Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 438
I wish I could say the same about a recent article in Mademoiselle. I grant you the grace of having been merely a dupe as I warned you you would be - for I cannot believe that you would announce that you pursued your education yourself while I went around to the speakeasies. There’s nothing to do about it now, but in future please call yourself by any name that doesn’t sound like mine in your writings. You must have wanted fifty dollars awfully bad to let them print such a trite and perverted version of your youth, unless you mean that it was the Fred Astaire pictures that taught you that gallant stance upon ‘your own two feet.’ This isn’t in the nature of quarreling but you certainly owe me an explanation because I see no earmarks of the ‘dutiful daughter’ about any of it.
By the time you get this it will be the eleventh. Your plan was to leave for California the fourteenth - your mother’s has varied between a trip to Virginia Beach and a quiet time at Saluda. Both of you have something on me because I can’t quite decide what is best. I am waiting to hear from Montgomery about the exact state of your grandmother’s health and also to make up my mind how much work I can undertake in the studios and under what conditions - a matter which depends on X rays, the willingness of the studio to let me work at home, and other such factors.
I want to have you out here for part of the summer. I have a nice cottage in the country, but very far out in the country, and utterly inaccessible if one doesn’t drive well. Whether a piano here would be practical or not I don’t know (remember how I felt about radio) but all that might be arranged if the personal equation were not doubtful (a situation for which for the moment I take full blame). Since I stopped picture work three months ago, I have been through not only a T.B. flare-up but also a nervous breakdown of such severity that for a time it threatened to paralyze both arms - or to quote the doctor: ‘The good Lord tapped you on the shoulder.’ While I am running no fever above 99, I don’t know what this return to picture work is going to do and when and if my health blows up you know what a poor family man I am. It seems best - and I am merely feeling my way as I Write this letter - for you to spend at least another week in the East and you might as well spend it in or near Asheville, especially as it gives your mother such a great pleasure. A long pilgrimage with her would almost certainly require a nurse and run into expense as all trips that your mother and I make have a way of doing.
However, if things seem more stabilized out here toward the end of this month I may change my mind and bring you out here and let your mother go to Montgomery. For the moment, there is nothing for you to do but wait and get along as well as possible with your music and writing and what money I can send you. I have a bill from Dr Hamman for $25.00. Either he was very dilatory or you didn’t go to see him till the end of your visit in Baltimore for his diagnosis arrived the day of the operation and it was money thrown away. He seemed to agree, however, that four times out of five you would have had eventual trouble with the appendix.
I have sent for your marks. If you get them, airmail them to me. If they average around ‘B’ I should think you’ve done well in pulling yourself out of a very difficult hole.
You can read as much or as little of this letter to your mother as you want. I don’t mean it to be disagreeable, but I was naturally surprised when instead of carrying out your announced intention of writing about the difference between northern and southern girls you chose to ride on my shoulder and beat me on the head with a wooden spoon.
Your bank statements came through. I noticed there were half a dozen slips marked ‘insufficient funds.’ Marshall Neilan, once an ace director out here, went to jail for that little failing last week. These are days when if you haven’t got it you better do without. Sorry about Meredith too - I always liked him. The Ober mix-up accounts for his recent coolness. I’m sorry - we got along pretty well for twenty years. — isn’t smug or even stuffy - he’s a nice adolescent who married a smooth-faced — person.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. Sent Peaches a nice present. Was going to do the same for the — girl but John gave me a ‘subtle’ talk about some dim-witted brother who was reformed by a year in a drink sanitarium, and almost got his bottom kicked on 33rd Street
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California October 31,1939
Scottina:
(Do you know that isn’t a nickname I invented but one that Gerald Murphy concocted on the Riviera year ago?) Look! I have begun to write something that is maybe great, and I’m going to be absorbed in it four or six months. It may not make us a cent but it will pay expenses and it is the first labor of love I’ve undertaken since the first part of Infidelity. (Do you remember that half-finished script the censor stopped that I showed you in Norfolk two years ago last Easter? You read it in the cabin of one of those Baltimore-Norfolk liners.)
Anyhow I am alive again - getting by that October did something - with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don’t drink. I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort.
And I think when you read this book, which will encompass the time when you knew me as an adult, you will understand how intensively I knew your world - not extensively because I was so ill and unable to get about. If I live long enough I’ll hear your side of things but I think your own instincts about your limitations as an artist are possibly best: you might experiment back and forth among the arts and find your niche as I found mine - but I do not believe that so far you are a ‘natural.’
So what? These are such valuable years. Let me watch over the development a little longer. What are the courses you are taking? Please list them. Please cater to me. Please do not ask me to rise to heights of nervous energy - in which I can usually discern the name of the dye on your instructor’s hair at long distance or reconstruct the murder of March, 1938, from a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. But give me some outlines.
a- What do Obers say about me? So sad?
b- What is this about my telling Mrs Owens you were a heel?
c. — What play are you in?
d. — What proms and games? Let me at least renew my youth!
e. — As a papa - not the mad child of a mad genius - what do you do? and how?
f. — What furniture? Do you still want etchings?
g. — What did Rosalind write?
h. — Do you want a test here?
i. — Did you ever think of calling on the Murphys to make them happy - not to deprecate — ?
I’m glad you read Malraux. Did you get the driver’s license? Is Mary Earle nice? I got an instant impression in Connecticut of a brave, lovely, impish person....
With dearest love,
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
CaliforniaNovember 4, 1939
Dearest Scottie:
Sorry my letter crossed yours - I mean the letter where I said you were not ‘a natural.’ If you brought or helped to bring off the show there, I am more than pleased. Without sentimentality, I think it would be nice to give Vassar something back of what it has given to you.
The only important questions in my letter were about your relations in Baltimore; I want to know about the formality of the presentations because, naturally, I will have to send appropriate gifts, etc.
Answer me that question, and also I would like to know how big a part you played in the show.
I have been trying to think of a name that is better for you than ‘Paint and Powder Club.’ What do you think of calling it the ‘Song and Story?’ Not so good - or is it?
I am sorry I wrote you that letter. Again let me repeat that if you start any kind of a career following the footsteps of Cole Por-
ter and Rodgers and Hart, it might be an excellent try. Sometimes I wish I had gone along with that gang, but
I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them. Will send you a small check herewith.
Dearest love.
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California January 25, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
Communication having apparently ceased from your end, I conclude that you are in love. Remember - there’s an awful disease that overtakes popular girls at 19 or 20 called emotional bankruptcy. Hope you are not preparing the way for it. Also I have a bill from a doctor which includes an X ray. Have you had a cough? Please give me a little information, no matter how skimpy.
You have earned some money for me this week because I sold ‘Babylon Revisited,’ in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story - neither of you nor of me - however, I am accepting it).
Dearest love always.
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California February 19, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
Delighted that you’re working on a play. In answer to a query in one of your past letters I do like Thomas Mann - in fact I had Put his Death in Venice on that list I gave you last summer. Have sent your treasurer his check.
I was very interested to hear about Kilduff. Let me know what becomes of Andrew in the club elections. Things are still very vague here.
With dearest love, F. S. Fitz
Have paid Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
March 15, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
No word from you for some time but I suppose a letter will cross this. I think it was you who misunderstood my meaning about the Comrades. The important thing is this: they had best be treated not as people holding a certain set of liberal or conservative opinions but rather as you might treat a set of intensely fanatical Roman Catholics among whom you might find yourself. It is not that you should not disagree with them - the important thing is that you should not argue with them. The point is that Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion and whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind (‘Fascist,”Liberal,”Trotskyist’) and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process. They are amazingly well- organized. The pith of my advice is: think what you want, the less said the better.
I am sorry about the physiology. There is no answer except the advice that I used to give you constantly in your less receptive days: that sometimes you can lick an especially hard problem by facing it always the very first thing in the morning with the very freshest part of your mind. This has so often worked with me that I have an uncanny faith in it No particular news. The Sayres are of course delighted that your mother is coming out. Your mother said something in her letter about spending vacations with you. As you know, I will not have this, except in the most limited fashion. I think the pull of an afflicted person upon a normal one is at all times downward, depressing and eventually somewhat paralyzing, and it should best be left to those who have chosen such duties as a life work. So if there are any inquiries from that source about your summer plans I think it would be wise to answer them in the most general terms, even hinting that you had work mapped out in the North.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. When does your Easter vacation begin? This is very important. Don’t forget to tell me about the fate of Turnbull and other Baltimorians - and about the play.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
March 18, 1940
Dear Scottie:
Thanks for your very full letter. Of course I am terribly curious to hear about the show and how big a success it was - for I don’t doubt that it was a success, and I think your idea to found a sort of Triangle was most ingenious and energetic and exactly the sort of thing that gives me great pride in you. The satiric theatre is perhaps a better method of expression for you than journalism and perhaps it is just as well that you did not get on the Miscellany board. Naturally I would give anything to see the play but will await your description of it when I see you.
