Letters to His Daughter
Scott Fitzgerald's Letters to Scottie (Frances Scott Fitzgerald)
1 - 5. Postmarked January 24 and 25, 1928
Five holograph postcards signed.
Montreal, Quebec
[postmarked Jan 24, 10 pm]
Dear Scotty:
Large rhinosceroses often eat little rhinosceroses—and I'm afraid that's the case with me. Sincerely yours, A. Rhinoscerose
[postmarked Jan 25, 11 pm]
Dear Diana:
There was a young man from Quebec ... Sincerely yours, Jupiter
[postmarked Jan 25, 11 pm]
Dear Pie-physiognomy:
We'll be back Fri night late or Sat morning early. I have been elected President of Canada but ma too busy as King of the World to take the job.
"I love you," say I.
"I know it," says Scotty
Yrs,
... the God of?→ Geo Washington
This is me throwing my books to the people of Quebec.
[postmarked Jan 25, 11 pm]
Dear Pie:
I'm bringing you six or seven nice new arithmetics as I know you would much rather have them than any other present. Yrs, Easter Bunny
[postmarked Montreal]
Pie O/2:
I Love you.
2x2=5
3+7=12
Washington is the Capital of England.
Venus is the God of war.
Greece is in New Your.
K-A-T-T spells cat.
F.S.F.
6. 1930
Holograph postcard signed.
Lausanne, Switzerland
Sweet darling—This makes various seyed doll's chair + table.
The secret of pulling it together again is to put all the curved surfaces next to to the curved surfaces + straight surfaces next to the straight surfaces. Do not force it.
I love you so, my child.
Daddy
7. December 1931, from Scottie to Santa Claus
Letter
Dear Santa
This Xmas please bring me:
1. Set of little doctor
2. Set of Lionels trains with:
Notes:
See Zelda Fitzgerald's Letter #114.
8. August 8, 1933
La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland
Dear Pie:
I feel very strongly about you doing [your] duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy—but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare's in which the line occurs “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bosom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?
I will arrange the camp bill.
Halfwit, I will conclude.
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…
Things not to worry about:
Don't worry about popular opinion
Don't worry about dolls
Don't worry about the past
Don't worry about the future
Don't worry about growing up
Don't worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don't worry about triumph
Don't worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don't worry about mosquitoes
Don't worry about flies
Don't worry about insects in general
Don't worry about parents
Don't worry about boys
Don't worry about disappointments
Don't worry about pleasures
Don't worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,
[Daddy]
P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. “Egg Fitzgerald.” How would you like that to go through life with—“Eggie Fitzgerald” or “Bad Egg Fitzgerald” or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?
Love anyhow.
9. [Summer, 1935]
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Scottina:
It was fine seeing you, and I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do). You are nicer to adults—you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls, 12-15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early—probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but—well:
“Daddy the prophet!” I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn't so right usually about you. When I wrote that “news-sheet” with events left out, you know—the letter that puzzled you—and headed it “Scottie Loses Head,” it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, and that you would “lose your head.” What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn't know—I couldn't have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy and indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (Understand I don't blame Andrew 1 too much—the fault was yours—he didn't, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!).
However, that's of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one—but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost have to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I'm not afraid of it for you. I don't want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive and is fine [if] founded on positive virtues, work, courage, etc., but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always—and it is a nice thing to have. I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.
Signs and portents of your persistent conceit: Mrs. Owens 2 said to me (and Mrs. Owens loves you), “For the first time in a long while Scottie was nice, and not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.”
Because, I guess, for the first time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours—a chance they never had, of belonging to “high society.” Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I'd have checked you on that)—but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all—your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you! You did not use one bit of your mind, one little spot! to think what they were thinking, or help them!
You went to Norfolk and gave out the information {via the Taylors, via Annabel, via mother) that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn't matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You know it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of “promoting yourself.” But those signs of one big catastrophe (it'll come—I want to minimize it for you, but it can't be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are a young member of the human race, who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen “popular girls” of 15 become utterly declasse in six months because they were essentially selfish.) You and Peaches 3 (who isn't selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more and more that less pretty girls will be attaching the solider, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you and Peaches are intelligent but both of you will be warped by this early attention, and something tells me she won't lose her head; she hasn't the “gift of gab” as you have— her laughter and her silence takes the place of much. That's why I wish to God you would write something when you have time—if only a one act play about how girls act in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.
I grow weary, but I probably won't write again for a month. Don't answer this, justifying yourself—of course I know you're doing the best you “can.”
The points of the letter are:
1st You did spill over, rashly!
2nd You are getting over the selfish period—thank God!
3d But it'll take one more big kick, and I want it to be mild, so your backside won't suffer too much.
4th I wish you'd get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people—what they say and how they behave.
With dearest love,
Your simply so-perfect too-too
Daddy
Please, turn back and read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton—oh yeah!
Notes:
1 Andrew Turnbull.
2 Mrs. Allein Owens had been Fitzgerald's secretary since May, 1932.
3 Peaches Finney, a close friend of Scottie's.
10. [July, 1935]
[New York City]
Darlin':
Am on a flying visit to New York. Spent yesterday afternoon with, of all people, Elissa Landi. She sailed for Europe last night. She is very nice.
I am not going to write you much this summer but you know my heart is with you always. Remember the one thing about riding—that you can't be as reckless at it as you can about swimming, because there's another factor besides yourself involved, the horse. So that no matter how good you were if the horse was bad there might be trouble. Different from diving, for example, where you have only yourself to blame. The point is, don't do anything or try anything that the riding master doesn't approve of. He knows just the point you've reached at handling the mount.
Good-by double durling. Aunt Rosalind,1 Mr. Ober2 and Mr. Perkins3 all invite you to spend a few days with them in N.Y. when camp is over. We shall see. I leave for the South Monday.
Your utterly irresistible
Daddy
Notes:
1 Zelda's sister, Mrs. Newman Smith.
2 Harold Ober, Fitzgerald's literary agent.
3 Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald's editor.
11. August 4, 1935
[Grove Park Inn] [Asheville, North Carolina]
Darling:
I always thought the first book of that series was one of the most exciting books I ever read.1 Ernest Hemingway thought so too. Please read it with a view to a possible dramatization of it and tell me your opinion. I never went any further in that series than the first one on account of no English versions being available.
I am glad you fell off your horse. Here in Carolina the only conveyance is by zebra. I have one zebra named Clarence.
My correspondence is now limited to five people: Elissa Landi, Mrs. Roosevelt, Aquilla,2 and a fourth whom I need scarcely mention, because I hardly know his name.
Darling, I am working hard and getting very well.
Please unleash yourself in your letters to your mother without mentioning riding catastrophies which might make her nervous.
Give my affectionate regards to Virginia, Helen [and] Betty and tell your counselor what a really obnoxious person you might turn out to be unless carefully watched.
Your stoogie—
Daddy
Notes:
1 An Alexander Dumas series, which one uncertain.
2 At one time Fitzgerald's chauffeur.
12. July 1936
Typed copy, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Asheville, North Carolina
Darling:
I'm afraid the candy would reach you in a glucose mass if I sent it across the heat wave. So buy it yourself or get someone to buy it in Dartmouth.
A very tiresome day. In mid-story and along comes a wire from Hollywood from an agent, who wants to buy sound rights of This Side of Paradise (Paramount owns the old silent rights but never made it) for sale to some big company. Query: What will I ask? If I ask a few thousand and he sells for a big sum I'll feel stung—if I ask too much he'll lose interest. Dont want to bring in Ober because if two agents commissions.
We got 7500 for sound rights alone to Gatsby, but that, being a play too, had already brought 60,000 for silent rights while Paradise only brought 10,000. Think I'll ask 5,000. Rats! I'm too tired to think straight. I wish I wasnt such a rotten business man and I wish Ober wasnt such a perfect gentleman. It takes a heel to deal with those vermin out there.
Dont see why I'm inflicting you with this. Tell me about the French (or math or latin) Congratulations on the back-jack—it's a pretty dive. I think of you constantly and if I ever prayed it would be that the irritations, exasperations and blow ups of the past winter wouldnt spoil the old confidence we had in each other.
Good-night darlin' Scottina
Daddy
13. July 1936
Typed copy, 1 p. Princeton University; Turnbull; Correspondence.
Asheville, North Carolina
Darling:
O.K. about the tutoring. Let it slide. But I hate to let one season slip by at your age without one difficult advance.
Do something for me! I'm proud of the swimming but summer's only summer. Give me a time maybe, and know always I'm thinking of you and for you, and my plans will come to you as soon as crystallized, sometime in August. Slim chance of my getting up to Pennsylvania. All Europe ideas definitely out. Spain was what I wanted to see and Spain is in what the newsmen call the “throes of revolution.”
Your mother likes your letters so much. Hope you have nice tent mates. I dont agree with Mrs. Tappan on that subject, but that's a whole story and I know whatever the situation is you'll make the best of it in your own courageous way
Oh darling Scottie—I don't want to force you but it does please me when you can make a connection between the Louisiana Purchase and why Fred Astaire lifts up his left hind foot for the world's pleasure. I want you to be among the best of your race and not waste yourself on trivial aims. To be useful and proud—is that too much to ask?
I enclose you the jacket of my latest book. I have decided to write in Scandinavian! from now on!
Your devoted Daddy
14. July 31, 1936
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Darling:
I am enclosing in this some pictures that tell a sad story. I had a terrific accident and broke my shoulder. I thought I would be very smart and do some diving and after a year and a half of inactivity I stretched my muscles too much in the air and broke my shoulder. It has all been very troublesome and expensive but I have tried to be as cheerful as possible about it and everyone has been very kind; the people here have rigged up a curious writing board for me so that I work with my hand over my head rather like this.1
I enclose money for your present small needs. It may be that the expenses of this injury will preclude your going to an expensive school this fall but life sometimes does those things to you and I know you are brave and able to adjust yourself to changing conditions and to know that all the effort that I have will be thrown into your education and the care of your mother. If I had not had this operation on my shoulder the doctor tells me I would never have been able to raise my arm above my shoulder again. It is still an open bet as to whether or not I will ever be able to raise it above my shoulder.
I am proud of you and I am only a little angered by the fact that you have not managed to read more than one of the French books.
Sunday night I leave for Baltimore and you can write me either there care of Mrs. Owens or here where I am returning. Isn't it lucky I did not go to Spain after all! Or maybe it would have been rather fun.
Your loving
Daddy
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald had drawn a picture of himself seated at his writing board.
15. Summer 1936 (?)
ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Grove Park Inn letterhead
Asheville, North Carolina
Scottina:
It was fine seeing you, + I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do.). You are nicer, to adults—you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls 12-15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early—probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but—well:
“Daddy the prophet!” I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn't so right usually about you. When I wrote that “news-sheet” with events left out, you know: the letter that puzzled you, + headed it “Scotty loses Head,” it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, + that you would “lose your head.” What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn't know— I couldn't have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy + indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (understand: I don't blame —— too much—the fault was yours—he didn't, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!)
However, that's of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one—but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost have to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I'm not afraid of it for you. I don't want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive + is fine is founded on positive virtues, work, courage, ect. but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always—and it is a nice thing to have. I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, + it cost me plenty.
Signs + portents of your persistent conciet: Mrs Owens said to me (+ Mrs. Owens loves you)
“For the 1st time in a long while Scotty was nice, + not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.”
Because, I guess, for the 1st time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours—, a chance they never had, of belonging to “high society.” Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing, (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I'd have checked you on that)—but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all— your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you! You did not use one bit of your mind, one little spot! to think what they were thinking, or help them!
You went to Norfolk + gave out the information (via the Taylors, via Annabel, via mother that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn't matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You know it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of “promoting yourself,” But those signs of one big catastrophe (it'll come—I want to minimize it for you, but it cant be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are a young member of the human race, who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen “popular girls” of 15 become utterly declasse in six months because they were essentially selfish. You (who isn't selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more + more that less pretty girls will be attacting the solider, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you + Peaches are intelligent but both of you will be warped by this early attention, + something tells me she wont lose her head; she hasn't the “gift of gab” as you have—her laughter + her silence takes the place of much. That's why I wish to God you would write something when you have time—if only a one act play about how girls act in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.
***
I grow weary, but I probably wont write again for a month. Don't answer this, justifying yourself—of course I know you're doing the best you “can.”
The points of the letter are.
1st You did spill over, rashly!
2nd You are getting over the selfish period—thank God!
3d But it'll take one more big kick, + I want it to be mild, so your backside won't suffer too much.
4th I wish you'd get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people—what they say + how they behave.
With dearest love
Your Simply So-perfect Too too Daddy
please, turn back + read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton—oh yeah!
16. October 20, 1936
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Dearest Scottina:
I had already decided to go up Thanksgiving which I will do, God willing, and so on your own suggestion I have killed the idea of going up on your birthday. You seem to understand the fact that I cannot afford at the moment to make two trips within the same month; so I know you won't be unduly disappointed.
To finish up news of me, the arm is really definitely out of danger and I am going to be able to use it again, which I doubted for three or four weeks. Went out to [a] football game with the Flynns last Saturday, the same sort of game exactly that we went to last fall at very much the same time. Lefty was his usual handsome self and Nora was charming as always. They asked about you repeatedly, and not because they thought they ought to but because they have a real affection for you, and I mean both of them. They were so happy to know that you are getting along so well at your school.
Confirming my Christmas plans, they are, briefly: that we shall have a party for you in Baltimore at the Belvedere or the Stafford, if we can afford it! Then the actual Christmas Day will be spent either here with your mother (it won't be like that awful Christmas in Switzerland), or else you and your mother and the trained nurse will go to Montgomery and spend Christmas with your grandmother; perhaps with a little time afterwards in Baltimore before you go back to school.
Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for a moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will, by itself, invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
Why are you whining about such matters as study hall, etc., when you deliberately picked this school 1 as the place you wanted to go above all places? Of course it is hard. Nothing any good isn't hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.
Scott
Notes:
1 Ethel Walker's.
17. October 28, 1936
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University; Correpondence.
Grove Park Inn Asheville, N.C.
Dearest Scottie:
When I go up Thanksgiving I am given the choice of taking you to dinner at either Pettibone Tavern, Old House, Farmington Country Club, Farmington Inn, Wampanoag Country Club or Avon Country Club. That part of Connecticut is a blank to me. Can you give me any steer as to where you prefer to go and whether there is some girl you are fond of that you would like to have go with us, whose parents will not be there. Possibly Aunt Rosalind will go up with me.
The regulations certainly seem to be strict. I am told that you are not to be allowed any chicken bones, and no morphine, under any conditions, and if I give you champagne and you roll in at midnight, you will be marked down 5% in each subject. Also, the regulations prescribe that you must go in your basketball uniform, balancing a copy of the Old Testament on your head, and if it slips just once—mind you, just once—you will be put back three grades and won't be able to enter Vassar until 1950.
Seriously, Pie, let me know about which one you prefer and whether you want any company with you—by which I mean that I don't feel like chaperoning any considerable group of girls, but if you have some special friend who would be lonely that day and you would like to bring along, it would be a pleasure.
Sorry about the birthday boquet being late. There don't seem to be any flower stores in Simsbury, and it had to go by way of Hartford.
Ever your loving daddy
18. November 10, 1936
Typed copy, 3 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence,
GROVE PARK INN, Asheville, N.C.
Dearest pie:
I got a School letter about Thanksgiving saying that Thanksgiving Day is best, and it is much better for me that way. There is no particular advantage in going out two or three times rather than one, without any particular objectives; the idea is to go out once and have a good time. I will be delighted to meet Agnes, and our engagement is on Thanksgiving day.
Now, this is a parenthesis in my letter: I got the little charms that you sent me for my birthday: the bells dangling from the string and the mule, and I appreciated your thought of me—in a reverse way, you little donkey.
Park Avenue girls are hard, aren't they? My own taste ran to kinder people, but they are usually the daughters of “up-and-coming” men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It is the Yankee push to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of Jay Gould who began by peddling buttons to a county and ended with the same system of peddler's morals by peddling railroads to a nation.
Don't mistake me. I think of myself always as a Northerner and I think of you as a Northerner. Nevertheless, we are all one nation now and you will find all the lassitude and laziness that you despise among those girls, enough to fill Savannah and Charleston, just as down here you will find the same “go getter” principle in the Carolinas.
About the happy medium—which usually means to establish a state of happiness that has happened before and may possibly, under favorable circumstances, happen again: you have got to throw yourself one way or another, that is to say, you have got to say that I am dedicated to a scholastic life for the moment, or I am going to play around. Knowing your wise moderation in all things, I am not presuming to give your advice in this matter, except such advice as we can all take, whether we are Eleanor Turnbulls or Monseigneur Voltaires.
If you really were a happy medium you would probably be the most popular girl in school, which is the last thing I would want of you. I would like you to be a defiant little point of light at the end of a diamond, and if you have fools to be with, to make them a setting.
I don't know whether you will stay there another year—it all depends on your marks and your work, and I can't give you the particular view of life that I have, which as you know is a tragic one, without dulling your enthusiasm. A whole lot of people have found it a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, my God, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that your duty to justify your inheritance is to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in with a certain esprit.
You have seen the shallowness of the Park Avenue girls, but if you had gone to school down here you would have seen the sort of half-ass attitude with which Southern women accept the decay of their race and cowardice of their men.
Now, insofar as your course is concerned, there is no question of your dropping mathematics and taking the easiest way to go into Vassar and being one of the girls fitted for nothing except to reflect other people without having any particular character of your own. I want you to take mathematics up to the limit of what the school offers. I want you to take physics and I want you to take chemistry. I don't care a damn about your English courses or your French courses. If you don't know two languages and the ways that great men chose to express their thoughts in those languages by this time, then you are not my daughter. You have got to do something hard and tough before you justify yourself with me entirely. You are an only child, but that doesn't give you any freedom of consonance with egotism.
I want you to know certain basic scientific principles, and I feel that that is impossible to learn unless you have the schooling of an East side newsboy or that of a scholar who has gone as far into mathematics and its inevitable results as coordinate geometry. I don't want you to give up mathematics next year. I learned about writing from doing something that I didn't have any taste for. If you don't carry your mathematics such as coordinate geometry (conic sections—or they may have some new name for it now) up to the point of calculus, you will have strayed far afield from what I had planned for you. If you don't care to carry beyond the calculus, it will show in the result of what struggles you may have with it; but you are not planning your course of study. I am doing that for the moment. Whether or not you make a success of it is my business and yours, but it is nothing to be decided by what is easiest. I have put too much thought into your education for that. You are going into Vassar with mathematical credits and a certain side of your life there is going to be scientific, and, as I used to say, it is not a subject of discussion: it is simply what I wish.
Honey, I wish I could see you. It would be so much easier to go over these important matters without friction, but at a distance it seems rather tough that you are inclined to take the easiest way and slide into the subjects that are easy for you, like languages.
No more until I see you Thanksgiving.
Daddy
19. November 17, 1936
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Dearest Pie:
I got a School Letter saying that Thanksgiving Day is best, and it is better for me that way. There is no particular advantage in going out two or three times rather than one, without particular objectives; the idea is to go out once and have a good time. I'll be delighted to meet whoever you want, and our engagement is on Thanksgiving Day.
(This is a parenthesis: I got the little charms that you sent me for my birthday, the bells dangling and the mule, and appreciated your thought of me—you little donkey!)
Park Avenue girls are hard, aren't they? Usually the daughters of “up-and-coming” men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It's the “Yankee push” to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of Jay Gould who began by peddling bad buttons to a county and ended, with the same system of peddler's morals, by peddling five dollar railroads to a nation.
Don't mistake me. I think of myself always as a northerner—and I think of you the same way. Nevertheless, we are all of one nation and you will find all the lassitude and laziness there that you despise, enough to fill Savannah and Charleston, just as down here you will find the same “go getter” principle in the Carolinas.
I don't know whether you will stay there another year—it all depends on your marks and your work, and I can't give you the particular view of life that I have (which as you know is a tragic one), without dulling your enthusiasm. A whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that it is your duty to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain esprit.
Now, insofar as your course is concerned, there is no question of your dropping mathematics and taking the easiest way to go into Vassar, and being one of the girls fitted for nothing except to reflect other people without having any particular character of your own. I want you to take mathematics up to the limit of what the school offers. I want you to take physics and I want you to take chemistry. I don't care about your English courses or your French courses at present. If you don't know two languages and the ways that men chose to express their thoughts in those languages by this time, then you don't sound like my daughter. You are an only child, but that doesn't give you any right to impose on that fact.
