Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald E-Book

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 970

Beschreibung

This carefully crafted ebook: "Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. Excerpt: "To Ernest Hemingway: Dear Ernest, Your stories were great (in April Scribners). But like me you must beware Conrad rhythms in direct quotation from characters, especially if you're pointing a single phrase and making a man live by it 'In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more' is one of the most beautiful prose sentences I've ever read. So much has happened to me lately that I despair of ever assimilating it - or forgetting it, which is the same thing. I hate to think of your being hard up. Please use this if it would help. The Atlantic will pay about $200.00, I suppose. I'll get in touch with Perkins about it…" Table of Contents: To Zelda Fitzgerald To Ernest Hemingway To Frances Scott Fitzgerald To Maxwell Perkins To John Peale Bishop To Mrs Bayard Turnbull To Christian Gauss To Harold Ober To Mrs Richard Taylor To Edmund Wilson To Gerald and Sara Murphy Other Letters

Leseprobe

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works

e-artnow, 2015

Contact: [email protected]

ISBN 978-80-268-3901-9

Table of Contents

To Zelda Fitzgerald

To Ernest Hemingway

To Frances Scott Fitzgerald

To Maxwell Perkins

To John Peale Bishop

To Mrs Bayard Turnbull

To Christian Gauss

To Harold Ober

To Mrs Richard Taylor

To Edmund Wilson

To Gerald and Sara Murphy

Other Letters

To Zelda Fitzgerald

Table of Contents

5521 Amestoy AvenueEncino, California May 6, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Excuse this being typewritten, but I am supposed to lie in bed for a week or so and look at the ceiling. I objected somewhat to that regime as being drastic, so I am allowed two hours of work every day.

You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness and with a consideration that I never understood that you had before. Because I can never remember anything else but consideration from you, so perhaps that sounds a little too much like a doctor or someone who knew you only when you were ill.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands - I had a wire from daughter in regard to the little Vassar girl, telling me her name, and saying that the whole affair was washed out, but I don’t feel at home with the business yet.

There was a sweet letter waiting here from you for me when I came.

With dearest love, Scott

5521 Amestoy AvenueEncino, CaliforniaJune 8, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

I have two letters from you, one the airmail in regard to Scottie’s operation and the other evidently posted before you had received mine. While she is in Baltimore I am having a re-check by my old friend, Dr Louis Hamman. I gather that she has had several ‘attacks.’ On the other hand, I want to be absolutely sure that the operation is imperative. I tell you this because though she will come to Asheville in any case - I think you’d better not make absolute arrangements until I get the report Dr Hamman. She reaches Baltimore today the 8th (unless she stays over a day with Harold Ober or someone else in New York) and I should get the report from Dr Hamman about the 15th or 16th - that is a few days before she is due to arrive in Asheville I will airmail you immediately and then you can clinch whatever arrangements you find advisable.

Remember, I will take care of the business of notifying her, breaking the news by airmail as soon as I hear how long she expects to remain in Baltimore. I am glad, just as you are, that since this seems to be necessary, you will be able to be at her side.

I am awfully sorry about the news concerning your mother. This seems to be a big year for illness in our family. I shall certainly plan for you to go down to see her around your birthday time as soon as the matter of Scottie’s visit - with or without operation - is disposed of. Perhaps if by chance Dr Hamman doesn’t think the operation advisable we can think up some combination scheme.

In the meantime I see from your last letter you were still worried about my health. Only last night I saw the doctor who tells me that I am already 60% better (I quote him exactly) than I was a month ago - and during that time I have blocked out a novel, completed and sold a story to Colliers magazine and over half-finished what will be a two-parter for The Saturday Evening Post - so you see I cannot possibly be very sick. What is the matter with me is quite definite and quite in control - the cause was overwork at the studios, and the cause being removed the illness should decrease at a faster rate than that at which it was contracted.

I am sitting outdoors as I dictate this and the atmosphere has just a breath of the back country plains in it, dry and hot, though the surrounding landscaped gardens are green and cool, very different from Asheville mountains, but I never had your gift for seeing nature plainly and putting her into vivid phrasing so I am afraid I can’t explain to you exactly what kind of country it is until you come here and see. Now Hollywood seems far away though it is just over the mountains and you seem very near always.

