Dear Scott/Dear Max
Correspondence of Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins

Chapter 3: The Drunkard's Holiday (January 1927 - February 1935)

177. To Fitzgerald

Jan. 20, 1927

Dear Scott:

I am under great pressure to tell people two things about you:—where you are, and what is to be the name of your novel. Now the papers have told where you are, so I won't have to refuse as I have been doing because you said confidential in your wire.45 But how about the title of the novel? And by the way, I guess you are right about “The World's Fair”. It is certainly a good title, and I see how it would fit what you told me of the book, the scene and all. There is one good reason for announcing it. It would give you control over it. You would establish a sort of proprietorship. And I think it would help to arouse curiosity and interest in the novel too, which will before so very long begin to appear in Liberty.—But whatever you decide about that, write me a line to tell me when you will be back here.

As ever your friend,

P.S. Love to Zelda.

Notes:

45. Fitzgerald had gone to Hollywood early in January to write movie scenarios, wiring Perkins to that effect on January 4th and urging him to keep his whereabouts confidential.

178. To Fitzgerald

April 7, 1927

Dear Scott:

I do not know how I ever happened to let you go without getting your address. All I can remember is Brandywine 100, well as I do remember the grand old edifice you are living in, and the broad river roughened by conflict with the tide.*

I do not want to harass you about your book, which might be bad for it. But if we could by any possibility have the title, and some text, and enough of an idea to make an effective wrap, by the middle of April, we could get out a dummy. And even if all these things had to be changed, it would be worth doing this.—It may though, be impossible, and then we won't, because we know perfectly well that all these things are insignificant along side of writing the book undisturbed by mfg. questions.

Love to Zelda.

Yours as ever,

Notes:

* Early in April, the Fitzgeralds moved into Ellerslie, a Greek-revival mansion outside Wilmington.

179. TO: Maxwell Perkins

April 1927

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

“Ellerslie,” Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Max:

I get continual requests for biographical data. Would it be very expensive to print a short pamphlet with two or three articles on me already published (Wilsons, Rosenfelds, Boyds—say about 12,000-15,000 words in all)—a picture or so, a few appreciations + a short bibliography. What would be the cost done in the cheapest way possible?

Hope you found the cane. Many thanks for deposit. Will send title + pages at 1st possible moment.2

Let me know about O'Hara's book. It was great to see you

No news. Working hard

Scott.

Notes:

1 A pamphlet was not published.

2 Perkins had requested the title and a sample of the text of Fitzgerald's novel in order to start designing the book. Fitzgerald submitted “The Boy Who Killed His Mother” as a working title.

180. To Fitzgerald

May 10, 1927

Dear Scott:

I had a letter from Hemingway saying that he was about to send off his stories for the book, “Men Without Women” but there is one story there called, “Up in Michigan” I think, which he says Liveright refused to publish in “In Our Time” and that it was on this account that he left Liveright. I think you spoke to Charlie Scribner about this story and said that it was ridiculous that he should think it could be published. Could you tell me about it some time? Certainly we cannot go as far as Liveright is willing to. At least, I look upon him as an extremist in that respect. On the other hand, Mrs. Hemingway told me that the story could be made acceptable even for conservatives, by striking out a few physiological details.

I made an excuse of the loss of your cane to send you a present, which will reach you in a day or two;—may already have reached you.^

I hope the book is going well.

As ever yours,

Notes:

^ Fitzgerald had apparently lost one of his favorite canes during a visit to New York.

181. To Perkins

Ellerslie Edgemoor Delaware

[ca. May 12, 1927]

Dear Max:

The cane was marvelous. The nicest one I ever saw and infinitely superior to the one mislaid. Need I say I value the inscription? This is the cane I shall never lose.

It seems a shame to put business into a letter thanking you for such a gift but just a line about Ernest. It is all bull that he left Liveright about that story. One line at least is pornographic, though please don't bring my name into the discussion. The thing is—what is a seduction story with the seduction left out. Yet if that is softened it is quite printable. However I trust your judgement, as he should.

I'm sorry about O'Hara. ** I imagined that this book wasn't as good as his first—however he doesn't seem to me now to be an indisputably good risk—he's mature and developed and ought to be doing first rate things, if ever.

(Explain to Hemmingway, why don't you, that while such an incident might be lost in a book, a story centering around it points it. In other words the material raison d'etre as oppossed to the artistic raison d'etre of the story is, in part, to show the physiological details of a seduction. If that were possible in America 20 publishers would be scrambling for James Joyce tomorrow.)

Thanks many times for looking for the old cane. It doesn't matter. I want to put off the pamphlet * for a month until I make up some misunderstandings with the men who wrote the articles

Many, many sincere thanks Max. I was touched when I found it at the station

Notes:

* Early in March, Fitzgerald had proposed that Scribners put together a pamphlet containing two or three articles on him, “a picture or so, a few appreciations & a short bibliography.” Perkins was enthusiastic about the idea and asked Fitzgerald to send along copies of the articles he wanted included.

** Unidentifiable.

Also Turnbull.

182. To Fitzgerald

June 2, 1927

Dear Scott:

I have been thinking much about the title, “The Boy Who Killed His Mother”.+ I do not think it is sensational in any objectionable sense whatever, and its very simplicity and directness, almost literalness, give it a value, and a distinction from most of your other titles. At the same time, I am not at all sure about it. You will probably think of other titles in the meantime, so that there will be several to select from.

Yours ever,

Notes:

^ Proposed for Fitzgerald's new novel, then in progress.

183. TO: Maxwell Perkins

September 1927

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

“Ellerslie,” Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Max:

One million matters

(1) Terribly sorry you can't come down. How about the first wk. end in October. Will that suit you both—I do hope so. The last fortnight of Sept is bad for us.

(2) Thanks for the royalty report. You were nice to say what you said—too nice, alas, for I'm going to ask you, if you possibly can, to deposit for me $200.00. That still keeps it under 5000. Can you?

(3) What do you know of Hemmingway, save his marriage?

(4) I'm hoping now to finish the novel by the middle of November.

(5) This enclosed letter is self explanatory. The entire European vogue of Gatsby (except the Scandanavian rights) rests on the French translation which I paid Llona to make. Evidently what he feared has happened and it seems a shame I wasn't informed about it before money was accepted from the Knauer Verlag. I don't know what arrangement you made with them but I hope it wasn't an outright sale—in any case if it is possible I wish you'd cancel the matter + take up the enclosed contract instead as neither Victor Llona or I who inaugurated the whole European business with your authorization were consulted by Knauer and I'd much rather come out there under Joyces publisher and translated by a known good man. Do let me know at once what you can do. It is of vital importance to me as I feel I am going to have more + more a European public. Also please return Llona's letter.

No more now. Always Your Affectionate Friend
Scott

P.S. I love my cane. I carry nothing else.

184. FROM: Maxwell Perkins

TL (CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

Dec. 8, 1927

Dear Scott:

I am sorry you were troubled about that check for one hundred and fifty. When busy at other things, I thought a number of times of wiring you. I had it on my mind, but I thought, “He will know we did it anyhow.” Now I am enclosing a check in behalf of Ernest Hemingway on orders just received from him. We sent him a check for a thousand dollars the other day, although he had not asked for it, and he does not seem to want it much. He says he may not ever cash it, and that he finds he lives according to the amount he has, however little it may be. “Men without” has gone to 13,000. I shall see John Biggs tomorrow, and hear about how you get on.

By the way, if you want an easy and amusing exercise, do as I have done, and get a set of quoit—tennis. It is practically the same game as deck tennis, and can be put up even on a piazza,—although I do not think yours is wide enough. I have it on a piazza and play it almost every night. Half an hour a day would keep you pretty fit, I believe, and Zelda would like it.

Ever yours,

185. To Perkins

“Ellersie” Edgemoor, Delaware

[ca. January 1, 1928]

Dear Max:

Patience yet a little while, I beseech thee and thanks eternally for the deposits.46 I feel awfully about owing you that money—all I can say is that if book is serialized I'll pay it back immediately. I work at it all the time but that period of sickness set me back—made a break both in the book & financially so that I had to do those Post stories—which made a further break. Please regard it as a safe investment and not as a risk.

I have no news. I liked Some People by Nicolson & The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Also I loved John's book* and I saw your letter agreeing that its his best thing, & the most likely to go. Its really thought out—oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner, tho on [the] whole its steadily & culminatively [cumulatively] effective thoroughout. From the first draft, which was the one I saw I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don't know.

No news from Ernest. In the latest transition (Vol 9.) there is some good stuff by Murray Goodwin (unprintable here) & a fine German play.

Always Your Afft. Friend

Except for a three day break last week (Xmas) I have been on the absolute wagon since the middle of October. Feel simply grand. Smoke only Sanos. God help us all.

Notes:

* Seven Days Whipping by John Biggs.

46. On September 24th, Perkins had deposited $600 for Fitzgerald; on December 2nd, $250; and on December 7th, $150.

Also Turnbull.

186. To Fitzgerald

Jan. 3, 1928

Dear Scott:

I was delighted to get your letter. I heard from John Biggs that you were making a splendid come back. Did you get the game of deck tennis? That would put on the final touches. I think we ought all to be proud of the way you climbed on the water wagon. It is enormously harder for a man who has no office hours and has control of his own time,—and it is hard enough for anybody.

We feel no anxiety whatever about the novel. I have worried a little about the length of time elapsing between that and “The Great Gatsby”. By the way, I was talking to Conrad Aiken whose opinions are worth something, and his opinion of “The Great Gatsby” is as high as any. I told him how depressed we were at the first reviews, and how I really thought the book had been injured by them because it did not gain the immediate impetus that good reviews would have given. He said, “Well now everybody knows anyhow what it was, and what 'Gatsby' means.”

Wishing you and Zelda the best of New Years, I am,

Ever your friend,

187. To Fitzgerald

Jan. 24, 1928

Dear Scott:

We have just agreed to take on a collection of Morley Callaghan's stories.* Some of them are very good, and they are all the genuine thing. And so is he himself. He wants particularly to see you, and I told him to let me know two or three days in advance before he came down again, and that I felt pretty sure I could get you to come over. He has interesting ideas about writing, and a remarkably just sense of things. At the first glance he is not very prepossessing, but one sees after a couple of minutes of talk, that he is highly intelligent and responsive. He is writing a novel which I have seen in unfinished form, and believe will turn out well.

I was immensely impressed with John's story, and that in the face of a great deal of scepticism. I thought it would be good, but that it would lack the same things which “Demigods” did,—and those things are really essential to any sort of a success. I thought he might never acquire them. But this story is magnificently written, far better than “Demigods”. Who but John would ever attempt to make a story out of such materials…

I have not read “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” myself, although when it came out I sent copies to a number of people who I thought would know a good thing. Between ourselves, the extravagant praise of a certain contributor to the columns of the Magazine, rather put me off it.^ As he likes it, I suspect I might not. I did read “The Caballa” when it came out, and thought it most promising.

We can surely count on your novel for the fall, can't we? It must be very nearly finished now.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* Published later in 1928 as Strange Fugitive.

^ Perkins may be referring here to William Lyon Phelps, then a regular book reviewer for Scribner's Magazine.

188. TO: Maxwell Perkins

After 24 January 1928

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

“Ellerslie,” Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Max:

Novel not finished. Christ I wish it were! Thanks for Hemmingway's letter. Was Dudly Lunt's law book any good?1

That's fine about Morly Callagan.2 I'll come up but give me plenty of warning. I think he really has it—personality, or whatever it is. One can't be sure yet and I doubt if he's as distinctive a figure as Ernest (Gosh! hasn't he gone over big?)

Will you ask the bk. keeping dept. not to spare my shame but to send me my bi-ennial report, for the income tax?

As Ever Scott.

Notes:

1 Possibly Dudley Lunt's The Road to the Law, published in 1932.

2 Morley Callaghan, Canadian novelist whose short-story collection, Native Argosy, had just been accepted by Scribners. See Perkins' 24 January letter to Fitzgerald in Scott/Max.

189. FROM Max Perkins TO Roger Burlingame (Fragment)

June 20, 1928

<…>

Waldo Peirce1 has been hereabouts lately with plans for trying to do some writing, in which I have little faith—that is, I have little faith in his ever doing the writing, though I think it might well be excellent if he did it. His mother has died and he seems to be heir to a large part of Bangor, Maine, where he now is “established on the back piazza with an antiquated typewriter.” He went down to visit Hemingway in Florida and came back with a pocketful of photographs of himself and Hemingway and Dos Passos (who was there too) with fishes almost as big as themselves. He gave us a very fine, simple drawing of Hemingway’s head, and promised to do some studies of him.

Scott2 is now in Paris finishing his novel.3 He went there for that purpose because of the expense of living in this country, which compelled him many times to drop the novel in order to write short stories for the Post. He promises to be back in August with a complete manuscript.

<…>

Notes

1 The painter

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

3 Tender Is the Night, Scribners, 1934.

190. To Fitzgerald

June 28, 1928

Dear Scott:

I am off tomorrow to Windsor for a month, but if you want anything from us, I think the most direct way to get it done would be to communicate with C.S., Jr. He will be here and will see to it.

I got from Ober your three boys' stories,47 and read them with great interest. Won't you have a book of them sometime? I thought the best part of any of them was that account of how the boys and girls met in a certain yard at dusk. That was beautifully done. That magical quality of summer dusk for young boys I have never before seen evoked. I hope you will be doing some more of these stories. I have just been having lunch with John Biggs, who said that Zelda wrote you were thinking of coming home,* he seemed to think, right away. I did not believe it though.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* After unsuccessfully trying to finish his novel at Ellerslie, Fitzgerald and his family had gone to Europe for the summer.

47. Stories centering around the character of Basil Duke Lee. The three referred to are probably “The Scandal Detectives” (Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1928), “A Night at the Fair” (Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1928), and “The Freshest Boy” (Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1928).

191. To Perkins

c/o Guaranty Trust Co. [Paris, France]

[circa July 1, 1928]

Dear Max:

We are settled and not a soul in the world knows where we are; on the absolute wagon and working on the novel, the whole novel and nothing but the novel. I'm coming back in August with it or on it. Thank you so much for the money—by this time Reynolds will have sold my last story and that, at French prices, will carry us through.

Please advise me as to the enclosure. Why not let's do it—you acting as my agent directly with him and keeping 10% thus saving Curtis Brown's 10%? Anyhow please advise me—I'd like to be published by him as he's done better than anyone in England with Americans.

I strongly advise your obtaining immediately the translation rights to

Les Hommes de la Route by Andre Chamson (Published by Bernard Grasset)

He's young, not salacious, and apparently is destined by all the solid literary men here to be the great novelist of France—no flash in the pan like Crevel, Radiguet, Aragon, etc. He has a simply astonishing reputation in its enthusiasm and solidity.

Yours as ever devotedly,
Scott

Thanks for the books at the boat—many thanks!

Notes:

From Turnbull.

192. To Perkins

58 Rue de Vaugirard [Paris, France]

[ca. July 15, 1928]

Dear Max:

I read John Bishops novel. Of course its impossible. All the people who were impressed with Norman Douglass South Wind & Beerbohm's Zulieka Dobson tried to follow them in their wretched organization of material—without having either the brilliant intelligence of Douglass or the wit of Beerbohm. Vide the total collapse of Aldous Huxley. Conrad has been, after all, the healthy influence on the technique of the novel.

Anyhow at the same time Bishop gave me a novellette to read—and to my great astonishment, as a document of the Civil War its right up to Bierce & Stephen Crane—beautifully written, thrilling and water tight as to construction & interest. He's been so discouraged over the hash he made of the novel that he's been half afraid to send it anywhere & I told him that now that tales of violence are so popular I thought Scribners magazine would love to have a look at it.

So I'm sending it—no one has seen it but me. His adress is

Chateau de Tressancourt Orgeval, Seine et Oise

I'm working hard as hell

As Ever your friend

Notes:

Also Turnbull.

193. To Perkins

[58 rue de Vaugirard] [Paris, France] [ca. July 21, 1928]

Dear Max

(1) The novel goes fine. I think its quite wonderful & I think those who've seen it (for I've read it around a little) have been quite excited. I was encouraged the other day, when James Joyce came to dinner, when he said, “Yes, I expect to finish my novel in three or four years more at the latest” & he works 11 hrs a day to my intermittent 8. Mine will be done sure in September.48

(2) Did you get my letter about Andre Chamson?49 Really, Max, you're missing a great opportunity if you don't take that up. Radiguet was perhaps obscene—Chamson is absolutely not—he's head over heels the best young man here, like Ernest & Thornton Wilder rolled into one. This Hommes de la Route (Road Menders) is his 2nd novel & all but won the Prix Goncourt—the story of men building a road, with all the force of K. Hamsun's Growth of the Soil—not a bit like Tom Boyds bogus American husbandmen. Moreover, tho I know him only slightly and have no axe to grind, I have every faith in him as an extraordinary personality like France & Proust. Incidently King Vidor (who made The Crowd & The Big Parade) is making a picture of it next summer. If you have any confidence in my judgement do at least get a report on it & let me know what you decide. Ten years from now he'll be beyond price.

(3) I plan to publish a book of those Basil Lee Stories after the novel. Perhaps one or two more serious ones to be published in the Mercury or with Scribners if you'd want them, combined with the total of about six in the Post Series, would make a nice light novel, almost, to follow my novel in the season immediately after, so as not to seem in the direct line of my so-called “work.” It would run to perhaps 50 or 60 thousand words.

(4) Do let me know any plans of a) Ernest b) Ring c) Tom (reviews poor, I notice) d) John Biggs

(5) Did you like Bishops story? I thought it was grand.

(6) Home Sept 15th I think. Best to Louise

(7)  About Cape—won't you arrange it for me and take the 10% commission? That is if I'm not committed  morally to Chatto&Windus who did, so to speak, pick me up out of the English gutter. I'd rather be with Cape. Please decide and act accordingly if you will. If you don't I'll just ask Reynolds. As you like. Let me know.

Ever yr Devoted & Grateful Friend,

Notes:

48. Soon after his arrival in Paris, Fitzgerald had assured Perkins that he was “on the absolute wagon and working on the novel, the whole novel and nothing but the novel. I'm coming back in August with it or on it.”

49. Early in July, Fitzgerald had advised Perkins to obtain the translation rights to Chamson's Les Hommes de la Route, noting that the author was “young, not salacious, and apparently … destined by all the solid literary men here to be the great novelist of France.” The only French writer with whom Fitzgerald formed a friendship, Chamson became a Scribners author.

Also Turnbull.

194. To Fitzgerald

Aug. 6, 1928

Dear Scott: -

I was delighted to get that letter in which you said the novel was going so well. I returned from my vacation last Monday and would have written immediately except that I wanted also to have gotten somewhere with Chamson. The delay was not that I did not take action on your first mention of this, but that the book was in the hands of Mrs. Boyd* and she could not bring me a copy here. I finally got one myself through the bookstore. I ordered one from Paris on first hearing from you but they sent the wrong book,—“Essay, Man and History”. I have had the “Road Menders” read and shall now merely read enough of it to confirm, as I expect to do, the opinion of the reader which is high. Then we will try to make a deal with Mrs. Boyd. Mr. Scribner and all of us are most grateful to you for suggestions like this and we certainly do value your opinion. You never yet fell wrong that I know of.50 As for the “Bishop” I think it very fine but the magazine certainly cannot use it because of its length and I don't know what to do about it. I will write you fully within a few days. Ring's book will not come out until 1929, early. We thought it best to wait for a full collection and there are four copies that we can get into it by postponement. John Biggs has had good reviews but does not look like much of a sale. I am to see him on Thursday for lunch.

There are many more things I want to write you about but I am being as brief as I can because Miss Wyckoff^ is away and the stenographers here are all terribly over-worked.

Love to Zelda.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* Probably literary agent Madeleine Boyd.

^ Irma Wyckoff (Mrs. Osmer Muench), Perkins' secretary.

50. On August 7th, Fitzgerald wired, “Knopf wants Andre Chamson. If you don't please wire before Friday.” Perkins' reply read, “Want Chamson. Making offer…”

195. TO: Maxwell Perkins

After 6 August 1928

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Paris

Dear Max:

Terribly sorry about Bishop.1 Delighted about Chamson.2 But this is very important!—The Road Menders is not accurate—they are not mending a road but pushing a new road thru + this becomes a great part of their lives; they are creaters + belong to their creation. Of course the difficulty of the literal “Men of the Road” is that it suggests Highwaymen to us. I suggest (without thinking any of these titles are good)

The Road Builders

The Road Makers

Creation

Toilers of the Road

Makers of the Road

Work on the Road3

In Haste Scott

Notes:

1 Perkins had declined to publish a novel by John Peale Bishop.

2 Andre Chamson, author of Les hommes de la route, whom Fitzgerald had recommended to Perkins. The novel was published by Scribners in 1929 as The Road.

3 See Perkins' 6 August letter to Fitzgerald in Scott/Max.

196. FROM Max Perkins TO ——

Aug. 28, 1928

Dear ——

We have read with interest your letter in criticism of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and we thank you for it. Probably if you had read the book through, you would not have felt any the less repugnance to it, but you would no doubt have grasped its underlying motive, which is by no means opposed to your own point of view.

The author was prompted to write this book by surveying the tragic situation of many people because of the utter confusion of ideals into which they have fallen, with the result that they cannot distinguish the good from the bad. The author did not look upon these people with anger or contempt so much as with pity. He saw that good was in them, but that it was altogether distorted. He therefore pictured, in the Great Gatsby, a man who showed extraordinary nobility and many fine qualities, and yet who was following an evil course without being aware of it, and indeed was altogether a worshipper of wholly false gods. He showed him in the midst of a society such as certainly exists, of a people who were all worshipping false gods. He wished to present such a society to the American public so that they would realize what a grotesque situation existed, that a man could be a deliberate law-breaker, who thought that the accumulation of vast wealth by any means at all was an admirable thing, and yet could have many fine qualities of character. The author intended the story to be repugnant and he intended to present it so forcefully and realistically that it would impress itself upon people. He wanted to show that this was a horrible, grotesque, and tragic fact of life today. He could not possibly present these people effectively if he refused to face their abhorrent characteristics. One of these was profanity—the total disregard for, or ignorance of, any sense of reverence for a Power outside the physical world. If the author had not presented these abhorrent characteristics, he would not have drawn a true picture of these people, and by drawing a true picture of them he has done something to make them different, for he has made the public aware of them, and its opinion generally prevails in the end.

There are, of course, many people who would say that such people as those in the book should not be written about, because of their repulsive characteristics. Such people maintain that it would be better not to inform the public about evil or unpleasantness. Certainly this position has a strong case. There is, however, the other opinion: vice is attractive when gilded by the imagination, as it is when it is concealed and only vaguely known of; but in reality it is horrible and repulsive, and therefore it is well it should be presented as it is so that it may be so recognized. Then people would hate it, and avoid it, but otherwise they may well be drawn to it on account of its false charm.

Very truly yours,

197. TO: Maxwell Perkins

October/November 1928

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

“Ellerslie,” Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Max:

Am going to send you two chapters a month of the final version of book beginning next week + ending in Feb.1 Strictly confidential. Don't tell Reynolds! I think this will help me get it straight in my own mind—I've been alone with it too long.

I think Stearns will be delighted + hereby accept for him.2 Send me a check made out to him—he hasn't had that much money since I gave him $50 in '25—the poor bastard. If you leave out his name leave out mine too—or as you like.

Ever Yrs Scott

Sending chapters Tues or Wed or Thurs.

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald sent only one installment of the novel.

2 Harold Stearns, “Apology of an Expatriate,” Scribner's Magazine (March 1929) — written in the form of a letter to Fitzgerald.

198. To Perkins

Edgemoor **

Nov '28

Dear Max:

It seems fine to be sending you something again, even though its only the first fourth of the book (2 chapters, 18,000 words). Now comes another short story, then I'll patch up Chaps. 3 & 4 the same way, and send them, I hope, about the 1st of December.

Chap. I. here is good

Chap II. has caused me more trouble than anything in the book. You'll realize this when I tell you it was once 27,000 words long! It started its career as Chap I. I am far from satisfied with it even now, but won't go into its obvious faults. I would appreciate it if you jotted down any critisisms—and saved them until I've sent you the whole book, because I want to feel that each part is finished and not worry about it any longer, even though I may change it enormously at the very last minute. All I want to know now is if, in general, you like it & this will have to wait, I suppose, until you've seen the next batch which finishes the first half. (My God its good to see those chapters lying in an envelope!)

I think I have found you a new prospect of really extraordinary talent in a Carl Van Vechten way. I have his first novel at hand—unfortunately its about Lesbians. More of this later.

I think Bunny's title* is wonderful!

Remember novel is confidential, even to Ernest.

Always Yrs.

Notes:

** The Fitzgeralds had returned home late in September.

* I Thought of Daisy, a novel by Edmund Wilson, published by Scribners in 1929.

Also Turnbull.

199. To Fitzgerald

Nov. 13, 1928

Dear Scott:

I have just finished the two chapters. About the first we fully agree. It is excellent. The second I think contains some of the best writing you have ever done—some lovely scenes, and impressions briefly and beautifully conveyed. Besides it is very entertaining, including the duel. There are certain things one could say of it in criticism, but anyhow I will make no criticism until I read the whole book, and so see the relationships of the chapters. I think this is a wonderfully promising start off. Send on others as soon as you can.

I wish it might be possible to get this book out this spring, if only because it promises so much that it makes me impatient to see it completed.

Ever yours,

200. FROM: Maxwell Perkins

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

Jan. 23, 1929

Dear Scott:

I enclose a check for one hundred dollars which is from Ernest Hemingway in payment of that loan. He has also written, “Unless you come and get the book you can't have it,” so I expect to go and get it next week.1 Why don't you come too, and swear to stick with me and I will have you back inside of nine days. I would feel much safer with you too. Without you I may leave a leg with a shark, or do worse,—because alone I would lack the courage of my cowardice which would otherwise prompt me not to have anything to do with sharks. It seems Hemingway and Waldo2 have a theory that the sharks are more afraid of them than they are of the sharks,—but they are much more likely to be afraid of them than they are of me.

I am going to post an office boy sentry to watch the elevators to see when you come into this building and go out of it unless you break the habit of skipping the fifth floor.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

1 A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway was in Key West, Fla.

2 Artist Waldo Peirce.

201. TO: Maxwell Perkins

February 1929

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Edgemoor, Dela

Dear Max

This is about four things

1st Can you have my “royalty” report sent me this week as I need it for my income tax. The last one Aug 1st 1928 with chivalrous delicacy does not mention the monies I had from you during 1928 and the government is insistant.

2nd Will you look out for a war book by one Wm. A. Brennan, a friend of a cousin of mine. It just might amount to something

3d Ditto in the case of a novel by Katherine Tighe Fessenden (Mrs. T. Hart Fessenden) who read proof on T. S. of P. + to whom I dedicated The Vegetable. Its her 1st novel + might be excellent. Will you let me know privately what you think of it?

4th Reynolds says Mr. Chas. Scribner was opposed to Cerf1 using one of my stories in a modern library collection to be called The Best Modern Short Stories; a 20th Century Anthology and to include Conrad, E. M Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Kath. Mansfield, Anderson + Maugham. In the cases of Hemmingway + Lardner who are chiefly known as short story writers I can see the objection, especially as they are still selling. But as my three collections sold about 150 books last year I don't see it makes much difference in a financial way.

