Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (573 page)

Very impressed, but not very, as I furnished most of the amusement myself.
Please
write! Best to Louise.

Your friend, Scott Fitzg —

Has story book had good advance sale? Or hasn’t it been the rounds yet? What’s its date?

14 Rue de Tilsitt

(New
address: Guaranty Trust Co.1 rue des Italiens)

circa December 30,1925

Dear Max:

(1) — To begin with, many thanks for all deposits, to you and to the Scribners in general. I have no idea now how I stand with you. To set me straight, will you send me my account now instead of waiting till February ist? It must be huge, and I’m miserable about it. The more I get for my trash, the less I can bring myself to write. However this year is going to be different.

(2) — Hemingway’s book (not his novel) is a 28,000 word satire on Sherwood Anderson and his imitators called
The Torrents of Spring.
I loved it, but believe it wouldn’t be popular, and Liveright have refused it -
they are backing Anderson
and the book is almost a vicious parody on him. You see I agree with Ernest that Anderson’s last two books have let everybody down who believed in him - I think they’re cheap, faked, obscurantic and awful. Hemingway thinks, but isn’t yet sure to my satisfaction, that their refusal sets him free from his three-book (letter) agreement with them. In that case I think he’ll give you his novel (on condition you’ll publish satire first - probable sale, 1000 copies) which he is now revising in Austria. Harcourt has just written Louis Bromfield that to get the novel they’ll publish satire, sight unseen (utterly confidential) and Knopf is after him via Aspinwall Bradley.

He and I are very thick and he’s marking time until he finds out how much he’s bound to Liveright. If he’s free I’m almost sure I can get satire to you first and then if you see your way clear

c/o
Guaranty
Trust Co.

Paris, France
circa
January
19, 1926

Dear Max:

Your thoughtful cablegram came today and I can’t imagine how the rumor got started - unless from Zelda using an imaginary illness as a protection against the many transients who demand our time. Somehow if one lives in Paris one is fair game for all the bores one wouldn’t look at and who wouldn’t look at one in New York. (If there’s one thing I hate it’s a sentence full of ‘ones.’)

We have escaped to a small town in the Pyrenees where Zelda is to take a cure. Our address for cables is Fitzgerald, Bellevue, Salies-de-Bearn, France, but for letters the Guaranty, Paris, is best. We are living in an absolutely deserted hotel. We move on to Nice the first of March. Here are my usual list of things.

(1) — Thanks a million times for the bound copy of my book - it is beautiful and, Max, I’m enormously obliged. I wish you’d written in the front - but that will wait till I get home. Your thought of me touched me more than I can say.

(2) — Now about the many deposits. They are past all reckoning but must total $5000 which is a record advance (?) on a book of short stories. I’m terribly sorry, Max. Could he send me my account this year on the1st of February
really
instead of February 15th? We won’t be able to tell about
The Sad
Young anyhow and I’m frantic to know if I’m helplessly in debt.

(3) — What is the date of the book? How are advance sales, compared with Gatsby? Did the latter ever reach 25,000?

(4) — Now, confidentially, as to Hemingway. He wrote a satire 28,000 words long on Sherwood Anderson, very funny but very cerebral, called
The
Torrents
of Spring.
It is biting on Anderson - so Liveright turns it down. Hemingway’s contract
lapses when
Liveright turns down
a book, so Hemingway says.
But I think Horace will claim this isn’t a book and fight it like the devil, according to a letter I saw which he wrote Ernest, because he’s crazy to get Ernest’s almost completed novel The Sun
Also Rises.
It is such a mess that Ernest goes to N.Y. next month.

Meanwhile Harcourt and Knopf are after him but he’s favorably disposed toward you because of your letters, and of the magazine. He’s very excitable, though, and I can’t promise he’ll know his own mind next month. I’ll tip you off the moment he arrives. Of course if Bridges likes his work and if you’ll take Torrents he’s yours absolutely - contingent, of course, on the fact that he isn’t bitched by some terrible contract with Liveright. To hear him talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions - but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cuckoo magazines, is very young and feels helpless so far away. You won’t be able to help liking him - — he’s one of the nicest fellows I ever knew.

