3rd I cannot permit my silence of last night when you spoke of yourself as being ‘shallow, etc.’
to pass as a tacit acceptance of the truth of that. I simply meant that for me the test of human values is conformity to the strictest and most unflinching rationality, while in your case it is based on standards of conduct. I don’t mean that because Rousseau’s life was disordered an intellectual should use that to justify his own weaknesses, nor even that my criteria necessarily subsume yours, but I must think they do even though I continually check up by seeing the lives of ‘orderly’ people, judging what’s fake and what’s real. This by the way doesn’t excuse the arrogance and bad manners of which I was guilty last night.
4th In résumé I owe you an apology, because I value your friendship, but not a retraction if I can persuade you that even my definitions are different from yours. With great admiration and respect for you and your way of life let me sign myself as Erratic but sincere tenant,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
September, 1933
Dear Mrs Turnbull:
I am going to have to not come to dinner Friday * (all of us, I mean), though naturally will come up in evening or afternoon to pay my respects to your mother with great pleasure - and curiosity and interest - at your convenience. We have dined out exactly four times in two years: twice with you, once at the Ridgelys, once on a ship. Without going into the whys of the precedent, it has become one, so with many thanks, I remain your friend (in this case regretful),
Scott Fitzgerald P.S. I have some documents of yours which I will cherish for a few days, unless you want them back immediately: one magazine article, one clipping, 2 letters of Andrew’s (or do you save letters - if not I will file them as they seem interesting to me and form part of a series).
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson, Maryland
September, 1933
Dear Mrs Turnbull:
How would this plan seem to you? for the school trek, beginning Thursday.
You to take Thursday and Friday; then:
Our week, your week, our week, your week, your week Our week,”
etc.
This arrangement because this year your children have the far mileage to cover. Is it Oak? (I believe the dictionary spelling is ‘Oke.’)
Your mother is utterly charming. I have never known a woman of her age to be so alive (I retract: there was also Mrs Winthrop Chanler). I enjoyed our hour together so much. Tell her so.
Ever your chattel,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 31, 1934
Dear Margaret:
I know it was very annoying for me to have lost my temper in public and I want to apologize to you both, for the discomfort that I know I gave you. There are certain subjects that simply do not belong to an afternoon tea and, while I still think that Mrs Perce’s arguments were almost maddening enough to justify homicide, I appreciate that it was no role of mine to intrude my intensity of feeling upon a group who had expected a quiet tea party.
Ever yours faithfully,
Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I’m sorry this is typed but I seem to have contracted Scottie’s poison ivy and my hands are swathed in bandages.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May11, 1935
Dear Margaret:
The lilies are wonderful. First I gave them to Scottie and then I took them back. I rushed to my window and called you just as your Ford rolled out of sight. I wanted to see you before I left, which is now, for a protracted sojourn in the country, probably Carolina, still seeking to get back the hours of sleep that I lost in ‘33 and ‘34. I am closing the house but am coming back in June to pack Scottie off to camp.
I think of you all so often and I miss keeping up with Andrew and Eleanor, their woes and joys and changes. Through Scottie’s eyes they lack reality, Andrew becomes a schemer of Machiavellian hue, Eleanor remains the child who just never will be as old as Scottie no matter how hard she tries, as though she were an Alice who had just perversely lost her growing cake. I still hear the wings of a career beating about her. As for Andrew I shall have to catch up as much as possible when I take him to the football game next autumn, though I wish I knew what he was going to do this summer.
I have a fair story in the current McCall’s if you run into it. La Paix must be grand now - I wish Zelda could walk through it, but alas, she is far too sick. When she is a little better and can go outside will you call on her sometime? I will let you know. She will be pretty lonesome when I am away and I hate like the devil to leave her but it is doctor’s orders.
Always affectionately,
Scott
Grove Pork Inn
Asheville,North Carolina
June, 1935
Dear Margaret:
What a nice letter you write! I quoted to Zelda tonight (in a letter) the part about ‘Scottie in yellow ruffles... with Andrew, Jack and Clarence... forming the dark half of the design.’
Also the inevitable fatalism that creeps into all womanhood, the almost lust for death as the culmination of experience; to quote you again, ‘life being made up of hope, and a little fulfillment.’ The hell it is - too much fulfillment from a man’s point of view, if he has been one of those who wanted to identify himself with it utterly. It’s so fast, so sweeping along, that he walks stumbling and crying out, wondering sometimes where he is, or where the others are, or if they existed, or whether he’s hurt anybody, but not much time to wonder, only sweeping along again with his only choice being between blindness or being muscle- bound from caution-conservatism-cowardice, the three great C’s I’ve tied up together, though God knows I’m capable of all three...
I became so metaphysical there that I had to destroy what I’d written. Anyhow I think that the fatalism of women can be confused with radicalism but is neither radical nor conservative to any extent. But a man’s life is a more gorgeous thing, I think, if he’s one of the fortunate. Oh, well - these generalities set ill upon a man of my age.
Thank you for asking Scottie out. You have been good to her. I like it when she goes to your house and gets a sense of the continuity of life that her own choppy existence hasn’t given her. I want her to be pretty hard but if she has to be a condottiere to a certain extent, I like her to know that all people don’t.
I am benefiting by my rest here, gaining weight, exuberance. But living alone leaves so many loopholes for brooding and when I do face the whole tragedy of Zelda it is simply a day lost. I think I feel it more now than at any time since its inception. She seems so helpless and pitiful. Liquor used to help put it out of mind, and it was one of the many services my old friend Barleycorn did me. However he had outlived his usefulness in that as well as all other regards.
I hear it is beautiful here, but without people all places are the same to me. I’d rather be at La Paix watching thru my iron grille one of your tribe moving about the garden, and wondering if Zelda had yet thrown the tennis racquet at Mr Crosley.
What a ten months this has been for Frances - good God! a lifetime for some people. Blessings on her - she is a fine person.
All my affectionate good wishes to you and yours,
Scott Fitz
Cambridge Arms Baltimore,
Maryland
Fall, 1935
Dear Margaret:
Pardon! We moved. I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. All politesse ceased to exist for a thick week during which I lived in a haze of cigarette smoke and nervous querulousness. I don’t even know why I wrote you about Scottie save that on my occasional emergencies all matters in the outside world seemed of equally vital importance - or unimportance: the N.R.A. and the Princeton-Williams game, the decline of the democratic dogma and the faint worry of a child. Anyhow, thanks.
I destroyed Andrew’s letter
- he is so level-headed in his analyses and he keeps growing. I wish I knew him better but I won’t though, until he is about 19. He might know me but I won’t know him because until then he will give me a presentation of himself that he thinks will impress or please me. This will not prevent him, I repeat, from finding out more and more about me if we meet often.
I know this Pell’s brother who was in ‘28. This one t had a school in New England for awhile, didn’t he, or was assistant headmaster somewhere or taught at St Mark’s? I’ve heard well of him. He was in Ivy, I think, and well liked, but on principle I’m against schoolmarms, male or female - though there’s just the ghost of one in me. Common sense tells me that there are rules but, like all modern men, the shade of Rousseau haunts me. (Bert- rand Russell’s Rousseau school is a flop - I know that at practically first hand - I’ve seen and talked to both parents and products.) That’s too big a subject for a letter and we’ve probably talked of it before.
Zelda is much much better - I’ve taken her out twice; suicidal tendency vanishing - interest in life returning.
Please enclose this to Andrew when you write.
Oh - I know what I wanted to tell you - I think I’m about to write a series of sketches for radio about father and daughter - I’ll tell you about it when we meet. In a week we’ll be in our real apartment (this is a substitute) in the same building, and you and Frances must come and give us your benediction, or are there only dates and cotillions now? We talk about you all a lot.
Always affectionately,
Scott Fitzg —
The Harvard game is November 9th - just a reminder.
The Cambridge Arms
Baltimore,
Maryland
Spring, 1936
Dear Margaret:
Just a footnote to our conversation: you of course recognized the allusion to William James’ remark when I spoke of ‘tender- minded’ and ‘tough-minded’ and said that I was the former and you the latter. It has no relation to sensitiveness but rather to sensibility. And I am not at all sure which I am. I think perhaps the creative worker has the privilege of jumping from one attitude to the other, or of balancing on the line. I am continually surprised both by my softness and by my hardiness.
Ever yours,
Scott Fitzg —
Read the article by Antheil if you get the last Esquire.
Grove Park Inn Asheville,
North Carolina
November n, 1936
Dear Margaret:
Only the fact that I have been incapacitated by a broken shoulder has broken the tradition of taking Andrew to a game beside the hall of his grandfather (‘Pepper Constable’). I am sending him two tickets to the last Princeton game and if he doesn’t want to use them he can give them to someone else who wants to.
Andrew is a brave fighter and I admire, sometimes, his stubbornness and his reticence just as much as I would like him in the sunshine when I have tried to give him what I have found from life. He has the potentialities of being absolutely first-rate. I hope he read War and Peace; and I wish I had had the advantage when I was a child of parents and friends who knew more than I did.
With dearest love to you all,
Scott Fitzgerald
Oak Hall
Hotel
Tryon, North Carolina
Spring, 1937
Dear Margaret:
What a lovely letter you write. I am timorous in answering you, having no flair for letters - my old ones reread make me wince.
And now, assuming that there are 20 intelligent women in Baltimore (isn’t the proper word ‘bright’ or ‘clever?’) I spring to answer you.
I think your first topic is the best of the two (the second embraces all feminism and will lead to triteness) but it’s not perfect. It’s awfully yes or no - has the aristocrat got money? - if ‘if hasn’t it had better be born into the middle of the middle classes in a small town. If you had money and were not Russian or Spanish it was certainly an advantage to be an aristocrat up to group to which she belonged.
now. One might not be invited out much or have a king give up his throne in one’s honor or be as well known as Harlow and Low outside the county, and certainly one had to kneel to the monied nobility, but it had its compensations. Tories have such true-and-tried indignations that they are practically formed at ten.
Oh, well - Tolstoi didn’t like it - which leads me to ask if Andrew finished War and Peace or has D. H. Lawrence come between them? He seemed fine at Xmas. The time will come when all adults will spend the holidays in bed as I did and you apparently. I came down here and went on the white list for another long stretch and am finding it dull and not even conducive to work. Not that I miss the liquor which gives me but little elation in my old age but it is gloomy to see how few things I really care about when I see clearly. I support Zelda’s contention that it were best to begin at the pole and work south to the Riviera and likewise add that one should have first drunk at 35 and progress to a champagne-pink three score and ten.
I should think Andrew would love Look Homeward, Angel and A Farewell to Arms.
Reading over Eleanor’s sweet little note gave me pleasure. Scot- tie does well, leading the school in French and English and apparently being very serious after her Xmas debauch.
I think of you often in your garden. Hasn’t my ghost become pretty dim at La Paix?
Always affectionately,
Scott
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
Fall, 1937
Dear Margaret:
I have owed you a letter for so long but these have been crowded months. I suppose Scottie told you the general line-up - after almost 3 years of intermittent illness it’s nice to be on a steady job like this - a sort of tense crossword puzzle game, creative only when you want it to be, a surprisingly interesting intellectual exercise. You mustn’t miss my first effort, Three Comrades, released next winter.
I’m sorry you were ill last March - a blood transfusion - that sounds serious! The news about Frances is strange and loyal and profound. I hope she finds it again - it’s not very easy if you have ‘anything to you.’ I know - though I’ve often tried desperately hard to be light of love.
Antony is a fine book - odd I almost sent it to you! Also an odd comment - several people who were ‘tops’ in English society - and I don’t mean the fast set but the inner-of-inner Duke-of-York business - told me he was ‘rather a bounder.’ I wonder what they meant -1 can sort of understand.
I have sent Andrew two seats to Harvard-Princeton and two to Navy-Princeton. They will arrive in a few weeks addressed to me care of you with Princeton University Athletic Association stamped on the envelope, fust open them and send them to Andrew with my enduring affection.
And reserve a bushel for yourself. —
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
November 13, 1939
Dear Margaret:
The enclosed letter explains itself, I am not allowed to communicate with Andrew in this regard by the club convention, nor should you send him this letter, but it would be perfectly proper for you to tell him that if a delegation of Cottage boys call on him, he might at least exchange appraising glances with them. Of course, he may be already set with a crowd joining some other organization - and most especially I want him to be happy in his choice of companions for his last two years.
In general my views are somewhat contrary to yours, insofar as the advantage of belonging to a larger than to a smaller corporate body. You remember how I argued, almost to the point of presumption, against your selection of Williams for him as against one of the Big Three. In the same manner, it seems to me that it would be a little better for Andrew’s future if he joined one of the so-called ‘big clubs’ at Princeton than one of the others. They are called big not because they necessarily have more members, but because they divide among themselves the leadership in most undergradua
te policy. The Charter Club and the Quadrangle Club are notably among the nicer ‘small’ clubs, but only a few months ago Jimmy Stewart was telling me how it wrankled throughout his whole Princeton career that he had joined Charter instead of Cottage, which had been his father’s club. The larger group, it seems to me, though it may make for stiffer going, pays off better at the end.
Nothing would please me better than that the whole snobbish system be abolished. But it is thoroughly entrenched there, as Woodrow Wilson saw, and to boys of that impressionable age assumes an importance all out of proportion to its reality. And boys have gone through college without joining any club at all with no loss of self-respect.
In general: if Andrew goes into naturally, say Cap and Gown, with the crowd he has always known, that is all in all probably the best thing. Failing that, it would be better to go into Cottage with two or three friends than to go with some larger group into any of the lesser clubs. I haven’t seen Andrew for years now (though I’ve had pleasant glimpses of him from Scottie and from several letters which he’s written me). So this is pretty much work in the dark. One thing that distinguished ‘big clubs’ from the others is that the boys are slightly older, and more sophisticated, and rather more endowed with front. I had my choice of two of the bigger clubs and two of the smaller ones and though I might have been more comfortable in Quadrangle, for instance, where there were lots of literary minded boys, I was never sorry about my choice. My ideas of education still go in the direction that college like the home should be an approximation of what we are likely to expect in the world.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 461