It should be said that Steinbeck and Dr. Hutchins, Peter Arno and the late Irving Thalberg, Caldwell and O’Hara, Saroyan and Odets, Colonel Lindbergh and District Attorney Dewey were all too young to play on our team. Their experiences, achievements, and certainties are not of our world. We are closer in time to the hulk in a veteran’s hospital — for these younger men did not dance the Grizzly Bear and the Bunny Hug when one was risking ostracism, or march a thousand miles to Beautiful Katie. But they swim, one and all, in our orbit; as the painter Picasso says: “You do something first and then somebody comes along and does it pretty.” Easy with that space gun! You oughtn’t to point things! By and large I grant them a grace we do not have, and for all we know the Messiah may be among them. But we are something else again.
Well — many are dead, and some I have quarreled with and don’t see anymore. But I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved — and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact — and rather deeply wise. More than that what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Gather’s: “We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
The Letters
Scott with Zelda, c. 1920
LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS
CONTENTS
To Zelda Fitzgerald
To Ernest Hemingway
To Frances Scott Fitzgerald
To Maxwell Perkins
To John Peale Bishop
To Mrs Bayard Turnbull
To Christian Gauss
To Harold Ober
To Mrs Richard Taylor
To Edmund Wilson
To Gerald and Sara Murphy
Other Letters
To Zelda Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
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.
You were a peach throughout the whole trip 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,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
June 8, 1939
Dearest Zelda:
I have two letters from you, one the airmail in regard to Scottie’s operation and the other evidently posted before you had received mine. While she is in Baltimore I am having a re-check by my old friend, Dr Louis Hamman. I gather that she has had several ‘attacks.’ On the other hand, I want to be absolutely sure that the operation is imperative. I tell you this because though she will come to Asheville in any case - I think you’d better not make absolute arrangements until I get the report Dr Hamman. She reaches Baltimore today the 8th (unless she stays over a day with Harold Ober or someone else in New York) and I should get the report from Dr Hamman about the 15th or 16th - that is a few days before she is due to arrive in Asheville I will airmail you immediately and then you can clinch whatever arrangements you find advisable.
Remember, I will take care of the business of notifying her, breaking the news by airmail as soon as I hear how long she expects to remain in Baltimore. I am glad, just as you are, that since this seems to be necessary, you will be able to be at her side.
I am awfully sorry about the news concerning your mother. This seems to be a big year for illness in our family. I shall certainly plan for you to go down to see her around your birthday time as soon as the matter of Scottie’s visit - with or without operation - is disposed of. Perhaps if by chance Dr Hamman doesn’t think the operation advisable we can think up some combination scheme.
In the meantime I see from your last letter you were still worried about my health. Only last night I saw the doctor who tells me that I am already 60% better (I quote him exactly) than I was a month ago - and during that time I have blocked out a novel, completed and sold a story to Colliers magazine and over half-finished what will be a two-parter for The Saturday Evening Post - so you see I cannot possibly be very sick. What is the matter with me is quite definite and quite in control - the cause was overwork at the studios, and the cause being removed the illness should decrease at a faster rate than that at which it was contracted.
I am sitting outdoors as I dictate this and the atmosphere has just a breath of the back country plains in it, dry and hot, though the surrounding landscaped gardens are green and cool, very different from Asheville mountains, but I never had your gift for seeing nature plainly and putting her into vivid phrasing so I am afraid I can’t explain to you exactly what kind of country it is until you come here and see. Now Hollywood seems far away though it is just over the mountains and you seem very near always.
Devotedly,
5521 Amestov Avenue
Encino,California
August, 1939
Dearest:
I know you’re going to miss Scottie and I hope August passes quickly for you. it seems strange that it’s here - this last month has been too much of a hell for me to help much, but now I can see light at the end of the passage. It was like 1935-1936 when no one but Mrs Owens and I knew how bad things were and all my products were dirges and elegies. Sickness and no money are a wretched combination. But, as I told you, there has not at least been an accumulation of debt and there are other blessings. I see that only the rich now can do the things you and I once did in Europe - it is a tourist-class world - my salary out here during those frantic 20 months turned out to be an illusion once Ober and the governments of the U.S. and Canada were paid and the doctors began.
