This place is full of fairies - one of them, a nice young man my own age, is a writer of promise and performance on the Aldous Huxley type. I like his books (his name is — ) and suggested that I send some to you as you are shy on young English of recent years, but Knopf had signed him up three weeks before!
I think Tom Boyd’s book is excellent - the preface is faintly pretentious but the stories themselves are great. By the way I think my new collection will be called
Dear Money. It ought to be awfully good and there will be no junk in it.
Yours in a Tremble,
Scott
Will you have a copy of my book sent to Miss Willa Cather, care of Knopf?
When should my book of short stories be in?
I had, or rather saw, a letter from my uncle who had seen a preliminary announcement of the book. He said. ‘It sounded as if it were very much like his others.’
This is only a vague impression of course but I wondered if we could think of some way to advertise it so that people who are perhaps weary of assertive jazz and society novels might not dismiss it as ‘just another book like his others.’ I confess that today the problem baffles me - all I can think of is to say in general to avoid such phrases ‘a picture of New York life,’ or ‘modern society’ - though as that is exactly what the book is it’s hard to avoid them. The trouble is so much superficial trash has sailed under those banners. Let me know what you think.
14 rue de Tilsitt
Paris,
France (permanent address)
circa April 22, 1925
Dear Max:
I suppose you’ve sent the book to Collins. If not, please do, and let me know right away. If he won’t take it because of its flop we might try Cape’s. I’m miserable at owing you all that money - if I’d taken the serial money I could at least have squared up with you.
I’ve had enthusiastic letters from Mencken and Wilson - the latter say s he’s reviewing it for that Chicago Tribune syndicate he writes for. I think all the reviews I’ve seen, except two, have been absolutely stupid and lousy. Someday they’ll eat grass, by God! This thing, both the effort and the result, have hardened me and I think now that I’m much better than any of the young Americans without exception.
Hemingway is a fine, charming fellow and he appreciated your letter and the tone of it enormously. If Liveright doesn’t please him he’ll come to you, and he has a future. He’s twenty-seven.
Bishop sent me The Apple of the Eye and it seemed pretty much the old stuff that D. H. Lawrence, Anderson, Suckow and Cather did long ago and Hardy before them. I don’t think such peasantry exists in America - Ring is much closer to the truth. I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty. All the rest is pathos. However maybe it’s good, a lot of people seem to think so.
I will send All the Sad Young Men about June 1st or 10th. Perhaps the deferred press on Gatsby will help it but I think now there’s no use even sending it to that crowd, Broun, F.P.A., Ruth Hale, etc. Incidentally my being over here and consequent delay in the proofs and review copies undoubtedly hurt the effect of the book’s appearance. Thanks again for your kind letters and all you’ve done. Let me know about Collins.
Scott
Let me know how many copies sold and whether the sale is now dead.
Marseille, en route to Paris
circa April 24, 1925
Dear Max;
Your telegram depressed me - I hope I’ll find better news in Paris and am wiring you from Lyons. There’s nothing to say until I hear more. If the book fails commercially it will be from one of two reasons or both.
First, the title is only fair, rather bad than good.
Second and most important, the book contains no important woman character, and women control the fiction market at present. I don’t think the unhappy end matters particularly.
I will have to sell 20,000 copies to wipe out my debt to you. I think it will do that all right - but my hope was it would do 75,000. This week will tell.
Zelda is well, or almost, but the expense of her illness and of bringing this wretched little car of ours back to France, wh’ch has to be done, by law, has wiped out what small progress I’d made in getting straight financially.
In all events I have a book of good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my next novel. When that is finished and published I’ll wait and see. If it will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not, I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it, and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this constant worry and interruption.
Yours in great depression, Scott PS. Let me know about Ring’s book. Did I tell you I thought “Hair-cut’ was mediocre?
PS. (2) Please refer any movie offers to Reynolds.
c/o Guaranty Trust Co.
Paris, France May I,
1925
Dear Max:
There’s no use for indignation against the long suffering public when even a critic who likes the book fails to be fundamentally held - that is, Stallings who has written the only intelligent review so far - but it’s been depressing to find how quick one is forgotten, especially unless you repeat yourself ad nauseam. Most of the reviewers floundered around in a piece of work that obviously they completely failed to understand and tried to give it reviews that committed them neither pro or con until someone of culture had spoken. Of course I’ve only seen The Times and the Tribune - and, thank God, Stallings, for I had begun to believe no one was even glancing at the book.
Now about money. With the $1000 for which I asked yesterday (and thank you for your answer) I owe you about $1200, or, if the book sells 12,000, about $4000. If there is a movie right, I will pay you all I owe - if not, all I can offer you at present is an excellent collection of stories for the fall entitled All the Sad Young Men - none of the stories appeared in the Post - I think ‘Absolution’ is the only one you’ve read. Thank you for all your advertising and all the advances and all your good will. When I get ahead again on trash I’ll begin the new novel.