In addition to the critics will you send my new book to the following people and charge my account (except in cases like Hergesheimer and Van Vechten, who actually reviewed Gatsby)? Send me only 3 copies. Thanks again for my beautiful copy.

As ever, Scott

South of France
February 20, 1926

Dear Max:

Two things have just occurred to me - or rather three. (1) You’ll get this letter about the 3rd of March. My book of stories may, at that time, have been out three weeks or three days - — you’ve not told me the date. Will you in any case write me immediately forecasting roughly the approximate sale? I know it can be only guesswork and you’ll be afraid of overestimating but I’d like to know at least the sale to that date. It has something to do with my income tax which must leave here the 14th. Also, would you send me an income tax blank?

My God! If it should sell 10,000 copies I’d be out of debt to you for the 1st time since 1922. Isn’t that a disgrace, when I get $2500 for a story as my regular price? But trash doesn’t come as easily as it used to and I’ve grown to hate the poor old debauched form itself.

How about Tom Boyd? Is he still going to be one of the barnyard boys? Or has he got sense and decided to write about the war, or seducing married women in St Paul, or life in a bum Kentucky military school, or something he knows about. He has no touch of genius like Hemingway and Cummings but like Dos Passos he has a strong, valuable talent. He must write about the external world, as vividly and acutely and even brilliantly as he can, but let him stop there. He is almost without the power of clear ratiocination and he has no emotional depths whatsoever. His hide is so thick that only battle itself could really make an impression on him - playing with the almost evanescent spiritual material of Anderson he becomes an ox to public view. I wish to God I could see him and talk to him. For heaven’s sake, Max, curb your usual (and, generally, sagacious) open-mindedness and don’t help him to ruin his future by encouraging his stupidest ambitions - he’ll turn bitter with failure.

(2) Has the play’s success helped the book Gatsby? My theory, you know, is that nowadays there’s not the faintest connection. That’s why I wouldn’t allow a movie edition of
The Beautiful and Damned.
By the way I don’t imagine those little 75 cent books sell any more. They shouldn’t. Do they? I mean did Jesse Williams’, Arthur Train’s, Wilson’s addresses, etc., sell like
The Perfect Tribute
and
The Third Wise Man?

Now, confidential: T. S. Eliot, for whom you know my profound admiration - I think he’s the greatest living poet in any language - wrote me he’d read Gatsby three times and thought it was
the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James.

Wait till they see the new novel!

Did you get Hemingway?

There was something else I wanted to ask you. What was it, damn it?

We’re coming home in the fall, but I don’t want to. I’d like to live and die on the French Riviera.

What’s the inside dope on the Countess Cathcart case?

I can’t remember my other question and it’s driving me frantic. Frantic! (Half an hour later)
Frantic!

FRANTIC!!!

If you see anybody I know tell ‘em I hate ‘em all, him especially. Never want to see ‘em again.

Why shouldn’t I go crazy? My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them they haven’t and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge. If I knew anything I’d be the best writer in America.

Scott Fitzg —

Eureka! Remembered! Refer my movie offers to Reynolds.

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins Alpes Maritime France (address till June
15)

circa
February
25, 1926

Dear
Max:

Thanks very much for your nice letter and the income blank. I’m delighted about the short story book. In fact with the play going well and my new novel growing absorbing and with our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Cannes and Nice) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious, and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well. Thanks for the Arthur Train legal advice. I’m glad you got Hemingway. I saw him for a day in Paris on his return and he thought you were great. I’ve brought you two successes (Ring and Tom Boyd) and two failures ( — and — ).

Ernest will decide whether my opinions are more of a hindrance or a help.

Why not try
College Humor
for his story? They published one thing of mine.

Poor Tom Boyd! First I was off him for his boneheadedness. Now I’m sorry for him.

Your friend,

Scott

I am out of debt to you for the first time in four years.

Will you get the enclosure for me, open it, and write me?

Think of that horse’s ass F.P.A. coming around to my work after six years of neglect. I’d like to stick his praise up his behind, God knows it’s no use to me now.

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins France

Before April27,
1926

Dear Max:

Why in God’s name did the advertising department broadcast a rotten sketch of me that makes me look like a degenerate? It’s come to me in a dozen clippings and will probably haunt me for the next five years. As it appears in Scribner’s Magazine I suppose Meyer sent it out - otherwise I would have thought it originated with some country newspaper that needed space in an awful hurry. I know it’s partly my own fault for not sending you one and I suppose this sounds vain and unpleasant but if you knew how it has taken the joy out of the press on my book to have that leering, puffy distortion reach me at the head of almost every review you’d know the way I’ve gotten worked up over it Thanks many times for Our Times. I read every word of it and loved it. Thoroughly interesting. About Mary Colum’s article: I thought that the more solid parts were obvious and pedantic, and that a good half of it was the sort of nonsense I didn’t expect from her. What on earth is the connection between Cocteau and Cummings? What does she mean by form? Does she think
King Lear
lacks it, while Marianne Moore has it? She uses it in the sense of successful conscious organization (so one thinks) and then it develops that she means mere novelty. Says she:

‘How profoundly true to their race, period and the needs of their public are the great artists - Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere! You can from their work pick out all the qualities, all the thoughts, all the ideals of the time that needed expression.’

How in the devil does she know that? How does anyone know that? There may have been whole elements in each of their times (John Donne, Roger Bacon in Shakespeare’s and Dante’s respective times for example) whose ideals and spirits were not even faintly summed up by the powerful but fallible and all-too-human titan who succeeded in forcing on us his picture. Don’t you agree?

I disliked the essay chiefly because it’s so plausible, and so dead, like (whisper it not, because I like him) the critical work of Ernest Boyd. Perhaps because I’ve just finished Chekhov’s
Letters on Literature.
God, there’s a book!

You owe me a long letter.

As ever,

Scott

Villa
Paquita Juan-les-Pins France

Before
May 10, 1926

Dear Max:

Thanks many times for all the books. The Hickey  I loved, having read the other three volumes of it. The war book too was great - God, what bad luck Tom Boyd had! Stallings made the killing with the play and movie; now Thomason makes a contract with Hearst, for a lot, I guess, and Tom who came first came too early, I suppose. Yet What Price
Glory
would never have been written, I suppose, except for
Through the
Wheat. Not that Tom’s novel wasn’t a success in a way but to make about $6000 as an originator and see others rake it in like croupiers later - I know how bitter it must make him.

The — book was tedious. I’m allowing for having seen it all at least three times but it was tedious. Undoubted power and a great gift of prose but you can’t arbitrarily patch together shreds of fine writing and call it a novel. And parts of it were merely sensational bombast. I’m sorry.

Nor, I’m afraid, will Ring’s book add to his reputation. Several stories were fine, none were cheap, but - God, I wish he’d write a more or less personal novel. Couldn’t you persuade him? The real history of an American manager, say Ziegfeld or a theatrical girl. Think how far Anita Loos got with a mere imitation of him.

I’m enclosing a letter. If you are willing I’d like to have them use ‘May Day’ from
Tales of the Jazz Age
and ‘The Rich Boy’ from All the Sad Young Men.

If it is too soon, in your judgment, to use the latter I could substitute ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.’ If you act as my agent in a case like this will you take it up with them? If not, let me know immediately and I will.

Also Charlie Bailey of Henry Holt wants to use The Camel’s Back’ in an anthology. I suppose it’s all right, good advertising, etc. I’d rather have him use ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ if he would. Both are in Tales
of the Jazz Age.