By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read - the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.
You speak of how good your generation is, but I think they share with every generation since the Civil War in America the sense of being somehow about to inherit the earth. You’ve heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Well, and fare thee well. You never answer the specific questions in my letters. You tell me about your courses in general, but not in particular. And that was an important question about your literary name - I’m against your using two names of mine, like in the College Bazaar.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaNovember 2, 1940
Dearest Scottina:
Listening to the Harvard-Princeton game on the radio with the old songs reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and that you are living now. I picture you as there though I don’t know whether you are or not.
I remember once a long time ago I had a daughter who used to write me letters but now I don’t know where she is or what she is doing, so I sit here listening to Puccini - ‘Someday she’ll write (Pigliano edda ciano).’
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaNovember 29, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
I started Tom Wolfe’s book on your recommendation. It seems better than Time and the River. He has a fine inclusive mind, can write like a streak, has a great deal of emotion, though a lot of it is maudlin and inaccurate, but his awful secret transpires at every crevice - he did not have anything particular to say! The stuff about the GREAT VITAL HEART OF AMERICA is just simply corny.
He recapitulates beautifully a great deal of what Walt Whitman said and Dostoevski said and Nietzsche said and Milton said, but he himself, unlike Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, has nothing really new to add. All right - it’s all a mess and it’s too bad about the individual - so what? Most writers line themselves up along a solid gold bar like Ernest’s courage, or Joseph Conrad’s art, or D. H. Lawrence’s intense cohabitations, but Wolfe is too ‘smart’ for this and I mean smart in its most belittling and most modern sense. Smart like Fadiman in The New Yorker, smart like the critics whom he so pretends to despise. However, the book doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live. But I’d like you to think sometime how and in what way you think it is superior to such a piece of Zolaesque naturalism as Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, or if it is superior at all. Did you like the description of Max Perkins as ‘Foxhall’? I believe Max had mixed emotions.
I’m taking a day off from my novel to go to the dentist, the doctor, and my agent, to the latter in order to discuss picture business when and if I go back to it in February. And I have saved an hour to rush in where angels fear to tread. I don’t know-------- — and have had to piece him together from what you have told me and from a letter you showed me and so forth. But it sounds to me as if he had a perceptible dash of lavender. I know exactly what you mean about the Dwight Fiske attitude - sometimes the Harvard manner approaches that deceptively as a pose - but when a man is tired of life at 21 it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself. One thing I’m sure of. There are plenty of absolutely first-rate men who will be within your range in the next two years. I remember that Lois Moran used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. She finally inverted it into the credo that if a man wasn’t married and inaccessible, he wasn’t a first-rate man. She gave herself a very bad time. The sea is still as full as ever of sharks, whales, trout and tuna. The real handicap for a girl like you would have been to have worn herself out emotionally at sixteen. I think we cut that by about two-thirds by keeping you comparatively busy in those two very crucial years. Life should be fun for you and there’s plenty of time. All I care for is that you should marry someone who is not too much a part of the crowd.
Lanahan is wrong about your disposition. You take adversity very well, but you are utterly dependent on sleep. Your extraordinary performance out here two years ago was directly attributable to the fact that you hadn’t slept since getting off the boat, if you slept on board of it! It amounts almost to an idiosyncracy in you and you should never make important decisions when you are extremely tired.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. It’s O.K. about the Xmas money but go slow. The phone rang after I finished this letter and the doctor after seeing my cardiogram has confined me to the house. So at this moment I couldn’t go to the studios if I wanted to. Try to save your fare to Baltimore and back.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
CaliforniaDecember 7, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
I’m sending the check you asked for next week. Will that be time enough? Also will send railroad fare, etc. I’m still in bed but managing to write and feeling a good deal better. It was a regular heart attack this time and I will simply have to take better care of myself. I’ve been living two floors up and will probably have to move, though not immediately.
It interests me what you are doing for Peaches. I should certainly think of nothing else but Peaches while you are writing it so it will be absolutely honest. But afterwards I would very much like to see a copy of it. Littauer, the editor of Colliers, came through here last week and liked your New Yorker piece very much. He might pay you more than almost anyone else. While in on the subject, remember that Harold Ober’s advice is only good up to a point. He is ‘the average reader’ and about one third the stories that I sold to The Saturday Evening Post were stories which he did not think they would buy. Like all agents, he is clogged with too much of the kind of reading trained to smell the money in the page - so I should never ask his advice on any literary matter, though of course in other regards he is an excellent agent.
My novel is something of a mystery, I hope. I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
Your Xmas plans seem O.K. to me.
With dearest love,
Daddy
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California
December, 1940
Dearest Scottie:
There has reached you by this time, I hope, a little coat. It was an almost never-worn coat of Sheilah’s that she wanted to send you. It seemed very nice to me - it may fill out your rather thin wardrobe. Frances Kroll’s father is a furrier and he remade it without charge! So you must at once please write the following letters: (1) To Sheilah, not stressing Mr Kroll’s contribution, (z) To Frances, praising the style.
(3) To me (in the course of things) in such a way that I can show the letter to Sheilah who will certainly ask me if you liked the coat.
You make things easier for me if you write these letters promptly. A giver gets no pleasure in a letter acknowledging a gift three weeks’ late even though it crawls with apolog es - you will have stolen pleasure from one who has tried to give it to you. (Ecclesiastes Fitzgerald.)
Lastly, drum up some story for Alabama that you bought the coat from some girl. Don’t say it came through me.
for the rest, I am still in bed - this time the result of twenty- five years of cigarettes. You have got two beautiful bad examples for parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But
be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas. Her letters are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature - even criminals do not fail that way - they are the law’s ‘Loyal Opposition,’ so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel and can’t finally report it but the story of the fire is magnificent. Only I’m afraid that after the grand character-planting nothing is going to come of it all. The picture of ‘Amy Carleton’ (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our apartment in Paris - do you remember?), with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom - sans succès - and finally ended by her own hand in Montana in 1934 in a lonely ranch house. The portrait of Mrs Jack is grand too. I believe her absolutely.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P-S- In the name of Somerset Maugham, the letter I.
UNDATED FRAGMENTS OF LETTERS TO SCOTTIE
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
The conclusion is: it will not win you either financial in- ependence or immortality. But you will be wise to publish it, if you can - if for no gain and only in a college magazine. It will you a sense of your own literary existence, and put you in not°h °t*lers trying (he same thing. In a literary way I can- help you beyond a point. I might say that I don’t think anyone succinct prose unless they have at least tried and failed to write a good iambic pentameter sonnet, and read Browning’, short dramatic poems, etc. - but that was my personal approach to prose. Yours may be different, as Ernest Hemingway’s was. But I wouldn’t have written this long letter unless I distinguished underneath the sing-song lilt of your narrative, some traces of a true rhythm that is ear-marked Scottina. There is as yet no honesty - the reader will say ‘so what?’ But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you - and then you will understand how it is possible to make a even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier’s!
The first thing I ever sold was a piece of verse to Poet Lore when I was twenty.
I shall somehow manage not to appear in a taxi-cab on Thanksgiving and thus disgrace you before all those ‘nice’ girls. Isn’t it somewhat old-fashioned to describe girls in expensive backgrounds as ‘nice?’ I will bet two-thirds of the girls at Miss Walker’s school have at least one grandparent that peddled old leather in the slums of New York, Chicago or London, and if I thought you were accepting the standards of the cosmopolitan rich, I would much rather have you in a southern school, where scholastic standards are not so high and the word ‘nice’ is not debased to such a ludicrous extent. I have seen the whole racket, and if there is any more disastrous road than that from Park Avenue to the Rue de la Paix and back again, I don’t know it.
They are homeless people, ashamed of being American, unable to master the culture of another country; ashamed, usually, of their husbands, wives, grandparents, and unable to bring up descendants of whom they could be proud, even if they had the nerve to bear them, ashamed of each other yet leaning on each other’s weakness, a menace to the social order in which they live — oh, why should I go on? You know how I feel about such things- If I come up and find you gone Park Avenue, you will have to explain me away as a Georgia cracker or a Chicago killer. God help Park Avenue.
Madame Curie progresses and it is a relief to be working on something that the censors have nothing against. It will be a comparatively quiet picture - as was The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the more I read about the woman the more I think about her as one of the most admirable people of our time. I hope we can get a little of that into the story.
You must have some politeness toward ideas. You can neither cut through, nor challenge nor beat the fact that there is an organized movement over the world before which you and I as individuals are less than the dust. Sometime when you feel very brave and defiant and haven’t been invited to one particular college function, read the terrible chapter in Dos Kapital on ‘The Working Day,’ and see if you are ever quite the same.
So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
To Maxwell Perkins
599 Summit Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
July 26, 1919
Dear Mr Perkins:
After four months’ attempt to write commercial copy by day and painful half-hearted imitations of popular literature by night I decided that it was one thing or another. So I gave up getting married and went home.
Yesterday I finished the first draft of a novel called: THE EDUCATION OF A PERSONAGE. It is in no sense a revision of the ill-fated Romantic Egotist but it contains some of the former material, improved and worked over, and bears a strong family resemblance besides.
But while the other was a tedious, disconnected casserole this is definite attempt at a big novel and I really believe I have hit it, as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse she trotted obediently around and became an erratic mistress if not a steady wife.
Now what I want to ask you is this - if I send you the book by August 20th and you decide you could risk its publication (I am blatantly confident that you will) would it be brought out in October, say, or just what would decide its date of publication?
This is an odd question I realize, especially since you haven’t even seen the book, but you have been so kind in the past about my stuff that I venture to intrude once more upon your patience.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
599 Summit Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
September 4, 1919
Dear Mr Perkins:
I sent the book today under a separate cover. I want to discuss a few things in connection with it.
You’ll notice that it contains much material from The Romantic Egotist.
(1) — Chapter II, Book I of the present book contains material from ‘Spires and Gargoyles,”Ha-Ha Hortense,”Babes in the Wood,’ and ‘Crescendo’ - rewritten in third person, cut down, and re-edited.
(2) — Chapter III, Book I contains material from ‘Second Descent of the Egotist’ and ‘The Devil,’ rewritten, etc.
(3) — Chapter IV, Book I contains material from ‘The Two Mystics,”Clara,’ and The End of Many Things.’
(4) — Chapter III, Book II is a revision of Eleanor in third person - with that fur incident left out.
Chapter I, Book I, and Chapters I, II, IV and V of Book II are entirely new.
You’ll see that of the old material there is all new use, outside the revision in the third person. For instance the Princeton characters of The R.E. - Tom, Tump, Lorry, Lumpy, Fred, Dick, Jim, Burne, Judy, Mclntyre and Jesse - have become in this book Fred, Dick, Alex, Tom, Kerry and Burne. Isabelle and Rosalind of The R.E. have become just Isabelle while the new Rosalind is a different person.
Beatrice is a new character. Dr Dudley becomes Monsignor Darcy; is a much better done - in fact every character is in better perspective.
The preface I leave to your discretion - perhaps it’s a little too clever-clever; likewise you may object to the literary personalities in Chapter II and Book II and to the length of the socialistic discussion in the last chapter. The book contains a little over ninety thousand words. I certainly think the hero gets somewhere.
I await anx
iously your verdict Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. Thornton Hancock is Henry Adams - I didn’t do him thoroughly, of course - but I knew him when I was a boy.
599 Summit Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
September 18, 1919
Dear Mr Perkins:
Of course I was delighted to get your letter and I’ve been in a sort of trance all day; not that I doubted you’d take it but at last I have something to show people. It has enough advertisement in St Paul already to sell several thousand copies and I think Princeton will buy it. (I’ve been a periodical, local Great-Expectations for some time in both places.)
Terms, etc., I leave to you but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book Xmas - or, say, by February? I have so many things dependent on its success - including of course a girl - not that I expect it to make me a fortune but it will have a psychological effect on me and all my surroundings and besides open up new fields. I’m in that stage where every month counts frantically and seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time. Will you let me know more exactly how that difference in time of publication influences the sale and what you mean by ‘early spring?’
Excuse this ghastly handwriting but I’m a bit nervous today. I’m beginning (last month) a very ambitious novel called The Demon Lover which will probably take a year. Also I’m writing short stories. I find that what I enjoy writing is always my best - every young author ought to read Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 442