I’m glad Ring is getting such a press and hope he’s selling. The boob critics have taken him up and always take a poke at the ‘intelligentsia’ who patronize him. But the ‘intelligentsia,’ Seldes and Mencken, discovered him (after the people) while the boob critics let The BigTown and Gullible’s Travels come out in dead silence. Let me know the sale.
A profound bow to my successor, Arlen - when I read The London Venture I knew he was a comer and was going to tell you but I saw the next day that Doran had already published Piracy. That was just before I left New York.
Which reminds me - it seems terrible that all the best of the young Englishmen have been snapped up. I tried to get — for you in Capri but he’d signed a rotten cash contract with Knopf a week before. Also they’ve just signed Brett Young who might have been had any time in the last two years and who’ll be a big seller and now I see The Constant Nymph is taken. Wouldn’t it Pay you to have some live young Londoner watch the new English books? I imagine Kingsleyt gets his information a month late out of The London Times Supplement. This sounds ill-natured but I am really sorry to see you lose so many new talents when they are appearing as fast now in England as they did here in 1920. Liveright has got Hemingway! How about Radiguet?
We have taken an apartment here from May 12th to January 12th, eight months, where I shall do my best. What a six months in Italy! Christ!
I’m hoping that by some miracle the book will go up to 23,000 and wipe off my debt to you. I haven’t been out of debt now for three years and with the years it grows heavy on my aging back. The happiest
thought I have is of my new novel - it is something really N E w in form, idea, structure - the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.
Write me any news - I haven’t had a written line since publication except a pleasant but not thrilling note from the perennial youth, Johnny Weaver. I am bulging with plans for - however, that’s later. Was Ring’s skit which was in Mencken’s American Language incorporated into What Of It? If not it should have been - it’s one of his best shorter things. And doesn’t it contain his famous World’s Series articles about Ellis Lardner’s Coat? If not they’d be a nucleus for another book of nonsense. Also his day at home in imitation of F.P.A.’s diary.
My address after the 12th is 14 rue de Tilsitt. If you have my Three Lives by Gertrude Stein don’t let anybody steal it.
Many thanks to Mr Scribner and to all the others and to you for all you’ve done for me and for the book. The jacket was a hit anyhow.
Scott
PS. And Tom Boyd’s book?
14 rue de Tilsitt
Paris,
France circa June 1, 1925
Dear Max:
This is the second letter I’ve written you today - I tore up my first when the letter in longhand from New Canaan telling me about Liveright arrived. I’m wiring you today as to that rumor - but also it makes it necessary to tell you something I didn’t intend to tell you.
Yesterday arrived a letter from T. R. Smith asking for my next book - saying nothing against the Scribners but just asking for it: if I happened to be dissatisfied they would be delighted, etc., etc. I answered at once, saying that you were one of my closest friends and that my relations with Scribners had always been so cordial and pleasant that I wouldn’t think of changing publishers. That letter will reach him at about the time this reaches you. I have never had any other communication of any sort with Liveright or any other publisher except the very definite and explicit letter with which I answered their letter yesterday.
So much for that rumor. I am both angry at Tom who must have been in some way responsible for starting it and depressed at the fact that you could have believed it enough to mention it to me. Rumors start like this -
Smith (a born gossip): I hear Fitzgerald’s book isn’t selling. I think we can get it, as he’s probably blaming it on Scribners.
The Next Man: It seems Fitzgerald is dissatisfied with Scribners and Liveright is after him.
The Third Man: I hear Fitzgerald has gone over to Liveright.
Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. If you like I will sign a contract with you immediately for my next three books. The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
First. Tho, as a younger man, I have not always been in sympathy with some of your publishing ideas (which were evolved under the pre-movie, pre-high-literacy-rate conditions of twenty to forty years ago), the personality of you and of Mr Scribner, the tremendous squareness, courtesy, generosity and open-mindedness I have always met there and, if I may say it, the special consideration you have all had for me and my work, much more than make up the difference.
Second. You know my own idea on the advantage of one publisher who backs you and not your work. And my feeling about uniform books in the matter of house and binding.
Third. The curious advantage to a rather radical writer in being published by what is now an ultra-conservative house. Fourth (and least need of saying). Do you think I could treat with another publisher while I have a debt, which is both actual and a matter of honor, of over $3000?
If Mr Scribner has heard this rumor please show him this letter. So much for Mr Liveright & Co.
Your letters are catching up with me. Curtis in Town & Country and Van Vechten in The Nation pleased me. The personal letters - Cabell, Wilson, Van Wyck Brooks, etc. - have been the best of all. Among people over here, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein are quite enthusiastic. Except for Rascoe it has been, critically only, a clean sweep.
