Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (593 page)

2. This idea has to do with an episode of some memoirs of Pavlova. It begins with a little girl briefly glimpsed and dancing in the Imperial Ballet before the war. A scene later in Paris at the height of the flurry over the ballet and stranded finally with a ballet company in either Australia or Brazil for lack of funds. The climax would hinge on the catastrophe of the death of Diaghilev. The sorrow of it that Zelda felt, as did many others, who seemed to feel also that the ballet was ended; the old Imperial school was dead and now Diaghilev who had personally kept it alive in Paris had gone to his grave. There seemed to them no future and I know how strong that feeling was among the ballet people in ‘30 and ‘31, a sort of utter despair, a sense that they had once been under patronage of the Czar and later of an entrepreneur and that now nobody was taking care of them. They are like children to a ridiculous extent and have less practical ideas than the wildest musician imaginable. This story would end up in New York or in Hollywood, the ballet having a new renaissance under an American growing delight in that particular art, as is practically true with Masine’s ballet in New York and with Trudy Shoop’s successful little trek around the country. That’s idea number two.

The third idea is more difficult in its selling aspects. In 1920 I tried to sell D. W. Griffith the idea that people were so interested in Hollywood that there was money in a picture about that and romance in the studio. He was immediately contemptuous of it, but of course a year later
Merton of the Movies
mopped up the country. The movies seem willing always to romanticize anything from a radio broadcasting room to a newspaper office as far as the entertainment world is concerned, but are so shy about themselves that another picture can be got out of Hollywood, which is certainly one of the most romantic cities in the world. A sort of mental paralysis came over them. Do you remember how the Hearst publicity men killed my story ‘Crazy Sunday’ for Cosmopolitan? That was in case someone should get hurt, that it might offend Norma Shearer, Thalberg, John Gilbert or Marion Da vies, etc., etc. As a matter of fact I had mixed up those characters so thoroughly that there was no character who could have been identified except possibly King Vidor and he would have been very amused by the story.

Let me repeat that this is the most difficult idea to sell but in some ways the most interesting of the three. A Russian ballet dancer finds herself in the extra line in Hollywood; they pick her out of the crowd for her good looks, give her bits of one kind or another but always on some other basis than the fact that she is a ballet dancer. This treatment of the general subject would have to close with a crash, at least I haven’t thought any further than that. It would turn entirely on the essential tonal background of the adventures of Europeans who develop their metier in a Yiddish world (only you don’t use that word except in Germany) that would be interesting to the people in the same rococo sense that the demand for pictures about places like Shanghai and the Trans- Siberian Railroad have in the American people. Combined with it is the always fascinating Hollywood story.

I’ve spent the morning writing this letter because I am naturally disappointed about the Post’s not liking the Gwen story and must rest and go to work this afternoon to try to raise some money somehow, though I don’t know where to turn.

Scott

Oak
Hall Hotel

Tryon,
North Carolina

Received March 23, 1937

Dear Harold;

Here, or herewith, is the revision of ‘Thumbs Up.’ Maybe it’ll go. It’s an odd story - one editor says cut the thumbs episode, another says cut everything else - I’ve done the latter and shortened it to about 5500 words (from 8000)
and
revised it thoroughly and written a new scene.

Thanks for the money - as time passes my position becomes more and more ludicrous, I mean generally. I just got a book (Books
and Battles of the
Twenties) in which I am practically a leading character; my birthday is two-column front page news as if I were 80 instead of 40 - and I sit worrying about next week’s $35.00 hotel bill! I really meant it that I’d like to go to Hollywood and let them see me. I wish you could see me. Weight 160 instead of 143 which was it last Xmas. And the dullest dogs making $1000 a week in Hollywood. Something has got to be done - this will end in slow ruination. Anyhow I’ve begun the football story but God knows where the next two weeks’ rent comes from. I will owe $105 by Thursday and will need cash - all in all $150. I was going to Max as a last resource but you have tapped that. What in hell shall I do? I want to write the football story unworried and uninterrupted. Since going on the wagon I will have written two originals, rewritten two stories (‘Thumbs’ and the cartoon story) and written 3 little Esquire pieces (two of them mediocre) to live on. That will be a hard two and a half months’ work. But reward, there is none.

In fatalistic optimism,

Scott

Going to the country dog-shows isn’t my daily occupation - it was my single appearance of that kind. I wanted you to see how different I look from Xmas.

Look at this — * next to me - covered with rings, lives in a mansion and owns it. Ah me - well, perhaps I’ve learned wisdom at 40 at last. If I ever get out of this mess!

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

August 2, 1939

Dear Harold:

I have been and still am somewhat shocked by your sudden and most determined reversal of form. Only six months ago you were telling me ‘not to be in too much of a hurry to pay you back’ but instead try to save some money. It was something of a counter-blast to find that my credit was now worth much less than I loaned Charles Warren and other young authors last year.

Your advice that I should have ‘taken on some movie work’ with a lung cavity and a temperature of 102° was a new slant. The cavity evidently began to form about the time I started on Air Raid, and your implication that I had been loafing must have been based on those two-day binges in New York, several months apart. Anyhow, when the temperature was still a hundred and the cavity still crackling I was asking Swanie to get me work and meanwhile putting in five hours a day on a bed-desk.

Being in need, I make no apology for having sent the original of the enclosed directly to the Post, with the request that they communicate by wire to me as well as by letter to you. I had a fifteen-day wait on ‘Temperature’ - it is hard to remember there was a time your cables reached me in North Africa. Sending a story direct may be bad policy but one doesn’t consider that when one is living on money from a hocked Ford - every day counts, less in the material matter of eating than in the inestimable question of morale. Swanie turned down a dozen jobs for me when I was sick in bed - but there just haven’t been any since the cavity began to heal.

