Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (554 page)

Now the European trip would be due to start either June 22 or July 2nd. I imagine that I could have the dates changed a little, or rather that, as you are one-fourth of the party, the time of your examinations would have to be a determining point in the itinerary. When will they be over? What are the actual dates? What would you say, if the European trip is decided on, to the idea of leaving school after graduation, coming out here and taking your boards here in Hollywood and then, if time is short, flying back to New York? I don’t mind your flying now as I did last summer. It is as nearly safe in June as such things can ever be. Also,
I want a truthful answer as
to whether the school would
rather you stayed there.
Please don’t make me take this up with Miss Walker. If they would rather, by a margin of 60-40, that you stayed, I want to know, and I want to know now, by
airmail.
The marks were really so very mediocre that, if I was Vassar, I wouldn’t take you unless the school swore that you were a serious character - and the school is not going to swear you are a serious character if you let a prep school dance stand even faintly in the way of your success. Besides, if they don’t want you to stay, and the trip abroad works out, I would like to catch a glimpse of you during that time. I don’t want to
come East in June if it can possibly be avoided.
After all, you are going to college, so this is not your real graduation. Nobody came to mine, and I don’t remember being hurt. Nevertheless, if it were not for all the hazards involved, such as bringing your mother there or else hurting her feelings by not bringing her, and the fact that it may come right at the crucial point of this picture (due to roll in June, but perhaps not starting till the fifteenth), I would love to go and see you standing flowerlike among the other fashionable peonies. Moreover, if it means an overwhelming lot to you, I will try to arrange it, but you can well understand how I dread any repetition of this Easter trip.

I got a vague word from Harold that you were going to ‘study hard’ but I have no word from anybody about whether you took Latin and how many lessons you took. The report is the same in detail from all your teachers and it is too dispiriting to go into. If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the
hardest
thing
first
at the exact moment that you
feel yourself fit for doing
anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration. It has been so ironic to me in after life to buy books to master subjects in which I took courses at college and which made no impression on me whatsoever. I once flunked a course on the Napoleonic era, and I now have over 300 books in my library on the subject and the other A scholars wouldn’t even remember it now. That was because I had made the mental tie-up that work equals something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something to be postponed. These scholars you speak of as being bright are no brighter than you, the great majority not nearly as quick nor, probably, as well endowed with memory and perception, but they have made that tie-up, so that something does not stiffen in their minds at the mention that it is a set task. I am so sure that this is your trouble because you are so much like me and because, after a long time milling over the matter, I have concluded that it was mine. What an idiot I was to be disqualified for play by poor work when men of infinitely inferior capacity got high marks without any great effort.

Write me what you think about the summer plans. The alternative is not sitting around in some attractive suburb with a bunch of GilmanSchool boys chewing on your ear, pleasant as the prospect might appear. I am afraid you would be somewhat second-hand by autumn, and I prefer you as you are for a little longer.

Dearest love.

Your Progenitor in the Direct Line Will you kindly touch on every point in this letter when you answer it? I am keeping a carbon, hoping you will. This is a time when we ought to be able to communicate - we are unconflicting on 90% of things - all except your lazy belly which my thin guts shrinks from. Please work - work with your best hours.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

Spring
, 1938

Dearest:

I hope Mary Earle won’t find the trip too expensive. It
is
if you are not going to Vassar, but if you are I think it will be such a worthwhile thing and I wish to God I could go over with you.

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his Legion of Decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33 (remember I didn’t like you to see them?) but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to
all
strong themes - so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children. Anyhow we’re starting a new story and a safe one.

About
adjectives:
all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats”Eve of Saint Agnes.’ A line like ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,’ is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement - the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes. Would you read that poem for me, and report?

I’m having a controversy with the HighlandHospital. They want to keep your mother there with only six weeks out a year and a few trips with Dr and Mrs Carroll. I can’t see it - I think she should be out from one-fourth to one-half the time, using the hospital only as a base. If I insist, they threaten to release her altogether to me which would be simply a catastrophe - I can’t work and look after her. And she wouldn’t obey any companion unless the hospital has authority back of the companion. Mrs Sayre wants her to come and sit beside what will soon be a deathbed and I can’t see that as promising any future (I don’t mean Mrs Sayre is sick but she is almost so). She (your mother) wants to come to your commencement with Newman and Rosalind - O.K. if it can be arranged for a nurse to take her to and from N.Y.

I don’t dare at the moment to tell your mother about the Alice Lee Myers trip or the fact that I’ve taken a shack at the beach here (address Garden of Allah still). She would feel as if we were happy and she was in prison. If only old Carroll was less obstinate - however it should be solved within a few weeks - I
may
have to go East but God forbid.

A letter from Miss Walker. Never has my intuition so surely informed me of a thing than now - that you are walking on a most delicate line there. No matter how you feel I should play a ‘straight’ role for five weeks, lest they mistake any action for a frivolous attitude. All through life there are such games to play - mine for instance, when I first came here, to keep away from any bars, even though I wasn’t tempted to drink. The connection of ‘bar-drunk’ was too easy to establish in people’s minds after my past performances. But don’t tell your best friend that you are playing a sober role - such things travel fast and far. You will be smart in playing nun for the time being - five weeks will win you many months.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

May, 1938

Dearest Pie:

I’m glad you acted decently in the end about that infirmary affair. We’ll consider it closed.

About the college courses, in case you get in - for freshman year at least I want them to be subject to discussion between us - I don’t think, for example, that you are ready for philosophy. I made some bad mistakes in choosing my own curriculum on silly careless premises, because courses came at the right time, were rumored easy, etc. I thought I’d read Italian to read Dante and didn’t get to first base. I should have known from my wretched French that I had no gift for languages. Similarly you went into physics instead of taking more French and you must have been a considerable drag on the rest of the class. So we will discuss your curriculum when we meet. The enclosed is merely to indicate to you that a course in economics might be interesting in these troubled times. I am not insistent about science but at least one line you follow must be useful rather than cultural.

It’s been a bad year for you. I hope you’ll save the remnants by getting into college and I do wish you wouldn’t blame others ever for what happens to you. A famous gunman who was lately electric-shocked from among us said he only shot the policeman because he wasn’t let alone. Right up to the chair he thought he was being put upon. You were never anti-social in youth - it is one regard in which this year your reasoning is more like your mother’s than mine. Never in her whole life did she have a sense of guilt, even when she put other lives in danger - it was always people and circumstances that oppressed her. I think, though, that you are walking towards some awful sock in the next few months that will have a sobering effect on you and I will be glad when it’s over and you are your old modest and charming self again.

Do try to make your mother happy for two days - excuse her enthusiasm. In her youth, she didn’t know such schools existed. Tell her you may go abroad if your exams are good.

If you do, and I am very anxious you should, I can’t bring you and Peaches out here this June - September would be better. I have no facilities for chaperonage at the moment but if there is cooperation in your heart this summer I will arrange it for next September. I gather Mary Earle’s mother wasn’t interested in the European trip.

The censors have stopped Infidelity as we were about to go into production. I am doing the screenplay of
The Women
for Norma Shearer. My God - what characters! What gossip! Let me remind you never to discuss my affairs with a living soul.

With dearest love,

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

July
7, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I don’t think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice - bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I’m talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an ‘authority,’ and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you - for the young can’t believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.

When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided - she wanted me to work too much for
her
and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

It was too late also for me to recoup the damage - I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years till my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.

The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds - she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage - sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy - she’s passed that failing on to you.

For a long time I hated
her
mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit - nothing but ‘getting by’ and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don’t want to change you. But I don’t want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energies and my earnings for people who talk my language.

I have begun to fear that you don’t. You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this.

People like — and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.

You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes - but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore (and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you) represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother’s illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that....