A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  One suggestion is to take preliminary physics. I don’t know whether, if you have already offered that as an entrance, they would allow it, but they might and it would be a fairly easy running over of it as a very essential and interesting subject. I do not mean that I advise a second year physics course because that would run into as much mathematics as chemistry. But if, God help us, they insist on a science I should advise you to consider them in the following order: botany, physiology, or child study. Think of the enormous pleasure amounting, almost, to the consolation for the tragedy of life, that flowers have been to your mother and your grandmother. Maybe you could be a landscape architect like LeNotre1 but the personal element is equally important. I felt all my life the absence of hobbies except such for me as abstract and academic ones, as military tactics and football. Botany is such a definite thing. It has its feet on the ground. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

  I am sorry about the philosophy. I should think that if anything your test questions will deal with the big key figures, and a certain concentration of work upon Plato, Aquinas, and Descartes would pay more dividends than trying to study over entirely the course from the beginning. Please don’t give it up as a bad job. Are you sure that you entirely understand the great usages thru the ages of such terms as nominalists and realists? I want you to keep your interest at least as far as Hegel from whose stem all Marxian thinking flows; certainly you will agree that Marxism does not concern itself with vague sophistries but weds itself to the most practical mechanics of material revolution.

  I should suggest that you go to Sea Island with the party and return by yourself, passing at least a full day with your mother in Ashville, and a day, if you like, in Baltimore; that is—I think the Finneys would be a little offended if you did not pay at least a courtesy visit. I shall try my best to be East by the second, and at least cross your path—perhaps in Ashville—but I have let myself be inveigled into another picture and it may possibly run on to the tenth of April; on the other hand it may blow up tomorrow. (It is the new Carroll-MacMurray picture.)

  With dearest love.

  P.S. Can you give me some sort of budget for your trip to Sea Island. 2nd P.S. You are not entirely right about the translations (poetry, of course, cannot be translated, but even there we have exceptions such as “The Rubaiyat”). Constance Garnet’s Russian translations are excellent, while Scott-Moncrief’s “Proust” is a masterpiece in itself2 And please do not leave good books half-finished, you spoil them for yourself. You shouldn’t have started “War and Peace” which is a man’s book and may interest you later. But you should finish both the Defore1 and the Samuel Butler. Don’t be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!

  TO: John Biggs, Jr.

  Spring 1939

  ALS, 10 pp. Princeton University

  Encino, California

  Dear John—

  Your letter with its family chronicle facinated me. It was nice to catch up a little. I remember Baba as a wild fascinating little witch with a vague touch of Wuthering Heights about her as she wrestled with her brothers. One girl in a family of boys has her dangers—like one boy in a family of girls who inevitably has a touch of the milksop—anyhow I’m glad Baba has temperment + sorry you’ve had to send her to reform school so young. That’s where I wanted to send Scottie when she was fired from Walkers last June.

  That’s a story in herself. Suffice to say it was nothing vicious—a surreptitious trip to a ball game in New Haven—it was after school had closed + some of the girls were sticking around for the Board exams. But it was plenty desturbing—the headmistress had to go up to Vassar and plead with the Dean not to strike her off the list of candidates.

  However it ended luckily—if not quite well. That is she got into Vassar at 16 and is still there but I dont think it taught her much, or perhaps taught her the wrong thing. Instead of learning that a fool is one who makes the same mistake twice she learned that a clever person can usually squirm out of trouble—a most dangerous conclusion. She got herself on probation at Vassar in Dec + is only just off last week thank God. Maybe this is too black a picture to paint. She’s very popular—was voted most popular + most attractive in her Walker class of 43—and did after all get a diploma from the school. She’s coming out with her best friend “Peaches” Finney (do you remember Eben at Hill + Princeton) in Baltimore next Octtober. Pete’s going to present her at the Bachellor’s Cottillion. That sounds odd from an old solitary like me with anti-bourgeoise leanings but remember Karl Marx made every attempt to marry his daughters into the Brittish nobility.

  As to sons—that’s another question. I’d feel on a big spot if I were you. Tho you’re not a worrier. With daughter I can feel sure she’s about like me—very little of her mother save the good looks—like me with less positive artistic talent and much more natural social talent. She hasn’t the lonleness of the artist—though one can’t be sure that means anything. Ernest wasn’t lonely superficially—what I mean is that in spite of the fact that Scottie edited her school paper + wrote the school play she doesn’t care—doesn’t care deeply + passionately so that she feels the nessessity to say. And its just as well. Nothing is more fatuous than the American habit of labeling one of their four children as the artist on a sort of family tap day as if the percentage of artists who made any kind of go of the lowsy business was one to four. It’s much closer to 1 to 400,000. You’ve got to have the egotism of a maniac with the clear triple-thinking of a Flaubert. The amount of initial talent or let us say skill and facility is a very small element in the long struggle whose most happy can only be a mercifully swift exhaustion. Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned—the empty shell of a gift long since accepted + consumed?

