It was too late also for me to recoup the damage - I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years till my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.
The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds - she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage - sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy - she’s passed that failing on to you.
For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit - nothing but ‘getting by’ and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don’t want to change you. But I don’t want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energies and my earnings for people who talk my language.
I have begun to fear that you don’t. You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this.
People like — and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.
You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes - but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore (and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you) represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother’s illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that....
To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a ‘wild society girl,’ vintage of 1915, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it - it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are ‘going somewhere,’ your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life - a real dream of your own - and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late - as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge - now your conversation is as commonplace as if you’d spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School - what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.
I shall come East in September to meet your boat - but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn’t likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will - or want to - remains to be seen.
Daddy P S. If you keep the diary, please don’t let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I’m not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don’t try to be witty in the writing, unless its natural - just true and real P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time? I wrote it over twice.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
July, 1938
Dearest Pie:
When I wrote down those architectural terms hoping to encourage a ‘Gothic Quest’ I overlooked what was right under my eye. Rotterdam, oddly enough, is the center of modern architecture. J. P. P. Oud, who was invited to give the Kalin lectures at Princeton some years ago, is the greatest living architect in all probability, and his workers’ dwellings, designed when he was city architect of Rotterdam, are a model for the world. See them if you come back that way and compare them with New York slums. Also, if this reaches you in Paris, you might find Caffin’s easy book on architecture at Brentano’s. Please buy it.
Also if you’re in Paris when this reaches you, a pneumatique might reach Nanny at 23 rue Pascal-Lecointre. I think it would be nice if you took her to lunch. If you do, make her feel happy and important - she did a great deal for you. Give her my love.
I have been trying to get your actual college board ratings. Do you realize now that all that bother about French has saved you one whole year of education? I mean that French was the deciding factor in your skipping a grade. So that if you should marry at 19 you will have had one more year of education than if you had let it slip. I hadn’t intended to bring up the college matters definitely in this letter, but, since I’ve said this,
I might as well add that you should approach Vassar as if you were going to do the four years. A girl’s life is so different from a boy’s in America that the odds are incalculable as to whether or not you will take a degree - but who knows? Your mother had a broken engagement on her hands a few days before her nineteenth birthday - what could have been better than to have had something to go on with? It is very exceptional for a grown person to jump straight from one serious love affair into another.
Aside from that - and you know I’d be happy if you didn’t marry before twenty at the earliest - I think it would have an effect on your own morale and the feelings of other students towards you if you signed up ‘for the duration of the war.’ To half of the girls there, Vassar will be their whole world as Princeton was mine and, though they might enjoy a little butterflying, their resentment against the self-confessed butterfly who is only killing time with them will be very deep in their hearts, and will deepen as the years increase. So I should soft-pedal my social ambitions and ride with the times. After all the president of last year’s Vassar senior class just married a Rockefeller and the Clark girl of Boston made her debut as a singer instead of on Beacon Hill. The Bachelors’ Cotillion simply doesn’t mean what it did twenty years ago - or even ten. I suppose it meant a lot to — because she’s not likely to have anything any better.
All that is snobbish talk but the part about going in wholeheartedly, and publicly so, is very important and real. I want college to be good -I was pretty discouraged there for a while -I felt myself losing interest, and illness has made me pretty selfish and self-protective. I could see you stranded with a lot of childhood memories - and two thousand trivial letters. I even had a talk with a man who owns a canning factory in San Diego with the idea of giving you the works from the bottom. It would have made you or broken you (i e., made you run away). But it was pretty drastic medicine and I’m glad I didn’t have to res
ort to it. In an odd way you are an old-fashioned girl, living half in the world of Mrs Finney and Mrs Turnbull (you should have seen the latter’s face the day the banks closed in ‘33 and I had the only money on the place - $1800 in gold). Often I have encouraged that because my generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness. But I don’t want you to live in an unreal world or to believe that the system that produced Barbara Hutton can survive more than ten years, any more than the French monarchy could survive 1789. Every girl your age in America will have the experience of working for her living. To shut your eyes to that is like living in a dream - to say ‘I will do valuable and indispensable work’ is the part of wisdom and courage.
With dearest love,
Daddy P.S. At the Saturday Evening Post rate this letter is worth $4000. Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won’t you read it twice?
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
September 19, 1938
Dearest Pie:
Here are a few ideas that I didn’t discuss with you and I’m sending this to reach you on your first day.
For heaven’s sake don’t make yourself conspicuous by rushing around inquiring which are the Farmington Girls, which are the Dobbs Girls, etc. You’ll make an enemy of everyone who isn’t. Thank heaven you’re on an equal footing of brains at last - most of the eventual leaders will be high school girls and I’d hate to see you branded among them the first week as a snob - it’s not worth a moment’s thought. What is important is to go to the library and crack your first book - to be among the 5% who will do this and get that much start and freshness.
A chalk Une is absolutely specified for you at present because... besides the ‘cleverness’ which you are vaguely supposed to have ‘inherited’, people will be quick to deck you out with my sins. If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty, I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest non-stop binge, and the world also will have an interest in the matter of your behavior. It would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: There she goes - just like her papa and mama.’ Need I say that you can take this fact as a curse - or you can make of it a great advantage?
