A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Inscription pasted in The Great Gatsby.

  Bruccoli

  TO: Sinclair Lewis

  April 1925

  Inscription pasted in The Great Gatsby.

  University of Tulsa

  Capri, Italy

  TO: H. L. Mencken

  April 1925

  Inscription pasted in The Great Gatsby.

  Enoch Pratt Free Library

  Capri, Italy

  Is Dos Passos novel any good?1 And what’s become of Cummings work. I havn’t read Some do Not2 but Zelda was crazy about. I glanced though it + kept wondering why it was written backward. At first I thought they’d sewn the cover on upside down. Well—these people will collaborate with Conrad.

  Do you still think Dos Passos is a genius? My faith in him is somehow weakened. Theres so little time for faith these days.

  Pinna Cruger is a damned attractive woman + while the husbands a haberdasher he’s at least a Groton Haberdasher (he went there, I mean, to school) + almost as gentile as Cupie Simon. Is Harlock (no connection) dead, or was that Leopold and Loeb.

  The Wescott book will be eagerly devoured. A personable young man of that name from Atlantic introduced himself to me after the failure of the Vegetable. I wonder if he’s the same. At any rate your Wescott, so Harrison Rhodes tells me is coming here to Rome.

  I’ve given up Nathan’s books. I liked the 4th series of predjudices. Is Lewis new book good. Hergeshiemers was awful. He’s all done.

  Merrit Hemminway—I have a dim memory that he + I admired Ginevra King at the same time once in those palmy days.

  The cheerfulest things in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extradordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again. Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.

  Our Very Best To Margaret

  Please Write!

  Scott

  In the Villa d’Este at Tivoli all that ran in my brain was:

  An alley of dark cypresses

  Hides an enrondured pool of light

  And there the young musicians come

  With instrements for her delight

  . . . . . locks are bowed

  Over dim lutes that sigh aloud

  Or else with heads thrown back they tease

  Reverberate echoes from the drum

  The stiff folds ect3

  It was wonderful that when you wrote that you’d never seen Italy—or, by God, now that I think of it never lived in the 15th Century.

  But then I wrote T. S. of P. without ever having been to Oxford.

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  1925

  ALS, 5pp. Princeton University

  En route to Paris

  April 10th

  Dear Max:

  The book comes out today and I am overcome with fears and forebodings. Supposing women didn’t like the book because it has no important woman in it, and critics didn’t like it because it dealt with the rich and contained no peasants borrowed out of Tess in it and set to work in Idaho? Suppose it didn’t even wipe out my debt to you—why it will have to sell 20,000 copies even to do that! In fact all my confidence is gone—I wouldn’t tell you this except for the fact that by the this reaches you the worst will be known. I’m sick of the book myself—I wrote it over at least five times and I still feel that what should be the strong scene (in the Hotel) is hurried and ineffective. Also the last chapter, the burial, Gatsby’s father ect is faulty. Its too bad because the first five chapters and parts of the 7th and 8th are the best things I’ve ever done.

  “The best since Paradise”. God! If you you knew how discouraging that was. That was what Ring said in his letter together with some very complementary remarks. In strictest confidence I’ll admit that I was disappointed in Haircut1—in fact I thought it was pretty lousy stuff—the crazy boy as the instrument of providence is many hundreds of years old. However please don’t tell him I didn’t like it.

  Now as to the changes I don’t think I’ll make any more for the present. Ring suggested the correction of certain errata—if you made the changes all right—if not let them go. Except on page 209 old dim La Salle Street Station should be Union old dim Union Station and should be changed in the second edition. Transit will do fine though of course I really meant compass. The page proofs arrived and seemed to be O.K. though I don’t know how the printer found his way through those 70,000 corrections. The cover (jacket) came too and is a delight. Zelda is mad about it (incidently she is quite well again.

  When you get this letter address me % Guaranty Trust Co. 1 Rue Des Italennes, Paris.

  Another thing—I’m convinced that Myers2 is all right but have him be sure and keep all such trite phrases as “Surely the book of the Spring!” out of the advertiseing. That one is my pet abomination. Also to use no quotations except those of unqualified and exceptionally entheusiastic praise from emminent individuals. Such phrases as

  “Should be on everyone’s summer list”

  Boston Transcript

  “Not a dull moment. . . a thoroughly sound solid piece of work”

  havn’t sold a copy of any book in three years. I thought your advertising for Ring was great. I’m sorry you didn’t get Wescotts new book. Several people have written me that The Apple of the Eye is the best novel of the year.

  Life in New Cannan sounds more interesting than life in Plainfield. I’m sure anyhow that at least two critics Benet + Mary Column1 will have heard about the book. I’d like her to like it—Benet’s opinion is of no value whatsoever.

  And thanks mightily for the $750.00 which swells my debt to over $6000.00.

  When should my book of short stories be in?

