Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (586 page)

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February
21, 1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for sending tne release on ‘Babylon.’ I haven’t yet gotten the money but it will be something over $800.00, very little as Hollywood prices go. However, it will give me a chance to try another short story and if either that or the one that is out now finds a home I ought to produce a few chapters of the novel. Meanwhile things do not move here at all in a moving-picture way, but one makes a certain adjustment.

I am glad John Bishop is in good spirits. The affairs of the world never really worried him much. The fact fills me with great envy. I can see ahead no further than finishing this book and getting Scottie through Vassar. The rest looks no brighter than it has for a long time. The greatest privilege would be to be able to do work so absorbing that one could forget the trouble abroad and at home.

I will keep you informed.

Ever yours,

Scott

c/o Phil Berg Agency

9484
Wilshire Boulevard

Beverly Hills,

California

May
20, 1940

Dear Max:

I’ve owed you a decent letter for some months. First - the above is my best address though at the moment I’m hunting for a small apartment. I am in the last week of an eight week movie job for which I will receive $2300. I couldn’t pay you anything from it, nor the government, but it was something, because it was my own picture Babylon Revisited and may lead to a new line up here. I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack - that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

The radio has just announced the fall of St Quentin! My God! What was the use of my wiring you that André Chamson has a hit when the war has now passed into a new stage, making his book a chestnut of a bygone quiet era.

I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. It is certainly no fault of yours. You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these five years. It’s funny what a friend is - Ernest’s crack in ‘The Snows,’ poor John Bishop’s article in the
Virginia Quarterly
(a nice return for ten years of trying to set him up in a literary way) and Harold’s sudden desertion at the wrong time, have made them something less than friends. Once I believed in friendship, believed I
could
(if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.

Professionally, I know, the next move must come from me. Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or
is the book
unpopular? Has it
had
its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers -I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much! Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp - in a
small
way I was an original. I remember we had one of our few and trifling disagreements because I said that to anyone who loved ‘When Lilacs Last,’ Tom Wolfe couldn’t be such a
great
original. Since then I have changed about him. I like ‘Only the Dead’ and ‘Arthur, Garfield, etc.,’ right up with the tops. And where are Tom and I and the rest when psychological Robespierres parade through American letters elevating such melo as
Christ
in
Concrete to
the top, and the boys read Steinbeck like they once read Mencken! I have not lost faith. People will buy my new book and I hope I shan’t again make the many mistakes of
Tender.
Tell me the news if you have time. Where is Ernest and what doing?....

Love to all of you, of all generations.

Scott

1403
Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California (new address)

June 6,
1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for your nice long letter, and for the book  - or did I thank you for the book? I was fascinated, not only by the excellent coverage of the battles (though the man’s extreme bias and the necessity of compression threw some of them out of focus), but by the curious philosophic note which began to run through it, from the discussion of Pharsalla on.

The note was reminiscent, exultant and dumb, but not until I found the name Spengler did his psychology become clear to me. Up to then I had thought: ‘What a wide range for a military man!’ Then the truth became plain. Poor old Spengler has begotten Nazis that would make him turn over in his grave, and Fuller makes his own distortion. Spengler believed that the Western world was dead, and he believed nothing else but that - though he had certain ideas of a possible Slavic rebirth. This did not include Germany, which he linked with the rest of western Europe as in decline. And that the fine flower of it all was to be the battle of Vittorio Veneto and the rise of Mussolini - well, Spengler’s turn in his grave must have been like that of an airplane propeller.

In his last four chapters Fuller begins to get ridiculous. I wonder how he feels now when that
admirable
Mr Franco is about to batter down Gibraltar. This of course does not detract from the interest of the book, especially through the Napoleonic era. Did you ever read Spengler - specifically including the second volume? I read him the same summer I was writing
The Great Gatsby
and I don’t think I ever quite recovered from him. He and Marx are the only modern philosophers that still manage to make sense in this horrible mess - I mean make sense by themselves and not in the hands of distorters. Even Mr Lenin looks now like a much better politician than a philosopher. Spengler, on the other hand, prophesied gang rule, ‘young peoples hungry for spoil,’ and more particularly ‘the world as spoil’ as an idea, a dominant super- cessive idea.

Max, what becomes of copyrights when a book goes out of print? For example, in the case of
Flappers.
For the sake of possible picture rights and so forth should I renew that copyright now? I haven’t an idea about this.

How does Ernest feel about things? Is he angry or has he a philosophic attitude? The Allies are thoroughly licked, that much is certain, and I am sorry for a lot of people. As I wrote Scottie, many of her friends will probably die in the swamps of Bolivia. She is all right now, by the way....

Do let me know about the copyright business, and I would be interested in at least a clue to Ernest’s attitude.

Every your friend,

Scott

1403 North
Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,
California

December
13,1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for your letter. The novel progresses - in fact progresses fast. I’m not going to stop now till I finish a first draft which will be sometime after the 15th of January. However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become - ‘a legend before it is written,’ which is what I believe Wheelock * said about
Tender Is the
Night. Meanwhile will you send me back the chapters I sent you as they are all invalid now, must be completely rewritten, etc. The essential idea is the same and it is still, as far as I can hope, a secret.

