Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (607 page)

‘Yeah’

‘Now’

‘Gimme de meat’

and you need at least one good
bark
(we all need one good bark) such as:

‘I’ll knock your back teeth down your throat!’

So forget all that has hitherto attracted you in our complicated system of grunts and go back to those fundamental ones that have stood the test of time.

With warm regards to you all,

Scott Fitz —

TO RICHARD KNIGHT

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

September 29, 1932

Dear Dick:

That was swell praise you gave Zelda and needless to say delighted her and set her up enormously. She revised the book so much that she lost contact with it and yours is the first word that gives it public existence. My own opinions on it were as disjointed as hers.

I’m sorry I used the word fairy and that you found it offensive. I have never in my wildest imaginings supposed you were a fairy, and I admit that under similar circumstances I would be inclined probably to bristle if the word were thrown around by someone whose attitude toward me was not unchallangeable. It is a lousy word to anyone not a member of the species. I offer you my sincere apologies and put it down to the fact that I was half asleep when you came and subsequently a little tight.

However, there must have been some desire to wound in using such a word, however trivially. You annoyed me - specifically by insisting on a world which we will willingly let die, in which Zelda can’t live, which damn near ruined us both, which neither you nor any of our more gifted friends are yet sure of surviving; you insisted on its value, as if you were in some way holding a battlefront, and challenged us to join you. If you could have seen Zelda, as the most typical end-product of that battle, during any day from the spring of ‘31 to the spring of ‘32 you would have felt about as much enthusiasm for the battle as a doctor at the end of a day in a dressing station behind a blood battle.

So for the offensive and inapplicable phrase read neurotic, and take it or leave it, whatever the bulk concerned. We have a good way of living, basically, for us; we got through a lot and have some way to go; our united front is less a romance than a categorical imperative and when you criticize it in terms of a bum world, no matter how big you face it, it is annoying to me, and seems to negate on purpose both past effort and future hope and I reserve the right to be annoyed.

Of course I like you, as who wouldn’t, and appreciate your lavish generosity with yourself, and much more about you than I can express in a letter.I feel that any unpleasantness between us has all been on the basis of liking Zelda, and the sincerity of your feeling toward her shouldn’t offend anybody except the most stupid and churlish of husbands. In another year, Deus volens, she will be well. For the moment she must live in a state of Teutonic morality, far from the exploits of the ego on its own. In other words, when you city fellows come down you can’t put ideas in the heads of our farm girls, without expecting resistance.

I lay myself open to your discovery of my most blatant hypocrisies. God knows that the correctness of our life preys on such a one as old Fitzgerald, but there we are, or rather here we are. With all good wishes,

Your most obedient servant,

Scott

TO MALCOLM COWLEY

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson,
Maryland

June 1,
1933

Dear Malcolm:

It was good to hear from you and we certainly enjoyed your brief visit. Dos is cured and has left to bask in the sun at Antibes and I certainly do envy him. I am working like hell.

As to using a part of my article in your book, go ahead, but I am using certain parts of it myself in my new book, in particular, parts about Antibes, so I will ask you to say, as it were, ‘Fitzgerald says’ instead of ‘Fitzgerald says in an article on the fazz Age’ because I do not want to call attention to the fact that I piece shorter things into long things though I suppose we all do. Would you mind arranging this?

Hope you manage to come back this way and let us know in advance.

Sincerely,

Scott

TO CHARLES W. DONAHOE

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge
Towson,
Maryland

June
26, 1933

Dear Sap:

The rush from the house t included not only the butler, the second butler, the two footmen, the first and second trained nurse, my mother, aunt, three first cousins, my four children, my secretary, who is very fat and weighs 250 pounds, the illegitimate children, J. P. Morgan and myself but ten other members of my household who may perhaps not be known to you by name. I extinguished the fire myself by an act of tremendous valor. Among the objects of art saved were ‘The Last Supper,’ the bat with which Babe Ruth batted his first home run, and the baby spoon with which you presented Scottie at her birth. (Let me take this occasion to congratulate you on what the West Coast does to growing boys. I cannot see Mrs Sap’s face in the picture but gather all goes beautifully.)

Seriously, the fire was greatly overexaggerated - so was the implication that old Fitzgerald was keeping up an elaborate household. We are struggling along like everybody else though I must confess with a pretty good break so far.

It was a coincidence that I heard from all my Princeton friends of which there are about a dozen - of which you, my dear sir, happen to be the most cherished - have turned up lately without even going to a reunion. From our class I heard from Non, two letters from Henry, one from you, none from Paul Dickey; in 1918 the record is not good on second thought; in 1919 however I crossed with Dave Bruce a year ago and Tom Lineaweaver turned up here in Baltimore and we spent two good days together.

Insofar as upperclassmen are concerned I saw a rather depressed nint at the Yale game and leave out — , a professional fairy. Even Dean Clarke, Bob Clarke’s brother (class of ‘27), has been here in Baltimore this winter which is like seeing Bob again.

All this list of names is put in for what provocative powers may be on you, and with a further wish that it may suggest to you the personality of your old friend from reading off a list of the people with whom he had dealings.

For yourself, your family and all that are dear to you I tender the old bunk and can’t tell you what a kick I got out of your note.

