Thanks immensely for the Henry James which I thought was wonderful and which is difficult reading as it must have been to write and for “At Sea.”1
The London press on my book has been spotty but the London Times gave it a good review as did G. B. Stern in The Daily Telegraph and so did The Manchester Guardian and The Spectator and those I guess are the four most important ones in England and I got a column in each of them. A letter says that it hasn’t reached a thousand copies yet.
I hope you’ll be down here soon. It was rather melancholy to think of “Welbourne”2 being closed for the winter, but the last time I saw Elizabeth she seemed quite reconciled at visiting here and there, though such a prospect would drive me nuts. Hope you have sent off the carbon of the Table of Contents.
Best ever,
Scott
TO: Harold Ober
CC—incomplete letter. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
December 8, 1934.
Dear Harold:
After rereading your letter there were some things I felt hadn’t been sufficiently answered. The first is that I have a deep suspicion that you and Max got together at some point and decided I needed disciplining. Now I know of my fondness for you both and assume that it is reciprocated and I know also that when one man is in debt to another he is rather helpless in such matters. Nevertheless, the assumption that all my troubles are due to drink is a little too easy. Gliding over my domestic difficulties and my self indulgence on that score and not deciding which one has caused the trouble—whether the hen preceeded the egg or the egg preceeded the hen—I want to get down to a few facts: a compact “apologia pro sua vita” after all the horrors in Montgomery and the winter of ’30 and ’31, the return of Zelda’s trouble, attacked by the family, etc (and you will find that this coincides almost exactly with my remissness in getting out MSS on specification. It became apparent to me that my literary reputation, except with the Post readers, was at its very lowest ebb. I was completely forgotten and this fact was rubbed in by Zelda’s inadvertently written book. From that time on until early this spring my chief absorption was to get my book published at any cost to myself and still manage to keep the ball rolling. With yours and Max’s help and some assistance from mother the thing was accomplished but at the end it left me in the black hole of Calcutta, mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and perhaps, morally exhausted. There seemed no time or space for recuperation. My expedition to Bermuda was a wash-out because of the pleurisy; Zelda collapsed again shortly after the holidays. The necessary “filling up” that a writer should be able to do after great struggles was impossible. No sooner did I finish the last galley on the last version of the last proof of the book proof of “Tender is the Night” than it was necessary to sit down and write a Post story.
Of course any apologia is necessarily a whine to some extent, a man digs his own grave and should, presumably lie on it, and I know that the fault for this goes back to those years, which were really years of self-in-
TO: Gertrude Stein
TLS, 1 p. Yale University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
December 29, 1934.
Dearest Gertrude Stein:
It was a disappointment to think that you would not be here for another meeting. I was somewhat stupid-got with the Christmas spirit, but I enjoyed the one idea that you did develop and, like everything else you say, it will sing in my ears long after everything else about that afternoon is dust and ashes. You were the same fine fire to everyone who sat upon your hearth—for it was your hearth, because you carry home with you wherever you are—a home before which we have all always warmed ourselves.
It meant so much to Zelda, giving her a tangible sense of her own existence, for you to have liked two of her pictures enough to want to own them. For the other people there, the impression was perhaps more vague, but everyone felt their Christmas eve was well spent in the company of your handsome face and wise mind—and sentences “that never leak.”1
All affection to you and Alice,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO: John Peale Bishop
RTLS, 6pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,
January 30, 1935
Dear John:
Your book1 had an extraordinary effect on me. Let me be frank to say that I took it up with some misgivings due to the fact that I felt that you had decided to deal with somewhat drab material, and that to make it colorful you might be inclined to lean over into melodrama—but more of that later. From the first I got completely under the spell of the exquisite prose, the descriptions of the Shenandoah country and, as one by one, the characters began to unfold, the whole scene became tense and exciting. I think the way that you built up the character of Marston on the foundation of old Mason was fine—contrary to Ernest’s dictum as to synthetic characters not being plausible.
Charlie emerges as an almost heroic figure early in the book, your young narrator is sympathetic but suffers insomuch as he partakes of the vague artist-as-a-young-man quality that distinguishes our time from the Werther-Byron-Stendahl character of a hundred years ago.
Virginia is the least achieved character to me. There are the fine passages describing her bedroom hysteria after the event, but, because it was never clear in your own mind exactly how she was, the courtroom scene in which she appeared did not hang fire with the intensity of similar scenes in High Wind in Jamaica or An American Tragedy or Sanctuary.
Your minor characters were fine, the comic aunt, the nigger pansy, the decayed Job’s counsellor (female), the ghost of the poetic judge—all in all, the book is packed full of beauty and wisdom and richness of perception. I read through the first half in one night and was so excited that I had to call up somebody (it turned out to be Elizabeth Lemmon) to tell them how much I liked it, how good it was, and how delighted I was that it was good!
