Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (620 page)

TO MISS KENT

5521
Amestoy
Avenue

Encino,

California

November
6, 1939

Dear Miss Kent:

I’m sorry that I could not conscientiously recommend this in its present form. You have an idea - but scarcely a story, do you think? I thought at first there was going to be an element of
Ramona
about it - that someone in the tribe was going to engage our interest. But no. We get a slowly mounting feud between two opposing forces - something that should be crammed into the first part of a story, and not have to sustain it dramatically throughout. I don’t think there’s enough here to hold the reader’s attention. If there was some sort of relation between the widow of an American colonel and the prince of an Indian tribe, or vice versa between the Indian princess and a captain of the U.S. troops, the story might gain some poise and balance.

This is not suggested as a way to make it a success. Some better way will probably occur to you. It is only said to tell you what I feel is lacking in your outline: a point of real interest, a true climax rather than a succession of incidents which do not build to an instant of real excitement. That’s what people buy.

Sorry I cannot be more helpful. Please feel quite free to send me anything else you may write.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JEAN OLIVIER

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

January
29, 1940

Dear Miss Olivier:

Thanks for your letter about ‘The Lost Decade’ and many apologies for not answering before. I am afraid Mr Trimble was drunk during those ten years, which is easier than one would think if one has the money.

You write in such a good English style that I am going to take the liberty of asking you never to sign yourself ‘Miss’ Jean Olivier. You wouldn’t like to get a letter from your namesake signed ‘Mister’ Laurence Olivier, would you?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO EDWIN KNOPF

5521
Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 1,
1940

Dear Eddie:

An hour after I called you a letter came asking if McBride could use my sketch, ‘The Night Before Chancellorsville,’ in an anthology. Armed with this coincidence I’ll enlarge a little on my idea.

You may remember that the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were fought respectively late in 1862 and early in 1863 and very nearly upon the same Virginia battlefield. I would begin my story with two girls who come South from Concord seeking the body of their brother who has been killed at Fredericksburg. They are sheltered, puritanical girls, used to the life of a small New England town. On the train going down they run into some ladies of the type pictured in my story. Moreover they encounter a charming Union cavalry captain with whom the gayer of the two Concord girls falls in love.

As in the story, the train rides right into Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville - the Union retreat and the Confederate advance. The girls are separated and their first task is to find each other. One of them meets a Confederate private from Alabama who at first she dreads and dislikes. In a Union counterattack the Confederate private is captured. He is identified as a Mosby guerilla by a man who bears him a grudge and hung up by his thumbs. (This actually happened to a cousin of my father’s in the Civil War and I have embodied the incident in another story called ‘When This Cruel War’ which
Colliers
bought last spring but has not yet published.) The northern girl cuts down the Confederate soldier and helps him to escape. The girl has begun by being impatient of her sister’s gayety. During their time behind the Confederate lines she has conscientiously continued her search for her brother’s grave. Now, after helping her enemy escape, and at the moment of a love scene between them, she finds that they are only a few yards from her brother’s grave. Entwined with the story of the two girls I would like to carry along the semi-comic character of one of those tarts, using her somewhat as Dudley Nichols used the tart in
Stagecoach.

There are two Civil Wars and there are two kinds of Civil War novels. So far, pictures have been made only from one of them - the romantic, chivalric, Sir Walter Scott story like
Gone
with
the Wind, The
Birth of
a Nation,
the books of Thomas Nelson Page and Mary Johnson. But there is also the realistic type modeled primarily on Stendhal’s great picture of Waterloo in
La Chartreuse de Parme,
Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage,
and the stories of Ambrose Bierce. This way of looking at war gives great scope for comedy without bringing in Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel as faithful negro slaves, because it shows how small the individual is in the face of great events, how comparatively little he
sees,
and how little he can do even to save himself. The Great War has been successfully treated like this -
Journey’s End
and All Quiet - the Civil War never.

We can all see ourselves as waving swords or nursing the sick but it gets monotonous. A picture like this would have its great force from seeing ourselves as human beings who go on eating and loving and displaying our small vanities and follies in the midst of any catastrophe.

I would like to write this story, with any encouragement. What do you think?

Ever your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DR CLARENCE NELSON

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February
7,1940

Dear Dr Nelson:

Just to tell you I have not forgotten you nor what I owe you. Physically the situation is really miraculously improved. Financially it is still as bad as ever but I just don’t see how it can go on being this bad. I have had no fever now for well over six weeks, feel no fatigue beyond what is normal, cough only a very little bit in the mornings and usually that is all for the whole day. In other words, as far as I can determine the disease is absolutely quiescent and, if anything, I have been more active than at any time since I took to bed last March.

I suppose that my absolutely dry regime has something to do with it but not everything. Oddly enough the little aches around the elbows and shoulders return from time to time whenever I have had a great orgy of Coca-Colas and coffee.

With very best wishes and hopes that soon I may be able to do something substantial about your bill.

Sincerely and gratefully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ARNOLD GINGRICH

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 7, 1940

Dear Arnold:

What would you think of this? You remember that about a week ago I wrote asking you about the publication of ‘Between Planes.’  You said that you hadn’t intended to publish it until after the Pat Hobby stories. Why don’t you publish it under a pseudonym - say, John Darcy? I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow, as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it, and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason. In other words it would fascinate me to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely and see if there is a response. I think it would be a shame to let that story stand over for such a long time now.

What do you think of this? While the story is not unlike me it is not particularly earmarked by my style as far as I know. At least I don’t think so. If the idea interests you I might invent a fictitious personality for Mr Darcy. My ambition would be to get a fan letter from my own daughter.

Ever your friend,

Scott

TO MR AND MRS S. J. PERELMAN

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California
phone: STate
4-0578

May 13, 1940

Dear Sid and Laura:

This is a love missive so do not be alarmed. I am not giving a tea for either the Princess Razzarascal or Two-ticker Forsite. But I am leaving this Elysian haunt in two weeks (the 29th to be exact) and sometime before that nonce I wish you two would dine or lunch. I know Sunday isn’t a good day for you because of the dwarfs and Saturday next I’m going to Maurice Evans’ and Sunday I’m engaged (now you know, girls, isn’t it wonderful?)

- but any other day between now and the 28th would be fine. I want to see you and very specifically you, and for the most general and non-specific reasons. The days being at their longest it is no chore to find this place up to 7:30, and perhaps the best idea is dinner. We could either dine à quatre or add the Wests and some other couple - say the Mannerheims or Browders - and afterwards play with my model parachute troops. At any event, side arms will not be de rigueur. Sheilah will be with me, just as merry as can be, to greet you on the porch with a julep. I have just reread Crime and Punishment and the chapters on gang labor in Capitalist Production and am meek as a liberal bourgeois lamb.

Call me up on the party line or drop me a note. The only acceptable excuse is that you’re going on vacation or have impetigo because I want to see you.

With spontaneous affection,

Scott

TO MRS HART FESSENDEN

c/o Phil Berg Agency Beverly Hills, California

May
29, 1940

Dear
K:

Seeing that Hester’s first born was the last man tapped for Bones reminded me of you both. Doesn’t that make about the fourth tie in a line and, as you two formed my first ideas of ‘Vas- sar Gals,’ I wonder if you knew that my daughter has been one now for some two years, so I must have been suitably impressed. She wanted to go to Bryn Mawr (to be near Baltimore where she came out last year) but I put my foot down - it was Vassar or nothing.

In these times speaking of oneself seems old-fashioned, but in the last three years I’ve known every extreme of sickness and health, riches and poorness, success and failure, and only in the last few months has life begun to level out again in any sensible way. The movies went to my head and I tried to lick the set up single-handed and came out a sadder and wiser man. For a long time they will remain nothing more nor less than an industry to manufacture children’s wet goods.

Tell me some news about you and yours if you ever get time.

Scott

TO LESTER COWAN

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,
California

June 26,
1940

Dear Lester:

Thinking over what we discussed yesterday I’ve listed many flaws in construction. The introduction of the little girl’s voice at the beginning of Sequence B is confusing, and I agree about the insufficiency of the last sequence, which leaves the little girl out of the picture for so long. From the middle of the Ritz Hotel stock-market scene, the script must be not only revised but invigorated with a new note - in which Honoria will participate dramatically.

I agree with you also that we must build a scene on the dock around the parting of Honoria and her father - a scene which will clearly show the spark already established between them. I like the new scene we outlined which shows Honoria at the beach at Brittany learning to dive and writing to her father’s trained nurse about it.

The changes in the story of Charles Wales’ business dealing, etc., can wait - I want to make clear his real reasons for going to Europe, to make stronger his reasons for signing away the guardianship of the child, his affection for the nurse, his motivation for going back into the market and whether he wins or loses there - and finally what he learns from the whole experience - but this all goes with the big revision.

Now about the other matter. Originally the child was to have been eight or nine years old. If she is to be slightly older, say at the very end and apex of childhood, the period of ‘Goodbye to dolls,’ she would of course be more aware and articulate about what is going on. Not
at every moment,
because a little girl of eleven lives halfway between a child’s world and that of an adult. But if she’s been well brought up she is beginning to realize her social responsibilities (in that regard I was very impressed with the Temple kid - no trace of coyness or cuteness, yet a real dignity and gentleness).

On the other hand this is a real child and I don’t think that I would want to put into Honoria’s mouth anything approaching the dying speech of Little Eva or the less credible children of Dickens. They ring false upon the modern ear, and, though they make certain sections of the audience weep, they revolt and alienate the intelligent section of the audience, including especially young people between eighteen and twenty-five, and create an atmosphere of disbelief in what happens thereafter.

Therefore, though no one is more responsive than I am to true sentiment and emotion, I still hold out against any sentimentality.

This is not the old story about ‘Daddy’s little helper’ - it is a mature dramatic piece and whatever child you find for it must have an emotional range larger than the First Reader. I want what happens in this picture to be felt in the stomach first, felt out of great conviction about the tragedy of father and child - and not felt in the throat to make a fat woman’s holiday between chocolate creams.

Going back to young Shirley Temple: if the personality that she has in private life could be carried
almost
without
heightening
over into the picture, I believe she would be perfect. She has reached a point pictorially and by reason of natural charm where any attempt to strain and stress her prophetic conduct would seem a vulgarization. She is a perfect thing now in her way, and I would like to see that exquisite glow and tranquility carried intact through a sustained dramatic action. Whoever you get for the part would have to forget such old dodges as talking with tears in her voice, something that a well brought-up child wouldn’t.