As I say I’m delighted that you’re going to do it and, as you wrote asking me to suggest a general mode of attack, I am telling you frankly what I would like. I’m so afraid of all the reviews being general and I devoted so much more care myself to the detail of the book than I did to thinking out the general scheme that I would appreciate a detailed review. If it is to be that length article it could scarcely be all general anyway.
I’m awfully sorry you’ve had the flu. We arrive East on the 9th. I enjoy your book page in Vanity Fair and think it is excellent.
The baby is beautiful.
As ever,
Scott
Capri, Italy
March, 1925
Dear John.
I am quite drunk. I am told that this is Capri; though as I remember Capri was quieter. As the literary wits might say, your letter received and contents quoted. Let us have more of the same - I think it showed a great deal of power and the last scene - — the dinner at the young Bishops - was handled with admirable restraint. I am glad that at last Americans are producing letters of their own. The climax was wonderful and the exquisite irony of the ‘Sincerely yours’ has only been equaled in the work of those two masters Flaubert and Ferber....
I will now have two copies of Wescott’s Apple as in despair I ordered one - a regular orchard. I shall give one to Brooks here whom I like. Do you know Brooks? He’s just a fellow here...
Excuse the delay. I have just been working on the envelope....
That was a caller. His name was Mussolini, I think, and he says he is in politics here. And besides I have lost my pen so I will have to continue in pencil... t It turned up - I was writing with it all the time and hadn’t noticed. That is because I am full of my new work, a historical play based on the life of Woodrow Wilson.
ACT I. At Princeton
Woodrow seen teaching philosophy. Enter Pyne. Quarrel scene - — Wilson refuses to recognize clubs. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. Pyne re-enters with glee club and trustees. Noise outside. ‘We have won - Princeton 12, Lafayette 3.’ Cheers. Football team enter and group around Wilson. ‘Old Nassau.’ Curtain.
ACT II. Gubernatorial Mansion at Paterson
Wilson seen signing papers. Tasker Bliss and Marc Connolly come in with proposition to let bosses get control. ‘I have im- portant papers to sign - and none of them legalize corruption.’ Triangle Club begins to sing outside window. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. President continues to sign papers. Enter Mrs Gait, John Grier Hibben, A1 Jolson and Grantland Rice. Song The Call to Larger Duty.’ Tableaux. Coughdrop.
ACT III (optional). The Battlefront 1918.
ACT IV
The peace congress. Clemenceau, Wilson and Jolson at table. The Bastard from Trenton now grown up but still a baby, in the uniform of the Prussian Guard, is mewling and pewking in Wilson’s lap.... The junior prom committee comes in through the skylight. Clemenceau: ‘We want the Sarre.’ Wilson: ‘No, Sane, I won’t hear of it.’ Laughter... Enter Marilyn Miller, Gilbert Seldes and Irish MeuseL Tasker Bliss falls into the cuspidor...
Oh Christ! I’m sobering up I Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my chef d’oeuvre and others’ opinion. Please! I think it’s great but because it deals with much debauched materials, quick deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers. To me it’s fascinating. I never get tired of it....
Zelda’s been sick in bed for five weeks, poor child, and is only now looking up. No news except I now get J2000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. Is Lewis’ book any good? I imagine that mine is infinitely better - what else is well reviewed this spring? Maybe my book is rotten but I don’t think so.
What are you writing? Please tell me something about your novel. And if I like the idea maybe I’ll make it into a short story for the Post to appear just before your novel and steal the thunder. Who’s going to do it? Bebe Daniels? She’s a wow!
How was Townsend’s first picture? Good reviews? What’s Alec doing? And Ludlow? And Bunny? Did you read Ernest Boyd’s account of what I might ironically call our ‘private’ life in his Portraits? Did you like it? I rather did.
Scott
I am quite drunk again and enclose a postage stamp.
c/o American Express Company Rome,Italy
April, 1925
Dear John: —
Your letter was perfect. It told us everything we wanted to know and the same day I read your article (very nice too) in Vanity Fair about cherching the past. But you disappointed me with the quality of some of it (the news) - for instance that Bunny’s play failed, that Townsend has got the swelled head and that you and Margaret find life dull and depressing there. We want to come back but we want to come back with money saved and so far we haven’t saved any - the I’m one novel ahead and book of pretty good (seven) short stories. I’ve done about 10 pieces of horrible junk in the last year the that I can never republish or bear to look at - cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work. But the novel I’m sure of. It’s marvelous.
We’re just back from Capri where I sat up (tell Bunny) half the night talking to my old idol Compton Mackenzie. Perhaps you met him. I found him cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.
