Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (561 page)

June
7, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Thank you for your letter. Planning from week to week, I am not quite sure yet about anything, but go ahead about the summer school, make reservations and so forth. I think it can be managed all right. I went to San Francisco with some friends for one day, and found it much too long to see that singularly second-rate and uninspired Fair - though they had some good Cranachs and El Grecos in the art exhibition.

Vassar’s only fault to the outer world is the ‘Vassar manner’ - which of course is founded on the sense of intellectual intensity that you mention. I found it particularly annoying in — ‘s daughter in Tryon some years ago. She told me all about American literature in the first half hour I met her - I believe she had been editor-in-chief of the
Miscellany
the year before. Of course it does not usually show itself like that, but, like the Harvard manner of 1900 which gave Harvard a country-wide unpopularity, makes itself known in a series of smug silences. Southern manners
are
better - especially the rather punctilious deference to older people. The chances are that some toothless old codger who doesn’t open his mouth may turn out to be the greatest authority in the world on some recondite subject, and you feel rather a fool when you have judged him and settled his hash with the glossy learning of a year or so. So be careful of it, especially this summer when you will meet many idiots, some in hysterical panic about the war and others too dumb to know what is going on.

You credit me with a gift of prophecy I don’t have. I
did
feel the war was coming in ‘39 and said so to a lot of people, but it was calculated by the time when Germany would have several new replacement classes to make up for the decreased birth-rate from 1915 to 1918. We all knew the German army wasn’t beaten and Woodrow Wilson didn’t want it to be beaten, not appreciating the utter helpless decadence of the English - something that has been apparent to even English intellectuals for twenty years. The intellectuals, those few who ever dabbled in military affairs, knew that the war was lost at Munich and that the Germans would tear the Allies to pieces, in Europe at least. And the American rich will try to betray America in exactly the same way as the British conservatives. A pogrom could be organized overnight against all the ‘subversive elements’ (whose power is tremendously overestimated at the moment) but the rich will have to have the pants scared off them before they stop skulking in their tents and begin to get their boys safe jobs in the quarter-master department.

The Comrades out here are in a gloomy spot; — goes around groaning how ‘the Revolution will have to come the hard way,’ in other words the party line is to let National Socialism (Nazism) conquer us and then somehow milk Marxism out of Hitler’s sterile teats! Stalin has pulled another boner just as he did in Finland. He had no intention of letting Hitler go this far.

With the situation changing as fast as it does now, it is difficult for Liberals to have a policy. The war may lead to anything from utter chaos to a non-Comintern American Revolution, but the world that I knew and that you have had eighteen years of will never exist again in our time. On the other hand I do not think it possible for the Germans to win the South American war against us. The native Yankee is still the most savage and intelligent fighter in the world. He plays the toughest, hardest games with a cooler head and it is simply unthinkable that an oppressed stock could be whooped up in one decade to conquer him. Still I think many of your friends will probably draw their last breaths in Paraguay or the forests of the Chaco. Did you see that Lehman has called for anti-aircraft defense for New York? What a cowardly panic! Next we will have Louis B. Mayer calling for anti-aircraft guns to defend Metro.

The letter has turned into gossip, and I have much to do. I finished the picture and am doing a short story. Had intended to rest for a week, but there wasn’t a chance. Dear, I have had a very depressed letter from your mother and another from your grandmother - the second told me in cautious language that your mother had had a ‘toxic attack.’ I know what this means, only I expected her to hold out at least two months. She seems to be recovered from that, but her own letter shows a great deal of despair, and your grandmother’s has a defeatism that I have never seen before. I don’t know what is going to happen, but as this may be the last time you have a chance to see your mother in a sane period, I want you to
find ten days
to
spend with her this June.
This may bust hell out of your plans, but remember that for ten months you have lived for yourself and you owe this to me. I don’t care when you go, except it is to be before summer school opens, and not just three or four days.

The
Harper’s
business is all right for me if you can fit it in with everything else. Will you tell me what you are going to take at summer school? I think I wrote you that I thought your next year’s Vassar course is fine, except for the Greek Civilization and Literature, which seems to me a profound waste of time. Your other three courses are so completely cultural that I wish that the fourth could be as practical a one as Vassar offers - I wish they had business school - or else a supplementary French course or another language. Greek Civilization and Literature is something you cannot learn in nine months, and it seems to me a rather dilettantish way of wasting time.

I expect to hear in a day or so whether I am going back to work on my picture story - I told you once it was an old
Saturday Evening
Post story called ‘Babylon Revisited’ that I wrote in 1931. You were one of the principal characters.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California
June 12,
1940

Dearest Scottina:

Thanks for your nice full letter - it made me happy, and I don’t doubt your sincerity about work. I think now you will always be a worker, and I’m glad. Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She had no education - not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me - but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing ‘kinetic,’ which, in physics, means internal driving force - she had to be led or driven. That was the tired element that all Judge Sayre’s children inherited. And the old mother is still, at times, a ball of fire!

