Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (619 page)

Would you be prepared, in return for an agreement or contract for first look at the novel and at a specified number of short stories in a certain time, to advance me $750.00, by wire on receipt of this letter - which will be even before the story reaches you Monday? This is a principal factor in the matter at the moment as these three months of illness have got me into a mess with income tax and insurance problems. When you get this, will you wire me yes or no, because if you can’t I can probably start studio work Friday. This may be against your general principles - from my angle I am offering you rather a lot for no great sum.

Ever yours with best wishes,

Scott

P.S. If this meets with your favorable consideration the money should be wired to the Bank of America, Culver City. If not would you wire me anyhow because my determination to handle my magazine relationship myself is quite final.

P.S. (2) The novel will run just short of 50,000 words.

TO KENNETH LITTAUER

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

Probably
late July,
1939

Dear Kenneth:

Here’s another Hollywood story. It is absolutely true to Hollywood as I see it. Asking you to read it I want to get two things clear. First, that it isn’t particularly likely that I’ll write a great many more stories about young love. I was tagged with that by my first writings up to 1925. Since then I have written stories about young love. They have been done with increasing difficulty and increasing insincerity. I would either be a miracle man or a hack if I could go on turning out an identical product for three decades.

I know that is what’s expected of me, but in that direction the well is pretty dry and I think I am much wiser in not trying to strain for it but rather to open up a new well, a new vein. You see, I not only announced the birth of my young illusions in
This Side of Paradise
but pretty much the death of them in some of my last Post stories like ‘Babylon Revisited.’ Lorimer seemed to understand this in a way. Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of editors continue to associate me with an absorbing interest in young girls - an interest that at my age would probably land me behind the bars.

I have a daughter. She is very smart; she is very pretty; she is very popular. Her problems seem to me to be utterly dull and her point of view completely uninteresting. In other words, she is exactly what I was once accused of being - callow. Moreover she belongs to a very overstimulated and not really adventurous generation - a generation that has been told the price of everything as well as its values. I once tried to write about her. I couldn’t So you see I’ve made a sort of turn. My hope is that, like Tarkington, if I can no longer write M. B
eaucaire
and the
Gentleman from
Indiana, I can make people laugh instead as he did in Seventeen which is completely objective and unromantic.

The second thing is my relation to Ober. It is completely vague. I’ve very seldom taken his advice on stories. I have regarded him as a mixture of friend, bill collector and for a couple of sick years as backer. So far as any editorial or financial dealing, I would much rather, as things are now, deal directly with an editor. For instance, if this sort of story is worth less to you than a story of young love, I would be perfectly willing to accept less. I would not want any agent to stand in my way in that regard. I think all the agents still act as if we were back in the 1920s in a steadily rising market So can I again ask you to deal telegraphically with me? I hope this story amuses you.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO MRS LAURA FELEY

5521 Aroestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

July
20, 1939

Dear Mrs Feley:

I don’t know whether those articles of mine in Esquire - that ‘Crack-Up’ series - represented a real nervous breakdown. In retrospect it seems more of a spiritual ‘change of life’ - and a most unwilling one - it was a protest against a new set of conditions which I would have to face and a protest of my mind at having to make the psychological adjustments which would suit this new set of circumstances. Being an essentially stable type I managed to cling on until there was a mixture of the patient’s adjustment to the situation and the situation’s adjustment to the patient.

And that, in such a case, is about all there is to do. The sensitive cannot make themselves overnight into specimens of the ‘tough- minded’ - the great ally is time, though I know that is a pretty old saw. Time was my rescuer and there was a friend concerned too, though I rather despised her intellectually and drew more nourishment from what she didn’t say than from what she did.

To come closer to your case: the word nervous breakdown covers a multiplicity of conditions, as your doctor has probably told you. It may mean anything from a collapse of the central nervous system, a case of schizophrenia that the family doesn’t want to acknowledge or a little mood of Irish melancholy. A girl having lost a man is liable to suddenly build him up into the only man in the world when, had things run smoothly, it is doubtful if he would have long interested her. You must know cases of this. I knew a high-strung girl who had an unfortunate ‘trial marriage’ with a man, which went badly - after which she went to Europe, turning down a series of good matches - returned to the scene of her early disaster to find the lost love, took one look at him and thought, ‘My God, how did I ever happen to go for
that!’

From what you tell me in your letter (and at such long range it is impossible for me to speak in anything but the broadest generalities) I can only say this: that if you are in any mess caused by conflict between old idealisms, religious or social, and the demands of the immediate present, you will probably have to make a decision between them. That is all too frequently a problem of these times - I hope the generation now growing up will shake free of it.

The doctor is probably your best friend, certainly much better than anyone you will find in your family - and if you have reason to think he is not your best friend, your very first move should be to find another. I don’t mean a series of doctors, but another whom you have good reason to think is equipped to deal with a case requiring intelligent handling.

With best wishes,

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MISS HELENE RICHARDS

5521 Awestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

July
27, 1939

Dear Miss Richards:

Attached is some biographical data. Sorry I have no picture but I may say that out here I am known as the old ‘oomph man.’ So any haberdasher’s advertisement will do as a portrait.

