Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 463
Zelda was delighted with your compliments about ‘The Millionaire’s Girl.’
Now - about the novel - the other night I read one great hunk of it to John Peale Bishop, and we both agreed that it would be ruinous to let Liberty start it uncompleted. Here’s a hypothetical possibility. Suppose (as may happen in such cases) they didn’t like the end and we quarreled about it - then what the hell! I’d have lost the Post, gained an enemy in Liberty - who would we turn to - Ray Long? Suppose Liberty didn’t like even the first part and went around saying it was rotten before it was even finished. I want to be in New York if possible when they accept it for there’s that element of cutting, never yet discussed - are they going to cut it? Are they going to cut my stories to 5000 words or not? Are they going to pay $3500 or $4000? At one time I was about to send four chapters out of eight done to you. Then I cut one of those chapters absolutely to pieces. I know you’re losing faith in me and Max too but God knows one has to rely in the end on one’s own judgment. I could have published four lousy, half- baked books in the last five years and people would have thought I was at least a worthy young man not drinking myself to pieces in the south seas - but I’d be dead as Michael Arlen, Bromfield, Tom Boyd, Callaghan and the others who think they can trick the world with the hurried and the second-rate. These Post stories in the Post are at least not any spot on me - they’re honest and if their form is stereotyped people know what to expect when they pick up the Post. The novel is another thing - if, after four years, I published the Basil Lee stories as a book I might as well get tickets for Hollywood immediately.
Well, that’s how things are. If you’ll have the confidence in me I think you’ll shortly see I knew what I was doing.
Ever yours,
Scott Fitz —
This letter sounds cross but I’m stupid-got with work today and too tired to rewrite it. Please forgive it - it has to get tomorrow’s boat Addenda Zelda’s been sick - not dangerously but seriously - and then I got involved in a wedding party and after 2 weeks just got to work on new story yesterday but 3000 words already done - about as many as I must owe you dollars.
Meanwhile I acknowledge:
(1) — The account (2) — News about The Beautiful and D —
(3) — Costain’s suggestion (incidentally he can go to hell). The only way I can write a decent story is to imagine no one’s going to accept it and who cares. Self-consciousness about editors is ruinous to me. They can make their criticisms afterwards. I’m not going to do another Josephine thing until I can get that out my head. I tore up the beginning of one. You might tell him pleasantly, of course, that I just can’t work that way. Still there’s no use telling him - the harm’s done but if he has any other ideas about writing stories please don’t tell me.
(4) — I’m sorry the proof’s destroyed on ‘First Blood.’ Could you get me a copy of the magazine it’s in - I’ve lost mine. I want to fix it while I remember. By the way I don’t mind not having proofs of my own stories sent me when I’m here - but when I’ve worked on a proof it’s like losing a whole draft of a thing.
Yours always,
Scott
Last Word
I undertand the movies are buying short stories again. Do you know a good agent in Hollywood you might persuade to interest himself in ‘Majesty?’ It’s constructed dramatically like a play and has some damn good dramatic scenes in it.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
December 8, 1934
Dear Harold:
After rereading your letter there were some things I felt hadn’t been sufficiently answered. The first is that I have a deep suspicion that you and Max got together at some point and decided I needed disciplining. Now I know of my fondness for you both and assume that it is reciprocated and I know also that when one man is in debt to another he is rather helpless in such matters. Nevertheless, the assumption that all my troubles are due to drink is a little too easy. Gliding over my domestic difficulties and my self-indulg- ence on that score and not deciding which one has caused the trouble - whether the hen preceded the egg or the egg preceded the hen -I want to get down to a few facts: a compact ‘apologia pro sua vita’ after all the horrors in Montgomery and the winter of ‘30 and ‘31, the return of Zelda’s trouble, attacked by the family, etc. (and you will find that this coincides almost exactly with my remissness in getting out mss. on specification). It became apparent to me that my literary reputation, except with the Post readers, was at its very lowest ebb. I was completely forgotten and this fact was rubbed in by Zelda’s inadvertently written book. From that time on until early this spring my chief absorption was to get my book published at any cost to myself and still manage to keep the ball rolling. With yours and Max’s help and some assistance from Mother the thing was accomplished but at the end it left me in the black hole of Calcutta, mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and, perhaps, morally exhausted. There seemed no time or space for recuperation. My expedition to Bermuda was a washout because of the pleurisy; Zelda collapsed again shortly after the holidays. The necessary ‘filling up’ that a writer should be able to do after great struggles was impossible. No sooner did I finish the last galley on the last version of the last proof of the book proof of Tender Is the Night than it was necessary to sit down and write a Post story.
Of course any apologia is necessarily a whine to some extent; a man digs his own grave and should, presumably, lie in it, and I know that the fault for this goes back to those years, which were really years of self-indulgence....
Hotel Stafford
Baltimore,
Maryland
Received July 2, 1935
Dear Harold:
I’m still here - at the last moment it appears that there is a suggestion about Zelda (three days ago was a most discouraging time) and it means finding a very special nurse. So I won’t leave till tomorrow. On an impulse I’m sending you a letter from Zelda that came today - a letter from which you can gauge the awful strangling heart-rending quality of this tragedy that has gone on now more than six years, with two brief intervals of hope. I know you’ll understand the intrusion of sending it to you - please mail it back to me; with things so black I hang on to every scrap that is like things used to be.
And with its precise irony life continues - I went to N.Y. after all Saturday afternoon to meet a girl - stayed 20 hours and got back here Sunday night to put Scottie on the train to camp.
Now as to business - or rather finances. I owe you still somewhere around S6500 (?) and should be paying you back at the rate of $1500 per story. But this has been a slow 6 weeks - first illness, then unsuccessful attempt at revise of Medieval IV, then a false start, then ‘What You Don’t Know.’ Considering that story alone for a minute and supposing it sold for $3000. You’ve given me
5500 advance $500
+ 300 commission =$1300
Normally that would leave me $1700. And I need $1000 for bills due (that doesn’t solve them but is ‘on account’) and I’ll need J700 on the 12th for life insurance. Of course I hope to have a new story in your hands by the 15th but I hope you can see your way clear to letting me have the whole sum this time - with the “nderstanding that on the next story I will surely be able to reimburse you $1500. (Won’t need the $700 till the 12 th but need the $1000 this week, by Friday, say, if the Post accepts and will put a check through.)
All this raises the ugly head of Medieval IV. Granted that Post pays J 3000 and you can complete paying me the whole sum this time - that is $1700 more -
Then shall I do Redbook revise IV first (it’s, alas, paid for!) and make Balmer * believe in me again? (He’s already published III and it reads well), or shall I do a Post story and begin to square things with you? Only you can decide this. I told you: Redbook III — can’t be revised but must be rewritten, and that and a new Post story will take to the end of July. I can survive till then but will it be too much of a drain on you to wait till then fo
r further payments?
There is no use of me trying to rush things. Even in years like ‘24, ‘28, ‘29, ‘30, all devoted to short stories, I could not turn out more than 8-9 top-price stories a year. It simply is impossible - all my stories are conceived like novels, require a special emotion, a special experience - so that my readers, if such there be, know that each time it’ll be something new, not in form but in substance. (It’d be far better for me if I could do pattern stories but the pencil just goes dead on me. I wish I could think of a line of stories like the Josephine or Basil ones which could go faster and pay $3000. But no luck yet. If I ever get out of debt I want to try a second play. It’s just possible I could knock them cold if I let go the vulgar side of my talent.)
So that covers everything. Will you let me know by straight wire as soon as you’ve read this if I can count on these advances ($1000 this week - $700 on the 12th) if the Post buys?
Then I can sign the checks and get off South with a clear conscience.
I want to see you and have a long talk with you under better conditions than we’ve found of late. You haven’t seen me since I’ve been on my no-liquor regime.