Am enclosing $75.00, which I hope will cover your vacation. Negotiations on the screenplay of ‘Babylon’ are still in course. If they should go through and you should be in Baltimore a week from now I would like you to go to Asheville and spend a night with your mother. As things are now I can’t afford it but we will see.
Thanks for the news about the Princeton boys. Colonial is a good club, older than Cap and Gown, in fact. At one time people used to refer to the ‘Big Five,’ but in my day Colonial got an unfortunate drinking reputation. Now I believe it specializes in boys out of the social register who don’t quite make the grade in the big time. I hope Andrew is happy there, though I don’t doubt that he is a little disappointed. If I were you I should not discuss the matter with him at all. I still think it is a lousy cruel system.
We’ll discuss the summer later. It so much depends on how much money I have. I think that doubtless some movie job could be found for you out here. Competent people with a little pull have no trouble finding places in the small income brackets. It is when your price is $1000 and up a week that it is another story. However I’m not exactly sure it’s the best thing.
I will attend to those New York bills when the first money comes in. I wish you would write me immediately where you will be during vacation. I mean the approximately exact dates so that I can reach you by wire in case it is feasible for you to go to North Carolina.
Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. I wish very much you would call on the Murphys during your spring vacation. If there is any way in which you could help Honoria - to a date, for instance - I think it would be mutually very advantageous. Of course, it shouldn’t look as if the suggestion came from me. I know it is difficult to pick up an old thread after an interval but it would please me immensely if you could at least pay a call there.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
CaliforniaMarch 27, 1940
Dear Scottie:
I am going to work on “Babylon’ at a lousy salary - a week from Monday. Anyhow it’s something.
A letter from Baltimore disturbed me this morning - what have you done to your hair? Three different people have seen fit to correspond with me about it. Can’t you tone down the effect a little? You heightened it so gradually that I don’t think you realize yourself now just what it looks like. Nobody minds if a woman over thirty wants to touch hers up but why imitate a type that is passé even in pictures? It was a cute trick when you had one blond strand that looked as if the sun might have hit it, but going completely overboard defeats any aesthetic purpose.
Best luck for the spring term. I know it’s always the hardest and I have that almost uncanny fear for you at the moment that comes sometimes. Perhaps it’s the touch of overconfidence and self- justification in your letters (i e., the Daisy Chain) that I haven’t seen for over a year. Please give yourself a margin for hard luck.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. I can understand the overconfidence - God haven’t I had it? But it’s hard as hell to recognize it in oneself - especially when time’s so short and there’s so much we want to do.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
April 11, 1940
Dearest Pie:
Thanks for your letter. I’m writing this on a Sunday night, sans Françoise and I hope you can read it I go to cinema work tomorrow on a sort of half-pay, half-’spec’ (speculation) business on my own story ‘Babylon Revisited.’ Which is to say Columbia advances me living money while I work and if it goes over in installments with the producer, the company, the releasing people, I get an increasing sum. At bottom we eat - at the top the deal is very promis
ing.
Why I’m writing tonight is because I foresee three months of intensive toil. (I feel like a criminal who has been in a hideout, been caught, and has to go back to the Big House. I’ve been visited by my crooked doctor and my moll and Frances the Fence has protected me. Now the Big House - oh Jees them guards!)
To put you in a good humor for the ensuing gratuitous though friendly advice, let me say I got a letter from Andrew today, out of two years’ silence, in which he ‘judges you objectively’ as a very fine girl. I was pleased naturally and wish they hadn’t counteracted the work I did on him by sending him to a school with a professional Holy-Joe for headmaster. His letter would make you very conceited - shall I send it? You seem to be a big shot down there.
The advice consists of this — --------’s name bobs up in so many of your letters that I assume he plays a big part in your life, no matter how seldom you see him. I’ve naturally formed a picture of him - vaguely I associate it with my relation with Marie Hersey at about your time of life. I think she told herself that I was hers for the special effort. But they had become matter- of-fact to me - lesser girls would have rivalled them for new excitement and anyone who summed them up, or seemed to me like your mother, would simply have washed them out of my mind.
Supposing — to be self-absorbed, charming, successful, and full of the same psychology I had - how definitely handicapped you might be in counting on him! By the very fact of old familiarity, old experience in common, it would be difficult, for men, if they’re alive, are continually looking for the new. I mean that he might, so to speak, meet the Queen of Abyssinia in his travels. And how can you rival her?