Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (546 page)

I hope you’re happy. I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side) - I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics. If you did I d advise you to try some short stories. You never could plot for shocks but you might try something along the line of Gogol’s The Cloak’ or Chekhov’s ‘The Darling.’ They are both in the Modern Library’s Best Russian
Short Stories
which the local Carnegie may have in stock.

Don’t waste your poor little income on wires to me - unless the money doesn’t come.

Yours at about 99.7,

Scott

P.S. Love to all. Excuse the bitter tone. I’ve overworked on the goddamn movie and am in bed for the day.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

May
11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Sorry I wrote you such a cross letter last week and I miss getting an answer from you. Things are better. The awful cough I had died down, the temperature fell and I’ve worked hard this week with apparently no ill effect except that I’m looking forward tomorrow to a peaceful Sunday spent in bed with Churchill’s Life of
Marlborough.
Funny that he should be Prime Minister at last. Do vou remember luncheon at his mother’s house in 1920 and Jack Churchill who was so hard to talk to at first and turned out to be so pleasant? And Lady Churchill’s call on the Countess of Bvnq whose butler was just like the butler in Alice in
Wonderland?
I thank God they’ve gotten rid of that old rapscallion, Chamberlain. It’s all terribly sad and as you can imagine I think of it night and day.

Also I think I’ve written a really brilliant continuity. It had better be for it seems to be a last life line that Hollywood has thrown me. It is a strong life line - to write as I please upon a piece of my own and if I can make a reputation out here (one of those brilliant Hollywood reputations which endure all of two months sometimes) now will be the crucial time.

Have a cynical letter from Scottie about the Princeton prom. Thank God I didn’t let her start to go at sixteen or she would be an old jade by now. Tell me something of your life there - how you like your old friends, your mother’s health, etc., and what you think you might do this summer during the hottest part. I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order
Best Russian Stories,
Modern Library edition, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.

Next week I’ll be able to send you what I think is a permanent address for me for the summer - a small apartment in the heart of the city. Next fall if the cough is still active I may have to move again to some dry inland atmosphere.

Love to all of you and especially yourself.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California
May 18, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

It’s hard to explain about the
Saturday
Evening Post matter. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, but the trouble with them goes back to the time of Lorimer’s retirement in 1935.I wrote them three stories that year and sent them about three others which they didn’t like. The last story they bought they published last in the issue and my friend, Adelaide Neil on the staff, implied to me that they didn’t want to pay that big price for stories unless they could use them in the beginning of the issue. Well, that was the time of my two- year sickness, T.B., the shoulder, etc., and you were at a most crucial point and I was foolishly trying to take care of Scottie and for one reason or another I lost the knack of writing the particular kind of stories they wanted.

As you should know from your own attempts, high-priced commercial writing for the magazines is a very definite trick. The rather special things that I brought to it, the intelligence and the good writing and even the radicalism all appealed to old Lorimer who had been a writer himself and liked style. The man who runs the magazine now is an up-and-coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who pub. lishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave fron tiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains - nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well I simply can’t do it and, as I say, I’ve tried not once but twenty times.

As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill, and I honestly don’t blame them for not taking the things that I’ve offered to them from time to time in the past three or four years. An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine
did
have unhappy endings - if you remember). In fact the standard of writing from the best movies, like Rebecca, is, believe it or not, much higher at present than that in the commercial magazines such as
Colliers
and the Post.

Thank you for your letter. California is a monotonous climate and already I am tired of the flat, scentless tone of the summer. It is fun to be working on something I like and maybe in another month I will get the promised bonus on it and be able to pay last year’s income tax and raise our standard of living a little.

Love to you all and dearest love to you.

Scott

P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs McKinney.

1401 North Laurel
Avenue

Hollywood,

California June
7, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

The Harvard Summer School idea seemed better for Scottie than her going to Virginia. You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness? Now all the Montague Normans, Lady Willerts, Guinnesses, Vallam- brosas etc., who loafed with us in the South of France through many summers seem to have dug themselves into an awful pit. I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem to be the right note - however charming.

I’ll be sending you a semi-permanent address any day now.

Dearest love.

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

 Hollywood,

California

 June 14,
1940

Dearest Zelda:

At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and well-informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten-year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have - which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, then perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August - by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with ‘Babylon Revisited’ - or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two-million-dollar tripe like All
This and Heaven
Too.

Twenty years ago
This Side of Paradise
was a best seller and we Were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.

Love to all of you.

Scott

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 6,
1940

Dearest Zelda:

I enjoyed reading the interview given out by our learned Scottie. I’m glad to know she spends her time thinking about strikes, relief and starvation while feeling no slightest jealousy of the girls with silver foxes who choose to recline on country club porches. It shows that we have hatched a worthy egg and I do not doubt that someday, like George Washington, she will ‘raise that standard to which all good men can repair.’

Seriously, I never heard such a bunch of hokum in my life as she sold that newspaper reporter but I’m glad she has one quality which I have found almost as valuable as positive original’ty, viz.: she can make the most of what she has read and heard - make a few paragraphs from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and
The
New
Republic
go further than most people can do with years of economic study. That is one way to grow learned, first pretend to be - then have to live up to it.

She has just shown her keenness in another way by taking me for $100.00 more advance money for the summer school than I had expected to pay, leaving me with a cash balance of $11.00 at date. Don’t bawl her out for this. Leave it to me because it most certainly will come out of her allowance and it was honestly nothing but carelessness in getting the exact data from the summer school. However, it affects you to this extent - that I’m going to ask you that if these checks reach you Monday not to cash them until Tuesday. It will be perfectly safe to cash them Tuesday because I’m getting a payment on the story at which I am back at work. The majority of the payment ($900.00) goes to Uncle Sam. $300.00 goes against a loan already made against it and the rest will be distributed for our needs during the next three weeks - so please if you have any extra funds save them for any emergency. We have done our share of lending and giving over many years and we must all watch our money.

Tell me what you do. Cousin Ceci writes that my Aunt Elise died last April at the age of ninety. I was fond of that old woman and I hadn’t yet assimilated her passing.

With dearest love always,

Scott

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 12,
1940

Dearest Zelda:

You never tell me if you are painting or not, or what you are writing if anything. I spent a silly day yesterday with Shirley Temple and her family. They want to do the picture and they don’t want to do the picture, but that’s really the producer’s worry and not mine. She’s a lovely little girl, beautifully brought up, and she hasn’t quite reached the difficult age yet - figuring the difficult age at twelve. She reminds me so much of Scottie in the last days at La Paix, just before she entered Bryn Mawr. You weren’t there the day of the Maryland Hunt Cup Race in the spring of ‘34 when Scottie got the skirt and coat from my mother which suddenly jumped her into adolescence. You may remember that she wore the little suit till she was about sixteen.

It’s hot as hell here today and I haven’t been able to work. I too have had only one letter from Scottie, but she seems to like Boston.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 20,
1940

Dearest Zelda:

Thanks for your letter about what you are doing. I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there. When times are a little calmer I think you ought to have a really inclusive exhibition of your pictures. Perhaps if the war is over next year it would be a good summer’s job for Scottie to arrange it - I mean fill the place that Cary Ross did six years ago. She would meet all sorts of interesting people doing it and I had an idea of suggesting it as her work for this August, but the war pushes art into the background. At least people don’t buy anything.

I am sending you Gertrude Stein’s new book which Max Perkins sent me. I am mentioned in it on some page - anyhow I’ve underlined it. On the back of the wrapping paper I’ve addressed it and stamped it to Scottie. She might like to look it over too. It’s a melancholy book now that France has fallen, but fascinating for all that.

Ten days more to go on the Temple picture.

With dearest love,

Scott

Please write me a few lines about your mother’s health. Is she well in general? Is she active? I mean does she still go downtown, etc., or does she only go around in automobiles? And tell me why you didn’t go to Carolina this year. Was it lack of funds or is the trip a little too much for her?

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California
August 24,1940

Dearest Zelda:

By the time you get this Scottie will have leisurely started South - with two or three stops. I’ve missed seeing her this summer but we’ve exchanged long letters of a quite intimate character in regard to life and literature. She is an awfully good girl in the broad fundamentals. Please see to one thing - that she doesn’t get into any automobiles with drunken drivers.

I think I have a pretty good job coming up next week - a possibility of ten weeks’ work and a fairly nice price at 20th Century- Fox. I have my fingers crossed but with the good Shirley Temple script behind me I think my stock out here is better than at any time during the last year.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California
September
5,1940

Dearest Zelda: