F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent - which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
TO BUDD SCHULBERG
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
February 28, 1939
Dear Budd:
I didn’t send my Dartmouth impressions because I know that when one is once separated from a picture any advice is rather gratuitous - seems to come from a long and uninformed distance. However, if Walter t still wants to use the Indian school for a prologue it would be very funny if the Indian students were being solemnly addressed by Ebenezer when you cut outside and pick up young squaws approaching on snow shoes, bursting into the school and dancing around with the young braves. From there you could dissolve to the station and the arrival of the girls.
Also your introduction of some character at the station might be a student smashing baggage, followed by a newly arrived girl. And his turning suddenly, mutual recognition: the pay-off is his finding that he has picked up the baggage of his own girl.
On that same working-your-way-through basis, I got a kick from the student waiters going out of character and talking to the guests - like the man who hired himself out to do that sort of thing.
The picture seems temporarily very far away, and I am engrossed in work of my own. But I wish you well, and I won’t forget the real pleasure of knowing you, and your patience as I got more and more out of hand under the strain. In retrospect, going East under those circumstances seems one of the silliest mistakes I ever made.
Always your friend,
Scott
TO JUDGE JOHN BIGGS, JR
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Spring, 1939
Dear John:
Your letter with its family chronicle fascinated me. It was nice to catch up a little. I remember Baba as a wild fascinating little witch with a vague touch of WutheringHeights about her as she wrestled with her brothers. One girl in a family of boys has her dangers - like one boy in a family of girls who inevitably has a touch of the milksop - anyhow I’m glad Baba has temperament and sorry you’ve had to send her to reform school so young....
As to sons - that’s another question. I’d feel on a big spot if I were you. the you’re not a worrier. With daughter I can feel sure she’s about like me - very little of her mother save the good looks - like me with less positive artistic talent and much more natural social talent. She hasn’t the loneliness of the artist - though one can’t be sure that means anything. Ernest wasn’t lonely superficially - what I mean is that in spite of the fact that Scottie edited her school paper and wrote the school play she doesn’t care - doesn’t care deeply and passionately so that she feels the necessity to say. And it’s just as well. Nothing is more fatuous than the American habit of labeling one of their four children as the artist on a sort of family tap day as if the percentage of artists who made any kind of go of the lousy business was one to four. It’s much closer to 1 to 400,000. You’ve got to have the egotism of a maniac with the clear triple-thinking of a Flaubert. The amount of initial talent or let us say skill and facility is a very small element in the long struggle whose most happy end can only be a mercifully swift exhaustion. Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned - the empty shell of a gift long since accepted and consumed?
To go back. I won’t discuss boys. They are incalculable. But I would like to sit around with you for hours discussing men, in particular J.B., Jr and F.S.F. I would make you read some of the stuff that’s stirred me lately, and append this list, culled from two years.
a. — Julius Caesar by James Anthony Froude. Don’t be appalled - it’s as modern as Strachey and I find from Max that Scribner never lets it go out of print.
b. — Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Absolute tops.
c. — The Culture of Cities which you must have read.
d. — The Trial - fantastic novel by the Czech Franz Kafka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it - it’s an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920-25.
e. — As for Americans there’s only one - Jerome Weidman, whose two books have been withdrawn as too perspicacious about the faults of his own race. He’s a grand writer the - only 25 and worth fifty of this Steinbeck, who is a cheap, blatant imitation of D.H.Lawrence. A book-club return of the public to its own vomit.
f. — (I am now writing this letter for my files as well as to you.) The best individual novel of the last five years is still Malraux’s Man’s Fate. I fought against reading it - liking neither the scene nor what I thought was going to be the attitude - but Jesiss, once I’d gotten into it - it’s as absorbing as the Farewell to Arms. On the other hand Man’s Hope is hasty journalism - about as good as Ernest’s Spanish stuff. (He agrees with me about Steinbeck by the way - thinks he’s a phoney, like Farrell.) You know how generous I feel toward new men if they have something, and I hope you won’t read under this a jealousy of which I think I’m incapable. I keep waiting for Odets to produce something fine.
For God’s sake, order these right away and for good jazz I append Guedalla’sWellington, and Burne’s Lee, Grant and Sherman - they’ll kill a night of insomnia. Hayes’ book on Lincoln neither brings us closer nor further away - ends by being a bore because he seems to have been conspicuously non-communicative about what we have now decided were the great moments. I guess Lincoln was just too busy to throw him his little crust of attention and he was out whoring somewhere.
I hope you’ll be a better judge than I’ve been a man of letters. I’ve worked here on the best jobs - Madame Curie, Three Comrades, Gone with the Wind, etc. - but it’s an uphill business and the only great satisfaction I’ve had has been paying off my debts - which amounted to about $40,000 at the end of 1936. At that point, despite Becky Sharp’s dictum that you can live on your debts for awhile, people begin to distrust you - and someday in Dostoevskian manner I’m going to write about the great difference between how you high-heartedly helped me over a hurdle and the heartburnings and humiliations I went thru in the process of approaching you. (That sentence is as full of ‘h’s’ as a passage in the later Swinburne.)
Anyhow we have always been great good friends to each other and that is a satisfaction as Gertrude Stein would say. I am glad for Bobby as only an old lunger can be glad (was she ever one). I only play ping-pong but if she ever condescends to that let her have a table ready at the point where our paths next cross.
Scott
TO MRS FRANK CASE
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
May 3, 1939
I seem to be inadvertently writing you from a sick-bed, but not a very serious one - though I think without your prompt action a week ago it might very well have been. I love New York in a very special way, but somehow the DoctorsHospital couldn’t quite compete with the balmy spring California and I took up my bed and walked, so to speak - at least as far as the airport.
Sheilah came out to see me yesterday and told me of another great kindness of yours which I hope life will someday enable me to repay - that you had telephoned her from New York telling her you thought I was in trouble and that perhaps she was the person to help me. The situation goes back several months further than the break between Sheilah and me, however.
Very much against my will, I was persuaded to take a job to which I felt spiritually inadequate because I needed a rest from pictures and because my health was going steadily worse. I was going to sleep every night with a gradually increasing dose of chloral - three teaspoonfuls - and two pills of nembutal every night and 48 drops of Digitalin to keep the heart working to the next day. Eventually one begins to feel like a character out of The Wizard of Oz. Work becomes meaningless and effort a matter of the medicine closet. To the last job, I brought a great
deal of individual enthusiasm, but by the end of the last week I was doing it on gin and to a person of my constitution the end of that is fairly plain.
I am sorry though it was so very plain. I am sorry that I ended up by putting up such a poor showing in front of you who have treated me always with - well, ‘kindness’ is a very inadequate word.
I found Flora flourishing and glad to see me back. She is a very nice heritage. It seems honestly awful to have caused either of you distress -I am a little dim on the last few hours in the hotel, and I don’t think Dr Graham wanted to be very explicit about it, but if there was any damage take care of it either directly with me or with Harold Ober with whom I have a running account and whom I am afraid, after twenty years, will not be very much shocked by any of my enormities.
With deep respect and affection.
Scott
TO S. J. PERELMAN
5521 Amcstoy Avenue
Encino, California
June 7,1939
Dear Sidney:
Seeing your apparently dead but only sleeping pan in the magazine, I was reminded to address you on several things. One is that while you once inherited a baby nurse from me I have now evened matters up by owning your 1937 Ford which gives excellent service. But the real purpose is this - that Laura’s brother (Nathaniel West) sent me his book and a very nice letter with it which has totally disappeared since a trip I made to Cuba, and I don’t know where to reach him to answer it.
The book, though it puts Gogol’s The Lower Depth in the class with The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, certainly has scenes of extraordinary power - if that phrase is still in use. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress, and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background, set off by those vividly drawn grotesques. The book bears an odd lopsided resemblance to Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, except that the anonymous builders of the Middle Ages did a better job with their flying buttresses than Mannix, Katz and Company with their theory of the buttocks in place.
Anyway, all good wishes to you. I’ll be out of pictures at least till late fall, working on a novel. Best to Laura.
Ever your friend,
TO TOM F. CAREY, JR
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
June 9, 1939
Dear Mr Carey:
My friend and landlord, Edward Everett Horton, handed your letter over to me thinking that as a Princetonian and a professional writer I could answer your questions to your satisfaction. He told me he was very fond of your father and asked me to speak to you as frankly and helpfully as possible.
In the first place, there have been in the past (and in what pictures considered better times) attempts to hire inexperienced writers - what they call ‘junior writers’ - and groom them to be useful. The particular attempt about which I know the method and its eventual outcome was made at Metro about three years ago when Eddie Knopf (then Scenario head) brought in a dozen young men who had written for the college magazines at the University of California, Stanford, etc., paid them what is here considered a living wage for a writer and hoped that genius would turn up among them. The outcome was that one boy has made something of a record - he did a solo job on Shopworn Angel - I can’t remember his name at the moment - and the others were let out’ to the last man with every wave of the recession in 1937-38.
This Metro experiment did not necessarily prove anything - certain ones I know were only there through pull, but I do know that it convinced Metro - the largest, richest and in some ways most experimental studio here - that the idea was not good. I had a young protégé in the East whom I brought out here, who - though he had written over one hundred stories for the pulp magazines - was never able to sell himself to Metro with whom I was then under contract - unless he came equipped with an idea and access to the powers-that-were. He had the access but he did not seem to have the idea or to be able to get it on paper so he has returned to the somewhat desperate business of pulp-writing in the East.
