Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (576 page)

I must tell you (and privately) for your own amusement that the first treaty Knopf sent me contained a clause that would have required me to give him $10,000 on date of publication - that is: 25% of
all
serial rights (not specifying only
English
ones) for which
Liberty
have contracted, as you know, for $40,000. This was pretty — or maybe an error in his office, but later I went over the contract with a fine tooth comb and he was very decent. Confidential! Incidentally he said to me as Harcourt once did to Ernest that you were the best publishers in America. I told him he was wrong - that you were just a lot of royalty-doctorers and short changers.

No more for the moment. I liked Bunny’s book and am sorry it didn’t go. I thought those Day Edgar stories made a nice book, didn t you? —

Ever your devoted friend,

Scott

I append the sheet of brilliant ideas of which you may find one or two worth considering. Congratulations on the Eddy book.

(Suggestion List)

(1) — Certainly if the ubiquitous and ruined McAlmon deserves a hearing then John Bishop, a poet and a man of really great talents and intelligence, does. I am sending you under another cover a sister story of the novelette you refused, which together with the first one and three shorter ones will form his Civil-War- civilian-in-invaded-Virginia book, a simply grand idea and a new, rich field. The enclosed is the best thing he has ever done and the best thing about the non-combatant or rather behind-the-lines war I’ve ever read. I
hope
to God you can use this in the magazine - couldn’t it be run into small type carried over like Sew Collins did with Boston and you
Farewell to
Arms? He
needs
the encouragement and is
so
worth it.

(2) — In the new
American Caravan
amid much sandwiching of Joyce and Co. is the first work of a 21 year old named Robert Cantwell. Mark it well, for my guess is that he’s learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.

(3) — Another young man therein named
Gerald Sykes
has an extraordinary talent in the line of heaven knows what, but very memorable and distinguished.

(4) — Thirdly (and these three are all in the whole damn book) there is a man named Erskine Caldwell, who interested me less than the others because of the usual derivations from Hemingway and even Callaghan - still, read him. He and Sykes are 26 years old. I don’t know any of them.

If you decide to act in any of these last three cases I’d do it within a few weeks. I know none of the men but Cantwell will go quick with his next stuff if he hasn’t gone already. For some reason young writers come in groups - Cummings, Dos Passos and me in 1920-21; Hemingway, Callaghan and Wilder in 1926-27 - and no one in between and no one since. This looks to me like a really new generation.

(5) — Now a personal friend (but he knows not that I’m writing you) - Cary Ross (Yale 1925) - poorly represented in this
American Caravan,
but rather brilliantly by poems in
The Mercury
and
Transition,
studying medicine at John Hopkins, and one who at the price of publication or at least examination of his poems might prove a valuable man. Distinctly younger than
post
war, later than my generation, sure to turn to fiction and worth corresponding with. I believe these are the cream of the young people.

(6) — Dos Passos wrote me about the ms. of some protégée of his but as I didn’t see the ms. or know the man the letter seemed meaningless. Did you do anything about Murray Godwin (or Goodwin)? Shortly I’m sending you some memoirs by an ex- marine, doorman at my bank here. They might have some documentary value as true stories of the Nicaraguan expedition, etc.

(7) — In the foreign (French) field there is besides Chamson one man, and at the opposite pole, of great talent. It is not Cocteau nor Aragon but young René Crevel. I am opposed to him for being a fairy but in the last Transition (Number 18) there is a translation of the beginning of his current novel which simply knocked me cold with its beauty. The part in Transition is called ‘Mr
Knife
and Miss
Fork’
and I wish to God you’d read it immediately. Incidentally the novel is a great current success here. I know it’s not yet placed in America and if you’re interested
please
communicate with me before you write Bradley.

(8) — Now, one last, much more elaborate idea. In France any military book of real tactical or strategical importance, theoretical or fully documented (and usually the latter) (and I’m not referring to the one-company battles between ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ taught us in the army under the name of Small Problems for infantry) - they are mostly published by Payot here and include such works as Ludendorf’s Memoirs;
and the Documentary Preparations for the German
Break-through in 1918 - how the men were massed, trained, brought up to the line in 12 hours in 150 different technical groups from flame throwers to field kitchens, the whole inside story from captured
orders
of the greatest
tactical
attack in history; a study of Tannenburg (German); several, both French and German, of the first Marne; a thorough study of gas warfare, another of tanks; no dogmatic distillations compiled by some old dotard, but original documents.

Now - believing that so long as we have service schools and not much preparation (I am a political cynic and a big-navy-man, like all Europeans) English translations should be available in all academies, army service schools, staff schools, etc. (I’ll bet there are American army officers with the rank of captain that don’t know what ‘infiltration in depth’ is or what Colonel Bruckmuller’s idea of artillery employment was) - it seems to me that it would be a great patriotic service to consult the war-department bookbuyers on some subsidy plan to bring out a tentative dozen of the most important as ‘an original source tactical library of the lessons of the great war.’ It would be parallel, but
more
essentially
military
rather than
politico-military
, to the enclosed list of Payot’s collection. I underline some of my proposed inclusions. This, in view of some millions of amateurs of battle now in America, might be an enormous popular success as well as a patriotic service. Let me know about this because if you shouldn’t be interested I’d like to make the suggestion for my own satisfaction to someone else. Some that I’ve underlined may be already published.

