Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 437
My own plans are uncertain. I am pretty disgusted with pictures after all that censorship trouble and want to break off for a while when I have another good credit (I won’t get one on The Women) - but when, I don’t know.
Haven’t read De Monorchia. Read several pieces by Cornelia Skinner and found them thin and unamusing. Since you’ve undertaken the Dorian Gray I hope you make a success of it but I hope the professor knows what you’re doing. She might not consider the rearrangement of someone else’s words a literary composition, which would leave you out on a limb. Are you taking swimming?
Dearest love,
Daddy
P S. Of course I do not care if you postpone ‘Cynara,’ etc., though it’s such a detail, and you must be in the library every day. Your college work comes first - but I can’t help wondering how, if time is reduced to such miniscules, you would ever have thought of trying out for a play. That of course is entirely out at present - last year should have taught you that lesson.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California March 11, 1939
Dear Scottie:
Thanks for your long letter about your course of subjects.
Generally, I think that your election of French as a major is a wise decision. I imagine that there will be some competition for the Sorbonne but it might be something to aim at. Also, if you want to take one English course I think you have chosen wisely. Once again I concur about the History of Music if it pleases you. But I wish you would thoroughly reconsider the chemistry question. It is an extremely laborious subject - it requires the most meticulous care and accuracy during long laboratory hours. Moreover, unless your mathematics are at your fingertips - and you were never very good at mathematics - you will be continually redoing experiments because of one small slip, and I just can’t see it fitting in with hours of music practice and some regular exercise.
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 LeNotre 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 SeaIsland with the party and return by yourself, passing at least a full day with your mother in Asheville, 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 Asheville - 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,
Daddy
P.S. Can you give me some sort of budget for your trip to SeaIsland? 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 Garnett’s Russian translations are excellent, while Scott-Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself. 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 Defoe and the Samuel Butler. Don’t be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
March, 1939
Dearest Scottie:
I was incredibly happy when I heard that the cloud had lifted. Don’t let it come down again! I was so happy when it lifted for me at Princeton and let me in for everything I’d wanted that I forgot. And the second time I never did manage to get out of a scholastic mess all the time I was in college. If you don’t get too happy this spring, don’t lose the ground you’ve gained - it’s going to be all right.
Congratulations -I know what it means to you, something you did for and by yourself. A sort of justification. The only excuse for the damper up above is that we have to continue to justify ourselves each week of our lives and it would seem there would be rest sometimes. Did you ever read Christina Rossetti’s
‘And does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes - to the very end -’
I want you to get Peaches a present - rather a useful one. This seems somewhat lavish but this is a world of give and take. I am allowing you twenty-five dollars for it. As it is a lavish gesture it should be a simple present - something she should find practical and useful - on the other angle from a ring-watch. Something that if you hadn’t bought it, Pete would have had to buy it. You know her well enough to give her familiar things. Ponder this carefully - if you buy her a ‘bauble’ the idea will defeat its purpose.
Also take your mother something for $15. So I’m sending:
6 days at SeaIsland at $13.00 — $78.00
2 presents — $40.00
Railroad fare — $100.00
Clothes $50.00
Expenses — $310.00 $50.00
$310.00 (sic)
And to cover the airplane I’m making it $350.00. You have no leeway on your incidentals. I know the instinct to delight everybody with a big tip but in the end we too generous people die of heart trouble, trying to make it good, and have rewarded the wrong people, so be a little penurious and calculating with your small change.
I’m just as glad Cottage lost out. They’ve been dominant for five years - it’s time it should be someone else. The only healthy thing about the God-awful system is that no one of the four is triumphant for long. In my time it was Tiger Inn - since then they’ve all taken turns. Did you run into a man named Ralph Wyer at the prom? He’s a Minnesotan and seems to me an altogether admirable fellow. I saw him lose a tooth with great grace at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival in the hockey game.
