I’m working like a dog on some movies at present. I was sorry our meetings in New York were so fragmentary. My original plan was to contrive to have long discourses with you but that interminable party began and I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober. In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.
My compliments to Mary Blair, Ted Paramore and whomsoever else of the elect may cross your path.
We have no plans for the summer.
Scott Rtz —
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD HACK WRITER AND PLAGIARIST SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
626 Goodrich Avenue
Postmarked May 30,1922
Dear Bunny:
Your delightful letter, of which I hope you have kept a copy, arrived this A.M. and the Fitzgeralds perused it ferociously, commending especially your hope that — gets a good screw in France.
I am so discouraged about the play that it has cheered me to know it’s still under consideration. I thought they’d burn it up.
I think you overestimate the play - the Act I is a gem. Also I think you’re wrong about the soldier scene. Zelda, George Nathan, Miller, Townsend and I think John all thought it should come out. Still I should not object to it being reinserted. Do you like my letterhead? I have jazzed up the millionaire scene in the revised version. I have not read Ulysses but I’m wild to - especially now that you mention some coincidence. Do you know where I can get it at any price? Sorry about your Smart Set novelette....
I am enormously interested in your play. Send me a copy when you can.
I’d like to meet Dos Passos - God, this is a dull letter. I didn’t read your Double Dealer poem the I heard about it and it seems to have achieved fame. The magazine is unprocurable out here.
We’re going to the country for the summer, but write me here immediately. I wish I could close in a rhapsody like yours but the fire is out for the night. Harris sent back the play to Reynolds without comment. If you can think of a title for it, jot it down and let me know.
Yield to your country complex. Zelda says how-de-do.
Ever thine,
F.Scott F —
St Paul,
Minnesota
Postmarked June 4, 1922
Dear Bunny:
You will be looked up by Thomas A. Boyd, a very clever kid who conducts the best book page west of New York, in a newspaper here. I do not ask you to wine and dine him as I personally dislike people sent to me with letters. I do ask you to see him the and give him half an hour or so of your valuable time. He’s quite a friend of mine.
Scott Fitz —
The Yacht Club
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
June 25, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Thank you for giving the play to Craven - and again for your interest in it in general. I’m afraid I think you overestimate it - because I have just been fixing up ‘Mr Icky’ for my fall book and it does not seem very good to me. I am about to start a revision of the play - also to find a name. I’ll send it to Hopkins next. So far it has only been to Miller, Harris and the Theatre Guild. I’d give anything if Craven would play that part. I wrote it, as the text says, with him in mind. I agree with you that Anna Christie was vastly overestimated....
Am going to write another play whatever becomes of this one. The Beautiful and Damned has had a very satisfactory but not inspiring sale. We thought it’d go far beyond Paradise but it hasn’t. It was a dire mistake to serialize it. Three Soldiers and Cytherea took the edge off it by the time it was published....
Did you like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ or did you read it. It’s in my new book anyhow.
What do you think of Rascoe’s page? It’s excellent, of course, compared to The Times or Herald but I think your criticism of his Frank-Harassment of his conversations hit the mark. There is something faintly repellent in his manner - in writing I mean. Who is this professionally quaint Kenhelm Digby? He is kittenish beyond credibility and I hate his guts. Is it Morley or Benêt?
I have Ulysses from the Brick Row Bookshop and am starting it. I wish it was laid in America - there is something about middle- class Ireland that depresses me inordinately - I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked. Except to go either South or to New York in October for the winter.
Ever thine,
F. Scott Fitz
The Yacht Club
White Bear Lake,
Minnesota
Postmarked July 13, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play. So when Craven returns it will you send it to me - or hold on to it, either one?
I read your article on Ulysses, the only criticism yet I could make head or tail of. Also your article on Byron in the Tribune. You are an incomparable egg and I wish I could see you. Life is damn dull
In God’s name,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Yacht Club
White Bear Lake,
Minnesota
Postmarked August 1, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Just a line to tell you I’ve finished my play and am sending it to Nathan to give to Hopkins or Selwyn. It is now a wonder. I’m going to ask you to destroy the 2 copies you have as it makes me sort of nervous to have them out This is silly but so long as a play is in an actor’s office and is unpublished as my play at Craven’s I feel lines from it will soon begin to appear on Broadway.
I want to thank you again for all you did for it and the time it took. I don’t know anything that involves more labor than trying to place someone else’s ms. I did it for — so I know and I am enormously obliged.
Write me any gossip if you have time. No news or plans have L
Thine,
Fitz
The Yacht Club
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
Postmarked August 5, 1922
Dear Bunny:
Fitzgerald howled over ‘Quintilian.’ He is glad it was reprinted as he couldn’t get the Double Dealer and feared he had missed it. It’s excellent especially the line about Nero and die one about Dr Bishop.
The play with an absolutely new second act has gone to Nathan who is giving it to Hopkins or Selwyn. Your description of John leaving was fine. Zelda and I both enjoyed it with dramatic
? and, what would have been gratifying to you, awe. Thank you for taking it to Ames 8c Elkins. I’m rather glad now that none of them took it as I’d have been tempted to let them do it - and my new version is much better. Please do not bother to return the 2 mss. you have as it’s a lot of trouble. I have copies of them and no use for them. Destruction will serve the same purpose - it only worries me to have them knocking around.
I read sprigs of the old oak that grew from the marriage of Mencken and Margaret Anderson (Christ! What a metaphor!) and is known as the younger genitals. It bored me. I didn’t read yours - but Rascoe is getting worse than Frank Harris with his elaborate explanations and whitewashings of himself. There’s no easier way for a clever writer to become a bore. It turns the gentle art of making enemies into the East Aurora Craft of making people indifferent... in the stunned pause that preceded this epigram Fitzgerald bolted his aspic and went to a sailor’s den.
‘See here,’ he said, ‘I want some new way of using the great Conradian vitality, the legend that the sea exists without Polish eyes to see it. Masefield has spread it on iambics and downed it; O’Neill has sprinkled it on Broadway; McFee has added an Even- rude motor -’
But I could think of no new art form in which to fit him. So I decided to end the letter. The little woman, my best pal and, I may add, my severest critic, asked to be remembered.
Would you like to see the new play? Or are you fed up for awhile? Perhaps we better wait till it appears. I think I’ll try to serialize it in Scribner’s - would you?
Scott F.
Am undecided about Ulysses applicatio
n to me - which is as near as I ever come to forming an impersonal judgment.
The Yacht Club
White Bear Lake,
Minnesota
Postmarked August 28, 1922
Dear Bunny:
The Garland arrived and I have re-read it. Your preface is perfect - my only regret is that it wasn’t published when it was written almost two years ago. ‘The Soldier’ of course I read for about the fifth time. I think it’s about the best short war story yet - but I object violently to ‘pitched forward’ in the lunch- putting anecdote. The man would have said ‘fell down’ or ‘sorta sank down.’ Also I was delighted as usual by ‘The Efficiency Expert.’ Your poems I like less than your prose - ‘The Lake’ I do not particularly care for. I like ‘The Centaur’ and the ‘Epilogue’ best - but all your poetry seems to flow from some source outside or before the romantic movement even when its intent is mostly lyrical.
I like all of John’s except the play, which strikes me as being obvious, and ‘Resurrection’ which despite its excellent idea and title and some spots of good writing is pale and without any particular vitality.
Due to you, I suppose, I had a wire from Langner, I referred him to George Nathan.
Many thanks for the book. Would you like me to review it? If so suggest a paper or magazine and I’ll be glad to.
Thine,
F. Scott Fitz
The format of the book is most attractive. I grow envious every time I see a Knopf binding.
Villa Marie, Valescure St Raphael, France
Postmarked October 7,1924
Dear Bunny:
The above will tell you where we are, as you proclaim yourself unable to find it on the map. We enjoyed your letter enormously, colossally, stupendously. It was epochal, acrocryptical, categorical. I have begun life anew since getting it and Zelda has gone into a nunnery on the Peloponnesus —
The news about the play is grand and the ballet too. I gather from your letter that O’Neill and Mary had a great success. But you are wrong about Ring’s book t My title was the best possible. You are always wrong - but always with the most correct possible reasons. (This statement is merely acrocritical, hypothetical, diabolical, metaphorical.)....
You speak of — ‘s wife. I didn’t see her - but stay, there was a woman there - but what she said and did and looked like I can not tell. Is she an elderly, gross woman with hair growing in her ears and a red, porous forehead? If so, I remember her. Or stay - there was a rumor that he had married an Ethiop and took her to bleach beside the fjord —
I had a short curious note from the latter Î yesterday, calling me to account for my Mercury story. At first I couldn’t understand this communication after seven blessedly silent years - behold: he was a Catholic. I had broken his heart This is a dumb letter but I have just been reading the advertisements of whore-houses in the French magazines. I seethe with passion for a ‘bains-massage,’ with volupté for oriental delights (tout un) in a Hotel Particular, or else I long to go with a young man (intell., bonne famille, affectueux) for a paid amorous weekend to the coast of illegible. Deep calling to deep.
I will give you now the Fitz touch without which this letter would fail to conform to your conception of my character.
Sinclair Lewis sold his new novel to the Designer for $50,000 (950,000.00 francs) - I never did like that fellow. (I do really.)