I want you to know certain basic scientific principles, and I feel that it is impossible to learn them unless you have gone as far into mathematics as coordinate geometry. I don't want you to give up mathematics next year. I learned about writing from doing something that I didn't have any taste for. If you don't carry your mathematics such as coordinate geometry (conic sections), you will have strayed far afield from what I had planned for you. I don't insist on the calculus, but it is certainly nothing to be decided by what is easiest. You are going into Vassar with mathematical credits and a certain side of your life there is going to be scientific.
Honey, I wish I could see you. It would be so much easier to go over these important matters without friction, but at a distance it seems rather tough that you are inclined to slide into the subjects that are easy for you, like modern languages.
No more until I see you Thanksgiving.
With dearest love,
F. Scott Fitz
P.S. Sorry you are on bounds—feel as if I had been the same for six months. However I have bought an ancient Packard roadster and get out more now. I always allow for your exuberance but I hope this doesn't come from a feud with any special teacher, or from any indiscretion of speech, a fault you should be beginning to control.
20. December 12, 1936
Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina
Dear Scottie:
As I wired you, there is no question of having ninety people. The most you can possibly ask is about sixty people; and even that is counting on ten or twelve refusals. If I had thought that the Ethel Walker School was going to give you a peculiar idea of what your financial resources are, it would have been far, far better to send you to a modest school here in the Carolina mountains. You are a poor girl, and if you don't like to think about it, just ask me. If you don't make up your mind to being that, you become one of those terrible girls that don't know whether they are millionairesses or paupers. You are neither one nor the other. The dance for you in Baltimore is a very modest one. It will have dignity because it pretends to nothing that it isn't. It will give you a certain amount of whoopee and it will probably lack a certain amount of things that you would expect. For instance, I am determined to have a hurdy-gurdy for the orchestra—you know, an Italian with a monkey, and I think the children will be very content with that. They don't want much, children of sixteen or seventeen, and they will be amused by the antics of the monkey. Your idea of a swing orchestra seems zero to me.
However, in the next room I will have some of the older people with a swing orchestra that I have engaged, and from time to time you may bring some of your choice friends in there to dance.
—But remember that I expect you and your crowd to dance by the hurdy-gurdy during the whole afternoon, quietly and slowly and without swing music, just doing simple waltz dancing.
You can stay all night all you want with people up to the night of December 24th, when you and I are going to make a hop South.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. You ask what to put on the cards. It should be about like this:
Miss Frances Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
December 22nd
Four to six
Hotel Belvedere Dancing
21. [Spring, 1937]
[Oak Hall Hotel] [Tryon, North Carolina]
Darling Scottina:
I loved having you here (except in the early morning) and I think we didn't get along so badly, did we? Glad you had a gay time in Baltimore and New York and have a friend at Groton. They are very democratic there—they have to sleep in gold cubicles and wash at old platinum pumps. This toughens them up so they can pay the poor starvation wages without weakening. (By the way, the older boys only can smoke at Andover and in a special place—you wretched liar you!)
The horse show is Wednesday. Everyone asks about you and really means it, some of them. La Sprague said her mother forgot to invite you to some party she gave and was in tears. She has two Williams boys who are here at the hotel on her trail. Caroline Kelly sends her love. I see your mother tomorrow. Finally finished my story (very good) and am starting another and a play on the side. Hollywood postponed but may come through.
What did you do in Baltimore? How were Peaches and Meredith? Answer.
With dearest love to my slew-footed angel,
Daddy
P.S. What about the toil? Are you sweating gall and vinegar?
22. Postmarked July 5, 1937
[En route to Hollywood]
Dearest Pie:
What an exit! Horrors of life in the sticks—nothing could have turned around there except a model T Ford. Sorry to leave you and Grandma in such a mess.
The air trip was fine—very thrilling as always. I'm sending this to the Obers where I hope you are by now. Also by the time you get this I'll have heard from the MacArthurs though I know it's all right. It will be great to have you with me in Hollywood. I know Freddie Bartholomew will love taking you around to birthday parties in the afternoons, and you'll find Shirley Temple as good a pal as Peaches and more loyal.
Where on earth did you get that preconception that I think of you as a scarlet woman? Hell, you're a romantic but that's not in your disfavor. It's all right to like affection, but not when you drive, in the immortal words of Mitzi Green. I simply don't want you in danger and I don't want you to do anything inappropriate to your age. For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy I know who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave. The girls who were what we called “speeds” (in our stone-age slang) at sixteen were reduced to anything they could get at the marrying time. It's in the logic of life that no young person ever “gets away with anything.” They fool their parents but not their contemporaries. It was in the cards that Ginevra King should get fired from Westover—also that your mother should wear out young. I think that despite a tendency to self indulgence you and I have some essential seriousness that will manage to preserve us. Whatever your sins are I hope you never get to justify them to yourself.
With dearest love,
Daddy
23. [July, 1937]
[En route to Hollywood]
Dearest Pie:
This may be the last letter for a time, though I won't forget the check when I get at my check book.
I feel a certain excitement. The third Hollywood venture. Two failures behind me though one no fault of mine. The first one was just ten years ago. At that time I had been generally acknowledged for several years as the top American writer both seriously and, as far as prices went, popularly. I had been loafing for six months for the first time in my life and was confident to the point of conceit. Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that with no effort on my part I was a sort of magician with words—an odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style.
Total result—a great time and no work. I was to be paid only a small amount unless they made my picture—they didn't.
The second time I went was five years ago. Life had gotten in some hard socks and while all was serene on top, with your mother apparently recovered in Montgomery, I was jittery underneath and beginning to drink more than I ought to. Far from approaching it too confidently I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named de Sano, since a suicide, and let myself be gypped out of command. I wrote the picture and he changed as I wrote. I tried to get at Thalberg but was erroneously warned against it as “bad taste.” Result—a bad script. I left with the money, for this was a contract for weekly payments, but disillusioned and disgusted, vowing never to go back, tho they said it wasn't my fault and asked me to stay. I wanted to get East when the contract expired to see how your mother was. This was later interpreted as “running out on them” and held against me.
(The train has left El Paso since I began this letter—hence the writing—Rocky Mountain writing.)
I want to profit by these two experiences—I must be very tactful but keep my hand on the wheel from the start—find out the key man among the bosses and the most malleable among the collaborators— then fight the rest tooth and nail until, in fact or in effect, I'm alone on the picture. That's the only way I can do my best work. Given a break I can make them double this contract in less [than] two years. You can help us all best by keeping out of trouble—it will make a great difference to your important years. Take care of yourself mentally (study when you're fresh), physically (don't pluck your eyebrows), morally (don't get where you have to lie) and I'll give you more scope than Peaches.
Daddy
24. October 8, 1937
[The Garden of Allah Hotel]
[Hollywood, California]
Darling Pie:
I'm awfully sorry about that telegram. I got a letter from Bill Warren, saying that it was all around Baltimore that I was making twenty-five hundred a week out here, and it disturbed and upset me. I suppose it was one of Rita Swann's ideas. I don't know why I suspected you—I should have known you would be more discrete and would at least name some believable figure. You see what a reputation you've made with your romantic tales!
As to the missing three days, I really don't blame you for that either. The trouble was that Harold Ober didn't know where you were either. If you had wired him instead of Aunt Rosalind, it would have been all right. However, it gave me only one bad hour, as I really don't fret about you as much as I used to. I did worry about your smoking this summer, but you gave me your word that you wouldn't smoke at Peaches' so that was all right; and I don't care much who you go out with so long as you are in at a decent hour and don't get the practice on your mind. From next summer on, you can find you'll have more privileges, but I don't want them to become habits that will turn and devour you. You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life. There is no other time but now.
No special news—things have been quiet. Had the questionable honor [of] meeting Walter Winchell, a shifty-eyed fellow surrounded by huge bodyguards. Norma Shearer invited me to dinner three times but I couldn't go—unfortunately, as I like her. Maybe she will ask me again. Also have seen something of Buff Cobb, Irving Cobb's daughter, who is an old friend; and Sheilah 1 who, by the way, has broken her engagement to the Marquess Donnegal. (The poor man was about to get on a boat, but it was a sort of foolish marriage in many ways.) Also have been to much tennis and saw Helen Wills come back in company with Von Cramm to defeat Budge and his partner. Took Beatrice Lillie, Charlie MacArthur and Sheilah to the Tennis Club the other night, and Errol Flynn joined us—he seemed very nice though rather silly and fatuous. Don't see why Peaches is so fascinated. Frank Morgan came over and talked to me, telling me that we had a fight in the cloak room at Gloria Swanson's seventeen years ago, but I had no recollection of the incident except that I had a scuffle with somebody. But in those days there [were] so many scraps that this one doesn't stand out in my memory.
I hope you thought over my analysis as to how to deal with the neatness habit, and if for one week you put each thing away individually from the moment of touching it to the moment of its final disposal—instead of putting away three things at a time—I think that you would lick it in a month and life would be easier for you in one more way. Please tell me about this when you write.
Looking over your letters and answering them in turn—it was nice of Peaches to give a party for you, and I'm glad Stanley is divine-looking; sorry Andrew is repulsive. I'm glad that you went out with that great heart-throb, Bob-the-Baker. Was Bob Haas nice? Your next letter comes from Exeter. Sorry you can't go to Annapolis—you'll be invited there again. Here I have a postcard and, by God, I'm awfully sore at you about that tutoring. I don't understand how on earth the letter could have been mislaid. I posted it from the airport in Spartan-burg that night. So you are still dwelling on the Fisher's Island party in retrospect!
Another letter tells of visiting Mary Earle on Long Island. It sounds fine, but you are right that romantic things really happen in roachy kitchens and back yards. Moonlight is vastly over-estimated. It was all right what you borrowed from Harold. He will put it on my account. So Meredith called from Baltimore! Aren't you afraid of stirring up those old embers? Your disloyalty to Princeton breaks my heart. I sent Andrew football tickets. Your dress sounds fine, Scottie, my bonnie lass.
Lastly, the letter with the Yale postmark—I bet you bought that stationery. It reminds me of something that happened yesterday. On such paper, but with the Princeton seal, I used to write endless letters throughout sophomore and junior years to Ginevra King of Chicago and Westover, who later figured in This Side of Paradise. Then I didn't see her for twenty-one years, though I telephoned her in 1933 to entertain your mother at the World's Fair, which she did. Yesterday I get a wire that she is in Santa Barbara and will I come down there immediately. She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep that illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference. I don't know whether I should go or not. It would be very, very strange. These great beauties are often something else at thirty-eight, but Ginevra had a great deal besides beauty.
I was hoping that they'd get up a “Higher French” course for you. Was nothing done about that? Miss Walker mentioned it in her letter. Your learning German seems to me rather pointless but don't construe this into any tendency to loaf on it. Knowing just a little bit would be a foundation—especially if we go abroad for a few weeks next summer.
I sent the thirteen dollars to Rosalind.
What do you want for your birthday? You might make a suggestion.
I think of you a lot. I was very proud of you all summer and I do think that we had a good time together. Your life seemed gaited with much more moderation and I'm not sorry that you had rather a taste of misfortune during my long sickness, but now we can do more things together—when we can't find anybody better. There—that will take you down! I do adore you and will see you Christmas.
Your loving
[Daddy]
Notes:
1 Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham.
Charles Marquis Warren, Baltimore protege of Fitzgerald.
Baltimore friend.
Lillie was a British comedienne.
Character actor; Morgan later played the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
25. November 4, 1937
[Metro-Goldivyn-Mayer Corporation]
[Culver City, California]
Dearest Pie:
I admit I'm a terrible correspondent but I hope it isn't the pot calling the kettle black—i.e., do you write your mother regularly once a week? As I assured you before, it is of the greatest importance, even if Bob-the-Butcher or Bill-the-Baker doesn't get the weekly hook in his gills.
News about the picture: The cast is tentatively settled. Joan Crawford had her teeth in the lead for a while but was convinced that it was a man's picture; and Loretta Young not being available, the decision rests at present on Margaret Sullavan. Certainly she will be much better than Joan Crawford in the role. Tracy and Taylor will be reinforced by Franchot Tone at present writing, and the cameras will presumably roll sometime in December. An old friend, Ted Paramore, has joined me on the picture in fixing up much of the movie construction, at which I am still a semi-amateur, though I won't be that much longer.
Plans about Christmas depend on whether I will be held here for changes through the shooting. I don't think that's probable, and if it weren't my first picture that I'm anxious to get as perfect as can be, I wouldn't let it be possible, because I can always have a vacation on three weeks' notice—but I want to mention it as a very faint chance. However, let us suppose I come East, as I will nine chances out of ten —I will expect to spend the time with you and your mother, perhaps a little in Baltimore, some in Asheville. Maybe I can take your mother to Montgomery, though that is very faint indeed and should not be mentioned to her. Also I want to spend a couple of days in New York and I have no doubt that you will want to be with me then.
Have you any plans of what you'd like to do? Would you like another party in Baltimore? I mean just an afternoon affair like the last. It might become a sort of an institution, a yearly round-up of your Baltimore friends. Write me immediately what you thought you wanted to do—of course you also will go to see your mother sometime during the holidays.
By ill chance the Harvard game tickets for Andrew went astray and were sent me here. I'm sorry. He must have been disappointed— save that he missed the worst drubbing Princeton has had in many years.
My social life is in definite slow motion. I refused a good many parties and am now in the comfortable position of not being invited much any more. I had dinner at Gladys Swarthout's last week with John McCormick and some of the musical crowd. I have taken in some football games with Sheilah Graham, and met the love of my youth, Ginevra King (Mitchell), after an interval of twenty-one years. She is still a charming woman and I'm sorry I didn't see more of her.
How much do the ads cost for your year book? Please let me know.
I have a small apartment now at the Garden of Allah, but have done nothing about the house situation, as there seems no chance of your mother coming out here at the present.
I am anxiously awaiting your first report and will be more inclined to go Christmas if it give rest of the col… [The rest of the letter is missing, except for the postscript.]
Congratulations on Cheerleader, etc. Can you turn a cartwheel?
Notes:
Actress who specialized in sympathetic roles.
Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young appeared in Three Comrades.
Fitzgerald quarreled with E. E. Paramore about responsibility for the screenplay of Three Comrades.
Swarthout was an opera soprano who appeared in movies; McCormack was a celebrated Irish tenor.
26. Autumn, 1937
[from The Crack-Up, 1945]
I shall somehow manage not to appear in a taxi-cab on Thanksgiving and thus disgrace you before all those “nice” girls. Isn't it somewhat old-fashioned to describe girls in expensive backgrounds as “nice?” I will bet two-thirds of the girls at Miss Walker's school have at least one grandparent that peddled old leather in the slums of New York, Chicago or London, and if I thought you were accepting the standards of the cosmopolitan rich, I would much rather have you in a southern school, where scholastic standards are not so high and the word “nice” is not debased to such a ludicrous extent. I have seen the whole racket, and if there is any more disastrous road than that from Park Avenue to the Rue de la Paix and back again, I don't know it.
They are homeless people, ashamed of being American, unable to master the culture of another country; ashamed, usually, of their husbands, wives, grandparents, and unable to bring up descendants of whom they could be proud, even if they had the nerve to bear them, ashamed of each other yet leaning on each other's weakness, a menace to the social order in which they live—oh, why should I go on? You know how I feel about such things. If I come up and find you gone Park Avenue, you will have to explain me away as a Georgia cracker or a Chicago killer. God help Park Avenue.
Notes:
Note from Crack-up
Scott Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, working for the moving pictures, during 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940, and most of the letters that follow must have been written from there. He made, however, a few short trips to the East, and this letter may have been written from an Eastern address.
27. [February, 1938]
[The Garden of Allah Hotel] [Hollywood, California]
Dearest Scottina:
So much has happened out here, and in the East, that a letter can't tell it.
Beginning at the end—Three Comrades went into production today and I started on the new Joan Crawford picture—as yet unnamed. I am half sick with work, overwhelmed with it and yet vaguely happier than I've been in months. The last part of a job is always sad and very difficult but I'm proud of the year's output and haven't much to complain of.
Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasn't particularly. I flew back to New York intending to take you out with your friends Saturday but I discovered you were on bounds. My zero hour was Monday morning in California so there was nothing to do except fly back on Sunday afternoon. I didn't think you and I could cover much ground with the horses flying around the tan bark and steaming in Rosa Bonheur's steel engraving on the wall.1
One time in sophomore year at Princeton, Dean West got up and rolled out the great lines of Horace:
“Integer Vitae, scelerisque pueris
Non eget mauris, facule nec arcu—” 2
—And I knew in my heart that I had missed something by being a poor Latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a great human experience I had rejected through laziness, through having sown no painful seed.
But when anything, Latin or pig latin, was ever put up to me so immediately as your chance of entering Vassar next fall I could always rise to meet that. It is either Vassar or else the University of California here under my eye and the choice is so plain that I have no sympathy for your loafing. We are not even out of debt yet, you are still [a] scholarship student and you might give them a break by making a graceful exit. They practically took you on your passport picture.
Baby, you're going on blind faith, as vain as Kitsy's belief that she wouldn't grow a whisker, when you assume that a small gift for people will get you through the world. It all begins with keeping faith with something that grows and changes as you go on. You have got to make all the right changes at the main corners—the price for losing your way once is years of unhappiness. You have not yet entirely missed a turning, but failing to get somewhere with the Latin will be just that. If you break faith with me I cannot feel the same towards you.
The Murphys, Nora, etc., asked after you. We will without fail go somewhere at Easter—your mother's going to make a stay in Montgomery with a companion and she'll meet us. Some New York gallery has taken some very expensive pictures of you—do you want any? I like them but my God they cost.
With dearest love always,
Daddy
Notes:
1 Bonheur was a French painter known particularly for her animal pictures; Fitzgerald is describing the Ether Walker reception room.
2 Horace actually wrote: “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus Non eget mauris iaculis neque arcu”
Presumably a reference to a children’s story.
28. February 22, 1938
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation]
[Culver City, California]
Dearest Pie:
I never hear from you any more. Please drop me a line and tell me if all goes well.
I started my new picture which is after all a piece called Infidelity and will star Joan Crawford and I don't know who else. I will finish the first draft Easter and will come East to take you somewhere.
Three Comrades is halfway through. I have seen some of the shooting and some of the “rushes” (where they run off what they've shot that day) but you can't tell much from either. To my mind, the producer seriously hurt the script in rewriting it. It may be I am wrong.
People ask after you, but I am the most curious of all. May I be permitted to ask after you? I'd like a line about your health, your work, your morale, success or failure of the play and such affairs. If you will let me know when the play is, I will send you a message of congratulation or flowery tokens if you prefer.
I think of you always, darling, and will try to invent something very nice for Easter.
Just heard from Mrs. Turnbull who said you had three especial qualities—loyalty and ambition were two, the third I'll tell you later. She felt that would protect you from harm. I make no comment. She seemed very fond of you.
Also the Finneys have sent me the work of a musician to do something about, and I am taking the matter in hand.
With dearest love,
Daddy
29. March 11, 1938
[The Garden of Allah Hotel]
[Hollywood, California]
Dearest Pie:
I'm glad you got 74. If you had gotten that the first term, we'd have something to start on now. A letter came at the same time from Miss Walker, in which she referred to your “low position in the class.” Of course this is not at all what you implied to me when I saw you in January, and I do wish you would be more accurate. To suggest a state of affairs which doesn't exist merely stalls off the final reckoning. The most important thing in your life now is to get good marks at school and pass the examinations for Vassar in June. It is so important that if you don't, I am unable, off-hand, to think of any satisfactory alternative. You will be exactly in the position of a man who has done a bad job and been fired, which will be a nice black mark against you at sixteen. You can't and mustn't let this happen. I am not going to spend Easter lecturing you and this is to forestall any attitude on your part that I am unreasonable not to be appeased by your success in other lines.
On the other hand, I am of course pleased that you did well as Mrs. Bennett (Harold Ober wrote me that your acting stood out). Also, I am glad that the musical comedy you wrote was so successful at school. Why don't you get a volume of Gilbert and Sullivan and read the extraordinary and amazing lyrics of lolanthe and Patience. I used to study them like mad when I was writing the Triangle shows at Princeton. (I see, by the way, that a boy named James W. Huntley has been elected to the Cottage Club at Princeton. Did you know him in Baltimore?) I wish I could say as nice things about the poem after Ogden Nash (I dined with him and Bill Leonard night before last). It was a long way after. Ogden Nash's poems are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line. Read over a poem of his and you will see what I mean. Your poem has every line in a different meter. One changes from a two-four rhyme to a gallop, to a waltz, and so forth, and the total effect is nil. I know you didn't think much of it but you did send it to me, so I am telling you the truth.
