I have an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby.
After you’ve read the book, let me know what you think about the title. Naturally I won’t get a night’s sleep until I hear from you, but do tell me the absolute truth, your first impression of the book, and tell me anything that bothers you in it.
As ever,
Scott
I’d rather you wouldn’t call Reynolds as he might try to act as my agent.
Hotel Continental StRaphael, France (leaving Tuesday)
circa November 7, 1924
Dear Max:
By now you’ve received the novel. There are things in it I’m not satisfied with, in the middle of the book - Chapters 6 and 7. And I may write in a complete new scene in proof. I hope you got my telegram.
I have now decided to stick to the title I put on the book. Trimalchio in West Egg.
The only other titles that seem to fit are Trimalchio and on the Road to West Egg. I had two others, Gold-hatted Gatsby and The High-bouncing Lover, but they seemed too light.
We leave for Rome as soon as I finish the short story I’m working on.
As ever,
Scott
I was interested that you’ve moved to New Canaan. It sounds wonderful. Sometimes I’m awfully anxious to be home.
But I am confused at what you say about Gertrude Stein. I thought it was one purpose of critics and publishers to educate the public up to original work. The first people who risked Conrad certainly didn’t do it as a commercial venture. Did the evolution of startling work into accepted work cease twenty years ago?
Do send me Boyd’s (Ernest’s) book when it comes out. I think the Lardner ads are wonderful. Did the Dark Cloud flop?
Would you ask the people downstairs to keep sending me my monthly bill for the encyclopedia?
Hotel des Princes Piazza di Spagna
Rome, Italy
circa December 1, 1924
Dear Max:
Your wire and your letters made me feel like a million dollars - I’m sorry I could make no better response than a telegram whining for money. But the long siege of the novel winded me a little and I’ve been slow on starting the stories on which I must live.
I think all your criticisms are true.
(a) — About the title. I’ll try my best but I don’t know what I can do. Maybe simply Trimalchio or Gatsby. In the former case, I don’t see why the note shouldn’t go on the back.
(b) — Chapters VI and VIII know how to fix.
(c) — Gatsby’s business affairs I can fix. I get your point about them.
(d) — His vagueness I can repair by making more pointed - this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.
(e) — But his long narrative in Chapter VIII will be difficult to split up. Zelda also thought it was a little out of key, but it is good writing and I don’t think I could bear to sacrifice any of it.
(f) — I have 1000 minor corrections which I will make on the proof and several more large ones which you didn’t mention.
Your criticisms were excellent and most helpful, and you picked out all my favourite spots in the book to praise as high spots. Except you didn’t mention my favourite of all - the chapter where Gatsby and Daisy meet.
Two more things. Zelda’s been reading me the cowboy book aloud to spare my mind and I love it - the I think he learned the American language from Ring rather than from his own ear.
Another point - in Chapter II of my book when Tom and Myrtle go into the bedroom while Carraway reads Simon Called Peter - is that raw? Let me know. I think it’s pretty necessary.
I made the royalty smaller because I wanted to make up for all the money you’ve advanced these two years by letting it pay a sort of interest on it. But I see by calculating I made it too small - a difference of 2000 dollars. Let us call it 15% up to 40,000 and 20% after that. That’s a good fair contract all around.
By now you have heard from a smart young French woman who wants to translate the book. She’s equal to it intellectually and linguistically, I think - had read all my others - if you’ll tell her how to go about it as to royalty demands, etc. Anyhow thanks and thanks and thanks for your letters. I’d rather have you and Bunny like it than anyone I know. And I’d rather have you like it than Bunny. If it’s as good as you say, when I finish with the proof it’ll be perfect.
Remember, by the way, to put by some cloth for the cover uniform with my other books.
As soon as I can think about the title, I’ll write or wire a decision. Thank Louise for me, for liking it. Best regards to Mr. Scribner. Tell him Galsworthy is here in Rome.
As ever,
Scott
Hotel des Princes Piazza di Spagna Rome,Italycirca December 20, 1924
Dear Max:
I’m a bit (not very - not dangerously) stewed tonight and I’ll probably write you a long letter. We’re living in a small, unfashionable but most comfortable hotel at $525.00 a month, including tips, meals, etc. Rome does not particularly interest me but it’s a big year here, and early in the spring we’re going to Paris. There’s no use telling you my plans because they’re usually just about as unsuccessful as to work as religious prognosticators are as to the End of the World. I’ve got a new novel to write - title and all - that’ll take about a year. Meanwhile, I don’t want to start it until this is out and meanwhile I’ll do short stories for money (I now get $2000 a story but I hate worse than hell to do them) and there’s the never-dying lure of another play.
Now! Thanks enormously for making up the $5000. I know I don’t technically deserve it, considering I’ve had $3000 or $4000 for as long as I can remember. But since you force it on me (in- execrable or is it execrable joke) I will accept it. I hope to Christ you get 10 times it back on Gatsby - and I think perhaps you will.
