Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (598 page)

I’d love to see you. God. I could give you some laughs. There’s no news except that Zelda and I think we’re pretty good, as usual, only more so.

Scott

Thanks again for your cheering letter.

Ellerslie Edgemoor,
Delaware

February, 1928

Dear Bunny:....

All is prepared for February 25th. The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old enthusiasms are being burnished with that zeal peculiar only to the British Tommy. My God, how we felt when the long slaughter of Passchendaele had begun. Why were the Generals all so old? Why were the Fabian society discriminated against when positions on the general staff went to Dukes and sons of profiteers? Agitators were actually hooted at in Hyde Park and Anglican divines actually didn’t become humanitarian internationalists overnight. What is Britain coming to - where is Milton, Cromwell, Oates, Monk? Where are Shaftesbury, Athelstane, Thomas à Becket, Margot Asquith, Iris March? Where are Blackstone, Touchstone, Clapham-Hopewell- ton, Stoke-Poges? Somewhere back at G.H.Q. handsome men with grey whiskers murmured, ‘We will charge them with the cavalry,’ and meanwhile boys from Bovril and the black country sat shivering in the lagoons at Ypres writing memoirs for liberal novels about the war. What about the tanks? Why did not Douglas Haig or Sir John French (the big smarties - look what they did to General Mercer) invent tanks the day war broke out, like Sir Phillip Gibbs, the weeping baronet, did or would, had he thought of it?

This is just a
sample
of what you will get on the 25th of February. There will be small but select company, coals, blankets, ‘something for the inner man.’

Please don’t say you can’t come the 25th but would like to come the 29th. We never receive people the 29th. It is the anniversary of the 2nd Council of Nicea when our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord -

It always gets stuck in that place. Put on ‘Old Man River’ or something of Louis Bromfield’s.

Pray gravity to move your bowels. It’s little we get done for us in this world. Answer.

Scott

Enjoyed your Wilson article enormously. Not so Thompson affair.

c/o
Guaranty Trust

4 Place de la Concorde
Paris,

France

Summer,
1930

Dear Bunny:

Congratulations on your marriage and all real hopes for your happiness. We heard, through Mary, long after the event of your collapse t and the thought that you’d survived it helped me through some despairing moments in Zelda’s case. She is now almost ‘well,’ which is to say the psychosis element is gone. We must live quietly for a year now and to some extent forever. She almost went permanently crazy - four hours’ work a day at the ballet for two years, and she 27 and too old when she began. I’m relieved that the ballet was over anyhow as our domestic life was cracking under the strain and I hadn’t touched my novel for a year. She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely impregnable safe inside her that it was months after the break before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.

I have seen no one for months save John in Paris.... the brief spell of work I nagged him into during Margaret’s pregnancy has now given way to interminable talk about a well on their property — Also a man named Thomas Wolfe, a fine man and a fine writer. Paris swarms with fairies and I’ve grown to loathe it and prefer the hospital-like air of Switzerland where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs. Met your friend Allen Tate, liked him....

Salute the new Mrs Wilson for me.... and remember you’re never long absent from the solicitudes of

Your old friend,

Scott

It was nice of you, and like you, to write Zelda.

La Paix (My God!)

Tow son, Maryland

Probably March,
1933

Dear Bunny:

Your letter with the head of Vladimir Ulianov just received. Please come here the night of the inauguration and stay at least the next day. I want to know with what resignation you look forward to your role of Lunacharsky and whether you decided you had nothing further worth saying in prose fiction or whether there was nothing further to say. Perhaps I should draw the answer to the last question from Axel’s
Castle
yet I remember stories of yours that anticipated so much that was later said that it seemed a pity. (Not that I don’t admire your recent stuff - particularly I liked ‘Hull House.’)

We had a most unfortunate meeting. I came to New York to get drunk and swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation. I assume full responsibility for all unpleasantness - with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him; and as for bringing up the butcher boy matter - my God I making trouble between friends is the last thing I had ever thought myself capable of. Anyhow, plenty of egotism for the moment.

Dos was here, and we had a nice evening - we never quite understand each other and perhaps that’s the best basis for an enduring friendship. Alec came up to see me at the Plaza the day I left (still in awful shape but not conspicuously so). He told me to my amazement that you had explained the fundamentals of Leninism, even Marxism, the night before, and Dos tells me that it was only recently made plain thru the same agency to
The New Republic.
I little thought when I left politics to you and your gang in 1920 you would devote your time to cutting up Wilson’s shroud into blinders! Back to Mallarmé.

- Which reminds me that T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon and evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine.... However, come in March. Don’t know what time the inaugura-

tion takes place but you find out and tell us the approximate time of your arrival here. Find out in
advance
for we may go to it too and we might all get lost in the shuffle.

