Posterity (13 page)

What happened to the job you were to get in Texas? Or was that just a phony tale?

I don't like to pan you but it is a big disappointment that after all the talk a year ago you have done so little to make yourself independent.

My health has been extremely poor during the past winter. It was the lowest I've felt since I was laid up in '37. The fact that the weather has been lousy, with record rains, had something to do with it. And, natually, like everyone else with any sense or imagination, I'm worried as hell about the future—which doesn't help any.

Carlotta joins me in love to you and please give our love to Oona. I owe her a letter and will write before long.

As ever,
Father

“Work you know is your work, which belongs to you!”

April the 28th 1941

Dear Eugene,

I am delighted to learn about the promotion. My sincerest congratulations! It is a deep pleasure and pride and satisfaction to know you are progressing steadily and that your fine work is appreciated. Work you know is your work, which belongs to you! That's the best thing about it. It seems to me I so rarely meet anyone who
knows
that the work he does
is
his work, a part of him, and not an extraneous support for his living. Even with people who are extremely successful, I feel this. Their work is an exterior job, not an inner necessity. They may possess a pleasant affection for it but no love and pain. I feel you love yours—in its deeper aspects, I mean, the devotion to knowledge and culture.

I hope you will be able to come out here this summer. There are a lot of things I'd like to say—and hear. I'm a louse not to have written you in so long. I meant particularly to tell you ages ago how deeply moved I was by the letter you wrote way back around my last birthday. “Deeply moved,” is right, not merely words! It was a grand letter to get from a son. I kept waiting for a mood in which I could answer as it should be answered, but the mood continued consistently indigo all winter. Poor health plus world crisis pessimism—but mostly poor health—the lowest prolonged period since my crack-up in '37. The weather was no help. For three months or more it rained four out of every five days, or more, and the flu epidemic closed the schools, etc.

This health business wouldn't bother me so much if it did not affect work. I've been able to get little done since last December except a lot of notes and outlines. However, the stride seems to be coming back now, with sun and warmth. And my work is one of the few things I don't feel depressed over. In the past two years I've written two plays I'm really enthusiastic about:
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day's Journey into Night
. They will rank among the finest things I've ever done, I know. But they—particularly the second—are emphatically not plays I want produced or published at this crisis-preoccupied time. They could not be understood. Not their real meaning or truth.
The Iceman Cometh
might be a big success, if done well, but it would be for its least significant merits and its finest values would be lost, or dismissed because the present psychology would not want to face them. Moreover, conditions in the New York theater are a mess, from all I hear, and due to grow increasingly worse. My health isn't up to bucking the strain of that kind of battle, even if there were no other reasons for remaining unproduced. So I'm staying partly aloof, and ignoring all Theater Guild persuasions.

In addition to the two plays, the Cycle, although on the shelf, is still very much alive. I constantly make notes of fresh angles I get on individual plays, or on the nine as a whole, and these will be a big help when I return to it. I've also written detached outlines for four new plays outside the Cycle (one, a comedy) which look damned good to me. So you see, crisis or no crisis, I don't feel blocked at all in my work, no matter what my intuitions are about its lack of timeliness! Bum health is my only real block—the periods when there just isn't the vitality for the grind of intensive day after day labor. When you live through the play you write, you have to have a lot of reserve life on tap.

I enclose a check for your birthday. Again, much paternal pride and congratulations! And love to you and Sally.

As ever,
Father

F
.
S
COTT
F
ITZGERALD TO
F
RANCES
S
COTT
“S
COTTIE
” F
ITZGERALD

“Nobody ever became a writer
just by wanting to be one.”

At forty years old, drunk and defeated over the financial failure of
Tender Is the Night
, F. Scott Fitzgerald felt his life as a novelist was over. He retreated to North Carolina, lived in various hotels near the sanatorium where Zelda, his wife, was institutionalized for schizophrenia, and wrote a series of essays for
Esquire
about his failure and “emotional bankruptcy.” Echoing the title of his
Esquire
essays, the years 1936 and 1937 became known as “The Crack-Up.”

In September 1936, with a broken shoulder from a diving accident, Fitzgerald was emotionally devastated further by an article in the
New York Post
. The front-page headline read: “The Other Side of Paradise Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair, Broken in Health He Spends His Birthday Regretting That He Has Lost Faith in His Star.”

Here he writes to his nearly fifteen-year-old daughter, who had just begun at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut.

Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936

Dearest Scottina:

I had already decided to go up Thanksgiving which I will do, God willing, and so on your own suggestion I have killed the idea of going up on your birthday. You seem to understand the fact that I cannot afford at the moment to make two trips within the same month; so I know you won't be unduly disappointed.

To finish up news of me, the arm is really definitely out of danger and I am going to be able to use it again, which I doubted for three or four weeks. Went out to football game with the Flynns last Saturday, the same sort of game exactly that we went to last fall at very much the same time. Lefty was his usual handsome self and Nora was charming as always. They asked about you repeatedly, and not because they thought they ought to but because they have a real affection for you, and I mean both of them. They were so happy to know that you are getting along so well at your school.

Confirming my Christmas plans, they are, briefly: that we shall have a party for you in Baltimore at the Belvedere or the Stafford, if we can afford it! Then the actual Christmas day will be spent either here with your mother (it won't be like that awful Christmas in Switzerland), or else you and your mother and the trained nurse will go to Montgomery and spend Christmas with your grandmother; perhaps with a little time afterwards in Baltimore before you go back to school.

Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only
style
that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Why are you whining about such matters as study hall, etc. when you deliberately picked this school as the place you wanted to go above all places? Of course it is hard. Nothing any good isn't hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.

Scott

L
AURA
I
NGALLS
W
ILDER TO
R
OSE
W
ILDER
L
ANE

“To think that I could have forgotten all this which comes back to me now. That's why the sooner
I write my stuff the better.”

In 1932, Missouri farm wife Laura Ingalls Wilder had her first book published. She was sixty-five years old. Her Ma, Pa, and sister Mary were all gone, younger sisters Carrie and Grace lived far away and she was afraid the story of her family and the world of her childhood would be lost forever. She wrote, too, hoping her work “might sell a good deal more than farm stuff” as she and her husband, Almanzo “Manly” Wilder, weren't quite making it at Rocky Ridge Farm with their chickens and fruit alone.

Her books, eight in all, did sell—and they keep selling, some thirty million copies in twenty-six languages—and through her work Wilder gives us, perhaps better than any other, a sense of what it was like to have been an American pioneer girl. She crossed the prairie by covered wagon. She lived in Indian Territory, a dugout hut, a frontier hotel, and a log cabin. She knew what it was like to make her own clothes, to build a house, to survive a long winter in near-starving conditions and to celebrate with almost nothing. And she knew what it meant to move on to new land and new horizons.

It is hard to know whether Wilder's books would have come to pass without the help of her only surviving child, Rose Wilder Lane. It was she who first encouraged her mother, back on the farm in Missouri, to write, and it was she who diligently served as her mother's agent, editor, and teacher. The correspondence between mother and daughter reveals just how involved Rose was with the books—with story line, rhythm, point of view, and character development—and how much she supported her mother in her work. Here, on the eve of the publication of
On the Banks of Plum Creek,
with the work on
By the Shores of Silver Lake
under way, nearly seventy-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder writes to fifty-year-old Rose.

Feb 5, 1937

Rose Dearest,

I am going to write you a day by day letter. There is'nt enough in my head to make a letter but every little bit, I think of something I want to say to you. The letter will be like the dictionary “fine reading, but the subject changes too often.”

Looking through my desk yesterday, I found a book Ma made of writing paper. When I put it there I couldn't bear to read it, but I am having to live over those days with Pa and Ma anyway, so I did.

Ma had written some of her own poetry in it and copied some that she liked.

And Pa had written two songs.

“The Blue Jaece Juniata” and “Mary of the Wild Moor.” Any time you want them, I'll send you copies.

He signed the songs and the date is 1860.

The whole songs are there. Blue Juniata is not much like the printed one we had when I used it, but is as I remember hearing it. So is the other but I have never seen or heard it anywhere else. “Oh father, dear father, come down and open the door. But the watch dogs did howl and the village bells tolled and the winds blew across the wild moor”

I am going to write to Grace about the wild flowers there and refresh our memories I'll be able, I think, to sort out the later imported ones from the old timers. I'll send them to you when I get them.

Bruce was over yesterday. Drove over after his day's work was done, to see if we were all right and if we needed anything.

Only stayed a minute for he had to hurry back to do his chores.

He asked if we knew Al was here. Said he hadn't seen him, but Mrs B. saw him go up to the house. She thought she was sure it was Al. I have not heard anything from him and sort of hate to phone anyone and ask. I'd have to ask Hoovers.

Just wondered how come if true.

You remember the old saying that “A man who wont steal from the R. R. Co aint honest.”

I am at present working on the R. R.

And here is something, I can't use in a child's story, but you could use it if you have a place for it.

On Uncle Hi's first contract he lost money. He had tried to his best to make a profit, been careful of expense, worked three of his own teams for which he could draw no pay. In the settlement the R.R. cheated him in measuring the yards of dirt moved. Their surveyors measured the finished grade and did the figuring. All goods for the camp, in the store, feed for the horses tools etc. were furnished by the R.R. but charged to the contractor. The Co. over-charged Uncle Hi on those.

He was broke and more, but the Co was good and kind and would give him another contract. I remember hearing him say, the only way to make anything was to go behind on a contract. The farther behind a man went, the more he would make.

So he took another contract. He worked his own teams but under other men's names so he could draw pay for them. The R.R. paid the men and charged the wages to the contractor. Uncle Hi kept a team hauling oats out of the feed store away somewhere and selling them. They took them away at night. Contractors had the right to take goods out of their stores but one had to be a little careful. The family took more than they could use of dry groceries and dry goods. When camp broke up, Aunt Docia took the three teams, she drove one, Lena drove one and Gene drove the other. The wagons were loaded with goods and tools. They went before the camp broke and Uncle Hi stayed for the settlement. He was a way behind on the contract, but his pockets were full of money.