Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (583 page)

I know that due to your experience with Tom Boyd, you place a great deal of emphasis on vitality, but remember that a great deal of the work in this world has been done by sick men and people who at first sight seem to have no vitality will suddenly exhibit great streaks of it. I’ve never seen this young man but potentially he seems capable of great efforts.

Things are standing still here. I am waiting to hear this afternoon about a
Saturday
Evening Post story, which, if it is successful, will continue a series.

Best wishes always,

Scott

Asheville, North Carolina

September
19, 1936

Dear Max:

This is my second day of having a minute to catch up with correspondence. Probably Harold Ober has kept you in general touch with what has happened to me but I will summarize:

I broke the clavicle of my shoulder, diving - nothing heroic, but a little too high for the muscles to tie up the efforts of a simple swan dive. At first the doctors thought that I must have tuberculosis of the bone, but x-ray showed nothing of the sort, so (like occasional pitchers who throw their arms out of joint with some unprepared-for effort) it was left to dangle for twenty-four hours with a bad diagnosis by a young intern; then an x-ray and found broken and set in an elaborate plaster cast.

I had almost adapted myself to the thing when I fell in the bathroom reaching for the light, and lay on the floor until I caught a mild form of arthritis called ‘myotosis,’ which popped me in the bed for five weeks more. During this time there were domestic crises: Mother sickened and then died and I tried my best to be there but couldn’t. I have been within a mile and half of my wife all summer and have seen her about half dozen times. Total accomplished for one summer has been one story, not very good, two
Esquire
articles, neither of them very good.

You have probably seen Harold Ober and he may have told you that Scottie got a remission of tuition at a very expensive school where I wanted her to go (Miss Ethel Walker’s School in Connecticut). Outside of that I have no good news, except that I came into some money from my mother, not as much as I had hoped, but at least $20,000 in cash and bonds at the materialization in six months - for some reason, I do not know the why or wherefore of it, it requires this time. I am going to use some of it, with the products of the last story and the one in process of completion, to pay off my bills and to take two or three months’ rest in a big way. I have to admit to myself that I haven’t the vitality that I had five years ago.

I feel that I must tell you something which at first seemed better to leave alone: I wrote Ernest about that story of his, asking him in the most measured terms not to use my name in future pieces of fiction. He wrote me back a crazy letter, telling me about what a greater Writer he was and how much he loved his children, but yielding the point - ‘If I should outlive him which he doubted. To have answered it would have been like fooling with a lit firecracker.

Somehow I love that man, no matter what he says or does, but just one more crack and I think I would have to throw my weight with the gang and lay him. No one could ever hurt him in his first books but he has completely lost his head and the duller he gets about it, the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.

No particular news except the dreary routine of illness. Scottie excited about the wedding.

As ever yours,

Scott Fitz

Grove
Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October
16, 1936

Dear Max:

As I wired you, an advance on my mother’s estate from a friend makes it unnecessary to impose on you further.

I do not like the idea of the biographical book. I have a novel planned, or rather I should say conceived, which fits much better

In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, published in
Esquire
(August, 1936), Hemingway had his hero musing, The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’

into the circumstances, but neither by this inheritance nor in view of the general financial situation do I see clear to undertake it. It is a novel certainly as long as
Tender Is the
Night, and, knowing my habit of endless corrections and revisions, you will understand that I figure it at two years. Except for a lucky break you see how difficult it would be for me to master the leisure of the two years to finish it. For a whole year I have been counting on such a break in the shape of either Hollywood buying
Tender
or else of Grisman getting Kirkland or someone else to do an efficient dramatization. (I know I would not like the job and I know that Davis who had every reason to undertake it after the success of
Gatsby
simply turned thumbs down from his dramatist’s instinct that the story was not constructed as dramatically as
Gatsby
and did not readily lend itself to dramatization.)So let us say that all accidental, good breaks can not be considered. I can not think up any practical way of undertaking this work. If you have any suggestions they will be welcomed, but there is no likelihood that my expenses will be reduced below $18,000 a year in the next two years, with Zelda’s hospital bilk, insurance payments to keep, etc. And there is no likelihood that after the comparative financial failure of
Tender Is the
Night that I should be advanced such a sum as $36,000. The present plan, as near as I have formulated it, seems to be to go on with this endless Post writing or else go to Hollywood again. Each time I have gone to Hollywood, in spite of the enormous salary, has really set me back financially and artistically. My feelings against the autobiographical book are:

First: that certain people have thought that those E
squire
articles  did me definite damage and certainly they would have to form part of the fabric of a book so projected. My feeling last winter that I could put together the articles I had written vanished in the light of your disapproval, and certainly when so many books have been made up out of miscellaneous material and exploited material, as it would be in my case, there is no considerable sale to be expected. If I were Negley Farson and had been through the revolutions and panics of the last fifteen years it would be another story, or if I were prepared at this moment to ‘tell all’ it would have a chance at success, but now it would Three Essays known collectively as ‘The Crack-Up’.

seem to be a measure adopted in
extremis,
a sort of period to my whole career.

