F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In Letters
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 1: 1907–1919

Chapter 2: 1919–1924

Chapter 3: 1924–1930

Chapter 4: 1930–1937

Chapter 5: 1937–1940

Chapter 4: Summer 1930 – July 1937

xxx. TO: Rosalind Sayre Smith

After 8 June 1930

AL (draft), 2 pp. Princeton University

Paris or Lausanne

Dear Rosalind

After three agonizing months in which I've given all my waking + most of my sleeping time to pull Zelda out of this mess, which itself arrived like a thunderclap. I feel that your letter which arrived today was scarcely nessessary. The matter is terrible enough without your writing me that you wish she would die now rather than go back to the mad world you and she have created for yourselves.” I know you dislike me, I know your ineradicable impression of the life that Zelda and I led, and evident your dismissal of any of the effort, and struggle success or happiness in it and I understand also your real feeling for her—but I have got Zelda + Scotty to take care of now as ever and I simply cannot be upset and harrowed still further. Also that since the Sayres can't come over and that Zelda can't for the moment go to America, I beg you to think twice before you say more to them than I have said. That is your business of course but our interests in this matter should be the same. Zelda at this moment is in no immediate danger—and I have promised to let you know as I already have if anything crucial is in the air.

****

I had collapsed in that fashion and Zelda were here taking every care of me imagine the effect on Zelda of recieving such a letter from my sister in America

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

June 1930

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Beau-Rivage Palace stationery.

Ouchy-Lausanne, Switzerland

Adress Paris

Dear Mother:

My delay in writing is due to the fact that Zelda has been desperately ill with a complete nervous breakdown and is in a sanitarium near here. She is better now but recovery will take a long time I did not tell her parents the seriousness of it so say nothing—the danger was to her sanity rather than her life.

Scotty is in the appartment in Paris with her governess. She loved the picture of her cousins. Tell Father I visited the

“—seven pillars of Gothic mould in
Chillon’s dungeons deep and old,”

+ thought of the first poem I ever heard, or was “The Raven.” Thank you for the Chesterton.

Love
Scott

Notes:

From “The Prisoner of Chillon,” by Byron.

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

June 1930

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Montreux, Switzerland

Dear Mother:

I’ve thought of you both a lot lately and I hope Father is better after his indigestion. Zelda’s recovery is slow. Now she has terrible ecxema—one of those mild but terrible diseases that don’t worry relations but are a living hell for the patient. If all goes as well as it did up to a fortnight ago we will be home by Thanksgiving.

According to your poem I am destined to be a failure. I re-enclose it

(1) All big men have spent money freely. I hate avarice or even caution

(2) I have never forgiven or forgotten an injury

(3) This is the only one that makes sense.

(4) If its worth doing. Otherwise it should be thrown over immediately

(5) No man’s critisism has ever been worth a damn to me.

These would be good rules for a man who wanted to be a chief clerk at 50.

Thanks for the check but really you mustn’t. I re-enclose it. The snap I’ll send to Scotty. The children are charming. Adress me care of my Paris Bank though I’m still by father’s Castle of Chillon. Have you read Maurois’ Life of Byron? And Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel?

Much love to you both
Scott

Notes:

Andre Maurois, Byron (1930).

Look Homeward, Angel had been published by Scribners in 1929.

xxx. TO: Madame Lubov Egorova

CC, 2 pp. [Fitzgerald a French translation of his letter; the text was translated by Eric Roman], Princeton University

HOTEL RIGHI VAUDOIS, GLION

June 22, 1930

Dear Madame Egarowa,

Zelda is still very ill. From time to time there is some improvement and then all of a sudden she commits some insane act. Unfortunately, complete recovery seems to be still far away.

As you know, one of the things which prevents her from getting better, and goes against all of the doctors’ efforts, is her continuous fear that she is wasting time required for her dancing class and that she has no time to lose. This fear makes her nervous and unsettled, and it postpones her recovery every time she thinks about it. It is for this reason that she left Malmaison much too soon.

It is doubtful—though she is unaware of it—that she could ever return to her dancing school; in any event, she will never be able to work with the same intensity, even though to my mind her appearing on stage could do her a lot of good.

Moreover, doctors would like to know what her chances were, what her future was like as a dancer, when she fell ill. She does not know it herself: one minute she says one thing, the next another. Her situation being critical, it is rather necessary that she should know the answer, despite all the disappointment it could cause her. That is why, knowing the affection you bear her and all the interest that you take in her ambitions I have come to ask you for a frank opinion.

It may be that in answering the following questions we would succeed in finding a solution.

1.- Could she ever reach the level of a first-rate dancer?

2.- Will she ever be a dancer like Nikitina, Danilowa etc.?

3.- If the answer to question number 2 is yes, then how many years would be required for her to achieve this goal, based on the progress she was making?

4.- If the answer to question number 2 is no, then do you believe that through the charm of her face and that of her beautiful body she could manage to get important roles in ballets such as Massine, for example, produces in New York?

5.- Are there things such as balance, etc. that she will never achieve because of her age and because she started too late?

6.- Is she as good a dancer as “Galla,” for example? To give me an idea of her position in your school, are there many students who are better than she?

7.- On the whole, do you believe that if she had not taken ill, she could have achieved a level as a dancer that would have satisfied both her ideal and her ambitions?

Have you ever thought that, lately, Zelda was working too much for someone her age?

I understand that all these questions are importunate but the goal of this is to save her sanity, and the truth about her career is necessary. You are the only person whom I can ask because you have always been very good to my wife, and you have always been interested in her work.

With all my apologies for the bother I may cause you, please rest assured of my admiration and of my respectful feelings.

Notes:

On July 9, 1930, Egorova replied that Zelda would never be a first-rate dancer because she had started too late. Egorova added that Zelda could become a good to very good dancer and that she would be capable of dancing important roles in the Massine Ballet Company.

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

AL (draft), 6 pp. [Italics in this draft represent passages underlined by Fitzgerald for emphasis], Princeton University

Summer(?) 1930

Lausanne, Switzerland (?)

For translation with carbon. But not on hotel stationary.

This letter is about a matter that had best be considered frankly now than six months or a year from now. When I last saw you I was almost as broken as my wife by months of horror. The only important thing in my life was that she should be saved from madness or death. Now that, due to your tireless intelligence and interest, there is a time in sight where Zelda and I may renew our life together on a decent basis, a thing which I desire with all my heart, there are other considerations due to my nessessities as a worker and to my very existence that I must put before you.

During my young manhood for seven years I worked extremely hard, in six years bringing myself by tireless literary self-discipline to a position of unquestioned preeminence among younger American writers, also by additional “hack-work” for the cinema ect. I gave my wife a comfortable and luxurious life such as few European writers ever achieve. My work is done on coffee, coffee and more coffee, never on alcohol. At the end of five or six hours I get up from my desk white and trembling and with a steady burn in my stomach, to go to dinner. Doubtless a certain irritability developed in those years, an inability to be gay which my wife—who had never tried to use her talents and intelligence—was not inclined to condone. It was on our coming to Europe in 1924 and apon her urging that I began to look forward to wine at dinner—she took it at lunch, I did not. We went on hard drinking parties together sometimes but the regular use of wine and apperatives was something that I dreaded but she encouraged because she found I was more cheerful then and allowed her to drink more. The ballet idea was something I inaugurated in 1927 to stop her idle drinking after she had already so lost herself in it as to make suicidal attempts. Since then I have drunk more, from unhappiness, and she less, because of her physical work—that is another story.

Two years ago in America I noticed that when we stopped all drinking for three weeks or so, which happened many times, I immediately had dark circles under my eyes, was listless and disinclined to work.

I gave up strong cigarettes and, in a panic that perhaps I was just giving out, applied for a large insurance policy. The one trouble was low blood-pressure, a matter which they finally condoned, and they issued me the policy. I found that a moderate amount of wine, a pint at each meal made all the difference in how I felt. When that was available the dark circles disappeared, the coffee didn't give me excema or beat in my head all night, I looked forward to my dinner instead of staring at it, and life didn't seem a hopeless grind to support a woman whose tastes were daily diverging from mine. She no longer read or thought or knew anything or liked anyone except dancers and their cheap satellites People respected her because I concealed her weaknesses, and because of a certain complete fearlessness and honesty that she has never lost, but she was becoming more and more an egotist and a bore. Wine was almost a nessessity for me to be able to stand her long monalogues about ballet steps, alternating with a glazed eye toward any civilized conversation whatsoever

Now when that old question comes up again as to which of two people is worth preserving, I, thinking of my ambitions once so nearly achieved of being part of English literature, of my child, even of Zelda in the matter of providing for her—must perforce consider myself first. I say that without defiance but simply knowing the limits of what I can do. To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens, even to continue the experiment thereafter if successful—only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot. My vision of the world at its brightest is such that life without the use of its amentities is impossible. I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocense in myself that could make it that possible, and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not with renunciation. For me it would be as illogical as permanently giving up sex because I caught a disease (which I hasten to assure you I never have) I cannot consider one pint of wine at the days end as anything but one of the rights of man.

Does this sound like a long polemic composed of childish stubborness and ingratitude? If it were that it would be so much easier to make promises. What I gave up for Zelda was women and it wasn't easy in the position my success gave me—what pleasure I got from comradeship she has pretty well ruined by dragging me of all people into her homosexual obsession. Is there not a certain disingenuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her relatives, and our friends that it was my drinking that had caused this calamity, and that I thereby admitted it? Wouldn't she finally get to believe herself that she had consented to “take me back” only if I stopped drinking? I could only be silent. And any human value I might have would disappear if I condemned myself to a life long ascetisim to which I am not adapted either by habit, temperment or the circumstances of my metier.

That is my case about the future, a case which I have never stated to you before when her problem needed your entire consideration. I want very much to see you before I see her. And please disassociate this letter from what I shall always feel in signing myself

Yours with Eternal Gratitude and Admiration
FIN

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

1930

ALS, l p. Princeton University

Lausanne, Switzerland

Dear Mother

No news. I'm still here waiting. Zelda is better but very slowly. She can't cross the ocean for some time yet + it'll be a year before she can resume her normal life unless there's a change for the better. Adress me Paris, care of Guaranty. Actually I'm in Lausanne + migrate to Paris once a fortnight to see Scotty who has a small apartment. So we're all split up.

Got the Swiss book. Its no good.

Love to you both Scott

xxx. TO: Thomas Wolfe

2 August 1930

have spent twenty consecutive hours with your fifst book am enormously moved and grateful scott fitzgerald

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To A. S. Frere-Reeves

Hotel Lorius Montreux

Aug. 2, 1930

Dear Frere:

<…>

The weather is hot but very fine here, and my pastime is to eat that good lake fish you like so well. Scott Fitzgerald telegraphed me from Paris this morning that he had just finished my first book after twenty consecutive hours, and that he was “enormously moved and grateful.” I hope he repents and leads a better life hereafter. I am working on my new book every day.

P.S. And please send the author a copy of that English first edition before it becomes so damned valuable he can’t afford to buy it!

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To John Hall Wheelock

Grand Hotel Bellevue Geneva

August 18, 1930

Dear Jack:

Thanks very much for your good letter. There is very little that I can say to you now except that (1) I have stopped writing and do not want ever to write again.

The place that I had found to stay—Montreux—did not remain private very long: (2) Fitzgerald told a woman in Paris where I was, and she cabled the news to America—I have had all kinds of letters and cables speaking of death and agony, from people who are perfectly well, and leading a comfortable and luxurious life among their friends at home. In addition, one of Mrs. Boyd’s “young men" descended upon me, or upon Montreux, and began to pry around. This, of course, may be an accident, but too many accidents of this sort have happened.

<…>

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Henry T. Volkening

Hotel Freiburger Hof

Freiburg, Germany

[September, 1930; the letter was never sent but was found among Wolfe’s papers.]

Dear Henry:

Please forgive me for having made you such a poor return for your fine letters. I haven’t been too busy to write ... I have two very long unfinished letters to you stuffed in among my junk: the reason I didn’t send them was that I couldn’t finish them—they would have each been ten million words long, and then I should not have been able to tell you about it ... The only way I’ll ever be able to tell you about these last four months, Henry, is to talk to (not with) you, and I long to do this, although I do not know how long it will be before I have that happiness. You must prepare yourself for the ordeal in whatever far off future: clasp a bottle of your bootlegger’s finest brew in your right hand and endure until the tidal wave shall have spent its force.

I am at length in the Black Forest. I arrived here a few days ago by a kind of intuition—the inside of me was like a Black Forest and I think the name kept having its unconscious effect on me. It is a very beautiful place —a landscape of rich, dark melancholy, a place with a Gothic soul, and I am glad that I have come here. These people, with all that is bestial, savage, supernatural, and also all that is rich, profound, kindly and simple, move me more deeply than I can tell you. France at the present time has completely ceased to give me anything. That is no doubt my fault, but their books, their art, their cities, their people, their conversation—nothing but their food at the present time means anything to me. The Americans in Paris would probably sneer at this—I mean these Americans who know all about it and are perfectly sure what French literature and French civilization stand for, although they read no French books, speak little of the language, and are never alone with French people.

I cannot tell you much at present about these last four months: I will tell you that I have had some of the worst moments of my life during them, and also some of the best. All told, it has been a pretty hard time, but I am going to be all right now. I don't know if you have ever stayed by yourself for so long a time (few people have and I do not recommend it) but if you are at all a thoughtful person, you arc bound to come out of it with some of your basic ore—you’ll sweat it out of your brain and heart and spirit. The thing I have done is one of the crudest forms of surgery in the world, but I knew that for me it was right. I can give you some idea of the way I have cut myself off from people I knew when I tell you that only once in the past six weeks have I seen anyone I knew—that was Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the master of the human heart, and I came upon him unavoidably in Geneva a week or two ago.

I can tell you briefly what my movements have been: I went to Paris from New York and, outside of a short trip to Rouen and a few places near Paris, I stayed there for almost two months. I think this was the worst time of all: I was in a kind of stupor and unfit to see anyone, but I ran into people I knew from time to time and went to dinner or the theatre with them. My publisher came over from England and was very kind—he is a very fine fellow—he took me out and I met some of the celebrities—Mr. Michael Arlen and some of the Left Bank People. This lasted little over a day: I was no good with people and I did not go back to see them. I began to work out of desperation in that noisy, sultry, uncomfortable city of Paris and I got a good deal done. Finally I got out of it and went to Switzerland. I found a very quiet, comfortable hotel in Montreux; I had a good room with a balcony over-looking the lake; and in the weeks that followed I got a great deal accomplished.

I knew no one here at all—the place was filled with itinerant English and American spinsters buying postcards of the Lake of Geneva—but one night I ran into the aforesaid Mr. Fitzgerald, your old time college pal and fellow-Princetonian¹. I had written Mr. F. a note in Paris, because Perkins is very fond of him and told me for all his faults he’s a fine fellow, and Mr. F. had had me to his sumptuous apartment near the Bois for lunch and three or four gallons of wine, cognac, whiskey, etc. I finally departed from his company at ten that night in the Ritz Bar where he was entirely surrounded by Princeton boys, all nineteen years old, all drunk, and all half-raw. He was carrying on a spirited conversation with them about why Joe Zinzendorff did not get taken into the Triple-Cazzaza Club: I heard one of the lads say “Joe’s a good boy, Scotty, but you know he’s a fellow that ain’t got much background.”—I thought it was time for Wolfe to depart, and I did.

