Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (608 page)

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GLENWAY WESCOTT

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 6, 1934

Dear Glenway Wescott (This seems to be the form with which authors insult each other) (this letter is friendly), About six years ago when I was doping out my novel Tender Is
the
Night, which will appear this spring, somebody told me about the departure of an American battleship from Villefranche with the attendant
poules,
etc. I built an episode of my book around it and spoke of it to several people. A year or so later a letter came from Ernest Hemingway telling me that you had used it for a background in a short story. His advice was that I should read it and thus avoid any duplication, but my instinct was to the contrary, and I waited until I had written my own scene before I read
Goodbye to Wisconsin.
There are, unavoidably, certain resemblances, but I think that I will let it stand. This letter is written to you exactly as I wrote one to Willa Cather before publication of
The Great Gatsby
in regard to a paragraph that strangely paralleled one of hers in
The Lost
Lady. I have a cruel hatred of plagiarism of one’s contemporaries, and would not want you to think I had taken to shoplifting.

What the hell did you do to Gertrude Stein that she went harsh on you? I am eagerly awaiting your next book.

With best wishes,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THOMAS WOLFE

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 2,
1934

Dear Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes:

Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter t which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome. It is hard to believe that it was in the summer of 1930 we went up the mountainside together - some of our experiences have become legendary to me and I am not sure even if they happened at all. One story (a lie or a truth) which I am in the habit of telling is how you put out the lights of Lake Geneva with a Gargantuan gestured so that I don’t know any more whether I was with you when it happened, or whether it ever happened at all!

I am so glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish. Again thanks for your generous appreciation.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes

TO JOHN JAMIESON

1307-Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland
April
7, 1934

Dear Mr Jamieson:

I thought Leighton’s article had a sort of fruity bitterness about it but I was not at the time in a position of answering it - and I was amused by the severe kidding that Ernest Hemingway gave it. I am absolutely sure that more sweat and blood went into the creation of, say, A
Farewell
to Arms than into
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel.
I agree with you that the latter is not heavily weighted, but to me it sounds less like a rough draft than like a small section of Proust.

I was interested also in your analysis of the influences upon my own books. I never read a French author, except the usual prep- school classics, until I was twenty, but Thackeray I had read over and over by the time I was sixteen, so as far as I am concerned you guessed right.

In any case let me thank you many times for your interest in
Gatsby
(by the way, the Modern Library is bringing it out again this spring) and your courtesy in sending me your observations. With very best wishes in hopes that we may meet in the near future.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN JAMIESON

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 15, 1934

Dear Mr Jamieson:

Thank you, immensely, for sending me your article. I agree with you entirely, as goes without saying, in your analysis of Gatsby. He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance. It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called ‘Absolution,’ in my book All
the Sad Young Men
was intended to be a picture of his early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery. Again, thanks! With very best wishes,

Yours,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO H. L. MENCKEN

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April
23, 1934

Dear Menck:

I am afraid that I am going to have to violate your favorite code of morals - the breaking of engagements - because I’ve got to go to New York about trying to capitalize on my novel in the movies.

Without wanting to add to your mass of accumulated correspondence just as you’ve cleared it away, I would like to say in regard to my book that there was a deliberate intention in every part of it except the first. The first part, the romantic introduction, was too long and too elaborated largely because of the fact that it had been written over a series of years with varying plans, but everything else in the book conformed to a
definite intention
and if I had to start to write it again tomorrow I would adopt the same plan, irrespective of the fact of whether I had in this case brought it off or not brought it off. That is what most of the critics fail to understand (outside of the fact that they fail to recognize and identify anything in the book): that the motif of the ‘dying fall’ was absolutely deliberate and did not come from any diminution of vitality but from a definite plan.

That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemingway and I worked out - probably from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger - and it has been the greatest ‘credo’ in my life ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known except insofar as I have my natural obligation to my family - to provide for them. I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud, if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose - and that is no sentimental yapping about being disinterested. It is simply that, having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

With terrific regrets that I probably won’t be back in time to hear your harrowing African adventures, and compare them with my own, and with best regards always to my favorite Venus, Sara, I am As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 10,
1934

Dear Mrs Luhan:

I was tremendously pleased and touched by your letter and by your communication to the
TribuneA
It always strikes me as very strange when I find new people in the world, because I always crystallize any immediate group in which I move as being an all- sufficient, all-inclusive cross-section of the world, at the time I know it (the group) - this all the more because a man with the mobility of the writing profession and a certain notoriety thinks that he has a good deal of choice as to whom he will know. That from the outer bleakness, where you were only a name to me, you should have felt a necessity of communicating an emotion felt about a stranger, gave me again the feeling that Conrad expresses as ‘the solidarity of innumerable human hearts,’ at times a pretty good feeling, and your letter came to me at one of those times. Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers,

who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention. In the case of this book your appreciation has given me more pleasure than any other, not excepting Gilbert Seldes who seemed to think that I had done completely what I started out to do and that it was worth doing.

