Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 478
Thank you again for your letter. I wish we could meet sometime soon when I have fully emerged from this small abyss.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO ARNOLD GINGRICH
The Cambridge Arms
Baltimore,
Maryland
March 20, 1936
Dear Arnold: In my ‘Ant’ satire phrase
Lebanon School for the Blind should be changed to
New JerseySchool for Drug Addicts.
It will be an easy change to make, easy to find in such a short piece. It seems important because the former seems in poor taste because of war blind, etc.
This is a good issue - fine piece by Ernest, and I enjoyed the Mex divorce. Haven’t got through the issue.
I get letters from all over (mostly from writers) about the ‘Crack-Up’ series: Alec Woollcott, Julian Street, G. B. Stem, Nancy Hoyt, James Boyd, etc., and from old friends, and naturally am rather touched. What the general response is is more questionable but there have been many of those too.
I will have another piece along shortly but I know there’s no hurry and I’m doing a ballet story or trying to for Goldwyn and Miriam Hopkins. Let me know when you want it.
Ever yours,
Scott Fitz
Please don’t forget this change in ‘Ants.’
TO ASA BUSHNELL
The Cambridge Arms
Baltimore,
Maryland
April 27, 1936
Dear Asa:
Is this a crazy idea? Perhaps architects will laugh at it but a recent editorial in an Alumni News asked for suggestions. My idea is to have as a building for the library a reproduction of what was torn down to make way for the present library. This part of the library would be above ground, and a series of subterranean galleries covered with glass brick radiating therefrom would house the books.
These galleries would (according to the type of book they carried, scientific, cultural, etc.) shoot in the direction of some convenient hall; for example, the gallery served with scientific books would lead toward the laboratories, that with religious books toward the Chapel reading room, etc.
The idea of a sort of subway, served (as I should envisage it) by electric trucks, and passing a series of alcoves, lit overhead by skylights paralleling the present walks, or by the aforementioned glass brick, is certainly revolutionary. But it would keep the library in the center of the campus. It would solve so many prob-
lems, and without violating any of the strategical plan for future Princeton architectural development.What do you think?
Ever yours,
Scott
TO MRS CLIFTON SPRAGUE
The Cambridge Artns
Baltimore,
Maryland
June, 1936
Dear Annabel:
It has been a rather terrible day and tomorrow promises to be no better, but after that I’m going to - got to - put Mother out of my mind for a day or so. I’ll summarize what happened.
It was sad taking her from the hotel, the only home she knew for fifteen years, to die - and to go thru her things. The slippers and corset she was married in, Louisa’s dolls in tissue paper, old letters and souvenirs, and collected scrap paper, and diaries that began and got nowhere, all her prides and sorrows and disappointments all come to nothing, and her lugged away like so much useless flesh the world had got thru with -
Mother and I never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality, but when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her and how she clung, to the end, to all things that would remind her of moments of snatched happiness. So I couldn’t bear to throw out anything, even that rug, and it all goes to storage......
TO ROBERT R. DUNN
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
Probably Summer, 1936
Dear Bob:
This is sheer impulse for no close friend ever passed so completely and abruptly out of my life as you did - except by death. Our whole adult life till now has passed without a single communication, unless I count a few chance encounters with your father fifteen years ago.
Is your mother living? Are you married? Has life been kind or bitter to you? I assume you know something about me from happening on my stuff here and there, but I know nothing about you. I remember a talk with Norma Talmadge (not Nash!) where your name figured, and meeting a fraternity brother of your ‘delegation’ on a bout between Naples and Marseille (name forgotten) - and I sometimes dream of you. In the dream you’re always very snooty and high-hat Life’s too short for you not to answer this. If your mother lives, give her my eternal homage, unqualified by the fact that she was always skeptical of me. She was one of the most fascinating women I ever knew.
Your old friend,
Scott
TO BENNETT CERF
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
July 23, 1936
Dear Bennett:
Temporarily I am no longer a Baltimorean, so I am afraid we will not be able to talk personally unless you are this far South. From your letter I guess that you are a little cagey about shooting at Tender Is the Night at the moment and I have no idea how many of a Modern Library edition of a book is necessary to sell to make it pay its way.
I have an idea that even among your clientele the actual bulk of a book, the weight of it in the hand, has something to do with buyer psychology. That is, that you would do better with, say, Willa Cather’s My Antonia than you would with Lost lady. All the first Modern Library books were small. Your tendency toward the giant size shows that you are alive to this psychological trait in the potential buyer.
