Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (544 page)
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Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald
All in all it was a husky generation. Match me Tommy Hitchcock or Bill Tilden for sheer power of survival as champions. Outside of a few Eastern cities there was a vacant lot in every block and I played humbly on the same teams with future Minnesota linemen, a national golf medalist, Dudley Mudge, and a national amateur champion, Harrison Johnston.
Later, pursued from hideout to hideout by the truant officers, I came in early contact with a few incipient men of letters. I was at prep school in New Jersey with Pulitzer Prizeman Herbert Agar and novelists Cyril Hume and Edward Hope Coffey. Hope and I were destined to follow a similar pattern — to write librettos at Princeton, “drool” for the college comic and, later, college novels. But I remember him best when he was center and I was quarterback on the second team at school. We were both fifteen — and awful. There were a couple of one-hundred-eighty-pound tackles (one of them now headmaster for his sins) who liked to practice taking me out, and Hope gave me no protection — no protection at all — and I would have paid well for protection. We were the laziest and lowest-ranking boys in school.
In college I was luckier. I knew the future presidents of many banks and oil companies, the Governor of Tennessee, and among the intellectuals encountered John Peale Bishop, warbird ElliottSprings, Judge John Biggs and Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Of course I had no idea who they were, and neither did they, or I could have started an autographed tablecloth. Things were stirring: Richard Cleveland, Henry Strater and David Bruce led a revolt against the “social system.” Spence and Pumpelly and Charlie Taft did the same at Yale.
Next on my list I find Al Capone, born in 1899 — but he saw the light in Naples. Anyhow, it’s a good place to stop.
IV
Those I have mentioned are only a platoon in an army of five million. Are they representative of my generation — of those who have one foot planted before the war and one after it? They are at any rate the articulate and my claim is that they have not been “sheltered” — when any moppet assures me that we “lived in an ! Ivory Tower,” my blood boils and I weep into my paraldehyde. The Jungle and The Octopus were on our shelves before John Steinbeck ate the grape of wrath. In 1920 the present writer recommended the immediate machine-gunning of all men in a position to marry. The revolution wasn’t just around the corner — it was under my hat. But it is a fact that the capacity of this generation to believe has run very thin. The war, the peace, the boom, the Depression, the shadow of the new war scarcely correspond to the idea of manifest destiny. Many men of my age are inclined to paraphrase Sir Edward Grey of 1914 — “The lamps are going out all over the world; we shall not see them lit again in our time.”
It should be said that Steinbeck and Dr. Hutchins, Peter Arno and the late Irving Thalberg, Caldwell and O’Hara, Saroyan and Odets, Colonel Lindbergh and District Attorney Dewey were all too young to play on our team. Their experiences, achievements, and certainties are not of our world. We are closer in time to the hulk in a veteran’s hospital — for these younger men did not dance the Grizzly Bear and the Bunny Hug when one was risking ostracism, or march a thousand miles to Beautiful Katie. But they swim, one and all, in our orbit; as the painter Picasso says: “You do something first and then somebody comes along and does it pretty.” Easy with that space gun! You oughtn’t to point things! By and large I grant them a grace we do not have, and for all we know the Messiah may be among them. But we are something else again.
Well — many are dead, and some I have quarreled with and don’t see anymore. But I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved — and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact — and rather deeply wise. More than that what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Gather’s: “We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
The Letters
Scott with Zelda, c. 1920
LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS
CONTENTS
To Zelda Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
May 6,
1939
Dearest Zelda:
Excuse this being typewritten, but I am supposed to lie in bed for a week or so and look at the ceiling. I objected somewhat to that regime as being drastic, so I am allowed two hours of work every day.
You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness and with a consideration that I never understood that you had before. Because I can never remember anything else but consideration from you, so perhaps that sounds a little too much like a doctor or someone who knew you only when you were ill.
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands - I had a wire from daughter in regard to the little Vassar girl, telling me her name, and saying that the whole affair was washed out, but I don’t feel at home with the business yet.