Keep well. I’m going to try to. I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.
Have arranged for Scottie to have a piano nearby, the not in this cottage. She seems to have had a happy time with you. I have written two long and two short stories and wait daily for Swanson to find me a studio job that won’t be too much of a strain - no more 14-hour days at any price. By the time you get this I hope I’ll be paying the small (not formidable) array of bills that have accumulated. Here is another check to be used most sparingly. - not on presents but necessities of Scottie’s departure, etc. Her tickets and traveling money will reach there Tuesday morning if all goes well. Her rail fare, round trip, is only $78.50 round trip, with $5.00 extra fare both ways.
Dearest love.
Scott
Of course you can count on going South in September. We could even meet you there.
And the editorial comment about your paintings was a real thrill to me. We must do something about that soon.
5121 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California August 4, 1939
Dearest:
Scottie arrives tomorrow and I hope she’ll enjoy the weeks out here. She doesn’t like heat much and of course this is subtropical but there is a pool nearby belonging to the landlord and as I wrote you there are boys from the East, at least for the present.
Perhaps I was unwise in telling her so succinctly that she had no home except Vassar. On the other hand, she doesn’t see the matter in relation to
the past. When I tried to make a home for her she didn’t want it, and I have a sick-man’s feeling that she will arrive in a manner to break up such tranquillity as I have managed to establish after this illness. Perhaps she has changed - but this is the first time in many years that you yourself have expressed pleasure in her filial behavior. I, too, have had that, though in short doses, ever since the spring of 1934. Perhaps the very shortness of the doses has been the fault and I hope this visit will be a remedy.
In theory I tend to disagree with you about doing her harm to know where she stands. Scottie at her best is as she is now with a sense of responsibility and determination. She is at her absolute worst when she lies on her back and waves her feet in the air - so incapable of gratitude of things arranged for (the golf at Virginia Beach, for instance, or the moving picture stuff here, has been accepted as her natural right as a princess). I was sorry for the women of fifty who applied for that secretarial job in Baltimore in 1932 - who had never before in their lives found that a home can be precarious. But I am not particularly sorry for a youngster who is thrown on his own at 14 or so and has to make his way through school and college, the old sink or swim spirit - I suppose, au fond, the difference of attitude between the North and the old South.
Anyhow, we shall think of you and talk of you a lot and look forward to seeing you and wish you were with us. I will have done something by the time you get this about your expense money there. — Dearest love.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California August 18, 1939
Dearest Zelda:
Got your letter from Saluda. Will absolutely try to arrange the Montgomery trip early in September. Your letter made me sad, and I wish I could say ‘Yes, go where you want right away’ - but it doesn’t take into consideration the situation here. I will be much better able to grapple with the problem and with Dr Carroll two weeks from now. A severe illness like mine is liable to be followed by a period of shaky morale and at the moment I am concerned primarily with keeping us all alive and comfortable. I’m working on a picture at Universal and the exact position is that if I can establish their confidence in the next week that I am of value on this job it will relieve financial pressure through the fall and winter.
Scottie is very pleasant and, within the limits of her age, very cooperative to date - on the other hard, she’s one more responsibility, as she learns to drive and brings me her work and this summer there is no Helen Hayes to take her on a glamor tour of Hollywood. All of which boils down to the fact that my physical energy is at an absolute minimum without being definitely sick and I’ve got to conserve this for my work. I am as annoyed at the unreliability of the human body as you are at the vagaries of the nervous system. Please believe always that I am trying to do my best for us all. I have many times wished that my work was of a mechanical sort that could be done or delegated irrespective of morale, for I don’t want or expect happiness for myself - only pence enough to keep us all going. Put your happiness I want exceedingly, just as I wart Scottie’s safety.
I am writing Dr Carroll a long letter in a week’s time of which I will send you a carbon. I have already written Dr Suitt about the swimming.
With dearest love,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California October 6, 1939
Dearest Zelda:
Living in the flotsam of the international situation as we all are, work has been difficult. I am almost penniless - I’ve done stories for Esquire because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances. You will remember it took me an average of six weeks to get the mood of a Saturday Evening Post story.
