Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (602 page)

In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod - always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults - rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

Before we meet again I hope you will have tasted strong liquor to excess and kissed many emotional young men in red and yellow moonlights - these things being chasteners of those prejudices which are as gutta
percha
to the niblicks of the century.

I am frightfully unhappy, look like the devil, will be famous within one 12-month and, I hope, dead within 2, Hoping you are the same, I am With excruciating respect,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. If you wish, you may auction off this letter to the gurls of your collidge - on condition that the proceeds go to the Society for the Drownding of Armenian Airedales.

Bla!

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

The
Allerton
East 39th Street
New
York
City

February, 1920

Dear Ruth:

I should have written you many moons ago to congratulate you but life sort of picked me up and whirled me along beginning last June and it’s only recently that I’m on my feet - so I’m hoping you’ll forgive me and sending you a belated wedding present. I have a vague memory of writing you a wild letter when my world collapsed last June -I wonder if you ever got it.

I seem, at present, to be a fairly well established author, with six stories appearing in
The Saturday
Evening
Post
beginning with the issue of February 21st, stories regularly in
Smart
Set and some in Scribner’s, and a novel coining out in April, published by Scribners. I’m probably going to get married in March - the same girl, of course - but we haven’t any idea where we’re going to live. I am immeasurably older, Ruth; I rather want to talk to you sometime - maybe we’ll be able to have an eventual bicker while our respective husband and wife chatter of the weather in the corner.

I told you an astounding thing last April -I shouldn’t have told you but at the time I simply had to tell someone. Life is so damn odd I Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitz —

P.S. Is that your right name - ‘Curt’ - or is it ‘Curtis?’ Or maybe it’s Kirt, Kurt or Kirk.

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

University Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey

March 26,1920

Dear Ruth:

I certainly was glad to get your letter because you are a good egg, Ruth, and Sam Kauffman who is at my elbow agrees with me. You may laugh when I tell you I am getting married April Fools’ Day but as a matter of fact I think I am. I have no idea where we’ll live - we’re going to the Biltmore for a week or so but my pocketbook wouldn’t stand that long, so we may take a cottage at Rye or somewhere like that. My book came out today and of course I’m frightfully excited. I am quite jubilant because I sold the movie rights of my first Post story, ‘Head and Shoulders’ for $2500 to the Metro people. Doesn’t that sound good? It was in the February 21st issue and was much better than the one last week.

Next time you’re in New York I want you to meet Zelda because she’s very beautiful and very wise and very brave as you can imagine - but she’s a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we’ll be will be hard to imagine. My address for the next ten years will probably be c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons and be sure and let me know next time you come or sometime and we can have luncheon or dinner or some darn thing - (You can see from this how out of my depths, I am.)

Well, Ruth, read my book.

As ever,

Scott Fitz —

TO THE BOOKSELLERS’ CONVENTION-

The Biltmore Hotel

New York City

Early April, 1920

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

I don’t want to talk about myself because I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book. In fact to write it, it took three months; to conceive it - three minutes; to collect the data in it - all my life. The idea of writing it came on the first of last July; it was a substitute form of dissipation.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

So, gentlemen, consider all the cocktails mentioned in this book drunk by me as a toast to the Bookseller’s Convention.

Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Commodore Hotel New York City

May, 1920

Dear Bug:

Well, you may go to Princeton but we never will again. We were there three days, Zelda and five men in Harvey Firestone’s car, and not one of us drew a sober breath, fust ask anybody about it when you go down there - ask your friend Ollie Rogers - he was on the party. It was the damnedest party ever held in Princeton and everybody in the University will agree.

We are going around in a circle but at last seem to have a plan. We have purchased an ancient Marmon - not very ancient, 1917 - and we’re going to tour north to Lake Champlain and see if we can get a cottage there for the summer. We didn’t like Rye at all and we can’t live in Princeton after our celebration.

So you are going to see Bet. My Gawd! I can imagine anyone married but not she.

I’m glad you and Jim are going to have another chance to cause each other’s doom and I certainly hope that if you decide you do want him you won’t change your mind again. I’m still mad about marriage - if we could only find a place to live.

Zelda sends her best and says to come back to New York and help her buy some more clothes.

Best to Bet and Heine.

Love, F.Scott F —

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

c/o Mrs
Wakeman Westport, Connecticut

May 14,
1920

Dear Ruth:

In acute agony and despair we at last forcibly left the Commodore, bought a car, threw our bags in the back seat and set out. We discovered the alarming fact our first day on the road from the people we had lunch with that t
here’s no swimming in Lake Champlain because
it’s
too cold.
That was the shock of our lives, Ruth, because if Zelda can’t swim she’s miserable. I feel I’m a terrible piker to have put you to all that trouble but honestly it never occurred to me that there was no swimming there. We turned down a slick cottage on the coast of Maine last month for that very reason.