To show you how well you guessed the gossip I wanted, we were wondering where — got the money for Havana, whether the Film Guild finally collapsed. (Christ! You should have seen their last two pictures - one from my story.) But I don’t doubt that —
and — will talk themselves into the Cabinet eventually. I’d do it myself if I could but I’m too much of an egotist and not enough of a diplomat ever to succeed-in the movies. You must begin by placing the tongue flat against the posteriors of such worthys as — and — and commence a slow carressing movement. Say what they may of Cruze - Famous Players is the product of two great ideas, DeMille and Gloria Swanson, and it stands or falls not on their ‘conference methods’ but on those two and the stock pictures that imitate them. The Cruze winnings are usually lost on such expensive experiments as — .
(Needless to say this letter is not for T.M. or Alec, but for your ears alone.)
Is Dos Passos’ novel any good? And what’s become of Cum- mings’ work? I haven’t read Some Do Not but Zelda was crazy about fit. I glanced through it and kept wondering why it was written backward. At first I thought they’d sewn the cover on upside down. Well - these people will collaborate with Conrad.
Do you still think Dos Passos is a genius? My faith in him is somehow weakened. There’s so little time for faith these days.
— is a damned attractive woman and, while the husband’s a haberdasher, he’s at least a Groton haberdasher (he went there, I mean, to school)....
The Wescott book will be eagerly devoured. A personable young man of that name from Atlantic introduced himself to me after the failure of The Vegetable. I wonder if he’s the same. At any rate your Wescott, so Harrison Rhodes tells me, is coming here to Rome.
I’ve given up Nathan’s books. I liked the fourth series of Prejudices. Is Lewis’ new book good? Hergesheimer’s was awful. He’s all done.
Merrit Hemingway - I have a dim memory that he and I admired Ginevra King at the same time once in those palmy days.
The cheerfulest thing in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again. Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.
Our very best to Margaret Please write!
Scott
In the Villa d’Este at Tivoli all that ran in my brain was:
An alley of dark cypresses
Hides an enrondured pool o
f light
And there the young musicians come
With instruments for her delight
— locks are bowed
Over dim lutes that sigh aloud
Or else with heads thrown back they tease
Reverberate echoes from the drum
The stiff folds etc.
It was wonderful that when you wrote that you’d never seen Italy - or, by God, now that I think of it, never lived in the 15th century.
But then I wrote T.S. of P. without ever having been to Oxford.
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
August 9,1925
Dear John:
Thank you for your most pleasant, full, discerning and helpful letter about The Great Gatsby. It is about the only criticism that the book has had which has been intelligible, save a letter from Mrs Wharton. I shall duly ponder, or rather I have pondered, what you say about accuracy - I’m afraid I haven’t quite reached the ruthless artistry which would let me cut out an exquisite bit that had no place in the context. I can cut out the almost exquisite, the adequate, even the brilliant - but a true accuracy is, as you say, still in the offing. Also you are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself - for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself - the amalgam was never complete in my mind.
Your novel sounds fascinating and I’m crazy to see it. I am beginning a new novel next month on the Riviera. I understand that MacLeish is there, among other people (at Antibes where we are going). Paris has been a mad-house this spring and, as you can imagine, we were in the thick of it. I don’t know when we’re coming back - maybe never. We’ll be here till January (except for a month in Antibes), and then we go Nice for the spring, with Oxford for next summer. Love to Margaret and many thanks for the kind letter.
Scott
Paris,France
Probably September, 1925
Dear Sir:
The enclosed explains itself. Meanwhile I went to Antibes and liked Archie MacLeish enormously. Also his poem, though it seems strange to like anything so outrageously derivative. T.S. of p. was an original in comparison.
I’m crazy to see your novel. I’m starting a new one myself. There was no one at Antibes this summer except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes, Charlie Brackett, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, ex-Premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont - just a real place to rough it, an escape from all the world. But we had a great time. I don’t know when we’re coming home -
The Hemingways are coming to dinner so I close with best wishes.
Scott
do Guaranty Trust
Paris,France
Winter, 1929
Dear John:
My depression over the badness of the novel * as novel had just about sunk me, when I began the novelette t - John, it’s like two different men writing. The novelette is one of the best war things I’ve ever read - right in with the very best of Crane and Bierce - intelligent, beautifully organized and written - oh, it moved me and delighted me - the Charles Town country, the night in town, the old lady - but most of all, in the position I was in at 4 this afternoon when I was in agony about the novel, the really fine dramatic handling of the old-lady-and-silver episode and the butchery scene. The preparation for the latter was adroit and delicate and just enough.
Now, to be practical - Scribner’s Magazine will, I’m sure, publish the novelette, if you wish, and pay you from $250-$400 therefor. This price is a guess but probably accurate. I’d be glad to act as your amateur agent in the case. It is almost impossible without a big popular name to sell a two-part story to any higher-priced magazine than that, as I know from my experience with ‘Diamond Big as Ritz,”Rich Boy,’ etc. Advise me as to whether I may go ahead - of course authority confined only to American serial rights.
