Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (562 page)

From the larger attitude one doesn’t know from day to day what the situation will be. We may be at war one week after the extinction of the British, an event which at present writing seems scarcely a fortnight away. It will probably mean our almost immediate embroilment both in Northern Canada and Brazil and at least a partial conscription. Scottie, you’ve been as lucky as anybody could be in your generation to have had a two months’ look at Europe just before the end and to have gotten in two years of college in times of peace before such matters are drowned in the roar of the Stuka bombers. And you have seen the men’s colleges as they may not be again in our time, with the games and proms. Maybe I’m speaking too quickly - if the British hold out two months until we can get aid to them - but it looks to me as if our task will be to survive.

Even so I would rather you didn’t get tied up in any war work except of a temporary nature for the present. I want vou to finish your education. If you have any plan for this summer that displaces summer school and is actually constructive please tell me immediately but I know you want to do something.

My thoughts are not so black as this letter sounds - for instance I’m now going to break off and hear the Louis and Godov fight which will prove Black Supremacy or Red Indian Supremacy or South American Inca Supremacy or something. I hope you are swimming a lot. I can’t exercise even a little any more; I’m best off in my room. But I love to think of you two diving from great heights and being very trim and graceful in the water.

With dearest love to all,

Daddy Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California
June
29, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

There’s no time to write you a long letter or to answer yours. Only about the summer school:

It seems important that either you take what will tend to give you a definite credit at Vassar or else have a practical tinge. You mentioned economics - I don’t know what kind of economics are taught there but the whole science is in such process of dissolution with new laws being built up overnight that if you take it be sure get a smart man - I mean a brilliant man and preferably a young one. I know a month is a very short time or there are several suggestions I might make. Not being on the spot I can’t advise you but only say that I hope it won’t be any form of intellectual needlework.

As soon as you get a minute, write me your circumstances there.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California
July 12,
1940

Dearest Scottie:

Jib is not spelt gyb. And beyond everything you have sinned in omission by not giving me the correct financial data and I expect an apology. Literally I had $12.00 in the bank for most of that week and it was very unpleasant.

Max Perkins writes me that Jane and three classmates are coming here and want to see something of the movies. I don’t know who to introduce them to except Shirley Temple with whom I spent the day yesterday. (Her mother was there so it was all right.) She really is a sweet little girl and reminds me of you at 11 1/2 when you hadn’t succumbed to the wiles of Fred Astaire, lovey dovey and the radio crooners. But I told her mother it wouldn’t be long now. I don’t know whether she’s going to do my picture or not.

Haven’t you got a carbon of the New
Yorker
article? I’ve heard that John Mason Brown is a great favorite as a lecturer and I think it’s very modern to be taking dramatic criticism though it reminds me vaguely of the school for Roxy ushers. It seems a trifle detached from drama itself. I suppose the thing’s to get
really
removed from the subject, and the final removal would be a school for teaching critics of teachers of dramatic criticism.

Isn’t the world a lousy place? - I’ve just finished a copy of
Life
and I’m dashing around to a Boris Karloff movie to cheer up. It is an inspirational thing called The
Corpse in the Breakfast Food.

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403
North Laurel
Avenue

Hollywood,
California

July 18,
1940

Dearest Scottie:

This summer has shown among other things that your education to date is entirely theoretical. I have no general quarrel with this and I believe it is as it should be in preparing for any sort of literary work. However the odds are against your having the type of talent that matures very quickly - most of my contemporaries did not get started at twenty-two, but usually at about twenty- seven to thirty or even later, filling in the interval with anything from journalism or teaching to sailing a tramp-schooner and going to wars.The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic type, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors - assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

Looking at the problem from short range only, you see how difficult it was to get a job this summer. So let’s see what Vassar’s got. The first thing that occurs to me is Spanish, which is simply bound to be of enormous value in the next ten years. Every junior-high-school child in California gets a taste of it and could beat you out of a job in South America if we expand that way. It is enough like French so that you have few alphabetical troubles, is pronounced as written, and has a fairly interesting literature of its own. I mean it’s not like studying Bulgarian or Chippewa or some strange dialect in which no one had ever had anything to say. Don’t you think this would be a much wiser move than the Greek and Latin culture? - the which shocks me that Vassar has such a namby-pamby ‘course.’

