“A Cheer For Princeton!”
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop

1. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

August 28, 1915

Dear Fitz: I wrote a whole first act, lyrics and all; some of it was exquisitely humorous and some of it was very weak.* I sent it to Lane and told him to forward it to you, when he had' finished with it, because I was too lazy to make another copy. He returned it to me with a long letter explaining that he liked it but that there were a number of important changes he wanted me to make. My impression was that he had failed to appreciate the exquisite humor of the exquisitely humorous parts but had fully appreciated the weakness of the weak parts. I received the package the night before I left for the West and didn't want to take it with me.

Lane wrote that he would send it to you, when he got it back the second time from me. I suppose the best thing I can do now is to write home for it to be sent now to you. I am sick of it myself. Perhaps you can infuse into it some of the fresh effervescence of youth for which you are so justly celebrated. The spontaneity of the libretto has suffered somewhat from the increasing bitterness and cynicism of my middle age.

Another thing, I thought until today that I was coming to St. Paul on my way East. Now I am almost sure it can't be done and so I shan't have an opportunity for talking it over personally with you until college opens. At any rate, I'll have the MS sent to you at once.

Yours etc. E.W.

Notes:

* “'The Evil Eye' … Edmund Wilson, Jr. wrote the book and Scott Fitzgerald wrote the lyrics … for the elaborately costumed annual performance of the Triangle Club … It was a howling success.”—Christian Gauss, “Edmund Wilson—the Campus and the Nassau 'Lit,'” in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 1944.

2. [Fragment] from the diary of Edmund Wilson

taken from: Wilson, E. A Prelude, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Why, I can go up to New York on a terrible party and then come back and go into the church and pray—and mean every word of it, too!”

[Scott was then a practicing Catholic, and though I sometimes used to kid him about it—he was the first educated Catholic I had ever known—I now think it was perhaps unfortunate that he lost his faith as he did. In his college days, the older men who were most interested in him and whom he most respected were Father Fay and Shane Leslie. I suppose it was inevitable that in an all- Protestant college—I do not remember in my time any other Catholic students, though there may have been a few—a college which had for him, a Westerner, the prestige of an acme of Eastern smartness, he should have imitated his companions in not taking religion seriously. But this left him with nothing at all to sustain his moral standards or to steady him in self-discipline. His desire to be a great writer only intermittently spurred him to effort. He had put on record before his death that he wanted to be buried in the Catholic cemetery in Baltimore with the other members of his family, but this was denied him by the Church, to which, after breaking away from it, he had never made his resubmission.]

3. [Fragment] from the diary of Edmund Wilson

taken from: Wilson, E. A Prelude, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

<…>

The situation at Yale was quite different. You were first asked to join a fraternity, and you could live in a fraternity house—we were not allowed to live in the clubs till the days when we came back as alumni. The election to the senior societies took place at the end of the junior year at the solemn ceremony of “Tap Day,” when the class waited under a certain tree for the seniors to run out of the society buildings—w'indowless and forbidding stone tombs, illuminated only from the top—tap their men and say “Go to your room!” Mysterious rites followed, which the members were pledged not to reveal. Of these senior societies at Yale, Skull and Bones was by far the most important. It was supposed to take in only the ablest men, and they were supposed to be dedicated thus to be “leaders" in after life as well as at college. They took Bones with extreme solemnity. If the word “Bones” was spoken, they were supposed to have to leave the room, and it was said, I do not know how truly, that they could not relinquish their society pins even when they were taking a shower, at which time they had to hold them in their teeth. No Bones man, after college, was supposed to fail; his career in the larger world was intently followed by his brothers, and if he showed any signs of weakening, they arranged to prop him up.

Scott Fitzgerald once had the idea of bringing out the word “bones” in a Triangle Show, and then having two men dressed as tattered old bums get up and leave the theater. All of this side of Yale was, in general, the object of a good deal of kidding on the part of Harvard and Princeton, and the climax of the Yale song, "For God, for country and for Yale" was called the greatest anticlimax ever written. And yet I felt a certain respect for the importance given at Yale to intellectual achievement. Scholarship counted as well as athletics, and the editor of the Yale News and the editor of the Yale Lit were ex officio tapped for Bones. At Princeton, you had no incentive to excel in any such pursuit. ФВК had no prestige, was considered, in fact, rather second-rate, and I remember that I felt John Bishop had undergone a slight degradation when he found that he had earned this distinction and went to a ФВК dinner. In the years when he and I and Whipple and Hamilton Armstrong and Stanley Dell and Scott Fitzgerald and John Biggs were operating the Lit, we actually made a profit, and yearly "cut a melon" which afforded us $50 apiece. But this kind of thing you did on your own incentive and under your own steam. When you were faced with the lack of competition that followed election to a club and found that it involved nothing hut a comfortable place to eat, you had to keep your own fires stoked, and this was in some ways a very good thing. The pressure of Yale competition sometimes had the result of making the poets as well as the political and business types too eager for conspicuous success. And stimulating though I usually found the Bones men, I became aware, later on, when I shared an apartment with three Eli’s, and saw a good many of their friends, that unless you had fared well at Yale and were confidently headed for some substantial achievement, you were by no means a loyal son of Yale hut were likely to look hack on it with bitterness. A blistering instance of this was the speech made by Sinclair Lewis when he attended an alumni dinner. He said that in his years at Yale his classmates had paid no attention to him, had simply thought him a “sad bird,” as we said at Princeton. But now that he had had some success—publicity, reputation and money—they were making a fuss about him. The implication was that they could go to Hell. The Princetonians, on the other hand, had usually an affection for Princeton, which sometimes became quite maudlin. An uncle of mine—neither of those mentioned above— when he had already been some years out of Princeton, returned in tears to his brother’s house because Princeton had lost the big game. Examples of this childish loyalty— always, accompanied by extreme conservatism in regard to old college usages and by strong opposition to "liberal” ideas—still turn up in the correspondence columns of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and I am glad to sec that the editor docs not encourage these outbursts but comments on them sometimes rather tartly. I used to note, on my visits to New Haven, that the dissipation at Yale was practised with the same earnestness as everything else, whereas the Yale men used to make fun of us for what they considered the childish namby-pambiness of "going to the Nass for a beer.” Yale was a burning religion, with, however, a good many unbelievers; Princeton a well-dressed and convivial group, to which, if one were not convivial, it was easy to remain indifferent.]

4. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

593 Summit Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

September 26, 1917

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

You'll be surprised to get this but it's really begging for an answer. My purpose is to see exactly what effect the war at close quarters has on a person of your temperament. I mean I'm curious to see how your point of view has changed or not changed—

I've taken regular army exams but haven't heard a word from them yet. John Bishop is in the second camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. He expects a 1st Lieutenancy. I spent a literary month with him (July) and wrote a terrific lot of poetry mostly under the Masefield-Brooke influence.

Here's John's latest.

BOUDOIR

The place still speaks of worn-out beauty of roses,
And half retrieves a failure of Bergamotte,
Rich light and a silence so rich one all but supposes
The voice of the clavichord stirs to a dead gavotte

For the light grows soft and the silence forever quavers,
As if it would fail in a measure of satin and lace,
Some eighteenth century madness that sighs and wavers
Through a life exquisitely vain to a dying grace.

This was the music she loved; we heard her often
Walking alone in the green-clipped garden outside.
It was just at the time when summer begins to soften
And the locust shrills in the long afternoon that she died.

The gaudy macaw still climbs in the folds of the curtain;
The chintz-flowers fade where the late sun strikes them aslant.
Here are her books too: Pope and the earlier Burton,
A worn Verlaine; Bonheur and the Fetes Galantes.

Come—let us go—I am done. Here one recovers
Too much of the past but fails at the last to find
Aught that made it the season of loves and lovers;
Give me your hand—she was lovely—mine eyes blind.

Isn't that good? He hasn't published it yet. I sent twelve poems to magazines yesterday. If I get them all back I'm going to give up poetry and turn to prose. John may publish a book of verse in the spring. I'd like to but of course there's no chance. Here's one of mine.

TO CECILIA

When Vanity kissed Vanity
A hundred happy Junes ago,
He pondered o'er her breathlessly,
And that all time might ever know
He rhymed her over life and death,
“For once, for all, for love,” he said…
Her beauty's scattered with his breath
And with her lovers she was dead.

Ever his wit and not her eyes,
Ever his art and not her hair.
“Who'd learn a trick in rhyme be wise
And pause before his sonnet there.”
So all my words however true
Might sing you to a thousandth June
And no one ever know that you
Were beauty for an afternoon.

It's pretty good but of course fades right out before John's. By the way I struck a novel that you'd like, Out of Due Time by Mrs. Wilfred Ward. I don't suppose this is the due time to tell you that, though. I think that The New Machiavelli is the greatest English novel of the century. I've given up the summer to drinking (gin) and philosophy (James and Schopenhauer and Bergson).

Most of the time I've been bored to death— Wasn't it tragic about Jack Newlin? I hardly knew poor Gaily.¹ Do write me the details.

I almost went to Russia on a commission in August but didn't so I'm sending you one of my passport pictures—if the censor doesn't remove it for some reason— It looks rather Teutonic but I can prove myself a Celt by signing myself

Very sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Princetonians who died in the war.

BOUDOIR Later published in a different form in Bishop’s first book of poems, Green Fruit.

To CECILIA Later incorporated in a different form and set as prose in Book Two, Chapter III, of This Side of Paradise.

5. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

October 7, 1917

Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.

Dear Fitz: I am quite unable to tell you what effect the war at close quarters has on a person of my temperament: I have never got any nearer to it than the Detroit state fairgrounds, where I am associated in the errand of mercy with the sorriest company of yokels that ever qualified as skillful plumbers or, an even less considerable eminence, received A.B. degrees from the University of Michigan, I waited till the middle of August to be called into camp and have now waited till October For the unit to sail for France. The ordeal has, it is true, been somewhat mitigated by having David Hamilton with me (I am at present writing from his house) and another friend From Yale; hut the latter has recently despaired of the hospital business and taken examinations for aviation and I have myself become so sterilized, suppressed, and blighted by two months of orderly, guard, and fatigue work that I am beginning to feel it wouldn't take much to make me do the same thing. Where is the old esprit and verve? I sometimes think it was finally extinguished the night when you and I sat alone upon the darkened and deserted verandah of Cottage (its marble splendors more desolate untenanted than were ever the stinking halls of Commons when Princeton was alive) and let John Bishop take the shabby whoring of the Princeton streets for the royal harlotries of Rome and the Renaissance. Ah, how not only, to quote your friend, are the beautiful broken and the swiftest made slow, but the kindly made hard and the clever made dull! Seriously, I shall never forget that ghastly evening; I have never seen or heard from John and was consequently glad to get his poem, which is excellent, of course, except for the last stanza, which does seem to me inadequate. I like yours, too, although I didn't understand the two quoted lines in the last stanza, and ever since “Princeton: The Last Day,” which, if it means what I think it does, possesses a depth and dignity of which I didn't suppose you capable, have thought you by way of becoming a genuine poet. If you have my more stuff of John's and your own, I wish you would send it along; my comrades of the unit make it seem to me incredible that I could ever have had friends who spent ecstatic hours pursuing the Beautiful. And if you have any news of Alec or Townsend, I should he exceedingly glad to hear it. You speak of Jack Newlin, but I have never heard nothing about him; has he been killed?

I'm inclined to agree with you about The New Machiavelli [H. G. Wells], at least so far as to admit that it is one of the best novels of the century. By the way, you should read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is probably another of the best novels of the century, and also an essay called “British. Novelists, Ltd” by Mrs. [Katharine Fullerton] Gerould in the last Yale Review. I wonder what will happen to the Lit. Will it be compelled to subsist for a while as a memory merely on the strength of the brilliant past which you and John and Teek and I and the rest have just supplied? When I read a few fragments of platitude reprinted in The Evening Post from Mr. Hibben's* speech at the opening of the university I avert my inward gaze from a crippled Princeton which I have no more tears to weep and turn them back to the contemplation of a wretched world which, for all the men I may damage or repair in the service of the country, I know I can do little or nothing to correct and heal. Although the truth is I have almost forgotten about the war, since I have become a member of the army. It has reached such an impasse, since the rejection of the Pope's appeal, that it only exasperates one to try to figure a solution. And if my letter is arid it is only because I am arid myself at the moment as I hope never to be again; but still remain, in the sacred name of the divine muses and the indissoluble bond of our knocked-up alma mater,

“Because her bells are clearer than the guns;
Because her books are braver than the charge'

(to quote the lines of a great but temporarily neglected poet).

Yours for what you choose to consider the Celtic strain in us and which, whatever it is, for all our laziness and ignorance, does separate from the optimistic and sentimental mass of our countrymen, in company with yourself,

Edmund Wilson, Jr.

You will pardon the effects of this vile stub pen.

Notes:

* “The president of Princeton in my time was John Grier Hibben…”

6. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Fall 1917

ALS, 6 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Cottage Club

Princeton, N.J.

Dear Bunny:

I’ve been intending to write you before but as you see I’ve had a change of scene and the nessesary travail there-off has stolen time.

Your poem came to John Biggs, my room mate, and we’ll put in the next number—however it was practically illegable so I’m sending you my copy (hazarded) which you’ll kindly correct and send back——

I’m here starting senior year and still waiting for my commission. I’ll send you the Litt. or no—you’ve subscribed haven’t you.

Saw your friend Larry Noyes in St. Paul and got beautifully stewed after a party he gave—He got beautifully full of canned wrath—I dont imagine we’d agree on much——

Do write John Bishop and tell him not to call his book “Green Fruit.”

Alec is an ensign. I’m enclosing you a clever letter from Townsend Martin which I wish you’d send back.

Princeton is stupid but Gauss + Gerrould are here. I’m taking naught but Philosophy + English—I told Gauss you’d sailed (I’d heard as much) but I’ll contradict the rumor.

The Litt is prosperous—Biggs + I do the prose——Creese and Keller (a junior who’ll be chairman) and I the poetry. However any contributions would be ect. ect.

Have you read Well’s “Boon; the mind of the race” (Doran—1916) Its marvellous! (Debutante expression. Young Benet (at New Haven) is getting out a book of verse before Xmas that I fear will obscure John Peale’s. His subjects are less Precieuse + decadent. John is really an anachronism in this country at this time—people want ideas and not fabrics.

I’m rather bored here but I see Shane Leslie occassionally and read Wells and Rousseau. I read Mrs. Geroulds “British Novelists Limited + think she underestimates Wells but is right in putting Mckenzie at the head of his school. She seems to disregard Barry and Chesterton whom I should put even above Bennet or in fact anyone except Wells.

Do you realize that Shaw is 61, Wells 51, Chesterton 41 Leslie 31 and I 21. (Too bad I havn’t a better man for 31. I can hear your addition to this remark).

Oh and that awful little Charlie Stuard (a sort of attenuated Super-Fruit) is still around (ex ’16—now 17/). He belongs to a preceptorial where I am trying to demolish the Wordsworth legend—and contributes such elevating freshman-cultural generalities as “Why I’m suah that romantisism is only a cross-section of reality Dr. Murch.”

Yes—Jack Newlin is dead—killed in ambulance service. He was, potentially a great artist

Here is a poem I just had accepted by “Poet Lore”

The Way of Purgation

A fathom deep in sleep I lie
   With old desires, restrained before;
To clamor life-ward with a cry
   As dark flies out the greying door.
And so in quest of creeds to share
   I seek assertive day again;
But old monotony is there—
   Long, long avenues of rain.

Oh might I rise again! Might I
   Throw off the throbs of that old wine—
See the new morning mass the sky
   With fairy towers, line on line—
Find each mirage in the high air
   A symbol, not a dream again!
But old monotony is there—
   Long, Long avenues of rain.

No—I have no more stuff of Johns—I ask but never recieve

If Hillquit gets the mayoralty of New York it means a new era. Twenty million Russians from South Russia have come over to the Roman Church. [In the margin:] news jottings (unofficial).

I can go to Italy if I like as private secretary of a man (a priest) who is going as Cardinal Gibbons representative to discuss the war with the Pope (American Catholic point of view—which is most loyal—barring the SienFien—40% of Pershing’s army are Irish Catholics. Do write.

Gaelicly Yours
Scott Fitzgerald

I remind myself lately of Pendennis, Sentimental Tommy (who was not sentimental and whom Barry never understood) Michael Fane, Maurice Avery + Guy Hazelwood)

Notes:

Wealthy Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald’s later a movie writer and producer.

Professors Christian Gauss and Gordon Hall Gerould.

Poet Stephen Vincent Benet, then a Yale undergraduate.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Yale Review (October 1917).

Compton Mackenzie, James M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells—contemporary British novelists.

This poem was not published by Poet Lore.

Father Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay had befriended Fitzgerald at the Newman School. He was the model for Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise.

Characters in novels by William Makepeace Thackeray, Barrie, and Mackenzie.

THE WAY OF PURGATION This poem in slightly different form and without the title appears at the beginning of Book Two, Chapter V, of This Side of Paradise."

7. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

December 3, 1917

France

Dear Fitz: Your letter has just reached me; thank you for Townsend's letter; I can almost hear him talking, I should make haste to do anything in my power to dissuade John from calling his poems Green Fruit, but do not know his address, having heard nothing from him. I wish you would let me know where he is and whether he got his commission. Ask him to drop me a line.

I cannot even yet tell you much about war at close quarters, being only near enough to hear the guns, which do not sound as loud as thunder. We are stationed in what was once a popular summer resort* hut has now been turned over to the American hospital service, which is going to turn the hotels into hospitals. It will he at least three months before they are ready to receive patients and I have decided, in the meantime, to resume the writing of my forthcoming books, war or no war. If I did not do this, I think I should die of my own futility? and a growing conviction of the futility of prolonging the war; this last fostered lately by Lord Landsdowne's letter, Bernard Shaw's last public speech, the Russian armistice and the Italian defeat and, also on being nourished by [Romain] Holland's Au-dessus de la melee, France's L'Orme du mail, and that fine series of ironies at the expense of the Franco-Prussian War: Les Soirees de Medan.

But the chief thing really is the terrible silence and weariness of this pan of France. Our life here, with its round of marvelous French dinners at little cafes and of walks and bicycle rides to the ancient villages that are all around us, would be perfectly idyllic, if it were not for the fact that the unseen, unrealized reality of the war and one's own prolonged inactivity makes it more ghastly than you can believe. Over such wine and food as this, we could once (Dave and I—and you and the rest, if you were here) have outworn and outdazzled the stars with the sparks of our jesting, but I feel that the door of the house of mirth and, in fact, of any normal occupation is shut till the war is over. Not that we don't hold revelry here of no mean order! David, a newspaperman from Harvard, an extremely amusing and nice artist, and myself are accustomed to consort together in the back rooms of cafes, restaurants, bistros, quinquettes, buvettes, and claquedents of every sort and drink with an enthusiasm verging on ferocity to the eternal damnation of the army. But all this is a revelry stunned and distraught, Christmas dinner among the convicts, the Black Mass performed by marionettes . . .

It somehow reassures me that you should be back at Princeton, as if, after all, the continuity of life there had nut quite been broken up. Remember me to Gauss: I think of him often in France, In spite of the fact that I had been here before, years ago, it was chiefly because of what he had taught me that I felt so little a stranger when I arrived here a couple of weeks ago.

Yours always, Edmund Wilson, Jr.

Notes:

* “We were stationed at Vittel in the Vosges…” —A Prelude

8. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

ALS, 4 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Jan 10th, 1917. [1918]

Dear Bunny:

Your last refuge from the cool sophistries of the shattered world, is destroyed!—I have left Princeton. I am now Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald of the 45th Infantry (regulars.) My present adress is

Co Q
P.O.B.

Ft. Leavenworth
Kan.

After Feb 26th

593 Summit Ave
St. Paul
Minnesota

will always find me forwarded

—So the short, swift chain of the Princeton intellectuals (Brooke’s clothes, clean ears and, withall, a lack of mental prigishness … Whipple, Wilson, Bishop, Fitzgerald … have passed along the path of the generation—leaving their shining crown apon the gloss and un worthiness of John Biggs head.

One of your poems I sent on to the Litt and I’ll send the other when I’ve read it again. I wonder if you ever got the Litt I sent you … so I enclosed you two pictures, well give one to some poor motherless Poilu fairy who has no dream. This is smutty and forced but in an atmosphere of cabbage …

John’s book came out in December and though I’ve written him rheams (Rhiems) of praise, I think he’s made poor use of his material. It is a thin Green Book.

Green Fruit

(One man here remarked that he didn’t read it because Green Fruit always gave him a pain in the A——!)

by
John Peale Bishop
1st Lt. Inf. R.C.
Sherman French Co
Boston.

In section one (Souls and Fabrics) are Boudoir, The Nassau Inn and, of all things, Fillipo’s wife, a relic of his decadent sophmore days. Claudius and other documents in obscurity adorn this section.

Section two contains the Elspeth Poems—which I think are rotten. Section three is (Poems out of Jersey and Virginia) and has Cambell Hall, Mellville and much sacharine sentiment about how much white bodies pleased him and how, nevertheless he was about to take his turn with crushed brains (this slender thought done over in poem after poem). This is my confidential opinion, however; if he knew what a nut I considered him for leaving out Ganymede and Salem Water and Francis Thompson and Prayer and all the things that might have given some body to his work, he’d drop me from his writing list. The book closed with the dedication to Townsend Martin which is on the circular I enclose. I have seen no reviews of it yet.

The Romantic Egotist
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“… The Best is over
You may complain and sigh
Oh Silly Lover…”
Rupert Brooke

“Experience is the name Tubby gives to his mistakes…
Oscar Wilde

Chas. Scribners Sons (Maybe!)
MCMXVIII

There are twenty three Chapters, all but five are written and it is in poetry, prose, vers libre and every mood of a tempermental temperature. It purports to be the picaresque ramble of one Stephen Palms from the San Francisco fire, thru School, Princeton to the end where at twenty one he writes his autobiography at the Princeton aviation school. It shows traces of Tarkington, Chesteron, Chambers Wells, Benson (Robert Hugh), Rupert Brooke and includes Compton-Mckenzie like love-affairs and three psychic adventures including one encounter with the devil in a harlots apartment.

It rather damns much of Princeton but its nothing to what it thinks of men and human nature in general. I can most nearly describe it by calling it a prose, modernistic Childe Harolde and really if Scribner takes it I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous over night. I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation…

In my right hand bunk sleeps the editor of Contemporary Verse (ex) Devereux Joseph, Harvard ’15 and a peach—on my left side is G. C. King a Harvard crazy man who is dramatizing “War and Peace”; but you see Im lucky in being well protected from the Philistines.

The Litt continues slowly but I havn’t recieved the December issue yet so I cant pronounce on the quality.

This insolent war has carried off Stuart Walcott in France, as you may know and really is beginning to irritate me—but the maudlin sentiment of most people is still the spear in my side. In everything except my romantic Chestertonian orthodoxy I still agree with the early Wells on human nature and the “no hope for Tono Bungay” theory.

God! How I miss my youth—thats only relative of course but already lines are beginning to coarsen in other people and thats the sure sign. I dont think you ever realized at Princeton the childlike simplicity that lay behind all my petty sophistication, selfishness and my lack of a real sense of honor. I’d be a wicked man if it wasn’t for that and now thats dissapearing…

Well I’m over stepping and boring you and using up my novel’s material so good bye. Do write and lets keep in touch if you like.

God Bless You
Celticly
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bishop’s adress

Lieut. John Peale Bishop (He’s a 1st Lt.)
334th Infantry
Camp Taylor
Kentucky

Notes:

T. K. Whipple became a literary critic.

Booth Tarkington, G. K. Chesterton, Robert W. Chambers, H. G. Wells, and Robert Hugh Benson were contemporary novelists; Rupert Brooke was a young British poet killed in World War I.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) was a partially autobiographical heroic poem by George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron.

H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay (1909) portrayed the corruption of English society.

world, is destroyed - I had graduated from college in 1916 and had written him from France that my last solace was to think of those of our literary group who were still at Princeton. E.W. in The Crack-Up

enclosed you two pictures - I had mentioned in my reply to his previous letter that he had enclosed two prints of his passport picture. E.W. in The Crack-Up

9. FROM: John Peale Bishop¹ , To Fitzgerald

January 1918

ALS, 5 pp. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

O God! O God! How wonderful Youth's Encounter is! Perhaps it meant more to me now than it would have done at Princeton, but it has done more than all the sociology in the world to make me feel life is worth living. I rose from its reading with that “free” feeling you have when the first thaw of spring takes the courses of winter. What if the light is too golden, the half-light too blue? Who would have them otherwise in a story of youth is an ass and the father of asininity. This is undoubtedly the true, the undefiled aim of the novel—to present—but how shall I venture to speak to your ears, so fearful of banalities?—any how it's not sociology. That's the chief difference between the French and the English novel—the typical French and English novel. There's no preachment in the former.

Now to come to your own book.² Scott, I think if you will recollect the volume above, or the account of Wells' youthful heroes, or Anatole France's he Livre de Mon Ami, the glaring defect of your book will be noted. I have a theory that novels as well as plays should be in scenes. The marvellous effect of Crime and Punishment is largely due to the cumulative effect of the successive climaxes. Each scene—chapter what you will should be significant in the development either of the story or the hero's character. And I don't feel that yours are. You see Stephen³ does the things every boy does. Well and good. I suppose you want the universal appeal. But the way to get it is to have the usual thing done in an individual way. You don't get enough into the boy's reactions to what he does. Its the only way to awaken the memory which is the real source of pleasure in boy's stories for grown-olds. It's not in relating what a boy does that causes this awakening, but his own love in what he does. Think of Michael Fane's reaction to the iron bars of his crib. It's wonderful. Now your boy sleds, but I don't feel that he enjoys sledding. In matter of fact, I don't realize fully that he does sled. You see what I mean? Each incident must be carefully chosen—to bring out the typical: then ride it for all its worth.

You see I don't know what Stuart's⁴ like. I don't feel the charm of Stephen's childish harem. While with Michael I successively fell just as deeply in love with Dora, Kathleen, and Lily as he did. You have got to be more leisurely. Fill out the setting. Make each incident a step. The successive chapters should be in echelon, each a step and yet all clear at once.

I have been pretty miserable lately, but today feel fairly like I'd prefer to keep living.

I'm thinking seriously of writing a novel myself. I have a room now— shared with one other man who is [not there] a great deal. I certainly can't write poetry.

Did I refer to the 45th Inf. again? Well, what I meant was that it was full of recruits and wouldn't be fit for foreign service for quite a while— That's nothing against it. It will probably give you better treatment than we get here. I am wild with rage over this last measure—All officers attend reveille—600 A.M. O ye gods of the petit dejeuner! It takes an act of congress to make gentlemen out of us. No body would ever suspect it from the life you lead. Being an attached lieutenant is almost as bad as being a T.C. Candidate. Except for the social idea, I'd as soon be a sergeant. When do you come down? ANSWER THAT.

You certainly shat on my poem. Well, its not very good, but Bunny⁵ liked it, so I chucked it in.⁶ That last section has a good deal of drule. Endymion, Sylvo and Nassau Street are all right, but the rest are bum.

However, I don't think you have any right to compare it to R.B.⁷ Nassau Street would be a fairer comparison. But you can't refer to his uplift, because our situation was so utterly different. Everybody felt it in England, but less because of the war than because of the frightful state England was in when war came. Decadent boredom and futile political wrangling. You damn well, nobody felt any lift at Princeton. And somehow, I've never reacted emotionally to the war. I am beginning to feel a fine hatred, if you will, but my chief emotion last spring was regret at seeing the fellows go and all that went into the last of Nassau Street. It was a banal emotion—we've discussed that before.

Adieu. St James of Compostella.

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald's Princeton classmate who became the model for Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in This Side of Paradise.

² “The Romantic Egoist.”

³ The hero of Fitzgerald's novel in progress was named Stephen Palms.

⁴ A character in “The Romantic Egoist.”

⁵ Edmund Wilson, Jr.

⁶ Bishop had published Green Fruit (1917), a volume of verse.

⁷ Rupert Brooke.

10. Jan 1918. [Fragment] From J. P. Bishop

Bishop wrote ...even death there would be a compensation - Keats, Shelley, Browning, Wilde, Bishop various and gifted quintet, let us weep over all five...

11. Jan 1918. [Fragment]

And Fitzgerald responded:

12. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald

January 1918

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

Now as to the book—The new chapters are much, much better. You didn't get the small boy's viewpoint very well. The schoolboy is far better done. I am beginning to know Stephen better, but I feel you are concealing a great deal of the young man's history that I ought to know. And it's just for this reason that I don't particularly like him. You see he isn't popular and on the whole one feels rather deservedly; you have been too hard on him and your reader is rather easily prejudiced against him. Why don't you give the other side. Show the boy's loneliness, his real suffering when alone, his mental and emotional states. The history is not subjective enough. I cant make that too strong. That's when the immense superiority of Youths Encounter comes in. You give us the acts of the boy. Mackenzie the mind and soul moving through the action. No body is particularly interested in what small boys do—except their individual parents—but we all love to recapture their attitude toward the world. In a way, it's the most mysterious thing in the world. To a grown man, woman is comparitively simple as against the adolescent youth. It apparently means nothing that we have been through it. It is exceedingly difficult to regain that curious mental life which is not rational, not clear, and uncolored by real emotion. It is the result of the beginning of clear reasoning and the uprising of the thousand obscure complexities of sex which permeate everything yet never identify themselves definitely with the sexual function That's my first criticism and the second is a further plea for simplification. Don't put in everything you remember. Retain only significant events and ride them hard. Pad them with Stephen's reactions. That's the great trouble with autobiographical material, it's so hard to arrange, so hard to distinguish as regards the incidental and the essential.

Send on more copy.

I haven't heard of the 45th going away.
One face than autumn lilies tenderer
And voice more soft than the far plaint of viols is
Or the soft moan of any grey-eyed lute player

—Heard the strange lutes on the green banks
Ring loud with grief and delight
Of the sun-silked, dark haired musicians
In the brooding silence of night.

O western winds when will ye blow
That the small rain down can rain.
Christ! that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
Till life us do part

Casabianca.

13. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

August 9, 1919

Red Bank

Dear Scott: I have heard various rumors about you since I have been back (I landed July 2), but can't seem to find out where you are now. I suppose you must be in St. Paul. I move up to the city tomorrow where I have an apartment (114 West Twelfth Street) with Larry Noyes and others. When you come to New York again, be sure to look me up and, in the meantime, drop me a line.

Stan Dell and I have conceived a literary project In which you might possibly help us. Our idea is to write a new Soirees de Medan on the American part in the war. The original Soirees de Medan was a set of short stories published after the Franco-Prussian War by a group of realistic writers headed by Zola (Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, etc.). Our problem is to get enough other people to contribute besides ourselves, and I have written to John Bishop and a number of others. These stories don't all of them have to deal with the fighting proper, of course, One of the remarkable virtues of the Soirees was the fact that they dealt not only with the front but also with the mismanagement of the war by the government, the effect on the civilian population, and the stagnation of the troops behind the lines. You never got abroad, but tant mieux! let us have something about army life in the States during the war. I know that your line isn't the Zola-Maupassant genre, but I'm sure you ought to be able to produce something illuminating. No Saturday Evening Post stuff, understand! clear your mind of cant! brace up your artistic conscience, which was always the weakest part of your talent! forget for a moment the phosphorescences of the decaying Church of Rome! Banish whatever sentimentalities may still cling about you from college! Concentrate in one short story a world of tragedy, comedy, irony, and beauty!!! I await your manuscript with impatience.

I'm sorry to hear that you were disappointed about your novel; I should like to see it. And you must write another someday, in any case.

Yours always, Edmund Wilson, Jr.

14. To F. Scott Fitzgerald [Postcard], From Edmund Wilson

August 14, 1919

114 West Twelfth Street, NX

I'm glad you've got a foothold with Scribner's. Don't worry about me: I'm not writing a novel, but I'm writing almost everything else, and getting some of it accepted. I hope your letter isn't a fair sample of your present literary methods: it looks like the attempt of a child of six to write F.P.A.'s [Franklin P. Adams] column. Send along your story, when you get to it.

E.W.

I don't think any of your titles are any good.

John Bishop hasn't arrived yet as far as I know.

15. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

ALS, 4 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

599 Summit Ave
St. Paul, Minn

August 15th [1919]

Dear Bunny:

Delighted to get your letter. I am deep in the throes of a new novel. Which is the best title

(1) The Education of a Personage

(2) The Romantic Egotist

(3) This Side of Paradise

I am sending it to Scribner—They liked my first one. Am enclosing two letters from them that migh t’amuse you. Please return them.

I have just the story for your book *. Its not written yet. An American girl falls in love with an officier Francais at a Southern camp.

Since I last saw you I’ve tried to get married + then tried to drink myself to death but foiled, as have been so many good men, by the sex and the state I have returned to literature

Have sold three or four cheap stories to Amurican magazines.

Will start on story for you about 25th d’Auout (as the French say or do not say), (which is about 10 days off)

I am ashamed to say that my Catholoscism is scarcely more than a memory—no that’s wrong its more than that; at any rate I go not to the church nor mumble stray nothings over chrystaline beads.

May be in N’York in Sept or early Oct.

Is John Bishop in hoc terrain?

Remember me to Larry Noyes. I’m afraid he’s very much off me. I don’t think he’s seen me sober for many years.

For god’s sake Bunny write a novel + don’t waste your time editing collections. It’ll get to be a habit.

That sounds crass + discordant but you know what I mean.

Yours in the Holder ** group
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

* Wilson was trying to get together a collection of realistic stories about the war.

** Holder Hall, Princeton University dormitory.

16. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

[Probably September, 1919]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

Scribners has accepted my book for publication late in the winter. You'll call it sensational but it really is neither sentimental nor trashy.

I'll probably be East in November and I'll call you up or come to see you or something. Haven't had time to hit a story for you yet. Better not count on me as the w. of i. or the E.S. are rather dry.

Yrs. faithfully, Francis S. Fitzgerald

17. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

November 21, 1919

114 West Twelfth Street, N.Y.

Dear Fitz: I have just read your novel with more delight than I can well tell you.* It ought to be a classic in a class with The Young Visiters.** Amory Blaine should rank with Mr. Salteena. It sounds like an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end. I wish you hadn't chosen such bad masters as Mackenzie and the later Wells: your hero is an unreal imitation of Michael Fane, who was himself unreal and who was last seen in the role of the veriest cardboard best-seller hero being nursed back to life in the Balkans. Almost the only things of value to be learned from the Michael Fane books are pretty writing and clever dialogue and with both of these you have done very well. The descriptions in places are very nicely done and so is some of the college dialogue, which really catches the Princeton tone, though your hero as an intellectual is a fake of the first water and I read his views on art, politics, religion, and society with more riotous mirth than I should care to have you know. You handicap your story, for one thing, by making your hero go to the war and then completely leaving the war out. If you thought you couldn't deal with his military experiences, you shouldn't have had him go abroad at all. You make him do a lot of other things that the real Amory never did, such as getting on The Prince and playing on the football team, and thereby you produce an incredible monster, half romantic hero and half F. Scott Fitzgerald. This, of course, may be more evident to me than it would be to some reader who didn't know you, but I really think you should cultivate detachment and not allow yourself to drift into a state of mind where, as in the latter part of the book, you make Amory the hero of a series of dramatic encounters with all the naive and romantic gusto of a small boy imagining himself as a brave hunter of Indians. The love affairs seem to me the soundest part of the book as fiction; the ones with Isabelle and Rosalind are the realest. I was, of course, infinitely entertained by the Princeton part: but you put in some very dubious things—the party at Asbury Park, for example, where they beat their way through the restaurants. If you tell me that you have seen this happen, I point to the incident in which the Burne brothers, who are presumably not supposed to he cads, are made to play an outrageous and impossible practical joke on the girl who comes down for the game. I was also very much shocked when poor old John Bishop's hair stands up on end at beholding the Devil.

I don't want to bludgeon you too brutally, however, for I think that some of the poems and descriptions are really exceedingly good. It would all be better if you would tighten up your artistic conscience and pay a little more attention to form. Il faut faire quelque chose de vraiment beau, vous savez! something which the world will not willingly let die! I feel called upon to give you this advice because I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without much difficulty.

The only first-rate novel recently produced in this genre is James Joyce's hook and that is one of the best things in English because of its rigorous form and selection and its polished style and because the protagonist is presented with complete detachment, with the ugly sides of his life as accurately depicted as the inspired and beautiful ones. But what about the ugly and mean features of Amory's life! You make some feeble attempts to account for them in the beginning, but on the whole your hero is a kind of young god moving among demi-gods; the Amory I hear about in the book is not the Amory I knew at Princeton, nor at all like any genuine human being I ever saw. Well, I concede that it is much better to imagine even a more or less brummagem god and strike off from him a few authentic gleams of poetry and romance than to put together a perfectly convincing and mediocre man who never conveys to the reader a single thrill of the wonder of life, like Beresford's Jacob Stahl and a lot of other current heroes, but I do think the most telling poetry and romance may be achieved by keeping close to life and not making Scott Fitzgerald a sort of super-Michael Fane. Cultivate a universal irony and do read something other than contemporary British novelists: this history of a young man stuff has been run into the ground and has always seemed to me a bum art form, anyway, at least when, as in Beresford's or Mackenzie's case, it consists of dumping all one's youthful impressions in the reader's lap, with a profound air of importance. You do the same thing: you tell the reader all sorts of stuff which has no tearing on your story and no other interest—that detail about how Amory's uncle gave him a cap, etc.

I really like the hook, though; I enjoyed it enormously, and I shouldn't wonder if a good many other people would enjoy it, too. You have a knack of writing readably which is a great asset, Your style, by the way, has become much sounder than it used to be. Well, I hope to see you here soon. Thanks for the novel.

Yours always, Edmund Wilson, Jr.

Notes:

* This Side of Paradise.

** A novel by Daisy Ashford, purporting to be written by a pre-adolescent English girl.

18. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald

18 December 1919

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

Dear Scott,

The most poetic thing in the novel is the Title—couldn't be better.

The most original character is Eleanor.

The best incident is the dramatic interlude at Alec's house.

The most realistic bit is the drunk.

The most amusing character is Tanaduke.

The best poem is “When Vanity kissed Vanity”

The cleverest poem is from Boston Bards and Hearst Reviewers.

The best-written part is the last.

The most unconvincing character is Amory's mother.

“ ” ” incident is that with Ferrenby's father.

But it's damn good, brilliant in places, and sins chiefly through exuberance and lack of development.

I have been offered a job to go back to Europe for a year at $2800, but shan't take it if Scribner's comes through, and I think they will. I wish I could go up and just write but I am too poor. And I can't write here. Alec¹ and I are going to live together. I am throwing out several poems a day and have started a story. The idea is a knock-out, but I doubt my ability to handle it. I enclose two poems, for your criticism.

When are you to be married? When are you coming to New York?

John

Notes:

¹ Alexander McKaig, Princeton '17.

19. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Inscription in This Side of Paradise (published on April 20, 1920)

University of Tulsa Library, New York City

This “Exquisite burlesque of Compton McKenzie with the pastiche of Wells at the end” is presented as toll to Bunny Wilson

F. Scott Fitzgerald
March 20th, 1920

Notes:

Fitzgerald's description of This Side of Paradise is quoted from Wilson's letter.

20. To Edmund Wilson

ALS, 1 p., Yale Univercity, New York City

December 1920

Chere Bunnay
Ici est la ms (le parte remainant)
Scincserlely,
Francois Don Scotus Fitz

Family tree of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

...

Notes:

The manuscript enclosed was either "This Is a Magazine" or "Jemina, The Mountain Girl" (both were published in Vanity Fair, Dec'20 or Jan'21, corresp.)

21. To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

April 28, 1920

Vanity Fair

Dear Mr. Gauss: Fitz is in town, at the Hotel Commodore. I have just had a telephone conversation with him. He said that he had left Princeton in disgrace and was ashamed to go back, but when I told him we wanted him for the dinner, he said that he would like to go down with John [Peale Bishop] and me and come back immediately afterwards. I hounded him about speaking and he protested that he couldn't speak except when under the influence and that he didn't want to get drunk on this occasion. I think he will he fairly tame, because he is going to leave Zelda at the Commodore; I trust that she will seize the opportunity to run away with the elevator boy or something.

I have written to Kean Wallis, but not to Teek Whipple; I understood that the committee would notify him. That's right, isn't it? John Bishop says he will speak. Besides him and Fitz, Stanley Dell, Townsend Martin, and Hardwick Nevin are surely coming,

Yours always, EW

22. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

February 19, 1921

Vanity Fair

… I am editing the MS of Fitz's new novel* and, though I thought it was lather silly at first, I find it developing a genuine emotional power which he has scarcely displayed before. I haven't finished it yet, though, so can't tell definitely. It is all about him and Zelda…

Notes:

* The Beautiful and Damned

23. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

February 1921

New York City

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence

Dear Bunny:

The kind of critisism¹ I'd like more than anything else—if you find you have the time, would be; par example

P. 10x I find this page rotten

P. 10y Dull! Cut!

P. 10z Good! enlarge!

P. 10a Invert sentence I have marked (in pencil!)

P. 10b unconvincing!

P. 10c Confused!

***

Ha-ha!

***

I'm glad you're going to the New Republic. It always seemed undignified for you to be on Vanity Fair.

F. Scott Fitz—

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald had probably given Wilson a working draft of The Beautiful and Damned.

24. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

March 1, 1921

The New Republic

… Fitz's new novel, which I have been editing, is admirable, much the best thing he has done; it is all about his married life …

25. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

July 1921

ALS, 6 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull.

Hotel Cecil stationery. London

Dear Bunny:

Of course I’m wild with jealousy! Do you think you can indecently parade this obscene success before my envious desposition, with equanaminity, you are mistaken.

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre + Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons + Celts to enter. France made me sick. It’s silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think its a shame that England + America didn’t let Germany conquor Europe. Its the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial + racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern frenchman as he is above the negro. Even in art! Italy has no one. When Antole France dies French literature will be a silly jealous rehashing of technical quarrels. They’re thru + done. You may have spoken in jest about N.Y. as the capitol of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money + all the refinements of aesthetescism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.

Alec sent me your article. I read it half a dozen times and think it is magnificent. I can’t tell you how I hate you. I don’t hate Don Stuart half as much (tho I find that I am suddenly + curiously irritated by him) because I don’t really dread him. But you! Keep out of my sight. I want no more of your articles!

Enclosed is 2 francs with which you will please find a french slave to make me a typed copy of your letter from Mencken. Send here at once, if it please you. I will destroy it on reading it. Please! I’d do as much for you. I haven’t gotten hold of a Bookman.

Paradise is out here. Of 20 reviews about half are mildly favorable, a quarter of them imply that I’ve read “Sinister Street once too often” + the other five (including the Times) damn it summarily as artificial. I doubt if it sells 1,500 copies.

Menckens 1st series of Predjudices is attracting wide attention here. Wonderful review in the Times.

I’m delighted to hear about The Undertaker. Alec wrote describing how John “goes to see Mrs. Knopf and rubs himself against her passionately hoping for early fall publication.” Edna has no doubt told you how we scoured Paris for you. Idiot! The American Express mail dept has my adress. Why didn’t you register. We came back to Paris especially to see you. Needless to say our idea of a year in Italy was well shattered + we sail for America on the 9th + thence to The “Sahara of Bozart” (Montgomery) for life.

With envious curses + hopes of an immediate responce

F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of Flappers +
Philosophers [juvenile])

Notes:

Wilson’s New Republic article on Mencken, which Mencken had commended.

Alexander McKaig, Princeton ’17.

The Undertaker’s Garland (1922), a collection of verse and prose by Wilson and Bishop.

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

26. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

June 22, 1921

Mont-Thabor Hotel, Paris

Dear Fitz: I find no word from you at the American Express (though I got a postcard in America before I left), so am writing to find out where you arc, etc. I arrived in Paris the day before yesterday and am not yet settled, so please write to me c/o Credit Commercial de France, 22 Boulevard des Capucines. I'm very anxious to see you, when possible. If you are in Italy, I expect to go there sometime in August.

I may say in closing that the two great literary successes of the States since your departure are Don Stewart and myself. The first installment of Don Stewart's History arrived with a crash, Prodigious praise from F.P.A., Broun, Cabell, etc.—and he was finally summoned to the penetralia of The Smart Set and requested to write them an article on Yale. And as for myself, my Mencken article, completely rewritten from the version you saw, enabled me to leave The New Republic in an aurora borealis of glory. It brought me not only a letter from the Prophet himself—from the enthusiasm of which I am still recovering—but also complimentary communications from Van Wyck Brooks and Lawrence Gilman. The Globe wrote an editorial on it; one unknown person sent me an enormously long letter to prove that I was all wrong. I am doing all this boasting on behalf of Dr. Stewart and myself, frankly, to make you jealous. As you know, I have always regarded your great capacity for envy as the one unfortunate blemish in an otherwise consummately admirable character and I hope to cure you, as G. B. Shaw describes intelligent men, in Back to Methuselah, being cured of false ideas, by homeopathic doses of the disease. (This is both idiotic and dull, I'm afraid, but it's very late and I'm exhausted.)

By the way, Mencken summoned me to the sacred chamber of The Smart Set the day you sailed, to talk to me about The Undertaker's Garland, and I greatly astounded Nathan by telling him that you were going abroad. He seemed a little crestfallen and I think he was sorry that you should have got off without patching up your quarrel. He told me that he was going to Europe himself and got your address from me, saying that he was going to look you up.

Scribner's passed The Undertaker up, with kind and noncommittal words. So we think we'll fall back on Knopf in the fall, Let me hear from you.

Yours for the shifting of the world's capital of culture from Paris to New York, E.W.

27. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

July 5, 1921

16 rue du Four, Paris

Dear Scott: It was terrible that we didn't meet, I never knew you had been here until John Wyeth told me—I think, the day you left. But you should have left a note at the American Express. I called there, expecting something from you.

Your reaction to the Continent is only what most Americans go through when they come over for the first time as late in life as you. It is due, I suppose, first, to the fact that they can't understand the language and, consequently, assume both that there is nothing doing and that there is something inherently hateful about a people who, not being able to make themselves understood, present such a blank facade to a foreigner, and second, to the fact that, having been a part of one civilization all their lives, it is difficult for them to adjust themselves to another, whether superior or inferior, as it is for any other kind of animal to learn to live in a different environment. The lower animals frequently die, when transplanted; Fitzgerald denounces European civilization and returns at once to God's country. The truth is that you are so saturated with twentieth-century America, bad as well as good—you are so used to hotels, plumbing, drugstores, aesthetic ideals, and vast commercial prosperity of the country—that you can't appreciate those institutions of France, for example, which are really superior to American ones. If you had only given it a chance to sink in! I wish that I could have seen you and tried to induct you a little into the amenities of France. Paris seems to me an ideal place to live: it combines all the attractions and conveniences of a large city with all the freedom, beauty, and regard for the arts and pleasures of a place like Princeton. I find myself more contented and at ease here than anywhere else I know. Take my advice, cancel your passage and come to Paris for the summer! Settle down and learn French and apply a little French leisure and measure to that restless and jumpy nervous system. It would be a service to American letters: your novels would never be the same afterwards. That's one reason I came to France, by the way: in America I feel so superior and culturally sophisticated in comparison to the rest of the intellectual and artistic life of the country that I am in danger of regarding my present attainments as an absolute standard and am obliged to save my soul by emigrating into a country which humiliates me intellectually and artistically by surrounding me with a solid perfection of a standard arrived at by way of Racine, Moliere, La Bruyere, Pascal, Voltaire, Vigny, Renan, Taine, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Anatole France. I don't mean to say, of course, that I can actually do better work than anybody else in America; I simply mean that I feel as if I had higher critical standards and that, since in America all standards are let down, I am afraid mine will drop, too; it is too easy to be a highbrow or an artist in America these days; every American savant and artist should beware of falling a victim to the ease with which a traditionless and half-educated public (I mean the growing public for really good stuff) can be impressed, delighted, and satisfied; the Messrs. Mencken, Nathan, Cabell, Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, Dell, Lippmann, Rosenfeld, Fitzgerald, etc., etc., should all beware of this; let them remember that, like John Stuart Mill, they all owe a good deal of their eminence “to the flatness of the surrounding country”! I do think seriously that there is a great hope for New York as a cultural center; it seems to me that there is a lot doing intellectually in America just now—America seems to be actually beginning to express herself in something like an idiom of her own. But, believe me, she has a long way to go. The commercialism and industrialism, with no older and more civilized civilization behind except one layer of eighteenth-century civilization on the East Coast, impose a terrific handicap upon any other sort of endeavor: the intellectual and aesthetic manifestations have to crowd their way up and out from between the crevices left by the factories, the office buildings, the apartment houses, and the banks; the country was simply not built for them and, if they escape with their lives, they can thank God, but would better not think they are too percent elect, attired in authentic and untarnished vestments of light, because they have obviously been stunted and deformed at birth and afterwards greatly battered and contaminated in their struggle to get out. Cabell seems to me a great instance of this: it is not the fact that he is a first-rate writer (I don't think, on the whole, that he is) which has won him the first place in public (enlightened public) estimation; it is the fact that he makes serious artistic pretensions and has labored long and conscientiously (and not altogether without success) to make them good. We haven't any Anatole France, or any of the classic literature which made Anatole France possible; consequently, Cabell looks good to us.

When I began this letter I intended to write only a page, but your strictures upon poor old France demanded a complete explanation of practically everything from the beginning of the world. I don't hope to persuade you to stay in Europe and I suppose you haven't time to come back to France. It's a great pity. (Have you ever tried the Paris-London airline, by the way? I think I shall, if I go to England.)

Mencken's letter went somewhat as follows (I haven't it with me):

“Dear Mr. Wilson: It would be needless to thank you. No one has ever done me before on so lavish a scale, or with so persuasive an eloquence. A little more and you would have persuaded even me. But what engages me more particularly as a practical critic is the critical penetration of the second half of your article. Here, I think, you have told the truth. The beer cellar, these days, has become as impossible as the ivory tower. One is irresistibly impelled to rush out and crack a head or two—that is, to do something or other for the sake of common decency. God knows what can be done. But, at any rate, it is easier to do with such a fellow as you in the grandstand.

“You must come down to Baltimore sometime. I pledge you in a large Humpen of malt. Yours sincerely, H. L. Mencken.”

I am sending you The Bookman: I happen to have a copy.

Yours always,
E.W.

28. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

July 3, 1921

Paris

… The Fltzgeralds have recently been here and tried to get hold of me, but, to my infinite regret, couldn't. I didn't know about it until after they had gone back to London. It seems they hate Europe and are planning to go back to America almost immediately. The story is that they were put out of a hotel because Zelda insisted upon tying the elevator—one of those little half-ass affairs that you run yourself—to the floor where she was living so that she would be sure to have it on hand when she had finished dressing for dinner…

29. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

August 16, 1921

Haslemere, Surrey, England

… The Fitzgeralds, as you perhaps know, came to Europe last May on the $7,000 which Fitz got for his new novel from The Metropolitan, The astonishing (though, I suppose, natural) thing was that they hated Europe, especially the Continent, and started back home after staying not much more than a month. They had apparently become so accustomed to the luxurious appointment of the Ritz and the Plaza and the jazz of American life that Europe seemed to them too tame and too primitive to he taken seriously. I had a violent letter from Fitz in which he declared that the modern American was as far superior to the modern Frenchman as the modern Frenchman was superior to the Negro …

30. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked November 25, 1921

ALS, 5pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

626 Goodrich Ave.

St. Paul, Minn.

Dear Bunny—

Thank you for your congratulations. * I’m glad the damn thing’s over. Zelda came through without a scratch + I have awarded her the croix-deguerre with palm. Speaking of France, the great general with the suggestive name is in town today.

I agree with you about Mencken—Weaver + Dell are both something awful. I like some of John’s critisism but Christ! he is utterly dishonest. Why does he tell us how rotten he thinks Mooncalf is and then give it a “polite bow” in his column. Likewise he told me personally that my “book just missed being a great book” + how I was the most hopeful ect ect + then damned me with faint praise in two papers six months before I’m published. I am sat with a condescending bow “halfway between the posts of Compton Mckenzie and Booth Tarkington.” So much for that!

I have almost completely rewritten my book. ** Do you remember you told me that in my midnight symposium scene I had sort of set the stage for a play that never came off—in other words when they all began to talk none of them had anything important to say. I’ve interpolated some recent ideas of my own and (possibly) of others. See enclosure at end of letter. ***

Having desposed of myself I turn to you. I am glad you + Ted Paramore are together. I was never crazy over the oboist nor the accepter of invitations and I imagine they must have been small consolation to live with. I like Ted immensely. He is a little too much the successful Eli to live comfortably in his mind’s bed-chamber but I like him immensely.

What in hell does this mean? My controll must have dictated it. His name is Mr. Ikki and he is an Alaskan orange-grower.

Nathan and me have become reconciled by letter. If the baby is ugly she can retire into the shelter of her full name Frances Scott.

I hear strange stories about you and your private life. Are they all true? What are you going to do? Free lance? I’m delighted about the undertaker’s garland. Why not have a preface by that famous undertaker in New York. Say justa blurb on the cover. He might do it if he had a sense of humor

St. Paul is dull as hell. Have written two good short stories + three cheap ones.

I liked Three Soldiers immensely + reviewed it for the St. Paul Daily News. I am tired of modern novels + have just finished Paine’s biography of Clemens. It’s excellent. Do let me see if if you do me for the Bookman. Isn’t The Triumph of the Egg a wonderful title. I liked both John’s + Don’s articles in Smart Set. I am lonesome for N.Y. May get there next fall + may go to England to live. Yours in this hell-hole of life & time,
the world.
F Scott Fitz—

Notes:

* On the birth of the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie.

** The Beautiful and Damned.

*** These enclosures included the greater part of Maury Noble's monologue in the chapter called “Symposium.”

John V. A. Weaver, poet and reviewer; Floyd Dell, novelist best known for Moon-Calf (1920).

E. E. Paramore, friend of Wilson, and, later, Fitzgerald’s collaborator on Three Comrades.

George Jean Nathan, co-editor with Mencken of The Smart Set; he was the model for Maury Noble in The Beautiful and Damned.

