Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  (2) — In the new American Caravan amid much sandwiching of Joyce and Co. is the first work of a 21 year old named Robert Cantwell. Mark it well, for my guess is that he’s learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.

  (3) — Another young man therein named Gerald Sykes has an extraordinary talent in the line of heaven knows what, but very memorable and distinguished.

  (4) — Thirdly (and these three are all in the whole damn book) there is a man named Erskine Caldwell, who interested me less than the others because of the usual derivations from Hemingway and even Callaghan - still, read him. He and Sykes are 26 years old. I don’t know any of them.

  If you decide to act in any of these last three cases I’d do it within a few weeks. I know none of the men but Cantwell will go quick with his next stuff if he hasn’t gone already. For some reason young writers come in groups - Cummings, Dos Passos and me in 1920-21; Hemingway, Callaghan and Wilder in 1926-27 - and no one in between and no one since. This looks to me like a really new generation.

  (5) — Now a personal friend (but he knows not that I’m writing you) - Cary Ross (Yale 1925) - poorly represented in this American Caravan, but rather brilliantly by poems in The Mercury and Transition, studying medicine at John Hopkins, and one who at the price of publication or at least examination of his poems might prove a valuable man. Distinctly younger than post war, later than my generation, sure to turn to fiction and worth corresponding with. I believe these are the cream of the young people.

  (6) — Dos Passos wrote me about the ms. of some protégée of his but as I didn’t see the ms. or know the man the letter seemed meaningless. Did you do anything about Murray Godwin (or Goodwin)? Shortly I’m sending you some memoirs by an ex- marine, doorman at my bank here. They might have some documentary value as true stories of the Nicaraguan expedition, etc.

  (7) — In the foreign (French) field there is besides Chamson one man, and at the opposite pole, of great talent. It is not Cocteau nor Aragon but young René Crevel. I am opposed to him for being a fairy but in the last Transition (Number 18) there is a translation of the beginning of his current novel which simply knocked me cold with its beauty. The part in Transition is called ‘Mr Knife and Miss Fork’ and I wish to God you’d read it immediately. Incidentally the novel is a great current success here. I know it’s not yet placed in America and if you’re interested please communicate with me before you write Bradley.

  (8) — Now, one last, much more elaborate idea. In France any military book of real tactical or strategical importance, theoretical or fully documented (and usually the latter) (and I’m not referring to the one-company battles between ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ taught us in the army under the name of Small Problems for infantry) - they are mostly published by Payot here and include such works as Ludendorf’s Memoirs; and the Documentary Preparations for the German Break-through in 1918 - how the men were massed, trained, brought up to the line in 12 hours in 150 different technical groups from flame throwers to field kitchens, the whole inside story from captured orders of the greatest tactical attack in history; a study of Tannenburg (German); several, both French and German, of the first Marne; a thorough study of gas warfare, another of tanks; no dogmatic distillations compiled by some old dotard, but original documents.

  Now - believing that so long as we have service schools and not much preparation (I am a political cynic and a big-navy-man, like all Europeans) English translations should be available in all academies, army service schools, staff schools, etc. (I’ll bet there are American army officers with the rank of captain that don’t know what ‘infiltration in depth’ is or what Colonel Bruckmuller’s idea of artillery employment was) - it seems to me that it would be a great patriotic service to consult the war-department bookbuyers on some subsidy plan to bring out a tentative dozen of the most important as ‘an original source tactical library of the lessons of the great war.’ It would be parallel, but more essentially military rather than politico-military, to the enclosed list of Payot’s collection. I underline some of my proposed inclusions. This, in view of some millions of amateurs of battle now in America, might be an enormous popular success as well as a patriotic service. Let me know about this because if you shouldn’t be interested I’d like to make the suggestion for my own satisfaction to someone else. Some that I’ve underlined may be already published.

  My God - this is 7 pages and you’re asleep and I want to catch the Olympic with this so I’ll close. Please tell me your response to each idea.

  Does Chamson sell at all? Oh, for my income tax will you have the usual statement of lack of royalties sent me - and for my own curiosity to see if I’ve sold a book this year except to myself.