I had not seen Mr. F. since that evening until I ran into him at the Casino at Montreux. That was the beginning of the end of my stay at that beautiful spot. I must explain to you that Mr. F. had discovered the day I saw him in Paris that I knew a very notorious young lady, now resident in Paris getting her second divorce, and by her first marriage connected with one of those famous American families who cheated drunken Indians out of their furs seventy years ago, and are thus at the top of the established aristocracy now. Mr. F. immediately broke out in a sweat on finding I knew the lady and damned near broke his neck getting around there: he insisted that I come (“Every writer,” this great philosopher said, “is a social climber.”) and when I told him very positively I would not go to see the lady, this poet of the passions at once began to see all the elements of a romance—the cruel and dissolute society beauty playing with the tortured heart of the sensitive young writer, etc.: he eagerly demanded my reasons for staying away. I told him the lady had cabled to America for my address, had written me a half dozen notes and sent her servants to my hotel when I first came to Paris, and that, having been told of her kind heart, I gratefully accepted her hospitality and went to her apartment for lunch, returned once or twice, and found that I was being paraded before a crowd of worthless people, palmed off as someone who was madly in love with her, and exhibited with a young French soda jerker with greased hair who was on her payroll, and who, she boasted to me, slept with her every night. (“I like his bod-dy,” she hoarsely whispered, “I must have some bod-dy whose bod-dy I like to sleep with,” etc.)

The end finally came when she began to call me at my hotel in the morning, saying she had had four pipes of opium the night before and was “all shot to pieces,” and what in God’s name would she do: she had not seen Raymond or Roland or Louis or whatever his name was for four hours; he had disappeared; she was sure something had happened to him; that I must do something at once; that I was such a comfort she was coming to the hotel at once; I must hold her hand, etc. It was too much. I didn’t care whether Louis had been absent three or thirty hours, or whether she had smoked four or forty pipes, since nothing ever happens to these people anyhow—they make a show of recklessness but they take excellent care they don't get hurt in the end—and for a man trying very hard to save his own life, I did not think it wise to try to live for these other people and let them feed upon me.

So I told Mr. F., the great analyst of the soul, to tell the woman nothing about me, to give no information at all about me or what I was doing, or where I was. I told him this in Paris, I told him again in Switzerland, and on both occasions the man got to her as fast as he could. That ended Montreux for me. She immediately sent all the information back to America—and the heart-rending letters, cables, etc., with threats of coming to find me, going mad, dying, etc. began to come directly to my hotel. I wanted to batter the walls down. The hotel people, who had been very kind to me, charged me three francs extra because I had brought a bottle of wine from outside into the hotel. (They have a right in Switzerland to do this), but I took my rage out on them, told them I was leaving next day, went on a spree, broke windows, plumbing fixtures, etc. in the town, and came back to the hotel at 2 A.M., pounded on the door of the director and on the doors of two English spinsters, rushed howling with laughter up and down the halls, cursing and singing—and in short, had to leave.

I went to Geneva where I stayed a week or so. Meanwhile my book came out in England. I wrote beforehand and asked the publisher not to send reviews because I was working on the new one and did not want to be bothered: he wrote back a very jubilant letter and said the book was a big success and said “Read these reviews—you have nothing to be afraid of.” I read them; they were very fine; I got in a state of great excitement. He sent me great batches of reviews then—most of them very good ones, some bad. I foolishly read them and got in a very excited condition about a book I should have left behind me months ago. On top of this, and the cables and letters from New York, I got in Geneva two very bad reviews —cruel, unfair, bitterly personal. I was fed up with everything: I wrote Perkins a brief note telling him good-bye, please send my money, I would never write again, etc; I wrote the English publisher another; I cut off all mail by telegraph to Paris; I packed up, rushed to the aviation field and took the first airplane, which happened to be going to Lyons...

It was a grand trip, lasted three weeks, and did me an infinite amount of good. All the time I scrawled, wrote, scribbled. I have written a great deal—my book is one immense long book made up of four average-sized ones, each complete in itself, but each part of the whole. I stayed in Geneva one day and of course Mr. F. was on the job, although he had been at Vevey and then at Caux. His wife, he says, has been very near madness in a sanatorium at Geneva, but is now getting better. (It turned out that she was a good half hour by fast train from Geneva.) When I told him I was leaving Geneva and coming to the Black Forest, he immediately decided to return to Caux. I was with him the night before I left Geneva; he got very drunk and bitter; he wanted me to go and stay with his friends Dorothy Parker and some people named Murphy² in Switzerland nearby. When I made no answer to this invitation, he was quite annoyed; said that I got away from people because I was afraid of them, etc. (which is quite true, and which I think, in view of my experiences with Mr. F. et al, shows damned good sense. I wonder how long Mr. F. would last by himself, with no more Ritz Bar, no more Princeton boys, no more Mr. F.). At any rate, I came to Basel, and F. rode part way with me on his way back to Caux.

A final word about him: I am sorry I ever met him; he has caused me trouble and cost me time; but he has good stuff in him yet. His conduct to me was mixed with malice and generosity; he read my book and was very fine about it: then his bitterness began to qualify him: he is sterile and impotent and alcoholic now, and unable to finish his book, and I think he wanted to injure my own work. This is base, but the man has been up against it: he really loves his wife and I suppose helped get her into this terrible fix. I hold nothing against him now—of course he can't hurt me in the end—but I trusted him and I think he played a shabby trick by telling tales on me.

At any rate, I got over my dumps very quickly, sweated it out in Provence, and here I am, trying to finish up one section of the book before I leave here. I may go to England where Reeves, my publisher, assures me I can be quiet and work in peace: I like him immensely and there are also two or three other people there I can talk to. I have never been so full of writing in my life—if I can do the thing I want to, I believe it will be good.

I found a great batch of letters and telegrams when I got back from exile. Reeves was very upset by my letter and was wiring everywhere. He sent me a very wonderful letter: he said the book had had a magnificent reception and not to be a damned fool about a few reviews. And Perkins wrote me two wonderful letters—he is a grand man, and I believe in him with all my heart. All the others at Scribners have written me, and I am ashamed of my foolish letters and resolved not to let them down.

I know it’s going to he all right now. I believe I’m out of the woods at last. Nobody is going to die on account of me; nobody is going to suffer any more than I have suffered: the force of these dire threats gets a little weaker after a while, and I know now, no matter what anyone may ever say. that in one situation I have acted fairly and kept my head up. I am a little bitter at rich people at present: I am a little hitter at people who live in comfort and luxury, surrounded by friends and amusement, and yet are not willing to give an even chance to a young man living alone in a foreign country and trying to get work done. I did all that was asked of me; I came away here when I did not want to come; I have fought it out alone; and now I am done with it. I do not think it will be possible for me to live in New York for a year or two, and when I come back I may go elsewhere to live. As for the incredible passion that possessed me when I was twenty-five years old and that brought me to madness and, I think, almost to destruction—that is over: that fire can never be kindled again.

[the letter breaks off here]

Notes:

1 Volkening went to Princeton six years after Fitzgerald and did not know him, but says that Wolfe always persisted in lumping them together as Princeton men.

2 Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Murphy of New York.

xxx. TO: H. L. and Sara Mencken

ALS, 1 p. Enoch Pratt Library

c/o Guaranty Trust
4 Place de la Concorde Paris, France

Dear Menk and Sarah:

Excuse these belated congratulations,¹ which is simply due to illness. Zelda and I were delighted to know you were being married + devoured every clipping sent from home. Please be happy

Ever your Friend Scott (and Zelda) Fitzgerald

Oct 18th, 1930

Notes:

¹ Mencken had married Sara Haardt, who grew up in Montgomery with Zelda Fitzgerald.

xxx. TO: Judge and Mrs. A. D. Sayre

CC, 3 pp. (fragment)

Princeton University

Paris, the 1st December 1930.

My dear Judge Sayre and Mrs. Sayre,

Herewith a summary of the current situation shortly after I wrote you: at length I became dissatisfied with the progress of the treatment—not from any actual reason but from a sort of American hunch that something could be done, and maybe wasn’t being done to expedite the cure.

The situation was briefly that Zelda was acting badly and had to be transferred again to the house at Praugras reserved for people under restraint—the form in her case being that if she could go to Geneva alone she would “see people that would get her out of her difficulties.”

When Forel told me this I was terribly perturbed and had the wires humming to see where we stood. I wrote Gros who is the head of the American hospital in Paris and the dean of American medecine here. Through the agency of friends I got opinions from medical specialists of all sorts and the sum and substance of the matter was as follows:

1°—That Forel’s clinique is as I thought the best in Europe, his father having had an extraordinary reputation as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, and the son being universally regarded as a man of intelligence and character.

2°—That the final rescourse in such cases are two men of Zurich—Dr. Jung and Dr. Blenler, the first dealing primarily with neurosis and the second with psychosis, which is to say, that one is a psychoanalist and the other a specialist in insanity, with no essential difference in their approach.

With this data in hand and after careful consideration I approached Dr. Forel on the grounds, that I was not satisfied with Zelda’s progress and that I had always at the back of my mind the idea of taking her home, and asked for a consultation. I think he had guessed at my anxiety and he greeted the suggestion with a certain relief and thereupon suggested the same two men I had already decided to call in—so that it made a complete unit. I mean to say there was nothing left undone to prove that I was dealing with final authorities.

After much, much talk I decided on Blenler rather than Jung—this was important because these consultations cost about five hundred dollars and one can’t be complicated by questions of medical etiquette. He came down a fortnight ago, spent the afternoon with Zelda and then the evening with Forel and me. Here is the total result.

1°—He agreed absolutely in principle with the current treatment.

2°—He recognized the case (in complete agreement with Forel) as a case of what is known as skideophranie, a sort of borderline insanity, that takes the form of double personality. It presented to him no feature that was unfamiliar and no characteristic that puzzled him.

3°—He said in answer to my questions that over a field of many thousands of such cases three out of four were discharged, perhaps one of those three to resume perfect functioning in the world, and the other two to be delicate and slightly eccentric through life—and the fourth case to go right down hill into total insanity.

4°—He said it would take a whole year before the case could be judged as to its direction in this regard but he gave me hope.

5°—He discussed at length the possibility of an eventual discovery of a brain tumor for the moment unlikely and the question of any glandular change being responsible. Also the state of American medical thought on such matters. (Forel incidently was at the Congress of Psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins last spring). But he insisted on seeing the case as a case and to my questioning answered that he did not know and no one knew what were the causes and what was the cure. The principles that he believes in from his experience are those that he and the older Forel, the father, (and followed by Myers of John Hopkins) evolved are rest and “re-education,” which seems to me a vague phrase when applied to a mind as highly organized as Zelda’s. I mean to say that it is somewhat difficult to teach a person who is capable now of understanding the Einstein theory of space, that 2 and 2 actually make four. But he was hardboiled, regarded Zelda as an invalid person and that was the burden of his remarks in this direction.

6°—The question of going home. He said it wasn’t even a question. That even with a day and night nurse and the best suite on the Bremen, I would be taking a chance not justified by the situation,—that a crisis, a strain at this moment might make the difference between recovery and insanity, and this question I put to him in various forms i.e. the “man to man” way and “if it were your own wife”—and he firmly and resolutely said “NO”—not for the moment. “I realize all the possible benefits but no, not for the moment.”

7°—He changed in certain details her regime. In particular he felt that Forel was perhaps pushing her too much in contact with the world, expediting a little her connection with me and Scotty, her shopping expeditions to Geneva, her going to the opera and the theatre, her seeing the other people in the sanitarium (which is somewhat like a hotel).

8°—He not only confirmed my faith in Forel but I think confirmed Forel’s own faith in himself on this matter. I mean an affair of this kind needs to be dealt with every subtle element of character. Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall and we are hoping that all the king’s horses will be able to put the delicate eggshell together.

9°—This is of minor importance and I put it in only because I know you despise certain weaknesses in my character and I do not want during this tragedy that fact to blur or confuse your belief in me as a man of integrity. Without any leading questions and somewhat to my embarrassment Blenler said “This is something that began about five years ago. Let us hope it is only a process of re-adjustment. Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded it but you couldn’t have prevented it.

My plans are as follows. I’m staying here on Lake Geneva indefinately because even if I can only see Zelda once a fortnight, I think the fact of my being near is important to her. Scotty I see once a month for four or five days,—it’s all unsatisfactory but she is a real person with a life of her own which for the moment consists of leading a school of twenty two French children which is a problem she set herself and was not arbitarily

Notes:

Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler.

Dr. Adolf Meyer, psychiatrist at the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital, who later treated Zelda Fitzgerald.

xxx. Bank Check

15 December, 1930.

Guaranty Trust Company of New York check, size 6.5 x 2.75, filled out and signed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, payable to Collector of Internal Revenue for $332.80

Notes:

Taxes.

1931

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

CC, 7 pp. Princeton University

Paris

29th January, 1931.

Dear Dr. Forel,

After this afternoon I am all the more interested in my own theory.

I hope you will be patient about this letter. A first year medical student could phrase it better than I, who am not sure what a nerve or a gland looks like. But despite my terminological ignorance I think you’ll see I’m really not just guessing.

I am assuming with you and with Dr. Bleuler that the homosexuality is merely a symbol—something she invented to fill her slowly developing schizophenie. Now let me plot the course of her illness according to my current idea.

Youth & early womanhood Age 15–25
She has a nervous habit of biting to the bleeding point the inside of her mouth. With all her talents she is without ambition. She has been brought up in a climate not unlike the French Riviera but even there she is considered a lazy girl. A lovely but faulty complexion with blemishes accentuated by her picking at them.

Age 26–28
First appearance of definitely irrational acts (burning her old clothes in bath-tub in February 1927, age 26 years, 7 months). At this time she began to go into deep long silences and husband felt he has lost her confidence. Began dancing at age 27 and had two severe attacks of facial eczema cured by electric ray treatment. A feeling that she wasn’t well provoked tests for metabolism. Results normal.

Age 28–29 1/2
First mention of homosexual fears August 1928. This coincides with complete and never entirely renewed break of confidence with husband. From this time on work is intensive every day with extraordinary sweating, so much so that in the summers of ’28 and ’29 I have seen literal wet pools on the floor when watching her lessons.

April 29th, 1930
Collapse—and quick physical recovery. After two weeks’ rest at Malmaison she seemed better than she does now.

April–June
A confused period about which my own judgment is not reliable. Then comes

June–July
Hysteria, madness with moments of brilliance (her short stories etc.) Schizophrania well divided so that her Doctor finds her charming at one moment and yet is forced to confine her to the Eglantine the next. The good effect of this last measure. This period culminates with the visit of her daughter. Two very stirring experiences which have a marked effect on accentuating her best side—until—

August
Finding her to be ripe the doctor intensifies the process of reeducation, aiming at, for one thing, reconciliation with the husband. Things apparently progress. She writes nice and pleasant letters. She has good will again and hope and your interest in her case and hope for her is at its strongest. Suddenly as things reach a point where the meeting with husband and the resumption of serious life is a week off, when she has reached the point when the doctor has been able to try, though unsuccessfully, psycho-analysis she breaks out with virulent eczema. In this eczema she becomes necessarily more the invalid, the weakling, more self-indulgent. Her will power decreases. When the postponed meeting with the husband occurs she

September
brings to it only enough balance in favor of normality to last an hour and a renewed attack of eczema succeeds it.

Now I want to interrupt the sequence here to insert my idea. The original nervous biting, followed by the need to sweat might indicate some lack of normal elimination of poison. This uneliminated poison attacks the nerves.

When I used to drink hard for several days arid then stopped I had a tendency toward mild eczema—of elimination of toxins through the skin. (Isn’t there an especially intimate connection between the skin and the nerves, so that they share together the distinction of being the things we know least about?) Suppose the skin by sweating eliminated as much as possible of this poison, the nerves took on the excess—then the breakdown came, and due to the exhaustion of the sweat glands the nerves had to take it all, but at the price of a gradual change in their structure as a unit.

Now (I know you’re regarding this as the wildest mysticism but please read on)—now just as the mind of the confirmed alcoholic accepts a certain poisoned condition of the nerves as the one to which he is the most at home and in which, therefore, he is the most comfortable, Mrs. F. encourages her nervous system to absorb the continually distilled poison. Then the exterior world, represented by your personal influence, by the shock of Eglantine, by the sight of her daughter causes an effort of the will toward reality, she is able to force this poison out of the nerve cells and the process of elimination is taken over again by her skin.

In brief my idea is this. That the eczema is not relative but is the clue to the whole business. I believe that the eczema is a definite concurrent product of every struggle back toward the normal, just as an alcoholic has to struggle back through a period of depression.

October
To resume the calendar for a moment:

She is obviously making an effort. But at the same time comes the infatuation for the red-haired girl. At first I thought that caused the third attack of eczema but now I don’t. Isn’t it possible that it was her resistance, her initial shame at the infatuation and the consequent struggle that brought on the third eczema? This is supported by the fact that the infatuation continued after the eczema had gone. The eczema may have proceeded from the struggle toward reality rather than from the excitation itself.

The whole system is trying to live in equilibrium. When her will dominates her she doesn’t find it. I can’t help clinging to the idea that some essential physical thing like salt or iron or semen or some unguessed at holy water is either missing or is present in too great quantity. But to continue

November
Physical health fine but more in the hallucination. Growing vagueness and almost complete lack of effort. No eczema—but no effort. Her second infatuation does not cause eczema and neither does the

December
First visit of child. Because she behaves badly at my behest she makes an effort to think before the second visit and there is immediate eczema.

One more note and then I’ll draw my conclusions.

When she was discharged as cured from Malmaison she had facial eczema which we attributed to drugs. But it did not appear at Valmont or in early days at Prangins in spite of drugs at Valmont and disintoxication at Prangins for she was sunk safely in her insane self on both occasions.

My conclusions.

(a) The nature of any such poison would, of course, be too subtle for us. I believe she needs

(1) Naturally all you include under the term reeducation.

(b) Renewal of full physical relations with husband, a thing to be enormously aided by an actual timing of the visits to the periods just before and just after menstruation, and avoiding visits in the middle of such times or in the exact centre of the interval.

(c) To disintoxicate artificially in exact accord with the intensity of the reeducation. I can not believe that with her bad eyes that give her headaches and her many highly developed artistic appreciations, that embroidery, carpentry or book-binding are, in her case, any substitute for real sweating. She has a desire to sweat—for many summers she cooked all the pigments out of her skin tanning herself. I know this is difficult now but couldn’t she take intensive tennis lessons in the spring or couldn’t we think of something? Golf perhaps?

(d) Failing this I believe artificial eliminations should be absolutely concurrent with every effort at mental cure. I believe that constipation or delayed menstruations or lack of real exercise at such a time should be foreseen and forestalled as, in my opinion, eczema will always be the result.

I suppose the only new thing in all this is that I connect the eczema with one only sort of agitation the good sort and not with all agitation. Will you write me whether you agree at all while this is still fresh in your mind. I left my American addresses at the desk. Is her physical health good in general? Have her eyes been examined—she complains that her lorgnettes no longer work. The doctoress told me she had no warm underwear and I recommended some very light angora wool and silk stuff but Telda wouldn’t listen to me.

She was enormously moved by my father’s death or by my grief at it and literally clung to me for an hour. Then she went into the other personality and was awful to me at lunch. After lunch she returned to the affectionate tender mood, utterly normal, so that with pressure I could have manoeuvred her into intercourse but the eczema was almost visibly increasing so I left early. Toward the very end she was back in the schizophrania.

I was encouraged by our talk to-day. I am having this typed and translated and sent you from Paris. I shall be back in three or four weeks. Would you kindly cable me five or six words at about the middle of every week to the address LITOBER NEW YORK (my name not required).

Always gratefully yours,

Notes:

House at Prangins clinic for the most severely disturbed patients.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

29 January-6 February 1931

Hamburg-Amerika Line letterhead

Bremen Feb 3d 1881

Madame—I hope to God you got some kind of sleep. No human being could possibly have all the stuff that I think you have, but you could divide that by two and still have enough left over to make a whole row of mixed debutantes and Tiller girls² or what have you.

This letter is a sort of tender homage or would you like that big lilac tree in front of the dining room or a cargo mast (the latter covered with the facial hair of any man on board including the captain)?

Your Chattel Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Troupes of dancers for musical comedies.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

29 January-6 February 1931

Somewhat later

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

Hamburg-Amerika Line letterhead

Canal Boat “Staten Island” “Spend-a-dollar day” 1901

Pearl of the Adriatic: Another note because I am in terror you will wake up with an open trunk in front of you + confuse it with the trunk you last saw early this [ ] morning tottering, I might say weaving from your palatial suite—what I mean is I am sober, de-alcoholized, de-nicotinized de-onionized and I still adore you. Jay Obrien himself could say no more.

Is every member of you entourage so inflamed with jealousy at my wakefulness that it will be difficult to see you?—Douglass Fairbanksova Dostoieffski for example? I arrived on the last day but we parvenus have to be pushing or My God the rush of modern life would just—just well, devour us—that doesn't sound right, but whatever the rush of modern life does.

Be generous; don't be a lower bert' but an upper 'bert—even forgive that. I miss you. Will you meet me in the boiler room just inside the first canary cage at 12:15? I miss you. If you have breath in your body answer this.

Jay (Doctor of Medicine)

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

29 January-6 February 1931

Hamburg-Amerika Line letterhead

Even Later

Graf Zeppelin Stowaways Quarters

Are you just going to sleep and sleep? And sleep and sleep? Havn't you any feeling of public responsibility. Havn't you any invitations to fine country houses. Mrs. Jay Obrien would blush for you. I woke up thinking of you—I have tried to get my mind a decent break by feeding books to it but you are too much alive to let them have any reality.

Wake up. The sun is shining, the clocks are ticking, the nose is running. Life is tearing along, and you an old sleepy-head.

Dudley Field Malone Bishop of Bordeaux

I enclose my photograph

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

29 January-6 February 1931

Hamburg-Amerika Line letterhead

The “Alps,” 6th Ave at 58th Near Nightfall

I put in a new razor blade for you + the texture of my skin is like duveteen or Gloria Morgan “Pond's Extract” Vanderbilt—it would not shame the greatest fairy that ever knitted a boudoir cap—and still no word. Are you recieving? Do you ever recieve? Did you ever think who killed Rothstien + Dorothy King?¹ I did. After the fourth note + no answer I said if they like sleeping I'll help go on with it. Thats my story and no transfer conniesseur from Brooklyn can shake it. What if your father is President? What if Scott Fitzgerald did try to make you? Every girl's got to get off on her own initiative and any paddles broken or bloomers-ripped should be reported to Miss Rorer at the small cottage. Have I got to have the whole Hapag S.S. Line installed with room telephones to know you're still alive?

Fitzg—

Notes:

¹ Gambler Arnold Rothstein and Dorothy King were victims of unsolved murders; Rothstein was the model for Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

New Yorker Hotel letterhead. New York City

feb 7th [1931]

So then you were gone + I couldn't whisper any more into the wooly top-knot of your hat. Everything was unreal again with all the women sitting naked on the tables + the men snarling among themselves + so I went behind my convenient bush—which is to say I got quite a lot drunk. I talked a lot to thisman thatman + that girl who was in ballet school with my wife but when I heard myself from the calm detached listening post that part of me was sitting in, telling her that she was mosh beautiful woom in a worl and asking Douglas fee had any ajections—I decided to get out which took twenty minutes of slow motion—I left the three of them in front of some cafe + came back to this lousy hotel with my briefcase in my arms, wondering about you + what you had gone home to + how long hours and days are.

So Mrs. Goldstien (Nee Mr. and Mrs Jay O'brien) so—there's some hours gone and to that extent you're nearer

Scott

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

After 7 February 1931

Hotel Napoleon letterhead. Paris

Micky Mouse: This is Virginia with names like Manassas and Culpepper full of the Civil War + I've been thinking about my father again + it makes me sad like the past always does. So I'll think of you because that's happy, Dear Bert.

The management of Grand Hotel had two of their men scurrying about New York all afternoon trying to get seats for Charley + me. Finally they had to buy in two singles from different agencies + change around two parties to get a pair of seats together. Charley arrived at the theatre at eight o'clock, took his seat + went sound asleep for three hours. He remembers the curtain going up + a man coming on the stage but nothing after that except that at one point a woman asked him to take his head off her shoulder. I reached the theatre at the moment when the last curtain was going down and saw the knees + feet of what appeared to be a lot of bellboys. So no one can say that Scott Fitzgerald + Charles MacArthur havn't been to “Grand Hotel"—at least in spirit. I left him in a speakeasy with the indignant manager, Charley looking very wild + helpless as if a whole series of tournedos had xploded in his mouth

I sent the books to 50 Plaza St. If they havn't come please call Scribners retail dept. I'm particularly anxious for you to have them.

I miss you so Goddamn much
Scott

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Wire. New York Public Library

1931 FEB 15 PM 6 35
MONTGOMERY ALA¹
H L MENCKEN
WILL YOU KINDLY WIRE ME THE NAME OF THE BIGGEST PSYCHIATRIST AT JOHNS HOPKINS FOR NONORGANIC NERVOUS TROUBLES ADDRESS 2400 16TH ST WASHINGTON DC REGARDS
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

¹ After his father's funeral Fitzgerald went to Montgomery to report to the Sayres on Zelda's condition.

xxx. To Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci)

From Turnbull.

S.S. Olympic

February 23, 1931

My dearest Ceci:

I don't know what in hell I'd have done unless you had come up. The trip South was not so fortunate as it might have been, but it didn't blot out my sense of you and how much I have always loved you and depended on you. Thank you for your second note. I have always wanted, if anything happened to me while Zelda is still sick, to get you to take care of Scottie.

All those days in America ¹ seem sort of blurred and dream-like now. Sometimes I think of Father, but only sentimentally; if I had been an only child I would have liked those lines I told you about of William McFee over his grave:—

“O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me: I waste my years sailing along the sea.”

Life got very crowded after I left you, and I am damned glad to be going back to Europe where I am away from most of the people I care about, and can think instead of feeling.

Gigi wrote me such a sweet letter, especially because it said that you liked me.

Dearest love to you.
Scott

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald had come back from Europe for his father's funeral.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

March 1931

Grand H6tel de la Paix letterhead Lausanne, Switzerland

Darling Micky Mouse: Arrived here in bum condition + took to bed—immediately a pile of the most depressing American mail arrived so I got up + organized myself + my affairs + now things look brighter (by the way if you have any lingering jealously of that lady you'll be glad to know that I found a week-old note here saying she was leaving for America because of the serious illness of her ex-husband!)

It was too bad about us this time—we met like two crazyy people, both cross + worried + exhausted + as we're both somewhat spoiled we took to rows + solved nothing. It was rough too about the hotel—at the time I was angry at that woman but later the scene of her in the hall returns to me as something terribly sordid, a scene in a cheap boarding house, and both of us too dazed to face it + her properly.

It certainly indicates that we're not too good for each other at this precise moment—as you suggested we'd each better try to straighten out our affairs first, because we're so different that we have to have a certain patience toward each other + that's impossible in a condition of agitation. All of which doesn't mean that my tenderness toward you is diminished in the slightest but only that I want it to go on, + one more siege like those three days would finish us both + spoil everything for ever.

In any case I find I'm in debt again which means two weeks hard work and a life of complete ascetisism. As I told you the first two weeks in July belong to my family. Meanwhile if your own plans get clearer—and believe me dear child I appreceate what of a hell of a time you've had—the Guaranty Trust always reaches me quickest, because I may be here or in Nyon with my invalid.

I hope things are better + that you'll try to remember the best -|- not the worst of that bad time

Your Krazy Cat

xxx. TO: Alice Lee Myers

c. March 1931

ALS, 2 pp. Mrs. Richard Myers

Grand Hotel de la Paix letterhead Lausanne, Switzerland

Sweet Alice (Ben Bolt or no Ben Bolt):

What a hell of time all my friends have been having this year! Even the Bishops have twins. But when I think of poor Dick with part of his flesh cloven to another part I have the horrors thinking what it must feel like. But those things leave no mental scars. I had my nosebones sawed without anaesthetics at his age and it only taught that all misery is over eventually.

All right about Scotty if you'll trade Fanny for her. But tell Dick not to tell her she's pretty because she gets ugly for a week afterwards grimacing at herself in mirrors. You've been so damn nice to her and there's nobody I'd rather have her with than your children This must be an exception to the fact that children of friends invariably loathe each other. Scotty + the little Murphys begin to glare as soon as they're in a radius of a hundred yards from each other.

Christ knows about this summer. I'd certainly love to have Scotty visit you for a time—she'll be some, maybe a lot with her mother + I plan taking her for a months swimming. It's all vague.

I hope you have a great time in America. In spite of the heavy gloom of up-to-my-neck-in-crepe, I enjoyed the way people are getting down to work.

Zelda is much, much better. Only a few months from being well. I've skiied with her yesterday.

Much Much love from us both to all of you
Scott

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Guaranty Trust, Paris

March 1931

Darling Micky Mouse:

When are you coming over?—about when? approximately when? I know you buyers don't get here usually until about Aout while we contact men just go hither + thither at will—but I have mothers to take to Carlsbad, daughters to arrange vacations for, and I want to know when you're coming + how much of you I can see. Are you coming in Apr.;? May?; June? Your telegram made me think sooner. I'll meet you anywhere (like Mr. Cornell) and just so long as you go in for white evening purses I know it'll be worth my while.

Oh Bert! I remember:

“No jam tomorrow”—and
“I've got my gloves on” (preceded by a shriek of laughter) and
“I g't a paarler”, and
The exploding tournedos, and best of all
“Not one of the nicest episodes, the nicest episode.”

