Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (612 page)

We are creatures bounding from each other’s shoulders, feeling already the feet of new creatures upon our backs bounding again toward an invisible and illusory trapeze (at present played by the short-winded Saroyans). If the calf no longer flexes, the bound will not be so high. In any case the outstretched arms will never catch that swinging thing because when life has been well lived one can make an adjustment and become the second man in the pyramid. It is when life has been ill lived that one is the third man; the first man always falls to his death, a fact that has haunted Ernest all his life.

This is all rather poor metaphysics expressed in ineffectual images. Again and again in my books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good as I intended to be (and you must know that what I mean by good is the modern don’t-hurt-a-hair-of- anybody’s-head-and-kill-a-hundred-thousand-people-if-necessary - in other words a personal conscience and meaning by the personal conscience yourself stripped in white midnight before your own God).

To take off with my whole weight (Charlie MacArthur continually urges me) if my suggestion about the bucolic background for a novel makes any sense it is embraced in the paragraph you requoted to me. I certainly think you should undertake something - more ambitious and I know to my own sorrow that to contemplate and project a long work is often an excuse for laziness. But let me pass along a suggestion:

Invent a system Zolaesque (see the appendix to Josephson’s
Life of Zola
in which he gives Zola’s plan for the first Rougon-Maquart book), but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.

After all who am I to be giving you advice? I dare to do so only because I know that you are at heart a humble man and not resentful of anything said by one who wishes you well.

(This is being taken down by a young man from BrownUniversity who is wilting visibly as he writes after a session with the many concerns that seem to surround a man of forty and the hieroglyphics of a half-done Post story to decipher tomorrow. He sends his regards or does he? Do you? No answer. He says he wonders what would happen if he would write a postscript to this thing.)

So much for tonight....

Ever your friend,

Scott

TO BENNETT CERF

Grove
Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

August 13, 1936

Dear Bennett:

The revision job would take the form, to a large extent, of a certain new alignment of the scenes - without changing their order in any case. Some such line as this:

That the parts instead of being one, two, and three (they were one, two, three and four in the magazine serial) would include in several cases sudden stops and part headings which would be to some extent explanatory; certain pages would have to be inserted bearing merely headings. Part two, for example, should say in a terse and graceful way that the scene is now back on the Riviera in the fall after these events have taken place, or that this brings us up to where Rosemary first encounters the Divers. Those examples are not accurate to my intention nor are they at all couched as I would have them, but that’s the general idea. (Do you remember the number of subheads I used in This
Side of Paradise -
at that time a rather novel experiment, the germ of which I borrowed from Bernard Shaw’s preface headings to his plays; indeed that was one of the few consciously original things in T
his Side of Paradise.)

There would be certain changes but I would supply the equivalent line lengths. I have not my plan with me; it seems to be in Baltimore. But I know how printing costs are. It was evolved to have a very minimum of replacement. There is not more than one complete sentence that I want to eliminate, one that has offended many people and that I admit is out of Dick’s character: ‘I never did go in for making love to dry loins.’ It is a strong line but definitely offensive. These are all the changes I contemplated with - — in addition some minor spelling corrections such as would disturb nothing but what was within a printed line. There will be no pushing over of paragraphs or disorganization of the present set-up except in the aforesaid inserted pages. I don’t want to change anything in the book but sometimes by a single word change one can throw a new emphasis or give a new value to the exact same scene or setting.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO BEATRICE DANCE

Grove
Park
Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

September
15,1936

Dear Beatrice:

The last two months have been such a feverish nightmare, day and night, sickness and that sort of thing, that I haven’t very clear memories of what letters I have written and what I haven’t. Today for the first time, I am really systematizing things under the proper headings of: ‘Immediate, Semi-Immediate,’ Mother’s Death, Financial, Scottie’s School,”Work,’ etc., etc. - so I am by no means sure whether I have to thank you for the fine kimono which I am wearing at present (alas! I have used it so much that you would scarcely know that it is only a month old), or whether only for the gorgeous sweater which I have so reverently laid away to save for more robust days) but really you must not inundate me with such tokens. I am embarrassed. It is impossible for me to send up equivalent incense to your memory - — much more than a memory, you know that.

Your letters were bright - and melancholy in the practically arctic night of the past ten months. I have never had so many things go wrong and with such defiant persistence. By an irony which quite fits into the picture, the legacy which I received from my mother’s death (after being too ill to go to her death bed or her funeral) is the luckiest event of some time. She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her, and it would have been quite within her character to have died that I might live.

Thank you for your wire today. People have received this E
squire
article with mingled feeling - not a few of them think it was a terrific mistake to have written any of them from ‘Crack- Up.’ On the other hand, I get innumerable ‘fan letters’ and requests to republish them in the Reader’s
Digest,
and several anthologists’ requests, which I prudently refused.

My Hollywood deal (which, as it happened, I could not have gone through with because of my shoulder) was seriously compromised by their general tone. It seems to have implied to some people that I was a complete moral and artistic bankrupt.

