Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 471
University Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey
March 26,1920
Dear Ruth:
I certainly was glad to get your letter because you are a good egg, Ruth, and Sam Kauffman who is at my elbow agrees with me. You may laugh when I tell you I am getting married April Fools’ Day but as a matter of fact I think I am. I have no idea where we’ll live - we’re going to the Biltmore for a week or so but my pocketbook wouldn’t stand that long, so we may take a cottage at Rye or somewhere like that. My book came out today and of course I’m frightfully excited. I am quite jubilant because I sold the movie rights of my first Post story, ‘Head and Shoulders’ for $2500 to the Metro people. Doesn’t that sound good? It was in the February 21st issue and was much better than the one last week.
Next time you’re in New York I want you to meet Zelda because she’s very beautiful and very wise and very brave as you can imagine - but she’s a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we’ll be will be hard to imagine. My address for the next ten years will probably be c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons and be sure and let me know next time you come or sometime and we can have luncheon or dinner or some darn thing - (You can see from this how out of my depths, I am.)
Well, Ruth, read my book.
As ever,
Scott Fitz —
TO THE BOOKSELLERS’ CONVENTION-
The Biltmore Hotel
New York City
Early April, 1920
THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY
I don’t want to talk about myself because I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book. In fact to write it, it took three months; to conceive it - three minutes; to collect the data in it - all my life. The idea of writing it came on the first of last July; it was a substitute form of dissipation.
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
So, gentlemen, consider all the cocktails mentioned in this book drunk by me as a toast to the Bookseller’s Convention.
Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Commodore Hotel New York City
May, 1920
Dear Bug:
Well, you may go to Princeton but we never will again. We were there three days, Zelda and five men in Harvey Firestone’s car, and not one of us drew a sober breath, fust ask anybody about it when you go down there - ask your friend Ollie Rogers - he was on the party. It was the damnedest party ever held in Princeton and everybody in the University will agree.
We are going around in a circle but at last seem to have a plan. We have purchased an ancient Marmon - not very ancient, 1917 - and we’re going to tour north to Lake Champlain and see if we can get a cottage there for the summer. We didn’t like Rye at all and we can’t live in Princeton after our celebration.
So you are going to see Bet. My Gawd! I can imagine anyone married but not she.
I’m glad you and Jim are going to have another chance to cause each other’s doom and I certainly hope that if you decide you do want him you won’t change your mind again. I’m still mad about marriage - if we could only find a place to live.
Zelda sends her best and says to come back to New York and help her buy some more clothes.
Best to Bet and Heine.
Love, F.Scott F —
TO RUTH STURTEVANT
c/o MrsWakeman Westport, Connecticut
May 14, 1920
Dear Ruth:
In acute agony and despair we at last forcibly left the Commodore, bought a car, threw our bags in the back seat and set out. We discovered the alarming fact our first day on the road from the people we had lunch with that there’s no swimming in Lake Champlain because it’s too cold. That was the shock of our lives, Ruth, because if Zelda can’t swim she’s miserable. I feel I’m a terrible piker to have put you to all that trouble but honestly it never occurred to me that there was no swimming there. We turned down a slick cottage on the coast of Maine last month for that very reason.
So we bore East, arrived here at nine o’clock this morning and immediately found the slickest little cottage on the Sound. We signed the lease on it at noon. There’s a beach here and loads of seclusion and just about what we’re looking for. We’d just about given up hope so now we’re in the most jovial mood imaginable.
Thank Curt for me, Ruth, and tell him I’m mighty indebted and awfully sorry we were so stupid in our geography. He wrote that you weren’t well. I hope you’re lots better now.
As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
Wakeman’s Westport,Connecticut
June 3, 1920
My dear President Hibben:
I want to thank you very much for your letter and to confess that the honor of a letter from you outweighed my real regretthat my book gave you concern. It was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips - no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’ - after that I retired. It is easy for the successful man in college, the man who has gotten what he wanted to say.
‘It’s all fine. It makes men. It made me, see’ -
- but it seems to me it’s like the captain of a company when he has his men lined up at attention for inspection. He sees only the tightly buttoned coat and the shaved faces. He doesn’t know that perhaps a private in the rear rank is half crazy because a pin is sticking in his back and he can’t move, or another private is thinking that his wife is dying and he can’t leave because too many men in the company are gone already.
I don’t mean at all that Princeton is not the happiest time in most boys’ lives. It is, of course - I simply say it wasn’t the happiest time in mine. I love it now better than any place on earth. The men - the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country. I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperament.
My view of life, President Hibben, is the view of the Theodore Dreisers and Joseph Conrads - that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men. My idealism flickered out with Henry Strater’s anti-club movement at Princeton. ‘The Four Fists,’ latest of my stories to be published, was the first to be written. I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three-inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially necessary for me to give the magazine what they wanted. The appreciation it has received has amazed me.
I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over- accentuate the gayety and country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the reader’s interest that part was much over- stressed, and of course the hero, not being average, reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate. It is the Princeton of Saturday night in May. Too many intelligent classmates of mine have failed to agree with it for me to consider it really photographic any more, as of course I did when I wrote it.
Next time I am in Princeton I will take the privilege of coining to see you.
I am, sir,
Very respectfully yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO BURTON RASCOE
38 West 59th StreetNew York City
November 17, 1920
Dear Mr Rascoe:
Thanks for the pamphlet. I enjoyed your essay on Mencken - I think it’s a clever touch: his ‘being the only true American,’ just as Anatole France ‘is the only living Catholic.’ Also I agree with you that he is a great man and bum crit
ic of poetry. Why has no one mentioned to him or of him that he is an intolerably muddled syllogism with several excluded middles on the question of aristocracy? What on earth does he mean by it? Every aristocrat of every race has come in for scathing comment yet he holds out the word as a universal panacea for art.
He and Nathan were up in the apartment drinking with us the other night and he was quite enthusiastic about Main Street.
This Mooncalf is a wretched thing without a hint of glamor, utterly undistinguished, childhood impressions dumped into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, and the sort of thing that Walpole and Beresford (whom I abominate) turn out twice a year with great bawlings about their art. I’d rather be Tarkington or David Graham Phillips and cast at least some color and radiance into my work! Wouldn’t you?
Thanks again.
Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
38 West 59th StreetNew York City
Christmas, 1920
Dear Mr Cabell:
It was the surprise of my life when Zelda handed me an autographed first edition of Jurgen this morning. You can imagine how I felt when I tell you I haven’t even been able to borrow it. Whenever I go to George Nathan’s I finger it covetously but I could never get farther than the door with it. People have a way of regarding it as infinitely precious. I want to see anyone try to borrow mine!
I once fingered a copy of it in a New Orleans bookstore one year ago and I’ve been cursing myself ever since for not buying it. I’d seen Mencken’s review but was very broke at the time. I read a wretched article on you in The Bookman by someone last month. Mencken and water. It must amuse you to have whole book review sections devoted to you after years of comparative neglect. Do you remember Samuel Butler’s
‘Oh critics, cultured critics
Who will praise me after I am dead
Who will see in me either more or less than I intended
How I should have hated you.’
- only you have the ironic good fortune of being alive.
I have just finished an extraordinary novel called The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy which shows touches of your influence, much of Mencken, and not a little of Frank Norris. Up to now such diverse writers as you, Mencken, Dreiser, and so forth have been held together more or less by the common enemy, philistia, but now that good books are, for the moment, selling almost as well as bad ones I wish Mencken would take a crack at such bogus masterpieces as Mooncalf, a book without glamor, without ideas, with nothing except a timorously uninteresting report of a shoddy and uninteresting life. I’m all for Salt, The Titan and Main Street. At Poor White I grow weary - but at Mooncalf - my God!
The only two books I’ve ever known my wife to weep over were Ethan Frome and The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck I appreciated your qualified tribute to Tarkington in Beyond Life. I agree with it perfectly.
I hope we’ll meet in the near future and meanwhile I’m looking forward to Jurgen as I have never looked forward to a book before.
Most admiringly and gratefully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MR AND MRS PHILIP MCQUILLAN
38 West 59th StreetNew York City
December 28, 1920
Dear Aunt Lorena and Uncle Phil:
The steak set is fine! We were in a furnished cottage all summer so we bought no silver so this will come in awfully handy whenever we have dinner in our apartment. We won’t have to bring the bread knife on the table any more. We certainly are much obliged.
I am just putting the finishing touches on my novel, The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy, which is the story of a young couple who rapidly go to pieces. It is much more carefully written than the first one and I have a good deal of faith in it the it’s so bitter and pessimistic that I doubt if it’ll have the popular success of the first. Still, as you know, I really am in this game seriously and for something besides money and if it’s necessary to bootlick the pet delusions of the inhabitants of Main Street (Have you read it? It’s fine!) to make money I’d rather live on less and preserve the one duty of a sincere writer - to set down life as he sees it as gracefully as he knows how.
I have a contract you know with the Metropolitan Magazine to serialize my next novel for $7000 but I’m sure if they tried to do this one their circulation would drop. You know the stuff they want! My current idol, H. L. Mencken, says about it:
‘If you yearn to uplift and like a happy comfortable sobbing, an upward rolling of eyes and a vast blowing of noses it will please you - on the other hand if you are a carnal fellow as I am, with a stomach ruined by alcohol, it will gag you.’
So within several years you’ll probably hear that I’ve been hung by an earnest delegation of 100% Americans.
I am waiting to hear from a scenario I outlined on Griffith’s order for — who is a colorless wench in the life as is her pal, — . But I am not averse to taking all the shekels I can garner from the movies. I’ll roll them joy pills (the literary habit) till doomsday because you can always say, ‘Oh, but they put on the movie in a different spirit from the way it was written!’
When I collect from Scribners this winter we expect to go abroad and spend a year or so. Why don’t you come East? The best liquor in New York is only $8.00 a quart. I thought of sending you and Uncle Alley and Father a bottle each but I decided it was too risky. I imagine you’d pay about $18.00 for anything drinkable out there.
Thanks again and luck to the redoubtable David.
As ever,
Scott
TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL
38 West 59th StreetNew York City
December 30, 1920
Dear Mr Cabell:
Can’t resist telling you that I have finished Jurgen and think on the whole that it’s a finer novel than The Revolt of the Anqels - the at present I’m inclined to rank your work as a whole below both Conrad and Anatole France. However you’re a much younger man.
My wife doesn’t agree - you are by all odds her favorite novelist.
Please don’t bother to answer this but if you’d let us know next time you’re in New York we’d both be very flattered.
Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then Joe read us... his poem at which both David... and I laughed appreciatively.
I’m sending a cable to Cabell
To cavil at callow callants
Who callously carped at the rabble
For caring for amours gallantes
For each pious burg out in Bergen
(a county in Jersey) has spoke
For jerking the joy out of Jurgen
And judging The Genius a joke!’
TO SINCLAIR LEWIS
38 West 59th StreetNew York City
January 26, 1920
1921
Dear Mr Lewis:
I want to tell you that Main Street has displaced Theron Ware in my favor as the best American novel. The amount of sheer data in it is amazing! As a writer and a Minnesotan let me swell the chorus - after a third reading.
With the utmost admiration,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL
38 West 59th Street
New York City
February 23,
1921
Dear Mr Cabell:
I was delighted to get Figures of Earth. I had just ordered it at the bookstore, which copy I shall present to some unworthy charity.
I am cancelling all engagements to read it today and tomorrow. Having finished my second novel née The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy but now known as The Beautiful and Damned I am about to sell my soul — and go to the coast to write one moving picture — ‘Well,’ as Codman says in his touching monograph on Anchovies, ‘there is no movie in Jurgen. It just won’t fillum.’ Incidentally given free rein, wouldn’t it be a treat to see it unex- purgated in the movies?
That was an idiotic review of The Cords of Vanity by Richard Le Gallienne - which reminds me I must order France’s new book, The Fall of the Angel
s. It must be a sequel to The Revolt of the Angels.
Still hoping that we may meet soon.
Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO FRANCES NEWMAN
38 West 59th Street
New York City
February 26, 1921
My dear Miss Newman:
While it astonished me that so few critics mentioned the influence of Sinister Street on This Side of Paradise, I feel sure that it was much more in intention than in literal fact. It occurred to me to write an American version of the history of that sort of young man - in which, no doubt, I was hindered by lack of perspective as well as by congenital shortcomings. But I was also hindered by a series of resemblances between my life and that of Michael Fane which, had I been a more conscientious man, might have precluded my ever attempting an autobiographical novel. I have five copies of Youth’s Encounter at present in my library, sent me by people who stumbled on the book and thought that it was an amusing parallel to my own life. When I was twenty-one and began This Side ofParadise my literary taste was so unformed that Youth’s Encounter was still my ‘perfect book.’ My book quite naturally shows the influence to a marked degree. However, I resent your details. Both Shane Leslie in the Dublin Review and Maurice Francis Egan in the Catholic World took me to task for painting ‘Monsignor Darcy’ from the life. He was, of course, my best friend, the Monsignor Sigourney Fay to whom the book was dedicated. He was known to many Catholics as the most brilliant priest in America. The letters in the book are almost transcriptions of his own letters to me.