Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (560 page)

Supposing — to be self-absorbed, charming, successful, and full of the same psychology I had - how definitely handicapped you might be in counting on him! By the very fact of old familiarity, old experience in common, it would be difficult, for men, if they’re alive, are continually looking for the new. I mean that he might, so to speak, meet the Queen of Abyssinia in his travels. And how can you rival her?

I’m not driving at the obvious answer of having many strings to your bow. I suppose you have. But haven’t you taken — as the only type? Women are capable of loving three or four types of masculine excellence like the women in
Candida
and
Strange Interlude.
You ought to have, for example: as a cold intellectual, someone who’s made the
Harvard Law Review
- you can find him with a little effort. He’ll probably be taken already but it can be done. The point is that you have not exhausted any other type at its best except — ; you have only examined the second-rate “nproved man of other species ( — , — , etc.). You should know the young predatory business type, hard as hell. He will lick you maybe but you should know him. A lead at Princeton would be one of the Ivy boys - not Harvey, but he might be a wedge - a boy inheriting a big business.

All the above is probably very obvious so forget it Are any of the enclosed friends of yours?

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. Have paid the Wallace Co. $35.00 and Altmans $40.00 on account. The printed enclosure reminded me that if you have occasion to drive, I forgot to tell you that in the rain don’t depress
the clutch
- use the brake only. And on hills - go down in the gear in which you’d have come up. I am moving in town to be near my work, so will you address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, or General Delivery, Encino, as they will forward it? Will write you as soon as I have a permanent address.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

April
12, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

I’m sorry about the tone of the telegram I sent you this morning, but it represents a most terrific worry. You are doing exactly what I did at Princeton. I wore myself out on a musical comedy there for which I wrote book and lyrics, organized and mostly directed while the president played football. Result: I slipped way back in my work, got T.B., lost a year in college - and, irony of ironies, because of scholastic slip I wasn’t allowed to take the presidency of the Triangle.

From your letter I guess that you are doing exactly the same thing and it just makes my stomach fall out to think of it. Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown - that somebody being the enthusiast.

Please, please, please
delegate every bit of the work you can and keep your scholastic head above water. To see a mistake repeated twice in two generations would be just too much to bear. This is the most completely experienced advice I’ve ever given you. What about that science and the philosophy? You’ve got to find hours to do them even if you have to find a secret room where you can go and study.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

April 27,1940

Dearest Scottina:

I am of course delighted about the play. Now that it is over I can admit that I thought it was quite a conception from the beginning and quite an achievement -I just had a moment when I was afraid that you were wearing yourself out over it. Musical comedy is fun - I suppose more ‘fun’ than anything else a literary person can put their talents to and it always has an air of glamor around it.

I was particularly interested in your line about ‘feeling that you had lost your favorite child.’ God, haven’t I felt that so many times. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager. However, that’s not anything to worry about in your case for another twenty years.

I am glad you are going to Princeton with whom you are going. I feel you have now somehow jumped a class. Boys like Kilduff and Lanahan are on a guess more ‘full of direction’ than most of the happy-go-luckies in Cap and Gown. I don’t mean more ‘ambition,’ which is a sort of general attribute of youth and is five parts hope to five parts good will, but I mean some calculated path stemming from a talent or money or a careful directive or all of these things, to find your way through the bourgeois maze - if you feel it is worth finding. Remember this, though, among those on both sides of the fence there are a lot of slow developers, people of quality and distinction whom you should not overlook. Particularly you will find them among those of difficult exteriors like Eleanor Turnbull or of a great pervading shyness or personal ugliness, etc. I certainly had to dig under a bushel of spoiled blackberries to find — at Princeton and often the same in later life. Needless to say I’ve made bad mistakes - one of them was —

I was going to speak to you about the summer plans - without anything special to contribute. Could you let me know more specifically about the New England idea? Who would you be with? What girls? I know you could make up a lot of names but please tell me pretty specifically what would be the housekeeping set-up? I think I could manage to back something like that. I rather hate to think of you out here unless you were going right out for money by displaying your person in celluloid. It is a half- tropical and listless atmosphere.

I am working on this ‘Babylon Revisited’ picture at a rotten salary but it is rather fun and may amount to something. Your mother seems happy to be home. I don’t expect the trouble to begin for at least two months.

With dearest love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

May
4, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

Glad you got a break in the New York papers. Bet you were thrilled. Notice you got the picture into the background to show you were a glamor girl at heart. No kidding, it was a good job. All I hope is you don’t flunk out. You are always welcome in California though. We are even opening our arms to Chamberlain in case the British oust him. We need him for Governor because we are afraid the Asiatics are going to land from Chinese parasols. Never mind - Santa Barbara will be our Narvik and we’ll defend it to our last producer. And remember, even England still has Noel Coward.

I actually have a formulating plan for part of your summer - if it pleases you - and I think I’ll have the money to make it good. I’m working hard, guiding by the fever which now hovers quietly around the 99.2 level, which is fairly harmless. Tell Frances Kil- patrick that though I never met her father he is still one of my heroes in spite of the fact that he robbed Princeton of a football championship single-handed - he was probably the greatest end who ever played football. In the future please send me clippings even though you do crack at me in the course of your interviews. I’d rather get them than have you send me accounts of what literary sour bellies write about me in their books. I’ve been criticized by experts including myself.

I think I’ve about finished a swell flicker piece. Did you read me in the current E
squire
about Orson Welles? Is it funny? Tell me. You haven’t answered a question for six letters. Better do so or I’ll dock five dollars next week to show you I’m the same old meany.

Honestly, Pie-crust, I’m tickled about the play. I hope to God your health is good.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. Enclosed 50c in stamps to buy the E
squire
with the Orson Welles piece.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

May 7, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

We write to each other without ever answering the other’s questions. For once I’ll answer one of yours. You asked me whether I thought that in the Arts it was greater to originate a new form or to perfect it. The best answer is the one that Picasso made rather bitterly to Gertrude Stein:

‘You do something first and then somebody else comes along and does it pretty.’

In the opinion of any real artist the inventor, which is to say Giotto or Leonardo, is infinitely superior to the finished Tintoretto, and the original D. H. Lawrence is infinitely greater than the Steinbecks.

Last thought about your review. You will be interviewed again and once more I ask you please do not discuss your mother or myself even faintly with them. You once made the astounding statement that you were immediately going to write our biographies. I’ll always agree with myself that I would never write anything about my own father and mother till they had been at least ten years dead, and since I am forty-three and may still have a lot to say for myself I think you’d be somewhat premature. I realize that you are now fully mature and would realize the unwisdom of talking about family affairs consciously - but sometimes these newspaper people twist things out of you.

My movie progresses and I think it’s going to be damn good. If your summer plans mature in any way keep me in the know. I send you a bonus of five dollars, not for any reason but simply because a letter without a check will probably seem to you half- filled. If you have no need for it just add it to your bank account.

Dearest love.

Mad Fitz (once the Scourge of the San Fernando) (Daddy)

5521
Amestoy
Avenue

Encino,
California

May 11,
1940

Dearest Scottina:

Unfortunately the stub of the money order was just the one of many that Frances happened to have misplaced (she has all the others). I’ve threatened her and great tears are oozing out of her eyes as she takes this dictation. However, even if it hadn’t been lost it would have been impossible to do much about a signed money order, especially from this end. I hope you went into the Vassar post office branches and identified yourself and put the clerks on watch. So don’t let it worry you. I lose ten dollars which is all in a day’s work and you lose the five which I was giving you as a bonus. A little later I’m going to ask you to send me a summary of your bills - not that I’ll be able to pay them all immediately but I’d like to know how you stand at the term’s end. Please try to address me c/o Phil Berg Agency, Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. That isn’t so hard to remember.

You confused me rather about your summer plans. If you were rooming with Mary Earle does that mean Cape Cod or does it mean at Vassar under Miss Hallie Flannigan? If it means Cape Cod I know some particularly interesting people up there - not at all the kind that are called ‘old friends’ whom you automatically are prejudiced against but some people who might open many rather camouflaged gates to you - some that your contemporaries don’t know about. I’m signing up for an apartment in the middle of Hollywood where there is a spare room for any wandering daughter, though if you come out here it should be for a reason as it is a dreary town for anyone with nothing to do.

I’m glad you didn’t start going to Princeton at sixteen or you’d be pretty jaded by this time. Yale is a good year ahead of Princeton in sophistication, though, it should be good for another year. Though I loved Princeton I often felt that it was a by-water, that its snobby institutions were easy to beat and to despise and unless I was a natural steeplechaser or a society groom I’d have to find my own private intellectual and emotional life. Given that premise it is a lovely quiet place, gentle and dignified, and it will let you alone. Of course, it is at its absolute worst in the fane Hall atmosphere you described. Sometime go down with a boy on one of those weekends when there’s almost nothing to do.

You’ve had a good year, haven’t you - the fruition of a great deal that went before. I’d love to see you and just talk a blue streak with you for about two days about plans if we could afford it financially which we can’t. But who can tell, maybe by late June or July we can. Please arrange to see your mother at the earliest possible time because I think those are going to be restless days for her. You don’t necessarily have to meet her in Montgomery. Perhaps you could meet somewhere else halfway. If there could be some arrangement where she wouldn’t be entirely left out and you wouldn’t be away with some boy at all hours.

Dearest love.

Daddy

5521
Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

May 18,1940

Dearest Scottie:

No word from you this week. I do want to hear all about your plans. Can you see your mother before you go to Baltimore? You say you want eight days. If you’re planning a sylvan idyll or doing anything rash like throwing away your honeymoon in advance - well, I can’t do anything about it except advise you that women from Aphrodite to Kitty Foyle have tried it impulsively and found that they threw away their lifetime with their honeymoon. I know it’s none of my business any more and I hope to God that I’m speaking out of turn. But you seemed so particularly fervent about it.

Isn’t it funny how different things are after only six months. For example, wasn’t your suggestion to the Miscellany board people about changing their paper rather like suggesting to the local church that it would be more fun if it were a burlesque house? And didn’t they take it about the same way, only more drily? I mean, you seem much wiser month by month and I don’t think you would have gone about it quite that way now. You would have made the paper first, posing as being in complete agreement and
then
throwing your bomb. Did you see in Time that the editor of the
Yale News
and nine other boys threw Bones this spring and aren’t you glad now that Vassar hasn’t a formal social system?....

1403
Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California
(new
address)