Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 460
Pleasant thoughts to you all.
As ever, Two things I forgot to say -
j. There’s a deliberate choice in my avoidance of a dramatic ending - I deliberately did not want it.
2. Without making apologies, I’d prefer to fade off my book, like the last of The Brothers Karamazov, or Time Regained, and let the belly carry my story, than to resort to the arbitrary blood-letting of Flaubert, Stendahl and the Elizabethans.
You see we must talk - no room in a letter.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland April 7, 1934
Dear John:
On receiving your first letter with its handsome tribute and generous praise I realized that I had been hasty in crediting that you would make such a criticism as ‘this book is no advance on Gatsby.’ You would be the first to feel that the intention in the two books was entirely different, that (to promote myself momentarily) Gatsby was shooting at something like Henry Esmond while this was shooting at something like Vanity Fair. The dramatic novel has canons quite different from the philosophical, now called psychological, novel. One is a kind of tour de force and the other a confession of faith. It would be like comparing a sonnet sequence with an epic.
The point of my letter which survives is that there were moments all through the book where I could have pointed up dramatic scenes, and I deliberately refrained from doing so because the material itself was so harrowing and highly charged that I did not want to subject the reader to a series of nervous shocks in a novel that was inevitably close to whoever read it in my generation.
Contrariwise, in dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger and crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes; and I was thinking that in your novel I would like to pass on this theory to you for what it is worth. Such advice from fellow-craftsmen has been a great help to me in the past, indeed I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who developed to me, in conversation, that the dying fall was preferable to the dramatic ending under certain conditions, and I think we both got the germ of the idea from Conrad.
With affection always, Scott
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland January 30, 1935
Dear John:
Your book had an extraordinary effect on me. Let me be frank to say that I took it up with some misgivings due to the fact that I felt that you had decided to deal with somewhat drab material, and that to make it colorful you might be inclined to lean over into melodrama - but more of that later. From the first I got completely under the spell of the exquisite prose, the descriptions of the Shenandoah country, and as one by one the characters began to unfold, the whole scene became tense and exciting. I think the way that you built up the character of Marston on the foundation of old Mason was fine - contrary to Ernest’s dictum as to synthetic characters not being plausible.
Charlie emerges as an almost heroic figure early in the book, your young narrator is sympathetic but suffers insomuch as he partakes of the vague artist-as-a-young-man quality that distinguishes our time from the Werther-Byron-Stendahl character of a hundred years ago.
Virginia is the least achieved character to me. There are the fine passages describing her bedroom hysteria after the event, but, because it was never clear in your own mind exactly how she was, the courtroom scene in which she appeared did not hang fire with the intensity of similar scenes in High Wind in Jamaica or An American Tragedy or Sanctuary.
Your minor characters were fine, the comic aunt, the nigger pansy, the decayed Job’s counselor (female), the ghost of the poetic judge - all in all, the book is packed full of beauty and wisdom and richness of perception. I read through the first half in onenight and was so excited that I had to call up somebody (it turned out to be Elizabeth Lemmon) to tell them how much I liked it, how good it was, and how delighted I was that it was good!
Yet when I finished the book there was a certain sense of unfulfillment and now I am going to permit myself to play papa for a moment.
When your heart was in poetry your inclination was to regard prose fiction as merely a stop-gap, a necessary nuisance. Time showed you the error of that early evaluation and it cost you a pretty penny in years. There are things in this book which are still typical of one who cannot light his way around and who has got to, for these are the years for you during which the best ammunition has to be fired off. Let me list, not too categorically, what I consider the faults of execution in the opus:
First, conscientiously you must try to cut all traces of other people out of yourself. If you were twenty-one it wouldn’t matter; it was all right for Tom Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel to make one chapter practically a parody of a chapter in Ulysses. It was forgivable for me to have done an equivalent thing half a dozen times in This Side of Paradise, but for anybody over forty to do it is simply not in the picture of one who has to make himself a personality.
Vide: Page 148, Frank Norris, speaking of Kipling, said, ‘the little colonial, to whose pipe we must all dance’ - but by that general admission of the tremendous power of certain stylists he announced that he, for one, would fight shy of any effect that he might gain by using their rhythms to cradle his ideas or to fill gaps with reminiscent echolalia. Several times I saw patterns in this book which derived background and drama from Faulkner, or cadence from Hemingway, and each time you might have produced something much stronger by having more of a conscience, by fighting against that tendency, cutting out the passage no matter how satisfactory it may have been in itself, and building up the structure with something that is yourself. In any case, that has been my experience, and I pass it on to you for what it’s worth.
Let’s call that the first point - There are only two. The second is purely a matter of structure. You once wrote me about Conrad’s ability to build his characters into such a reality, commonplace reality, that any melodrama that afterwards occurred would be palatable. The first half of your book is so heavy with stimuli and promises, that the later catastrophe of the rape is minimized - both in itself and in its consequences. Charle’s whole wild day should have been telescoped and much cut, insofar as the intervening episodes are concerned, such as the bathers hearing the shots. The title should not have given away so much of the plot. You had put out so many leads by that time that the reader was practically expecting the World War, and the actual fact that Charlie violated a spinster is anticlimactical as is her ensuing denunciation of him. When you plant a scene in a book the importance of the scene cannot be taken as a measure of the space it should occupy, for it is entirely a special and particular artistic problem. If Dreiser, in The American Tragedy, plans to linger over the drowning in upper New York well and good, but I could tell you plenty of books in which the main episode, around which swings the entire drama, is over and accomplished in four or five sentences.
There is, after all, a third point I think the book is a little too rough. The insistence on sex-in-the-raw occupies more space than the phenomenon usually does in life. Insofar as this is the story of a boy’s awakening to the world of passion, it is justified, but when you launch yourself into an account of the brutal fate that haunts us the balance is not what it should be. Much of the testimony in the trial seemed to be arbitrarily introduced from Krafft- Ebing.
Now as a peroration let me congratulate you again. It is beautifully made, beautifully written and one of your three characters emerges as a creation. I liked Charlie, and would like to have met him, and he will stay with me when most of the fictional history of many years is forgotten. I congratulate you with all my heart With best to you both, Scott
P.S. Aside from the fun of the above strictures it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the word ‘demean’ does not mean ‘de- base.’The phrase ‘to demean’ means only ‘to conduct one’s self and does not imply that the conduct is either good or bad. It is a common error. Other quibbles: On the jacket the Shenandoah Valley is placed in tidewater Virginia and the story in the 90
s. When did people roll around so casually in cars in the late 90s? It seems to me that you would be justified in asking Max to correct these errors iii further printings.
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
May, 1935
Dear John:
Here’s a letter of uncalled-for advice. I think though it’s good. All right - into the lion’s mouth.
Act of Darkness must be written off. It was a good novel - it Had high points (I’m coming back to that), it showed that your long phase of being self-conscious in prose is over. You’ve got ten good years - two or three fine novels left. Now, here’s my inventory.
From the wildest fantasy (which you did not and could not handle through lack of readiness and incisiveness of wit, profuse- ness of it, and through other reasons like Hergesheimeric tendency to take it easy doing still-lives) you went (and I was all for it) to the most complete realism, taking in passing the Civil War. The part taken in passing came closest to being your natural field. You jumped over it too quickly - I don’t mean the war in particular - I mean the blend. Because you’re two people - you are not yet your work as in a sense I am mine.
You are a. — a person of conventional background and conduct with tendency almost to drabness, non-resistance, uxoriousness, bourgeois- respectable, etc., etc., etc., etc.
b. — a poet with sense of wonder and color of life expressed in men, women, and words; and grand gestures, grand faits accomplis, parades.
1. Setting. I should use a sensational set, probably costume set using some such character as the Lost Dauphin - I mean it - not fulfilled Renaissance character or you’ll just make a picture book. Something enormous, gross, obvious, untouched by fine hands. Some great stone the sculptors have rejected. Your background had better shimmer, not be static or peaceful.
2. Plot. Advice on this is no good. You handle it well but I advise a change of pace -I find so many good enough books are in the same key, i e., Appointment in Samarra. Life is not so smooth that it can’t go over suddenly into melodrama. That’s the other face of much worry about inevitability. Everything’s too beautifully caused - one can guess ahead. Even the movies know this and condemn a story as ‘too straight.’ My own best solution to date is the to-and-fro, keep-facts-back mystery stuff, but it’s difficult. Of course it’s the Dickens-Dostoevski thing. Act of Darkness was much too straight, and tempo too even. Only a very short piece wants complete tempo, one breath, Ethan Frome. It’s short story technique. Even Pride and Prejudice walks and runs like life.
3. Try and find more ‘bright’ characters; if the women are plain make them millionairesses or nymphomaniacs; if they’re scrubwomen, give them hot sex attraction and charm. This is such a good trick I don’t see why it’s not more used - I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a barbed one.
There is tremendous comedy inherent in your relations with Hurlock and Feustman. You can do more with minor characters - your perverted Negroes, etc., are good enough but you’re rich with stuff. You dredge yourself with difficulty.
I’d like to see some gaiety in your next book to help sell it Can’t you find some somewhere?
Anyhow all this care for shimmering set, active plot, bright characters, change of pace and gaiety should all show in the plan. Leave out any two, and your novel is weaker, any three or four and you’re running a department store with only half the counters open.
All this is a presumption. Max Perkins told me the book hadn’t gone and while I know it had a good press and the season was bad still I do worry about you and would hate to see you either discouraged or apathetic about your future as a novelist.
Best to your huge clan.