Yours ever, Scott Fitz —
Mail Zelda’s letter to Asheville. Thanks for your nice wire about story. It set me up.
Cambridge Arms Apartments Charles & 34th Streets Baltimore,
Maryland
December 31, 1935
Dear Harold:
I’d have gone to Hollywood a year ago last spring. I don’t think I could do it now but I might. Especially if there was no choice. Twice I have worked out there on other people’s stories - on an ‘original’ with John Considine telling me the plot twice a week and on the Katharine Brush story - it simply fails to use what qualities I have. I don’t blame you for lecturing me since I have seriously inconvenienced you, but it would be hard to change my temperament in middle-life. No single man with a serious literary reputation has made good there. If I could form a partnership with some technical expert it might be done. (That’s very different from having a supervisor who couldn’t fit either the technical or creative role but is simply a weigher of completed values.) I’d need a man who knew the game, knew the people, but would help me tell and sell my story - not his. This man would be hard to find, because a smart technician doesn’t want or need a partner, and an uninspired one is inclined to have a dread of ever touching tops. I could work best with a woman, because they haven’t any false pride about yielding a point. I could have worked with old Bess Meredith if we hadn’t been in constant committees of five. I’m afraid unless some such break occurs I’d be no good in the industry.
The matter will probably solve itself - I’ll either pull out of this in the next few months or else go under - in which case I might start again in some entirely new way of my own.
I know what you would do now in my situation and what the Ideal Way would be, but it simply isn’t in me to do my duty blindly. I have to follow my fate with my eyes wide open.
Scottie is so well and happy. She has such faith in me and doesn’t know what’s happening. Tonight she and two of her ad-
mirers decorated a tree. I hope Dick is better and has a happy Christmas even out there away from his family.
Yours,
Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. Do you think The New Yorker could use the poem attached?
The Cambridge Arms Charles & 34th Streets Baltimore,
Maryland
February 8, 1936
Dear Harold:
The man Braun is a plain, simple man with a true instinct toward the arts. He is of complete financial integrity and we were awfully nice to him once during a journey through North Africa and I think he is honestly fond of both Zelda and me.
I start with this because I don’t want to mess up this chance with any of the inadvertencies and lack of foresight that lost me the sale of Tender Is the Night and ruined the Grade Allen venture. You are now in touch with Hollywood in a way that you were not several years ago. This is obviously a job that I can do expertly - but it is also obviously a job that a whole lot of other people can do fairly well. Now it seems to me that the point can be sold that I am equipped to do this treatment, which is the whole gist of this letter.
He has gone out there and they will put some hack on the thing and in two minutes will have a poor imitation of Lily Pons deserting the stage for a poor country boy or a poor country girl named Lily Pons astounding the world in ten minutes. A hack will do exactly that with it, thinking first what previous stories dealing with the ballet and theatre have been about, and he will try to write a reasonable imitation about it. As you know Zelda and I have been through hell about the whole subject and you’ll know, too, that I should be able to deliver something entirely authentic in the matter of invention and feeling.
It seems odd having to sell you such a suggestion when once you would have taken it at my own valuation, but after these three years of reverses it seems necessary to reassure you that I have the stuff to do this job and not let this opportunity slide away with the rumor that ‘Scott is drinking’ or ‘Scott is through.’
You know that the merest discussion of ideas among the Yids would mean that they were public property. You know also as in the case of radio Columbia, that they want a sample. Now how on earth you can both sell the idea that I can do this job, that is, write a 5000-word story with cash in advance, and yet be sure that the plot won’t leak out, I don’t know. That seems to be your problem. You remember that I lost the whole month of October on that false radio come-on where they were obviously kidding. Isn’t there some way to determine whether these people are kidding or not? This man has, in a sense, come to me and I think the idea ought to be caught and trapped right now because as you may well imagine I have little energy to dissipate.
