Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (600 page)

I would like to have some days with you and Sara. I hear distant thunder about Ernest and Archie and their doings but about you not a tenth of what I want to know.

With affection,

Scott

Other Letters

TO ALIDA BIGELOW

Cottage Club
Princeton, New Jersey

Postmarked January 10,
1917

Dear Alida:

I never felt so depressed in my life as I do this afternoon and what should I do in the middle and lowest point of it but pick up North
of Boston.
- It made me still gloomier; but it’s well worth reading and for the most part good poetry. The first poem, the one about mending the wall, is the best thing in it I think.

- Much obliged - you were very good to send it. Even the ‘platitudinous remark’ seemed satirical on a day like this however.

I’ll send you a one-act play by me when it comes out in the next Nassau Lit. It’s called ‘The Debutante.’ - It’s a knockout!

Just had a scrap with my English preceptor - he’s a simple bone- head and I’m not learning a thing from him. I told him so!

I never had such a simple Christmas vacation as this one. The only two parties I enjoyed particularly were the German and the Lamda Sigma dance. Perhaps there was a reason - the incidentally I’ve cut out all drinking for one year. (Good old New Year’s resolution.) I suppose you’ve regaled Ruth with an account of my exploits at the first-named affair - but what bother I!

Isn’t it a shame about Mrs S! I hear from Elkins Owlliphant, however, that she’s now back at school.

I wonder if Sandy is going to maTry — ! Wouldn’t this be a suitable pair to travel around the streets of St Paul! He must have some strange power over woming!

Haven’t heard a word from home since I got back here - Gee! Honestly! Never did I feel so low.

It’s four o’clock and I have the electric light on - you can imagine what kind of day it is.

If you can receive books and you won’t be shocked I’ll send you a knockout called
The Confessions of an Inconstant Man.
One part of it is rather mean, the!! You’ll have to send it back as another copy is unprocurable for Love or Money. - Tell me whether you want to read it or not.

I got the funniest letter from a girl in New York whom I’d never heard of saying that she had light brown hair and brown eyes and that she wanted to meet me. She said she’s seen that picture (awful chromo) of
moi
in
The Times.

Well Alida I’m sorry this letter is so gloomy but that’s the form I’m in so it can’t be helped.

Give my best to Virginia Sweat and tell her I’m sorry I’ve got such a weak line. I am

Yours till deth,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER

Camp Chatham Orillia, Ontario

July
18, 1907

Dear Mother, I received your letter this morning and though I would like very much to have you up here I don’t think you would like it as you know no one here except Mrs Upton and she is busy most of the time. I don’t think you would like the accommodations as it is only a small town and no good hotels. There are some very nice boarding houses but about the only fare is lamb and beef. Please send me a dollar because there are a lot of little odds and ends I need. I will spend it cautiously. All the other boys have pocket money besides their regular allowance.

Your loving son,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWARD FITZGERALD

University
Cottage
Club
Princeton,
New
Jersey

November 14,
1917

Dear Mother:

You were doubtless surprised to get my letter but I certainly was delighted to get my commission.

My pay started the day I signed the Oath of Allegiance and sent it back which was yesterday - Went up to Brooks Brothers yesterday afternoon and ordered some of my equipment.

I haven’t received any orders yet but I think I will be ordered to Fort Leavenworth within a month - I’ll be there three months and would have six additional months’ training in France before I was ordered with my regiment to the trenches.

I get $141 a month ($1700 a year) with a 10% increase when I’m in France.

My uniforms are going to cost quite a bit so if you haven’t sent me what you have of
my
own
money
please do so.

I’m continuing here going to classes until I get orders. I am Second Lieutenant in the
regular
infantry and not a reserve officer -I rank with a West Point graduate.

Things are stupid here -I hear from Marie and Catherine Tighe occasionally and got a letter from Non two weeks ago - I hear he’s been ordered to Texas.

Went down to see Ellen Stockton in Trenton the other night She is a perfect beauty.

About the army, please let’s not have either tragedy or Heroics because they are equally distasteful to me. I went into this perfectly cold-bloodedly and don’t sympathize with the ‘Give my son to country’ etc.

etc. etc.

or ‘Hero stuff’

because I
just
went and purely for
social reasons.
If you want to pray, pray for my soul and not that I won’t get killed - the last doesn’t seem to matter particularly and if you are a good Catholic the first ought to.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. I have never been more cheerful. Please be nice and respect my wishes.

Love,

Scott

TO SHANE LESLIE

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas December 22,
1917

My dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter followed me here - My novel isn’t a novel in verse. It merely shifts rapidly from verse to prose but it’s mostly in prose.

The reason I’ve abandoned my idea of a book of poems is that I’ve only about twenty poems and can’t write any more in this atmosphere - while I can write prose, so I’m sandwiching the poems between reams of autobiography and fiction. It makes a potpourri, especially as there are pages in dialogue and in vers libre, but it reads as logically for the times as most public utterances of the prim and prominent. It is a tremendously conceited affair. The title page looks (will look) like this:

THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST by

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Best is over.

You may remember now and think and sigh Oh silly lover!’

- — Rupert Brooke

- — ‘Ou me coucha banga loupa Domalumba guna duma..

- — Gilbert Chesterton

“Experience is the name Tubby gives to all his mistakes.’

