Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (597 page)

As ever,

F. Scott Fitz-Hardy

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Spring,
1922

Dear Bunny:

From your silence I deduce that either you decided that the play * was not in shape to offer to the Guild or that they refused it.

I have now finished the revision. I am forwarding one copy to Harris and, if you think the Guild would be interested, will forward them the other. Your play should be well along by now. Could you manage to send me a carbon?

I’m working like a dog on some movies at present. I was sorry our meetings in New York were so fragmentary. My original plan was to contrive to have long discourses with you but that interminable party began and I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober. In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.

My compliments to Mary Blair, Ted Paramore and whomsoever else of the elect may cross your path.

We have no plans for the summer.

Scott Rtz —

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD HACK WRITER AND PLAGIARIST SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

626
Goodrich
Avenue

Postmarked May 30,1922

Dear Bunny:

Your delightful letter, of which I hope you have kept a copy, arrived this A.M. and the Fitzgeralds perused it ferociously, commending especially your hope that — gets a good screw in France.

I am so discouraged about the play that it has cheered me to know it’s still under consideration. I thought they’d burn it up.

I think you overestimate the play - the Act I is a gem. Also I think you’re wrong about the soldier scene. Zelda, George Nathan, Miller, Townsend and I think John all thought it should come out. Still I should not object to it being reinserted. Do you like my letterhead? I have jazzed up the millionaire scene in the revised version. I have not read Ulysses but I’m wild to - especially now that you mention some coincidence. Do you know where I can get it at any price? Sorry about your Smart Set novelette....

I am enormously interested in your play. Send me a copy when you can.

I’d like to meet Dos Passos - God, this is a dull letter. I didn’t read your Double Dealer poem the I heard about it and it seems to have achieved fame. The magazine is unprocurable out here.

We’re going to the country for the summer, but write me here immediately. I wish I could close in a rhapsody like yours but the fire is out for the night. Harris sent back the play to Reynolds without comment. If you can think of a title for it, jot it down and let me know.

Yield to your country complex. Zelda says how-de-do.

Ever thine,

F.Scott F —

St Paul,

Minnesota

Postmarked June 4,
1922

Dear Bunny:

You will be looked up by Thomas A. Boyd, a very clever kid who conducts the best book page west of New York, in a newspaper here. I do not ask you to wine and dine him as I personally dislike people sent to me with letters. I do ask you to see him the and give him half an hour or so of your valuable time. He’s quite a friend of mine.

Scott Fitz —

The Yacht
Club

White
Bear Lake, Minnesota

June
25, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Thank you for giving the play to Craven - and again for your interest in it in general. I’m afraid I think you overestimate it - because I have just been fixing up ‘Mr Icky’ for my fall book and it does not seem very good to me. I am about to start a revision of the play - also to find a name. I’ll send it to Hopkins next. So far it has only been to Miller, Harris and the Theatre Guild. I’d give anything if Craven would play that part. I wrote it, as the text says, with him in mind. I agree with you that
Anna Christie
was vastly overestimated....

Am going to write another play whatever becomes of this one. The
Beautiful and
Damned has had a very satisfactory but not inspiring sale. We thought it’d go far beyond
Paradise
but it hasn’t. It was a dire mistake to serialize it. Three
Soldiers
and Cytherea took the edge off it by the time it was published....

Did you like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ or did you read it. It’s in my new book anyhow.

What do you think of Rascoe’s page? It’s excellent, of course, compared to The
Times or Herald
but I think your criticism of his Frank-Harassment of his conversations hit the mark. There is something faintly repellent in his manner - in writing I mean. Who is this professionally quaint Kenhelm Digby? He is kittenish beyond credibility and I hate his guts. Is it Morley or Benêt?

I have Ulysses from the Brick Row Bookshop and am starting it. I wish it was laid in America - there is something about middle- class Ireland that depresses me inordinately - I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked. Except to go either South or to New York in October for the winter.

Ever thine,

F. Scott Fitz

The Yacht Club

White Bear
Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked July
13, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play. So when Craven returns it will you send it to me - or hold on to it, either one?

I read your article on
Ulysses,
the only criticism yet I could make head or tail of. Also your article on Byron in the Tribune. You are an incomparable egg and I wish I could see you. Life is damn dull

In God’s name,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked August 1, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Just a line to tell you I’ve finished my play and am sending it to Nathan to give to Hopkins or Selwyn. It is now a wonder. I’m going to ask you to destroy the 2 copies you have as it makes me sort of nervous to have them out This is silly but so long as a play is in an actor’s office and is unpublished as my play at Craven’s I feel lines from it will soon begin to appear on Broadway.

I want to thank you again for all you did for it and the time it took. I don’t know anything that involves more labor than trying to place someone else’s ms. I did it for — so I know and I am enormously obliged.

Write me any gossip if you have time. No news or plans have L

Thine,

Fitz

The
Yacht Club

White Bear
Lake, Minnesota

Postmarked
August 5, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Fitzgerald howled over ‘Quintilian.’ He is glad it was reprinted as he couldn’t get the Double
Dealer
and feared he had missed it. It’s excellent especially the line about Nero and die one about Dr Bishop.

The play with an absolutely new second act has gone to Nathan who is giving it to Hopkins or Selwyn. Your description of John leaving was fine. Zelda and I both enjoyed it with dramatic

? and, what would have been gratifying to you, awe. Thank you for taking it to Ames 8c Elkins. I’m rather glad now that none of them took it as I’d have been tempted to let them do it - and my new version is much better. Please do not bother to return the 2 mss. you have as it’s a lot of trouble. I have copies of them and no use for them. Destruction will serve the same purpose - it only worries me to have them knocking around.

I read sprigs of the old oak that grew from the marriage of Mencken and Margaret Anderson (Christ! What a metaphor!) and is known as the younger genitals. It bored me. I didn’t read yours - but Rascoe is getting worse than Frank Harris with his elaborate explanations and whitewashings of himself. There’s no easier way for a clever writer to become a bore. It turns the gentle art of making enemies into the East Aurora Craft of making people indifferent... in the stunned pause that preceded this epigram Fitzgerald bolted his aspic and went to a sailor’s den.

‘See here,’ he said, ‘I want some new way of using the great Conradian vitality, the legend that the sea exists without Polish eyes to see it. Masefield has spread it on iambics and downed it; O’Neill has sprinkled it on Broadway; McFee has added an Even- rude motor -’

But I could think of no new art form in which to fit him. So I decided to end the letter. The little woman, my best pal and, I may add, my severest critic, asked to be remembered.

Would you like to see the new play? Or are you fed up for awhile? Perhaps we better wait till it appears. I think I’ll try to serialize it in Scribner’s - would you?

Scott F.

Am undecided about Ulysses application to me - which is as near as I ever come to forming an impersonal judgment.

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked August 28, 1922

Dear Bunny:

The Garland arrived and I have re-read it. Your preface is perfect - my only regret is that it wasn’t published when it was written almost two years ago. ‘The Soldier’ of course I read for about the fifth time. I think it’s about the best short war story yet - but I object violently to ‘pitched forward’ in the lunch- putting anecdote. The man would have said ‘fell down’ or ‘sorta sank down.’ Also I was delighted as usual by ‘The Efficiency Expert.’ Your poems I like less than your prose - ‘The Lake’ I do not particularly care for. I like ‘The Centaur’ and the ‘Epilogue’ best - but all your poetry seems to flow from some source outside or before the romantic movement even when its intent is mostly lyrical.

I like all of John’s except the play, which strikes me as being obvious, and ‘Resurrection’ which despite its excellent idea and title and some spots of good writing is pale and without any particular vitality.

Due to you, I suppose, I had a wire from Langner, I referred him to George Nathan.

Many thanks for the book. Would you like me to review it? If so suggest a paper or magazine and I’ll be glad to.

Thine,

F. Scott Fitz

The format of the book is most attractive. I grow envious every time I see a Knopf binding.

Villa Marie, Valescure St Raphael, France

Postmarked October
7,1924

Dear Bunny:

The above will tell you where we are, as you proclaim yourself unable to find it on the map. We enjoyed your letter enormously, colossally, stupendously. It was epochal, acrocryptical, categorical. I have begun life anew since getting it and Zelda has gone into a nunnery on the Peloponnesus —

The news about the play is grand and the ballet too. I gather from your letter that O’Neill and Mary had a great success. But you are wrong about Ring’s book t My title was the best possible. You are always wrong - but always with the most correct possible reasons. (This statement is merely acrocritical, hypothetical, diabolical, metaphorical.)....

You speak of — ‘s wife. I didn’t see her - but stay, there was a woman there - but what she said and did and looked like I can not tell. Is she an elderly, gross woman with hair growing in her ears and a red, porous forehead? If so, I remember her. Or stay - there was a rumor that he had married an Ethiop and took her to bleach beside the fjord —

I had a short curious note from the latter Î yesterday, calling me to account for my Mercury story. At first I couldn’t understand this communication after seven blessedly silent years - behold: he was a Catholic. I had broken his heart This is a dumb letter but I have just been reading the advertisements of whore-houses in the French magazines. I seethe with passion for a ‘bains-massage,’ with volupté for oriental delights (tout un) in a Hotel Particular, or else I long to go with a young man (intell., bonne
famille, affectueux
) for a paid amorous weekend to the coast of illegible. Deep calling to deep.

I will give you now the Fitz touch without which this letter would fail to conform to your conception of my character.

Sinclair Lewis sold his new novel to the Designer for $50,000 (950,000.00 francs) - I never did like that fellow. (I do really.)

My book is wonderful, t so is the air and the sea. I have got my health back - I no longer cough and itch and roll from one side of the bed to the other all night and have a hollow ache in my stomach after two cups of black coffee. I really worked hard as hell last winter - but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.

Write to me of all data, gossip, event, accident, scandal, sensation, deterioration, new reputation - and of yourself.

Our love,

Scott

14
rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

Spring
, 1925

Dear Bunny:

Thanks for your letter about the book. I was awfully happy that you liked it and that you approved of the design. The worst fault in it, I think is aBlG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However, the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it - the everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name. Mencken said (in a most enthusiastic letter received today) that the only fault was that the central story was trivial and a sort of anecdote (that is because he has forgotten his admiration for Conrad and adjusted himself to the sprawling novel) and I felt that what he really missed was the lack of any emotional backbone at the very height of it.

Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote so is
The Brothers Karamazov.
From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story. However, the letters from you and Mencken have compensated me for the fact that of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about and for the even more depressing fact that it was, in comparison with the others, a financial failure (after I’d turned down fifteen thousand for the serial rights). I wonder what Rosenfeld thought of it I looked up Hemingway. He is taking me to see Gertrude Stein tomorrow. This city is full of Americans - most of them former friends - whom we spend most of our time dodging, not because we don’t want to see them but because Zelda’s only just well and I’ve got to work; and they seem to be incapable of any sort of conversation not composed of semi-malicious gossip about New York courtesy celebrities. I’ve gotten to like France. We’ve taken a swell apartment until January. I’m filled with disgust for Americans in general after two weeks’ sight of the ones in Paris - these preposterous, pushing women and girls who assume that you have any personal interest in them, who have all (so they say) read James Joyce and who simply adore Mencken. I suppose we’re no worse than anyone, only contact with other races brings out all our worst qualities. If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job.