Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (550 page)

On the other hand you can thank God you missed this publishing season 11 am 5th best seller in the country and haven’t broken 12,000.

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland June 1,
1934

Dear Ernest:

Your letter crossed, or almost crossed, one of mine which I am glad now I didn’t send, because the old charming frankness of your letter cleared up the foggy atmosphere through which I felt it was difficult for us to talk any more.

Because I’m going egoist on you in a moment, I want to say that just exactly what you suggested, that the addition of that Chinamen-running story in the
Cosmopolitan
would have given Winner
Take
Nothing the weight that it needed, was in my head too. Allow me one more criticism, that while I admire your use of purely abstract titles I do not think that one was a particularly fortunate choice.

Next to go to the mat with you on a couple of technical points. The reason I had written you a letter was that Dos dropped in in passing through and said you had brought up about my book what we talked about once in a café on the Avenue de Neuilly about composite characters. Now, I don’t entirely dissent from the theory but I don’t believe you can try to prove your point on such a case as Bunny using his own father as the sire of John Dos Passos, or in the case of this book that covers ground that you personally paced off about the same time I was doing it. In either of those cases how could you trust your own detachment? If you had never met any of the originals then your opinion would be more convincing.

Following this out a little farther, when does the proper and logical combination of events, cause and effect, etc., end and the field of imagination begin? Again you may be entirely right because I suppose you were applying the idea particularly to the handling of the creative faculty in one’s mind rather than to the effect upon the stranger reading it. Nevertheless, I am not sold on the subject, and especially to account for the big flaws of Tender on that ground doesn’t convince me. Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of the Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archaeology, etc., upon the Bible story; and, in the second, of Shakespeare’s trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch’s Lives and Hollinshed’s
Chronicles.
There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. You can accuse me justly of not having the power to bring it off, but a theory that it can’t be done is highly questionable. I make this point with such persistence because such a conception, if you stick to it, might limit your own choice of materials. The idea can be reduced simply to: you can’t say
accurately
that composite characterization hurt my book, but that it only hurt it for you.

To take a case specifically, that of Gerald and Sara. I don’t know how much you think you know about my relations with them over a long time, but from certain remarks that you let drop, such as one ‘Gerald threw you over,’ I guess that you didn’t even know the beginning of our relations —

I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over - in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that. (By the way, I didn’t read the Wescott story of Villefranche sailors till I’d done my own version. Think that was the wisest course, for me anyhow, and got a pleasant letter from him in regard to the matter.)

To go back to my theme song, the second technical point that might be of interest to you concerns direct steals from an idea of yours, an idea of Conrad’s and a few lines out of David-into-Fox- Garnett. The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to
The Nigger,
that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. The second contribution to the burglary was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very end of A
Farewell
to Arms. I remember that your first draft - or at least the first one I saw - gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary of the future lives of the characters: ‘The priest became a priest under Fascism,’ etc., and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this - nevertheless, you convinced me. The third piece of burglary contributing to this symposium was my admiration of the dying fall in the aforesaid Garnett’s book and I imitated it as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of
Tender,
telling the reader in the last pages that, after all, this is just a casual event, and trying to let
him
come to bat for
me
rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with McCallagan or McKisco, Sweetie?)

Thanks again for your letter which was damned nice, and my absolute best wishes to all of you. (By the way, where did you ever get the idea that I didn’t like Pauline, or that I didn’t like her as much as I should?) Of all that time of life the only temperamental coolness that I ever felt toward any of the people we ran around with was toward — , and even in that case it was never any more than that. I have honestly never gone in for hating. My temporary bitternesses toward people have all been ended by what Freud called an inferiority complex and Christ called ‘Let him without sin’ - I remember the day he said it. We were justlikethat then; we tossed up for who was going to go through with it - and he lost.

I am now asking only $5000 for letters. Make out the check to MalcolmRepublic, c/o
The New
Cowlick.

Ever your friend,

Scott

P.S. Did you ever see my piece about Ring in
The New
Cowlick - I think you’d have liked it.

P.S.S. This letter and questions require no answers. You are ‘write’ that I no longer listen, but my case histories seem to go in largely for the same magazines, and with simple people I get polite. But I listen to you and would like damn well to hear your voice again.

Grove
Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

August, 1936

Dear Ernest:

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write
de profundis
sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

It’s a fine story t - one of your best - even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

On
the train, traveling to some point in the
South June 5, 1937

It was fine to see you so well and full of life, Ernest. I hope you’ll make your book fat -I know some of that
Esquire
work is too good to leave out. All best wishes to your Spanish trip I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.

Ever yours,

Scott

Going South always seems to me rather desolate and fatal and uneasy. This is no exception. Going North is a safe dull feeling.

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,
California

November
8, 1940

Dear
Emest:

It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you Brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the side shows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death - and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.

I never got to tell you how I liked To
Have and Have Not
either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance - paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoevsky in their undeflected intensity.

Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoevsky with his wide appeal more than any other European - and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

With old affection,

Scott

P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November - you can’t flunk out in November) and how I am an awful suck about the rich and a social climber. What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit - how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry - I won’t tell anybody. Not even Alan Campbell who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.

P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.

To Frances Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson,
Maryland
August 8, 1933

Dear Pie:

I feel very strongly about you doing your duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy - but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs
‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than
weeds.’

Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a
Saturday Evening Post
story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me ‘Pappy’ again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom
hard,
six times for every time you
are impertinent.
Do you react to that? I will arrange the camp bill. Halfwit, I will conclude.

Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Worry about... Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about: What am I really aiming at?

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) — Scholarship

(b) — Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?

(c) — Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. ‘Egg Fitzgerald.’ How would you like that to go through life with - ‘Eggie Fitzgerald’ or ‘Bad Egg Fitzgerald’ or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?

Love anyhow.

Grove
Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

Summer,
1935

Scottina:

It was fine seeing you, and I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do). You are nicer to adults - you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls, 12-15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early - probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but - well:

‘Daddy the prophet!’ I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you. When I wrote that ‘news-sheet’ with events left out, you know - the letter that puzzled you - and headed it ‘Scottie Loses Head,’ it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, and that you would ‘lose your head.’ What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn’t know - I couldn’t have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy and indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (Understand: I don’t blame Andrew  too much - the fault was yours - he didn’t, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!).