A Life in Letters
Page 8
If you insist I will cut it out though very much against my better judgement and Zelda’s. It was even starred by O’Brien in his year book of the short story and mentioned by Blanche Colton Williams2 in the preface to the last O Henry Memorial Collection. Please tell me what you think.
As to another matter. My play, Gabriel’s Trombone3 is now in the hands of Arthur Hopkins. It is, I think, the best American comedy to date + undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written. Noting that Harpers are serializing “The Intimate Strangers”, a play by Booth Tarkington I wonder if Scribners Magazine would be interested in serializing Gabriel’s Trombone that is, of course, on condition that it is to be produced this fall. Will you let me know about this or shall I write Bridges.
Also, last but not least, I have not yet recieved a statement from you. I am awfully hard up. I imagine there’s something over $1000.00 still in my favor. Anyways will you deposit a $1000.00 for me when you recieve this letter. If there’s not that much due me will you charge off the rest as advance on Tales of the Jazz Age? After my play is produced I’ll be rich forever and never have to bother you again.
Also let me know about the Tarquin matter + about Gabriel’s Trombone.
As Ever
F Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. Thanks for the Fair + Co. check.
TO: Cecilia Delihant Taylor
After October 1922
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Great Neck, Long Island
Dear Cousin Cecie:
The pictures are wonderful—also you are a very sweet person (as always) to write me about Tales of the Jazz Age. We are established in the above town very comfortably and having a winter of hard work. I’m writing a play which I hope will go on about the 1st of Jan. I wish you could arrange to come up for the opening.
Great Neck is a great place for celebrities—it being the habitat of Mae Murray, Frank Craven, Herbert Swope, Arthur Hopkins, Jane Cowl, Joseph Santley, Samuel Goldwyn, Ring Lardner, Fontayne Fox, “Tad,” Gene Buck, Donald Bryan, Tom Wise, Jack Hazard, General Pershing. It is most amusing after the dull healthy middle west. For instance at a party last night where we went were John McCormick, Hugh Walpole, F.P.A, Neysa Mcmien, Arthur William Brown, Rudolph Frimll + Deems Taylor. They have no mock-modesty + all perform their various stunts apon the faintest request so its like a sustained concert. I
don’t know when we’re going to have a chance to see you again. Zelda hasn’t seen her mother now for almost two years and it doesn’t look as tho we’ll be able to get south till Spring.
Our Love to All of you
Yr. Devoted Cousin
Scott
TO: Edmund Wilson
Before March 1923
ALS, 1 p. Yale University
Great Neck, L.I.
Dear Bunny:
Nominating Ring Lardner as America’s most popular humorist,1
Because he is really inimitable, as is shown by the lamentable failure of his many imitators,
Because he does not subscribe to a press-clipping bureau and is quite unaware of the critical approval he is recieving in recondite circles,
Because he is frequently covered with bruises from being the Yale football team against his four Harvard-bound boys.
And finally because with a rare, true ear he has set down for the enlightenment of posterity the American language as it is talked today
Dear Bunny: Chop this up if you want. See you soon.
F. S. Fitzgerald
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. March 1923
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
6 Pleasant Ave.
Montgomery, Ala
Dear Mr. Perkins:
I’m awfully curious to hear any new opinions on the book1 so when Whitney Darrow2 or anyone else who hasn’t read it, reads it, do let me know. I expect to be here about a week or 10 days longer. I’m working on the “treatment”3 of This Side of Paradise. They’ve paid me $1000. and are to pay $9000. more on delivery of this so I’m anxious to get it done by the first.
I’ll want two extra galley proofs of the play if its convenient, to send to the managers.
I have a few changes for Act III, bits of polyphonic prose that I’m going to insert. Its good weather here but I’m rather miserable and depressed about life in general. Being in this town where the emotions of my youth culminated in one emotion makes me feel old and tired. I doubt if, after all, I’ll ever write anything again worth putting in print.
As Ever
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: C. O. Kalman4
After November 11, 1923
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Great Neck Long Island
5.30 A.M.
(not so much up already as up still)
Dear Kaly;—
I hear that you have given two seats to this nonsensical game between the Yale blues vs. the Princeton Elis, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. For what reason, is what I want to know.
Ring W. Lardner
Dear Kaly:
This is a letter from your two favorite authors. Ring + I got stewed together the other night + sat up till the next night without what he would laughingly refer to as a wink of sleep. About 5.30 I told him he should write you a letter. The above is his maudlin extacy.
The tickets arrived and I am enclosing check for same. I’m sorry as the devil you didn’t come. We could have had a wonderful time even tho the game was punk.
We took Mr + Mrs Gene Buck (the man who writes the Follies + Frolics.) This is a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauchés + actresses so I know that you and she to who you laughingly refer to as the missus would enjoy it.