Now - I come to some things I may have written you before. Did I tell you that I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in the old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water - a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and that when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o’clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued by Mac? It was a hot night, and I was soaking wet in the cast so I caught cold on the tile floor of the bathroom, and a form of arthritis called ‘myotosis’ developed, which involved all of the joints on that side of the body, so back to the bed I went and I have been cursing and groaning without cessation until about three days ago when the devil began to abandon me. During this time Mother died in the North and a dozen other things seemed to happen at once, so that it will take me several months to clear the wreckage of a completely wasted summer, productive of one mediocre short story and two or three shorts....

The summer was to have been devoted to Zelda and I have seen her exactly five times, her doctors feeling proud of her improvement and knowing that it would depress her to see me ill or in pain.

As to Ernest, at first I resented his use of my name in the story  and I wrote him a somewhat indignant letter, telling him it must not be republished in a book. He answered, agreeing, but rather resentfully, and saying that he felt that since I had chosen to expose my private life so ‘shamelessly’ in E
squire,
he felt that it was sort of an open season for me, and I wrote him a hell of a letter which would have been sudden death for somebody the next time we met, and decided, hell, let it go. Too often literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War. I consider ic an example of approaching maturity on my part and am proud of my self control. He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

I am glad you have had a happy summer and have been amused by such reports as your running into our Grove Park Inn friend.

Scott

TO CAMERON ROGERS

Grove Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

September
21, 1936

Dear Rogers:

Manila Galleon
arrived last week. I was reminded all through of Victory, just as Conrad I suppose was reminded of something when he wrote
Victory.
I loved it.

I have been with a broken shoulder and there were only two books in the bad times that I could let the nurses read to me —
Manila Galleon
and Mencken’s
American Language. I
had the sense of an utterly vacant sky, without the blue of the Caribbean, sort of a yellow-white. It made me ill at ease and made me want to go back to Europe at all cost, or at least to some seaboard where the only colors were those of my own scars and breeches and the only glint that of my own sword.

Your friend and admirer,

Scott Fitz

TO C. O. KALMAN

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October 10,1
936

Dear Kallie:

Above and beyond the egotism that seems to descend upon a sick man like a dark cloud, I have been able to appreciate the kindness and friendliness with which you have come to my assistance. I do not know very many rich people well, in spite of the fact that my life has been cast among rich people - certainly only two well enough to have called upon in this emergency, the first personal loan I have ever asked for - though I have made heavy drains on my publishers and agents at times.

I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered and tried to set up a household in Baltimore which I was ill equipped to sustain. I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda (who is in a sanitarium near here, better, but still a mental patient, as perhaps she always will be) to a pool near here and tried a high dive with muscles that had not been exercised, by the doctors’ orders, for two years, and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings, so that the ball of the ball-and-socket joint hung two and one-half inches below the socket joint. It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing called ‘myoto- sis’ which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate, and then a return to the impotency of the trouble. The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. (She earned a scholarship to a very expensive school - Miss Walker’s, do you know it? She is now in school and apparently very happy.)

The nervous system is pretty well shot. You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking to keep up what morale has been necessary - think of it any way you want to; I know, thank God, you are no moralist. I know you have lent this money on the ask-me-no-question basis, but I feel I owe you this explanation.

For heaven’s sake, please try to expedite the loan. The first time in my life I have known what it is to be hog-tied by lack of money, as you know how casually I have always dealt with it.

I want to bring Scottie West at Easter and, seeing her, you will see how much I still have to live for, in spite of a year in a slough of despond.

Ever afftly yours,

Scott Fitz

TO MRS WILLIAM HAMM

Grove
Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

October 28, 1936

Dear Marie:

It was damn nice of you to write me. That article in Time (not to mention the three ‘Crack-Up’ articles in E
squire)
brought so many letters from old friends, ranging from such as you - and I think of you as about my oldest real friend, certainly my first love - to men that had been in my Company in the army, addressed to ‘

Dear Lieutenant.’ Thank you for your thoughtfulness in trying to cheer me up. However, child, life is more complicated than that. There has been some question in my mind whether I should ever have written the Esquire articles. Ernest Hemingway wrote me an irritable letter in which he bawled me out for having been so public about what were essentially private affairs and should be written about in fiction or not at all.

As to the article in Time, it came from an interview in the New York Evening Post written by a man who presumably had come all the way from New York to talk to me about my fortieth birthday. He spread it across three columns in the Post, with a picture of me as I was at twenty-one and an entirely faked-up picture of me as I was at forty. None of the remarks attributed to me did I make to him. They were taken word by word from the first ‘Crack-Up’ article. I saw him because he had come a long way, and I had a temperature of 103 with arthritis, after a ten weeks’ siege in and out of bed. He was an s. o. b. and I should have guessed it. As soon as the Time article came out I wired Miss Walker’s School in Simsbury, which Scottie has just entered, to keep it from her if possible, and I think she escaped reading it.