Your comment on the satirical quality in English fiction is very apt. If you want a counter-irritant read Bleak House (Dickens’ best book) - or if you want to explore the emotional world - not now, but in a few more years - read Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov. And you’ll see what the novel can do. Glad you like Butler - I liked the place where Ernest’s father ‘turned away to conceal his lack of emotion.’ My God - what precision of hatred is in those lines. I’d like to be able to destroy my few detestations — , for example - with such marksmanship as that.
Again thanks for wiring me. I must love you a lot for you have quite a power to lift me up and cast me down.
Jove, (Sometimes known as Jupiter or ‘Papa Angelicus’)
5521 Ames toy Avenue
Encino, California
April 5, 1939
Dearest: Thanks for your letter.
When you get time give me a sort of budget of what you did with the money I sent you. I mean, estimate roughly what became of it. Also, did you take any planes to and from SeaIsland or Asheville? As I wrote you, most of those eastern lines are safe after the first February. In spite of the storm you ran into on way back East last fall, I think it’s rather old-fashioned not get used to airplane travel and use it as a convenience. You made a great impression on your mother. How different a year ago at Virginia Beach when you seemed as far apart the poles, during those dreary tennis games and golf lessons!
Of course, the fact that she is so much better accounts for a good deal of it, but I believe that was the time you had first discovered love, in the person of — , and were in a sort of drugged coma until you could get back to Baltimore.
Spring was always an awful time for me about work. I always felt that in the long boredom of winter there was nothing else to do but study. But I lost the feeling in the long, dreamy spring days and managed to be in scholastic hot water by June. I can’t tell you what to do about it - all my suggestions seem to be very remote and academic. But if I were with you and we could talk again like we used to, I might lift you out of your trouble about concentration. It really isn’t so hard, even with dreamy people like you and me - it’s just that we feel so damned secure at times as long as there’s enough in the bank to buy the next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through the next ordeal. Our danger is imagining that we have resources - material and moral - which we haven’t got. One of the reasons I find myself so consistently in valleys of depression is that every few years I seem to be climbing uphill to recover from some bankruptcy. Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess. I thought I was so strong that I never would be ill and suddenly I was ill for three years, and faced with a long, slow uphill climb. Wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve - so that if on a night you had set aside to study for a philosophy test you learned that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help, you could skip that night and find you had a reserve of one or two days preparation to draw on. But I think that, like me, you will be something of a fool in that regard all your life, so I am wasting my words.
Query: Are you taking up the swimming during the spring term? I hope tremendously you will, but I suppose that’s been decided already. If not, what are you doing for spring athletics?
Query No. 2: Is there any way - and don’t kid me - in which you can take driving lessons? Also, if you get time - and this is not important - give me a slight picture of what the life is at Sea Island. Also, when you get time, write your mother, because I’ve been putting off a visit to her and may possibly have to be here three weeks longer on this damned picture and she probably feels that I’m never coming.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
P.S. Got a nice thank-you letter from Frances Turnbull for the check I sent her.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
May 6, 1939
Dearest:
I am sending you four weeks’ allowance and hope you can make it go. Found your very sweet letter when I got back. Please pay up your debts in full. You know if things get really out of hand you can always call on me, but I am in for a little siege of illness and I will have to count pennies for a few months until this time is over, so don’t splurge on any new big spring wardrobe.
Plans for June all depend on factors that I am absolutely unable to regulate now. Literally, I do not know what we are liable to do. In spite of the fact that I have this house and may possibly bring your mother out here for a month or so (now this must absolutely not be mentioned in any letter to her because everything is ready by the hospital and I haven’t yet divulged any plans to Dr Carroll) I still don’t see you out here. You see, it would inevitably force us into that old relationship which was unsuccessful five years ago in Baltimore of my being more or less in the unpleasant position of a spy on your private affairs.
I am turning over several possibilities in my mind. One of them is would you like to go to Russia with a group of girls on an economically organized tour? I am sure such things must be going on at Vassar and you need only make inquiries about it and give me the data. I mean something for three or four weeks. I agree I don’t want you to go back to France this summer. But it might just be an experience to go to Russia on some non-deluxe affair. Form your own opinion about how the experiment might work-out. I have several more strings to my bow, but I am not telling you all of them at once. But Hollywood - why?
What do you want to do out here? I can no more see you as a reader in a studio wading through bad novels and worse magazine stories all summer and being so dog-tired at the end of the day that you would probably be ready for anything, even these empty-headed California boys. The question of getting you a test has occurred to me too, but I have got at least three or four reasons against it. First, I believe you ought to wait another year - — second, I want you to have one more year at Vassar and then make your debut in Baltimore. Suppose you were good? Then it would completely upset the applecart which we have elaborately set up back East. And what else can you do out here? Do you want to come out and be my secretary? Let us laugh quietly and mirthlessly with a Boris Karloff ring. As for some of the ideas you had before, it skips my mind whether we discussed them, but I remember one of them was whether you should go to summer stock in one of those New England towns. Honey, I may as well hand you over to the white slavers and make a thorough job of it. For girls like you, it is nothing but a complete playtime job and strong competition between the girls to see who gets the honor of being seduced by the leading man.
Doubtless all sorts of ideas have occurred to you and, if so, why not list them and send them to me - maybe we will find out of them one that fits both our ideas.
I think I have answered almost everything in your letter and I have another idea about the driving which I am going to leave for another month because it seems to me almost dangerous for a girl your age not to know how to drive.
Dearest love.
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,California
July, 1939
My plan would be to start you out here the last day of the month - — that is ten days from the time of writing this letter. The only thing that would prevent this would be some unexpected turn of illness. This is unlikely, but possible. I don’t know how this trip is going to work out and feel a certain trepidation. I am of course not drinking and haven’t been for a long time, but any illness is liable to have a certain toxic effect on the system and you may find me depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic - all these qualities more intensified than you have previously experienced them in me. Beyond this I am working very hard and the last thing I want at the end of day is a problem while, as it is natural at your age, what you want at the end of the day is excitement. I tell you all this because lately we had planned so many meetings with anticipation and they turned out to be flops. Perhaps forewarned will be forearmed.
If the experiment proves upsetting I will have no further choice than to pack you off East somewhere again, but there are several friends here whom you could visit for a time if we failed to make a satisfactory household. So the trip will be worthwhile. Also I am more of a solitary than I have ever been but I don’t think that will worry you because you had your dosages of motion pictures stars on two other trips. To describe how humorless I feel about life at this point you have simply to read the Tarking- ton story called ‘Sinful Dadda Little’ in the Post issue of July 22 (still current, I believe) and remember that I read it without a particle of amusement but with a complete disgust at ‘Dadda’ for not drowning the two debutantes at the end.
Probably I am underestimating you, as everyone seems to be pleased with your good manners and your ‘attitude’ (I know you hate that word) this summer - notably Mrs Owens and your mother. But you left a most unp
leasant impression behind last autumn with many people, and I would much rather not see you at all than see you without loving you. Your home is Vassar. Anything else to be supplied at present is a mockery of a home. It is too bad it should be this way but the only thing is to treat it as a visit and for us both to remember the rules of common courtesy towards each other. I take my sleeping pills regularly between eleven and twelve so we won’t have any of those midnight wrangles that disfigured your June and September visits. Can’t the party wait till you get here to discuss? Beneath all this, you understand, I have so much to talk to you about. (Incidentally, your memory has played you false about the philosophy.
If the taking of it was a mistake it was mine not yours. I chose it one day when we were sitting on my bed with the catalogue at the beach a year ago. And I had some correspondence with Vassar trying to get you into the course at all. The history and French are as much a mystery to me as you say they are to you.)
Please give your mother this enclosed letter when you are alone with her as I don’t want it to go through the sanitarium. (Changed. Am writing her
Zelda separately. Enclosed is for yours and her expenses at boarding house.)
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. I am pretty definitely breaking with Ober but he doesn’t know it yet.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
July, 1939
I am certainly glad that you’re up and around and sorry that your selection of post-Flaubertan realism depressed you. I certainly wouldn’t begin Henry James with The Portrait of a Lady which is in his ‘late second manner’ and full of mannerisms. Why don’t you read Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller first? Lord Jim is a great book - the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good? Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession.