I expect to hear in a day or so whether I am going back to work on my picture story - I told you once it was an old Saturday Evening Post story called ‘Babylon Revisited’ that I wrote in 1931. You were one of the principal characters.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaJune 12, 1940
Dearest Scottina:
Thanks for your nice full letter - it made me happy, and I don’t doubt your sincerity about work. I think now you will always be a worker, and I’m glad. Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She had no education - not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me - but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing ‘kinetic,’ which, in physics, means internal driving force - she had to be led or driven. That was the tired element that all Judge Sayre’s children inherited. And the old mother is still, at times, a ball of fire!
I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting ‘B’s.’ Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for ‘A’s’ - don’t take the things in which you can get ‘A,’ for you can leam them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry - you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel - and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.’...
Please wire me what days you have chosen to go South so I can make financial arrangements.
Can’t you tell some story down there that it’s urgently necessary to go to summer school because you’ve been on the edge of flunking out? Otherwise they’ll wonder why the money couldn’t be spent for a seaside vacation for you all. I’m living in the smallest apartment here that will permit me riot to look poor, which I can’t afford to do in Hollywood. If the picture goes through, I will give your mother a trip in August. At the moment I am keeping her on a slender allowance, as for ten years she has absorbed the major proportion of the family income.
I did listen to the radio all through my trip. Jesus! What a battle!
Please at least go in to see Gerald Murphy at Marfe Cross for five minutes in passing thru N.Y. this summer!
Send me the details about Harvard Summer School Can I pay,n ‘bailments?
Even as a construction man, Pinero was inferior to both Shaw and Ibsen. What purpose is served in teaching that second-rate Noel Coward at Vassar?
The New Yorker story might hamper you if you attach too much importance to it. The play was an accomplishment -I admit it with pride and pleasure. I’d like to see the story. Can’t you send the a copy?
Reading over your letter, you don’t sound like an introvert at all. You sound a little flushed and overconfident, but I’m not worried.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. You want to go to summer school. I will have to do extra work for that, and I’ll do it gladly. But I want you to spend ten days with your mother first. And please give me a full complete report on your mother’s condition. Your request for $15.00 just came as I was putting this in an envelope. To get it to you (Frances is away) cost me my morning. You must not ask me to wire you money - it is much harder to get than last summer. I owe thousands. I couldn’t have had this trip except that the Rogers were going and invited me. Sorry to close the letter this way but you must count your pennies.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California June 15, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
Here is your round fare to Montgomery. I’m sorry it can’t be more but, while my picture is going to be done, the producer is going to first do one that has been made for the brave —
who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back to the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby Esquire.
Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss------and her fellows feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.
Anyhow they need you. I will dig you out in time for the summer school.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. As I said, I am trying to give you $30.00 a week this summer, and when there is a lot of traveling to be done will increase this somewhat. For instance, I gave you $20.00 extra to get out of Vassar and there is $10.00 extra in this check which makes $30.00 and which will cover a good deal of transportation to date (including the round trip fare to Montgomery). Will send the next check there.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California June 20, 1940
Dearest Zelda and Scottie:
I wish I were with you this afternoon. At the moment I am sitting rather dismally contemplating the loss of a three-year-old Ford and a thirty-three-year-old tooth. The Ford (heavily mortgaged) I shall probably get back according to the police because it is just a childish prank of the California boys to steal them and then abandon them. But the tooth I had grown to love.
In recompense I found in Colliers a story by myself. I started it Just before I broke my shoulder in 1936 and wrote it in intervals over the next couple of years. It seemed terrible to me. That I will ever be able to recover the art of the popular short story is doubtful. At present I’m doing a masterpiece for Esquire and waiting to see if my producer can sell the ‘Babylon Revisited’ screenplay to Shirley Temple. If this happens, everything will look very much brighter.
Scottie, I got the marks and was naturally pleased you were off probation at last. It brought back memories of phoning you from Los Angles to see if you were at the Harvard game, of the dean’s gloomy picture a year ago last October, of years of distress about your work with threats and prayers and urgings and rewards and apologies and promises and then suddenly the first change about a year ago when you found that Vassar didn’t care whether you studied or not - or whether you stayed in or not. It is a story of hair-breadth escapes, and extraordinary devices going back to the French schedule that we had at ‘La Paix.’ All sorts of people have been drawn into it. Hours, days and weeks have been consumed. Stories, scripts, trips have been put aside - all to achieve what might have been prevented if I had carried out my first plan - never to let you go near an American school, or else I should have let you become a doll. I couldn’t leave you hanging -
The police have just called up telling me they’ve recovered my car. The thief ran out of gas and abandoned it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The poor lad was evidently afraid to call anybody to help him push it to the curb. I hope next time he gets a nice, big, producer’s car with plenty of gas in it and a loaded revolver in each side pocket and he can embark on a career of crime in earnest. I don’t like to see any education left hanging in the air.
Enclosed find four checks, two of which (including one of yours, Scottie) should go to Mrs Sayre for provisions, etc. By Monday I should be able to make some plans for you, Sc
ottie. Meanwhile you will have written whether you would like to go to Harvard alone which I did not think should frighten you. You have those two Vassar credits to make up if you are going to get an A.B. degree and I presume this would do it.