In relation to all this, I enjoyed reading
General Grant’s
Lost
Stand,
and was conscious of your particular reasons for sending it to me. It is needless to compare the difference in force of character between myself and General Grant, the number of words that he could write in a year, and the absolutely virgin field which he exploited with the experiences of a four-year life under the most dramatic of circumstances. What attitude on life I have been able to put into my books is dependent upon entirely different field of reference with the predominant themes based on problems of personal psychology. While you may sit down and write 3000 words one day, it inevitably means that you write 500 words the next....

I certainly have this one more novel, but it may have to remain among the unwritten books of this world. Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum, have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil-end of a point of view. I have got myself completely on the spot and what the next step is I don’t know.

I am going to New York around Thanksgiving for a day or so and we might discuss ways and means. This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

Anyhow, thank you for your willingness to help me. Thank Charlie for me and tell him that the assignments he mentioned have only been waiting on a general straightening up of my affairs. My God, debt is an awful thing!

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Heard from Mrs Rawlings and will see her.

Grove
Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October
22, 1936

Dear Mr Kerr:

There is one great publisher in America, and that is Charles Scribner’s Sons. Their list includes, as you must know, Hemingway, Wolfe, etc., and has included at most times young Erskine Caldwell and (for the magazine, at least) William Faulkner. There is no question that they are more open to talent than any other publisher because of their resources, first, and because of the tradition of taking a chance on a talent that has not yet got itself an audience.

I am out of Baltimore in Asheville where I have been ill and I am unable to see you or read your manuscript or estimate what you have to offer, but I think by all odds the wisest thing to do is to send your manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, where you will be read carefully and with imagination by a staff of three or four men who have managed to pick out some of the most extraordinary books of our time, after other publishers have turned them down.

If they should decide that it was not to their advantage to publish your manuscript, send copies of this correspondence to my agent, Harold Ober, at 40 East 49th Street, New York City, and he might be able to give you better advice. If in the future your novel is published and makes a success, I should suggest that you put all rights in his hands. He will charge you ten per cent, but in sixteen years of professional writing he has saved me much more than ten per cent.

Now, have I told you anything you want to know? Again, I am sorry that I cannot read your novel until it is in type, but I am laboring under tremendous obligations here and there is simply not the physical time. This is exactly the same advice that I gave Ernest Hemingway many years ago and is based on a long career which has touched the publishing business in general.

Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oak
Hall Hotel

Tryon, North
Carolina

February, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for your note and the appalling statement. Odd how enormous sums of £10,000 have come to seem lately - I can remember turning down that for the serialization of
The Great Gatsby -
from
College Humor.

Well, my least productive and lowest general year since 1926 is over. In that year I did 1 short story and
2
chapters of a novel - that is, two chapters that I afterwards used. And it was a terrible story. Last year, even though laid up 4 months, I sold 4 stories and 8
Esquire
pieces, a poor showing God knows. This year has started slowly also, some damn lack of interest, staleness, when I have every reason to want to work if only to keep from thinking. Haven’t had a drink since I left the North (about six weeks, not even beer) but while I feel a little better nervously, it doesn’t bring back the old exuberance. I honestly think that all the prize fighters, actors, writers who live by their own personal performance ought to have managers in their best years. The ephemeral part of the talent seems when it is in hiding so apart from one, so ‘otherwise,’ that it seems it ought to have some better custodian than the poor individual with whom it lodges and who is left with the bill. My chief achievement lately has been in cutting down my and Zelda’s expenses to rock bottom; my chief failure is my inability to see a workable future. Hollywood for money has much against it, the stories are somehow mostly out of me unless some new source of material springs up, a novel takes money and time - I am thinking of putting aside certain hours and digging out a play, the ever-appealing mirage. At 40 one counts carefully one’s remaining vitality and resources, and a play ought to be within both of them. The novel and the autobiography have got to wait till this load of debt is lifted.

So much, and too much, for my affairs. Write me of Ernest and Tom and who’s new and does Ring still sell and John Fox and The House
of
Mirth. Or am I the only best seller who doesn’t sell?

The account, I know, doesn’t include my personal debt to you. How much is it please?

I don’t know at all about Brookfield. Never heard of it but there are so many schools there. Someone asked me about Oldfields where Mrs Simpson went and I’d never heard of that. Please write me - you are about the only friend who does not see fit to incorporate a moral lesson, especially since The Crack-Up’ stuff. Actually I hear from people in Sing Sing and Joliet all comforting and advising me.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon, North
Carolina

Before March 19, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for the book - I don’t think it was very good but then I didn’t go for Sheean or Negley Farson either. Ernest ought to write a swell book now about Spain - real Richard Harding Davis reporting or better. (I mean not the sad jocosity of P.O.M. passages or the mere calendar of slaughter.) And speaking of Ernest, did I tell you that when I wrote asking him to cut me out of his story he answered, with ill grace, that he would - in fact he answered with such unpleasantness that it is hard to think he has any friendly feeling to me any more. Anyhow please remember that he agreed to do this if the story should come in with me still in it.