Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO KENNETH LITTAUER

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino,California

  Probably late July, 1939

  Dear Kenneth:

  Here’s another Hollywood story. It is absolutely true to Hollywood as I see it. Asking you to read it I want to get two things clear. First, that it isn’t particularly likely that I’ll write a great many more stories about young love. I was tagged with that by my first writings up to 1925. Since then I have written stories about young love. They have been done with increasing difficulty and increasing insincerity. I would either be a miracle man or a hack if I could go on turning out an identical product for three decades.

  I know that is what’s expected of me, but in that direction the well is pretty dry and I think I am much wiser in not trying to strain for it but rather to open up a new well, a new vein. You see, I not only announced the birth of my young illusions in This Side of Paradise but pretty much the death of them in some of my last Post stories like ‘Babylon Revisited.’ Lorimer seemed to understand this in a way. Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of editors continue to associate me with an absorbing interest in young girls - an interest that at my age would probably land me behind the bars.

  I have a daughter. She is very smart; she is very pretty; she is very popular. Her problems seem to me to be utterly dull and her point of view completely uninteresting. In other words, she is exactly what I was once accused of being - callow. Moreover she belongs to a very overstimulated and not really adventurous generation - a generation that has been told the price of everything as well as its values. I once tried to write about her. I couldn’t So you see I’ve made a sort of turn. My hope is that, like Tarkington, if I can no longer write M. Beaucaire and the Gentleman from Indiana, I can make people laugh instead as he did in Seventeen which is completely objective and unromantic.

  The second thing is my relation to Ober. It is completely vague. I’ve very seldom taken his advice on stories. I have regarded him as a mixture of friend, bill collector and for a couple of sick years as backer. So far as any editorial or financial dealing, I would much rather, as things are now, deal directly with an editor. For instance, if this sort of story is worth less to you than a story of young love, I would be perfectly willing to accept less. I would not want any agent to stand in my way in that regard. I think all the agents still act as if we were back in the 1920s in a steadily rising market So can I again ask you to deal telegraphically with me? I hope this story amuses you.

  Ever yours,

  Scott

  TO MRS LAURA FELEY

  5521 Aroestoy Avenue

  Encino,California

  July 20, 1939

  Dear Mrs Feley:

  I don’t know whether those articles of mine in Esquire - that ‘Crack-Up’ series - represented a real nervous breakdown. In retrospect it seems more of a spiritual ‘change of life’ - and a most unwilling one - it was a protest against a new set of conditions which I would have to face and a protest of my mind at having to make the psychological adjustments which would suit this new set of circumstances. Being an essentially stable type I managed to cling on until there was a mixture of the patient’s adjustment to the situation and the situation’s adjustment to the patient.

  And that, in such a case, is about all there is to do. The sensitive cannot make themselves overnight into specimens of the ‘tough- minded’ - the great ally is time, though I know that is a pretty old saw. Time was my rescuer and there was a friend concerned too, though I rather despised her intellectually and drew more nourishment from what she didn’t say than from what she did.

  To come closer to your case: the word nervous breakdown covers a multiplicity of conditions, as your doctor has probably told you. It may mean anything from a collapse of the central nervous system, a case of schizophrenia that the family doesn’t want to acknowledge or a little mood of Irish melancholy. A girl having lost a man is liable to suddenly build him up into the only man in the world when, had things run smoothly, it is doubtful if he would have long interested her. You must know cases of this. I knew a high-strung girl who had an unfortunate ‘trial marriage’ with a man, which went badly - after which she went to Europe, turning down a series of good matches - returned to the scene of her early disaster to find the lost love, took one look at him and thought, ‘My God, how did I ever happen to go for that!’

  From what you tell me in your letter (and at such long range it is impossible for me to speak in anything but the broadest generalities) I can only say this: that if you are in any mess caused by conflict between old idealisms, religious or social, and the demands of the immediate present, you will probably have to make a decision between them. That is all too frequently a problem of these times - I hope the generation now growing up will shake free of it.

  The doctor is probably your best friend, certainly much better than anyone you will find in your family - and if you have reason to think he is not your best friend, your very first move should be to find another. I don’t mean a series of doctors, but another whom you have good reason to think is equipped to deal with a case requiring intelligent handling.

  With best wishes,

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO MISS HELENE RICHARDS

  5521 Awestoy Avenue

  Encino,

  California

  July 27, 1939

  Dear Miss Richards:

  Attached is some biographical data. Sorry I have no picture but I may say that out here I am known as the old ‘oomph man.’ So any haberdasher’s advertisement will do as a portrait.