1921 novel by John Dos Passos.

Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. (1912), by Albert Bigelow Paine.

1921 story collection by Sherwood Anderson.

Bishop and Stewart.

31. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

626 Goodrich Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

[Postmarked January 24, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

Farrar tells a man here that I'm to be in the March “Literary Spotlight.” ¹ I deduce that this is your doing. My curiosity is at fever heat—for God's sake send me a copy immediately.

Have you read Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check?

Have you seen Hergesheimer's movie Tol'able David?

Both are excellent. I have written two wonderful stories and get letters of praise from six editors with the addenda that “our readers, however, would be offended.” Very discouraging. Also discouraging that Knopf has put off the Garland till fall. I enjoyed your da-daist article in Vanity Fair—also the free advertising Bishop gave us. Zelda says the picture of you is “beautiful and bloodless.”

I am bored as hell out here. The baby is well—we dazzle her exquisite eyes with gold pieces in the hopes that she'll marry a millionaire. We'll be East for ten days early in March.

I have heard vague and unfathomable stories about your private life —not that you have become a pervert or anything—romantic stories. I wish to God you were not so reticent!

What are you doing? I was tremendously interested by all the data in your last letter. I am dying of a sort of emotional anemia like the lady in Pound's poem. The Briary Bush is stinko. Cytherea is Hergesheimer's best but it's not quite.

Yours, John Grier Hibben ²

Notes:

¹A series of portraits of contemporary writers published in The Bookman.

² John Grier Hibben, then president of Princeton.

32. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

January 1922

ALS, 7 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

626 Goodrich Ave.
St. Paul, Minn

Dear Bunny—

Needless to say I have never read anything with quite the uncanny fascination with which I read your article.¹ It is, of course, the only intelligible and intelligent thing of any length which has been written about me and my stuff—and like everything you write it seems to me pretty generally true. I am guilty of its every stricture and I take an extraordinary delight in its considered approbation. I don't see how I could possibly be offended at anything in it—on the contrary it pleases me more to be compared to “standards out of time,” than to merely the usual scapegoats of contemporary criticism. Of course I'm going to carp at it a little but merely to conform to convention. I like it, I think it's an unprejudiced diagnosis and I am considerably in your debt for the interest which impelled you to write it.

Now as to the liquor thing—it's true, but nevertheless I'm going to ask you take it out. It leaves a loophole through which I can be attacked and discredited by every moralist who reads the article. Wasn't it Bernard Shaw who said that you've either got to be conventional in your work or in your private life or get into trouble? Anyway the legend about my liquoring is terribly widespread and this thing would hurt me more than you could imagine—both in my contact with the people with whom I'm thrown—relatives and respectable friends— and, what is much more important, financially.

So I'm asking you to cut.

1. “when sober” on page one. I have indicated it. If you want to substitute “when not unduly celebrating” or some innuendo no more definite than that, all right.

2. From “This quotation indicates …” to “… sets down the facts” would be awfully bad for me. I'd much rather have you cut it or at least leave out the personal implication if you must indicate that my characters drink. As a matter of fact I have never written a line of any kind while I was under the glow of so much as a single cocktail and tho my parties have been many it's been their spectacularity rather than their frequency which has built up the usual “dope-fiend” story. Judge and Mrs. Sayre would be crazy! And they never miss The Bookman.

Now your three influences, St. Paul, Irish (incidentally, though it doesn't matter, I'm not Irish on Father's side—that's where Francis Scott Key comes in) and liquor are all important I grant. But I feel less hesitancy asking you to remove the liquor because your catalogue is not complete anyhow—the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.

Both Zelda and I roared over the Anthony-Maury incident. You've improved mine (which was to have Muriel go blind) by 100%—we were utterly convulsed.

But Bunny, and this I hate to ask you, please take out the soldier incident. I am afraid of it. It will not only utterly spoil the effect of the incident in the book but will give rise to the most unpleasant series of events imaginable. Ever since Three Soldiers, The New York Times has been itching for a chance to get at the critics of the war. If they got hold of this I would be assailed with the most violent vituperation in the press of the entire country (and you know what the press can do, how they can present an incident to make a man upholding an unpopular cause into the likeness of a monster—vide Upton Sinclair). And, by God, they would! Besides the incident is not correct. I didn't apologize. I told the Colonel about it very proudly. I wasn't sorry for months afterwards and then it was only a novelist's remorse.

So for God's sake cut that paragraph. I'd be wild if it appeared! And it would without doubt do me serious harm.

I note from the quotation from “Head and Shoulders” and from reference to “Bernice” that you have plowed through Flappers for which conscientious labor I thank you. When the strain has abated I will send you two exquisite stories in what Professor Lemuel Ozuk in his definitive biography will call my “second” or “neo-flapper” manner.

But one more carp before I close. Gloria and Anthony are representative. They are two of the great army of the rootless who float around New York. There must be thousands. Still, I didn't bring it out.

With these two cuts, Bunny, the article ought to be in my favor. At any rate I enjoyed it enormously and shall try to reciprocate in some way on The Undertaker's Garland though I doubt whether you'd trust it to my palsied hands for review. Don't change the Irish thing—it's much better as it is—besides the quotation hints at the whiskey motif.

Forever,
Benjamin Disraeli

I am consoled for asking you to cut the soldier and alcoholic paragraphs by the fact that if you hadn't known me you couldn't or wouldn't have put them in. They have a critical value but are really personal gossip.

I'm glad about the novelette in Smart Set. I am about to send them one. I am writing a comedy—or a burlesque or something. The “romantic stories” about you are none of my business. They will keep until I see you.

Hersesassery—Quelque mot!

How do you like echolalia for “meaningless chatter?”

Glad you like the title motto— Zelda sends best— Remember me to Ted.¹ Did he say I was “old woman with jewel?”

Notes:

¹ This letter and the letter after it refer to Wilson's essay, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in the March, 1922, Bookman (reprinted in Wilson's collection, The Shores of Light).

¹ Ted Paramore. Actually it was Edna Millay who had said that to meet Fitzgerald was to think of a stupid old woman with whom someone had left a diamond (his talent), and Wilson had quoted the remark at the beginning of his Bookman essay.

Wilson’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Bookman (March 1922).

Wilson’s burlesque of the final meeting of Anthony Patch and Maury Noble reads: “It seemed to Anthony that Maury’s eyes had a fixed glassy stare; his legs moved stiffly as he walked and when he spoke his voice had no life in it. When Anthony came nearer, he saw that Maury was dead!”

Unidentified incident during Fitzgerald’s army service.

Sinclair, whose novels and nonfiction books treated controversial subjects, was frequently attacked in the press.

Edna St. Vincent Millay had compared Fitzgerald to a stupid old woman with whom someone had left a diamond.

33. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

ALS, 2 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

626 Goodrich Ave, St. Paul, Minn

Feb 6th 1921 [1922]

Dear Bunny—

I read your letter in a chastened mood. My whole point was that you read the book a long time ago in its informal condition, before its final revision and before your own critisisms had strained out some of the broken cork—that, therefore, while as a critic seeing the book for the first time you would, of course, have to speak the truth whether it hurt me financially or not, still that this case was somewhat different and that a pre-publication review which contained private information destined (in my opinion) to hurt the sale of my book, was something of which I had a legitimate right to complain. My specification of “financial” injury is simply a private remark to you—it would be absurd for me to pretend to be indifferent to money, and very few men with a family they care for can be. Besides, you know that in these two novels I have not suppressed anything with the idea of making money by the suppression but I think I am quite justified in asking you to suppress a detail of my private life—and it seems to me that a financial reason is as good as any, rather better in fact, according to Samuel Butler, than to spare my family.

I had forgotten, as a matter of fact, that those Spotlight things are supposed to be personal. Please don’t think that I minded the Maury thing. I was simply congratulating you on inventing a more witty parody than I thought I had made. Still I was tight that night and may have said it. The actual quotation from my first draft is quite correct—I didn’t say it wasn’t.

This is a quibbling letter and I hope it doesn’t sound ill natured. It isn’t. I simply felt that your letter put me in a bad light and I hasten to explain my objections.

As a matter of fact I am immensely grateful to you for the article and tried to tell you so in my letter. Despite the fact that I am not quite insane about “What Maisie Knew” as you prophecied I would be I admire your judgements in almost every way more than those of anyone else I know, and I value your opinion on my stuff. In your first letter you said yourself that it was O.K. to object to the booze thing and your quarrel with me seems to be that I gave you a perfectly unaffected and honest answer when I told you I feared financial injury.

As you have a 1st edition of the book I won’t send you another but will give it my invaluable autograph when I reach New York. I had intended that Perkins should send me the novel to autograph first.

I think its too bad that you have gone to all this trouble over the article and I’m afraid I have put you to it. Anyway its a complicated subject + I can excuse myself better when I see you sometime next month. But I feel quite sure that if Mencken in doing a Literary Spotlight on Drieser had remarked in dead earnest that Drieser’s having four wives had had considerable influence on his work, Drieser would have raised a slight howl. And if he had remarked that Drieser was really the hero of all the seductions mentioned in The Titan I think Drieser would have torn his hair—and complained, at least, that he wanted to save such data for his privately printed editions.

As Ever

F. Scott Fitz-Hardy

Notes:

1897 novel by Henry James.

Wilson’s published Bookman article did not mention Fitzgerald’s drinking.

34. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

February 1922

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

St. Paul, Minnesota
626 Goodrich Ave

Dear John:

I’ll tell you frankly what I’d rather you’d do. Tell specifically what you like about the book + don’t—the characters—Anthony, Gloria, Adam Patch, Maury, Bloeckman, Muriel Dick, Rachael, Tana ect ect ect. Exactly whether they’re good or bad, convincing or not. What you think of the style, too ornate (if so quote) good (also quote) rotten (also quote). What emotion (if any) the book gave you. What you think of its humor. What you think of its ideas. If ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them. Is it boring or interesting. How interesting. What recent American books are more so. If you think my “Flash Back in Paradise” in Chap I is like the elevated moments of D. W. Griffith say so. Also do you think its imitative and of whom. What I’m angling for is a specific definate review. I’m tickled both that they’ve asked for such a lengthy thing and that your going to do. You cannot hurt my feelings about the book—tho I did resent in your Baltimore article being definately limited at 25 years old to a place between Mckenzie who wrote 2 1/2 good (but not wonderful) novels + then died—and Tarkington who if he has a great talent has the mind of a school boy. I mean, at my age they’d done nothing.

As I say I’m delighted that you’re going to do it and as you wrote asking me to suggest a general mode of attack I am telling you frankly what I would like. I’m so afraid of all the reviews being general + I devoted so much more care myself to the detail of the book than I did to thinking out the general sceme that I would appreciate a detailed review. If it is to be that length article it could scarcely be all general anyway

I’m awfully sorry you’ve had the flue. We arrive east on the 9th. I enjoy your book page in Vanity Fair and think it is excellent—

The baby is beautiful.

As Ever
Scott

Notes:

Bishop reviewed The Beautiful and Damned in the March 5, 1922 New York Herald.

Bishop had reviewed the serialization in the Baltimore Evening Sun (October 8, 1921).

35. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

626 Goodrich Avenue St. Paul, Minnesota

[Spring, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

From your silence I deduce that either you decided that the play ¹ was not in shape to offer to the Guild or that they refused it.

I have now finished the revision. I am forwarding one copy to Harris and, if you think the Guild would be interested, will forward them the other. Your play should be well along by now. Could you manage to send me a carbon?

I'm working like a dog on some movies at present. I was sorry our meetings in New York were so fragmentary. My original plan was to contrive to have long discourses with you but that interminable party began and I couldn't seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober. In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.

My compliments to Mary Blair, Ted Paramore and whomsoever else of the elect may cross your path.

We have no plans for the summer.

Scott Fitz-----

Notes:

¹ The Vegetable.

36. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

March 25, 1922

777 Lexington Avenue, N.Y.

… But with the resurgence of spring, the arrival in town of the Fitzgeralds…

… In regard to the second of these events, we find them both somewhat changed—particularly Zelda, who has become matronly and rather fat (about which she is very sensitive) and is offended by the cynical indifference of Fitz to the baby; much of her old jazz has evaporated; she seems quite a different person from when he first married her and, as she becomes more mellowed, I like her better. As for him, he looks like John Barrymore on the brink of the grave—chiefly, I guess, because he has just been sick—but also, somehow, more intelligent than he used to; his soul seems to have been somewhat scarified by his trip to Europe combined with the coming of the baby—two events which seem to have gone ill together. He has written a comedy, which he is trying to sell, and which he shouldn't have any difficulty in selling, I should think, from the fragments of it I have read—it is very funny.* He arrived this morning in a hansom, after an all-night party of some kind, and wanted to take me for a drive in the park. …

Notes:

* The Vegetable.

37. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

February/March 1922

St. Paul, Minnesota

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

Dear Bunny

The interpolated Harlequin episode is a scream—Zelda + I laughed ourselve's sick over it. I am charmed with the whole review.¹ I am in terror as to the book's success. We reach N.Y. on the 9th—will be probably at the Plaza.

Scott F

Notes:

¹ “The Literary Spotlight.”

38. [Fragment] To H. L. Mencken, From Edmund Wilson

May 12, 1922

777 Lexington Avenue, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Mencken: I haven't been able to think of any really good subject for the kind of article you want. … But how would you feel about an imaginary dialogue?*—say between Van Wyck Brooks and Scott Fitzgerald on the joylessness and lack of vitality in American life. It has just struck me as ironic that while Fitz and Zelda were reveling nude in the orgies of Westport (summer before last), Brooks in the same town, probably without ever knowing they were there, should have been grinding out his sober plaint against the sterile sobriety of the country…

Notes:

* Discordant Encounters.

39. From H. L. Mencken To Edmund Wilson

[OFP] Letters of H. L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Knopf, 1961)

The Smart Set 25 West 45th Street New York

May 17, 1922

Dear Mr. Wilson:

I note that your letter is dated May the 12th. It seems to have been touring the various postoffice sub-stations for four days.

I doubt that a dialogue between Brooks and Fitzgerald would be for us. It would inevitably collide with the somewhat numerous dialogues between Nathan and me that we printed last year. It is possible that the latter may be resumed before the end of the present year. But we’d be delighted to have some short pieces from you. The chances are that they would fit admirably into our new department, “The Nietzschean Follies”.

I don’t know what the Baltimore Sun folks are doing nor what their plans are for covering the Federation of Labor convention. Certainly they’ll cover it in some more or less careful way. I suggest that you write forthwith to J. Edw. Murphy, managing editor of the Evening Sun. The stuff that you have done for the Sun has been printed in the evening edition, and I think that it would be better to deal with Murphy. The only jobs worth having done there involve living in Baltimore, which you told me that you were disinclined to do. Nevertheless it might be possible eventually to evolve something that would avoid this difficulty. Why don't you run down to Baltimore some time and meet the chief functionaries of the Sun? I'll be glad to arrange it at any time convenient for you.

I changed the meaning of the word “jejune” eight or ten years ago. That is to say, I added a new special meaning, to wit, that of youthful feebleness. This new meaning you will find in all of the latest editions of the international dictionaries.

Sincerely yours,
H. L. Mencken

40. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Before 26 May 1922

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

Dear Bunny:

Havn't heard a word from the Theatre Guild. Did you ever give them the play¹

Scott F. 626 Goodrich St Paul.

For God's sake write me some dope on

(1) your play²

(2) undertaker³

(3) Literary Gossip ect ect ect ect

I think I dedicated my next book (Tales of the Jazz Age)⁴ to you, but I have sent it off + I am not sure.⁵

Notes:

¹ The Vegetable was produced in 1923 by Sam H. Harris.

² Possibly The Crime in the Whistler Room (1924).

³ The Undertaker's Garland by Wilson and Bishop (1922).

4 Tales of the Jazz. Age was dedicated to Fitzgerald's mother. The Vegetable was dedicated: to katherine tighe and edmund wilson, jr. who deleted many ABSURDITIES FROM MY FIRST TWO NOVELS I RECOMMEND THE ABSURDITIES SET DOWN here. Miss Tighe was a St. Paul friend of Fitzgerald's.

⁵ Added vertically in the left-hand margin.

41. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

May 26, 1922

777 Lexington Avenue, N.Y.

Dear Scott: I owe you a thousand apologies for not having answered your letters before, but the Theatre Guild has been putting me off from week to week almost ever since I gave them the play* and I have been waiting, thinking always that the next week I'd be able to give you a definite decision. The last date they fixed me was Thursday (yesterday) and when I called them up today they gave me to understand that it was still being read but that they would let me know immediately, etc. They are really, however, considering it seriously: it takes them a long time to decide partly because they have a sort of editorial board, each member of which, apparently, has to read and vote on it.

So far as I am concerned, I think it is one of the best things you ever wrote. I have read only the first version—I didn't take time to read the second because the Theatre Guild insisted that they were in a great hurry about it—so won't criticize it now at length. I thought the millionaire episode, except the first scene, a little weak and the last act too palpably padded. As for the battle scene, it was fine and you made a great mistake in allowing them to kid you into removing it. The Guild thinks so, too, and have expressed disappointment that it isn't in the revised version—so, if they decide to take it, I think you ought to put it back. I should suggest that you make the White House and battle the second act and the millionaire and postman the third; this would do away with the necessity of stalling along at the beginning of the postman scene simply in order to make it into a whole act. As I say, I think that the play as a whole is marvelous—no doubt, the best American comedy ever written. I think you have a much better grasp on your subject than you usually have—you know what end and point you are working for, as isn't always the case with you. If I were writing my Bookman article now, I'd have to do parts of it in a different strain. I think you have a great gift for comic dialogue —even if you never can resist a stupid gag—and should go on writing plays. The Theatre Guild couldn't decide about the play at their meeting for selecting the last play of the season and so—though why nobody knows —fixed upon Arnold Bennett's What the Public Wants, which is now nut running a very successful course. By the way, the great question is, have you read James Joyce's Ulysses} Because if you haven't, the resemblance between the drunken-visions scene in it and your scene in the White House must take its place as one of the great coincidences in literature.

As for gossip, the usual asslapping still goes on. The Undertaker's Garland is nearly done, but, I suppose, will not be out till later. My novelette, that The Smart Set found too obscene for them, will probably be published as a separate book, I dare say that by this time you have heard of John's impending marriage (to Margaret Hutchins, of course), I regard it as more or less of a calamity but I suppose it was inevitable. She will supply him with infinite money and leisure but, I fear, chloroform his intellect in the meantime. They ate going abroad for a year almost immediately (they are to get married. June 17). I think her a prime dumbbell with nothing much to distinguish her but an all too strong will which may lead John around by the balls. A sad, sad business! —unless it should turn out to be a very satisfactory arrangement, We have seen a lot of Dos Passos lately—he is extremely nice; he is writing a novel which, I gather from what he has told me, is about the devitalized gentility of modern Boston; he describes it as “a tragedy of impotence.” Don Stewart has gone to France; I hope he gets a good screw there. Ted and I have written and rewritten the first act of our play and read it to Benchley and Mrs. Parker with more or less sincere enthusiasm on their part. We have only one copy of it or I'd send it to you. By the way, I don't suppose you read my great poem in The Double Dealer. I must send it to you, if you haven't. The Beautiful and Damned has had very interesting reviews—especially Mary Colum's in The Freeman.

If this letter is anything lacking in my usual wit and profundity, it is because I have been in bed most of the week with a combination of tonsillitis, general debility, intestinal disturbances, and malignant melancholia—the last superinduced by having dinner one night with John, his fiancee, and her family. I am faint and full of disgust with the city and think of fleeing to New England for a little country stuff (a desire which visits me only once every five years) and a chance for meditation and prayer.

Convey all my recommendations to Zelda, whose review of The Damned I thought fine and whose thing in The Metropolitan I liked less. Mary [Blair] tells me to tell you that the tickets to The Hairy Ape didn't cost anything and that it is perfectly all right. By the way, what has Hams had to say about your play; have you heard anything further from him? Farewell, farewell … I am growing weaker and weaker (having lived almost exclusively on orange juice and gargle, for the last three days) and, if I do not break off soon, will fall forward unconscious into the typewriter and he ground to atoms by the relentless wheels … Farewell, farewell … If an old man's blessing can profit you anything, take it and fight the good fight … Every word that I write comes straight from the depths of an empty and unsteady stomach—it is written not in common ink hut in my few poor last drops of gastric juice … Farewell … I go, I go to the high cold hills of New England—to that shore where the voice of the sea carries the heart with the urgency of its beat, where my ancestors served the altars of learning and committed murders in the name of God. My stomach is rotted with bad gin, my tonsils are riddled with ulcers, my soul is laid waste with contemplation of my own and. others' sins—not against the Ten Commandments but against Honor, Justice, and Light! … Farewell! I fall like the fair statue of a god eaten out from within by marble maggots. Pray for my soul!

Notes:

* The Vegetable.

42. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked May 30, 1922

ALS, 3 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
HACK WRITER AND PLAGIARIST
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
626 Goodrich Avenue

Dear Bunny:

Your delightful letter, of which I hope you have kept a copy, arrived this a.m. + the Fitzgeralds perused it ferociously, commending especially your hope that Don gets a good screw in France.

I am so discouraged about the play that it has cheered me to know its still under consideration. I thot they’d burned it up.

I think you overestimate the play—tho Act I is a gem. Also I think you’re wrong about the soldier scene. Zelda, Geo. Nathan, Miller, Townsend and I think John all thot it should come out. Still I should not object to it being reinserted. Do you like my letterhead? I have jazzed up the millionaire scene in the revised version. I have not read Ulysses but I’m wild to—especially now that you mention some coincidence. Do you know where I can get it at any price? Sorry about your Smart Set novelette. I agree with you that John’s marriage is a calamity—rather—and, having the money, she’ll hold a high hand over him. Still I don’t think he’s happy and it may release him to do more creative work.

I am enormously interested in your play. Send me a copy when you can.

I’d like to meet Dos Passos—God this is a dull letter. I didn’t read your Double Dealer poem tho I heard about it and it seems to have achieved fame. The magazine is unprocurable out here.

We’re going to the country for the summer, but write me here immediately. I wish I could close in a rapsody like yours but the fire is out for the night. Harris sent back the play to Reynolds without comment. If you can think of a title for it jot it down + let me know.

Yield to your country complex. Zelda says how-de-do.

Ever Thine
F Scott F____

Notes:

Printed letterhead.

Wilson had submitted Fitzgerald’s play to the Theatre Guild and to actor/producer Frank Craven. Neither produced the play.

Broadway producer William Harris.

43. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

June 3, 1922

777 Lexington Avenue, N.Y.

Dear Scott: I'm sorry to say that I have just heard from the Theatre Guild to the effect that they have finally decided not to produce the play. There was apparently disagreement about it among the various members. Don't be downhearted, however. Mary Blair wants to take it—with your permission—to Frank Craven and Richard Bennett, both of whom she knows. I should think that you are practically sure of having it produced somehow. In the meantime, if I were you, I should certainly have it published. I am enormously honored to have your new book dedicated to me—if it is. You made an error in commiserating with me about my novelette, which I said was, not was not, going to be published. If Knopf doesn't do it, a Chicago firm has offered to—suggesting one of those editions where sixteen copies of this book have been done into print on hand-woven isinglass and the type shot from a gun—but I am against this.

You can get Ulysses for $2.5 from the Brick Row Book Shop, 19 East 47th Street, N.Y. So far as I know, this is the only place where you can get it, and they have only a few. See my review of it in a forthcoming New Republic. (See also my article on New Jersey in this week's Nation.)

I enclose a picture of John (from the Daily News) which tells the whole sad story in a coup d'oeil. I scarcely know whether I can summon cynicism enough to attend the wedding. Just at present I am about to leave town for New England—where I expect to make a tour of Boston, Concord, and Provincetown, investigating the Transcendentalists and other matters—coming back in time for the Princeton reunion and John's wedding (why don't you come on for these two occasions?). In July I'll probably have to go back on Vanity Fair—for a time, anyway—to take John's place. God help us all!

Your old college friend and sincere admirer,
EW

44. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

St. Paul, Minnesota

[Postmarked June 4, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

You will be looked up by Thomas A. Boyd, a very clever kid who conducts the best book page west of New York, in a newspaper here. I do not ask you to wine or dine him as I personally dislike people sent to me with letters. I do ask you to see him tho and give him half an hour or so of your valuable time. He's quite a friend of mine.

Scott Fitz-----

45. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

June 20, 1922

777 Lexington Avenue, N.Y.

Dear Scott: We have given the play to Frank Craven, who promises to read it within the week, I wish you would write and let me know exactly what you are doing with it apart from this. Is your play broker still trying to do anything with it? Eugene O'Neill, whom I saw up at Provincetown, told me that Nathan had told him that he intended to take it to Hopkins when he had the revised version. Now, has Nathan taken it to Hopkins? O'Neill thinks it would be a good idea to have Hopkins see it and says he will mention it to him. O'Neill, from what Nathan and I have told him, is very enthusiastic about it. He is an extraordinarily attractive fellow, by the way. I find with gratification that he regards Anna Christie as more or less junk and thinks it is a great joke that it won the Pulitzer Prize. His genius seems to be only just becoming properly articulate—in The Hairy Ape.

My tour of New England was a great success: I feel a bigger, better, and more wholesome man for it. I came back only just in time for John's wedding—the most amusing piece of buffoonery of the kind I have ever participated in. John was apparently scared into stupefaction and at the end of the ceremony was found to be standing on the bride's train, so that she couldn't leave the altar. His mother and sister were very skeptical and unreconciled about the whole business and, under the influence of champagne, became very plain-spoken. The bride's father, under the same influence, became amorous and tried to rape Elinor Wylie and Hazel Rascoe. The younger intellectuals formed a ring and danced round and round in the middle of the room to the jazz orchestra.

Well, uphold the Faith! Be strong. Quit you like men. Your friend [Thomas A,] Boyd hasn't turned up, but I'll put myself at his service when he does.

46. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

ALS, 3 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

White Bear Lake, Minnesota

June 25th 1922

Dear Bunny:

Thank you for giving the play to Craven—and again for your interest in it in general. I’m afraid I think you overestimate it—because I have just been fixing up “Mr. Icky” * for my fall book and it does not seem very good to me. I am about to start a revision of the play—also to find a name. I’ll send it to Hopkins next So far it has only been to Miller, Harris + The Theatre Guild. I’d give anything if Craven would play that part. I wrote it, as the text says, with him in mind. I agree with you that Anna Christie was vastly overestimated.

Your description of the wedding amused us violently. I’m writing a Dunciad on the critics to the tune of the Princton faculty song.

Here is one verse.

Whatever Umpty Dumpty damns
His errors sound like epigrams
He tidies up his mental turds
By neat arrangement of the words.

Am going to write another play whatever becomes of this one. The Beautiful + Damned has had a very satisfactory but not inspiring sale. We thought it’d go far beyond Paradise but it hasn’t. It was a dire mistake to serialize it. Three Soldiers and Cytherea took the edge off it by the time it was published.

I wonder if John’s insatiable penis has drunk its fill at last. He probably never left his bed during the trip. Did you like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz or did you read it. Its in my new book anyhow.

