Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (577 page)

Scott

This illness has cost me a fortune - hence that telegram in July. The biggest man in Switzerland gave all his time to her - and saved her reason by a split second.

Grand
Hotel de
la Paix Lausanne,
Switzerland

Before May 21, 1931

Dear Max: —

An idea:

Princeton has had lots of books, too many in the last ten years (on a cursory inspection I’m not so much impressed with Burn- ham’s book which leans heavily on so many of us greybeards), but-

There’s been no Harvard book since Charlie Flandrau and Philosophy Four. I’m very impressed with a series of Harvard-Boston society stories by Bernard De Voto which have been running in the Post the last year. They’re light, romantic and
exceedingly witty.
I think that under some such title as Outside
the Yard
the as yet unsaturated Harvard public would lap them up. (I don’t dare suggest you call them Recent
Researches at Cambridge.)

The new avant-garde magazines are not up to Transition, and this
Caravan
has nothing new except some good poetry. The fazz Age is over. If Mark Sullivan is going on, you might tell him I claim credit for naming it and that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day 1919 to the crash of the stock market in 1929 - almost exactly one decade.

Zelda is
so
much better. I’m taking her on a trip tomorrow - only for the day. But she’s herself again now, the not yet strong.
Please
send that proof of hers.

Yours always,

Scott

Fitz Don
Ce-Sar Hotel StPetersburg, Florida (for three days only)

circa
January
15,1932

Dear Max:

At last for the first time in two years and a half I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead. Am replanning it to include what’s good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words and publishing. Don’t tell Ernest or anyone - let them think what they want - you’re the only one who’s ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.

Your letters still sound sad. For God’s sake take your vacation this winter. Nobody could quite ruin the house in your absence, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you and when you come back cut off an empty head or two. Thalberg did that with Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer.

Which reminds me that I’m doing that ‘Hollywood Revisited’ in the evenings and it will be along in, I think, six days - maybe ten.

Have Nunnally Johnson’s humorous stories from the
Post
been collected? Everybody reads them. Please at least look into this. Ask Myers - he ought to search back at least a year which is as long as I’ve been meaning to write you about it.

Where in hell are my Scandinavian copies of
The Great Gatsby?

You couldn’t have sent me anything I enjoyed more than the Churchill book.

Always yours devotedly,

Scott Fitzg —

Hotel Rennert Baltimore,

Maryland

Before May 2,
1932

Dear Max:...

Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-

Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think. But I must urge you two things.

(1) — If you like it please
don’t
wire her congratulations and please keep whatever praise you may see fit to give on
the staid side -
I mean,
as you naturally would,
rather than yield to a tendency one has with invalids to be extra nice to cheer them up. This seems a nuance but it is rather important at present to the doctors that Zelda does not feel that the acceptance (always granted you like it) means immediate fame and money. I’m afraid all our critical tendencies in the last decade got bullish; we discovered one Hemingway to a dozen Callaghans and Caldwells (I think the latter is a wash-out) and probably created a lot of spoiled geniuses who might have been good workmen. Not that I regret it - if that last five years uncovered Ernest, Tom Wolfe and Faulkner it would have been worthwhile, but I’m not certain enough of Zelda’s present stability of character to expose her to any superlatives. If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, and part of it done fatigued and uninspired, and part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.

(2) — Don’t discuss contract with her until I have talked to you.

Ring’s last story in the
Post
was pathetic, a shade of himself, but I’m glad they ran it first and I hope it’ll stir up his professional pride to repeat.

Beginning the article for you on Monday. You can count on it for the end of next week.

Now very
important.

(1)
—
I must have a royalty report for 1931 for my income tax - they insist.

(2) — I borrowed $600 in 1931. $500 of this was redeemed by my article. The other hundred should show in royalty report.

(3) Since
Gatsby
was not placed with Grosset or Burt, I’d like to have it in the Modern Library. This is my own idea and have had no approach but imagine I can negotiate it. Once they are interested would of course turn negotiations over to you. But I feel, should you put obstacles in the way, you would be doing me a great harm and injustice.
Gatsby
is constantly mentioned among memorable books but the man who asks for it in a store on the basis of such mention does not ask twice. Booksellers do not keep such an item in stock and there is a whole new generation who cannot obtain it. This has been on my mind for two years and I must insist that you give me an answer that doesn’t keep me awake nights wondering why it possibly benefited the Scribners to have me represented in such an impersonal short story collection as that of the Modern Library by a weak story, and Ring, etc., by none at all. That ‘they would almost all have been Scribner authors’ was a most curious perversion of what should have been a matter of pride into an attitude of dog-in-the-manger.

Excuse that outburst, Max. Please write, answering all questions. Tell Louis I liked her story and hope she’s better. Things go all right with me now. What news of Ernest? And his book?