A list of suggestions follows:
First I enclose something which I wish you would read last because it has nothing to do with the present offer, but it is something that I wrote gratuitously for a Russian dancer some years ago. Please consider that last and featuring, as it does, a male dancer rather than a female, it would certainly not fit Spessivtzewa’s requirements. The other ideas which follow are the basis of a moving picture while that was for an actual ballet.
l. Zelda’s awful experience of trying a difficult art too late in life to culminate with the irony that just before she cracked up she had been hoping to get little ‘bits’ in Diaghilev’s ballet and that people kept coming to the studio who she thought were emissaries of his and who turned out to be from the Folies Bergères and who thought they might make her into an American shimmy dancer. This was about like a person hoping to lead the Philadelphia Symphony being asked to be assistant conductor of Ben Bernie’s band.
Please don’t have anybody read Zelda’s book because it is a bad book! But by glancing over it yourself you will see that it contains all the material that a tragedy should have, though she was incapable as a writer of realizing where tragedy lay as she was incapable of facing it as a person. Of course the tragic ending of Zelda’s story need not be repeated in the picture. One could concede to the picture-people the fact that the girl might become a popular dancer in the Folies Bergères. One could conceive of a pathetic ending à la Hepburn in which because of her idealism she went on being a fifth-rate ‘figurine’ in ballets all over Europe - this to be balanced by a compensatory love story which would make up for her the failure of her work. This would seem to me to be much the best treatment of this story.
2. This idea has to do with an episode of some memoirs of Pavlova. It begins with a little girl briefly glimpsed and dancing in the Imperial Ballet before the war. A scene later in Paris at the height of the flurry over the ballet and stranded finally with a ballet company in either Australia or Brazil for lack of funds. The climax would hinge on the catastrophe of the death of Diaghilev. The sorrow of it that Zelda felt, as did many others, who seemed to feel also that the ballet was ended; the old Imperial school was dead an
d now Diaghilev who had personally kept it alive in Paris had gone to his grave. There seemed to them no future and I know how strong that feeling was among the ballet people in ‘30 and ‘31, a sort of utter despair, a sense that they had once been under patronage of the Czar and later of an entrepreneur and that now nobody was taking care of them. They are like children to a ridiculous extent and have less practical ideas than the wildest musician imaginable. This story would end up in New York or in Hollywood, the ballet having a new renaissance under an American growing delight in that particular art, as is practically true with Masine’s ballet in New York and with Trudy Shoop’s successful little trek around the country. That’s idea number two.
The third idea is more difficult in its selling aspects. In 1920 I tried to sell D. W. Griffith the idea that people were so interested in Hollywood that there was money in a picture about that and romance in the studio. He was immediately contemptuous of it, but of course a year later Merton of the Movies mopped up the country. The movies seem willing always to romanticize anything from a radio broadcasting room to a newspaper office as far as the entertainment world is concerned, but are so shy about themselves that another picture can be got out of Hollywood, which is certainly one of the most romantic cities in the world. A sort of mental paralysis came over them. Do you remember how the Hearst publicity men killed my story ‘Crazy Sunday’ for Cosmopolitan? That was in case someone should get hurt, that it might offend Norma Shearer, Thalberg, John Gilbert or Marion Da vies, etc., etc. As a matter of fact I had mixed up those characters so thoroughly that there was no character who could have been identified except possibly King Vidor and he would have been very amused by the story.
Let me repeat that this is the most difficult idea to sell but in some ways the most interesting of the three. A Russian ballet dancer finds herself in the extra line in Hollywood; they pick her out of the crowd for her good looks, give her bits of one kind or another but always on some other basis than the fact that she is a ballet dancer. This treatment of the general subject would have to close with a crash, at least I haven’t thought any further than that. It would turn entirely on the essential tonal background of the adventures of Europeans who develop their metier in a Yiddish world (only you don’t use that word except in Germany) that would be interesting to the people in the same rococo sense that the demand for pictures about places like Shanghai and the Trans- Siberian Railroad have in the American people. Combined with it is the always fascinating Hollywood story.