But everything may be all right tomorrow. As I wrote you - or did I? - friends sent Scottie back to college. That seemed more important than any pleasure for you or me. There is still two hundred dollars owing on her tuition - and I think I will probably manage to find it somewhere.
After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you - but not enough to go overboard. For you to go on your first excursion without a nurse, without money, without even enough to pay your fare back, when Dr Carroll is backing you, and when Scottie and I are almost equally as helpless in the press of circumstances as you - well, it is the ruse of a clever old lady whom I respect and admire and who loves you dearly but not wisely —
I ask only this of you - leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and what eventually will fight through as the right to save you, the permission to give you a chance.
Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.
With dearest love always,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California January 31, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
The article arrived and from a first brief glance I shall say that it is going to be rather difficult to sell. However, I will read it thoroughly tonight and report. Even a very intellectual magazine like the Forum or the Atlantic Monthly prefers their essays to contain some certain number of anecdotes or some dialogue or some cohesive and objective events. Of course, you might claim that vour whole article was conversation and in a sense it is, but it is one person’s conversation and thus does not contain much conflict. However, I think it is damn good considering that your pen has been rusty for so long. Shall I suggest you some ideas which yoa might handle with more chance of realizing on them? Tell me.
Dear, I know no one in Asheville except a couple of secretaries and nurses and the clerks at the hotel. I was ill at the time I was there and confined to mv room most of the time so I have no idea how you would make business contacts. This seems to be a great year for art and I wish you would drop a line to Cary Ross or someone about your new paintings and see if there is some interest. That would be a more practical way of getting things in motion than taking up something you’re unfamiliar with.
All is the same here. I think I have a job for next week. I know I’ve finished a pretty good story - the first one adequate to the Post in several years. It was a hard thing to get back to. My God, what a fund of hope and belief I must have had in the old days! As I say, I will write you more about the story tomorrow.
Dearest love.
Scott
552 1 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California February 6, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I understand your attitude completely and sympathize with it to a great extent. But the mood which considers any work beneath their talents doesn’t especially appeal to me in other people, though I acknowledge being sometimes guilty of it myself. At the moment I am hoping for a job at Republic Studios, the lowest of the low, which would among other things help to pay your hospital bill. So the fact that anything you do can be applied on your bill instead of on our jaunt to the Isles of Greece doesn’t seem so tough.
However, I am disappointed, with you, that the future Ruskins and Elie Faures and other anatomists of art will have to look at your windows instead of the mail hall. But something tells me that by the time this letter comes you will have changed your point of view. It is those people that have kept your talent alive when you willed it to sink into the dark abyss. Granted it’s a delicate thing - mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear. (God, what a mess of similes.) But the awful thing would have been some material catastrophe that would have made it unable to run at all.
Dearest love.
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
CaliforniaMarch 19, 1940
Dearest:
It seems to me best not to hurry things.
(a) — I’d like you to leave with the blessings of Dr Carroll (you’ve consumed more of his working hours than one human deserves of another - y
ou’d agree if you’d see his correspondence with me.) Next to Forel he has been your eventual best friend - better even than Meyert (though this is unfair to Meyer who never claimed to be a clinician but only a diagnostician).
But to hell with all that, and with illness.
(b) — Also, you’d best wait because I will certainly have more money three weeks from now than at present, and (c) — If things develop fast Scottie can skip down and see you for a day during her vacation - otherwise you won’t see her before summer. This is an if!
I don’t think you fully realize the extent of what Scottie has done at Vassar. You wrote rather casually of two years being enough but it isn’t. Her promise is unusual. Not only did she rise to the occasion and get in young but she has raised herself from a poor scholar to a very passable one; sold a professional story at eighteen; and moreover in very highbrow, at present very politically minded Vassar she has introduced with some struggle a new note. She has written and produced a musical comedy and founded a club called the Omgim to perpetuate the idea - almost the same thing that Tarkington did in 1893 when he founded the Triangle at Princeton. She did this against tough opposition - girls who wouldn’t let her on the board of the daily paper because, though she could write, she wasn’t ‘politically conscious.’
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 427