Personally I should like very much to be in the collection—but there are only three or four short stories, Absolution, The Rich Boy, Benjamin Button, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz + May Day that I'd put in a book with the people I've mentioned—everything recently has a certain popular twist, even when its pretty good. So without your permission I'll have to forgo the matter. Please advise me.2

I'll be up next week

As Ever
Scott

Notes:

1 Bennett Cerf, a founding partner of Random House.

2 Great Modern Short Stories, ed. Grant Overton (1930), included Fitzgerald's “At Your Age” and Hemingway's “Three-Day Blow” but nothing by Ring Lardner.

202. To Perkins

 [Ellerslie] [Edgetnoor, Delaware]

[ca. March 1, 1929]

Dear Max:

I am sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters—there is a weeks work to straighten them out & in the confusion of influenza & leaving, I havn't been able to do it. I'll do it on the boat & send it from Genoa. A thousand thanks for your patience—just trust me a few months longer, Max—its been a discouraging time for me too but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you've never reproached me.

I'm delighted about Ernest's book—I bow to your decision on the modern library without agreeing at all. $100 or $50 advance is better than 1/8 of $40 for a years royalty, & the Scribner collection sounds vague & arbitrary to me. But its a trifle & I'll give them a new & much inferior story instead as I want to be represented with those men, ie Forster, Conrad, Mansfield ect.51

Herewith a manuscript I promised to bring you—I think it needs cutting but it just might sell with a decent title and no foreword. I don't feel certain tho at all—

Will you watch for some stories from a young Holger Lundberg who has appeared in the Mercury, he is a man of some promise & I headed him your way.

I hate to leave without seeing you—and I hate to see you without the ability to put the finished ms in your hands. So for a few months good bye & my affection & gratitude always

Notes:

51. Scribners had refused Random House permission to use a Fitzgerald story in a planned anthology, because, as Perkins explained in a letter of February 25th, the royalty proposed (one-half cent) “seemed like robbery.” He added that Scribners was planning their own similar anthology and that they would pay “2c apiece royalty.”

Also Turnbull.

203. To Perkins

[Paris]

[ca. April 1, 1929]

Dear Max:

This letter is too hurried to thank you for the very kind & encouraging one you wrote me. Its only to say—watch for a book on Baudelaire by Pierre Loving which Madeliene Boyd will bring you. I believe another one has been published but this man once did me a service & I promised to call your attention to it, before knowing it had a rival in the market.

I'm delighted about Ernest's novel.* Will be here in Paris trying as usual to finish mine, till July 1st. c/o The Guaranty Trust, Rue des Italiennes. Then the seashore.

A French man here (unfortunately I havn't his book at hand, but he's a well known writer on aviation) has written a book called “Evasions d'Aviateurs” dealing with aviators escapes during the war—all true & to me facinating. It's a best seller here now. In three months will come a sequel which will include some escapes of German & American aviators (as you know it was the tradition of all aviators to escape) which will include that of Tommy Hitchcock.

What would you say to the two in one oversized volume profusely illustrated with photographs? I believe Liberty had a great success with Richthoven & as a record of human ingenuity Les Evasions d'Aviateurs is astounding. To swell the thing a 3d book he has just published called Special Missions of Aviators during the War might be added. What do you think? It might just make a great killing like Trader Horn—it has a certain bizzare quality to divert the bored.

Unfortunately I havn't the man's name.

Again thank you for your kind and understanding letter. I'm ashamed of myself for whining about nothing & never will again.

Notes:

* A Farewell to Arms, published by Scribners in September, 1929.

Also Turnbull.

204. To Fitzgerald

April 12, 1929

Dear Scott:

I was certainly glad to get a letter from you and I immediately wrote Madeline Boyd to see if she could get through Bradley, an option on the book about the escapes of aviators. The Chamson has got beautiful reviews, but so far has not sold much;—but we are bringing out “Roux le Bandit” in the fall, and shall follow it by the other. I think we shall get the right results in the end. Don't think I do not—or that we do not—realize how much you have done for us apart from your own books. We fully appreciate it as a very great thing for us.—But the book we really want to publish is your book.

As for the last sentence of your letter, it ought not to have been written. You never did it so far as I know. You have always been to me the very model of courage.

Ever yours,

205. To Perkins

Villa Fleur des Bois Boulevard Eugene Gazagnaire (Till Oct 1st) Cannes.

[ca. June 1929]

Dear Max:

A line in haste to say

(1.) I am working night & day on novel from new angle that I think will solve previous difficulties

(2.) Dotty Parker, whos Big Blonde won O. Henry prize is writing a novelette or novel. She has been getting bad prices & I think, if she interested you she'd be glad to find a market in Scribners. Just now she's at a high point as a producer & as to reputation. You'd better get her Paris bank address from Bookman or New Yorker and have them forward, as I don't know when she'll leave here, where she's at Hotel Beau Rivage, Antibes. I wouldn't lose any time about this if it interests you.

(3.) Ernest's last letter a little worried, but I don't see why. To hell with the toughs of Boston. I hope to god All Quiet on the Western Front won't cut in on his sales. My bet is the book will pass 50,000.

(4) Deeply sorry about Ring.* Why won't he write about Great Neck, a sort of Oddysee of man starting in theatre business.

(5.) Do send me Bunny's book. I heard about his breakdown. I hope his poems include “Our Autumns were unreal with the new—”Please ask him about it—its haunted me for 12 years.

(6) Sorry about John's* leg—am writing him as I want news of the play.

(7) Tom Boyd has apparently dropped from sight, hasn't he. Do give me any news

Always Yr. Afft. Friend

Notes:

* Perkins had written on May 31st that Lardner's new book, Round Up, had sold 10,000 copies, with a prospect of 10,000 more, but that he seemed “dreadfully discouraged.”

* John Biggs.

Also Turnbull.

206. TO: Maxwell Perkins

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Villa Fleur des Bois Cannes

Sept 1st [1929]

Dear Max:

Working hard at the novel + have sworn not to come back this fall without completing it. Prospects bright. Two things.

(1) My clipping Bureau (The Author's) has gone out of business. Will you send me the adress of another.

(2) Most important—can you get me copies of The Great Gatsby in German, Swedish, Norwregan Danish ect. I should like very much to have them + if they go out of print never will even see them.' Can you take care of this for me?

Ever Yours Scott

207. To Fitzgerald

October 30, 1929

Dear Scott:

Weeks ago I began to hear rumors that you were about to sail for America,—in fact that you were then probably actually on the ocean. Then John Biggs began to think you would arrive any day,—probably at New Orleans.—But yesterday I had a letter from Ernest which spoke about you in a way which made me think you must be in Paris, and said nothing about your sailing at all, and so I am in hopes this letter may get there before you leave.

You will have heard about Ernest's book from him: it has sold just about 36,000 to date, and the only obstacle to a really big sale is that which may come from the collapse of the market,—what effect that will have nobody can tell. It may have a very bad effect on all retail business including that of books. No book could have been better received than his, and it has been the outstanding seller ever since it appeared. It has been pre-eminent. You may also have heard that Ring's play, “June Moon” based upon “Some Like 'Em Cold” and having songs for which Ring wrote both words and music, is a distinct success.—But this does not encourage me so much, because I am sure if Ring made a lot of money, he would do even less writing of the kind we can use, than even now.—And he is writing another play too, and once a man gets going at that, it is a question if he will ever do anything else, except by necessity. I hope you and Ernest will keep out of it.

I have seen several people lately who have seen you. One was Robert McAlmon.^ Ernest sent me a letter telling me he was coming, and so far as I could see the letter was entirely designed to help him, and there was no advantage to Ernest whatever in his meeting me. Ernest simply hoped that we would be able to do something for McAlmon as publishers, and yet when we got out to dinner what does McAlmon do but start in to say mean things about Ernest (this is absolutely between you and me) both as a man and as a writer. I can see that he might be envious, and that that was all the significance his talk had, but you would think even so, that when Ernest had brought us together, he might have laid off on him.

Another who had seen you was Callaghan.—He had seen you, he said, out of the corner of his eye while boxing with Ernest. He said you were meant to be keeping time, but that you were evidently thinking of something quite remote from boxing, and that he wondered if you ever would call the end of the round.

Bunny Wilson's book has sold about 3,000 and it is not going to have a large sale. What did you think of it? It did get excellent reviews and among a certain crowd made quite a hit,—but for the general public there is too much thought in it, or rather the thought and theory are too important and conspicuous elements in it. At least I suppose that is the trouble. We have been having quite an active and exciting season here with the life of Mrs. Eddy and the Christian Scientists living up to their great motto “All is love” by boycott and intimidation, which we have countered by advertising the fact that they were using these methods. You would have been much interested in this whole affair if you had been on hand. I sent Ernest a copy of the book,—or did I send you one? Then of course there was a certain amount of controversy over the “Farewell” out of which we seem to have come very successfully;—and the Wolfe book* of which I told you before you left here, is also stirring things up quite a bit.^

Notes:

^ American writer and editor.

* Later published as Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe.

^ Letter breaks off here, unsigned.

208. To Perkins

10 Rue Pergolese [Paris, France]

[ca. November 15, 1929]

Dear Max:

For the first time since August I see my way clear to a long stretch on the novel, so I'm writing you as I can't bear to do when its in one of its states of postponement & seems so in the air. We are not coming home for Xmas, because of expense & because it'd be an awful interruption now. Both our families are raising hell but I can't compromise the remains of my future for that.

I'm glad of Ring's success tho—at least its for something new & will make him think he's still alive & not a defunct semi-classic. Also Ernest's press has been marvellous & I hope it sells. By the way, McAlmon*  is a bitter rat and I'm not surprised at anything he does or says. He's failed as a writer and tries to fortify himself by tieing up to the big boys like Joyce and Stien and despising everything else. Part of his quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest that I was a fairy—God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghan*  that Ernest was a fairy. He's a pretty good person to avoid

Sorry Bunny's book didn't go—I thought it was fine, & more interesting than better or at least more achieved novels.

Congratulations to Louise.

Oh, and what the hell is this book I keep getting clippings about with me and Struthers Burt and Ernest ect. As I remember you refused to let The Rich Boy be published in the Modern Library in a representative collection where it would have helped me & here it is in a book obviously fordoomed to oblivion that can serve no purpose than to fatigue reviewers with the stories. I know its a small matter but I am disturbed by the fact that you didn't see fit to discuss it with me.

However that's a rather disagreeable note to close on when I am forever in your debt for countless favors and valuable advice. It is because so little has happened to me lately that it seems magnified. Will you, by the way, send the Princeton book by Edgar—it's not available here. Did Tom Boyd elope? And what about Biggs' play?

Ever Yr. Afft Friend

* American writer and publisher, Robert McAlmon.

** Canadian writer, Morley Callaghan.

Notes:

A Farewell to Arms.

Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan was published by Scribners.

Present-Day American Stories (Scribners, 1929).

In Princeton Town (1929), by Day Edgar.

Also Turnbull.

209. FROM: Maxwell Perkins

TL(CC), 3 pp. Princeton University

November 20, 1929

Dear Scott:

Harold Ober was telling me today of a letter he had from you which said you would not come back until mid-February. Well, do come then anyhow. He told me the novel seemed to be going on, but I suppose we can hardly expect to publish until fall,—unless perhaps you will be sending it over before you yourself leave France.

I was terribly sorry to have to decline John Biggs'1 last book. It did not seem to have the life and power of his others;—and besides he had been Hemingway'd. Many young writers have, but one would not expect it of so marked an individual as John. He picked up the superficial traits of Ernest's method without anything else. It is possible, though, that this book represents a transition with John. He has probably outgrown his old fantastic phaze with its almost insane imaginative quality, and the next thing he writes may be much more natural, and if he gets into a new mood he may do better and also more successful things. I think he felt greatly disappointed, but I could not do anything else in his interests, even more than in ours.

Everything goes well to date with “A Farewell to Arms.” Ernest has cabled me several times to report on the sale, but it is hard to do it because there are always complications like those which come from dealers and jobbers splitting their orders so that part go into one month, and others into another, so that sometimes the sale is several thousand larger than the card actually shows. And yet I am always careful not to give an over-statement. In reality, between ourselves, the sale must now be 50,000, and perhaps more, but only about 47,000 show on the card. Somehow rumors very damaging to us have got about that Ernest is dissatisfied with his publisher. He knew about this before we did, and wrote me there was nothing in it whatever, but there is nothing that can be done to stop it, and every other house is perfectly willing to pass it on, and to take the excuse for going to Ernest with an offer. Here is one publisher rushing to him who, when “The Sun Also” appeared said of Scribners:— “A great publisher sunk to the gutter,” and another publisher sends over a delegation whose younger men read aloud passages from “The Sun Also” in derision, at a director's meeting. You would think they would be too ashamed of their original position to do this. I enclose herewith a paragraph from the Eagle which I suppose was written by a man who came in to see me to tell me that there was nothing in these reports of Ernest's dissatisfaction; and then he turns right around and puts into the paper something which will spread them everywhere. It is just an annoyance that can't be avoided, I suppose, but it is hurtful with writers in general who hear of it, as they all must.

I was impressed with McAlmon's “Village,”2 a copy of which he gave me. Some of the passages in it are very fine, but he does not seem to have any attractiveness of style, but rather the reverse. I think though, that if he will be patient, we shall be able to publish a book made up of some of the better things in “Village” and some other things which he has that he thinks will combine with these. I would certainly like to do this even on his own account because he is entitled to publication.—And I understand that he has had much to do with bringing other writers forward, although I never knew exactly what it was. Was he the originator and publisher of “Transition”?3

I hope you will send me a line some day, but don't do it if you are too busy. Remembrances to Zelda.4

Ever yours,

Notes:

1 Scribners had published two of Biggs' novels: Demigods (1926) and Seven Days Whipping (1928).

2 Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (1924).

3 McAlmon had slandered both Fitzgerald and Hemingway during his meeting with Perkins.

4 See Fitzgerald's c. 15 November letter to Perkins in Scott/Max.

210. To Fitzgerald

Nov. 30, 1929

Dear Scott:

I am sorry you feel as you do—and I understand why you feel as you do—about the collection of stories. The truth is I did not care much about the venture myself, but I see no harm in it at all, and the idea was that a collection like this could sell in school and college courses… I did speak to you about this collection, and you acquiesced in it in a letter you wrote me just before you sailed.

You may be right about wanting stories in the Modern Library, and it has been much on my mind that you should not have one of your best ones in if you have a story in at all. But what are regular publishers to do if all kinds of special sorts of publishers get out anthologies all the time, and come to them for their material and pay practically nothing for it, either to them or to the author. There are more of these demands for material for anthologies every year.—When a new publisher sets up, the very first thing he does is to try to get up an anthology of stories. I realize that the Modern Library is in a different position from others. It is a fine enterprise too, and good for the book business as a whole, in the long run.—But they come down upon us all the time with these requests, and it is hard to be making exceptions, and this book of theirs as originally planned, was over fifty percent made up of material published by Scribners.

I could not be glader of anything than of hearing how well you are going forward now. I know the book will be a great book, and you will have the most ardent support from every man here when it is ready.

Remembrances to Zelda. I am sending Scotty a copy of “American Folk and Fairy Tales”.

Ever your friend,

211. To Fitzgerald

Dec. 17, 1929

Dear Scott:

I am enclosing a letter I got from Callaghan, and a note which he sent to the Herald Tribune, and which was printed there. They will show you how things stand. The girl who started this story is one Caroline Bancroft. She wanders around Europe every year and picks up what she can in the way of gossip, and prints it in the Denver paper, and it spreads from there. Callaghan told me the whole story about boxing with Ernest, and the point he put the most emphasis on was your time-keeping. That impressed him a great deal. He did say that he knew he was more adept in boxing than Ernest, and that he had been practising for several years with fighters. He was all right about the whole matter. He is much better than he looks.52

…

Ernest's book should have sold very close to 70,000 by Christmas, and then the question is whether we can carry it actively on into the next season;—and that is chiefly a question because of the fact that we are evidently in for a period of depression. We have come out well here for the year—probably the best year we have had—but it is largely because of four or five very good books. Most books have failed this year, and most publishers have had bad years because of the fall season.

I hope you and Zelda will be coming back sometime early in 1930. Why don't you think of going down to Key West if I go in the spring?

Ever your friend,

Notes:

52. During the summer of 1929 in Paris, Fitzgerald had acted as unofficial timekeeper for a boxing match between Hemingway and Callaghan. He became so fascinated with the action of the match that he forgot to keep track of the time and only ended the round when Callaghan dropped Hemingway with a wild swing. Hemingway at first accused Fitzgerald of deliberately prolonging the round so that he could be beaten; but, according to Callaghan, all ended in an amicable drink at a nearby bar. Caroline Bancroft's account, in the Denver Post, inaccurately portrayed the match as the result of Hemingway's having spoken slightingly of Callaghan's knowledge of boxing. This same version was printed in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Books Section by Isabel M. Paterson, on November 24, 1929.

212. To Perkins

10 Rue Pergolese Paris, France

Jan 21st 1930

This has run to seven long close-written pages so you better not read it when you're in a hurry.*

Dear Max: There is so much to write you—or rather so many small things that I'll write 1st the personal things and then on another sheet a series of suggestions about books and authors that have accumulated in me in the last six months.

(1.) To begin with, because I don't mention my novel it isn't because it isn't finishing up or that I'm neglecting it—but only that I'm weary of setting dates for it till the moment when it is in the Post Office Box.

(2) I was very grateful for the money*—it won't happen again but I'd managed to get horribly into debt & I hated to call on Ober, who's just getting started, for another centt

(3.) Thank you for the documents in the Callaghan case. I'd rather not discuss it except to say that I don't like him and that I wrote him a formal letter of apology. I never thought he started the rumor & never said nor implied such a thing to Ernest.

(4.) Delighted with the success of Ernest's book. I took the responsibility of telling him that McAlmon was at his old dirty work around New York. McAlmon, by the way, didn't have anything to do with founding Transition. He published Ernest's first book over here & some books of his own & did found some little magazine but of no importance.

(5) Thank you for getting Gatsby for me in foreign languages

(6) Sorry about John Biggs but it will probably do him good in the end. The Stranger in Soul Country had something & the Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp. How is his play going?

(7.) Tom Boyd seems far away. I'll tell you one awful thing tho. Lawrence Stallings was in the West with King Vidor at a huge salary to write an equivalent of What Price Glory. King Vidor told me that Stallings in despair of showing Vidor what the war was about gave him a copy of Through the Wheat. And that's how Vidor so he told me made the big scenes of the Big Parade. Tom Boyd's profits were a few thousand—Stallings were a few hundred thousands. Please don't connect my name with this story but it is the truth and it seems to me rather horrible.

(8) Lastly & most important. For the English rights of my next book Knopf** made me an offer so much better than any in England (advance $500.00; royal[t]ies sliding from ten to fifteen & twenty; guaranty to publish next book of short stories at same rate) that I accepted of course.53 My previous talk with Cape was encouraging on my part but conditional. As to Chatto & Windus—since they made no overtures at my All the Sad Young Men I feel free to take any advantage of a technicality to have my short stories published in England, especially as they answered a letter of mine on the publication of the book with the signature (Chatto & Windus, per Q), undoubtedly an English method of showing real interest in one's work.

I must tell you (+ privately) for your own amusement that the first treaty Knopf sent me contained a clause that would have required me to give him $10,000 on date of publication—that is: 25% of all serial rights (no specifying only English ones,) for which Liberty have contracted, as you know, for $40,000. This was pretty Jewish, or maybe an error in his office, but later I went over the contract with a fine tooth comb + he was very decent. Confidential! Incidently he said to me as Harcourt once did to Ernest that you were the best publishers in America. I told him he was wrong—that you were just a lot of royalty-doctorers + short changers.

No more for the moment. I liked Bunny's book and am sorry it didn't go. I thought those Day Edgar stories made a nice book, didn't you?

Ever Your Devoted Friend

I append the sheet of brilliant ideas of which you may find one or two worth considering. Congratulations [on] the Eddy book.

(Suggestion List)

(1.) Certainly if the ubiquitous and ruined McAlmon deserves a hearing then John Bishop, a poet and a man of really great talents and intelligence does. I am sending you under another cover a sister story of the novelette you refused, which together with the first one and three shorter ones will form his Civil-War-civilian-in-invaded-Virginia-book, a simply grand idea & a new, rich field. The enclosed is the best thing he has ever done and the best thing about the non-combatant or rather behind-the-lines war I've ever read. I hope to God you can use this in the magazine—couldn't it be run into small type carried over like Sew Collins did with Boston & you Farewell to Arms? He needs the encouragement & is so worth it.

(2) In the new American Caravan amid much sandwiching of Joyce and Co is the first work of a 21 year old named Robert Cantwell. Mark it well, for my guess is that he's learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.

(3.) Another young man therein named Gerald Sykes has an extraordinary talent in the line of heaven knows what, but very memorable and distinguished.

(4) Thirdly (and these three are all in the whole damn book) there is a man named Erskine Caldwell, who interested me less than the others because of the usual derivations from Hemmingway and even Callaghan—still read him. He & Sykes are 26 yrs old. I don't know any of them.

If you decide to act in any of these last three cases I'd do it within a few weeks. I know none of the men but Cantwell will go quick with his next stuff if he hasn't gone already. For some reason young writers come in groups—Cummings, Dos Passos & me in 1920-21; Hemmingway, Callaghan & Wilder in 1926-27 and no one in between and no one since. This looks to me like a really new generation

(5) Now a personal friend (but he knows not that I'm [writing] you)—Cary Ross (Yale 1925)—poorly represented in this American Caravan, but rather brilliantly by poems in the Mercury & Transition, studying medicine at Johns Hopkins & one who at the price of publication or at least examination of his poems might prove a valuable man. Distincly younger that [than] post war, later than my generation, sure to turn to fiction & worth corresponding with. I believe these are the cream of the young people

(6) [general]* Dos Passos wrote me about the ms. of some protegee of his but as I didn't see the ms. or know the man the letter seemed meaningless. Did you do anything about Murray Godwin (or Goodwin?). Shortly I'm sending you some memoirs by an ex-marine, doorman at my bank here. They might have some documentary value as true stories of the Nicaraguan expedition ect.

(7.) In the foreign (French) field there is besides Chamson one man, and at the opposite pole, of great great talent. It is not Cocteau nor Arragon but young Rene Crevel. I am opposed to him for being a fairy but in the last Transition (number 18.) there is a translation of the beginning of his current novel which simply knocked me cold with its beauty. The part in Transition is called Mr. Knife and Miss Fork and I wish to God you'd read it immediately. Incedently the novel is a great current success here. I know its not yet placed in America & if you're interested please communicate with me before you write Bradley.

(8) Now, one last, much more elaborate idea. In France any military book of real tactical or strategical importance, theoretical or fully documented (& usually the latter) (and I'm not referring to the one-company battles between “Red” & “Blue” taught us in the army under the name of Small Problems for Infantry). They are mostly published by Payots here & include such works as Ludendorfs Memoirs; and the Documentary Preparations for the German break-thru in 1918 — how the men were massed, trained, brought up to the line in 12 hours in 150 different technical groups from flame throwers to field kitchens, the whole inside story from captured orders of the greatest tactical attack in history; a study of Tannenburg (German); several, both French & German of the 1st Marne; a thorough study of gas warfare, another of Tanks, no dogmatic distillations compiled by some old dotart, but original documents.

Now—believing that so long as we have service schools and not much preparation (I am a political cynic and a big-navy-man, like all Europeans) English Translations should be available in all academies, army service schools, staff schools ect (I'll bet there are American army officers with the rank of Captain that don't know what “infiltration in depth” is or what Colonel Bruckmuller's idea of artillery employment was.) It seems to me that it would be a great patriotic service to consult the war-department bookbuyers on some subsidy plan to bring out a tentative dozen of the most important as “an original scource [source] tactical library of the lessons of the great war.” It would be a parallel, but more essentially military rather than politico-military, to the enclosed list of Payot's collection. I underline some of my proposed inclusions. This, in view of some millions of amateurs of battle now in America might be an enormous popular success as well as a patriotic service. Let me know about this because if you shouldn't be interested I'd like to for my own satisfaction make the suggestion to someone else. Some that I've underlined may be already published.

My God—this is 7 pages & you're asleep & I want to catch the Olympic with this so I'll close. Please tell me your response to each idea.

Does Chamson sell at all? Oh, for my income tax will you have the usual statement of lack of royalties sent me—& for my curiosity to see if I've sold a book this year except to myself.

Notes:

* This note appeared above the salutation.

* On January 13th, Perkins had deposited $500 for Fitzgerald.

^ Harold Ober had recently disassociated himself from Paul Reynolds and was now starting on his own.

** Alfred A. Knopf, Ltd.

* These brackets are Fitzgerald's.

53. This agreement was terminated when Knopf dissolved their London house.

During the summer of 1929, Fitzgerald, acting as timekeeper for a sparring match between Hemingway and Callaghan, inadvertently allowed a round to run long, during which Callaghan knocked down Hemingway. This event was publicized and placed a strain on the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship. See Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (1963).

Knopf did not publish Tender Is the Night in England.

Bishop’s “The Cellar” had been rejected by Scribner’s Magazine, which then accepted “Many Thousands Gone” (September 1930). The novelette won the Scribner’s Magazine prize for 1930 and became the title story for Bishop’s first Charles Scribner’s Sons book in 1931.

Also Turnbull.

213. To Fitzgerald

Feb. 11, 1930

Dear Scott:

I enclose the royalty report. It was mighty good to get your long letter and all the suggestions, and I shall write you in detail about them this week. But as for the John Bishop story, I think it is a very, very fine thing, and although you must not say anything yet to him about it, I do hope we can work out a way of getting it into the Magazine. It is a hard proposition, for in a sense it is not a magazine kind of thing even in character. But it is a most unusual and impressive piece of work.

The Chamson stories have sold only about 2500 copies apiece. “The Crime of the Just” comes out pretty soon, and we may do better;—but anyhow, I am in hopes of publishing them all in one volume, and the very faint hope that we may be able to interest the Guild in the one volume. The stories are so short that they are at a disadvantage as separate books anyhow, and although they have had very warm reviews, they did not strike with a sufficient impact to get through to a sizeable public.—But when put together, they may well do more. Chamson tells us that he is writing a larger, and altogether different sort of novel. We have had very nice, sympathetic letters from him always.

I am trying to get in touch with Cantrell and Erskine Caldwell, and I shall let you know what comes of it.

I have here Crevell's “Etes-vous Fous” and I shall have the Transition, and I shall certainly communicate with you before the week is done. The military books I do not think we can go in for. We are pretty heavily embarked in literature relating to war, although quite different, of course, from that you speak of.—And there is even a large book on the whole military conduct of the war that we are involved with.—A fine book too, but a very large and difficult one. Besides, the American people do not believe there is ever going to be another war, apparently,—at least outside the Union Club and the Brevoort.

This letter is just a preliminary to a real answer. I have been so excessively busy that I have not been able to round things up as quickly as I had hoped.

Ernest went through, and seemed in fine shape. I swore I would go down to Key West in March,—and I do hope to do it for I have seldom liked a place as well.

Always your friend,

214. TO: Maxwell Perkins

After 11 February 1930

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Paris

Dear Max:

Just a last word about the Bishop story. He (and I too) is in doubt about the episode of the Union boy murdered + mutilated by the nigger. It is too melodramatic + not too clear, as the whole thing is already harrowing enough.

Will you consider the question of cutting it from the story. It is a short episode + not really important1

Ever
Scott

Notes:

1 “Many Thousands Gone” (Scribner's Magazine [September 1930]), which Fitzgerald had recommended to Perkins. The murder and castration of the soldier were retained in the story. See Perkins' 11 February letter to Fitzgerald in Scott /Max.

215. To Fitzgerald

March 14, 1930

Dear Scott:

I am off tomorrow for Key West where Mike Strater* also is, for two weeks. I wish you were here and could come too. Ernest is planning for a cruise up to the Everglades. If I ever go down there again after this year, and you are in this country, I shall keep after you until I get you to come along.

John Bishop writes that he told you about our accepting his story, but I wrote to you about it at the same time that I wrote to him. Since then I have seen both Cantwell, who is a very interesting fellow, and Caldwell. In fact we have taken two stories by Caldwell, though they are not up to his best. Cantwell submitted one which I enjoyed immensely in reading, but which we could not take partly because it was very long, and partly because it was one of those stories which do not make a clear, definite impression,—more of the sort that Katherine Mansfield often wrote in that respect. But it was beautifully done. I had lunch with him, and he is to send us others, but some friend of his had led him long ago to Farrar and Rhinehart, and they had accepted his first novel without seeing a line of it, which I do not think we could have done. Caldwell is also writing a novel, and although other publishers are after him now, I think we can probably have it.

Harold Ober yesterday gave me reason to hope that a large part of your novel would be here before long. I'll tell you when we get that into our hands, and a publication date set, we'll let loose everything we have got in the way of salesmanship and advertising. Everyone here is impatient to get that book and what is more, there is no author who commands a more complete loyalty than you do.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

*A painter and friend of Hemingway.

216. To Perkins

May 1930

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University; Life In Letters.

Paris

Dear Max:

I was delighted about the Bishop story—the acceptance has done wonders for him. The other night I read him a good deal of my novel + I think he liked it. Harold Ober wrote me that if it couldn’t be published this fall I should publish the Basil Lee stories, but I know too well by whom reputations are made + broken to ruin myself completely by such a move—I’ve seen Tom Boyd, Michael Arlen + too many others fall through the eternal trapdoor of trying cheat the public, no matter what their public is, with substitutes—better to let four years go by. I wrote young + I wrote a lot + the pot takes longer to fill up now but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago. If you think Callahgan hasn’t completely blown himself up with this death house masterpiece just wait and see the pieces fall. I don’t know why I’m saying this to you who have never been anything but my most loyal and confident encourager and friend but Ober’s letter annoyed me today + put me in a wretched humor. I know what I’m doing—honestly, Max. How much time between The Cabala + The Bridge of St Lois Rey, between The Genius + The American Tragedy between The Wisdom Tooth + Green Pastures. I think time seems to go by quicker there in America but time put in is time eventually taken out—and whatever this thing of mine is its certainly not a mediocrity like The Woman of Andros + The Forty Second Parallel. “He through” is an easy cry to raise but its safer for the critics to raise it at the evidence in print than at a long silence.

Ever yours
Scott

Notes:

Callaghan, Strange Fugitive (1928).

The Cabala (1926) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder; The “Genius” (1915) and An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser; The Wisdom Tooth (1926) and The Green Pastures (1929), by Marc Connelly.

The Woman of Andros (1930), by Wilder; The 42nd Parallel (1930), by John Dos Passos.

Also Turnbull.

217. FROM: Maxwell Perkins

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

May 14, 1930

Dear Scott:

I hope Zelda is O.K. now. I am mighty sorry she was ill.1 You ought to spend next winter in Key West,—the healthiest, sunniest, restfullest place in the world (so far as I know it) and enough good company.

I have never found any flaw in your judgment about your work, yet. I think you are dead right in holding back the Basil Lee story until you get out the novel. The only thing that has ever worried me about you was the question of health. I know you have everything else, but I have often been afraid on that account, perhaps because I myself can stand so little in the way of late hours, and all that goes with them.

But don't blame me for being impatient once in a while. It is only the impatience to see something one expects greatly to enjoy and admire, and wishes to see triumph. That's the truth.

Ever yours,

Notes:

1 In April 1930 Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a nervous breakdown in Paris. While she was being treated at a Swiss clinic Fitzgerald shuttled between Switzerland and Paris, where Scottie was living with a governess.

218. To Perkins

[10 rue Pergolese] [Paris, France]

[May, 1930]

Dear Max:

First let me tell you how shocked I was by Mr. Scribner's death. It was in due time of course but nevertheless [I shall miss] his fairness toward things that were of another generation, his general tolerance and simply his being there as titular head of a great business.

Please tell me how this affects you—if at all.

The letter enclosed has been in my desk for three weeks as I wasn't sure whether to send it when I wrote it. Then Powell Fowler and his wedding party arrived and I got unfortunately involved in dinners and night clubs and drinking; then Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven't done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.

Have you read The Building of St. Michele and D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious? Don't miss either of them.

Always yours,
Scott

What news of Ernest?

Please don't mention the enclosed letter to Ober as I've written him already.

Notes:

The letter enclosed... - The Letter #163 of this collection

Brother of Ludlow Fowler.

The Story of San Michele (1929), by Axel Munthe.

From Turnbull.

219. To Perkins

 [Switzerland]

[ca. July 8, 1930]

Dear Max:

I'm asking Harold Ober to offer you these three stories^ which Zelda wrote in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you'll see that apart from the beauty & richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them—their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for awhile seemed to have brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion they are literature tho I may in this case read so much between the lines that my opinion is valueless. (By the way Caldwell's stories were a throrough disappointment, wern't they—more crimes committed in Hemmingway's name)

Ever yours

Notes:

^ “A Workman,” “The Drouth and the Flood” and “The House.”

Also Turnbull.

220. To Fitzgerald

July 8, 1930

Dear Scott:

There is nothing so futile as telling a person you are sorry for things that have happened,—particularly when the person is one who knows how sorry you would be. I do hope Zelda is getting on. It is too bad. You certainly have a lot on your hands. We got the cable, and have replied that the fifteen hundred was deposited.

Ernest was here a while ago to meet Bumby,* who had come over with Ernest's sister-in-law. Ernest was very well, and we had some good times. We managed to take over from Liveright “In Our Time” and we shall re-issue that, and I believe will do quite well with it. On account of the circumstances it was published in, it never had a good show, and I think we could almost give it the effect of a new book, for the general public.

John Bishop sent over another story which was too long, and was not otherwise quite right for magazine publication, but he shortened it, and changed it in the other ways, and I think it is a very fine story.—Certainly it is a beautiful piece of writing.

Business never was worse, but people begin to think it will pick up in the fall.... We came out much better than most people this spring because of S. S. Van Dine,+ whose books seem not to have been affected by the depression,—in fact, almost to have gained by it. The booksellers seemed to think that they could sell it, and only it, and concentrated upon it.

Hoping that things will soon be better with you all, and that you may be back here, I am,

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* Nickname of John, Hemingway's oldest son.

+ Pen-name of Willard Huntington Wright, author of the Philo Vance mystery stories.

221. To Perkins

[Switzerland]

[circa July 20, 1930]

Dear Max:

Zelda is still sick as hell, and the psychiatrist who is devoting almost his entire time to her is an expensive proposition. I was so upset in June when hopes for her recovery were black that I could practically do no work and got behind—then arrived a wire from Ober that for the first time he couldn't make me the usual advance up to the price of a story. So then I called on you. I am having him turn over to you $3000 from the proceeds of the story I am sending off this week, as it's terrible to be so in debt. A thousand thanks and apologies.

Yours as ever (if somewhat harassed and anxious about life),
Scott

Notes:

From Turnbull.

222. FROM Max Perkins TO Thomas Wolfe (Fragment)

June 3, 1930

<…>

There are two people I hope you may see—Scott Fitzgerald and John Galsworthy. I dare say the Heinemann1 crowd will see that you see Galsworthy, and I hope you will see that you see Scott. I know you would have a grand time together. I meant to have written him that you were likely to turn up, but never did it. If you need any introduction, you can tell him that I was extremely anxious that you should look him up, but the fact is you won’t need any introduction, for he will know all about the “Angel” and will be eager to see you.

I shall write more when there is more to be said.

Ever yours,

Notes

1 William Heinemann, Ltd., Wolfe’s publishers in England.

223. From Thomas Wolfe To MAXWELL E. PERKINS

Guaranty Trust Co, Paris.

July 1, 1930

Dear Mr. Perkins:

I have a long letter under way to you, but I shall probably not send it until I have left Paris. The main news is that I have been at work for several weeks, and have worked every day except last Sunday, when I met Scott Fitzgerald for the first time. He called me up at my hotel and I went out to his apartment for lunch: we spent the rest of the afternoon together talking and drinking—a good deal of both—and I finally left him at the Ritz Bar. He was getting ready to go back to Switzerland where he has been for several weeks, and had come up to close up his apartment and take his little girl back with him. He told me that Mrs. Fitzgerald has been very sick—a bad nervous breakdown—and he has her in a sanitarium at Geneva. He spoke of his new book and said he was working on it: he was very friendly and generous, and I liked him, and think he has a great deal of talent, and I hope he gets that book done soon. I think we got along very well—we had quite an argument about America: I said we were a homesick people, and belonged to the earth and land we came from as much or more as any country I knew about—he said we were not, that we were not a country, that he had no feeling for the land he came from. “Nevertheless," as Galileo said, “it moves." We do, and they are all homesick or past having any feeling about anything.

I have missed America more this time than ever: maybe it’s because all my conviction, the tone and conviction of my new book is filled with this feeling, which once I would have been ashamed to admit. I notice that the Americans who live here live with one another for the most part, and the French exist for them as waiters, taxi drivers, etc.—vet most of them will tell you all about the French, and their minute characteristics. I have been absolutely alone for several weeks—Fitzgerald was the first American I had talked to for some time, but yesterday I was here in the bank, and in walked Jim Boyd: I was so surprised and happy I could not speak for a moment—we went out to lunch together and spent the rest of the day together. He has been quite sick with the sinus trouble, as you know. We went to see a doctor, and I waited below: this doctor made no examination and gave no verdict, but is sending him to a specialist. I hope they do something for him—he is a fine fellow, and I like him enormously. We went to a nice cafe and drank beer and talked over the American soil and what we were going to do for literature, while Mrs. Boyd shopped around town. Later we all drove out to the Bois and through it to a nice little restaurant out of town on the banks of the Seine—we had a good quiet dinner there and came back. I think Jim enjoyed it, and I am going to meet them again to-night. It has done me a great deal of good to see them ...

I am going to Switzerland—I have several places in mind but must go and see them—I would have gone long ago, but I did not want to move fast when I had started. I do not know how long I shall stay over here, but I shall stay until I have done the first part of my book, and can bring it back with me. It is going to be a very long book, I am afraid, but there is no way out of it. You can’t write the book I want to write in 200 pages. It has four parts, its whole title is “The October Fair,” and the names of the four parts are (1) “Antaeus”; (2) “The Fast Express”; (3) “Faust and Helen”; (4) “The October Fair." 1 I am working on the part called “Antaeus” now, which is like a symphony of many voices run through with the beginning thread of story that continues through the book. I propose to bring back to America with me the parts called “Antaeus" and “The Fast Express” (all these names are tentative and if you don’t like them we'll get others). The book is a grand book if I have character and talent enough to do it as I have conceived it. The book has to do with what seem to me two of the profoundest impulses in man—Wordsworth, in one of his poems “To a Skylark,” I think, calls it "heaven and home” and I called it in the first line of my book, "Of wandering forever and the earth again."

By “the earth again” I mean simply the everlasting earth, a home, a place for the heart to come to, and earthly mortal love, the love of a woman, who, it seems to me belongs to the earth and is a force opposed to that other great force that makes men wander, that makes them search, that makes them lonely, and that makes them both hale and love their loneliness. You may ask what all this has to do with America—it is true it has to do with the whole universe—but it is as true of the enormous and lonely land that we inhabit as any land I know of, and more so, it seems to me.

I hope this does not seem wild and idiotic to you, I have been unable to tell you much about it here, but I will in greater detail later. I ask you to remember that in the first part—“Antaeus”—the part of many voices— everything moves, everything moves across the enormous earth, except the earth itself, and except for the voices of the women crying out “Don’t go! Stay! Return, return!”—the woman floating down the river in flood on her housetop with her husband and family (I finished that scene the other day and I think it is a good one). The whole scene, told in the woman’s homely speech, moves to the rhythm of the great river; yet the scene has pungent and humorous talk in it, and I think does not ring false. You understand that the river is in her brain, in her thought, in her speech; and at the very end, lying in her tent at night while a new house is being built where the old one was (for he refuses to go up on high ground back beyond the river where nothing moves) she hears him waken beside her— he thinks she is asleep—she knows he is listening to the river, to the whistles of the boats upon the river, that he wants to be out there upon the river, that he could go floating on forever down the river. And she hates the river, but all of its sounds are in her brain, she cannot escape it ... “All of my life is flowing like the river, all of my life is passing like the river, I think and dream and talk just like the river as it goes by me, by me, by me, to the sea.”2 Does it sound idiotic? I don't think so if you could see the whole; it is full of rich detail, sounds and talk. I will not tell you any more now—this letter is too long and I have had no lunch. The river woman is only one thing ... I'll tell you all about it later. Everything moves except the earth and the voices of the women crying out against wandering!

I miss seeing you and Scribners more than I can say. I hope I can do a good book for you and for myself and for the whole damn family. Please hope and pull for me and write me when you can. Excuse this long scrawl. I hope this finds you well and enjoying the summer, and also that you get a good vacation. Jim Boyd and I will think of you every time we drink a glass of beer and wish that you were here just for an hour or so to share it. I send everyone my best and warmest wishes.

Don’t tell anyone where I am or where I'm going unless you think they have some business to find out. Tell them you don't know where I am (if anyone asks) but that mail will get to me if sent to The Guaranty Trust Co., Paris.

Notes:

1 Of Time and the River; which was only the Erst half of what Wolfe calls The October Fair here, finally had eight parts: “Orestes: Flight Before Fury“; “Young Faustus"; Telemachus"; “Proteus: The City"; “Jason's Voyage"; “Antaeus: Earth Again ”; "Kronos and Rhea: The Dream of Time"; and “Faust and Helen."

2 This scene became very long and was finally omitted from Of Time and the River. However, the words “goes by me, by me, by me, to the sea” were changed to “flows by us, by us, by us, to the sea” and used as a refrain throughout the book, as pages 333, 510, 860, etc.

224. From Thomas Wolfe To MAXWELL E. PERKINS

Hotel Lorius

Montreux, Switzerland

July 17, 1930

Dear Mr. Perkins:

Your letter was sent on here from Paris, and I got it this morning. I suppose by now you have the letter I sent you from Paris several weeks ago. I have been here five or six days... The other night at the Casino here I was sitting on the terrace when I saw Scott Fitzgerald and a friend of his, a young man I met in Paris. I called to them, they came over and sat with me: later we gambled at roulette and I won 15 francs, then Scott took us to a night club here. This sounds much gayer than it is: there is very little to do here, and I think I saw all the night life there is on that occasion. Later Scott and his friend drove back to Vevey, a village a mile or two from here on the lake: they are staying there. They asked me to come over to dine with them, but I am not going: I do not think I am very good company to people at present. It would be very easy for me to start swilling liquor at present but I am not going to do it. I am here to get work done, and in the next three months, I am going to see whether I am a bum or a man. I shall not try to conceal from you the fact that at times now I have hard sledding: my life is divided between just two things:—thought of my book, and thought of an event in my life which is now, objectivally [sic] finished. I do not write any more to anyone concerned in that event— I received several letters, but since none have come for some time I assume no more will come. I have been entirely alone since I left New York, save for these casual meetings I have told you about. Something in me hates being alone like death, and something in me cherishes it: I have always felt that somehow, out of this bitter solitude, some fruit must come. I lose faith in myself with people. When I am with someone like Scott I feel that I am morose and sullen—and violent in my speech and movement part of the time. Later, I feel that I have repelled them.

Physically my life is very good. My nerves are very steady. I drink beer and wine, mostly beer, I do not think to excess; and I have come to what is, I am sure, one of the most beautiful spots in the world. I am staying at a quiet and excellent hotel here; have a very comfortable room with a writing desk and a stone balcony that looks out on the lake of Geneva, and on a garden below filled with rich trees and grass and brilliant flowers. On all sides of the lake the mountains soar up: everything begins to climb immediately, this little town is built in three or four shelving terraces, and runs along the lake shore. Something in me wants to get up and see places, the country is full of incredibly beautiful places, but also something says “stay here and work."

<…>

225. To Fitzgerald

Aug. 5, 1930

Dear Scott:

I have read Zelda's manuscripts over several times—they came to me while I was away—and I do think they show an astonishing power of expression, and have and convey a curiously effective and strange quality.—But they are for a selected audience, and not a large one, and the magazine thinks that on that account, they cannot use them. One would think that if she did enough more they might make a book. Descriptively they are very rare, and the description is not just description. It has a curious emotional content in itself. But for the present I shall have to send them back to Ober. I think one of the little magazines might use them. I wish we could.

I am terribly sorry about Zelda herself.* But if she has made progress maybe it should become more rapid, and everything will come out right.

Wolfe wrote me that he had seen you and greatly enjoyed it, but said he feared he had been bad company for you,—that he had felt worried and morose.

Ernest writes from Wyoming saying that he had wanted to write to you, but that he was working well on his book, and did not dare stop, and giving all kings of regards, etc.

I have been away for two weeks and am terribly jammed up with work, and it is as hot as can be.

Always yours,

Notes:

* Fitzgerald had written, late in July, that “Zelda is still sick as hell.”

226. FROM Max Perkins TO THOMAS WOLFE

Aug. 28, 1930

Dear Tom :

If I really believed you would be able to stand by your decision, your letter would be a great blow to me. I cannot believe it, though. If anyone were ever destined to write, that one is you. As for the English reviews, I saw one from an important source which was adverse, though it recognized the high talent displayed. It argued that the book1 was at fault because it was chaotic and that the function of an artist was to impose order. That was the only review that could be called unfavorable, and, as I say, it recognized that the book showed great talent. Otherwise the reviews—and I must have seen all the really important ones—were very fine.

For Heaven’s sake write me again. I am sending you herewith a royalty report showing the money due.

Always and anxiously yours,

Notes

1 Look Homeward, Angel, Scribners, 1929.

227. To Perkins

Geneva, Switzerland ^

[ca. September 1, 1930]

Dear Max:

All the world seems to end up in this flat and antiseptic smelling land—with an overlay of flowers. Tom Wolfe is the only man I've met here who isn't sick or hasn't sickness to deal with. You have a great find in him—what he'll do is incalculable. He has a deeper culture than Ernest and more vitality, if he is slightly less of a poet that goes with the immense surface he wants to cover. Also he lacks Ernests quality of a stick hardened in the fire—he is more susceptible to the world. John Bishop told me he needed advice about cutting ect, but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he has to be published in five volumes. I liked him enormously.

I was sorry of course about Zelda's stories—possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn't know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a Waste-Land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College Humor and I think in view of the success of Dotty Parkers Laments (25,000 copies) I think a book might be got together for next Spring if Zelda can add a few more during the winter.

Wasn't that a nice tribute to C.S. from Mencken in the Mercury?*

The royalty advance or the national debt as it might be called shocked me.^ The usual vicious circle is here—I am now exactly $3000. ahead which means 2 months on the Encyclopedia. I'd prefer to have all above the $10,000 paid back to you off my next story (in October). You've been so damn nice to me.

Zelda is almost well. The doctor says she can never drink again (not that drink in any way contributed to her collapse), and that I must not drink anything, not even wine, for a year, because drinking in the past was one of the things that haunted her in her delerium.

Do please send me things like Wolfe's book when they appear. Is Ernest's book a history of bull-fighting? I'm sending you a curious illiterate ms written by a chasseur at my bank here. Will you skim it & see if any parts, like the marines in Central America, are interesting as pure data? And return it, if not, directly to him? You were absolutely right about the dollar books—it's a preposterous idea and I think the Authors League went crazy.

Always yours

This illness has cost me a fortune—hence that telegram in July.** The biggest man in Switzerland gave all his time to her—& saved her reason by a split second.

Notes:

^ Fitzgerald was in Switzerland so that he could be near Zelda, who was in Les Rives de Prangins sanitarium on Lake Geneva.

* Charles Scribner, Senior, President of Charles Scribner's Sons, had died in May.

^ Perkins had sent Fitzgerald the royalty report on August 12th. Fitzgerald had wired Perkins for $1500 on July 7th.

Laments for the Living (1930).

Charles Scribner II.

Also Turnbull.

228. FROM Max Perkins TO THOMAS WOLFE

Sept, 10, 1930

Dear Tom :

I wrote you very hurriedly at the end of August: I was then on the edge of a ten days’ vacation which is now ended. I hoped when I got back there might be another letter telling me you felt differently than in your last, and I have had that letter on my mind ever since you wrote it. I could not clearly make out why you had come to your decision, and surely you will have to change it; but certainly there never was a man who had made more of an impression on the best judges with a single book, and at so early an age. Certainly you ought not to be affected by a few unfavorable reviews—even apart from the overwhelming number of extremely and excitedly enthusiastic reviews. By the way, Scott Fitzgerald wrote me how much better things were with him now; but most of his letter was taken up with you. I daresay it would be a good thing if you could avoid him at present, but he was immensely impressed with you, and with the book, and however you may regard him as a writer, he is certainly a very sensitive and sure judge of writers. Not that there is any further need of confirmation with respect to you. There is no doubt of your very great possibilities—nor, for that matter, of the great accomplishment of the “Angel.”

Somewhere, perhaps to Jack,1 you referred to a young man of our friend Madeleine’s2 having run you down and taken observations. I daresay this was not pleasant, but I have seen the letter he wrote her—she came in with it—and it was extremely interesting. He also has great admiration for you, and he quoted some of your sayings, which I could recognize as authentic, and which were extremely discerning. There was one about Scott.3

It seems rather futile to write this letter, in view of your having stopped all communications.4 I hope somehow it will break through to you. If you do not write me some good news pretty soon, I shall have to start out on a spying expedition myself. You know it has been said before that one has to pay somehow for everything one has or gets, and I can see that among your penalties are attacks of despair, as they have been among the penalties great writers have generally had to pay for their talent.

Please do write me.

Always your friend,

Notes

1 John Hall Wheelock, an editor at Scribners

 2 Madeleine Boyd, literary agent.

 3 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

4 Wolfe, at this time, was still abroad.

229. To Fitzgerald

Nov. 12, 1930

Dear Scott:

I am terribly ashamed about the David Livingston manuscript.^^ I read quite a bit of it and found there was a great deal to be said for the way it was written, in detail. Very spirited and graphic. But then I gave it to Meyer here who read it all through, and one other looked it over, and in the end we decided we could not do it.—But in the rush of things I never did get to writing about it. If you tell me though, I will explain it all to Ober, and he may place it.

He sent us the other day a story by Zelda called “Miss Bessie”. We took it,—if the price we offered, which was not very high, is acceptable. I suppose you must have read it so there is not much need of my saying anything about it, but it did give a very complete strong sense of a character in this Southern old maid. It was moving in that way, but it had another quality that was still more moving.—In some way it made the reader share the feelings of the young girl through whose eyes Miss Bessie was seen, so that she was not only real, and in some degree was not real, but was as the young girl saw her.

But when we send the proof I was going to ask Zelda if she would consider whether her figures of speech—I suppose they would be called similes—were not too numerous, and sometimes too remote.—That is, sometimes she likens something in the story to something too distant from it; and this has the effect sometimes of putting the emphasis on the figure of the simile instead of the thing to which it is likened. Then too, there is a little point at the end as to how the man met his death which needs clarification, I thought.

Zelda probably knows just as much about writing as anybody hereabouts, but few writers can get sufficiently away from their own work to know how it will strike a reader. So I did not think she would mind the raising of these points.

I have heard that you are to come back before Christmas. Is this so? I wish it were. I only saw John Bishop when he was here once, but enjoyed that. Ernest, having escaped all the dangers involved in killing grizzlies and elk, in Montana, then got badly hurt in a motor accident. Dos Passos was with him. They were driving at night and in the glare of coming headlights Ernest got too far over to the right and ran off the road into a gulley. His upper right arm was so badly broken that they had to operate and tie the bone. Pauline* wired me that he had been in great pain, but that it ought not to last long.—But evidently she was worried about him. It was something very unusual in the way of a broken arm.

Always your friend,

Notes:

++ Apparently the book by the chasseur at his bank which Fitzgerald had mentioned that he was sending Perkins. Early in November Fitzgerald wrote asking whether the manuscript had ever arrived.

* Mrs. Ernest Hemingway.

230. From Thomas Wolfe To MAXWELL E. PERKINS (The draft of the letter)

[London]

[December, 1930]

Dear Mr. Perkins:

I suppose you have by now an enormous letter I wrote you about two weeks ago—it was filled with work and woes: I want to write you this short one to tell you my plans and intentions. First, it is only three or four days before Christmas, I have the satisfaction of feeling completely exhausted with work for the moment: my mind is tired and I can not sleep very well. I am going to keep it up until Christmas, then I am going to Paris for four or five days, and I am going to do nothing but sleep, eat and drink the best food and wine I can get. Then I propose to come back here and work till I drop for about six weeks, until I know I can bring the first part in consecutive chapters or in draft back home. Then I propose taking third class on the fastest boat I can find—the Bremen or Europa—so that I'll be in New York in five or six days after sailing. Then I should like to proceed immediately (this is the hard part) to a place where I can get to work again.

I have told you that my new book is haunted throughout by the Idea of the river—of Time and Change. Well, so am I—and the thing that is eating at my entrails at present is when can I have this formidable work ready. You have been wonderful not saying anything about time, but I feel you would like to see something before next Fall. I don’t make any promises but I’ll try like hell: I am distressed at the time I spent over personal worries, excitement over the first one, and fiddling around, but it's no good crying about that now—I think this came as fast as it could: now I’ve got it all inside me. and much of it down on paper, but I must work like hell. The thing that is good for me is almost total obscurity— I love praise and flattery for my work, but there must be no more parties, no more going out. I must live in two rooms somewhere until I hate to leave them: I want to see you and one or two people, but I want to come back without seeing anyone in New York for several weeks except you and one or two others: don’t think I’m talking through my hat, it's the only way I can do this piece of work and I must do it in this way.

Now about the place to work. This is a hell of a lot to ask you, but I don’t want you to do it if you can get someone else to do it—try to help me if you can. I don’t know whether it is good to live in New York now. My present obsession is that I am going within the next few years to get married and live somewhere in America in the country or in one of the smaller cities—in Baltimore, or in Virginia, or in the Pennsylvania farm country or in the West—but I have no time to go wandering all over America now.

(My book, by the way, is filled with this kind of exuberance, exultancy and joy—I know if I can make people feel it, they will eat it up: I hope to Cod the energy is still there, this homesickness abroad has made me feel it more than ever—I mean the richness, fabulousness, exultancy and wonderful life of America—the way you feel (I mean the young fellow, the college kid, going off on his own for the first time) 1 when he is rushing through the night in a dark pullman berth and he sees the dark mysterious American landscape rolling by (Virginia, say!) and the voluptuous good-looking woman in the berth below stirring her pretty legs between the sheets, the sound of the other people snoring, and the sound of voices on the little station platforms in the night—some man and woman seeing their daughter off, then you hear her rustle down the aisle behind the nigger porter and they knock against your green curtain—it is all so strange and familiar and full of joy, it is as if some woman you loved had laid her hand on your bowels.