And I miss you so Goddamn much

So, as we agreed, let's not have such a long time interval between these Honalulu Beaches. Bert, dear.

Scott

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Grand Hotel de la Paix letterhead Lausanne, Switzerland

Guaranty Trust 4 Concorde

March 11th 1931

Dear Kaly:

I can't thank you enough for your kindness to mother. I love your “There is no charge for this as we are doing it every day.” Such a wonderful reason. I'm going to write Lorimer that I make no charge for my writing as I'm doing it every day. Can't you hear the barber's: “No, please sir—I won't take a penny—I'm doing it every day.” However there's probably some catch to it—you've found that cache of old prayer books I left in your mother's cellar or something like that + your conscience is troubling you. Far be it from me not to look for the motive behind—I suppose you think I'm going to write another story about you—well, I'm not—unless you get in some more interesting trouble.

I hear you're the only prominent Minnesotan that didn't get a Nobel Prize last year + that's why you're afraid to show your face in Europe.

Zelda is almost well—really well. I hope we'll be home in the fall. She's still in the clinique but I went ski-ing with her this afternoon.

All love, sacred + profane to Sandy + yourself

Scott F

xxx. To Gilbert Seldes

One page ALS.

Undated, circa Spring 1931.

The check that fell out of my mail this morning… …just emerging in company with Zelda from the biggest muddle we ever got into… Zelda is so near well that its now a question of a few weeks – but she had a damn narrow escape from permanent neurasthenia or worse. We have no plans. I am here in Switzerland near her… Your Affectionate Old Friend, Scott.

Notes:

Fitzgerald writes to Gilbert Seldes from Switzerland, where Zelda was being treated at a clinic. Fitzgerald thanks him for a check.

xxx. To Paul Eldridge

ALS, 1 page, Auction.

June 15, 1931.

Thank you for the open, pleasant tone of your letter Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

June 1931

ALS, 1 p. University of Virginia

Grand Hotel de la Paix letterhead Lausanne, Switzerland

Dear Mr. Dashiell:

As I wired—I'd like to do the article² (It's already paid for!) It'll be ten days before I can send it, tho It'll reach you about early in July. Thanks for the idea

Yrs. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Scribner's Magazine (November 1931).

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

TLS, 1 p. (with holograph postscripts). Princeton University

Summer 1931

Sunday.

Dear Scott:—

How great that everything seems to be going so well and that you can all really come here. We had begun to worry a little and expect an ugly letter from you. You've doubtless got my telegram saying that the fourth August will be fine. We return from Salzburg on the afternoon of the third after Patrick's next injection which takes place that morning. We stay at the Grand Hotel de l'Europe when there. It's not a bad idea that we see each other there that day, unless you're coming by another way (Zurich—Munich) to Bad Aussee.

Bring bathing suits.

The name of the property is RAMGUT, Bad Aussee, Steyrmark, Austria. Telephone number I. We are about 85 kilometres or two hours and one half easy going from Salzburg. I should suggest that you come by Zurich, Buchs, Innsbruck, Salzburg,—or if you want to go to Germany from the Swiss border and then South to Salzburg, go by Munich,—but by Innsbruck and the Austrian Tyrol is lovely.

Our schedule may be too tight a one to allow of our going to Vienna with you, as it will be just the moment that we are without a trained nurse for Patrick, the present one leaves August 3rd and Miss Stewart does not land until the 10th. But you and Zelda must go, Scottie can stay with us so easily until you come back to get her. It will give you and Zelda kind of a fling alone;—and we are on your way back.

The termination of your letter with it's patter of baby feet had what you would consider the desired effect upon Sara: sharp local pains followed by excessive retching.

Our love to you all. We are looking forward to seeing you,

Gerald.

[Across the top] Vienna is 5 hrs. (at most) due East of us by motor. We are on the direct road between Salzburg + Wien.

[Along left margin] Bring Express or A.B.A. checks for Austria + Germany,—otherwise it's difficult,—and if possible put USA somewhere on your car,—otherwise you're apt to be eaten for a Frog. With USA they strew roses.

xxx. Inscription TO: Samuel Marx

Inscription in This Side Of Paradise, Auction

Hollywood

For Sam Marx who has just arranged my future for me—very different from the future of Amory Blaine,—from his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald Hollywood, 1931

xxx. FROM: Norma Shearer Thalberg

c. December 1931

Wire. Scrapbook. Princeton University

SCOTT FITZGERALD
CHRISTIE HOTEL HOLLYWOOD CALIF
I THOUGHT YOU WERE ONE OF THE MOST AGREEABLE PERSONS AT OUR TEA
NORMA THALBERG.

Notes:

While working in Hollywood on Red-Headed Woman, Fitzgerald got drunk at a party in the Thalbergs' home and performed for the guests. “Crazy Sunday” is based on this incident.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

1931

Inscription in This Side of Paradise. Princeton University

Dear Bert:

This book is silly + dated now but it made me a name when I was very young. It was the first book about necking + the younger generation—way back before Flaming Youth or such things

Affectionately Yours F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

16 December 1931

Official Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer document signed. Auction

This will confirm the agreement between us that the term of your employment under your contract of employment with us dated November 7, 1931, shall be deemed to have expired on December 15, 1931… it being expressly understood that we shall have and retain all rights of every kind granted to us under said contract.

[pencil annotation at the bottom] Mr. Thalberg signed original copy only. Mr. Mayer signed 2 copies. Copies signed by L. B. Mayer sent to Ober & Craig.

Notes:

In his second stint in Hollywood, Fitzgerald spent a four-week assignment working on the script for Red-Headed Woman, a screenplay to be adapted from Katharine Brush's novel of the same name. Thalberg found his script to be too serious, and turned it over to Anita Loos for a rewrite. Loos delivered a script with more playful banter, and the Jean Harlow vehicle—with Loos's solo screen credit—became a box office success. Dismayed by his failure, Fitzgerald returned east after MGM releases Fitzgerald from his contract.

1932

xxx. TO Dayton (?) Kohler

From Turnbull.

819 Felder Avenue Montgomery, Alabama

January 25, 1932

Dear Mr. Kohler:

The reason for my long delay in writing you is this—shortly after receiving your letter I left France for Switzerland in terrible confusion because of the sickness of my wife. My current correspondence was packed by mistake in a crate—which has only just been opened. I am terribly sorry.

I was delighted naturally with your article about me. You cover me with soothing oil and make me feel more important than I have for ages.

I am mid-channel now in a double-decker novel which I hope will justify some of the things that you say. Perhaps Swanson of College Humor or someone there might be interested—for the moment I am vieux jeu and completely forgotten by the whole new generation which has grown up since I published my last book in '26. So since there has been no published development since then, I think the article would be for the present hard to sell.

I am doubly grateful for your interest and again I apologize for my apparent discourtesy in not answering you before.

If you are ever in Montgomery, Alabama, I would love to see you. My address is 819 Felder Avenue.

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

CC of retyped letter, 2 pp.

Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives,
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Montgomery, Alabama

Zelda Fitzgerald
#6408
3.14.32
Letter from husband.

Dear Dr. Squires:
Zelda’s novel, or rather her intention of publishing it without any discussion, has upset me considerably. First, because it is such a mixture of good and bad in its present form that it has no chance of artistic success, and, second, because of some of the material within the novel.

As you may know I have been working intermittently for four years on a novel which covers the life we led in Europe. Since the spring of 1930 I have been unable to proceed because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums. However, about fifty thousand words exist and this Zelda has heard, and literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rythym, materials, even statements and speeches. Now you may say that the experience which two people have undergone is common is common property—one transmutes the same scene through different temperments and it “comes out different” As you will see from my letter to her there are only two episodes, both of which she has reduced to anecdotes but upon which whole sections of my book turn, that I have asked her to cut. Her own material—her youth, her love for Josaune, her dancing, her observation of Americans in Paris, the fine passages about the death of her father—my critisisms of that will be simply impersonal and professional. But do you realize that “Amory Blaine” was the name of the character in my first novel to which I attached my adventures and opinions, in effect my autobiography? Do you think that his turning up in a novel signed by my wife as a somewhat aenemic portrait painter with a few ideas lifted from Clive Bell, Leger, ect. could pass unnoticed? In short it puts me in an absurd and Zelda in a rediculous position. If she should choose to examine our life together from an inimacable attitude & print her conclusions I could do nothing but answer in kind or be silent, as I chose—but this mixture of fact and fiction is simply calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can’t let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we have accumulated enroute—My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity. That’s why she sent the book directly to New York.

Of course were she not sick I would have to regard the matter as an act of disloyalty or else as something to turn over to a lawyer. Now I don’t know how to regard it. I know however that this is pretty near the end. Her mother thinks she is an abused angel incarcerated there by my bad judgement or ill intention. In the whole family there is just a bare competence save what I dredge up out of my talent and work to pay for such luxuries as insanity. But Scotty and I must live and it is getting more and more difficult in this atmosphere of suspicion to turn out the convinced and well-decorated sopiusous for which Mr. Lorimer pays me my bribe.

My suggestion is this—that you try to find why Zelda sent to the novel north without getting my advice, which, as I have given her her entire literary education, all her encouragement and all her opportunity, was the natural thing to do.

Secondly that you tell Mrs. Sayre that I am any kind of a villain you want, and that you have private information on the fact, but htat her daughter is sick, sick, sick, and that there is no possibility of being mistaken on that.

Third—keep the novel out of circulation until Zelda reads my detailed criticism & appeal to reason which will take two days more to prepare.

Meanwhile I will live here in a state of mild masturbation and a couple of whiskys to go to sleep on, until my lease expires April 15th when I will come north. I appreciate your letters and understand the difficulties of prognosis in this case. My sister-in-law will be north this week. She is a trivial, charming woman and we dislike each other deeply. Her observation or analysis of any given series of facts is open to the same skeptesism as that of any member of the Sayre family—they left the habit of thinking to the judge for so long that it practically has become a parlor game with them.

I enclose Zelda a check for fifty dollars.

Yours Sincerely & Gratefully
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

The original draft of Save Me the Waltz, written while Zelda Fitzgerald was in the Phipps Clinic, has not survived.

Bell was a British art critic; Fernand Leger was a French painter.

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

CC of retyped letter, 1 p.

Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives,
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Montgomery, Alabama

Zelda Fitzgerald
#6408
no date (I think 3.20.32)
Letter from husband.

Dear Dr. Squires:
On the advice of a doctor here I sent Zelda a very much shortened version of the letter here inclosed which incorporate my ideas on the subject of her self expression. I am simply unable to depart from my professional attitude—if you think that in any way I have departed from it please tell me—but I think that what further speculation we indulge in are in the realms of the most highly experimental ethics. I feel helpless and alone in the face of the situation; nevertheless I feel myself a personality, and if the situation continues to shape itself as one in which only one of us two can survive, perhaps you would doing a kindness to us both by recommending a separation. My whole stomach hurts when I contemplate such an eventuality—it would be throwing her broken upon a world which she despises; I would be a ruined man for years—but, alternatively, I have reached the point of submersion if I must continue to rationalize the irrational, stand always between Zelda and the world and see her build this dubitable career of hers with morsels of living matter chipped out of my mind, my belly, my nervous system and my loins. Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Niether judgement would mean anything: The former class would be composed of those who had seen me unpleasantly drunk and the latter of those who had seen Zelda unpleasantly psychotic. These two classes would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other—in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives. Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucination.

So you see I beg you not to pass the buck to me. Please, when I come north, remember that I have exhausted my intelligence on the subject—I have become a patient in the face of it. Her affair with Edward Josaune in 1925 (and mine with Lois Moran in 1927, which was a sort of regenge) shook something out of us, but we can’t both go on paying and paying forever. And yet I feel that that’s the whole trouble back of all this.

I will see you Thursday or Friday—I wish you’d tell me then what I ought to do—I mean I wish that you and Doctor Myers would re-examine the affair,

Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

Spring 1932

CC of retyped letter, 2 pp.

Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives,
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, Maryland

FITZGERALD, Zelda
Letter from husband.
# 6408

Saturday Evening
Dear Dr. Squires:
The whole current lay-out is somewhat discouraging. I seem to be bringing nothing to its solution except money and good will—and Zelda brings nothing at all, except a power of arousing sumpathy. She has perhaps achieved something fairly good, at everybodys cost all around, including especially mine. She thinks she has done a munificent thing in changing the novel at all—she has become as hard and coldly egotistic as she was when she was in the ballet and I would no more think of living with her as she now than I would repeat those days. The one ray of hope is this—that once the novel is sent off (it has almost torn down all the relations patiently built up for a year) she must not write any more personal stuff while she is under treatment. What has happened is the worst possible thing that could have happened—it has put her through a detailed recapituation of all the worldly events that first led up to the trouble, embittering her in retrospect, and then been passed back through me, so that I’ve been in an intolerable position. Through no fault of yours her stay at the clinic has resolved itself into a very expensive chance to satisfy her desire for self-expression. We are farther apart than we have been since she first got sick two years ago and this time I have no sense of guilt what soever.

Now some particular points (alas, unrelated!)

First: In regard to our phone conversation. Our sexual relations have been good or less good from time to time but they have always been normal. She had her first orgasm about ten days after we were married, and from that time to this there haven’t been a dozen times in twelve years , when she hasn’t had an orgasm. And since the renewal of our relations last spring that accident has never occurred and our relations, in that regard up to the day she entered Johns Hopkins were more satisfactory than ever before (Also O. K. here in Bait, as explained)

The difficulty in 1928–1930 was tempermental—it led to long periods of complete lack of desire. During 1929 we were probably together only two dozen times and always it was purely physical, but in so far as the purely physical goes it was mutually satisfactory. I have had experience & read all available literature, including that book by the Dutchman I saw on your shelves and I know whereof I speak.

On the other hand I think it is unfortunate she has had no more children; also she’s probably a rather polygamus type; and possibly she has, when not herself, a touch of mental lesbianism. The first and third things I can’t do anything about—the second thing I simply I couldn’t stand for and stillfeel any nessessity to preserve the family.

Second She weighed 110 on a slot machine today, dressed, and told me she’d been losing weight. She eats, when she’s with me, two packs of mints, tho sugar has always caused her acne. I asked her if she’d like to go down the valley (Shenendoah) & spend a night next Saturday. Else, I said, I’d like to go to New York for a day or so, wanting a change. She had no interest in the valley trip, but asked why didn’t I go to New York? There is a vague form in her mind of “go on—do what you want—All I want is a chance to work.” The only essential that she leaves out is that I also want a chance to work, to cease this ceaseless hack work that her sickness compells me to. You will see that some blind unfairness in the novel. The girl’s love affair is an idyll—the man’s is sordid—the girl’s drinking is glossed over (when I think of the two dozen doctors called in to give her 1/5 grain of morphine or a raging morning!), while the man’s is accentuated. However there’s no use going over that again. It’s all been somewhat modified. The point is that there’s no working basis between us and less all the time—unless this novel finishes a phase in her life & it all grows dim with having been written. That’s the best hope at present. But she musn’t start another personal piece of work—she spoke today of a novel “on our personal quarrel & her insanity.” Should she begin such a work at present I would withdraw my backing from her immediately because the sands are running out again on my powers of indurance—I can’t pay for the smithy where she forges a weapon to bring down on mine and Scottys &, eventually, her own head, for all the pleasant exercise it may give her mental muscles.

