Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (557 page)

My address is simply Endno, California.

Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion.

Love,

Daddy

5521
Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

Winter
, 1939

Dearest Scottie:

I know you looked first at the check, but it does
not
represent a business transaction. I am too tired at the moment to argue but your figures are wrong. However, I’m having it all checked up by my secretary. I think there is a gift somewhere.

Sorry you got the impression that I’m quitting the movies - they are always there - I’m doing a two-weeks rewrite for Paramount at the moment, after finishing a short story. But I’m convinced that maybe they’re not going to make me Czar of the Industry right away, as I thought 10 months ago. It’s all right, baby - life has humbled me - Czar or not, we’ll survive. I am even willing to compromise for Assistant Czar!

Seriously, I expect to dip in and out of the pictures for the rest of my natural life, but it is not very soul-satisfying because it is a business of telling stories fit for children and this is only interesting up to a point. It is the greatest of all human mediums of communication and it is a pity that the censorship had to come along and do this, but there we are.
Only
- I will never again sign a contract which binds me to tell none other than children’s stories for a year and a half!

Anyhow, I’m on the new Madeleine Carroll picture (go to see
Café Society -
it’s pretty damn good, I think. This one is the same producer-director-stars combination) and anyhow the movies are a dull life and one hopes one will be able to transcend it.

You’ve let me down about the reading. I’m sorry you did because I’ll have to bargain with you. Read Moll
Flanders,
for any favors asked. I mean this: skip
Tono Bungay
but if you don’t care enough about my advice to do some fractional exploring in literature instead of skimming
Life
and
The New Yorker,
I’m going to get into one of those unsympathetic moods - if I’m not sorry for people’s efforts there seems to be an icy and inhuman reaction. So please report on Moll
Flanders
immediately... meanwhile airmail me another travel folder on Mrs Draper and her girls. Who is she and they? And who is Moll Flanders?

I hope you enjoy the Princeton prom - please don’t be overwhelmingly - but no, I am done with prophecies - make your own mistakes. Let me only say ‘Please don’t be overwhelmingly anything!’ and, if you are, don’t give my name as the responsible parent! (And by the way never give out any interview to any newspaperman, formal or informal - this is a most definite and most advised plea. My name and you, bearing parts of it, is (are) still news in some quarters - and my current policy, for reasons too numerous to explain, is
silence.
Please do me this courtesy!)

I should like to meet you somewhere early in April - the third or fourth.

Your mother is in Florida - it seems to have been delayed.

Of course I’m glad and it warms me all over to know that even ungrammatically ‘both your French English and history teachers’ etc. Though you are pretty completely hatched and I can be little more than your most dependable friend, your actions still have a most decided effect on me and at long range I can only observe you thru the eyes of Vassar. I have been amazed that you do not grasp a certain advantage that is within your hand - as definite as the two-headed Russian eagle - a girl who didn’t
have
to have an education because she had the other women’s gifts by accident - — and who
took one
anyhow. Like Tommy Hitchcock who came back from England in 1919 already a newspaper hero in his escapes from Germany and the greatest polo player in the world - — and went up to Harvard in the same year to become
a freshman
- because he had the humility to ask himself ‘Do I know anything?’ That combination is what forever will put him in my pantheon of heroes.

Go thou and do likewise.

Love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

Winter, 1939

Dearest Pie:

Day of rest! After a wild all-night working on Gone with
the Wind
and more to come tomorrow. I read it - I mean really read it - it is a good novel - not very original, in fact leaning heavily on
The Old Wives’ Tale, Vanity Fair,
and all that has been written on the Civil War. There are no new characters, new technique, new observations - none of the elements that make literature - especially no new examination into human emotions. But on the other hand it is interesting, surprisingly honest, consistent and workmanlike throughout, and I felt no contempt for it but only a certain pity for those who considered it the supreme achievement of the human mind. So much for that -I may be on it two weeks - or two months. I disagreed with everybody about how to do
Madame Curie
and they’re trying it another way.

Your cold stirred certain gloomy reflections in me. Like me, you were subject to colds when young, deep chest colds near to pneumonia. I didn’t begin to be a heavy smoker until I was a sophomore but it took just one year to send me into tuberculosis and cast a shadow that has been extremely long. I wish there was something that would make you cut it out - the only pay-off is that if you’re run down by June to spend a summer in the open air, which is a pity with so much to do and learn. I don’t want to bury you in your debut dress.

My own plans are uncertain. I am pretty disgusted with pictures after all that censorship trouble and want to break off for a while when I have another good credit (I won’t get one on
The
Women) - but
when,
I don’t know.

Haven’t read De
Monorchia.
Read several pieces by Cornelia Skinner and found them thin and unamusing. Since you’ve undertaken the
Dorian Gray
I hope you make a success of it but I hope the professor knows what you’re doing. She might not consider the rearrangement of someone else’s words a literary composition, which would leave you out on a limb. Are you taking swimming?

Dearest love,

Daddy

P S. Of course I do not care if you postpone ‘Cynara,’ etc., though it’s such a detail, and you must be in the library every day. Your college work comes first - but I can’t help wondering how, if time is reduced to such miniscules, you would ever have thought of trying out for a play. That of course is entirely out at present - last year should have taught you
that
lesson.

5521
Amestoy
Avenue

Encino,

California
March
11, 1939

Dear Scottie:

Thanks for your long letter about your course of subjects.

