Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 472
Amory Blaine’s mother was also an actual character, the mother of a friend of mine, whose name I cannot mention. There is such an obvious connection between her early career and that of the cook in Youth’s Encounter that I appreciate your pointing it out. You see I object to being twice blamed - once for transcribing a character from life and once for stealing him from another author. I have had numerous comments from Princeton about putting J — into the book as Thomas P. D’Invilliers,’ and now I am told that I borrowed the dilettante aesthete Wilmot from Mackenzie. ‘Spires and Gargoyles’ was possibly suggested by ‘Dreaming Spires’ but the terms ‘slicker’ and ‘big men’ were in use at Princeton when I first went there - before Youth’s Encounter was written.
It seems to me that you have marred a justified criticism by such pettinesses as comparing the names ‘Blaine’ and ‘Fane,’ and by remarking on the single occurrence of the word ‘narcissus’ in Sinister Street. You seem to be unconscious that even Mackenzie had his sources such as Dorian Gray and None Other Gods and that occasionally we may have drunk at the same springs. Incidentally Michael’s governess did not tease him about G. A. Henty.
This is the first letter of any kind I have ever written to a critic of my book and I shall probably regret this one before the day is over. I sent the novel to Mencken with the confession that it derived itself from Mackenzie, Wells and Tarkington, with half a dozen additional overtones, but there are comparisons you brought up that make me as angry as my book evidently made you. It is as if I accused Floyd Dell of being a plagiarist because both our mooncalfs wrote poetry and both walked toward a dark town at the last, whispering of their lost loves - or said that Cabell’s Jurgen is an imitation of The Revolt of the Angels, or even, to use another Tristan and Irene comparison, compared your article with p. 138 of Mencken’s Prejudices, ist Series.
Yours very truly,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MISS VAS
Dellwood White Bear Lake, Minnesota
September 14, 1921
My dear Miss Vas:
Your teacher is probably an ass - most of them are, I’ve found. Your details about me are correct but your spelling is as incorrect as mine. There were 125 misspellings in the 1st printing of Paradise.
I would enjoy seeing your review - also your novel. There is no such thing as ‘getting your values straightened out’ except for third-class minds who are willing to accept the latest jitney interpretation of the universe by some Illinois or South Carolina messiah.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Winter, 1922
Dear George:
Thanks for your note. In the same mail came a letter from Harris’ office about my play. I suppose they would be best as,.
according to Zoe Akin, Hopkins is a bad financier and John Williams is on the rocks. The play is, like most of my stuff, a very bad performance full of exceedingly good things. It varies between comedy and burlesque and is composed of three intermediate fanciful scenes strung together not too securely between a very solid first and last act.
I shall probably be sending you an exquisite novelette within the month - the best thing I’ve ever done - something really remarkable.
By now you’ve read my book and though I know it amused and entertained you I’d give anything to talk with you and hear what you thought of its artistic merits. Bunny (Edmund B.) Wilson is doing an article on me for the March Bookman in which he dissects me cruelly and completely. I can’t tell you how I enjoyed it. He has a fine mind, George, and except for Aldous Huxley and Dos Passos he’s worth all the rest of the ‘younger generation’ put together.
A long time ago when Donald Stewart first met you he wondered if you recognized him as the man whom we brought to your apartment once and who went on a party with Ruth, Zelda, you and me.
We’re coming East for a fortnight in March. I read The Critic and the Drama with the greatest interest, though I had read most if not all of it in the Smart Set. Best to Mencken.
As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
February, 1922
Dear Mr Cabell:
I feel that by asking your permission to quote a private letter I have not acted in the best of taste. There have been, of course, innumerable precedents of late, but that does not excuse it. I appreciate your exceeding kindness and courtesy.
It seems that Perkins of Scribners had heard from some editor in Richmond that you liked the book. He had tried to get in touch with that editor to see if it was quotable - realizing how invaluable a word from you might be. For some reason he evidently failed, and he wired me Monday night - or Sunday - asking me if I had a letter from you which was quotable. I wired you immediately.
I’ve had the pleasure of a three day amour with an Exquisite Case of Spanish Influenza, and like all such illicit affairs it has left me weak and chastened. I hope you are not the same.
Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
March 4, 1922
Dear Mr Cabell:
Thank you for your letter. I am tremendously sorry you followed The Beautiful and Damned in the serial because it was cut to pieces. But I appreciate the compliment of your doing so. And the final book version was considerably revised. However it isn’t worth going through again, for you, I mean.
Hergesheimer, that charming egotist, came through this swollen Main Street awhile back. He didn’t like it When do we meet?
I have just finished a comedy for the commercial stage. When do you publish another book? Please do soon as I am bored with all current fiction including my own.
Yours faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I appreciate your kindness in saying those things about the book. I cut part of the ending in the final revision, as you notice. I hope it wasn’t the part you liked. I liked the other ending but it seemed to spoil the general hardness of the book.
TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Plaza New York City
March 27,1922
Dear Mr Cabell:
Am dictating this and it is the most profound agony I have ever gone through. The stenographer embarrasses me because I feel that I have got to think quickly and in consequence everything comes in broken clauses. But I simply cannot let your very kind letter go unanswered any longer. You were very nice to allow me to place such an endorsement in the advertisements of my book. It has gone up beyond 30,000, in fact it will touch 40,000 within the week, but I doubt very much if as many people will like it who liked This Side of Paradise. I saw Mencken and Nathan for a minute the other morning. Mencken seemed nervous and tired, but Nathan is his usual self, albeit developing a paunch and losing a bit of his remarkable youthfulness. Why do not you publish a geography of the lands of your own creating on the inside, front and back covers of your next book, much as Conrad has in the last edition of Victory? I think it would be very amusing both for you and for your public, or would it, in the case of an imaginative country, appear too obvious?
Am in New York, having rather a poor time and will return to St Paul Sunday.
As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JOHN V. A. WEAVER
626 Goodrich Avenue
St Paul,
Minnesota
Probably May, 1922
Dear John:
I was tickled to write the review. I saw Broun’s and F.P.A.’s reviews but you know how they love me and how much attention I pay to their dictums.
This is my new style of letter writing. It is to make it easy for comments and notes to be put in when my biographer begins to assemble my collected letters.
The Metropolitan isn’t here yet. I shall certainly read ‘Enamel.’ I wish to Christ I could go to Europe.
Thine,
P. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MISS PAXTON
Great Neck, Long Island
Fall, 1922-Spring, 1924
Dear Miss Paxton:
As I have nothing but respect for Theta Sigma Phi it would be a mean trick for me to agree to make a speech for them. How would you like to have a collapsed novelist wandering wildly over the campus of the University of Illinois? I suggest Mr Bryant or Mr Cone as an alternate.
Seriously I’d love to do it but I’m absolutely incapable through constitutional stagefright. With appreciation of the honor of being asked, I am Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. My price for lectures is 12,000 louis d’or, or, when lecturing in Guatemala, I accept my fee in rubber.
TO MR MAURICE
Great Neck, Long Island
February, 1923
Dear Mr Maurice:
I don’t know how to apologize for my delay - but the fault is Sherwood Anderson’s. It’s an amazing book t and affected me profoundly. It reached me Friday and I didn’t get to reading it until Sunday - finished it late Sunday night - intending to review it Monday morning. Well, I sat down at nine and wrote about 1500 words of the worst drivel ever launched. My wife read it, we decided it’d be criminal to hand it in. The book is the full flowering of Anderson’s personality and wants the most careful consideration else one is tempted to say the wildest things about it.
This is the first time I can remember having failed to live up to my word on a thing like this - but it seemed simply out of my power. My review will reach you Friday. I suppose that’s plenty of time as it’s already two days too late for the issue of February 24th.
With sincere apologies, I am Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO THE EDITOR OF THE LITERARY DIGEST
Great Neck, New York
Probably late April, 1923
The clean-book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap where it rested comfortably between the Civil War and the World War. The really unmoral books like Simon Called Peter and Murnbo Jumbo won’t be touched - they’ll attack Herge- sheimer, Dreiser, Anderson and Cabell whom they detest because they can’t understand. George Moore, Hardy and Anatole France who are unintelligible to children and idiots will be suppressed at once for debauching the morals of village clergymen.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO CARL VAN VECHTEN
Great Neck, New York
Postmarked March 1, 1924
Dear Carl:
Thanks for the kind telegram. I’m always glad when anyone likes The Beautiful and Damned - most people prefer This Side of Paradise and while I do myself I hate to see one child preferred above another - you know the feeling. We both want to see you soon and are going to haul or drag you out here by ‘hook or crook’ (if I may be allowed to coin a new phrase).
Thine,
F. Scott Fitz —
TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Great Neck, Long Island
April, 1923
Dear Sherwood:
Just as I was asking the girl in Vanity Fair to save me an autograph of yours if one ever happened in there, your letter came. I liked Many Marriages much more fully than I could express in that review - It stays with me still. It’s a haunting book and, it seems to me, ahead of Poor White and even of the two books of short stories.
I don’t quite get you about Tom Boyd - he’s a great fellow, incidentally, and a strong admirer of your work. His own first book out this month is an excellent piece of work.
Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO CARL VAN VECHTEN
Villa Marie, Valescure St Raphael, France
Probably June, 1924
Dear Carl:
Your letter was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever had. Thank you for a most cheerful half hour while I basked in the warmth of such generous praise. We shall be here until November 1st so don’t neglect to send The Tatooed Countess down to the last sardonic gargoyle on her navel.
We are living here in a sort of idyllic state among everything lovely imaginable in the way of Mediterranean delights. Unlike you I have only an occasional lust for the exotic streets of the metropolis - at present I am content to work and become excruciatingly healthy under Byron’s and Shelley’s and Dickens’ sky. I will try to dig up a picture though God knows where. I have just received two furious letters from papists referring to ‘Absolution.’ But yours is worth ten thousand of them.
Zelda sends her admiration and love to you both and I do too.
F. Scott Fitz —
TO ERNEST BOYD
Hotel des Princes Rome, Italy
February 1,1925
Dear Ernest:
Your picture of me in Portraits, Real and Imaginary truly touched me. I was honestly delighted that I, or we, had pleased anybody enough so they could write about me (or us) like that. Of course it was indiscreet (you should see the letter I got today from Mother: ‘Who is this Ernest Boyd who seems to know so much about my boy?’) but it is so delicately done that I’m sure it will fill the gay cafés with everybody who reads it. It made Zelda and I horribly homesick for New York. We’d love to go shooting out into space with you and Madeleine. We’re tired of black shirts and dirty teeth and the parades of Pope — the Sixth - tho, contrary to Madeleine’s prediction, we thoroughly enjoyed St Raphael last summer. Paris in the spring, as they say!
I read the whole book with the greatest pleasure, regretting that the ‘impressions’ were so short, and liking especially A. E., Nathan, myself, Aesthete, Yeats and Beer. And, least, the critic. But God, it all sounded like home - and the $100,000 we’re trying to save over here is still about 199,000 away.
My new novel appears in late March: The Great Gatsby. It represents about a year’s work and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done. All my harsh smartness has been kept ruthlessly out of it - it’s the greatest weakness in my work, distracting and disfiguring it even when it calls up an isolated sardonic laugh. I don’t think this has a touch left. I wanted to call it Trimalchio (it’s laid on Long Island) but I was voted down by Zelda and everybody else.
Best love to you and Madeleine from both of us - and thank you for writing about me so pleasantly. I feel like an infinitely more genial soul than I did a week ago.
Scott Fitzg —
TO ROGER BURLINGAME
Bound from Naples to Marseille en route to Paris
April 19, 1925
Dear Roger:
I think that’s about the nicest letter I ever received about my work. I was tremendously pleased that it moved you in that way - ‘made you want to be back somewhere so much’ - because that describes, better than I could have put it myself, whatever unifying emotion the book has, either in regard to the temperament of Gatsby himself or in my own mood while writing it. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write. As yet I know nothing. Zelda has been too sick for the long overland trip to Paris in our French Ford so we had to catch a boat on a day’s notice to get the car back to France within the 6 months’ period of the International touring arrangement. (She’s better now - Italy depressed us both beyond measure - a dead land where everything that could be done or said was done long ago - for whoever is deceived by the pseudo-activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a corpse. In these days of criticism it takes a weak bunch of desperates to submit for 3 years to a tyrant, even a mildly beneficent one.)
- But leaving suddenly I have heard nothing about Gatsby - nothing except you and Ring since Perkins’ letters three months ago. I don’t know how many were printed or what advance orders or what notices or advertising, not to mention reviews, the by this time all that information is probably waiting for me in Paris, having been forwarded from Capri. (By the way,
will you ask Max to pass on any movie nibbles to Reynolds?)
Thank you again and again for your letter. I shall always keep it.
Scott Fitz —
TO H. L. MENCKEN
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
May 4, 1925
Dear Menck:
Your letter was the first outside word that reached me about my book. I was tremendously moved both by the fact that you liked it and by your kindness in writing me about it. By the next mail came a letter from Edmund Wilson and a clipping from Stallings, both bulging with interest and approval, but as you know I’d rather have you like a book of mine than anyone in America.
There is a tremendous fault in the book - the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy’s attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the consequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over). Everyone has felt this but no one has spotted it because it’s concealed beneath elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose. Wilson complained: The characters are so uniformly unpleasant’; Stallings: ‘a sheaf of gorgeous notes for a novel’; and you say: ‘The story is fundamentally trivial.’ I think the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. Despite your admiration for Conrad you have lately - perhaps in reaction against the merely well made novels of James’ imitators - become used to the formless. It is in protest against my own formless two novels, and Lewis’ and Dos Passos’ that this was written. I admit that in comparison to My Antonia and The Lost Lady it is a failure in what it tries to do but I think in comparison to Cytherea or Linda Condon it is a success. At any rate I have” learned a lot from writing it, and the influence on it has been the masculine one of The Brothers Karamazov, a thing of incomparable form, rather than of the feminine one of The Portrait of a Lady. If it seems trivial or ‘anecdotal’ (sp) it is because of an aesthetic fault, a failure in one very important episode, and not a frailty in the theme. At least I don’t think so. Did you ever know a writer to calmly take a just criticism and shut up?