Devotedly,

5521 Amestov Avenue Encino, California August, 1939

Dearest:

I know you’re going to miss Scottie and I hope August passes quickly for you. it seems strange that it’s here - this last month has been too much of a hell for me to help much, but now I can see light at the end of the passage. It was like 1935-1936 when no one but Mrs Owens and I knew how bad things were and all my products were dirges and elegies. Sickness and no money are a wretched combination. But, as I told you, there has not at least been an accumulation of debt and there are other blessings. I see that only the rich now can do the things you and I once did in Europe - it is a tourist-class world - my salary out here during those frantic 20 months turned out to be an illusion once Ober and the governments of the U.S. and Canada were paid and the doctors began.

Keep well. I’m going to try to. I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.

Have arranged for Scottie to have a piano nearby, the not in this cottage. She seems to have had a happy time with you. I have written two long and two short stories and wait daily for Swanson to find me a studio job that won’t be too much of a strain - no more 14-hour days at any price. By the time you get this I hope I’ll be paying the small (not formidable) array of bills that have accumulated. Here is another check to be used most sparingly. - not on presents but necessities of Scottie’s departure, etc. Her tickets and traveling money will reach there Tuesday morning if all goes well. Her rail fare, round trip, is only $78.50 round trip, with $5.00 extra fare both ways.

Dearest love. Scott

Of course you can count on going South in September. We could even meet you there.

And the editorial comment about your paintings was a real thrill to me. We must do something about that soon.

5121 Amestoy AvenueEncino,California August 4, 1939

Dearest:

Scottie arrives tomorrow and I hope she’ll enjoy the weeks out here. She doesn’t like heat much and of course this is subtropical but there is a pool nearby belonging to the landlord and as I wrote you there are boys from the East, at least for the present.

Perhaps I was unwise in telling her so succinctly that she had no home except Vassar. On the other hand, she doesn’t see the matter in relation to the past. When I tried to make a home for her she didn’t want it, and I have a sick-man’s feeling that she will arrive in a manner to break up such tranquillity as I have managed to establish after this illness. Perhaps she has changed - but this is the first time in many years that you yourself have expressed pleasure in her filial behavior. I, too, have had that, though in short doses, ever since the spring of 1934. Perhaps the very shortness of the doses has been the fault and I hope this visit will be a remedy.

In theory I tend to disagree with you about doing her harm to know where she stands. Scottie at her best is as she is now with a sense of responsibility and determination. She is at her absolute worst when she lies on her back and waves her feet in the air - so incapable of gratitude of things arranged for (the golf at Virginia Beach, for instance, or the moving picture stuff here, has been accepted as her natural right as a princess). I was sorry for the women of fifty who applied for that secretarial job in Baltimore in 1932 - who had never before in their lives found that a home can be precarious. But I am not particularly sorry for a youngster who is thrown on his own at 14 or so and has to make his way through school and college, the old sink or swim spirit - I suppose, au fond, the difference of attitude between the North and the old South.

Anyhow, we shall think of you and talk of you a lot and look forward to seeing you and wish you were with us. I will have done something by the time you get this about your expense money there. — Dearest love.

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California August 18, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Got your letter from Saluda. Will absolutely try to arrange the Montgomery trip early in September. Your letter made me sad, and I wish I could say ‘Yes, go where you want right away’ - but it doesn’t take into consideration the situation here. I will be much better able to grapple with the problem and with Dr Carroll two weeks from now. A severe illness like mine is liable to be followed by a period of shaky morale and at the moment I am concerned primarily with keeping us all alive and comfortable. I’m working on a picture at Universal and the exact position is that if I can establish their confidence in the next week that I am of value on this job it will relieve financial pressure through the fall and winter.

Scottie is very pleasant and, within the limits of her age, very cooperative to date - on the other hard, she’s one more responsibility, as she learns to drive and brings me her work and this summer there is no Helen Hayes to take her on a glamor tour of Hollywood. All of which boils down to the fact that my physical energy is at an absolute minimum without being definitely sick and I’ve got to conserve this for my work. I am as annoyed at the unreliability of the human body as you are at the vagaries of the nervous system. Please believe always that I am trying to do my best for us all. I have many times wished that my work was of a mechanical sort that could be done or delegated irrespective of morale, for I don’t want or expect happiness for myself - only pence enough to keep us all going. Put your happiness I want exceedingly, just as I wart Scottie’s safety.

I am writing Dr Carroll a long letter in a week’s time of which I will send you a carbon. I have already written Dr Suitt about the swimming.

With dearest love, Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California October 6, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Living in the flotsam of the international situation as we all are, work has been difficult. I am almost penniless - I’ve done stories for Esquire because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances. You will remember it took me an average of six weeks to get the mood of a Saturday Evening Post story.