I am glad you have gotten around to liking Dorothy Parker and that you had the good taste to pick out her “Diary of a New York Lady.” It is one of her best pieces. As to knowing her, you do know her, but that was in the days when you were a little weary of my literary friends. I knew Elizabeth Firestone's father very well and liked him very much. What are you going to do for the Firestone Tire Hour? Thank God you got a credit for posture. That's really good news. I think you can have the suit that you want for spring. Shall I send you the money or what? Write me immediately.
I think your Pinehurst suggestion is rather good for Easter. Jim Boyd lives at Southern Pines next door; in fact, he owns most of it. We might do a few days there and a few days at Virginia Beach. However, the geographical part of our plans will depend on what the doctor will let your mother do.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
I liked the lyrics you told me last January—very well turned. I suppose they were in the show. Ordered none of those photos—they were so tight-lip one imagined that they concealed gold teeth. I heard there was a flood here but didn't look out the window as I was busy.
30. [March, 1938]
[The Garden of Allah Hotel] [Hollywood, California]
Dearest Pie:
Your letter was welcome but I'm sorry you waited to write me until you had nothing pleasant to say—all about hating people, and where you were going to college and how you were about to replace De-Mille and Berlin next year. Together with some impertinent cracks about my absurd unreasonableness. I simply conclude that you were in a bad humor because none of it makes much sense.
As to Bryn Mawr, I am entering you at St. Timothy's next year so if you miss at Vassar you will be able to be near Baltimore, which I gather you want. If you thought you were going to spend next year weekending in Baltimore you must have suddenly come to one of those decisions of yours that I am a sucker. I have no such plans for you. Either you accept responsibilities and let me graduate from this unwelcome role of stern father or you stay another year in jail with the children. Your whole liberty turns on the question of your work and nothing else—the kind of talent in demand out here doesn't walk out on a job.
In any case I'm coming East this month and we'll go somewhere and we'll find out your objections to this dog's life you lead and if they're valid we'll change them.
Love,
Daddy
31. April 18, 1938
[The Garden of Allah Hotel] [Hollywood, California]
Dearest Pie:
Got your postcard. A couple of days ago got a wire from my old friend, Alice Lee Myers. You remember, the woman who took Honoria and some other girls abroad last summer. She is taking a party this year which will include Fanny, and I think it sounds very good. Traveling is always fun; you always meet young people on the boat and in hotels during the summer, and the trip itself would include a station wagon tour of France, Belgium, Holland, and perhaps a taste of England. I won't mention that it would help your French, because that sounds too much like work, but I will say that if it works out you will be a very lucky girl, for quite possibly these are the last few years in which you will be able to see Europe as it was. Though I may add that if you get caught in a war this summer, I will simply deny knowing you and you will have to get out of it the best way you can; but please don't start one.
God, how I'd like to go myself. Everything is work here, just as I expected, and of course I came back without any rest and it was two or three days before I was really able to get going again. I like the work part, but seem to have to do it in big, heartbreaking doses, which is bad for the constitution. Sorry we didn't have as many talks as I had hoped for. You had no special plans for the summer, I gathered, except what general invitations might be available, and I really don't want you out here for the whole summer because there is no Helen Hayes and really nothing much to do that would interest you except a repetition of last summer—only less interesting, as I am out of touch with Norma, Joan, etc. However, if you come for a week in June with Peaches, I will open up relations again and try to make an impression on her. I am writing the Finneys today. I wouldn't talk around school about summer plans until they are more definite. I will have to bargain with Alice Lee Myers about the European trip, and for the Hollywood trip see if Pete will trust his precious into my hands. Your mother, Obers, etc., are to know nothing yet—the teachers nothing.
Now the European trip would be due to start either June 22 or July 2nd. I imagine that I could have the dates changed a little, or rather that, as you are one-fourth of the party, the time of your examinations would have to be a determining point in the itinerary. When will they be over? What are the actual dates? What would you say, if the European trip is decided on, to the idea of leaving school after graduation, coming out here and taking your boards here in Hollywood and then, if time is short, flying back to New York? I don't mind your flying now as I did last summer. It is as nearly safe in June as such things can ever be. Also, I want a truthful answer as to whether the school would rather you stayed there. Please don't make me take this up with Miss Walker. If they would rather, by a margin of 60-40, that you stayed, I want to know, and I want to know now, by airmail. The marks were really so very mediocre that, if I was Vassar, I wouldn't take you unless the school swore that you were a serious character—and the school is not going to swear you are a serious character if you let a prep school dance stand even faintly in the way of your success. Besides, if they don't want you to stay, and the trip abroad works out, I would like to catch a glimpse of you during that time. I don't want to come East in June if it can possibly be avoided. After all, you are going to college, so this is not your real graduation. Nobody came to mine, and I don't remember being hurt. Nevertheless, if it were not for all the hazards involved, such as bringing your mother there or else hurting her feelings by not bringing her, and the fact that it may come right at the crucial point of this picture (due to roll in June, but perhaps not starting till the fifteenth), I would love to go and see you standing flowerlike among the other fashionable peonies. Moreover, if it means an overwhelming lot to you, I will try to arrange it, but you can well understand how I dread any repetition of this Easter trip.
I got a vague word from Harold that you were going to “study hard” but I have no word from anybody about whether you took the Latin and how many lessons you took. The report is the same in detail from all your teachers and it is too dispiriting to go into. If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration. It has been so ironic to me in after life to buy books to master subjects in which I took courses at college and which made no impression on me whatsoever. I once flunked a course on the Napoleonic era, and I now have over 300 books in my library on the subject and the other A scholars wouldn't even remember it now. That was because I had made the mental tie-up that work equals something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something to be postponed. These scholars you speak of as being bright are no brighter than you, the great majority not nearly as quick nor, probably, as well endowed with memory and perception, but they have made that tie-up, so that something does not stiffen in their minds at the mention that it is a set task. I am so sure that this is your trouble because you are so much like me and because, after a long time milling over the matter, I have concluded that it was mine. What an idiot I was to be disqualified for play by poor work when men of infinitely inferior capacity got high marks without any great effort.
Write me what you think about the summer plans. The alternative is not sitting around in some attractive suburb with a bunch of Gilman School boys chewing on your ear, pleasant as the prospect might appear. I am afraid you would be somewhat second-hand by autumn, and I prefer you as you are for a little longer.
Dearest love.
Your Progenitor in the Direct Line
Will you kindly touch on every point in this letter when you answer it? I am keeping a carbon, hoping you will. This is a time when we ought to be able to communicate—we are unconflicting on 90% of things—all except your lazy belly which my thin gut shrinks from. Please work—work with your best hours.
32. April 27, 1938
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University; Correpondence.
Hollywood
Dearest Pie:
Well—the cards are certainly on the table. It is apparent that, in borderline cases such as yours:
Entrance to Vassar depends on the Good Will of your school.
The Good Will of your School is likewise borderline in your case-good possibilities and somewhat smelly results; good extra curricular activities and disturbing conceit (which I hope won't go into your letter to Vassar.)
The Good Will of the School can be said to depend entirely on the next six weeks. The fortnight of waiting is when they will be making up their final report. If you are a leader as you consider yourself, perhaps you could exert yourself so that what happened to last year's Fifth Form won't happen to yours.
I have written Alice Lee Myers that the trip to Europe depends entirely on whether your school recommends you for college. If not, I don't think you'd get anything out of the trip and it can wait till next Summer when you're more mature. Something less expensive can be arranged here in America.
About New York shopping—can't Aunt Rosalind do it?
You ask about your mother—it goes to and fro. Dr. Carroll wants her to stay there with only six weeks out a year. I don't see that—so hopeless and dismal, so I'm asking for three to four months. Her family thinks I'm behind Carroll! So I've sent them the whole correspondence.
When I'm away from your mother I feel always an intense pity for her. She was one of the eternal children of this world, the nuisance makers, the charming excuse-artists—a thing people will stand until they realize the awful toll exacted from others.
I have waited to write the Finneys1 till I heard from you. Perhaps if it can't be arranged in June it may be in Autumn.
It's pretty unlikely for me to come in June—would you like your mother to come with an attractive, well-dressed nurse?
Answer me this—and always
Dearest love
Daddy
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald was planning a trip to California for Scottie and her friend Peaches Finney.
33. [Spring, 1938]
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest:
I hope Mary Earle won't find the trip too expensive. It is if you are not going to Vassar, but if you are I think it will be such a worthwhile thing and I wish to God I could go over with you.
We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity to our infinite disappointment. It won't be Joan's next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his Legion of Decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33 (remember I didn't like you to see them?) but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children. Anyhow we're starting a new story and a safe one.
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats' “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement—the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes. Would you read that poem for me, and report?
I'm having a controversy with the Highland Hospital. They want to keep your mother there with only six weeks out a year and a few trips with Dr. and Mrs. Carroll. I can't see it—I think she should be out from one-fourth to one-half the time, using the hospital only as a base. If I insist, they threaten to release her altogether to me which would be simply a catastrophe—I can't work and look after her. And she wouldn't obey any companion unless the hospital has authority back of the companion. Mrs. Sayre wants her to come and sit beside what will soon be a deathbed and I can't see that as promising any future (I don't mean Mrs. Sayre is sick but she is almost so). She (your mother) wants to come to your commencement with Newman and Rosalind—O.K. if it can be arranged for a nurse to take her to and from N.Y.
I don't dare at the moment to tell your mother about the Alice Lee Myers trip or the fact that I've taken a shack at the beach here (address Garden of Allah still). She would feel as if we were happy and she was in prison. If only old Carroll was less obstinate—however it should be solved within a few weeks—I may have to go East but God forbid.
A letter from Miss Walker. Never has my intuition so surely informed me of a thing than now—that you are walking on a most delicate line there. No matter how you feel I should play a “straight” role for five weeks, lest they mistake any action for a frivolous attitude. All through life there are such games to play—mine for instance, when I first came here, to keep away from any bars, even though I wasn't tempted to drink. The connection of “bar-drunk” was too easy to establish in people's minds after my past performances. But don't tell your best friend that you are playing a sober role—such things travel fast and far. You will be smart in playing nun for the time being—five weeks will win you many months.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
34. [May, 1938]
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Pie:
I'm glad you acted decently in the end about that infirmary affair. We'll consider it closed.
About the college courses, in case you get in—for freshman year at least I want them to be subject to discussion between us—I don't think, for example, that you are ready for philosophy. I made some bad mistakes in choosing my own curriculum on silly careless premises, because courses came at the right time, were rumored easy, etc. I thought I'd read Italian to read Dante and didn't get to first base. I should have known from my wretched French that I had no gift for languages. Similarly you went into physics instead of taking more French and you must have been a considerable drag on the rest of the class. So we will discuss your curriculum when we meet. The enclosed is merely to indicate to you that a course in economics might be interesting in these troubled times. I am not insistent about science but at least one line you follow must be useful rather than cultural.
It's been a bad year for you. I hope you'll save the remnants by getting into college and I do wish you wouldn't blame others ever for what happens to you. A famous gunman who was lately electric-shocked from among us said he only shot the policeman because he wasn't let alone. Right up to the chair he thought he was being put upon. You were never anti-social in youth—it is one regard in which this year your reasoning is more like your mother's than mine. Never in her whole life did she have a sense of guilt, even when she put other lives in danger—it was always people and circumstances that oppressed her. I think, though, that you are walking towards some awful sock in the next few months that will have a sobering effect on you and I will be glad when it's over and you are your old modest and charming self again.
Do try to make your mother happy for two days—excuse her enthusiasm. In her youth, she didn't know such schools existed. Tell her you may go abroad if your exams are good.
If you do, and I am very anxious you should, I can't bring you and Peaches out here this June—September would be better. I have no facilities for chaperonage at the moment but if there is cooperation in your heart this summer I will arrange it for next September. I gather Mary Earle's mother wasn't interested in the European trip.
The censors have stopped Infidelity as we were about to go into production. I am doing the screenplay of The Women for Norma Shearer. My God—what characters! What gossip! Let me remind you never to discuss my affairs with a living soul.
With dearest love,
Daddy
35. June 20, 1938
Wire. Princeton University; Correspondence.
CULVERCITY CALIF 223P 1938 JUN 20 PM 6 37
LETTER FROM VASSAR ENCOURAGING AS TO LATE UNPLEASANTNESS BUT WORRIES ME ABOUT WORK HOPE YOU ARE PUTTING EIGHT OR TEN HOURS A DAY ON HISTORY KNOWING EVERY CORNER OF IT LOVE
DADDY.
Notes:
1 Sent c/o Harold Ober in Scarsdale, N.Y., where Scottie was staying.
36. July 7, 1938
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
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.1 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 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 also 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 till 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 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's 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 energies 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 on 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 the 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 misinformation 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 like 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 sisters’ 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 not have been in evidence on the day Mrs. Perry Smith figuratively did the same to you.
All this was the long preparation for the dispair 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.
To sum up: what you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been.) In your career as a “wild society girl”, vintage of 1925, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it—it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere”, your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life—a real dream of your own—and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late—as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge—now your conversation is as commonplace as if you’d spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School—what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.
I shall come East in September to meet your boat—but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn’t likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will—or want to—remains to be seen.
Daddy
P. S. If you keep the diary, please don’t let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I’m not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don’t try to be witty in the writing, unless it’s natural—just true and real.
P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time—I wrote it over twice.
Notes:
1 After graduation, while studying for college boards at Ethel Walker's, Scottie had broken bounds and been asked to leave the school. Fitzgerald's fear that it might prevent her from getting into Vassar occasioned this letter.
37. [July, 1938]
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation ] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Pie:
When I wrote down those architectural terms hoping to encourage a “Gothic Quest” I overlooked what was right under my eye. Rotterdam, oddly enough, is the center of modern architecture. J. P. P. Oud, who was invited to give the Kalin lectures at Princeton some years ago, is the greatest living architect in all probability, and his workers' dwellings, designed when he was city architect of Rotterdam, are a model for the world. See them if you come back that way and compare them with New York slums. Also, if this reaches you in Paris, you might find Caffin's easy book on architecture at Brentano's. Please buy it.
Also if you're in Paris when this reaches you, a pneumatique might reach Nanny at 23 rue Pascal-Lecointre. I think it would be nice if you took her to lunch. If you do, make her feel happy and important—she did a great deal for you. Give her my love.
I have been trying to get your actual college board ratings. Do you realize now that all that bother about French has saved you one whole year of education? I mean that French was the deciding factor in your skipping a grade. So that if you should marry at 19 you will have had one more year of education than if you had let it slip. I hadn't intended to bring up the college matters definitely in this letter, but, since I've said this, [I] might as well add that you should approach Vassar as if you were going to do the four years. A girl's life is so different from a boy's in America that the odds are incalculable as to whether or not you will take a degree—but who knows? Your mother had a broken engagement on her hands a few days before her nineteenth birthday—what could have been better than to have had something to go on with? It is very exceptional for a grown person to jump straight from one serious love affair into another.
Aside from that—and you know I'd be happy if you didn't marry before twenty at the earliest—I think it would have an effect on your own morale and the feelings of other students towards you if you signed up “for the duration of the war.” To half of the girls there, Vassar will be their whole world as Princeton was mine and, though they might enjoy a little butterflying, their resentment against the self-confessed butterfly who is only killing time with them will be very deep in their hearts, and will deepen as the years increase. So I should soft-pedal my social ambitions and ride with the times. After all the president of last year's Vassar senior class just married a Rockefeller and the Clark girl of Boston made her debut as a singer instead of on Beacon Hill. The Bachelors' Cotillion simply doesn't mean what it did twenty years ago—or even ten. I suppose it meant a lot to__ __ because she's not likely to have anything any better.
All that is snobbish talk but the part about going in whole-heartedly, and publicly so, is very important and real. I want college to be good— I was pretty discouraged there for a while—I felt myself losing interest, and illness has made me pretty selfish and self-protective. I could see you stranded with a lot of childhood memories—and two thousand trivial letters. I even had a talk with a man who owns a canning factory in San Diego with the idea of giving you the works from the bottom. It would have made you or broken you (i.e., made you run away). But it was pretty drastic medicine and I'm glad I didn't have to resort to it. In an odd way you are an old-fashioned girl, living half in the world of Mrs. Finney and Mrs. Turnbull (you should have seen the latter's face the day the banks closed in '33 and I had the only money on the place—$1800 in gold). Often I have encouraged that because my generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness. But I don't want you to live in an unreal world or to believe that the system that produced Barbara Hutton can survive more than ten years, any more than the French monarchy could survive 1789. Every girl your age in America will have the experience of working for her living. To shut your eyes to that is like living in a dream—to say “I will do valuable and indispensable work” is the part of wisdom and courage.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. At the Saturday Evening Post rate this letter is worth $4000. Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won't you read it twice?
38. Sept. 6th 1938
TLS, 3 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence.
MGM letterhead. Culver City, California
Dearest Pie:
Please read this whole letter carefully at the first opportunity. These instructions are absolute, and subject to no revision, because the next week is going to be somewhat difficult for me.
I decided to bring Peaches out because the matter had gone too far in their minds to be called off without rudeness and possibly injuring your whole relationship there. You are leaving for Hollywood Wednesday night to stay out here until Sunday afternoon—both ways by plane of course. I will try to give you the best available time though it won't be like last time at all. So don't expect too much. And the less you say to Peaches about whom you know here the better, because then less people will fail to remember you when they see you. This is very important, to save yourself any possible loss of prestige in front of Peaches. As an old snob, I know you will understand me.
Meanwhile you will go to Harold Obers when the boat docks Saturday (I'm not asking him to meet you because you know how much his Saturday afternoons mean to him) and I want you to be very specially nice to them all day Sunday—I mean really “give.” They think it is asinine for me to bring you out here now but there is no use trying to explain to them—just tell them you think Daddy is crazy or that you left a toothbrush out here that you have to get, or anything you want. The point is I don't want you to spend all day Sunday in telephoning your New York clientele and making plans for the winter via the Ober's telephone. I know that at sixteen one wants to announce one's whereabouts to the world as an event of cosmic importance but please suppress this for one day and let them have a pleasant impression and their Sunday peace. You can leave for Baltimore any time you want to Monday—that is, any time when it is convenient for Peaches or her family to meet you. I don't want you to celebrate your homecoming by anything tricky. I mean having yourself met by a boy or arriving late at the Finneys, etc.
All arrangements about buying clothes, etc., etc., I will tell you about when you come out here. But I really have so many things to discuss with you that I will only say now that I don't want you to make any dates in Baltimore or New York for this winter without seeing me. I mean specifically no football games, school or college dances, etc. This applies to Baltimore, Princeton, New York and everywhere else.
As to the clothes, a proper budget is being figured out for you and you will have a suitable allowance. Concurrently with that, I have stopped all charge accounts in New York because with you charging odd things it would be impossible to figure just what you were costing. So you will be on a cash basis and perhaps—though it is a Utopian dream—you may learn more about handling money than I ever did.
Your Mother is coming to New York about the 20th and will ride up to Vassar. It gives her such great pleasure to think she is contributing to your education and it is the kind thing to carry on the illusion. Aunt Rosalind will be with her and it will interfere no more with you than did her coming to Commencement last June.
Mrs. Finney knows that you had some row with your headmistress and that you flew out here and took the Vassar exams in New York. She knows no more than that nor have I spoken of it to anyone including your Mother and your Aunt Rosalind.
On Monday before you leave for Baltimore be sure and call the Murphys, call on them if possible, to thank them for bringing you home. This will be a little courtesy which will be tremendously appreciated both by me and by them. Failing this—I mean if they're not there—write them a “thank you” letter from Baltimore. Also before you come out here I wish you will have written a letter to Alice Lee Myer to reach her on her arrival. You must get these things out of the way. There will be absolutely no time for me to “play mama.”
Now about Hollywood: As to my personal life here, do me the courtesy not to discuss it with Peaches in any way either before you get here or while you are here. It will not touch you in any way. Any friend will be simply encountered as a friend and no more. You should not even say to Peaches that such-and-such a person is a “great friend” of mine. It is most decidedly not Peaches' business.
I hope you enjoy your two days in Baltimore—hope you will also be wise enough not to put your hands on the wheel of a car. It is unfortunate that it hasn't been convenient for you to learn to drive—I mean to be at ease with a car in traffic but that takes at least two months. Be wise and let it alone until next summer when I promise you it will be arranged. Handling another person's car clumsily isn't either pleasant or pictorial for them. The matter of smoking I will discuss with you here.
Again let me ask you to read this letter over twice or at least look it over twice—preferably after half an hour. Because every point here is of great importance and I would like you to spend the four days until I see you without displeasing me.
… [Ninety-one words omitted by the editor Bruccoli.]
Hoping that your attention to this letter will preclude any unpleasant brushes on our brief contact, I am
With dearest love—Daddy
Please Re-read *
Notes:
* Written in large letters at the bottom of the page.
39. September 19, 1938
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Pie:
Here are a few ideas that I didn’t discuss with you and I’m sending this to reach you on your first day.
For heaven’s sake don’t make yourself conspicuous by rushing around1 inquiring which are the Farmington Girls, which are the Dobbs Girls, etc. You’ll make an enemy of everyone who isn’t. Thank heaven you’re on an equal footing of brains at last—most of the eventual leaders will be high school girls and I’d hate to see you branded among them the first week as a snob—it’s not worth a moment’s thought. What is important is to go to the library and crack your first book—to be among the 5% who will do this and get that much start and freshness.
A chalk line is absolutely specified for you at present—because:
A. The Walker episode will necessarily remain for awhile in the Vassar authorities’ minds. (It reached me for the first time last week in a rather garbled form.) But if there is no sequel it will die a natural death in six more months. Your bearing my name gives longevity to any such episodes whether they’re grave or trifling—it makes them better morsels of gossip.
B. My second reason for the chalk line is allied with this last—beside the “cleverness” which you are vaguely supposed to have “inherited”, people will be quick to deck you out with my sins. If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty, I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest nonstop binge, and the world also will have an interest in the matter of your behavior. It would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: “There she goes—just like her papa and mama.” Need I say that you can take this fact as a curse—or you can make of it a great advantage?
Remember that you’re there for four years. It is a residential college and the butterfly will be resented. You should never boast to a soul that you’re going to the Bachelors’ Cotillion. I can’t tell you how important this is. For one hour of vainglory you will create a different attitude about yourself. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck. And while I’m on this: You will notice that there is a strongly organized left-wing movement there. I do not particularly want you to think about politics, but I do not want you to set yourself against this movement. I am known as a left-wing sympathizer and would be proud if you were. In any case, I should feel outraged if you identified yourself with Nazism or Red-baiting in any form. Some of those radical girls may not look like much now but in your lifetime they are liable to be high in the councils of the nation.
I think it would be wise to put on somewhat of an act in reference to your attitude to the upper classmen. In every college the class just ahead of you is of great importance. They approach you very critically, size you up and are in a position to help or hinder you in anything you try. I mean the class just ahead of you. A Sophomore class is usually conceited. They feel that they have been through the mill and have learned something. While this is very doubtful, it is part of wisdom to humor that vanity in them. It would pay dividends many times to treat them with an outward respect which you might not feel and I want you to be able to do such things at will, as it happens that all through life you may be in a position in which you will constantly have to assume a lowly rank in a very strict organization. If anybody had told me my last year at Princeton that I would stand up and take orders from an ex-policeman, I would have laughed. But such was the case because, as an army officer, he was several grades above me in rank and competence—and that is not the last time it has happened.
Here is something you can watch happen during your college course. Always at the beginning of the first term about half a dozen leaders arise. Of these at least two get so intoxicated with themselves that they don’t last the first year, two survive as leaders and two are phonies who are found out within a year—and therefore discredited and rated even lower than before, with the resentment people feel for anyone who has fooled them.
Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are and will do through life. Two years are gone and half the indicators already point down—two years are left and you’ve got to pursue desperately the ones that point up!
I wish I were going to be with you the first day, and I hope the work has already started.
With dearest love,
Notes:
1 At Vassar.
40. [Fall, 1938]
[Metro-Goldivyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Scottie:
I am intensely busy. On the next two weeks, during which I finish the first part of Madame Curie, depends whether or not my contract will be renewed. So naturally I am working like hell—though I wouldn't expect you to understand that—and getting rather bored with explaining the obvious over and over to a wrong-headed daughter.
If you had listened when Peaches read that paper aloud last September this letter and several others would have been unnecessary. You and I have two very different ideas—yours is to be immediately and overwhelmingly attractive to as many boys as you can possibly meet, including Cro-Magnons, natural-born stevedores, future members of the Shriners and plain bums. My idea is that presently, not quite yet, you should be extremely attractive to a very limited amount of boys who will be very much heard of in the nation or who will at least know what it is all about.
The two ideas are irreconcilable, completely and utterly inverse, obverse and contradictory! You have never understood that!
I told you last September that I would give you enough to go to Vassar, live moderately, leave college two or three times during the fall term—a terrific advantage in freedom over your contemporaries in boarding school.
After four weeks I encountered you on a weekend. Here is how it was spent—God help the Monday recitations:
Friday—on the train to Baltimore
Dance
Saturday—to New York (accidentally) with me
Sunday—to Simsbury to a reunion
The whole expedition must have cost you much more than your full week's allowance. I warned you then, as I had warned you in the document Peaches read, that you would have to pay for your Thanksgiving vacation. However, in spite of all other developments— the Navy game, the Dean's information, the smoking, the debut plans—I did not interfere with your allowance until you gave me the absolute insult of neglecting a telegram. Then I blew up and docked you ten dollars—that is exactly what it cost to call you the day of the Yale-Harvard game because I could not believe a word you said.
Save for that ten dollars you have received $13.85 every week. If you doubt this I will send you a record of the cancelled checks.
There is no use telegraphing any more—if you have been under exceptional expenses that I do not know of I will of course help you. But otherwise you must stay within that sum. What do you do it for? You wouldn't even give up smoking—and by now you couldn't if you wanted to. To take Andrew and Peaches—who, I think you will agree, come definitely under the head of well-brought-up children—if either of them said to their fathers: “I'm going to do no favors for you but simply get away with everything I can”—well, in two minutes they'd lose the $25 a month they probably get!
But I have never been strict with you, except on a few essentials, probably because in spite of everything I had till recently a sense of partnership with you that sprang out of your mother's illness. But you effectively broke that up last summer and I don't quite know where we stand. Controlling you like this is so repugnant to me that most of the time I no longer care whether you get an education or not. But as for making life soft for you after all this opposition—it simply isn't human nature. I'd rather have a new car.
If you want to get presents for your mother, Peaches, Mary Law, Grandmother, etc., why not send me a list and let me handle it here? Beyond which I hope to God you are doing a lot about the Plato—and I love you very much when given a chance.
Daddy
P.S. Do you remember going to a party of Rosemary Warburton's in Philadelphia when you were seven? Her aunt and her father used to come a lot to Ellerslie.
41. November 11, 1938
TL (CC), 3 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence.
MGM letterhead. Culver City, California
Dearest Scottie:—
I still believe you are swimming, protozoa-like, in the submerged third of your class, and I still think your chance of flunking out is all too rosy—two 'B' tests in your easiest subjects are absolutely no proof to the contrary. You would have to be a complete numbskull to write a lower test than that in French or English. As a freshman at Princeton we had to struggle with Plautus, Terrence, Sallust and Integral Calculus.
However, the point of this letter is that I am compelled at last by this telegraph matter to dock your allowance. I pay you almost as much as some stenographers on this lot get for a hard week—and you treat me to this childish monkey business! You see I put a tracer on that call and the telegraph company reports that you told them the telegram was received by your roommate. Your letter tells quite another story. On the basis of it I am claiming damage from the Company for non-delivery, which unless your conscience is clear may lead to some trouble in Poughkeepsie. If your conscience isn't clear you'd better come clean right away.
I'm habituated to the string of little lies (such as you telling Dorothy that you went to the Navy-Princeton game, telling me that Gordon Meacham was Captain of the Freshman football team) but this sort of thing can lead into a hellish mess. I once saw a pathological liar in police court, her face blazing with pimples, her blue eyes straight as a die, as she told the sargeant the most amazing circumstantial story about where her boy friend had been the night of the holdup. I knew that the sargeant had the proof of the guilt on his blotter but there was something admirable, even awe-inspiring, about the way the girl invented even though she must have been squirming inwardly. If you should happen to be there next term I want you to take music and continue making up your songs and plays, because I kept thinking how, if life had been a little kinder, that girl might have been a great creator of fiction.
Instead she got two years.
Anyhow, the allowance is definitely docked to $3.85 until you come clean on the following questions:
1. The telegram matter. I think it would be wiser to settle it with me instead of the Dean.
2. I wrote you a letter, unacknowledged, of which the purport was that I didn't want you to go to debutant affairs in New York this year. I still don't want you to go to them. That includes Dorothy Burns' tea. My reasons are manifold and I will be glad to go into them with you further
3. I want you to go to Baltimore this Thanksgiving, leaving on the first day of vacation and remaining until Sunday. It shames me, and you too, to have to say that I must put a check on this, and that if you let me down I will consider that there is no use keeping you at Vassar another day.
4. I have asked you to stay at Vassar the week-end after the Yale game.
5. You can certainly find time to read eighteen Elizabethian lyrics. If I could spare the time and trouble to try to fix up the matter of the English course, what do you do with your hours?
On another slip I have listed these questions. Until I get a clear answer on every one, together with an affirmation that you intend to play square with me and stop this line of opposition, you will have to get along with pin money.
I know that you must have worries of your own and I hate to add to them. What I ask seems so very little. This year of many liberties is something I gave you with money and care (do you remember the schedules at Bryn Mawr?) Do you think it's fair to use these privileges against me? I've made every sort of appeal to your more civilized instincts and all I get is the most insincere “Can't we be friends?”—in other words, can't we be friends on your terms.
Friends!—we don't even speak the same language. I'll give you the same answer my father would have given to me—at seventeen, eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Either you can decide to make concessions to what I want in the East or you can come out here Thanksgiving and try something else.
Since you've finished the “Farewell To Arms” the second bit of reading includes only the following poems. The reference is to the index of first lines in either the Oxford book or the Golden Treasury.
Come Unto These |
Shakespeare |
Tell Me Where |
“ |
Hark, Hark the Lark |
“ |
Take Oh Take |
“ |
Go Lovely Rose |
Waller |
Oh Western Wind |
Anon |
Art Thou Poor Yet |
Dekker |
Fear No More |
Shakespeare |
My True Love |
Sidney |
Who Is Sylvia |
Shakespeare |
The question will be along about Wednesday. If you read these ten poems you can answer it in a flash.
42. November 15, 1938
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Scottie:
I haven't heard from you yet but I'm assuming that your common sense has asserted itself and I'll get a fair answer to my letter. How you could possibly have missed the answer to my first question I don't know, unless you skipped pages 160 to 170 in Farewell to Arms. Try again! There's nothing vague in these questions of mine but they require attention. I hope you've sent me the answer to the second question. The third question is based on the book Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is fifteen pages long and since you have it in your room you ought to get through it carefully in four or five days. As far as I am concerned you can skip the wise-cracks in italics on pages 766, 767 and 768. They were written by somebody else and just stuck in there. But read carefully the little introduction on 754 and note also that I do not mean “Ecclesiasticus” which is something entirely different. Remember when you're reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world. Notice that Ernest Hemingway got a title from the third paragraph. As a matter of fact the thing is full of titles. The paragraph on page 756 sounds like the confession of a movie producer, even to the swimming pools.
Am glad you were reading about Twentieth Century Sophists. You meet them every day. They see their world falling to pieces and know all the answers, and are not going to do anything about it.
Did the quilts come? The Baltimore stuff and also the one from New York, which, of course, was a duplication as it turned out. Isn't it common courtesy to acknowledge such matters? Also, Harold said he sent you that old Redbook story of mine. Did you read it?
Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. Your failure to send me that slip on the second page gummed up the list of Elizabethan lyrics I'd made, so that there was some repetition in the second list. Your teachers must love you for that splendid casual quality but I don't think you'd hold a job five minutes.
43. November 18, 1938
RTLS, 2pp. [The Princeton University Library document is incomplete. Bracketed words have been supplied from Turnbull’s text; his source is unknown.] Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
Dearest Scottie:
I’m certainly glad to catch a glimmer of wisdom in your attitude—even though you unveiled the story of the blow-away pink slip after the telegraph company had checked on you. And even though in one page of your letter you had intended to go to Baltimore from Thursday to Saturday, while in another part you hadn’t intended to go at all.
[I’m sorry about ——’s tea. I’ve nothing against her except that she rather stuck her neck out about Vassar, which I suppose she is attending for the social prestige involved. She seemed very nice, quite transparent—a type that turned up all too frequently in the Cottage Club at Princeton. I do wish you would find some more interesting friends. To take the curse off your not going to her party I wrote a nice letter to her mother explaining my apparent tyranny in forbidding it. Same to the mother of——.
In answering my questions you asked some yourself. The one about Baltimore can be answered from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for weeping, a time for laughing,” etc. Fourteen was simply not the time for you to run around on evening dates—at least Pete Finney and I thought not in our erroneous ways. The parents of —— and —— thought differently. Who is interested in a girl with her bloom worn off at sixteen? The one thing you still reproach me for is letting you go, against my better judgment, to the dance at St. Andrew’s School.]
It is now perfectly sensible for you to go with college boys. (I didn’t want you to stay in Baltimore this fall because I felt it would shoot you into Vassar with your mind full of gayety or love, which it apparently did, for your first month there was a flat bust. Also, I did not want you to start with a string of football games this fall.) If you are invited to the Yale or Princeton Proms this winter or next spring by a reputable boy—and I’m entitled to the name, please—I’d have absolutely no objection to your going (*If it doesn’t come in an examination week.). The whole damn thing about going to the colleges is to keep it in proportion. Did you ever hear of a college boy, unless he were an idiot, racing from Smith to Vassar to Wellesley? There are certain small sacrifices for a college education or there wouldn’t be any honor in having gone to college.
But the New York thing is as wrong now as the auto date was at fourteen. I will quote you from a letter I wrote Harold Ober: “Those debutante parties in New York are the rendezvous of a gang of professional idlers, parasites, pansies, failures, the silliest type of sophomores, young customers’ men from Wall Street and hangers-on—the very riff-raff of social New York who would exploit a child like Scottie with flattery and squeeze her out until she is a limp colorless rag. In one more year she can cope with them. In three more years it will be behind her. This year she is still puppy enough to be dazzled. She will be infinitely better off here with me than mixed up with that sort of people. I’d rather have an angry little girl on my hands for a few months than a broken neurotic for the rest of my life.” But I don’t have to tell you this—you probably read the Life article on the dim-witted Frazier girl and the razz on her in The New Yorker.
As to the money. Your full allowance for next Monday, $13.85, will reach you almost as soon as this does. I’m sorry you were inconvenienced at the loss of the $10.00, but it is a trifle compared to the inconvenience you have caused at this end. I will also send an additional $5.00, which will make $18.85 for the Baltimore trip, but that $5.00 will come off the following week’s allowance. I want you to stay in Baltimore until Sunday, and I mean specifically in Baltimore, not at Vassar, not at Scarsdale. This money must absolutely take care of the Baltimore trip!
Yes, it is too bad you have to be checked up on like a girl of ten. I’d hoped you’d be rather different this year. If Peaches hadn’t been with you that first day in Hollywood I would have squelched the idea of rooming with a debutante as I had meant to. I let it go because I didn’t want to open her visit that way. I’m as sick of this bloody matter as you are. I can just see people pointing at you at New York dances and saying “That’s Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter. She likes her champagne young. Why doesn’t he do something about it?”
Even if your aims are the most worldly, the road that I am pointing out is the right one. A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Please address all future correspondence to my new address, 5221 Amestoy Ave., Encino, Los Angeles, California.
44. November 25, 1938
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
Dearest Scottie:
I'm concerned about the history test though I know the classroom work may have been better. However, at Walkers your tests ran almost equal to your classroom work, usually ahead of it, and finishing early rather indicates that you were out of material, doesn't it? But I feel that if you like that work you can pass it. I never blame failure— there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. That's why I finally lost interest in _____ _____I'm sending you a book that seems to have helped some people at Princeton. You might glance over it. You must admit that my prophecy has proven true. I said that to get decent grades you would have to study at least as hard as you did between leaving Walkers and taking the board examinations. I don't mean that it will be tough sledding indefinitely but there will have to be a period of tough sledding before you come to Easy Street. Why don't you let it be now? You can still pull out of this hole before Christmas—and put me in a most generous mood.
Knowing your character, here's about the way things will go in the next month. You have four weeks before Christmas and probably you intend to try hard but at the moment you have gotten into some entanglement in Baltimore that you either want to go deeper into or get out of, or put on ice—in any case, that will require two or three days of letter writing and absorption. Then you will do well for three days—until the reply to your letter sets you off again. By now your impetus will be exhausted and you will have a good three-day low— the movies and New York, forget to hand in a theme, or something like that. Two weeks gone. Then, alas, one of those things will happen against which only the wisest will guard—a two-day cold, an unexpected change of Christmas plans, some personal trouble or upset. Then there's only a week left and despite frantic hours you will have another failure on your hands. Don't you see that this is just how it happens? Where's that “common sense” that you boast about?
I begin to wonder about the postal service there. I wrote you some weeks ago that the second question was:
During the retreat from Caporetto, Lieutenant Henry was haunted by one of the poems in the second list, which came into his memory in distorted form. What poem was it?
That should take you only a minute. Also, did you ever get my letter in which I included a letter you wrote me from Walkers last June?
The address given you before is incorrect. The right address is: 5521 Amestoy Ave., Encino, Los Angeles, California.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. $5.00 of the $10.00 advanced you is deducted from this week's check, which please find enclosed.
45. [December, 1938]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottie:
A letter from Miss Barber tells me you may very possibly be on probation. I am disappointed but not broken-hearted as it was on the cards from September. In one way you are like me—that when things seemed to be going oh so smoothly they were really slipping from underneath subtly and surely. But on the other hand remember that when you are struggling and fighting and perhaps feeling you are getting nowhere, maybe even despairing—those are the times when you may be making slow, sure progress. I hope December has been one of those times—I hope it is the beginning of an effort that, if the probation is imposed, will see it lifted very soon.
I thought the letter from Miss Barber had a somewhat impertinent tone. This is doubtless because you seem to have told her you were eighteen which of course would throw an entirely different light on my wishes about New York and make me rather silly. This rather detracted from the sympathy that I first felt for you, which prompted my wire.
Presuming you are hard up I am sending a small advance on your Dec. 19th allowance to keep the wolf from the door.
My plans are all uncertain. Is that Princeton pamphlet any good?
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Your letter came. Touched that you wish I wouldn't worry about the marks and enlightened to know why freshmen are marked hard. “I don't see why you're so furious because I'm not brilliant” is a sentence that touches my heart. I don't know whether it's the thought or the style that impresses me most. Which was your philosophical poem? “Be my little little little, little wife?”
Which reminds me. I sent you the librettos of W. S. Gilbert. What I want you to read is Patience which was written as a counterblast of Wilde's asceticism. Did you like the Dowson poem? What notorious modern novel takes its title from a line of it?
About your masterwork—the diary. (Seriously it has some nice writing in it, sharp observation, flashes of wit, etc. I cut pages 1 and 2 from a typed version and sent it to your grandmother.)
The editing I did was slight—names changed (Myers, Murphys, etc.); reference to your mother's not getting well ___ There is not a word or a line changed—nor even a correction of spelling. Excuse my map —I never did know how you got from Switzerland to Paris.
Who are you going to visit in Baltimore if you go there? I have no time to dig you up stuff about Ernest but his first book In Our Time tells a lot about himself. I have not taken a week from your allowance. I wish in your letter now—the last I'll get before vacation—you would tell me in bulk just how much you owe!
Daddy
46. c. 1938 (?)
AL, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Hollywood, California
Instruction
Read carefully Keat's Ode to a Nightingale
***
In this poem is a phrase which will immediately remind you of my work.1 First find this. In the same stanza is another phrase which I rather guiltily adapted to prose in the 2nd paragraph on p. 115 of The Great Gatsby.2
The question
When you have found what I refer to have you learned anything about the power of the verb in description?
Notes:
1 “Already with thee! tender is the night, / And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, / Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; / But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”
2 “He lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.”
47. [January, 1939]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Pie:
I believe you have to deposit this by the third of February. Anyhow as soon as you know you are going on give it to them. I have added the music charges from the catalogue—of course you get no scholastic credit for preliminary music.
I suppose you have finished the essay. If you are still writing it don't forget that the age of marriage is largely a biological question. Girls in India mature at thirteen, in the American tropics at about fifteen or sixteen, and in Scandinavia as late as twenty-one. Most questions in life have an economic basis (at least according to us Marxians), but this is one where biology undermines economics. Hence the Spanish duenna and the French chaperone, because these races realize that while economically it's better to wait, nature in southern lands has quite contrary intentions.
I will take care of the Turnbull matter.
By this time you will have heard from exams. I hope it goes well. You are the first woman on either side of your family to try for a higher education—though many of them have been well-read. If you get to know a little bit you will combine a great deal of latent power in yourself, and be able to live more fully and richly than the majority of pretty girls whose lives in America are lop-sided, backward-looking and wistful.
How about “Cynara,” etc.? I feel a slowly mounting exasperation.
My address is simply
Encino, California.
Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion.
Love,
Daddy
48. c. January 1939
[from Undated fragments in The Crack-Up]
Madame Curie progresses and it is a relief to be working on something that the censors have nothing against. It will be a comparatively quiet picture—as was The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the more I read about the woman the more I think about her as one of the most admirable people of our time. I hope we can get a little of that into the story.
49. [Winter, 1939]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
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 Cafe 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
Notes:
Madeleine Carroll, British actress.
50. [Winter, 1939]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
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 Monarchia. 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 minuscules, 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.
Notes:
Treatise on government by Dante Alighieri.
Cornelia Otis Skinner, writer and actress.
51. Night Letter Jan. 7, 1939
Wire. Princeton University ; Correspondence.
Hollywood, California
FORGOT TO SAY I GOT THE PRESENT IT IS LOVELY AND I M WEARING IT NOW STOP SUGGEST THAT TO MAKE SOUTHERN THEME INTERESTING YOU MUST GIVE EXAMPLES AND ANECDOTES FROM LIFE AND EVEN PUT IN DIALOGUE STOP BELIEVE IT OR NOT HAVE BEEN LOANED TO SELZNICK TO DO THE FINAL POLISH ON SCARLET DEAREST LOVE
DADDY
52. After 11 February 1939
ALS, 2 pp.1 Princeton University; Correspondence.
Encino, California
Dearest: Please! Come clean with me. I do not want you to run charge accounts. Let's call that $40.00 extra—a present—and start over. Enclosed is your allowance for Mon 13th, Mon 20th + Mon 27th of March. Please pay off your debts + live frugally till vacation. (over) I am quite likely to stop work here for several months (next week) and I want to be able to cut our standard of living in half at any time to do other work not so immediately profitable. Your “lady bountiful” complex is really not becoming; and wouldn't it be better to have my confidence for next autumn when you'll want a more mature wardrobe?
The poem was Cynara—and by Ernest Dowson. Some day you'll recognize great poetry when you see it, + when you send me doggerel such as your last have some wit in your closing lines. I knew you were in the doggerel stage + asked you to read W. S. Gilbert because his is at least the best—Cole Porter knows it by heart.
Send me your essay—I'd like to see it before recommending it, if you please!
Somehow I got the impression that while you had worked in Dec and tried to in Jan, in spite of sickness, you were now gliding along in that dangerous state that ends at a mountain-side. Please give me one good subject—I need encouragement.
Love Daddy
Who flunked out of Yale + Princeton—anyone I know?
Notes:
1 Written in the margin and on the verso of an 11 February letter from the Peck & Peck store in Poughkeepsie, requesting Fitzgerald's authorization of a charge account for Scottie. The account elicited Fitzgerald's 19 February 1940 comment: “Have paid Peck + Peck + Peck + Peck + Peck.”
53. March 11, 1939
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
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 re-doing 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 Sea Island 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 Sea Island? 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!
Notes:
Andre Lenotre, seventeenth-century French landscape architect best known for his work at Versailles.
Constance Garnett and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff.
Defoe.
54. [March, 1939]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
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 Rosetti'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 Sea Island 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”)
55. April 5, 1939
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest:
Thanks for your letter.
When you get time give me a sort of budget of what you did with the money I sent you. I mean, estimate roughly what became of it. Also, did you take any planes to and from Sea Island or Asheville? As I wrote you, most of those eastern lines are safe after the first of February. In spite of the storm you ran into on the way back East last fall, I think it's rather old-fashioned not to get used to airplane travel and use it as a convenience.
You made a great impression on your mother. How different from a year ago at Virginia Beach when you seemed as far apart as the poles, during those dreary tennis games and golf lessons! Of course, the fact that she is so much better accounts for a good deal of it, but I believe that was the time you had first discovered love, in the person of ___ ___, and were in a sort of drugged coma until you could get back to Baltimore.
Spring was always an awful time for me about work. I always felt that in the long boredom of winter there was nothing else to do but study. But I lost the feeling in the long, dreamy spring days and managed to be in scholastic hot water by June. I can't tell you what to do about it—all my suggestions seem to be very remote and academic. But if I were with you and we could talk again like we used to, I might lift you out of your trouble about concentration. It really isn't so hard, even with dreamy people like you and me—it's just that we feel so damned secure at times as long as there's enough in the bank to buy the next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through the next ordeal. Our danger is imagining that we have resources— material and moral—which we haven't got. One of the reasons I find myself so consistently in valleys of depression is that every few years I seem to be climbing uphill to recover from some bankruptcy. Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess. I thought I was so strong that I never would be ill and suddenly I was ill for three years, and faced with a long, slow uphill climb. Wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve—so that if on a night you had set aside to study for a philosophy test you learned that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help, you could skip that night and find you had a reserve of one or two days preparation to draw on. But I think that, like me, you will be something of a fool in that regard all your life, so I am wasting my words.
Query: Are you taking up the swimming during the spring term? I hope tremendously you will, but I suppose that's been decided already. If not, what are you doing for spring athletics?
Query No. 2: Is there any way—and don't kid me—in which you can take driving lessons? Also, if you get time—and this is not important—give me a slight picture of what the life is at Sea Island. Also, when you get time, write your mother, because I've been putting off a visit to her and may possibly have to be here three weeks longer on this damned picture and she probably feels that I'm never coming.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
P.S. Got a nice thank-you letter from Frances Turnbull for the check I sent her.
56. May 6, 1939
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest:
I am sending you four weeks' allowance and hope you can make it go. Found your very sweet letter when I got back. Please pay up your debts in full. You know if things get really out of hand you can always call on me, but I am in for a little siege of illness and I will have to count pennies for a few months until this time is over, so don't splurge on any new big spring wardrobe.
Plans for June all depend on factors that I am absolutely unable to regulate now. Literally, I do not know what we are liable to do. In spite of the fact that I have this house and may possibly bring your mother out here for a month or so (now this must absolutely not be mentioned in any letter to her because everything is ready by the hospital and I haven't yet divulged any plans to Dr. Carroll) I still don't see you out here. You see, it would inevitably force us into that old relationship which was unsuccessful five years ago in Baltimore of my being more or less in the unpleasant position of a spy on your private affairs.
I am turning over several possibilities in my mind. One of them is would you like to go to Russia with a group of girls on an economically organized tour? I am sure such things must be going on at Vassar and you need only make inquiries about it and give me the data. I mean something for three or four weeks. I agree that I don't want you to go back to France this summer. But it might just be an experience to go to Russia on some non-deluxe affair. Form your own opinion about how the experiment might work out. I have several more strings to my bow, but I am not telling you all of them at once. But Hollywood—why?
What do you want to do out here? I can no more see you as a reader in a studio wading through bad novels and worse magazine stories all summer and being so dog-tired at the end of the day that you would probably be ready for anything, even these empty-headed California boys. The question of getting you a test has occurred to me too, but I have got at least three or four reasons against it. First, I believe you ought to wait another year—second, I want you to have one more year at Vassar and then make your debut in Baltimore. Suppose you were good? Then it would completely upset the applecart which we have elaborately set up back East. And what else can you do out here? Do you want to come out and be my secretary? Let us laugh quietly and mirthlessly with a Boris Karloff ring. As for some of the ideas you had before, it skips my mind whether we discussed them, but I remember one of them was whether you should go to summer stock in one of those New England towns. Honey, I may as well hand you over to the white slavers and make a thorough job of it. For girls like you, it is nothing but a complete playtime job and strong competition between the girls to see who gets the honor of being seduced by the leading man.
Doubtless all sorts of ideas have occurred to you and, if so, why not list them and send them to me—maybe we will find out of them one that fits both our ideas.
I think I have answered almost everything in your letter and I have another idea about the driving which I am going to leave for another month because it seems to me almost dangerous for a girl your age not to know how to drive.
Dearest love.
Daddy
57. June 3, 1939
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Hollywood, California
Dearest Pie:—
You asked for it about that “instructive” business when you spoke of taking a course at U.C.L.A. It seems what you really dread is a travel trip and I think you're awfully foolish because to my mind this really will be the last summer when it will be safe to travel in Europe. In any case, I want you to consult immediately with your Freshman director or whoever handles such things and find out what parties, if any, are making that Scandinavian trip touching in Russia—what is the shortest trip available; what is the latest you could go on such a trip—specifically is there any trip of that kind leaving in August and how much it would cost. Heaven knows I am not going to force anything like that on you against your will, but so far no suggestion of yours nor any idea of mine has carried the plot more than a month or so forward.
I don't want you to try to get a job through the Vassar Employment Bureau. It would mean (quite selfishly) a worry for me for I would have to come East and investigate the job. And though I appreciate the remorse and the intensity of purpose that inspired your five-and-dime suggestion, I assure you that Barbara Hutton is not going to let a rival in there. She kind of feels she owns it, you know.
So this letter is going to have, to some extent, an inconclusive ring. This much is certain. I gather that you want to spend from a week to ten days in Baltimore and will be at Finney's or Law's (please let me know) which brings us to about the 18th—when I want you at the very latest to appear in Asheville prepared to spend at least from a week to ten days with your mother. This seems to me to be an absolute obligation which has been too long put off and I know that you will not regard it as a trial since your relations with her are so much better.
During your visit in Baltimore (which I gather begins the 9th) you will receive a call from one of my old friends, Dr. Hammon or the handsome Dr. Ben Baker (just married, alas!) They will ask you to make an appointment with them in town for an examination of your appendix which will not take more than half an hour. I am doing this not because I doubt the infirmary physicians at Vassar but because I want a double opinion about the immediacy of the matter before we decide about the operation. In any case it will not occur in Baltimore. However, when they do call, I wish you would conform as much as possible to their convenience and not put it off till the last day of your visit. It's simply a check up. By the time you're in Asheville which is to be by the 18th, I will have decided the next steps—such as when you are coming out here, etc.
The idea of being counsellor in a summer camp doesn't appeal to me for reasons which I'll explain to you when I see you. If you do want to do some actual wage earning yourself this summer, we can arrange a little while of that too and speaking of that, I am sorry I cramped your style in that Mademoiselle affair.1 I really don't care what they do in the line of captions and headings, but appreciate your refusing to let them change your text. I am sorry that it should be that way and I hope it works out all right and that you get the fifty bucks. I know what you wrote must have had some life and merit or they wouldn't have considered it. I hope you've kept a carbon.
All goes well here. I am just finishing a story—2 to get my hand in after a lapse of almost four years—and then will probably do an original for Carole Lombard and Dave Selznick wants.3 My illness while serious enough is not at all critical—merely a question of time and patience and rest, so please stay out of too much trouble.
I am sorry that that letter about the bills reached you when you were threatened with measles but those coincidences will happen, but I am delighted that the measles have turned out to be imaginary. Good luck in your exams.
With dearest love,Scott I mean Daddy
P.S. Make the money go as long as possible.
Notes:
1 “A Short Retort,” Mademoiselle (July 1939), an article by Scottie about her generation.
2 Probably “Design in Plaster,” Esquire (November 1939), or “Temperature” (unpublished).
3 Fitzgerald did not get this assignment.
58. [July, 1939]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
[The first part of this letter is missing.]
My plan would be to start you out here the last day of the month— that is ten days from the time of writing this letter. The only thing that would prevent this would be some unexpected turn of illness. This is unlikely, but possible. I don't know how this trip is going to work out and feel a certain trepidation. I am of course not drinking and haven't been for a long time, but any illness is liable to have a certain toxic effect on the system and you may find me depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic—all these qualities more intensified than you have previously experienced them in me. Beyond this I am working very hard and the last thing I want at the end of day is a problem while, as it is natural at your age, what you want at the end of the day is excitement. I tell you all this because lately we had planned so many meetings with anticipation and they turned out to be flops. Perhaps forewarned will be forearmed.
If the experiment proves upsetting I will have no further choice than to pack you off East somewhere again, but there are several friends here whom you could visit for a time if we failed to make a satisfactory household. So the trip will be worthwhile. Also I am more of a solitary than I have ever been but I don't think that will worry you because you had your dosages of motion picture stars on two other trips. To describe how humorless I feel about life at this point you have simply to read the Tarkington story called “Sinful Dadda Little” in the Post issue of July 22 (still current, I believe) and remember that I read it without a particle of amusement but with a complete disgust at “Dadda” for not drowning the two debutantes at the end.
Probably I am underestimating you, as everyone seems to be pleased with your good manners and your “attitude” (I know you hate that word) this summer—notably Mrs. Owens and your mother. But you left a most unpleasant impression behind last autumn with many people, and I would much rather not see you at all than see you without loving you. Your home is Vassar. Anything else to be supplied at present is a mockery of a home. It is too bad it should be this way but the only thing is to treat it as a visit and for us both to remember the rules of common courtesy toward each other. I take my sleeping pills regularly between eleven and twelve so we won't have any of those midnight wrangles that disfigured your June and September visits. Can't the party wait till you get here to discuss? Beneath all this, you understand, I have so much to talk to you about. (Incidentally, your memory has played you false about the philosophy. If the taking of it was a mistake it was mine not yours. I chose it one day when we were sitting on my bed with the catalogue at the beach a year ago. And I had some correspondence with Vassar trying to get you into the course at all. The history and French are as much a mystery to me as you say they are to you.)
Please give your mother this enclosed letter when you are alone with her as I don't want it to go through the sanitarium. (Changed. Am writing her [Zelda] separately. Enclosed is for yours and her expenses at boarding house.)
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. I am pretty definitely breaking with Ober but he doesn't know it yet.
59. [July, 1939 - dated July 7, 1938 and 1939 in The Crack-Up]
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
[The first part of this letter is missing.]
I am certainly glad that you're up and around and sorry that your selection of post-Flaubertan realism depressed you. I certainly wouldn't begin Henry James with The Portrait of a Lady which is in his “late second manner” and full of mannerisms. Why don't you read Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller first? Lord Jim is a great book—the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good? Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession.
I wish I could say the same about a recent article in Mademoiselle. I grant you the grace of having been merely a dupe as I warned you you would be—for I cannot believe that you would announce that you pursued your education yourself while I went around to the speakeasies. There's nothing to do about it now, but in future please call yourself by any name that doesn't sound like mine in your writings. You must have wanted fifty dollars awfully bad to let them print such a trite and perverted version of your youth, unless you mean that it was the Fred Astaire pictures that taught you that gallant stance upon “your own two feet.” This isn't in the nature of quarreling but you certainly owe me an explanation because I see no earmarks of the “dutiful daughter” about any of it.
By the time you get this it will be the eleventh. Your plan was to leave for California the fourteenth—your mother's has varied between a trip to Virginia Beach and a quiet time at Saluda. Both of you have something on me because I can't quite decide what is best. I am waiting to hear from Montgomery about the exact state of your grandmother's health and also to make up my mind how much work I can undertake in the studios and under what conditions—a matter which depends on X rays, the willingness of the studio to let me work at home, and other such factors.
I want to have you out here for part of the summer. I have a nice cottage in the country, but very far out in the country, and utterly inaccessible if one doesn't drive well. Whether a piano here would be practical or not I don't know (remember how I felt about radio) but all that might be arranged if the personal equation were not doubtful (a situation for which for the moment I take full blame). Since I stopped picture work three months ago, I have been through not only a T.B. flare-up but also a nervous breakdown of such severity that for a time it threatened to paralyze both arms—or to quote the doctor: “The good Lord tapped you on the shoulder.” While I am running no fever above 99, I don't know what this return to picture work is going to do and when and if my health blows up you know what a poor family man I am. It seems best—and I am merely feeling my way as I write this letter—for you to spend at least another week in the East and you might as well spend it in or near Asheville, especially as it gives your mother such a great pleasure. A long pilgrimage with her would almost certainly require a nurse and run into expense as all trips that your mother and I make have a way of doing.
However, if things seem more stabilized out here toward the end of this month I may change my mind and bring you out here and let your mother go to Montgomery. For the moment, there is nothing for you to do but wait and get along as well as possible with your music and writing and what money I can send you. I have a bill from Dr. Hamman for $25.00. Either he was very dilatory or you didn't go to see him till the end of your visit in Baltimore for his diagnosis arrived the day of the operation and it was money thrown away. He seemed to agree, however, that four times out of five you would have had eventual trouble with the appendix.
I have sent for your marks. If you get them, airmail them to me. If they average around “B” I should think you've done well in pulling yourself out of a very difficult hole.
You can read as much or as little of this letter to your mother as you want. I don't mean it to be disagreeable, but I was naturally surprised when instead of carrying out your announced intention of writing about the difference between northern and southern girls you chose to ride on my shoulder and beat me on the head with a wooden spoon.
Your bank statements came through. I noticed there were half a dozen slips marked “insufficient funds.” Marshall Neilan, once an ace director out here, went to jail for that little failing last week. These are days when if you haven't got it you better do without. Sorry about Meredith too—I always liked him. The Ober mix-up accounts for his recent coolness. I'm sorry—we got along pretty well for twenty years._____isn't smug or even stuffy—he's a nice adolescent who married a smooth-faced_____person.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. Sent Peaches a nice present. Was going to do the same for the _____girl but John gave me a “subtle” talk about some dim-witted brother who was reformed by a year in a drink sanitarium, and almost got his bottom kicked on 3 3rd Street.
60. September 21, 1939
Wire. Princeton University; Life In Letters.
Encino, California
YOU CAN REGISTER AT VASSAR STOP IT COST A HEMORRHAGE BUT I RAISED SOME MONEY FROM ESQUIRE AND ARRANGED WITH COMPTROLLER TO PAY OTHER HALF OCTOBER 15TH IF YOU DONT PLAY STRAIGHT THIS WILL BE ALL STOP FORGIVE ME IF UNJUSTLY CYNICAL REMEMBER HARMONY MORE PRACTICAL THAN MUSIC HISTORY ALSO OTHER CHANGE STOP RETURN ME FORMER CHECK AIR MAIL LOVE
DADDY.
61. October 31, 1939
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Scottina:
(Do you know that isn't a nickname I invented but one that Gerald Murphy concocted on the Riviera years ago?) Look! I have begun to write something that is maybe great, and I'm going to be absorbed in it four or six months. It may not make us a cent but it will pay expenses and it is the first labor of love I've undertaken since the first part of Infidelity. (Do you remember that half-finished script the censor stopped that I showed you in Norfolk two years ago last Easter? You read it in the cabin of one of those Baltimore-Norfolk liners.)
Anyhow I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don't drink. I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort.
And I think when you read this book, which will encompass the time when you knew me as an adult, you will understand how intensively I knew your world—not extensively because I was so ill and unable to get about. If I live long enough I'll hear your side of things but I think your own instincts about your limitations as an artist are possibly best: you might experiment back and forth among the arts and find your niche as I found mine—but I do not believe that so far you are a “natural.”
So what? These are such valuable years. Let me watch over the development a little longer. What are the courses you are taking? Please list them. Please cater to me. Please do not ask me to rise to heights of nervous energy—in which I can usually discern the name of the dye on your instructor's hair at long distance or reconstruct the murder of March, 1938, from a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. But give me some outlines.
a. What do Obers say about me? So sad?
b. What is this about my telling Mrs. Owens you were a heel?
c. What play are you in?
d. What proms and games? Let me at least renew my youth!
e. As a papa—not the made child of a mad genius—what do you do? and how?
f. What furniture? Do you still want etchings?
g. What did Rosalind write?
h. Do you want a test here?
i. Did you ever think of calling on the Murphys to make them happy—not to deprecate Honoria?
I’m glad you read Malreaux. Did you get the driver’s license? Is Mary Earle nice? I got an instant impression in Connecticut of a brave, lovely, impish person. And was [Name omitted by editor Bruccoli.] somewhat slowed down in her inevitable dreary progress between the abortionist and the rest-cure? Don’t answer that last. The name is still a sort of emetic to me.
Notes:
French novelist Andre Malraux.
62. November 4, 1939
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Dearest Scottie:
Sorry my letter crossed yours—I mean the letter where I said you were not “a natural.” If you brought or helped to bring off the show there, I am more than pleased. Without sentimentality, I think it would be nice to give Vassar something back of what it has given to you.
The only important questions in my letter were about your relations in Baltimore; I want to know about the formality of the presentations because, naturally, I will have to send appropriate gifts, etc.
Answer me that question, and also I would like to know how big a part you played in the show.
I have been trying to think of a name that is better for you than “Paint and Powder Club.” What do you think of calling it the “Song and Story?” Not so good—or is it?
I am sorry I wrote you that letter. Again let me repeat that if you start any kind of a career following the footsteps of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, it might be an excellent try. Sometimes I wish I had gone along with that gang, but I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them.
Will send you a small check herewith.
Dearest love.
Daddy
63. January 25, 1940
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Dearest Scottie:
Communication having apparently ceased from your end, I conclude that you are in love. Remember—there's an awful disease that overtakes popular girls at 19 or 20 called emotional bankruptcy. Hope you are not preparing the way for it. Also I have a bill from a doctor which includes an X ray. Have you had a cough? Please give me a little information, no matter how skimpy.
You have earned some money for me this week because I sold “Babylon Revisited,” in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn't worthy of the magnificent story—neither of you nor of me—however, I am accepting it).
Dearest love always.
Daddy
64. February 19, 1940
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Dearest Scottie:
Delighted that you're working on a play. In answer to a query in one of your past letters I do like Thomas Mann—in fact I had put his Death in Venice on that list I gave you last summer. Have sent your treasurer his check.
I was very interested to hear about Kilduff. Let me know what becomes of Andrew in the club elections. Things are still very vague here.
With dearest love,
F. S. Fitzg——
Have paid Peck + Peck + Peck + Peck + Peck.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
Peck & Peck, a fashionable New York women’s clothing store, had a branch shop near the Vassar campus.
65. February 26 1940
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Dearest Scottie:—
I am sorry you've got the February blues. Schoolmasters have told me that in small schools they look forward to February as a time of horror. I understand about the prom. Isn't it a question of your popularity turning on you—most people assume that a popular girl has surely been asked and are afraid to try. By this time you will either have gone or not gone and are no longer staying awake at night over it.
The Alumni Weekly has repercussions of the Princeton editorials. I have been very interested.1
With my own career at low ebb I have been hesitant to write you— because what at least carried financial pressure before hasn't that, much less any trace of authority. There are a couple of things though that have preyed in my mind come Maundy Thursday to wit: that the reason you missed the Messelaeni is because you were a little Walker School about it. “I didn't know enough about politics” etc—what it really means is you are in the midst of a communist dominated student movement at Vassar which you do nothing about. The movement will go both up and down in the next few years. You can join it or let it simmer but you have never even considered it outside of classroom work—except to say, perhaps, that your father is rather far to the left. It would be foolish ever to make enemies of those girls. Silly and fanatical as they seem now some of them are going to be forces in the future of that section. You must have some politeness toward ideas. You can neither cut through, nor challenge nor beat the fact that there is an organized movement over the world before which you and I as individuals are less than the dust. Some time when you feel very brave and defiant and haven't been invited to one particular college function read the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on The Working Day, and see if you are ever quite the same.
I do not want you to lose your gayety ever—or ever your seriousness.
Do you know any lawyers? Ask somebody at the next Y.H.P. function who's gone on to law at Harvard. Then ask a law student who are the top prospects for the Editorship of the Harvard Law Review. Why not meet the lawyers. But for Christ's sake meet the people, meet the communists at Vassar and at least be politician enough to be absolutely dumb about politics and if you [ ] make them on their side.2
P.S. I can't accentuate this too much as you move in such varying worlds so at the risk of being a bore I beg you once more to consider politics as being a religion, something that you can only discuss freely among those of the same general attitude as your own. With other people you will find yourself in intolerable arguments—friendships are being made and broken over questions of policy, a state of things which is liable to increase month by month. It is all white hot and the long pinchers of tact can be very useful.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Articles on changing the Princeton club system in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (16 and 23 February).
2 The bottom of this page is torn off, removing words on the last line.
This return address appears on the letter; the letters before and after it are from the Encino address.
66. March 8 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Dearest Scottie:
Delighted to be able to tell you that your mother is going home in April for an indefinite stay. A letter came from Dr. Carroll to that effect this morning. It is the first time he has ever considered such a thing and I hope to Heaven that he is deciding with all the acuteness of his judgment. I think he is. He has always been right so far so today I have written your mother that she can go and you can imagine what her joy will be.
I was so pleased with your letter. It seems like a fulfillment of something that you should go up to the library of Cottage and see that old poem hanging there.1 I am glad of course that you did go to Princeton and glad for every happiness you had this year.
Please let me know the news about what clubs the boys go, or did I ask you that before. Too bad you didn't go to St. Andrews this year and crash Life. The one thing I didn't like in your letter was the suggestion of working in the college shop at Lord and Taylor's this summer. It seems to me utterly uninteresting and unconstructive. I would even prefer the dramatic school idea or the summer stock. The hours are long and hard and New York in summer can be pretty tough. The experience you got would be pretty damned routine and dull after the first week unless you were planning to work up to be a lady buyer, which God forbid. Commercial genius like scientific genius is something that I'm afraid was denied to you and me.
They have remade that old Hepburn picture “The Bill of Divorcement” with Maureen O'Hara. It is based on a falsity and I hear this remake is very poor, but I should not advise your seeing it or if you go to see it, go alone, though as I say it is not worth seeing.
I am still in consultation on doing the screenplay for “Babylon Revisited” but not on salary, yet. Enclosed is $10.00.
With dearest love, always,
Daddy
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, Calif.
Notes:
1 A manuscript poem by Fitzgerald in the Princeton Cottage Club.
67. March 15, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottie:
No word from you for some time but I suppose a letter will cross this. I think it was you who misunderstood my meaning about the Comrades. The important thing is this: they had best be treated not as people holding a certain set of liberal or conservative opinions but rather as you might treat a set of intensely fanatical Roman Catholics among whom you might find yourself. It is not that you should not disagree with them—the important thing is that you should not argue with them. The point is that Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion and whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind (“Fascist,” “Liberal,” “Trotskyist”) and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process. They are amazingly well-organized. The pith of my advice is: think what you want, the less said the better.
I am sorry about the physiology. There is no answer except the advice that I used to give you constantly in your less receptive days: that sometimes you can lick an especially hard problem by facing it always the very first thing in the morning with the very freshest part of your mind. This has so often worked with me that I have an uncanny faith in it.
No particular news. The Sayres are of course delighted that your mother is coming out. Your mother said something in her letter about spending vacations with you. As you know, I will not have this, except in the most limited fashion. I think the pull of an afflicted person upon a normal one is at all times downward, depressing and eventually somewhat paralyzing, and it should best be left to those who have chosen such duties as a life work. So if there are any inquiries from that source about your summer plans I think it would be wise to answer them in the most general terms, even hinting that you had work mapped out in the North.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. When does your Easter vacation begin? This is very important. Don't forget to tell me about the fate of Turnbull and other Baltimorians—and about the play.
68. March 18, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dear Scottie:
Thanks for your very full letter. Of course I am terribly curious to hear about the show and how big a success it was—for I don't doubt that it was a success, and I think your idea to found a sort of Triangle was most ingenious and energetic and exactly the sort of thing that gives me great pride in you. The satiric theatre is perhaps a better method of expression for you than journalism and perhaps it is just as well that you did not get on the Miscellany board. Naturally I would give anything to see the play but will await your description of it when I see you.
Am enclosing $75.00, which I hope will cover your vacation. Negotiations on the screenplay of “Babylon” are still in course. If they should go through and you should be in Baltimore a week from now I would like you to go to Asheville and spend a night with your mother. As things are now I can't afford it but we will see.
Thanks for the news about the Princeton boys. Colonial is a good club, older than Cap and Gown, in fact. At one time people used to refer to the “Big Five,” but in my day Colonial got an unfortunate drinking reputation. Now I believe it specializes in boys out of the social register who don't quite make the grade in the big time. I hope Andrew is happy there, though I don't doubt that he is a little disappointed. If I were you I should not discuss the matter with him at all. I still think it is a lousy cruel system.
We'll discuss the summer later. It so much depends on how much money I have. I think that doubtless some movie job could be found for you out here. Competent people with a little pull have no trouble finding places in the small income brackets. It is when your price is $1000 and up a week that it is another story. However I'm not exactly sure it's the best thing.
I will attend to those New York bills when the first money comes in. I wish you would write me immediately where you will be during vacation. I mean the approximately exact dates so that I can reach you by wire in case it is feasible for you to go to North Carolina.
Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. I wish very much you would call on the Murphys during your spring vacation. If there is any way in which you could help Honoria1 —to a date, for instance—I think it would be mutually very advantageous. Of course, it shouldn't look as if the suggestion came from me. I know it is difficult to pick up an old thread after an interval but it would please me immensely if you could at least pay a call there.
Notes:
1 The Murphys' daughter.
69. March 27, 1940
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Dear Scottie:
I am going to work on “Babylon” at a lousy salary—a week from Monday. Anyhow it's something.
A letter from Baltimore disturbed me this morning—what have you done to your hair? Three different people have seen fit to correspond with me about it. Can't you tone down the effect a little? You heightened it so gradually that I don't think you realize yourself now just what it looks like. Nobody minds if a woman over thirty wants to touch hers up but why imitate a type that is passe even in pictures? It was a cute trick when you had one blond strand that looked as if the sun might have hit it, but going completely overboard defeats any aesthetic purpose.
Best luck for the spring term. I know it's always the hardest and I have that almost uncanny fear for you at the moment that comes sometimes. Perhaps it's the touch of overconfidence and self-justification in your letters (i.e., the Daisy Chain) that I haven't seen for over a year. Please give yourself a margin for hard luck.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. I can understand the overconfidence—God haven't I had it? But it's hard as hell to recognize it in oneself—especially when time's so short and there's so much we want to do.
70. April 1 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Encino, California
Dearest Scottie:
Enclosed find fifteen dollars. I expect to go back to picture work next Monday.
Hope you enjoyed your vacation. I gathered from your impassioned reluctance to visit the old folk that there was a boy in the background. I hope it went well.
Love, Daddy
P.S. Thinking of Venice today reminded me of when I was there with you. You don't remember going to Venice though you rode in a gondola and ate Venetian ices. But then there's no reason why you should remember— it was five months before you were born. “Oh daddy—don't be vulgar.”1
Notes:
1 The last sentence was added in holograph.
71. April 11, 1940
Retyped letter, 2 pp. Princeton University Encino, California
Dearest Pie:-
Thanks for your letter. I’m writing this on a Sunday night, sans Francoise and I hope you can read it. I go to cinema work tomorrow on a sort of halfpay, half “spec” (speculation) business on my own story Babylon Revisited. Which is to say Columbia advances me living money while I work and if it goes over in installments with the producer, the company, the releasing people, I get an increasing sum. At bottom we eat—at top the deal is very promising.
Why I’m writing tonight is because I foresee three months of intensive toil (I feel like a criminal who has been in a hideout, been caught and has to go back to the big-house. I’ve been visited by my crooked doctor and my moll and Frances the Fence has protected me. Now the Big House again—Oh Jees them guards!)
To put you in a good humor for the ensuing gratuitous though friendly advice, let me say I got a letter from Andrew today, out of two years silence, in which he “judges you objectively” as a very fine girl. I was pleased naturally and wish they hadn’t counteracted the work I did on him by sending him to a school with a professional Holy-Joe for headmaster. His letter would make you very conceited—shall I send it? You seem to be a big shot down there.
The advice consists of this—Bobby Coleman’s name bobs up in so many of your letters that I assume he plays a big part in your life, no matter how seldom you see him. I’ve naturally formed a picture of him—vaguely I associate it with my relation with Marie Hersey at about your time of life. I think she told herself that I was hers for the special effort. But they had become matter-of-fact to me—lesser girls would have rivalled them for new excitement and anyone who summed them up, or seemed to me like your mother, would simply have washed them out of my mind.
Supposing Bobby to be self-absorbed, charming, successful, and full of the same psychology I had—how definitely handicapped you might be in counting on him! By the very fact of old familiarity, old experience in common, it would be difficult, for men, if they’re alive, are continually looking for the new. I mean, that he might so to speak meet the Queen of Abyssinia in his travels. And how can you rival her?
I’m not driving at the obvious answer of having many strings to your bow. I suppose you have. But haven’t you taken Bobby as the only type? Women are capable of loving three or four types of masculine excellence like the women in Candida and Strange Interlude. You ought to have for example: as a cold intellectual—someone who’s made the Harvard Law Review—you can find him with a little effort. He’ll probably be taken already but it can be done. The point is that you have not exhausted any other type at its best except Bobby—you have only examined the second rate unproved man of other species (Kilduff, Naylor, etc.) You should know the young predatory business type, hard as hell, he will lick you maybe but you should know him. A lead at Princeton would be one of the Ivy boys—not Harvey but he might be a wedge—a boy inheriting a big business.
All the above is probably very obvious so froget it. Are any of the enclosed friends of yours?
Dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Have paid The Wallace Co., $35. and Altman $40., on account.
The printed enclosure reminded me that if you have occasion to drive, I forgot to tell you that in the rain don’t depress the clutch—use the break only. And on hills—go down in the gear in which you’d have come up.
I’m moving in town to be near my work, so will you address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills or General Delivery, Encino, as they will also forward it. Will write you as soon as I have a permanent address.
Notes:
Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary.
Producer Lester Cowan had bought movie rights to “Babylon Revisited” for $1,000 and hired Fitzgerald to write the screenplay for $500 a week.
Turnbull.
72. April 12, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] Encino, California
Dearest Scottie:
I'm sorry about the tone of the telegram I sent you this morning, but it represents a most terrific worry. You are doing exactly what I did at Princeton. I wore myself out on a musical comedy there for which I wrote book and lyrics, organized and mostly directed while the president played football. Result: I slipped way back in my work, got T.B., lost a year in college—and, irony of ironies, because of scholastic slip I wasn't allowed to take the presidency of the Triangle.
From your letter I guess that you are doing exactly the same thing and it just makes my stomach fall out to think of it. Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get “Thank you” and that's all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown—that somebody being the enthusiast.
Please, please, please delegate every bit of the work you can and keep your scholastic head above water. To see a mistake repeated twice in two generations would be just too much to bear. This is the most completely experienced advice I've ever given you. What about that science and the philosophy? You've got to find hours to do them even if you have to find a secret room where you can go and study.
Dearest love always.
Daddy
73. April 27, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California}
Dearest Scottina:
I am of course delighted about the play. Now that it is over I can admit that I thought it was quite a conception from the beginning and quite an achievement—I just had a moment when I was afraid that you were wearing yourself out over it. Musical comedy is fun—I suppose more “fun” than anything else a literary person can put their talents to and it always has an air of glamor around it.
I was particularly interested in your line about “feeling that you had lost your favorite child.” God, haven't I felt that so many times. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager. However, that's not anything to worry about in your case for another twenty years.
I am glad you are going to Princeton with whom you are going. I feel you have now somehow jumped a class. Boys like Kilduff and Lanahan are on a guess more “full of direction” than most of the happy-go-luckies in Cap and Gown. I don't mean more “ambition,” which is a sort of general attribute of youth and is five parts hope to five parts good will, but I mean some calculated path stemming from a talent or money or a careful directive or all of these things, to find your way through the bourgeois maze—if you feel it is worth finding. Remember this, though, among those on both sides of the fence there are a lot of slow developers, people of quality and distinction whom you should not overlook. Particularly you will find them among those of difficult exteriors like Eleanor Turnbull or of a great pervading shyness or personal ugliness, etc. I certainly had to dig under a bushel of spoiled blackberries to find___________at Princeton and often the same in later life. Needless to say I've made bad mistakes—one of them was___________
I was going to speak to you about the summer plans—without anything special to contribute. Could you let me know more specifically about the New England idea? Who would you be with? What girls? I know you could make up a lot of names but please tell me pretty specifically what would be the housekeeping set-up? I think I could manage to back something like that. I rather hate to think of you out here unless you were going right out for money by displaying your person in celluloid. It is a half-tropical and listless atmosphere.
I am working on this “Babylon Revisited” picture at a rotten salary but it is rather fun and may amount to something. Your mother seems happy to be home. I don't expect the trouble to begin for at least two months.
With dearest love,
Daddy
74. May 4, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottina:
Glad you got a break in the New York papers. Bet you were thrilled. Notice you got the [?] picture into the background to show you were a glamor girl at heart. No kidding, it was a good job. All I hope is you don't flunk out. You are always welcome in California though. We are even opening our arms to Chamberlain in case the British oust him. We need him for Governor because we are afraid the Asiatics are going to land from Chinese parasols. Never mind— Santa Barbara will be our Narvik and we'll defend it to our last producer. And remember, even England still has Noel Coward.
I actually have a formulating plan for part of your summer—if it pleases you—and I think I'll have the money to make it good. I'm working hard, guiding by the fever which now hovers quietly around the 99.2 level, which is fairly harmless. Tell Frances Kilpatrick that though I never met her father he is still one of my heroes in spite of the fact that he robbed Princeton of a football championship single-handed—he was probably the greatest end who ever played football. In the future please send me clippings even though you do crack at me in the course of your interviews. I'd rather get them than have you send me accounts of what literary sour bellies write about me in their books. I've been criticized by experts including myself.
I think I've about finished a swell flicker piece. Did you read me in the current Esquire about Orson Welles? Is it funny? Tell me. You haven't answered a question for six letters. Better do so or I'll dock five dollars next week to show you I'm the same old meany.
Honestly, Pie-crust, I'm tickled about the play. I hope to God your health is good.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. Enclosed 50c in stamps to buy the Esquire with the Orson Welles piece.
75. May 7, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottie:
We write to each other without ever answering the other's questions. For once I'll answer one of yours. You asked me whether I thought that in the Arts it was greater to originate a new form or to perfect it. The best answer is the one that Picasso made rather bitterly to Gertrude Stein:
“You do something first and then somebody else comes along and does it pretty.”
In the opinion of any real artist the inventor, which is to say Giotto or Leonardo, is infinitely superior to the finished Tintoretto, and the original D. H. Lawrence is infinitely greater than the Steinbecks.
Last thought about your review. You will be interviewed again and once more I ask you please do not discuss your mother or myself even faintly with them. You once made the astounding statement that you were immediately going to write our biographies. I'll always agree with myself that I would never write anything about my own father and mother till they had been at least ten years dead, and since I am forty-three and may still have a lot to say for myself I think you'd be somewhat premature. I realize that you are now fully mature and would realize the unwisdom of talking about family affairs consciously—but sometimes these newspaper people twist things out of you.
My movie progresses and I think it's going to be damn good. If your summer plans mature in any way keep me in the know. I send you a bonus of five dollars, not for any reason but simply because a letter without a check will probably seem to you half-filled. If you have no need for it just add it to your bank account.
Dearest love.
Mad Fitz (once the Scourge of the San Fernando)
(Daddy)
76. May 11, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottina:
Unfortunately the stub of the money order was just the one of many that Frances happened to have misplaced (she has all the others). I've threatened her and great tears are oozing out of her eyes as she takes this dictation. However, even if it hadn't been lost it would have been impossible to do much about a signed money order, especially from this end. I hope you went into the Vassar post office branches and identified yourself and put the clerks on watch. So don't let it worry you. I lose ten dollars which is all in a day's work and you lose the five which I was giving you as a bonus. A little later I'm going to ask you to send me a summary of your bills—not that I'll be able to pay them all immediately but I'd like to know how you stand at the term's end. Please try to address me % Phil Berg Agency, Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. That isn't so hard to remember.
You confused me rather about your summer plans. If you were rooming with Mary Earle does that mean Cape Cod or does it mean at Vassar under Miss Hallie Flannigan? If it means Cape Cod I know some particularly interesting people up there—not at all the kind that are called “old friends” whom you automatically are prejudiced against but some people who might open many rather camouflaged gates to you—some that your contemporaries don't know about. I'm signing up for an apartment in the middle of Hollywood where there is a spare room for any wandering daughter, though if you come out here it should be for a reason as it is a dreary town for anyone with nothing to do.
I'm glad you didn't start going to Princeton at sixteen or you'd be pretty jaded by this time. Yale is a good year ahead of Princeton in sophistication, though, it should be good for another year. Though I loved Princeton I often felt that it was a by-water, that its snobby institutions were easy to beat and to despise and unless I was a natural steeplechaser or a society groom I'd have to find my own private intellectual and emotional life. Given that premise it is a lovely quiet place, gentle and dignified, and it will let you alone. Of course, it is at its absolute worst in the Jane Hall atmosphere you described. Sometime go down with a boy on one of those weekends when there's almost nothing to do.
You've had a good year, haven't you—the fruition of a great deal that went before. I'd love to see you and just talk a blue streak with you for about two days about plans if we could afford it financially which we can't. But who can tell, maybe by late June or July we can. Please arrange to see your mother at the earliest possible time because I think those are going to be restless days for her. You don't necessarily have to meet her in Montgomery. Perhaps you could meet somewhere else halfway. If there could be some arrangement where she wouldn't be entirely left out and you wouldn't be away with some boy at all hours.
Dearest love.
Daddy
77. May 18, 1940
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
Dearest Scottie:
No word from you this week. I do want to hear all about your plans. Can you see your mother before you go to Baltimore? You say you want eight days. If you're planning a sylvan idyll or doing anything rash like throwing away your honeymoon in advance—well, I can't do anything about it except advise you that women from Aphrodite to Kitty Foyle have tried it impulsively and found that they threw away their lifetime with their honeymoon. I know it's none of my business any more and I hope to God that I'm speaking out of turn. But you seemed so particularly fervent about it.
Isn't it funny how different things are after only six months. For example, wasn't your suggestion to the Miscellany board people about changing their paper rather like suggesting to the local church that it would be more fun if it were a burlesque house? And didn't they take it about the same way, only more drily? I mean, you seem much wiser month by month and I don't think you would have gone about it quite that way now. You would have made the paper first, posing as being in complete agreement and then throwing your bomb. Did you see in Time that the editor of the Yale News and nine other boys threw Bones this spring and aren't you glad now that Vassar hasn't a formal social system? … [The rest of the letter is missing.[
78. June 7, 1940
TL, 3 pp. Princeton University
1403 Laurel Avenue
Hollywood
California
(new address)
Dearest Scottie:
Thank you for your letter. Planning from week to week, I am not quite sure yet about anything, but go ahead about the Summer School, make reservations and so forth. I think it can be managed all right. I went to San Francisco with some friends for one day, and found it much too long to see that singularly second-rate and uninspired Fair—though they had some good Cranachs and El Grecos in the art exhibition.
Vassar’s only fault to the outer world is the “Vassar manner”—which of course is founded on the sense of intellectual intensity that you mention. I found it particularly annoying in Margaret Culkin Banning’s daughter in Tryon some years ago. She told me all about American literature in the first half hour I met her—I believe she had been editor-in-chief of the Miscellaeni, the year before. Of course it does not usually show itself like that, but, like the Harvard manner of 1900 which gave Harvard a country-wide unpopularity, makes itself known in a series of smug silences. Southern manners are better—especially the rather punctilious deference to older people. The chances are that some toothless old codger who doesn’t open his mouth may turn out to be the greatest authority in the world on some recondite subject, and you feel rather a fool when you have judged him and settled his hash with the glossy learning of a year or so. So be careful of it, especially this summer when you will meet many idiots, some in hysterical panic about the war and others too dumb to know what is going on.
You credit me with a gift of prophecy I don’t have. I did feel the war was coming in ’39 and said so to a lot of people, but it was calculated by the time when Germany would have several new replacement classes to make up for the decreased birth-rate from 1915 to 1918. We all knew the German army wasn’t beaten and Woodrow Wilson didn’t want it to be beaten, not appreciating the utter helpless decadence of the English—something that has been apparent to even English intellectuals for twenty years. The intellectuals, those few who ever dabbled in military affairs, knew that the war was lost at Munich and that the Germans would tear the Allies to pieces, in Europe at least. And the American rich will try to betray America in exactly the same way as the British conservatives. A pogrom could be organized over-night against all the “subversive elements” (whose power is tremendously over estimated at the moment) but the rich will have to have the pants scared off them before they stop skulking in their tents and begin to get their boys safe jobs in the quarter-master department.
The Comrades out here are in a gloomy spot; Donald Stewart goes around groaning how “the Revolution will have to come the hard way,” in other words the party line is to let National Socialism (Nazism) conquer us and then somehow milk Marxism out of Hitler’s sterile teats! Stalin has pulled another boner just as he did in Finland. He had no intention of letting Hitler go this far.
With the situation changing as fast as it does now, it is difficult for Liberals to have a policy. The war may lead to anything from utter chaos to a nonComintern American Revolution, but the world that I knew and that you have had eighteen years of will never exist again in our time. On the other hand I do not think it possible for the Germans to win the South American war against us. The native Yankee is still the most savage and intelligent fighter in the world. He plays the toughest, hardest games with a cooler head and it is simply unthinkable that an oppressed stock could be whooped up in one decade to conquer him. Still I think many of your friends will probably draw their last breaths in Paraguay or the forests of the Chaco. Did you see that Lehman has called for anti-aircraft defense for New York? What a cowardly panic! Next we will have Louis B. Mayer calling for antiaircraft guns to defend Metro.
This letter has turned into gossip, and I have much to do. I finished the picture and am doing a short story. Had intended to rest for a week, but there wasn’t a chance. Dear, I have had a very depressed letter from your mother and another from your grandmother—the second told me in cautious language that your mother had had a “toxic attack.” I know what this means, only I expected her to hold out at least two months. She seems to be recovered from that, but her own letter shows a great deal of despair, and your grandmother’s has a defeatism that I have never seen before. I don’t know what is going to happen, but as this may be the last time you have a chance to see your mother in a sane period, I want you to find ten days to spend with her this June. This may bust hell out of your plans, but remember that for ten months you have lived for yourself and you owe this to me. I don’t care when you go, except it is to be before Summer School opens, and not just three or four days.
The Harper’s business is all right for me if you can fit it in with everything else. Will you tell me what you are going to take at Summer School? I think I wrote you that I thought your next year’s Vassar course is fine, except for the Greek Civilization and Literature, which seems to me a profound waste of time. Your other three courses are so completely cultural that I wish that the fourth could be as practical a one as Vassar offers—I wish they had Business School—or else a supplementary French course or another language. Greek Civilization and Literature is something you cannot learn in nine months, and it seems to me a rather dilettantish way of wasting time.
I expect to hear in a day or so whether I am going back to work on my picture story—I told you once it was an old Saturday Evening Post story called “Babylon Revisited” that I wrote in 1931. You were one of the principal characters.
With dearest love,
Daddy
79. June 12, 1940
TLS, 2 pp.[The bracketed passage—not in the Princeton University copy—is transcribed from Turnbull.] Princeton University
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottina:
Thanks for your nice full letter—it made me happy, and I don’t doubt your sincerity about work. I think now you will always be a worker, and I’m glad. Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She had no education—not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me—but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing “kinetic”, which, in physics, means internal driving force—she had to be led or driven. That was the tired element that all Judge Sayre’s children inherited. And the old mother is still, at times, a ball of fire!
I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting “B’s”. Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for “A’s”—don’t take the things in which you can get “A”, for you can learn them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry—you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel—and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. [What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.”. . . .]
Please wire me what days you have chosen to go South so I can make financial arrangements.
Can’t you tell some story down there that it’s urgently necessary to go to summer school because you’ve been on the edge of flunking out? Otherwise they’ll wonder why the money couldn’t be spent for a seaside vacation for you all. I’m living in the smallest apartment here that will permit me not to look poor, which I can’t afford to do in Hollywood. If the picture goes through, I will give your mother a trip in August. At the moment I am keeping her on a slender allowance, as for ten years she has absorbed the major proportion of the family income.
I did listen to the radio all through my trip. Jesus! What a battle!
Please at least go in to see Gerald Murphy at Mark Cross for five minutes in passing thru N.Y. this summer!
Send me the details about Harvard Summer School. Can I pay in installments?
Even as a construction man, Pinero was inferior to both Shaw and Ibsen. What purpose is served in teaching that second rate Noel Coward at Vassar?
The ‘New Yorker’ story might hamper you if you attach too much importance to it. The play was an accomplishment—I admit it with pride and pleasure. I’d like to see the story. Can’t you send me a copy?
Reading over your letter, you don’t sound like an introvert at all. You sound a little flushed and over-confident, but I’m not worried.
With Dearest Love,
Daddy
P.S. You want to go to summer school. I will have to do extra work for that, and I’ll do it gladly. But I want you to spend ten days with your mother first. And please give me a full complete report on your mother’s condition. Your request for $15.00 just came as I was putting this in an envelope. To get it to you (Frances is away) cost me my morning. You must not ask me to wire you money—it is much harder to get than last summer. I owe thousands. I couldn’t have had this trip except that the Rogers were going + invited me. Sorry to close the letter this way but you must count your pennies.
80. June 14, 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
Dearest Scottie:—
By my mistake the money was not sent to Mary Law. I wired you $15. care of Ober and here’s another $15. The allowance for the week of June 17 will be sent you tomorrow and you can use it to get to Montgomery.
Things not so bright here.
Dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother. I can’t really say there was any resemblance except in the beauty and certain terms of expression she used, and also I naturally used many circumstantial events of our early married life. However the emphases were entirely different. We had a much better time than Anthony and Gloria had.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
Gloria Patch of The Beautiful and Damned.
81. June 15 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
Dearest Scottie:
Here is your round trip fare to Montgomery. I’m sorry it can’t be more but, while my picture is going to be done, the producer is going to first do one that has been made for the brave Laurence Olivier who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back by the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby Esquire.
Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss Le Grand and her fellow feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr. Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.
Anyhow they need you. I will dig you out in time for the summer school.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. As I said, I am trying to give you $30. a week this summer, and when there is a lot of traveling to be done will increase this somewhat. For instance, I gave you $20. extra to get out of Vassar and there is $10. extra in this check which makes $30. and which will cover a good deal of transportation to date (including the round trip fare to Montgomery). Will send the next check there.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
82. June 20, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Zelda and Scottie:
I wish I were with you this afternoon. At the moment I am sitting rather dismally contemplating the loss of a three-year-old Ford and a thirty-three-year-old tooth. The Ford (heavily mortgaged) I shall probably get back according to the police because it is just a childish prank of the California boys to steal them and then abandon them. But the tooth I had grown to love.
In recompense I found in Colliers a story by myself. I started it just before I broke my shoulder in 1936 and wrote it in intervals over the next couple of years. It seemed terrible to me. That I will ever be able to recover the art of the popular short story is doubtful. At present I'm doing a masterpiece for Esquire and waiting to see if my producer can sell the “Babylon Revisited” screenplay to Shirley Temple. If this happens, everything will look very much brighter.
Scottie, I got the marks and was naturally pleased you were off probation at last. It brought back memories of phoning you from Los Angeles to see if you were at the Harvard game, of the dean's gloomy picture a year ago last October, of years of distress about your work with threats and prayers and urgings and rewards and apologies and promises and then suddenly the first change about a year ago when you found that Vassar didn't care whether you studied or not—or whether you stayed in or not. It is a story of hair-breadth escapes, and extraordinary devices going back to the French schedule that we had at “La Paix.” All sorts of people have been drawn into it. Hours, days and weeks have been consumed. Stories, scripts, trips have been put aside—all to achieve what might have been prevented if I had carried out my first plan—never to let you go near an American school, or else I should have let you become a doll. I couldn't leave you hanging—
The police have just called up telling me they've recovered my car. The thief ran out of gas and abandoned it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The poor lad was evidently afraid to call anybody to help him push it to the curb. I hope next time he gets a nice, big, producer's car with plenty of gas in it and a loaded revolver in each side pocket and he can embark on a career of crime in earnest. I don't like to see any education left hanging in the air.
Enclosed find four checks, two of which (including one of yours, Scottie) should go to Mrs. Sayre for provisions, etc. By Monday I should be able to make some plans for you, Scottie. Meanwhile you will have written whether you would like to go to Harvard alone which I do not think should frighten you. You have those two Vassar credits to make up if you are going to get an A.B. degree and I presume this would do it.
From the larger attitude one doesn't know from day to day what the situation will be. We may be at war one week after the extinction of the British, an event which at present writing seems scarcely a fortnight away. It will probably mean our almost immediate embroilment both in Northern Canada and Brazil and at least a partial conscription. Scottie, you've been as lucky as anybody could be in your generation to have had a two months' look at Europe just before the end and to have gotten in two years of college in times of peace before such matters are drowned in the roar of the Stuka bombers. And you have seen the men's colleges as they may not be again in our time, with the games and proms. Maybe I'm speaking too quickly—if the British hold out two months until we can get aid to them—but it looks to me as if our task will be to survive.
Even so I would rather you didn't get tied up in any war work except of a temporary nature for the present. I want you to finish your education. If you have any plan for this summer that displaces summer school and is actually constructive please tell me immediately but I know you want to do something.
My thoughts are not so black as this letter sounds—for instance I'm now going to break off and hear the Louis and Godoy fight which will prove Black Supremacy or Red Indian Supremacy or South American Inca Supremacy or something. I hope you are swimming a lot. I can't exercise even a little any more; I'm best off in my room. But I love to think of you two diving from great heights and being very trim and graceful in the water.
With dearest love to all,
Scott—Daddy
83. June 29, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
There's no time to write you a long letter or to answer yours. Only about the summer school:
It seems important that either you take what will tend to give you a definite credit at Vassar or else have a practical tinge. You mentioned economics—I don't know what kind of economics are taught there but the whole science is in such process of dissolution with new laws being built up overnight that if you take it be sure and get a smart man —I mean a brilliant man and preferably a young one. I know a month is a very short time or there are several suggestions I might make. Not being on the spot I can't advise you but only say that I hope it won't be any form of intellectual needlework.
As soon as you get a minute, write me your circumstances there.
With dearest love,
Daddy
84. July 12, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
Jib is not spelt gyb. And beyond everything you have sinned in omission by not giving me the correct financial data and I expect an apology. Literally I had $12.00 in the bank for most of that week and it was very unpleasant.
Max Perkins writes me that Jane and three classmates are coming here and want to see something of the movies. I don't know who to introduce them to except Shirley Temple with whom I spent the day yesterday. (Her mother was there so it was all right.) She really is a sweet little girl and reminds me of you at 11 1/2 when you hadn't succumbed to the wiles of Fred Astaire, lovey dovey and the radio crooners. But I told her mother it wouldn't be long now. I don't know whether she's going to do my picture or not.
Haven't you got a carbon of the New Yorker article? I've heard that John Mason Brown is a great favorite as a lecturer and I think it's very modern to be taking dramatic criticism though it reminds me vaguely of the school for Roxy ushers. It seems a trifle detached from drama itself. I suppose the thing's to get really removed from the subject, and the final removal would be a school for teaching critics of teachers of dramatic criticism.
Isn't the world a lousy place? —I've just finished a copy of Life and I'm dashing around to a Boris Karloff movie to cheer up. It is an inspirational thing called The Corpse in the Breakfast Food.
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.
With dearest love,
Daddy
85. July 18, 1940
Retyped letter, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
This summer has shown among other things that your education to date is entirely theoretical. I have no general quarrel with this and I believe it is as it should be in preparing for any sort of literary work. However the odds are against your having the type of talent that matures very quickly—most of my contemporaries did not get started at twenty-two, but usually at about twenty-seven to thirty or even later, filling in the interval with anything from journalism teaching sailing a tramp-schooner and going to wars. The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors—assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
Looking at the problem from short range only, you see how difficult it was to get a job this summer. So let’s see what Vassar’s got. The first thing that occurs to me is Spanish, which is simply bound to be of enormous value in the next ten years. Every junior-high-school child in California gets a taste of it and could beat you out of a job in South America if we expand that way. It is enough like French so that you have few alphabetical troubles, is pronounced as written, and has a fairly interesting literature of its own. I mean it’s not like studying Bulgarian or Chippewa or some strange dialect in which no one had ever had anything to say. Don’t you think this would be a much wiser move than the Greek and Latin culture?—the which shocks me that Vassar has such a namby-pamby “course”.
I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer—I mean any one good book like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Ten Days That Shook the World” or Renan’s “Life of Christ”. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer—then I have heard nothing from you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read “Pere Goriot” or “Crime and Punishment” or even “The Doll’s House” or “St. Matthew” or “Sons and Lovers”? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese.
Don’t be too hard on Princeton. Harvard produced John Reed but they also produced Richard Whitney who I like to believe would have been spotted as a punk at Princeton. The Honor System sometimes has a salutary effect on light-fingered gentry.
With dearest love,
Daddy
Notes:
Reed was a member of the American Communist Party, author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), and the only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin.
Whitney, a socially prominent stockbroker and head of the New York Stock Exchange, went to prison for embezzlement.
86. July 29, 1940
TLS, 2pp. [The top portion of this letter is torn off.] Princeton University
Hollywood, California
I am still on the Temple picture and will continue on if a very avaricious gent named Cowan will loosen up. If he doesn’t, I will rest for a week, and can stand it as my cough has become a public nuisance.
I wonder who was the ex-Westover woman you met. I wasn’t responsible for Ginevra getting fired but that’s the way of a legend—it was some Yale boys.
This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it’s come so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like “English Prose since 1800.” Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal—and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction—something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once—there’s some in your diary—and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry which is the most concentrated form of style.
Example: You read Melantha which is practically poetry and sold a New Yorker story—you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-Diary level of average performance. The only sensible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry—Blake to Keats. (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above teatable level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O’Hara.
Strange Interlude is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it and called it Candida. On the other hand you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s Doll’s House. Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House—all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes.
Well, the old master wearies—the above is really good advice Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.
Love,
Daddy
P.S. Understand me, I think the poetry courses you took in school (and I read the booklets) were utterly sissified drool. But a real grasp of Blake, Keats, etc. will bring you something you haven’t dreamed of. And it should come now.
Notes:
“Melanctha,” one of the stories in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909); Kitty Foyle, 1939 novel by Christopher Morley.
1928 play by Eugene O’Neill.
87. August 3, 1940
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Dear Scottie:
Jane Perkins passed through and happened to mention that she had taken that Blake-to-Keats course—I became less enthusiastic about it because she said they studied Amy Lowell’s biography which is a saccharine job compared to Colvin’s. However, in the catalogue I see a course called #217 in verse writing. It says, “limited to twelve members—permission required” and it gives only one point. Is that at all practical? I imagine there would be some latitude in the poets that you would read. There is also that Shakespeare course (165) and one in French Poetry (240), one point. Some of the history and philosophical courses look good to me but—oh, hell I can’t advise you from this distance. I’m just sorry you can’t read some poetry.
It isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around—John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in “verse” but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non-poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with The Nightingale which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the Pot of Basil with its great stanzas about the two brothers, “Why were they proud, etc.”; and The Eve of St. Agnes, which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, Bright Star and the others.
Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
You still have that French typewriter in storage, haven’t you? Would it be any good? We rent one here and it costs only $5. for three months. You threaten to send me money! If you have any extra, pay your bills in Poughkeepsie. My suggestion is that after you visit Miss Doyle, you go to Lake Forest and from there go South to Montgomery. I’m afraid the latter seems to be necessary. Your mother most particularly asked to see you again and the only alternative would be to send her North to see you, which means sending two people. I know it will be dull going into that hot little town early in September—but you are helping me. Even invalids like your mother have to have mileposts—things to look forward to and back upon. It gives her more pride there in Montgomery if you come to see her, something to talk about. Only think how empty her life is and you will see the importance of your going there. Will you figure out what the fare to Chicago will be?
You wrote me such a full letter that I haven’t answered it all even now. When we get some breathing space here I’ll have Frances figure how much you cost this year.
Dearest love.
Daddy
P.S. Be careful about showing my letters—I mean to your mother for instance. I write you very freely.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
One of Maxwell Perkins’s daughters.
Lowell’s John Keats was published in 1925; Sir Sidney Colvin published several books on Keats, among them John Keats (Scribners, 1917).
88. August 12, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottina:
I'm sorry I didn't mention the story—I'm glad you sold it but I thought you were disappointed that you didn't sell it to a big magazine. I suggested disposing of it to some Vassar paper—do you remember?— just for the sake of getting into print and getting some opinions on it. I'm glad you got some money too. I thought of it as a sort of practice composition but I felt a personal interest in it, not having forgotten the nights we worked over it.
I saw your picture in Harper's Bazaar and I'm glad you got the job. Working among the poor has differing effects on people. If you're poor yourself you get their psychology and it's broadening—for example, when a boy of the bourgeoise ships before the mast on a tramp-schooner where he has to endure the same privations as the seaman, undoubtedly he achieves something of their point of view forever. On the contrary, a Bennington girl spending a month in slum work and passing weekends at her father's mansion in Long Island gets nothing at all except a smug feeling that she is Lady Bountiful.
I was interested in your Cape Cod conquest. Theoretically a girl has her widest range of choice from about 19 years, 6 months, to 20 years, 6 months—or so I figure. The 18-year-old girl seems to have, because she has a stag line after her, but actually she has probably collected less eligibles than a slightly older girl. Of course, with the war there may be a tendency among your generation to rush into things. There were lots of quick marriages in 1918. Most of the men came back—but there are a few “class boys” from my class at Princeton who never saw their fathers.
Enclosed is a Vassar paper about the Spanish. Do remember that, with a new language, the first week when you learn the structure is the important time. I believe that if you study Spanish hard for a fortnight, even at the expense of everything else, you can coast along on it pretty easily the rest of the year, but if you don't get the verb forms right and the declensions it will start getting mountainously hard inside of a month and will become your cross. I discovered this in Italian at Princeton—neglecting it and then trying to catch up too late. Result: I flunked it hopelessly and never did learn it. However, I'm glad you're taking a chance.
With dearest love, always,
Daddy
89. August 24, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottina:
I can imagine the dinner party. I remember taking Zelda to the young_____'s when we were first married and it was a pretty frozen dish, though in general the places we went to even from the beginning were many flights up from the average business man's menage. Business is a dull game and they pay a big price in human values for their money. They are “all right when you get to know them.” I liked some of the young Princeton men in business but I couldn't stand the Yale and Harvard equivalents because we didn't even have the common ground of the past. The women are empty twirps mostly, easy to seduce and not good for much else. I am not talking about natural society women like Mary Harriman Rumsey and Sara Murphy and some others who made their lives into pageants, almost like actresses.
However, you seem wise enough to see that there is something in _____'s angle. College gives you a head start, especially a girl, and people are not in any hurry to live and think your way. It's all a question of proportion: if you married an army officer you would live half a lifetime of kow-towing to your inferiors until your husband made his way to the top. If, as the chances are, you marry a business man— because for the present business absorbs most of the energetic and attractive boys—you will have to play your cards properly in the business hierarchy. That was why I have always hoped that life would throw you among lawyers or men who were going into politics or big-time journalism. They lead rather larger lives.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. It is simply a means of making dubious promises to a credulous public. (But if you showed this letter to_____it would be the end of everything in short order, for a man must have his pride and the more he realizes such a situation the less he can afford to admit it.) If I had been promoted when I was an advertising man, given enough money to marry your mother in 1920, my life might have been altogether different. I'm not sure though. People often struggle through to what they are in spite of any detours—and possibly I might have been a writer sooner or later anyhow.
You haven't given me much idea of_____ Would he object to your working—outside the house I mean? Excluding personal charm, which I assume, and the more conventional virtues which go with success in business, is he his own man? Has he any force of character? Or imagination and generosity? Does he read books? Has he any leaning toward the arts and sciences or anything beyond creature comfort and duck-shooting? In short, has he the possibilities of growth that would make a lifetime with him seem attractive? These things don't appear later—they are either there latently or they will never be there at all.
I'm not asking these questions to be answered, but only to suggest again that if he is a fairly standardized article, you will find plenty of them during the next year—more than you ever met before—and eighteen is still young to commit yourself.
I think I have a job with 20th Century, which may be a long one. I will know Monday. I'm deducing that you received some money from Harper's because you give me no idea of the state of your finances. Anyhow I'm enclosing $15.00. When you get this letter please night letter me how much it will cost to get to Montgomery. I would suggest that you go as follows: take the evening boat from New York to Norfolk, spending a day or night with Ceci, and then go from there to Montgomery or to Atlanta as you like. Certainly before you see all those walking neuroses you can spend a day with the Taylors who have always liked you so much. The trip to Norfolk by boat from New York is really damn nice. You come into Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads from a different angle—almost like an ocean voyage and the ship is larger and nicer than the little ferry boats from Baltimore. Also the price is reasonable—less than railroad.
Dear, even in joking I don't like you to use the expression “nervous breakdown” about any emotional struggle you may have to pass through in the next couple of years. Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions? Most girls of your generation and your mother's and your grandmother's have had to decide difficult things at your age and it is silly to think that it is any strain peculiar to yourself. The young men are just as bad—some of them talk about having nervous breakdowns if they are conscripted. But you didn't cut your milk teeth on an aspirin tablet and I hate that raspberry sundae diction. Face what you've got to face and keep your chin where it belongs.
With dearest love, always,
Daddy
P.S. In your telegram please say also if you are going to Norfolk, and when.
90. September 5, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
I'm going into a huddle on this script and probably won't be able to write you again at length before Vassar starts. I read the story in College Bazaar and was very pleased with it. You've put in some excellent new touches and its only fault is the jerkiness that goes with a story that has often been revised. Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to the length. The three-jump story should be done on three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes. This of course is the ideal—in many stories one strikes a snag that must be hacked at but, on the whole, stories that drag along or are terribly difficult (I mean a difficulty that comes from a poor conception and consequent faulty construction) never flow quite as well in the reading. However, I'm glad you published this one. It was nice to see your name.
About names, I don't quite know what to do. You calling yourself Frances Scott Fitzgerald does push me a little into the background. It calls attention to my being of my generation, which is not too good since I hope to have a big book out in a year. That is my only objection. There are three Van Dorens who write and people have long ago given up telling which is Rita, which is Mark, and which is Carl. I'm afraid that Frances Scott Fitzgerald is likely to lead to a certain confusion. What do you think?
You never told me why you stayed in New York so long—I rather gather somebody was married, possibly my Favorite Glamorist. All girls from 18 to 19 take the marriage of a friend as a heavy body blow but don't let it worry you, kid. Remember your old book, “Men Are Like Street Cars.” Anyhow panic about such things is completely endemic to your age and has no basis in reality. God willing, you will have at least fifteen more years of being highly attractive to attractive men. And all this because you've never shaved your legs, plucked your eyebrows or criticized your father! ….
A last thought about other people's weddings—you don't have to be right about your objectives at the moment—only about your ways and means, learning Spanish, for instance, getting to know poetry. Honestly the ends will take care of themselves.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. Also saw your account of a weekend at Yale, Harvard and Princeton. It was very colorful. Things don't seem to have changed much. Have you ever been to Cornell? Aw, tell me the truth, I won't dock your allowance. How much does College Bazaar pay you? If you remember, will you write me the name of a picture-frame store at Vassar and I'll have those Princeton etchings of Don Swann's framed for you before college starts.
91. September 14 1940
TLS, 1 p.1 Princeton University; Correspondence.
Dearest Scottie:—
Two letters from your mother have discussed your not going back to Vassar and you have mentioned it yourself. You were quite right that I tended in my letters to give your mother a one-sided view of things. Technically everything I have told her is true. I do run a small fever and in place of doing an Esquire story I did rest up for a week by hocking the car so I would be ready for this job. But I would be working anyhow as I can't imagine simply lying on my back; and believe me things were much worse a year ago when the car was hocked in need and I had to borrow money to send you to college.
So forget it. All goes well here. I'm having some etchings framed for you. Do you want a picture of me in my palmy days or have you got one?
With dearest love, Daddy
1403 N. Laurel Avenue, Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 A holograph postscript has been torn off the letter.
92. September 17, 1940
[1403 North Laurel Avenue] [Hollywood, California]
Dearest Scottina:
I hope they won't gun for you at college this year but from the tenor of the letter they sent about your work improving, I gather that they will. There was just a hint in it. You must try to realize their point of view and compromise with it. They feel they give you a lot and don't want you to use the place as simply a proving ground for individual egotisms—
—which, of course, is what you and I would like it to be. I went back to junior year with Princeton in my pocket and it took them four months to take it all away from me—stripped of every office and on probation—the phrase was “ineligible for extra-curricular activities.” I was in the hospital besides.
Don't let it happen to you. It isn't necessary. Start well with your work—the old “initial impression.” But if you took the whole play on your shoulders, as you threaten, you'll have to get straight B's to make them think you're doing any studying—can't you find some bright sophomores to do the work while you play the executive—bring them along “to inherit,” so to speak? If any one man tried to do the Triangle he'd have a beautiful breakdown—it's a complex organization built up over years.
This is really such sensible advice—you've founded the club, you want to perpetuate it. All right—draw up an organization that will really divide the creative work, which is to say the hard work. For you to write, cast, direct, ballyhoo and manage—and do any work or reading besides is an idiotic program. I know what effort is and I respect it but aren't you verging on the extravagant—you who pride yourself on your common sense?
When I set out to write a big novel at 21 it was ambitious and difficult—but when your mother started to catch up with Pavlova at 28 it was fantastic and impossible. Your trying to juggle this thing without a director or organization, with your Harper's Bazaar and your admirers and the games and parties, would lead to disaster. It doesn't take any prophet to make that observation—it just takes the most casual onlooker. No possible triumph is worth the loss of your health.
I could almost bet that you've done very little work on the play this summer—that it's uppermost on your mind now. That is just the beginning of the great confusion in which you will find yourself if you don't sit down now and decide what you can do and what you can't—and find others to delegate it to. Believe me—they'll let you do all the work—and heartily admire you—like they did me. They sent flowers too—but not to the footlights, where I expected them—only to the infirmary.
Your affectionate but somewhat concerned
Daddy
P.S. This is an advance on your next week's allowance as I know all your trips leave you penniless.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
93. September 21 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Dearest Scottina:
Thanks for your letter. I can imagine your surprise about Bob and Bobby, and don't think me callous when I say that the main thing is to get the right letters in the right envelopes. I shall never forget getting a picture of your mother (which I had paid for) autographed tenderly to Bobby Jones, the Atlanta golfer. And with Bob and Bobby—well, a girl can't be too careful.
Tell me if you like Spanish.
With dearest love, Daddy
P.S. Have sent $10. to Raymond's Art Shop, 354 Main St., Poughkeepsie, together with three etchings, one Princeton, one Bryn Mawr School, and one of a family home. (Francis Scott Key, Jr., wasn't particularly closely related—I have some etchings of the old Key places in St. Mary's County but they're buried somewhere.) The fourth picture you can pretend is “Old Bobs Roberts”—your boy on the West Coast. (if you don't want this one send it back as thousands are clamoring for it—really, I want it if you don't.) Anyhow you'd better drop into the shop and see how they're framing them.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
94. October 5, 1940
TLS, 2 pp. [The bracketed passage—not in the Princeton University copy—is transcribed from Turnbull.] Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
Glad you liked Death in Venice. I don’t see any connection between that and Dorian Gray except that they both have an implied homosexuality. Dorian Gray is little more than a somewhat highly charged fairy tale which stimulates adolescents to intellectual activity at about seventeen (it did the same for you as it did for me). Sometime you will re-read it and see that it is essentially naive. It is in the lower ragged edge of “literature,” just as Gone with the Wind is in the higher brackets of crowd entertainment. Death in Venice, on the other hand, is a work of art, of the school of Flaubert—yet not derivative at all. Wilde had two models for Dorian Gray: Balzac’s “Le Peau de Chagrin” and Huysman’s “A Rebours”.
After which literary lecture I can only sympathize with the practically desolate state of Vassar and assure you that many of those that have left will lament through their lives that they didn’t go on. In that connection, by the way, aren’t there many transfers from other colleges in junior year? I should think after this past year everything would indeed be anti-climax. You’ve had almost everything you wanted—in Vassar, in Baltimore, and in general. But it’s rather lucky that in life we don’t go on repeating. Certainly you should have new objectives now—this of all years ought to be the time of awakening for that nascent mind of yours. [Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.]
You speak of how good your generation is, but I think they share with every generation since the Civil War in America the sense of being somehow about to inherit the earth. You’ve heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Well, and fare the well. You never answer the specific questions in my letters. You tell me about your courses in general, but not in particular. And that was an important question about your literary name—I’m against your using two names of mine, like in the College Bazaar.
With dearest love.
Daddy
Notes:
Scottie had published an article signed Frances Scott Fitzgerald in the college issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
95. October 19, 1940
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University; Correspondence.
Dearest Scottina:
This is going to be a mercenary letter. First place, I suggest that the enclosed birthday gift be combined with any other you receive to buy something as substantial as a coat—I mean a good payment on one.
Second—what do you think of this suggestion. Writing Peaches and Mary letters which say frankly that you have no way of repaying them at the moment for many courtesies and much hospitality and would they like you to pick them out a little dress, or the money you had to spend for them to use themselves. I feel conscious about your going to Baltimore now without some gift and can give you $30 for each (total $60.) if you approve and write me immediately. It isn't much—I know your friendships really pay for it but it's a sort of token of appreciation that I think they'd appreciate. I would so much like to do something for both those families.
Gerald and Sarah Murphy both write how they missed you. Could you go there some time and not overwhelm them. Excuse me—I know you have tact. But their tragedy won't die while they live.1
This time maybe I'll finish my novel. You can help by acknowledging the weekly check when received. And you would oblige me by acknowledging the other birthday gift from the coast at once.2
With dearest love, Daddy
P.S. About not showing the Birth of a Nation: By the Vassar Trustees' ruling (11[7] July 1896, still in force) Not more than ten or less than five negro or mullato girls can be admitted to Vassar in any given year. This was modified (in 1903 minutes of the Trustees 3[VI]) to admit 8 quadroons or 16 octaroons. Can you wonder they're sensitive? The new ruling admits 64 macaroons.3
P.S. (2) O God that I could ever again feel as old as you do now!
1403 N. Laurel Ave. Hollywood, Calif.
Notes:
1 Both the Murphys' sons had died.
2 From Sheilah Graham.
3 The brackets in this paragraph are Fitzgerald's. The last sentence was added in holograph.
96. November 2, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottina:
Listening to the Harvard-Princeton game on the radio with the old songs reminds me of the past that 1 lived a quarter of a century ago and that you are living now. I picture you as there though I don't know whether you are or not.
I remember once a long time ago I had a daughter who used to write me letters but now I don't know where she is or what she is doing, so I sit here listening to Puccini—“Someday she'll write (Pigliano edda ciano).”
With dearest love,
Daddy
Notes:
Fitzgerald was inventing an aria from Italian opera; Edda Ciano was Mussolini’s daughter.
97. November 29, 1940
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Dearest Scottie:
I started Tom Wolfe’s book on your recommendation. It seems better than Time and the River. He has a fine inclusive mind, can write like a streak, has a great deal of emotion, though a lot of it is maudlin and inaccurate, but his awful secret transpires at every crevice—he did not have anything particular to say! The stuff about the GREAT VITAL HEART OF AMERICA is just simply corny.
He recapitulates beautifully a great deal of what Walt Whitman said and Dostoevski said and Nietzsche said and Milton said, but he himself, unlike Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, has nothing really new to add. All right—it’s all a mess and it’s too bad about the individual—so what? Most writers line themselves up along a solid gold bar like Ernest’s courage, or Joseph Conrad’s art, or D. H. Lawrence’s intense cohabitations, but Wolfe is too “smart” for this and I mean smart in its most belittling and most modern sense. Smart like Fadiman in the New Yorker, smart like the critics whom he so pretends to despise. However, the book doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live. But I’d like you to think sometime how and in what way you think it is superior to such a piece of Zolaesque naturalism as Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” or if it is superior at all. Did you like the description of Max Perkins as “Foxhall?” I believe Max had mixed emotions.
I’m taking a day off from my novel to go to the dentist, the doctor, and my agent, to the latter in order to discuss picture business when and if I go back to it in February. And I have saved an hour to rush in where angels fear to tread. I don’t know Bobby and have had to piece him together from what you have told me and from a letter you showed me and so forth. But it sounds to me as if he had a perceptible dash of lavender. I know exactly what you mean about the Dwight Fiske attitude—sometimes the Harvard manner approaches that deceptively as a pose—but when a man is tired of life at 21 it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself. One thing I’m sure of. There are plenty of absolutely first-rate men who will be within your range in the next two years. I remember that Lois Moran used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. She finally inverted it into the credo that if a man wasn’t married and inaccessible, he wasn’t a first-rate man. She gave herself a very bad time. The sea is still as full as ever of sharks, whales, trout and tuna. The real handicap for a girl like you would have been to have worn herself out emotionally at sixteen. I think we cut that by about two-thirds by keeping you comparatively busy in those two very crucial years. Life should be fun for you and there’s plenty of time. All I care for is that you should marry someone who is not too much a part of the crowd.
Lanahan is wrong about your disposition. You take adversity very well, but you are utterly dependent on sleep. Your extraordinary performance out here two years ago was directly attributable to the fact that you hadn’t slept since getting off the boat, if you slept on board of it! It amounts almost to an idiosyncracy in you and you should never make important decisions when you are extremely tired.
With dearest love,
Daddy
P.S. It’s O.K. about the Xmas money but go slow. The phone rang after I finished this letter and the doctor after seeing my cardiogram has confined me to the house. So at this moment I couldn’t go to the studios if I wanted to. Try to save your fare to Baltimore and back.
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
You Can’t Go Home Again (1940).
Samuel J. Lanahan, a Princetonian, whom Scottie married in 1943.
Fitzgerald had suffered a heart attack at Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.
98. December 7, 1940
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
I'm sending the check you asked for next week. Will that be time enough? Also will send railroad fare, etc. I'm still in bed but managing to write and feeling a good deal better. It was a regular heart attack this time and I will simply have to take better care of myself. I've been living two floors up and will probably have to move, though not immediately.
It interests me what you are doing for Peaches. I should certainly think of nothing else but Peaches while you are writing it so it will be absolutely honest. But afterwards I would very much like to see a copy of it. Littauer, the editor of Colliers, came through here last week and liked your New Yorker piece very much. He might pay you more than almost anyone else. While I'm on the subject, remember that Harold Ober's advice is only good up to a point. He is “the average reader” and about one third of the stories that I sold to The Saturday Evening Post were stories which he did not think they would buy. Like all agents, he is clogged with too much of the kind of reading trained to smell the money in the page—so I should never ask his advice on any literary matter, though of course in other regards he is an excellent agent.
My novel is something of a mystery, I hope. I think it's a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it's finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
Your Xmas plans seem O.K. to me.
With dearest love,
[Daddy]
99. c. December 15, 1940
ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dearest Scottie:
There has reached you by this time I hope, a little coat. It was an almost never worn coat of Shielah’s that she wanted to send you. It seemed very nice to me—it may fill out your rather thin wardrobe. Frances Kroll’s father is a furrier and he remade it—without charge!
So you must at once please write the following letters.
(1.) To Shielah, not stressing Mr. Kroll’s contribution
(2) To Frances praising the style.
(3) To me (in the course of things) in such a way that I can show the letter to Shielah who will certainly ask me if you liked the coat.
You make things easier for me if you write these letters promptly. A giver gets no pleasure in a letter acknowledging a gift three weeks late even though it crawls with apologies—you will have stolen pleasure from one who has tried to give it to you. (Ecclesiases Fitzgerald)
Lastly drum up some story for Alabama that you bought the coat from some girl. Don’t say it came through me.
For the rest I am still in bed—this time the result of twenty five years of cigarettes. You have got two beautiful bad examples of parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas. Her letters are tragically brilliant in all matters except those of central importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law’s “Loyal Opposition”, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel + can’t finally report it but the story of the fire is magnificent. Only Im afraid that after the grand character planting nothing is going to come of it all. The picture of “Amy Carleton” (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our appartment in Paris—do you remember?) with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom—sans succes—and finally ended by her own hand in Montana in 1934 in a lonely ranch house. The portrait of Mrs. Jack is grand too. I believe her absolutely.
With Dearest Love
Daddy
PS. In the name of Somerset Maughn, the letter!
Fitzgerald’s last letter to Scottie Fitzgerald (Princeton University).
Notes:
Last letter of Fitzgerald to Scottie Fitzgerald.
Reference to Maugham’s “The Letter.”
[Undated Fragments from Letters to Scottie]
100. [undated fragment, from Turnbull]
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
101. [undated fragment, from Turnbull]
The conclusion is: it will not win you either financial independence or immortality. But you will be wise to publish it, if you can—if for no gain and only in a college magazine. It will give you a sense of your own literary existence, and put you in touch with others trying the same thing. In a literary way I cannot help you beyond a point. I might say that I don't think anyone can write succinct prose unless they have at least tried and failed to write a good iambic pentameter sonnet, and read Browning's short dramatic poems, etc.—but that was my personal approach to prose. Yours may be different, as Ernest Hemingway's was. But I wouldn't have written this long letter unless I distinguished, underneath the sing-song lilt of your narrative, some traces of a true rhythm that is ear-marked Scottina. There is as yet no honesty —the reader will say “so what?” But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you—and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Carrier's!
102. [undated fragment, from Turnbull]
The first thing I ever sold was a piece of verse to Poet Lore when I was twenty.
103. [undated fragment, from Turnbull]
So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a metier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
WHO'S WHO
Scottie Fitzgerald, or Frances Scott Fitzgerald (1921–1986), the Fitzgeralds’ only child, became a journalist and was active in the Democratic Party. Her gift of the Fitzgerald Papers to the Princeton University Library facilitated the extensive research and publication on her parents. Although she resisted publicity as what she referred to as “daughter of,” she generously aided students and scholars. She edited (with Bruccoli and Joan P. Kerr) The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1974). Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith was much loved and admired.
These letters were first published in books:
- 1) The Crack-Up, ed. by E. Wilson (1945);
- 2) McCall magazine (1963, October, by A. Turnbull);
- 3) The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by A. Turnbull (1963);
- 4) Letters to His Daughter ed. by A. Turnbull (1965) - the base text for this Collection.