Always your friend,

Scott

P.S. Please not a word to Zelda about anything I may have done or said in New York. She can stand literally nothing of that nature. I’m on the water-wagon but there’ll be lots of liquor for you.

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

Postmarked March
12, 1934

Dear Bunny:

Despite your intention of mild criticism  in our conversation, I felt more elated than otherwise - if the characters got real enough so that you disagreed with what I chose for their manifest destiny the main purpose was accomplished. (By the way, your notion that Dick should have faded out as a shyster alienist was in my original design, but I thought of him, in reconsideration, as an ‘homme épuisé,’ not only an ‘homme manqué.’ I thought that, since his choice of a profession had accidentally wrecked him, he might plausibly have walked out on the profession itself.)

Any attempt by an author to explain away a partial failure in a work is of course doomed to absurdity - yet I could wish that you, and others, had read the book version rather than the magazine version which in spots was hastily put together. The last half for example has a much more polished facade now. Oddly enough several people have felt that the surface of the first chapters was too ornate. One man even advised me to ‘coarsen the texture,’ as being remote from the speed of the main narrative!

In any case when it appears I hope you’ll find time to look it over again. Such irrelevancies as Morton Hoyt’s nose-dive and Dick’s affair in Innsbruck are out, together with the scene of calling on the retired bootlegger at Beaulieu, and innumerable minor details. I have driven the Scribner proofreaders half nuts but I think I’ve made it incomparably smoother.

Zelda’s pictures go on display in a few weeks and I’ll be meeting her in N.Y. for a day at least. Wouldn’t it be a good time for a reunion?

It was good seeing you and good to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out.

With affection always,

Scott Fitzgerald

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 7,1934

Dear Bunny:

I’ve had a big reaction from your last two articles in
The
New
Republic.
In spite of the fact that we always approach material in different ways there is some fast-guessing quality that, for me, links us now in the work of the intellect. Always the overtone and the understatement.

It was fun when we all believed the same things. It was more fun to think that we were all going to die together or live together, and none of us anticipated this great loneliness, where one has dedicated his remnants to imaginative fiction and another his slowly dissolving trunk to the Human Idea. Nevertheless the stress that you put upon this in your New Republic article - of forces never still, of rivers never ending, of clouds shifting their prophecies at evening, afternoon or morning - this sense of things has kept our courses loosely parallel, even when our references to data have been so disparate as to throw us miles apart.

The purport of this letter is to agree passionately with an idea that you put forth in a discussion of Michelet: that conditions irretrievably change men and that what looks purple in a blue light looks, in another spectrum, like green and white bouncing snow. I want you to know that one among many readers is absolutely alert on the implications and substrata of meaning in this new work.

Ever affectionately yours,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

May
16, 1939

Dear Bunny:

News that you and Mary had a baby reached me rather late because I was out of California for several months. Hope he is now strong and crawling. Tell him if he grows up any bigger I shall be prepared to take him for a loop when he reaches the age of twenty- one at which time I shall be sixty-three. I don’t know any girl in the last several years with more charm than Mary. It was a delight to meet her and spend an evening with you all. If I had known about the news in time, I would have wired you.

I called up Louise Fort in San Diego, but couldn’t get her number and imagine she had left before I came back to California. However, I am sending on your letter to Ted Paramore who may have more luck.

Believe me, Bunny, it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton. Though my idea is now, to learn about a new life from Louis B. Mayer who promises to teach me all about things if he ever gets around to it

Ever your devoted friend,

Scott

1403
North Laurel
Avenue Hollywood,
California

October
21, 1940

Dear Bunny:

I am deep into the
Finland Station
and I break off to write you that some of the reviews especially
The
New Yorker and New Republic made me sick....

I suppose they wanted you to produce a volume on the order of John Strachey, and they had a few labels prepared with which to quarantine you. Why otherwise they should quarrel with your historical approach is inexplicable to me.

It is a magnificent book - just as it promised to be in
The New Republic.
My very best to you both and to the young one.

Ever,

Scott

P.S. Am somewhere in a novel

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood,

California

November
25, 1940

Dear Bunny:....

Two years after it was published I ran across an article by John Bishop in the
Virginia Quarterly.
His war story about Ernest under the corpses is pure crap. Also he says that I flunked out of Princeton, though in the year referred to I went to my last class November 28th, when it is somewhat unusual to flunk out. Also he reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I’ve had this before but nobody seems able to name these rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction - Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in ‘café society.’ It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more....

I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.

With best to you both,

Scott

P.S. This sounds like such a bitter letter - I’d rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.

To Gerald and Sara Murphy

Grove Park Inn Sunset

Mountain Asheville,

North Carolina

August 15, 1935

Dear
est Sara:

Today a letter from Gerald, a week old, telling me this and that about the awful organ music around us, made me think of you, and I mean think of you (of all people in the world you know the distinction). In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction, i e., that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character - in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender