Don’t You Love It?
All Five Senses.
Napoleon’s Coat.
Tavern music, Boat trains.
Dated.
Thumbs Up.
The Bed in the Ball Room.
Book of burlesque entitled These My Betters.
Title for bad novel: God’s Convict.
Skin of His Teeth.
Picture-Minded.
Love of a Lifetime.
Gwen Barclay in the Twentieth Century.
Result—Happiness.
Murder of My Aunt.
Police at the Funeral.
The District Eternity.
U
UNCLASSIFIED
My extraordinary dream about the Crimean War.
The improper number of Life and the William’s Purple Cow cover beginning something.
Time: Henry VIII cut from a halitosis ad.
Just before quarrel had been talking about the best and what it was founded on.
She and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the past, but they were never sure, as her father and her grandfather had been sure. Confusedly she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get principles just by wishing for them?
The war had become second-page news.
Meeting Princetonians in the army as buglers, etc.
Diary of the God Within: They got half of it—this is the other half.
Before breakfast, their horses’ hoofs sedately scattered the dew in sentimental glades, or curtained them with dust as they raced on dirt roads. They bought a tandem bicycle and pedaled all over Long Island—which a contemporary Cato considered “rather fast” for a couple not yet married.
About three pieces of the truth (specific) fitted into one of the most malicious and troublesome lies she’d ever told. These latter are permitted this indiscretion within limits as about the only surcease they will ever find in this world.
We took a place in the great echoing salon as far away from the other clients as possible, much as theatrical managers “dress a thin house,” distributing the crowd to cover as much ground as possible.
In Hendersonville: * I am living very cheaply. Today I am in comparative affluence, but Monday and Tuesday I had two tins of potted meat, three oranges and a box of Uneedas and two cans of beer. For the food, that totalled eighteen cents a day—and when I think of the thousand meals I’ve sent back untasted in the last two years. It was fun to be poor—especially you haven’t enough liver power for an appetite. But the air is fine here, and I liked what I had—and there was nothing to do about it anyhow because I was afraid to cash any checks, and I had to save enough for postage for the story. But it was funny coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than forty cents cash in the world and probably a deficit at my bank. I gallantly gave Scotty my last ten when I left her and of course the Flynns, etc., had no idea and wondered why I didn’t just “jump into a taxi” (four dollars and tip) and run over for dinner.
Enough of this bankrupt’s comedy—I suppose it has been enacted all over the U. S. in the last four years, plenty of times.
Nevertheless, I haven’t told you the half of it—i.e., my underwear I started with was a pair of pyjama pants—just that. It was only today I could replace them with a union suit. I washed my two handkerchiefs and my shirt every night, but the pyjama trousers I had to wear all the time, and I am presenting it to the Hendersonville Museum. My socks would have been equally notorious save there was not enough of them left, for they served double duty as slippers at night. The final irony was when a drunk man in the shop where I bought my can of ale said in a voice obviously intended for me, “These city dudes from the East come down here with their millions. Why don’t they support us?”
My great grandmother visited Dolly Madison.
It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match.
From a little distance one can perceive an order in what at the time seemed confusion. The case in point is the society of a three generation Middle Western city before the war. There were the two or three enormously rich, nationally known families—outside of them rather than below them the hierarchy began. At the top came those whose grandparents had brought something with them from the East, a vestige of money and culture; then came the families of the big self-made merchants, the “old settlers” of the sixties and seventies, American-English-Scotch, or German or Irish, looking down somewhat in the order named—upon the Irish less from religious difference— French Catholics were considered rather distinguished— than from their taint of political corruption in the East. After this came certain well-to-do “new people”—mysterious, out of a cloudy past, possibly unsound. Like so many structures, this one did not survive the cataract of money that came tumbling down upon it with the war.
This preamble is necessary to explain the delicate social relation, so incomprehensible to a European, between Gladys Van Schillinger, aged fourteen, and her senior by one year, Basil Duke Lee. Basil’s father had been an unsuccessful young Kentuckian of good family and his mother, Alice Reilly, the daughter of a “pioneer” wholesale grocer. As Tarkington says, American children belong to their mother’s families, and Basil was “Alice Reilly’s son.” Gladys Van Schillinger, on the contrary—
SONGS OF 1906
Way Down in Cotton Town (Rogers Bros.).
Teasing
Coax Me
Kiss Me Goodnight, Dear Love
Don’t Get Married Anymore, Love
Waiting at the Church (Vesta Victoria).
Tale of a Kangaroo
Dearie, My Dearie
If It Takes My Whole Week’s Pay
Roosevelt and Big Stick
Princeton Glee Club
Nora Bayes and Harvest Moon
V
VERNACULAR
Man saying, “This is Jack O’Brien,” “This is Florence Fuller.”