But everything may be all right tomorrow. As I wrote you - or did I? - friends sent Scottie back to college. That seemed more important than any pleasure for you or me. There is still two hundred dollars owing on her tuition - and I think I will probably manage to find it somewhere.

After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you - but not enough to go overboard. For you to go on your first excursion without a nurse, without money, without even enough to pay your fare back, when Dr Carroll is backing you, and when Scottie and I are almost equally as helpless in the press of circumstances as you - well, it is the ruse of a clever old lady whom I respect and admire and who loves you dearly but not wisely —

I ask only this of you - leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and what eventually will fight through as the right to save you, the permission to give you a chance.

Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.

With dearest love always, Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California January 31, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

The article arrived and from a first brief glance I shall say that it is going to be rather difficult to sell. However, I will read it thoroughly tonight and report. Even a very intellectual magazine like the Forum or the Atlantic Monthly prefers their essays to contain some certain number of anecdotes or some dialogue or some cohesive and objective events. Of course, you might claim that vour whole article was conversation and in a sense it is, but it is one person’s conversation and thus does not contain much conflict. However, I think it is damn good considering that your pen has been rusty for so long. Shall I suggest you some ideas which yoa might handle with more chance of realizing on them? Tell me.

Dear, I know no one in Asheville except a couple of secretaries and nurses and the clerks at the hotel. I was ill at the time I was there and confined to mv room most of the time so I have no idea how you would make business contacts. This seems to be a great year for art and I wish you would drop a line to Cary Ross or someone about your new paintings and see if there is some interest. That would be a more practical way of getting things in motion than taking up something you’re unfamiliar with.

All is the same here. I think I have a job for next week. I know I’ve finished a pretty good story - the first one adequate to the Post in several years. It was a hard thing to get back to. My God, what a fund of hope and belief I must have had in the old days! As I say, I will write you more about the story tomorrow.

Dearest love. Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California February 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I understand your attitude completely and sympathize with it to a great extent. But the mood which considers any work beneath their talents doesn’t especially appeal to me in other people, though I acknowledge being sometimes guilty of it myself. At the moment I am hoping for a job at Republic Studios, the lowest of the low, which would among other things help to pay your hospital bill. So the fact that anything you do can be applied on your bill instead of on our jaunt to the Isles of Greece doesn’t seem so tough.

However, I am disappointed, with you, that the future Ruskins and Elie Faures and other anatomists of art will have to look at your windows instead of the mail hall. But something tells me that by the time this letter comes you will have changed your point of view. It is those people that have kept your talent alive when you willed it to sink into the dark abyss. Granted it’s a delicate thing - mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear. (God, what a mess of similes.) But the awful thing would have been some material catastrophe that would have made it unable to run at all.

Dearest love. Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California March 19, 1940

Dearest:

It seems to me best not to hurry things.

(a) — I’d like you to leave with the blessings of Dr Carroll (you’ve consumed more of his working hours than one human deserves of another - you’d agree if you’d see his correspondence with me.) Next to Forel he has been your eventual best friend - better even than Meyert (though this is unfair to Meyer who never claimed to be a clinician but only a diagnostician).

But to hell with all that, and with illness.

(b) — Also, you’d best wait because I will certainly have more money three weeks from now than at present, and (c) — If things develop fast Scottie can skip down and see you for a day during her vacation - otherwise you won’t see her before summer. This is an if!

I don’t think you fully realize the extent of what Scottie has done at Vassar. You wrote rather casually of two years being enough but it isn’t. Her promise is unusual. Not only did she rise to the occasion and get in young but she has raised herself from a poor scholar to a very passable one; sold a professional story at eighteen; and moreover in very highbrow, at present very politically minded Vassar she has introduced with some struggle a new note. She has written and produced a musical comedy and founded a club called the Omgim to perpetuate the idea - almost the same thing that Tarkington did in 1893 when he founded the Triangle at Princeton. She did this against tough opposition - girls who wouldn’t let her on the board of the daily paper because, though she could write, she wasn’t ‘politically conscious.’

We have every reason at this point to cheer for our baby. I would do anything rather than deny her the last two years of college which she has now earned. There is more than talent there - a real genius for organization.

Nothing has developed here. I write these ‘Pat Hobby’ stories - and wait. I have a new idea now - a comedy series which will get me back into the big magazines - but my God I am a forgotten man. Gatsbv had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.

With dearest love always, Scott

5521 Amestoy AvenueEncino, California April 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I got your wire today asking for $5.00 and simultaneously one came from Dr Carroll saying you were coming out. I don’t know what the rail fare to Montgomery is, but I am sending you herewith $60.00, which I hope will take care of your ticket, baggage, etc. You are leaving bills behind you, I know, which I will try to take care of as soon as I can. I have sent Jean West $25.00 on account. Moreover I have sent a check to your mother for your expenses when you get to Montgomery.

Now as to the general arrangement: I am starting to work on this ‘speculation’ job. That is, they are giving me very little money but if the picture is resold when finished the deal will be somewhat better. I hesitated about accepting it but there have been absolutely no offers in many months and I did it on the advice of my new agent. It is a job that should be fun and suitable to my still uneven state of health. (Since yesterday I seem to be running a fever again.) In any case we can’t go on living indefinitely on those Esquire articles. So you will be a poor girl for awhile and there is nothing much to do about it. I can manage to send you $30.000 a week of which you should pay your mother about $15.00 for board, laundry, light, etc. The rest will be in checks of alternately $10.00 and $20.00 - that is, one week the whole sum will amount to $35.00, one week $25.00, etc. This is a sort of way of saving for you so that in alternate weeks you will have a larger lump sum in case you need clothes or something.

You will be cramped by this at first - more so than in the hospital, but it is everything that I can send without putting Scottie to work which I absolutely refuse to do. I don’t think you can promise a person an education and then snatch it away from them. If she quit Vassar I should feel like quitting all work and going to the free Veterans Hospital where I probably belong.

The main thing is not to run up bills or wire me for extra funds. There simply aren’t any and as you can imagine I am deeply in debt to the government and everyone else. As soon as anything turns up I will naturally increase your allowance so that you will have more mobility, clothes, etc.

I am moving in town to be near my work. For the present, will you please address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California? If you forget, ‘General Delivery, Encino’ will be forwarded to me also. As soon as I have a new permanent address I will write to you. I do hope this goes well. I wish you were going to brighter surroundings but this is certainly not the time to come to me and I can think of nowhere else for you to go in this dark and bloody world. I suppose a place is what you make it but I have grown to hate California and would give my life for three years in France. So bon voyage and stay well.

Dearest love. Scott

5521 Amestoy AvenueEncino, California May 4, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I sympathize with your desire to do something. Why can’t you hire a cool room somewhere for a studio? All you’d need is an easel, a chair and a couch and I think you have an easel somewhere. I think with Marjorie’s help you could get it for almost nothing and perhaps after next week I can help more (I go according to the fever - if it stays around 99 I feel rash, if it runs up over a degree at a daily average I get alarmed and think we mustn’t get stony broke like last fall). My ambition is to pay the government who’ve laid off me so far. I don’t know what they’d annex except my scrapbook.

Will return the clipping Monday - she’s a smooth enough kid* (for which I take most of the credit except for the mouth, legs and personal charm, and barring the wit which comes from us both) - anyhow she’s the best kind a good deal of figuring out could do. She’s not as honest as either you or me but maybe she didn’t have as much to conceal.

I hope you’re happy. I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side) - I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics. If you did I d advise you to try some short stories. You never could plot for shocks but you might try something along the line of Gogol’s The Cloak’ or Chekhov’s ‘The Darling.’ They are both in the Modern Library’s Best Russian Short Stories which the local Carnegie may have in stock.

Don’t waste your poor little income on wires to me - unless the money doesn’t come.

Yours at about 99.7, Scott

P.S. Love to all. Excuse the bitter tone. I’ve overworked on the goddamn movie and am in bed for the day.

5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, CaliforniaMay 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Sorry I wrote you such a cross letter last week and I miss getting an answer from you. Things are better. The awful cough I had died down, the temperature fell and I’ve worked hard this week with apparently no ill effect except that I’m looking forward tomorrow to a peaceful Sunday spent in bed with Churchill’s Life of Marlborough. Funny that he should be Prime Minister at last. Do vou remember luncheon at his mother’s house in 1920 and Jack Churchill who was so hard to talk to at first and turned out to be so pleasant? And Lady Churchill’s call on the Countess of Bvnq whose butler was just like the butler in Alice in Wonderland? I thank God they’ve gotten rid of that old rapscallion, Chamberlain. It’s all terribly sad and as you can imagine I think of it night and day.

Also I think I’ve written a really brilliant continuity. It had better be for it seems to be a last life line that Hollywood has thrown me. It is a strong life line - to write as I please upon a piece of my own and if I can make a reputation out here (one of those brilliant Hollywood reputations which endure all of two months sometimes) now will be the crucial time.

Have a cynical letter from Scottie about the Princeton prom. Thank God I didn’t let her start to go at sixteen or she would be an old jade by now. Tell me something of your life there - how you like your old friends, your mother’s health, etc., and what you think you might do this summer during the hottest part. I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library edition, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.

