I am glad you have had a happy summer and have been amused by such reports as your running into our Grove Park Inn friend.
Scott
TO CAMERON ROGERS
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
September 21, 1936
Dear Rogers:
Manila Galleon arrived last week. I was reminded all through of Victory, just as Conrad I suppose was reminded of something when he wrote Victory. I loved it.
I have been with a broken shoulder and there were only two books in the bad times that I could let the nurses read to me — Manila Galleon and Mencken’s American Language. I had the sense of an utterly vacant sky, without the blue of the Caribbean, sort of a yellow-white. It made me ill at ease and made me want to go back to Europe at all cost, or at least to some seaboard where the only colors were those of my own scars and breeches and the only glint that of my own sword.
Your friend and admirer,
Scott Fitz
TO C. O. KALMAN
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
October 10,1936
Dear Kallie:
Above and beyond the egotism that seems to descend upon a sick man like a dark cloud, I have been able to appreciate the kindness and friendliness with which you have come to my assistance. I do not know very many rich people well, in spite of the fact that my life has been cast among rich people - certainly only two well enough to have called upon in this emergency, the first personal loan I have ever asked for - though I have made heavy drains on my publishers and agents at times.
I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered and tried to set up a household in Baltimore which I was ill equipped to sustain. I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda (who is in a sanitarium near here, better, but still a mental patient, as perhaps she always will be) to a pool near here and tried a high dive with muscles that had not been exercised, by the doctors’ orders, for two years, and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings, so that the ball of the ball-and-socket joint hung two and one-half inches below the socket joint. It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing called ‘myoto- sis’ which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate, and then a return to the impotency of the trouble. The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. (She earned a scholarship to a very expensive school - Miss Walker’s, do you know it? She is now in school and apparently very happy.)
The nervous system is pretty well shot. You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking to keep up what morale has been necessary - think of it any way you want to; I know, thank God, you are no moralist. I know you have lent this money on the ask-me-no-question basis, but I feel I owe you this explanation.
For heaven’s sake, please try to expedite the loan. The first time in my life I have known what it is to be hog-tied by lack of money, as you know how casually I have always dealt with it.
I want to bring Scottie West at Easter and, seeing her, you will see how much I still have to live for, in spite of a year in a slough of despond.
Ever afftly yours,
Scott Fitz
TO MRS WILLIAM HAMM
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
October 28, 1936
Dear Marie:
It was damn nice of you to write me. That article in Time (not to mention the three ‘Crack-Up’ articles in Esquire) brought so many letters from old friends, ranging from such as you - and I think of you as about my oldest real friend, certainly my first love - to men that had been in my Company in the army, addressed to ‘
Dear Lieutenant.’ Thank you for your thoughtfulness in trying to cheer me up. However, child, life is more complicated than that. There has been some question in my mind whether I should ever have written the Esquire articles. Ernest Hemingway wrote me an irritable letter in which he bawled me out for having been so public about what were essentially private affairs and should be written about in fiction or not at all.
As to the article in Time, it came from an interview in the New York Evening Post written by a man who presumably had come all the way from New York to talk to me about my fortieth birthday. He spread it across three columns in the Post, with a picture of me as I was at twenty-one and an entirely faked-up picture of me as I was at forty. None of the remarks attributed to me did I make to him. They were taken word by word from the first ‘Crack-Up’ article. I saw him because he had come a long way, and I had a temperature of 103 with arthritis, after a ten weeks’ siege in and out of bed. He was an s. o. b. and I should have guessed it. As soon as the Time article came out I wired Miss Walker’s School in Simsbury, which Scottie has just entered, to keep it from her if possible, and I think she escaped reading it.
I am leading a dull life convalescing, but am planning to go to New York next month and am actually writing again after a long interval of incapacity to do anything.
Indeed, I do know Lefty and Nora Flynn. We three and Zelda (she is still ill and in and out of sanitariums) went to a football game last week. Yesterday she called me up from downstairs in the hotel to say she was in a fashion show and would I come behind the scenes. Zelda and I are going over to dine with them sometime next week. During the mood of depression that I seem to have fallen into about a year ago she was a saint to me; took care of Scottie for a month one time under the most peculiar circumstances, and is altogether, in my opinion, one of the world’s most delightful women. But if you know her, there is no need to tell you that.
