I find that living alone in a very small town did more to restore my nervous strength than any other one thing, though I must say the months there were not highly productive.
I hope you will get something out of this letter that will be of value to you, and if there is any point on which you would like me to go further, please write me again.
With hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be seeing some point of light in your trouble, I am Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MRS MARY LEONARD PRITCHETT
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
March 4, 1938
Dear Mrs Pritchett:
Sorry I could not get word to you before you sailed.
I am out of touch with the stage in New York, but have talked to Sidney Howard and several other playwrights here regarding your suggestions for the casting of Tender Is the Night. Invariably, Margaret Rawlings has seemed a very good choice for Nicole to those who have read the book, and, equally unanimously, they have been against Beulah Bondi.
Nicole should have not merely glamor but a practically irresistible glamor. In fact, my ideal casting would be Katharine Hepburn or Margaret Sullavan, with the beauty of Loretta Young.
Oddly enough, the character of Tommy, or rather some of the mannerisms of Tommy, were taken from Mario Braggiotti, the brother of Stiano. It would be a delightful coincidence if Stiano played the part.
Thank you for your interest in the casting. They have really done an awfully good job and, in the reading, all the parts seemed very fat and tempting. Bob Montgomery out here is one of several actors who keep recurring to the playing of Dick Diver. With very best wishes, Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO DAYTON KOHLER
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
March 4,1938
Dear Mr Kohler:
Your project of a survey of contemporary literature sounds interesting. I should think that whether it should be a success or not would depend rather on its unity than its variety. If you follow what has been said about the names you mention, you could very well produce a book which would be a mere recapitulation and summary and would be out-classed by a later manifestation of literary vitality - much as Carl Van Doren’s two books on the American novel, published in 1920, have become obsolete, as well as the studies of Henry S. Canby and Stuart P. Sherman. Mencken’s book, Prefaces, on the contrary, is still very much alive.
I should think you would approach the Houghton Mifflin people with something more than the outline which you have sent me. Some of the names. I find in it are meaningless. Elinor Wylie as a novelist, for example, is entirely imitative of Max Beerbohm and others. Elsie Singmaster I never heard of. —
is not even as faintly important as, say, Harry Leon Wilson. And who are — and H. L. Davis? Why Wilbur Daniel Steele, who left no mark whatsoever, invented nothing, created nothing except a habit of being an innocuous part of the O’Brien anthology? Dorothy Canfield as a novelist is certainly of no possible significance. Cora Jarrett was a realer person. Canfield simply got hold of child education as an early monopoly and what she has to say is less important than Willa Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case.’
Does Maxwell Anderson deserve a special section? Have you read Edmund Wilson in The New Republic upon his blank verse? Winterset seemed to me a complete fake. James Ahearn is certainly a much more important figure of the past than Augustus Thomas.
In fact, your list includes so much of the mediocre, so many men who are already covered with dust, that I cannot find a line through it. If you’d confine yourself to twelve contemporaries, instead of fifty, you would find, I think, that they swept up everything worth saying. Perhaps I am wrong. Some people seem to look on our time as a sort of swollen Elizabethan age, simply crawling with geniuses. The necessity of the artist in every generation has been to give his work permanence in every way by a safe shaping and a constant pruning, lest he be confused with the journalistic material that has attracted lesser men.
Perhaps I misunderstand your intention. If so, I apologize and await an answer.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON
The Garden of AllahHotel Hollywood,California
March 11, 1938
Dear Matty:
Glad you enjoyed Hollywood. Something you said makes me fear you carried away one false impression. In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material - he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job. This is a necessary evolution that the talkies brought about, and I should say that in seven out of ten cases, your feeling that the director or producer was the great coordinator no longer applies.
It was great meeting you. Anything I can ever do for you here let me know. Best wishes.
Scott Fitz
Sid and I had lunch and he spoke so affectionately of you and of your wife.
TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY
The Garden of Allah Hotel Hollywood,California
March 16, 1938
Dear Pete and Margaret:
I waited an unpardonably long time to write you, but I wanted to see if I could manage to give Miss (or Mrs?) Hoffmannt a decent hearing here. What I have arranged, I will come to presently, but first I want to tell you what I did. I went first to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer and twice missed the head man and got no encouragement - nothing but a blank statement that they were not interested in listening to music by amateurs or even professionals. The acute cause of their attitude I soon found was that they have five law suits on their hands because they have done that, and at this moment Cole Porter is being sued for a great sum by a woman who played him her pieces and then accused him of stealing melodies from them. I then went to 20th Century-Fox and Warner Brothers and met the same situation. Next I concluded that I had better hear the tunes myself. I had them played over by a musician but didn’t think his opinion was honest - then who should occur to me but our old friend — , who had written me a month before that he was in Hollywood and would like to see me. I went to call, with the music. It was rather depressing to see — , who was so sprightly at Princeton, turned into a down-at-the-heels, very discouraged-looking pansy. He told me a little of his story - that he had been out here ten years, had written two thousand tunes (they were all scored and piled on his piano), had had half a dozen auditions and no luck at all except some incidental music that he had written for a Nelson Eddy radio broadcast and the two or three pieces that he had in the New York show, New Faces. He played over some of his own tunes - easily the best were the ones that he and I wrote together for the Triangle - finally, without its seeming to be the object of the visit, I brought out Miss Hoffman’s pieces. They seemed to me so far ahead of — , there was no comparison. Especially I liked ‘Beautiful Things,’ which has a real swing and a good lyric and, I should think, just that quality that catches on.
A friend then took, or promised to take, the songs to Paramount, but nothing came of that and, as time was passing, I thought I’d make another onslaught on M-G-M. This time, I got an introduction from my producer to the top man in the music department, Mr Finston. He seemed more practical than anyone I had talked to and I asked him what would happen if young authors got no hearing on the ground that perhaps they might
bring suit for plagiarism. I told him the number of people who had turned down my own stuff when I was young, but that never had anyone refused to read it, and tried to make him see it from the point of view of the incipient young musical talent who actually had something to offer. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t have them played over. However, he did say that he would definitely get her an audition in New York, where for some reason they haven’t got the overwhelming fear of law suits which hangs over the moving pictures. He promised me (and I am writing for the carbon copy of his letter to Miss Hoffman - and I will check on it) that he would see positively that her stuff got an audition in New York from the people with whom they deal there, perhaps a musical subsidiary of the M-G-M office.
This seems little to have accomplished after this long wait. Perhaps there is some secret trick to breaking in that I don’t know, but there was the experience of — , an accomplished musician, after ten years which was far from encouraging. It seems to be a very crowded profession. Certainly my advice to her is to follow exactly what Finston says in his letter because, though he was not especially encouraging, he seemed an utterly honest man and was trying to do the best he could as a favor to the producer who introduced me. He said also that he was returning the music to her in your care.
I will now answer letters (which I do all in great gobs every two months). The party that Peaches and Scottie gave seems a long way off now but I am glad it was a success and that the ticket matter straightened itself out. Peggy’s account of the other festivities of Christmas fill me with a vague melancholy which is not even nostalgia, that is, I would never want to go through the time of life again Peaches and Scottie are in, but I am sorry for anyone who believes as much as they must believe. There is something very special to be written about the psychology of pretty girls. Lately I have run into two who were great belles of my time and who are now ravaged with dope. The reason is that life promises so very much to a pretty girl between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five that she never quite recovers from it. By pretty girl I mean what used to be called the belle type, the type with ‘it.’ Ernest Hemingway once said that you could never go back emotionally, or, with more accuracy, sensationally; having had a sensation in the emotional sense, one would not be inclined to be content with a lesser sensation, so a belle nowadays, unless sobered by a flock of children, is liable to go on seeking the intensity of that game of playing with men. None of our colleges have succeeded in inventing anything to compete with the kind of love that doesn’t have to be paid for with responsibility.