My God - this is 7 pages and you’re asleep and I want to catch the
Olympic
with this so I’ll close. Please tell me your response to
each
idea.

Does Chamson sell at all? Oh, for my income tax will you have the usual statement of lack of royalties sent me - and for my own curiosity to see if I’ve sold a book this year except to myself.

10
rue Pergolèse

Paris, France

circa May 1, 1930

Dear Max:

I was delighted about the Bishop story - the acceptance has done wonders for him. The other night I read him a good deal of my novel and I think he liked it. Harold Ober wrote me that if it wouldn’t be published this fall I should publish the Basil Lee stories, but I know too well by whom reputations are made and broken to ruin myself completely by such a move - I’ve seen Tom Boyd, Michael Arlen, and too many others fall through the eternal trap-door of trying to cheat the public, no matter what their public is, with substitutes - better to let four years go by. I wrote young and I wrote a lot and the pot takes longer to fill up now but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago. If you think Callaghan hasn’t completely blown himself up with this deathhouse masterpiece just wait and see the pieces fall. I don’t know why I’m saying this to you who have never been anything but my most loyal and confident encourager and friend but Ober’s letter annoyed me today and put me in a wretched humor. I know
what I’m doing -
honestly, Max. How much time between
The Cabala
and
The Bridge of St Luis Rey,
between
The Genius
and
The American Tragedy,
between
The Wisdom
Tooth and
Green Pastures?
I think it seems to go by quicker there in America but time put in is time eventually taken out - and whatever this thing of mine is it’s certainly not a mediocrity like
The Woman of Andros
and
The Forty-Second Parallel.
‘He’s through’ is an easy cry to raise but it’s safer for the critics to raise it at the evidence in print than at a long silence.

Ever yours,

Scott

10
rue
Pergolèse

Paris,
France

May, 1930

Dear Max:

First let me tell you how shocked I was by Mr Scribner’s death. It was in due time of course but nevertheless

I shall miss his fairness toward things that were of another generation, his general tolerance and simply his being there as titular head of a great business.

Please tell me how this affects you - if at all. The letter enclosed has been in my desk for three weeks as I wasn’t sure whether to send it when I wrote it. Then Powell Fowler and his wedding party arrived and I got unfortunately involved in dinners and night clubs and drinking; then Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven’t done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.

Have you read The
Building of St
Michele and D. H. Lawrence’s
Fantasia of the Unconscious?
Don’t miss either of them.

Always yours,

Scott What news of Ernest?

Please don’t mention the enclosed letter to Ober as I’ve written him already.

Switzerland

circa July 8, 1930

Dear Max:

I’m asking Harold Ober to offer you these three stories which Zelda wrote in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you’ll see that apart from the beauty and richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them - their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for a while seemed to have brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion they are literature the I may in this case read so much between the lines that my opinion is valueless. (By the way Caldwell’s stories were a thorough disappointment, weren’t they - more crimes committed in Hemingway’s name.)

Ever yours,

Scott

Switzerland

circa July 20, 1930

Dear Max:

Zelda is still sick as hell, and the psychiatrist who is devoting almost his entire time to her is an expensive proposition. I was so upset in June when hopes for her recovery were black that I could practically do no work and got behind - then arrived a wire from Ober that for the first time he couldn’t make me the usual advance up to the price of a story. So then I called on you. I am having him turn over to you $3000 from the proceeds of the story I am sending off this week, as it’s terrible to be so in debt. A thousand thanks and apologies.

Yours as ever (if somewhat harassed and anxious about life),

Scott

Geneva, Switzerland

circa
September
1, 1930

Dear Max:

All the world seems to end up in this flat and antiseptic smelling land - with an overlay of flowers. Tom Wolfe is the only man I’ve met here who isn’t sick or hasn’t sickness to deal with. You have a great find in him - what he’ll do is incalculable. He has a deeper culture than Ernest and more vitality, if he is slightly less of a poet that goes with the immense surface he wants to cover. Also he lacks Ernest’s quality of a stick hardened in the fire - he is more susceptible to the world. John Bishop told me he needed advice about cutting, etc., but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he has to be published in five volumes. I liked him enormously.

I was sorry of course about Zelda’s stories - possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a waste-land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College
Humor
and I think in view of the success of Dotty Parker’s
Laments
(25,000 copies) I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during the winter.

Wasn’t that a nice tribute to C.S. from Mencken in
The
Mercury?

The royalty advance or the national debt as it might be called shocked me. The usual vicious circle is here - I am now exactly $3000 ahead which means 2 months on the encyclopedia. I’d prefer to have all above the $10,000 paid back to you off my next story (in October). You’ve been so damn nice to me.

Zelda is almost well. The doctor says she can never drink again (not that drink in any way contributed to her collapse), and that I must not drink anything, not even wine, for a year, because drinking in the past was one of the things that haunted her in her delirium Do please send me things like Wolfe’s book when they appear. Is Ernest’s book a history of bull-fighting? I’m sending you a curious illiterate ms. written by a chasseur at my bank here. Will you skim it and see if any parts, like the marines in Central America, are interesting as pure data? And return it, if not, directly to him? You were absolutely right about the dollar books - it’s a preposterous idea and I think the Authors League went Crazy. —

Always yours,