Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 477
With the most cordial good wishes,
Scott Fitzgerald
TO ARNOLD GINGRICH
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 8, 1935
Dear Arnold:
Scottie was delighted to get the check from Abramson. I don’t know what in God’s name he wants it for but he’s welcome to it. It’s a nice little piece for that age so you have pleased her immensely and don’t reproach yourself.
As to health, the body had been gradually sliding toward annihilation for two years but the process didn’t get acute until about six months ago, and when it did, it went fast. I was doing my stuff on gin, cigarettes, bromides, and hope. Finally, the stuff itself was getting rather watery so I decided to get away while I was still on my feet. I laid up, or rather down, in Tryon, North Carolina, recuperated quickly, decided to quit drinking for a few years (which has honestly been no trouble so far) and am back here feeling quite myself t I tell you these dull details at length because your letter seemed really interested, and an inquiry about health is practically irresistible at my age.
I’ve followed the career of Cast Down the Laurel with interest. You certainly got the top press and I was gratified. (Finished Part III by the way and like it best of all!)
Will be here till heaven knows when, except possibly a short Easter trip somewhere with my daughter.
Ever yours,
Scott Fitz
P.S. I haven’t forgotten that I owe you a $200.00 article, but I am sewed up with S.E.P. fiction for a few weeks more. P.S. 2. Again let me tell you that I appreciate that nice little compliment to Scottie about the poem.
TO ARNOLD GINGRICH
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 11,1935
Dear Arnold:
That was a damn nice letter to write me, but, my God, I have suddenly reached a change of life in which everything I have written seems terrible, an odd state of things because usually I pore over my own stuff crying aloud from time to time in ecstasy, “What a man!’ I don’t like anybody else’s work either. I wish there was something to do except read. Women and liquor take up so much time and get you into so much trouble. I wish I liked music like you do but it simply makes me want to howl when certain notes are struck.
Esquire holds up beautifully but my dog story was rotten, I have two other short plots which I swear I will do for you within the next two months. I still owe you one. Your literary plans are frightening but of course everybody is always behind; still, it is exceptional to be so particularly far behind.
Best wishes always,
Scott Fitz
TO ANDREW TURNBULL
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
Summer, 1935
Dear Andrew:
Thanks for remembering me with a letter on Frances’ new typewriter. Haven’t seen you to really talk for such a long time that I scarcely know you except thru Scottie. She tells me you are a low-lifer and in trouble with the police for passing some of the Weyerhauser kidnap jack but I say, ‘Don’t believe it - Andrew is all right. There is nothing the matter with the boy except his character, environment, family, body, mind, past and future, and he will probably turn out O.K. in the end.’ But what an end!
So far as Constable is concerned - I don’t want you to run him down. He’s all right - not as good as his substitute Rulon-Miller but all right. And I’m glad. In fact I got him elected captain - I came into the room in a blackbeard disguise during the conclave and pled with them. ‘See here,’ I said, ‘a good back hasn’t come out of Gilman since Slagle, and they’re starving for somebody to admire, them kids are. Pretty soon they’ll begin to turn to dolls like “Apples” Fitzpatrick and “Mozart” Hopney -’ but I stopped myself at this juncture. I enclose Fritz Crisler’s answer.*
Always your friend,
Scott Fitz —
TO JULIAN STREET
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Summer, 1935
Dear Street:
Thanks for your letter - I mean really thanks. It was a most generous gesture and came at a time when I was wondering if anyone I respected read my stories - not that exactly, but if they liked them or if I was losing my grip in that medium - that is, of writing ‘high-priced’ stories and still having them make sense. It was easier when I was young and believed in things and hoped that life might be a happy matter for some people. But as you learn that happiness is a prerogative of the perennial children of this world, and not too many of them, it becomes increasingly difficult.
Again thanks - my mind goes back often to several pleasant afternoons in Paris with you.
Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MARGARET CASE HARRIMAN
Hotel Stafford Baltimore,
Maryland
August, 1935
Anyhow I knew later that you knew all this. I started to come to New York yesterday afternoon, to see you, because I thought you’d think I’d run out on you, instead of on my own wretched state of mind and health (not a bit helped by a three-hour session with Zelda’s doctors), got as far as Philadelphia, phoned from there to the Algonquin to change my forwarding address to The Stafford instead of my house, and took the train back to Baltimore. When I see you again I want everything to be right - even if I find you engrossed in a love affair with Geo V. and have no time for me.