  10 rue Pergolèse

  Paris, France

  circa May 1, 1930

  Dear Max:

  I was delighted about the Bishop story - the acceptance has done wonders for him. The other night I read him a good deal of my novel and I think he liked it. Harold Ober wrote me that if it wouldn’t be published this fall I should publish the Basil Lee stories, but I know too well by whom reputations are made and broken to ruin myself completely by such a move - I’ve seen Tom Boyd, Michael Arlen, and too many others fall through the eternal trap-door of trying to cheat the public, no matter what their public is, with substitutes - better to let four years go by. I wrote young and I wrote a lot and the pot takes longer to fill up now but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago. If you think Callaghan hasn’t completely blown himself up with this deathhouse masterpiece just wait and see the pieces fall. I don’t know why I’m saying this to you who have never been anything but my most loyal and confident encourager and friend but Ober’s letter annoyed me today and put me in a wretched humor. I know what I’m doing - honestly, Max. How much time between The Cabala and The Bridge of St Luis Rey, between The Genius and The American Tragedy, between The Wisdom Tooth and Green Pastures? I think it seems to go by quicker there in America but time put in is time eventually taken out - and whatever this thing of mine is it’s certainly not a mediocrity like The Woman of Andros and The Forty-Second Parallel. ‘He’s through’ is an easy cry to raise but it’s safer for the critics to raise it at the evidence in print than at a long silence.

  Ever yours,

  Scott

  10 rue Pergolèse

  Paris,France

  May, 1930

  Dear Max:

  First let me tell you how shocked I was by Mr Scribner’s death. It was in due time of course but nevertheless

  I shall miss his fairness toward things that were of another generation, his general tolerance and simply his being there as titular head of a great business.

  Please tell me how this affects you - if at all. The letter enclosed has been in my desk for three weeks as I wasn’t sure whether to send it when I wrote it. Then Powell Fowler and his wedding party arrived and I got unfortunately involved in dinners and night clubs and drinking; then Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven’t done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.

  Have you read The Building of St Michele and D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious? Don’t miss either of them.

  Always yours,

  Scott What news of Ernest?

  Please don’t mention the enclosed letter to Ober as I’ve written him already.

  Switzerland

  circa July 8, 1930

  Dear Max:

  I’m asking Harold Ober to offer you these three stories which Zelda wrote in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you’ll see that apart from the beauty and richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them - their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for a while seemed to have brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion th
ey are literature the I may in this case read so much between the lines that my opinion is valueless. (By the way Caldwell’s stories were a thorough disappointment, weren’t they - more crimes committed in Hemingway’s name.)

  Ever yours,

  Scott

  Switzerland

  circa July 20, 1930

  Dear Max:

  Zelda is still sick as hell, and the psychiatrist who is devoting almost his entire time to her is an expensive proposition. I was so upset in June when hopes for her recovery were black that I could practically do no work and got behind - then arrived a wire from Ober that for the first time he couldn’t make me the usual advance up to the price of a story. So then I called on you. I am having him turn over to you $3000 from the proceeds of the story I am sending off this week, as it’s terrible to be so in debt. A thousand thanks and apologies.

  Yours as ever (if somewhat harassed and anxious about life),

  Scott

  Geneva, Switzerland

  circa September 1, 1930

  Dear Max:

  All the world seems to end up in this flat and antiseptic smelling land - with an overlay of flowers. Tom Wolfe is the only man I’ve met here who isn’t sick or hasn’t sickness to deal with. You have a great find in him - what he’ll do is incalculable. He has a deeper culture than Ernest and more vitality, if he is slightly less of a poet that goes with the immense surface he wants to cover. Also he lacks Ernest’s quality of a stick hardened in the fire - he is more susceptible to the world. John Bishop told me he needed advice about cutting, etc., but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he has to be published in five volumes. I liked him enormously.

  I was sorry of course about Zelda’s stories - possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a waste-land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College Humor and I think in view of the success of Dotty Parker’s Laments (25,000 copies) I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during the winter.

  Wasn’t that a nice tribute to C.S. from Mencken in The Mercury?

  The royalty advance or the national debt as it might be called shocked me. The usual vicious circle is here - I am now exactly $3000 ahead which means 2 months on the encyclopedia. I’d prefer to have all above the $10,000 paid back to you off my next story (in October). You’ve been so damn nice to me.

  Zelda is almost well. The doctor says she can never drink again (not that drink in any way contributed to her collapse), and that I must not drink anything, not even wine, for a year, because drinking in the past was one of the things that haunted her in her delirium Do please send me things like Wolfe’s book when they appear. Is Ernest’s book a history of bull-fighting? I’m sending you a curious illiterate ms. written by a chasseur at my bank here. Will you skim it and see if any parts, like the marines in Central America, are interesting as pure data? And return it, if not, directly to him? You were absolutely right about the dollar books - it’s a preposterous idea and I think the Authors League went Crazy. —

  Always yours,

  Scott

  This illness has cost me a fortune - hence that telegram in July. The biggest man in Switzerland gave all his time to her - and saved her reason by a split second.

  Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne, Switzerland

  Before May 21, 1931

  Dear Max: —

  An idea:

  Princeton has had lots of books, too many in the last ten years (on a cursory inspection I’m not so much impressed with Burn- ham’s book which leans heavily on so many of us greybeards), but-

  There’s been no Harvard book since Charlie Flandrau and Philosophy Four. I’m very impressed with a series of Harvard-Boston society stories by Bernard De Voto which have been running in the Post the last year. They’re light, romantic and exceedingly witty. I think that under some such title as Outside the Yard the as yet unsaturated Harvard public would lap them up. (I don’t dare suggest you call them Recent Researches at Cambridge.)

  The new avant-garde magazines are not up to Transition, and this Caravan has nothing new except some good poetry. The fazz Age is over. If Mark Sullivan is going on, you might tell him I claim credit for naming it and that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day 1919 to the crash of the stock market in 1929 - almost exactly one decade.

  Zelda is so much better. I’m taking her on a trip tomorrow - only for the day. But she’s herself again now, the not yet strong. Please send that proof of hers.

  Yours always,

  Scott

  Fitz Don Ce-Sar Hotel StPetersburg, Florida (for three days only)

  circa January 15,1932

  Dear Max:

  At last for the first time in two years and a half I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead. Am replanning it to include what’s good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words and publishing. Don’t tell Ernest or anyone - let them think what they want - you’re the only one who’s ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.

  Your letters still sound sad. For God’s sake take your vacation this winter. Nobody could quite ruin the house in your absence, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you and when you come back cut off an empty head or two. Thalberg did that with Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer.

  Which reminds me that I’m doing that ‘Hollywood Revisited’ in the evenings and it will be along in, I think, six days - maybe ten.

  Have Nunnally Johnson’s humorous stories from the Post been collected? Everybody reads them. Please at least look into this. Ask Myers - he ought to search back at least a year which is as long as I’ve been meaning to write you about it.

  Where in hell are my Scandinavian copies of The Great Gatsby?

  You couldn’t have sent me anything I enjoyed more than the Churchill book.

  Always yours devotedly,

  Scott Fitzg —

  Hotel Rennert Baltimore,

  Maryland

  Before May 2,1932

  Dear Max:...

  Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-

  Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think. But I must urge you two things.

  (1) — If you like it please don’t wire her congratulations and please keep whatever praise you may see fit to give on the staid side - I mean, as you naturally would, rather than yield to a tendency one has with invalids to be extra nice to cheer them up. This seems a nuance but it is rather important at present to the doctors that Zelda does not feel that the acceptance (always granted you like it) means immediate fame and money. I’m afraid all our critical tendencies in the last decade got bullish; we discovered one Hemingway to a dozen Callaghans and Caldwells (I think the latter is a wash-out) and probably created a lot of spoiled geniuses who might have been good workmen. Not that I regret it - if that last five years uncovered Ernest, Tom Wolfe and Faulkner it would have been worthwhile, but I’m not certain enough of Zelda’s present stability of character to expose her to any superlatives. If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, and part of it done fatigued and uninspired, and part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.

  (2) — Don’t discuss contract with her until I have talked to you.

  Ring’s last story in the Post was pathetic, a shade of himself, but I’m glad they ran it first and I hope it’ll stir up his professi
onal pride to repeat.

  Beginning the article for you on Monday. You can count on it for the end of next week.

  Now very important.

  (1) — I must have a royalty report for 1931 for my income tax - they insist.

  (2) — I borrowed $600 in 1931. $500 of this was redeemed by my article. The other hundred should show in royalty report.

  (3) Since Gatsby was not placed with Grosset or Burt, I’d like to have it in the Modern Library. This is my own idea and have had no approach but imagine I can negotiate it. Once they are interested would of course turn negotiations over to you. But I feel, should you put obstacles in the way, you would be doing me a great harm and injustice. Gatsby is constantly mentioned among memorable books but the man who asks for it in a store on the basis of such mention does not ask twice. Booksellers do not keep such an item in stock and there is a whole new generation who cannot obtain it. This has been on my mind for two years and I must insist that you give me an answer that doesn’t keep me awake nights wondering why it possibly benefited the Scribners to have me represented in such an impersonal short story collection as that of the Modern Library by a weak story, and Ring, etc., by none at all. That ‘they would almost all have been Scribner authors’ was a most curious perversion of what should have been a matter of pride into an attitude of dog-in-the-manger.