Yet when I finished the book there was a certain sense of unfulfillment and now I am going to permit myself to play papa for a moment:
When your heart was in poetry your inclination was to regard prose fiction as merely a stop-gap, a necessary nuisance. Time showed you the error of that early evaluation and it cost you a pretty penny in years. There are things in this book which are still typical of one who cannot light his way around and who has got to, for these are the years for you during which the best amunition has to be fired off. Let me list, not too categorically, what I consider the faults of execution in the opus:
First, conscientiously you must try to cut all traces of other people out of yourself. If you were twenty-one it wouldn’t matter; it was all right for Tom Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel to make one chapter practically a parody of a chapter in Ulysses. It was forgivable for me to have done an equivalent thing half a dozen times in This Side of Paradise, but for anybody over forty to do it is simply not in the picture of one who has to make himself a personality. Vide: page 148.
Frank Norris, speaking of Kipling, said “the little colonial, to whose pipe we must all dance”—but by that general admission of the tremendous power of certain stylists he announced that he, for one, would fight shy of any effect that he might gain by using their rhythms to cradle his ideas or to fill gaps with reminiscent echolalia. Several times I saw patterns in this book which derived background and drama from Faulkner, or cadence from Hemingway and each time you might have produced something much stronger by having more of a conscience, by fighting against that tendency, cutting out the passage no matter how satisfactory it may have been in itself, and building up the structure with something that is yourself. In any case, that has been my experience, and I pass it on to you for what it’s worth.
Let’s call that the first point—there are only two. The second is a matter of purely structure. You once wrote me about Conrad’s ability to build his characters into such a reality, commonplace reality, th
at any melodrama that afterwards occurred would be palatable. The first half of your book is so heavy with stimuli and promises, that the later catastrophe of the rape is minimized—both in itself and in its consequences. Charlie’s whole wild day should have been telescoped and much cut, insofar as the intervening episodes are concerned, such as the bathers hearing the shots. The title should not have given away so much of the plot. You had put out so many leads by that time that the reader was practically expecting the world war and the actual fact that Charlie violated a spinster is anticlimatical as is her ensuing denunciation of him. When you plant a scene in a book the importance of the scene cannot be taken as a measure of the space it should occupy, for it is entirely a special + particular artistic problem. If Dreiser, in The American Tragedy; plans to linger over the drowning in upper New York well and good, but I could tell you plenty books in which the main episode, around which swings the entire drama, is over and accomplished in four or five sentences.
There is, after all, a third point. I think the book is a little too rough. The insistence on sex-in-the-raw occupies more space than the phenomenun usually does in life. Insofar as this is the story of a boy’s awakening to the world of passion, it is justified, but when you launch yourself into an account of the brutal fate that haunts us the balance is not what it should be. Much of the testimony in the trial seemed to be arbitrarily introduced from Krafft Ebing.1
Now as a peroration let me congratulate you again. It is beautifully made, beautifully written and one of your three characters emerges as a creation. I liked Charlie, and would like to have met him, and he will stay with me when most of the fictional history of many years is forgotten. I congratulate you will all my heart.
With best to you both,
Scott
P.S. Aside from the fun of the above strictures it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the word “demean” does not mean “debase.” The phrase “to demean” means only “to conduct one’s self” and does not imply that the conduct is either good or bad. It is a common error. Other quibbles: On the jacket the Shenandoah Valley is placed in tidewater Virginia and the story in the 90s. When did people roll around so casually in cars in the late 90s? It seems to me that you would be justified in asking Max to correct these errors in further printings.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 4 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
March 11, 1935.
Dear Max:
The second annoyance to you in two days—pretty soon I’m going to be your most popular author. (By the way we had sort of a Scribner congerie here last night. Jim Boyd1 and Elizabeth2 came to supper and George Calverton3 dropped in afterwards. Your name came up frequently and you would have probably wriggled more than at Wolfe’s dedication.4 To prolong this parenthesis unduly I am sorry I mentioned Tom’s book. I hope to God I won’t be set up as the opposition for there are fine things in it, and I loved reading it, and I am delighted that it’s a wow, and it may be a bridge for something finer. I simply feel a certain disappointment which I would, on no account, want Tom to know about, for, responding as he does to criticism, I know it would make us life long enemies and we might do untold needless damage to each other, so please be careful how you quote me. This is in view of Calverton’s saying he heard from you that I didn’t like it. It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on a bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in “A Farewell to Arms.” If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled. I would give anything if I hadn’t had to write Part III of “Tender is the Night” entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference. Even Ernest commented on sections that were needlessly included and as an artist he is as near as I know for a final reference. Of course, having struggled with Tom Wolfe as you did this is old hat to you. I will conclude this enormous parenthesis with the news that Elizabeth has gone to Middleburg to help Mrs. White open up her newly acquired house.)