My book is wonderful, t so is the air and the sea. I have got my health back - I no longer cough and itch and roll from one side of the bed to the other all night and have a hollow ache in my stomach after two cups of black coffee. I really worked hard as hell last winter - but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.
Write to me of all data, gossip, event, accident, scandal, sensation, deterioration, new reputation - and of yourself.
Our love,
Scott
14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France
Spring, 1925
Dear Bunny:
Thanks for your letter about the book. I was awfully happy that you liked it and that you approved of the design. The worst fault in it, I think is aBlG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However, the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it - the everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name. Mencken said (in a most enthusiastic letter received today) that the only fault was that the central story was trivial and a sort of anecdote (that is because he has forgotten his admiration for Conrad and adjusted himself to the sprawling novel) and I felt that what he really missed was the lack of any emotional backbone at the very height of it.
Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazov. From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story. However, the letters from you and Mencken have compensated me for the fact that of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about and for the even more depressing fact that it was, in comparison with the others, a financial failure (after I’d turned down fifteen thousand for the serial rights). I wonder what Rosenfeld thought of it I looked up Hemingway. He is taking me to see Gertrude Stein tomorrow. This city is full of Americans - most of them former friends - whom we spend most of our time dodging, not because we don’t want to see them but because Zelda’s only just well and I’ve got to work; and they seem to be incapable of any sort of conversation not composed of semi-malicious gossip about New York courtesy celebrities. I’ve gotten to like France. We’ve taken a swell apartment until January. I’m filled with disgust for Americans in general after two weeks’ sight of the ones in Paris - these preposterous, pushing women and girls who assume that you have any personal interest in them, who have all (so they say) read James Joyce and who simply adore Mencken. I suppose we’re no worse than anyone, only contact with other races brings out all our worst qualities. If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job.
I’d love to see you. God. I could give you some laughs. There’s no news except that Zelda and I think we’re pretty good, as usual, only more so.
Scott
Thanks again for your cheering letter.
Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware
February, 1928
Dear Bunny:....
All is prepared for February 25th. The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old enthusiasms are being burnished with that zeal peculiar only to the British Tommy. My God, how we felt when the long slaughter of Passchendaele had begun. Why were the Generals all so old? Why were the Fabian society discriminated against when positions on the general staff went to Dukes and sons of profiteers? Agitators were actually hooted at in Hyde Park and Anglican divines actually didn’t become humanitarian internationalists overnight. What is Britain coming to - where is Milton, Cromwell, Oates, Monk? Where are Shaftesbury, Athelstane, Thomas à Becket, Margot Asquith, Iris March? Where are Blackstone, Touchstone, Clapham-Hopewell- ton, Stoke-Poges? Somewhere back at G.H.Q. handsome men with grey whiskers murmured, ‘We will charge them with the cavalry,’ and meanwhile boys from Bovril and the black country sat shivering in the lagoons at Ypres writing memoirs for liberal novels about the war. What about the tanks? Why did not Douglas Haig or Sir John French (the big smarties - look what they did to General Mercer) invent tanks the day war broke out, like Sir Phillip Gibbs, the weeping baronet, did or would, had he thought of it?
This is just a sample of what you will get on the 25th of February. There will be small but select company, coals, blankets, ‘something for the inner man.’
Please don’t say you can’t come the 25th but would like to come the 29th. We never receive people the 29th. It is the anniversary of the 2nd Council of Nicea when our Blessed Lord, our Blessed L
ord, our Blessed Lord -
It always gets stuck in that place. Put on ‘Old Man River’ or something of Louis Bromfield’s.
Pray gravity to move your bowels. It’s little we get done for us in this world. Answer.
Scott
Enjoyed your Wilson article enormously. Not so Thompson affair.
c/o Guaranty Trust
4 Place de la Concorde Paris,
France
Summer, 1930
Dear Bunny:
Congratulations on your marriage and all real hopes for your happiness. We heard, through Mary, long after the event of your collapse t and the thought that you’d survived it helped me through some despairing moments in Zelda’s case. She is now almost ‘well,’ which is to say the psychosis element is gone. We must live quietly for a year now and to some extent forever. She almost went permanently crazy - four hours’ work a day at the ballet for two years, and she 27 and too old when she began. I’m relieved that the ballet was over anyhow as our domestic life was cracking under the strain and I hadn’t touched my novel for a year. She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely impregnable safe inside her that it was months after the break before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.
I have seen no one for months save John in Paris.... the brief spell of work I nagged him into during Margaret’s pregnancy has now given way to interminable talk about a well on their property — Also a man named Thomas Wolfe, a fine man and a fine writer. Paris swarms with fairies and I’ve grown to loathe it and prefer the hospital-like air of Switzerland where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs. Met your friend Allen Tate, liked him....
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 467