I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting ‘B’s.’ Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for ‘A’s’ - don’t take the things in which you can get ‘A,’ for you can leam them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry - you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel - and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.’...

Please
wire me what days you have chosen to go South so I can make financial arrangements.

Can’t you tell some story down there that it’s urgently necessary to go to summer school because you’ve been on the edge of flunking out? Otherwise they’ll wonder why the money couldn’t be spent for a seaside vacation for you all. I’m living in the smallest apartment here that will permit me riot to look poor, which I can’t afford to do in Hollywood. If the picture goes through, I will give your mother a trip in August. At the moment I am keeping her on a slender allowance, as for ten years she has absorbed the major proportion of the family income.

I did listen to the radio all through my trip. Jesus! What a battle!

Please at least go
in to see Gerald
Murphy at Marfe Cross for five
minutes
in
passing thru
N.Y. this
summer!

Send me the details about
Harvard Summer School Can I pay,
n ‘bailments?

Even as a construction man, Pinero was inferior to both Shaw and Ibsen. What purpose is served in teaching that second-rate Noel Coward at Vassar?

The New Yorker story might hamper you if you attach too much importance to it. The play was an accomplishment -I admit it with pride and pleasure. I’d like to see the story. Can’t you send the a
copy?

Reading over your letter, you don’t sound like an introvert at all. You sound a little flushed and overconfident, but I’m not worried.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. You want to go to summer school. I will have to do extra work for that, and I’ll do it gladly. But I want you to spend ten days with your mother first. And
please
give me a
full
complete report on your mother’s condition. Your request for $15.00 just came as I was putting this in an envelope. To get it to you (Frances is away) cost me my morning. You must not ask me to wire you money - it is much harder to get than last summer. I owe
thousands.
I couldn’t have had this trip except that the Rogers were going and invited me. Sorry to close the letter this way but you must count your pennies.

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California June
15, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Here is your round fare to Montgomery. I’m sorry it can’t be more but, while my picture
is
going to be done, the producer is going to
first
do one that has been made for the brave —

who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back to the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby E
squire.

Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss------and her fellows feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.

Anyhow they need you. I will dig you out in time for the summer school.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. As I said, I am trying to give you $30.00 a week this summer, and when there is a lot of traveling to be done will increase this somewhat. For instance, I gave you $20.00 extra to get out of Vassar and there is $10.00 extra in this check which makes $30.00 and which will cover a good deal of transportation to date (including the round trip fare to Montgomery). Will send the next check there.

1403
North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,
California June 20, 1940

Dear
est Zelda and Scottie:

I wish I were with you this afternoon. At the moment I am sitting rather dismally contemplating the loss of a three-year-old Ford and a thirty-three-year-old tooth. The Ford (heavily mortgaged) I shall probably get back according to the police because it is just a childish prank of the California boys to steal them and then abandon them. But the tooth I had grown to love.

In recompense I found in
Colliers
a story by myself. I started it Just before I broke my shoulder in 1936 and wrote it in intervals over the next couple of years. It seemed terrible to me. That I will ever be able to recover the art of the popular short story is doubtful. At present I’m doing a masterpiece for E
squire
and waiting to see if my producer can sell the ‘Babylon Revisited’ screenplay to Shirley Temple. If this happens, everything will look very much brighter.

Scottie, I got the marks and was naturally pleased you were off probation at last. It brought back memories of phoning you from Los Angles to see if you were at the Harvard game, of the dean’s gloomy picture a year ago last October, of years of distress about your work with threats and prayers and urgings and rewards and apologies and promises and then suddenly the first change about a year ago when you found that Vassar didn’t care whether you studied or not - or whether you stayed in or not. It is a story of hair-breadth escapes, and extraordinary devices going back to the French schedule that we had at ‘La Paix.’ All sorts of people have been drawn into it. Hours, days and weeks have been consumed. Stories, scripts, trips have been put aside - all to achieve what might have been prevented if I had carried out my first plan - never to let you go near an American school, or else I should have let you become a doll. I couldn’t leave you hanging -

The police have just called up telling me they’ve recovered my car. The thief ran out of gas and abandoned it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The poor lad was evidently afraid to call anybody to help him push it to the curb. I hope next time he gets a nice, big, producer’s car with plenty of gas in it and a loaded revolver in each side pocket and he can embark on a career of crime in earnest. I don’t like to see any education left hanging in the air.

Enclosed find four checks, two of which (including one of yours, Scottie) should go to Mrs Sayre for provisions, etc. By Monday I should be able to make some plans for you, Scottie. Meanwhile you will have written whether you would like to go to Harvard alone which I did not think should frighten you. You have those two Vassar credits to make up if you are going to get an A.B. degree and I presume this would do it.