Ever your friend,

Scott

Hotel Rennert

Baltimore,

Maryland

circa May 14, 1932

Dear Max:

Here is Zelda’s novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel - I am too close to tell. It has the faults and virtues of a first novel. It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look
Homeward,
Angel, than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemingway. It should interest the many thousands interested in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell.

Now, about its reception. If you refuse it, which I don’t think you will, all communication should come through me. If you accept it write her directly and I withdraw all restraints on whatever meed of praise you may see fit to give. The strain of writing it was bad for her but it had to be written - she needed relaxation afterwards and I was afraid that praise might encourage the incipient egomania the doctors noticed, but she has taken such a sane common-sense view lately - (At first she refused to revise - then she revised completely, added on her own suggestion and has changed what was a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work. She can do more with the galleys but I can’t ask her to do more now.) - But now praise will do her good, within reason. But she mustn’t write anything more on the
personal
side for six months or so until she is stronger.

Now a second thing, more important than you think. You haven’t been in the publishing business over twenty years without noticing the streaks of smallness in very large personalities. Ernest told me once he would ‘never publish a book in the same season with me,’ meaning it would lead to ill-feeling. I advise you, if he is in New York (and always granting you like Zelda’s book), do not
praise it, or even talk about it to him!
The finer the thing he has written, the more he’ll expect your entire allegiance to it as this is one of the few pleasures, rich and full and new, he’ll get out of it. I know this, and I think you do too and probably there’s no use warning you. There is no possible conflict between the books but there has always been a subtle struggle between Ernest and Zelda, and any apposition might have curiously grave consequences - curious, that is, to un-jealous men like you and me.

One thing more. Please, in your letter to Zelda (if of acceptance) do not mention contracts or terms. I will take it up immediately on hearing from you.

Thanks about the Modern Library. I don’t know exactly what I shall do. Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone....

Ever your friend,

Scott

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

January
19, 1933

Dear Max:

I was in New York for three days last week on a terrible bat. I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for twenty-four hours groaning. Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks. Ernest told me he concealed from you the fact that I was in such rotten shape. I send you this, less to write you a Rousseau’s
Confession
than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years’ standing.

Thanks for the books that you have had sent to me from time to time. They comprise most of the reading I do because like everybody else I gradually cut down on expenses. When you have a line on the sale of Zelda’s book let us know.

Found New York in a high state of neurosis, as does everybody else, and met no one who didn’t convey the fact to me: it possibly proves that the neurosis is in me. All goes serenely down here. Am going on the water-wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don’t tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am
his
alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, the even Post stories must be done in a state of sobriety. I thought he seemed in good shape, Bunny less so, rather gloomy. A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

For God’s sake can’t you lighten that pall of gloom which has settled over Scribner’s

Magazine - Erskine Caldwell’s imitations of Morley Callaghan’s imitations of Ernest, and Stuart Chase’s imitations of Earl Browder’s imitating Lenin? Maybe Ring would lighten your volume with a monthly article. I see he has perked up a little in
The
New Yorker.

All goes acceptably in Maryland, at least from the window of my study, with distant gun flashes on the horizon if you walk far out of the door.

Ever your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,
Maryland

September
25, 1933

Dear Max:

The novel has gone ahead faster than I thought. There was a little setback when I went to the hospital for four days but since then things have gone ahead of my schedule which, you will remember, promised you the whole manuscript for reading November 1, with the first one-fourth ready to shoot into the magazine (in case you can use it) and the other three-fourths to undergo further revision. I now figure that this can be achieved by about the 25th of October. I will appear in person, carrying the manuscript and wearing a spiked helmet.

There are several points and I wish you would answer them categorically.

1. Did you mean that you could get the first fourth of the story into the copy of the magazine appearing late in December and therefore that the book could appear early in April? I gathered that on the phone but want to be sure. I don’t know what the ocean travel statistics promise for the spring but it seems to me that a May publication would be too late if there was a great exodus and I should miss being a proper gift book for it. The story, as you know, is laid entirely in Europe -I wish I could have gotten as far as China but Europe was the best I could do, Max (to get into Ernest’s rhythm).

2.1 would not want a magazine proof of the first part, though of course I would expect your own proofreaders to check up on blatant errors, but would want to talk over with you any small changes that would have to be made for magazine publication - in any case to make them myself.

3. Will publication with you absolutely preclude that the book will be chosen by the Literary Guild or the Book-of-the-Month? Whatever the answer, the serial will serve the purpose of bringing my book to the memory and attention of my old public and of getting straight financially with you. On the other hand, it is to both our advantages to capitalize if possible such facts as that the editors of those book leagues might take a fancy to such a curious idea that the author, Fitzgerald, actually wrote a book after all these years (this is all said with the reservation that the book is good). Please answer this as it is of importance to me to know whether I must expect my big returns from serial and possibly theatrical and picture rights or whether I have as good a chance at a book sale, launched by one of those organizations, as any other best seller.