To that extent you might have luck with Tender Is the Night. As you may know, Tender Is the Night hung around between sixth and twelfth best seller through its publishing season (spring of ‘34) which was a terrible one, while The Great Gatsby, which was a light little volume barely touching 50,000 words, was a rank commercial failure and was only on best seller lists its first week during a fine season (the spring of 1925). As a succès d’estime Gatsby outshone This Side of Paradise and Beautiful and Damned but I do not believe its sale to this day, outside your Modem Library edition, has passed 25,000 copies in America. Of course the Continental sales in German, French and Scandinavian have added a great deal to that.
Since actual distribution of Tender Is the Night was small in spite of its place on the best-selling list, it might be a much better bet than The Great Gatsby and there is always recurrent interest in This Side of Paradise (a calling, indeed, by this time).
I would like to have another book on your list, not from vanity (take a bow, Mr Cerf), but simply because I think that two books would be stronger than one in building up a permanent interest among those whose destiny leads them to accept my observation as part of their cosmology. Do let me hear from you.
Ever yours,
Scott
TO JOHN O’HARA
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
July 25, 1936
Dear John:
Your letter got side-tracked in moving and has just turned up. Possibly I may have answered it before and, if I did, everything I said was true, and if what I say now contradicts everything I said before that is all true too. Before I tell you how to write your new novel let me tell you about affairs here.
There are no affairs here.
We will now turn to your new novel. You quoted in your letter a very cryptic passage from the wonderful advice that I give to people. It sounds exactly like the advice that Ernest and I used to throw back and forth at each other, none of which ever had any effect - the only effect I ever had on Ernest was to get him in a receptive mood and say let’s cut everything that goes before this. Then the pieces got mislaid and he could never find the part that I said to cut out. And so he published it without that and later we agreed that it was a very wise cut. This is
not literally true and I don’t want it established as part of the Hemingway legend, but it’s just about as far as one writer can go in helping another. Years later when Ernest was writing Farewell to Arms he was in doubt about the ending and marketed around to half a dozen people for their advice. I worked like hell on the idea and only succeeded in evolving a philosophy in his mind utterly contrary to everything that he thought an ending should be, and it later convinced me that he was right and made me end Tender Is the Night on a fade-away instead of a staccato. Didn’t we talk about this once before - I seem to see your large ear in the way of my voice.
There is some element that can as well as not be expressed by the dietician’s word ‘roughage’ or up-stream by which you can judge yourelf as a novelist or as a personality - the fact recently quoted by Middleton Murray that John Keats felt that creative talent is essentially without character, is empiric: the acceptance of disorganization is another matter because it eventually implies a lesion of vitality. I have just written a long letter to an admirer or mourner as to why I do not believe in Psychoanalysis, for the disintegration of that thing, that judgment, the extinction of that light is much more to be dreaded than any material loss.
We are creatures bounding from each other’s shoulders, feeling already the feet of new creatures upon our backs bounding again toward an invisible and illusory trapeze (at present played by the short-winded Saroyans). If the calf no longer flexes, the bound will not be so high. In any case the outstretched arms will never catch that swinging thing because when life has been well lived one can make an adjustment and become the second man in the pyramid. It is when life has been ill lived that one is the third man; the first man always falls to his death, a fact that has haunted Ernest all his life.
This is all rather poor metaphysics expressed in ineffectual images. Again and again in my books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good as I intended to be (and you must know that what I mean by good is the modern don’t-hurt-a-hair-of- anybody’s-head-and-kill-a-hundred-thousand-people-if-necessary - in other words a personal conscience and meaning by the personal conscience yourself stripped in white midnight before your own God).
To take off with my whole weight (Charlie MacArthur continually urges me) if my suggestion about the bucolic background for a novel makes any sense it is embraced in the paragraph you requoted to me. I certainly think you should undertake something - more ambitious and I know to my own sorrow that to contemplate and project a long work is often an excuse for laziness. But let me pass along a suggestion:
Invent a system Zolaesque (see the appendix to Josephson’s Life of Zola in which he gives Zola’s plan for the first Rougon-Maquart book), but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
After all who am I to be giving you advice? I dare to do so only because I know that you are at heart a humble man and not resentful of anything said by one who wishes you well.
(This is being taken down by a young man from BrownUniversity who is wilting visibly as he writes after a session with the many concerns that seem to surround a man of forty and the hieroglyphics of a half-done Post story to decipher tomorrow. He sends his regards or does he? Do you? No answer. He says he wonders what would happen if he would write a postscript to this thing.)
So much for tonight....
