Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 475
It was a coincidence that I heard from all my Princeton friends of which there are about a dozen - of which you, my dear sir, happen to be the most cherished - have turned up lately without even going to a reunion. From our class I heard from Non, two letters from Henry, one from you, none from Paul Dickey; in 1918 the record is not good on second thought; in 1919 however I crossed with Dave Bruce a year ago and Tom Lineaweaver turned up here in Baltimore and we spent two good days together.
Insofar as upperclassmen are concerned I saw a rather depressed nint at the Yale game and leave out — , a professional fairy. Even Dean Clarke, Bob Clarke’s brother (class of ‘27), has been here in Baltimore this winter which is like seeing Bob again.
All this list of names is put in for what provocative powers may be on you, and with a further wish that it may suggest to you the personality of your old friend from reading off a list of the people with whom he had dealings.
For yourself, your family and all that are dear to you I tender the old bunk and can’t tell you what a kick I got out of your note.
Scott
TO JOHN O’HARA
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland
July 18, 1933
Dear O’Hara:
I am especially grateful for your letter. I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding’ (modern form ‘inhibitions’). So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. So if I were elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalene to Guards, with an embryonic history which tied me to the Plantagenets, I would still be a parvenu. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.
I suppose this is just a confession of being a Gael though I have known many Irish who have not been afflicted by this intense social self-consciousness. If you are interested in colleges, a typical gesture on my part would have been, for being at Princeton and belonging to one of its snootiest clubs, I would be capable of going to Podunk on a visit and being absolutely booed and overawed by its social system, not from timidity but simply because of an inner necessity of starting my life and my self-justification over again at scratch in whatever new environment I may be thrown.
The only excuse for that burst of egotism is that you asked for it. I am sorry things are breaking —
TO ANDREW TURNBULL
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland
August 8, 1933
Dear Andrew:
Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and one more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use. Your mother told me that you had written a couple of somber letters home and I am both amused and disgusted. In trouble such as yours (of the reality of which I am by no means convinced) the proper tradition is that the mouth is kept shut, the eyes are lowered; the personality tries to say to itself: ‘I will adjust and adapt, I can beat anything offered to me; therefore I can beat change.’ Anything short of that would be dishonor to the past and to whatever you believe in.
The mouth tight, and the teeth and lips together are a hard thing, perhaps one of the hardest stunts in the world, but not a waste of time, because most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence. Remember to think straight: the crowd at camp is probably right socially and you are probably wrong. I’ll tell you a fact to corroborate that: I almost gave up the lease on this house for the simple fact that you persistently clung to the idea that beating down females was a method of establishing superiority over them.
Andrew, this will sound like kicking somebody when he’s down, and you wouldn’t expect that from a man who pretends to be your friend-; nevertheless, we have spent too many hours together for you to doubt that my friendship for you is founded on a mutual understanding that nothing could break - outside of a disagreement in principle. So I presume to suggest: would you examine your conscience and see if you have violated such primary laws as have been laid down for you? Where you haven’t - well, to hell with what other people think - better to fight your way out. The only thing that I ever told you definitely was that popularity is not worth a damn and respect is worth everything, and what do you care about happiness - and who does except the perpetual children of this world?
Always your friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Postscript: Am sending you a book.
Postscript (2) The poor boys called on me again. I tried to discourage them by making them work but I think they liked itl Postscript (3) Don’t leave this letter around - I’m sure you will get what I’m shooting at but it would defeat its own purpose if your contemporaries happened on it Postscript (4) Why, if your professed affection for your family is so strong, should you have disturbed your mother enough so that she should have brought up your gloom in conversation to me? Are you a Willie boy after all?
Postscript (5) This letter expects an answer.
