Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (589 page)

The young men turn to us (I don’t mean, God forbid! my Post stories, but to my generation). The bow they make to Cabell, for example, is purely formal. I believe that if one is interested in the world into which willy-nilly one’s children will grow up the most accurate data can be found in the European leaders, such as Lawrence, Jung and Spengler, and after that in the very sincere young Americans emerging one by one, and least in the attempts to make logical and palatable the current world scene. I think we are all a little sick but the logic of history won’t permit us to go backward.

Again thanks for sending me the Lawrence, which I’d have otherwise missed. With very best wishes,

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September 21,
1932

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I’m afraid I was dogmatic last night on a subject about which it is silly to be dogmatic. But I do know that I’d prefer Scottie to marry a man of the world even if he was not of her world - a man six or eight years older than herself. The value of every year of experience he brings to the marriage is enormous. I have heard so many college girls complain about their young husbands not knowing anything, by which they didn’t mean formal education but the lack of any approach to life except the social or the modern big-business approach. They have never been to sea, or to the wars, robbed a bank, hunted to live, supported a chorus girl, founded a religion, or dealt directly with other men in some rough school such as politics. If she marries for a whole lot of money that is a different matter for with enough money one can change husbands or live in Paris and not even bother. I am referring to the young couple who will have to meet the usual problems together, such as the money one. And I think if a suitor of Scottie’s was entirely innocent in his past life I’d be inclined to make the old remark: ‘Well, I don’t want you to practice on her.’

Of course nowadays with so much knowledge available the chances are that women know when they’re being cheated but fifty years ago, so numerous doctors have revealed, there were many marriage tragedies beneath what seemed a happy surface.

Of course, I don’t believe in the double standard -I believe it’s disappearing anyhow - I only meant that it was possible for a man to be far from a saint and yet be wildly jealous of his wife, as I am.

Just a last word and I am through boring you with this interminable discussion - I don’t think it matters what a boy’s politics are before he is sixteen but I hope the colleges will cover about all the current economic theories, if only that the boy should know where he stands and what he’s fighting. When a United States Senator
after his election
has to look up the principles of Marxism by which one-sixth of the world is governed it shows he’s a pretty inadequate defender of his own system.

Again, excuse this long letter - couldn’t get down to work this morning and simply had to argue about something.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m sorry I lent you the Hemingway book - there’s a streak of vulgarity in it I would find quite offensive except I know that he does it as a protest against censorship.

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

Probably
Spring,
1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I can’t resist adding a word of qualification to the opinions I expressed so freely last night.

1st Ford Madox Ford once said, ‘Henry James was the greatest writer of his day; therefore for me the greatest man.’ That is all I meant by superiority. T. S. Eliot seems to me a very great person - Mrs Lanier seems to me a very fine character. To me the conditions of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare to them the duties of a soldier in war-time. I simply cannot admire, say, a merchant or an educator with the intensity I reserve for other professions, and in a sense the world agrees with me. Of the Elizabethans we remember the Queen and Drake, a ruler and a captain - only two ‘people of affairs’ in contrast to Bacon, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh. You may say that is because history is written by writers - I think it is more than that.

2nd Please believe that, within the limits of the frame you have chosen, I know no children better brought up than yours. My somewhat tactless bursts of criticism of the frame itself are prompted by my faith in a sort of sixth sense that I think I have about the way the world is going.

3rd I cannot permit my silence of last night when you spoke of yourself as being ‘shallow, etc.’

to pass as a tacit acceptance of the truth of that. I simply meant that for me the test of human values is conformity to the strictest and most unflinching rationality, while in your case it is based on standards of conduct. I don’t mean that because Rousseau’s life was disordered an intellectual should use that to justify his own weaknesses, nor even that my criteria necessarily subsume yours, but I must
think
they do even though I continually check up by seeing the lives of ‘orderly’ people, judging what’s fake and what’s real. This by the way doesn’t excuse the arrogance and bad manners of which I was guilty last night.

4th In résumé I owe you an apology, because I value your friendship, but not a retraction if I can persuade you that even my definitions are different from yours. With great admiration and respect for you and your way of life let me sign myself as Erratic but sincere tenant,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September,
1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I am going to have to not come to dinner Friday * (all of us, I mean), though naturally will come up in evening or afternoon to pay my respects to your mother with great pleasure - and curiosity and interest - at your convenience. We have dined out exactly four times in two years: twice with you, once at the Ridgelys, once on a ship. Without going into the whys of the precedent, it has become one, so with many thanks, I remain your friend (in this case regretful),

Scott Fitzgerald P.S. I have some documents of yours which I will cherish for a few days, unless you want them back immediately: one magazine article, one clipping, 2 letters of Andrew’s (or do you save letters - if not I will file them as they seem interesting to me and form part of a series).

La Paix,
Rodgers’
Forge

Towson, Maryland

September, 1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

How would this plan seem to you? for the school trek, beginning Thursday.

You to take Thursday and Friday; then:

Our week, your week, our week, your week, your week Our week,”

etc.

This arrangement because this year your children have the far mileage to cover. Is it Oak? (I believe the dictionary spelling is ‘Oke.’)

Your mother is utterly charming. I have never known a woman of her age to be so alive (I retract: there was also Mrs Winthrop Chanler). I enjoyed our hour together so
much.
Tell her so.