I don’t have to explain that even though a man has once saved another from drowning, when he refuses to stretch out his arm a second time the victim has to act quickly and desperately to save himself. For change you did, Harold, and without warning - the custom of lending up to the probable yield of a next short story obtained between us for a dozen years. Certainly you haven’t just discovered that I’m not any of the things a proper business man should be? And it wasn’t even a run-around - it was a walk-around that almost made me think the New York telegraph was closed. Finally I had to sell a pair of stories to Esquire, the longer one of which (2800 words) might have brought twice as much from Liberty.

Whatever I am supposed to guess, your way of doing it, and the time you chose, was as dispiriting as could be. I have been all too hauntingly aware during these months of what you did from 1934 to 1937 to keep my head above water after the failure of Tender, Zelda’s third collapse and the long illness. But you havemade me sting nevertheless. Neither Swanson nor Sheilah nor Eddie Knopf have any idea but that I have labored conscientiously out here for twenty months and every studio (except Wanger, but including Metro!) asked for, according to Swanson, me at some time during April and May.

Your reasons for refusing to help me were all good, all praiseworthy, all sound - but wouldn’t they have been equally so any time within the past fifteen years? And they followed a year and a half in which I fulfilled all my obligations If it is of any interest to you I haven’t had a drink in two months but if I was full of champagne I couldn’t be more confused about you than I am now.

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. Temperature’ turned up yesterday at the Van Nuys Railway Express - and in case you think that’s incredible I forward the evidence.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

October
7, 1939

Dear Harold:

Thanks for your letter. Thanks for taking care of Scottie. And your saying that you had written me several letters and torn them up did something to clarify what I had begun to interpret as some sadistic desire to punish me. I sent the stories to
Colliers
for the simple reason that it seemed difficult to deal with someone who treats you with dead silence. Against silence you can do nothing but fret and wonder. Your disinclination to back me is, of course, your own business, but representing me without communication (such as returning a story to me without even an airmail stamp) is pretty close to saying you were through with me.

I communicated directly with Colliers and wrote a series of pieces for
Esquire
because we have to live and eat and nothing can interfere with that. Can’t you regard this trouble as a question of a man who has had a bad break and leave out the moral problem as to whether or not or how much it is his own fault? And if you think I can’t write, read these stories. They brought just two hundred and fifty apiece from
Esquire,
because I couldn’t wait to hear from you, because I had bank balances of five, ten and fifteen dollars.

Anyhow I have ‘lived dangerously’ and I may quite possibly have to pay for it, but there are plenty of other people to tell me that and it doesn’t seem as if it should be you.

I don’t think there is any chance of fixing up that other story. It just isn’t good.

Sincerely,

Scott

P.S. Could you mail me back these stories? I have no copies. Don’t you agree that they are worth more than $250.00? One of them was offered to
Colliers
in desperation - the first Pat Hobby story - but Littauer wired that it ‘wasn’t a story.’ Who’s right?

To Mrs Richard Taylor

Princeton
University

Princeton,

New
Jersey

June 10,
1917

Dear Cousin Ceci: Glad you liked the poem. Here are two others.

ON THE SAME PLAY - TWICE SEEN

Here in the figured dark I watch once more There with the curtain rolls a year away A year of years - There was an idle day Of ours when happy endings didn’t bore Our unfermented souls - and rocks held ore, Your little face beside me, wide-eyed, gay, Smiled its own repertoire, while the poor play Reached me as a faint ripple reaches short -

Yawning and wondering an evening thru I watch alone and chatterings of course Spoil the one scene which somehow
did
have charms You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you Right there - where Mr K. defends divorce And What’s-her-name falls fainting in his arms.

Here’s another one, very recent, that’s rather better. It’s called:

WHEN WE MEET AGAIN

The little things we only know We’ll have forgotten, Put away Words that have melted with the snow And dreams begotten This today And dawns and days we used to greet That all could see and none could share Will be no bond - and when we meet

We shall not care - We shall not care.

And not a tear will fall for this

A little while hence

No regret

Will rise for a remembered kiss

Nor even silence

When we’ve met

Can give old ghosts a waste to roam

Or stir the surface of the sea

If grey shapes drift beneath the foam

We shall not see - We shall not see.

When life leaps deathward as a flame

Love at the scorching

Of its breath

Casts his mad heart into the same

Fires that are torching

Life to Death

Though cracks may widen in the tomb

Chords from still heart to moving ear

Tremble and penetrate the gloom

We shall not hear - We shall not hear

Colours of mine have filled your eyes.

Light from the morn

Of our last sea

Has gathered to you till the wise

Think love so born

Eternity.

But wisdom passes - yet the years

Will feed you wisdom; age will go Back to the old - For all your tears

We shall not know - We shall not know.

I can’t resist putting in two more.

ON A CERTAIN MAN

He loved me too much, I could not love him

Opened so wide my eyes I could not see,

For all I left unsaid I might not move him

He did not love himself enough for me.

He kissed my hand and let himself, unruddered,

Drift on the surface of my ‘youth’ and ‘sin’

His was the blameless life, and still I shuddered

Seeing the dark spot where his lips had been.

‘How you must hate me, you of joy and brightness

Who have no sentiment - Ah - I’m a bore -’

I smile and lie and pray the God, politeness;

I’ll sicken if his curled hair nears once more.

Trembling before the fire, I gasp and rise.