  Scott

  P. S.

  I had, or rather saw, a letter from my uncle who had seen a preliminary announcement of the book. He said:

  “it sounded as if it were very much like his others.”

  This is only a vague impression, of course, but I wondered if we could think of some way to advertise it so that people who are perhaps weary of assertive jazz and society novels might not dismiss it as “just another book like his others”. I confess that today the problem baffles me—all I can think of is to say in general to avoid such phrases as “a picture of New York life” or “modern society”—though as that is exactly what the book is its hard to avoid them. The trouble is so much superficial trash has sailed under those banners. Let me know what you think

  Scott

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  c. April 24, 1925

  ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

  Marseille, en route to Paris

  Dear Max:

  Your telegram2 depressed me—I hope I’ll find better news in Paris and am wiring you from Lyons. There’s nothing to say until I hear more. If the book fails commercially it will be from one of two reasons or both

  1st The title is only fair, rather bad than good.

  2nd And most important—the book contains no important woman character and women controll the fiction market at present. I don’t think the unhappy end matters particularly.

  It will have to sell 20,000 copies to wipe out my debt to you. I think it will do that all right—but my hope was it would do 75,000. This week will tell.

  Zelda is well, or almost but the expense of her illness and of bringing this wretched little car of ours back to France which has to be done, by law, has wiped out what small progress I’d made in getting straight financially.

  In all events I have a book of good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my my next novel. When that is finished and published I’ll wait and see. If it will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insec
urity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this constant worry and interruption

  Yours in great depression

  Scott

  P.S. Let me know about Ring’s Book. Did I tell you that I thought Haircut was mediochre?

  P.S. (2) Please refer any movie offers to Reynolds.

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  1925

  ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

  Guaranty Trust Co.

  Paris. May 1st

  Dear Max:

  There’s no use for indignation against the long suffering public when even a critic who likes the book fails to be fundamentally held—that is Stallings who has written the only intelligent review so far1—but its been depressing to find how quick one is forgotten, especially unless you repeat yourself ad nauseam. Most of the reviewers floundered around in a piece of work that obviously they completely failed to understand and tried to give it reviews that committed them neither pro or con until some one of culture had spoken. Of course I’ve only seen the Times and the Tribune—and, thank God, Stallings, for I had begun to believe no one was even glancing at the book.

  Now about money. With the $1000. for which I asked yesterday (and thank you for your answer) I owe you about $7200, or if the book sells 12,000 about $4000.00. If there is a movie right I will pay you all I owe—if not, all I can offer you at present is an excellent collection of stories for the fall entitled “All the Sad Young Men”—none of the stories appeared in the Post—I think Absolution is the only one you’ve read. Thank you for all your advertising and all the advances and all your good will. When I get ahead again on trash I’ll begin the new novel.

  I’m glad Ring is getting such a press and hope he’s selling. The boob critics have taken him up and always take a poke at the “intelligentia” who patronize him. But the “intelligentsia”—Seldes + Mencken discovered him (after the people) while the boob critics let The Big Town and Gullibles Travels come out in dead silence. Let me know the sale.

  A profound bow to my successor Arlen1—when I read The London Venture I knew he was a comer and was going to tell you but I saw the next day that Doran had already published Piracy. That was just before I left New York.

  Which reminds me—it seems terrible that all the best of the young Englishmen have been snapped up. I tried to get Louis Golding2 for you in Capri but he’d signed a rotten cash contract with Knopf a week before. Also they’ve just signed Brett Young who might have been had any time in the last two years and who’ll be a big seller and now I see The Constant Nymph3 is taken. Wouldn’t it pay you to have some live young Londoner watch the new English books. I imagine Kingsley4 gets his information a month late out of the London Times Supplement. This sounds ill-natured but I am really sorry to see you loose so many new talents when they are appearing as fast now in England as they did here in 1920. Liverite5 has got Hemminway! How about Radiguet?

  We have taken an appartment here from May 12th to Jan 12th, eight months, where I shall do my best. What a six months in Italy! Christ!

  I’m hoping that by some miracle the book will go up to 23,000 and wipe off my debt to you. I haven’t been out of debt now for three years and with the years it grows heavy on my ageing back. The happiest thought I have is of my new novel—it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that Joyce and Stien are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.

  Write me any news—I havn’t had a written line since publication except a pleasant but not thrilling note from the perennial youth, Johnny Weaver.1 I am bulging with plans for—however that’s later. Was Rings skit which was in Mencken’s American Language incorporated into What of It? If not it should have been—its one of his best shorter things. And doesn’t it contain his famous world’s series articles about Ellis Lardners Coat? If not they’d be a nucleous for another book of nonsense. Also his day at home in imitation of F.P.A.’s2 diary.

  My adress after the 12th is 14 Rue de Tilsitt. If you have my Three Lives by Gertrude Stien don’t let anybody steal it.

