Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (604 page)

Am in New York, having rather a poor time and will return to St Paul Sunday.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN V. A. WEAVER

626
Goodrich
Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Probably May, 1922

Dear John:

I was tickled to write the review. I saw Broun’s and F.P.A.’s reviews but you know how they love me and how much attention I pay to their dictums.

This is my new style of letter writing. It is to make it easy for comments and notes to be put in when my biographer begins to assemble my collected letters.

The
Metropolitan
isn’t here yet. I shall certainly read ‘Enamel.’ I wish to Christ I could go to Europe.

Thine,

P. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MISS PAXTON

Great
Neck,  Long Island

Fall,
1922-Spring, 1924

Dear Miss Paxton:

As I have nothing but respect for Theta Sigma Phi it would be a mean trick for me to agree to make a speech for them. How would you like to have a collapsed novelist wandering wildly over the campus of the University of Illinois? I suggest Mr Bryant or Mr Cone as an alternate.

Seriously I’d love to do it but I’m absolutely incapable through constitutional stagefright. With appreciation of the honor of being asked, I am Most sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My price for lectures is 12,000 louis d’or, or, when lecturing in Guatemala, I accept my fee in rubber.

TO MR MAURICE

Great Neck, Long Island

February,
1923

Dear Mr Maurice:

I don’t know how to apologize for my delay - but the fault is Sherwood Anderson’s. It’s an amazing book t and affected me profoundly. It reached me Friday and I didn’t get to reading it until Sunday - finished it late Sunday night - intending to review it Monday morning. Well, I sat down at nine and wrote about 1500 words of the worst drivel ever launched. My wife read it, we decided it’d be criminal to hand it in. The book is the full flowering of Anderson’s personality and wants the most careful consideration else one is tempted to say the wildest things about it.

This is the first time I can remember having failed to live up to my word on a thing like this - but it seemed simply out of my power. My review will reach you Friday. I suppose that’s plenty of time as it’s already two days too late for the issue of February 24th.

With sincere apologies, I am Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LITERARY DIGEST

Great
Neck,
New York

Probably late
April,
1923

The clean-book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap where it rested comfortably between the Civil War and the World War. The really unmoral books like Simon
Called Peter
and Murnbo Jumbo won’t be touched - they’ll attack Herge- sheimer, Dreiser, Anderson and Cabell whom they detest because they can’t understand. George Moore, Hardy and Anatole France who are unintelligible to children and idiots will be suppressed at once for debauching the morals of village clergymen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

Great Neck,
New York

Postmarked March
1, 1924

Dear Carl:

Thanks for the kind telegram. I’m always glad when anyone likes
The Beautiful and Damned
- most people prefer
This Side of Paradise
and while I do myself I hate to see one child preferred above another - you know the feeling. We both want to see you soon and are going to haul or drag you out here by ‘hook or crook’ (if I may be allowed to coin a new phrase).

Thine,

F. Scott Fitz —

TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Great Neck, Long Island

April, 1923

Dear Sherwood:

Just as I was asking the girl in
Vanity Fair
to save me an autograph of yours if one ever happened in there, your letter came. I liked Many Marriages much more fully than I could express in that review - It stays with me still. It’s a haunting book and, it seems to me, ahead of
Poor White
and even of the two books of short stories.

I don’t quite get you about Tom Boyd - he’s a great fellow, incidentally, and a strong admirer of your work. His own first book out this month is an excellent piece of work.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

Villa Marie,  Valescure St Raphael,
 France

Probably June, 1924

Dear Carl:

Your letter was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever had. Thank you for a most cheerful half hour while I basked in the warmth of such generous praise. We shall be here until November 1st so don’t neglect to send The Tatooed Countess   down to the last sardonic gargoyle on her navel.

We are living here in a sort of idyllic state among everything lovely imaginable in the way of Mediterranean delights. Unlike you I have only an occasional lust for the exotic streets of the metropolis - at present I am content to work and become excruciatingly healthy under Byron’s and Shelley’s and Dickens’ sky. I will try to dig up a picture though God knows where. I have just received two furious letters from papists referring to ‘Absolution.’ But yours is worth ten thousand of them.

Zelda sends her admiration and love to you both and I do too.

F. Scott Fitz —

TO ERNEST BOYD

Hotel des Princes Rome,
 Italy

February
1,1925

Dear Ernest:

Your picture of me in
Portraits, Real and Imaginary
truly touched me. I was honestly delighted that I, or we, had pleased anybody enough so they could write about me (or us) like that. Of course it was indiscreet (you should see the letter I got today from Mother: ‘Who is this Ernest Boyd who seems to know so much about my boy?’) but it is so delicately done that I’m sure it will fill the gay cafés with everybody who reads it. It made Zelda and I horribly homesick for New York. We’d love to go shooting out into space with you and Madeleine. We’re tired of black shirts and dirty teeth and the parades of Pope — the Sixth - tho, contrary to Madeleine’s prediction, we thoroughly enjoyed St Raphael last summer. Paris in the spring, as they say!

I read the whole book with the greatest pleasure, regretting that the ‘impressions’ were so short, and liking especially A. E., Nathan, myself, Aesthete, Yeats and Beer. And, least, the critic. But God, it all sounded like home - and the $100,000 we’re trying to save over here is still about 199,000 away.

