Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 473
Incidentally, I had hoped it would amuse the Mencken who wrote the essay on New York in the last book of Prejudices - the I know nothing in the new Paris streets that I like better than Park Avenue at twilight.
I think the book is so far a commercial failure, at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn’t reached 20,000 yet. So I rather regret (but not violently) the fact that I turned down $15,000 for the serial rights. However I have all the money I need and was growing rather tired of being a popular author. My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it. Strange to say, my whole heart was in my first trash. I thought that ‘The Offshore Pirate’ was quite as good as ‘Benediction.’ I never really ‘wrote down’ until after the failure of The Vegetable and that was to make this book possible. I would have written down long ago if it had been profitable - I tried it unsuccessfully for the movies. People don’t seem to realize that for an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world. When people like Hughes and Stephen Whitman go wrong after one tragic book, it is because they never had any real egos or attitudes but only empty bellies and cross nerves. The bellies full and the nerves soothed with vanity they see life rosily and would be violently insincere in writing anything but the happy trash they do. The others, like Owen Johnson, just get tired. There’s nothing the matter with some of Johnson’s later books, they’re just rotten that’s all. He was tired and his work is no more writing in the sense that the work of Thomas Hardy and Gene Stratton Porter is writing than were Dreiser’s dime novels.
However I won’t bore you any longer. I expect to spend about two years on my next novel and it ought to be more successful critically. It’s about myself - not what I thought of myself in This Side of Paradise. Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented.
With many, many thanks,
F. Scott Fitz —
P.S. This is simply an acknowledgment and expects no answer.
Italy (but not France) is full of Pilson and Munich beer of fine quality. There is less than there was when I got there.
TO H. L. MENCKEN
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
May or June, 1925
Dear Menck:
The idea is fascinating and I’ll try it when we go to Brussels in July. I’ve got two pieces of hack work to do first. I thought the Spring Flight was great - it needed some cutting tho, and I have no feeling that he has another book in him. That must have been all true. Abo I liked The Constant Nymph t but I thought The Apple of the Eye was lousy.
By the way you mention in your review of Sea Horses that Conrad has only two imitators. How about O’Neill in Emperor Jones Hergesheimer in Bright Shawl Me in Gatsby Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence (Heart of Darkness) (Java Head)
(God! I’ve learned a lot from him)
(You mentioned it in your own review, five years ago)
But his (Conrad’s) approach and his prose is naturally more imitated than his material, the he did send at least O’Neill and Masefield to sea in ships.
As ever, Robert Chambers Fitzgerald (according to Rascoe)
TO CARL VAN VECHTEN
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
Postmarked June 6, 1925
Dear Carl:
I met Fanya on the streets of this not unpress-agented hamlet, looking lovely as usual (Fanya - not Paris) and she told me you like Gatsby and had written me. The letter must have gone astray but last week arrived The Nation with your review of my book. Carl, it made me feel awfully high to have anyone whose work I admire and enjoy as much as I do yours feel that way and write that way about my book. A dozen or more people have been very complimentary about it, largely on account of the writing, but only three or four seemed to have cared to notice what I was driving at and whether or not I approached realizing my intention - but I am consoled by the fact that those three or four have been the people whose appreciation I would rather have than any other Americans. And when one of them goes to the trouble not only of writing a letter but of reviewing it - well, you can’t ask much more in the way of courtesy or friendliness. I can’t tell you how deeply I am in your debt.
Scott Fitz —
TO GILBERT SELDES
14 rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France
June, 1925
Dear Gilbert:
Your letter made me feel awfully good. Please come over! We dined with Gerald t last night and had such a good time that I Mrs Carl Van Vechten. —
must shift to pencil or my trembling hand will spread the high hint of hangover over the page.
If you get a proof of your Dial review please send it to me as I can’t wait to see the magazine - having had only three even decent reviews.
Burton Rascoe says The Great Gatsby is just Robert Chambers with overtones of Nedra by Harold Nigrath. So I think I’ll write a ‘serious’ novel about the Great Struggle the Great American Peasant has with the Soil. Everyone else seems to be doing it. Burton will be the hero as I’m going to try to go to ‘life’ for my material from now on. Best from us both to you both.
Scott
TO GERTRUDE STEIN
14 rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France
June, 1925
Dear Miss Gertrude Stein:
Thank you. None of your letter was ‘a bad compliment’ and all of it ‘was a comfort.’ Thank you very much. My wife and I think you a very handsome, very gallant, very kind lady and thought so as soon as we saw you, and were telling Hemingway so when you passed us searching your car in the street. Hemingway and I went to Lyons shortly after to get my car and had a slick drive through Burgundy. He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.
I am so anxious to get The Making of Americans and learn something from it and imitate things out of it which I shall doubtless do. That future debt I tried so hard to repay by making the Scribners read it in the Transatlantic convinced one, but the old man’s mind was too old.
You see, I am content to let you, and the one or two like you who are acutely sensitive, think or fail to think for me and my kind artistically (their name is not legend but the word like it), much as the man of 1901, say, would let Nietche (sp!) think for him intellectually. I am a very second-rate person compared to first-rate people - I have indignation as well as most of the other major faults - and it honestly makes me shiver to know that such a writer as you attributes such a significance to my factitious, meritricious (metricious?) This Side of Paradise. It puts me in a false position, I feel. Like Gatsby, I have only hope. Thank you enormously for writing me.
Scott Fitzg —
TO GILBERT SELDES
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris,France
June or July, 1925
Dear Gilbert:
Thank you a thousand times for your enthusiasm about Gatsby. I believe I’d rather have your discriminating enthusiasm than anyone’s in America (did I tell you this before?), and to be really believed-in again, to feel ‘exciting,’ is tremendously satisfactory. My new novel may be my last for ten years or so - that is if it sells no better than Gatsby (which has only gone a little over 20,000 copies) for I may go to Hollywood and try to learn the moving picture business from the bottom up.
We leave for Antibes on August 4th - Zelda and I in our car (the same one) and nurse and baby by train. There we shall spend one month growing brown and healthy - then return here for the fall. Beyond January our plans are vague - Nice followed by Oxford or Cambridge for the summer perhaps. — has been here - he seemed horribly pretentious to me and more than usually wrong - in fact it was a shock to see the change in him. I see Hemingway a great deal and, before you left, something of Gerald - both of them are thoroughly charming.
If you and Amanda come over in the spring we may have a villa big enough for you to visit us in Nice. God, I’m wild for the Riviera. Love from us to you both.
Scott
TO H. L. MENCKEN
14 rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France
Fall, 1925
Dear Menck:
Thank you for your most kind, just and illuminating review of Gatsby. I am amused at the later reviews coming in from the West, some of them containing whole paraphrases from it (your review) needless to say unacknowledged. I think it has had the effect of swinging the expression of opinion from a sort of suspicious bewilderment to a grudging, but on the whole deferential, bewilderment.
Once more I am in your debt for the interest you have shown in dedicating that much space and consideration to me.
I have met most of the American literary world here (the crowd that centers about Pound) and find them mostly junk- dealers; except a few like Hemingway who are doing rather more thinking and working than the young men around New York. Best regards to George.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
Fall, 1925
Dear Alec:
This is to ask you a peculiar favor and to add hastily that if it is any trouble please don’t hesitate to neglect it. It is the case of a newspaperman here named Harold Stearns, whom you may know, and who is down and out through, so he claims and so others claim, a sort of persecution on the part of Sinclair Lewis. To what extent Lewis has gone after him I don’t know but he came to me (he meaning Stearns) with the story that he could get no answer of any kind from the stuff he has sent the World or The New Yorker, stuff that was to some extent solicited.
He has been helped here by various people (for the last month his typewriter has been in pawn in Deauville) but he is terribly depressed by what he imagines is a sort of universal blackball against him. The favor Ï want to ask you is to find out if there is stuff of his lying unused and unpaid for in the World office. He says he’s written and written and can’t get an answer.
This is of course confidential and any answer I get from you I will communicate to no one but him. It is terribly sad to see a man of his age and intelligence going to pieces because of what may possibly be a series of accidents and coincidences. This possibility is what I’d like to clear up.
Your friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO CARL VAN VECHTEN
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
Fall, 1925
Dear Carl:
Firecrackers came and Zelda and I read it with the greatest delight. You have never done anything better than the acrobats, the whole roadhouse scene at the end and attempted seduction by the broker (character of the girl was marvelously managed). With The Blind Bow Boy I like it best of your four novels - it seems to me that this rather than The Tattooed Countess is your true line of genius - in Campaspe for example you suggest so much more than you say - she is the embodiment of New York, mysterious and delicate and entirely original, while Countess Natorini, for all the amazing and virtuosic details about her past, was really a ‘character.’ Cunnar was fine also, and a brilliant conception - the least successful part of a very brilliant book were the relations between Gunnar and Campaspe.
I wish you could personally create a new form for that sort of novel, something lying between the almost unbearable sequence of humor in Zuleika and the almost equally annoying diffuseness of South Wind. You in The Blind Bow Boy have come nearer to doing it, so far, than either Huxley or Firbank.
As ever your friend,
Scott Fitzgerald
TO MARYA MANNES
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
October, 1925
Dear Marya:
Thank you for writing me about Gatsby - I especially appreciate your letter because women, and even intelligent women, haven’t generally cared much for it. They do not like women to be presented as emotionally passive - as a matter of fact I think most women are, that their minds are taken up with a sort of second-rate and unessential bookkeeping which their apologists call ‘practicality’ - like the French, they are centime-savers in the business of magic. (You see I am a Schopenhauerian, not a Shavian.)
You are thrilled by New York - I doubt you will be after five more years when you are more fully nourished from within. I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams. America’s greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after awhile you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old, and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose. Nor does the ‘minute itself ever come to life either, the minute not of unrest and hope but of a glowing peace - such as when the moon rose that night on Gerald and Sara’s garden and you said you were happy to be there. No one ever makes things in America with that vast, magnificent, cynical illusion with which Gerald and Sara make things like their parties.
(They were here, last week, and we spent six or seven happy days together.)
My new novel is marvelous. I’m in the first chapter. You may recognize certain things and people in it.
The young people in America are brilliant with second-hand sophistication inherited from their betters of the war generation who to some extent worked things out for themselves. They are brave, shallow, cynical, impatient, turbulent and empty. I like them not. The ‘fresh, strong river of America!’ My God, Marya, where are your eyes - or are they too fresh and strong to see anything but their own color and contour in the glass? America is so decadent that its brilliant children are damned almost before they are born. Can you name a single American artist except James and Whistler (who lived in England) who didn’t die of drink? If it is fresh and strong to be unable to endure or tolerate things-as-they-are, to shut your eyes or to distort and lie - then you’re right, Marya Mannes, and no one has ever so misinterpreted the flowers of civilization, the Greek or Gallic idea, as Your sincere admirer,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO GERTRUDE STEIN
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
December 27, 1925
Dear Miss Gertrude Stein:
It was so good to hear from you again - especially as I am in the geographical center of The Making of Americans and have been so fascinated by it and have been thinking of you so much lately.
About Tuesday: We leave for Salies-les-Bains January 7th or 8th to try and cure my wife who has been ill now in bed for over a week. She gets up tomorrow but it’s too soon for her to go out as she must save for the trip and we’ve been forced to decline all invitations. But she’s so anxious to see you again that instead of accepting for myself alone I’m going to be so bold as to ask you if we can’t come some afternoon between this Friday (1st) and next Thursday (6th) - any one of those afternoons we’d be so happy to come. Can we?
Yours, always admiringly and respectfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO HENRY ALBERT PHILLIPS
Hotel Bellevue Salies de Bearn
Basses-Pyrénées France
Winter, 1926
Dear Mr Phillips:
As you see we’re in this out-of-the-way hole; taking a cure and getting very healthy. That is: my wife’s taking a cure and I’m merely getting healthy. The other inhabitants are two goats and a paralytic. We’ll be in Nice however from the ist of March on, where our address will be c/o American Express. Can’t we meet there?
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO CARL VAN VECHTEN
Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins France
Summer, 1926
Dear Carl:
Nigger Heaven is great! Your best to date, though my affection for The Bow Boy will never die. I can’t tell you of our enthusiasm, but suffice to say I read it in one night and Zelda read it the next. It seems, outside of its quality as a work of art, to sum up subtly and inclusively, all the direction of the northern nigger or, rather, the nigger in New York. Our civilization imposed on such virgin soil takes on a new and more vivid and more poignant horror as if it had been dug out of its context and set down against an accidental and unrelated background. This is a
lousy sentence but I hope it expresses a small part of our delight in the book.
Always your friend,
Scott Fitz —
TO CECILIA TAYLOR
Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware
August, 1927
Dear Cecilia:
This is to remind you about September. We’ll be having some sort of party here and then we’ll go to New York for a day or two and see some shows. So save a week for us. When is your vacation?
We’re just leaving for Long Island to visit Tommy Hitchcock and watch the polo (Zelda prays nightly that the Prince of Wales will come down from Canada), then we’re visiting some people in Genesee and back here by the eighteenth. We talk of you all so often - I can’t tell you how proud of you I am for being such exceptionally gorgeous people, or how much I enjoyed being with you and feeling pleasantly linked up with you. I know when I say how few people in the world really count at all, it seems to you a mere piece of snobbishness, but to me it’s simply a bare, cold, unpleasant fact. People have always subconsciously recognized this by letting vitality atone for many more sins than charity can. You five t are among those ‘for whom the physical world exists.’I For most people it simply glides by in a half-comprehended and unenjoyed dream. And We Both Love You.