Also she spoke of a play again. That would do no harm because its more cold & impersonal—it might overlay the memory of the novel & all that the novel evoked. Ironicly enough I gave her the plan for the novel, recommended autobiography ect, with no idea that this would happen.

Third I have vague ideas of (a) tennis lessons for her (I still think of the ski-ing & her nessessity of being superior at something.) (b) A few spring clothes—to encourage minor vanities in place of this repellant & devastating pride (c) trying her without nurses to see how she will do her stuff there. Or, for a week: Apparently without nurses.

We have been nessessarily marking time till the novel was finished but something must now be done about taking a definate decision, I feel. It is not healthy for me to brood in such facts as these: that I have one terrible ace-in-the-hole which is to take her out, give her her head and simply wait the fortnight until she gave the evidence nessessary to commit her. She has not the faintest Idea how much she depends on me, and if the only salvation for us all will be for her to thus see the withdrawal of my support (as she saw it in miniature in the shortage of money) then it shall be done.

I have still another plan, but one which depends on some additional sacrifice on my part & I’m not sure I can make it. Of that more later. In any case I’d like very much to see you & Doctor Myers early this week; but, please I want to be told what you’ve considered & decided. I have exhausted my own original impetus & laid all my cards on the table. I need advice for myself as the essentially responsible party. I feel that, practically, you would be helping me swaying either toward the idea that Zelda is essentially sick and therefore giving me the right to ask you to insulate me from the attendant evils. Or by swaying toward the idea that she is well, that our marriage is at fault, letting the problem become a worldly one where I can consult my own interest as to dealing with it. At present our collaboration is too vague. I don’t know my role and count on you to point it out to me.

Ever yours gratefully
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

There is a note in the margin beside this paragraph: “(as relations are now).”

xxx. To Tom Lineaweaver

ALS, 3 pages, Hotel Rennert letterhead, Auction.

c. April 1932

Hotel Rennert, Baltimore

Dear Tom:
Had rather a run-in with your friend Davis—all my fault & yet unfortunate if it had any consequences. Leaving the Poes shortly after you, we went to a friend of his & from there called up Bryan Dancy. My idea was to drop in only, & on arrival, I called up the Rennert & asked them to send out a boy to drive my car. Some smart alec at the party met the man & sent him back so much against my will I had to stay to dinner. I wanted to be home. Anyhow it seems that I said to the assembly at dinner that ‘I was living in a state of mild masturbation at the Rennert.’ It seemed to me an entirely innocuous remark. I’d said the same thing to Eleanor a few hours before and she didn’t collapse, but Massa Davis & Wife decided to be offended. Then also I was unwise as to mention the word virginity in conversation. I realized about then that I was being to them, offensive. I sent for my man to come & drive me home & this time he appeared. This morning I sent Mrs. Dancy flowers & know there’s no harm done there, but what version that flowery ass, Davis, will give you I don’t know. I know that whenever I’m nice to people I don’t like or respect I’m sooner or later rude to them as a sort of compensation. I had heard the story of the Portsmouth Priory once too often.
Ever yours,

I remember,—years ago / When a deb. was desperate for a beaux, / She could phone to any Princeton Club / And get a dancing, if alcoholic sub.” The final couplet reads, “So now we're gathered here today / To celebrate the initial jump in the hay.

Notes:

poem in pencil by Fitzgerald, unsigned, two pages on two adjoining sheets, 5.5 x 7, no date but likely written around the time of Eleanor and Tom Lineaweaver's marriage on June 28, 1920

Fitzgerald lived at Baltimore’s Hotel Rennert from March 30-May 20, 1932, presumably dating the letter to this period. In the humorous letter, Fitzgerald tells the story of his “offensive” behavior after leaving a party at the Poes—a reference to the grandsons of Edgar Allan Poe’s cousin, who attended Princeton as well. Fitzgerald was seemingly forced into company that he had little patience for, leading to a series of off-colored comments that shocked the guests. With the additional unpublished poem—which gives insight and depth to this friendship that spanned decades, as it was seemingly written for Tom and Eleanor's wedding on June 28, 1920

See Also June 26, 1933 letter to Charles W. Donahoe.

xxx. To Miss Sillcot

Hotel Rennert, Baltimore

ALS, 1 page, Auction

April 6, 1932 [misdated 1931 by Fitzgerald]. Stamped “received” on April 8, 1932

I hate to call upon you once again well before I have had a chance to thank you for your past favor, but I am embroiled with the stupidest tax-collector since Louis XV. He refuses to allow me one cent of deductions for typing (though I can't type a word myself), office rent ect because I have not kept expense books!

However the immediate matter is the moot question of earned income. Can you tell me if any writers pay taxes on magazine stories as un-earned income? Do not all writers that you know of list their stories as earned income and are they ever questioned? Is not the ruling vague and in practice haven't the authorities in Washington recognized the money earned by a writer as earned income?

Can you write me about this? I believe I am merely up against the stupidity of one man but will be glad to know if you are cognizant of the general precedent and any variants thereupon that may have reached your ears.

P.S. Needless to say he did not allow the movie gift as a charity.
Sincerely & Gratefully, F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

TL (CC), 3 pp. Princeton University

Hotel Rennert Baltimore, Md.

April 18, 1932

Dear Dr. Forel:

Forgive me for not having written before, but things have been in a turmoil. Now for the news.

A week after I last wrote you (about February 1st), Lelda¹ had another period (about two hours) of psychotic delusions, with attendant hysteria, and suggested herself that we go to a clinic. I took her (without any trouble—this was not anything like as serious as 1930, save for these short periods), and I left her with Dr. Myers in Baltimore, and returned to Montgomery. My haste was lest she begin to turn against me again (which she did not at any time).

It appears that, as you fondly hoped, this may indeed be the “classical case” though nothing is yet entirely certain. She has behaved almost perfectly at Johns Hopkins. They do not take “committed” patients there and they told me that during the whole time she had not done or said anything that would warrant committing her. She wrote, or finished, a novel in the clinic that is excellent—in it she told, in veiled terms, of her dancing life of 1928-29 and our quarrels and I think it raked up a lot of the past and for awhile the doctors reported her tense and driven by nervous energy, (she refused to talk to the doctors about herself or her case). She is not yet absolutely stable (the unmotivated smile returned and is now disappearing). In most ways she seems externally better than she was at Prangins at Easter, 1931, and a little less well than she was in mid-summer, 1931. There was too much tragic strain on her this fall, and then the awful sleep-killing asthma from October to February when she came here. (We think we have traced it, by the way, to moose hair. Isn't that extraordinary? In every house where she has had asthma there has been a moose head).

My only immediate worry is that, with her writing, a little of the old tendency to “take the bit in her teeth” has come back. In the American atmosphere some of the “reeducation” has worn off, yet even that may have been part of the relapse (it showed itself in much talk about how she was going to drink all she wanted to, etc.); in this regard, she is better in this last month, during which I've been in Baltimore. My plans are to take a house here and, if things continue to improve, to let her slip gradually into it and resume domestic life again—this, with the clinic within reach and with Lelda insulated against such strains as lingering death in the family and asthmatic attacks. There were no circumstances or rift in our personal life which could have contributed to this relapse—we were very happy.

During the crisis, I longed for you, but a trip to Europe is at present financially impossible. I read Dr. Myer some excerps from your recent letter, leaving out of course, your advice to return to Prangins, and your recommendation of another psychiatrist (which arrived too late). Until recently Myer has seen much less of Lelda than you did; she has been more directly under the care of his chief assistant, a woman doctor (more intelligent than Mlle. Byasni) whom Lelda likes, but to whom, I think, she has given a more romantic and self-justifying presentment of herself than she should, as a person who really wants to be understood and integrated. Recently, on my urging, she has opened up to Dr. Myers as to the reasons for her coming here, and is doing her best to help. One factor in this is her realization that these are hard times and we're feeling it like everyone else. One week, through an oversight, I didn't send her allowance. One can't charge at Johns Hopkins and she couldn't pay her hairdresser—the doctors say the change in her was extraordinary. She was tractable, serious and it was the beginning of her improvement—the liberal stream of money which I have been providing for a dozen years, was temporarily cut off—perhaps in that way I have done my share in unhealthily shielding her for so long from the realities of life—perhaps after all she's been a victim of our decade of prosperity.

Ever your devoted friend,

P.S. Please do write Dr. Myers anything you think would be useful and I will be enormously grateful. He has your last report, consultation with Bleuler, etc.

P.S.—2 No excema.

Notes:

¹ “Zelda” was typed thus throughout the surviving carbon copy of the letter.

xxx. From Gertrude Stein

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

December 1931.

Inscription in Stein's How to Write (1931). Bruccoli.

To Fitzgerald and I hope you did not mind my putting you in from Gtde Stn.

Notes:

On p. 30 of How to Write (Paris: Plain Edition) Fitzgerald marked the sentence: "That is the cruelest thing I ever heard is the favorite phrase of Gilbert." In the "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" (1933) Stein later wrote: "Fitzgerald always says ... her doing it is the cruelest thing I ever heard of."

xxx. TO: Gertrude Stein

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

Hotel Rennert stationery.
Baltimore, Maryland

April 28, 1932.

Dear Gertrude Stien:
You were so nice to think of me so far off and send me your book. Whenever I sit down to write I think of the line that you drew for me and told me that my next book should be that thick. So many of your memorable remarks come often to my head, and they seem to survive in a way that very little current wisdom does.

I read the book, of course, immediately, and was half through it for the second time (learning a lot as we all do from you) when my plans were upset by my wife’s illness, and by an accident it was consigned to temporary storage.

I hope to be in Europe this summer and to see you. I have never seen nearly as much of you as I would like.

Yours always, admiringly and cordially,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Miss Gertrude Stien,
c/o Shakespearre & Co. Librarie,
Pres de la Theatre de l’odeon, Paris.

Notes:

How to Write (1931).

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

April/May 1932

Hotel Rennert letterhead Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Menk:

The above proves that I am now a resident of your city. Zelda is taking a precautionary rest cure at Hopkins (nothing serious—she's just finishing a fine novel) + I am standing by.

The immediate purpose is to ask you if you can put me in touch with a reliable and unextorionate bootlegger, I have been depending on the whimsical brews of bell-boys.

I want to see you—at present we are nessessarily in retirement but wouldn't want to leave without a glimpse of you.

Best to Sarah + yourself
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

July 1932

La Paix Roger's Forge, Md

Dear Menck

The enclosed story has a history.¹ It was written specifically for Cosmopolitan, and the editors liked it but as it was about to be set up the Hearst policy man forbade it on the ground that it discussed well-known figures in Metro which Hearst contrails.² The Post was afraid of it as being risque and I have concluded that its a little too good for the popular magazines. Perhaps it will interest you

Ever Yours

F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ “Crazy Sunday,” American Mercury (October 1932).

² William Randolph Hearst did not control MGM, but he financed the Marion Davies movies made there.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

ALS, 1 p. New York Public Library

Before 29 July 1932

Dear Menck:

Appropos of your idea that you'd like to see a few communists seated in congress may I make a suggestion. I'm afraid it hasn't much reality in our attempt to govern a continent but it might be amusing + exciting + clarify some things. Why not appoint one of your yes-men to draw up an exact list of senators + representatives ranging from right to left as in the French senate + chambre. At least our departure from “Parlimentary” proceedure has become more pronounced than has the French (and German) sceme from our still functioning method.

It would be parallel to your series about states + I have an idea that it's one of my best hunches. Naturally, in order to send the boys protesting or scurrying to cover, it ought to come out before elections. I havn't the political knowledge to do it myself but if it doesn't interest you please let me know so 1 can pass it on immediately to Max Perkins

I'm sure you'll see amusing slants, such as finding strange bed-fellows, if the comparative radicalism or conservatism of delegates are grouped in fours or eights. But it ought to be done by a “heavy,” not a reporter.¹

It is nice to be living near you

Faithfully F. Scott Fitzgerald

“La Paix” Roger's Forge, Towson, Md.

If you take the idea it will cost you a first edition of one of your books chosen by me from among five submitted titles.

[Holograph note attached to first page of letter:]

Dear Menck

Could they strike an extra galley for me? + send it with the proof galley?

Faithfully Scott Fitz

Notes:

¹ On 29 July Mencken replied: “I think your idea for the cooperative lists of Senators and Representatives is an excellent one. Unfortunately, it would take a great deal of special knowledge to complete it and the only man really competent to do the job is probably Paul Y. Anderson, of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. However, Frank Kent could certainly make a good stab at it. Inasmuch as he is already working for Scribner, I suggest that you propose the whole scheme to Perkins. It would fall a bit outside the present plans of The American Mercury.” (Princeton)

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

August 2, 1932

Reputed Bantling:

In deponing and predicating incessantly that you were a “Shakespearean clown” I did not destinate to signify that you were a wiseacre, witling, dizzard, chowderhead, Tom Nody, nizy, radoteur, zany, oaf, loon, doodle, dunderpate, lunkhead, sawney, gowk, clod-poll, wise man of Boeotia, jobbernowl or mooncalf but, subdititiously, that you were intrinsically a longhead, luminary, “barba tenus sapientes,” pundit, wrangler, licentiate learned Theban and sage, as are so many epigrammatists, wit-worms, droles de corp, sparks, merry-andrews, mimes, posture-masters, pucinellas, scaramouches, pantaloons, pickle-herrings and persi-fleurs that were pullulated by the Transcendent Skald.

Unequivocally,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

August 18, 1932

Dear Andronio:

Upon mature consideration I advise you to go no farther with your vocabulary. If you have a lot of words they will become like some muscle you have developed that you are compelled to use, and you must use this one in expressing yourself or in criticizing others. It is hard to say who will punish you the most for this, the dumb people who don't know what you are talking about or the learned ones who do. But wallop you they will and you will be forced to confine yourself to pen and paper.

Then you will be a writer and may God have mercy on your soul.

No! A thousand times no! Far, far better confine yourself to a few simple expressions in life, the ones that served billions upon countless billions of our forefathers and still serve admirably all but a tiny handful of those at present clinging to the earth's crust. Here are the only expressions you need:

“Yeah”

“Naw”

“Gimme de meat”

and you need at least one good bark (we all need one good bark) such as:

“I'll knock your back teeth down your throat!”

So forget all that has hitherto attracted you in our complicated system of grunts and go back to those fundamental ones that have stood the test of time.

With warm regards to you all,
Scott Fitz——

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 1 p. Columbia University

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

August 29, 1932.

Dear Mr. Cerf:

Of course I think Ulysses should be published legally in America. In the first place time has crept up on Ulysses and many people are under the daisies who were horrified ten years ago. In the second place compared to pornography on the news stands Ulysses is an Elsie book. And in the third place people who have the patience to read Ulysses are not the kind who will slobber over a few little Rabelaisian passages.

Very truly yours, F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Cary Ross

TL(CC), 4 pp. Princeton University

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

September 3, 1932.