Then the wonderful richness and size of the country, the feeling that you can be rich and famous, that you can make money easily—the wonderful soil, sometimes desolate and lonely-looking as you found the parts of North Carolina you visited, yet that same earth, Mr. Perkins, produces enough pungent and magnificent tobacco to smoke up the world, and from that same clay come the most luscious peaches, apples, melons, all manner of juicy and wonderful things. I was thinking of it in Switzerland this summer—how incredibly beautiful Switzerland is—the story-book lakes, the unbelievable mountains, the lush velvety mountain meadows— and how desolate and ugly North Carolina would seem to a European— and yet Switzerland is a kind of fake—horribly dull food, dull stunted little fruits and vegetables, dull grapes, dull wine, dull people, and horrible  dead sea fish that comes from those lovely Alpine lakes. Switzerland, for all its rich grand beauty can not produce anything one-tenth as good or pungent as North Carolina tobacco, melons, peaches, apples, or the wonderful ducks, turkey's, and marvellous fish along the lonely desolate N.C. coast—and that is America, the only country where you feel this joy, this glory, this exuberance, the thing that makes the young fellows cry out and squeal in their throats. These poor dull tired bastards with their terribly soft woolly steamy, dreary skies—do you think they can ever feel this way? They may sneer at us, hate us, revile and mock us, say we are base and without beauty or culture, but no matter how much they call on their dead glories, their Shakespeares, Molieres, Shelley s, you know there can be no lying, no hocus-pocus about their beastly, damnable dreary air—they can’t argue about that, they have to breathe it, and it will rot and decay anyone after a time, just as bad food, bad housing, will do it. I feel pity and sorrow for them—the plain truth is that the lives of most of their people are dreary compared to ours—they have to go to American movies for amusement. No, they can’t have the feeling we have in Autumn when the frost comes and all the wonderful colors come out, and you hear the great winds at night and the burrs plopping to the ground and the far-off frosty barking of a dog, and the wonderful sound of an American train on the rails and its whistle.

The people of North Carolina are like that wonderful earth—they are not little, dull, dreary Babbitts: I am going to tell the truth about these people and, by God, it is the truth about America. I don’t care what any little worn-out waste-lander, European or American, or anyone else says: I know what I know. The people in North Carolina have these same wonderful qualities as the tobacco, the great juicy peaches, melons, apples, the wonderful shad and oysters of the coast, the rich red clay, the haunting brooding quality of the earth. They are rich, juicy, deliberate, full of pungent and sardonic humor and honesty, conservative and cautious on top, but at bottom wild, savage, and full of the murderous innocence of the earth and the wilderness. Do you think this is far-fetched? Scott F.G. 2 did and ridiculed the idea that the earth we lived on had anything to do with us—but don’t you see that 300 years upon this earth, living alone minute by minute in the wilderness, eating its food, growing its tobacco, being buried and mixed with it, gets into the blood, bone, marrow, sinew of the people—just as breathing this dreary stuff here has got into these dull, depressed, splenetic and despondent wretches who have to breathe it: how in Cod’s name can anyone be pig-headed and stubborn enough to deny it?

You are a New Englander and quieter about it, but every American has this exultant feeling at times—the way snow comes in New England and the way it spits against your window at night and the sounds of the world get numb, you are living like a spirit in wonderful dark isolation: my bowels used to stir with it and once I got off the Fall River boat after a night of storm and snow on the dark water of the Sound, and the wind and powdery snow were blowing and howling at dawn, everything was white and smokey wonderful grey, and there was the train for Boston in the middle of it, black, warm, fast, and all around the lonely and tragic beauty of New England. (Yes! and another good-looking woman in the stateroom next to me coming up on the boat.)

This is glory and wonder, and I shall not be ashamed to tell all of it— what else is homesickness, loyalty, love of country than this—each one of the million moments of your life, the intolerable memory of all the sounds and sights and feelings you knew there. I shall neither try to defend or condemn anything—it is in me, all of it, I shall tell of the cruelty and horror, murder and sudden death, the Irish cop, the smell of blood and brains upon the sidewalk, along with everything else—it is all part of my story, and I know it is time and so do you. It is also glorious and exultant and nowhere else in the world can they feel this way: if I tell about it as it is, in all its magnificence and joy, how can it fail to be good? I do not say that I can, but we shall see.)

<…>

Notes:

1 This is described on pages 74 and 75 of Of Time and the River.

2 Scott Fitzgerald.

231. To Perkins

Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne

[ca. May 15, 1931]

Dear Max:

An idea:

Princeton has had lots of books—too many in the last ten years (on a cursory inspection I'm not so much impressed with Burnham's book which leans heavily on so many of us greybeards) but—

There's been no Harvard book since Charlie Flandrau & Philosophy Four.* I'm very impressed with a series of Harvard-Boston Society stories by Bernard de Voto which have been running in the Post the last year. They're light, romantic & exceedingly witty. I think that under some such title as “Outside the Yard” the as yet unsaturated Harvard public would lap them up. (I don't dare suggest you call them “Recent Researches at Cambridge.”)

The new avant-garde magazines are not up to Transition, & this Caravan has nothing new except some good poetry. The Jazz Age is over. If Mark Sullivan is going on^ you might tell him I claim credit for naming it & that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day 1919 to the crash of the Stock Market in 1929—almost exactly one decade.

Zelda is so much better. I'm taking her on a trip tomorrow—only for the day. But she's herself again now, tho not yet strong. Please send that proof of hers.

Yours always

Notes:

* Charles Flandrau wrote two novels based on his undergraduate days at Harvard, Harvard Episodes (1897) and The Diary of a Freshman (1901).

+ With his history of the United States between 1900-1925. Entitled Our Times, the history was published, in six volumes, by Scribners between 1927 and 1935.

Also Turnbull.

232. To Fitzgerald

May 21, 1931

Dear Scott:

You are certainly entitled to credit for the phrase, “The Jazz Age”. I shall tell Sullivan about it too. What you say is extremely interesting, and significant, and Dashiell** is writing you to ask for an article about it. If you could possibly squeeze it in, I think there might be advantage in it for you,—apart from the price paid, which would look pretty small, I know. It may be hard to believe, but the fact is that an article in Scribner's has a much greater effect in the real book reading public, than one in the Post. Arthur Train, who has written millions of articles in the Post, put one on Boston in Scribner's, and was astonished at the effect. I thought you might well have something important to say in such a paper as this which might be of very marked value indirectly to sale.

I am awfully glad to hear about Zelda and hope to Heaven she may go on well. We shall soon send you proof. I have spoken to Dashiell.

I had meant to write you about Key West, but now so much time has elapsed that it seems hardly worthwhile. Ernest was in grand shape except for his arm, and that enabled him to fish, which is quite a piece of work. He could not straighten his arm on account of adhesions, and these may have to be cut, but that seems to be thought a trifle, and in the end he is sure to be practically what he was before the break.

Molly Colum seems to be in a bad way. Weeks ago I heard she had sprained her ankle, but yesterday I got a letter speaking of a bone having to set, and of its being worse now than it was in the beginning. She cannot move her foot. I know she would be mighty keen to see you if you had time to drop in at 1 bis rue de Vaugirard.

Now Ernest has gone off to Spain, and in view of his talent for getting hurt, I think he is mighty likely to run into a bomb or something.—But then, he seems to get hurt under conditions when you would never dream of such a thing, such as when he is standing under a skylight, and not under those in which anybody else would get hurt.

I am looking up the De Voto stories. I know him somewhat, and favorably, and I am told the stories are pretty good. He is a promising man.

Always yours,

Notes:

** Alfred Dashiell, Managing Editor of Scribner's Magazine. Fitzgerald wrote the piece and it was published, under the title “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in the November, 1931, issue.

233. TO: Maxwell Perkins

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Summer 1931

Lausanne, Switzerland

Dear Max: Here's the article—I found that I had pretty well exhausted my ideas on the subject but I think this is all right. Charge off my account what you think right, for it is shorter than you wanted.

Did you get me the Scandanavian copies of Gatsby?

Zelda is well, thank God, and is writing some amazing stuff We sail for America on the Aquitania Sept 19th, so I'll see you about the twenty fifth. So will you tell your secretary to hold mail.

We are going to Alabama for the winter + there I hope to God I'll finish the novel

What are these wine cubes? Will you get me a couple and keep them in your desk till I come—I'm curious, + afraid they'll disappear before I come.

I'm so anxious to see you

Always Yours Devotedly
Scott F

234. To Fitzgerald

Oct. 21, 1931

Dear Scott:

I think there is no doubt that Zelda has a great deal of talent, and of a very colorful, almost poetic kind. In the case of the particular story, “The Two Nuts”54 I think perhaps the color and all that, rather overwhelmed the story. Zelda has a marvellous instinct for metaphors, or whatever they called them. They are always remarkably good in themselves,—those places where she likens something to something else, but I think that sometimes they are so effective that the thing she likens a thing to, outshines the thing she means to illuminate. It was that way with this story often, I thought. It would not so much have mattered if there had not been so much of a story in one way,—that is, the career of those poor nuts who were so very representative of the time and the point of view. I thought the story got rather buried. I do not doubt she could easily place it anyhow, but if it ever should get revised, I do not doubt she could place it here,—but I know there is more money elsewhere.

I am glad the depression seems a long way off. People feel a little more cheerful hereabouts. Ernest was in great shape,—never saw him better. He has gone to Kansas City until after the event, and thereafter to Key West. I do not believe I am going to be able to get to Key West, but if I do, I wish to thunder you could do it too.

Always yours,

Notes:

54. Zelda Fitzgerald had submitted her story, “A Couple of Nuts,” to Scribner's Magazine. Dashiell had rejected it, writing Fitzgerald on October 16th that “the story itself is so encrusted with figures of speech that it is obscure and in some places it seems that the really dramatic parts of the story are dodged.”

235. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

MONTGOMERY ALA 1228P 1932 JAN 5 PM 1 58

HAVE YOU SEEN KAUFFMANS OF THE I SING JUDGING FROM REVIEWS THE INFLUENCE OF THE VEGETABLE OVERSTEPS THE BOUNDARY OF DECENCY WILL YOU MAKE DISCREET INQUIRIES AND WIRE ME YOUR OPINION REGARDS
SCOTT FITZGERALD

236. FROM Max Perkins TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Jan. 14, 1932

Dear Ernest:

I wish that manuscript1 would come—but keep it until it is ready. But I expect to get a lot out of it that will act as a counterbalance for things that one sees on all sides...

The house must be grand, and Key West too. That is the place to forget about the troubles of the world. I have been recommending it to young men out of jobs. If you begin to see strange young men appearing, with enough capital to buy a boat, I’ll be to blame, and I can guess what you will say about me. I tell them they ought to go down there and stay until after the depression, and then they will come back fit and happy to start in, instead of all frazzled out.

There is one sentence in your letter that made me think you had sent the manuscript, but I guess not yet. It has not arrived.

I read MacLeish’s “Hamlet” and think it grand. It is astonishing that a man can be doing what he is, and not have got across better. But I think the new poem will do it. And Houghton Mifflin seem to be playing him up in their spring announcement as if they meant to play him hard when they publish.

I have heard nothing of Scott2 except by telegraph, but he is back in Alabama, and is to do an article on “Hollywood Revisited.”

You asked about Tom Wolfe. He has accomplished a great volume of work, and what I have seen of it, not much, is as good as it could be. He keeps getting all upset, and he is so now, and I am to have an evening with him and try to make him think he is some good again. He is good all right.

I wish I were down there with you all…

Always yours,

Notes

1 Death in the Afternoon, published by Scribners in 1932.

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

237. To Perkins

Don Ce-Sar Hotel Pass-a-grille Beach, St. Petersburg, Florida* For three days only

[ca. January 15, 1932]

Dear Max:

At last for the first time in two years & 1/2 I am going to spend five consectutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead Am replanning it to include what's good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words & publishing. Don't tell Ernest or anyone—let them think what they want—you're the only one whose ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.

Your letters still sound sad. For God's sake take your vacation this winter. Nobody could quite ruin the house^ in your absense, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you & when you come back cut off an empty head or two. Thalberg did that with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Which reminds me that I'm doing that “Hollywood Revisited”55 in the evenings & it will be along in, I think, six days—maybe ten.

Have Nunnally Johnston's [Johnson's] humorous stories from the Post been collected? Everybody reads them. Please at least look into this. Ask Myers—he ought to search back at least a year which is as long as I've been meaning to write you about it.

Where in hell are my Scandanavian copies of The Great Gatsby?

You couldn't have sent me anything I enjoyed more than the Churchill book.

Always Yours Devotedly

Notes:

Irving Thalberg, legendary movie producer; he became the model for Monroe Stahr, protagonist of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.

Probably the one-volume abridgment of Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, published by Scribners in 1931.

* The Fitzgeralds had returned to the United States in September, 1931, after Zelda's release from Pragins.

^ Charles Scribner's Sons.

55. Fitzgerald had gone to Hollywood late in November to write for the movies and had offered to do an article for Scribner's Magazine on his experiences there. He never finished the piece, explaining to Dashiell late in September, 1932, that he had written “about twenty pages” of it but was now immersed in his novel and couldn't finish the article.

Also Turnbull.

238. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

MONTGOMERY ALA 1102A JAN 29 1932

HAVE BEEN TRYING UNSUCCESSFULLY TO DO HOLLYWOOD ARTICLE AT NIGHT AND WORKING FURIOUSLY ON NOVEL SIMPLY DONT DARE STOP WILL DO ARTICLE AT FIRST BREAK IN ENTHUSIASM TERRIBLY SORRY
SCOTT FITZGERALD.
1244P

239. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

MONTGOMERY ALA 1932 MAR 16 PM 10 21

PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE OR IF NOT ALREADY DONE EVEN CONSIDER ZELDAS BOOK UNTIL YOU GET REVISED VERSION LETTER FOLLOWS1
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

1 Zelda had written the first version of Save Me the Waltz at Phipps and sent it directly to Perkins. When Fitzgerald learned about it, he was bitterly angry because he felt she had used material that belonged to him. The first draft of Save Me the waltz does not survive.

240. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

MONTGOMERY ALA 1932 MAR 25 PM 11 52

THINK NOVEL CAN SAFELY BE PLACED ON YOUR LIST FOR SPRING IT IS ONLY A QUESTION OF CERTAIN SMALL BUT NONE THE LESS NECESSARY REVISIONS MY DISCOURAGEMENT WAS CAUSED BY THE FACT THAT MYSELF AND DAUGHTER WERE SICK WHEN ZELDA SAW FIT TO SEND MANUSCRIPT TO YOU YOU CAN HELP ME BY RETURNING MANUSCRIPT TO HER UPON HER REQUEST GIVING SOME PRETEXT FOR NOT HAVING AS YET TIME READ IT AM NOW BETTER AND WILL WRITE LETTER TOMORROW IN MY OPINION IT IS A FINE NOVEL STOP WILL TAKE UP ARTICLE AS SOON AS I HAVE FINISHED CURRENT POST STORY WHICH WILL BE ON ARRIVAL BALTIMORE WEDNESDAY BEST REGARDS FAITHFULLY
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

241. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

MONTGOMERY ALA 1150A 1932 MAR 28 PM 1 41

READ MANUSCRIPT BUT IF YOU HAVE ALREADY RETURNED IT WIRE AND ILL SEND COPY STOP IF YOU LIKE IT AND WANT TO USE IMMEDIATELY REMEMBER ALL MIDDLE SECTION MUST BE RADICALLY REWRITTEN STOP TITLE AND NAME OF AMORY BLAINE CHANGED1 STOP ARRIVING BALTIMORE THURSDAY TO CONFER WITH ZELDA WILL IMMEDIATELY DECIDE ON NEW TITLE AND NAME CHANGES REVISING SHOULD TAKE FORTNIGHT
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

1 The original title of Save Me the Waltz is not known. David Knight, the hero, was named Amory Blaine after the hero of This Side of Paradise.

242. To Perkins

Hotel Rennert Baltimore**

[ca. April 30, 1932]

Dear Max:

I was shocked to hear of your daughter’s illness. If it is anything mental I can deeply sympathize for there is nothing so “terrifying + mysterious”, as you say. I am somewhat of an amateur expert on the subject + if at any time things don’t go well let us meet in New York and talk about it. I mean there were times Zelda’s illness when I needed a layman’s advice. If she is in good hands do not make the criminal mistake of trying to hurry things, for reasons of family affection or family pride.

Zelda's novel++ is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You'll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think. But I must urge you two things

(1.) If you like it please don't wire her congratulations, and please keep whatever praise you may see fit to give on the staid side—I mean, as you naturally would, rather than yield to a tendency one has with invalids to be extra nice to cheer them up. This seems a nuance but it is rather important at present to the doctors that Zelda does not feel that the acceptance (always granted you like it) means immediate fame and money. I'm afraid all our critical tendencies in the last decade got bullish; we discovered one Hemmingway to a dozen Callaghans and Caldwells (I think the latter is a wash-out) & probably created a lot of spoiled geniuses who might have been good workmen. Not that I regret it—if the last five years uncovered Ernest, Tom Wolfe & Faulkner it would have been worth while, but I'm not certain enough of Zelda's present stability of character to expose her to any superlatives. If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, & part of it done fatigued and uninspired, and part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.

(2.) Don't discuss contract with her until I have talked to you.

*********

Ring's last story in the Post* was pathetic, a shade of himself, but I'm glad they ran it first and I hope it'll stir up his professional pride to repeat.

Beginning the article^ for you on Monday. You can count on it for the end of next week.

Now very important.

(1.) I must have a royalty report for 1931 for my income tax—they insist.

(2.) I borrowed $600 in 1931. $500 of this was redeemed by my article.** The other hundred should show in royalty report.

(3.) Since Gatsby was not placed with Grosset or Burt I'd like to have it in the Modern Library. This is my own idea & have had no approach but imagine I can negotiate it. Once they are interested would of course turn negotiations over to you. But I feel, should you put obstacles in the way you would be doing me a great harm and injustice. Gatsby is constantly mentioned among memorable books but the man who asks for it in a store on the basis of such mention does not ask twice. Booksellers do not keep such an item in stock & there is a whole new generation who cannot obtain it. This has been on my mind for two years and I must insist that you give me an answer that doesn't keep me awake nights wondering why it possibly benefited the Scribners to have me represented in such an impersonal short story collection as that of The Modern Library by a weak story & Ring ect by none at all. That “they would almost all have been Scribner authors” was a most curious perversion of what should have been a matter of pride into an attitude of dog-in-the-manger.

Excuse that outburst, Max. Please write, answering all questions. Tell Louise I liked her story & hope she's better. Things go all right with me now. What news of Ernest? And his book?*

Ever Your friend

Notes:

** Fitzgerald had come to Baltimore to be near Zelda, who was in the Phipps Clinic there.

++ Save Me the Waltz, published by Scribners in October, 1932.

* “One Hit, One Error, One Left,” which appeared in the April 23rd issue.

^ The article on Hollywood.

** “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

* Death in the Afternoon.

Also Turnbull.

243. To Fitzgerald

May 2, 1932

Dear Scott:

I had to be away for a few days so all I did when your letter came was to see that you got the royalty information.

As to “The Great Gatsby”, we are perfectly willing to have that go into the Modern Library, and in fact I had once or twice mentioned it to Cerf as something they might take. His inclination seemed to be to wait until another novel had been published, or another book of some kind, which would bring you forward again. I understand perfectly how you feel about the stories, and I understood it at the time. But really the great defect in the publishing business—the thing that underlies all its troubles is that it lets rights to its own books get into the hands of reprint publishers…

Ernest's book is a very very fine book. In some ways it is his best and biggest book. It is very revealing too because it gives a whole point of view about life in giving one about bull fighting. It says wonderfully interesting things about writing, directly, and much more by inference. And there are beautiful things in it about America, as well as about Spain.

You tell me when I ought to say anything to Zelda. In not writing to her I have not been showing anything like the interest we feel in her novel, and I do not want to discourage her by thinking we are not anxious to get the manuscript back. But I shall do nothing without word from you. I am mighty glad things look pretty fair now.

Always yours,

244. To Perkins

 [Hotel Rennert] [Baltimore, Md.]

[ca. May 14, 1932]

Dear Max:

Here is Zelda's novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to it to tell. It has the faults & virtues of a first novel. It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward Angel than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemmingway. It should interest the many thousands interested in dancing. It is about something & absolutely new, & should sell.

Now, about its reception. If you refuse it, which I don't think you will, all communication should come through me. If you accept it write her directly and I withdraw all restraints on whatever meed of praise you may see fit to give.56 The strain of writing it was bad for her but it had to be written—she needed relaxation afterwards and I was afraid that praise might encourage the incipient egomania the doctors noticed, but she has taken such a sane common sense view lately (at first she refused to revise—then she revised completely, added on her own suggestion & has changed what was a rather flashy and self-justifying “true confessions” that wasn't worthy of her into an honest piece of work. She can do more with the galley but I cant ask her to do more now.)—but now praise will do her good within reason. But she musn't write anything more on the personal side for six months or so until she is stronger.

Now a second thing, more important than you think. You havn't been in the publishing business over twenty years without noticing the streaks of smallness in very large personalities. Ernest told me once he would “never publish a book in the same season with me”, meaning it would lead to ill-feeling. I advise you, if he is in New York, (and always granting you like Zelda's book) do not praise it, or even talk about it to him! The finer the thing he has written, the more he'll expect your entire allegiance to it as this is one of the few pleasures, rich & full & new, he'll get out of it. I know this, & I think you do too & probably there's no use warning you. There is no posssible conflict between the books but there has always been a subtle struggle between Ernest & Zelda, & any apposition might have curiously grave consequences—curious, that is, to un-jealous men like you and me.

One more thing. Please, in your letter to Zelda (if of acceptance) do not mention contracts or terms. I will take it up immediately on hearing from you.

Thanks about the Modern Library. I don't know exactly what I shall do. Five years have rolled away from me and I can't decide exactly who I am, if anyone.

Tell me if anything further happens in the family matter—actually I am such a blend of the scientific + the laymans attitude on such subjects that I could be more help than anyone you could think of. I could come to New York, + intend to soon anyhow.

Ever your Friend

Notes:

56. Late in August, 1932, Perkins wrote Zelda, “However things come out with this book, I think from everything of yours I have seen, that you should go on with writing because everything you do has an individual quality that comes from yourself, and no one else can duplicate it. And each thing you do, it seems to me, shows a growing skill in expression.”

Also Turnbull.

245. FROM Max Perkins TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

July 22, 1932

Dear Ernest:

Everything seems now to be right with the book.1 And you will see, when we send you the page-proof, what we have done about the words, and it is not so bad. For Heaven’s sake get Cape’s2 set off to him as soon as you can, because he will be getting in a jam soon. I have written him about the pictures, which I think he will have to take from us all printed, with captions; and the jacket and the frontispiece. Everything looks altogether to the good about the book in every way—except the bad business conditions—and I believe you will surmount them.

Is there any chance you will be here in October?—Scott3 and I have got a grand tour of the Virginia battlefields planned, and although I do not see how I could take in more than two, it would be a great time if you were there. It all came from my going down to Baltimore and seeing Gettysburg, and really, Ernest, it was perfectly magnificent: you could understand every move in the whole battle if you had read about it. You could see the whole battlefield plain as day. There is a stone wall, as good as any in Connecticut, about two feet high, on Roundtop, built on the 3rd of July, by some Maine regiments. They knew all about stone walls. It is as good as new today.

Scott and Zelda are living about forty minutes out from Baltimore in a house on a big place that is filled with wonderful old trees. I wanted to walk around and look at the trees, but Scott thought we ought to settle down to gin-rickeys. But you could see the trees from the piazza where we sat, and a little pond there, too. It was really a fine sort of melancholy place… Scott did not look so well, but he was in fine spirits, and talked a lot. He told me that if I went to Key West he would certainly go next time. You know he was in Florida, and he began inquiring about the fishing. It seems he caught an amberjack, I think, that weighed about forty pounds. He asked me how big the fish we caught were, and maybe I stretched it a little, but I could see it worried Scott. He said he had had an awful fight with this amberjack. It was mighty good to see him anyhow. I wish you would come and go to Antietam with us. It is beautiful country all around. The depression seems simply silly when you motor all over that country and see the crops and all the rich foliage, and the orchards coming along, and even the villages looking all neat and fresh. It makes you feel as if it were all a lunacy, this depression.

I hope everything is right with you now, and that you won’t overdo it for a while.

Since I last wrote you, I saw Archie MacLeish. It was at the Davenports—this Marcia Davenport wrote “Mozart.”4 I like to talk to Archie a lot, but didn’t have much chance. He is a Scotchman and I am a Yankee, and there is something in common between the two. Russell Davenport5 is an awfully good fellow. I know you would like him. Probably Archie has told you about him. These Davenports (I have seen a lot of them on account of her book) have moved up to Windsor and taken a farm there, and their only real farming item is one pig, and they named him Max. But I am in hopes it was after Max Foster.

Let me know if you are all right soon…

Always yours,

Notes

1 Death in the Afternoon, Scribners, 1932.

2 Jonathan Gape, publisher of Hemingway in England.

3 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

4 Published by Scribners in 1932.

5 Newspaper man, writer and poet.

246. To Perkins

“La Paix,” Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland *

January 19, 1933.

Dear Max:

I was in New York for three days last week on a terrible bat. I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for twenty-four hours groaning. Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks. Ernest told me he concealed from you the fact that I was in such rotten shape. I send you this, less to write you a Rousseau's Confession than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years standing.

Thanks for the books that you have had sent to me from time to time. They comprise most of the reading I do because like everybody else I gradually cut down on expenses. When you have a line on the sale of Zelda's book let us know.

Found New York in a high state of neurosis, as does everybody else, and met no one who didn't convey the fact to me: it possibly proves that the neurosis is in me. All goes serenely down here. Am going on the water-wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don't tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, tho even Post stories must be done in a state of sobriety. I thought he seemed in good shape, Bunny less so, rather gloomy. A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

For God's sake can't you lighten that pall of gloom which has settled over Scribner's?*—Erskine Caldwell's imitations of Morley Callaghan's imitations of Ernest, and Stuart Chase's imitations of Earl Browder imitating Lenine. Maybe Ring would lighten your volume with a monthly article. I see he has perked up a little in the New Yorker.

All goes acceptably in Maryland, at least from the window of my study, with distant gun flashes on the horizon if you walk far out of the door.

Ever your old friend,

Notes:

Chase was a political writer; Browder was the head of the Communist Party in America; Lenin was the founder of Bolshevism and a leader of the Communist revolution in Russia.

* During the summer, Fitzgerald had moved into “La Paix,” a rented Victorian house on the Bayard Turnbull estate outside Baltimore.

* Scribner's Magazine.

Also Turnbull.

247. To Fitzgerald

Jan. 27, 1933

Dear Scott:

Those were fine photographs you sent me, and you look mighty well and happy in them.—And it is time you were happy, and I am prophesying to myself that you will have a book published within the next eighteen months,—that allows for serialization. Those ducks, or whatever you have there, look a great sight bigger than the ones we got. You must be shooting over the grounds where your ancestors shot.—Every now and then I have come across something about them.

You think that Ernest thinks very differently about you from what he does, I guess. He told me about having a very long talk with you. You did call me up, by the way. I was out and did not get back until after five, and then I called up the Plaza but you were out. I left a message that you were to get in touch with Ernest at the Brevoort. I thought you had gone back the next day until later I heard you had not, and the day after that, I think it was, I called up Harold Ober and he told me you had just gone, and that you did not feel too good.

I am sending you a couple more books in case you are out of “reading matter”. There are plenty of good people we could get like Ring Lardner if we could pay the price, but we cannot touch them. Ring's prices are frightful. I wish we could find somebody with humor.

