Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (568 page)

(5) — The question of
Jazz
or not
Jazz
is Scylla and Charybdis anyhow. If I use such a title as
Half Portions,
etc., or
Chance Encounters,
no one will buy it anyhow - it will just be another book of short stories. It is better to have a title and a title-connection that is a has-been than one that is a never-will-be. The splash of the flapper movement was too big to have quite died down - the outer rings are still moving.

(6) — If I could think of a wonderful selling title unconnected with jazz I’d use it but I can’t, so we better use a safe one that has a certain appeal. Short story collections are the hardest things on earth to name - to get a title which is at once arresting, inviting, applicable and inclusive, and doesn’t sound like a rehash of the titles of O. Henry, or isn’t an anemic namby-pamby wishy-washy phrase.

(7) — In any case I think it will be wise to undersell the booksellers - a few, I fear from your silence, are going to be stuck with
The B. and
D. and, though
Flappers
seems to be still trickling along, there are two bookstores in St Paul that have quite a few left.

(8) — The only possible other title I can think of is
The
Diamond
as
Big as
the Ritz and Other Stories.
I hate titles like Sideshow and In One Reel and
Happy
End. They have begun to sound like veils and apologies for bringing out collections at all. Only good short story titles lately are Limbo and Seven Men. I might possibly call my book
Nine
Humans
and Fourteen Dummies
if you’d permit such a long title (in this case I’d have to figure out how many humans and how many dummies there are in the collection) - but if you feel awfully strongly against
Jazz Age,
I insist that it be an arresting title if it spreads over half the front cover. Please let me know at once what you think. I’m sure in any case the stories will be reviewed a great deal, largely because of the Table of Contents. Wire me if necessary.

As ever, Scott Fitzg —

If you are really considering the library, don’t forget The White Mice by Gouverneur Morris.

626
Goodrich
Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Before May 13, 1922

Dear Mr Bridges:

As Mr Perkins has no doubt told you I was aghast and horrified at that silly anecdote sprung from God knows whither which Burton Rascoe had the ill-taste to reprint in his column. I wrote him an indignant letter about it but I haven’t heard from him.

I can only tell you what I have long suspected - that any strange happening in the new literary generation is at once attributed to me. When we returned from Europe last summer there were legends enough current to supply three biographers.

Needless to say I regret the indignity done to you by the association with your name of such a piece of unwarranted vulgarity - and believe me.

As ever Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The
Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota circa August
11,
1922

Dear Mr Perkins:

I’ve labored over these proofs for a week and feel as if I never want to see a short story again. Thanks for the information about Canadian and Australian publishers. You ought to penalize the lighted-match-girl twenty yards.

Now as to ‘Tarquin of Cheapside.’ It first appeared in the
Nassau
Literary Magazine at Princeton and Katharine Fullerton Gerould reviewing the issue for the
Daily Princetonian
gave it high praise, called it ‘beautifully written,’ and tickled me with the first public praise my writing has ever had. When Mencken printed it in the Smart Set it drew letters of praise from George O’Neill, the poet, and Zoe Akins. Structurally it is almost perfect and next to ‘The Offshore Pirate’ I like it better than any story I have ever written.

If you insist I will cut it out, though very much against my better judgment and Zelda’s. It was even starred by O’Brien in his yearbook of the short story and mentioned by Blanche Colton Williams in the preface to the last O. Henry memorial collection. Please tell me what you think.

As to another matter, my play, Gabriel’s Trombone  is now in the hands of Arthur Hopkins. It is, I think, the best American comedy to date and undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written. Noting that
Harper’s
are serializing The
Intimate Strangers,
a play by Booth Tarkington, I wonder if
Scribner’s Magazine
would be interested in serializing
Gabriel’s Trombone
- that is, of course, on condition that it is to be produced this fall. Will you let me know about this or shall I write Bridges?

Also, last but not least, I have not yet received a statement from you. I am awfully hard up. I imagine there’s something over $1000 still in my favor. Anyway will you deposit $1000 for me when you receive this letter? If there’s not that much due me will you charge off the rest as advance on Tales
of the Jazz Age?
After my play is produced I’ll be rich forever and never have to bother you again.

Also let me know about the ‘Tarquin’ matter and about
Gabriel’s Trombone.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Thanks for the
Fair & Co.
check. —

Great Neck,

Long Island

Before November
7, 1923

Dear
Max:

I have got myself into a terrible mess. As you know, for the past month I have been coming every day to the city to rehearsals * and then at night writing and making changes on the last act and even on the first two. It’s in shape at last and everybody around the theater who has seen it says it’s a great hit. I put aside the novel three weeks ago and wrote a short story but it was done under such pressure that it shows it and Hovey doesn’t want it. I am so hard pressed now for time trying to write another for him that I’m not even going to the Harvard-Princeton game Saturday. The show opens in Atlantic City a week from Monday.

I went up to the American Play Company yesterday and tried to get some money on the grounds that the show was in rehearsal. They sighed and moaned a little but said firmly that it was against their rules.

I’m at the end of my rope - as the immortal phrase goes. I owe the Scribner Company something over $3500, even after deducting the reprint money from
The
Beautiful and
Damned.
I owed them more than that before
The B. and D.
was published but that was guaranteed by the book being actually in your hands.