Dear Cary:

Your formidable letter, is at hand. Since The American Tragedy, nay! since A la Richerche de temps Perdus no' one has attempted such a task as answering it would be. Even the heading makes it necessary to drag out The Last of the Mohicans and look up the history and geography of Lake George—then one must gape at the date August 26th 1932 and the eclipse that ensued (with all the astronomical ramifications) prefiguring, paralleling and indirectly precipitating the fall of capitalism and here one must read Das Capital at last. The handwriting alone is a lifetime study for a triumverate of calligraphist, psychiatrist and specialist in Nagari, Devanagari and Brahmi.

So instead of answering the letter I will write one. First as to your car-little you'd reck (not “wreck") how rash you were. It's now our car—we seem to have taken it over for its board. How it runs, the little green darling, and such care we take of it! Not a night that it isn't washed, that is, not a rainy night. And if it isn't simonized once a week then the word simony doesn't mean that the Popes waxed their mustaches. Does it pant, does it pull—oh God, hold me back, I want to go back to the garbage can, open the lid and kiss that car.

Now, you refer to some pictures—Zelda doesn't remember any pictures but she does remember that she missed a few paper cloths that she used to take off make-up, and Aquilla, the small black energy, says that some of his shoe rags are gone while—but enough. So for “pictures” we read “fixtures,” and now, Cary, we would never accuse you of taking off the fixtures. There was the unfortunate matter of Zelda's diamond ring that, as you explained, got stuck to a wad of your gum, as well as Dr. Gluccks curious loss of the watch marked “love from Dicky Loeb,” but we have missed nothing—except you, Cary, we have missed you.

About the poems, please do some weeding, please offer a selection, please after you have worked over the best ones add one or two in the highly critical mood that the working over will induce, a few written in that utter boredom and despair that I have seen sometimes as a mood in you but never expressed. Go on the cross as the last Jesus of decadent Capitalism, but let's see all five wounds—it is only from the fifth, the unrememberable one, that the holy grail is collected; it is only the last bored glance that finds the purse which we could least afford to lose.

I'm writing Max Perkins. Unfortunately, he doesn't know any poetry and hands it all to the poetry editor whose name I can never remember though he is a poet himself and has been there for years. If you will find out his name from any clerk in Scribner's book store I'll write him too. I'll recognize the name if I see it.

All goes well here. I went to the Hopkins with a temperature of 104 degrees diagnosed as typhoid, but incorrectly. I came back in a week to find Zelda overstrained with worry but she has recovered the lost ground, driven in the Japanese outposts, and can be reached c/o the American Consulate, Shanghai. Meanwhile, we shall be here indefinitely—which is to say I am extending our lease for six months more. You are welcome here at any time with or without warning although the latter is preferable because when my mother is here I get in a nervous humor and growl at all forms of animal life as well as at a few bright minerals.

Have been reading Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy together—chapter by chapter (this is serious) and am simply overwhelmed by the resemblance. The books are simply two faces of the same world spirit and only by putting them together do you get anything as integral as, say, "Smoke”² or "Moll Flanders.”

Young doctors come here in the long afternoons. Mr. Crossly is old and brown on the verandah. There is an ungodly lot of animal life trying to end the fair weather with a non-stop concert. Scotty comes home from picnics with her hair wet and one last unexpended laugh.

My warm regards to the Paul Rosenfeld and to the Stieglitzs³ who probably don't remember me. Naturally Zelda and I are intensely grateful to Stieglitz and Rosenfeld for the interest they show in Zelda's pictures. We will talk about an exhibition when you arrive.

We both send five gallon jars of good feeling and gratitude to stand on the shelves of your apartment while you dismantle it.

Till soon,

Notes:

² An 1867 novel by Turgenev.

³ Photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

La Paix, [Rodgers' Forge] [Towson, Maryland]

September 10, 1932

Dear Mrs. Turnbull:

Thanks for your quotation from the Emperor.¹ It is a great thesis and even the Communists are working it—claiming that no man not under a religious spell (in their case, Communism) can have a focal point from which to orientate his work. I think that it is largely a question of the age in which one lives and I am not philosopher enough to think it through for myself.

Thanks too for the Lawrence item which I will read tonight. Later: Read it and enjoyed the Murray letter hugely.

With unjustified egotism I am sending you two articles on the American novel that have appeared in the last year. I know Munson by reputation—Leighton I haven't heard of. One is pleasantly disposed toward me—the other not—and both articles seem to me mostly bunk. I send them because Lewisohn treats with interest his own generation and dismisses mine so entirely, because we deal with the post-war world which he does not understand. To give, for example, Hergesheimer's stories of ladies' laundry and picturesque peasants, all got up in the questionable later stylistics of Henry James, more importance than Hemingway's work is simply to say, “Well, that's the world I like and I'm a pacifist liberal Jew and you can't expect me to understand new tendencies in a social system I didn't get with my mother's milk anyhow.” He allows to his own generation the right to report the traditionally unimportant, but in the new one, the observed truth has got to fit in with his own crystallized conceptions. Well, well—I shall be like that sometime.

The young men turn to us (I don't mean, God forbid! my Post stories, but to my generation). The bow they make to Cabell, for example, is purely formal. I believe that if one is interested in the world into which willy-nilly one's children will grow up the most accurate data can be found in the European leaders, such as Lawrence, Jung and Spengler, and after that in the very sincere young Americans emerging one by one, and least in the attempts to make logical and palatable the current world scene. I think we are all a little sick but the logic of history won't permit us to go backward.

Again thanks for sending me the Lawrence, which I'd have otherwise missed. With very best wishes,

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Napoleon.

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

H. L. Mencken 704 Cathedral St. Baltimore

September 12, 1932

My dear Scottie:

I think your poem is excellent, though I confess that it seems a bit irrelevant. However, that is no objection in poetry. Your rhymes are very good, and your count of syllables is sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes.

Now and then stamps come in from Finland. I'll send them to you hereafter.

I am sorry indeed to hear that your father has been ill. He called up yesterday, but didn’t say a word about it. Please remember me to your mother.

Sincerely yours,
H. L. Mencken

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge [Towson, Maryland]

September 21, 1932

Dear Mrs. Turnbull:

I'm afraid I was dogmatic last night on a subject about which it is silly to be dogmatic. But I do know that I'd prefer Scottie to marry a man of the world even if he was not of her world—a man six or eight years older than herself. The value of every year of experience he brings to the marriage is enormous. I have heard so many college girls complain about their young husbands not knowing anything, by which they didn't mean formal education but the lack of any approach to life except the social or the modern big-business approach. They have never been to sea, or to the wars, robbed a bank, hunted to live, supported a chorus girl, founded a religion, or dealt directly with other men in some rough school such as politics. If she marries for a whole lot of money that is a different matter for with enough money one can change husbands or live in Paris and not even bother. I am referring to the young couple who will have to meet the usual problems together, such as the money one. And I think if a suitor of Scottie's was entirely innocent in his past life I'd be inclined to make the old remark: “Well, I don't want you to practice on her.”

Of course nowadays with so much knowledge available the chances are that women know when they're being cheated but fifty years ago, so numerous doctors have revealed, there were many marriage tragedies beneath what seemed a happy surface.

Of course, I don't believe in the double standard—I believe it's disappearing anyhow—I only meant that it was possible for a man to be far from a saint and yet be wildly jealous of his wife, as I am.

Just a last word and I am through boring you with this interminable discussion—I don't think it matters what a boy's politics are before he is sixteen but I hope the colleges will cover about all the current economic theories, if only that the boy should know where he stands and what he's fighting. When a United States Senator after his election has to look up the principles of Marxism by which one-sixth of the world is governed it shows he's a pretty inadequate defender of his own system.

Again, excuse this long letter—couldn't get down to work this morning and simply had to argue about something.

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm sorry I lent you the Hemingway book¹—there's a streak of vulgarity in it I would find quite offensive except I know that he does it as a protest against censorship.

Notes:

¹ The Sun Also Rises.

xxx. TO: Alice Lee Myers

TL(CC), 1 p. (fragment)

Princeton University

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

September 29, 1932.

Dear Alice Lee,

Your letter destresses me, in spite of the really fine tone you take. These sudden reverses seem to be part of our time but when they happen to people like you and Dick, who used your resources so wisely and generously it seems terrible, and drives me more and more toward the Fed flag about which I have been may-poling at a distance all through the decade. I don't any more feel that the money I make belongs to me and while pretending to dispense it grudgingly in the current manner I feel it is all a farce and that an adjustment must come soon.

However I know you don't feel that way and will take this as a burden on your own strong shoulders—and of course with your talents and the double wits of two people with a common cause you will survive and flourish long after the Fitzgeralds collapse.

xxx. TO Richard Knight

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

September 29, 1932

Dear Dick:

That was swell praise you gave Zelda and needless to say delighted her and set her up enormously. She revised the book so much that she lost contact with it and yours is the first word that gives it public existence. My own opinions on it were as disjointed as hers.

I'm sorry I used the word fairy and that you found it offensive. I have never in my wildest imaginings supposed you were a fairy, and I admit that under similar circumstances I would be inclined probably to bristle if the word were thrown around by someone whose attitude toward me was not unchallengeable. It is a lousy word to anyone not a member of the species. I offer you my sincere apologies and put it down to the fact that I was half asleep when you came and subsequently a little tight.

However, there must have been some desire to wound in using such a word, however trivially. You annoyed me—specifically by insisting on a world which we will willingly let die, in which Zelda can't live, which damn near ruined us both, which neither you nor any of our more gifted friends are yet sure of surviving; you insisted on its value, as if you were in some way holding a battlefront, and challenged us to join you. If you could have seen Zelda, as the most typical end-product of that battle, during any day from the spring of '31 to the spring of '32 you would have felt about as much enthusiasm for the battle as a doctor at the end of a day in a dressing station behind a blood battle.

So for the offensive and inapplicable phrase read neurotic, and take it or leave it, whatever the bulk concerned. We have a good way of living, basically, for us; we got through a lot and have some way to go; our united front is less a romance than a categorical imperative and when you criticize it in terms of a bum world, no matter how big you face it, it is annoying to me, and seems to negate on purpose both past effort and future hope and I reserve the right to be annoyed.

Of course I like you, as who wouldn't, and appreciate your lavish generosity with yourself, and much more about you than I can express in a letter. I feel that any unpleasantness between us has all been on the basis of liking Zelda, and the sincerity of your feeling toward her shouldn't offend anybody except the most stupid and churlish of husbands. In another year, Deus volens, she will be well. For the moment she must live in a state of Teutonic morality, far from the exploits of the ego on its own. In other words, when you city fellows come down you can't put ideas in the heads of our farm girls, without expecting resistance.

I lay myself open to your discovery of my most blatant hypocrisies. God knows that the correctness of our life preys on such a one as old Fitzgerald, but there we are, or rather here we are. With all good wishes,

Your most obedient servant,
[Scott]

xxx. TO: Dr. Thomas Rennie

CC of retyped letter, 4 pp.

Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Hospital

“La Paix.” Towson, Maryland

LETTER FROM HUSBAND TO PHYSICIAN: October, 1932

The situation has reduced itself in my mind to a rather clear-cut struggle of egos between Zelda and myself. Last night, after a most affectionate day, a day in which at home, at the theatre, in the car, she would literally not move an inch from me nor talk of anything save how she loved me and admired me—a situation which I dread for it almost always precedes a reaction of some kind—after such a day, she suddenly announced in the evening what sounded to me like an ultimatum, a threat to go crazy. She wrote out some notes to Dr. Meyer, which as you will see are all aimed at rather vague persecuting forces and in which I am not named but am suggested.

I think I know what is underneath and it parallels what happened last February. Here it is:

As I told you, I got ahead at last financially in August and since then I have written 30,000 words on my novel. She knows this and one side of her is glad. She knows my plans, to break off presently for a week and then resume, completing the whole task, which is the fruit of four years of preparation and note taking and experiment in such time as I could afford to give to it. She knows it is serious and that it naturally rests to some degree upon my life.

Now for the last five years—the two and a half of ballet and the two and a half of sickness, she has come to regard me as the work horse and herself as the artist—the producer of the finer things such as painting, uncommercial literature, ballet, etc., such as I have not been able to mix with the damn Post story writing. Consciously she knows that her Literary work is founded upon mine and that she is still a long way from turning out work as the best of mine. Nevertheless she is damn well going to try and naturally I’ve helped and encouraged her. But regard this:

It is significant that last February her breakdown was associated with my outlining to her a frame for what was then a new approach to my work which was a story of our eight years in Europe. I read her a chapter. What did she do immediately on her arrival in the clinic but sit down and try to write it herself, including what she must have known was some of the best material in my notebook, stuff I had often discussed with her and that she knew I hadn’t touched for short stories because it belonged in a more important medium. Together with this were a great mass of my ideas, my remarks, comments on my failings, my personal habits, fragments of my style and bits of all my stock in trade. This was sent off to a publisher before I could see it. What happened you know—I protested vehemently and what was for me an unsatisfactory compromise, was reached—she cut out the most offensive of the material and on my advice worked up the best parts so that the book assumed a certain artistic coherence.

But the fundamental struggle continued, shown indirectly by her unwillingness to let me help her with her stories coupled with a study of my books so profound that she is saturated with them, whole fragments of my scenes and cadences come out in her work, which she admits. One is flattered—it is only when she aims to use the materials of our common life, the only fact material that I have (heaven knows there’s no possible harm in her using her own youth, her dancing, etc.) that she becomes a danger to my life and to us. She knows that my novel is almost entirely concerned with the Riviera and the two years we spent there, and I have continually asked her to keep away from it and she agrees in theory, yet she has just blandly completed a play about it, laid on the very beach where my novel begins. Her agitation to begin another novel increases in intensity—I know there will be whole sections of it that are simply muddy transcriptions of things in my current novel—things we both observed and have a right to, but that under the present circumstances I have all rights to. Imagine a painter trying to paint on canvasses each of which has a sketchy vulgarization, in his own manner, lined across it, by the companion within whose company he first observed the subject—at the painter’s expense.

Now Zelda is a fine person and she sees this. The arrangement is that I am to finish and publish my novel before she tries another extended piece of work. This is absolutely all right with me. But in her subconscious there is a deathly terror that I may make something very fine in the use of this material of “ours”, that I may preclude her making something very fine. She knows that her book is not an achieved artistic whole, but she wants to hurry through a lot more material in the same way—incidentally leaving me literally nothing.

The conflict is bothering her. The nearer I come to completion, that is to artistic satisfaction, and announce it to her, the more restless she becomes, though outwardly rejoicing. The fact that her undertaking a long piece of work of a deeply personal order would be a serious menace to her health is apparent to her. And it is an equal menace—this subconscious competing with me.

“Why can’t I sell my short stories?” she says.

“Because you’re not putting yourself in them. Do you think the Post pays me for nothing?”

(She wants to make money but she wants to save her good stuff for books so her stories are simply casually observed, unfelt phenomena, while mine are sections, debased, over-simplified, if you like, of my own soul. That is our bread and butter and her health and Scotty’s education).