There was a sweet letter waiting here from you for me when I came.
With dearest love,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California
June 8,
1939
Dearest Zelda:
I have two letters from you, one the airmail in regard to Scottie’s operation and the other evidently posted before you had received mine. While she is in Baltimore I am having a re-check by my old friend, Dr Louis Hamman. I gather that she has had several ‘attacks.’ On the other hand, I want to be absolutely sure that the operation is imperative. I tell you this because though she will come to Asheville in any case - I think you’d better not make absolute arrangements until I get the report Dr Hamman. She reaches Baltimore today the 8th (unless she stays over a day with Harold Ober or someone else in New York) and I should get the report from Dr Hamman about the 15th or 16th - that is a few days before she is due to arrive in Asheville I will airmail you immediately and then you can clinch whatever arrangements you find advisable.
Remember, I will take care of the business of notifying her, breaking the news by airmail as soon as I hear how long she expects to remain in Baltimore. I am glad, just as you are, that since this seems to be necessary, you will be able to be at her side.
I am awfully sorry about the news concerning your mother. This seems to be a big year for illness in our family. I shall certainly plan for you to go down to see her around your birthday time as soon as the matter of Scottie’s visit - with or without operation - is disposed of. Perhaps if by chance Dr Hamman doesn’t think the operation advisable we can think up some combination scheme.
In the meantime I see from your last letter you were still worried about my health. Only last night I saw the doctor who tells me that I am already 60% better (I quote him exactly) than I was a month ago - and during that time I have blocked out a novel, completed and sold a story to
Colliers
magazine and over half-finished what will be a two-parter for
The Saturday Evening Post
- so you see I cannot possibly be very sick. What is the matter with me is quite definite and quite in control - the cause was overwork at the studios, and the cause being removed the illness should decrease at a faster rate than that at which it was contracted.
I am sitting outdoors as I dictate this and the atmosphere has just a breath of the back country plains in it, dry and hot, though the surrounding landscaped gardens are green and cool, very different from Asheville mountains, but I never had your gift for seeing nature plainly and putting her into vivid phrasing so I am afraid I can’t explain to you exactly what kind of country it is until you come here and see. Now Hollywood seems far away though it is just over the mountains and you seem very near always.
Devotedly,
5521 Amestov
Avenue
Encino,
California
August, 1939
Dearest:
I know you’re going to miss Scottie and I hope August passes quickly for you. it seems strange that it’s here - this last month has been too much of a hell for me to help much, but now I can see light at the end of the passage. It was like 1935-1936 when no one but Mrs Owens and I knew how bad things were and all my products were dirges and elegies. Sickness and no money are a wretched combination. But, as I told you, there has not at least been an accumulation of debt and there are other blessings. I see that only the rich now can do the things you and I once did in Europe - it is a tourist-class world - my salary out here during those frantic 20 months turned out to be an illusion once Ober and the governments of the U.S. and Canada were paid and the doctors began.
Keep well. I’m going to try to. I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.
Have arranged for Scottie to have a piano nearby, the not in this cottage. She seems to have had a happy time with you. I have written two long and two short stories and wait daily for Swanson to find me a studio job that won’t be too much of a strain - no more 14-hour days at any price. By the time you get this I hope I’ll be paying the small (not formidable) array of bills that have accumulated. Here is another check to be used most sparingly. - not on presents but necessities of Scottie’s departure, etc. Her tickets and traveling money will reach there Tuesday morning if all goes well. Her rail fare, round trip, is only $78.50 round trip, with $5.00 extra fare both ways.
Dearest love.
Scott
Of course you can count on going South in September. We could even meet you there.
And the editorial comment about your paintings was a real thrill to me. We must do something about that soon.
5121 Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California August 4, 1939
Dearest:
Scottie arrives tomorrow and I hope she’ll enjoy the weeks out here. She doesn’t like heat much and of course this is subtropical but there is a pool nearby belonging to the landlord and as I wrote you there are boys from the East, at least for the present.