Scott
P.S. Address as on envelope till about June 25th.
Haven’t had a drink this year - not even wine or beer - are you surprised?
To Mrs Bayard Turnbull
La Paix,
Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
September 10, 1932
Dear Mrs Turnbull:
Thanks for your quotation from the Emperor. It is a great thesis and even the Communists are working it - claiming that no man not under a religious spell (in their case, Communism) can have a focal point from which to orientate his work. I think that it is largely a question of the age in which one lives and I am not philosopher enough to think it through for myself.
Thanks too for the Lawrence item which I will read tonight Later: Read it and enjoyed the Murray letter hugely.
With unjustified egotism I am sending you two articles on the American novel that have appeared in the last year. I know Munson by reputation - Leighton I haven’t heard of. One is pleasantly disposed toward me - the other not - and both articles seem to me mostly bunk. I send them because Lewisohn treats with interest his own generation and dismisses mine so entirely, because we deal with the post-war world which he does not understand. To give, for example, Hergesheimer’s stories of ladies’ laundry and picturesque peasants, all got up in the questionable later stylistics of Henry James, more importance than Hemingway’s work is simply to say, ‘Well, that’s the world I like and I’m a pacifist liberal Jew and you can’t expect me to understand new tendencies in a social system I didn’t get with my mother’s milk anyhow.’ He allows to his own generation the right to report the traditionally unimportant, but in the new one, the observed truth has got to fit in with his own crystallized conceptions. Well, well -I shall be like that sometime.
The young men turn to us (I don’t mean, God forbid! my Post stories, but to my generation). The bow they make to Cabell, for example, is purely formal. I believe that if one is interested in the world into which willy-nilly one’s children will grow up the most accurate data can be found in the European leaders, such as Lawrence, Jung and Spengler, and after that in the very sincere young Americans emerging one by one, and least in the attempts to make logical and palatable the current world scene. I think we are all a little sick but the logic of history won’t permit us to go backward.
Again thanks for sending me the Lawrence, which I’d have otherwise missed. With very best wishes,
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
September 21, 1932
Dear Mrs Turnbull:
I’m afraid I was dogmatic last night on a subject about which it is silly to be dogmatic. But I do know that I’d prefer Scottie to marry a man of the world even if he was not of her world - a man six or eight years older than herself. The value of every year of experience he brings to the marriage is enormous. I have heard so many college girls complain about their young husbands not knowing anything, by which they didn’t mean formal education but the lack of any approach to life except the social or the modern big-business approach. They have never been to sea, or to the wars, robbed a bank, hunted to live, supported a chorus girl, founded a religion, or dealt directly with other men in some rough school such as politics. If she marries for a whole lot of money that is a different matter for with enough money one can change husbands or live in Paris and not even bother. I am referring to the young couple who will have to meet the usual problems together, such as the money one. And I think if a suitor of Scottie’s was entirely innocent in his past life I’d be inclined to make the old remark: ‘Well, I don’t want you to practice on her.’
Of course nowadays with so much knowledge available the chances are that women know when they’re being cheated but fifty years ago, so numerous doctors have revealed, there were many marriage tragedies beneath what seemed a happy surface.
Of course, I don’t believe in the double standard -I believe it’s disappearing anyhow - I only meant that it was possible for a man to be far from a saint and yet be wildly jealous of his wife, as I am.
Just a last word and I am through boring you with this interminable discussion - I don’t think it matters what a boy’s politics are before he
is sixteen but I hope the colleges will cover about all the current economic theories, if only that the boy should know where he stands and what he’s fighting. When a United States Senator after his election has to look up the principles of Marxism by which one-sixth of the world is governed it shows he’s a pretty inadequate defender of his own system.
Again, excuse this long letter - couldn’t get down to work this morning and simply had to argue about something.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m sorry I lent you the Hemingway book - there’s a streak of vulgarity in it I would find quite offensive except I know that he does it as a protest against censorship.
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
Probably Spring, 1933
Dear Mrs Turnbull:
I can’t resist adding a word of qualification to the opinions I expressed so freely last night.
1st Ford Madox Ford once said, ‘Henry James was the greatest writer of his day; therefore for me the greatest man.’ That is all I meant by superiority. T. S. Eliot seems to me a very great person - Mrs Lanier seems to me a very fine character. To me the conditions of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare to them the duties of a soldier in war-time. I simply cannot admire, say, a merchant or an educator with the intensity I reserve for other professions, and in a sense the world agrees with me. Of the Elizabethans we remember the Queen and Drake, a ruler and a captain - only two ‘people of affairs’ in contrast to Bacon, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh. You may say that is because history is written by writers - I think it is more than that.
2nd Please believe that, within the limits of the frame you have chosen, I know no children better brought up than yours. My somewhat tactless bursts of criticism of the frame itself are prompted by my faith in a sort of sixth sense that I think I have about the way the world is going.