Ring’s book has been a terrible disappointment to everyone here. He didn’t even bother to cut out the connecting tags at the end of his travel articles and each of the five plays contain the same joke about ‘his mother - afterwards his wife.’ I shouldn’t press him about his new collection if I were you because if you just took the first nine stories he writes, they couldn’t be up to the others and you know how reviewers are quick to turn on anyone in whom they have believed and who now disappoints them. Of course I’ve only read ‘Haircut’ and I may be wrong. I do want him to believe in his work and not have any blows to take away his confidence. The reviews I have seen of What of It? were sorry imitations of Seldes’ stuff and all of them went out of their way to stab Seldes in the back. God, cheap reviewers are low swine - but one must live.
As I write, word has just come by cable that Brady has made an offer for the dramatic rights of Gatsby, with Owen Davis, king of professional play doctors, to do dramatization. I am, needless to say, accepting, but please keep it confidential until the actual contract is signed.
As you know, despite my admiration for Through the Wheat, I haven’t an enormous faith in Tom Boyd either as a personality or an artist - as I have, say, in E. E. Cummings and Hemingway. His ignorance, his presumptuous intolerance and his careless grossness, which he cultivates for vitality as a man might nurse along a dandelion with the hope that it would turn out to be an onion, have always annoyed me. Like Rascoe he has never been known to refuse an invitation from his social superiors - or to fail to pan them with all the venom of a fames Oliver Curwood he-man when no invitations were forthcoming.
All this is preparatory to saying that his new book sounds utterly lousy - Sheila Kaye-Smith has used the stuff about the farmer having girls instead of boys and being broken up about it. The characters you mention have every one become stock-props in the last ten years - ‘Christy, the quaint old hired man’ after a season in such stuff as Owen Davis’ Ice Bound must be almost ready for the burlesque circuit.
History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer and His Hired Man Christy (Both guaranteed to be utterly full of the Feel of the Soil) First Period 1855 - English Peasant discovered by George Eliot in Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, etc.
1888 - Given intellectual interpretation by Hardy in fude and Tess.
1890 - Found in France by Zola in Germinal.
1900 - Crowds of Scandinavians - Hamsun, Bojer, etc. - tear him bodily from the Russian, and, after a peep at Hardy, Hamlin Garland finds him in the Middle West. (Most of that, however, was literature. It was something pulled by the individual out of life and only partly with the aid of models in other literatures.)
Second Period 1914-Sheila Kaye-Smith frankly imitates Hardy, produces two good books and then begins to imitate herself.
1915 — - Brett Young discovers him in the coal country.
1916 — - Robert Frost discovers him in New England.
1917 — - Sherwood Anderson discovers him in Ohio.
1918 — - Willa Cather turns him Swede.
1920 - Eugene O’Neill puts him on the boards in Different and Beyond the Horizon.
1922 — - Ruth Suckow gets in before the door closes.
(These people were all good second-raters except Anderson. Each of them brought something to the business - but they exhausted the ground, the type was set. All was over.)
Third Period The Cheapskates discover him - bad critics and novelists, etc.
1923 — - Homer Croy writes West of the Water Tower.
1924 — - Edna Ferber turns from her flip fewish saleswoman for a strong silent earthy carrot grower and the Great Soul of Charley Towne thrills to her passionately Real and Earthy Struggle.
1924-Ice Bound by the author of Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model wins Pulitzer Prize. The Able McLaughlins wins f 10,000 prize and is forgotten the following week.
1925 — - The Apple of the Eye pronounced a masterpiece
.
1926-TOM, BOYD, WRITES, NOVEL, ABOUT, INARTICULATE, FARMER, WHO, IS, CLOSE, TO SOIL, AND, HIS, HIRED, MAN CHRISTY! ‘STRONG! VITAL! REAL!’
As a matter of fact the American peasant as ‘real’ material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% of the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English and Russian peasants were - and, if he has any sensitivity whatsoever (except a most sentimental conception of himself, which our writers persistently shut their eyes to), he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking for the static in a world that for almost a hundred years had simply not been static. Isn’t it a fourth rate imagination that can find only that old property farmer in all this amazing time and land? And anything that ten people a year can do well enough to pass muster has become so easy that it isn’t worth doing.
I can not disassociate a man from his work. That.. are going to tell us mere superficial ‘craftsmen’ like Hergesheimer, Wharton, Tarkington, and me about the Great Beautiful Appreciation they have of the Great Beautiful Life of the Manure Widder rather turns my stomach. The real people like Gertrude Stein (with whom I’ve talked) and Conrad (see his essay on James) have a respect for people whose materials may not touch theirs at a single point. But the fourth-rate and highly derivative people like Tom are loud in their outcry against any subject matter that doesn’t come out of the old, old bag which their betters have used and thrown away.
For example there is an impression among the thoughtless (including Tom) that Sherwood Anderson is a man of profound ideas who is ‘handicapped by his inarticulateness.’ As a matter of fact Anderson is a man of practically no ideas - but he is one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today. God, he can write! Tom could never get such rhythms in his life as there are on the pages of Winesburg, Ohio. Simple! The words on the lips of critics make me hilarious: Anderson’s style is about as simple as an engine room full of dynamos. But Tom flatters himself that he can sit down for five months and by dressing up a few heart throbs in overalls produce literature.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 447