What I don’t like is the out-of-print element. In a second I’m going to discuss the Philippe business with you, but first let me say that I would rather have This Side of Paradise in print, if only in that cheap American Mercury book edition than not in print at all. I see they have just done Elliot Paul’s Indelible. How do you think they would feel about it? And what is your advice on the subject?
Now about Philippe. When I wrote you I had envisaged another year of steady work here. At present, while it is possible that I may be on the coast for another year, it is more likely that the work will be from picture to picture with the prospect of taking off three or four months in the year, perhaps even more, for literary work. Philippe interests me. I am afraid, though, it would have to be supported by something more substantial. I would have to write 10,000 or 15,000 more words on it to make it as big a book as Gatsby and I’m not at all sure that it would have a great unity. You will remember that the plan in the beginning was tremendously ambitious - there was to have been Philippe as a young man founding his fortunes - Philippe as a middle-aged man participating in the Capetian founding of France as a nation - Philippe as an old man and the consolidation of the feudal system. It was to have covered a span of about sixty years from 880 A.D. to 950. The research required for the second two parts would be quite tremendous and the book would have been (or would be) a piece of great self-indulgence, though I admit self-indulgence often pays unexpected dividends.
Still, if periods of three or four months are going to be possible in the next year or so I would much rather do a modern novel. One of those novels that can only be written at the moment and when one is full of the idea - as Tender should have been written in its original conception, all laid on the Riviera. I think it would be a quicker job to write a novel like that between 50 and 60,000 words long than to do a thorough revision job with an addition of 15,000 words on Philippe. In any case I’m going to decide within the next month and let you know.
Thanks for your letter. I wish you’d send me a copy of the Tom Wolfe article because I never see anything out here. John wrote about me in the Virginia Quarterly, too.
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. I hope Jane and Scottie see a lot of each other if Scottie stays in, but as I suspected, she has tendencies toward being a play-girl and has been put on probation. I hope she survives this February.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
February 25, 1939
Dear Max:
I was sorry that a glimpse of you was so short but I had a hunch that you had wanted to talk over something with your daughter and that I was rather intruding. How pretty she was - she seemed a little frightened of me for some reason, or maybe it was one of my self-conscious days.
One of the things I meant to tell you was how much I enjoyed the book Cantigny by Evarts, whom I gather is a cousin of yours - or is that true? It seemed to me very vivid. It reminded me of one of the best of Tom Boyd’s stories in Point of Honor though the attitude was quite satisfactorily different.
No doubt you have talked to Harold in regard to that life insurance business. Of course, he thinks I am rash, but I think it would be morally destructive to continue here any longer on the factory worker’s basis. Conditions in the industry somehow propose the paradox: ‘We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.’
I have several plans, and within a day or so will be embarked on one of them. It is wonderful to be writing again instead of patching - do you know in that Gone with the Wind job I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell; that is, when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through as if it were Scripture and check out phrases of hers which would cover the situation!
Best wishes always.
Scott
P.S. I am, of course, astonished that Tom Wolfe’s book did what you told me. I am sure that if he had lived and meant to make a portrait of you he would at least have given it a proper tone and not made you the villain. It is astonishing what people will do though. Ernest’s sharp turn against me always seemed to have pointless childish quality - so much so that I really never felt any resentment about it. Your position in the Wolfe matter is certainly an exceedingly ironic one.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
May 22, 1939
Dear Max:
Just had a letter from Charlie Scribner - a very nice letter and I appreciated it and will answer it. He seemed under the full conviction that the novel was about Hollywood and I am in terror that this misinformation may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave any such impression it is entirely false: I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years. It is distinctly not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I would want to get about).
It is, however, progressing nicely, except that I have been confined to bed for a few weeks with a slight return of my old malady. It was nice getting a glimpse of you, however brief - especially that last day. I caught the plane at half past four and had an uneventful trip west.
I have grown to like this particular corner of California where I shall undoubtedly stay all summer. Dates for a novel are, as you know, uncertain, but I am blocking this out in a fashion so that, unlike Tender, I may be able to put it aside for a month and pick it up again at the exact spot factually and emotionally where I left off.
Wish I had some news, but what I have seen lately is only what you can see outside a window. With very best to all - and please do correct that impression which Charlie seems to have.