“Sleep, male cabbage.”
“’Cause I just came home from there and they told me one of their mos’ celebrated heartbreakers was visiting up here, and meanwhile her suitors were shooting themselves all over the city. That’s the truth. I used to help pick ’em up myself sometimes when they got littering the streets.”
Freeman: Grease in the transcommission—What are you scused of?
Man on pier pronouncing dessert as desert.
Those dumguards.
The McCoy.
Modern Slang, 1932:
Pushover
Grand
Bag
Lay
Sugar
Life preserver
A Hell
A Dick
A Natural
On the Lose (not loose)
A Punk
Kee-ooot
Well you’re not exactly in the saoth or the soth or the suth or even the sith.
A phrenograstic-stenographer (Freeman).
A toomer—a tournament.
Ring’s friend: Retire, Expectorate, Wish some potatoes.
“Put it down there” for “sit down.”
Cliché: In spite of them perhaps because of them.
Obsolete expression: Confound it!
Unusual—Babbitt’s word very, very fine.
Unbeknownst.
Italian woman who stole my boat at Placid.
“Ai feel ez if eme being kpt,” said the English lady.
“Admired mentality” of Mrs. Richards.
Slang:
Branegan (party), conk (kill), klink (jail).
Too much shiftin’ of the vessels for the movin’ of the vittles.
It burns her up—in the movies.
No dice, no soap.
Comes in a pa-a-akige, so conven-i-e-n’t (ending all clauses and sentences.)
Y
YOUTH AND ARMY
Bobby’s motorcycle and cigarette case.
Club elections in 1915 were in the worst snow storm in years. Found that out twenty years afterwards, but remember chasing Sap through snow.
The forced march.
The rides to see Zelda.
The thief at Leavenworth.
The missing material.
The scene with sergeants.
Once in his youth he had been a boy scout for a month, but all he remembered was the scout call, “Zinga, Zinga Bom-Bom.”
There was a flurry of premature snow in the air and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them, he saw that they were his stars as always—symbols of ambition, struggle and glory. The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened, and the thin-brown clouds, stripped for battle, passed in review. The scene was of an unparalleled brightness and magnificence, and only the practised eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there.
Who called me Fitzboomski during Russo-Jap war?
Children’s lack of emotion as we know it is healthy.
The days of blazers and two sorts of telephones.
Scott Fitzgerald so they say,
Goes a-courting night and day.
Playing with yo-yos in the drug store, walking the dog ditto.
Dearie
Stay in Your Own Backyard
Waiting at the Church
Tropic Color
Kiss Me Goodnight
I’m Romeo
Oh, Moonbeam Light and Airy
Bamboo Tree
My Buckboard.
Alley’s razor.
Banjo lessons.
The Mormon who came to see me at Aunt A’s in St. Paul.
Everybody Works and I’m the Guy.
“Dear old fellow
“I may inform you that I received your note. But can also inform you that the place where I stay is Le Poildu and not La Poildu. Amen. I play every afternoon in the garden with a little girl who lives in the hotel. When we climbed on the top of a tall sort of thing we had a magnificent view of the country all around. Brittany is a really very pretty place. Very many laboureurs, workers, farmers with their wives, farmers and washers. You can see rocks and rocks with the night-capped waves attacking them. I hope you have the same exquisite site. I am learning tennis with a very good teacher at the Union sportive de la poel.
“Oug! Aie! there is the cat Dicky who is putting his claws into my innocent skin of my delicious self.”
There followed a portrait of Dicky “seen of face and of side” and the letter bore the signature “Iris, your delicious daughter.”
“P.S. I just left this note on Mile’s bureau ‘puisque vous me faîtes le supplice des Pruneaux délivrez-moi des gouttes dans le nez.’ I hope she will have pity.” (Scotty)
Morgan opened one of the “weekly newspapers” that Iris had made for him when she was away in Brittany last summer:
THE 100 PIECES OF NEW NEWS
India is in a bad case.
Yesterday the english king spoke of a complete defeat among the indians the defeat of Calicut is terrible for us.
We will sadly announce that Mrs. Iris Parkling’s reverend daughter, Miss Marie-Antoinette Parkling, who came from Bellegio, Italy, had to go yesterday to the doll hospital. Her arm came straight off during her school recess while she was tumbling over a pile of comrades.
FINE ARTS
The new fantasy of Miss Iris Parkling.
The well-known actress has had a fantasy these last days and has wanted to buy clay to undertake sculpture. She wants to model a head of Mile, her most complaisant poser.
Fitzgerald’s livery stable.
Jimmie and me kissing Marie and Elizabeth, and the sprained ankle.
Gave up spinach for Lent.
“Idioglossia” what Driscoll twins had.
May I take the key?
Sing Song at Yacht Club.
Candy being distributed in youth—“Oh, come on, you know me.”