The novel is just something you’ve learned from and profited by. It has occasional spurts - like the conversations frequently of Brakespeare, but it is terribly tepid - I refrain - rather I don’t refrain but here set down certain facts which you are undoubtedly quite as aware of as I am.
1. — Pp. 1-28. Elaborate preparation. Baby born without a scene. Only announcement. Monsignor feeble. A Catholic bishop does not rank above monsignor - his ambition to be a bishop is as incomprehensible as the idea of a staff captain to have a company.
2. — You have now all but lost the reader. He will not face the mass of detail 28 et sequitur. Italian theme strained - your ignorance of the Catholic Church fascinates me. Did you ever meet Mrs Winthrop Chanler? Madden good idea but observed thinly.
Your combination of leaning on a great thing for your color and simultaneously trying to patronize it -!
At end something happens - child cries - feeble - has no significance except the strained one of making the reader think - ‘Well, after all that climb it must mean more than I think it does!’
P. 48. Et sequitur.
First really fine page - my novel has same idea (shorter) about an English whore. However when this sixth Who’s Who commences all interest finally vanishes. No life is that dull. Did you ever see those midwestern books of the eighties-nineties, Our Pioneers, or Mid-Western Military Men - A Compilation? Even lists of dates, with their suggestion, are more alive.
(I’m taking you for a beating, but do you remember your letters to me about Gatsby? I suffered, but I got something - like I did out of your friendly tutelage in English poetry.)
You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade - where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think. Cf., andrognous (sic), etc. Exceptions: (a) need to avoid repetition (b) need of rhythm, etc. (c) etc.
P. 62. Story interest again begins.
P. 71. Gone again. Reader’s effort, like writer’s, was too much.
P. 79, etc. (Incidentally in this novel you have (a) suggestion that Gettysburg was fought before Chancellorsville (b) that retreat from Gettysburg and from Antietam was in same campaign (c) that Colonels were often locally elected in southern armies - which contrast sharply with your profound knowledge of the Civil War in story.)
A big person can make a much bigger mess than a little person and your impressive stature converted a lot of pottery into pebbles during the three years or so you were in the works. Luckily the pottery was never very dear to you. Novels are not written, or at least begun, with the idea of making an ultimate philosophical system - you tried to atone for your lack of confidence by a lack of humility before the form.
The main thing is: no one in our language possibly excepting Wilder has your talent for ‘the world,’ your culture and acuteness of social criticism as implied in the story. There the approach (second and third person, etc.) is considered, full scope in choice of subject for your special talents (descriptive power, sense of le pays, ramifications of your special virtues such as loyalty, concealment of the sensuality, that is your bête noire to such an extent that you can no longer see it black, like me my drunkenness).
Anyhow it’s (the story) marvelous. Don’t be mad at this letter. I have the horrors tonight and perhaps am taking it out on you. Write me when I could see you here in Paris in the afternoon between 2:30 and 6:30 and talk - and name a day and a café at your convenience - I have no dates save on Sunday so any day will suit me. Meanwhile I’ll make one more stab at your novel to see if I can think of any way by a miracle of cutting it could be made presentable. But I fear there’s neither honor nor money in it for you.
Your old and always affectionate friend, Scott Excuse Christ-like tone of letter. Began tippling at page 2 and am now positively holy (like Dostoevski’s non-stinking monk).
Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne April, 1931
Dear John:
Read Many Thousands over again (the second time) and like it enormously. I think it h
angs together as a book too. I like the first story -1 think it’s damn good. I’d never read it before. ‘Death and Young Desire’ doesn’t come off - as for instance the handling of the same theme in The Story of St Michele. Why I don’t know.
My favorite is ‘The Cellar’ - I am still fascinated by the Con-
radian missing man - that’s real fiction. ‘Bones’ seems even better in the respect-inspiring light thrown by Bunny’s opinion. I’m taking it to Zelda tomorrow.
Ever friend,
Scott
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland April 2, 1934
Dear John:
Somebody (I’ve forgotten who after an overcrowded and hectic twenty-four hours in New York) quoted you to me as saying that this current work is ‘no advance on what he’s done before.’ That’s a legitimate criticism, but I can’t take it as a slam. I keep thinking of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus preface - and I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring. And if the ending of this one is not effectual I should be gladder to think that the effect came back long afterwards, long after one had forgotten the name of the author.
All this makes it more necessary to see you and do some doping on the practice of the novel while you’re in process of revision. I’ll be up in New York toward the beginning of next week. Will you keep that in mind and if your plans change suddenly let me know?
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 459