TO JOHN LARDNER
La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland
September 20, 1933
Dear John:
I was sorry not seeing you in Paris but your residence there coincided with illness in Switzerland. The whole point of calling you up was an idea that I have had for some time, which won’t be less good for being old, that those articles that your father wrote could be strung into a very interesting story. Nevertheless, someone would have to work over it. Who to turn to! Much better a contemporary; consequently I have examined the possibilities. I can’t do it myself because I am engrossed in work of my own, and it seems to me the next best person would be Gilbert Seldes; consequently I called Gilbert Seldes and he said he would like to do the work. I suggested to him a ten per-cent cut of whatever it nets; even if he asks more I think it would be worth your while because he is a crack editor and I would let stand whatever terms he suggests.
This is a rather difficult situation because, as I said on the phone, your father is the worst editor of his own stuff who ever turned up in a big way of the writing line, with the possible exception of Theodore Dreiser. And your mother is not especially interested in writing as such, and so I will have to turn it over to you, but I would like to turn it over as a complete idea so that you could do it or destroy it as seems fitting to you. Will you let Gilbert Seldes decide? Pass over all the material to him that you get from Wheeler, not in sections, but collect it first yourself even if it takes about a month altogether. Gilbert is one of the very first journalists in America and if anyone can make an interesting and consecutive narrative of it he can do it, and, to repeat, he is interested in the idea. When a few is interested he has the strong sense of the track that we other races don’t even know the sprinting time of. His task is not merely an editorial one, according to my original conception, but will also include getting the stuff in order so it will tell a whole story (as much as Ring wanted to tell) of a certain period in his life. As his happens to be one of the most interesting temperaments of all the Americans of our time somebody is sure to be interested in publishing it, probably Scrib- ners; but there I want to butt into the situation and get it done right. The Autobiography of Ring W. Lardner was merely a long short story, all full of personal anecdotes that could only have been of interest to Ring and his friends. That’s what I mean by the fact that he has been a poor editor of his own stuff, and probably his sickness has not improved him in that regard, so while you must naturally tell him the idea is in progress it is much wiser for you and me to keep it in our hands. Or rather I hereby hand it over to you, with the opinion that you get from Seldes, and I would like to be c
alled in as the doctor at the last moment when something tangible has been accomplished.
With regards to (Scarface) (Half-Wit) (Red Nose) (Pure Insult) Lardner: please give all of them my very best regards and to yourself with reiterated regrets that we didn’t meet in Paris.
Yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO GLENWAY WESCOTT
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
February 6, 1934
Dear Glenway Wescott (This seems to be the form with which authors insult each other) (this letter is friendly), About six years ago when I was doping out my novel Tender Is the Night, which will appear this spring, somebody told me about the departure of an American battleship from Villefranche with the attendant poules, etc. I built an episode of my book around it and spoke of it to several people. A year or so later a letter came from Ernest Hemingway telling me that you had used it for a background in a short story. His advice was that I should read it and thus avoid any duplication, but my instinct was to the contrary, and I waited until I had written my own scene before I read Goodbye to Wisconsin. There are, unavoidably, certain resemblances, but I think that I will let it stand. This letter is written to you exactly as I wrote one to Willa Cather before publication of The Great Gatsby in regard to a paragraph that strangely paralleled one of hers in The Lost Lady. I have a cruel hatred of plagiarism of one’s contemporaries, and would not want you to think I had taken to shoplifting.
What the hell did you do to Gertrude Stein that she went harsh on you? I am eagerly awaiting your next book.
With best wishes,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO THOMAS WOLFE
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
April 2, 1934
Dear Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes:
Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter t which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome. It is hard to believe that it was in the summer of 1930 we went up the mountainside together - some of our experiences have become legendary to me and I am not sure even if they happened at all. One story (a lie or a truth) which I am in the habit of telling is how you put out the lights of Lake Geneva with a Gargantuan gestured so that I don’t know any more whether I was with you when it happened, or whether it ever happened at all!