Next week I’ll be able to send you what I think is a permanent address for me for the summer - a small apartment in the heart of the city. Next fall if the cough is still active I may have to move again to some dry inland atmosphere.

Love to all of you and especially yourself.

Dearest love. Scott

5521Amestoy Avenue Encino,California May 18, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

It’s hard to explain about the Saturday Evening Post matter. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, but the trouble with them goes back to the time of Lorimer’s retirement in 1935.I wrote them three stories that year and sent them about three others which they didn’t like. The last story they bought they published last in the issue and my friend, Adelaide Neil on the staff, implied to me that they didn’t want to pay that big price for stories unless they could use them in the beginning of the issue. Well, that was the time of my two-year sickness, T.B., the shoulder, etc., and you were at a most crucial point and I was foolishly trying to take care of Scottie and for one reason or another I lost the knack of writing the particular kind of stories they wanted.

As you should know from your own attempts, high-priced commercial writing for the magazines is a very definite trick. The rather special things that I brought to it, the intelligence and the good writing and even the radicalism all appealed to old Lorimer who had been a writer himself and liked style. The man who runs the magazine now is an up-and-coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who pub. lishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave fron tiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains - nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well I simply can’t do it and, as I say, I’ve tried not once but twenty times.

As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill, and I honestly don’t blame them for not taking the things that I’ve offered to them from time to time in the past three or four years. An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine did have unhappy endings - if you remember). In fact the standard of writing from the best movies, like Rebecca, is, believe it or not, much higher at present than that in the commercial magazines such as Colliers and the Post.

Thank you for your letter. California is a monotonous climate and already I am tired of the flat, scentless tone of the summer. It is fun to be working on something I like and maybe in another month I will get the promised bonus on it and be able to pay last year’s income tax and raise our standard of living a little.

Love to you all and dearest love to you. Scott

P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs McKinney.

1401 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood,California June 7, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

The Harvard Summer School idea seemed better for Scottie than her going to Virginia. You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness? Now all the Montague Normans, Lady Willerts, Guinnesses, Vallam-brosas etc., who loafed with us in the South of France through many summers seem to have dug themselves into an awful pit. I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem to be the right note - however charming.

I’ll be sending you a semi-permanent address any day now.

Dearest love. Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California June 14, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and well-informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten-year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have - which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, then perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August - by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with ‘Babylon Revisited’ - or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two-million-dollar tripe like All This and Heaven Too.

Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we Were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.

Love to all of you. Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California July 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I enjoyed reading the interview given out by our learned Scottie. I’m glad to know she spends her time thinking about strikes, relief and starvation while feeling no slightest jealousy of the girls with silver foxes who choose to recline on country club porches. It shows that we have hatched a worthy egg and I do not doubt that someday, like George Washington, she will ‘raise that standard to which all good men can repair.’

Seriously, I never heard such a bunch of hokum in my life as she sold that newspaper reporter but I’m glad she has one quality which I have found almost as valuable as positive original’ty, viz.: she can make the most of what she has read and heard - make a few paragraphs from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and The New Republic go further than most people can do with years of economic study. That is one way to grow learned, first pretend to be - then have to live up to it.

She has just shown her keenness in another way by taking me for $100.00 more advance money for the summer school than I had expected to pay, leaving me with a cash balance of $11.00 at date. Don’t bawl her out for this. Leave it to me because it most certainly will come out of her allowance and it was honestly nothing but carelessness in getting the exact data from the summer school. However, it affects you to this extent - that I’m going to ask you that if these checks reach you Monday not to cash them until Tuesday. It will be perfectly safe to cash them Tuesday because I’m getting a payment on the story at which I am back at work. The majority of the payment ($900.00) goes to Uncle Sam. $300.00 goes against a loan already made against it and the rest will be distributed for our needs during the next three weeks - so please if you have any extra funds save them for any emergency. We have done our share of lending and giving over many years and we must all watch our money.

Tell me what you do. Cousin Ceci writes that my Aunt Elise died last April at the age of ninety. I was fond of that old woman and I hadn’t yet assimilated her passing.

With dearest love always, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California July 12, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

You never tell me if you are painting or not, or what you are writing if anything. I spent a silly day yesterday with Shirley Temple and her family. They want to do the picture and they don’t want to do the picture, but that’s really the producer’s worry and not mine. She’s a lovely little girl, beautifully brought up, and she hasn’t quite reached the difficult age yet - figuring the difficult age at twelve. She reminds me so much of Scottie in the last days at La Paix, just before she entered Bryn Mawr. You weren’t there the day of the Maryland Hunt Cup Race in the spring of ‘34 when Scottie got the skirt and coat from my mother which suddenly jumped her into adolescence. You may remember that she wore the little suit till she was about sixteen.

It’s hot as hell here today and I haven’t been able to work. I too have had only one letter from Scottie, but she seems to like Boston.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California July 20, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Thanks for your letter about what you are doing. I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there. When times are a little calmer I think you ought to have a really inclusive exhibition of your pictures. Perhaps if the war is over next year it would be a good summer’s job for Scottie to arrange it - I mean fill the place that Cary Ross did six years ago. She would meet all sorts of interesting people doing it and I had an idea of suggesting it as her work for this August, but the war pushes art into the background. At least people don’t buy anything.

I am sending you Gertrude Stein’s new book which Max Perkins sent me. I am mentioned in it on some page - anyhow I’ve underlined it. On the back of the wrapping paper I’ve addressed it and stamped it to Scottie. She might like to look it over too. It’s a melancholy book now that France has fallen, but fascinating for all that.

Ten days more to go on the Temple picture.

With dearest love, Scott

Please write me a few lines about your mother’s health. Is she well in general? Is she active? I mean does she still go downtown, etc., or does she only go around in automobiles? And tell me why you didn’t go to Carolina this year. Was it lack of funds or is the trip a little too much for her?

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California August 24,1940

Dearest Zelda:

By the time you get this Scottie will have leisurely started South - with two or three stops. I’ve missed seeing her this summer but we’ve exchanged long letters of a quite intimate character in regard to life and literature. She is an awfully good girl in the broad fundamentals. Please see to one thing - that she doesn’t get into any automobiles with drunken drivers.

I think I have a pretty good job coming up next week - a possibility of ten weeks’ work and a fairly nice price at 20th Century-Fox. I have my fingers crossed but with the good Shirley Temple script behind me I think my stock out here is better than at any time during the last year.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California September 5,1940

Dearest Zelda:

Here’s ten dollars extra as I thought that due to Scottie’s visit it might come in handy. Also I’m sending you Craven’s Art Masterpieces, a book of extraordinary reproductions that is a little art gallery in itself.

Don’t be deceived by this sudden munificence - as yet I haven’t received a cent from my new job, but in a wild burst of elation of getting it, I hocked the car again for J 150.00.

With dearest love, always, Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California September 14, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Am sending you a small check next week which you should really spend on something which you need - a winter coat, for instance - or, if you are equipped, to put it away for a trip when it gets colder. I can’t quite see you doing this, however. Do you have extra bills, dentist’s, doctors’, etc., and, if so, they should be sent to me as I don’t expect you to pay them out of the thirty dollars.

And I certainly don’t want your mother to be in for any extras. Is she?

This is the third week of my job and I’m holding up very well but so many jobs have started well and come to nothing that I keep my fingers crossed until the thing is in production. Paramount doesn’t want to star Shirley Temple alone on the other picture and the producer can’t find any big star who will play with her so we are temporarily held up.

As I wrote you, Scottie is now definitely committed to an education and I feel so strongly about it that if she wanted to go to work I would let her really do it by cutting off all allowance. What on earth is the use of having gone to so much time and trouble about a thing and then giving it up two years short of fulfilment. It is the last two years in college that count. I got nothing out of my first two years - in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially); it carried me full swing into my career. Her generation is liable to get only too big a share of raw life at first hand.

Write me what you do?

With dearest love, Scott

P.S. Scottie may quite possibly marry within a year and then she is fairly permanently off my hands. I’ve spent so much time doing work that I didn’t particularly want to do that what does one more year matter? They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California September 21,1940

Dearest Zelda:

So glad you like the art book. I would like to hear of your painting again and I meant it when I said next summer if the war is settled down you ought to have another exhibition.

Scottie went to Baltimore as she planned and I finally got a scrap of a note from her but I imagine most of her penmanship was devoted to young men. I think she’s going back with the intention, at least, of working hard and costing little.

I don’t know how this job is going. It may last two months - it may end in another week. Things depend on such hairlines here - one must not only do a thing well but do it as a compromise, sometimes between the utterly opposed ideas of two differing executives. The diplomatic part in business is my weak spot.

However, the Shirley Temple script is looking up again and is my great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not a novelist.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California September 28, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Autumn comes - I am forty-four - nothing changes. I have not heard from Scottie since she got to Vassar and from that I deduce she is extremely happy, needs nothing, is rich - obviously prosperous, busy and self-sufficient. So what more could I want? A letter might mean the opposite of any of these things.

I’m afraid Shirley Temple will be grown before Mrs Temple decides to meet the producer’s terms of this picture. It wouldn’t even be interesting if she’s thirteen.

Tomorrow I’m going out into society for the first time in some months - a tea at Dottie Parker’s (Mrs Alan Campbell), given for Don Stewart’s ex-wife, the Countess Tolstoy. Don’t know whether Don will be there or not. Ernest’s book is the’Book-of-the-Month.’ Do you remember how superior he used to be about mere sales? He and Pauline are getting divorced after ten years and he is marrying a girl named Martha Gellhorn. I know no news of anyone else except that Scottie seems to have made a hit in Norfolk.

Dearest love. Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California October 5, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Enjoyed your letter - especially the consoling line about the Japanese being a nice clean people. A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband, John Monk Saunders, committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor, whom I hadn’t seen twice since the days at Swope’s; Frank Tuttle of the old Film Guild. There was a younger generation there too and I felt very passé and decided to get a new suit.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California October 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda; Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended, as if they were being bombed.

A letter from Gerald yesterday. He has no news except a general flavor of the past. To him, now, of course, the Riviera was the best time of all. Sara is interested in vegetables and gardens and all growing and living things.

I expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish, a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years’ away. I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because, after fifty, one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think, except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.

My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing - but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmas-time this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man - a label which I had done nothing to deserve.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California October 19,1940

Dearest Zelda:

I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on Tender Is the Night at the end - I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in Little Eva, which reminds me that I saw the two — Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?

My room is covered with charts like it used to be for Tender Is the Night, telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short, as I originally planned it two yean ago, and more on the order of Gatsby.

Dearest love.

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California October 23, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carroll matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money, I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th

Century-Fox to last until December 15th so I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.

I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or sideshows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.

It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.

Two thousand words today and all good.

With dearest love. Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California October 26, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Ernest sent me his book and I’m in the middle of it. It is not as good as the Farewell to Arms. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments. But I imagine it would please the average type of reader, the mind who used to enjoy Sinclair Lewis, more than anything he has written. It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does. I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat. But the point is, he is making a fortune out of it - has sold it to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and as it’s the Book-of-the-Month selection he will make $50,000 from it in that form. Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.

No news except that I’m working hard, if that is news, and that Scottie’s story appears in The New Yorker this week.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California November 2, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Listening to the Harvard and Princeton game on the radio reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and Scottie is living now. I hear nothing from her though I imagine she is at Cambridge today.

The novel is hard as pulling teeth but that is because it is in its early character-planting phase. I feel people so less intently than I did once that this is harder. It means welding together hundreds of stray impressions and incidents to form the fabric of entire personalities. But later it should go faster. I hope all is well with you.

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California November 9, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Got into rather a fret about Scottie last week, which however came out all right. She went to the infirmary with grippe and then in spite of my telegrams to everyone there, including the dean, Scottie and the infirmary itself, darkness seemed to close about her. I could get no information. Her weekly letter was missing. As I say, it turned out all right. She had been discharged and was probably out of town but I wrote her a strong letter that she must keep me informed of her general movements - not that I have any control over them or want any because she is after all of age and capable of looking after herself but one resents the breaking of a habit and I was used to hearing about her once a week.

I’m still absorbed in the novel which is growing under my hand - not as deft a hand as I’d like - but growing.

With dearest love always, Scott

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California November 16, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I’m still listening to Yale-Princeton, which will convince you I spend all my time on the radio. Have had to lay off Coca-Cola, hence work with an attack of avitaminosis, whatever that is - it’s like a weight pressing on your shoulders and upper arms. Oh for the health of fifteen years ago!

I’d love to see anything you write so don’t hesitate to send it. I got the doctor’s bill which has been paid today. I liked Scottie’s little sketch, didn’t you?

With dearest love, Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California November 23,1940

Dearest Zelda:

Enclosed is Scottie’s little story - she had just read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha on my recommendation and the influence is what you might call perceptible.

The odd thing is that it appeared in eastern copies of The New Yorker and not in the western, and I had some bad moments looking through the magazine she had designated and wondering if my eyesight had departed.

The editor of Colliers wants me to write for them (he’s here in town), but I tell him I’m finishing my novel for myself and all I can promise him is a look at it. It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I’m digging it out of myself like uranium - one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas. It is a novel à la Flaubert without ‘ideas’ but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods.

The resemblance is rather to Gatsby than to anything else I’ve written. I’m so glad you’re well and reasonably happy.

With dearest love, Scott

P.S. Please send Scottie’s story back in your next letter - as it seems utterly impossible to get duplicates and I shall probably want to show it to authors and editors with paternal pride.

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California December 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

No news except that the novel progresses and I am angry that this little illness has slowed me up. I’ve had trouble with my heart before but never anything organic. This is not a major attack but seems to have come on gradually and luckily a cardiogram showed it up in time. I may have to move from the third to the first floor apartment but I’m quite able to work, etc., if I do not overtire myself.

Scottie tells me she is arriving South Xmas Day. I envy you being together and I’ll be thinking of you. Everything is my novel now - it has become of absorbing interest. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by February.

With dearest love,

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California December 13, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Here’s why it would be foolish to sell the watch. I think I wrote you that over a year ago when things were very bad indeed I did consider pawning it as I desperately needed $200.00, for a couple of months. The price offered, to my astonishment, was $20.00, and of course I didn’t even consider it. It cost, I believe, $600.00. The reason for the shrinkage is a purely arbitrary change of taste in jewelry. It is actually artificial and created by the jewelers themselves. It is like the Buick we sold in 1927 - for $200.00 - to come back to America in ‘31 and buy a car of the same year and much more used for $400.00. If you have no use for the watch I think it would be a beautiful present for Scottie. She has absolutely nothing of any value and I’m sure would prize it highly. Moreover she never loses anything. If you preferred you could loan it to her as I think she’d get real pleasure out of sporting it.

The novel is about three-quarters through and I think I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of the time in bed where I write on a wooden desk that I had made a year and a half ago. The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.

I had a letter from Katharine Tighe the other day, a voice out of the past. Also one from Harry Mitchell who was my buddy at the Barron G. Collier Advertising Agency. And one from Max Perkins who is keen to see the novel and finally one from Bunny Wilson who is married now to a girl named Mary McCarthy who was an editor of The New Republic. They have a baby a year old and live in New Canaan.

I will write you again early next week in time for Christmas.

Dearest love.

P.S. I enclose the letter from Max, in fact two letters only I can’t find the one that just came. They will keep you au courant with the publishing world and some of our friends.

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California December 19, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

This has to be a small present this year but I figure Scottie’s present as a gift to you both and charge it off to you accordingly.

I am very anxious for Scottie to finish this year of college at least, so please do not stress to her that it is done at any inconvenience. The thing for which I am most grateful to my mother and father are my four years at Princeton, and I would be ashamed not to hand it on to another generation so there is no question of Scottie quitting. Do tell her this.

I hope you all have a fine time at Christmas. Much love to your mother and Marjorie and Minor and Nonny and Livy Hart and whoever you see.

Dearest love. Scott

To Ernest Hemingway

Table of Contents

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France Postmarked November 30,1925   Dear Ernest:

I was quite ashamed of the other morning. Not only in disturbing Hadley, but in foisting that — alias — upon you. However it is only fair to say that the deplorable man who entered your apartment Saturday morning was not me but a man named Johnston who has often been mistaken for me.

Zelda, evidences to the contrary, was not suffering from lack of care but from a nervous hysteria which is only relieved by a doctor bearing morphine. We both went to Belleau Wood next day to recuperate.

For some reason I told you a silly lie - or rather an exaggeration - silly because the truth itself was enough to make me sufficiently jubilant. The Saturday Evening Post raised me to $2750 and not $3000, which is a jump of $750.00 in one month. It was probably in my mind that I could not get $3000 from the smaller magazines. The Post merely met the Hearst offer, but that is something they seldom do.

What garbled versions of the McAlmon episode or the English orgy we lately participated in I told you, I don’t know. It is true I saved McAlmon from a beating he probably deserved and that we went on some wild parties in London with a certain Marchioness of Milford Haven whom we first met with Tallulah Bankhead. She was about half royalty, I think. Anyhow she was very nice - anything else I may have added about the relations between the Fitzgeralds and the house of Windsor is pure fiction.

I’m crazy to read the comic novel. Are you going to the MacLeishes’ Tuesday? I hope Hadley is well now. Please believe me that we send our best wishes to Ernest M. Hemingway.

Scott

Villa St Louis Juan-les-PinsAugust orSeptember,1926

Dear Ernest:

Sorry we missed you and Hadley. No news. I’m on the wagon and working like hell. Expect to sail for N.Y. December 10th from Genoa on the Conte Biancamano. Will be here till then. Saw bullfight in Fréjus. Bull was euneuch (sp.). House barred and dark.