Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (566 page)

I’m going to break up the start of my novel and sell it as three little character stories to Smart Set. I’ll only get $40.00
a
piece but no one else would take them, I don’t think - and besides I want to have Mencken and Nathan hot on my side when my book comes out. As soon as I’ve done that I’m going to do two or three stories for Mr Bridges. If I give up the idea of
Darling Heart
which I’ve practically decided to do, at least as a serial, and plan not to start my fall novel until June and finish it in August, my idea will be to do 3 stories a month, one for Smart Set, one for
Scribner’s,
and one for the Post. The latter are now paying me $600.00 which is a frightful inducement since I’m almost sure I’ll get married as soon as my book is out.

Have you any idea of the date yet? And when my short stories will begin to appear?

Faithfully yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Please forward any mail that may come there for me. I expect to be in New York about the 24th - leave here the 20th.

Westport,
Connecticut
August 12, 1920

Dear Mr Scribner:

Again I am immensely obliged to you. I should certainly feel much more business-like and less profligate if you would tell your bookkeeper when our reckoning comes this autumn to charge me full interest on the advances you’ve made me.

My new novel, called The Flight of the Rocket,! concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33d years (1913 — 1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book and I hope won’t disappoint the critics who liked my first one. I hope it’ll be in your hands by November 1st.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald 38 West 59th StreetNew
York City
December 31, 1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

The bank this afternoon refused to lend me anything on the security of stock I hold - and I have been pacing the floor for an hour trying to decide what to do. Here, with the novel within two weeks of completion, am I with six hundred dollars’ worth of bills and owing Reynolds $650.00 for an advance on a story that I’m utterly unable to write. I’ve made half a dozen starts yesterday and today and I’ll go mad if I have to do another debutante, which is what they want.

I hoped that at last being square with Scribners I could remain so. But I’m at my wit’s end. Isn’t there some way you could regard this as an advance on the new novel rather than on the Xmas sale which won’t be due me till July? And at the same interest that it costs Scribners to borrow? Or could you make it a month’s loan from Scribner & Co. with my next ten books as security? I need
$ 1600.00.

Anxiously,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

6
Pleasant Avenue
Montgomery, Alabama
July
30, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

I have been intending to write you the following letter for some months and I’ve been deterred for many causes - chief among which were the facts that any letter from me on this subject would sound like impertinent and unsolicited criticism and secondly because I have been the recipient of so many favors and courtesies from Scribners that it was scarcely my place to cavil at what I considered ultra-conservatism in their marketing and editorial policies. But in most businesses nowadays a box is set aside for employees’ suggestions and so perhaps even from outside you won’t resent it if I speak what’s on my mind.

What prompted this letter was the clipping on page D  which I took from the Tribune. I happen to know that two weeks ago
Mooncalf
had not reached 50,000 copies and I know also that it has not had nearly the vogue of my book in the libraries as is apparent from
The Bookman’s
monthly score. Yet my novel so far as I have seen got not one newspaper ad, not one
Times
or
Tribune
ad or Chicago ad since
six months
after publication. And Knopf has forcibly kept Mooncalf in the public eye for twice that long. What notoriety my book has preserved as well as what notoriety it got in the beginning, it got almost unaided. Its ads were small and undistinguished and confined almost entirely to college magazines and to Scribner’s. The only ad from among my nine or ten suggestions that was used (except the ‘novel about flappers written for philosophers’) was ruined by Black’s ‘make it a Fitzgerald Christmas.’ The ads gotten up in the office were small and so scattered as to have no follow-up or reiterative punch. Don’t gather from this that I have the idea that my book was slighted: on the contrary I think Whitney Darrow and Rodgers and everyone who had anything to do with it there gave it much more personal attention than any book they were handling. Nevertheless the following facts remain:

(1)
Mooncalf,
on its issue, was advertised in Montgomery, Alabama. This
Side of Paradise,
the it sold fifty or more copies here on Zelda’s reputation, wàs not once advertised. Mooncalf was advertised two months in St Paul. This Side
of Paradise
appeared in the papers 3 times in ads. It sold itself largely on personal home-town unsolicited notices about me. This was also true to a great extent in Chicago - from the advertising section of the
Chicago Daily
News which I have on file together with the numbers of
Chicago
Tribune during the week when my book was heading the list, I discover about eleven ads. It ran 18 weeks as best seller in Chicago. During that time it should have been advertised in 2 papers at least every other week. From my slight experience in advertising I know that much about campaigns. Mooncalf (not to mention Lulu Bett and The Age of Innocence, neither of which had one-tenth the initial publicity of my book and both of which are still selling) has been advertised almost every week for 8 months in Chicago papers and usually in both. Knopf runs almost daily ads for books that
he believes in
that may not sell 10,000 copies (like Zell for instance) in the
Tribune.
The greatest selling point my book had, Mencken’s statement quoted on the wrapper (together with an entirely neutral statement from Phelps) was allowed to be forgotten with one exception, one ad. Knopf would be using it still, and keeping the book talked about by means of it. Sinclair Lewis’s remark in the
Tribune,
‘In Scott Fitzgerald we have an author who will be the equal of any young European,’ was
absolutely
unused.

Dellwood
White Bear Lake,
 Minnesota August 25, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

Excuse the pencil but I’m feeling rather tired and discouraged with life tonight and I haven’t the energy to use ink - ink, the ineffable destroyer of thought, that fades an emotion into that slatternly thing, a written-down mental excretion. What ill- spelled rot!