I am still swollen up like a barrel but have reduced my beer consumption to nine bottles today. My spots are fading, but I still have a faint hope they may turn out to be leprosy and end my exigent private life forever so I can go on writing unperturbed.
Sweet Jesus! They have now disappeared from the torso and appeared on the sides of my neck! The end has come! Oh, if I had but known!
While I think of it-in regard to Joe Hergesheimer. Of course he is more established than I am, in the same way that Hugh Walpole is more ‘established’ than D. H. Lawrence - established with whom? And I like his talent in half a dozen fine scenes and don’t compare Walpole to him intellectually. But it is simply another sort of writing. Almost everything I write in novels goes, for better or worse, into the subconscious of the reader. People have told me years later things like ‘The Story of Benjamin Button’ in the form of an anecdote, having long forgotten who wrote it. This is probably the most egotistic thing about my writing I’ve ever put into script or even said (it’s one of those matters like the question of being a 1.1. that has to be left to demonstration - but in the former case literary the matter takes a spread of years). Everyone who has read Java Head knows that Hergesheimer wrote it - even those who remember a fairly novel torch cry from Cytherea, ‘I want to be outraged,’ will remember Hergesheimer. But his two highest flights, the only two that really became part of the conscience of our race, probably wouldn’t be remembered. The awful loneliness of the girl and the man in the forest in Episode I of the Three Black Pennies (the rest of the 3 legged thing was n g. pretentious and superimposed form) -
and the other was the burning of Linda’s mother’s hair in a permanent.
Surely that is a very mild contribution to have made to the human consciousness 1
This letter is getting as long as the other. I remember so many things you said - about how New Yorkers’ lives were spaced to have always something, there was no time left for loneliness - oh, there’s so much to hear you say, no matter how much I’d be cynical about -
Affectionately,
Scott
I may be North again in three weeks -I must go to Carolina first and write one story or two.
Postscript: In the morning.
I sent a telegram. I feel so sick - I’m lying in a gallon of sweat as I write this - that I’d call a doctor except I’ve been through this before and would be ashamed to ask him what to do when I know! I hope the telegram was coherent. Will try to lie here and discipline myself and note down what goes thru
my head in fever and make something out of these lost three days.
And I can all too well see us sitting together in ‘one of those outdoor cafés or whatever they call them.’
Whatever they call them!
TO JAMES BOYD
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina
August, 1935
Dear Jim:
Long Hunt came. I read it immediately. I liked it - it has the same quality of all your books, and yourself is in it. (To digress for a minute - I’ve had several clippings lately that found qualities in common between your work and mine. I was trying to think what they were, for God knows our subject matter, pasts, etc., have been miles apart, but I think I know - it’s a sort of nostalgic sadness that runs through them. I don’t know whether it’s because we both read Keats a lot when we were young, or because we neither of us have been entirely well men throughout a large part of our maturity but there is undoubtedly a similarity of mood between The Dark Shore and Tender Is the Night. God what a parenthesis.)
Anyhow Long Hunt is a haunting book. I have quarrels with it as I have with every book ever written, including one’s own, of course, but I like it because of its sharp individuality that follows it through the - wait a minute, let me start that sentence over. You have a strong sense of the common good, the common weal, whether in tribes, frontier cities, ‘society,’ etc., but the individuality never deserts you. They are both you.
I have just emerged not totally unscathed, I’m afraid, from a short violent love affair which will account for the somewhat sentimental cadence of this letter and for the lack of ink in the vicinity.It’s no one I ever mentioned to you but it was in the bag when I came to Southern Pines and I had done much better to let it alone because this was scarcely a time in my life for one more emotion. Still it’s done now and tied up in cellophane and - and maybe someday I’ll get a chapter out of it. God, what a hell of a profession to be a writer. One is one simply because one can’t help it. Much better to follow the Long Hunt.
With regards and good wishes to you both - hope we meet again this summer. You write a nice letter -I wish I did.
Your Friend, Scott Fitzg TO —
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina
Early September, 1935
This is going to be as tough a letter to read as it is to write. When I was young I found a line in Samuel Butler’s Notebooks - the worst thing that can happen to a man is the loss of his health, the second worst the loss of his money. All other things are of minor importance.
This is only a half truth but there are many times in life when most of us, and especially women, must live on half truths. The utter synthesis between what we want and what we can have is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my youth when I had it, or thought I did.
The point of the Butler quotation is that in times of unhap- piness and emotional stress that seemed beyond endurance, I used it as a structure, upon which to build up a hierarchy of comparative values:
- — This comes first.
- — This comes second.
This is what you, — , are not doing!
Your charm and the heightened womanliness that makes you attractive to men depends on what Ernest Hemingway once called (in an entirely different connection) ‘grace under pressure.’ The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them makes that tensity in you that is the secret of all charm - when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you become just another victim of self-indulgence? - breaking down the solid things around you and, moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable? - imagine having to have had to call in Doctor Cole in this matter! The indignity! I have plenty of cause to be cynical about women’s nervous resistance, but frankly I am concerned with my misjudgment in thinking you were one of the strong - and I can’t believe I was mistaken.
The tough part of the letter is to send you this enclosure - which you should read now a loving, dependent letter from Zelda -
- — now you’ve read it?
There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them - and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty. When people get mixed up they try to throw out a sort of obscuring mist, and then the sharp shock of a fact - a collision seems to be the only thing to make them sober- minded again. You once said, ‘Zelda is your love!’ (only you said ‘lu-uv’). And I gave her all the youth and freshness that was in me. And it’s a sort of investment that is as tangible as my talent, my child, my money. That you had the same sort of appeal to me, deep down in the gut, doesn’t change the other.
The harshness of this letter will have served its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence outside you - and in doing so remind you that you have an existence outside of me. I don’t belittle your fine intelligence by supposing that anything written here need be said, but I thought maybe the manner of saying it might emphasize those old dull truths by which we live. We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like a lot of dropped trays.
- — You have got to be good.
- — Your sense of superiority depends upon the picture of yourself as being good, of being large and generous and all-comprehending, and just and brave and all-forgiving. But if you are not good, if you don’t preserve a sense of comparative values, those qualities turn against you - and your love is a mess and your courage is a slaughter.
TO LAURA GUTHRIE
Hotel Stafford
Baltimore,
Maryland
September 23, 1935
Dear Laura:
The news from the West is pretty terrible -I have seen plenty of people disappointed in love, from old maids who thought they had lost their only chance, to — who tried to kill herself when — threw her over - but I never saw a girl t who had so much take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more, so it could scarcely be classed even as a disappointment - merely one of these semi-tragic facts that must be faced. It’s very strange and sad. I have nothing from her except the wire.
For myself all goes well. I woke up on the train after a fine sleep, came to the hotel and went to work with Mrs Owens before noon. We discussed all the ‘ifs’ and will decide nothing before a week. Scottie arrived like a sun goddess at 3 o’clock, all radiant and glowing. We had a happy evening walking and walking the dark streets. The next morning she was invited to visit in the country for the weekend and I continued my picking up of loose ends, first Zelda - she was fine, almost herself, has only one nurse now and has no more intention of doing away with herself. It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have even now, closer to her than to any other human being. This is not a denial of other emotions - oh, you understand.
I have stopped all connections with M. Barleycorn. The eczema is almost gone but not quite. Baltimore is warm but pleasant. I love it more than I thought - it is so rich with memories - it is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up to-
gether under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought and not melancholy at all.
Scott
TO JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
Baltimore,
Maryland
Probably Fall, 1935
Dear Joe:
You talked to someone who didn’t like this book - I don’t know who, or why they didn’t. But I could tell in the Stafford Bar that afternoon when you said that it was ‘almost impossible to write a book about an actress’ that you hadn’t read it thru because the actress fades out of it in the first third and is only a catalytic agent.
Sometime will you open it at the middle, perhaps at page 155, and read on
for five or ten minutes -? If it were not for my sincere admiration for your judgment I would forego this plea. You were not the only one repelled by the apparent triviality of the opening - I would like this favorite among my books to have another chance in the crystal light of your taste.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Page 155-et seq.
TO JULIAN STREET
Cambridge Arms Apartments 1 East 34th StreetBaltimore,
Maryland
February 24, 1936
Dear Mr Street:
That was an awfully nice letter. Like the other it has made me think that you are indeed a friend even though we have seldom met. There is a third article which completes the trilogy of depression Of course now that things seem a little brighter, or at least the intensity of that despair is fading, I can see that the writing of them was a sort of catharsis but at the time of writing them what I said seemed absolutely real. And may I add that this is no claim to being completely out of the woods except that I would not be inclined to write that way again under the present circumstances. I see, too, that an unfriendly critic might damn the series as the whining of a spoilt baby, but in that case so is most poetry the complaints of the eternally youthful thing that persists in the writer and merely the fact that this is prose separates it from a great many of the mutterings of Shelley, Stephen Crane and Verlaine. I am not comparing this in quality with great poems of lamentation. I am simply saying that it is not essentially different in mood.