For:
I can now make it perfect but the proof (I will soon get the immemorial letter with the statement ‘We now have the book in hand and will soon begin to send you proof.’ What is ‘in hand?’ I have a vague picture of everyone in the office holding the book in the right hand and reading it.) will be one of the most expensive affairs since Madame Bovary. Please charge it to my account. If it’s possible to send a second proof over here I’d love to have it. Count on 12 days each way - four days here on first proof and two days on the second. I hope there are other good books in the spring because I think now the public interest in books per se rises when there seems to be a group of them, as in 1920 (spring and fall), 1921 (fall), 1922 (spring). Ring’s and Tom’s (first) books, Willa Cather’s Lost Lady, and in an inferior, cheap way Edna Ferber’s are the only American fiction in over two years that had a really excellent press (say, since Babbitt).
With the aid you’ve given me I can make Gatsby perfect. The Chapter 7 (the hotel scene) will never quite be up to mark - I’ve worried about it too long and I can’t quite place Daisy’s reaction. But I can improve it a lot. It isn’t imaginative energy that’s lacking - it’s because I’m automatically prevented from thinking it out over again because I must get all those characters to New York in order to have the catastrophe on the road going back, and I must have it pretty much that way. So there’s no chance of bringing the freshness to it that a new conception sometimes gives.
The rest is easy and I see my way so clear that I even see the mental quirks that queered it before. Strange to say, my notion of Gatsby’s vagueness was O.K. What you and Louise and Mr Charles Scribner found wanting was that:
I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in and you felt it. If I’d known and kept it from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now. - and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure, I’m going to tell more.
It seems of almost mystical significance to me that you thought he was older - the man I had in mind, half-unconsciously, was older (a specific individual) and evidently, without so much as a def
inite word, I conveyed the fact. Or rather I must qualify this Shaw Desmond trash by saying that I conveyed it without a word that I can at present or for the life of me trace. (I think Shaw Desmond was one of your bad bets - I was the other.)
Anyhow after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller Magee case and after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to let him go and have Tom Buchanan dominate the book (I suppose he’s the best character I’ve ever done - I think he and the brother in Salt and Hurstwood in Sister Carrie are the three best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years, perhaps and perhaps not) but Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for awhile, then lost him, and now I know I have him again. I’m sorry Myrtle is better than Daisy. Jordan of course was a great idea (perhaps you know it’s Edith Cummings) but she fades out. It’s Chapter VII that’s the trouble with Daisy and it may hurt the book’s popularity that it’s a man’s book.
Anyhow I think (for the first time since The Vegetable failed) that I’m a wonderful writer and it’s your always wonderful letters that help me to go on believing in myself.
Now some practical, very important questions. Please answer every one.
1. — Montenegro has an order called the Order of Danilo. Is there any possible way you could find out for me there what it would look like - whether a courtesy decoration given to an American would bear an English inscription - or anything to give verisimilitude to the medal which sounds horribly amateurish?
2. — Please have no blurbs of any kind on the jacket!!! No Mencken or Lewis or Sid Howard or anything. I don’t believe in them one bit any more.
3. — Don’t forget to change name of book in list of works.
4. — Please shift exclamation point from end of third Une to end of fourth line in title page poem. Please! Important!
5. — I thought that the whole episode (2 paragraphs) about their playing the ‘Jazz History of the World’ at Gatsby’s first party was rotten. Did you? Tell me your frank reaction - personal.
Don’t think! We can all think!
Got a sweet letter from Sid Howard - rather touching. I wrote him first I thought Transatlantic was great stuff - a really gorgeous surprise. Up to that I never believed in him specially and I was sorry because he did in me. Now I’m tickled silly to find he has power, and his own power. It seemed tragic too to see Mrs Vietch wasted in a novelette when, despite Anderson, the short story is at its lowest ebb as an art form. (Despite Ruth Suckow, Gertrude Stein, Ring, there is a horrible impermanence on it because the overwhelming number of short stories are impermanent.)
Poor Tom Boyd! His cycle sounded so sad to me - perhaps it’ll be wonderful but it sounds to me like sloughing in a field whose first freshness has gone.
See that word? The ambition of my life is to make that use of it correct. The temptation to use it as a neuter is one of the vile fevers in my still insecure prose.
Tell me about Ring! About Tom - is he poor? He seems to be counting on his short story book, frail cane! About Biggs! - did he ever finish the novel? About Peggy Boyd - I think Louise might have sent us her book!
I thought The White Monkey was stinko. On second thoughts I didn’t like Cowboys, West and South either. What about Bal du Comte d’Orgel? and Ring’s set? and his new book? and Gertrude Stein? and Hemingway?
I still owe the store almost $700.00 on my encyclopedia, but I’ll pay them on about January 10th - all in a lump as I expect my finances will then be on a firm footing. Will you ask them to send me Ernest Boyd’s book? § Unless it has about my drinking in it that would reach my family. However, I guess it’d worry me more if I hadn’t seen it than if I had. If my book is a big success or a great failure (financial - no other sort can be imagined I hope) I don’t want to publish stories in the fall. If it goes between 25,000 and 50,000 I have an excellent collection for you. This is the longest letter I’ve written in three or four years. Please thank Mr Scribner for me for his exceeding kindness.