And, I added, foolishly but truly, “Besides, a lot of visual emotion has been going into this current series of pictures, so that your description, that is your emotional description, not the merely casual observation, has suffered.”

Bang! She abandons pictures. She writes, writes, writes, and goes backward and has been going backward for over a fortnight.

The conflict is at the root of it. She feels that my success has got to be, otherwise we all collapse—she feels also that it is a menace to her. “Why should it be him—why shouldn’t it be me?” “I’m as good or better than he is.” If she thought she would again be permitted to write in a clinic, I believe she would have “conflicted” herself into one long ago and sat down at a big piece of direct self-justification.

And I believe she is considering making an attempt at such an idea. If her book goes well it may reinforce the idea and all my effort be reduced to a scrap of paper. So far as my own novel is concerned I am absolutely desperate and determined to finish it without interference from Zelda, sane or insane. Can’t we do something to forestall the dangers on the horizon?

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Talked over main ideas with Zelda. Didn’t read it to her.
F.

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

October 1932

“La Paix” Roger's Forge, Md.

Dear Mr. Dashiell:

I seem to have put all the stuff I had on Hollywood into “Crazy Sunday” which you couldn't use, + which is in the current Mercury. I have about twenty pages on Hollywood Revisted, and if I wasn't on my novel again I could workup something, but nothing extraordinary that would matter to you, I'm afraid. So for the present I'll simply have to “put the matter to our account.” The article, as happens sometimes, died in midair when several editors (including Lorimer) didn't like the story version of my material* + chilled my own entheusiasm, which was probably ill-founded¹

Sincerely F. Scott Fitzgerald

* Think Mencken only bought it for fancied value of name.

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald did not complete this article.

xxx. TO: Gregg Dougherty

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

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

December 6, 1932.

Dear Gregg:

I should have written you before but on the eve of receiving your data went to bed with grippe—when I called you I already had one foot in the grave. A thousand thanks for the whole thing which I believe will be of great aid. I am inclosing check for thirty dollars for you to dispose of as you see fit as a small payment for the work involved in doping out the two experiments. If the story sells (as I believe it will) I feel that I will owe a further contribution to science.² I have figured such things at various prices. Once I gave a man ten per cent of the net for giving me his entire life story with full permission to use it, and on the other hand I presented two young Hopkins internes with free trips to the Yale game for checking inaccuracies in a medical story. When I see whether or not this sells I will figure out what should be a proper reimbursement for the amount of help of yours that I have been able to use.

It is fun being in touch with an old friend if only in brief correspondence. You told me something once years ago that has been of help to me several times in my life. You said it in a moment of extreme impatience. It happened on an evening in the dark spring of 1918. Do you remember it? With best wishes

Faithfully,

Notes:

² Probably “On Schedule,” The Saturday Evening Post (18 March 1933).

1933

xxx. To Christian Gauss

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

February 2, 1933

Dear Mr. Gauss:

I had no special reason for calling you beyond that of friendship. I was up there for a couple of days because Gregg Dougherty was checking over some chemistry data I had in a story. I observed the disappearance of the rah-rah boy and thought Princeton in sweaters was quite becoming to itself. If this depression wasn't so terrible it wouldn't be so bad at all.

I am still at the novel and hope to God it can be finished this spring as I am very tired of being Mr. Lorimer's little boy year after year, though I don't know what I'd do without him.

Will certainly call on you when I next come to Princeton. With best regards to Mrs. Gauss and your beautiful red-headed progeny, I am, as always,

Your friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: T. S. Eliot

3 February 1933

Inscription in Eliott's Ash-Wednesday (1930). Bruccoli

inscribed to Scott Fitzgerald with the author's homage
T. S. Eliot
3.ii.33

Notes:

Eliot met Fitzgerald when he lectured in Baltimore in 1933.

xxx. TO: Thomas Rennie

19 February 1933

Inscription in Rene Fulop-Miller's The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1929). Bruccoli.

To Tom Rennie:
with the deepest devotion
of
Zelda and
Adolph Meyer
M. Blenler
Sigmund Freeud
Mr. Jung
and, [modestly]
Adolph Forel
F. Scott Fitzgerald
19233

Notes:

Zelda Fitzgerald inscribed this book to her psychiatrist; F. Scott Fitzgerald added an inscription listing prominent psychiatrists.

xxx. TO: Dr. Adolf Meyer

CC, 7 pp. Princeton University

“La Paix”
Roger’s Forge, Md.

April 10th, 1933

Dear Dr. Myer:

Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s case as it existed in a purer form—last October, say, when I was standing up under the thing—I would like to submit you some questions which might clarify things for me. I’ve had the feeling of a certain futility in our conversations with you and Dr. Rennie, though at first they did much good because she was still close to the threat of force and more acutely under the spell of your personality. Certain questions never really came to a head—no doubt you saw the thing in flux. And I know also that you were trying to consider as a whole the millieu in which she is immersed, including my contributions to it—nevertheless in one way or another our discussions have gotten so wide in scope that they would properly have to include the whole fields of philosophy, sociology and art to lead anywhere.

This is my fault. In my own broodings about the case, I have gone through the same experience—arriving at the gate of such questions as to whether Zelda isn’t more worth saving than I am. I compromised on the purely utilitarian standpoint that I was the wage-earner, that I took care of wife and child, financially and practically, and beyond that that I was integrated—integrated in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that I might have two counts against me to her one.

That fact has stood up for the last three years (save for her mother’s little diversion to the effect that I wanted to spirit away her daughter to a madhouse.) It began to collapse, bit by bit, six months ago—that is to say the picture of Zelda painting things that show a distinct talent, of Zelda trying faithfully to learn how to write is much more sympathetic and, superficially, more solid than the vision of me making myself iller with drink as I finish up the work of four years.

But when I began to compromise my case by loss of self-control and outbreaks of temper, my own compensation was to believe in it more and more. I will probably be carried off eventually by four strong guards shrieking manicly that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Zelda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract. But to return to last October, may I ask my first categorical question.

Does Dr. Meyer suspect, or did Dr. Squires lead him to suspect that there were elements in the case that were being deliberately concealed? I ask this because for a month Zelda had Dr. Forel convinced that I was a notorious Parisien homo-sexual.

The second question also requires a certain introduction. It goes back to something we’ve talked about before and if I restate it in detail it is chiefly to clarify it in my own mind.

All I ever meant by asking authority over her was the power of an ordinary nurse in any continental country over a child; to be able to say “If you don’t do this I shall punish you.” All I have had has been the power of the nurse-girl in America who can only say, “I’ll tell your Mama.”

It seems to me that one must either have

(1) A mutual bond between equals

(2) Direct authority

(3) Delegated authority

To give responsibility without authority seems to me impossible. If a nurse can and does punish, or instead of “punish” let me say “enforce”—there is a certain healthy action and reaction set up between nurse and child, perhaps from the nurse’s remorse at her strictness or the child’s sense that the punishment was just—at the very worst, in the case of real injustice or over-punishment, the child has recourse to the parents. We once had a nurse of that sort—we were aware of it before the child was.

Naturally I can’t rush in and turn out Zelda’s lights when its her bedtime. I can’t snatch strong cigarettes away from her, or countermand orders for a third cup of strong coffee given to a servant. Through moral suasion I might but more of that later.

Here is my second question:

Will Doctor Meyer give me the authority to ask Zelda when she is persistently refactory to pack her bag and spend a week under people who can take care of her, such as in the clinic?

If Doctor Meyer is in doubt about my ability to decide when such force is necessary, then hasn’t the case reached such a point of confusion psychologically that I had better resort to legal means to save myself, my child and the three of us in toto.

My third question:

I have noted throughout our conversations a reluctance on your part to impose any ideas of morality upon her, save ideas of moderation in various directions. It has seemed to me that she has taken advantage of this difference of attitude from that of the continental physicians with whom she was most in contact to draw a false inference. Because Dr. Forel believes in the strictly teutonic idea of marriage and Dr. Meyer does not she imagines that the latter’s attitude is nihilistic and that it somehow negates all mutual duty between husband and wife except the most casual profession of it.

Now this idea of mutual duty was, from. Zelda’s youth, the thing most lacking in her personality, much more lacking than in the average spoiled American girl. So that it shocked other women, even gay society women and theatrical women, again and again. At the same time she is the type who most clearly needs a guiding hand. There is the predisposition of her family to mental troubles, and in addition her mother tried hard to make everlasting babies of her children. Zelda played the baby with me always except when an important thing came up, when she was like a fire-horse in her determination and on the principal occasion she ended in Switzerland. In that moral atmosphere—which I admit can’t be transported entire to the U.S.A.—she changed very much, became less dependent and more mature in smaller things and more dependent on my advise on a few main issues.

The nine months before her second breakdown were the happiest of my life and I think, save for the agonies of her father’s death, the happiest of hers. Now all that is disappearing week by week and we are going back to the agonizing cat and dog fight of four or five years ago.

To recapitulate—since her personality began to split about 1928, the two main tendencies have been:

(1) Self-expression, extreme neglect of home, child and husband, exageration of physical and mental powers [Two words omitted by the editor.] bullheadedness (Beautiful psychiatric term!).

(2) Conservatism, almost Victorianism, dread of any extremes or excess, real domesticity, absorbtion in child, husband, family and close friends, quick amenity to moral suasion.

One of her reasons for gravitating toward the first state is that her work is perhaps at its best in the passage from the conservative to the self-expressive phase, just before and just after it crosses the line—which, of course, could be the equivalent of the period of creative excitement in an integrated person. Just before crossing it is better—over the line she brings that demonaic intensity to it that achieves much in bulk with more consequent waste. I could make you a list in parallel lines but refrain out of respect for your patience.

Creatively she does not seem able to keep herself around that line. A healthful approach with all that implies, and a limited work time never to be exceeded, gives the best results but seems to be impossible outside of the dicipline of a clinic. We came nearest to this last August and September. With much pushing and prodding she lived well, wrote well and painted well.

But the question of her work I must perforce regard from a wider attitude. I make these efforts possible and do my own work besides. Possibly she would have been a genius if we had never met. In actuality she is now hurting me and through me hurting all of us.

First, by the ill-will with which she regards any control of her hours.

Second, by the unbalanced egotism which contributes to the above, and which takes the form of an abnormal illusion cherished from her ballet days: that her work’s success will give her some sort of divine irresponsibility backed by unlimited gold. It is still the idea of an Iowa high-school girl who would like to be an author with an author’s beautiful care-free life. It drives her to a terrible pressing hurry.

Third, by her inferiority complex caused by a lack of adaptation to the fact that she is working under a greenhouse which is my money and my name and my love. This is my fault—years ago I reproached her for doing nothing and she never got over it. So she is mixed up—she is willing to use the greenhouse to protect her in every way, to nourish every sprout of talent and to exhibit it—and at the same time she feels no responsibility about the greenhouse and feels that she can reach up and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment, yet she is shrewd to cringe when I open the door of the greenhouse and tell her to behave or go.

Fourth, by her idea that because some of us in our generation with the effort and courage of youth battered a nitch in an old wall, she can make the same kind of crashing approach to the literary life with the frail equipment of a sick mind and a berserk determination.

With one more apology for this—my God, it amounts to a booklet!—I arrive at my last question.

Doesn’t Dr. Meyer think it might be wise to let Zelda have the feeling for a minute of being alone, of having exhausted everyone’s patience—to let her know that he is not essentially behind her in any way for she interprets his scientific impersonality as a benevolent neutrality?

Otherwise the Fitzgerald’s seem to be going out in the storm, each one for himself, and I’m afraid Scotty and I will weather it better than she.

Yours gratefully always, and in extremis

xxx. TO: Dr. Adolf Meyer

Spring 1933

AL (draft), 6 pp. Princeton University

“La Paix,” Towson, Maryland

Dear Dr. Myer:

Thanks for your answer to my letter—it was kind of you to take time to reply to such an unscientific discussion of the case. I felt that from the difference between my instinctive-emotional knowledge of Zelda, extending over 15 years, and your objective-clinical knowledge of her, and also from the difference between the Zelda that everyone who lives a hundred consecutive hours in this house sees and the Zelda who, as a consumate actress, shows herself to you—from these differences we might see where the true center of her should lie, around what point its rallying ground should be. When you qualify or disqualify my judgement on the case, or put it on a level very little above hers on the grounds that I have frequently abused liquor I can only think of Lincoln’s remark about a greater man and heavier drinker than I have ever been—that he wished he knew what sort of liquor Grant drank so he could send a barrel to all his other generals.

This is not said in any childish or churlish spirit of defying you on your opinions on alcohol—during the last six days I have drunk altogether slightly less than a quart and a half of weak gin, at wide intervals. But if there is no essential difference between an overextended, imaginative, functioning man using alcohol as a stimulus or a temporary aisment and a schitzophrene I am naturally alarmed about my ability to collaborate in this cure at all.

Again I must admit that you are compelled to make your judgements apon the basis of observed behavior but my claim is that a true synthesis of the totality of the behavior elements in this case has not yet been presented to you.

If you should for example be in a position to interview an indefinate number of observers—let me say at random my family as opposed to hers, my particular friends as opposed to hers, or even my instinctive protection of Zelda as opposed to her instinctive protection of me—you could formulate simply nothing—you would have to guess, rather like a jury sitting on the case of a pretty girl and a plausible man. Or if as you say (and I must disagree) that this is a dual “case” in any sense further than that it involves the marriage of two artistic temperments, you should interview Dr. Squires or any of Zelda’s nurses while she was in Phipps—there would be the fault of Zelda being the subject and me becoming the abstraction so that there would be real play of subjective forces between us to be observed.

But if, to follow out my (fable) there should be another series of people to be examined to whom our life bares a nearer relation in its more basic and more complex terms, I mean terms that are outside “acting” and personal charm because they are in each case qualified by a hard an objective reality—you might be confronted with my child and what she thinks; by any professional writer of the first rank (say Dos Passos, Lewis, Mencken, Hemmingway, any real professional) on being told that their amateur wives were trying to cash in secretly on their lust for “self expression” by publishing a book about your private life with a casual survey of the material apon which you were currently engaged; by my business associates a publisher each of fourteen years standing; by every employee, secretaries, nurses, tennis-instructors, governesses; and by every servant almost without exception—if you could meet an indefinate series of these people extending back long before Zelda broke down I think there would be less doubt in your mind as to whence this family derives what mental and moral stamina it possesses. There would be a good percentage who liked her better than me and probably a majority who found her more attractive (as it should be); but on the question of integrity, responsibility, conscience, sense of duty, judgment, will-power, whatever you want to call it—well, I think that 95% of this group of ghosts; their judgment would be as decided as Solomon pronouncing apon the two mothers.

This beautiful essay (I find that manic-depressives go in for such lengthy expositions and I suspect myself + all authors of being incipient manic-depressives) is another form of my old plea to let me sit apon the bench with you instead of being kept down with the potential accomplices—largely on the charge of criminal associations.

The witness is weary of strong drink and until very recently He had had the matter well in hand for four years and has it in hand at the moment, and needs no help on the matter being normally frightened by the purely physical consequences of it. He does work and is not to be confused with the local Hunt-Club-Alcoholic and asks that his testimony be considered as of prior validity to any other.