I think Scottie at fourteen was in a fair way to a disproportionate youth. Lacking Peaches’ calm temperament, she had projected herself into the world of sixteen and, of course, was taking it all much more hysterically than a girl of sixteen would. The convent-like attitude of Miss Walker’s was just right for her. I think she caught up on her precocity by a full year and I am not afraid for her now in the same way that I was then. These are the days, I should think, when the next star on the horizon is the chance, remote but always possible, of an unfortunate early marriage or an equally unfortunate early love affair. I found that Scottie, with the one man she could invite to school this year - for the senior tea - had chosen a Princeton boy now in his last year at YaleLawSchool. I suppose it was nothing but sheer bravado. There she, when the other girls were writing to prep school and college boys, would dazzle them by producing an actual man of the world. I put my foot down immediately, because a boy of that age, if he happened to be loose in principle, could twist a sixteen-year-old girl around his finger. The boy happened to be a nice boy, but the idea was absolutely bogus and phoney. Every once in a while, such delusions of grandeur overtake my daughter - is the same true of Peaches?
I wouldn’t tell Scottie this but I am really not very concerned about whether she remains a virgin after the âge of twenty, but I think it is of the greatest importance that the girl doesn’t throw herself away for any trivial or inessential reason, and every year makes such a difference. I stilf believe in the strictest chaperonage, formal or secret (by which I mean a pretty close check upon a girl’s movements), because my theory follows Pope’s statement that Evil (I am using the word in its old-fashioned sense), first looked upon as terrible, longer looked upon as tolerable, finally becomes attractive. He said it much better, with a beautiful rhyme. Also, I am hot against a child of Scottie’s background ever having any traffic with liquor, and don’t like cigarettes either, simply because it takes up so much unnecessary energy and is such a comfort to the idler and the loafer. Moreover, if she ever takes up a sedentary profession like mine, it will be awful for her. I smoked myself right into T.B. Did you notice the recent pronunciamento about cigarettes in Time? So you see, in general I am still the old-fashioned parent.
To go back to Miss Hoffman - took one song to a party where I knew Rodgers and Hart were going to be, and had it played over. Rodgers thought it was very good, but all he could advise me to do was to try to get it played over in some studio. I didn’t know him well enough to ask him to do anything about it. So you see that this appears to be the wrong door to knock at. There is something about Hollywood, everybody very highly paid and camping on the job, which makes it harder to approach from here than if one is in New York with the magic of distance giving desirability. Not only has no one been willing to give the stuff a break but no one has been able to tell me - and that includes Irving Berlin, with whom I talked about six months ago, before I got this music - just what gets a song-writer a start. Somehow, they get involved with a manager, a lyric writer, a playwright, and a show is staged and a show clicks. They are part of the line-up and it seems to miraculously make them professionals. They don’t seem to cross that line alone in the way writers do. I remember at Princeton, Cam Clark and others used to come down and pick the best of the hundred or so compositions composed on the campus. There seems to be nothing like that in the professional world, at least out here, and it is terrible to think how many good songs go unpublished when old hacks, such as Romberg has become, continue to grind out repetitions of themselves for operettas. It simply can’t be bucked from here.
With affection to you both, and regrets that this is such a pessimistic report, Ever yours,
Scott
P.S. Been doing a picture for Joan Crawford. About one-third through. Is an original and quite a different job from the dramatization of Three Comrades. However, this time I have the best producer in Hollywood, a fine showman who keeps me from any amateur errors, and I hope to finish the picture alone. Do you remember Ted Paramore of Hill? He was my collaborator on Three Comrades.
TO MISS MARTHA FEUERHERM
Hollywood,California
March 16, 1938
My dear Miss Feuerherm:
In regard to your letter about F. Scott Fitzgerald we refer you to the following: F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Youth and Parentage - C. B. Ansbrucher, Berlin. Privately Printed.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Image and the Man - Irene Kramer Thurston. Brentano’s, 1937.
Fitzgerald As I Knew Him - J. B. Carstairs. Scribners, 1928. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rise of Islam. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1922.
The Women Who Knew F. Scott Fitzgerald - Marie, Comtesse de Segours. Editions Galantiere, Paris.
I hope that these books will serve your purpose.
Sincerely yours,
J. P. Carms Secretary
TO FRANCES TURNBULL
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
November 9,1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which
it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories, In Our Time, went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In This Side of Paradise I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional, having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing, can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming - the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it, or whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that want the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to analyze why this story isn’t salable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than Your old friend,
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 482