Will you tell that so-called Mr Gingrich that I am accustomed, in my haughty way, to some word of approbation if not ecstasy about my contributions. Bland and chaste as your check was, it somehow lacked emotion. However, we are accepting it

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

5521
Ames toy Avenue

Encino, California

August
3, 1939

Dear Morton:

Because your story was so perfect technically and so absolutely sincere I am going to take the risk of making an unasked-for suggestion. Someone once said - and I am quoting most inexactly - ‘A writer who manages to look a little more deeply into his own soul or the soul of others, finding there, through his gift, things that no other man has ever seen or dared to say, has increased the range of human life.’

That is why a young writer (and I shrink at the word as much as you do) is tempted, when he comes to the crossroads of what to say and not to say as regards character and feeling, to be guided by the known, the admired and the currently accepted as he hears a voice whisper within himself, ‘Nobody would be interested in this feeling I have, this unimportant action - therefore it must be peculiar to me, it must not be universal nor generally interesting nor even right.’ But if the man’s gift is deep or luck is with him, as one may choose to look at it, some other voice in that crossroads makes him write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is his style, his personality - eventually his whole self as an artist. What he has thought to throw away or, only too often, what he has thrown away, was the saving grace vouchsafed him. Gertrude Stein was trying to express a similar thought when - speaking of life rather than letters - she said that we struggle against most of our exceptional qualities until we’re about forty and then, too late, find out that they compose the real us. They were the most intimate self which we should have cherished and nourished.

Again, the above is inexact and all that I have said might lead you astray in the sense that it has led Saroyan astray and the late Tom Wolfe in imagining that writing should be a cultivation of every stray weed found in the garden. That is where talent comes in to distinguish between the standard blooms which everyone knows and are not particularly exciting, the riotous and deceitful weeds, and that tiny faint often imperceptible flower hidden in a comer which, cultivated à la Burbank, is all it will ever pay us to cultivate whether it stays small or grows to the size of an oak.

This is all too professorial. I felt you were trying to characterize with your fat boy. You failed to get a strong effect because (a) it was too facile a characteristic which you merely repeated from time to time to give him visibility and stability and (b) anyone who could write that story so well and with so much observation must certainly be able to see deeply enough into himself and others and to dredge forth a more vivid person than a mere clumsy gawk about whom ‘it was just too bad.’ And let me say that I think if you had done so the story, because of its honesty so far as it went, and because of its economical and dramatic straight line, might very well have been salable.

Your friend by proxy,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MORTON KROLL

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

August 9,1939

Dear Morton:

I claim the last word. You’re entirely right that one’s first influences are largely literary but the point where the personal note emerges can come very young (vidé Keats). I’ll go further than that. I believe that with the natural prose-writer it might very well come long before twenty, depending on the amount of awareness with which it is looked for - and, referring directly to the classics, my mother did me the disservice of throwing away all but two of my very young efforts - way back at twelve and thirteen, and later I found that the surviving fragments had more quality than some of the stuff written in the tightened-up days of seven or eight years later.

A last word supplementary to my somewhat ponderous letter: if you were learning tennis you would form yourself not upon an eccentric like Tilden, for example, but upon players with classic styles like Cochet or La Coste (my references are of the dim past). You cannot imitate a mannerism with profit; a man might labor over Tilden’s tennis style for six years, finding at the end that it simply couldn’t be done without Tilden’s 6’6” in height.

The Hemingway of
Farewell to Arms,
the Joyce of
Dubliners,
the Keats of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

and ‘The Grecian Urn,’ the Mark Twain of the great central parts of
Huckleberry Finn,
the
Daisy Miller
of Henry James, the Kipling of
The Drums of Fore and Aft
are great English classics in a sense that such grand things as
Shropshire Lad
are not. Oscar Wilde for all his occasionally penetrating guesses was as Whistler said, a provincial at bottom - he tried imitating
The Shropshire Lad
in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ and with the borrowed and, hence, phoney mood produced something only a few steps up from Robert Service.

(One last great parenthesis. It just happens that the most
classical
classics are in French while the most eccentric classics seem to be in English. If you had French, for example, I would recommend you the ‘Maison Tellier’ of Maupassant rather than that Kipling piece as a completely classical short story.)

Don’t answer this. I am keeping your letter and will sell it for a great profit later on.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DR JOHN G. VOIGT

5521 Atnestoy
Avenue

Encino, California

August 11, 1939

Dear Dr Voigt:

I’m terribly sorry but I haven’t had a picture taken for about twelve years. This is no stall. I think now that I shall wait until it’s time for a death mask because I’m in that unattractive middle- aged phase that doesn’t seem safe to record for prosperity. (This is not a misprint.)

Thank you for your very kind letter. Hope someday we may meet.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO EDGAR POE

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

September
18, 1939

Dear Ed:

You have an early Chaldean handwriting but an excellent heart. And our tastes must be similar because the dressing gown is a beautiful piece of lechery. Thank you. I have named it Cela- lume  and shall think in its depths.

Best to Babe - sorry I didn’t see her. I’ve been on the run between Universal and United Artists (where Niven is and isn’t going to finish his picture) and on the point of suing R.K.O. for keeping me awake on their lot across the street. I am so tired of being old and sick - would much rather be a scared young man peering out over a hunk of concrete or mud toward something I hated than be doing this here stuff.

Ever yours,

Scott