From the larger attitude one doesn’t know from day to day what the situation will be. We may be at war one week after the extinction of the British, an event which at present writing seems scarcely a fortnight away. It will probably mean our almost immediate embroilment both in Northern Canada and Brazil and at least a partial conscription. Scottie, you’ve been as lucky as anybody could be in your generation to have had a two months’ look at Europe just before the end and to have gotten in two years of college in times of peace before such matters are drowned in the roar of the Stuka bombers. And you have seen the men’s colleges as they may not be again in our time, with the games and proms. Maybe I’m speaking too quickly - if the British hold out two months until we can get aid to them - but it looks to me as if our task will be to survive.
Even so I would rather you didn’t get tied up in any war work except of a temporary nature for the present. I want vou to finish your education. If you have any plan for this summer that displaces summer school and is actually constructive please tell me immediately but I know you want to do something.
My thoughts are not so black as this letter sounds - for instance I’m now going to break off and hear the Louis and Godov fight which will prove Black Supremacy or Red Indian Supremacy or South American Inca Supremacy or something. I hope you are swimming a lot. I can’t exercise even a little any more; I’m best off in my room. But I love to think of you two diving from great heights and being very trim and graceful in the water.
With dearest love to all,
Daddy Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaJune 29, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
There’s no time to write you a long letter or to answer yours. Only about the summer school:
It seems important that either you take what will tend to give you a definite credit at Vassar or else have a practical tinge. You mentioned economics - I don’t know what kind of economics are taught there but the whole science is in such process of dissolution with new laws being built up overnight that if you take it be sure get a smart man - I mean a brilliant man and preferably a young one. I know a month is a very short time or there are several suggestions I might make. Not being on the spot I can’t advise you but only say that I hope it won’t be any form of intellectual needlework.
As soon as you get a minute, write me your circumstances there.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaJuly 12, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
Jib is not spelt gyb. And beyond everything you have sinned in omission by not giving me the correct financial data and I expect an apology. Literally I had $12.00 in the bank for most of that week and it was very unpleasant.
Max Perkins writes me that Jane and three classmates are coming here and want to see something of the movies. I don’t know who to introduce them to except Shirley Temple with whom I spent the day yesterday. (Her mother was there so it was all right.) She really is a sweet little girl and reminds me of you at 11 1/2 when you hadn’t succumbed to the wiles of Fred Astaire, lovey dovey and the radio crooners. But I told her mother it wouldn’t be long now. I don’t know whether she’s going to do my picture or not.
Haven’t you got a carbon of the New Yorker article? I’ve heard that John Mason Brown is a great favorite as a lecturer and I think it’s very modern to be taking dramatic criticism though it reminds me vaguely of the school for Roxy ushers. It seems a trifle detached from drama itself. I suppose the thing’s to get really removed from the subject, and the final removal would be a school for teaching critics of teachers of dramatic criticism.
Isn’t the world a lousy place? - I’ve just finished a copy of Life and I’m dashing around to a Boris Karloff movie to cheer up. It is an inspirational thing called The Corpse in the Breakfast Food.
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California
July 18, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
This summer has shown among other things that your education to date is entirely theoretical. I have no general quarrel with this and I believe it is as it should be in preparing for any sort of literary work. However the odds are against your having the type of talent that matures very quickly - most of my contemporaries did not get started at twenty-two, but usually at about twenty- seven to thirty or even later, filling in the interval with anything from journalism or teaching to sailing a tramp-schooner and going to wars.The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic type, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors - assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
Looking at the problem from short range only, you see how difficult it was to get a job this summer. So let’s see what Vassar’s got. The first thing that occurs to me is Spanish, which is simply bound to be of enormous value in the next ten years. Every junior-high-school child in California gets a taste of it and could beat you out of a job in South America if we expand that way. It is enough like French so that you have few alphabetical troubles, is pronounced as written, and has a fairly interesting literature of its own. I mean it’s not like studying Bulgarian or Chippewa or some strange dialect in which no one had ever had anything to say. Don’t you think this would be a much wiser move than the Greek and Latin culture? - the which shocks me that Vassar has such a namby-pamby ‘course.’
I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer -I mean any one good book like The Brothers Karamazov or Ten Days That Shook the World or Renan’s Life of Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer - then I have heard nothing rom you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Pere Goriot or Crime and Punishment or even The Doll’s House or St Matthew or Sons and Lovers? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.
Don’t be too hard on Princeton. Harvard produced John Reed but they also produced Richard Whitney who I like to believe would have been spotted as a punk at Princeton. The Honor System sometimes has a salutary effect on light-fingered gentry.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California July 29, 1940
I am still on the Temple picture and will continue on if a very avaricious gent named — will loosen up. If he doesn’t, I will rest for a week, and can stand it as my cough has become a public nuisance.
I wonder who was the ex-Westover woman you met. I wasn’t responsible for Ginevra getting fired but that’s the way of a legend - it was some Yale boys.
This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it’s come so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like ‘English Prose since 1800.’ Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal - and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction - something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once - there’s some in your diary - and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry which is the most concentrated form of style.
Example: You read Melanctha which is practically poetry and sold a New Yorke
r story - you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-diary level of average performance. The only sen-
sible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry - Blake to Keats (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O’Hara.
Strange Interlude is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it and called it Candida. On the other hand, you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s Doll’s House. Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House - all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes.
Well, the old master wearies - the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.
Love,
Daddy P.S. Understand me, I think the poetry courses you took in school (and I read the booklets) were utterly sissified drool. But a real grasp of Blake, Keats, etc., will bring you something you haven’t dreamed of. And it should come now.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 440