Saw something of Joe with the Kalmans in Paris - my God, is it six years ago? But since then they have vanished. St Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it is still home to me; but the people that make it so are now only such a few - the Kalmans, Nonnie, Bob Clarke and a scattering of others. I don’t know what I would have to say to so many people who once meant so much to me. An amazing letter came out of the West from Bob Dunn a few months ago saying that he had tried to get in touch with me the last time I was in Hollywood. We exchanged a little local gossip by correspondence, but the trying to keep alive a friendship at long distance is a difficult business. Do you remember one time at the Cottage Club at Princeton, about 1927, when I came up behind you and grabbed you by the arms in a great crowd and said in your ear, This is somebody you know very well,’ but I might have been almost anyone, so far as you knew.
I know you went through hell, Marie, with your first marriage, and all that kidnapping of the children, and of course when my son named, I believe, John Fitzgerald, kidnapped your husband (or was he then your fiance?) I was shocked at his daring to molest you. I wrote him a letter to the penitentiary in which I said that if he wanted to kidnap anybody to leave Marie alone, because she was beginning to have a neurosis on the matter. John has been a good son to me, sending me most of the Weyerhauser ransom money, but the trouble is, I blew it in, Marie.
Well, well, for the rest of the news - my mother died at a ripe old age last summer. If you answer this, tell me how is your mother, who always daily frightened me, and for whom I also had a peculiar admiration because she somehow played the part that Alice Brady plays currently of a completely haywire person who always really had a grip on things.
I thought — was not particularly interesting but very nice. Her father is the oldest settler in this hotel, a retired newspaper publisher, and the man she married looked to me l
ike one of his contemporaries.
It seems strange to hear you say you have just moved in from LakeMinnetonka instead of from White Bear. The cities were growing close when we were young, but are they now so close together that such places as White Bear Lake and Minnetonka are the same thing?
With affection always,
Scott
TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY
Oak Hall Hotel
Tryon, North Carolina
Spring, 1937
Dear Pete and Peggy:
It was swell of you to write me and I don’t know yet how you found out where my wandering daughter was. Coincidental with your telegram came one from her saying she had expected to wire me tomorrow and is coming by Spartanburg, not Asheville as ordered, with me in the act of leaving a call for six o’clock to meet her in Asheville! Ah, me - or youth, hell, or something.
Still as I let her down Xmas I shall forgive the lapse. There isn’t really much I can do about it. She expects it to be dull here but she’ll find it quite gay. I want to get to know her again - I’m in fine shape again (for forty) - not so much as a glass-beer since January and perhaps she’ll approve of me.
I think of you often and your kindness to her in the chilling emergencies of the past year. Someday I’m going to write about the series of calamities that led up to the awful state I was in Xmas. A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself. Because of this - I mean too many anxieties and too much introspection - I’m going to Hollywood next month and extrovert awhile, do a picture on order for Harlow and Robert Taylor and then some other work for Metro if they want me to stay on. I might take Scottie there this summer.
This little town is as full of Princetonians as Baltimore and fuller of sunshine. I was never a part of Baltimore but in spite of much personal unhappiness there, I mean chiefly illnesses, I love the place and am grateful to its general urbanity and sophistication for much kindness - with your kindness to Scottie coming first. I think I like it next to any city except New York but I’m too confirmed a wanderer to have been content there.
I hope the Peacherino is as beautiful and blooming as ever and that you, Peggy, are strong enough now to do whatever you want to do. I still think of your lovely house with the June sunlight on the pool and the black-brown children being ravenously happy.
With every good wish to you all,
Ever your friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I still don’t see how you got Scottie’s address unless you phoned Miss Walker’s. I didn’t even know Sally Simmons’ father’s name!
TO COREY FORD
Oak Hall Tryon, North Carolina
April, 1937
Dear Corey:
I think you have read or heard that I’ve been in a somewhat bitter temper for a year, and that led you to say to yourself, ‘It might cheer the poor bastard up to think he’s not forgotten.’ Whatever was the impulse that made you write it did cheer me up and the idea that people have such thoughts and do something so concrete about it is the most cheering of all.
I had been sick as hell for a year and took an extra one to get over it morally for, as a child of the bitch goddess, I began trying to fight it with two quarts a day and got into an awful psychological jam. However I came back to life last January after the newspapers began cracking at me (it was rather a shock - nobody ever tried to interfere with Ring Lardner’s utterly private life, but I had myself to blame with those indiscreet Esquire articles) and decided to be an example to myself. I now admire myself almost as much as William Seabrook, Mary McLane and Casanova.