Ever your friend,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
November 20, 1939
Dear Max:
A lot depends on this week. I’ve about decided to show him (Littauer) the first nine or ten thousand words and I think it’s literally about fifty-fifty whether he’ll want it or not. The material is definitely ‘strong.’ As soon as I hear anything from him I’ll let you know.
Of course, if he will back me it will be a life-saver, but I am by no means sure that I will ever be a popular writer again. This much of the book, however, should be as fair a test as any. Thanks for your letter.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
December 19, 1939
Dear Max:
The opinion about the novel seems half good and half bad. In brief, about four or five people here like it immensely, Leland likes it and you like it. Colliers, however, seems indifferent to it though they like the outline. My plan is to just go ahead and dig it out. If I could interest any magazine, of course, it would be a tremendous help but today a letter from the Post seems to indicate that it is not their sort of material. The plan has changed a bit since I first wrote the outline, but it is essentially as you know it.
Your offering to loan me another thousand dollars was the kindest thing I ever heard of. It certainly comes at the most opportune time. The first thing is this month’s and last month’s rent and I am going to take the liberty of giving my landlady a draft on you for $205.00, for January 2nd. This with the $150.00 that you have already sent me is $355.00. For the other $645.00, will you let me know when it is available?
I am not terribly in debt as I was in 1935-7, but uncomfortably so. I think though my health is getting definitely better and if I can do some intermittent work in the studios between each chapter of the novel instead of this unprofitable hacking for Esquire, I shall be able to get somewhere by spring.
Max, you are so kind. When Harold withdrew from the questionable honor of being my banker, I felt completely numb financially and I suddenly wondered what money was and where it came from. There had always seemed a little more somewhere a
nd now there wasn’t Anyhow, thank you.
Ever your friend,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
February 21, 1940
Dear Max:
Thanks for sending tne release on ‘Babylon.’ I haven’t yet gotten the money but it will be something over $800.00, very little as Hollywood prices go. However, it will give me a chance to try another short story and if either that or the one that is out now finds a home I ought to produce a few chapters of the novel. Meanwhile things do not move here at all in a moving-picture way, but one makes a certain adjustment.
I am glad John Bishop is in good spirits. The affairs of the world never really worried him much. The fact fills me with great envy. I can see ahead no further than finishing this book and getting Scottie through Vassar. The rest looks no brighter than it has for a long time. The greatest privilege would be to be able to do work so absorbing that one could forget the trouble abroad and at home.
I will keep you informed.
Ever yours,
Scott
c/o Phil Berg Agency
9484 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills,
California
May 20, 1940
Dear Max:
I’ve owed you a decent letter for some months. First - the above is my best address though at the moment I’m hunting for a small apartment. I am in the last week of an eight week movie job for which I will receive $2300. I couldn’t pay you anything from it, nor the government, but it was something, because it was my own picture Babylon Revisited and may lead to a new line up here. I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack - that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.
The radio has just announced the fall of St Quentin! My God! What was the use of my wiring you that André Chamson has a hit when the war has now passed into a new stage, making his book a chestnut of a bygone quiet era.
I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. It is certainly no fault of yours. You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these five years. It’s funny what a friend is - Ernest’s crack in ‘The Snows,’ poor John Bishop’s article in the Virginia Quarterly (a nice return for ten years of trying to set him up in a literary way) and Harold’s sudden desertion at the wrong time, have made them something less than friends. Once I believed in friendship, believed I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.
Professionally, I know, the next move must come from me. Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers -I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much! Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp - in a small way I was an original. I remember we had one of our few and trifling disagreements because I said that to anyone who loved ‘When Lilacs Last,’ Tom Wolfe couldn’t be such a great original. Since then I have changed about him. I like ‘Only the Dead’ and ‘Arthur, Garfield, etc.,’ right up with the tops. And where are Tom and I and the rest when psychological Robespierres parade through American letters elevating such melo as Christ in Concrete to the top, and the boys read Steinbeck like they once read Mencken! I have not lost faith. People will buy my new book and I hope I shan’t again make the many mistakes of Tender. Tell me the news if you have time. Where is Ernest and what doing?....
Love to all of you, of all generations.
Scott
1403 Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California (new address)
June 6, 1940
Dear Max:
Thanks for your nice long letter, and for the book - or did I thank you for the book? I was fascinated, not only by the excellent coverage of the battles (though the man’s extreme bias and the necessity of compression threw some of them out of focus), but by the curious philosophic note which began to run through it, from the discussion of Pharsalla on.