- — Oscar Wilde

I’ll send you a chapter or two to look over if you would. I’d like it a lot if you would. I’m enclosing you a poem that Poet
Lore
a magazine of verse has just taken.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

2nd Lt, U.S., Co. Q

Ft
Leavenworth, Kansas February 4, 1918

Dear
Mr Leslie:

This is just a note to inform you that the first draft of
The Romantic
Egotist will be ready for your inspection in three weeks altho I’m sending you a chapter called The Devil’ next week.

Think of a romantic egotist writing about himself in a cold barracks on Sunday afternoons... yet that is the way this novel has been scattered into shape - for it has no form to speak of.

Dr Fay told me to send my picture that he wants through you. Whether he meant for you to forward it to him or put it away until he returns I didn’t comprehend.

I certainly appreciate your taking an interest in my book... By the way I join my regiment, the 45th Infantry, at Camp Taylor, Kentucky, in three weeks.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas

Early February, 1918

Dear Mr Leslie:

Here’s Chapter XVI The Devil’ and Chapter XIII. I picked it out as a chapter you could read without knowing the story. I wish you’d look it over and see what you think of it It’s semi-typical of the novel in its hastiness and scrubby style.

I have a week’s leave before joining my regiment and I’m going up to Princeton to rewrite. Now I can pass thru Washington and see you about this novel either on the seventh or eighth or ninth of February. Will you tell me which of these days you’d be liable to have an afternoon off? Any one of them is convenient as far as I’m concerned. I could bring you half a dozen chapters to look at and I’d like to know whether you think it would have any chance with Scribner.

The novel begins nowhere as most things do and ends with the war as all things do. Chapter XIII will seem incoherent out of its setting. Well - I leave here Monday the 26th. After that my address will be Cottage Club - Princeton, N.J.

I’d be much obliged if you’d let me know which afternoon would be most convenient for you.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald Did you ever notice that remarkable coincidence? Bernard Shaw is 61 years old, H. G. Wells is 51, G. K. Chesterton 41, you’re 31, and I’m 21 - all the great authors of the world in arithmetical progression.

45th
Infantry Camp Gordon, Georgia May
8, 1918

Dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter filled me with a variety of literary emotions... you see, yours is the first pronouncement of any kind that I’ve received upon my first born...

That it is crude, increditably dull in places is too true to be pleasant... I have no idea why I hashed in all that monotonous drivel about childhood in the first part and would see it hacked out like an errant appendix without a murmur... There are too many characters and too much local social system in the Princeton section... and in all places all through, the verses are too obviously lugged in...

At any rate I’m tremendously obliged to you for taking an interest in it and writing that awfully decent letter to Scribner... If he thinks that a revision would make it at all practicable I’d rather do it than not, or if he despairs of it I might try some less conservative publisher than Scribner is known to be...

We have no news except that we’re probably going inside of two months and, officers and men, we’re wild to go...

I wonder if you’re working on the history of Martin Luther or are on another tack... Do write a novel with young men in it, and kill the rancid taste that the semi-brilliant Changing Winds left on so many tongues. Or write a thinly disguised autobiography... or something. I’m wild for books and none are forthcoming... I wrote mine (as Stevenson wrote Treasure
Island)
to satisfy my own craving for a certain type of novel. Why are all the truish novels written by the gloomy half-twilight realists like Beresford and Walpole and St John Ervine? Even the
Soul of a Bishop is
colorless... Where are the novels of five years ago:
Tono Bungay, Youth’s Encounter, Man Alive, The New Machiavelli?
Heavens, has the war caught all literature in the crossed nets of Galsworthy and George Moore?

Well... May St Robert (Benson) appear to Scribner in a dream...

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Much obliged for mailing on Dr Fay’s letter.

17th Infantry, Brig. Headquarters Camp Sheridan, Alabama January
13,

1919

Dear Mr Leslie:

I can’t tell you how I feel about Monsignor Fay’s death - He was the best friend I had in the world and last night he seemed so close and so
good
that I was almost glad - because I think he wanted to die. Deep under it all he had a fear of that blending of the two worlds, that sudden change of values that sometimes happened to him and put a vague unhappiness into the stray corners of his life.

But selfishly dam sorry. Never more

‘will we drink with the sunlight for lamp

Myself and the dead’

I know how you feel too and Stephen Parrott and Mrs Leslie and Mrs Chanler and Father Hemmick and Delbos and O’Kelly and Sanderson and the fifty people that must somehow have felt a great security in him. He was such a
secure
man: one
knows
that he is happy now - Oh God! I can’t write -

I just wanted to talk to someone who knew him as I knew him.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American Red Cross Base Hospital Camp Sheridan, Alabama

Late January,
1919

Dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter seemed to start a new flow of sorrows in me. I’ve never wanted so much to die in my life. Father Fay always thought that if one of us died the other would, and now how I’ve hoped so.

Oh, it all seemed so easy - life, I mean, with people who understood satisfied needs. Even the philistines seemed very good and quiet, always ready to be duped or influenced or something, and now my little world made to order has been shattered by the death of one man.

I’m beginning to have a horror of
people
: I can quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian.

This has made me nearly sure that I will become a priest. I feel as if in a way his mantle had descended upon me - a desire, or more, to some day recreate the atmosphere of him. I think he was the sort of man St Peter was, so damned human.

Think of the number of people who in a way looked to him and depended on him. His faith shining thru all the versatility and intellect.

I think I did feel him but I can’t tell you of it in a letter. It was rather ghastly.

I’m coming to New York in February or March to write or something. I’ll come and see you then.

If there’s anything about him in any magazine I wish you’d send them.

I’ve been here in the hospital with influenza.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald