Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 468
Salute the new Mrs Wilson for me.... and remember you’re never long absent from the solicitudes of
Your old friend,
Scott
It was nice of you, and like you, to write Zelda.
La Paix (My God!)
Tow son, Maryland
Probably March, 1933
Dear Bunny:
Your letter with the head of Vladimir Ulianov just received. Please come here the night of the inauguration and stay at least the next day. I want to know with what resignation you look forward to your role of Lunacharsky and whether you decided you had nothing further worth saying in prose fiction or whether there was nothing further to say. Perhaps I should draw the answer to the last question from Axel’s Castle yet I remember stories of yours that anticipated so much that was later said that it seemed a pity. (Not that I don’t admire your recent stuff - particularly I liked ‘Hull House.’)
We had a most unfortunate meeting. I came to New York to get drunk and swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation. I assume full responsibility for all unpleasantness - with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him; and as for bringing up the butcher boy matter - my God I making trouble between friends is the last thing I had ever thought myself capable of. Anyhow, plenty of egotism for the moment.
Dos was here, and we had a nice evening - we never quite understand each other and perhaps that’s the best basis for an enduring friendship. Alec came up to see me at the Plaza the day I left (still in awful shape but not conspicuously so). He told me to my amazement that you had explained the fundamentals of Leninism, even Marxism, the night before, and Dos tells me that it was only recently made plain thru the same agency to The New Republic. I little thought when I left politics to you and your gang in 1920 you would devote your time to cutting up Wilson’s shroud into blinders! Back to Mallarmé.
- Which reminds me that T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon and evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine.... However, come in March. Don’t know what time the inaugura-
tion takes place but you find out and tell us the approximate time of your arrival here. Find out in advance for we may go to it too and we might all get lost in the shuffle.
Always your friend,
Scott
P.S. Please not a word to Zelda about anything I may have done or said in New York. She can stand literally nothing of that nature. I’m on the water-wagon but there’ll be lots of liquor for you.
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
Postmarked March 12, 1934
Dear Bunny:
Despite your intention of mild criticism in our conversation, I felt more elated than otherwise - if the characters got real enough so that you disagreed with what I chose for their manifest destiny the main purpose was accomplished. (By the way, your notion that Dick should have faded out as a shyster alienist was in my original design, but I thought of him, in reconsideration, as an ‘homme épuisé,’ not only an ‘homme manqué.’ I thought that, since his choice of a profession had accidentally wrecked him, he might plausibly have walked out on the profession itself.)
Any attempt by an author to explain away a partial failure in a work is of course doomed to absurdity - yet I could wish that you, and others, had read the book version rather than the magazine version which in spots was hastily put together. The last half for example has a much more polished facade now. Oddly enough several people have felt that the surface of the first chapters was too ornate. One man even advised me to ‘coarsen the texture,’ as being remote from the speed of the main narrative!
In any case when it appears I hope you’ll find time to look it over again. Such irrelevancies as Morton Hoyt’s nose-dive and Dick’s affair in Innsbruck are out, together with the scene of calling on the retired bootlegger at Beaulieu, and innumerable minor details. I have driven the Scribner proofreaders half nuts but I think I’ve made it incomparably smoother.
Zelda’s pictures go on display in a few weeks and I’ll be meeting her in N.Y. for a day at least. Wouldn’t it be a good time for a reunion?
It was good seeing you and good to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out.
With affection always,
Scott Fitzgerald
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
September 7,1934
Dear Bunny:
I’ve had a big reaction from your last two articles in The New Republic.In spite of the fact that we always approach material in different ways there is some fast-guessing quality that, for me, links us now in the work of the intellect. Always the overtone and the understatement.
It was fun when we all believed the same things. It was more fun to think that we were all going to die together or live together, and none of us anticipated this great loneliness, where one has dedicated his remnants to imaginative fiction and another his slowly dissolving trunk to the Human Idea. Nevertheless the stress that you put upon this in your New Republic article - of forces never still, of rivers never ending, of clouds shifting their prophecies at evening, afternoon or morning - this sense of things has kept our courses loosely parallel, even when our references to data have been so disparate as to throw us miles apart.
The purport of this letter is to agree passionately with an idea that you put forth in a discussion of Michelet: that conditions irretrievably change men and that what looks purple in a blue light looks, in another spectrum, like green and white bouncing snow. I want you to know that one among many readers is absolutely alert on the implications and substrata of meaning in this new work.
Ever affectionately yours,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
May 16, 1939
Dear Bunny:
News that you and Mary had a baby reached me rather late because I was out of California for several months. Hope he is now strong and crawling. Tell him if he grows up any bigger I shall be prepared to take him for a loop when he reaches the age of twenty- one at which time I shall be sixty-three. I don’t know any girl in the last several years with more charm than Mary. It was a delight to meet her and spend an evening with you all. If I had known about the news in time, I would have wired you.
I called up Louise Fort in San Diego, but couldn’t get her number and imagine she had left before I came back to California. However, I am sending on your letter to Ted Paramore who may have more luck.
Believe me, Bunny, it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton. Though my idea is now, to learn about a new life from Louis B. Mayer who promises to teach me all about things if he ever gets around to it
Ever your devoted friend,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
October 21, 1940
Dear Bunny:
I am deep into the Finland Station and I break off to write you that some of the reviews especially The New Yorker and New Republic made me sick....
I suppose they wanted you to produce a volume on the order of John Strachey, and they had a few labels prepared with which to quarantine you. Why otherwise they should quarrel with your historical approach is inexplicable to me.
It is a magnificent book - just as it promised to be in The New Republic. My very best to you both and to the young one.
Ever,
Scott
P.S. Am somewhere in a novel
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood,
California
November 25, 1940
Dear Bunny:....
Two years after it w
as published I ran across an article by John Bishop in the Virginia Quarterly. His war story about Ernest under the corpses is pure crap. Also he says that I flunked out of Princeton, though in the year referred to I went to my last class November 28th, when it is somewhat unusual to flunk out. Also he reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I’ve had this before but nobody seems able to name these rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction - Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in ‘café society.’ It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more....
I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.
With best to you both,
Scott
P.S. This sounds like such a bitter letter - I’d rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.
To Gerald and Sara Murphy
Grove Park Inn Sunset
Mountain Asheville,
North Carolina
August 15, 1935
Dearest Sara:
Today a letter from Gerald, a week old, telling me this and that about the awful organ music around us, made me think of you, and I mean think of you (of all people in the world you know the distinction). In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction, i e., that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character - in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender
‘Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful’
and again
‘He had been heavy, belly-frightened with love of her for years’
- in those and in a hundred other places I tried to evoke not you but the effect that you produce on men - the echoes and reverberations - a poor return for what you have given by your living presence, but nevertheless an artist’s (what a word!) sincere attempt to preserve a true fragment rather than a ‘portrait’ by Mr Sargent. And someday, in spite of all the affectionate skepticism you felt toward the brash young man you met on the Riviera eleven years ago, you’ll let me have my little corner of you where I know you better than anybody - yes, even better than Gerald. And if it should perhaps be your left ear (you hate anyone to examine any single part of your person, no matter how appreciatively - that’s why you wore bright clothes) on June evenings on Thursdays from 11:00 to 11:15 here’s what I’d say.
That not one thing you’ve done is for nothing. If you lost everything you brought into the world - if your works were burnt in the public square the law of compensation would still act (I am too moved by what I am saying to write it as well as I’d like). You are part of our times, part of the history of our race. The people whose lives you’ve touched directly or indirectly have reacted to the corporate bundle of atoms that’s you in a good way. I have seen you again and again at a time of confusion take the hard course almost blindly because long after your powers of ratiocination were exhausted you clung to the idea of dauntless courage. You were the one who said:
‘All right, I’ll take the black checker men.’
I know that you and Gerald are one and it is hard to separate one of you from the other, in such a matter for example as the love and encouragement you chose to give to people who were full of life rather than to others, equally interesting and less exigent, who were frozen into rigid names. I don’t praise you for this - it was the little more, the little immeasurable portion of a millimeter, the thing at the absolute top that makes the difference between a World’s Champion and an also-ran, the little glance when you were sitting with Archie on the sofa that you threw at me and said:
‘And-Scott!’
- taking me in too, and with a heart so milked of compassion by your dearest ones that no person in the world but you would have that little more to spare.
Well - I got somewhat excited there. The point is: I rather like you, and I think that perhaps you have the makings of a good woman.
Gerald has invited me to come up for a weekend in the fall - probably September.
It’s odd that when I read over this letter it seems to convey no particular point, yet I’m going to send it. Like Cole’s eloquent little song ‘I think it’ll tell you how great you are.’
From your everlasting friend,
Scott
Cambridge Arms Apts.
Baltimore,
Maryland
Postmarked March 30,1936
Dearest Sara (and Gerald too, if he’s not in London):
I want news of you. The winter has presented too many problems here for me to come North, even as far as New York, and my last word of you was by kindness of Archie - and not too encouraging.
If you read the little trilogy I wrote for Esquire you know I went through a sort of ‘dark night of the soul’ last autumn, and again and again my thoughts reverted to you and Gerald, and I reminded myself that nothing had happened to me with the awful suddenness of your tragedy of a year ago, nothing so utterly conclusive and irreparable. I saw your face, Sara, as I saw it a year ago this month, and Gerald’s face last fall when I met him in the Ritz Bar, and I felt very close to you - and correspondingly detached from Emest, who has managed to escape the great thunderbolts, and Nora Flynn whom the gods haven’t even shot at with much seriousness. She would probably deny that, and she helped me over one black week when I thought this was probably as good a time to quit as any, but as I said to her the love of life is essentially as incommunicable as grief.
I am moving Zelda to a sanatorium in Asheville - she is no better, though the suicidal cloud has lifted. - I thought over your Christian Science idea and finally decided to try it but the practitioner I hit on wanted to begin with ‘absent treatments,’ which seemed about as effectual to me as the candles my mother keeps constantly burning to bring me back to Holy Church - so I abandoned it. Especially as Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps.
incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scottie isn’t, because I’ve brought Scottie up hard as nails (perhaps that’s fatuous, but I think I have). Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s ‘terribly dangerous secret thoughts’ I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her -
The only way to show me you forgive this great outpouring is to write me about yourselves. Some night when you’re not too tired, take yourself a glass of sherry and write me as lovely and revealing a letter as you did before. Willy-nilly we are still in the midst of life and all true correspondence is necessarily sporadic but a letter from you or Gerald always pulls at something awfully deep in me. I want the best news, but in any case I want to know.
With dearest affection to you all,
Scott
Oak Hall
Hotel Tryon,
North Carolina
January 31, 1937
Dearest Gerald and Sara:
The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice I can
see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln’s in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.
But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort 0f joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.
Scott
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
March 11,1938
Dear Gerald:
Your letter was a most pleasant surprise. The telegram I sent you was prompted by one of those moments when you see people as terribly alone - a moment in the Newark airport. It was entirely a piece of sentimentality because, of course, Sheilah has lots of friends in New York; and I realize now that it was a bad time to ask anything. You were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend you have never failed me.