The note was reminiscent, exultant and dumb, but not until I found the name Spengler did his psychology become clear to me. Up to then I had thought: ‘What a wide range for a military man!’ Then the truth became plain. Poor old Spengler has begotten Nazis that would make him turn over in his grave, and Fuller makes his own distortion. Spengler believed that the Western world was dead, and he believed nothing else but that - though he had certain ideas of a possible Slavic rebirth. This did not include Germany, which he linked with the rest of western Europe as in decline. And that the fine flower of it all was to be the battle of Vittorio Veneto and the rise of Mussolini - well, Spengler’s turn in his grave must have been like that of an airplane propeller.
In his last four chapters Fuller begins to get ridiculous. I wonder how he feels now when that admirable Mr Franco is about to batter down Gibraltar. This of course does not detract from the interest of the book, especially through the Napoleonic era. Did you ever read Spengler - specifically including the second volume? I read him the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don’t think I ever quite recovered from him. He and Marx are the only modern philosophers that still manage to make sense in this horrible mess - I mean make sense by themselves and not in the hands of distorters. Even Mr Lenin looks now like a much better politician than a philosopher. Spengler, on the other hand, prophesied gang rule, ‘young peoples hungry for spoil,’ and more particularly ‘the world as spoil’ as an idea, a dominant super- cessive idea.
Max, what becomes of copyrights when a book goes out of print? For example, in the case of Flappers. For the sake of possible picture rights and so forth should I renew that copyright now? I haven’t an idea about this.
How does Ernest feel about things? Is he angry or has he a philosophic attitude? The Allies are thoroughly licked, that much is certain, and I am sorry for a lot of people. As I wrote Scottie, many of her friends will probably die in the swamps of Bolivia. She is all right now, by the way....
Do let me know about the copyright business, and I would be interested in at least a clue to Ernest’s attitude.
Every your friend,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,California
December 13,1940
Dear Max:
Thanks for your letter. The novel progresses - in fact progresses fast. I’m not going to stop now till I finish a first draft which will be sometime after the 15th of January. However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become - ‘a legend before it is written,’ which is what I believe Wheelock * said about Tender Is the Night. Meanwhile will you send me back the chapters I sent you as they are all invalid now, must be completely rewritten, etc. The essential idea is the same and it is still, as far as I can hope, a secret.
Budd Schulberg, a very nice, clever kid out here, is publishing a Hollywood novel with Random House in January. It’s not bad but it doesn’t cut into my material at all. I’ve read Ernest’s novel and most of Tom Wolfe’s t and have been doing a lot of ruminating as to what this whole profession is about. Tom Wolfe’s failure to really explain why you and he parted mars his book but there are great things in it. The portraits of the Jacks (who are they?), Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.
No one points out how Saroyan has been influenced by Franz Kafka. Kafka was an extraordinary Czechoslovakian Jew who died in ‘36. He will never have a wide public but The Trial andAmericaare two books that writers are never able to forget.
This is the first day off I have taken for many months and I just wanted to tell
you the book is coming along and that comparatively speaking all is well.
Ever your friend,
Scott
P.S. How much will you sell the plates of This Side of Paradise for? I think it has a chance for a new life.
To John Peale Bishop
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Late February or early March, 1922
Dear John:
I’ll tell you frankly what I’d rather you’d do. Tell specifically what you like about the book and don’t. The characters - Anthony, Gloria, Adam Patch, Maury, Bloeckman, Muriel Dick, Rachael, Tana, etc., etc., etc. - exactly whether they’re good or bad, convincing or not. What you think of the style - too ornate (if so quote) good (also quote) rotten (also quote). What emotion (if any) the book gave you. What you think of its humor. What you think of its ideas. If ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them. Is it boring or interesting? How interesting? What recent American books are more so? If you think my ‘Flash- Back in Paradise’ in Chapter I is like elevated moments of D. W. Griffith say so. Also do you think it’s imitative, and of whom? What I’m angling for is a specific definite review. I’m tickled both that they’ve asked for such a lengthy thing and that you’re going to do it. You cannot hurt my feelings about the book - the I did resent in your Baltimore article being definitely limited at 25 years old to a place between Mackenzie who wrote il/i good (but not wonderful) novels and then died - and Tarkington who if he has a great talent has the mind of a school boy. I mean, at my age they’d done nothing.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 458