  To go back. I wont discuss boys. They are incalculable. But I would like to sit around with you for hours discussing men in particular JB Jr. + F.S.F. I would make you read some of the stuff that’s stirred me lately + append this list, culled from two years.

  Julius Caesar by James Anthony Fronde.1 Don’t be appalled—it’s as modern as Strachey2 + I find from Max that Scribner never lets it go out of print.

  Flaubert and Madame Bovary.3 Absolute Tops.

  The Culture of Cities4 which you must have read.

  The Trial—fantastic novel by the Czek Franz Kaffka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it—its an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920–25.

  As for Americans there’s only one—Jerome Weidman,5 whose two books have been withdrawn as too perspicacious about the faults of his own race. He’s a grand writer tho—only 25 and worth fifty of this Steinbeck who is cheap blatant imitation of D.H. Lawrence. A book club return of the public to its own vomit.

  (I am now writing this letter for my files as well as to you) The best individual novel of the last five years is still Malraux Man’s Fate.6 I fought against reading it liking neither the scene nor what I thought was going to be the attitude—but Jesus, once I’d gotten into it—it’s as absorbing as the Farewell to Arms. On the other hand Man’s Hope7 is hasty journalism—about as good as Ernests Spanish stuff. (He agrees with me about Steinbeck by the way—thinks he’s a phoney like Farrel) You know how generous I feel toward new men if they have something and I hope you wont read under this a jealously of which I think I’m incapable. I keep waiting for Odets1 to produce something fine.

  For God’s sake order these right away and for good jazz I append Guedalla’s Wellington,2 and Burns Lee, Grant and Sherman3—they’ll kill a night of insomnia. Hayes book on Lincoln4 neither brings us closer nor further away—ends by being a bore because he seems to have been conspicuously non-communicative about what we have now decided were the great moments. I guess Lincoln was just too busy to throw him his little crust of attention + he was out whoring somewhere.

  I hope you’ll be a better Judge than I’ve been a man of letters. I’ve worked here on the best
jobs—Madame Curie, Three Comrades, Gone with the Wind, ect but it’s an uphill business and the only great satisfaction Ive had has been paying off my debts—which amounted to about $40,000 at the end of 1936. At that point, despite Becky Sharps5 dictum that you can live on your debts for awhile people begin to distrust you—and someday in Dostoievskian manner I’m going to write about the great difference between how you highheartedly helped me over a hurdle and the heartburnings and humiliations I went thru in the process of approaching you. (That sentence is as full of “h’s” as a passage in the later Swinburne.)

  Anyhow we have always been great good friends to each other and that is a satisfaction as Gertrude Stien would say. I am glad for Bobby as only an old lunger can be glad (was she ever one). I only play ping-pong but if she ever condescends to that let her have a table ready at the point where our paths next cross.

  Scott

  TO: Zelda Fitzgerald

  CC, 1 p. Princeton University

  Encino, California

  May

  6

  1939

  Dearest Zelda:-

  Excuse this being typewritten, but I am supposed to lie in bed for a week or so and look at the ceiling. I objected somewhat to that regime as being drastic, so I am allowed two hours of work every day.6

  You were a peach throughout the whole trip1 and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness and with a consideration that I never understood that you had before. Because I can never remember anything else but consideration from you, so perhaps that sounds a little too much like a doctor or someone who knew you only when you were ill.

  You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands—I had a wire from daughter in regard to the little Vassar girl, telling me her name, and saying that the whole affair was washed out, but I don’t feel at home with the business yet.

  There was a sweet letter waiting here from you for me when I came. With dearest love.

  TO: Edmund Wilson

  CC, 1 p. Yale University

  May

  16

  1939

  Dear Bunny:-News that you and Mary2 had a baby reached me rather late because I was out of California for several months. Hope he is now strong and crawling. Tell him if he grows up any bigger I shall be prepared to take him for a loop when he reaches twenty-one at which time I shall be sixty-three. I don’t know any girl in the last several years with more charm than Mary. It was a delight to meet her and spend an evening with you all. If I had known about the news in time, I would have wired you.

  I called up Louise Fort in San Diego, but couldn’t get her number and imagine she had left before I came back to California. However, I am sending on your letter to Ted Paramore who may have more luck.

  Believe me, Bunny, it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton. Though my idea is now, to learn about a new life from Louis B. Mayer3 who promises to teach me all about things if he ever gets around to it.

  Ever your devoted friend,

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino, California

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

  May

  22

  1939

  Dear Max:-

  Just had a letter from Charlie Scribner—a very nice letter and I appreciated it and will answer it. He seemed under the full conviction that the novel was about Hollywood1 and I am in terror that this mis-information may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave any such impression it is entirely false: I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years. It is distinctly not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I would want to get about.)