This letter is a case of the tail (the parenthesis) wagging the dog. Here is the dog. A man named John S. Martens writes me wanting to translate “Tender is the Night” or “This Side of Paradise” or “The Great Gatsby” into Norwegian. He has written Scribner’s and met the same blank wall of silence that has greeted me about all publishing of my books in other countries. I am quite willing to handle continental rights directly but I cannot do it when I do not know even the name of the publisher of my books, having never had copies of them or any information on that subject. Isn’t there somebody in your office who is especially delegated to seeing to such things? It is really important to me and if I should write a book that had an international appeal it would be of great advantage to have a foothold with translators and publishers in those countries. All I want from you is the status of “The Great Gatsby” in Scandanavia, Germany, etc. and a word as to whether I shall go ahead and make arrangements myself for the future in that regard.
I’d be glad to get a dozen or so copies of “Taps at Reveille” as soon as available.
Ever yours,
Scott
P.S. I haven’t had a drink for almost six weeks and haven’t had the faintest temptation as yet. Feel fine in spite of the fact that business affairs and Zelda’s health have never been worse.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 3 pp. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 15, 1935.
Dear Max:
You don’t say anything about “Taps” so I gather it hasn’t caught on at all. I hope at least it will pay for itself and its corrections. There was a swell review in The Nation1; did you see it?
I went away for another week but history didn’t repeat itself and the trip was rather a waste. Thanks for the message from Ernest. I’d like to see him too and I always think of my friendship with him as being one of the high spots of life. But I still believe that such things have a mortality, perhaps in reaction to their very excessive life, and that we will never again see very much of each other. I appreciate what he said about “Tender is the Night.” Things happen all the time which make me think that it is not destined to die quite as easily as the boys-in-a-hurry prophesied. However, I made many mistakes about it from its delay onward, the biggest of which was to refuse the Literary Guild subsidy.
Haven’t seen Beth1 since I got back and am calling her up today to see if she’s here. I am waiting eagerly for a first installment of Ernest’s book.2 When are you coming south? Zelda, after a terrible crisis, is somewhat better. I am, of course, on the wagon as always, but life moves at an uninspiring gait and there is less progress than I could wish on the Mediaeval series3—all in all an annoying situation as these should be my most productive years. I’ve simply got to arrange something for this summer that will bring me to life again, but what it should be is by no means apparent.
About 1929 I wrote a story called “Outside the Cabinet Maker’s” which ran in the Century Magazine. I either lost it here or else sent it to you with the first batch of selected stories for “Taps” and it was not returned. Will you (a) see if you’ve got it? or (b) tell me what and where the Century company is now and whom I should address to get a copy of the magazine?
I’ve had a swell portrait painted at practically no charge and next time I come to New York I am going to spend a morning tearing out of your files all those preposterous masks with which you have been libeling me for the last decade.
Just found another whole paragraph in “Taps,” top of page 384, which appears in “Tender is the Night.” I’d carefully elided it and written the paragraph beneath
it to replace it, but the proof readers slipped and put them both in.
Ever yours,
Scott
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 4 pp.—with holograph postscript. Princeton University
1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,
April 17, 1935.
Dear Max:
Reading Tom Wolfe’s story1 in the current Modern Monthly makes me wish he was the sort of person you could talk to about his stuff. It has all his faults and virtues. It seems to me that with any sense of humor he could see the Dreiserian absurdities of how the circus people “ate the cod, bass, mackerel, halibut, clams and oysters of the New England coast, the terrapin of Maryland, the fat beeves, porks and cereals of the middle west” etc. etc. down to “the pink meated lobsters that grope their way along the sea-floors of America.” And then (after one of his fine paragraphs which sounds a note to be expanded later) he remarks that they leave nothing behind except “the droppings of the camel and the elephant in Illinois.” A few pages further on his redundance ruined some paragraphs (see the last complete paragraph on page 103) that might have been gorgeous. I sympathize with his use of repetition, of Joyce-like words, endless metaphor, but I wish he could have seen the disgust in Edmund Wilson’s face when I once tried to interpolate part of a rhymed sonnet in the middle of a novel, disguised as prose. How he can put side by side such a mess as “With chitterling tricker fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came” and such fine phrases as “tongue-trilling chirrs, plum-bellied smoothness, sweet lucidity” I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar. I hope to Christ he isn’t taking all these emasculated paeans to his vitality very seriously. I’d hate to see such an exquisite talent turn into one of those muscle-bound and useless giants seen in a circus. Athletes have got to learn their games; they shouldn’t just be content to tense their muscles, and if they do they suddenly find when called upon to bring off a necessary effect they are simply liable to hurl the shot into the crowd and not break any records at all. The metaphor is mixed but I think you will understand what I mean, and that he would too—save for his tendency to almost feminine horror if he thinks anyone is going to lay hands on his precious talent. I think his lack of humility is his most difficult characteristic, a lack oddly enough which I associate only with second or third rate writers. He was badly taught by bad teachers and now he hates learning.
A Life in Letters Page 32