Generally, I think that your election of French as a major is a wise decision. I imagine that there will be some competition for the Sorbonne but it might be something to aim at. Also, if you want to take one English course I think you have chosen wisely. Once again I concur about the History of Music if it pleases you. But I wish you would thoroughly reconsider the chemistry question. It is an extremely laborious subject - it requires the most meticulous care and accuracy during long laboratory hours. Moreover, unless your mathematics are at your fingertips - and you were never very good at mathematics - you will be continually redoing experiments because of one small slip, and I just can’t see it fitting in with hours of music practice and some regular exercise.

One suggestion is to take
preliminary
physics. I don’t know whether, if you have already offered that as an entrance, they would allow it, but they might and it would be a fairly easy running over of it as a very essential and interesting subject. I do not mean that I advise a second-year physics course because that would run into as much mathematics as chemistry. But if, God help us, they insist on a science I should advise you to consider them in the following order: botany, physiology, or child study. Think of the enormous pleasure amounting, almost, to the consolation for the tragedy of life that flowers have been to your mother and your grandmother. Maybe you could be a landscape architect like LeNotre but the personal element is equally important. I felt all my life the absence of hobbies except such, for me as abstract and academic ones, as military tactics and football. Botany is such a definite thing. It has its feet on the ground. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

I am sorry about the philosophy. I should think that if anything your test questions will deal with the big key figures, and a certain concentration of work upon Plato, Aquinas, and Descartes would pay more dividends than trying to study over entirely the course from the beginning. Please don’t give it up as a bad job. Are you sure that you entirely understand the great usages thru the ages of such terms as
nominalists
and
realists
? I want you to keep your interest at least as far as Hegel from whose stem all Marxian thinking flows; certainly you will agree that Marxism does not concern itself with vague sophistries but weds itself to the most practical mechanics of material revolution.

I should suggest that you go to SeaIsland with the party and return by yourself, passing at least a full day with your mother in Asheville, and a day, if you like, in Baltimore; that is, I think the Finneys would be a little offended if you did not pay at least a courtesy visit. I shall try my best to be East by the second, and at least cross your path - perhaps in Asheville - but I have let myself be inveigled into another picture and it may possibly run on to the tenth of April; on the other hand it may blow up tomorrow. (It is the new Carroll-MacMurray picture.)

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. Can you give me some sort of budget for your trip to SeaIsland? 2nd P.S. You are not entirely right about the translations (poetry, of course, cannot be translated, but even there we have exceptions such as
The
Rubaiyat). Constance Garnett’s Russian translations are excellent, while Scott-Moncrieff’s
Proust
is a masterpiece in itself. And please do not leave good books half- finished, you spoil them for yourself. You shouldn’t have started War
and Peace,
which is a man’s book and may interest you later. But you should finish both the Defoe and the Samuel Butler. Don’t be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!

5521
Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

March,
1939

Dearest Scottie:

I was incredibly happy when I heard that the cloud had lifted. Don’t let it come down again! I was so happy when it lifted for me at Princeton and let me in for everything I’d wanted that I forgot. And the second time I never did manage to get out of a scholastic mess all the time I was in college. If you don’t get too happy this spring, don’t lose the ground you’ve gained - it’s going to be all right.

Congratulations -I know what it means to you, something you did for and by yourself. A sort of justification. The only excuse for the damper up above is that we have to continue to justify ourselves each week of our lives and it would seem there would be rest sometimes. Did you ever read Christina Rossetti’s

‘And does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes - to the very end -’

I want you to get Peaches a present - rather a useful one. This seems somewhat lavish but this is a world of give and take. I am allowing you twenty-five dollars for it. As it is a lavish gesture it should be a simple present - something she should find practical and useful - on the other angle from a ring-watch. Something that if you hadn’t bought it, Pete would have had to buy it. You know her well enough to give her familiar things. Ponder this carefully - if you buy her a ‘bauble’ the idea will defeat its purpose.

Also take your mother something for $15. So I’m sending:

6 days at SeaIsland at $13.00 —  $78.00

2 presents —         $40.00

Railroad fare —           $100.00

Clothes                                             $50.00

Expenses —           $310.00 $50.00

$310.00
(sic)

And to cover the airplane I’m making it $350.00. You have no leeway on your incidentals. I know the instinct to delight everybody with a big tip but in the end we too generous people die of heart trouble, trying to make it good, and have rewarded the wrong people, so be a little penurious and calculating with your small change.

I’m just as glad Cottage lost out. They’ve been dominant for five years - it’s time it should be someone else. The only healthy thing about the God-awful system is that no one of the four is triumphant for long. In my time it was Tiger Inn - since then they’ve all taken turns. Did you run into a man named Ralph Wyer at the prom? He’s a Minnesotan and seems to me an altogether admirable fellow. I saw him lose a tooth with great grace at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival in the hockey game.

Your comment on the satirical quality in English fiction is very apt. If you want a counter-irritant read
Bleak House
(Dickens’ best book) - or if you want to explore the emotional world - not now, but in a few more years - read Dostoevski’s Brothers
Karamazov.
And you’ll see what the novel can do. Glad you like Butler - I liked the place where Ernest’s father ‘turned away to conceal his lack of emotion.’ My God - what precision of hatred is in those lines. I’d like to be able to destroy my few detestations — , for example - with such marksmanship as that.

Again thanks for wiring me. I must love you a lot for you have quite a power to lift me up and cast me down.

Jove, (Sometimes known as Jupiter or ‘Papa Angelicus’)

5521 Ames toy Avenue

Encino, California