If a young man, however, has ‘made the slick paper magazines’ it is an entirely different story. Two or three stories in the slicks, especially a minor triumph such as Richard Sherman’s To Mary with Love’ in the Post several years ago, can set a man for a whole Hollywood career. I know a young Dartmouth man, a recent graduate, who has every access to the heads of companies but who has just chosen to go East and continue some work he has in mind for Colliers - there’s no secret about it - it’s young Budd Schulberg - thus seriously curtailing his income, but he leaves with the conviction that these people are more impressed with what comes out with the imprimatur of an important magazine in the East than with almost anything done here.
This resume of the situation applies to the present time - there was a period when the eastern writer was suspect - he was ‘high hat,’ he did not know the medium, and wouldn’t take the trouble to learn it - and in those days people entered scenario-writing through the oddest channels - but I believe that time is gone.
Hardly a man here is in the big money who has not a best seller or some striking stories or a successful play to his credit. (A few exceptions to this are John Lee Mahin and Robert Riskin, who are among the half dozen best picture-writers in the business.) But the rule still stands.
And all this is subject to the vagueness that surrounds this industry. There is none of it that I could swear to. I have been out here almost two years though with my eyes open and this is what I would tell my daughter if her literary ambitions were far enough developed to make her yearn toward the flesh pots of Hollywood.
With very best wishes to you,
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘17
P.S. Edward Everett Horton gave me carte blanche in answering this letter but to your questions I must respond even more vaguely. I am sure that if you had professional material in your portfolio and were on the spot Mr Horton would be only too glad to give you letters to the heads of any Scenario department but he could not guarantee, any more than I could, their mood toward your work or their studio’s attitude toward untried authors. I broke into the literary world by selling stories to the now defunct Smart Set at $35.00 a shot (some of them had been in the Nassau Lit) and then kept cracking at The Saturday Evening Post, but every man’s literary beginnings are different. However, I do know that 80% of what is classified here as ‘talent’ has made its reputation in the East.
TO KENNETH LITTAUER
5521 A tries toy Avenue
Encino,California
July 18, 1939
Dear Kenneth:
I was of course delighted to finish off the Civil War story to your satisfaction at last - I may say to my satisfaction also, because the last version felt right. And after twenty months of moving pictures it was fun to be back at prose-writing again. That has been the one bright spot in a situation you may have heard from Harold Ober: that I have been laid up and writing in bed since the first of May, and I am only just up and dressed.
As I told your Mr Wilkinson when he telephoned, the first thing I did when I had to quit pictures for awhile was to block out my novel (a short one the size of Gatsby) and made the plan on a basis of 2500 word units. The block-out is to be sure that I can take it up or put it down in as much time as is allowed between picture work and short stories. I will never again sign a long picture contract, no matter what the inducement: most of the profit when one overworks goes to doctors and nurses.
Meanwhile I am finishing a 4500-word piece designed for your pages. It should go off to you airmail Saturday night because I am going back to the studios for a short repair job Monday.
I would like to send the story directly to you, which amounts to a virtual split with Ober. This is regrettable after twenty years of association but it had better be asked under the anonymity of ‘one of those things.’ Harold is a fine man and has been a fine agent and the fault is mine. Through one illness he backed me with a subst
antial amount of money (all paid back to him now with Hollywood gold), but he is not prepared to do that again with growing boys to educate - and, failing this, I would rather act for a while as my own agent in the short story just as I always have with Scribners. But I much prefer, both for his sake and mine, that my sending you the story direct should be a matter between you and me. For the fact to reach him through your office might lead to an unpleasant cleavage of an old relationship. I am writing him later in the week making the formal break on terms that will be understood between us, and I have no doubt that in some ways he will probably welcome it. Relationships have an unfortunate way of wearing out, like most things in this world.
Would you be prepared, in return for an agreement or contract for first look at the novel and at a specified number of short stories in a certain time, to advance me $750.00, by wire on receipt of this letter - which will be even before the story reaches you Monday? This is a principal factor in the matter at the moment as these three months of illness have got me into a mess with income tax and insurance problems. When you get this, will you wire me yes or no, because if you can’t I can probably start studio work Friday. This may be against your general principles - from my angle I am offering you rather a lot for no great sum.
Ever yours with best wishes,
Scott
P.S. If this meets with your favorable consideration the money should be wired to the Bank of America, Culver City. If not would you wire me anyhow because my determination to handle my magazine relationship myself is quite final.
P.S. (2) The novel will run just short of 50,000 words.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 483
