Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (616 page)

My first intention was to go through it and ‘criticize’ it, but I see I’m not capable of doing that - too many obstacles in my own mind prevent me from getting a clear vision. I had some notes - that Rosemary wouldn’t express her distaste for the battlefield trip - she had a
good
time and it belittles Dick’s power of making things fun. Also a note that Dick’s curiosity and interest in people was
real
- he didn’t stare at them - he glanced at them and
felt
them. I don’t know what point of the play I was referring to. Also I’m afraid some of his long Shavian speeches won’t play -

and no one’s sorrier than I am - his comment on the battle of the Somme for instance. Also Tommy seemed to me less integrated than he should be. He was Tommy Hitchcock in a way whose whole life is a challenge - who is only interested in realities, his kind - in going into him you’ve brought him into the boudoir a little - I should be careful of what he says and does unless you can feel the strong fresh-air current in him. I realize you’ve had to use some of the lesser characters for plot transitions and convenience, but when any of them go out of character I necessarily feel it, so I am a poor critic. I know the important thing is to put over Dick in his relation to Nicole and Rosemary and, if you can, Bob Montgomery and others here would love to play the part. But it must get by Broadway first.

If it has to be cut, the children will probably come out. On the stage they will seem to press, too much for taste, against distasteful events. As if Dick had let them in for it - he is after all a sort of superman, an approximation of the hero seen in overcivilized terms - taste is no substitute for vitality but in the book it has to do duty for it. It is one of the points on which he must never show weakness as Siegfried could never show physical fear. I did not manage, I think in retrospect, to give Dick the cohesion I aimed at, but in your dramatic interpretation I beg you to guard me from the exposal of this. I wonder what the hell the first actor who played Hamlet thought of the part? I can hear him say, ‘The guy’s a nut, isn’t he?’ (We can always find great consolation in Shakespeare.)

Also to return to the criticism I was not going to make -I find in writing for a particular screen character here that it’s convenient to suggest the way it’s played, especially the timing - i e., at the top of page 25 it would probably be more effective -

Rosemary didn’t grow up. (pause) It’s better that way. (pause) Etc.

But I’d better return to my thesis. You’ve done a fine dramatization and my gratitude to you is part of the old emotion I put into the book, part of my life.

Most sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 22,
1938

Dear Mr Garis:

In several ways, I am familiar with the melancholia you describe. Myself, I had what amounted to a nervous breakdown which never, however, approached psychosis. My wife, on the contrary, has been a mental patient off and on for seven years and will never be entirely well again, so I have a very detached point of view on the subject.

As I look at my own approach toward a practical inability to function and my gradual recession from it, it appears to me as being a matter of adjustment. The things that were the matter with me were so apparent, however, that I did not even need a psychoanalyst to tell me that I was being stubborn about this (giving up drink) or stupid about that (trying to do too many things); and so, to say that all such times of depression are merely ‘a moment of adjustment’ is pretty easy.

I know this: that it is impossible to write without hope, and especially it is impossible to write cheerfully the sort of things in demand by the magazines when one is hospitalized physically or mentally and trying to draw sustenance from a dark-appearing world or from the childish optimism of nurses.

There was a period in my time of depression where I had T.B. and another where I had a broken back. (I lump the whole time together as covering about three and a half years.) I had to look far, far back into my life to write anything at all except about children and hospitals. My own life seemed too dismal to write about.

I think a great deal of your problem will depend on whether you have a sympathetic wife who will realize calmly and coolly, rather than emotionally, that a talent like yours is worth saving, will help you figure out how much strain, how many hours a day of strain you can stand and how many hours must be given to a rigorous if not vigorous physical regime. In this your attention must be bent figuratively on such nonessentials as the ‘birds and flowers,’ the weight, the number of hours’ sleep, the utterly nontoxic diet - even though this means a much smaller amount of production and a temporary reduction in your scale of living or if debt enters into it. If you get sicker, there is no question but that you must retire to some absolutely quiet place and be prepared to sacrifice three or four months of your life to build up your nervous system. This can be done by yourself with the help of a good friend, at a certain stage. If you let it go too far, you will need a sanitarium. I got myself in hand just before the latter and more unpleasant alternative would have become necessary.

In three old
Esquire
magazines of 1936, you will find three articles called ‘Crack-Up,”Paste Together’ and ‘Handle with Care,’ which show the mood I was in at the time and doubtless you will find it quite parallel to yours. The writing of the articles helped me personally but rather hurt me professionally. They do not tell you how I gradually climbed out of the morass though there are hints in it of what course it finally took.

The question of will in these cases is very doubtful. Let us say that in my case the disease wore itself out. Let us hope that in yours it will also. But I assure you that if at the moment when I first became aware that my nervous system was out of hand, that there were unnecessary rages, glooms, nervous tensity, times of coma-like inertia, if I had, instead of trying quick remedies like a couple of days in the hospital or a one-week trip, taken off several months, I would have saved at least a year of my life.

One of the best psychiatrists near you is Dr James Rennie, consultant at the Phipps Clinic, JohnsHopkinsHospital, Baltimore. He was in charge of my wife and was a kindly friend to me during my own struggle. The men around New York all seem a little bit ovemervous themselves, to me. The most helpful man in my wife’s case was Dr Robert S. Carroll of HighlandHospital, Asheville, North Carolina. However, he is less a consultant than a practicing clinitian. His strong point is that toxic conditions of the blood from diet, etc., play a tremendous part in nervous disturbances. But if it ever came to the point where you thought you ought to lay up under medical care, his is the sanitarium which I should choose, and I have had my wife in a half dozen in this country. And it is quite reasonable in price.