Remember that you’re there for four years. It is a residential college and the butterfly will be resented. You should never boast to a soul that you’re going to the Bachelors’ Cotillion. I can’t tell you how important this is. For one hour of vainglory you will create a different attitude about yourself. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck. And while I’m on this: You will notice that there is a strongly organized left-wing movement there. I do not particularly want you to think about politics, but I do not want you to set yourself against this movement. I am known as a left-wing sympathizer and would be proud if you were. In any case, I should feel outraged if you identified yourself with Nazism or Red-baiting in any form. Some of those radical girls may not look like much now but in your lifetime they are liable to be high in the councils of the nation.
I think it would be wise to put on somewhat of an act in reference to your attitude to the upper classmen. In every college the class just ahead of you is of great importance. They approach you very critically, size you up and are in a position to help or hinder you in anything you try. I mean the class just ahead of you. A sophomore class is usually conceited. They feel that they have been through the mill and have learned something. While this is very doubtful, it is part of wisdom to humor that vanity in them. It would pay dividends many times to treat them with an outward respect which you might not feel and I want you to be able to do such things at will, as it happens that all through life you may be in a position in which you will constantly have to assume a lowly rank in a very strict organization. If anybody had told me my last year at Princeton that I would stand up and take orders from an ex-policeman, I would have laughed. But such was the case because, as an army officer, he was several grades above me in rank and competence - and that is not the last time it has happened.
Here is something you can watch happen during your college course. Always at the beginning of the first term about half a dozen leaders arise. Of these at least two get so intoxicated with themselves that they don’t last the first year, two survive as leaders and two are phonies who are found out within a year - and therefore discredited and rated even lower than before, with the resentment people feel for anyone who has fooled them.
Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are and will do through life. Two years are gone and half the indicators already point down - two years are left and you’ve got to pursue desperately the ones that point up!
I wish I were going to be with you the first day, and I hope the work has already started.
With dearest love,
Daddy
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
Fall, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
I am intensely busy. On the next two weeks, during which I finish the first part of Madame Curie, depends whether or not my contract will be renewed. So naturally I am working like hell - though I wouldn’t expect you to understand that - and getting rather bored with explaining the obvious over and over to a wrong-headed daughter.
If you had listened when Peaches read that paper aloud last September this letter and several others would have been unnecessary. You and I have two very different ideas - yours is to be immediately and overwhelmingly attractive to as many boys as you can possibly meet, including Cro-Magnons, natural-born stevedores, future members of the Shriners and plain bums. My idea is that presently, not quite yet, you should be extremely attractive to a very limited amount of boys who will be very much heard of in the nation or who will at least know what it is all about.
The two ideas are irreconcilable, completely and utterly inverse, obverse and contradictory! You have never understood that!
I told you last September that I would give you enough to go to Vassar, live moderately, leave college two or three times during the fall term - a terrific advantage in freedom over your contemporaries in boarding school.
After four weeks I encountered you on a weekend. Here is how it was spent - God help the Monday recitations:
Friday - on the train to Baltimore Dance Saturday-to New York (accidentally) with me Sunday - to Simsbury to a reunion
The whole expedition must have cost you much more than your full week’s allowance. I warned you then, as I had warned you in the document Peaches read, that you would have to pay for your Thanksgiving vacation. However, in spite of all other developments - the Navy game, the Dean’s information, the smoking, the debut plans - I did not interfere with your allowance until you gave me the absolute insult of neglecting a telegram. Then I blew up and docked you ten dollars - that is exactly what it cost to call you the day of the Yale-Harvard game because I could not believe a word you said.
Save for that ten dollars you have received $13.85 every week. If you doubt this I will send you a record of the cancelled checks.
There is no use telegraphing any more - if you have been under exceptional expenses that I do not know of I will of course help you. But otherwise you must stay within that sum. What do you do it for? You wouldn’t even give up smoking - and by now you couldn’t if you wanted to. To take Andrew and Peaches - who, I think you will agree, come definitely under the head of well- brought-up children - if either of them said to their fathers: ‘I’m going to do no favors for you but simply get away with everything I can’ - well, in two minutes they’d lost the J25 a month they probably get!
But I have never been strict with you, except on a few essentials, probably because in spite of everything I had till recently a sense of partnership with you that sprang out of your mother’s illness. But you effectively broke that up last summer and I don’t quite know where we
stand. Controlling you like this is so repugnant to me that most of the time I no longer care whether you get an education or not. But as for making life soft for you after all this opposition - it simply isn’t human nature. I’d rather have a new car.
If you want to get presents for your mother, Peaches, Mary Law, Grandmother, etc., why not send me a list and let me handle it here? Beyond which I hope to God you are doing a lot about the Plato - and I love you very much when given a chance.
Daddy
P.S. Do you remember going to a party of Rosemary Warburton’s in Philadelphia when you were seven? Her aunt and her father used to come a lot to Ellerslie.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
November 15, 1938
Dearest Scottie:
I haven’t heard from you yet but I’m assuming that your common sense has asserted itself and I’ll get a fair answer to my letter. How you could possibly have missed the answer to my first question I don’t know, unless you skipped pages 160 to 170 in Farewell to Arms. Try again! There’s nothing vague in these questions of mine but they require attention. I hope you’ve sent me the answer to the second question. The third question is based on the book Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is fifteen pages long and since you have it in your room you ought to get through it carefully in four or five days. As far as I am concerned you can skip the wise-cracks in italics on pages 766, 767 and 768. They were written by somebody else and just stuck in there. But read carefully the little introduction on 754 and note also that I do not mean ‘Ecclesiasticus’ which is something entirely different. Remember when you’re reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world. Notice that Ernest Hemingway got a title from the third paragraph. As a matter of fact the thing is full of titles. The paragraph on page 756 sounds like the confession of a movie producer, even to the swimming pools.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 435