My new novel appears in late March:
The Great Gatsby.
It represents about a year’s work and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done. All my harsh smartness has been kept ruthlessly out of it - it’s the greatest weakness in my work, distracting and disfiguring it even when it calls up an isolated sardonic laugh. I don’t think this has a touch left. I wanted to call it
Trimalchio
(it’s laid on Long Island) but I was voted down by Zelda and everybody else.

Best love to you and Madeleine from both of us - and thank you for writing about me so pleasantly. I feel like an infinitely more genial soul than I did a week ago.

Scott Fitzg —

TO ROGER BURLINGAME

Bound
from Naples to Marseille en route to Paris

April
19, 1925

Dear Roger:

I think that’s about the nicest letter I ever received about my work. I was tremendously pleased that it moved you in that way - ‘made you want to be back somewhere so much’ - because that describes, better than I could have put it myself, whatever unifying emotion the book has, either in regard to the temperament of Gatsby himself or in my own mood while writing it. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write. As yet I know nothing. Zelda has been too sick for the long overland trip to Paris in our French Ford so we had to catch a boat on a day’s notice to get the car back to France within the 6 months’ period of the International touring arrangement. (She’s better now - Italy depressed us both beyond measure - a dead land where everything that could be done or said was done long ago - for whoever is deceived by the pseudo-activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a corpse. In these days of criticism it takes a weak bunch of desperates to submit for 3 years to a tyrant, even a mildly beneficent one.)

- But leaving suddenly I have heard nothing about Gatsby - nothing except you and Ring since Perkins’ letters three months ago. I don’t know how many were printed or what advance orders or what notices or advertising, not to mention reviews, the by this time all that information is probably waiting for me in Paris, having been forwarded from Capri. (By the way, will you ask Max to pass on any movie nibbles to Reynolds?)

Thank you again and again for your letter. I shall always keep it.

Scott Fitz —

TO H. L. MENCKEN

14
rue de
Tilsitt Paris,
France

May 4, 1925

Dear Menck:

Your letter was the first outside word that reached me about my book. I was tremendously moved both by the fact that you liked it and by your kindness in writing me about it. By the next mail came a letter from Edmund Wilson and a clipping from Stallings, both bulging with interest and approval, but as you know I’d rather have you like a book of mine than anyone in America.

There is a tremendous fault in the book - the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy’s attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the consequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over). Everyone has felt this but no one has spotted it because it’s concealed beneath elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose. Wilson complained: The characters are so uniformly unpleasant’; Stallings: ‘a sheaf of gorgeous notes for a novel’; and you say: ‘The story is fundamentally trivial.’ I think the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. Despite your admiration for Conrad you have lately - perhaps in reaction against the merely well made novels of James’ imitators - become used to the formless. It is in protest against my own formless two novels, and Lewis’ and Dos Passos’ that this was written. I admit that in comparison to My Antonia and
The Lost Lady
it is a failure in what it tries to do but I think in comparison to Cyt
herea
or
Linda Condon
it is a success. At any rate I have” learned a lot from writing it, and the influence on it has been the masculine one of
The Brothers Karamazov,
a thing of incomparable form, rather than of the feminine one of
The Portrait of a Lady.
If it seems trivial or ‘anecdotal’ (sp) it is because of an aesthetic fault, a failure in one very important episode, and not a frailty in the theme. At least I don’t think so. Did you ever know a writer to calmly take a just criticism and shut up?

Incidentally, I had hoped it would amuse the Mencken who wrote the essay on New York in the last book of
Prejudices - the
I know nothing in the new Paris streets that I like better than Park Avenue at twilight.

I think the book is so far a commercial failure, at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn’t reached 20,000 yet. So I rather regret (but not violently) the fact that I turned down $15,000 for the serial rights. However I have all the money I need and was growing rather tired of being a popular author. My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it. Strange to say, my whole heart was in my first trash. I thought that ‘The Offshore Pirate’ was quite as good as ‘Benediction.’ I never really ‘wrote down’ until after the failure of
The
Vegetable and that was to make this book possible. I would have written down long ago if it had been profitable - I tried it unsuccessfully for the movies. People don’t seem to realize that for an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world. When people like Hughes and Stephen Whitman go wrong after one tragic book, it is because they never had any real egos or attitudes but only empty bellies and cross nerves. The bellies full and the nerves soothed with vanity they see life rosily and would be violently insincere in writing anything but the happy trash they do. The others, like Owen Johnson, just get tired. There’s nothing the matter with some of Johnson’s later books, they’re just rotten that’s all. He was tired and his work is no more writing in the sense that the work of Thomas Hardy and Gene Stratton Porter is writing than were Dreiser’s dime novels.

However I won’t bore you any longer. I expect to spend about two years on my next novel and it ought to be more successful critically. It’s about myself - not what I thought of myself in
This Side of Paradise.
Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented.

With many, many thanks,

F. Scott Fitz —

P.S. This is simply an acknowledgment and expects no answer.

Italy (but not France) is full of Pilson and Munich beer of fine quality. There is less than there was when I got there.

TO H. L. MENCKEN

14
rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

May or June, 1925

Dear Menck:

The idea is fascinating and I’ll try it when we go to Brussels in July. I’ve got two pieces of hack work to do first. I thought the Spring Flight  was great - it needed some cutting tho, and I have no feeling that he has another book in him. That must have been all true. Abo I liked The Constant Nymph t but I thought The Apple
of the
Eye was lousy.