You’re liable to get a bullet in the side of the head.
Foxy Grampa.
Sis Hopkins.
Mrs. Wiggs.
My lady sips from her satin shoe.
Since he rode into Brussels in a staff car in October, 1918.
It all seemed very familiar to me, probably it was like some hay ride in my youth.
Thirteen: Me: What? Did they separate the sexes at the play?
Scotty: Daddy—don’t be vulgar!
Curious nostalgia about Pam, Anne of Green Gables, etc.
Her eyes, dark and intimate, seemed to have wakened at the growing brilliance of the illuminations overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of the cooling night.
With a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder.
As the car rose, following the imagined curve of the sky, it occurred to Basil how much he would have enjoyed it in other company, or even alone, the fair twinkling beneath him with new variety, the velvet quality of the darkness that is on the edge of light and is barely permeated by its last attenuations. Again they reached the top of the wheel and the sky stretched out overhead, again they lapsed down through gusts of music from remote calliopes.
When I was young, the boys in my street still thought that Catholics drilled in the cellar every night with the idea of making Pius the Ninth autocrat of this republic.
She and I used to sit at the piano and sing. We were eighteen, so whenever we came to the embarrassing words “lovey-dovey” or “tootsie-wootsie” or “passion” in the lyric, we would obliterate the indelicacy by hurried humming.
Among the more jazzy of the themes in Annabel’s convent composition book, I found Earthquakes, Italy, St. Francis Xavier. The subjects had a familiar ring.
Father Barrow told me of a pious nun who opened the regents’ examinations in advance and showed it to her class so that Catholic children might make a good showing to the glory of God.
Young Alec Seymore wrote a story and read it to me. It was about a murderer who, after the crime, was “greatly abashed at what he had done.”
Notes of Childhood:
Make a noise like a hoop and roll away.
She’s neat ha ha.
Grandfather’s whiskers.
Aha, she laughed.
Annex rough house.
Hume against Locke.
Changing Voice.
Snow.
Hot dogs.
Hair oily and pumps from notes.
Miss Sweet’s school.
Folwell Paulson.
Each Bath.
Writing in class.
Debates.
It’s one thing to call a man.
Story of dirty shirt.
Trick show lemonade stand.
Baby’s Arms
Tulip Time
Dardenella
Hindustan
After You’ve Gone
I’m Glad I Could Make
Smiles
Down to Meet You in a Taxi
Shimmee
Wait Till the Cows Come Home
Shimmee Shake or Tea
So Long, Letty
Why Do They Call Them Babies
Goodbye, Alexander
Nobody Knows
Bubbles
Dear Heart
Pretty Girl Like Melody (1920)
Buttercup
Rose of No Man’s Land
How You Going to Keep ’em
Long, Long Trail
Mlle, from Armentieres
My Buddy
Home Fires
Want to Go Home
Madelon
Joan of A
rc
Over There
We Don’t Want the Melon
God Help Kaiser Bill
Belgium Rose
All Around the Barnyard Rag
The Letters
It is to be hoped that Scott Fitzgerald’s letters will be eventually collected and published. Those that follow are merely a handful that happened to be easily obtainable and which throw light on Fitzgerald’s literary activities and interests. The first group consists of letters to friends; the second of letters to his daughter. In most of the letters of the first group, the spelling and punctuation have been left as they were in the originals, except for the uniform italicization of titles of books and magazines and the insertion of missing ends of parentheses.
LETTERS TO FRIENDS
TO EDMUND WILSON
September 26th, 1917
593 Summit Ave
St. Paul, Minn.
Dear Bunny:
You’ll be surprised to get this but it’s really begging for an answer. My purpose is to see exactly what effect the war at close quarters has on a person of your temperament. I mean I’m curious to see how you’re point of view has changed or not changed—
I’ve taken regular army exams but haven’t heard a word from them yet. John Bishop is in the second camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. He expects a 1st Lieutenancy. I spent a literary month with him (July) and wrote a terrific lot of poetry mostly under the Masefield-Brooke influence.
Here’s John’s latest.
BOUDOIR*
The place still speaks of worn-out beauty of roses,
And half retrieves a failure of Bergamotte,
Rich light and a silence so rich one all but supposes
The voice of the clavichord stirs to a dead gavotte
For the light grows soft and the silence forever quavers,
As if it would fail in a measure of satin and lace,
Some eighteenth century madness that sighs and wavers
Through a life exquisitely vain to a dying grace.
This was the music she loved; we heard her often
Walking alone in the green-clipped garden outside.
It was just at the time when summer begins to soften
And the locust shrills in the long afternoon that she died.
The gaudy macaw still climbs in the folds of the curtain;
The chintz-flowers fade where the late sun strikes them aslant.
The Crack-Up Page 21