Ever your friend,
Scott
TO BENNETT CERF
Grove Park Inn
Asheville,
North Carolina
August 13, 1936
Dear Bennett:
The revision job would take the form, to a large extent, of a certain new alignment of the scenes - without changing their order in any case. Some such line as this:
That the parts instead of being one, two, and three (they were one, two, three and four in the magazine serial) would include in several cases sudden stops and part headings which would be to some extent explanatory; certain pages would have to be inserted bearing merely headings. Part two, for example, should say in a terse and graceful way that the scene is now back on the Riviera in the fall after these events have taken place, or that this brings us up to where Rosemary first encounters the Divers. Those examples are not accurate to my intention nor are they at all couched as I would have them, but that’s the general idea. (Do you remember the number of subheads I used in This Side of Paradise - at that time a rather novel experiment, the germ of which I borrowed from Bernard Shaw’s preface headings to his plays; indeed that was one of the few consciously original things in This Side of Paradise.)
There would be certain changes but I would supply the equivalent line lengths. I have not my plan with me; it seems to be in Baltimore. But I know how printing costs are. It was evolved to have a very minimum of replacement. There is not more than one complete sentence that I want to eliminate, one that has offended many people and that I admit is out of Dick’s character: ‘I never did go in for making love to dry loins.’ It is a strong line but definitely offensive. These are all the changes I contemplated with - — in addition some minor spelling corrections such as would disturb nothing but what was within a printed line. There will be no pushing over of paragraphs or disorganization of the present set-up except in the aforesaid inserted pages. I don’t want to change anything in the book but sometimes by a single word change one can throw a new emphasis or give a new value to the exact same scene or setting.
Ever yours,
Scott
TO BEATRICE DANCE
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, North Carolina
September 15,1936
Dear Beatrice:
The last two months have been such a feverish nightmare, day and night, sickness and that sort of thing, that I haven’t very clear memories of what letters I have written and what I haven’t. Today for the first time, I am really systematizing things under the proper headings of: ‘Immediate, Semi-Immediate,’ Mother’s Death, Financial, Scottie’s School,”Work,’ etc., etc. - so I am by no means sure whether I have to thank you for the fine kimono which I am wearing at present (alas! I have used it so much that you would scarcely know that it is only a month old), or whether only for the gorgeous sweater which I have so reverently laid away to save for more robust days) but really you must not inundate me with such tokens. I am embarrassed. It is impossible for me to send up equivalent incense to your memory - — much more than a memory, you know that.
Your letters were bright - and melancholy in the practically arctic night of the past ten months. I have never had so many things go wrong and with such defiant persistence. By an irony which quite fits into the picture, the legacy which I received from my mother’s death (after being too ill to go to her death bed or her funeral) is the luckiest event of some time. She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her, and it would have been quite within her character to have died that I might live.
Thank you for your wire today. People have received this Esquire article with mingled feeling - not a few of them think it was a terrific mistake to have written any of them from ‘Crack- Up.’ On the other hand, I get innumerable ‘fan letters’ and requests to republish them in the Reader’s Digest, and several anthologists’ requests, which I prudently refused.
My Hollywood deal (which, as it happened, I could not have gone through with because of my shoulder) was seriously compromised by their general tone. It seems to have implied to some people that I was a complete moral and artistic bankrupt.
Now - I come to some things I may have written you before. Did I tell you that I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in th
e old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water - a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and that when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o’clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued by Mac? It was a hot night, and I was soaking wet in the cast so I caught cold on the tile floor of the bathroom, and a form of arthritis called ‘myotosis’ developed, which involved all of the joints on that side of the body, so back to the bed I went and I have been cursing and groaning without cessation until about three days ago when the devil began to abandon me. During this time Mother died in the North and a dozen other things seemed to happen at once, so that it will take me several months to clear the wreckage of a completely wasted summer, productive of one mediocre short story and two or three shorts....
The summer was to have been devoted to Zelda and I have seen her exactly five times, her doctors feeling proud of her improvement and knowing that it would depress her to see me ill or in pain.
As to Ernest, at first I resented his use of my name in the story and I wrote him a somewhat indignant letter, telling him it must not be republished in a book. He answered, agreeing, but rather resentfully, and saying that he felt that since I had chosen to expose my private life so ‘shamelessly’ in Esquire, he felt that it was sort of an open season for me, and I wrote him a hell of a letter which would have been sudden death for somebody the next time we met, and decided, hell, let it go. Too often literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War. I consider ic an example of approaching maturity on my part and am proud of my self control. He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.