Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (549 page)

With eager and anxious good wishes,

Scott

Address for a year - EllerslieMansion, Edgemoor, Delaware. Huge old house on Delaware River. Pillars, etc. I am called ‘Colonel.’ Zelda ‘de old Missus.’

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

November
, 1927

Dear
Ernest:

Thousands will send you this clipping. I should think it would make you quite conscious of your public existence. It’s well meant - he praised your book a few days before.

The book is fine. I like it quite as well as
The Sun,
which doesn’t begin to express my enthusiasm. In spite of all its geographical and emotional rambling, it’s a unit, as much as Conrad’s books of Contes were. Zelda read it with fascination, liking it better than anything you’ve written. Her favorite was ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ mine, barring ‘The Killers,’ was ‘Now I Lay Me.’ The one about the Indians was the only one that left me cold and I’m glad you left out ‘Up in Michigan.’ They probably belong to an earlier and almost exhausted vein.

‘In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.’ God, what a beautiful line. And the waking dreams in ‘Now I Lay Me’ and the whole mood of ‘Hills Like.’

Did you see the pre-view by that.... Rascoe who obviously had only read three stories but wanted to be up to the minute?

Max says it’s almost exhausted 7500 - however that was five days ago. I like your title - AH
the Sad Young Men
Without Women - and I feel my influence is beginning to tell. Manuel Garcia is obviously Gatsby. What you haven’t learned from me you’ll get from Good Woman Bromfield and soon you’ll be Marching in the Van of the Younger Generation.

No work this summer but lots this fall. Hope to finish the novel by1st December. Have got nervous as hell lately - purely physical but scared me somewhat - to the point of putting me on the wagon and smoking denicotinized cigarettes. Zelda is ballet dancing three times a week with the Phila Symphony - painting also. I think you were wise not jumping at
Hearst’s
offer. I had a contract with them that, as it turned out, did me unspeakable damage in one way or another. Long is a sentimental scavenger with no ghost of taste or individuality, not nearly so much as Lorimer for example. However, why not send your stories to Paul Reynolds? He’ll be glad to handle them and will get you good prices. The Post now pays me $3500 - this detail so you’ll be sure who’s writing this letter.

I can’t tell you how I miss you. May cross for 6 weeks in March or April. The
Grandmothers *
was respectable but undistinguished, and are you coming home? Best to Pauline. With good wishes and affection,

Scott

Ellerslie, Edgemoor, Delaware

December,
1927

Dear
Ernest:

Perkins sent me the check for 800 bits (as we westerners say), indicating, I hope, that you are now comfortably off in your own ascetic way. I am almost through my novel, got short and had to do three Post stories but as I am now their pet exhibit.... to the tune of 32,000 bits per felony it didn’t take long to come to the surface.

(This tough talk is not really characteristic of me - it’s the influence of AH
the Sad Young Men
Without Women in Love.) Louis Golding stepped off the boat and said you and I were the hope of American Letters (if you can find them) but aside from that things look black, ‘old pard’ - Brommy is sweeping the West, Edna Ferber is sweeping the East and Paul Rosenfeld is sweeping what’s left into a large ornate waste-basket, a gift which any Real Man would like, to be published in November under the title,
The Real Leisure Class,
containing the work of one-story Balzacs and poets so thin-skinned as to be moved by everything to exactly the same degree of mild remarking.

Lately I’ve enjoyed Some
People, Bismarck
(Ludwig’s), Him (in parts) and the Memoirs of Ludendorff. I have a new German war book, Die
Krieg
Against
Krieg,
which shows men who mislaid their faces in Picardy and the Caucasus - you can imagine how I thumb it over, my mouth fairly slithering with fascination.

If you write anything in the line of an ‘athletic’ story please try the Post or let me try them for you, or Reynolds. You were wise not to tie up with
Hearst’s.
They are absolute bitches who feed on contracts like vultures, if I may coin a neat simile.

I’ve tasted no alcohol for a month but Xmas is coming.

Please write me at length about your adventures - I hear you were seen running through Portugal in used B.V.D.S, chewing ground glass and collecting material for a story about boule players; that you were publicity man for Lindbergh; that you have finished a novel a hundred thousand words long consisting entirely of the word ‘balls’ used in new groupings; that you have been naturalized a Spaniard, dress always in a wine-skin with ‘zippervent and are engaged in bootlegging Spanish Fly between St Sebastian and Biarritz where your agents sprinkle it on the floor of the Casino. I hope I have been misinformed but, alas!, it all has too true a ring. For your own good I should be back there, with both of us trying to be good fellows at a terrible rate. Just before you pass out next time think of me.

This is a wowsy country but France is illegible and I hope to spend March and April, or April and May, there and elsewhere on the continent.

How are you, physically and mentally? Do you sleep? ‘Now I Lay Me’ was a fine story - you ought to write a companion piece, ‘Now I Lay Her.’ Excuse my bawdiness but I’m oversexed and am having saltpeter put in my
Pâté de Foie Gras au Truffles
Provençal.

Please write news. My best to Pauline - Zelda’s also to you both. God will forgive everybody - even Robert McAlmon and Burton Rascoe.

Always afftly,

Scott

Ellerslie

Edgemoor, Delaware

Postmarked December
28,1928

Dear
Ernest:

I’m terribly sorry about your trouble. I guess losing parents is just one of the things that happens to one in the thirties - every time I see my father now I think it’s the last time.

Thank Pauline for the really beautiful Xmas card. It was great to have you both here, even when I was intermittently unconscious.

I send you what may be news, and what a nice precedent for beating up Mencken. Saw the Murphys for an hour in New York. We’re sailing March 1st and I hope to have the novel here. (Confidential about sailing though, until I’m sure - won’t go unless novel’s finished.) Ring thought you were fine - he was uncharacteristically enthusiastic.

I’m bored and somewhat depressed tonight so I won’t continue. Oh, yes -I met old H. Stearns just before leaving Paris and feeling drunk and Christ-like suggested a title to him, ‘Why I Go On Being Poor in Paris,’ told him to write it as an informal letter to me and I’d sell it. In a burst of energy he did and I sent it to Max who wrote a check for $100.00 for it. Now Harold writes me that $100 isn’t very much (as a matter of fact it isn’t much of a letter either) and exhibits such general dissatisfaction that I think he thinks I held out on him. You’ve got to be careful who you do favors for - within a year you’ll probably hear a story that what started him on his downward path was my conscienceless theft of his royalties.

Spengler’s second volume is marvelous. Nothing else is any good - when will you save me from the risk of memorizing your works from over-reading them by finishing another? Remember, Proust is dead - to the great envy of Your crony and gossip,

Scott

Paris, France

Postmarked May 17, 1929

Dear Herr Hemophile: or ‘Bleeding Boy’ as I sometimes call you.

Will you take salt with us on Sunday or Monday night? Would make great personal whoopee on receipt of favorable response. Send me a pneu or answer me in person, save between 3 and 7. Highest references, willing to travel - gens du
monde, cultivé, sympathique cherche hôte pour dimanche ou lundi
- answer because I shall probably ask Bishop, if you can come....

God save us, Preserve us, Bless us.

Yrs, in Xt

Fitzg —

12 Blvd. Eugène
Gazagnaire Cannes, France
August 23, 1929

Dear Ernest:

I’ve been working like hell, better than for four years, and now am confident of getting old faithful off before the ail-American teams are picked - hence the delay. I wrote Max (not mentioning your letter) one of those don’t- lose-your-head notes, though I, like you, never thought there was more than an outside chance of his being forced to let you down. I felt sure that if it came to a crisis he’d threaten to resign and force their hand.

The book sticks with me, by the way; I’m sure it’s all I thought at first and can’t wait to read it in printing letters.

It’s been gay here but we are, thank God, desperately unpopular and not invited anywhere. See the Murphys once a week or so - Gerald is older, less gay, more social, but not so changed as many people in five years. D. Parker is on the crest - the I didn’t see her as much as I’d liked.

Now - Ruth Goldbeck Voallammbbrrossa not only had no intention of throwing you out in any case, but has even promised on her
own initiative
to speak to whoever it is (she knows her) has the place. She is a fine woman, I think; one of the most attractive in evidence at this moment, in every sense, and is not deserving of that nervous bitterness.

Not knowing whether you’ve left Spain I’m sending this to Paris. Hoping you’ll be here in September for a week or so.

Bunny Wilson’s book  has a fascinating portrait of Dos in it, and is full of good things, and to me interesting throughout Oddly enough what it lacks is his old bogey, form. It is shapeless as Wells at his wildest, or almost Have read nothing good recently save a book on the Leopold- Loeb case and Harold Nicholson’s Trnnyson, neither recent.

This is a dull letter but it’s late and what’s left of the mind is tired.

Always afftly yours,

Scott

Best to Pauline.

Villa Fleur des Bois Cannes,
France

September
9,1929

Dear Ernest:

I’m glad you decided my letter wasn’t snooty - it was merely hurried (incidentally I thought you wanted a word said to Ruth G. if it came about naturally - I merely remarked that you’d be disappointed if you lost your apartment - never a word that you’d been exasperated). But enough of pretty dismal matters - let us proceed to the really dismal ones. First the let me say that from Perkins’ last your book like Pickwick has become a classic while still in serial form. Everything looks bright as day for it and I envy you like hell but would rather have it happen to you than to anyone eke.

Just taken another chapter to typist’s and it’s left me in a terrible mood of depression as to whether it’s any good or not. In 2 1\2 months I’ve been here I’ve written 20,000 words on it and one short story, which is superb for me of late years. I’ve paid for it with the usual nervous depressions and such drinking manners as the lowest bistro (bistrot?) boy would scorn. My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current company - after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange places. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories - and realizing that anyone in my state of mind, who has in addition never been able to hold his tongue, is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.

Among them has been — . Naturally she, having been in an equivalent state, lacks patience - (this isn’t snooty - no one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived). Incidentally the Murphys have given their whole performance for her this summer and I think, the she would be the last to admit it, she’s had the time of her life.

We’re coming to Paris for 2 months the 1st of October.

Your analysis of my inability to get my serious work done is too kind in that it leaves out the dissipation, but among acts of God it is possible that the 5 years between my leaving the army and finishing Gatsby (1919-1924) which included 3 novels, about 50 popular stories and a play and numerous articles and movies may have taken all I had to say too early, adding that all the time we were living at top speed in the gayest worlds we could find. This au
fond
is what really worries me - the the trouble may be my inability to leave anything once started. I have worked for 2 months over a popular short story that was foredoomed to being torn up when completed. Perhaps the house will burn down with this ms. and preferably me in it.

Always your stinking old friend,

Scott

I have no possible right to send you this gloomy letter. Really if I didn’t feel rather better with one thing or another I couldn’t have written it. Here’s a last flicker of the old cheap pride: the Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions - in her youth one was enough.

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 10,1934

Dear Ernest:

Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers’ jargon out of my head.

Ever friend,

Scott All I meant about the editing was that if I’d been in Max’s place I’d have urged you to hold the book t for more material. It had neither the surprise of I.O.T(nessessessarily) nor its unity, and it did not have
as large a proportion
of first-flight stories as M.W. W.  I think in a ‘general presentation’ way this could have been atoned for by sheer bulk. Take that opinion for what it’s worth.