt for you, which prompted my wire.
Presuming you are hard up I am sending a small advance on your Dec. 19th allowance to keep the wolf from the door.
My plans are all uncertain. Is that Princeton pamphlet any good?
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Your letter came. Touched that you wish I wouldn’t worry about the marks and enlightened to know why freshmen are marked hard. ‘I don’t see why you’re so furious because I’m not brilliant’ is a sentence that touches my heart. I don’t know whether it’s the thought or the style that impresses me most. Which was your philosophical poem? ‘Be my little little little, little wife?’
Which reminds me. I sent you the librettos of W. S. Gilbert. What I want you to read is Patience which was written as a counterblast of Wilde’s asceticism. Did you like the Dowson poem? What notorious modern novel takes its title from a line of it?
About your masterwork - the diary. (Seriously it has some nice writing in it, sharp observation, flashes of wit, etc. I cut pages 1 and 1 from a typed version and sent it to your grandmother.)
The editing I did was slight - names changed (Myers, Murphys, etc.); reference to your mother’s not getting well.... There is not a word or a line changed - nor even a correction of spelling. Excuse my map - I never did know how you got from Switzerland to Paris.
Who are you going to visit in Baltimore if you go there? I have no time to dig you up stuff about Ernest but his first book In Our Time tells a lot about himself. I have not taken a week from your allowance. I wish in your letter now - the last I’ll get before vacation - you would tell me in bulk just how much you owe!
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
January, 1939
Dearest Pie:
I believe you have to deposit this by the third of February. Anyhow as soon as you know you are going on give it to them. I have added the music charges from the catalogue - of course you get no scholastic credit for preliminary music.
I suppose you have finished the essay. If you are still writing it don’t forget that the age of marriage is largely a biological question. Girls in India mature at thirteen, in the American tropics at about fifteen or sixteen, and in Scandinavia as late as twenty-one. Most questions in life have an economic basis (at least according to us Marxians), but this is one where biology undermines economics. Hence the Spanish duenna and the French chaperone, because these races realize that while economically it’s better to wait, nature in southern lands has quite contrary intentions.
I will take care of the Turnbull matter.
By this time you will have heard from exams. I hope it goes well. You are the first woman on either side of your family to try for a higher education - though many of them have been well- read. If you get to know a little bit you will combine a great deal of latent power in yourself, and be able to live more fully and richly than the majority of pretty girls whose lives in America are lop-sided, backward-looking and wistful.
How about ‘Cynara,’ etc.? I feel a slowly mounting exasperation.
My address is simply Endno, California.
Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion.
Love,
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Winter, 1939
Dearest Scottie:
I know you looked first at the check, but it does not represent a business transaction. I am too tired at the moment to argue but your figures are wrong. However, I’m having it all checked up by my secretary. I think there is a gift somewhere.
Sorry you got the impression that I’m quitting the movies - they are always there - I’m doing a two-weeks rewrite for Paramount at the moment, after finishing a short story. But I’m convinced that maybe they’re not going to make me Czar of the Industry right away, as I thought 10 months ago. It’s all right, baby - life has humbled me - Czar or not, we’ll survive. I am even willing to compromise for Assistant Czar!
Seriously, I expect to dip in and out of the pictures for the rest of my natural life, but it is not very soul-satisfying because it is a business of telling stories fit for children and this is only interesting up to a point. It is the greatest of all human mediums of communication and it is a pity that the censorship had to come along and do this, but there we are. Only - I will never again sign a contract which binds me to tell none other than children’s stories for a year and a half!
Anyhow, I’m on the new Madeleine Carroll picture (go to see Café Society - it’s pretty damn good, I think. This one is the same producer-director-stars combination) and anyhow the movies are a dull life and one hopes one will be able to transcend it.
You’ve let me down about the reading. I’m sorry you did because I’ll have to bargain with you. Read MollFlanders, for any favors asked. I mean this: skip Tono Bungay but if you don’t care enough about my advice to do some fractional exploring in literature instead of skimming Life and The New Yorker, I’m going to get into one of those unsympathetic moods - if I’m not sorry for people’s efforts there seems to be an icy and inhuman reaction. So please report on MollFlanders immediately... meanwhile airmail me another travel folder on Mrs Draper and her girls. Who is she and they? And who is Moll Flanders?
I hope you enjoy the Princeton prom - please don’t be overwhelmingly - but no, I am done with prophecies - make your own mistakes. Let me only say ‘Please don’t be overwhelmingly anything!’ and, if you are, don’t give my name as the responsible parent! (And by the way never give out any interview to any newspaperman, formal or informal - this is a most definite and most advised plea. My name and you, bearing parts of it, is (are) still news in some quarters - and my current policy, for reasons too numerous to explain, is silence. Please do me this courtesy!)
I should like to meet you somewhere early in April - the third or fourth.
Your mother is in Florida - it seems to have been delayed.
Of course I’m glad and it warms me all over to know that even ungrammatically ‘both your French English and history teachers’ etc. Though you are pretty completely hatched and I can be little more than your most dependable friend, your actions still have a most decided effect on me and at long range I can only observe you thru the eyes of Vassar. I have been amazed that you do not grasp a certain advantage that is within your hand - as definite as the two-headed Russian eagle - a girl who didn’t have to have an education because she had the other women’s gifts by accident - — and who took one anyhow. Like Tommy Hitchcock who came back from England in 1919 already a newspaper hero in his escapes from Germany and the greatest polo player in the world - — and went up to Harvard in the same year to become a freshman - because he had the humility to ask himself ‘Do I know anything?’ That combination is what forever will put him in my pantheon of heroes.
Go thou and do likewise.
Love,
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,Californ
ia
Winter, 1939
Dearest Pie:
Day of rest! After a wild all-night working on Gone with the Wind and more to come tomorrow. I read it - I mean really read it - it is a good novel - not very original, in fact leaning heavily on The Old Wives’ Tale, Vanity Fair, and all that has been written on the Civil War. There are no new characters, new technique, new observations - none of the elements that make literature - especially no new examination into human emotions. But on the other hand it is interesting, surprisingly honest, consistent and workmanlike throughout, and I felt no contempt for it but only a certain pity for those who considered it the supreme achievement of the human mind. So much for that -I may be on it two weeks - or two months. I disagreed with everybody about how to do Madame Curie and they’re trying it another way.
Your cold stirred certain gloomy reflections in me. Like me, you were subject to colds when young, deep chest colds near to pneumonia. I didn’t begin to be a heavy smoker until I was a sophomore but it took just one year to send me into tuberculosis and cast a shadow that has been extremely long. I wish there was something that would make you cut it out - the only pay-off is that if you’re run down by June to spend a summer in the open air, which is a pity with so much to do and learn. I don’t want to bury you in your debut dress.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 436