Phipps Clinic in Baltimore is really a sanitarium for diagnosis. It is rather unfortunately situated, to my mind, in the middle of a big city.

I find that living alone in a very small town did more to restore my nervous strength than any other one thing, though I must say the months there were not highly productive.

I hope you will get something out of this letter that will be of value to you, and if there is any point on which you would like me to go further, please write me again.

With hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be seeing some point of light in your trouble, I am Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS MARY LEONARD PRITCHETT

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

March 4,
1938

Dear Mrs Pritchett:

Sorry I could not get word to you before you sailed.

I am out of touch with the stage in New York, but have talked to Sidney Howard and several other playwrights here regarding your suggestions for the casting of
Tender Is the
Night. Invariably, Margaret Rawlings has seemed a very good choice for Nicole to those who have read the book, and, equally unanimously, they have been against Beulah Bondi.

Nicole should have not merely glamor but a practically irresistible glamor. In fact, my ideal casting would be Katharine Hepburn or Margaret Sullavan, with the beauty of Loretta Young.

Oddly enough, the character of Tommy, or rather some of the mannerisms of Tommy, were taken from Mario Braggiotti, the brother of Stiano. It would be a delightful coincidence if Stiano played the part.

Thank you for your interest in the casting. They have really done an awfully good job and, in the reading, all the parts seemed very fat and tempting. Bob Montgomery out here is one of several actors who keep recurring to the playing of Dick Diver. With very best wishes, Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DAYTON KOHLER

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

March 4,
1938

Dear Mr Kohler:

Your project of a survey of contemporary literature sounds interesting. I should think that whether it should be a success or not would depend rather on its unity than its variety. If you follow what has been said about the names you mention, you could very well produce a book which would be a mere recapitulation and summary and would be out-classed by a later manifestation of literary vitality - much as Carl Van Doren’s two books on the American novel, published in 1920, have become obsolete, as well as the studies of Henry S. Canby and Stuart P. Sherman. Mencken’s book,
Prefaces,
on the contrary, is still very much alive.

I should think you would approach the Houghton Mifflin people with something more than the outline which you have sent me. Some of the names. I find in it are meaningless. Elinor Wylie as a novelist, for example, is entirely imitative of Max Beerbohm and others. Elsie Singmaster I never heard of. —

is not even as faintly important as, say, Harry Leon Wilson. And who are — and H. L. Davis? Why Wilbur Daniel Steele, who left no mark whatsoever, invented nothing, created nothing except a habit of being an innocuous part of the O’Brien anthology? Dorothy Canfield as a novelist is certainly of no possible significance. Cora Jarrett was a realer person. Canfield simply got hold of child education as an early monopoly and what she has to say is less important than Willa Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case.’

Does Maxwell Anderson deserve a special section? Have you read Edmund Wilson in The New Republic upon his blank verse? Winterset seemed to me a complete fake. James Ahearn is certainly a much more important figure of the past than Augustus Thomas.

In fact, your list includes so much of the mediocre, so many men who are already covered with dust, that I cannot find a line through it. If you’d confine yourself to twelve contemporaries, instead of fifty, you would find, I think, that they swept up everything worth saying. Perhaps I am wrong. Some people seem to look on our time as a sort of swollen Elizabethan age, simply crawling with geniuses. The necessity of the artist in every generation has been to give his work permanence in every way by a safe shaping and a constant pruning, lest he be confused with the journalistic material that has attracted lesser men.

Perhaps I misunderstand your intention. If so, I apologize and await an answer.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

The Garden of AllahHotel Hollywood,California

March 11,
1938

Dear Matty:

Glad you enjoyed Hollywood. Something you said makes me fear you carried away one false impression. In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material - he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of
Three Comrades,
where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job. This is a necessary evolution that the talkies brought about, and I should say that in seven out of ten cases, your feeling that the director or producer was the great coordinator no longer applies.

It was great meeting you. Anything I can ever do for you here let me know. Best wishes.

Scott Fitz

Sid  and I had lunch and he spoke so affectionately of you and of your wife.

TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY

The Garden of Allah
Hotel Hollywood,
California

March 16,
1938

Dear Pete and Margaret:

I waited an unpardonably long time to write you, but I wanted to see if I could manage to give Miss (or Mrs?) Hoffmannt a decent hearing here. What I have arranged, I will come to presently, but first I want to tell you what I did. I went first to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer and twice missed the head man and got no encouragement - nothing but a blank statement that they were not interested in listening to music by amateurs or even professionals. The acute cause of their attitude I soon found was that they have five law suits on their hands because they have done that, and at this moment Cole Porter is being sued for a great sum by a woman who played him her pieces and then accused him of stealing melodies from them. I then went to 20th Century-Fox and Warner Brothers and met the same situation. Next I concluded that I had better hear the tunes myself. I had them played over by a musician but didn’t think his opinion was honest - then who should occur to me but our old friend — , who had written me a month before that he was in Hollywood and would like to see me. I went to call, with the music. It was rather depressing to see — , who was so sprightly at Princeton, turned into a down-at-the-heels, very discouraged-looking pansy. He told me a little of his story - that he had been out here ten years, had written two thousand tunes (they were all scored and piled on his piano), had had half a dozen auditions and no luck at all except some incidental music that he had written for a Nelson Eddy radio broadcast and the two or three pieces that he had in the New York show, New Faces. He played over some of his own tunes - easily the best were the ones that he and I wrote together for the Triangle - finally, without its seeming to be the object of the visit, I brought out Miss Hoffman’s pieces. They seemed to me so far ahead of — , there was no comparison. Especially I liked ‘Beautiful Things,’ which has a real swing and a good lyric and, I should think, just that quality that catches on.