Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (599 page)

‘Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful’

and again

‘He had been heavy, belly-frightened with love of her for years’

- in those and in a hundred other places I tried to evoke not you but the effect that you produce on men - the echoes and reverberations - a poor return for what you have given by your living presence, but nevertheless an artist’s (what a word!) sincere attempt to preserve a true fragment rather than a ‘portrait’ by Mr Sargent. And someday, in spite of all the affectionate skepticism you felt toward the brash young man you met on the Riviera eleven years ago, you’ll let me have my little corner of you where I know you better than anybody - yes, even better than Gerald. And if it should perhaps be your left ear (you hate anyone to examine any single part of your person, no matter how appreciatively - that’s why you wore bright clothes) on June evenings on Thursdays from 11:00 to 11:15 here’s what I’d say.

That not one thing you’ve done is for nothing. If you lost everything you brought into the world - if your works were burnt in the public square the law of compensation would still act (I am too moved by what I am saying to write it as well as I’d like). You are part of our times, part of the history of our race. The people whose lives you’ve touched directly or indirectly have reacted to the corporate bundle of atoms that’s you in a good way.
I have seen you again and again at a time of confusion take the hard course almost blindly because long after your powers of ratiocination were exhausted you clung to the idea of dauntless courage.
You were the one who said:

‘All right, I’ll take the black checker men.’

I know that you and Gerald are one and it is hard to separate one of you from the other, in such a matter for example as the love and encouragement you chose to give to people who were full of life rather than to others, equally interesting and less exigent, who were frozen into rigid names. I don’t praise you for
this -
it was the little more, the little immeasurable portion of a millimeter, the thing at the absolute top that makes the difference between a World’s Champion and an also-ran, the little glance when you were sitting with Archie on the sofa that you threw at me and said:

‘And-Scott!’

- taking me in too, and with a heart so milked of compassion by your dearest ones that no person in the world but you would have that little more to spare.

Well - I got somewhat excited there. The point is: I rather like you, and I
think
that perhaps you have the makings of a good woman.

Gerald has invited me to come up for a weekend in the fall - probably September.

It’s odd that when I read over this letter it seems to convey no particular point, yet I’m going to send it. Like Cole’s eloquent little song ‘I think it’ll tell you how
great
you are.’

From your everlasting friend,

Scott

Cambridge Arms
Apt
s.

Baltimore,

Maryland

Postmarked March 30,1936

Dearest Sara (and Gerald too, if he’s not in London):

I want news of you. The winter has presented too many problems here for me to come North, even as far as New York, and my last word of you was by kindness of Archie - and not too encouraging.

If you read the little trilogy I wrote for
Esquire
you know I went through a sort of ‘dark night of the soul’ last autumn, and again and again my thoughts reverted to you and Gerald, and I reminded myself that nothing had happened to me with the awful
suddenness
of your tragedy of a year ago, nothing so utterly conclusive and irreparable. I saw your face, Sara, as I saw it a year ago this month, and Gerald’s face last fall when I met him in the Ritz Bar, and I felt very close to you - and correspondingly detached from Emest, who has managed to escape the great thunderbolts, and Nora Flynn whom the gods haven’t even shot at with much seriousness. She would probably deny that, and she helped me over one black week when I thought this was probably as good a time to quit as any, but as I said to her the love of life is essentially as incommunicable as grief.

I am moving Zelda to a sanatorium in Asheville - she is no better, though the suicidal cloud has lifted. - I thought over your Christian Science idea and finally decided to try it but the practitioner I hit on wanted to begin with ‘absent treatments,’ which seemed about as effectual to me as the candles my mother keeps constantly burning to bring me back to Holy Church - so I abandoned it. Especially as Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps.

incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scottie isn’t, because I’ve brought Scottie up hard as nails (perhaps that’s fatuous, but I
think
I have). Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s ‘terribly dangerous secret thoughts’ I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her -

The only way to show me you forgive this great outpouring is to write me about yourselves. Some night when you’re not too tired, take yourself a glass of sherry and write me as lovely and revealing a letter as you did before. Willy-nilly we are still in the midst of life and all true correspondence is necessarily sporadic but a letter from you or Gerald always pulls at something awfully deep in me. I want the best news, but in any case I want to know.

