(1) — The Education of a Personage (2) — The Romantic Egotist (3) — This Side of Paradise I am sending it to Scribners - they liked my first one. Am enclosing two letters from them that might amuse you. Please return them.
I have just finished the story for your book.It’s not written yet. An American girl falls in love with an officer Français at a southern camp.
Since I last saw you I’ve tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death but foiled, as have been so many good men, by the sex and the state I have returned to literature.
Have sold three or four cheap stories to Amuricun magazines.
Will start on story for you about 25th d’Aout (as the French say or do not say) which is about 10 days off.
I am ashamed to say that my Catholicism is scarcely more than a memory - no, that’s wrong, it’s more than that; at any rate I go not to the church nor mumble stray nothings over crystalline beads.
May be in N’York in September or early October.
Is John Bishop in hoc terrain?
Remember me to Larry Noyes. I’m afraid he’s very much off me. I don’t think he’s seen me sober for many years.
For God’s sake, Bunny, write a novel and don’t waste your time editing collections. It’ll get to be a habit.
That sounds crass and discordant but you know what I mean.
Yours in the Holder group,
Scott Fitzgerald
599 Summit Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Probably September, 1919
Dear Bunny:
Scribners has accepted my book for publication late in the winter. You’ll call it sensational but it really is neither sentimental nor trashy.
I’ll probably be East in November and I’ll call you up or come to see you or something. Haven’t had time to hit a story for you yet Better not count on me as the w. of i. or the E.S. are rather dry.
Yrs. faithfully,
Francis S. Fitzgerald
Hotel Cecil London, England
May, 1921
Dear Bunny:
Of course I’m wild with jealousy! Do you think you can indecently parade this obscene success before my envious disposition, with equanimity? You are mistaken.
God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo- Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it’s a shame that England and America didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art! Italy has no one. When Anatole France dies French literature will be a silly jealous rehashing of technical quarrels. They’re thru and done. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aesthe- ticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generations as the English are now.
Alec sent me your article. I read it half a dozen times and think it is magnificent. I can’t tell you how I hate you. I don’t hate Don Stewart half as much (tho I find that I am suddenly and curiously irritated by him) because I don’t really dread him. But you! Keep out my sight. I want no more of your articles!
Enclosed is 2 francs with which you will please find a French slave to make me a typed copy of your letter from Mencken. Send here at once, if it please you. I will destroy it on reading it. Please! I’d do as much for you. I haven’t gotten hold of a Bookman.
Paradise is out here. Of 20 reviews about half are mildly favorable, a quarter of them imply that I’ve read ‘Sinister Street once too often’ and the other five (including The Times) damn it summarily as artificial. I doubt if it sells 1500 copies.
Mencken’s first series of Prejudices is attracting attention here. Wonderful review in The Times.
I’m delighted to hear about The Undertaker.... Edna has no doubt told you how we scoured Paris for you. Idiot! The American Express mail department has my address. Why didn’t you register? We came back to Paris especially to see you. Needless to say our idea of a year in Italy was well shattered and we sail for America on the 9th and thence to the ‘Sahara of Bozart’ (Montgomery) for life.
With envious curses and hopes of an immediate response.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - author of Flappers and Philosophers (juvenile)
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul Minnesota
Postmarked November 25, 1921
Dear Bunny:
Thank you for your congratulations. I’m glad the damn thing’s over. Zelda came through without a scratch and I have awarded her the croix-de-guerre with palm. Speaking of France, the great general with the suggestive name is in town today.
I agree with you about Mencken - Weaver and Dell are both something awful. I like some of John’s criticism but Christ! he is utterly dishonest. Why does he tell us how rotten he thinks Mooncalf is and then give it a ‘polite bow’ in his column. Likewise he told me personally that my ‘book just missed being a great book’ and how I was the most hopeful, etc., etc., and then damned me with faint praise in two papers six months before I’m published. I am sat with a condescending bow ‘halfway between the post of Compton Mackenzie and Booth Tarkington.’ So much for that!
I have almost completely rewritten my book. Do you remember you told me that in my midnight symposium scene I had sort of set the stage for a play that never came off - in other words when they all began to talk none of them had anything important to say. I’ve interpolated some recent ideas of my own and (possibly) of others. See enclosure at end of letter. Having disposed of myself, I turn to you. I am glad you and Ted Paramore are together. I was never crazy about the oboist nor the accepter of invitations and I imagine they must have been small consolation to live with. I like Ted immensely. He is a little too much the successful Eli to live comfortably in his mind’s bed-chamber but I like him immensely.
What in hell does this mean? My control must have dictated it. His name is Mr Ikki and he is an Alaskan orange-grower.
Nathan and me have become reconciled by letter. If the baby is ugly she can retire into the shelter of her full name, Frances Scott.
I hear strange stories about you and your private life. Are they all true? What are you going to do? Free-lance? I’m delighted about The Undertaker’s Garland. Why not have a preface by that famous undertaker in New York, say just a blurb on the cover? He might do it if he had a sense of humor.
St Paul is dull as hell. Have written two good short stories and three cheap ones.
I like Three Soldiers immensely and reviewed it for the St Paul Daily News. I am tired of modern novels and have just finished Paine’s biography of Clemens. It’s excellent. Do let me see it if you do me for The Bookman. Isn’t The Triumph of the Egg a wonderful title? I liked both John’s and Don’s articles in Smart Set. I am lonesome for New York. May get there next fall and may go to England to live. Yours in this hell-hole of life and time, the world.
F. Scott Fitz
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Postmarked January 24, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Farrar tells a man here that I’m to be in the March ‘Literary Spotlight.’ I deduce that this is your doing. My curiosity is at fever heat - for God’s sake send me a copy immediately.
Have you read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check?
Have you seen Hergesheimer’s movie Tol’able David?
Both are excellent. I have written two wonderful stories and get letters o
f praise from six editors with the addenda that ‘our readers, however, would be offended.’Very discouraging. Also discouraging that Knopf has put off the Garland till fall. I enjoyed your da- daist article in Vanity Fair - also the free advertising Bishop gave us. Zelda says the picture of you is ‘beautiful and bloodless.’
I am bored as hell out here. The baby is well - we dazzle her exquisite eyes with gold pieces in the hopes that she’ll marry a millionaire. We’ll be East for ten days early in March.
I have heard vague and unfathomable stories about your private life - not that you have become a pervert or anything - romantic stories. I wish to God you were not so reticent!
What are you doing? I was tremendously interested by all the data in your last letter. I am dying of a sort of emotional anemia like the lady in Pound’s poem. The Briary Bush is stinko. Cytherea is Hergesheimer’s best but it’s not quite.
Yours, John Grier Hibben
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
January, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Needless to say I have never read anything with quite the uncanny fascination with which I read your article. It is, of course, the only intelligible and intelligent thing of any length which has been written about me and my stuff - and like everything you write it seems to me pretty generally true. I am guilty of its every stricture and I take an extraordinary delight in its considered approbation. I don’t see how I could possibly be offended at anything in it - on the contrary it pleases me more to be compared to ‘standards out of time,’ than to merely the usual scapegoats of contemporary criticism. Of course I’m going to carp at it a little but merely to conform to convention. I like it, I think it’s an unprejudiced diagnosis and I am considerably in your debt for the interest which impelled you to write it.
Now as to the liquor thing - it’s true, but nevertheless I’m going to ask you take it out. It leaves a loophole through which I can be attacked and discredited by every moralist who reads the article. Wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said that you’ve either got to be conventional in your work or in your private life or get into trouble? Anyway the legend about my liquoring is terribly widespread and this thing would hurt me more than you could imagine - both in my contact with the people with whom I’m thrown - relatives and respectable friends - and, what is much more important, financially.
So I’m asking you to cut.
1. — ‘when sober’ on page one. I have indicated it. If you want to substitute ‘when not unduly celebrating’ or some innuendo no more definite than that, all right.
2. — From ‘This quotation indicates...’ to ‘... sets down the facts’ would be awfully bad for me. I’d much rather have you cut it or at least leave out the personal implication if you must indicate that my characters drink. As a matter of fact I have never written a line of any kind while I was under the glow of so much as a single cocktail and the my parties have been many it’s been their spectacularity rather than their frequency which has built up the usual ‘dope-fiend’ story. Judge and Mrs Sayre would be crazy I And they never miss The Bookman.
Now your three influences, St Paul, Irish (incidentally, though it doesn’t matter, I’m not Irish on Father’s side - that’s where Francis Scott Key comes in) and liquor are all important I grant. But I feel less hesitancy asking you to remove the liquor because your catalogue is not complete anyhow - the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill- mindedness of Zelda.
Both Zelda and I roared over the Anthony-Maury incident. You’ve improved mine (which was to have Muriel go blind) by 100% - we were utterly convulsed.
But Bunny, and this I hate to ask you, please take out the soldier incident. I am afraid of it. It will not only utterly spoil the effect of the incident in the book but will give rise to the most unpleasant series of events imaginable. Ever since Three Soldiers, The New York Times has been itching for a chance to get at the critics of the war. If they got hold of this I would be assailed with the most violent vituperation in the press of the entire country (and you know what the press can do, how they can present an incident to make a man upholding an unpopular cause into the likeness of a monster - vide Upton Sinclair). And, by God, they would! Besides the incident is not correct. I didn’t apologize. I told the Colonel about it very proudly. I wasn’t sorry for months afterwards and then it was only a novelist’s remorse.