  Will you tell that so-called Mr Gingrich that I am accustomed, in my haughty way, to some word of approbation if not ecstasy about my contributions. Bland and chaste as your check was, it somehow lacked emotion. However, we are accepting it

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  5521Ames toy Avenue

  Encino, California

  August 3, 1939

  Dear Morton:

  Because your story was so perfect technically and so absolutely sincere I am going to take the risk of making an unasked-for suggestion. Someone once said - and I am quoting most inexactly - ‘A writer who manages to look a little more deeply into his own soul or the soul of others, finding there, through his gift, things that no other man has ever seen or dared to say, has increased the range of human life.’

  That is why a young writer (and I shrink at the word as much as you do) is tempted, when he comes to the crossroads of what to say and not to say as regards character and feeling, to be guided by the known, the admired and the currently accepted as he hears a voice whisper within himself, ‘Nobody would be interested in this feeling I have, this unimportant action - therefore it must be peculiar to me, it must not be universal nor generally interesting nor even right.’ But if the man’s gift is deep or luck is with him, as one may choose to look at it, some other voice in that crossroads makes him write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is his style, his personality - eventually his whole self as an artist. What he has thought to throw away or, only too often, what he has thrown away, was the saving grace vouchsafed him. Gertrude Stein was trying to express a similar thought when - speaking of life rather than letters - she said that we struggle against most of our exceptional qualities until we’re about forty and then, too late, find out that they compose the real us. They were the most intimate self which we should have cherished and nourished.

  Again, the above is inexact and all that I have said might lead you astray in the sense that it has led Saroyan astray and the late Tom Wolfe in imagining that writing should be a cultivation of every stray weed found in the garden. That is where talent comes in to distinguish between the standard blooms which everyone knows and are not particularly exciting, the riotous and deceitful weeds, and that tiny faint often imperceptible flower hidden in a comer which, cultivated à la Burbank, is all it will ever pay us to cultivate
whether it stays small or grows to the size of an oak.

  This is all too professorial. I felt you were trying to characterize with your fat boy. You failed to get a strong effect because (a) it was too facile a characteristic which you merely repeated from time to time to give him visibility and stability and (b) anyone who could write that story so well and with so much observation must certainly be able to see deeply enough into himself and others and to dredge forth a more vivid person than a mere clumsy gawk about whom ‘it was just too bad.’ And let me say that I think if you had done so the story, because of its honesty so far as it went, and because of its economical and dramatic straight line, might very well have been salable.

  Your friend by proxy,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO MORTON KROLL

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino,

  California

  August 9,1939

  Dear Morton:

  I claim the last word. You’re entirely right that one’s first influences are largely literary but the point where the personal note emerges can come very young (vidé Keats). I’ll go further than that. I believe that with the natural prose-writer it might very well come long before twenty, depending on the amount of awareness with which it is looked for - and, referring directly to the classics, my mother did me the disservice of throwing away all but two of my very young efforts - way back at twelve and thirteen, and later I found that the surviving fragments had more quality than some of the stuff written in the tightened-up days of seven or eight years later.

  A last word supplementary to my somewhat ponderous letter: if you were learning tennis you would form yourself not upon an eccentric like Tilden, for example, but upon players with classic styles like Cochet or La Coste (my references are of the dim past). You cannot imitate a mannerism with profit; a man might labor over Tilden’s tennis style for six years, finding at the end that it simply couldn’t be done without Tilden’s 6’6” in height.

  The Hemingway of Farewell to Arms, the Joyce of Dubliners, the Keats of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

  and ‘The Grecian Urn,’ the Mark Twain of the great central parts of Huckleberry Finn, the Daisy Miller of Henry James, the Kipling of The Drums of Fore and Aft are great English classics in a sense that such grand things as Shropshire Lad are not. Oscar Wilde for all his occasionally penetrating guesses was as Whistler said, a provincial at bottom - he tried imitating The Shropshire Lad in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ and with the borrowed and, hence, phoney mood produced something only a few steps up from Robert Service.

  (One last great parenthesis. It just happens that the most classical classics are in French while the most eccentric classics seem to be in English. If you had French, for example, I would recommend you the ‘Maison Tellier’ of Maupassant rather than that Kipling piece as a completely classical short story.)

  Don’t answer this. I am keeping your letter and will sell it for a great profit later on.

  Yours,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO DR JOHN G. VOIGT

  5521 Atnestoy Avenue

  Encino, California

  August 11, 1939

  Dear Dr Voigt:

  I’m terribly sorry but I haven’t had a picture taken for about twelve years. This is no stall. I think now that I shall wait until it’s time for a death mask because I’m in that unattractive middle- aged phase that doesn’t seem safe to record for prosperity. (This is not a misprint.)

  Thank you for your very kind letter. Hope someday we may meet.

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO EDGAR POE

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino,

  California

  September 18, 1939

  Dear Ed:

  You have an early Chaldean handwriting but an excellent heart. And our tastes must be similar because the dressing gown is a beautiful piece of lechery. Thank you. I have named it Cela- lume and shall think in its depths.

  Best to Babe - sorry I didn’t see her. I’ve been on the run between Universal and United Artists (where Niven is and isn’t going to finish his picture) and on the point of suing R.K.O. for keeping me awake on their lot across the street. I am so tired of being old and sick - would much rather be a scared young man peering out over a hunk of concrete or mud toward something I hated than be doing this here stuff.

  Ever yours,

  Scott

  TO MISS KENT

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino,

  California

  November 6, 1939

  Dear Miss Kent:

  I’m sorry that I could not conscientiously recommend this in its present form. You have an idea - but scarcely a story, do you think? I thought at first there was going to be an element of Ramona about it - that someone in the tribe was going to engage our interest. But no. We get a slowly mounting feud between two opposing forces - something that should be crammed into the first part of a story, and not have to sustain it dramatically throughout. I don’t think there’s enough here to hold the reader’s attention. If there was some sort of relation between the widow of an American colonel and the prince of an Indian tribe, or vice versa between the Indian princess and a captain of the U.S. troops, the story might gain some poise and balance.

  This is not suggested as a way to make it a success. Some better way will probably occur to you. It is only said to tell you what I feel is lacking in your outline: a point of real interest, a true climax rather than a succession of incidents which do not build to an instant of real excitement. That’s what people buy.

  Sorry I cannot be more helpful. Please feel quite free to send me anything else you may write.

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO JEAN OLIVIER

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino, California

  January 29, 1940

  Dear Miss Olivier:

  Thanks for your letter about ‘The Lost Decade’ and many apologies for not answering before. I am afraid Mr Trimble was drunk during those ten years, which is easier than one would think if one has the money.

  You write in such a good English style that I am going to take the liberty of asking you never to sign yourself ‘Miss’ Jean Olivier. You wouldn’t like to get a letter from your namesake signed ‘Mister’ Laurence Olivier, would you?

  Sincerely,

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  TO EDWIN KNOPF

  5521 Amestoy Avenue

  Encino,

  California

  February 1, 1940

  Dear Eddie:

  An hour after I called you a letter came asking if McBride could use my sketch, ‘The Night Before Chancellorsville,’ in an anthology. Armed with this coincidence I’ll enlarge a little on my idea.

  You may remember that the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were fought respectively late in 1862 and early in 1863 and very nearly upon the same Virginia battlefield. I would begin my story with two girls who come South from Concord seeking the body of their brother who has been killed at Fredericksburg. They are sheltered, puritanical girls, used to the life of a small New England town. On the train going down they run into some ladies of the type pictured in my story. Moreover they encounter a charming Union cavalry captain with whom the gayer of the two Concord girls falls in love.

  As in the story, the train rides right into Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville - the Union retreat and the Confederate advance. The girls are separated and their first task is to find each other. One of them meets a Confederate private from Alabama who at first she dreads and dislikes. In a Union counterattack the Confederate private is captured. He is identified as a Mosby guerilla by a man who bears him a grudge and hung up by his thumbs. (This actually happened to a cousin of my father’s in the Civil War and I have embodied the incident in another story called ‘When This Cruel War’ which Colliers bought last spring but has not yet published.) The northern girl cuts down the Confederate
soldier and helps him to escape. The girl has begun by being impatient of her sister’s gayety. During their time behind the Confederate lines she has conscientiously continued her search for her brother’s grave. Now, after helping her enemy escape, and at the moment of a love scene between them, she finds that they are only a few yards from her brother’s grave. Entwined with the story of the two girls I would like to carry along the semi-comic character of one of those tarts, using her somewhat as Dudley Nichols used the tart in Stagecoach.

  There are two Civil Wars and there are two kinds of Civil War novels. So far, pictures have been made only from one of them - the romantic, chivalric, Sir Walter Scott story like Gone with the Wind, The Birth of a Nation, the books of Thomas Nelson Page and Mary Johnson. But there is also the realistic type modeled primarily on Stendhal’s great picture of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and the stories of Ambrose Bierce. This way of looking at war gives great scope for comedy without bringing in Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel as faithful negro slaves, because it shows how small the individual is in the face of great events, how comparatively little he sees, and how little he can do even to save himself. The Great War has been successfully treated like this - Journey’s End and All Quiet - the Civil War never.

  We can all see ourselves as waving swords or nursing the sick but it gets monotonous. A picture like this would have its great force from seeing ourselves as human beings who go on eating and loving and displaying our small vanities and follies in the midst of any catastrophe.