Posterity (26 page)

Remember that you will be left nothing in this world in all probability, and that you are liable to be thrown at any time on your own resources and be compelled to make your own living. There is no assurance whatever that you will ever fall heir to a dot, and anyway you ought to have pride enough to prepare yourself to make your own living and take a stand among men of your generation.

You were practically dismissed last year from Exeter, and I suppose that that will be your fate this year. Perhaps Mr. Carnal will likely say that he does not think you are studious enough to go on further. Think of what this will mean to me. Think of the disgrace that I have already suffered and that I would more than ever suffer with such an outcome as this. Mr. Carnal told me that if boys did not do well that they did not want them, and that is so with everybody. If men are not worthwhile, people do not want them. If you have not a reputation for doing things honestly, faithfully, and industriously, people do not want you.

What I have said above, Warren, is entirely for your own good, as I see it, from the standpoint of a father who is interested in the future of his son. Don't be a quitter; don't be a failure.

Yours affectionately,

Warren Pershing never went to West Point. Instead, he graduated from Yale University and was named Most Likely to Succeed by his class of 1931. He went on to found Pershing & Company, a Wall Street investment firm, and until General Pershing's last days, Warren was his father's greatest source of pleasure.

E
UGENE
O'N
EILL TO
S
HANE
O'N
EILL

“But if you show no friendship toward me, if you prove by your actions you are indifferent whether I live or die, except when you want something from me, then you must admit I would be a poor sap and sucker to waste my friendship on you, simply because
you happen to be my son.”

At the end of 1936, having just won the Nobel Prize, forty-nine-year-old Eugene O'Neill was admitted to the hospital with acute appendicitis and nearly died from complications. He remained hospitalized for months, battling depression all the while. From his two younger children, twelve-year-old Oona and eighteen-year-old Shane, he heard not a word.

Below is Eugene O'Neill's bitter first letter to Shane following the illness.

(Shane later convinced O'Neill that both he and Oona had written during his struggle, but that the correspondence never reached their father. Apparently, and for reasons unknown, O'Neill's third wife, Carlotta, seized and destroyed the children's letters while O'Neill was in the hospital.)

[Fall 1937]

Dear Shane:

Your letter arrived a few days ago. Yes, I received the letter you sent to Sea Island last spring. I did not answer it because I was sore at you. And I still am sore—and with good reason. You may not remember it but for nearly three months last winter I was in a hospital seriously ill and during all that time I did not receive one damned line from either you or Oona. You can't have the excuse that you did not know. The news of my illness was sent out by the Associated Press, United Press, etc. to papers all over the country. So, later on, was the fact that the Nobel Prize medal had to be presented to me in the hospital at Oakland. I received letters and wires of sympathy from all over, even from strangers. From my own children—except Eugene—nothing. And yet you knew, even if you didn't get the Oakland address from the papers, that you could always reach me care of Harry Weinberger.

Now if you think that is any way to act, or that I am going to stand for your acting like that and still feel any affection for you, you are badly mistaken. Oona has some excuse. She is still only a kid. But you are old enough to be responsible for your actions—or lack of them—and I hold you responsible. I expect the same sort of respect and consideration from you that I received from Eugene when he was your age. If you give it, there is no reason why the relationship between you and me should not develop into as fine a one as that between Eugene and me has been for years and still is. Quite outside of our being father and son, Eugene and I are friends, as man to man, which is a thing few fathers and sons manage to achieve. And that's what I want to be to you—a friend. But if you show no friendship toward me, if you prove by your actions you are indifferent whether I live or die, except when you want something from me, then you must admit I would be a poor sap and sucker to waste my friendship on you, simply because you happen to be my son.

I am giving you this straight from the shoulder because it is time you and I came to a frank understanding. It is time you realize that in this life you are going to get from others exactly the same treatment you give to others. If you take me for granted, and think you can treat me as no friend of mine would dare to treat me without losing my friendship forever, why then I warn you you must be prepared to lose my friendship forever, too.

So think it over. It is up to you. If you want to be my son more than in name, you will have to act with a little more decent consideration and gratitude—not to add, respect. It isn't difficult, you know. Eugene has done it without breaking his back. All you have to do is get it in your head that you can't expect something for nothing, even from fathers.