So we bore East, arrived here at nine o’clock this morning and immediately found the slickest little cottage on the Sound. We signed the lease on it at noon. There’s a beach here and loads of seclusion and just about what we’re looking for. We’d just about given up hope so now we’re in the most jovial mood imaginable.

Thank Curt for me, Ruth, and tell him I’m mighty indebted and awfully sorry we were so stupid in our geography. He wrote that you weren’t well. I hope you’re lots better now.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN GRIER HIBBEN

Wakeman’s
Westport,
Connecticut

June
3, 1920

My dear President Hibben:

I want to thank you very much for your letter and to confess that the honor of a letter from you outweighed my real regretthat my book gave you concern. It was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips - no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’ - after that I retired. It is easy for the successful man in college, the man who has gotten what he wanted to say.

‘It’s all fine. It makes men. It made me, see’ -

- but it seems to me it’s like the captain of a company when he has his men lined up at attention for inspection. He sees only the tightly buttoned coat and the shaved faces. He doesn’t know that perhaps a private in the rear rank is half crazy because a pin is sticking in his back and he can’t move, or another private is thinking that his wife is dying and he can’t leave because too many men in the company are gone already.

I don’t mean at all that Princeton is not the happiest time in most boys’ lives. It is, of course - I simply say it wasn’t the happiest time in mine. I love it now better than any place on earth. The men - the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country. I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperament.

My view of life, President Hibben, is the view of the Theodore Dreisers and Joseph Conrads - that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men. My idealism flickered out with Henry Strater’s anti-club movement at Princeton. ‘The Four Fists,’ latest of my stories to be published, was the first to be written. I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three-inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially necessary for me to give the magazine what they wanted. The appreciation it has received has amazed me.

I must admit however that This
Side of Paradise
does over- accentuate the gayety and country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the reader’s interest that part was much over- stressed, and of course the hero, not being average, reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate. It is the Princeton of Saturday night in May. Too many intelligent classmates of mine have failed to agree with it for me to consider it really photographic any more, as of course I did when I wrote it.

Next time I am in Princeton I will take the privilege of coining to see you.

I am, sir,

Very respectfully yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO BURTON RASCOE

38 West 59th StreetNew York
City

November 17, 1920

Dear Mr Rascoe:

Thanks for the pamphlet. I enjoyed your essay on Mencken - I think it’s a clever touch: his ‘being the only true American,’ just as Anatole France ‘is the only living Catholic.’ Also I agree with you that he is a great man and bum critic of poetry. Why has no one mentioned to him or of him that he is an intolerably muddled syllogism with several excluded middles on the question of aristocracy? What on earth does he mean by it? Every aristocrat of every race has come in for scathing comment yet he holds out the word as a universal panacea for art.

He and Nathan were up in the apartment drinking with us the other night and he was quite enthusiastic about Main Street.

This
Mooncalf
is a wretched thing without a hint of glamor, utterly undistinguished, childhood impressions dumped into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, and the sort of thing that Walpole and Beresford (whom I abominate) turn out twice a year with great bawlings about their art. I’d rather be Tarkington or David Graham Phillips and cast at least some color and radiance into my work! Wouldn’t you?

Thanks again.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

Christmas,
1920

Dear Mr Cabell:

It was the surprise of my life when Zelda handed me an autographed first edition of Jurgen this morning. You can imagine how I felt when I tell you I haven’t even been able to borrow it. Whenever I go to George Nathan’s I finger it covetously but I could never get farther than the door with it. People have a way of regarding it as infinitely precious. I want to see anyone try to borrow mine!

I once fingered a copy of it in a New Orleans bookstore one year ago and I’ve been cursing myself ever since for not buying it. I’d seen Mencken’s review but was very broke at the time. I read a wretched article on you in
The Bookman
by someone last month. Mencken and water. It must amuse you to have whole book review sections devoted to you after years of comparative neglect. Do you remember Samuel Butler’s

‘Oh critics, cultured critics

Who will praise me after I am dead

Who will see in me either more or less than I intended

How I should have hated you.’

- only you have the ironic good fortune of being alive.

I have just finished an extraordinary novel called
The Beautiful Lady
Without
Mercy
which shows touches of your influence, much of Mencken, and not a little of Frank Norris. Up to now such diverse writers as you, Mencken, Dreiser, and so forth have been held together more or less by the common enemy, philistia, but now that good books are, for the moment, selling almost as well as bad ones I wish Mencken would take a crack at such bogus masterpieces as
Mooncalf,
a book without glamor, without ideas, with nothing except a timorously uninteresting report of a shoddy and uninteresting life. I’m all for Salt,
The Titan
and Main Street. At
Poor White
I grow weary - but at
Mooncalf -
my God!

The only two books I’ve ever known my wife to weep over were
Ethan Frome
and
The
Rivet
in Grandfather’s Neck
I appreciated your qualified tribute to Tarkington in Beyond
Life.
I agree with it perfectly.

I hope we’ll meet in the near future and meanwhile I’m looking forward to
Jurgen
as I have never looked forward to a book before.