  Many thanks to Mr. Scribner and to all the others and to you for all you’ve done for me and for the book. The jacket was a hit anyhow.

  Scott

  P.S. And Tom Boyd’s Book?

  TO: Edmund Wilson

  May 1925

  ALS, 2 pp. Yale University

  14 Rue de Tillsit

  Paris, France

  Dear Bunny:

  Thanks for your letter about the book. I was awfully happy that you liked it and that you approved of its design. The worst fault in it, I think is a Big Fault: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it—tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name. Mencken said (in a most entheusiastic letter received today) that the only fault was that the central story was trivial and a sort of anecdote (that is because he has forgotten his admiration for Conrad and adjusted himself to the sprawling novel.) and I felt that what he really missed was the lack of any emotional backbone at the very height of it.

  Without makeing any invidious comparisons between Class A. and Class C., if my novel is an anectdote so is The Brothers Karamazoff. From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story. However the letters from you and Mencken have compensated me for the fact that of all the reviews, even the most entheusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about and for the even more depressing fact that it was, in comparison with the others, a financial failure (after I’d turned down fifteen thousand for the serial rights!). I wonder what Rosenfeld3 thought of it?

  I looked up Hemminway. He is taking me to see Gertrude Stien tomorrow. This city is full of Americans—most of them former friends—whom we spend most of our time dodgeing, not because we don’t want to see them but because Zelda’s only just well and I’ve got to work; and they seem to be incapable of any sort of conversation not composed of semi-malicious gossip about New York courtesy celebrities. I’ve gotten to like France. We’ve taken a swell appartment until January. I’m filled with disgust for Americans in general after two weeks sight of the ones in Paris—these preposterous, pushing women and girls who assume that you have any personal interest in them, who have all (so they say) read James Joyce and who simply adore Mencken. I suppose we’re no worse than any one else, only contact with other races brings out all our worst qualities. If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job.

  I’d love to see you. God, I could give you some laughs. There’s no news except that Zelda and I think we’re pretty good, as usual, only more so.

  Scott

  Thanks again for your cheering letter.

  TO: H. L. Mencken

  ALS, 2 pp. Enoch Pratt Free Library

  14 Rue de Tilsitt

  Paris, France

  May 4th, 1925

  Dear Menk—

  Your letter was the first outside word that reached me about my book. I was tremendously moved both by the fact that you liked it and by your kindness in writing me about it. By the next mail came a letter from Edmund Wilson and a clipping from Stallings, both bulging with interest and approval, but as you know I’d rather have you like a book of mine than anyone in America.

  There is a tremendous fault in the book—the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy’s attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the consequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over). Everyone has felt this but no one has spotted it because its concealed beneath elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose. Wilson complained: “The characters are so uniformly unpleasant,”
Stallings: “a sheaf of gorgeous notes for a novel” and you say: “The story is fundamentally trivial.” I think the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. Despite your admiration for Conrad you have lately—perhaps in reaction against the merely well-made novels of James’ imitators—become used to the formless. It is in protest against my own formless two novels, and Lewis’ and Dos Passos’ that this was written. I admit that in comparison to My Antonia and The Lost Lady it is a failure in what it tries to do but I think in comparison to Cytherea or Linda Condon1 it is a success. At any rate I have learned a lot from writing it and the influence on it has been the masculine one of The Brothers Karamazov, a thing of incomparable form, rather than the feminine one of The Portrait of a Lady. If it seems trivial or “anecdotal” (sp) it is because of an aesthetic fault, a failure in one very important episode and not a frailty in the theme—at least I don’t think so. Did you ever know a writer to calmly take a just critisism and shut up?

  Incidently, I had hoped it would amuse the Mencken who wrote the essay on New York in the last book of Prejudices—tho I know nothing in the new Paris streets that I like better than Park Avenue at twilight.

  I think the book is so far a commercial failure—at least it was two weeks after publication—hadn’t reached 20,000 yet. So I rather regret (but not violently) the fact that I turned down $15,000.00 for the serial rights. However I have all the money I need and was growing rather tired of being a popular author. My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it—strange to say my whole heart was in my first trash. I thought that the Offshore Pirate was quite as good as Benediction. I never really “wrote down” until after the failure of the Vegetable and that was to make this book possible. I would have written down long ago if it had been profitable—I tried it unsuccessfully for the movies. People don’t seem to realize that for an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world. When people like Hughes and Stephen Whitman2 go wrong after one tragic book it is because they never had any real egos or attitudes but only empty bellies and cross nerves. The bellies full and the nerves soothed with vanity they see life rosily and would be violently insincere in writing anything but the happy trash they do. The others, like Owen Johnson,3 just get tired—there’s nothing the matter with some of Johnson’s later books—they’re just rotten that’s all. He was tired and his work is no more writing in the sense that the work—Thomas Hardy and Gene Stratton Porter4 is writing than were Driesers dime novels.