Could this be done? Could I assign the first royalty payments on the play to you to be paid until the full amount be cleared up? I meant to pay some of it if there was a margin anyhow on account of the delay in the novel. But this would at least guarantee it.

What I need to extricate myself from the present hole is $650.00 which will carry me to the 15 th when Hovey will have my next story. And the only grounds on which I can ask for this additional is for me to assign you those rights up to the figure outstanding and to include also the interest on the whole amount I owe you.

If I don’t in some way get $650.00 in the bank by Wednesday morning I’ll have to pawn the furniture. Under the assignment of the royalties to you, the full amount would be paid back at between $500.00 and $1100 a week, before January 15th.

I don’t even dare come up there personally but for God’s sake try to fix it.

Yours in Horror,

F. Scott F.

Great Neck,

Long Island

Before April 16, 1924

Dear Max:

A few words more, relative to our conversation this afternoon. While I have every hope and plan of finishing my novel in June, you know how those things often come out, and even if it takes me ten times that long I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it, or even, as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of. Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged and, in approaching it from a new angle, I’ve had to discard a lot of it - in one case, 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story). It is only in the last four months that I’ve realized how much I’ve, well, almost
deteriorated
in the three years since I finished
The Beautiful and Damned.
The last four months of course I’ve worked but in the two years - over two years - before that, I produced exactly one play, half a dozen short stories and three or four articles - an average of about one
hundred
words a day. If I’d spent this time reading or traveling or doing anything - even staying healthy - it’d be different, but I spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I’d written The B. and D. at the rate of one hundred words a day, it would have taken me 4
years, so
you can imagine the moral effect the whole chasm had on me.

What I’m trying to say is just that I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last, or at least for the first time in years, I’m doing the best I can. I’ve gotten in dozens of bad habits that I’m trying to get rid of 1. — Laziness 2. — Referring everything to Zelda - a terrible habit; nothing ought to be referred to anybody until it’s finished 3. — Word consciousness and self-doubt, etc., etc., etc., etc.

I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way, but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve
talked so much
and not lived enough within myself to develop the necessary self-reliance. Also I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27.
Copperfield
and P
endennnis
were written at past 40, while This
Side of Paradise
was three books and
The
B.
and D.
was two. So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work - not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully and at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not.

If I ever win the right to any leisure again, I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I’m doing the best I can.

Yours ever,

Scott F —

Villa Marie, Valescure StRaphael, France June 18,
1924

Dear
Max:

Thanks for your nice long letter. I’m glad that Ring’s had good reviews but I’m sorry both that he’s off the wagon and that the book’s not selling. I had counted on a sale of 15 to 25 thousand right away for it.

Shelley was a God to me once. What a good man he is compared to that colossal egotist Browning! Haven’t you read Ariel yet? For heaven’s sake read it if you like Shelley. It’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read of anyone and it’s by a Frenchman. I think Harcourt publishes it. And who ‘thinks
badly’
of Shelley now!

We are idyllically settled here and the novel is going fine - it ought to be done in a month - though I’m not sure as I’m contemplating another 16,000 words, which would make it about the length of
Paradise -
not quite enough even then.

I’m glad you liked ‘Absolution.’ As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan. Two Catholics have already protested by letter. Be sure and read The Baby Party’ in
Hearst’s
and my article in
The Woman’s Home Companion.

Tom Boyd wrote me that Bridges had been a dodo about some Y.M.C.A. man - I wrote him that he oughtn’t to fuss with such a silly old man. I hope he hasn’t - you don’t mention him in your letter. I enjoyed Arthur Train’s story in the
Post
but he made three steals on the first page - one from Shaw (the Arab’s remark about Christianity), one from Stendahl, and one I’ve forgotten. It was most ingeniously worked out - I never could have handled such an intricate plot in a thousand years. War and Peace came - many thanks, and for the inscription too. Don’t forget the clippings. I will have to reduce my tax in September.

As ever, yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. If Struthers Burt comes over here, give me his address.

Villa Marie,

Valescure

St Raphael,

France

circa
July 16,
1924

Dear Max:

Is Ring dead? We’ve written him three times and not a word. How about his fall book? I had two suggestions. Either a collection called Mother
Goose in Great Neck
(or something nonsensical) to include his fairy tales in Hearst’s, some of his maddest syndicate articles, his Forty-niners’ sketch, his Authors League sketch, etc.

- or My
Life and Loves
(privately printed for subscribers only - on sale at all bookstores). I believe I gave you a tentative list for that but he’d have to eke it out by pointing some new syndicate articles that way. I thought his short story book was great - ‘Alibi Ike,”Some Like ‘em Cold’ and ‘My Roomy’ are as good almost as ‘The Golden Honeymoon.’ Mencken’s review was great. Do send me others. Is it selling?

Would you do me this favor? Call up Harvey Craw, Fifth Ave. - he’s in the book - and ask him if my house is rented. I’m rather curious to know and letters bring me no response. He is the Great Neck agent.

I’m not going to mention my novel to you again until it is on your desk. All goes well. I wish your bookkeeper would send me the August statement even the no copies of my books have been sold. How about Gertrude Stein’s novel? I began War
and Peace
last night. Do write me a nice long letter.