Maybe this has nothing to do with why you wrote me. Anyhow thank you more than I can say. I’m sorry our meetings have been so brief - the last at Marice Hamilton’s in February, 1931. My God, where have these six years gone? - whole months go by and nothing seems to happen. Is that just middle-age? I’d like to do a lot of leisurely things now but there seems to be no time.
Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO C. O. KALMAN
Oak Hall Hotel
Tryon,North Carolina
June, 1937
Dear Kallie:
Well, you certainly gave me a generous helping hand out of a nightmare and now that it is paid up - as far as such an obligation can be paid -I want to tell you that I’ve been constantly thinking ofwhat you did with gratitude and appreciation. What got me into the two years’ mess that reached its lowest point in the fall of 1936 was the usual combination of circumstances. A prejudiced enemy might well say it was all drink, a fond mama might say it was a run of ill-luck, a banker might say it was not providing for the future in better days, a psychiatrist might say it was a nervous collapse - it was perhaps partly all these things - the effect was to fantastically prevent me from doing any work at the very age when presumably one is at the height of one’s powers. My life looked like a hopeless mess there for awhile and the point was I didn’t want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good Goddamn.
Luckily a few people had faith in me, or perhaps only kindliness - there was a doctor that was interested and some old friends who simply couldn’t believe it was me. I hurt myself professionally no end but did no great damage to private relations - Scottie being away at school, Zelda in a sanitarium, and myself in North Carolina where I saw no people at all. And for six months (I went on the complete wagon, not even beer, in January) I have been steadily coming back, first physically, and finally financially, the that’s only just begun and I’m afraid I’ll have to go to Hollywood before accumulating any surplus.
So much for me and I don’t think it will ever happen again. I want to come to St Paul sometime this summer, probably on my way to or from the coast, and I want to be sure you’re there, so write me if and when you and Sandy will be gone to Europe to fight with General Franco for the rights of labor and the 20- hour day. Scribners, 597 Fifth Avenue, is a permanent address for me, though in person I am usually in Carolina near Zelda. I took her out swimming yesterday and we talked of you. Again my deepest gratitude.
With affection always,
Scott Fitzg —
TO CORY FORD
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
Early July, 1937
Dear Corey:
These Texas lands are like crossing a sea - spiritually I mean, with a fat contract at the end and the loss of something for a year or so. the I find that the vast majority of — s who yelp about that had nothing to lose, either talent or vitality, when they sold out - and at the moment with my play finished I’m no exception. Even Dotty’s * chief kick was, I imagine, that the precious lazybones never had to work so hard in her life. And it amuses me to see the squirming of one-opus geniuses like Lawson, Hermann and Saroyan who simply have no more to say. How simple to be a Communist under those conditions - one can explain away not only the world’s inadequacies but one’s own. After — ‘s long pull at the mammalia of the Whitneys he ought to be able to swim under a long way. He’ll be under something eke when the real trouble begins.
The only real holdout against Hollywood is Ernest. O’Neill, etc., are so damn rich that they don’t count. Dos Passos has nibbled and Erskine Caldwell, whom I admire a lot, seems to have gone in. It’s a pretty unsatisfactory business - I’m trying a special stunt to beat the game. I’m getting up at six and working till nine on my own stuff which I did before under similar circumstances when I was young. (This is confidential.) The boys who try to write creatively at night after a day in the studio or on Saturdays after work there are gypped from the start - also those who write ‘on vacations.’ Nobody’s ever gotten out that way and I’m not going to perish before one more book.
Oddly enough this book is likeParadise. Mine have alternated between being selective and blown up.Paradise and Gatsby were selective; The Beautiful and Damned and Tender aimed at being full and comprehensive - either could be cut by one-fourth, especially the former. (Of course they were cut t
hat much but not enough.) The difference is that in these last two I wrote everything, hoping to cut to interest. In This Side of Paradise (in a crude way) and in Gatsby I selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’ or whatever you might call it, rejecting in advance in Gatsby, for instance, all of the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the small focal point that impressed me - my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance. All this because you seem to sincerely like some of my work and I dare then assume that above might interest you somewhat.
So our meeting is postponed unless you come West the I’ll keep your address in my ‘immediate’ file in case autumn finds me in New York.
Yours with cordial good wishes,
Scott Fitzgerald
TO THOMAS WOLFE
The Garden of Allah Hotel
Hollywood,California
July, 1937
Dear Tom:
I think I could make out a good case for your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that such qualities as pleasantness or grief, exuberance or cynicism can become a plague in others? That often people who live at a high pitch often don’t get their way emotionally at the important moment because it doesn’t stand out in relief?
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 479