Budd Schulberg, a very nice, clever kid out here, is publishing a Hollywood novel with Random House in January. It’s not bad but it doesn’t cut into my material at all. I’ve read Ernest’s novel and most of Tom Wolfe’s t and have been doing a lot of ruminating as to what this whole profession is about. Tom Wolfe’s failure to really explain why you and he parted mars his book but there are great things in it. The portraits of the Jacks (who are they?), Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.

No one points out how Saroyan has been influenced by Franz Kafka. Kafka was an extraordinary Czechoslovakian Jew who died in ‘36. He will never have a wide public but
The Trial
and
America
are two books that writers are never able to forget.

This is the first day off I have taken for many months and I just wanted to tell you the book is coming along and that comparatively speaking all is well.

Ever your friend,

Scott

P.S. How much will you sell the plates of This
Side of Paradise
for? I think it has a chance for a new life.

To John Peale Bishop

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Late February or early March,
1922

Dear John:

I’ll tell you frankly what I’d rather you’d do. Tell specifically what you like about the book and don’t. The characters - Anthony, Gloria, Adam Patch, Maury, Bloeckman, Muriel Dick, Rachael, Tana, etc., etc., etc. - exactly whether they’re good or bad, convincing or not. What you think of the style - too ornate (if so quote) good (also quote) rotten (also quote). What emotion (if any) the book gave you. What you think of its humor. What you think of its ideas. If ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them. Is it boring or interesting? How interesting? What recent American books are more so? If you think my ‘Flash- Back in Paradise’ in Chapter I is like elevated moments of D. W. Griffith say so. Also do you think it’s imitative, and of whom? What I’m angling for is a specific definite review. I’m tickled both that they’ve asked for such a lengthy thing and that you’re going to do it. You cannot hurt my feelings about the book - the I did resent in your Baltimore article being definitely limited at 25 years old to a place between Mackenzie who wrote il/i good (but not wonderful) novels and then died - and Tarkington who if he has a great talent has the mind of a school boy. I mean, at my age they’d done nothing.

As I say I’m delighted that you’re going to do it and, as you wrote asking me to suggest a general mode of attack, I am telling you frankly what I would like. I’m so afraid of all the reviews being general and I devoted so much more care myself to the
detail
of the book than I did to thinking out the
general
scheme that I would appreciate a detailed review. If it is to be that length article it could scarcely be all general anyway.

I’m awfully sorry you’ve had the flu. We arrive East on the 9th. I enjoy your book page in Vanity Fair and think it is excellent.

The baby is beautiful.

As ever,

Scott

Capri, Italy

March, 1925

Dear John.

I am quite drunk. I am told that this is Capri; though as I remember Capri was quieter. As the literary wits might say, your letter received and contents quoted. Let us have more of the same - I think it showed a great deal of power and the last scene - — the dinner at the young Bishops - was handled with admirable restraint. I am glad that at last Americans are producing letters of their own. The climax was wonderful and the exquisite irony of the ‘Sincerely yours’ has only been equaled in the work of those two masters Flaubert and Ferber....

I will now have two copies of Wescott’s Apple as in despair I ordered one - a regular orchard. I shall give one to Brooks here whom I like. Do you know Brooks? He’s just a fellow here...

Excuse the delay. I have just been working on the envelope....

That was a caller. His name was Mussolini, I think, and he says he is in politics here. And besides I have lost my pen so I will have to continue in pencil... t It turned up - I was writing with it all the time and hadn’t noticed. That is because I am full of my new work, a historical play based on the life of Woodrow Wilson.

ACT I. At Princeton

Woodrow seen teaching philosophy. Enter Pyne. Quarrel scene - — Wilson refuses to recognize clubs. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. Pyne re-enters with glee club and trustees. Noise outside. ‘We have won - Princeton 12, Lafayette 3.’ Cheers. Football team enter and group around Wilson. ‘Old Nassau.’ Curtain.

ACT II.
Gubernatorial Mansion at Paterson

Wilson seen signing papers. Tasker Bliss and Marc Connolly come in with proposition to let bosses get control. ‘I have im- portant papers to sign - and none of them legalize corruption.’ Triangle Club begins to sing outside window. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. President continues to sign papers. Enter Mrs Gait, John Grier Hibben, A1 Jolson and Grantland Rice. Song The Call to Larger Duty.’ Tableaux. Coughdrop.

ACT III (optional).
The Battlefront 1
918.

ACT IV

The peace congress. Clemenceau, Wilson and Jolson at table. The Bastard from Trenton now grown up but still a baby, in the uniform of the Prussian Guard, is mewling and pewking in Wilson’s lap.... The junior prom committee comes in through the skylight. Clemenceau: ‘We want the Sarre.’ Wilson: ‘No, Sane, I won’t hear of it.’ Laughter... Enter Marilyn Miller, Gilbert Seldes and Irish MeuseL Tasker Bliss falls into the cuspidor...

Oh Christ! I’m sobering up I Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my
chef d’oeuvre
and others’ opinion.
Please!
I think it’s great but because it deals with much debauched materials, quick deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers. To me it’s fascinating. I never get tired of it....

Zelda’s been sick in bed for five weeks, poor child, and is only now looking up. No news except I now get J2000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. Is Lewis’ book any good? I imagine that mine is infinitely better - what else is well reviewed this spring? Maybe my book  is rotten but I don’t think so.