So for God’s sake cut that paragraph. I’d be wild if it appeared! And it would without doubt do me serious harm.
I note from the quotation from ‘Head and Shoulders’ and from reference to ‘Bernice’ that you have plowed through Flappers for which conscientious labor I thank you. When the strain has abated I will send you two exquisite stories in what Professor Lemuel Ozuk in his definitive biography will call my ‘second’ or ‘neo- flapper’ manner.
But one more carp before I close. Gloria and Anthony are representative. They are two of the great army of the rootless who Still, I didn’t bring it out.
With these two cuts, Bunny, the article ought to be in my favor. At any rate I enjoyed it enormously and shall try to reciprocate in some way on The Undertaker’s Garland though I doubt whether you’d trust it to my palsied hands for review. Don’t change the Irish thing - it’s much better as it is - besides the quotation hints at the whiskey motif.
Forever,
Benjamin Disraeli
I am consoled for asking you to cut the soldier and alcoholic paragraphs by the fact that if you hadn’t known me you couldn’t or wouldn’t have put them in. They have a critical value but are really personal gossip.
I’m glad about the novelette in Smart Set. I am about to send them one. I am writing a comedy - or a burlesque or something. The ‘romantic stories’ about you are none of my business. They will keep until I see you.
Hersesassery - Quelque mot!
How do you like echolalia for ‘meaningless chatter?’
Glad you like the title motto - Zelda sends best - Remember me to Ted. Did he say I was ‘old woman with jewel?’
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota February 6,
1922
Dear Bunny:
I read your letter in a chastened mood. My whole point was that you read the book a long time ago in its informal condition, before its final revision and before your own criticisms had strained out some of the broken cork - that, therefore, while as a critic seeing the book for the first time you would, of course, have to speak the truth whether it hurt me financially or not, still that this case was somewhat different and that a pre-publication review which contained private information destined (in my opinion) to hurt the sale of my book was something of which I had a legitimate right to complain. My specification of ‘financial’ injury is simply a private remark to you - it would be absurd for me to pretend to be indifferent to money, and very few men with a family they care for can be. Besides you know that in these two novels I have not suppressed anything with the idea of making money by the suppression but I think I am quite justified in asking you to suppress a detail of my private life - and it seems to me that a financial reason is as good as any, rather better in fact, according to Samuel Butler, than to spare my family.
I had forgotten, as a matter of fact, that those ‘Spotlight’ things are supposed to be personal. Please don’t think that I minded the Maury thing. I was simply congratulating you on inventing a more witty parody than I thought I had made. Still I was tight that night and may have said it. The actual quotation from my first draft is quite correct -I didn’t say it wasn’t.
This is a quibbling letter and I hope it doesn’t sound ill-natured. It isn’t. I simply felt that your letter put me in a bad light and I hasten to explain my objections.
As a matter of fact I am immensely grateful to you for the article and tried to tell you so in my letter. Despite the fact that I am not quite insane abou
t What Maisie Knew as you prophesied I would be I admire your judgments in almost every way more than those of anyone else I know, and I value your opinion on my stuff. In your first letter you said yourself that it was O.K. to object to the booze thing and your quarrel with me seems to be that I gave you a perfectly unaffected and honest answer when I told you I feared financial injury.
As you have a first edition of the book I won’t send you another but will give it my invaluable autograph when I reach New York. I had intended that Perkins should send me the novel to autograph first.
I think it’s too bad that you have gone to all this trouble over the article and I’m afraid I have put you to it. Anyway it’s a complicated subject and I can excuse myself better when I see you sometime next month. But I feel quite sure that if Mencken in doing a ‘Literary Spotlight’ on Dreiser had remarked in dead earnest that Dreiser’s having four wives had had a considerable influence on his work, Dreiser would have raised a slight howl. And if he had remarked that Dreiser was really the hero of all the seductions mentioned in The Titan I think Dreiser would have torn his hair - and complained, at least, that he wanted to save such data for his privately printed editions.
As ever,
F. Scott Fitz-Hardy
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Spring, 1922
Dear Bunny:
From your silence I deduce that either you decided that the play * was not in shape to offer to the Guild or that they refused it.
I have now finished the revision. I am forwarding one copy to Harris and, if you think the Guild would be interested, will forward them the other. Your play should be well along by now. Could you manage to send me a carbon?
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 466