With dearest affection to you all,

Scott

Oak
Hall

Hotel Tryon,

North Carolina

January
31, 1937

Dearest Gerald and Sara:

The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice I can see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln’s in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.

But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort 0f joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

March
11,1938

Dear Gerald:

Your letter was a most pleasant surprise. The telegram I sent you was prompted by one of those moments when you see people as terribly alone - a moment in the Newark airport. It was entirely a piece of sentimentality because, of course, Sheilah  has lots of friends in New York; and I realize now that it was a bad time to ask anything. You were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend you have never failed me.

Alas, I wish I could say the same for myself. I don’t gather from your letter whether you were going to look upon the antique world with Sara, Dos and Katy t I wish I was, but with the sort of wishing that is remote and academic. I don’t care much where I am any more, nor expect very much from places. You will understand this. To me, it is a new phase, or, rather, a development of something that began long ago in my writing - to try to dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to actually believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.

I am writing a picture called
Infidelity
for Joan Crawford. Writing for her is difficult. She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the

British. I live a quiet life here, keeping regular hours, trying to get away every couple of weeks for days in the sun at La folia, Santa Barbara. King Vidor appeared for a day or so, asked about you and is off for England. Eddie * and I talk of you. Sheilah, of course, was fascinated by you both, and I looked up old pictures in old scrapbooks for her.
Tender
Is the Night has been dramatized and may go on the stage next fall. I shall obtain you gallery seats for the first night where you can blush unseen.

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

Spring,
1940

Honey - that goes for Sara too:

I have written a dozen people since who mean nothing to me - — writing you I was saving for good news. I suppose pride was concerned - in that personally and publicly dreary month of September last about everything went to pieces all at once and it was a long uphill pull.

To summarize: I don’t have to tell you anything about the awful lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poisoning effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up and down and a stabilization at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed - — and now for two and a half months and one short week that may have been grip - nothing at all. With it went a psychic depression over the finances and the effect on Scottie and Zelda. There was many a day when the fact that you and Sara did help me at a desperate moment... seemed the only pleasant human thing that had happened in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten. The thousands that I’d given and loaned - well, after the first attempts I didn’t even worry about that. There seem to be the givers and the takers and that doesn’t change. So you were never out of my mind - but even so no more present than always because this was only one of so many things.

In the land of the living again I function rather well. My great dreams about this place are shattered and I have written half a novel and a score of satiric pieces that are appearing in the current E
squires
about it. After having to turn down a bunch of well-paid jobs while I was ill there was a period when no one seemed to want me for duck soup - then a month ago a producer asked me to do a piece of my own for a small sum ($2000) and a share in the profits. The piece is ‘Babylon Revisited’ and an old and not bad Post story of which the child heroine was named Honoria! I’m keeping the name.

It looks good. I have stopped being a prophet (third attempt at spelling this) but I think I may be solvent in a month or so if the fever keeps subservient to what the doctors think is an exceptional resistance —

So now you’re up to date on me and it won’t be so long again. I might say by way of counter-reproach that there’s no word of any of you in your letter. It is sad about — . Writing you today has brought back so much and I could weep very easily.

With dearest love,

Scott

Twentieth Century-Fox
Film Corporation

Beverly Hills,

California

September
14, 1940

Dear Gerald:

I suppose anybody our age suspects what is emphasized - so let it go. But I was flat in bed from April to July last year with day and night nurses. Anyhow as you see from the letterhead I am now in official health.

I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack
soft
place - even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence - that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as ‘progress’ is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs. Except for the stage-struck young girls people come here for negative reasons - all gold rushes are essentially negative - and the young girls soon join the vicious circle. There is no group, however small, interesting as such.

Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent - by whom I mean the spoiled writers, Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dotty, Dash Hammett, etc. That Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference. So is one type of Commy Malraux didn’t list among his categories in Man’s
Hope -
but nothing would disappoint her so vehemently as success.

I have a novel pretty well on the road. I think it will baffle and in some ways irritate what readers I have left. But it is as detached from me as
Gatsby
was, in intent anyhow. The new Armageddon, far from making everything unimportant, gives me a certain lust for life again. This is undoubtedly an immature throw-back, but it’s the truth. The gloom of all causes does not affect it - I feel a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses - however misdirected —