What do you think of Rascoe’s page. Its excellent of course compared to The Times or Herald but I think your critisism of his Frank-Harrassment of his conversations hit the mark. There is something faintly repellant in his manner—in writing I mean. Who is this professionally quaint Kenhelm Digby. He is kittenish beyond credibility + I hate his guts. Is it Morley or Benet? I have Ullyses from the Brick Row Bookshop + am starting it. I wish it was layed in America—there is something about middle-class Ireland, that depresses me inordinately—I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked. Expect to go either south
or to New York in October
for the winter.
Ever Thine
F. Scott Fitz.

Notes:

Arthur Hopkins, Broadway producer.

1921 play by Eugene O’Neill.

Alexander Pope’s satirical poem (1728) on literary figures.

1922 novel by Joseph Hergesheimer.

Fitzgerald is punning on Frank Harris, author of self-aggrandizing autobiographical works.

Pseudonym used in The Saturday Review of Literature.

* Wilson had been telling him how funny he thought this burlesque, which first appeared in the Smart Set and was afterwards included in Tales of the Jazz Age.

47. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club White Bear Lake, Minnesota

[Postmarked July 13, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play. So when Craven returns it will you send it to me—or hold on to it, either one?

I read your article on Ulysses, the only criticism yet I could make head or tail of. Also your article on Byron in the Tribune. You are an incomparable egg and I wish I could see you. Life is damn dull.

In God's name,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

48. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

July 31, 1922

Vanity Fair

Dear Scott: Craven sent back the play: he has written one for himself; and Winthrop Ames also has rejected it with soft words. Just now a man named Felton Elkins, who is very rich and has just started in on the producing business, has it; I am going to have lunch with him tomorrow and I understand he has read it and likes it, so will leave this letter open and add whatever may be of interest tomorrow. Tyler (producer of the Kaufman—Connelly comedies), Augustin Duncan (brother of Isadora and an excellent actor and director, who has just assumed the direction of the new Equity Players—what promises to be a very important enterprise), and Brock Pemberton (the young Algonquin Belasco who put over Miss Lulu Beit) have all expressed a desire to see the play: but do you want me to show them the present text or to send it back to you, after I get it from Elkiris tomorrow, for the changes you have concocted—or will you send me a new copy of the second act? Also, what, if anything, has Hopkins done about it? I saw Helen Westley some time ago and she told me that she believed thoroughly in the play and was all for having the Theatre Guild produce it but that Philip Moeeller had got cold feet when it came to the pinch and voted against it, though he liked it. She says that she thinks Lawrence Langner, at present abroad, will probably champion it and that she would he glad to have it presented for consideration again in the fall when he gets hack. She protested that she had roared with laughter over the MS and assured me that that was an almost unheard of thing for an actress to do,

John got off the other day and I am hack in the old madhouse (V.F), It was all very affecting, nearly breaking Alec McKaig's and my hearts. Just a few moments before the time of sailing a great and sudden storm burst over the city as if in portent of some sinister and ominous event; a child with a triple penis was prematurely born in Brooklyn, and a large bright star in the form of the female genital was seen to hover over 53rd St. and Sixth Ave. In the midst of these heroic thunders the fateful ship left the dock and as soon as it had cleared the harbor the summer skies cleared again—but a glamour was gone from the day; the sun lay more heavily on the city.

Have you been reading the great controversy about the Younger Generations*—carried on by Spingarn, Nock, Seldes, Rascoe, Rosenfeld, The N'ew York Times, and myself. It is weltering around in a great slough of confusion, growing more and more hopeless all the time. Both sides have revealed themselves—if we may judge by their utterances in the debate—utterly incompetent to engage intelligently in the simplest sort of controversy; it is all a great mess of misunderstandings and general inability to deal accurately with ideas—accusations answered without being read and explanation? gone astray amid the “buzz” of the Algonquin (see last week's Freeman), of insults, insinuations, recantations, and curses. Instead of picking out the opponent's vulnerable spots and taking careful aim at them, the combatants are in the habit of loading heavy artillery pieces with nails, beer tops, old pairs of scissors, and fragments of broken glass and firing them broadcast at the enemy. Everybody makes generalizations and every generalization is worse than the last; every member of the Younger Generation identifies the Younger Generation with himself and ascribes his own private virtues and preferences to a whole movement, and the Older Generation does the same thing. I am sick of the whole business and have just performed a great phlebotomy on Rosenfeld's article for Vanity Fair on the subject, reducing it to three thousand words from about a million.

I must cease: it's two in the morning and I get up every morning at 8:45 now, functioning on an efficiency basis for the first time in several years … Yours with kindest regards to the little woman. EW

I have seen Elkins and he feels just as I told you I did in connection with the first draft—that it rather goes to pieces from the millionaire scene on. I am absolutely convinced that the postman scene won't do as a whole act and should be a mere brief scene at the close, the first part of the third act being the last part of the dream. I really think it ought to be fixed up before circulating farther—so I shall return the MS to you. Aside from this, Elkins's producing projects seem to be rather vague; he likes the play and says he would be glad to put it on if it is revised, but I have an idea that he may never get to the point of putting anything on.**

Notes:

* “The Younger Generation,” by J. E. Spingarn, in The Freeman.

** “I cannot remember anything about Scott Fitzgerald's reaction to the failure of The Vegetable to get to New York, He was highly critical of his own work and, I think, had ceased to believe in it.” —To Charlotte Kretzoi, 1964

49. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club White Bear Lake, Minnesota

[Postmarked August 1, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

Just a line to tell you I've finished my play and am sending it to Nathan to give to Hopkins or Selwyn. It is now a wonder. I'm going to ask you to destroy the 2 copies you have as it makes me sort of nervous to have them out. This is silly but so long as a play is in an actor's office and is unpublished as my play at Craven's I feel lines from it will soon begin to appear on B’way [Broadway].

I want to thank you again for all you did for it and the time it took. I don't know anything that involves more labor than trying to place someone else's ms. I did it for_____so I know and I am enormously obliged.

Write me any gossip if you have time. No news or plans have I.

Thine,
Fitz

50. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Hack Writer and Plagiarist
St. Paul Minnesota *

[The Yacht Club]
[White Bear Lake, Minnesota]

[Postmarked August 5, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

Fitzgerald howled over “Quintilian.” ¹ He is glad it was reprinted as he couldn't get the Double Dealer and feared he had missed it. It's excellent especially the line about Nero and the one about Dr. Bishop.

The play with an absolutely new second act has gone to Nathan who is giving it to Hopkins or Selwyn. Your description of John leaving was fine. Zelda and I both enjoyed it with dramatic[?] and, what would have been gratifying to you, awe. Thank you for taking it to Ames & Elkins. I'm rather glad now that none of them took it as I'd have been tempted to let them do it—and my new version is much better. Please do not bother to return the 2 mss. you have as it's a lot of trouble. I have copies of them and no use for them. Destruction will save the same purpose—it only worries me to have them knocking around.

I read sprigs of the old oak that grew from the marriage of Mencken and Margaret Anderson (Christ! What a metaphor!) and is known as the younger genitals. It bored me. I didn't read yours—but Rascoe is getting worse than Frank Harris with his elaborate explanations and whitewashings of himself. There's no easier way for a clever writer to become a bore. It turns the gentle art of making enemies into the East Aurora Craft of making people indifferent… in the stunned pause that preceded this epigram Fitzgerald bolted his aspic and went to a sailor's den.

“See here,” he said, “I want some new way of using the great Conradian vitality, the legend that the sea exists without Polish eyes to see it. Masefield has spread it on iambics and downed it; O'Neill has sprinkled it on Broadway; McFee has added an Evenrude motor—”

But I could think of no new art form in which to fit him. So I decided to end the letter. The little woman, my best pal and, I may add, my severest critic, asked to be remembered.¹

Would you like to see the new play? Or are you fed up for awhile? Perhaps we better wait till it appears. I think I'll try to serialize it in Scribner's—would you?

Scott F.

Am undecided about Ulysses application to me—which is as near as I ever come to forming an impersonal judgment.

Notes:

* printed letterhead

¹A nonsense poem of Wilson's published in the New Orleans Double Dealer.

¹ In the margin beside this paragraph Fitzgerald had written, “Cribbed from Harry Leon Wilson.”

51. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club White Bear Lake, Minnesota

[Postmarked August 28, 1922]

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

The Garland arrived and I have re-read it. Your preface is perfect— my only regret is that it wasn't published when it was written almost two years ago. “The Soldier” of course I read for about the fifth time. I think it's about the best short war story yet—but I object violently to “pitched forward” in the lunch-putting anecdote. The man would have said “fell down” or “sorta sank down.” Also I was delighted as usual by “The Efficiency Expert.” Your poems I like less than your prose—“The Lake” I do not particularly care for. I like “The Centaur” and the “Epilogue” best—but all your poetry seems to flow from some source outside or before the romantic movement even when its intent is mostly lyrical.

I like all of John's except the play, which strikes me as being obvious, and “Resurrection” which despite its excellent idea and title and some spots of good writing is pale and without any particular vitality.

Due to you, I suppose, I had a wire from Langner. I referred him to George Nathan.

Many thanks for the book. Would you like me to review it? If so suggest a paper or magazine and I'll be glad to.

Thine, F. Scott Fitz

The format of the book is most attractive. I grow envious every time I see a Knopf binding.

52. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Summer 1922

White Bear Yatch Club, White Bear Lake, Minn. new address

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

Dear Bunny:

Thanks for the funniest picture (of John + Margaret¹) that I ever saw. Thanks ever so much for all the trouble you have taken with my play. I'd be delighted to have Mary Blair² show it to Craven + Bennet,³ but I fear the former will write his own plays from now on + I doubt if the latter could see himself in the leading part. I wish you'd get both copies back from the theatre guild if you can. I don't think it would pay to have it published before production, unless I had other plays to put with it. My two one-act things are to be in my autumn collection (Porcelain + Pink + Mr Icky I mean). I am ordering Ullyses + will watch for your review—also New Jersey article.

You told me your novellette was not to be published in The Smart Set—it was for that I was commiserating you. What in God's name is the date on the Undertaker. I am thinking of starting a new novel or else writing another play. Wife + child both beautiful and healthy

Scott Fitzg—

I must stop. I have just seen a beautiful landscape and am unstrung.

Notes:

¹ John Peale and Margaret Bishop.

² Actress who married Wilson in 1923.

³ Broadway actors Frank Craven and Richard Bennett.

53. FROM: John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, To Scott Fitzgerald

1922

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University; From Correspondence,

To Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, in the earnest belief that this book¹ deserves for to outsell This Side of Paradise—
Edmund Wilson, Jr.
John Peale Bishop

Notes:

¹ The Undertaker's Garland (1922).

54. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

September 22, 1922

Vanity Fair

Dear John: … The only exciting recent event is the sudden arrival of the Fitzgeralds, who decided that they could stand the Middle West no longer and immediately came on. They ace at present, of course, at the Plaza but are going to get a house out at Rye and live East permanently. The most extraordinary thing is that they are both in the most wonderful form—partly owing to a summer in the country—and have resolved to begin a new phase of their life. Fitz has not let anybody but me know he is in the city and, though they have been here several days, they have not had one drink! Both are wonderful-looking physically (Zelda has lost her fat) and are functioning so rationally that I can hardly believe my eyes. Fitz goes about soberly transacting his business and in the evenings writes at his room in the hotel. I had a long conversation with him last night and found him full of serious ideas about regulating his life. He has hit upon a modus vivendi for preventing Zelda from absorbing all his time, emotion, and seminal juice: they have made a compact for the purpose of obviating the wasteful furies of jealousy, by which each is bound not to go out alone with another member of the other sex. I don't know how long it will last but I have never seen Fitz present a more dignified appearance than during this brief interregnum, I suppose that when the hyenas find out that he is in town they will all be on his neck— he has not even told Townsend and Alec. He is busy negotiating about his play. …

55. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Before March 1923

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

Great Neck, L.I.

Dear Bunny:

Nominating Ring Lardner as America's most popular humorist,¹

Because he is really inimitable, as is shown by the lamentable failure of his many imitators,

Because he does not subscribe to a press-clipping bureau and is quite unaware of the critical approval he is recieving in recondite circles,

Because he is frequently covered with bruises from being the Yale football team against his four Harvard-bound boys.

And finally because with a rare, true ear he has set down for the enlightenment of posterity the American language as it is talked today

***

Dear Bunny: Chop this up if you want. See you soon.
F. S. Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame,” Vanity Fair, 20 (March 1923), 71. The published caption reads: “Because he is quite unaware of the approval he is receiving in erudite circles; because he is covered with bruises from representing the Yale football team against his Harvard-bound boys; and finally, because with a rare true ear he has set down for posterity the accents of the American language.”

56. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

After 18 March 1923

ALS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

6 Pleasant Ave. Montgomery, Ala

Dear Bunny:

The servants are not permanently gone. They were simply on a vacation and I can get in touch with them if you want. And there's probably plenty of coal in Great Neck by now. In any event why won't you + Mary spend the week-end of April 7th with us?

I'd seen Rascoe's customary botch—He seems to be devoid of any sense of humor. I hope Ring never sees the Fox story.¹

For a moment you scared me about “The Adding Machine”—I thot someone had my President scene.² No news. I'm bored to death.

As Ever Scott—

Notes:

¹ Rascoe's “A Bookman's Day Book” column in the New York Tribune (18 March 1923) included an anecdote about Fitzgerald and Wilson, and disparagingly repeated a Ring Lardner joke about foxes.

² Elmer Rice's surrealistic play The Adding Machine; Fitzgerald was concerned that Rice had anticipated the second act of The Vegetable.

57. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Summer 1924

ALS, 3 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Villa Marie, Valescure, St Raphael France

Dear Bunny:

The above will tell you where we are as you proclaim yourself unable to find it on the map. We enjoyed your letter enormously, collossally, stupendously. It was epochal, acrocryptical, categorical. I have begun life anew since getting it and Zelda has gone into a nunnery on the Pelleponesus.

Yes, John seemed to us a beaten man—with his tiny frail mustache—but perhaps only morally. Whether or not he still echoes the opinions of others I don’t know—to me he said nothing at all. In fact I remember not a line (I was drunk + voluble myself though).

The news about the play is grand + the ballet too. I gather from your letter that O’Niell + Mary had a great success. But you are wrong about Ring’s book. * My title was the best possible. You are always wrong—but always with the most correct possible reasons. (This statement is merely acrocrytical, hypothetical, diabolical, metaphorical)

You speak of John’s wife. I didn’t see her—but stay there was a woman there, but what she said + did + looked like I can not tell. Is she an elderly, gross woman with hair growing in her ears and and a red porous forehead? If so I remember her. Or stay—there was a rumor that he had married an Ethiope and took her to bleach beside the ffjiords. Or was that John, Or Eb Gaines… .

I had a short curious note from the latter yesterday, calling me to account for my Mercury Story. *** At first I couldn’t understand this communication after seven blessedly silent years—behold: he was a catholic. I had broken his heart.

This is a dumb letter but I have just been reading the advertisements of whore-houses in the French magazines. I seethe with passion for a “bains-massage” with volupte oriental delights (tout nu) in a Hotel Particular or else I long to go with a young man (intell. bon famile. affecteux) for a paid amorous week end to the coast of Guine. Deep calling to deep. I will give you now the Fitzg touch without which this letter would fail to conform to your conception of my character;

Sinclair Lewis sold his new novel to The Designer for $50,000 (950,000.00 francs) + I never did like that fellow. (I do really).

My book is wonderful, ** so is the air + the sea. I have got my health back—I no longer cough and itch and roll from one side of the bed to the other all night and have a hollow ache in my stomach after two cups of black coffee. I really worked hard as hell last winter—but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.

Write me of all data, gossip, event, accident, scandal, sensation, deterioration, new reputation,—and of yourself.

Our Love
Scott

Notes:

* Ring Lardner's How to Write Short Stories.

** The Great Gatsby.

Wilson’s wife Mary Blair had played the female lead in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924).

*** “Absolution,” American Mercury (June 1924).

58. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

November 6, 1922

Vanity Fair

Dear Fitz: Egmont Arens, former art editor of Vanity Fair, is going to get out another number of his Playboy, which is to contain drawings and writings by all the more unruly native geniuses. We want you to come to a party given to discuss it this Wednesday night—to start from the Washington Square Book Shop on West Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth at 6:30. Can't you come? Dos Passos, Sew Collins, Elinor Wylie, and others are going to be there. The idea is to make Playboy a sort of mouthpiece for all the bizarre and scurrilous things which people can't publish elsewhere. I wish you'd call me up as soon as you get this letter and let me know if you can come.

59. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

March 24, 1923

Dear Scott: Never mind about the house. We merely wanted it for a weekend or two, and as there are no servants or heat or anything, it would be too much trouble. You need not have been worried about crowding, however, as we intended to sleep in separate beds. I saw The Adding Machine* the other night and the author has got some of your stuff in the first part—also in the general theme. The first half is excellent but it goes off before the end. You ought to sec it when you get bad;. It seems incredible, in any case, that with it and Roger Bloomer on the stage, you can't get your thing produced. I enclose Burton Rascoe's report of a conversation with me, which speaks For itself. Ted Paramore and I have extracted almost as much amusement from it as from the original pleasantries. If Lardner ever sees his account of the fox story, I suppose it will be nuts to him. Love to Zelda.

Notes:

* Elmer Rice.

60. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

June 30, 1920 [1923]

Brookhaven, Long Island

…As for gossip, there is so much to tell—though nothing of tremendous importance—that I can't face the problem of really bringing you up to date. Fitz and Zelda have struck their perfect milieu in the jazz society of Great Neck, where they inhabit a brand-new suburban house, Zelda plays golf, and Fitz is already acquiring pompous overtones of the successful American householder. They are still one of the most refreshing elements at large, however, and it would take me pages to do justice to their pranks. …

61. [Fragment] To H. L. Mencken, From Edmund Wilson

August 17, 1923

15 Willow Street. Brooklyn

… Fitz is struggling with a new novel and very low in his mind. …

62. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

January 15, 1924

1 Univercity Place, N.Y.

… To go on to the Fitzgeralds, Scott's play went so badly on the road that it was taken off before it got to New York, thereby causing them a great deal of chagrin. Since then, Fitz has entered upon a period of sobriety of unexampled duration, writing great quantities of short stories for the popular magazines. He is also doing a new novel. Esther Murphy, Seldes, Dos Passos, Mary, and I had Christmas dinner with them at Great Neck. I like Zelda better and better every year and they are among the only people now that I'm always glad to see. Alec [McKaig] and they are still at nuts and I wish that, for heaven's sake, when you get back, you would try to reconcile them. I have attempted it in vain. It all dates from that terrible time they came to New York in March, I think, two years ago and stopped at the Plaza. …

63. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

April 11, 1925

3 North Washington Square, N.Y.

Dear Scott: Your book came yesterday and I read it last night.* It is undoubtedly in some ways the best thing you have done—the best planned, the best sustained, the best written. In fact, it amounts to a complete new departure in your work. The only bad feature of it is that the characters are mostly so unpleasant in themselves that the story becomes rather a bitter dose before one has finished with it. However, the fact that you are able to get away with it is the proof of its brilliance. It is full of all sorts of happy touches—in fact, all the touches are happy—there is nut a hole in it anywhere. I congratulate you—you have succeeded here in doing most of the things that people have always scolded you for not doing. I wish, in your next, you would handle a more sympathetic theme. (Not that I don't admire Gatsby and see the point of the whole thing, but you will admit that it keeps us inside the hyena cage.) Rosenfeld has an essay about you in his new book, just out. I'll urge him to send you a copy if he hasn't done so, as he tells me you have sent him yours, Mary wants to send her best love to you both. I would give anything to have you here this spring. Let me hear from you—my best to Zelda. I hope she is over her peritonitis—she owes me a letter, if she is.

Yours as ever, EW

I particularly enjoyed the man who takes the oculist's advertisement for the eyes of God.

Notes:

* The Great Gatsby.

64. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

Late March 1925

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

I am quite drunk
I am told that this is Capri, though
as I remember Capri was quieter.

Dear John:

As the literary wits might say, your letter recieved and contents quoted. Let us have more of the same—I think it showed a great deal of power and the last scene—the dinner at the young Bishops—was handled with admirable restraint. I am glad that at last Americans are producing letters of their own. The climax was wonderful and the exquisite irony of the “sincerely yours” has only been equealed in the work of those two masters Flaubert and Ferber.

Norman Douglas is not here now and anyway I have piles.

I will now have two copies of Wescotts “Apple” as in despair I ordered one—a regular orchard. I shall give one to Brooks, here whom I like. Do you know Brooks? He’s just a fellow here…

Excuse the delay. I have just been working on the envelope…

That was a caller. His name was Musselini, I think, and he says he is in politics here. And besides I have lost my pen so I will have to continue in pencil… It turned up—I was writing with it all the time and hadn’t noticed. That is because I am full of my new work, a historical play based on the life of Woodrow Wilson

Act I. At Princeton

Woodrow seen teaching philosophy. Enter Pyne. Quarrel scene—Wilson refuses to recognize clubs. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. Pyne reenters with glee club and trustees. Noise outside “We have won—Princeton 12 - Layfayette 3.” Cheers. Football team enter and group around Wilson. Old Nassau. Curtain

Act II. Gubernatorial Mansion at Patterson

Wilson seen signing papers. Tasker Bliss and Marc Connelly come in with proposition to let bosses get controll. “I have important papers to sign—and none of them legalize corruption.” Triangle Club begins to sing out side window. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. President continues to sign papers. Enter Mrs. Gait, John Grier Hibben, Al Jolsen and Grantland Rice. Song “The call to Larger Duty.” Tableau. Coughdrop.

Act III. (optional)
The Battle front 1918.

Act IV

The peace congress. Clemenceau, Wilson and Jolsen at table. The Bastard from Trenton now grown up but still a baby, in the uniform of the Prussian Guard is mewling and pewking in Wilson’s lap. Orlando is fucking Mrs. Gait in a corner. The junior prom committee comes in through the skylight. Clemenceau: “We want the Sarre.” Wilson: “No, sarre, I wont hear of it.” Laughter Orlando grunts at a passing orgasm. Enter Marylyn Miller, Gilbert Seldes and Irish Meusel. Tasker Bliss falls into the cuspidor…

Oh Christ! I’m sobering up! Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my chef d’oevre + others opinion. Please! I think its great but because it deals with much debauched materials, quick-deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers. To me its facinating. I never get tired of it.

“Dodo” Benson is here. I think he is (or was) probably a fairy.

Zelda’s been sick in bed for five weeks, poor child, and is only now looking up. No news except I now get 2000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. Is Lewis’ book any good. I imagine that mine is infinitely better—what else is well-reviewed this spring? Maybe my book * is rotten but I don’t think so.

What are you writing? Please tell me something about your novel. And if I like the idea maybe I’ll make it into a short story for the Post to appear just before your novel and steal the thunder. Who’s going to do it? Bebe Daniels? She’s a wow!

How was Townsends first picture. Good reviews? What’s Alec doing? And Ludlow? And Bunny? Did you read Ernest Boyd’s account of what I might ironicly call our “private” life in his “Portraits?” Did you like it? I rather did.

Scott

I am quite drunk again and enclose a postage stamp.

Notes:

Glenway Wescott, The Apple of the Eye (1924).

* The Great Gatsby.

And besides I have lost - This sentence is written in pencil. The rest of the letter is in ink.

65. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

April 1925

ALS, 5 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

American Express Co.
Rome, Italy.

Dear John:

Your letter was perfect. It told us everything we wanted to know and the same day I read your article (very nice too) in Van. Fair about cherching the past. But you disappointed me with the quality of some of it (the news)—for instance that Bunnys play failed, that Townsend has got the swelled-head and that you + Margaret find life dull and depressing there. We want to come back but we want to come back with money saved and so far we havn’t saved any—tho I’m one novel ahead and book of pretty good (seven) short stories. I’ve done about 10 pieces of horrible junk in the last year tho that I can never republish or bear to look at—cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work. But the novel Im sure of. Its marvellous

We’re just back from Capri where I sat up (tell Bunny) half the night talking to my old idol Compton Mackenzie. Perhaps you met him. I found him cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.

To show how well you geussed the gossip I wanted we were wondering where The Seldes got the money for Havana, whether The Film Guild finally collapsed (Christ! You should have seen their last two pictures—one from my story.) But I don’t doubt that Frank Tuttle + Townsend will talk themselves into the Cabinet eventually. I do it myself if I could but I’m too much of an egotist + not enough of a diplomat ever to succeed in the movies. You must begin by placing the tongue flat against the posteriors of such worthys as Gloria Swanson + Allan Dwan and commence a slow carressing movement. Say what they may of Cruze—Famous Players is the product of two great ideas Demille + Gloria Swansons and it stands or falls not their “conference methods” but on those two + the stock pictures that imitate them. The Cruze winnings are usually lost on such expensive experiments as Frank Tuttle. (Needless to say this letter is not for T. M. or Alec, but for your ears alone.)

Is Dos Passos novel any good? And what’s become of Cummings work. I havn’t read Some do Not but Zelda was crazy about. I glanced though it + kept wondering why it was written backward. At first I thought they’d sewn the cover on upside down. Well—these people will collaborate with Conrad.

Do you still think Dos Passos is a genius? My faith in him is somehow weakened. Theres so little time for faith these days.

Pinna Cruger is a damned attractive woman + while the husbands a haberdasher he’s at least a Groton Haberdasher (he went there, I mean, to school) + almost as gentile as Cupie Simon. Is Harlock (no connection) dead, or was that Leopold and Loeb.

The Wescott book will be eagerly devoured. A personable young man of that name from Atlantic introduced himself to me after the failure of the Vegetable. I wonder if he’s the same. At any rate your Wescott, so Harrison Rhodes tells me is coming here to Rome.

I’ve given up Nathan’s books. I liked the 4th series of predjudices. Is Lewis new book good. Hergeshiemers was awful. He’s all done.

Merrit Hemminway—I have a dim memory that he + I admired Ginevra King at the same time once in those palmy days.

The cheerfulest things in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extradordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again. Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.

Our Very Best To Margaret

Please Write!

Scott

In the Villa d’Este at Tivoli all that ran in my brain was:

An alley of dark cypresses
Hides an enrondured pool of light
And there the young musicians come
With instrements for her delight
… . locks are bowed
Over dim lutes that sigh aloud
Or else with heads thrown back they tease

Reverberate echoes from the drum
The stiff folds ect

It was wonderful that when you wrote that you’d never seen Italy—or, by God, now that I think of it never lived in the 15th Century.

But then I wrote T. S. of P. without ever having been to Oxford.

Notes:

Grit (1924).

Actor who was a partner with Townsend Martin in the Film Guild.

Allan Dwan, James Cruze, and Cecil B. De Mille were movie directors.

Fitzgerald sent Scribners inscriptions on slips of paper to be pasted in presentation copies.

Literary historian and critic.

Manhattan Transfer (1925).

1924 novel by Ford Madox Ford.

Lines from Bishop’s poem “Plato in Italy.”

66. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

May 1925

ALS, 2 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Lettters.

14 Rue de Tillsit
Paris, France

Dear Bunny:

Thanks for your letter about the book. * I was awfully happy that you liked it and that you approved of its design. The worst fault in it, I think is a Big Fault: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it—tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name. Mencken said (in a most entheusiastic letter received today) that the only fault was that the central story was trivial and a sort of anecdote (that is because he has forgotten his admiration for Conrad and adjusted himself to the sprawling novel.) and I felt that what he really missed was the lack of any emotional backbone at the very height of it.