With gratitude for that necessity in you which made you take the special trouble, the extra steps, which reassured me that even at the moment of popping out something new I was reaching someone by air mail - and with the added declaration that I want to see you, I am Yours most cordially,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My excuse for dictating this is a sprained arm.

TO GILBERT SELDES

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May
31, 1934

Dear Gilbert:

fust read the Lardner collection. At first I was disappointed because I had expected there would be enough stuff for an omnibus and I still feel that it could have stood more weight. However, looking over those syndicate articles I realize what you were up against - even many of those which you were compelled to use are rather definitely dated and I think you did the best you could with the material at hand.

Anyhow, I’ve had a further hunch on the matter which is this: the short one-act plays at the end do stand up but they would not play in any conventional sense because so much of the nonsense is embodied in the stage directions, but if they were done, as I believe one was, for the Authors League Fete or the Dutch Treat Club with Benchley and Stewart clowning the whole business, I believe they would play very well. Now doping along on the subject, it seems to me an evening of five nonsense plays would be monotonous no matter how funny they were, but just suppose, taking over the technique of the Grand Guignol, two of those plays were alternated with something macabre. When the Grand Guignol failed in New York it seems to me that I remember that all the plays were plays of horror and the minute the novelty wore off it closed up shop. If the fault of too much of a good thing were repeated this whole hunch might flop, but mightn’t some enterprising producer be interested in a thoroughly balanced program if we could get the material together? I don’t know whether there are any good horror one-acters in America but we might pick up a couple of the Grand Guignol hits very cheaply or get somebody to dredge something out of Edgar Allan Poe. What do you think of this idea? Do you think there’s any money in it? If we do it we ought to get started immediately. I am terribly tied up in work and also not being on the spot could not efficiently go into it. I hand you the suggestion for what it is worth and I wish you would let me know what you think of it. In any case I would be glad to aid in any advisory capacity.

My novel seems to go pretty well. I haven’t been able to make up my mind entirely how good it is because most of the reviewers have been so entirely cuckoo in their effect of saying in one line that the thing comes off entirely because it is technically so well done and others say it comes off in spite of all its technical faults. No two reviewers - and I am speaking only of the big shots - agree who was the leading character. Malcolm Cowley in
The New
Republic seems to be chiefly impressed by a man who only appears once in the whole picture - in any case my total impression is that a whole lot of people just skimmed through the book for the story and it simply cannot be read that way. In any case, your review and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s enthusiasm made it all worthwhile to me.

Love to Amanda and the children.

Ever yours, Scott

TO FRITZ CRISLER

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

June,
1934

Dear Fritz:

You write me again demanding advice concerning the coming season. I hasten to answer - again I insist that using a member of the Board of Trustees at left tackle to replace Charles (‘Asa’) Ceppi and Christian (‘Dean’) Eisenhart would be a mistake. My idea is a backfield composed of Kipke, Eddie Mahan, President Lowell, and anybody we can get for the left side - Pepper Einstein in the center - and then either bring back Light-Horse Harry Lee, or else you will fill in yourself for the last place. Or else shift Kadlic to center and fill in with some member of the 75-lb. team.

Failing that, it is, as you suggest in your round-robin, a question of using a member of the Board of Trustees. Then who? and where? There is ‘Hack’ Kalbaugh. There is the late President Witherspoon - but where is he? There is Harkness Hall, but we can’t get it unless we pay for the whole expressage at this
end!

The best suggestion is probably to put Rollo Rulon Roll-on at full, and return to the Houghton system.

Now Fritz, I realize that you and I and Tad know more about this thing than I do - nevertheless I want to make my suggestion: all the end men and backfield men and members of the Board of Trustees start off together - then they all reverse their fields, led by some of the most prominent professors and alumni - Albie Booth, Bob Lassiter, etc. - and almost before we know it we are up against the Yale goal - let me see, where was I? I meant the Lehigh goal - anyhow some goal, perhaps our own. Anyhow the main thing is that the C.W.A. is either dead, or else just beginning, and to use again that variation of the ‘Mexican’ shift, that I suggested last year will be just disastrous. Why? Even I can follow it! Martineau comes out of the huddle - or topples back into it - he passes to some member of past years’ teams - (who won’t be named here because of the eligibility rules) and then - well, from there on we go on to practically anything. But not this year, Fritz Crisler, if you take my advice!