Always yours,
Scott Fitz —
Hotel des Princes Rome,
Italy (But address the American Express Co. because it’s damn cold here and we may leave any day.)
January 24, 1925
Dear Max:
This is a most important letter so I’m having it typed. Guard it as your life.
1) — Under a separate cover I’m sending the first part of the proof. While I agreed with the general suggestions in your first letters I differ with you in others. I want Myrtle Wilson’s breast ripped off - it’s exactly the thing, I think, and I don’t want to chop up the good scenes by too much tinkering. When Wolfsheim says ‘sid’ for ‘said,’ it’s deliberate. ‘Orgastic’ is the adjective for ‘orgasm’ and it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy. It’s not a bit dirty. I’m much more worried about the disappearance of Tom and Myrtle on galley 9 -I think it’s all right but I’m not sure. If it isn’t please wire and I’ll send correction.
2) — Now about the page proof - under certain conditions never mind sending them (unless, of course, there’s loads of time, which I suppose there isn’t. I’m keen for late March or early April publication).
The conditions are two.
a) — That someone reads it very carefully twice to see that every one of my inserts are put in correctly. There are so many of them that I’m in terror of a mistake.
b) — That no changes whatsoever are made in it except in the case of a misprint so glaring as to be certain, and that only by you.
If there’s some time left but not enough for the double mail, send them to me and I’ll simply wire O.K. which will save two weeks. However don’t postpone for that. In any case send me the page proof as usual just to see.
3) — Now, many thanks for the deposit. Two days after wiring you I had a cable from Reynolds that he’d sold two stories of mine for a total of $3750, but before that I was in debt to him and after turning down the $10,000 from College Humor I was afraid to borrow more from him until he’d made a sale. I won’t ask for any more from you until the book has earned it. My guess is that it will sell about 80,000 copies but I may be wrong. Please thank Mr Charles Scribner for me. I bet he thinks he’s caught another John Fox now for sure. Thank God for John Fox. It would have been awful to have had no predecessor.
4) — This is very important. Be sure not to give away any of my plot in the blurb. Don’t give away that Gatsby dies or is a parvenu or crook or anything. It’s a part of the suspense of the book that all these things are in doubt until the end. You’ll watch this, won’t you? And remember about having no quotations from critics on the jacket - not even about my other books!
5) — This is just a list of small things.
a) — What’s Ring’s title for his spring book?
b) — Did O’Brien star my story ‘Absolution’ or any of my others on his trash-album? t c) — I wish your bookkeeping department would send me an account on February first. Not that it gives me pleasure to see how much in debt I am but that I like to keep a yearly record of the sales of all my books.
Do answer every question and keep this letter until the proof comes. Let me know how you like the changes. I miss seeing you, Max, more than I can say.
As ever,
Scott
P-S. I’m returning the proof of the title page, etc. It’s O.K. but my heart tells me I should have named it Trimalchio. However against all the advice I suppose it would have been stupid and stubborn of me. Trimalchio in West Egg was only a compromise. Gatsby is too much like Babbitt and The Great Gatsby is weak because there’s no emphasis even ironically on his greatness or lack of it. However let it pass.
Hotel Tiberio Capri, Italy (new address)
circa February 18,1925’
Dear Max:
After six weeks of uninterrupted work the proof is finished and the last of it goes to you this afternoon. On the whole it’s been very successful labor.
(1) — I’ve brought Gatsby to life.
(2) — I’ve accounted for his money.
(3) — I’ve fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII).
(4) — I’ve improved his first party.
(5) — I’ve broken up his long narrative in Chapter VIII.
This morning I wired you to hold up the galley of Chapter X. The correction - and God! it’s important because in my other revision I made Gatsby look too mean - is enclosed herewith. Also some corrections for the page proof.
We’re moving to Capri. We hate Rome. I’m behind financially and have to write three short stories. Then I try another play, and by une, I hope, begin my new novel.
Had long interesting letters from Ring and John Bishop. Do tell me if all corrections have been received. I’m worried.
Scott
I hope you’re setting publication date at first possible moment.
Hotel Tiberio Capri,
Italy
March 31, 1925
Dear Max:
As the day approaches, my nervousness increases. Tomorrow is the 1st and your wire says the 10th. I’ll be here until the 25th, probably later, so if the book prospers I’ll expect some sort of cable before I leave for Paris. All letters that you write after 15th of April should be addressed to the Guaranty Trust Co., Paris, but if there’s any dope in the first two or three days of publication I’d love a reassuring line here, even if the success doesn’t justify a cable.
I enclose you a picture of a naked woman, which you may add to your celebrated pornographic collection from Sumatra, Transylvania, and the PolynesianIslands.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 446