I am so glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish. Again thanks for your generous appreciation.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes
TO JOHN JAMIESON
1307-Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland April 7, 1934
Dear Mr Jamieson:
I thought Leighton’s article had a sort of fruity bitterness about it but I was not at the time in a position of answering it - and I was amused by the severe kidding that Ernest Hemingway gave it. I am absolutely sure that more sweat and blood went into the creation of, say, A Farewell to Arms than into Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel. I agree with you that the latter is not heavily weighted, but to me it sounds less like a rough draft than like a small section of Proust.
I was interested also in your analysis of the influences upon my own books. I never read a French author, except the usual prep- school classics, until I was twenty, but Thackeray I had read over and over by the time I was sixteen, so as far as I am concerned you guessed right.
In any case let me thank you many times for your interest in Gatsby (by the way, the Modern Library is bringing it out again this spring) and your courtesy in sending me your observations. With very best wishes in hopes that we may meet in the near future.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO JOHN JAMIESON
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
April 15, 1934
Dear Mr Jamieson:
Thank you, immensely, for sending me your article. I agree with you entirely, as goes without saying, in your analysis of Gatsby. He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance. It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called ‘Absolution,’ in my book All the Sad Young Men was intended to be a picture of his early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery. Again, thanks! With very best wishes,
Yours,
Scott Fitzgerald
TO H. L. MENCKEN
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
April 23, 1934
Dear Menck:
I am afraid that I am going to have to violate your favorite code of morals - the breaking of engagements - because I’ve got to go to New York about trying to capitalize on my novel in the movies.
Without wanting to add to your mass of accumulated correspondence just as you’ve cleared it away, I would like to say in regard to my book that there was a deliberate intention in every part of it except the first. The first part, the romantic introduction, was too long and too elaborated largely because of the fact that it had been written over a series of years with varying plans, but everything else in the book conformed to a definite intention and if I had to start to write it again tomorrow I would adopt the same plan, irrespective of the fact of whether I had in this case brought it off or not brought it off. That is what most of the critics fail to understand (outside of the fact that they fail to recognize and identify anything in the book): that the motif of the ‘dying fall’ was absolutely deliberate and did not come from any diminution of vitality but from a definite plan.
That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemingway and I worked out - probably from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger - and it has been the greatest ‘credo’ in my life ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known except insofar as I have my natural obligation to my family - to provide for them. I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud, if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose - and that is no sentimental yapping about being disinterested. It is simply that, having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
With terrific regrets that I probably won’t be back in time to hear your harrowing African adventures, and compare them with my own, and with best regards always to my favorite Venus, Sara, I am As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 10, 1934
Dear Mrs Luhan:
I was tremendously pleased and touched by your letter and by your communication to the TribuneA It always strikes me as very strange when I find new people in the world, because I always crystallize any immediate group in which I move as being an all- sufficient, all-inclusive cross-section of the world, at the time I know it (the group) - this all the more because a man with the mobility of the writing profession and a certain notoriety thinks that he has a good deal of choice as to whom he will know. That from the outer bleakness, where you were only a name to me, you should have felt a necessity of communicating an emotion felt about a stranger, gave me again the feeling that Conrad expresses as ‘the solidarity of innumerable human hearts,’ at times a pretty good feeling, and your letter came to me at one of those times. Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like
scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers,
who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention. In the case of this book your appreciation has given me more pleasure than any other, not excepting Gilbert Seldes who seemed to think that I had done completely what I started out to do and that it was worth doing.
With gratitude for that necessity in you which made you take the special trouble, the extra steps, which reassured me that even at the moment of popping out something new I was reaching someone by air mail - and with the added declaration that I want to see you, I am Yours most cordially,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. My excuse for dictating this is a sprained arm.
TO GILBERT SELDES
1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore,
Maryland
May 31, 1934
Dear Gilbert:
fust read the Lardner collection. At first I was disappointed because I had expected there would be enough stuff for an omnibus and I still feel that it could have stood more weight. However, looking over those syndicate articles I realize what you were up against - even many of those which you were compelled to use are rather definitely dated and I think you did the best you could with the material at hand.