Ever your chattel,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May
31, 1934

Dear Margaret:

I know it was very annoying for me to have lost my temper in public and I want to apologize to you both, for the discomfort that I know I gave you. There are certain subjects that simply do not belong to an afternoon tea and, while I still think that Mrs Perce’s arguments were almost maddening enough to justify homicide, I appreciate that it was no role of mine to intrude my intensity of feeling upon a group who had expected a quiet tea party.

Ever yours faithfully,

Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I’m sorry this is typed but I seem to have contracted Scottie’s poison ivy and my hands are swathed in bandages.

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May11, 1935

Dear Margaret:

The lilies are wonderful. First I gave them to Scottie and then I took them back. I rushed to my window and called you just as your Ford rolled out of sight. I wanted to see you before I left, which is now, for a protracted sojourn in the country, probably Carolina, still seeking to get back the hours of sleep that I lost in ‘33 and ‘34. I am closing the house but am coming back in June to pack Scottie off to camp.

I think of you all so often and I miss keeping up with Andrew and Eleanor, their woes and joys and changes. Through Scottie’s eyes they lack reality, Andrew becomes a schemer of Machiavellian hue, Eleanor remains the child who just never will be as old as Scottie no matter how hard she tries, as though she were an Alice who had just perversely lost her growing cake. I still hear the wings of a career beating about her. As for Andrew I shall have to catch up as much as possible when I take him to the football game next autumn, though I wish I knew what he was going to do this summer.

I have a fair story in the current McCall’s if you run into it. La Paix must be grand now - I wish Zelda could walk through it, but alas, she is far too sick. When she is a little better and can go outside will you call on her sometime? I will let you know. She will be pretty lonesome when I am away and I hate like the devil to leave her but it is doctor’s orders.

Always affectionately,

Scott

Grove Pork Inn

Asheville,
North Carolina

June, 1935

Dear Margaret:

What a nice letter you write! I quoted to Zelda tonight (in a letter) the part about ‘Scottie in yellow ruffles... with Andrew, Jack and Clarence... forming the dark half of the design.’

Also the inevitable fatalism that creeps into all womanhood, the almost lust for death as the culmination of experience; to quote you again, ‘life being made up of hope, and a little fulfillment.’ The hell it is - too much fulfillment from a man’s point of view, if he has been one of those who wanted to identify himself with it utterly. It’s so fast, so sweeping along, that he walks stumbling and crying out, wondering sometimes where he is, or where the others are, or if they existed, or whether he’s hurt anybody, but not much time to wonder, only sweeping along again with his only choice being between blindness or being muscle- bound from caution-conservatism-cowardice, the three great
C’s
I’ve tied up together, though God knows I’m capable of all three...

I became so metaphysical there that I had to destroy what I’d written. Anyhow I think that the fatalism of women can be confused with radicalism but is neither radical nor conservative to any extent. But a man’s life is a more gorgeous thing, I think, if he’s one of the fortunate. Oh, well - these generalities set ill upon a man of my age.

Thank you for asking Scottie out. You have been good to her. I like it when she goes to your house and gets a sense of the continuity of life that her own choppy existence hasn’t given her. I want her to be pretty hard but if she has to be a
condottiere
to a certain extent, I like her to know that all people don’t.

I am benefiting by my rest here, gaining weight, exuberance. But living alone leaves so many loopholes for brooding and when I do face the whole tragedy of Zelda it is simply a day lost. I think I feel it more now than at any time since its inception. She seems so helpless and pitiful. Liquor used to help put it out of mind, and it was one of the many services my old friend Barleycorn did me. However he had outlived his usefulness in that as well as all other regards.

I hear it is beautiful here, but without people all places are the same to me. I’d rather be at La Paix watching thru my iron grille one of your tribe moving about the garden, and wondering if Zelda had yet thrown the tennis racquet at Mr Crosley.

What a ten months this has been for Frances - good God! a lifetime for some people. Blessings on her - she is a fine person.

All my affectionate good wishes to you and yours,

Scott Fitz

Cambridge
Arms
Baltimore,

Maryland

Fall, 1935

Dear Margaret:

Pardon! We moved. I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. All
politesse
ceased to exist for a thick week during which I lived in a haze of cigarette smoke and nervous querulousness. I don’t even know why I wrote you about Scottie save that on my occasional emergencies all matters in the outside world seemed of equally vital importance - or unimportance: the N.R.A. and the Princeton-Williams game, the decline of the democratic dogma and the faint worry of a child. Anyhow, thanks.

I destroyed Andrew’s letter - he is so level-headed in his analyses and he keeps growing. I wish I knew him better but I won’t though, until he is about 19. He might know
me
but I won’t know
him
because until then he will give me a
presentation
of himself that he thinks will impress or please me. This will not prevent him, I repeat, from finding out more and more about me if we meet often.

I know this Pell’s brother who was in ‘28. This one t had a school in New England for awhile, didn’t he, or was assistant headmaster somewhere or taught at St Mark’s? I’ve heard well of him. He was in Ivy, I think, and well liked, but on principle I’m against schoolmarms, male or female - though there’s just the ghost of one in me. Common sense tells me that there are rules but, like all modern men, the shade of Rousseau haunts me. (Bert- rand Russell’s Rousseau school is a flop - I know that at practically first hand - I’ve seen and talked to both parents and products.) That’s too big a subject for a letter and we’ve probably talked of it before.