  It is, however, progressing nicely, except that I have been confined to bed for a few weeks with a slight return of my old malady. It was nice getting a glimpse of you, however brief—especially that last day. I caught the plane at half past four and had an uneventful trip West.

  I have grown to like this particular corner of California where I shall undoubtedly stay all summer. Dates for a novel are as you know, uncertain, but I am blocking this out in a fashion so that, unlike “Tender”, I may be able to put it aside for a month and pick it up again at the exact spot factually and emotionally where I left off.

  Wish I had some news, but what I have seen lately is only what you can see outside a window. With very best to all—and please do correct that impression which Charlie seems to have.

  Ever your friend,

  Scott

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino, California

  TO: Harold Ober

  TLS, 2 pp. Lilly Library

  May 29 1939

  Dear Harold:—

  This letter is going to be full of information, some of which I may have let drop in New York or which you may have guessed. In the first place, as I suspected, I have been ill with a touch of the old malady from about the time I came off “Gone With the Wind”. I knew I should not have taken on those last two pictures both of which were terrors and far beyond my strength at the time.1 The sudden outburst of drink was a result of an attempt to keep up my strength for an effort of which I was not capable. After consultations here I have been condemned, in no uncertain terms, to a period at home some of which has to be spent in bed. This doesn’t mean that I am not working—I am allowed three to four hours a day for that, but I have told Swanie2 to sign me off any available list. (This Hitchcock from England seems to have had me first on the list to do “Rebecca”) But Swanie evidently realized that I really wasn’t up to anything (for observed on a list by Sheilah who happened to see it in Hitchcock’s office at Selznick’s was, “Unavailable—gone to Cuba.”)

  Well, “Unavailable—gone to Cuba” is as good as anything else. So to friends in the East I would rather not have it known that I was ill. Any story that I have gone away into the California mountains to write a novel will cover the situation because if I should want to go back to actual picture making next Fall, I would not want anyone to be able to say, “Well—that Fitzgerald, I understand he’s been sick and we don’t want anyone that’s liable to break down on this picture.” In other words, it would do me a damage here which it would not do in the East, as this is a hot bed of gossip. I even prefer Swanie to think that I am a bluffing hypochondriac than to know the whole truth. I think I told him that I had a little mild heart trouble. I am cut off here in Encino from anything and anybody who might disturb me, under the charge of an excellent doctor. There’s no taint of alcoholism to confuse the issue and my only visitor is Shielah who comes out two or three times a week. We are friends again, even intimates—though we stick to our old resolution not to go back to the same basis as before.

  Now, I wish you could airmail me The following information and please do not spare me in this, because my morale is high and I want to know the exact situation where I stand with the magazines—notably the Post. As in our previous discussions I told you that that five thousand word length is likely to be a terror for me and while I realize that Collier’s has the right to see some stories still I cannot somehow see it as a permanent relation. I have planned my work in the following order:

  First, I have blocked out my novel completely with a rough sketch of every episode and event and character so that under proper circumstances I could begin writing it tomorrow. It is a short novel about fifty thousand words long and should take me three to four months.

  However, for reasons of income tax I feel I should be more secure before I launch into such a venture—but it wil
l divide easily into five thousand word lengths and Collier’s might take a chance on it where the Post would not. They might at least be promised a first look at it when it’s finished—possibly some time late in the Fall. Secondly, I have hesitated between the idea of those picture originals which I discussed with you and the idea of doing some short stories and have decided on the second because since I haven’t done a short story for over two years I feel rather full of material and rather enthusiastic about doing a few. What I want to know most is how much the Post would pay me. I want to know frankly from their contact man what is the opinion of the new editor of of my work and as specifically as possible the sum they would offer. After this long lapse—(it has now been four years since I was their prize boy)—I do not expect $4000., naturally, but if he suggested any such sum as $2000., it would lead me to believe that he did not especially like my work, or else felt that I had fallen off and gone Hollywood or wants to make a clean sweep of Lorimer’s old authors. Whatever you cannot find out specifically, I wish you would write me the feel of.

  Also in regard to other magazines. The Pictorial Review has not published those two Gwen stories. They weren’t good stories—were written at a bad time, and I don’t blame them. Perhaps later I can either revise those stories or send them another to go with them which will make it an interesting series. That, however, is out for the present as I feel that everything I wrote in ’35 was all covered with a dust of gloom and illness. Likewise with Balmer whom I suppose has never forgiven me for the dilatory arrival of the Red Book stories. What does that leave as possible high-priced markets in New York? As I say, I feel I have from two to four short stories in me which will be in my own manner. And now let me repeat that if you could airmail me this information or as much of it as you can collect, it would be of inestimable value at this moment.