Scott

TO JOHN O’HARA

La Paix,
Rodgers’ Forge Towson,
Maryland

July 1
8, 1933

Dear O’Hara:

I am especially grateful for your letter. I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding’ (modern form ‘inhibitions’). So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. So if I were elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalene to Guards, with an embryonic history which tied me to the Plantagenets, I would still be a parvenu. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.

I suppose this is just a confession of being a Gael though I have known many Irish who have not been afflicted by this intense social self-consciousness. If you are interested in colleges, a typical gesture on my part would have been, for being at Princeton and belonging to one of its snootiest clubs, I would be capable of going to Podunk on a visit and being absolutely booed and overawed by its social system, not from timidity but simply because of an inner necessity of starting my life and my self-justification over again at scratch in whatever new environment I may be thrown.

The only excuse for that burst of egotism is that you asked for it. I am sorry things are breaking —

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

La Paix,
Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

August 8, 1933

Dear Andrew:

Nobody
naturally
likes a mind quicker than their own and one more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s
minds has been the concealing of them,
until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use. Your mother told me that you had written a couple of somber letters home and I am both amused and disgusted. In trouble such as yours (of the reality of which I am by no means convinced) the proper tradition is that the mouth is kept shut, the eyes are lowered; the personality tries to say to itself: ‘I will adjust and adapt, I can beat anything offered to me; therefore I can beat change.’ Anything short of that would be dishonor to the past and to whatever you believe in.

The mouth tight, and the teeth and lips together are a hard thing, perhaps one of the hardest stunts in the world, but not a waste of time, because most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence. Remember to think straight: the crowd at camp is probably right
socially
and you are probably wrong. I’ll tell you a fact to corroborate that: I almost gave up the lease on this house for the simple fact that you persistently clung to the idea that beating down females was a method of establishing superiority over them.

Andrew, this will sound like kicking somebody when he’s down, and you wouldn’t expect that from a man who pretends to be your friend-; nevertheless, we have spent too many hours together for you to doubt that my friendship for you is founded on a mutual understanding that nothing could break - outside of a disagreement in principle. So I presume to suggest: would you examine your conscience and see if you have violated such primary laws as have been laid down for you? Where you haven’t - well, to hell with what other people think - better to fight your way out. The only thing that I ever told you definitely was that popularity is not worth a damn and respect is worth everything, and what do you care about happiness - and who does except the perpetual children of this world?

Always your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Postscript: Am sending you a book.

Postscript (2) The poor boys called on me again. I tried to discourage them by making them work but I
think they liked itl
Postscript (3) Don’t leave this letter around - I’m sure you will get what I’m shooting at but it would defeat its own purpose if your contemporaries happened on it Postscript (4) Why, if your professed affection for your family is so strong, should you have disturbed your mother enough so that she should have brought up your gloom in conversation to me? Are you a Willie boy after all?

Postscript (5) This letter expects an answer.

TO JOHN LARDNER

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

September 20,
1933

Dear John:

I was sorry not seeing you in Paris but your residence there coincided with illness in Switzerland. The whole point of calling you up was an idea that I have had for some time, which won’t be less good for being old, that those articles that your father wrote could be strung into a very interesting story. Nevertheless, someone would have to work over it. Who to turn to! Much better a contemporary; consequently I have examined the possibilities. I can’t do it myself because I am engrossed in work of my own, and it seems to me the next best person would be Gilbert Seldes; consequently I called Gilbert Seldes and he said he would like to do the work. I suggested to him a ten per-cent cut of whatever it nets; even if he asks more I think it would be worth your while because he is a crack editor and I would let stand whatever terms he suggests.

This is a rather difficult situation because, as I said on the phone, your father is the worst editor of his own stuff who ever turned up in a big way of the writing line, with the possible exception of Theodore Dreiser. And your mother is not especially interested in writing as such, and so I will have to turn it over to you, but I would like to turn it over as a complete idea so that you could do it or destroy it as seems fitting to you. Will you let Gilbert Seldes decide? Pass over all the material to him that you get from Wheeler, not in sections, but collect it first yourself even if it takes about a month altogether. Gilbert is one of the very first journalists in America and if anyone can make an interesting and consecutive narrative of it he can do it, and, to repeat, he is interested in the idea. When a few is interested he has the strong sense of the track that we other races don’t even know the sprinting time of. His task is not merely an editorial one, according to my original conception, but will also include getting the stuff in order so it will tell a whole story (as much as Ring wanted to tell) of a certain period in his life. As his happens to be one of the most interesting temperaments of all the Americans of our time somebody is sure to be interested in publishing it, probably Scrib- ners; but there I want to butt into the situation and get it done right. The Autobiography
of
Ring W.
Lardner
was merely a long short story, all full of personal anecdotes that could only have been of interest to Ring and his friends. That’s what I mean by the fact that he has been a poor editor of his own stuff, and probably his sickness has not improved him in that regard, so while you must naturally tell him the idea is in progress it is much wiser for you and me to keep it in our hands. Or rather I hereby hand it over to you, with the opinion that you get from Seldes, and I would like to be called in as the doctor at the last moment when something tangible has been accomplished.

With regards to (Scarface) (Half-Wit) (Red Nose) (Pure Insult) Lardner: please give all of them my very best regards and to yourself with reiterated regrets that we didn’t meet in Paris.