I have been waiting about Zelda's book in the hope that copies sent on consignment (we had to distribute a great many books that way since the booksellers would not take any chance on anything) would turn out to have sold. They did not though, and I think the sale will amount to about 1400 copies. That is way above the average for a first novel in that bad year, but you are use[d] to such big numbers that it will seem mighty bad to you. As soon as I can get the accurate figures, I shall send them to Zelda.

Always yours,

248. To Perkins

“La Paix,” Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

January 30, 1933.

Dear Max:

I meant to ask you when I last wrote but forgot about it: do you remember (you couldn't possibly) that when I submitted the manuscript of Flappers and Philosophers thirteen years ago I sent with it some poems which were to be interpolated between the text of the stories. You advised against publishing the poems but they were not returned and I have no copies of them. Would you have somebody go through your manuscript files and find them and send them on?

I was sorry I said that about the magazine which, in spite of everything, is one of the best in America. Probably I was still smarting under your refusal of Crazy Sunday though I understand exactly why you had to turn it down.* Incidentally, you must have been right about it for O'Brien took it for one of his Best Short Stories of the year and you know my unutterably low opinion of that gent.

I do not think the sale of Zelda's book was bad when I have just learned that Dos Passos' 1919 [Nineteen Nineteen] only sold 9,000 copies. At that rate I don't see how my book is even going to pay the debt I owe you because he is certainly more in the public eye at present than I am.

Will be getting in touch with you within the next few months on what I hope will be important business.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* Scribner's Magazine had turned down Fitzgerald's story because of its length.

249. To Fitzgerald

Feb. 3, 1933

Dear Scott:

I have hunted up the poems and here they are.—Also a memorandum that may serve as a souvenir, in Zelda's writing I think.

I look forward to your getting in touch with me. If only this world will settle down on some kind of stable basis so that a man can attend to his own affairs I think that you will soon begin to do steady and consistent work. Let the basis be anything so long as it is a basis,—a relatively fixed point from which a man can view things.

I do not think that the outcome with Dos Passos means very much. His sales have steadily dropped. I suppose he might have sold 20,000 or more in this case if it had not been for the depression. But the truth is I do not think his way of writing, and his theory makes books that people care to read unless they are interested objectively in society, or in literature purely for its own sake. His whole theory is that books should be sociological documents, or something approaching that. I know I never have taken one of them up without feeling that I was in for three or four hours of agony only relieved by admiration of his ability. They are fascinating, but they do make you suffer like the deuce, and people cannot want to do that.

I am sending Zelda a novel that I believe she will enjoy,—“South Moon Under”. *

Always yours,

Notes:

* By Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

250. To Fitzgerald

August 4, 1933

Dear Scott:

When do you think I shall see you? I don't want to be away when you are likely to turn up, but I don't want to pin you down to a date, either. I hope things are going on well. You have had a mighty hard pull, but it may end rightly. Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; — but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.

I wish we could have sent Zelda a larger check.^ When I see you, I'll speak to you about it. I would have written to her encouraging her to write more because I think she really could do a great deal, except that the result did not give much in a practical sense, with which to back the argument. Many of the reviews too are bad, but they were all based upon that one point of over-writing in the matter of figures of speech.

Ernest is on the point of sailing from Havana for Spain, where he and Sidney Franklin** and a man named Whitney, are to make a movie to fit the title “Death in the Afternoon”. We are to publish a collection of his stories this fall. He fished for some months off the coast of Cuba, and with results that made what we used to get off the Tortugas look like sardines.

I think things are bad with Ring. I hate to inquire. He is at Easthampton and nobody ever seems to see him.

I guess I can hope to see you in a few weeks.

Always yours,

Notes:

^ For royalties on Save Me the Waltz.

** “Bull-fighter and friend of Hemingway.

251. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

September 25, 1933.

Dear Max:

The novel has gone ahead faster than I thought. There was a little set back when I went to the hospital for four days but since then things have gone ahead of my schedule, which you will remember, promised you the whole manuscript for reading November 1, with the first one-fourth ready to shoot into the magazine (in case you can use it) and the other three-fourths to undergo further revision. I now figure that this can be achieved by about the 25th of October. I will appear in person carrying the manuscript and wearing a spiked helmet.

There are several points and I wish you would answer them categorically.

1. Did you mean that you could get the first fourth of the story into the copy of the magazine appearing late in December and therefore that the book could appear early in April? I gathered that on the phone but want to be sure. I don't know what the ocean travel statistics promise for the spring but it seems to me that a May publication would be too late if there was a great exodus and I should miss being a proper gift book for it. The story, as you know, is laid entirely in Europe—I wish I could have gotten as far as China but Europe was the best I could do, Max (to get into Ernest's rhythm).

2. I would not want a magazine proof of the first part, though of course I would expect your own proof readers to check up on blatant errors, but would want to talk over with you any small changes that would have to be made for magazine publication—in any case, to make them myself.

3. Will publication with you absolutely preclude that the book will be chosen by the Literary Guild or the Book of the Month? Whatever the answer the serial will serve the purpose of bringing my book to the memory and attention of my old public and of getting straight financially with you. On the other hand, it is to both our advantages to capitalize if possible such facts as that the editors of those book leagues might take a fancy to such a curious idea that the author, Fitzgerald, actually wrote a book after all these years (this is all said with the reservation that the book is good.) Please answer this as it is of importance to me to know whether I must expect my big returns from serial and possibly theatrical and picture rights or whether I have as good a chance at a book sale, launched by one of those organizations, as any other best seller.

Ober is advancing me the money to go through with it (it will probably not need more than $2,000 though he has promised to go as far as $4,000) and in return I am giving him 10% of the serial rights. I plan to raise the money to repay him (if I have not already paid him by Post stories) by asking a further advance on the book royalties or on my next book which might be an omnibus collection of short stories or those two long serial stories about young people that I published some time ago in the Post as the Basil stories and the Josephine stories—this to be published in the fall.

You are the only person who knows how near the novel is to being finished, please don't say a word to anyone.

4. How will you give a month's advance notice of the story—slip a band on the jacket of the December issue? I want to talk to you about advertising when I see you in late October so please don't put even the publicity man at any work yet. As to the photographs I have a snapshot negative of the three of us with a surfboard, which enlarges to a nice 6x10 glossy suitable for rotogravures, and also have a fine double profile of Zelda and me in regular cabinet photograph size and have just  gotten figures from  the  photographer.  He  wants  $18.00 for twelve, $24.00 for twenty-four and $35.00 for fifty and says he does not sell the plates, though I imagine he could be prevailed upon if we give him a “take it or leave it” offer. How many would you need? These two photographs are modern I don't want any of the old ones sent out and I don't want any horrors to be dug up out of newspaper morgues.

Tell me how many you would need to cover all the press? Would it be cheaper if I sat when I came up there—the trouble is that in only one out of any three pictures is my pan of any interest.

5. My plan, and I think it is very important, is to prevail upon the Modern Library, even with a subsidy, to bring out Gatsby a few weeks after the book publication of this novel. Please don't say that anybody would possibly have the psychology of saying to themselves “One of his is in the Modern Library therefore I will not buy another”, or that the two books could be confused. The people who buy the Modern Library are not at all the people who buy the new books. Gatsby—in its present form, not actually available in sight to book buyers, will only get a scattering sale as a result of the success of this book. I feel that every time your business department has taken a short-sighted view of our community of interest in this matter, which is my reputation, there has been no profit on your part and something less than that on mine. As for example, a novel of Ernest's in the Modern Library and no novel of mine, a good short story of Ernest's in their collection of the Great Modern Short Stories and a purely commercial story of mine. I want to do this almost as much as I want to publish this novel and will cooperate to the extent of sharing the cost.

There will be other points when I see you in October, but I will be greatly reassured to have some sort of idea about these points so that I can make my plans accordingly.57 I will let you know two or three days in advance when you may expect me.

One last point: Unlike Ernest I am perfectly agreeable to making any necessary cuts for serial publication but naturally insist that I shall do them myself.

You can imagine the pride with which I will enter your office a month from now. Please do not have a band as I do not care for music.

Ever yours,

Notes:

Between September 1933 and January 1937 Fitzgerald checked into Johns Hopkins Hospital eight times to taper off from alcohol and receive treatment for tubercular fevers.

Tender Is the Night was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (January–April 1934).

The novel was a Literary Guild alternate for June 1934.

The Great Gatsby, with a new introduction by Fitzgerald, was published by Modern Library in September 1934.

57. In a letter of reply, dated September 27th, Perkins said that he hoped to put the first fourth of the novel into the January number of the magazine, “and therefore to finish by about the 20th of March, and we could publish on the day we finished.” Failing that, they would begin it in the February issue and publish by April 20th. On the book club matter, he explained that a number of serialized books had been taken by clubs. He also reported that he had talked to Bennett Cerf of Random House about issuing Gatsby in the Modern Library and “we will do all we can to help that along.”

Also Turnbull.

252. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

September 29, 1933.

Dear Max:

Since talking to you and getting your letter another angle has come up. Ober tells me that Burton of Cosmopolitan is very interested in the novel and if he took it would, in Ober's opinion, pay between $30,000 and $40,000 for it. Now against that there are the following factors:

1. The fact that though Burton professes great lust for my work the one case in which I wrote a story specifically for him, that movie story that you turned down and that Mencken published,* he showed that he really can't put his taste into action; in that case the Hearst policy man smeared it.

2. The tremendous pleasure I would get from appearing in Scribners.

3. The spring publication.

4. My old standby, the Post, would not be too pleased to have my work running serially all spring and summer in the Cosmopolitan.

On the other hand, the reasons why it must be considered are between thirty and forty thousand, and all of them backed by the credit of the U.S. Treasury. It is a purely hypothetical sum I admit and certainly no serial is worth it, yet if Willie Hearst is still pouring gold back into the desert in the manner of 1929 would I be stupid not to take some or would I be stupid not to take some? My own opinion is that if the thing is offered to Burton, he will read it, be enthusiastic, and immediately an Obstacle will appear. On the other hand, should I even offer it to them? Should I give him a copy on the same day I give you a copy asking an answer from him within three days? Would the fact that he refused it diminish your interest in the book or influence it? Or, even, considering my relations with you would it be a dirty trick to show it to him at all? What worries me is the possibility of being condemned to go back to the Saturday Evening Post grind at the exact moment when the book is finished. I suppose I could and probably will need a damn good month's rest outdoors or traveling before I can even do that.

Can you give me any estimate as to how much I could expect from you as to payment for the serial and how much of that will be in actual cash? It seems terrible to ask you this when it is not even decided yet whether or not you want it; but what I want to do is to see if I can not offer it at all to Burton; I wish to God I had never talked to Harold about it and got these upsetting commercial ideas in my head.

I am taking care of the picture matter. I certainly would like to be on your cover and stare down Greta Garbo on the news stands. I figure now that it should reach you, at the latest, on the 25th, though I am trying for the 23rd.

Ring's death was a terrible blow. Have written a short appreciation of him for the New Republic*

Please answer.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* “Crazy Sunday,” American Mercury, October, 1932.

* Ring Lardner died on September 25th. Fitzgerald's “Ring” appeared on October 11th in the New Republic.

Also Turnbull.

253. To Fitzgerald

September 30, 1933.

Dear Scott:

If the Cosmop would give you $30 or $40,000 for the serial, I think the only strong argument that could be advanced against taking it would be the quality of the magazine. The fact that you have not had a novel since so long and have been writing stories only for popular magazines makes it somewhat desirable that you should now appear in a high-class magazine. I know Harold Ober has said that, but my honest opinion, given against a natural tendency toward wishful thinking to the contrary, is that this element is exaggerated. I don't think the prospects of the novel would be injured by its appearing in the Cosmop enough to overcome the financial advantages. I think when the novel came out it would soon ride over any of the possible prejudices there might be in the upper levels of readers. In fact I doubt if the prejudices exist at all. It would be difficult if it were a question of Liberty which is so horribly cheap now. As to all the other points you make such as the one about your relations with us,—they, and in particular that one, ought not to figure at all. Our relations with you wouldn't be right if they let you do something to your disadvantage, but I honestly don't think there is anything in that point whatever.

As to the arrangements we should make, I haven't been able to talk about it enough to figure it out. We'll have to do that quickly if the serial does come to us. We'll do the best we can you can be sure. But I think you ought in the circumstances to give them a copy of the novel at the time you give it to us. There does exist the risk you mention of having to go back to the S.E.P. grind. Escape from that is the main thing.—58

…

…

I was in hopes that you might do us an article on Ring. I thought you could do one about Ring, himself.

Always yours,

Notes:

58. Scribner's Magazine finally agreed to publish Tender Is the Night (the title which Fitzgerald decided on for his novel) in serial form, paying the author $10,000, $6,000 of which was applied to reduce his debt to Scribners and the remainder in cash.

254. To Fitzgerald

Oct. 6, 1933

Dear Scott:

I just read your piece on Ring. Of course you could not do anything for Scribner's now. I thought it might have been only on one phase of him alone, but it says a great deal. I thought it was a very fine piece.

I am now writing to ask your advice.—I want to have us publish some sort of volume of Ring's material. The only possibilities I can think of are either a selection from his stories by somebody qualified to take out the best, and those most representative of his talent; or a selection from all of his writings, which would let in something from “You Know Me Al” and those little plays that you speak of, and some of the best of his lighter things. But whether we followed one of these plans, or the other, we would need an introduction, and I think only one that was written by someone really appreciative of him as a writer, and at the same time knew him well as a man, and was appreciative of him that way too, would do.—Grantland Rice would not do therefore, and the usual literary critic certainly would not.—So who would? Would you, do you think? And if so, would you be willing to undertake it? It is true that you only knew Ring after what was the most typical part of his career was over,—when he was a sports writer, and a newspaperman, and all that. I suppose people like Grantland Rice might say, why didn't they ask someone who went through all those days with him? Anyhow, I wish you would either write me about this matter (it is a pure favor I am asking you) or else think it over until you appear here in the latter part of this month.—We could not publish a book until 1934. If we did it, I would want to get a really fine picture of Ring. I would almost rather have it after the Great Neck days because, although he did look terribly gaunt and ill, even before he went to the hospital, I do think that you could see better what a remarkable creature he was then.59

John Bishop is back,—has a house in Connecticut.

Always yours,

Notes:

59. On October 7th, Fitzgerald declined Perkins' invitation because he was too busy and suggested Gilbert Seldes as the editor. He also outlined the direction the collection ought to take, observing that it should be organized very carefully so that it would present “the story of a whole period, not up to the present, for toward the end he [Ring] was a sick man and did not record very well; but during the period in which Ring functioned rationally he 'got' everything that was going and that might be of interest to many people.” The volume should be “a sort of Ring's history of the world,” not “spotted like Lears nonsense but … organized like Carroll's nonsense.”

255. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

October 7, 1933

Dear Max:

I had already thought of your point and talked to John Lardner about it. 1 My idea was that Gilbert Seldes could do it and was the ideal man for the job; also my idea was that the articles that Ring wrote over that series of time could be made into a sort of Ring's history of the world. Whoever edits it should make it into a unit as far as possible. (Naturally I am not referring to the achieved facts of the stories.) I think that a big book of nonsense could be got up based on all the writings, apart from fiction, that Ring did, from his early newspaper days until the present. I have already taken it up with Seldes and John Lardner (the latter of whom is still under the spell of his father's obsequies and will probably not get around to any action for a week or so) that it must be edited. When I say edited, I mean edited; if you want to have a volume of Ring's that would properly represent him you should commission such a man as Gilbert to go through everything which is not fiction and make a sort of story out of it. Pay him high, 35 to 45% of the total royalties, and publish the book as a standard book of nonsense; no thin little volume such as the Story of a Wonderman (though what meat was in that should be used) but a real monument of American nonsense.

Any collection of Benchley, Corey Ford or Thurber would be merely a selection of incidents, in my opinion, while this collection of Ring's could be made the story of a whole period, not up to the present, for toward the end he was a sick man and did not record very well; but during the period in which Ring functioned rationally he got everything that was going and that might be of interest to many people.

Why not get in touch with Gilbert and talk it over, showing him this letter, or else telling him the equivalent of the opinions here expressed? I know what I could do with the material and have faith in the hypothetical result, but it is simply impossible for me to undertake such work under present circumstances. This publication, mind you, would have to be utterly unlike the hasty compilations of Ring's nonsense that you have put out—it would have to be a new dealing with it; it would take an intelligent appreciator's whole time for a month to put it out in any other form than that would do harm to his reputation. My idea is that this nonsense cannot be spotted like Lear's nonsense but must be organized like Lewis Carroll's nonsense. All of it that is still funny (except the parts that were merely timely) should be included, but it must be made consecutive—well, consult with Gilbert and see if he has anything to suggest; this is the best I can offer.

Ever yours,
Scott

Notes:

1A selected edition of Ring Lardner's writings.

From Turnbull.

256. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

October 19, 1933.

Dear Max:

All goes well here. The first two chapters are in shape and am starting the third one this afternoon. So the first section comprising about 26,000 words will be mailed to you Friday night or Saturday morning.

Naturally I was delighted by your gesture of coming up two thousand. I hope to God results will show in the circulation of the magazine and I have an idea they will. Negotiations with Cosmopolitan were of course stopped and Ober is sure that getting the release from Liberty is merely a matter of form which he is attending to. I think I will need the money a little quicker than by the month, say $1000 on delivery of the first section and then the other 3 $1000s every fortnight after that. This may not be necessary but the first $2000 will. As you know, I now owe Ober two or three thousand and he should be reimbursed so he can advance me more to carry me through the second section and a Post story. Naturally, payments on the serial should be made to him.

I am saying this now and will remind you later. My idea is that the book form of the novel should be set up from the corrected proof of the serial,—in that I will reinsert the excisions which I am making for the serial.

If you have any way of getting French or Swiss railroad posters it would be well for you to try to. Now as to the blurbs:* I think there should not be too many; I am sending you nine.^

***

“The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a work of art.”
London Times

***

As to T. S. Eliot: what he said was in a letter to me—that he'd read it several times, it had interested and excited him more than any novel he had seen, either English or American, for a number of years, and he also said that it seemed to him that it was the first step forward in the American novel since Henry James.

I know him slightly but I would not dare ask him for an endorsement. If it can be managed in any way without getting a rebuff, even some more qualified statement would be the next best thing to an endorsement by Joyce or Gertrude Stein.

Of course I think blurbs have gotten to be pretty much the bunk, but maybe that is a writer's point of view and the lay reader does not understand the back-scratching that is at the root of most of them. However, I leave it in your hands. Don't quote all of these unless you think it is advisable.

We can talk over the matter of Gatsby in the Modern Library after your announcement has appeared.

Again thanks for the boost in price and remember the title is a secret to the last.

Ever your friend,

I should say to be careful in saying it's my first book in seven years not to imply that it contains seven years work. People would expect too much in bulk & scope.

This novel, my 4th, completes my story of the boom years. It might be wise to accentuate the fact that it does not deal with the depression. Don't accentuate that it deals with Americans abroad—there's been too much trash under that banner.

No exclamatory “At last, the long awaited ect.” That merely creates the “Oh yeah” mood in people.

Notes:

* Perkins had asked Fitzgerald for statements about Gatsby for publicity purposes.

^ The first eight are missing.

Also Turnbull.

257. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

October 20, 1933.

Dear Max:

Made not only the changes agreed upon but also cut out several other small indelicacies that I happened upon. I think this is now damn good.*

How is this for an advertising approach:

“For several years the impression has prevailed that Scott Fitzgerald had abandoned the writing of novels and in the future would continue to write only popular short stories. His publishers knew different and they are very glad now to be able to present a book which is in line with his three other highly successful and highly esteemed novels, thus demonstrating that Scott Fitzgerald is anything but through as a serious novelist.”

I don't mean necessarily these exact words but something on that general line, I mean something politic enough not to disparage the Post stories but saying quite definitely that this is a horse of another color.

If Dashiell likes this section of the book ask him to drop me a line. Am starting the revision of the second section Monday.

Ever your friend,

Notes:

* For the Tender Is the Night serial.

Alfred Dashiell was managing editor of Scribner’s Magazine.

258. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

TOWSON MD 417A 1933 NOV 3 AM 8 59

SEXTONS NOTE DISTURBED ME1 STOP PLEASE REQUEST THEY LAY OFF ALL PUBLICITY STOP YOUR PLAIN STATEMENT WAS ENOUGH STOP IF FURTHER STUFF GOES OUT NOW IT WILL KILL DEAD THE STRATEGIC POSITION IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES STOP FAR BETTER IT APPEAR AS MYSTERY SERIAL BY A MASKED UNKNOWN STOP NOT DESIRABLE ALIENATE BIG PEOPLE TO PLEASE LIBRARIANS WHO ARE JUST SHEEP STOP HAVE NO PRIVATE LIFE EXCEPT OF INTEREST TO FRIENDS STOP WRITING FULLY MONDAY
F SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald was reacting to the advance publicity for the Scribner's serialization of Tender Is the Night.

259. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University; Life in Letters

I HAVE DEFINETELY DECIDED ON TITLE PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AROUND AS WIDELY AS SEEMS NECESSARY
F SCOTT FITZGERALD

Notes:

The title was written on the Western Union form by Perkins. The novel had been announced as Doctor Diver’s Holiday.

260. To Perkins

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

November 13, 1933.

Dear Max:

I was too sanguine in estimating the natural divisions of the novel. As it turns out in the reworking the line up is as follows:

I. The first triangle story, which you have (26,000 words)

II. Completion of that story, plus the throw-back to courtship of doctor and his wife (19,000 words)

III. The doctor's struggles with his problem, concluding with his debacle in Rome.

IV. The doctor's decline after he has given up.

********

These two last parts are going to be long as hell, especially IV, Section III, as you may remember, includes the part about his journeying around Europe, which we agreed could be considerably cut, but Section IV could not be cut much without omission of such key incidents as would cripple the timing of the whole plan. That Section is liable to amount to as much as forty thousand words—could you handle it? Or must I divide it, and lose a month on spring publication?

By that time reader interest in the serial will be thoroughly aroused (or thoroughly killed) so I think the idea of the book publication should be paramount if you can arrange the material factor of such a long installment.

Ever yours,

P. S. By the way: where in hell is the proof? And will you have two struck off? This is important for Section II where the medical part begins, but how can I ask a doctor to judge fairly upon Section II unless he can read Section I?60

Notes:

60. Fitzgerald apparently showed the novel to a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, for, in a letter to Dashiell written on December 25th, he reported that the doctor had said that “not only is the medical stuff in [Section] II accurate but it seems the only good thing ever written on psychiatry…”

261. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 13, 1934.

Dear Max:

What do you think of the idea of using twenty-four of those wood-cuts, which illustrate the serial, as head and tail pieces for chapters in the book or, alternatively, interspersing them through the novel? I think it is comparatively an innovation in recent fiction and might give the book a certain distinction. I've gotten very fond of the illustrations. Who the hell is the illustrator? If it is too expensive a process let me know, but since the cuts are already made I thought it might not be.

Please do not send me any book galley for the present, just hold it there. I am already confused by the multiplicity of the irons I have in the fire and as far as possible would prefer to do the book galley in one or two long stretches.

I did not thank you over the phone for the further advance, which does not mean that I did not appreciate it, but only that I have so much to thank you for.61

Tell Dashiell that I cannot promise not to make changes in Section III, but under no conditions will it be lengthened. Section IV is taking longer than I thought and it may be the middle of. next week before you get it.

Ever Yours

P.S.1. Will you ask Dashiell to strike off as many as half a dozen additional proofs because I have always a use for them in passing them around for technical advice. Again, this request is conditioned by not wanting it to be exorbitantly expensive.

P.S.2. Don't forget my suggestion that the jacket flap should carry an implication that though the book starts in a lyrical way, heavy drama will presently develop.

P.S.3. Any contract you suggest will probably be O.K. You might bring one with you when you come down, an event to which I look forward eagerly.

P.S.4. Also remember that upon due consideration I would prefer the binding to be uniform with my other books. If these were prosperous times and there were any prospect of a superior reissue of my whole tribe I'd say “let it begin here” to quote the famous commander of the Minute men, but there isn't, so I prefer to stick to my undistinguished green uniform—I mean even to the point of the guilt stampings being uniform to the others.

P.S.5. I don't want to bore you by reiterating but I do think the matter of Gatsby in the Modern Library should be taken up as shortly as possible after the appearance of installment II.62

P.S.6. Am getting responses only from a few writers and from the movies. The novel will certainly have success d'estime but it may be slow in coming—alas, I may again have written a novel for novelists with little chance of its lining anybody's pockets with gold. The thing is perhaps too crowded for story reachers to search it through for the story but it can't be helped, there are times when you have to get every edge of your finger-nails on paper. Anyhow I think this serial publication will give it the best chance it can possibly have because it is a book that only gives its full effect on its second reading. Almost every part of it now has been revised and thought out from three to six times.

P.S.7. What is the name of a functioning press clipping bureau?

Notes:

61. On January 5th, Perkins sent Harold Ober a check for $2,000, with the understanding that the sum was a “loan at 5% to be repaid upon the sale of movie rights to 'Tender Is the Night';—but in the event that no sale is possible, this amount becomes a charge against Mr. Fitzgerald's general account.”

62. Cerf eventually agreed to publish Gatsby in the Modern Library, giving Fitzgerald a $500 advance and a fee of $50 for writing an Introduction to the new printing which was set directly from Scribners plates and published in 1934.

Also Turnbull.

262. To Fitzgerald

Jan. 15, 1934

Dear Scott:

… I'll think about the points you bring up.—But I think everything is coming out mighty well. That is my belief.

I am giving Dashiell your message. The blurb should be and will be as you say, and I am not forgetting about Gatsby.

Unless for some reason the book is above the general public's head—for some reason I cannot see in view of its fascination—it ought to be more than a sucess d'estime.

…

I know that you are having a hell of a time jumping from iron to iron to keep them all at the right temperature, but I think you might consider (I say it with much hesitation and doubt) the possibility of reducing in length what was in the first installment and the first part of the second. It is probably impossible, and perhaps unwise anyhow. I thought you might conceivably cut out the shooting in the station. The purpose would be only that as soon as people get to Dick Diver their interest in the book, and their perception of its importance increases some thirty to forty percent. People do read a book differently from a serial though. I merely suggest the idea in order that your subconscious mind may work upon it a little without distracting you at all from anything else.—To be considered if at all, only when you come to the book proof.

Ever yours,

263. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

January 18, 1934

Dear Max:

You letter covers everything except the English publication. Since the old Chatto & Windus idea I came to practically an understanding with Cape, came to a real one with Knopf, which was broken when they dissolved their London house. What would you do about Faber & Faber? Advise me.

Much as I value your advice, by which I profited in the revision of Gatsby, I can’t see cutting out the “shooting at the train-side.” It serves all sorts of subtle purposes and since I have decided that the plan of the book is best as originally conceived, the small paring away would be very little help and I think would do more harm than good. I intend to think over this question once more but at the moment I am satisfied with the book as it stands, as well as being pretty dead on it. I want to hear some reactions on Section II, but I like the slow approach, which I think has a psychological significance affecting not only the work in question, but also having a bearing on my career in general. Is that too damn egotistical an association?

Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitz——

Notes:

Tender Is the Night was published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1934.

264. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD I934 JAN 28 PM 8 29

DECIDED REGRETFULLY DONT LIKE JACKET MUCH TOO ITALIANATE TOO RED AND YELLOW SKY DOES NOT GIVE WHITE AND BLUE SPARKLE OF FRENCH RIVIERA AM SENDING REAL RIVIERA POSTER SHOWING MAXFIELD PARRISH COLORS IF IMPRACTICAL WOULD PREFER SHENTON WOODCUT OR PLAIN JACKET WAIT FOR LETTER1
FITZGERALD.

Notes:

1 The dust jacket on the published book has a Riviera scene in red, yellow, blue, white, and green.

265. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 1, 1934.

Dear Max:

Confirming my telegram I wish to God I had thought of this a week ago, but having put the proof aside to do my story it didn't occur to me. Now you know what my galleys look like. To transfer twenty-eight pages of those corrections from one kind of galley proof to another kind of galley proof will be a matter, to me, of many days work and it will obscure all the advantage of doing my final revision on clean galleys. My idea was originally to use the benefit of the magazine galley as an extra chance at corrections. As I said in my wire the reinsertion of the cut scenes is the work of only an afternoon.1

Of course if you have gone ahead with Section IV from the manuscript I suppose there is nothing to be done except strike off another galley for me when I have done all that spade work over again, altogether, probably a more expensive process, if Section IV is not already completely set up for the book. This is an awful mess. The ideal way would be, if you haven't already set up a whole block of Section IV, to wait for corrected magazine proof of IV and have some editor roughly dub in the two big cuts, the scene of the fairies and the scene of the Lesbians, and send that to me with my own typescript containing the minor blue underlined magazine cuts. In that way I can work swiftly and efficiently. Meanwhile you could show the Book of the Month Club magazine galley of IV supplemented, just to be honest, with my typescript of the Lesbian scene if The Book of Mo. can get it back to you in time to insert it in my book galley for Section IV. From what you said to me on the phone last night about Wallace Myers' accuracy, perhaps he could handle it.

This is all the result of haste and nobody's fault except mine, but I worried about it all last night and it is essential that it be straightened up. I wish you would wire me immediately. Accept your decision about the jacket but be sure and do your best about that yellow as well as the red. I think every bit of yellow could be changed to white. Maybe somebody who knows about color printing could think of some way of introducing a little of that crimson-purple, as in the last poster I sent you, into the mountains. Oh God, it's hell to bother you about all this but of course the book is my whole life now and I can't help this perfectionist attitude.

You'll see Section I will come out all right.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald was working on proofs of the serial and book texts of Tender Is the Night at the same time.

266. FROM Max Perkins TO MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS

Feb. 1, 1934

Dear Mrs. Rawlings :

I am sure you will do a fine book,1 and you ought to have trouble in getting under way with a fine book. Incidentally, you once remarked upon my having sent “South Moon”2 to Scott Fitzgerald as not being very apt because it was not his sort of book. He had never said anything about it to me, but last night, in talking about his own book by long distance, he referred to yours, and in the highest terms. It is not his kind of book either, but he knew it was a beautiful book. I shall be patient, but you ought not to get discouraged if it goes hard. I know you won’t be.

As for the Prix Femina, I have tried to find out about it, but I do not know how to get hold of the French woman who now and then calls up about it. But apparently it has not been awarded. I do not understand how they do, for I was informed that it lay between your book and one other, a long time ago. But I shall let you know the moment I hear, and I hope things will turn out so that you will come to New York.

I do not want you to be neatly boxed in a workshop at all, and if personal angles seem to you to tend to embarrass me, remember that I am a Yankee on both sides of my family, and I suppose I shall never get over it altogether.

Couldn’t you some time do an account of the rattlesnake hunt, for an article?

I am struggling with Tom Wolfe for a couple of hours every night now, and he is going to get his book3 done for the fall. But it is the most difficult work I was ever engaged in. I feel that Scott having got his done is a good omen, for that seemed perfectly hopeless many times. Now he has done it4, and it is a very fine thing, and will restore him to the position he held after “The Great Gatsby,” if not put him in a higher one. I was down with him for three days last week in Baltimore.

If ever you want to show me any fragments of “Hamaca”5 even, please do it. You must not let my Yankee reticence ever make you feel that there is any book in which I should be so interested.

Always yours,

Notes

1 Golden Apples, Scribners, 1935.

2 South Moon Under by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Scribners, 1933.

3 Of Time and the River, Scribners, 1935.

4 Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribners, 1934.

5 Published by Scribners in 1935.

267. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 5, 1934.

Dear Max:

Isn't there any mechanical means by which you can arrange to include the 1400 words of the arrest in Cannes?* The more I think of it the more I think that it is absolutely necessary for the unity of the book and the effectiveness of the finale to show Dick in the dignified and responsible aspect toward the world and his neighbors that was implied so strongly in the first half of the book. It is all very well to say that this can be remedied in book publication but it has transpired that at least two dozen important writers and newspaper men are reading the book in the serial and will form their impressions from that. I have made cuts in Section IV—a good bit of the last scene between Dick and Tommy but also the proof has swollen somewhat in revision which counteracts that, nor can I reduce the 1250 words of that scene to 800. I am saying 1400 because I know there will be a slight expansion. Couldn't you take out some short piece from the number? Surely it hasn't crystallized at this early date. Even with this addition the installment is shorter than the others, as I promised Fritz.^

If I do not hold these two characters to the end of the book it might as well never have been written. It is legitimate to ruin Dick but it is by no means legitimate to make him an ineffectual. In the proof I am pointing up the fact that his intention dominated all this last part but it is not enough and the foreshortening without the use of this scene, which was a part of the book structure from the first, does not contain enough of him for the reader to reconstruct his whole personality as viewed as a unit throughout—and the reason for this is my attempt to tell the last part entirely through Nicole's eyes. I was even going to have her in on the Cannes episode but decided against it because of the necessity of seeing Dick alone.

My feeling about this was precipitated by the remarks of the young psychiatrist who is the only person who had read all the magazine proof and only the magazine proof. He felt a sharp lesion at the end which those who had read the whole novel did not feel.

While I am writing you I may as well cover some other points:

1. Please don't forget the indentation of title and author on the front cover as in previous books. There are other Fitzgeralds writing and I would like my whole name on the outside of the book, and also I would prefer uniformity.

2. Would you please strike off at least three book proofs for me, all to be used for revisions such as medical, linguistic, etc? Also, I would like an extra galley of book proof Section IV when you have it, for Ober to pass on to Davis in order to supply the missing material.

3. In advertising the book some important points are: Please do not use the phrase “Riviera” or “gay resorts.” Not only does it sound like the triviality of which I am so often accused, but also the Riviera has been thoroughly exploited by E. Phillips Oppenheim and a whole generation of writers and its very mention invokes a feeling of unreality and unsubstantiality. So I think it would be best to watch this and reduce it only to the statement that the scenes of the book are laid in Europe. If it could be done, a suggestion that, after a romantic start, a serious story unfolds, would not be amiss; also it might be mentionable that for exigencies of serialization, a scene or two was cut. In general, as you know, I don't approve of great ballyhoo advertisements, even of much quoted praise. The public is very, very, very weary of being sold bogus goods and this inevitably reacts on solider manufacturies.

I find that revising in this case is pulling up the weakest section of the book and then the next weakest, etc. First, Section III was the weakest and Section IV the strongest, so I bucked up III, then IV was the weakest and is still but when I have fixed that Section I will be the weakest. The section that has best held up is Section II.

I was tremendously impressed with “South Moon Under” ** until I read her prize short story, “Gal Young Un.” I suddenly saw the face of Ethan Fromme peering out from under a palmetto hat. The heroine is even called Matt in tribute to the power of the subconscious. Well, well, well, I often think of Picasso's remark “You do it first then other people can come along and do it pretty and get off with a big proportion of the spoils. When you do it first you can't do it pretty.” So I guess Miss Rawlings is just another writer after all, just when I was prepared to welcome her to the class of 1896 with Ernest, Dos Passos and myself.

Please wire about the inclusion of the Cannes episode,* and don't sidetrack these advertising points.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* Perkins wired Fitzgerald on February 5th asking whether he could condense the arrest to eight-hundred words as that was all that could be fitted into the magazine installment. On the same day, presumably before he wrote this letter, Fitzgerald replied by telegram, expressing the hope that the entire scene could be retained.

^ Alfred Dashiell.

* Perkins agreed to retain the arrest scene in its entirety in a telegram on February 5th, before he even received this letter.

** A novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Perkins had asked Fitzgerald whether the scene could be condensed for the magazine installment.

Alfred Dashiell.

Playwright Owen Davis.

Popular British espionage novelist.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel was published by Scribners in 1933.

Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver are central figures in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911).

The scene was printed in its entirety in the magazine installment.

Also Turnbull.

268. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD 1934 FEB 5 AM 1 28

FEEL CANNES JAIL SCENE SHOULD GO INTO SERIAL OPINIONS INDICATE SAME OTHERWISE DICKS CHARACTER WEAKENS AND NOVEL FORSHOTENS TOWARD END IT IS NEEDED AND WAS WRITTEN TO BOLSTER HIM UP IN INEVITABLY UNDIGNIFIED CUCKOLD SITUATION STOP PLEASE PERMIT WILL TREAT TACTFULLY WIRE
FITZGERALD.

Notes:

1 Ch. 10 of Book 3. This scene was included in the serial version, but is set in Antibes.

269. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD 1248P 1934 FEB 5 PM 1 29

FEEL DOWNRIGHT ESSENTIAL FOR READER TO GET GLIMPSE OF DICK THROUGH IMPERSONAL EYES NOT TOMMYS AND NICOLES TO SUSTAIN HIM AT THE END OTHERWISE FINAL TRIAL OFF INSPIRES SCORN INSTEAD OF PATHOS CANT REPEAT MISTAKE OF BEAUTIFUL DAMNED STOP SCENE IS FOURTEEN HUNDRED WORDS BUT CANT YOU ARRANGE IT SOMEHOW1
SCOTT.

Notes:

1 Two drafts for Perkins' wires to Fitzgerald on 5 February are in the Scribners Papers. In the first of these Perkins asks Fitzgerald to condense the jail scene to 800 words; but the second Perkins wire draft reads: “Will work it out somehow but cut anywhere you rightly can.” See Fitzgerald's 5 February letter to Perkins in Scott/Max.

270. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

February 7, 1934

Dear Max:

The fear of being dependent again on The Saturday Evening Post promoted this idea and led me to a consideration of publishing in general; and, from that, the notion developed in the half-baked way that I told you. I began by thinking of the publishing devices of the early 18th century, with special reference to Dickens' Household Words.

Now, just as Scribner's Magazine has changed its character several times between being primarily a fiction magazine, or primarily an open forum, so there is no reason in its tradition why it should not consider a radical step. I do not underestimate the value of the present Scribner's in the humanitarian way, but nowadays ventures must be self-sustaining, and competing journals can also muster the same quantity and quality of uneasy liberal thinking—viz. Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. This innovationary policy has, of course, been exemplified in your regime, not only by encouraging the short novels, or novelettes, but also in this new departure about long novels. Pursuing this policy to its logical end, I am inclined to think that sooner or later you will be faced with the decision of choosing (temporarily at least) between being a magazine of fiction or being a magazine of opinion, and that the opinions eventually must be yours. I am Communist enough to distrust the idea of an “open forum,” which usually means a forum in which a Roman citizen can appear and talk as much as he wants within the range of Roman opinion—in despite of the apparent radicalism of your publishing John Strachey.

By and large I see the problems that confront you, yet I wonder whether you or I, or any of us, can really print a synthesis of opinions in the air as a policy; and in the same breath, I reiterate that in all common sense this tack will sooner or later amount to a compromise that, like all compromises, will have neither force nor vitality. The other idea, on the contrary, has the following advantages: from the editorial point of view it would give you the opportunity of going into a specialization that, substituted for the somewhat vague economic views (and here I refer to the whole staff of Scribners publishing house, from Charles to the printer's devil, indeed, to all of us insofar as we are associated with you, with the accumulated taste embodied in the publishing house), would be a line for which you are perhaps better equipped than anybody in America.

A second argument in favor of the idea is that you have at your disposal almost anybody that you want. When you say, as you did the other night, that you cannot count on writers delivering on time, God knows I understand, but you have so many good young writers, and I am counting on the idea attracting so many others who otherwise cannot publish except in book form. I think your difficulties, once the idea was launched, would be on the contrary, a question of deciding betwixt good things offered.

My idea, as I told you, would be a cover, which would say, for example: first part of Hemingway, second part of Fleming, third part of Fitzgerald, fourth part of Wolfe. You would be dealing with two or three established authors and perhaps one newcomer that you happened to like, and the money that you paid out would serve to keep those people going. In these days any author would rather have a modest fee for his serial than not to serialize at all. In a sense, they would develop a feeling that they were partners in a corporate enterprise and I think that I can speak for many of us when I say that we would welcome the idea of a forum which is as open for long fiction as it is for the most casual opinionated shreds of political opinion.

A fourth point: while I don't know the mechanics of the magazine's make-up, this policy should not preclude the inclusion of a certain number of opinionated articles upon public affairs, used almost as editorials. From your experience you must have seen that out of half a dozen articles in Scribner's, or for that matter in any other quality magazine, about six a year have the value of what the Victorians would call essays and the rest is mere timely journalism, moribund almost with its appearance; after a few months how many of such articles are of more literary or humanitarian importance than the spreads in Hearst's Sunday supplement? And, practically, if the consumer can get The New York Sunday Times Book Review and Magazine Section what distinction can he make between that and a quality magazine except for the name and the colored jacket?

As I mentioned last night, almost all the editorial magazine successes have depended on young men, if I can flatter you and Charles Scribner, me, Ernest, Tom Wolfe, as being young men. Crowninshield 1 grows old and Ross comes up with The New Yorker; The Literary Digest grows old and Time comes along; Lorimer,2 who has been for a long time my bread (Scribner's being considered the meat of my survival), is growing old, and then that bread will inevitably go stale.

It is not beyond the limits of imagination to suppose that this condition, in which only the choices of the Book-of-the-Month get across big, may be a permanent condition. It is conceivable that the local bookstore, except as represented by such as yours and Brentano's, will become as obsolete as the silent picture. For one thing the chain-store buying and the job-lot-buying department stores seem to condemn the independent bookstores to the situation that they have reached in Baltimore where, considering the outlay involved, they can only be compared to the fallow antique shops. There is also the library question, which, in a socializing world, will become bigger and bigger.

In resume, let me line up the elements for and against the idea.

Present procedure: dignified presentation of a, perhaps, good book with sale of 3000 copies, and not much profit to anybody.

Attitude toward the author's surrendering dramatic and movie rights correct in the 90s when conditions were different but now archaic.

Futility of issuing books that, either from inefficiency in writing or being-over-the-heads-of-the-crowd, clutter up the remnant counter. Essentially this is not a service to writers as was the case in the past. Take, for example, my recommendation to you, rather half-hearted, of Woodward Boyd's The Love Legend. Why the hell should she have the right to publish a poor book? As things tighten up I think that more harm is done by encouraging inefficient amateurs than would be done if they were compelled to go through a certain professional apprenticeship. The one man or woman aspirant out of a hundred who has some quality of genius is another matter, but those who show “promise” had probably better be relegated immediately to doing other things in the world, or else working on their own guts for professional advancement, rather than be coddled along on the basis that they may eventually make a fortune for themselves and everybody concerned.

Therefore, a weariness in the reviewers, and, except for the presentation, no realistic cooperation.

Now to consider conditions as they are: there is, first, the selection by the book leagues, whether we like it or not; there is the reprinting of either quality stuff in the Modern Library or drug-store stuff in the reprint houses, with the publishers frankly taking a share in other rights, specifically including movie rights.

Now why shouldn't incipient writers have to prove themselves? Why shouldn't an issue of a book between boards be contingent upon the ability of the work to arouse interest? And isn't a magazine-printing a cheaper and more advantageous test all around?

If this comes out at the proper end of the horn as the note I intended to blow when I blew, it reduces itself to the following propositions:

1. That Scribner's is much better equipped now to handle fiction, travel, etc., than to handle politics.

2. That, unless you have some big axe to grind, politics are of only transitory interest.

3. That traditionalism is, in this case, a policy to which one can fairly attach the odium of archaism, because just as an author's main purpose is “to make you see,” so a magazine's principal purpose is to be read.

4. Perhaps I am the proverbial fool rushing in, and if it so appears to you simply forget the whole suggestion. However, I have a hunch that within a year somebody will adopt such a policy. And may I reiterate that the idea was suggested originally by a policy which you have already inaugurated, and that this is simply a radical urge to hasten it toward what I think is an inevitable outcome, an effort to meet the entertainment business on its own predetermined grounds.

Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

1 Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair.

2 George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post.

From Turnbull.

271. To Fitzgerald

Feb. 14, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am planning to see you on Saturday.

Now I enclose a letter (keep it for me) from Bennet Cerf whom I supplied with complete magazine proofs of “Tender Is the Night”... Here are comments from Marjorie Rawlings: “I hear much talk already of 'Tender Is the Night. I thought, beginning to read it after I had written you, that Fitzgerald had filled the contract I was setting up for myself—a book disturbing, bitter and beautiful. I am totally unable to analyze the almost overpowering effect that some of his passages create—some of them about quite trivial people and dealing with trivial situations. There is something terrifying about it when it happens, and the closest I can come to understanding it is to think that he does, successfully at such times, what I want to do—that is, visualizes people not in their immediate setting, from the human point of view—but in time and space—almost, you might say, with the divine detachment. The effect is very weird when he does it with unimportant people moving in a superficial and sophisticated setting. I shouldn't put it that way, for of course importance and un-importance are relative—if they exist at all.”

I hope you can get through the book proof pretty fast. We are mighty crowded for time,—I have said nothing about it because I knew you had to have the way clear for magazine proof. We want to publish as close to the end of the serial as we possibly can, and there is a lot of work to be done by the printers in make-up, etc.

Always yours,

272. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 4, 1934.

Dear Max:

Confirming our conversation on the phone this morning, I wish you could get some word to the printers that they should not interfere with my use of italics. If I had made a mess of a type face, that would be another matter. I know exactly what I am doing, and I want to use italics for emphasis, and not waste them on the newspaper convention laid down by Mr. Munsey in 1858. Of course, always you have been damned nice in having your printers follow my specifications, but in this case, and under the very pressing conditions under which we are working, it worries me that the book galleys came back with exactly the same queries that the magazine galleys had. Could you tip them the wink some way so that they would please follow my copy exactly as they used to, as this is my last chance at the book? Whoever has been in charge of it must be very patient because I know at the ninth revision that the very sight of any part of it fills me with nausea. However, I have to go on in this particular case while they don't, and so are liable to get careless.

Going over the other points, I hope both (1) that the review copies will go out in plenty of time, and (2) that they will get the version of the novel as it will be published because there is no doubt that each revision makes a tremendous difference in the impression that the book will leave. After all, Max, I am a plodder. One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway, and I told him, against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that's the truth of the matter, that everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I wanted to indulge that. I can do cheap things. I changed Clark Gable's act at the moving picture theatre here the other day. I can do that kind of thing as quickly as anybody but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over every point until I have made myself into a slow moving Behemoth (if that is the correct spelling), and so there I am for the rest of my life. Anyhow, these points of proof reading, etc, are of tremendous importance to me, and you can charge it all to my account, and I will realize all the work you have had on it.

As I told you on the phone, I enjoyed Marjory Rawlin's praise, but it was somewhat qualified by her calling my people trivial people. Other stuff has drifted in from writers all over America, some of it by telegram, which has been complimentary.

Now, about advertising. Again I want to tell you my theory that everybody is absolutely dead on ballyhoo of any kind, and for your advertising department to take up any interest that the intellectuals have so far shown toward the book and exploit that, would be absolutely disastrous. The reputation of a book must grow from within upward, must be a natural growth. I don't think there is a comparison between this book and The Great Gatsby as a seller. The Great Gatsby had against it its length and its purely masculine interest. This book, on the contrary, is a woman's book. I think, given a decent chance, it will make its own way in so far as fiction is selling under present conditions.

Excuse me if this letter has a dogmatic ring. I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.63

Zelda is better. There is even a chance of her getting up for the exhibition of her paintings at Easter, but nothing certain. Do you still think that idea of piling the accumulated manuscript in the window* is a valid one? My instinct does not quite solve the problem. What do you think? Would it seem a little phoney?

With best wishes,

Notes:

* Fitzgerald had proposed exhibiting the accumulated drafts and manuscripts of Tender Is the Night in Scribners Fifth Avenue display window, as a publicity gimmick.

63. In an earlier letter, dated February 1, 1934, Fitzgerald had said, “Oh God, it's hell to bother you about all this but of course the book is my whole life now and I cannot help this perfectionist attitude.”

Frank A. Munsey, American publisher.

Held at Cary Ross’s gallery in New York City, March 29 to April 30, 1934.

The Scribners bookstore display window at 597 Fifth Avenue.

Also Turnbull.

273. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 5, 1934.

Dear Max:

The stout arrived this morning and I am sampling it for lunch. I think I'd better have my photograph taken first for if I become as swollen as you intend my thousands and thousands of younger admirers will just leave the sinking ship.

By the way, when you and Louise left here did you, by any chance, take with you 12 spoons, 12 forks, 12 knives (fish), 12 knives (dinner), 1 silver salver, 1 revolver, 1 platinum and diamond wrist-watch? I don't like to accuse anybody of anything but there is a very curious coincidence. I may say if it's all sent back within the week I shall take no further steps in the matter. We assure you, sir, that we returned the wrong trousers and we are having our agent look into the matter. With a business as large as ours and trousers as small as yours such things will happen.

In any case, Max, if the stout kills me I protected myself by a new clause in my will based on the old Maryland Poison Act-Md.362 XX: 1, 47.*

Yours very truly,

Notes:

* This letter is signed “F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bart.).”

Also Turnbull.

274. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD 920A 1934 MAR 15 AM 9 31

PLEASANT NICE THOUGHTS IT WOULD BREAK MY HEART IF THE PROOF READERS ARE STICKING BACK ALL THOSE ITALICS I TWICE ELIMINATED STOP IN THE FIRST PROOF THEY HAD ALL THE FRENCHMEN TALKING IN ITALICS
SCOTT

275. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 2, 1934.

Dear Max:

In the usual confusion of leaving your city I don't know whether I paid my bill at the Algonquin, whether you paid it or whether it was paid at all. Have you got any dope on the subject?

All in all, I am deeply satisfied with the get-up of the book. My only regret is that the dedication isn't to You, as it should be, because Christ knows you've stuck with me on the thing through thick and thin, and it was pretty thin going for a while.

Got a fine letter from Tom Wolfe. Thank you for your hospitality and courtesy to Scottie and me, more than I can say.

Ever yours, Scott

P.S. I could use a dozen copies of the book if you could send them here.

276. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 15, 1934.

Dear Max:

I got swell personal letters from James Branch Cabel, Carl Vanvechten, Shane Leslie, John O'Hara, and various members of the New Yorker crowd, but don't think I would care to quote them—especially as the press has been so profuse in using big names. After all, a letter is written in a few minutes and a man may change his opinion the next minute on such a detail as his opinion of, or reaction from, a work of fiction. And while I believe that this praise has been sincere, I do not think that they (any more than myself) would want to be quoted until they have had time for mature reflection.

So I think that all the personal stuff that has come in had better be buried.

As ever, Scott

277. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD 21 5P MAY 11 1934

FINISHING POST STORY STOP CANT EXPECT PAY UNTIL NEXT WEEK END STOP MUST GET ZELDA OUT OF HOCK AT THAT EXORBITANT CLINIC AND ENTER HER HERE IN REASONABLE PLACE STOP CAN I RAISE SIX HUNDRED FROM YOU ON MOVIE BASIS OR ANY OTHER EVEN MORTGAGE ON THIS STORY
F SCOTT FITZGERALD
249P

278. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

May 15, 1934.

Dear Max:

In reference to our conversation: I have roughly about four plans for a book to be published this autumn.+ Now I think that we must, to some extent, set aside the idea that a diffuse collection stands much chance of a decent sale, no matter what previous records Ernest and I have made. Of course I shall make every attempt to unify what I prepare by an inclusive and definitive title, which is even more important with short stories than with a novel, for it is necessary to bind them together and appeal to one mood in a buyer. Moreover, with so much material to choose from I think the collection should have some real inner unity, even in preference to having it include selected stories of many types. Roughly here are my ideas:

Plan 1. The idea of a big omnibus including both new stories and the pick of the other three collections. You must tell me what luck you've had with the omnibus volumes of Lardner, Galsworthy, etc.

Plan 2 The Basil Lee stories, about 60,000 words, and the Josephine stories, 37,500—with one or two stories added, the last of which will bring Basil and Josephine together—making a book of about 120,000 words under some simple title such as “Basil and Josephine.” This would in some ways look like the best commercial bet because it might be taken like Tarkington's “Gentle Julia,” “Penrod,” etc. almost as a novel, and the most dangerous artistically for the same reason—for the people who buy my books might think that I was stringing them by selling them watered goods under a false name.

Plan 3. A collection of new short stories. Of these there are about forty, of which about twenty-nine are possible and say fifteen might be chosen, with the addition of one or two very serious, non-commercial stories, which I have long planned but have yet to write, to heighten the tone of the volume. This might be unified under some title which would express that they are tales of the golden twenties, or even specifically, “More Tales of the Jazz Age.” The table of contents would be something like this:

The dates are not the dates written but the period each story might represent.

1918—The Last of the Belles or else The Love Boat

1919—Presumption

1920—The Adolescent Marriage or else One Trip Abroad

1921 —Outside the Cabinet Makers or else A short Trip Home

1922—Two Wrongs or else A Freeze-out

1923—At Your Age or else In a Little Town

1924—Crazy Sunday or else Jacob's Ladder

1925—Rough Crossing or else Family in the Wind

1926—The Bowl or else Interne

1927—Swimmers or else A New Leaf

1928—Hotel Child or else

1929—Change of Class

Majesty or else

1930—The Bridal Party

I Got Shoes

1931—Babylon Revisited or else More Than Just a House

1932—Between Three and Four

and three others, Two for a Cent, The Pusher-in-the-Face and One of My Oldest Friends which makes up the twenty-nine, excluding the Basil and Josephine stories, the unwritten ones and a couple of new ones I have just finished and can't judge.

I don't know how many of these you remember but of course I would ask you and perhaps a few other people to read over a selection and give some opinions, though among these twenty-nine there is scarcely one which everybody has enjoyed and scarcely one which nobody has enjoyed.

Plan 4. This is an idea founded on the success of such books as Alexander Woollcott's “While Rome Burns.” As you know I have never published any personal stuff between covers because I have needed it all for my fiction; nevertheless, a good many of my articles and random pieces have attracted a really quite wide attention, and might again if we could get a tie-up of title and matter, which should contain wit and a soupcon of wisdom and not look like a collection of what the cat brought in, or be haunted by the bogey of all articles in a changing world, of being hilariously dated. It might be the best idea of all. Let me give you a rough idea as to what I have in that line:

There are my two articles for the Post which attracted such wide attention in their day that I have yet to hear the last of them, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year.” There are “Echoes of the Jazz Age” from Scribner's and “My Lost City” which the Cosmopolitan has been holding up but wouldn't sell back to me to publish in the American. Other articles which have attracted attention are “Princeton” in College Humor, “One Hundred False Starts” in the Post, “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk,” a long, supposedly humorous account of an automobile journey that appeared in Motor, an article called “Girls Believe in Girls” in Liberty, and two articles called “Making Monagomy Work” and “Are [Our] Irresponsible Rich?” published by the Metropolitan Syndicate in the early twenties, and an article called “On Being Twenty-five” in the American. And these also from the early twenties, “Wait till you have children of your own” (Woman's Home Companion), “Imagination” and “A Few Mothers” in the Ladies Home Journal and “The Little Brother of the Flapper” in McCalls.

This, or a good part of it, would have to comprise the backbone of the book and would be about 57,000 words. In addition there are some literary reviews, etc. of which nothing should be preserved except the elegy on Ring and an article in the Bookman on “How to Waste Material” welcoming Ernest's arrival. Beyond this there are a few hors d'oeuvres such as “A Short Autobiography” and “Salesmanship in the Champs Elysees” both in the New Yorker and a few other short sketches from Vanity Fair, College Humor, etc. and some light verse. There are also a couple of articles in which Zelda and I collaborated—idea, editing and padding being mine and most of the writing being hers—but I am not sure I would be justified in using it. Also I have some of my very first stories written at twelve and thirteen, some of which are funny enough to be reprinted.

Looking this over it doesn't seem very voluminous. I haven't seen Woollcott's book (by the way, did he get a copy of the novel?) and don't know how thick it is, but there seems to be some audience somewhere for collections (Dorothy Parker, etc.) as didn't exist in the 1920s.

The above [is] all that I could count on getting ready for next fall. The “dark age” novel could not possibly be ready inside of a year, that is to say, for the autumn of 1935.

Would you please think over this line-up carefully and let me hear your advice, also I will ask Zelda's, which is often pretty good in what does not concern herself and which is always, strangely enough, conservative. A fifth idea of sandwiching some of my stuff in with hers, her old sketches of girls in College Humor, her short phantasies, etc. has occurred to me but I don't know that I think it's advisable.

I may come up but probably not. Thanks a lot for the money.*

Ever yours,

Notes:

+ Tender Is the Night had been published on April 12th.

* Perkins had deposited $600 for Fitzgerald on May 15th.

279. To Fitzgerald

May 17, 1934

Dear Scott:

We are all strongly in favor of Plan #2, Basil and Josephine. The only point against it might be that of the time you would need to get it right. If you feel confident about that not being too great,—not more than six weeks say—we are very strongly for it. I see the danger of misleading the public into thinking of it as a novel in the same sense that “Tender Is the Night” is, and we ought to be sure that there is no mistake made. I think we could surely do it with safety and I believe the book would be very much liked and admired.

After Plan #2, we favor Plan #3. I am writing you immediately without going into the matter at any great length, in order to get a decision. We want to put you into the fall list right away.

Always yours,

280. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

May 21, 1934.

Dear Max:

On thinking it over and in going over the Basil and Josephine stories the business seems impossible. They are not as good as I thought. They are full of Tarkington and as he is now writing a new series of juveniles there would be inevitable comparisons and perhaps not to my advantage.

Secondly, they would require a tremendous amount of work and a good deal of new invention to make them presentable.

Thirdly, I have not quite enough faith in the Business Department to believe that they would not exploit it to some extent as a novel (as in their using a private letter to me from T.S. Eliot on the jacket of “Tender” when they swore they only wanted it to show to the trade) and any such misconception would just ruin what position I have reconstituted with the critics. The ones who like “Tender” would be disgusted; the ones who were baffled by it or dislike my work would take full advantage to goose-pile on me. It's too damn risky and I am too old for such a chance and the penalty might be too high. What it amounts to is that if it is presented as a novel it wrecks me and if it were presented as short stories then what is the advantage of it over a better collection of short stories? I admit there is some.

Fourthly, I find that I have bled too many of them of their best phrases and ideas for “Tender Is the Night.”

However, I have decided to bust up the series and use some of them in this book (Kipling busted up his “Soldiers Three” stories in the same way and ran them through several books.)

So that leaves Plan 3. I have picked out eight stories that I know I want to republish and I am submitting to you now fifteen others from which I wish you would select (perhaps collecting several opinions) about six or seven or eight to join to the original eight. I can meanwhile start evening work revising the first eight.

The working title will be “More Tales of the Jazz Age” though I will keep thinking on that subject. Barring accidents you can certainly count on the stories in six weeks.

Ever yours,

281. To Fitzgerald

June 4, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am returning the stories. I divided them into three groups according to my preference, but of course you will consider in the selection anyhow, the question of variety of kinds which I have not done.

Into the first group I have put:
Last of the Belles
Two Wrongs
Majesty (especially because the ending is fine)

Basil and Josephine:
He Thinks He's Wonderful
A Perfect Life
Woman With a Past

In the next group:
I Got Shoes (which I think comes mighty near to being a very fine story but did not seem to me to be completely successful)
Presumption (which I thought was one of the few stories that ever got away completely with a surprise at the end)
More Than a House
A New Leaf

In the third group I put:
At Your Age
Change of Class
Between Three and Four
A Freeze Out
The Bowl

This grouping is pretty arbitrary and will only help you because it is some other person's judgment.

Always yours,

282. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, June 8, 1934.

Dear Max:

I have pretty well lined up the book. It comes to sixteen stories as you will see from enclosure (1).64 You seem to like the Basil Lee and Josephine stories so well that I am sending you herewith the others of the series and if there is any of these that you like equally I can include them. Of course the book is 120,000 words long now and you may want me to take out one or two of the others. I hate to impose on you when I know you are so busy but I will be greatly obliged if you would look over these seven within the next fortnight and send them back. As I say, I have sixteen stories and each one you choose of these adds about 7500 words. Appended also is a list of titles, enclosure (2)65 I am not crazy about any of them but I don't seem very fertile in that direction at present.

As I wired you I did not care for the jacket. My suggestion is to carry out an idea you used in the advertising of “All the Sad Young Men” which makes a virtue of the diversity of the material rather than an attempt to conceal it, briefly, a set of figures typifying eight or ten of the principle characters spread over the jacket. John Held, Jr. did that in the “Vegetable” if you will remember. Here we might have Basil, Josephine, a movie star, an army officer, a little girl, a sinister ghostly man (as in “A Short Trip Home”), a girl wearing a crown as in “Majesty.” ect. These should not be caricatures like Held's figures nor yet decorations like Shenton's designs but somewhere in between. Perhaps you know someone who could dope up such a scheme. They might be cloud-like figures swirling along with only their faces and busts showing. I can see the idea but can't quite picture it but I have no doubt that a clever man could. As you know the biggest short story success of late has been in a book that called itself frankly “Seven Gothic Tales.”*

The following is a burlesque of the idea but may illustrate: Supposing these figures were seen like souls coming out of the smoke of the torch of the Statue of Liberty, or seen in the windows of a fast express bounding over a precipice, or they might all be rising from the smoke of a devastated battlefield, or they might all be placed over some sweating workmen who make their adventures possible. Anyhow, you'll get the idea.

Ever yours,

P.S. Shall I feed in the stories as I correct them so the setting up can begin?

Notes:

* By Isak Dinesen.

64. The sixteen listed were: “The Scandal Detectives,” “The Freshest Boy,” “He Thinks He's Wonderful,” “The Perfect Life,” “First Blood,” “A Woman With a Past,” “Crazy Sunday,” “Two Wrongs,” “Jacob's Ladder,” “Majesty,” “Family in the Wind,” “A Short Trip Home,” “One Interne,” “The Last of the Belles,” “A New Leaf,” and “Babylon Revisited.”

65. The titles Fitzgerald suggested were: “Basil, Josephine and Others,” “When Grandma Was a Boy,” “Last Year's Steps,” “The Salad Days,” “Many Blues,” “Just Play One More,” and “A Dance Card.” Perkins wrote on June 11th that the best of these was the first, but that “it would be better to have some phrase which suggested the general character of the whole collection.”

283. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

June 26, 1934.

Dear Max:

Am sending along No. 1 of the stories because I feel it's going to be the devil to set up. There are two others all corrected, but the slow thing is to look through “Tender Is the Night” and see what phrases I took out of the stories. This is confused by the fact that there were so many revisions of “Tender” that I don't know what I left in it and what I didn't leave in it finally. I am going to have trouble with two of the stories you suggested.66 In “The Captured Shadow” I'll have to make up a whole new ending which is almost like writing a new story. Secondly, the Josephine story, “A Nice Quiet Place,” has some awfully phoney stuff in the middle that I'll have to find a substitute for. So can't I send the stories in their original order, and have them set up separately, and then sandwich between them the last two if I can think of some way of fixing them in time.

Nothing new about the title.67

By the time you get this you will have gotten a begging telegram asking for a thousand dollars. How I ever got so deep in debt I don't know unless it's been this clinic business,* because I've written regularly a story a month since finishing the last proof of “Tender” and they have been sold. I have also fixed up and sold some of Zelda's little articles besides. Debt is an odd thing and it seems if you ever get started in it it is very difficult to get disentangled. I have put the movie possibilites of the novel out of mind for the present though the young man I told you about who went from here to the coast is still trying further treatments in hopes that they will buy it. My best chance now is that if Phyllis Bottome's psychiatric story^ goes they may all rush to buy whatever else is available in that line. Looks now as if I will be here until well into the summer, but I am going to try damn hard to get a month off somewhere if I can get clear of debt and clear of the work to which I committed myself. I can well understand all your difficulties working in the office by day and with Tom Wolfe by night because until ten days ago, when I collapsed and took to my bed I have been doing about the same thing. I am all right now and once I get this “Post” story off should be out of the worst.

Zelda does much better. Morrow read her stuff but turned down the plan.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* Fitzgerald is referring to the cost of having Zelda treated at the Phipps Clinic.

^ Private Worlds (1934).

66. On June 18th, Perkins had written, suggesting that Fitzgerald add “The Captured Shadow” and possibly “A Nice Quiet Place” or “A Night at the Fair.”

67. Perkins, in a letter on June 19th, had remarked, “You might call the book, 'Babylon Revisited: Stories by Scott Fitzgerald.'”

Also Turnbull.

284. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

July 30, 1934.

Dear Max:

The bottom sort of fell out of things after you left.* We sat around for a few hours and talked a lot about you. The only flaw in the evening was the fact that afterwards I didn't seem to be able to sleep any better in Virginia than I did in Maryland, so after reading an old account of Stuart's battles for an hour or so, I got dressed in despair and spent the small hours of the morning prowling around the place, finally snatching two hours of sleep between seven and nine. The next day—it being our hostess' custom to sleep late—Anne took me over to meet the fabled Harden, who was as interesting as promised by the discussions of him. Returning to “Welbourne” a whole slew of Virginians appeared and to my regret I didn't have much more chance to talk to Elizabeth, because my conscience had begun to worry me and I decided to take the three o'clock bus back to Washington. However, one of the guests took dictation and I managed to have my joke about Grant and Lee taken down on paper. Then last night I had it faked up by the “Sun” here in Baltimore and I am going to send one to Elizabeth framed. Please return the one herewith enclosed for your inspection.

I thought Elizabeth Lemon was charming—I wonder why the hell she never married. The whole atmosphere of that countryside made me wonder about many things. It seems to me more detached than any place I have ever visited in the Union except a few remote towns in Alabama and Georgia during the war before the radio came. By the way, I had never ridden in a bus before and thought it was rather a horrible experience after the spacious grace of that house.

This morning before breakfast I read Tom Wolfe's story in Scribner's.^ I thought it was perfectly beautiful and it had a subtlety often absent from his work, an intense poetry rather akin to Ernest (though naturally you won't tell Tom that because he wouldn't take it as a compliment.) What family resemblance there is between we three as writers is the attempt that crops up in our fiction from time to time to recapture the exact feel of a moment in time and space exemplified by people rather than by things—that is, an attempt at what Wordsworth was trying to do rather than what Keats did with such magnificant ease, an attempt at a mature memory of a deep experience. Anyhow please congratulate him for me with all my heart.

This letter is dragging out. Hope you found Louise all right. A thousand thanks for taking me into that very novel and stimulating atmosphere. I had been in a hell of a rut.

Ever yours,

P.S. Here's the money I owe you. I made it twelve instead of eleven because I had forgotten that expensive wine that I insisted upon ordering and which I drank most of, and anyhow twelve is a more symmetrical number than eleven.

Notes:

* Perkins and Fitzgerald had made a trip to Middleburg, Virginia, where they had visited some of Perkins' relatives who lived in a pre-Civil War mansion called “Welbourne.”

+ “The House of the Far and Lost.”

Also Turnbull.

285. To Fitzgerald

July 30, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am sending you the Memoirs of Baron de Marbot. I know you will enjoy reading it, and what we are doing is to select about 100,000 words from it and publishing it under the title of “The Adventures of General Marbot”. John Thomason has made very many pictures, and better ones than he ever made before, even better than the Crockett. Maybe reading this book between two and four would take you out of things. I have known of it since childhood because my father used to translate it to me directly from the French, and I find that Thomason had always known it too.

I hope you got a good rest down there in Virginia.—Or did Elizabeth take you next day around to see all the rich people? I came back comfortably in an air-cooled car, and worked last night with Thomas Wolfe, but I could not get that place out of my head.

Yours always,

286. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue

August 17, 1934.

Dear Max,

I can't possibly see cleaning up the proofs of “Taps at Reveille”* before October 1st, and I suppose that means publication would be delayed until November 1st. I am sorry as Hell that it has to be this way; perhaps, even, you would better list it as a February book, although I do think that I should be able to do it before the first of October under normal circumstances. Working in ill health, however, slows up everything, and the harder I try to work, the more the ultimate effect for the present makes me incapable of more work. Remember, one is no longer twenty-one.

You wouldn't want to put out the book in December, would you? A book of short stories, I shouldn't imagine, could not compete with the rush of novels offered at that time. I have had the feeling lately that the people that buy books—mostly women—do it when their husbands spare them the money; so that some pronouncement by our Current Dictator might be more significant in sales than the old seasonal rules. You couldn't sell such an idea to an old Tory like Whitney.* But you might remember this prophecy a year from now.

I hope all goes well with you. Everything here is somewhat confused by an accumulation of work and the fact that my secretary went off for two weeks' vacation—I had abandoned so much detail to her that I can hardly feel my way around—and by the fact that affairs do not go well with Zelda.

Beth^ dropped me a line to say that she had got the framed Appommatox clipping, and in the same note asked me if I could come down there for two days early next week, but I can't think at the moment how it can be worked in. If I took work down with me, I know I wouldn't do it; and if I didn't, I would be too woried to have a good time. However, it might be practical by the week-end of the 27th, and how about your joining me in such a pilgrimage?

Best wishes,

Notes:

* The title finally decided upon for the short story collection.

* Probably Whitney Darrow.

^ Elizabeth Lemon.

287. To Fitzgerald

Aug. 20, 1934

Dear Scott:

My personal idea of it would be that we should publish the book of stories as soon as we could, whenever it was. I think it urgently important that you should bring out these stories close to “Tender Is the Night” for I think that the reviewers will be impressed by them, and that it will lead to a new discussion of “Tender Is the Night” and give a good many of them a chance to speak out more clearly than they did before. “Tender Is the Night” will have had time to sink in, and they will have had more conviction about it. Besides, the stories themselves show more sides of you than “Tender Is the Night”.—They show that you understand more different sorts of people than are in that. I am very anxious to get them out for those reasons, especially.

You are in a position where you are compelled to think of immediate financial return beyond anything else. But if there is any conceivable way by which you could get these proofs read quickly and let us get the book out in October, it would in every other respect than that of immediate financial return be worth doing. You are smart about organizing your work, so you must have thought of everything. Is there any way that another person could work with you? The only question seems to be that of what you have used from the stories in “Tender Is the Night.” I several times did notice things you had used. This ought to be avoided, of course, but I think it need not be avoided to the very uttermost. There is no reason a writer should not repeat a little in those respects. Hem has done it. Anyhow, whatever would hasten the publication of this book would, I think, be worth doing if it could be done.

Always yours,

P.S. Just got your telegram about Pat O'Mara.68 I know he has written well, and we shall look after his manuscripts well.

Notes:

68. On August 19th, Fitzgerald had wired that he was sending two O'Mara manuscripts and advised Perkins to “give them your best eye as he is the white headed boy hereabouts and already has fine work to his credit.”

288. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Md.

[August 23, 1934]

Dear Max,

I have considered everything about the book very carefully and decided that it would be too difficult—I don't mean considered it in a hasty way, but considered it just as carefully as anything can be considered, looking at every possible angle. I am not in the proper condition either physically or financially to put over the kind of rush job that this would be. It would be an attempt to do what I did with “Tender” and would leave me in exactly the same spot that “Tender Is the Night” did. I see your reasoning about the critics; nevertheless, I have a feeling that this is not as important as it might seem.

I have got to get myself out of this morass of debt and I see my way clear now to doing it, to a great extent, having reduced it from the twenty thousand dollars in the red, where I was wallowing when I started the last lap on the book, to the two or three thousand that I am in now; but I am terribly unhappy in debt and do not get much comfort out of my personal life if I feel any such shadow over me.

To speak of brighter matters, went down for a day with Elizabeth, after all. She was as usual, but almost at the moment that I had got there, she got word that her sister and brother-in-law were due home from a sickness (I never can straighten up their family relationships). And so I decided th[a]t my part was to leave, though I had planned to stay there another few hours and Elizabeth and I had, in addition, planned to howl for you over the telegraph to see if you could possibly break your week in the middle.

…

…

She is a sweet person and I can understand your feeling of affection for her.

Best wishes always,

289. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue

August 24, 1934.

Dear Max,

This is sort of a postscript to my letter of yesterday: I do think that you were doing specious reasoning in part of your letter. The fact that Ernest has let himself repeat here and there a phrase would be no possible justification for my doing the same. Each of us has his virtues and one of mine happens to be a great sense of exactitude about my work. He might be able to afford a lapse in that line where I wouldn't be and after all I have got to be the final judge of what is appropriate in these cases. Max, to repeat for the third time, this is in no way a question of laziness. It is a question absolutely of self-preservation. It is not going to be a money book in any case and is not going to go very far toward reimbursing the money I still owe you, and so I think in view of everything that my suggestion of waiting until after Christmas is the best.

Besides, it is not only the question of the repetitions but there are certain other stories in the collection that I couldn't possibly think of letting go out in their current form. I fully realize that this may be a very serious inconvenience to you but for me to undertake anything like that at this moment would just mean sudden death and nothing less than that.

Ever yours,

P.S. I have just gotten a royalty report and don't know whether the sum of my debit is on the red page or on the regular royalty report. Please have someone let me know.

Notes:

Also Turnbull.

290. TO: Elizabeth Lemmon (Maxwell Perkins' cousin.)

TLS, 2 pp. (with holograph postscript).

Princeton University; Turnbull; Correspondence.

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

September 6, 1934.

Dearest Beth

This is the story that I got out of “Welbourne,” with my novelist instinct to make copy out of social experience.2 I don't think for a moment that this does any justice to “Welbourne” but it might amuse you as conveying the sharp impression that the place made on me during a few week-ends. Am sorry that this is not a transcription of the final draft as the Post will publish it, but in its general outlines it is the story as written.

Of course the detail about the initials of the “Gallant Pelham” will identify the place to such neighbors of yours who read the Saturday Evening Post. As the story is so detached from any reality I am sure it won't cause you or family any annoyance.

With Love Scott Fitzg—

Just wired you the weather killed my Mannassus trip. Hope to hell you're all right now.

Notes:

* Miss Lemmon lived at a pre-Civil War mansion called “Welbourne” in the Virginia hunt country (Middleburg, Virginia). The story was “Her Last Case,” Saturday Evening Post (3 November 1934); initials of the “Gallant Pelham”—Actually it was Jeb Stuart's initials which Major John Pelham, Stuart's chief of artillery, had scratched on one of the window panes at “Welbourne”.

291. FROM Max Perkins TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Oct. 1, 1934

Dear Ernest:

I seem to get busier all the time, and I cannot figure out the reason why it should be so, although business has very distinctly improved, for us anyhow. I think that in an underlying way it has been improving slightly for two years in publishing, almost imperceptibly, but yet really.

I had meant to write you about Bumby,1 though I suppose the telegram was all you needed. He is a boy who is likely to get ruined by being so remarkably attractive. When we put him on the train to Chicago and I told the porter that there was no one to look after him, and that he must do it, about half the car rushed up to volunteer to do it. I’ll bet Bumby had a bad trip, for all the attention he got from old ladies and gentlemen. My son-in-law took him up to the Natural History Museum, but they did not see all the Indians because some of those rooms were still shut off. Then, in the afternoon, Louise2 took him up to see our grandson in the Doctor’s Hospital (he was about a week old then), and Bumby expressed very great, but I suspect polite, interest, and said that he had seen babies before, in Chicago (I guess at the World’s Fair), but that they were in incinerators. None of the children were home, but Bumby left his helmet as a gift to our youngest who, we had told him, was about his age. Louise found him most entertaining; he imitated the way Americans talk French, as he said, and the way English boys talked in the school he went to in France, and he was very enthusiastic about what he got to eat.

People keep asking me what you are doing and I simply tell them that I do not know, and Sidney Franklin3 did not know either. But I suspect that it is something mighty important and will wait to find out.

I expect to see Scott4 in about ten days. He has been selling some stories. His novel5 sold almost exactly 15,000 copies, which was disappointing to me, of course, though it seemed at that time that that was about as far as books were going. It is about as far as any books seemed to go that season, but I guess it must have been because there weren’t any books that could go further. Books are doing better now. Stark Young6 has sold 35,000 almost, in barely more than two months, and other people have books that are selling well. If we knew things wouldn’t get worse, there would be plenty of reason to feel much better than in a long time.

Yours,

Notes

1 Nickname of John Hemingway, eldest son of Ernest Hemingway.

2 Mrs. Maxwell E. Perkins.

3 The bull fighter, translator of Shadows of the Sun by Alejandro Perez, Scribners, 1934.

4 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

5 Tender Is the Night, Scribners, 1934.

6 So Red the Rose, Scribners, 1934.

292. To Fitzgerald

Oct. 17, 1934

Dear Scott:

…

I am enclosing a royalty report because you always want to see it. We deposited the hundred, but you know, Scott, it is not quite the same here as in the old days when we had a dictatorship. We may be getting out of tune with the times, but now we have more or less of a republic. The house has half a dozen different departments, and the heads of all of them have an interest in the entire business. Charlie and I understand this situation, but it is impossible to make such a one, for instance, as the head of the educational department (which, by the way, does better than we do in the depression) understand it. He would think we were just crazy, having all but cleared up your indebtedness by the way we arranged for “Tender Is the Night” to let it all pile up again. I wish to Heaven—and I know you do too—that we could work the thing out some way. But you have had a run of mighty bad luck, and have struggled against it very valiantly, and it still is true, “as the feller says” that the only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

Always yours,

293. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

October 17, 1934

Dear Max:

The mood of terrible depression and despair is not going to become a characteristic and I am ashamed and felt very yellow about it afterwards. But to deny that such moods come increasingly would be futile.

I took you at your word and went down to Welbourne for an afternoon to prance before Elizabeth and found her in her usual good form, and also Mary Rumsey. But the trouble about women is that when you need them most they are never in a receptive mood (not that both Elizabeth and Mary were not hospitable, it's just the old story that when you feel like weeping on somebody's shoulder you're usually in such a state of mind and body that nobody wants you to weep on their shoulder).

The country was beautiful, however. Will write at length later. They missed you, and I added to their chagrin by telling them how I urged you to go down the night before.

Feel somewhat refreshed and am finishing my story today.

Ever yours,
Scott

Notes:

From Turnbull.

294. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

October 30, 1934

Dear Max:

I don't know what legends I have left in Lowden County.69 I went down and behaved myself well on all occasions but one, when I did my usual act, which is—to seem perfectly all right up to five minutes before collapse and then to go completely black. On this occasion, my chauffer was at hand and let me sleep. The strain on Elizabeth was nul. I have got to like Charlie and Missy very much, but whether it is reciprocated is still another story.

And still another story is whether it does rest me to go down there. I get excited because of the gaiety—Mary Rumsey was there but she seemed wearied from her affairs in Washington, and not the woman I had known on Long Island. She seemed to be continually be calling the butler. Although she was perfectly sweet to me—ordered a special supper, had guests to tea—(to which, because of circumstances, we couldn't get to)—and was sore about it and, with her usual good manners, expressed no resentment.

Came back and finished the Red Book story,* which I think is good (& is accepted) This is twelve o'clock in the morning and I worked till twelve last night getting off this Red Book affair. I am going to sleep for half an hour, after that if I have any energy, I'm going out and get a hair-cut.

I'm going to do at least two stories more but until I get some money from the Red Book Business, which should be by Wednesday, I don't know whether I can begin again the serious correction of the stories. God knows, you should know how conscientious I am. And when you say we are likely to be ready for Spring, you under-estimate my ideas of current conditions in pub. business. What the devil, Max—your Spring list isn't made till Xmas is it?

I have never had to ask you to stick with me, but after that mood of terrible discouragement I was in last month, you might have taken literally what I said. I am, in point of fact, never really discouraged; nevertheless to communicate it were a crime indeed.

After getting off the mediaeval story I am taking a day's rest-up.

Thanks a million times for the “Art of the Novel” by Henry James. I thought Calverton's book* was very poor but told him the opposite.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* “In the Darkest Hour,” Part I of The Count of Darkness, Fitzgerald's planned novel of medieval life.

* Probably The Passing of the Gods (1934), by V. F. Calverton, penname of George Goetz.

69. Fitzgerald had gone again to Middleburg, Virginia, to visit Elizabeth Lemon, and in a letter on October 26th, Perkins had remarked, “Tom [Wolfe] went down to Welbourne over the weekend, and came back with legends of your doings thereabouts.”

295. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

November 1, 1934

Dear Max:

This is only to tell you that the story about Welbourne^ is in this week's copy of the Post. Didn't want you to miss it.

I'm relieved that the legends that Tom Wolf told you are harmless—but I accuse Elizabeth of a semi-attempt to make legendary figures of all literary characters, and people her region with a new mythology.70

Glad Tom Wolf had a good time there and I hope all progresses well in that direction.

About the stories: All I can say is that I am doing my best and think I can get the full proof to you before Christmas. Will you have the proofreaders set up “Her Last Case” from the Sat. Eve. Post and send me galleys of that—though there is very little I want to change. I will try to get you two or three stories by the middle of next week which will release more much [much more] type. This is contingent upon my third mediaeval story (Balmer** has just taken the second) which I have embarked upon and which sounds good to me. I have decided to do a string of these, at least two more after this one, and then do a Post story. They bring approximately half as much money but I can do them faster because of the feeling of enthusiasm, probably the feeling of escape from the modern world. I am going to sandwich in the stories between this next mediaeval event and the one following.

Best always,

Notes:

^ “Her Last Case.”

** Edwin Balmer, editor of Redbook.

70. Perkins had written, on October 31st, explaining that the legends about Fitzgerald at Welbourne “related mostly to the fact that the telephone down there apparently is one that everybody can listen in on, and one was that you represented yourself as the author of 'Anthony Adverse', and another about something you telephoned to Elizabeth when you were dining with Mary Rumsey.”

296. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Mayland,

November 8, 1934.

Dear Max:

In further reference to my telegram of Tuesday night: first, I am sending you the third story in its proper place ready to go into the book. The thing that worried me when I did it was whether the proofreader is going to be able to release a lot of type, because, due to the fact that the end of one story and the beginning of another were run on one galley, he will have to scrap half the type in the galley and yet retain the other half—this because the stories were not set up in proper order. I know this is a terrible and costly mess and I take full responsibility; nevertheless, I did think the stories would be set up separately and getting at them is as if the chapters of a book were set up any which way, like I, VII, II, V, III, VI, and it all has to be straightened out each time. As you know that is fatiguing work and can best be done when one is fresh, and is hard to do at night.