Well, that's that. If you are the boy I still hope you are, despite evidence to the contrary, then this letter should make you think, and so much good will come of it for us both. If you are not—well, then it's just too bad.

Carlotta is glad you liked the Japanese robe. And we are both happy that you are so pleased with the new school. It sounds grand. And it's your luck to be away from that damned hookworm Florida joint. That country, with its rotten debilitating climate did more than anything else to wreck my health and lead to the long stretch of hospital and illness I went through last winter and spring. I am feeling fine again now and will be able to start hard work again, I hope, by the first of next year—or when we move into the new home we are building in the San Ramon Valley (near Oakland) which will be finished sometime in January. At present, we are living in a small rented house. I like California immensely. Carlotta joins in love to you.

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

“I never wanted to see again in this world women
who were brought up as idlers.”

In July 1938 F. Scott Fitzgerald was forty-one years old. Five years had passed since his last novel was published and he was having trouble financially, so he took a job writing screenplays in Hollywood. With his wife, Zelda, institutionalized for schizophrenia, he felt the responsibility of raising Scottie was his alone. The following letter was written to sixteen-year-old Scottie after a series of episodes of bad behavior, including her expulsion from the Ethel Walker School, a Connecticut boarding school, for sneaking away from campus to hitchhike to Yale. Less than two years later Fitzgerald was dead from a heart attack following years of heavy drinking.

July 7th, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I don't think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice—bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I'm talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an “authority,” and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you—for the young can't believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.

When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided and one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her, but being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for
her
and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

It was too late for me to recoup the damage—I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years until my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.

The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds—she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn't have the strength for the big stage—sometimes she pretended, and she pretended beautifully, but she didn't have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy—she passed that failing on to you.

For a long time I hated
her
mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit—nothing but “getting by” and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don't want to change you. But I don't want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energy and my earnings for people who talk my language.

I have begun to fear that you don't. You don't realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this. People like Rosalind and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that
you
have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.

You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks at old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore—(and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you)—represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother's illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school; less willingly after that. There began to be an unsympathetic side to you that alienated first Mrs. Owens, then your teachers at Bryn Mawr. The line of those who felt it runs pretty close to you—adults who saw you every day. Among them you have made
scarcely a single close friend, with all your mastery of exterior arts of friendliness
. All of them have loved you, as I do, but all of them have had reservations, and important ones: they have felt that something in you wasn't willing to pull your weight, to do your part—for more than an hour.

This last year was a succession of information beginning as far back as December that you were being unfair to me, more frankly that you were cheating. The misfortune about your standing in your class, the failure to tutor at the Obers at Christmas, the unwillingness to help with your mother at Easter in golf or tennis, then the dingy outbreak in the infirmary at the people who were “on to you,” who knew you had none of the scholar in you but lived in a babyish dream—of the dance favors of a provincial school. Finally the catastrophe which, as far as I am able to determine, had no effect except to scare you because you knew I wouldn't maintain you in the East without some purpose or reason.

If you did not have a charm and companionability, such a blow might have chastened you, but unlike my Uncle Phil you will always be able to find companions who will reassure you of your importance even though your accomplishment is a goose-egg. To the last day of his life Phil was a happy man, though he loafed always and dissipated a quarter of a million of his own and his sister's money and left his wife in poverty and his son as you saw him. He had charm—great charm. He never liked me after I was grown, because once he lost his charm in front of me and I kicked his fat backside. Your charm must have not been in evidence on the day Mrs. Perry Smith figuratively did the same to you.

All this was the long preparation for the despair I experienced ten days ago. That you did or did not know how I felt about Baltimore, that you thought I'd approve of your meeting a boy and driving back with him unchaperoned to New York by night, that you
honestly
thought I would have permitted that—well, tell it to Harold, who seems to be more gullible.

The clerk from the Garden of Allah woke me up with the telegram in which I mistook
Simmons
for
Finney
and I called the
Finneys
—to find them gone. The result was entirely a situation of your own making—if you had any real regret about the Walker episode you'd have respected my wishes for a single week.