Without makeing any invidious comparisons between Class A. and Class C., if my novel is an anectdote so is The Brothers Karamazoff. From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story. However the letters from you and Mencken have compensated me for the fact that of all the reviews, even the most entheusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about and for the even more depressing fact that it was, in comparison with the others, a financial failure (after I’d turned down fifteen thousand for the serial rights!). I wonder what Rosenfeld thought of it?

I looked up Hemminway. He is taking me to see Gertrude Stien tomorrow. This city is full of Americans—most of them former friends—whom we spend most of our time dodgeing, not because we don’t want to see them but because Zelda’s only just well and I’ve got to work; and they seem to be incapable of any sort of conversation not composed of semi-malicious gossip about New York courtesy celebrities. I’ve gotten to like France. We’ve taken a swell appartment until January. I’m filled with disgust for Americans in general after two weeks sight of the ones in Paris—these preposterous, pushing women and girls who assume that you have any personal interest in them, who have all (so they say) read James Joyce and who simply adore Mencken. I suppose we’re no worse than any one else, only contact with other races brings out all our worst qualities. If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job.

I’d love to see you. God, I could give you some laughs. There’s no news except that Zelda and I think we’re pretty good, as usual, only more so.

Scott

Thanks again for your cheering letter.

Notes:

Paul Rosenfeld.

* The Great Gatsby.

67. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

June 9th, 1925

TLS, 4 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

108 East 86th Street, New York City

Dear Scott, I have delayed unpardonably in acknowledging your letter and the book, having waited to get some inkling of your spring and summer address. All I know is that you can't be in Rome at this season, and yet it is to Rome that I suppose this will have to go.

I might begin as regards the Great Gatsby by telling you that I had dinner with Seldes and Van Wyck Brooks last night, and that Seldes is reviewing the GG in the Dial saying that you have written a grand book which leaves all your contemporaries behind (contemporaries specifically including Lewis and Cather, not to mention the Stevie-dear Benets etc and in the hogswill) Brooks admitted modestly and with characteristic quietness that he had read the book and liked it.

On all sides, in fact, I gather that you have rather bowled them all over, intelligentsia and the more or less intelligent public. Johnson, the famous players gent who occasionally gives me some money for doing captions, thinks it one of the greatest books of all time etc.

As for myself, I think that you have definitely in this book, as you never did in its predecessors, crossed the line which distinguishes the artist from whatever you like, but not-artist. It has all the old fire, the instinctive gift of the novelist, which Godknows you've always had but it has also, what you never before showed, a fine and rigorous control, a clear sense of planning and an execution quite up to the plan. In brief you have got rid of your worst enemy, your ungodly facility. But—I could go on showering compliments on you quite as ferevently as those you have already received and are about to receive. But as you'll undoubtedly get more of those than you can possible have need for, I am going to put down, very briefly what I've got against the book. If I do, please don't think that I don't admire it with the most ardent; I do, but I also think that having come over the aforementioned line into the artist class you have got to be taken seriously and scrupulously to task for shortcomings which before were pardonable enough.

In the first place, I object to the inaccuracy of a great deal of the writing. For instance, in the paragraph in which you introduce the two girls buoyed up by the sofa, the first impression is a stroke of genius, but as you go on, you in one phrase add and in the next detract from that impression. I am not here talking about the strict Dictionary, Edmund Wilson, use of words, I am talking about a quality of clear visualization. You admit things into that paragraph which could not, the first conditions being granted, have been seen. There are details which could not have been as you describe them. This may seem a picayune point, but it is, to my mind, the final distinction of good writing, accuracy at once to the emotion of the scene and its sensible facts. My own feeling is that you would profit by doing what Joyce, James etc, have done, taking notes on the spot, working them up as practice descriptions, and then carefully analyzing the result. This may seem like an amateur advising a professional, and it is. For there are a number of things which you can do already which no amount of note-taking will teach you or another. But I still think that you would gain by a very strict consideration of the elements which go into a description, whether of things only seen or of things felt. Different as they are, both Joyce and James are superbly accurate writers. The one is true to a visual, the other a nervous experience. Your own experience of things outside your self still seems to me a bit blurred, whether considered as a thing felt or a thing seen. This may seem to you splitting hairs that had better be left in the horse's tail, or surrounding the horse's ass. But I assure you that though a great many people will pass over such inaccuracies as I have noted, practically all of them will feel the gain in intensity of a complete realization of the thing—person, object, scene, situation—which in the GG now seems to me not quite there.

I feel this lack of complete realization also in the broader aspects of the book—in the character of Gatsby and in his relation to the girl. What you have got is all right as far as it goes, but it does not, to my mind, go far enough. I grant of course that Gatsby should remain a vague mysterious person to the end, but though he is seen through a mist, always, one should feel his solidity behind that mist. And it's because you don't entirely “get” him, that the violent end seems abrupt. Emotionally it is beautifully prepared for, but it does to me seem in action just a little “willed.” Everything of Gatsby is specified, but it as though you saw him in patches instead of getting casual glimpses of what is after all a complete man. Great characters—Falstaff or Bloom or the Baron de Charlus—continually offer new and surprising aspects of themselves (somehow James characters don't, and I am inclined to think that this is one of the reasons why one resents James' overelaboration); so does Gatsby, but the transition, not in the scene but in the character, is not quite managed. The only way out of this is I suppose, a more lengthy preparation before writing another novel—after it is conceived and the characters placed in your mind.

I think too that the book is too short. I remember what you said to me in Paris about the excessive length of modern novels, and guess that you deliberately imposed the present length on your book. I grant the virtues you have gained by this; the impression of complete control, of nothing that is not strictly necessary, of the ultimate concision possible to your tale. Still I think the book would have gained by a greater elaboration and a slower tempo in the early portions. Your end is so violent that it seems to me you should have done, what Dickens and Conrad both do when they are working toward a bloody and extravagant end, so set the characters in a commonplace attitude, in everyday situations, that the reader completely accepts them, and hence, ultimately anything they may do or suffer.

But you have done wonders both as a writer and as a social critic. And you have, a thing after all, very few novelists succeed in doing, broken new ground. Gatsby is a new character in fiction, and, as everybody is now saying, a most familiar one in life. You have everything ahead of you; Gatsby definitely admits you to importance. For god's sake take your new place seriously. Scrutinize your own impressions, distrusting your facility which will continue to work anyhow as far as it is needful, and cultivate the acquaintance of writers who are both subtle and accurate, especially those who are different in temper from yourself. A little more subtlety, a little more accuracy, and you'll have every living American novelist, and most of the dead ones, wiped off the critic's slate.

Are you going to stay in Europe? We may come over in the fall to stay a couple of years. Though it's all very uncertain.¹

John.

Notes:

¹ See Fitzgerald's 9 August letter to Bishop in Letters.

68. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

August 1925

TL, 1 p. (fragment). Scrapbook. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

I was delighted to get your letter—with the Paris address. I wrote, belatedly it is true, thanking you for the Great Gatsby, to Rome, but with no very lively hopes that my strictures on the book would ever reach you.

Curiously enough I have seen almost no reviews of it, beyond the not very interesting, even though decidedly laudatory account which Stallings gave of it in the World, and the, also published in the World Menckenian drool. The man has become a sausage machine, grinding out the same old highly spiced weenies and hot dogs we've been consuming for years.

As for myself, I liked the book, liked it enormously, though, as I told you in the Italian letter, I thought it too short—a thing I haven't said of a novel ever before in my life—and the character of Gatsby insufficiently elaborated. I can't understand your resentment of the critic's failure to perceive your countenance behind Gatby's mask. To me it was evident enough. I haven't watched you living up to the Fitzgerald legend since 1917 for nothing. But it seems to me interesting, if at all, privately only. The point is that you have created a distinct and separate character, perhaps the first male you have ever created on the scale [ ] a novel, whom you have filled, as is inevitable, with your own emotional life. But to ask people to see you in Gatsby seems to me an arrant piece of personal vanity; as an artist it should flatter you that they did not see it.

Since sending it to you I have read the Apple of the Eye. I think you underrate it. But then I didn't regard it as a picture of American peasants; on the contrary it seems to me a rather fine projection of personal emotion on the part of Westcott. He is by instinct an artist, as yet not especially original, and, for a prosateur, too much under the influence of the imagist poets; but the consciousness is there, both of the material and the effects he means to produce. And on the whole it seems to me a very creditable performance. At least I am interested in what he will do next, and for most of my compatriots I have an indifference to their future which to say the least gives me a good deal of time for reading the works of dead men and foreigners. Nothing, I think, will ever persuade me to do more than glance through a Lewis novel, a Hecht novel, even I am afraid to say a Dos Passos novel.

The great thing about you is, aside from the fact that your material is always new and interesting in itself, is that you are quite likely at any time to do something radically different from anything you have ever done before. And the ordinary American's incapacity to do more than endlessly repeat himself, or rather his first success, is what makes contemporary American letters a desert of inanity. Besides, practically none of them no how to write.¹

1 See Fitzgerald's 9 August letter to Bishop in Letters.

69. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

TO: John Peale Bishop

c. August 9, 1925

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University; From Turnbull.

14 Rue de Tilsitt
Paris, France

Dear John:

Thank you for your most pleasant, full, discerning and helpful letter about The Great Gatsby. It is about the only critisism that the book has had which has been intelligable, save a letter from Mrs. Wharton. I shall duly ponder, or rather I have pondered, what you say about accuracy—I’m afraid I haven’t quite reached the ruthless artistry which would let me cut out an exquisite bit that had no place in the context. I can cut out the almost exquisite, the adequate, even the brilliant—but a true accuracy is, as you say, still in the offing. Also you are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.

Your novel sounds facinating and I’m crazy to see it. I am beginning a new novel next month on the Rivierra. I understand that MacLiesh is there, among other people (at Antibes where we are going). Paris has been a madhouse this spring and, as you can imagine, we were in the thick of it. I don’t know when we’re coming back—maybe never. We’ll be here till Jan. (except for a month in Antibes, and then we go Nice for the Spring, with Oxford for next summer. Love to Margaret and many thanks for the kind letter.

Scott

Notes:

Edith Wharton’s letter was published in The Crack-Up (1945).

Poet Archibald MacLeish.

70. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked September 21, 1925

CC, 1 p. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Paris

Dear Sir:

The enclosed explains itself. Meanwhile I went to Antibes and liked Archie Macliesh enormously. Also his poem, though it seems strange to like anything so outrageously derivative. T. S. of P. was an original in comparison.

I’m crazy to see your novel. I’m starting a new one myself. There was no one at Antibes this summer except me, Zelda, the Valentino, the Murphy’s, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the Mclieshes, Charlie Bracket, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Openhiem, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Chrystal Eastman, ex-Premier Orlando, Ettienne de Beaumont—just a real place to rough it, an escape from all the world. But we had a great time. I don’t know when we’re coming home—

The Hemmingways are coming to dinner so I close with best wishes.

Scott

Notes:

The enclosure was, as I recall it, a letter of introduction to me. But who was being introduced I cannot recall. J.P.B. in The Crack-Up

71. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

February 23, 1926

3 North Washington Square, N.Y.

… Hemingway has been in town for a few days—has now gone back to France. He reports that the Fitzgeralds are in good condition, have withdrawn from Paris, and that Scott is working on a new novel.*…

Notes:

* Tender Is the Night.

72. [Fragment] To Ernest Hemingway, From Edmund Wilson

May 4, 1927

… I have seen the Fitzgeralds. They have bought a large house containing twenty rooms, at a place called Brandywine Hundred, near Wilmington, Delaware. They are contemplating some prodigious parties. I wish that you were over here and were able to attend them. …

73. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Early February 1928?

ALS, 2 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

“Ellerslie” stationery. Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Bunny:

(Such a quaint nickname. It reminds me of a—oh, you know, a sort of a—oh, a rabbit, you know.)

All is prepared for February 25th. The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old entheusiasms are being burnished with that zeal peculiar only to the Brittish Tommy. My God, how we felt when the long slaughter of Paschendale had begun. Why were the generals all so old? Why were The Fabian society discriminated against when positions on the general staff went to Dukes and sons of profiteers. Agitators were actually hooted at in Hyde Park and Anglican divines actually didn’t become humanitarian internationalists over night. What is Briton coming to—where is Milton, Cromwell, Oates, Monk? Where are Shaftsbury, Athelstane, Thomas a Becket, Margot Asquith, Iris March, Where are Blackstone, Touchstone, Clapham-Hopewellton, Stoke-Poges? Somewhere back at G.H.Q. handsome men with grey whiskers murmured “We will charge them with the cavalry” and meanwhile boys from Bovril and the black country sat shivering in the lagoons of Ypres writing memoirs for liberal novels about the war. What about the tanks? Why did not Douglas Haig or Sir John French (the big smarties) (Look what they did to General Mercer) invent tanks the day the war broke out, like Sir Phillip Gibbs the weeping baronet, did or would, had he thought of it.

This is just a sample of what you will get on the 25th of Feb. There will be small but select company, coals, blankets, “something for the inner man”.

Please don’t say you can’t come the 25th but would like to come the 29th. We never recieve people the 29th. It is the anniversary of the 2nd Council of Nicea when our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord——

It always gets stuck in that place. Put on “Old Man River,” or something of Louis Bromfields.

Pray gravity to move your bowels. Its little we get done for us in this world. Answer.

Scott

Enjoyed your Wilson article enormously. Not so Thompson affair. *

Notes:

* An article by W. G. Thompson, counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1928.

74. [Fragment] To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

1928

… I have also read Archie MacLeish's Hamlet, which I consider a prime piece of bathos. Phelps Putnam, who had seen Archie and read the poem before it was published, had warned me that both he and I were pilloried in it, I figure that I am Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Osric, the water fly, all rolled into one—and there were moments when I had suspicions that I was also Claudius, the adulterous uncle .. .

75. [Fragment] To Hamilton Basso, From Edmund Wilson

May 9, 1929

… I was rereading The Great Gatsby last night, after I had been going through my page proofs, and thinking with depression how much better Scott Fitzgerald's prose and dramatic sense wore than mine. If I'd only been able to give my book the vividness and excitement, and the technical accuracy, of his! Have you ever read Gatsby? I think it's one of the best novels that any American of his age has done. Of course, he'd had to pass through several immature and amateurish phases before he arrived at that one, and writing, like everything else, is partly a matter of expertness…

76. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

March/April 1929?

ALS, 8pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Paris
c/o Guaranty Trust

Dear John:

My depression over the badness of the novel as novel had just about sunk me, when I began the novellette—John, it’s like two different men writing. The novellette is one of the best war things I’ve ever read—right up with the very best of Crane and Bierce—intelligent, beautifully organized + written—oh, it moved me and delighted me—the Charlestown country, the night in town, the old lady—but most of all, the position I was in at 4 this afternoon when I was in agony about the novel, the really fine dramatic handling of the old-lady-and-silver episode + the butchery scene. The preparation for the latter was adroit and delicate and just enough.

Now, to be practical—Scribners Magazine will, I’m sure, publish the novellette, if you wish, + pay you from $250–$400 therefore This price is a guess but probably accurate, I’d be glad to act as your amateur agent in the case. It is almost impossible without a big popular name to sell a two-part story to any higher priced magazine than that, as I know from my experience with Diamond Big as Ritz, Rich Boy ect. Advise me as to whether I may go ahead—of course authority confined only to American serial rights.

The novel is just something you’ve learned from + profited by. It has occasional spurts—like the conversations frequently of Brakespeare, but it is terribly tepid—I refrain—rather I don’t refrain but here set down certain facts which you are undoubtedly quite as aware of as I am

(1) Pps 1–28. Elaborate preparation. Baby born without a scene—. Only announcement. Monsignor feeble A Catholic Bishop does not rank above Monsignor—his ambition to be a bishop is as incomprehensible as the idea of a staff captain to have a company.

(2) You have now all but lost the reader. He will not face the mass of detail 28 et sequitur. Italian theme strained—your ignorance of the catholic church facinates me. Did you ever meet Mrs. Winthrop Chanler? Madden good idea but observed thinly.

Your combination of leaning on a great thing for your color + simultaneously trying to patronize it—!

At end something happens—child cries—feeble—has no significance except the strained one of making the reader think—“Well, after all that climb it must mean more than I think it does!”

Pps 48. et sequitur

1st really fine page—my novel has same idea (shorter) about an English whore. However, when this 6th Who’s Who commences all interest finally vanishes. No life is that dull. Did you ever see those mid-western books of the eighties + nineties “Our pioneers”, or “Mid-western Military Men—a compilation”? Even lists of dates, with their suggestion, are more alive.

(I’m taking you for a beating, but do you remember your letter to me about Gatsby. I suffered but I got something—like I did out of your friendly tutelage in English poetry.

You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade—where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think. (c.f. “andrognous” ect

exceptions:

(a) need to avoid repetition

(b) need of rythm, ect.

P. 62 Story interest again begins

p. 71 Gone again. Reader’s effort like writers was too much.

P 79 ect. (Incidently in this novel you have (a) suggestion that Gettysburg was fought before Chancellorsville (b) that retreat from Gettysburg + from Antietam was in same campaign that Colonels were often locally elected in Southern armies—which contrasts sharply with your profound knowledge of The Civil War in story.

A big person can make a much bigger mess than a little person and your impressive stature converted a lot of pottery into pebbles during the three years or so you were in the works. Luckily the pottery was never very dear to you. Novels are not written, or at least begun, with the idea of making an ultimate philosphical system—you tried to attone for your lack of confidence by a lack of humility before the form.

The main thing is: no one in our language possibly accepting Wilder has your talent for “the world”, your culture, + accuteness of social critisism as implied in the story, there the approach (2nd + 3d person ect.) is considered, full scope for your special talents (descriptive power, sense of “le pays”, ramifications of your special virtues such as loyalty, concealment of the sensuality, that is your bete noir to such an extent that you can no longer see it black, like me my drunkeness.

Anyhow it’s (the story) marvellous. Don’t be mad at this letter. I have the horrors tonight + perhaps am taking it out on you. Write me when I could see you here in Paris in the afternoon between 2.30— + 6.30 + talk— + name a day and a cafe at your convenience—I have no dates save on Sunday so any day will suit me. Meanwhile I’ll make one more stab at your novel to see if I can think of any way by a miracle of cutting it could be made presentable. But I fear there’s neither honor nor money in it for you

Your Old + Always
Affectionate Friend
Scott

Excuse Christ-like tone of letter. Began tippling at page 2 and am now positively holy (like Dostioeveffskis non-stinking monk)

Notes:

Unpublished work by Bishop.

Bishop’s story “The Cellar,” published in his collection, Many Thousands Gone.

77. From Edmund Wilson

Inscription in Wilson's Poets, Farewell! (1929). Bruccoli.

To Zelda and Scott
This little sheaf of woodland
pipings from a wayward lute
With affection
From Bunny Wilson
October 1929

WILSON, Edmund. POETS, FAREWELL! (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929). Wilson's first volume of poetry, INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author. The book was published in October 1929.

78. [Fragment] To To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

[undated, 1930]

Provincetown

… I have been very much worried by reports that Zelda Fitzgerald has gone off her head and is in a sanatorium—I wish you would let me know if you know anything about it, I wish something could be done about them—I have a feeling they never see anybody with any sense. …

79. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Summer 1930

ALS, 2 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

c/o Guaranty Trust
4 Place de la Concorde
Paris

Dear Bunny:

Congratulations on your marriage and all real hopes for your happiness. We heard through Mary, long after the event of your collapse and the thought that you’d survived it helped me through some dispairing moments in Zelda’s case. She is now almost “well”, which is to say the psychosis element is gone. We must live quietly for a year now and to some extent forever. She almost went permanently crazy—four hours work a day at the ballet for two years, and she 27 and too old when she began. I’m relieved that the ballet was over anyhow as our domestic life was cracking under the strain and I hadn’t touched my novel for a year. She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely unpregnable safe inside her that it was months after the break before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.

I have seen no one for months save John in Paris—he is now more in prison than ever + the brief spell of work I nagged him into during Margaret’s pregnancy has now given way to interminable talk about a well on their property. What an awful woman. Also a man named Thomas Wolfe, a fine man and a fine writer. Paris swarms with fairies and I’ve grown to loathe it and prefer the hospital-like air of Switzerland where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs. Met your friend Allen Tate, liked him + pitied him his wife

Salute the new Mrs. Wilson for me (my God, I just noticed this accidental justaposition—forgive me) and remember you’re never long absent from the sollicitudes of

Your Old Friend
Scott

It was nice of you, + like you, to write Zelda.

Notes:

To Margaret Canby.

Wilson’s first wife, actress Mary Blair.

Wilson had suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1929.

Poet and critic married to fiction writer Caroline Gordon.

80. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

August 8, 1930

Provincetown

Dear Max: I don't know precisely what Zelda's condition is, but have written her a letter which I want to send to Scott, to give her, if he thinks proper. Will you forward it to him?…

81. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

August 8, 1930

Provincetown

Dear Scott: I have just heard from Max Perkins about Zelda's illness. From what he has written me, I can't tell precisely what has happened, but I know from my own experience that these breakdowns where people seem to go off their heads aren't necessarily serious, and as people in that condition are extremely sensitive to suggestion, I thought it might be worthwhile to write her—use your own discretion about giving her the letter,

I've often thought about you both—you must be having an awful time now. I wish there were something I could do—if there should be, you must let me know. I've missed you and Zelda these last years more than any other friends and wish you didn't insist upon living abroad, which I'm convinced is a great mistake for American writers, hard as America can be to live in.

I got married last February to a girl named Margaret Canby (she was formerly married to a cousin of Henry Seidel), I've known her for years—knew her first through Ted Paramore; she comes from California, Mary is married again, too. We're up here in O'Neill's old place, where I came before, three summers ago … I'm thinking of spending part of the winter up here, in Provincetown, at least to get away from New York. Dos is married, as you know, and has bought a little farm over at Truro in a lonely and rather somber little hollow where the occasional booming of bitterns is the only sound to be heard. He is becoming more and more of a respectable householder every day and has decided that he is “a middle-class liberal.”

I hope things may be going better with Zelda by this time. Don't let the neurologists depress you—the old-fashioned neurologist can be the most funereal and unnerving type in the world. If Zelda is in Switzerland, I shouldn't hesitate to go to Jung at Zurich about her. He got Stan Dell out of a sad condition a year or two ago, and everybody who has had anything to do with him seems to swear by him.

As ever: Bunny Wilson

82. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne

April, 1931

From Turnbull.

Dear John:

Read Many Thousands over again (the second time) and like it enormously. I think it hangs together as a book too. I like the first story—I think it's damn good. I'd never read it before. “Death and Young Desire” doesn't come off—as for instance the handling of the same theme in The Story of St. Michele. Why I don't know. My favorite is “The Cellar”—I am still fascinated by the Conradian missing man—that's real fiction. “Bones” seems even better in the respect-inspiring light thrown by Bunny's opinion. I'm taking it to Zelda tomorrow.

Ever your friend,
Scott

83. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

November 7, 1932

Red Bank

Dear Scott: Thanks ever so much for asking me to Baltimore. I've been wanting very much to see you and Zelda and have been on the verge of writing you, I'm afraid I can't make it, though, till later. I'm going West on a reporting trip the end of this week, but will be back before Christmas and would love to come sometime in January, say, if you can have me. Is there any chance of your coming to New York?—one of the most dismal places ever known now, tut with no temptation any more to disorganizing debauchery.

I thought your story in The Mercury was swell—wish you would do something more about Hollywood, which everybody who knows anything about it is either scared or bribed not to tell about or have convinced themselves is all right. I've only just started Zelda's novel.* I thought Hemingway's bullfighting book was pretty maudlin—the only thing of his I haven't liked.** My feeling was that, though bullfighting was probably a good clean sport, H. had made it disgusting. Best love to Zelda. Hope to see you soon.

As ever, Bunny W.

Notes:

* Save Me the Waltz.

** Death in the Afternoon.

84. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Wire. Yale University; From Correspondence.

ROGERSFORGE MD 1933 JAN 30 PM 10 05

HAVE BEEN WORRIED BY THE UNFORTUNATE CONDITIONS OF OUR MEETING THAT I HAD LOOKED FORWARD TO FOR SO LONG¹ STOP STILL COUNTING ON YOU TO COME DOWN HERE AND WE ALL HOPE YOU CAN BRING ROSALIND² WHAT ABOUT THIS WEEKEND STOP HAVE ASKED NONE OF THE QUESTIONS NOR SAID ANY OF THE THINGS THAT I WANTED TO ASK AND SAY
SCOTT.

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald was on a bender when he met Wilson and Hemingway in New York, and he quarreled with both of them.

² Wilson's daughter.

85. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

March 26, 1933

314 East 53rd Street, N.Y.

Dear Scott: The Red Bank bank has folded up with a loud crash, so you will have gotten Lack the check I gave you. Here is the currency.

I've sent hack Sanctuary through The New Republic. I thought it was pretty good. He [William Faulkner] certainly has a compelling imagination, and I thought the whole fable very well conceived, though sloppily executed stylistically and technically.

When are you coming to New York? Looking back on our conversations, I'd like to enlarge on certain points.

Bunny

86. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

c. February 1933

ALS, 3 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

La Paix (My God!)
Towson Md 1933

Dear Bunny

Your letter with the head of Vladimir Ulianov just recieved. Please come here the night of the inauguration + stay at least the next day. I want to know with what resignation you look forward to your role of Lunafcharsky + whether you decided you had nothing further worth saying in prose fiction or whether there was nothing further to say. Perhaps I should draw the answer to the last question from Axel’s Castle yet I remember stories of yours that anticipated so much that was later said that it seems a pity. (Not that I don’t admire your recent stuff—particularly I liked Hull House.

We had a most unfortunate meeting. I came to New York to get drunk + swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation. I assume full responsibility for all unpleasantness—with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him; and as for bringing up the butcher boy matter—my God! making trouble between friends is the last thing I had ever thought myself capable of. Anyhow, plenty of egotism for the moment.

Dos was here, + we had a nice evening—we never quite understand each other + perhaps that’s the best basis for an enduring friendship. Alec came up to see me at the Plaza the day I left (still in awful shape but not conspicuously so). He told me to my amazment that you had explained the fundamentals of Leninism, even Marxism the night before, + Dos tells me that it was only recently made plain thru the same agency to the editors to The New Republic. I little thought when I left politics to you + your gang in 1920 you would devote your time to cutting up Wilson’s shroud into blinders! Back to Mallarme.

—Which reminds me that T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon + evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine. Very broken and sad + shrunk inside.

However come in March. Don’t know what time the inauguration takes place but you find out + tell us the approximate time of your arrival here. Find out in advance for we may go to it too + we might all get lost in the shuffle.

Always Your Friend
Scott

P.S. Please not a word to Zelda about anything I may have done or said in New York. She can stand literally nothing of that nature. I’m on the water-wagon but there’ll be lots of liquor for you

Notes:

Wilson had put a stamp with the head of Lenin on his letter to Fitzgerald.

Anatoly Lunacharsky had directed arts and education in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1921.

87. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

October 21, 1933

314 East 53rd Street, N.Y.

Dear Scott: I liked your thing about Lardner and was glad you did it for the N.R. The only thing I objected to in the last paragraph was the “great and good American,” which didn't seem to meet the case exactly. Am delighted to hear about your book. I have just read Hemingway's new short stories,* and though the best of them ate excellent, now is your time to creep up on him, John Bishop is here—in pretty good form, I thought, when I saw him. I haven't seen his book of poems yet. Margaret has got him planted out at Westport, which has been obsolete ever since you left. I am living in my little house here—a different kind of life from anything I have ever had in New York before—no neighborhood I know, no telephone, no doorman, no people all around in other apartments—I enjoy it. Rest love to Zelda. When are you coming to N.Y.?

As ever, Bunny

Notes:

* Winner Take Nothing.

88. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzggerald

TLS, 1 p. Yale University; From Correspondence.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

November 2, 1933.

Dear Bunny:

Why wasn't Ring a great and good American? Who is? I meant the mixed metaphor about tearing a medallion which I thought afterwards would be rather a Herculean feat.¹

Ever yours, F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ On 21 October Wilson complimented Fitzgerald on “Ring” but criticized its closing lines: “A great and good American is dead. Let us not obscure him by the flowers, but walk up and look at that fine medallion, all abraded by sorrows that perhaps we are not equipped to understand.” Wilson explained on 4 November that “great and good American” sounded to him “like a political speech.”

89. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

November 4, 1933

314 East 53rd Street, N.Y.

Dear Scott: I thought that “great and good American” sounded like a political speech. Besides, Lardner, though a first-rate writer, wasn't exactly great, was he?—and, though personally likable, his chief claim to distinction was a gift for Swiftian satire based on bate. He always seemed to me to be desperately irked by his Family, his associates, and himself. I'm sorry I missed seeing Zelda when she was here. Saw John Bishop a couple days ago. His book of poems is quite impressive. Have you seen it? Now is your time to creep up on Hemingway.

As ever, EW

90. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

December 4, 1933

314 East 53rd Street, N,Y.

Dear Scott: I'm sorry about the other day, but you ate sometimes a hard guy to get along with and I'm told I'm not wonderful in this respect either. What I object to is precisely the “scholar and vulgarian,” “you helped me more than I helped you” business. I know that this isn't entirely a role you've foisted on me: I've partly created it myself. But don't you think at our present time of life we might dispense with this high-school (Princeton University) stuff? I've certainly laid you under contribution in the past in the concoction of my literary personae and I don't blame you or object a bit if you do the same with me. But just don't make yourself disagreeable about it after asking me to lunch, you mug, if you expect me to eat any with you.

Hope you're recuperating in Bermuda. I'm looking forward to your book. Love to Zelda.

As ever, Bunny

91. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

December 1933/January 1934

AL, 2 pp. (fragment). ² Scrapbook. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

Dear Scott,

The first installment of the novel confirms what I have long thought, that your gifts as a novelist surpass those of any of us. It is so skilful, so subtle, so right that I have only praise for it. You get the whole romance of that period, which is now like history.

The only thing I question in the whole installment are some of the names. Your list of queer names is right. But I don't like Hengist and Horsa. They are too funny for the text. And your French man's name¹ is confusing, particularly so early in the novel. It's hard to grasp the duel accordingly. Giving him an English prenom is excellent, but he needs a new surname. And have somebody beside the Scribner staff watch the [ ]² They are no good, and [ ] pass over

Notes:

¹ On p. 102 of the book Abe North addresses two Englishmen as “Major Hengest and Mr. Horsa.” Tommy Barban was named Tommy Costello in the serial version.

² The bottom left corner of this letter was cut off when Fitzgerald pasted it in his scrapbook, deleting those words indicated by brackets.

92. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked March 12, 1934

Wilson’s retyped copy, 2 pp. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Bunny:

Despite your intention of mild criticism in our conversation, * I felt more elated than otherwise—if the characters got real enough so that you disagreed with what I chose for their manifest destiny the main purpose was accomplished (by the way, your notion that Dick should have faded out as a shyster alienist was in my original design, but I thot of him, in reconsideration, as an “homme epuise,” not only an “homme manque”. I thought that, since his choice of a profession had accidentally wrecked him, he might plausibly have walked out on the profession itself.)

Any attempt by an author to explain away a partial failure in a work is of course doomed to absurdity—yet I could wish that you, and others, had read the book version rather than the mag. version which in spots was hastily put together. The last half for example has a much more polished facade now. Oddly enough several people have felt that the surface of the first chapters was too ornate. One man even advised me to “coarsen the texture”, as being remote from the speed of the main narrative!

In any case when it appears I hope you’ll find time to look it over again. Such irrevelancies as Morton Hoyt’s nosedive and Dick’s affair in Ohnsbruck are out, together with the scene of calling on the retired bootlegger at Beaulieu, & innumerable minor details. I have driven the Scribner proofreaders half nuts but I think I’ve made it incomparably smoother.

Zelda’s pictures go on display in a few weeks & I’ll be meeting her in N.Y. for a day at least. Wouldn’t it be a good time for a reunion?

It was good seeing you & good to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out.

With affection always,
Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

* Of Tender Is the Night.

93. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,

April 2, 1934.

Dear John:

Somebody (I’ve forgotten who after an overcrowded and hectic twenty-four hours in New York) quoted you to me as saying that this current work is “no advance on what he’s done before.” That’s a legitimate criticism, but I can’t take it as a slam. I keep thinking of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus Preface—and I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring. And if the ending of this one is not effectual I should be gladder to think that the effect came back long afterwards, long after one had forgotten the name of the author.

All this makes it more necessary to see you and do some doping on the practise of the novel while you’re in process of revision. I’ll be up in New York toward the beginning of next week. Will you keep that in mind and if your plans change suddenly let me know.

Pleasant thoughts to you all.

As ever,
Scott

Two things I forgot to say—

1. There’s a deliberate choice in my avoidance of a dramatic ending—I deliberately did not want it.

2. Without making apologies, I’d prefer to fade off my book, like the last of The Brothers Karanzoff, or Time Regained, and let the belly carry my story, than to resort the arbitrary blood-letting of Flaubert, Stendahl and the Elizabethans.

You see we must talk—no room in a letter.
F.S F.

Notes:

Tender Is the Night.

Conrad wrote: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

94. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

ALS, 2 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

April 3, 1934.

Dear Scott,

I come fresh from reading Tender Is the Night and am overcome with the magnificence of it. It surpasses The Great Gatsby. You have shown us, what we have wanted so long and impatiently to see, that you are a true, a beautiful and a tragic novelist. I have only praise for its understanding, its characterization, and its deep tenderness. I write you much enthusiasm. Like a good wine, you mature and gain in richness. There is no loss of strength. Nor, to drop the figure, of invention. And I may tell you that I am very happy that you have carried it off. I think I can say honestly that I am always gratified when an American does a good book. But that you should do this book pleases me beyond measure. I can guess what it means to you. And with all of old affection, I congratulate you.

I'm glad you changed Costello's name. The one point in the book which stuck for me was the incest. I couldn't quite believe it. Nor do I think it was necessary. But it's done, and is being forgotten—if I should need to forget it—in the midst of so many Triumphs.

I'm sorry I couldn't dine with you at Alec's. We are now mud-bound as a month ago snow-bound. M was stuck for nearly an hour this morning in the Valley Forge Road. But I'll see Zelda's show if I can possibly get into New York.¹

As ever,

Notes:

¹ See Fitzgerald's 7 April letter to Bishop in Letters.

95. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University; From Correspondence.

April 4, 1934

Dear Scott:

I wrote you last night just after finishing Tender Is the Night. But this morning I received your letter, which demands a reply.

I don't remember talking to anyone in New York about the novel except Esther¹ and she did all the talking. Certainly the quoted remark means nothing to me. I haven't been in New York for three weeks at least, and at that time I had read only the first installment in Scribner's. I hate reading novels in magazines and decided to put yours off until I had the complete copy.

It is true that the tone of the first section bothered me when I read it in Scribner's. But I know now that it was right—To see the Divers through Rosemary's romantic and naive eyes. And as for the end of your novel, I don't see how it could be bettered. It moved me profoundly.

You can understand my worrying over your beginning, because technically my novel² does the same thing—That is, there is a long stretch, seen through a young boy's eyes, in which no ironic view of the other characters is possible. That can only come as the plot unfolds. If I can succeed in sustaining the reader over this half as well as you do, I shall be immensely gratified. I exaggerated none of my enthusiasm when I wrote you last night. I admire Tender is the Night tremendously. One sentence in my letter may convey a false meaning—I wanted to say that we had waited a long time for this novel—not for you to prove yourself a novelist.

I want to see you very much. I have been terribly slowed up in my work lately. I suspect a profound boredom with Connecticut as being at the bottom of it. The winter here has about annihilated all vitality.

affectionately, JB

Notes:

¹ Probably Esther Murphy.

² Act of Darkness (Scribners, 1935).

96. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

RTLS, 2 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,

April 7, 1934

Dear John:

On receiving your first letter with its’ handsome tribute and generous praise I realized that I had been hasty in crediting that you would make such a criticism as “this book is no advance on Gatsby.” You would be the first to feel that the intention in the two books was entirely different, that (to promote myself momentarily) Gatsby was shooting at something like Henry Esmond while this was shooting at something like Vanity Fair. The dramatic novel has cannons quite different from the philosophical, now called psychological novel. One is a kind of tour de force and the other a confession of faith. It would be like comparing a sonnet sequence with an epic.

The point of my letter which survives is that there were moments all through the book where I could have pointed up dramatic scenes, and I deliberately refrained from doing so because the material itself was so harrowing and highly charged that I did not want to subject the reader to a series of nervous shocks in a novel that was inevitably close to whoever read it in my generation

—contrariwise, in dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger-crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes; and I was thinking that in your novel I would like to pass on this theory to you for what it is worth. Such advice from fellow-craftsmen has been a great help to me in the past, indeed, I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who developed to me, in conversation, that the dying fall was preferable to the dramatic ending under certain conditions, and I think we both got the germ of the idea from Conrad.

With affection always,
Scott

97. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

September 7, 1934

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

I've had a big reaction from your last two articles in The New Republic.¹ In spite of the fact that we always approach material in different ways there is some fast-guessing quality that, for me, links us now in the work of the intellect. Always the overtone and the understatement.

It was fun when we all believed the same things. It was more fun to think that we were all going to die together or live together, and none of us anticipated this great loneliness, where one has dedicated his remnants to imaginative fiction and another his slowly dissolving trunk to the Human Idea. Nevertheless the stress that you put upon this in your New Republic article—of forces never still, of rivers never ending, of clouds shifting their prophecies at evening, afternoon or morning—this sense of things has kept our courses loosely parallel, even when our references to data have been so disparate as to throw us miles apart.

The purport of this letter is to agree passionately with an idea that you put forth in a discussion of Michelet: that conditions irretrievably change men and that what looks purple in a blue light looks, in another spectrum, like green and white bouncing snow. I want you to know that one among many readers is absolutely alert to the implications and substrata of meaning in this new work.

Ever affectionately yours,
Scott

Notes:

¹ Articles on Michelet, afterwards included in To The Finland Station.

98. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

September 11, 1934

Provincetown

Dear Scott: I'm glad you liked my stuff in The New Republic. It will be better when I've redone it for a book. Yes: Michelet set-ins to have been the first great master of the sodal-relativity idea. People don't realize how much Proust and a lot of other writers got from him.

I've just come back today from a visit to John Bishop, who is staying down the Cape at South Harwich. In spite of my usual fits of exasperation with Margaret, I enjoyed seeing John extremely. When Margaret is around, they talk about nothing else but fine food—how, even though the stock of the local grocers is so limited, you can have all the rare old dishes if you send away for the things. But when you get John alone, he reverts to literature and art and is really awfully good on them. I had forgotten how good he was—and he seemed to me particularly stimulating after Provincetown, which, though it has kept up quite a noble standard at times in the past, has now sunk to a level of incredible intellectual sterility. Even Dos is out in Hollywood, turning Pierre Louys into a picture for von Sternberg.

Love to Zelda—I hope she is better.

As ever, Bunny

99. [Fragment] To Phelps Putna, From Edmund Wilson

December 4, 1934

Red Bank

… As for literature, I didn't think Scott's novel * quite as bad as you seem to: the characters and the story are cockeyed, but I thought he got something real out of the marriage relationship—a kind of situation which in less aggravated forms is not uncommon among people of that kind nowadays. He claims to have improved it a lot in rewriting it for the book. …

Notes:

* Tender Is the Night.

100. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

RTLS, 6 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,
January 30, 1935

Dear John:

Your book had an extraordinary effect on me. Let me be frank to say that I took it up with some misgivings due to the fact that I felt that you had decided to deal with somewhat drab material, and that to make it colorful you might be inclined to lean over into melodrama—but more of that later. From the first I got completely under the spell of the exquisite prose, the descriptions of the Shenandoah country and, as one by one, the characters began to unfold, the whole scene became tense and exciting. I think the way that you built up the character of Marston on the foundation of old Mason was fine—contrary to Ernest’s dictum as to synthetic characters not being plausible.

Charlie emerges as an almost heroic figure early in the book, your young narrator is sympathetic but suffers insomuch as he partakes of the vague artist-as-a-young-man quality that distinguishes our time from the Werther-Byron-Stendahl character of a hundred years ago.

Virginia is the least achieved character to me. There are the fine passages describing her bedroom hysteria after the event, but, because it was never clear in your own mind exactly how she was, the courtroom scene in which she appeared did not hang fire with the intensity of similar scenes in High Wind in Jamaica or An American Tragedy or Sanctuary.

Your minor characters were fine, the comic aunt, the nigger pansy, the decayed Job’s counsellor (female), the ghost of the poetic judge—all in all, the book is packed full of beauty and wisdom and richness of perception. I read through the first half in one night and was so excited that I had to call up somebody (it turned out to be Elizabeth Lemmon) to tell them how much I liked it, how good it was, and how delighted I was that it was good!

Yet when I finished the book there was a certain sense of unfulfillment and now I am going to permit myself to play papa for a moment:

When your heart was in poetry your inclination was to regard prose fiction as merely a stop-gap, a necessary nuisance. Time showed you the error of that early evaluation and it cost you a pretty penny in years. There are things in this book which are still typical of one who cannot light his way around and who has got to, for these are the years for you during which the best amunition has to be fired off. Let me list, not too categorically, what I consider the faults of execution in the opus:

First, conscientiously you must try to cut all traces of other people out of yourself. If you were twenty-one it wouldn’t matter; it was all right for Tom Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel to make one chapter practically a parody of a chapter in Ulysses. It was forgivable for me to have done an equivalent thing half a dozen times in This Side of Paradise, but for anybody over forty to do it is simply not in the picture of one who has to make himself a personality. Vide: page 148.

Frank Norris, speaking of Kipling, said “the little colonial, to whose pipe we must all dance”—but by that general admission of the tremendous power of certain stylists he announced that he, for one, would fight shy of any effect that he might gain by using their rhythms to cradle his ideas or to fill gaps with reminiscent echolalia. Several times I saw patterns in this book which derived background and drama from Faulkner, or cadence from Hemingway and each time you might have produced something much stronger by having more of a conscience, by fighting against that tendency, cutting out the passage no matter how satisfactory it may have been in itself, and building up the structure with something that is yourself. In any case, that has been my experience, and I pass it on to you for what it’s worth.

Let’s call that the first point—there are only two. The second is a matter of purely structure. You once wrote me about Conrad’s ability to build his characters into such a reality, commonplace reality, that any melodrama that afterwards occurred would be palatable. The first half of your book is so heavy with stimuli and promises, that the later catastrophe of the rape is minimized—both in itself and in its consequences. Charlie’s whole wild day should have been telescoped and much cut, insofar as the intervening episodes are concerned, such as the bathers hearing the shots. The title should not have given away so much of the plot. You had put out so many leads by that time that the reader was practically expecting the world war and the actual fact that Charlie violated a spinster is anticlimatical as is her ensuing denunciation of him. When you plant a scene in a book the importance of the scene cannot be taken as a measure of the space it should occupy, for it is entirely a special + particular artistic problem. If Dreiser, in The American Tragedy; plans to linger over the drowning in upper New York well and good, but I could tell you plenty books in which the main episode, around which swings the entire drama, is over and accomplished in four or five sentences.

There is, after all, a third point. I think the book is a little too rough. The insistence on sex-in-the-raw occupies more space than the phenomenun usually does in life. Insofar as this is the story of a boy’s awakening to the world of passion, it is justified, but when you launch yourself into an account of the brutal fate that haunts us the balance is not what it should be. Much of the testimony in the trial seemed to be arbitrarily introduced from Krafft Ebing.

Now as a peroration let me congratulate you again. It is beautifully made, beautifully written and one of your three characters emerges as a creation. I liked Charlie, and would like to have met him, and he will stay with me when most of the fictional history of many years is forgotten. I congratulate you will all my heart.

With best to you both,

Scott

P.S. Aside from the fun of the above strictures it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the word “demean” does not mean “debase.” The phrase “to demean” means only “to conduct one’s self” and does not imply that the conduct is either good or bad. It is a common error. Other quibbles: On the jacket the Shenandoah Valley is placed in tidewater Virginia and the story in the 90s. When did people roll around so casually in cars in the late 90s? It seems to me that you would be justified in asking Max to correct these errors in further printings.

Notes:

Bishop’s novel Act of Darkness (Scribners, 1935).

Richard Krafft-Ebing, German psychiatrist who was an authority on sexual behavior.

101. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

May 1935

ALS 6 pp. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Asheville, North Carolina

Dear John:

Here’s a letter of uncalled for advice. I think though it’s good. All right—into the lions mouth.

Act of Darkness must be written off. It was a good novel—it had high points (I’m coming back to that), it showed that your long phase of being self-conscious in prose is over. You’ve got ten good years—two or three fine novels left. Now, here’s my inventory.

From the wildest fantasy (which you did not + could not handle through lack of readiness + incisiveness of wit + profuseness of it and through other reasons like Hergeshiemeric tendency to take it easy doing still-lifes) you went (+ I was all for it) to the most complete realism, taking in passing the civil war. The part taken in passing came closest to being your natural field. You jumped over it too quickly—I don’t mean the war in particular—I mean the blend. Because you’re two people—you are not yet your work as in a sense I am mine

You are

(a.) a person of conventional background + conduct with tendency almost to drabness, non-resistance, uxoriousness, bourgeoise-respectable ect ect ect ect.

(b.) a poet with sense of wonder and color of life expressed in men, women + words; + grand gestures, grand faits accomplis, parades.

(1) Setting. I should use a sensational set, probably costume set using some such character as the Lost Dauphin—I mean it—not a fulfilled rennaissanse character or you’ll just make a picture book; Something enormous, gross obvious, untouched by fine hands. Some great stone the schulptors have rejected. Your background had better shimmer, not be static or peaceful

(2) Plot Advice on this is no good. You handle it well but I advise a change of pace—I find so many good enough books are in the same key i.e. appointment in Sammara. Life is not so smooth that it can’t go over suddenly into melodrama. That’s the other face of much worry about inevitability Everything’s too beautifully caused—one can guess ahead. Even the movies know this + condemn a story as “too straight.” My own best solution to date is the to-and-fro, keep facts back mystery stuff, but its difficult. Of course its the Dickins Dostoieffski thing. Act of Darkness was much too straight, + tempo too even. Only a very short piece wants complete tempo, one breath, Ethan Fromme. It’s short story technique. Even Pride + Predjudice walks + runs like life

(3) Try and find more “bright” characters, if the women are plain make them millionairesses or nymphomaniacs, if they’re scrub women give them hot sex attraction + charm. This is such a good trick I don’t see why its not more used—I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a barbed one.

There is tremendous comedy inherent in your relations with Hurlock + Feustman. You can do more with minor characters—your perverted negroes ect are good enough but you’re rich with stuff. You dredge yourself with difficulty.

I’d like to see some gayiety in your next book to help sell it. Can’t you find some somewhere?

Anyhow all this care for shimmering set, active plot, bright characters, change of pace + gayiety should all show in the plan. Leave out any two, + your novel is weaker, any three or four + you’re running a department store with only half the countirs open.

All this is presumption. Max Perkins told me the book hadn’t gone + while I know it had a good press + the season was bad still I do worry about you + would hate to see you either discouraged or apathetic about your future as a novelist

Best to Yr. Huge Clan
Scott

Adress as on envelope
till about June 25th.

P.S. Havn’t had a drink this year—not even wine or beer—are you surprised?

102. Annotattion in Wilson's book

after October, 1937

Inscription in Wilson, Edmund. This Room & this Gin & these Sandwiches. New York: The New Republic, 1937.

I have told Bunny my plan for Gatsby

Wilson's volume of plays, annotated by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

103. [Fragment] To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

October 18, 1938

Stamford

… I remember that on one occasion some years ago I came to you with a request for what was certainly the very moderate sum of $75, and that at another time I tried to get Scribner's to be one of my sponsors when I was making a loan from a bank. You wouldn't do anything for me on either occasion at a time when you were handing out money to Scott Fitzgerald like a drunken sailor—which he was spending like a drunken sailor. Naturally you expected him to write you a novel which would make you a great deal more money than my books seemed likely to do. But, even so, the discrepancy seemed to me somewhat excessive. … You people haven't shown any signs of life since old man Scribner died—except when you yourself have a paroxysm over some writer—usually very unreliable, like Scott or Tom Wolfe—upon whom you squander money and attention like a besotted French king with a new favorite. …

104. [Fragment] To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

October 25, 1938

Stamford

… I've just had a telegram from Scott, who says he is going to arrive here this afternoon. …

105. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

October 27, 1938

Stamford

… Scott Fitzgerald has just been here to see us. I have never seen so great and sudden a change in anybody I knew. He doesn't drink, works hard in Hollywood, and has a new girl, who, though less interesting, tends to keep him in better order than Zelda (who seems to be fading out in the sanatorium). But the effect is very queer and disconcerting. As his personality was always a romantic drunken personality, it is something new for him to have to present to the world a sober and practical one; and he seems mild, rather unsure of himself, and at moments almost banal. There are times when you might almost mistake him for a well-meaning Middle Western businessman. It is melancholy to think of him in Hollywood, which has such a stultifying and oppressive effect on everybody who has anything to do with it. But I imagine he'll emerge from it eventually. He may work through to something new in the literary way. It's really a proof of his strength of character and physique that he's been able to survive at all. But it's very queer, as I say: it's as if he were looking at the world around him with grownup eyes for the first time, venturing tentative opinions about it and gradually acquiring a technique for dealing with it …

106. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

February 1, 1939

Stamford

… Have I told you that Scott came to see us on a visit from Hollywood? He is transformed in the most amazing way. Hollywood and strict non-drinking have changed him—believe it or not—into something in the nature of a well-meaning Middle Western businessman who takes a diffident interest in the better kind of books. He had his girl with him— a pretty little blond English girl who writes a syndicated movie column. She is a steadying influence but not awfully interesting—I think that his present normality and tameness are partly due to her. It occurred to me for the first time that his madness had probably partly been due to Zelda. I realized also that he had never before had a technique for meeting the world sober. He is now evolving one in rather a groping way. It is as if he were learning to walk for the first time among grownups. Maybe he will emerge into a later period and accomplish something remarkable. I can't imagine that he is doomed to perpetual Hollywood. …

107. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

CC, 1 p. Yale University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

May
16
1939

Dear Bunny:—News that you and Mary had a baby reached me rather late because I was out of California for several months. Hope he is now strong and crawling. Tell him if he grows up any bigger I shall be prepared to take him for a loop when he reaches twenty-one at which time I shall be sixty-three. I don’t know any girl in the last several years with more charm than Mary. It was a delight to meet her and spend an evening with you all. If I had known about the news in time, I would have wired you.

I called up Louise Fort in San Diego, but couldn’t get her number and imagine she had left before I came back to California. However, I am sending on your letter to Ted Paramore who may have more luck.

Believe me, Bunny, it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton. Though my idea is now, to learn about a new life from Louis B. Mayer who promises to teach me all about things if he ever gets around to it.

Ever your devoted friend,

5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California

Notes:

Wilson had married writer Mary McCarthy in 1938.

Head of MGM.

108. [Fragment] To F.W. Dupee, From Edmund Wilson

May 16, 1940

Wellfleet

… You are developing all the symptoms of the occupational disease of editors—among them, thinking up idiotic ideas for articles that you want the writes to write instead of printing what they want to write. (Mary wants me to ask you whether you think you’re The Saturday Evening Post.) …

109. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California

October 21, 1940

From Turnbull.

Dear Bunny:

I am deep into the Finland Station and I break off to write you that some of the reviews especially The New Yorker and New Republic made me sick….

I suppose they wanted you to produce a volume on the order of John Strachey, and they had a few labels prepared with which to quarantine you. Why otherwise they should quarrel with your historical approach is inexplicable to me.

It is a magnificent book—just as it promised to be in The New Republic. My very best to you both and to the young one.

Ever,
[Scott]

P.S. Am somewhere in a novel.

110. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

November 1, 1940

Stamford

Dear Scott: I was awfully glad to hear from you and to know that you like the Finland Station—also that your own book is coming on.* I hope it's about Hollywood—I've just read practically all the novels ever written on the subject, and none of them really does much with it. They all either deal with the fringes—the extras, etc.—or just treat Hollywood as an episode in somebody's life; I suppose they are all really scared to go to the mat with the industry itself.

We've been living up on the Cape, but have come back here for the winter, because I'm back on The New Republic for a time. I'm also writing a novel of a new and strange kind.

If you come East, do be sure to look us up.

As ever, Bunny W.

Notes:

* The Last Tycoon.

111. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

CC, 1 p. Princeton University; From Turnbull + Correspondence, also Life In Letters.

November
25
1940

Dear Bunny:

I’ve been reading your new essays with interest and if you expect (as Max Perkins hinted) to republish them sometime, I’d like to put you on to something about Steinbeck. He is a rather cagey cribber. Most of us begin as imitators but it is something else for a man of his years and reputation to steal a whole scene as he did in “Mice and Men”. I’m sending you a marked copy of Norris’ “McTeague” to show you what I mean. His debt to “The Octupus” is also enormous and his balls, when he uses them, are usually clipped from Lawrence’s “Kangaroo”. I’ve always encouraged young writers—I put Max Perkins on to Caldwell, Callaghan and God knows how many others but Steinbeck bothers me. I suppose he cribs for the glory of the party.

Two years after it was published I ran across an article by John Bishop in the Virginia Quarterly. His war story about Ernest under the corpses is pure crap. Also he says that I flunked out of Princeton, though in the year referred to I went to my last class November 28th, when it is somewhat unusual to flunk out. Also he reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I’ve had this before but nobody seems able to name these rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction—Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in “Cafe Society.” It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more. Maybe it’s conscience—nobody ever sold himself for as little gold as he did.

I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.

With best to you both,

P.S. This sounds like such a bitter letter—I’d rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.