My big mistake was in thinking I could possibly deliver this collection for this fall. I should have known perfectly well that, in debt as I was to the tune of about $12,000 on finishing “Tender,” I should have to devote the summer and most of the fall to getting out of it. My plan was to do my regular work in the daytime and do one story every night, but as it works out, after a good day's work I am so exhausted that I drag out the work on a story to two hours when it should be done in one and go to bed so tired and wrought up, toss around sleepless, and am good for nothing next morning except dictating letters, signing checks, tending to business matters ect; but to work up a creative mood there is nothing doing until about four o'clock in the afternoon. Part of this is because of ill health. It would not have seemed so difficult for me ten years, or even five years ago, but now just one more straw would break the camel's back.

I have about half a dozen of these done but I am determined this time to send them in only in the proper order and not add further confusion either in my own mind or that of the printer's. The trouble began when I sent you two stories to be set up which were nowhere near each other in the book. If I told a story about a boy of sixteen years old and sixty pages on the reader came upon a story of the same boy at thirteen it would make no sense to him and look like careless presentation, and which, as you know, I dislike nothing more.

As you may have seen I took out “A New Leaf” and put in “Her Last Case.” You didn't tell me whether or not you read it or liked it.

I know you have the sense that I have loafed lately but that is absolutely not so. I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time. In actual work since I finished the last proof of the novel in the middle of March, eight months ago, I have written and sold three stories for the Post, written another which was refused, written two and a half stories for the Redbook, rewritten three articles of Zelda's for Esquire and one original for them to get emergency money, collaborated on a 10,000 word treatment of “Tender Is the Night,” which was no go, written an 8,000 word story for Gracie Allen, which was also no go, and made about five false starts on stories which went from 1,000 to 5,000 words, and a preface to the Modern Library edition of “The Great Gatsby,” which equalizes very well what I have done in other years. I am good for just about one good story a month or two articles. I took no vacation this summer except three or four one-night trips to Virginia and two business trips to New York, each of which lasted about four or five days. Of course this is no excuse for not making more money, because in harder times you've got to work harder, but as it happens I am in a condition at the moment where to work extra hard means inevitably that I am laid up for a compensitory time either here or in the hospital. All I can say is that I will try to do two or three of these all at once after finishing each piece of work, and as I am now working at the rate of a story each ten days for the Redbook series I should finish up the ten I have left to do in about one hundred days and deliver the last of them in mid-February. Perhaps if things break better it may be a month sooner.

The London press on my book has been spotty but the London Times gave it a good review as did G. B. Stern in The Daily Telegraph and so did The Manchester Guardian and The Spectator and those I guess are the four most important ones in England and I got a column in each of them. A letter says that it hasn’t reached a thousand copies yet.

Thanks immensely for the Henry James which I thought was wonderful and which is difficult reading as it must have been to write and for “At Sea.”*

I hope you'll be down here soon. It was rather melancholy to think of “Welbourne” being closed for the winter, but the last time I saw Elizabeth she seemed quite reconciled at visiting here and there, though such a prospect would drive me nuts. Hope you have sent off the carbon of the Table of Contents.

Best ever,

Notes:

* The Art of the Novel, by Henry James, and At Sea, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, were both published by Scribners in 1934.

Also Turnbull.

297. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

November 10, 1934.

Dear Max:

Supplementing my letter of a few days ago, remember that the thing which has been delaying the stories is not only the internal difficulties (such as replacing the high points removed and inserted in “Tender”) but also the work on the medieval series, which is going along steadily and now has reached almost 30,000 words! I know a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush but if this should be ready, as I firmly believe it will, for a year from now, it is much more likely to make money than this spring's collection of stories. Remember it is a novel and not merely a string of episodes about a single character as in the case of the Basil stories. It just happens that it does divide itself into fairly complete units and that Balmer, thank God, is sold on it.

Ever yours,

298. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

November 20, 1934.

Dear Max:

Your letter did not cover the junking of “Her Last Case”^ but I presume that you had not yet started to set it up. (I wish you'd return it to me.) Anyhow, here is the substitute for it and this is final.* It will be published in the January issue of “Esquire.”…

I don't know how good this story is, but a certain type of reader will like it, and it can scarcely be accused of any crimes such as being “well made” with which some of the others might be charged. It's been in my mind a long time and rather had to be written and it makes a break in the rather uniform length and structure of the commercial numbers.

However, it is just off the stove and I have not had any opinions on it so if you do not like its savor please tell me! In that case I would provide no substitute but publish seventeen instead of eighteen stories. If you do like it, will you have it set up in galley immediately and send it to me?

Ever yours,

P.S. That was good news about Ernest. Needless to say I am highly curious about the setting of his novel. I hope to God it isn't the crusading story that he once had in mind, for I would hate like hell for my 9th century novel to have to compete with that.

P.S. 2. I particularly don't want the Basil or Josephine stories run together as units—that is, as if they were two novelettes. The only indication that each is a series should be provided by the table of contents and by the heading of each story such as:

BASIL
IV The Captured Shadow etc.

In other words, each story should start on a new page.

Excuse me for being so finicky but in the pressure of doing many things at once I am slipping into the old psychology that if I don't do it myself it will be all wrong—a fault that you, young man, are inclined to share with me. This Lee biography^ is shooting me in that direction. Again and again his weakness in trusting others, when he carried only the main scheme in his head, is emphasized.

…

…

Notes:

^ On November 15th, Fitzgerald had wired Perkins that he was removing both “Her Last Case” and “A New Leaf from the book.

* “The Fiend.”

^ Robert E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman, published by Scribners in four volumes in 1934 and 1935.

299. To Perkins

Nov. 22, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am returning “Her Last Case”. I don't know why you dropped it. I thought you were going to send that story I read a good part of about plagiarism which I did think was better than “Her Last Case” as a complete story. I know what this story is after glancing at it. I shall read it after five. You could have kept it and made a much bigger and finer story. You are profligate with your material as Ring told you about “The Rich Boy”.

Hem's story is not the one you speak of. I think that is something he is keeping for a remote future. This story is “The Highlands of Africa”.* It is 75,000 words by his estimate, which is likely to be too short. It is not a novel in form, but rather, a story. He raises all kinds of complicated questions about how it should be published, and I have got to think them all over and write him so I do not know when it will be published. He is very happy about it,—says in quality it is more like “Big Two Hearted River” and that it does what he always did have a wonderful talent for, paint landscapes.

Honestly, Scott, I think you are going to have a fine book of stories, and it is going to look well, and you may be fooled on the way it sells. I shall send you the jacket soon, but it is coming along well. I hope you stay keen about the mediaeval book. The way things are going makes it seem more and more a happy idea.

Always yours,

Notes:

* Published by Scribners in 1935 as The Green Hills of Africa.

300. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, November 26, 1934

Dear Max:

The real thing that decided me about “Her Last Case” was that it was a place story and just before seeing it in published form I ran across Thomas Wolfe's “The House of the Far and Lost” and I thought there was no chance of competing with him on the same subject, when he had brought off such a triumph. There would inevitably have been invidious comparisons. If my story had anything to redeem it, except atmosphere, I would not hesitate to include it but most of it depends on a mixture of hysteria and sentiment—anyhow, I did not decide without some thought.

I think by this time you will have read and liked “The Fiend” which, spare and meager as it may be, has, I believe, a haunting quality. At least the tale in itself had enough poignancy to haunt me long enough, to keep in my skull for six years. Whether I've given it the right treatment, or disparaged it by too much peeling away of accessories, I can't say. That's one reason that I asked you to set it up, because maybe I am not too clear about it myself and maybe I can do something with the proof if it seems advisable.

I throw out most of the stuff in me with delight that it is gone. That statement might be interesting to consider in relation with Ernest's article in last month's Esquire,* an unexpressed idea is often a torment, even though its expression is liable to leave an almost crazy gap in the continuity of one's thoughts. And it would have been absolutely impossible for me to have stretched “The Rich Boy” into anything bigger than a novelette.

That statement was something that Ring got off; he never knew anything about composition, except as it concerned the shorter forms; that is why he always needed advice from us as to how to organize his material; it was his greatest fault the fault of many men brought up in the school of journalism—while a novelist with his sempiternal sigh can cut a few breaths. It is a hell of a lot more difficult to build up a long groan than to develop a couple of short coughs!

Glad Ernest isn't doing the Crusading story, now, because it would be an unfortunate competition.

Josephine^ goes along and I think I will be in the clear about her this week, and—as I told you—two or three of the others have already been done and just have to be glanced at.

Your suggestion to go to Key West is tempting as hell but I don't know whether it would be advisable on either Ernest's account or mine. We can talk about that later.

A short note from Beth acknowledged an invitation that I gave her to meet Gertrude Stein is she if she should be in the vicinity, and said that she had a long letter from you. Outside of that, life has gone along at what would seem to most people a monotonous routine: entertained Lovestone; “The Opposition Communist” Saturday and put him up for the night but haven't quite made up my mind about what I think of him.

Am so fascinated with the medieval series that my problem is making them into proper butcher's cuts for monthly consumption. I have thought of the subject so long that the actual fertility of invention has become even a liability.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* “Genio After Josie: A Havana Letter.”

^ The Josephine stories.

Also Turnbull.

301. FROM Max Perkins TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

November 28, 1934

Dear Ernest:

Maybe I might come down to Key West. I would like to do it mighty well. I’d like to spend an afternoon on the dock looking at those lazy turtles swimming around…

Now to take up minor points: I am sending you a couple of clippings from the Times and the Tribune, and there was a piece in the Telegram. Herschel Brickell on the Post is going to do one, and there will be others too in less important places. I imagine the Sunday papers had pieces last week, or will this week. I did not see the papers last Sunday because I had to go off for a week-end of talk and drink. But the Art section would cover the issue anyhow. I haven’t seen it. I tried to call up the man who runs it, but only got whoever was in charge. They knew we had helped them some, and I suppose gave me the truth, which was that they had sold quite a few, had had a good public, and good expectations. If we can do anything further, tell us. They thought everything was all right.

I do not think I saw all the pieces in Esquire, though I must have read eight of them. The truth is I did like them, even including the one about Ring Lardner. I had heard some of them criticized, as that one was. But no one could have admired or been more fond of Ring than I was, and, although knowing you, I may have read something into it, from you, I did like it. Ring was not, strictly speaking, a great writer. The truth is he never regarded himself seriously as a writer. He always thought of himself as a newspaperman, anyhow. He had a sort of provincial scorn of literary people. If he had written much more, he would have been a great writer perhaps, but whatever it was that prevented him from writing more was the thing that prevented him from being a great writer. But he was a great man, and one of immense latent talent which got itself partly expressed. I guess Scott1 would think much the same way about it.

I think it is magnificent about the story.2 Couldn’t you modify the title (which I am altogether for, in general) to “In the Highlands of Africa”?3 It would imply something that happened, or things that happened there. Without the “In,” as a title alone, it might be what they call a “travel” book. You will suspect that in this suggestion I am thinking of the trade and the wholesale department. I know they would bring the travel suggestion up, against the title. But I have not told anyone about this book except Charlie,4 and he has not told anyone. The title suggests a great deal to me, and all I want to do to it is to get in something that makes it seem as if it were a story.

I do not want to put anything so emphatically that it will embarrass you to overrule me if you must, but it is my strong conviction that this story2 ought to be published by itself. It detracts from a book to add anything else to the same volume. It does not make it more desirable, but less so. This comes partly from the fact that publishers are always padding books, and everybody is on to it. They get a story of 25 or 30 thousand words and it is too short to interest the trade, the price would have to be so low that the margin is too small. The public seems to object to small books, so then they proceed to pad it. Either they pad it by putting in a great many half-titles and some illustrations or, much more often, by asking the author for pieces to add to it, or stories. It is never so good as a complete unit. What is more, I do not think it is so good absolutely. “Spring Freshets” [Turgenev] is really a long story, and should have been published by itself, because it is a masterpiece and ought not to be thought of with anything else but only by itself. If this book5 were only 40,000 words, I would say, publish it alone. Then, to revert to the purely practical: when the reviewers review the book with the short pieces added, their comments would be somewhat vitiated by being scattered to some extent over the other pieces. I hope you will publish it by itself.

The other possibility was to put it in the lead of “The First Fifty-Seven.”6 That would make a very big book, for one thing. But the chief objections I have to it are the same ones that apply to the addition of the Esquire pieces. The reviews then would be of all the stories. I see that you regard this as a story, not a novel, but that makes no difference. It is a complete unit and considerably longer than would be necessary to make a full book. Besides, with this story you are writing you will have plenty to give “The First Fifty-Seven” the element of new material that is needed, and fine things too. The reason I wrote about the last Esquire piece was mostly because of what it said about writing. I thought that was magnificent, and as true as any utterance could be. Old Tom7 has been trying to change his book into a kind of Marxian argument (having written most of it some years before he ever heard of Marx), and I have been trying to express to him that very thing, that what convictions you hold on economic subjects will be in whatever you write, if they are really deep. So you don’t have to drag them in. I thought the whole piece was very interesting, but it was that writing part that particularly got me.

Always yours,

P.S. If you do write me again, tell me if you know a painter named Kuniochi, a Jap—I mean personally. Do you like him himself, not his paintings? I am in hopes of seeing Mike Strater8 soon.

Notes

1 F. Scott Fitzgerald.

2 Green Hills of Africa, Scribners, 1935.

3 Published in 1935, by Scribners, as Green Hills of Africa.

4 Charles Scribner, president of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

5 Green Hills of Africa.

6 Published by Scribners in 1938, as The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine.

7 Thomas Wolfe.

8 A painter.

302. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

December 3, 1934.

Dear Max:

Do you realize that they are sending me a whole series of new galleys which repeat from the beginning of my old galleys? I don't know whether this was accidental or intentional, in any case, I am very glad—but I must remind you that it will inevitably slow up the completion of the book—as well as defeat your purpose of being able to free the type. A proof is to me as a covey of partridges to Ernest Hemingway. I can't let it alone.

Will you give me a straight story about when you actually want this in, because I am still feeling my way around in a wilderness of work and want to aligne what must be done. The complications are:

I have your first proofs to do

Your second proofs to do

Proofs from Balmer on the Medieval novel1

Originals for Balmer

Extra work for “Esquire” to keep alive

And a “Saturday Evening Post” story in the offing (which looks so remote as to be practically hypothetical.)

I want to keep all these things straight and I'd be terribly obliged for any final decision as to a favorable date of publication for Taps at Reveille this spring, and the corresponding zero hour for the final version—and please tell me the truth, Max. I am no longer in diapers in this game and hurrying me honestly does no good.

Just had to turn down a wonderful invitation to fly south with Gingrich of “Esquire” to see Ernest at Key West, the whole trip free including champagne. However, I still have a faint hope of accompanying you when you go.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald was attempting to write an historical novel in the form of a serial for Redbook Magazine. He completed four segments of this work, usually referred to as the “Count of Darkness,” or “Philippe,” stories; the first was “In the Darkest Hour.”

303. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 3 pp., Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

December 17, 1934.

Dear Max:

Enclosed are two galleys and also a short short story called “The Night Before Chancellorsville” which I wish could be included into the book. This story and “The Fiend” together are not as long as “Her Last Case” so I think they would fit in your space originally allowed for that.

2. On original galley 84 six lines from the bottom (in story “First Blood”) there occurs the phrase “their eyes were blazing windows across the court of the same house.” This phrase I find occurs in Tender is the Night and I am very anxious to cut it if I haven't already done it on the galley I returned you. This is awfully important to me and I wish you would have it checked up before you put it into page proof.2 Certain people I know read my books over and over again and I can't think of anything that would more annoy or disillusion a reader than to find an author using a phrase over and over as if his imagination were starving. Please let me know if you find it!

3. You have not told me whether you wanted me to correct the typescript of “The Fiend” or whether you are going to send me galleys.

You will notice that “Crazy Sunday” is scarcely corrected at all in contrast to previous stories so I think that it will all even out. I hope that whoever is going over my proofs knows that my reason for cutting or changing some of the best passages is that they were used in Tender is the Night.

This makes about half the stories but you can be sure the other half will not take as long as these first ones; six of these latter I will hardly have to touch at all, the proof was largely a matter of getting started. It looked so formidable and there's been so much to do. I can do two a week without fail.

Please answer those first three questions, Max.

Ever yours, Scott

P.S. If you do not like “The Night Before Chancellorsville” please tell me frankly. My idea is that this and “The Fiend” would give people less chance to say they are all standardized Saturday Evening Post stories, because, whatever can be said about them, they are not that. I know I am suppressing certain Post stories that in suspense and story interest are superior to these two—it is be the question of the book as a whole. If you decide to use “The Night Before Chancellorsville” the Table of Contents should be changed so that it comes between “Two Wrongs” and “Jacob's Ladder.”3

Notes:

2 The phrase was deleted.

3 “Jacob's Ladder” was not included in the volume.

71. On December 21st, Fitzgerald wrote that he was now uncertain about including “The Night Before Chancellorsville” because he had intended originally to make it a longer story and was afraid it was now “too spare.” He asked for Perkins' advice. Perkins replied, on December 26th, that he was “very much for” including the story, adding that two people at Scribners who had read it, besides himself, also favored including it. The story was included in the collection, but under the title “The Night of Chancellorsville.”

304. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

December 18, 1934.

Dear Max:

Tremendously obliged for the fifty dollars.* The Redbook is stalling on these Medieval stories, much to my disgust, and that is slowing up things and also it may put a crimp in the series so far as serialization is concerned. They have taken three and can't seem to decide about the fourth so temporarily I am going to return to the Post and make some larger money until that straightens out. This was the reason for the financial emergency.

Now I've got to blow up because an incident of this proof has upset my entire morning. You know how irascible I am when I am working and it increases with the years, but I have never seen a proof reader quite as dumb as the one who has looked over this second galley. In the first place I did not want a second galley and did not ask for it—these stories have been corrected once for myself, once for the Post and the third time on your first galleys and that is all I can do. I expected to have the page proofs made up from the corrected first galley and requested that not even these be sent to me. I first understand that it is an advantage to make no more corrections, then along comes a set of completely superfluous galleys marked with the most idiotic and disturbing queries.72

Example: This proof reader calmly suggests that I correct certain mistakes of construction in the character's dialogue. My God, he must be the kind who would rewrite Ring Lardner, correcting his grammar, or fix up the speeches of Penrod to sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Who is it? Robert Bridges?

His second brilliant stroke of Victorian genius was to query all the split infinitives. If, on a fourth version, I choose to let them stand I am old enough to know what I am doing. On this proof I simply struck off the queries and am sending the rest back without looking at it. My worry is that I didn't look at the Basil stories at all before returning them, and if he has corrected all Basil's language, spoiling some of my jokes—well it just gives me the feeling of wanting to send back the whole mass of first galleys and saying set it up.

Honestly, Max, I have worked like a dog on these galleys and it is costing me money to make these changes, and to have some cluck fool with them again is exasperating beyond measure. They should have gone right into page proof from my first galleys—I would a hundred times rather have half a dozen errors creep in than have half a dozen humorous points & carefully considered rhythms, spoiled by some school marm. This may seem vehement but I tell you it will haunt me in my sleep until you write reassuring me that no such thing happened in the case of the Basil stories.

Again thanks for the money. It was a life-saver. There will be another story coming along tomorrow.

Ever yours,

Notes:

* Deposited by Perkins on December 18th.

72. On December 3rd, Fitzgerald had expressed surprise at receiving a second set of galleys and warned Perkins that it would “slow up the completion of the book,” for, he explained, “a proof is to me as a covey of partridges to Ernest Hemingway. I can't let it alone.” That Perkins had trouble in getting proofs back from at least one other of his authors is made clear in his letter of December 6th in which he reported that he finally had to give Thomas Wolfe “an ultimatum,—that we would send back twenty galleys a day whether he read them or not.”

Also Turnbull.

305. TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

December 26, 1934.

Dear Max:

Growing increasingly ashamed about bothering you with details I want to suppress the forward to “Taps at Reveille.”1 Zelda didn't like it and her taste is usually good in such things and it doesn't read well to me. It has a kind of snappy-snooty sound which I intruded into the preface of Cerf's publication of “The Great Gatsby.” If you can, without undue fermentation, arrange this, I think the fortunes of the book will be furthered.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

1 The foreword was omitted and is now lost.

306. TO: Maxwell Perkins

Wire. Princeton University

1935 FEB 12 PM 9 46

TRYON NCAR1

TITLE SEEMS INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS COULD YOU KILL JACKET AND PRINT PLAIN ONE SUGGESTIONS LAST NIGHTS MOON STOP IN THE LAST QUARTER OF THE MOON STOP GOLDEN SPOONS STOP MOONLIGHT IN MY EYES STOP OLD TITLE INVITES DISASTER WOMEN COULDNT PRONOUNCE AND WOULD FIND NO INTEREST I HAVE CONSIDERED THIS CAREFULLY2
SCOTT.

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald had gone to North Carolina for the benefit of his tuberculosis.

2 Perkins wired back on 13 February that changing the title of Taps at Reveille would “increase already extravagant expenses and further delay publication.” See Perkins' 18 February letter to Fitzgerald in Scott /Max.

307. To Fitzgerald

Feb. 18, 1935

Dear Scott:

I guess you are probably back in Baltimore by now, and I hope I shall hear from you soon. I did not agree with you about the change of title at all.73 I think you have a good title. I cannot believe that “Reveille” which is known to every man who was ever in the national guard, the army, military school, boys' camp or girls' camp, is a difficult word for people, and even if it is, “Taps” is not. It would not be one of those titles they cannot speak of from embarrassment,—which is what the salesmen say about some difficult ones to pronounce. But anyhow, it really would be wrong to begin to make any further changes after so many have been made. I want to do as you want, and only do not when it seems impossible.

I hope the rest* did you a lot of good, but if I had known you were going to take a vacation I would have tried to bring you to Key West. Hem was quite mad that I did not, because I had intimated to him before that I might be able to get you to come.

I am sending a copy of “Of Time and the River” which is to be published on March 8th.

Always yours,

Notes:

* Fitzgerald had gone to North Carolina.

73. Fitzgerald had wired on February 12th that the title “seems increasingly meaningless” and suggested four possible alternatives: “Last Night's Moon,” “In the Last Quarter of the Moon,” “Golden Spoons,” and “Moonlight in My Eyes.”

308. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 26, 1935.

Dar Max:

Just heard from reading “Time” that Tom Boyd is dead and it is quite a shock. Do you know anything about the attendant circumstances?74

Looking forward eagerly for Tom Wolfe's book.*

Got in this morning from North Carolina and am at hard work again on short stories. (I've been on the absolute wagon for a month, not even beer or wine, and feel fine.) As soon as you get a copy of “Taps” even if unbound, or a jacket, please send them to me. I am very anxious to see how it lines up especially the jacket. What publication date have you?

Ever yours,

P.S. I am sure that nothing Tom has said in his dedication75 could exaggerate the debt that he owes you—and that stands for all of us who have been privileged to be your authors.

Notes:

* Of Time and the River.

74. Perkins replied, on February 27th, that Boyd had died of a brain tumor which he had had, unbeknownst to his doctor, for some time.

75. The dedication read: TO MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS A great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair, a work to be known as “Of Time and the River” is dedicated with the hope that all of it may be in some way worthy of the loyal devotion and the patient care which a dauntless and unshaken friend has given to each part of it, and without which none of it could have been written.

309. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore,

Maryland, March 9, 1935.

Dear Max:

The book ^ arrived. It was fine to see. I liked the get up and thought it was an excellent blurb on the back, but—

—is it, alas, too late to do anything about the jacket? It is pretty Godawful and about six people have commented on it. I don't know who Miss Doris Spiegal is but it's rather discouraging to spend many hours trying to make the creatures in a book charming and then have someone who can't draw as well as Scottie cover five square inches with daubs that make them look like morons. The first jacket was very much better.

This sounds ungrateful in view of the trouble my books have always been, but I do want to record the fact that of late I have been badly served by your art department. To take a perfectly good photograph and debauch it into a toothless old man on the back of “Tender” was not so good, but I do think a jacket like this has the absolute opposite effect of those fine attractive jackets that Hill and Held used to draw for my books. I always believed that eternal care about titles and presentation was a real element in their success.

I've seen Jim Boyd and we've had several meals together. He's an awfully nice fellow.

I am still hesitating about sending this letter because I know what a lot more important things you have in your mind and how busy you are at this season, but I am sending it on the off-chance that it might have been a sample jacket and that something might be done.

Ever yours,

P.S. I was glad that Tom* got nice reviews in Time and the New Yorker and that they gave him space in proportion to the time and effort that went into his volume. I'm going to give it a more thorough reading next week.

Notes:

^ Taps at Reveille.

* Thomas Wolfe, later is discussed his Of Time and the River.

Also Turnbull.

310. To Perkins

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 11, 1935.

Dear Max:

The second annoyance to you in two days—pretty soon I'm going to be your most popular author. (By the way we had sort of a Scribner congerie here last night. Jim Boyd and Elizabeth came to supper and George Calverton dropped in afterwards. Your name came up frequently and you would have probably wriggled more than at Wolfe's dedication. To prolong this parenthesis unduly I am sorry I mentioned Tom's book. I hope to God I won't be set up as the opposition for there are fine things in it, and I loved reading it, and I am delighted that it's a wow, and it may be a bridge for something finer. I simply feel a certain disappointment which I would, on no account, want Tom to know about, for, responding as he does to criticism, I know it would make us life long enemies and we might do untold needless damage to each other, so please be careful how you quote me. This is in view of Calverton's saying he heard from you that I didn't like it. It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on a bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in “A Farewell to Arms.” If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled. I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of “Tender is the Night” entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference. Even Ernest commented on sections that were needlessly included and as an artist he is as near as I know for a final reference. Of course, having struggled with Tom Wolfe as you did this is old hat to you. I will conclude this enormous parenthesis with the news that Elizabeth has gone to Middleburg to help Mrs. White open up her newly acquired house.)

This letter is a case of the tail (the parenthesis) wagging the dog. Here is the dog. A man named John S. Martens writes me wanting to translate Tender Is the Night or This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby into Norwegian. He has written Scribners and met the same blank wall of silence that has greeted me about all publishing of my books in other countries. I am quite willing to handle continental rights directly but I cannot do it when I do not know even the name of the publisher of my books, having never had copies of them or any information on that subject. Isn't there somebody in your office who is especially delegated to seeing to such things? It is really important to me and if I should write a book that had an international appeal it would be of great advantage to have a foothold with translators and publishers in those countries. All I want from you is the status of The Great Gatsby in Scandinavia, Germany, etc., and a word as to whether I shall go ahead and make arrangements myself for the future in that regard.

I'd be glad to get a dozen or so copies of Taps at Reveille as soon as available.

Ever yours,

P.S. I haven't had a drink for almost six weeks and haven't had the faintest temptation as yet. Feel fine in spite of the fact that business affairs and Zelda's health have never been worse.

Notes:

James Boyd, historical novelist published by Scribners.

Elizabeth Lemmon.

V. F. Calverton, born George Goetz, wrote and edited books on political and sociological subjects.

Wolfe’s eloquently grateful dedication of Of Time and the River (Scribners, 1935) to Maxwell Perkins had attracted considerable notice.

Also Turnbull.

WHO'S WHO

Maxwell E. Perkins (1884–1947), editorial director at Charles Scribner’s Sons, was Fitzgerald’s generous friend and closest literary adviser. He fought for the publication of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, and thereafter provided encouragement and financial backing. At Scribners Perkins assembled a great stable of writers that included Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. His literary judgment and commitment to his writers have become legendary. See A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: Dutton/Congdon, 1978).

The letters of Perkins were published in:

These letters were first published in books:

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