About the novel - which after my letters I should think you’d be so bored with you’d wish it had never existed - I’d like very much if it came out in England simultaneously with America. You have the rights to it, have you not? If you do not intend to place it would you be willing to turn them over to me on the same 10% basis as
Paradise so
I could place it either with Collins or thru Reynolds?

Hope you’re enjoying New Hampshire - you probably are. I’m having a hell of a time because I’ve loafed for 5 months and I want to get to work. Loafing puts me in this particularly obnoxious and abominable gloom. My third novel, if I ever write another, will I am sure be black as death with gloom. I should like to sit down with 1/2  dozen chosen companions and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature. If it wasn’t for Zelda I think I’d disappear out of sight for three years. Ship as a sailor or something and get hard - I’m sick of the flabby semi-intellectual softness in which I flounder with my generation.

Scott Fitz

Dellwood
White Bear Lake,
Minnesota

Before October
7, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

I appreciate your courtesy and thoughtfulness in telegraphing me. Zelda received the letter and is awaiting the book with interest. In setting up the book are they including that table ‘By F. Scott Fitzgerald’ with my multitudinous and voluminous notes numbered beneath?

I have not seen one
single
review for 2 months but here are my prognostications for the fall. I have only read the first of these books.

(1) — Brass by Charles Norris. Worthy, honest, thorough, but fundamentally undistinguished.

(2) — Three
Soldiers
by John Dos Passos. The book of the autumn.

(3) — Eric Dorn by Ben Hecht. Probably the second best book of the autumn.

(4) —
The Beginning of Wisdom
by Stephen Vincent Benet. Beautifully written but too disjointed and patternless. Critics will accuse him of my influence but unjustly as his book was written almost simultaneously with mine.

(5) —
The Briary Bush.
Another rotten novel by Floyd Dell, which, because it is without a touch of grace or beauty or wit, will be hailed as a masterpiece by all the ex-policemen who are now critics.

Will you send me that Brentano sketch when it appears?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitz —

626
Goodrich
Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

December 12,
1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

Have just received your letter in re Bible anecdote in novel  and I’m rather upset about it. You say:

‘Even when people are wrong you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity about it.’

Now in that remark lies, I think, the root of your objection - except to substitute ‘be
intimidated by’
for ‘respect.’ I don’t sup pose any but the most religious-minded people in the world believe that such interludes as
The Song of Solomon
or the story of Ruth have or ever had even in the
minds of the original chroniclers
the faintest religious significance. The Roman Church insists that in The Song
of Solomon
the bride is the church and the lover is Christ but it is almost universally doubted if any such thing was even faintly intended.

Now I feel sure that most people will know that my sketch refers to the
Old
Testament, and to Jehovah, the cruel Hebrew God, against whom such writers as even Mark Twain not to mention Anatole France and a host of others have delivered violent pyrotechnics from time to time.

As to the personal side of it don’t you think all changes in the
minds
of people are brought about by the
assertion
of a thing - startling perhaps at first but later often becoming, with the changes of the years, bromidic. You have read Shaw’s preface to
Androcles and the Lion
- that made no great stir - in fact to the more sophisticated of the critics it was a bit bromidic. His preface, moreover, is couched with very little reverence even the it treats of Christ who is much less open to discussion than merely that beautiful epic of the Bible. If you object to my phrasing I could substitute ‘deity’ for’god almighty’and get a better word than bawdy - in fact make it more dignified - but I would hate to cut it out as ifs very clever in its way and Mencken - who saw it -

and Zelda were very enthusiastic about it. It’s the sort of thing you find continually in Anatole France’s Revoit
of the
Angels - as well as in
furgen
and in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. The idea, refusing homage to the Bible and its God, runs thru many of Mark Twain’s essays and all through Paine’s biography.

In
fact, Van Wyck Brooks
in
The Ordeal
  criticizes Clemens for allowing many of his statements to be toned down at the request of William Dean Howells or Mrs Clemens. If it was an incident which I felt had no particular literary merit I should defer to your judgment without question, but that passage belongs beautifully to that scene and is exactly what was needed to make it more than a beautiful setting for ideas that fail to appear. You say:

‘Even when people are altogether wrong you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity.’

I can imagine that remark having been made to Galileo and Mencken, Samuel Butler and Anatole France, Voltaire and Bernard Shaw, George Moore and even, if you will pardon me, in this form once upon a time.

‘You don’t like these scribes and pharisees. You call them whitened sepulchres but even when people are altogether wrong - etc.’

I haven’t seen the proof with your notation and have only read your letter. But I do feel that my judgment is right in this case. I do not expect in any event that I am to have the same person-for- person public this time that
Paradise
had. My one hope is to be endorsed by the intellectually élite and thus be
forced
onto people as Conrad has. (Of course I’m assuming that my work grows in sincerity and proficiency from year to year as it has so far.) If I cut this out it would only be because I would be afraid and I haven’t done that yet and dread the day when I’ll have to.

Please write me frankly as I have you - and tell me if you are speaking for yourself, for the Scribner Company, or for the public. I am rather upset about the whole thing. Will wait until I hear from you.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Besides, as to the position of the thing in the story, it is necessary to show the growth of Maury’s pessimism and to do this I have invented a fable in which the
hoi poloi
do more than refuse to believe their wise men - but they twist the very wisdom of the wise into a justification of their own maudlin and self-satisfactory creeds. This would discourage
any
one.