1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, California

112. To Zelda Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

December 27, 1940

Stamford

Dear Zelda: I have been so terribly shocked by Scott's death.* I had had two letters from him lately, in which he had sounded as if he were getting along well with his book. Though I hadn't seen much of him of recent years, we had a sort of permanent relationship, due to our having known one another at college and having started in writing at the same time. It has brought so many things back—the days when you and he arrived in New York together—and I have been thinking about you a lot these last few days. I know how you must feel, because I feel myself as if I had been suddenly robbed of some part of my own personality—since there must have been some aspect of myself that had been developed in relation to him. You must let me know if there is ever anything that I can do for you or for Frances. Max Perkins tells me that she is a very fine girl. All my love and sympathy, Zelda. I hope I shall see you sometime before too long, We have been hoping to take a trip South some winter, and shall look you up when we do.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

Notes:

* Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940.

113. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

January 2, 1941

The New Republic

Dear John: I saw Sheilah Graham, Scott's girl friend, last week. She was with him when he died. You know that he'd been doing a lot of work on his book and had not been drinking for a year. He'd been writing all that morning, was feeling pleased at Laving got over some difficult scene. He had had a heart attack about three weeks before, and the doctor came to sec him every week. That day he was feeling so well that he phoned the doctor not to come. That afternoon he had been talking to Sheilah about Scottie, with whom he carried on an elaborate correspondence, and had just finished a chocolate bar, after which he had licked his fingers, He suddenly started out of his chair as if he had been jerked by a wire, made a clutch at the mantelpiece, and fell dead. The man in the book he was writing was to have died of a heart attack. It was a novel about Hollywood, which he was keeping a secret, because he didn't want the people out there to know about it.

There is a lot more that I will tell you when I see you. In the meantime, I want to do something about him in a literary supplement to The New Republic which I'm going to get out in February.* (Aside from that, I've stopped working in the office and am now out here at Stamford all the time.) I wish you would write something about him—a poem or something in prose. Do please let me know right away whether you won't do something. I'm glad to have the Paris poem—I'll either send it on to the N.R., or, failing anything on Scott, put it in the supplement. But do try to write something about him—preferably a poem. Perhaps you could come down here for a weekend and we could discuss the whole matter. I may ask John O'Hara to write something, too. He adored Scott and was one of the only people who had heard any of the new novel. There is also going to be a question of publishing a volume collected from his manuscripts and letters,

I had written him that he oughtn't to be offended by what you had written in The Southern Review, that you had no invidious feeling about him, etc.

Do try to get down to see us. I have felt Scott's death very much—men who start out writing together write for one another more than they realize till somebody dies.

As ever, Bunny W.

Notes:

* “In Memory of Scott Fitzgerald,” The New Republic. March 3, 1941

114. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

January 7, 1941

The New Republic

Dear John: I am awfully glad you are writing something about Scott. I am writing Glenway Wescott, Dos, Thornton Wilder, John O'Hara, and a man named Budd Schulberg, Jr., in Hollywood, who I understand is a great admirer of his. If you have any suggestions, let me know. I wish you were in reach so that we could discuss it,

I was going to write you that, on rereading your Paris poem, I didn't think it one of your best. There's too much of Eliot's “Triumphal March,” and I have often deplored the day when you came under the influence of Chirico. This is, of course, not to say that it isn't distinguished, but it would be very much to the point in Direction, and I would much rather have you on Scott, It was strange to look through This Side of Paradise, and find a scene of a night walk at Princeton that paralleled one of your poems and must have sprung from some old Princeton conversation.

How long is the Simenon? I think they could probably take a thousand words.

As ever, Edmund Wilson

115. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

January 14, 1941

Stamford

Dear John: I don't remember saying anything about objecting to the dream element in your poem—it was the Chirico element that I wasn't enthusiastic about (also in the other poems of yours in which it occurs). Please don't be hurt. My note was written in haste from the N.R. I only drop in there for moments in order to transact necessary business. My administration there (except for this supplement) is over—so you ought to transact business with Nigel Dennis, I'm sending him your review, which is first-rate, I liked your pieces about Edna and Pound—I think you are good in this vein of reminiscence.

I do hope you do the poem on Scott. Glenway Wescott has written something and a man named Budd Schulberg in Hollywood—whom Scott thought a promising novelist—is writing an appreciation from the point of view of the youngest generation. I'm also trying to get John O'Hara and Dos. The supplement is not coming out till sometime in February, but I think I ought to have all the material, if possible, by the end of this month.

It's extremely depressing to me that Joyce should have died, too—even though I suppose his work was finished. Yeats, Freud, Trotsky, and Joyce have all gone in so short a time—it is almost like the death of one's father. I think, though, that Scott at the present time needs commemoration more than Joyce, because his contemporaries have done him less justice,

I'm sorry you're feeling exhausted—but come! Somebody's got to survive and write.

As ever, Bunny

116. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

February 16, 1941

Stamford

Dear Max: I have just read Scott's MS, and it is heartbreaking, as you say. I think the book would have been very good. It is much superior to anything else about Hollywood. And it is the only one of Scott's books that shows any knowledge of any field of human activity outside of dissipation.

Here is what I would suggest for a book;

1. The Great Gatsby, if it is out of print. Otherwise, perhaps not. (It is out of print in the Modern Library.)

2. This MS just as it is, except for the few changes he has indicated. There should be a note explaining what he meant to do with the story—which I can't make out from his plan. But Sheilah Graham must know. I will edit the MS myself, if you want me to. There are spots where it ought to be compared with the written copy. The plan probably ought to be reproduced, too: it shows how carefully he was working it out, and it gives a good idea of the kind of effects he was aiming at.

3. The Crack-Up. I think you ought to consider this seriously. I hated it when it came out, just as you did; but I have found several intelligent people that think highly of it. There was more truth and sincerity in it, I suppose, than we realized at the time. He wanted it published in a book himself, and after all I dare say it is a part of the real Fitzgerald record.

4. Possible other unpublished MSS. I have an idea that his notebooks were interesting, and selections from these might be included. And Sheilah told me that since Scottie had been at Vassar, he had written her a remarkable series of letters about how she ought to conduct herself and life in general, over which he took a lot of pains.

5. The memorial articles by other writers which I am running in The New Republic. The first installment was in last week, and the second will be in next. The Glenway Wescott piece and John Bishop's poem are really topnotch things—John's poem one of the best he ever wrote. Dos couldn't give much time to his piece, because he was finishing a book, but talked as if he intended to write something longer about Scott's work later on. John O'Hara wanted to write at more length and tell more anecdotes about Scott, and as he shows a good sense of Scott's personality, it might be worthwhile to have him do this. [Robert] Benchley, whom I hadn't thought of asking, volunteered to contribute something; but I wasn't able to take any more space in The New Republic for it.

I feel definitely that Scott will be read in the future and that people will think him significant, and such a book will make valuable materials accessible, even if it doesn't sell enormously.

I am going to New York the Wednesday after next and expect to have my book ready by then—so couldn't we have lunch that day? I will meet you at the Shelton at one if it is O.K.

Thank you for the Joyce article, which is interesting.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

117. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

February 17, 1941

Stamford

Dear John: Just received your letter—and this is a last appeal to do something about the “dives.” It is the noun that particularly worries me. It is a raffish and slightly antiquated word that somehow has comic connotations and is out of the key of your poem*—so that I am sure people will think you mean “plunges.” Not that I want to induce you to change it against your own best judgment if you think it is all right. I will go over the page proofs carefully.

I have just read Scott's unfinished MS, and it has made me feel very sad. It would certainly have been very good. But the sense of his approaching death hangs over the last pages he wrote in a strange and tragic way.

As ever, EW

Notes:

* “The Hours,” published in “In Memory of Scott Fitzgerald.”

118. [Fragment] To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

March 13, 1941

Stamford

… Here is a letter from Sheilah Graham explaining about Scott's book. Please send it back to me. Make a copy if you want to. John Biggs* has just written me, and I am going to see him next week.

I will get in touch with you again before we leave. Am going to work on the novel as soon as I have cleaned up a few odd jobs.

I saw [Edward] Weeks in Boston and told him about Scott's first chapter, in which he expressed a great interest. If you send it to him, don't you think you ought to send a copy—keeping the MS with Scott's penciled notes yourself? …

Notes:

* “John Biggs is Scott's executor …”

119. [Fragment] To Morton D. Zabel, From Edmund Wilson

March 15, 1941

… 9. Fitzgerald. Yes: I have always greatly admired that passage at the end of The Great Gatsby. In fact, I think the whole last ten or twelve pages are one of the best things in the American prose of this period. His unfinished novel about Hollywood is most remarkable—returns to the more concentrated and objective vein of Gatsby rather than to his romantic vein. …

120. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

March 27, 1941

Stamford

Dear Max: Sheilah Graham has just written me asking me whether she can't have a copy of Scott's MS, so that she can go over it carefully before she comes on. Can you send her one?—or should I apply to John Biggs? Another thing: couldn't Scribner's pay her fare to come up to see me on the Cape? I will just have gotten settled by May 8, which is when she is coming; and I don't want to have to come down again for the purpose. It would be difficult to go over the MS in a New York hotel anyway. (Perhaps she can come straight from the West to Boston.)

About Esquire: I think you had better wait till we have produced a cleaned-up text before sending them a MS. Otherwise, the names and other things are going to cause confusion.

It was nice to see you and your daughter the other night. I hope our combination of liquors didn't ruin you. We were a little the worse for it ourselves.

As ever, Bunny W.

121. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

May 5, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear John: The above is now my permanent address—have just bought a house up here. I'm working on Scott's MS and find that it's possible to supplement the unfinished draft from these notes and sketches better than I had supposed. I hope you can locate the original copy. There is also among the notes a certain amount of personal stuff about his love affairs, with names and dates, for example. When I am done with them, I'll send them back to you, with a memorandum explaining how I used them and what is in them. There are certain things that it may be of interest to publish someday. I have an idea that an extremely interesting book could someday be made up from his notebooks and letters. In regard to his introducing the names of real people into his Hollywood novel, I haven't come across anything that seems libelous. Real names have been kept carefully out of the main action, and those that are used merely serve to give the reader his bearing. They are used in just the same way that real names would he used in any novel about a special field. Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls introduces real people by their names to a far greater extent and treats them far more harshly. H. G. Wells's novels are full of real political and literary figures introduced under their real names.

I haven't received the books you want me to autograph. I'll send you my new one when it's out, if you have the faintest interest in it.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

122. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

May 24, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear Max: I am enclosing:

1. My foreword, which ought to stand at the beginning of the MS.

2. My synopsis of the unfinished part of the story. Please have them make three copies of this and send them to the following persons, whom I am writing to have them check up on it in various ways: Sheilah Graham, 1443 North Hay worth Avenue, Hollywood, California; Miss Frances Kroll, 7 West Eighth Street, New York; and E. E. Paramore, 2073 Coldwater Canyon, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, California.

3. Scott's outline, which ought to he copied for the MS.

4. The rest of the Esquire stuff (under separate cover). I have put on the top the three articles which recapitulate the adventures of the Fitzgeralds. They are well written and, in their relatively light way, have a certain autobiographical interest. If you publish a volume later with the Crack-Up articles and other things in it, I think that these might be included. I hope that you will keep all these Esquire articles on file.

If you will send me a copy of the whole typed MS, including the above parts, I will go through it and get it right back to you.

As ever, EW

123. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

June 13, 1941

Wellfleet

… I shall have to put in a month or more of work on the Tycoon, and I think Scribner's ought to pay something for it. I don't want to make money out of Scott, hut I think you ought to put, say, $500 to the credit of his account, so that the family will get the benefits of it. I'll send you the MS in a day or two …

124. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

June 19, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear Max: Here is Scott's MS ready to go to the printer.

1. Sheilah Graham found another outline of Scott's and I have dug up some other data which make it possible to give a much better account of how the story was to have ended. I have therefore rewritten my synopsis, and it ought to be typed again. I do not need to see the typed copy, as I can check on it in the proofs; but I wish you would send carbons to the same three people to whom they were sent before. The other new pages in pencil (mostly on this yellow paper, but also including the last page of the main text of the story on white paper) probably ought to be typed too.

2. I have included a suggestion for a title page. I don't want “Edited by EW” on it, as you proposed. My name at the end of the foreword will indicate my part in the matter.

3. The typographer ought to pay attention to the problem of setting my commentary in the notes in smaller type than the documents by Scott, so that it will be easy to distinguish the two without using quotation marks for the latter. This is the way it is always done.

4. It ought to be possible to get the big outline on two facing pages, so that it could be read by turning the book sideways.

5. I want to see proofs on the whole volume. And please send me back Scott's books when you have transferred the corrections from them.

6. I enclose a letter from Harold Clurman. I suppose you will want to send him proofs—unless it's a bad idea to let them see the book out there before it actually appears …

As ever, EW

Just got your letter. About the “Pat Hobby” stories: You know I didn't want to include them all, but only four or five, which I picked out. They aren't very good in themselves, but I think that they do add to the general picture of Hollywood. I felt that all this Hollywood material combined to give an impression of Scott's point of view on the movies that you don't get from The Tycoon alone. Sheilah Graham says that he thought some of them were rather good, and I was partly guided by her selection. At worst, it can't do any harm to stick them in at the back of the book. I have sort of apologized for them in my foreword …

125. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

July 3, 1941

Wellfleet

… I don't think the “Pat Hobby” stories ought to be included in the volume with The Crack-Up … Unless [Samuel] Roth wants to bring out a volume containing all the “Pat Hobby” sketches (which I don't really think is worthwhile), the volume you are bringing out is the place for them. Leave them out if you feel so strongly. It isn't very important— but I thought that the ones I picked out would make some impression as a group and that parts of them were very amusing …

126. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

August 4, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear John: Thank you for your letter. The suggestions which you thought were Roth's originally came from me—I had asked him to send them to you. I have offered to edit the book (if this is agreeable to you), as he seems to want me to do. It is merely a question of assembling the material and writing a little foreword. I don't want my name to appear in connection with it, though, because I don't want to include all the memorial pieces that I published in The New Republic and I don't want Zelda— who was hurt when I didn't print one she sent me—to know that I am in any way responsible for the book. I think the Wescott piece ought to be included—though it is not devoid of pansy malice and vanity—because it makes out a good case for The Crack-Up and is well written and pretty interesting, I thought. Dos Passos is going to enlarge his piece, and this ought to counterbalance Glenway.

I have a number of letters Scott wrote me at the time that his various books came out, with some very acute self-criticism in them. Have you anything of the kind? Letters about personal matters wouldn't be in order at the present time, hut some of his observations on writing, etc., would be worth printing, I think. I haven't seen the letters to Scottie. I thought that they might be interesting because he devoted a lot of care to writing them, I am told.

I saw his friend Katherine Fessenden … (nee Tighe, of St. Paul) up here yesterday. She told me to let you know that she would be very glad to help with money if Scottie needed to get through college or anything.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

How about your writing something about Scott yourself? None of the things in The New Republic gave any really solid personal picture of him and I think you could do this.

127. To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

September 8, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear Max: I am sending back the page proofs on Scott's book.

My foreword was not included with these proofs. This, I suppose, was because the early pages of a book are always printed separately; but I wish you would check up, so that I'll be sure to get it.

The printers have made something of a mess of the setting of the notes, etc., by beginning my summary of the conclusion on the same page on which the last chapter ends, and by running everything along after this, without starting the new sections on new pages. This is contrary to the indications of my copy; and I don't think it can be due to an attempt on the part of your office to keep the number of pages down, because you have taken an extra page for the title of each of the short stories. The first of these eyesores I have been able to straighten out; but to do anything about the Test would involve resetting a large part of the book.

The proofreaders at your printers' have lived up to the criticisms you have often heard me make by failing to straighten out the usages and spellings. One of the primary functions of a proofreader is to make these uniform; but this proof looks as if it had been read by a number of different people who had not agreed 00 a uniform practice. I have attended to the things I noticed; but I discovered when I was going through the latter part of the book that the word “good-by” was spelled differently there than it was in The Last Tycoon, Somebody ought to go through the proofs and make this uniform. The spelling I prefer is “good-by” rather than “good-bye.”

Somebody has checked on Scott's references to the First Division on page 201. I'm not in a position to straighten that out up here. If you want to make this passage consistent with the facts, you might get the same person who discovered the errors to substitute references which would be correct. Of course, they would have to be regiments that men such as Scott is describing would have been likely to be in.

I have taken out the first reference to Metro; but the second one is all right, because Scott is merely indicating the different techniques of moviemaking peculiar to the different companies. There is no identification of Stahr with Metro.

The 'Bald Hemingway characters' ought to he left. I can't imagine that Scribner's nervousness about Hemingway extends to barring any reference to his work. What conceivable objection can there be to referring to the characters of any novelist?

The references to Tommy Manville, etc., and to the _______ brothers (who were not the Warner brothers, as John Biggs seems to think, hut the Fisher brothers), are completely innocuous. John seems to be under the impression that real people are never mentioned in books …

I assume that you will send copies to Zelda and Scottie, and I should like two or three for myself.

Could you send me the group of Esquire articles of Scott's that I picked out as worth printing? Not the Hollywood stuff, but The Crack-Up and associated pieces.

Will you please send me Scottie's address?

As ever, Edmund Wilson

128. To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

September 8, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear Christian: Your secretary at Princeton has just written me, and I am terribly sorry to hear about Alice's illness. I hope that she is well on her way to recovery.

This letter also brings the bad news of Duane Stuart's death—which is particularly a shock because I had just had a letter from him acknowledging a copy of my book which I had sent him. It had seemed to me, when I last saw him at your house, that he had managed to remain quite young and responsive to things. He was certainly one of the first-rate men at Princeton, one of the ones who really gave it distinction and kept up the standards when I was there.

I am just today getting off the last proofs of Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, which I edited for Scribner's. It was very sad to do it. I think it would have been in some ways his best book—certainly his most mature. He had made some sort of new adjustment to life, and was working very hard at the time of his death. He had written the last pages the day before he died of a heart attack. In going through his MSS and notes, I was very much impressed to see what a conscientious artist he had become, I hope you will read the book. He always valued your opinion.

I have bought a house up here on the Cape, and am settled here permanently, I guess. The New Republic, which I was back on for a few months last winter, is now really an agent of British propaganda—since the Elmhirsts finance it and dictate the policy—and no place for me. I'm writing something in the nature of a novel, which I'm afraid is going to take years. Mary is well toward the end of a book that is something between a novel and a book of short stories—which I'm very much impressed by. I'm not sure she isn't the woman Stendhal.

Please give my love to Alice, and tell her that I hope soon to see her well. You people have had a lot of afflictions these last years.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

129. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

September 14, 1941

Wellfleet

… This contract is all right: but if I can get the memorial pieces for nothing, he ought to make it 15 percent. So don't sign it till I've talked to the various people …

130. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

August 11, 1941

Princeton Club

Dear John: You will remember that I agreed to donate my editorial work on Scott's book. It has occurred to me since that I ought to make sure that it isn't donated merely to Scribner's—which, so far as I can see, will be the case unless they make some payments to Scott's estate. Max Perkins, whom I have just seen, points out that Scribner's is canceling Scott's debts to them; hut I don't see that what Scribner's does in relation to Scott's estate has anything to do with my connection with the editing of the hook—which is a transaction between Scribner's and me, I've put in oh it at least six weeks' work, which is worth about $500, and I think that they ought to pay $500 to the estate. Otherwise, I simply give the work to Scribner's. If they had gotten someone else, who was not a friend of Scott's, they would have had to pay him something, I wish you would let me know what you think about this situation. If possible, please drop me a line here at the Princeton Club, so that I can get it before I leave Friday afternoon, as I want to take it up with Max before I go.

As ever, Bunny W.

131. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

December 8, 1941

Wellfleet

Dear John: Here are some points about the book of material by and about Scott which the Colt Press is going to publish:

1. It looks as if Dos Passos and the other people whose memorial notices I wanted to include would all contribute their pieces for nothing. When I have definite notification that they will, you can sign the contract. The Fitzgeralds can thus get 15 percent.

2. There ate two other items I want to include; Scott's article on Ring Lardner at the time of his death, of which I have a copy; and the letter that T. S. Eliot wrote Scott when Scott had sent him The Great Gatsby. I have written to Eliot and have just gotten permission from him to print this letter. Scott was enormously proud of it, and I remember seeing it pasted up in one of those scrapbooks he used to keep. It ought to be possible to find it there. Won't you have one of the many minions and myrmidons of whom you undoubtedly dispose in your present exalted position look this up and send me a copy?

3. Won't you also try to find that last letter Scott wrote me, which I spoke to you about on the phone? Haven't you any letters from him yourself that are interesting from the literary point of view?

4. Have you got any copies of Esquire articles? I have copies of The Crack-Up proper; but there are some other pieces which are related to these which I also wanted to include. Scribner's had them, but they seem to be under the impression that they passed them on to you. If you have them, I wish you would send them to me. They are reminiscences of European travel and of getting back to America afterwards, and there is one about lying awake at night.

5. Did you get the MSS of The Last Tycoon, which I sent you some rime ago?

How are you?
Bunny Wilson

132. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

January 6, 1942

Wellfleet

Dear John: Thank you for the Fitzgerald material. I think that the Tom Wolfe letter might he included—especially if you could find a copy of the letter of Scott's which inspired it. I remember seeing the T. S. Eliot letter pasted up in one of those albums of clippings and things Scott kept. Have you looked in those? I think it's important to include this, if possible.

Thanks for your letter about my hook. Have you had notification of the celebration planned For the centenary of the founding of the Lit? They began by planning something too ambitious, and. it has now dwindled, I believe, to a simple banquet. I hope you will go.

As ever, Bunny W.

133. To James Thurber, From Edmund Wilson

February 9, 1942

Wellfleet

Dear Thurber: I was glad you were able to do that review of Scott's book—the only one which has had any critical value. I've been sorry to hear that you've been having such a bad time with your eyes. Everybody misses your stuff in The New Yorker. You know, Scott admired your work enormously and used to say that Thackeray had started in Punch in very much the same way. I hope that you will soon be able to write and draw again.

Yours sincerely, Edmund Wilson

134. To Gertrude Stein, From Edmund Wilson

February 10, 1942

Wellfleet

Dear Miss Stein: I am getting together a sort of memorial volume for Scott Fitzgerald and should like to include the enclosed letter, which you wrote him about The Great Gatsby, I should be grateful if you would give me permission to publish it. You never did a portrait of Scott or anything of the kind, did you?

I hope that things are going well with you over there. The last thing of yours I read sounded reassuring.

Yours sincerely, Edmund Wilson

135. To Gertrude Stein, From Edmund Wilson

April 17, 1942

Wellfleet

Dear Miss Stein: Thank you very much for your letter. I am having Scribner's send you a copy of Scott's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, which you may not have seen, Scottie is in her last year at Vassar, She looks like Scott and Zelda in about equal proportions. Zelda lives with her mother and sister in Montgomery. The tragedy is so complete. Scott, you know, had stopped drinking and was working very hard at the time of his death. He had a British girl friend who—though not brilliant-appreciated him and took very good care of him. His serious literary ambitions had reasserted themselves, and he was working on a book about Hollywood, which I believe would have been one of his best things. He had had a heart attack a few weeks before his death. The doctor hadn't taken it particularly seriously; hut one afternoon, when he had been sitting talking, he got up and suddenly fell dead. He had been feeling rather happy about the progress he was making with his book. I think you are right: that he had the constructive gift that Hemingway doesn't have at all—and I feel sure that some of his work will last.

Yours sincerely, Edmund Wilson

136. To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

May 18, 1942

Wellfleet

Dear John: My poem about Scott is in this week's New Yorker—improved, I think, but far from perfect; I'm going to work over it some more before it appears in the hook.

I'm expecting the proofs on my book of verse this week and should like to consult you about them. Mary will probably have to go to New York the end of the week—perhaps you could come up here for a night then.

I've sent the Fitzgerald material off. Your producing those nonsensical and gossiping letters made me get out some to me that I had excluded, and I think the whole picture now is much more complete and typical. I think that we ought to go over the proofs of this very carefully together. There are several points still that will have to be cleared up.

Drop me a line and let me know what days this week you will be free. If my proofs come in the middle of the week, I might try to arrange to get down to South Chatham and show them to you.

As ever, EW

137. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

July 16, 1942

Wellfleet

… I think that these notebooks of Scott's are extremely good and ought to be included in out book. Dos Passos, who has seen them, agrees with me, and even seems to think that they ought to be published in toto. I think, however, that they ought to be weeded out to some extent—particularly the verse, a lot of which is terrible.

In the meantime, my friend Roth, who was going to publish the book, seems to have overexpanded and announces he can't go on. Jay Laughlin— I don't know whether you know who he is: a rich young scion of Laughlin steel, who does non-commercial publishing*—has written me asking whether he can take over the book. Laughlin has a reputation of not paying his royalties on time and of grinding down his authors generally; and I have written him proposing that he pay the contributors and the editors something exclusive of the 15 percent to the Fitzgerald estate. I don't believe he will agree to this; but I think the book would perhaps be better handled by a regular commercial publisher. I believe that the inclusion of the notebooks will make it a book that can really be sold. I have also collected highly entertaining letters from John Bishop and Gerald Murphy. I don't see why Scribner's shouldn't bring it out—on the same terms as The Last Tycoon—and I'll speak to Max Perkins about it, if you think it's a good idea, when I go to New York in August . . .

Notes:

* New Directions.

138. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

September 12, 1942

Wellfleet

… Scribner's seems far from enthusiastic about bringing out the book about Scott, but Houghton Mifflin are interested, and I think that they or Laughlin will do it …

139. To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

1943

Dear Arthur: I almost never read variants, and I believe that the publication and comparison of the various drafts of a writer's work is mostly perfectly futile. I have a horror of having my own production circulate in a state of undress, and for this reason have always avoided reading other people's works in the same condition. It is mildly interesting to a writer to see how another writer goes about it to improve his stuff. I was quite impressed by and learned something from the successive versions of the same passages as they appeared in the various drafts of an unfinished dialogue of Anatole France's. But a little of this goes a long way. I don't mind leaving on record a few MSS of mine in their successive phases; but the chips and shavings of writing mostly belong in the dump heap. If you leave them around, they are likely to be edited or written about in theses by scholars in the universities who ought to be occupied with something better. The parts of a writer's papers that represent things not realized or not finished yet, or things that for personal or political or other reasons he hasn't been able to publish, are of course another matter; but they are the affair of a literary executor.

Yours as ever, Edmund W

140. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

March 20, 1943

Wellfleet

… I am trying to make a deal with Reynal and Hitchcock for a book of mine, and am trying to put over Scott's book, too—should know this coming week, and will write you, also send you what I owe you …

141. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

May 27, 1943

Wellfleet

… Here is Laughlin's contract, which seems to me O.K. I meant him to send the checks on the advance himself; but he has arranged it differently, so that you will have to. The list is as Follows:

$25 to John Peale Bishop, Sea Change, South Chatham, Massachusetts

$25 to John Dos Passos, 571 Commercial Street, Provincetown, Massachusetts

$25 to Glenway Wescott, 48 East 89th Street, New York City

$25 to Paul Rosenfeld, 270 West 11th Street, New York City

I am supposed to get $100. Since I owe you fifty, only send me fifty, and that will take care of my debt. Laughlin, as you see, is sending you $200 …

When you send the contracts back to Laughlin, ask him to send you a set of proofs when they are ready, so that you can check on what is being printed. I gradually accumulated quite a lot of material from you and Harold Ober and other people, and I think it will be quite a book. I will ship back to you this mass of Fitzgerald material I have when the book has finally gone to press …

142. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

June 3, 1943

Wellfleet

Dear John: I have tentatively called the Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up. I am not especially keen on this as a title, and it occurs to me that it might make people fee] better to change it to something else.

Two points that might be made are: that Glenway Wescott's appreciation is largely based on The Crack-Up; and that if you read The Crack-Up through, you realize that it is not a discreditable confession but an account of a kind of crisis that many men of Scott's generation have gone through, and that in the end he sees a way to live by application to his work.

I thought at one time of writing a foreword and explaining all this, but I decided that the documents explained themselves. Nobody who read the whole book would get an impression of final demoralization. Scott's last phase, when he was working on The Last Tycoon, figures both in his notebooks and in the letters; and Dos Passos wrote especially for this volume a piece which praises The hast Tycoon.

I hope that you can counteract with your influence any influence that Ober and Max Perkins may have had on Scottie, and that you can allay her misgivings.

As ever, Bunny Wilson

143. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

August 25, 1943

Wellfleet

Dear John: I have just examined the Fitzgerald MS as edited by Laughlin. The passages and notes I omitted and that he wants to have restored come under the following heads: 1. Notes that have already been printed in connection with The Last Tycoon. 2. Things that are libelous or that would hurt or embarrass people. I had already struck out the reference to Anne. 3. Stuff that I thought not worth printing. Of the notes in this last category, I have put back three or four; I think that in most cases I was well advised. I am sending the MS back to you today.

I suggest that the way to proceed is as follows. Have copies made of the pages where omissions occur. This will prevent Scottie's being needlessly worried by anything that is not to he in the book, and it will also keep Laughlin out of temptation. Take the matter up with Scottie, and then, if it is all right with her, insist that Laughlin sign a contract that includes the following stipulations: 1. The text of the book is in every particular to be controlled by you and me. a. The choice, number, and placing of the photographs is to be controlled by you and me. 3, I am to see both galleys and page proofs. I believe that he will publish the book. He cannot put things in against our wishes, as you seemed to fear when we were talking on the phone, If we give him a copy that hasn't got them on.

There remains the question of the letter to Joseph Mankiewicz (page 292). I think it is a very interesting document, and I want, if possible, to publish it. I don't see that there is anything libelous in it, and I don't feel that movie people of this type deserve any courtesy. But if you want to show it to him, have a copy made and do so—or I will do it, if you prefer.

If everything works out with Scottie and Laughlin, you can send the MS direct to wherever Laughlin says send it. I don't have to see it again till it is in proofs; but the originals of the pages from which the copies have been made ought to be sent fa me so that I can check up later.

About the letters which don't seem to you worthwhile: I think I am justified in including them. They are Interesting in connection with Scott's books. Some people to whom I have shown them think them very good. The only thing that worries me about them is that so many of them are to me. I wish I could have got more letters to other people . . .

As ever, Bunny W

I see that Laughlin has put on his title page: “Published by the Colt Press. Distributed by New Directions.” New Directions is Laughlin; but the Colt Press is the outfit out in California that published my Boys in the Back Room and Note-Boohs of Night. They were originally to have published the Fitzgerald book; but the man who ran it became insolvent and went to Alaska as a soldier. The business, I was given to understand, folded up. I have the greatest difficulty getting anybody out there to do anything about my own books. I think that you ought to find out about this before signing any contract. You ought to he sure who is responsible.

144. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

November 5, 1943

Wellfleet

Dear John: I saw Scottie before I left New York and did not find her difficult at all. She wants some passages in the letters and notes left out, and I am going to omit them. She seemed to feel a little hurt that I had not asked to see the letters that her father wrote her at college. I told her that I had wanted to see them; but that you and Max Perkins had told me that they were not possible to publish, and that the copies she had made of them had never been shown me. She has offered to send them to me. What was your impression about them?

I am going to go through the whole MS in a day or two. On second thought, I think it will be better to wait till we definitely know about Laughlin before I do anything further about the MS. The letters were put together two years ago and I had not looked at them again till my interview with Scottie the other day. It may be that I was a little callous in leaving things that were calculated to make Scottie uncomfortable. My original idea was merely to print passages which bore on his literary work; the whole subject of his personal relations might better be left for the eventual biographer.

Now, in the meantime, I think the thing to do—even before we have a new copy of the MS made—is to find out whether Laughlin will consent to a contract which makes him powerless to intervene in any way. I suggested every stipulation I could think of in an earlier letter to you. The question of the photographs should be mentioned, too.

As ever, Bunny W

I have just written Maurice Speiser, enclosing all the references to Hemingway, and asked him to get a release from H. Will dig up the Gertrude Stein letter.

145. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

November 9, 1943

Wellfleet

… There is no point in sending Laughlin the MS again in the form in which we want it printed, because he has already seen it in this form. The only changes that will be made will be the omission of a few personal passages about Scottie and one or two other people. In fact, the book should not be sent to him again. Send him the contract with a new clause. He will have to sign it or give up publishing the book, and I don't think he wants to do this. If you want to authorize me to do so, I will take the matter up with him myself. I am used to these literary negotiations. If he should refuse, I feel sure that I can get somebody else to do it when I go to New York.

We are going to New York December 6, and will be all winter at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Do come to see us. I gave the hotel your name as a “social reference” for the apartment we are taking there, and hope you will tell them that I am solvent.

Another point about the MS: on looking through it mote carefully, I find that Scottie wants something done about certain references to an aunt of hers and one or two other things that it will be easier to take up with her when I get to New York. I will have another interview with her then, and go over everything. A new copy tan be made after this …

146. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

November 22, 1943

Wellfleet

Dear John: What have you done about Laughlin: I have just had a letter from him saying that he has not heard from you. He also tries to butter me up, due to the fact that I am going to review books in The New Yorker. All that is necessary is to tell him that the MS is the same as before, with the exception of a few omissions necessitated by Scottie's desire not to have her aunt offended, etc. If he will not agree on these conditions, there is no use bothering with him. I can get somebody else to publish it, I'm sure. The publishers are now eating out of my hand, and I receive honeyed letters from them daily. If you want me to handle the correspondence with Laughlin, I will; but do let us get the thing cleared up.

Thank you for your recommendation. I am afraid, however, that the high opinion you express of my literary abilities will not impress the hotel management much.

As ever, Bunny W

147. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

March 10, 1944

Wellfleet

… Thanks for your letters and all your trouble about the Fitzgerald book. I am sorry that Mankiewicz objects to having that letter printed. He is certainly wrong in saying that Scott was “happy with the final script.” I have just called up Maurice Speiser about the references to Hemingway in Scott's notebooks. Hemingway is in town, and Speiser is going to see him tomorrow and ask him about this. I will let you know what he says …

148. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

May 15, 1944

Wellfleet

… It is sad to think of those “frohe Tage” today when Teek Whipple, Scott, and John are all dead and Stan Dell seems to be a confirmed neurotic who does nothing but translate Jung. I miss John terribly, coming back up here this year, as he lived down the Cape at South Chatham, and I had seen a lot of him in recent years. His life was a tragedy, like Scott's, and it gives me the deep sense of a loss that can never be retrieved to read your description of him —so vivid to me—of the impression he made in his undergraduate days. He underwent a rapid and dreadful change in his late years and was really prematurely senile when he died—yet he saved his art through it all and, at the time he made his elegy for Scott's death, struck a fresh vein which flowed for some time. I believe that some of his best work was written then. I have been thinking about the whole group, and I believe that, in certain ways, Princeton did not sera them very well. I said this to Mary, who has had considerable opportunity to observe the men from the various colleges, and she said: “Yes, Princeton didn't give them quite moral principle enough to be writers.” Instead, it gave you too much respect for money and country-house social prestige. Both Scott and John in their respective ways, I think, fell victims to this. I don't want to be pharisaical about them: I was more fortunate than either of them, not in gifts, but in the opportunity to survive, because I had enough money for study and travel in the years when those things are most valuable, but not so much that—like Stanley—I didn't have to think about earning some. One's only consolation is that Princeton did give us other things that were good—a sort of eighteenth-century humanism that probably itself was not unconnected with the rich-patron relationship of the university to somebody like M. T. Pyne. And then if we had gone to Yale, though we should probably all have survived in the flesh, we might never have survived in whatever it is that inspires people not to take too seriously the ideal of the successful man….

149. To John Biggs, From Edmund Wilson

May 19, 1944

Wellfleet

… Thanks for sending me your letter to Laughlin. Did you make it clear that he would have to agree not to tamper with any of my editing? I will write him about this, if necessary …

150. To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

1949

… When he [F. Scott Fitzgerald] was in Capri, he went to see Compton Mackenzie. I asked about their conversation. “I asked him,” he said, “why he had petered out and never written anything that was any good since Sinister Street and those early novels.” “What did he say to that?” “He said it wasn't true,” Scott then went on to tell me his theory that the trouble with Mackenzie was that he had missed the great experience of the war. I have thought about this recently since I have been reading up Mackenzie's books from the point where we all dropped him. It is not true at all that he missed the war. He was physically in such bad shape that nobody would accept him for service till Sir Ian Hamilton, who liked his novels, heard that he wanted to get in the service and gave him a job in the Galiipoli campaign, which enabled him, without actually fighting, to see a certain amount of fighting. When Mackenzie's health broke down, Hamilton sent him to Athens, where he had a very lively and rather dangerous career as head of the British Secret Service. He has written Tout volumes of memoirs and several novels about it, though I don't believe any of them had yet come out at the time that Scott himself felt that he had missed the war …

I suppose you have looked into the early Mackenzie, whose influence on Scott can't be overestimated. (The curious thing is that Zelda wrote like Mackenzie, too. I don't know whether she got it at first hand or through Scott or what). But what strikes me, in reading Mackenzie today, is that, much better educated though he was than Scott, Scott's best is far better than Mackenzie's. Mackenzie is a very odd literary case. I may write something about him someday. He gets less attention now than he deserves. He has been—except perhaps in Carnival and Guy and Pauline—completely lacking in intensity and almost completely extroverted. I have a theory—his mother, I believe, was an American woman from the South and his father a Scottish actor—that he represents a peculiar breed —romantic but extroverted, intelligent but superficial, quixotic but rather mild—that is due to this mingling of strains and that doesn't find any appropriate role in the English public-school system in which he was brought up. His reminiscences of the war—so full of the enjoyment of adventure and moving quickly through foreign lands and so critically detached from the British cause, which he is supposed to be there to serve—might almost have been written by an American. In his later years, he went to live in Scotland and interested himself in Scotch affairs—is now doing a series of Scotch novels. He is, as I say, an anomalous case. His career has been disappointing, but I would rather read him than Somerset Maugham, for he seems to me a real and rather remarkably gifted writer. I met him in London four years ago at a rather dreary literary gathering and, unexpectedly, enjoyed him more than anybody else that evening. I was astonished, among all the limp and the dim, to find him so cheerful and brisk, small and wiry, and full of energy and delighted with himself.

I hadn't meant to go on at this length—it seems to he turning into notes for my Mackenzie essay … *

Notes:

* E. had planned to include an essay on Compton Mackenzie in The Devils and Canon Barham, which was published after his death. He had gotten “through reading” the many volumes, but the essay was never written.

151. [Fragment] To Arthur Mizener*, From Edmund Wilson

1949

… The only one of these excerpts from my letters to Scott that I don't care to have printed is the one that begins, “I'm sorry about the other day”—which requires too much explanation. I had been seeing him during those years only at long intervals and we were rather out of joint with one another. We had both been having our troubles and were touchy. The incident mentioned here was due to a misunderstanding on my part, but it had been brought on by Scott's habit of needling his friends when he had passed a certain point of alcoholic consumption. On previous occasions when I had seen him he had presented me with writings of his, pointing out passages, sometimes highly invidious, which he would tell me were based on me. On this occasion, he wrote me to clear the situation up and afterwards came round to see me in New York to be sure things were all right between us. But he handled it with his usual lack of tact, and I received him rather coldly …

Notes:

* In 1944 The Princeton University Library Chronicle published “Edmund Wilson: A Checklist” by Arthur Mizener, at which time E. wrote him: “… looking at the bibliography, have been very much impressed, not by my output, but by your patience and industry. It will be immensely useful to me, if not to anyone else.”

152. [Fragment] To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

1950

… Scott did not “quarrel with me viciously.” He did not quarrel at all. I became offended and walked out. My letter to him may sound vicious, but there was nothing of the kind on his side. This whole thing was due to a misunderstanding on my part, my own self-confidence at the time being probably in as bad shape as his. What had led up to the incident was his habit of needling one—which he would alternate with an admiration even more annoying. John Bishop told me that he did this with him, and I have seen him do it with Hemingway …*

Notes:

* “I'll be glad to read the MS [The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald].”—To Arthur Mizener, 1950

153. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

February 24, 1950

17 East 84th Street, N.Y.

… I have just read the whole of the manuscript of Arthur Mizener's book on Scott and am very much worried about it.* He has assembled in a spirit absolutely ghoulish everything discreditable or humiliating that ever happened to Scott. He has distorted the anecdotes that people have told him in such a way as to put Scott and Zelda in the worst possible light, and he has sometimes taken literally the jokes and nonsense that Scott was always giving off in letters and conversation and representing them as sinister realities. On the other hand, he gives no sense at all of the Fitzgeralds in the days when they were soaring—when Scott was successful and Zelda enchanting. Of course, Mizener is under a disadvantage in not having known them or their period, but his hook is a disconcerting revelation of his own rather sour personality. I am disturbed about it because I am, I suppose, partly responsible for his having undertaken it, and his brief biography of Scott in that book about eminent Princetonians and one or two other things had led me to think that ho would be a good person. (The worst of it is that I have also an uncomfortable feeling that he is exploiting to some extent my own technique of emphasizing the miseries of a writer's life in order to bring out the glories of his work— because he does praise Scott as a writer, though in rather a woolly and boring way.) I am going to remonstrate with him about it. Please don't say anything about all this. …

To go back to Arthur Mizener: reading his books has given me new insight into how literary biographies are written—makes me understand the biographer's misunderstanding of what happened and his ignorance of important things that people close to his subject knew but that nobody would have been willing to tell him. It is queer to find one's own day before yesterday turning up as literary history. I thought that Arthur, having been to Princeton, would be good on the Princeton part; but he is actually rather misleading. He once told me of his permanently gnawing chagrin at not having made the right kind of club, and he seems to suppose that in our time there was a social life and a literary life that was something quite different. I am apparently represented as having written the Triangle play in my senior year in order to acquire prestige. …

Notes:

* The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener.

154. To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

February 22, 1950

… You have done a remarkable job of research, of assembling and sorting out scattered materials, and have understood admirably a good many things that the ordinary biographer would have been likely to miss …

155. To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

March 3, 1950

17 East 84th Street, N.Y.

… I ought to tell you that I saw Inez Haynes Irwin a year ago (she used to be a well-known writer, is quite an old lady now), and she told me that she had met Scott only once, but that he had made on her a tremendous impression—looking distinguished and talking brilliantly. “He was like a Renaissance prince,” she said, Undoubtedly this was not the light in which he appeared when he went to see Edith Wharton, hut if he had had a chance to know her better, I imagine that they would have gotten along, as Gertrude Stein and he did, and the bordello in which he and Zelda were supposed to have spent a week would have fallen into perspective as a joke. (I don't believe, by the way, as you seem to, that Gertrude Stein's interest In him was prompted solely by her pique against Hemingway. She was a very good judge of writing, and the only time I ever met her she talked about Scott with intelligence. She said—what is perfectly true—that he had much more sense of form than Hemingway.)

In Zelda's case, though you describe her as she later was, you don't give any idea of her appearance at the time she first came to New York, except for her provincial clothes—of which, when I spoke to her later once of the first time John Bishop and I had seen her, I discovered she was still ashamed, but which none of Scott's friends at that time had thought anything hut romantically Southern. Yet her astonishing prettiness then, with what John called her “honey-colored” hair, is a very important “value” in the picture. Nor do you, I think, make clear that even when her mind was going, the writing and painting she did had her curious personal quality of imaginative iridescence and showed something of real talent. In the earlier days of her married life this talent came out mainly in her conversation, which was so full of felicitous phrases and unexpected fancies that, in spite of the fact that it was difficult to talk to her consecutively about anything, you were not led, especially if you yourself had absorbed a few Fitzgerald highballs, to suspect any mental unsound-ness from her free “flight of ideas” . . .

… It is true that you have the advantage of not having known the Fitzgeralds or seen anything of the gaiety of the twenties, whereas you must have had a first-hand impression of the desperate hangover of the thirties. But you can't really tell the story without somehow doing justice to the exhilaration of the days when Scott was successful and Zelda at her most enchanting … The remarkable thing about the Fitzgeralds was their capacity for carrying things off and carrying people away by their spontaneity, charm, and good looks. They had a genius for imaginative improvisations of which they were never quite deprived even in their later misfortunes …

… Since I wrote you, I have got hold of a copy of Zelda's Save Me the Waltz, which I hadn't seen since it came out … I have the impression that you have quoted or depended on the novel in such a way sometimes as to make it appear that you have some kind of direct authority for attributing behavior or thoughts to Zelda which are actually out of the story. Of course, you would give your source in the notes; but wouldn't it be a mistake to take incidents in the story as literally true, since so much of it is obviously fictitious? I am thinking of the episode of the aviator and his departure and the heroine's tearing up his letter and photograph, etc. Have you independent confirmation that all this really happened as she tells it…

156. To Arthur Mizener, From Edmund Wilson

April 4, 1950

Wellfleet

Dear Arthur: I have badgered you enough about the Fitzgerald book but I had been thinking of sending you some general tips and your last letter encourages me to do so.

It is important, in writing a biography, to remember that you are telling a story and that the problems of presenting the material are in many ways just the same as those of presenting a subject of fiction. You cannot take for granted, on the part of the reader, any knowledge whatever of your particular subject. You have to introduce it to him so that he will understand it every step of the way, and you have to create your characters and background and situations just as you would those of fiction. You must put yourself in the reader's place. The Kenyan Review and the rest of them are not a particularly good school for this, because they are always making allusions to writers and movements and books without explaining what these things mean to them (very often they don't quite know).. They assume that the reader will have read the. same books and made the same assumptions as themselves.

And the biographer has not only to choose and place every detail of his picture, but to calculate the tone of every sentence. It is quite obvious that, in dealing with Scott, you have produced, by not hitting the tone, an effect you didn't intend. This has sometimes happened to me when some completely irrelevant feeling has got into something I was writing. To correct it, you have to approach the thing in a perfectly objective way and readjust it step by step, systematically, so as to put it in a different light. In spite of the fact that the biographer is given his materials in the shape of letters, memoirs, etc., he is just as much responsible for the portrait that emerges as Scott was for the Great Gatsby.

But, in dealing with the given data, you do have a different problem from the writer of sheer fiction, because you have to have some principles for deciding what constitutes evidence. Biographers, of course, have dealt with this problem in a variety of different ways. It is always a lot of trouble to check on facts, and in the case of an amusing or romantic character, anecdotes grow rapidly into legends. I recommend, in this connection, that book about Henry James called The Legend of the Master,* in which the author tries to run down the truth about some of the most famous James anecdotes. When I was writing about Lenin in the Finland Station, I tended to accept the memoirs published in the Soviet Union. I hadn't realized how early the deliberate mythmaking had been begun. Now I am not at all sure that some of my details of his return to Russia were not made up out of the whole cloth for the purposes of a volume of eulogies, of the authenticity of which I was convinced by the proletarian status of the supposed witnesses, but by which I may well have been taken in. Trotsky, whose first volume of a life of Lenin is one of the best things on the subject, does not even believe in the memoir published by Lenin's sister, which I decided to accept. You don't have any such baffling problem in finding out about Scott, but it is always an awful nuisance to try to get at the truth behind conflicting accounts, and though you are scrupulous and scholarly with texts, you have not had any occasion before to train yourself in examining evidence. In regard to the nut-kicking incident, for example (if it was nuts: I thought it was something else, which shows how legends vary), I suggest that you write to John Dos Passos … explaining that you have heard several versions and asking him exactly what happened. He was there and he is an accurate observer and is likely to tell you the truth.

Well, I seem to he having a field day as an Elder Biographer giving advice. Don't feel, by the way, that you are bound to accept all my or anybody else's suggestions about the MS.

As ever, Edmund W.

Notes:

* A collection of memoirs of Henry James compiled by Simon Novell-Smith

157. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

April 27, 1950

Wellfleet

… Arthur Mizener has behaved very well about the criticisms I made of his biography of Scott and has been revising the manuscript, but I have my misgivings about the results of his trying to put Scott in a more genial light…

158. [Fragment] To Alfred Kazin, From Edmund Wilson

June 10, 1950

Wellfleet

… I think that Mizener's book on Fitzgerald, which is supposed to he out in the fall, will be more helpful to you than I can. He knows all the literature on the subject. The best thing I ever wrote about him, I guess, is the poem at the beginning of The Crack-Up….

159. To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

November 19, 1950

Wellfleet

… You might be interested to read Budd Schulberg's novel based on Scott. Having known him, as well as being more intelligent and intuitive than Mizener, he really comes closer to the truth of both the Fitzgeralds and the period. Not a very good novel, though.

160. To Malcolm Cowley, From Edmund Wilson

1951

Dear Malcolm: I was interested in this introduction.* I have never really read Tender Is the Night, since it first came out in Scribner's—though Scott told me that he thought he had much improved it when he revised it for the book. Maybe I'll read this new edition. Do have them send me a copy. Scribner's proofreading (in our time) has always been terrible. When they republished Paradise lately, they left some of the misspellings of the original edition. Max Perkins couldn't spell himself and couldn't be made to take proofreading seriously.

I have always felt that the weakness of Tender Is the Night was that Scott, when he wrote the first part, was thinking only about Gerald Murphy and had no idea that Dick Diver was a brilliant psychiatrist. It is hard to believe in him as a scientist—and also, I think, hard to believe that such a man as Scott tries later to imagine should eventually have sunk into obscurity instead of becoming a successful doctor with a fashionable practice in New York or attached to an expensive sanatorium. Except for the movies, Scott never had any kind of organized professional life. It is, of course, a remarkable book just the same. …

As ever, Edmund

Notes:

* Malcolm Cowley's introduction to a new edition of Tender is the Night.

161. To Morley Callaghan, From Edmund Wilson

1962

Toronto

… I have just read That Summer * with, of course, intense interest. You have performed the feat—rare in the literary world—of writing about other writers truthfully and with understanding and yet without malice. You must be the first person—I haven't read the family memoirs—who has really told what Hemingway was like. You evidently got the benefit of the charming side of both him and Scott more than I ever did. I saw Hemingway —always on his visits to New York—probably not half a dozen times, and my relations with Scott were somewhat embarrassed by my position of seniority and mentorship at college, from which he never recovered. You speak, somewhere near the beginning, of “fierce passions' which, without your expecting it, were to be set off in Paris by your relationships with one another. If you meant this to be taken seriously, isn't it a little strong for Hemingway's childish sulks and a certain youthful touchiness from which all of you seem to have suffered? A good deal of the story is extremely funny. It will probably, in any case, survive as a classic memoir, like Trelawny on Shelley and Byron …

Notes:

* That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendship with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Some Others.

162. To Gilbert Seldes, From Edmund Wilson

1963

Scott was sometimes called Fitz in college. I always called him that then, and for some time after we were out.

163. To Charlotte Kretzoi, From Edmund Wilson

1964

“Shadows on Laurels” was the first thing of his I published when I was editor of the college magazine.

164. [Fragment] To John Dos Passos, From Edmund Wilson

November 26, 1966

Wellfleet

Dear Dos: I have just read The Best Times and very much enjoyed it. I wish we could talk about it …

I think that you have also got one of your stories about Scott Fitzgerald wrong. On the occasion when he threw the vegetables—they were things like half grapefruit from the garbage pail, weren't they?—he had purposefully not been asked by the Murphys to meet their nobilities, and, in order to show his defiance, heaved the vegetables into the party from behind a wall. (Archie MacLeish is said to have gone out and socked him.) I know that he wrote on Margaret Bishop's dress with a lipstick. But did he do this more than once? …

Sources:

1. Wilson, E. Letters on literature and politics,1912-1972 – letters from Edmund Wilson.

2. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by A. Turnbull. – letters from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

3. The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by Bruccoli – noted as “Correspondence”

WHO'S WHO

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was a class ahead of Fitzgerald at Princeton and encouraged him to write for the Nassau Literary Magazine. Wilson became a distinguished literary and social critic, and Fitzgerald wrote of him that “For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience.” Wilson played a key role in the reassessment of Fitzgerald, editing The Last Tycoon (1941) and The Crack-Up (1945). See Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1945).

John Peale Bishop (1892–1944) was Fitzgerald’s classmate at Princeton, and Fitzgerald credited Bishop with having taught him to understand poetry. Bishop became a respected poet and critic. Although Fitzgerald and Bishop maintained their friendship, their meetings became infrequent after Bishop married a wealthy woman the Fitzgeralds found uncongenial. See Elizabeth Carroll Spindler, John Peale Bishop: A Biography (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1980).

Published in various collections of letters (see above) (1970's).

“A Cheer For Princeton!”The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop

1. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

2. [Fragment] from the diary of Edmund Wilson

3. [Fragment] from the diary of Edmund Wilson

4. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

5. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

6. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

7. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

8. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

9. FROM: John Peale Bishop1 , To Fitzgerald

10. Jan 1918. [Fragment] From J. P. Bishop

11. Jan 1918. [Fragment]

12. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald

13. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

14. To F. Scott Fitzgerald [Postcard], From Edmund Wilson

15. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

16. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

17. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

18. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald

19. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

20. To Edmund Wilson

21. To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

22. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

23. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

24. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

25. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

26. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

27. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

28. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

29. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

30. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

31. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

32. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

33. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

34. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

35. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

36. [Fragment] To Stanley Dell, From Edmund Wilson

37. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

38. [Fragment] To H. L. Mencken, From Edmund Wilson

39. From H. L. Mencken To Edmund Wilson

40. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

41. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

42. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

43. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

44. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

45. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

46. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

47. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

48. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

49. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

50. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

51. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

52. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

53. FROM: John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, To Scott Fitzgerald

54. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

55. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

56. TO: Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

57. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

58. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

59. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

60. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

61. [Fragment] To H. L. Mencken, From Edmund Wilson

62. [Fragment] To John Peale Bishop, From Edmund Wilson

63. To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

64. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

65. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

66. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

67. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

68. FROM: John Peale Bishop, To Fitzgerald.

69. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

70. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

71. [Fragment] To Christian Gauss, From Edmund Wilson

72. [Fragment] To Ernest Hemingway, From Edmund Wilson

73. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

74. [Fragment] To F. Scott Fitzgerald, From Edmund Wilson

75. [Fragment] To Hamilton Basso, From Edmund Wilson

76. To John Peale Bishop, From Fitzgerald

77. From Edmund Wilson

78. [Fragment] To To Maxwell Perkins, From Edmund Wilson

79. To Edmund Wilson, From Fitzgerald

“A Cheer For Princeton!”
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop

9. FROM: John Peale Bishop¹ , To Fitzgerald