I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer -I mean any one good book like
The
Brothers Karamazov or Ten
Days
That
Shook
the World or Renan’s
Life of
Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer - then I have heard nothing rom you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Pere Goriot or
Crime and Punishment
or even The Doll’s House or St Matthew or
Sons and Lovers?
A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.

Don’t be too hard on Princeton. Harvard produced John Reed but they also produced Richard Whitney who I like to believe would have been spotted as a punk at Princeton. The Honor System sometimes has a salutary effect on light-fingered gentry.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North
Laurel
Avenue

Hollywood,
California July
29, 1940

I am still on the Temple picture and will continue on if a very avaricious gent named — will loosen up. If he doesn’t, I will rest for a week, and can stand it as my cough has become a public nuisance.

I wonder who was the ex-Westover woman you met. I wasn’t responsible for Ginevra getting fired but that’s the way of a legend - it was some Yale boys.

This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it’s come so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like ‘English Prose since 1800.’ Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal - and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction - something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once - there’s some in your diary - and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own
garden.
And the only thing that will help you is poetry which is the most concentrated form of style.

Example: You read Melanctha which is practically poetry and sold a New Yorker story - you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-diary level of average performance. The only sen-

sible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry - Blake to Keats (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what
each
of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for clubwomen who want to continue on from
Rebecca
and Scarlett O’Hara.

Strange Interlude is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it and called it
Candida.
On the other hand, you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s
Doll’s House.
Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House - all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes.

Well, the old master wearies - the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.

Love,

Daddy P.S. Understand me, I think the poetry courses you took in school (and I read the booklets) were utterly sissified drool. But a real grasp of Blake, Keats, etc., will bring you something you haven’t dreamed of. And it should come now.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 3, 1940

Dear Scottie:

Jane Perkins passed through and happened to mention that she had taken that Blake-to-Keats course - I became less enthusiastic about it because she said they studied Amy Lowell’s biography which is a saccharine job compared to Colvin’s. However, in the catalogue I see a course called #217 in verse writing. It says, ‘limited to twelve members - permission required’ and it gives only one point. Is that at all practical? I imagine there would be some latitude in the poets that you would read. There is also that Shakespeare course (165) and one in French Poetry (240), one point. Some of the history and philosophical courses look good to me but - oh, hell I can’t advise you from this distance. I’m just sorry you can’t read some poetry.

It isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around - John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in ‘verse’ but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non- poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. ‘The Grecian Urn’ is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with ‘The Nightingale’ which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the ‘Pot of Basil’ with its great stanzas about the two brothers, ‘Why were they proud, etc.’; and ‘The Eve of St Agnes,’ which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, ‘Bright Star’ and the others.

Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

You still have that French typewriter in storage, haven’t you? Would it be any good? We rent one here and it costs only $5.00 for three months. You threaten to send
me
money! If you have any extra, pay your bills in Poughkeepsie. My suggestion is that after you visit Miss Doyle, you go to Lake Forest and from there go South to Montgomery. I’m afraid the latter seems to be necessary. Your mother most particularly asked to see you again and the only alternative would be to send her North to see you, which means sending two people. I know it will be dull going into that hot little town early in September - but you are helping me. Even invalids like your mother have to have mileposts - things to look forward to and back upon. It gives her more pride there in Montgomery if you come to see her, something to talk about. Only think how empty her life is and you will see the importance of your going there. Will you figure out what the fare to Chicago will be?

You wrote me such a full letter that I haven’t answered it all even now. When we get some breathing space here I’ll have Frances figure how much you cost this year.

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. Be careful about showing my letters - I mean to your mother for instance. I write you very freely.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 12, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

I’m sorry I didn’t mention the story - I’m
glad
you sold it but I thought you were disappointed that you didn’t sell it to a big magazine. I suggested disposing of it to some Vassar paper - do you remember? - just for the sake of getting into print and getting some opinions on it. I’m glad you got some money too. I thought it as a sort of practice composition but I felt a personal interest in it, not having forgotten the nights we worked over it.