Everything is in its usual muddle. Zelda says ect, asks, ect, sends ect.
Your Happy but Lazy friend
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. April 10, 1924
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Long Island, New York
Great Neck.
Dear Max:
A few words more relative to our conversation this afternoon. While I have every hope + plan of finishing my novel in June you know how those things often come out. And even it takes me 10 times that long I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of. Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged + in approaching it from a new angle I’ve had to discard a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story). It is only in the last four months that I’ve realized how much I’ve—well, almost deteriorated in the three years since I finished the Beautiful and Damned. The last four months of course I’ve worked but in the two years—over two years—before that, I produced exactly one play, half a dozen short stories and three or four articles—an average of about one hundred words a day. If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it’d be different but I spent it uselessly, niether in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I’d written the B. & D. at the rate of 100 words a day it would have taken me 4 years so you can imagine the moral effect the whole chasm had on me.
What I’m trying to say is just that I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last, or at least for the 1st time in years, I’m doing the best I can. I’ve gotten in dozens of bad habits that I’m trying to get rid of
1. Laziness
2. Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anybody until its finished
3. Word consciousness—self doubt
ect. ect. ect. ect.
I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve talked so much and not lived enough within myself to delelop the nessessary self reliance. Also I don’t know anyone who has used up
so [torn]sonel experience as I have at 27. Copperfield + Pendennis were written at past forty while This Side of Paradise was three books + the B. + D. was two. So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully + at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievment + must depend on that as the 1st books did not.
If I ever win the right to any liesure again I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I’m doing the best I can.
Yours Ever
Scott F————
TO: Thomas Boyd
May 1924
ALS, 6 pp. Princeton University
Grimm’s Park Hotel stationery. Hyères, France
Dear Tom:
Your letter was the first to reach me after I arrived here. This is the lovliest piece of earth I’ve ever seen without excepting Oxford or Venice or Princeton or anywhere. Zelda and I are sitting in the café I’Universe writing letters (it is 10.30. P.M.) and the moon is an absolutely au fait Mediteraenean moon with a blurred silver linnen cap + we’re both a a little tight and very happily drunk if you can use that term for the less nervous, less violent reactions of this side.
We found a wonderful English nurse in Paris for $26.00 a month (My God! We paid $90.00 in New York) and tomorrow we’re going to look at a villa that has a butler + cook with it for the summer + fall. I have 100 feet of copper screen against the mosquitoes (we brought 17 pieces of baggage) + on the whole it looks like a gorgeous working summer.
We missed Edith Wharton by one day—she left yesterday for Paris + won’t return until next season. Not that I care, except that I met her in New York + she’s a very distinguished grande dame who fought the good fight with bronze age weapons when there were very few people in the line at all.
I’m going to read nothing but Homer + Homeric literature—and history 540–1200 A.D. until I finish my novel + I hope to God I don’t see a soul for six months. My novel grows more + more extraordinary; I feel absolutely self-sufficient + I have a perfect hollow craving for lonliness, that has increased for three years in some arithmetical progression + I’m going to satisfy it at last.
I agree with you about Bunny + Mencken—though with qualifications as to both. Bunny appreciates feeling after its been filtered through a temperment but his soul is a bit sec—and in beginning the Joyce cult on such an exalted scale he has probably debauched the taste of a lot of people—(who of course don’t matter anyhow)—but these unqualified admirations! Poor Waldo Frank!1
My God! Do you know you once (its been a year) thought that Middleton Murray2 was an important man!
Paul Rosenfeld3 is quite a person—(he admires Sandburg though!)—+ the “Port of New York” is quite an adventure in our nervous critical entheusiasm; its nicer tho to be sitting here, to watch slow dogs inspect old posts. (I don’t kid myself Ive got away from anything except people in the most corporeal sense.)
Well, I shall write a novel better than any novel ever written in America and become par excellence the best second-rater in the world.
Good night old kid
F Scott Fitz—
P.S. Brentano’s (Paris) seems to have had some Thru the Wheat but are sold out—Max is entheusiastic about The Dark Cloud 1 + promised to send it to me. I made a suggestion about brighter color in the jacket. Between you + me the background of the first proof suggested a story of the steel mills. It should be rather rich, I think, like Melvilles Moby Dick jacket. This is entre nous
For Christs sake don’t blame Scribners because of that ass Bridges. Perkins + Old Charles would make 20 Bridges bearable. What do you mean you lost $1200.00.
The Jellybean is junk! I’ve written a fine story called The Baby Party (a bit soft but good stuff) that will appear in Hearsts for July or August.
F.S.F
EUROPE, THE GREAT GATSBY, DETERIORATION
1924–1930
June 1924
Settle at Villa Marie, Valescure, St. Raphael. ZF becomes involved with French aviator Edouard Jozan. FSF writes The Great Gatsby during summer–fall 1924.
June 1924
“Absolution” in the American Mercury.
Winter 1924–1925
Rome, at Hotel des Princes, where FSF revises The Great Gatsby.
February 1925
Capri, stay at Hotel Tiberio.
April 10, 1925
Publication of The Great Gatsby.
May–December 1925
Apartment at 14, rue de Tilsitt, in Paris on Right Bank.
May 1925
FSF meets Ernest Hemingway in the Dingo Bar, Paris.
August 1925
Leave Paris for a month at Antibes.
January 1926
ZF takes “cure” at Salies-de-Bearn.
January and February 1926
“The Rich Boy” in Red Book magazine.
February 1926
Play version of The Great Gatsby, by Owen Davis, produced on Broadway.
February 26, 1926
Publication of All the Sad Young Men, third short story collection.
Early March 1926
Return to Riviera and rent Villa Paquita, Juan-les-Pins.
May 1926
Hemingways join Murphys and Fitzgeralds on Riviera. The Fitzgeralds turn their villa over to the Hemingways and move to the Villa St. Louis, Juan-les-Pins, where they remain until the end of 1926.
1926
First movie version of The Great Gatsby.
December 1926
Return to America.
January 1927
First trip to Hollywood to work on “Lipstick” (unproduced) for United Artists; stay at Ambassador Hotel.
March 1927–March 1928
The Fitzgeralds rent “Ellerslie,” near Wilmington, Delaware.
April 1928
Return to Paris for the summer.
April–August 1928
Apartment at 58, rue Vaugirard, on the Left Bank.
April 1928
Publication of the first Basil Duke Lee story, “The Scandal Detectives,” in The Saturday Evening Post. This eight-story series about FSF’s youth appears in the Post from April 1928 to April 1929.
Midsummer 1928
ZF commences dancing lessons with Lubov Egorova in Paris.
September 1928
Return to America.
September 1928–March 1929
At “Ellerslie.”
Winter 1928–1929
ZF begins writing the series of short stories dealing with the lives of six young women for College Humor.
March 1929
“The Last of the Belles” in The Saturday Evening Post.
March 1929
Return to France, traveling from Genoa along the Riviera and then to Paris.
June 1929
Leave Paris for Riviera, renting the Villa Fleur des Bois, Cannes.
October 1929
Return to Paris; take apartment at 10, rue Pergolese on Left Bank.
February 1930
FSF and ZF travel to North Africa.
TO: Robert Kerr1
June 1924
ALS, 1 p. Doris K. Brown
Great Neck—I mean
St. Raphael, France
Villa Marie.
Dear Bob:
Thanks for your letter + for selling the membership many thanks indeed. One hundred and fifty is more than I expected. I hope some time that I may be able to return the favor.
The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yatch I mean, + the mysterious yatchsman whose mistress was Nellie Bly2 I have my hero occupy the same position you did + obtain it in the same way.3 I am calling him Robert B. Kerr instead of Robert C. Kerr to conceal his identity (this is a joke—I wanted to give you a scare. His name is Gatsby).
Best to you all from all of us and again thanks enor
mously for your courtesy + your trouble
Sincerely
Scott Fitzg—
TO: Maxwell Perkins
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
Villa Marie, Valescure
St. Raphael, France
June 18th, 1924
Dear Max:
Thanks for your nice long letter. I’m glad that Ring’s had good reviews4 but I’m sorry both that he’s off the wagon + that the books not selling. I had counted on a sale of 15 to 25 thousand right away for it.
Shelley was a God to me once. What a good man he is compared to that collosal egotist Browning! Havn’t you read Ariel5 yet? For heaven’s sake read it if you like Shelley. Its one of the best biographies I’ve ever read of anyone + its by a Frenchman. I think Harcourt publishes it. And who “thinks badly” of Shelley now?
We are idyllicly settled here + the novel is going fine—it ought to be done in a month—though I’m not sure as I’m contemplating another 16,000 words which would make it about the length of Paradise—not quite though even then.
I’m glad you liked Absolution. As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan. Two Catholics have already protested by letter. Be sure + read “The Baby Party” in Hearsts + my article in the Woman’s Home Companion.
Tom Boyd wrote me that Bridges had been a dodo about some Y.M.C.A. man—I wrote him that he oughtn’t to fuss with such a silly old man. I hope he hasn’t—you don’t mention him in your letter. I enjoyed Arthur Trains1 story in the Post but he made three steals on the 1st page—one from Shaw (the Arabs remark about Christianity) one from Stendahl + one I’ve forgotten. It was most ingeniously worked out. I never could have handled such an intricate plot in a thousand years. War + Peace came—many thanks + for the inscription too. Don’t forget the clippings. I will have to reduce my tax in Sept.