Sincerely

P.S. Please don’t bother to answer the above—its simply a restatement anyhow. In answer to your points—I can concieve of giving up all liquor but only under conditions that seem improbable—Zelda suddenly a helpmate or even divorced and insane. Or, if one can think of some way of doing it, Zelda marrying some man of some caliber who would take care of her, really take care of her This is a possibility Her will to power must be broken without that—the only alternative would be to break me and I am forwarned + forearmed against that

P.S.2 All I meant by the difference between the Teutonic + American ideas of marriage is expressed in the differences between the terms Herr + Frau and the terms Mr + Mrs

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[La Paix, Rodgers' Forge] [Towson, Maryland]

[Probably Spring, 1933]

Dear Mrs. Turnbull:

I can't resist adding a word of qualification to the opinions I expressed so freely last night.

1st Ford Madox Ford once said, “Henry James was the greatest writer of his day; therefore for me the greatest man.” That is all I meant by superiority. T. S. Eliot seems to me a very great person—Mrs. Lanier seems to me a very fine character. To me the conditions of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare to them the duties of a soldier in war-time. I simply cannot admire, say, a merchant or an educator with the intensity I reserve for other professions, and in a sense the world agrees with me. Of the Elizabethans we remember the Queen and Drake, a ruler and a captain—only two “people of affairs” in contrast to Bacon, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh. You may say that is because history is written by writers—I think it is more than that.

2nd Please believe that, within the limits of the frame you have chosen, I know no children better brought up than yours. My somewhat tactless bursts of criticism of the frame itself are prompted by my faith in a sort of sixth sense that I think I have about the way the world is going.

3rd I cannot permit my silence of last night when you spoke of yourself as being “shallow, etc.” [to] pass as a tacit acceptance of the truth of that. I simply meant that for me the test of human values is conformity to the strictest and most unflinching rationality, while in your case it is based on standards of conduct. I don't mean that because Rousseau's life was disordered an intellectual should use that to justify his own weaknesses, nor even that my criteria necessarily subsume yours, but I must think they do even though I continually check up by seeing the lives of “orderly” people, judging what's fake and what's real. This by the way doesn't excuse the arrogance and bad manners of which I was guilty last night.

4th In resume I owe you an apology, because I value your friendship, but not a retraction if I can persuade you that even my definitions are different from yours. With great admiration and respect for you and your way of life let me sign myself as your

Erratic but sincere tenant,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Malcolm Cowley

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

June 1, 1933

Dear Malcolm:

It was good to hear from you and we certainly enjoyed your brief visit. Dos is cured and has left to bask in the sun at Antibes and I certainly do envy him. I am working like hell.

As to using a part of my article in your book, go ahead, but I am using certain parts of it myself in my new book, in particular, parts about Antibes, so I will ask you to say, as it were, “Fitzgerald says” instead of “Fitzgerald says in an article on the Jazz Age” because I do not want to call attention to the fact that I piece shorter things into long things though I suppose we all do. Would you mind arranging this?

Hope you manage to come back this way and let us know in advance.

Sincerely,
[Scott]

xxx. TO: Lawrence Lee

TLS, 2 pp. University of Pittsburgh

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

June 12, 1933.

Dear Lawrence:

I waited to write you until I could read Summer Goes On.² It seems to me excellent—the advance over the rather Alfred Noisy Highwayman poem is astounding. If I chose the piece that pleased me most I should simply have to mention them all but I particularly liked Headstone for a Quarrel, When Summer's In Full Bloom, Noon in Barbour County, Lines to a Dead Lady (in spite of the touch of Eliott) and all the sonnets. I must warn you that Bequest to my Daughters is an idea that was pretty well enshrined in the will of Citizen George Francis Train, or am I thinking of the wrong man? Maybe, though, it is one of those recurrent ideas that pop up every decade or so. In all my hearty congratulations.

And thank you for your hospitality and for a most pleasant afternoon which gave me a haunting impression of one of the most beautiful places this side of the Atlantic.³

With very best wishes, F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Scribners, 1933.

³ Fitzgerald had visited Charlottesville in May. See Lee's “Tender Was the Man: Memories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Pittsburgh Press Family Magazine (14 July 1974).

xxx. TO Charles W. Donahoe

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

June 26, 1933

Dear Sap:

The rush from the house ² included not only the butler, the second butler, the two footmen, the first and second trained nurse, my mother, aunt, three first cousins, my four children, my secretary, who is very fat and weighs 250 pounds, the illegitimate children, J. P. Morgan and myself but ten other members of my household who may perhaps not be known to you by name. I extinguished the fire myself by an act of tremendous valor. Among the objects of art saved were “The Last Supper,” the bat with which Babe Ruth batted his first home run, and the baby spoon with which you presented Scottie at her birth. (Let me take this occasion to congratulate you on what the West Coast does to growing boys. I cannot see Mrs. Sap's face in the picture but gather all goes beautifully.)

Seriously, the fire was greatly overexaggerated—so was the implication that old Fitzgerald was keeping up an elaborate household. We are struggling along like everybody else though I must confess with a pretty good break so far.

It was a coincidence that I heard from all my Princeton friends of which there are about a dozen—of which you, my dear sir, happen to be the most cherished—have turned up lately without even going to a reunion. From our class I heard from Non, two letters from Henry, one from you, none from Paul Dickey; in 1918 the record is not good on second thought; in 1919 however I crossed with Dave Bruce a year ago and Tom Lineaweaver turned up here in Baltimore and we spent two good days together.

Insofar as upperclassmen are concerned I saw a rather depressed runt at the Yale game and leave out __ __, a professional fairy. Even Dean Clarke, Bob Clarke's brother (class of '27), has been here in Baltimore this winter which is like seeing Bob again.

All this list of names is put in for what provocative powers may be on you, and with a further wish that it may suggest to you the personality of your old friend from reading off a list of the people with whom he had dealings.

For yourself, your family and all that are dear to you I tender the old bunk and can't tell you what a kick I got out of your note.

[Scott]

Notes:

² La Paix had recently caught fire.

xxx. TO: Isaac Benesch

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge, Towson, Maryland,
July 10, 1933.

My dear Mr. Benesch:
The other night at the Vagabonds in a state of great excitement and discouragement I was guilty of a misconception and a consequent silly rudeness to you, and I feel that proper amends should be made. My wife and I were on the stage having a little post-mortem on her play when we came in on a discussion between you and Bob Dobson about quite another play. In a hypersensitive mood I applied your remark to the vehicle upon which we were laboring and thought that maybe we were meant to overhear, and naturally blew up.

Please accept my sincere apologies which have been forthcoming ever since I realized next morning that I was absolutely in the wrong.

Very sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Mrs. H. H. Prouse

18 July 1933

TLS, 1 p. Unlocated, from The Collector, No. 854 (1977), #K-746.

“La Paix,” Towson, Maryland

The Keys settled in Maryland with a tremendous grant about 1698 in St. Marys County. They were rich with no special record of service to the state until after the Revolution. You and I are both descended from Philip Key, who died about 1800, you through his grandson Francis Scott Key, and I through Francis Scott Key's uncle Philip Barton Key² … In my branch of the Key family (descendants of Philip Barton Key) there has been no money or achievement of note for four or five generations though some of the descendents have married well. … I am told here in Baltimore that two men bearing the Key name, descendents of the aforementioned Philip Key, died poverty stricken in the Confederate Home at the beginning of the century. So I am afraid we must forget past glories, if there were any, and look forward to the future.

Notes:

² Fitzgerald was an enthusiastic but inaccurate amateur genealogist. Francis Scott Key was the great-grandson of the original Philip Key; his father was John Ross Key, brother of Philip Barton Key, from whom Fitzgerald was not descended. Philip Barton Key's father, Francis Key, was the brother of Dr. John Key, from whom Fitzgerald was descended. Francis Scott Key was F. Scott Fitzgerald's second cousin, three times removed.

Philip Key (1) - Dr. John Key - Philip Key - Eliza M. Key - Cecilia A. Scott - Edward Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“ “ (2) - Francis Key – (21) - John Ross Key - Francis Scott Key

“ “ - “ “ – (22) - Philip Barton Key

xxx. TO: John O’Hara

RCC, 1 p.(fragment). Princeton University

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge,

Towson, Maryland,

July 18, 1933.

Dear O’Hara:

I am especially grateful for your letter. I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word “breeding” (modern form “inhibitions”). So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two cylinder inferiority complex. So if I were elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalene to the Guards with an embryonic history which tied me to the Plantagonets, I would still be a parvenue. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.

I suppose this is just a confession of being a Gael though I have known many Irish who have not been afflicted by this intense social self-consciousness. If you are interested in colleges, a typical gesture on my part would have been, for being at Princeton and belonging to one of its snootiest clubs, I would be capable of going to Podunk on a visit and being absolutely booed and over-awed by its social system, not from timidity but simply because of an inner necessity of starting my life and my self justification over again at scratch in whatever new environment I may be thrown.

The only excuse for that burst of egotism is that you asked forrit. I am sorry things are breaking [The rest of the letter is missing.]

Notes:

Eton, prestigious English school; Magdalen, a college of Oxford University; The Guards, a socially prominent British regiment; Plantagenets, English royal house from 1154 to 1399.

xxx. To Mr. Lester Roberts

Almac Hotel, 71st Street at Broadway, New York City, N.Y.

[La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge, Towson, Maryland
July 18, 1933]

Dear Mr. Roberts:
Thank you for your letter. My excuse for the long delay in answering is that a pile of letters were side tracked into an anwered file just before I moved from one house to another. Sorry. Haven’t had a photograph taken for five years. Again thank you for the interest that inspired your letter,
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Francis Swann

TLS, 1 p. (with three-page annotated TS), Bruccoli

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

July 19, 1933.

Dear Francis:

Enclosed is the plan. I won't be starting my part of it for another three or four weeks but I send you this so that if you have any brain waves you can note them down. In any case stick it away someplace and don't let it get lost around the Vagabonds.² See you soon.

Ever yours,
F Scott Fitzgerald

Francis

It is agreed that for eleven weeks we produce one skit a piece each week trying to fit it into the general plan outlined so that at the end of three months we will have thirty-three skits from which to choose. Skits must fit in with general line of plot. Rough assignment to Francis Swann:

All plot scenes in Act II

1, 8 in Act II

4, 6, 13 in Act I

Plot numbers to be dramatized and jazzed if possible. Try to have one of your four numbers a tap number; one number should have to do with percussion value of firearms used in a muffled way.

Avoid the morbid and bloodthirsty, on the other hand don't lean over backward as attempt to make gangsters feminine would be equally bad effect. Skits should expose trivial and cheap motives in back of gangsters without moralizing.

When a theme line for song occurs to you simply write it down, don't write lyric till we get music line-up.

Don't write anything that disagrees with main theme or will confuse it. Use main characters when possible but use them in character. In addition each of us is to invent a series of two or three characters not too important, to run through our own skits. Those characters must be definitely subordinated to the simple lines of the plot and nothing that occurs in plot scenes can be permitted to turn on these characters. In other words we can each write a little comedy of our own running through the play or else do four or five stunt numbers with or without music. Remember: the minor characters are not to be tied directly to the main plot.

Act I (The Civic Building)

Background city of Chicago in pandemonium state of civil war. Gangsters under handsome executive taking over control and finally win control only to find pretty young girl alone at helm, everybody having walked out on her.

1—Chorus and skit

2—Plot Scene—Establish character of girl and gangster executive. Song if it seems convenient.

3—Song or skit (Comic)

4—Song or skit (Sentimental)

5—Song or skit (Dramatic or Pictorial)

6—Song or skit (Comic)

7—Plot Scene—Establish girl's relation with Idealist. Song if convenient.

8—Song or skit (Sentimental)

9—Song or skit (Dramatic or Pictorial)

10—Song or skit (Comic)

11—Plot Scene—Prepare finale of act. Establish interrelation of three main characters. Hint Master Mind. Song if convenient.

12—Song or skit (Sentimental)

13—Song or skit (Dramatic or Pictorial)

14—Plot Scene—Lead into finale

15—Plot Scene—Finale. Song—Closing Chorus

Act II (The Streets)

It develops that mystery man who is backing gangsters is also backing reformers. Girl threatens exposure thereby winning back city to the side of good, but is attracted by gangster's nephew and elopes with him at the end.

1—Chorus and skit

2—Plot Scene—Girl's predicament—bring out that Idealist is controlled by Master Mind. Song if convenient.

3—Song or skit (Comic)

4—Song or skit (Sentimental)

5 (Long)—Plot Scene—Audience guesses Master Mind. In same scene disclose that Executive depends on Master Mind. Song if convenient.

6—Song or skit (Comic)

7—Song or skit (Sentimental)

8—Song or skit (Comic)

9—Plot Scene—Girl's ultimatum. Song if convenient.

10—Plot Scene—Girl elopes with ex-Executive'

Notes:

² The proposed collaboration between Fitzgerald and Swann on a musical comedy was abandoned.

xxx. TO: George Jean Nathan

TLS, 1 p. Cornell University

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

July 27, 1933.

Dear George:

My interest in finding the Spectator in six pages this issue reminded me that you asked me to contribute. My phantom novel which is now really in its last stages absorbes every second of time that I don't have to devote to making a living so that for months even all correspondence has gone by the boards. As a matter of fact I have several pieces which I would like to work up for you but that eventuality seems some months off.

Please give my affectionate souvenirs to Ernest¹ whose letter I also omitted to answer. We often think of you and read everything you write, but we seem to see each other only at intervals of three years.

With cordial best wishes always,

F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Ernest Boyd, an editor of The American Spectator.

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

August 8, 1933

Dear Andrew:

Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and one more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men's minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use. Your mother told me that you had written a couple of somber letters home ¹ and I am both amused and disgusted. In trouble such as yours (of the reality of which I am by no means convinced) the proper tradition is that the mouth is kept shut, the eyes are lowered; the personality tries to say to itself: “I will adjust and adapt, I can beat anything offered to me; therefore I can beat change.” Anything short of that would be dishonor to the past and to whatever you believe in.

The mouth tight, and the teeth and lips together are a hard thing, perhaps one of the hardest stunts in the world, but not a waste of time, because most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence. Remember to think straight: the crowd at camp is probably right socially and you are probably wrong. I'll tell you a fact to corroborate that: I almost gave up the lease on this house for the simple fact that you persistently clung to the idea that beating down females was a method of establishing superiority over them.

Andrew, this will sound like kicking somebody when he's down, and you wouldn't expect that from a man who pretends to be your friend; nevertheless, we have spent too many hours together for you to doubt that my friendship for you is founded on a mutual understanding that nothing could break—outside of a disagreement in principle. So I presume to suggest: would you examine your conscience and see if you have violated such primary laws as have been laid down for you? Where you haven't—well, to hell with what other people think—better to fight your way out. The only thing that I ever told you definitely was that popularity is not worth a damn and respect is worth everything, and what do you care about happiness—and who does except the perpetual children of this world?

Always your friend,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Postscript: Am sending you a book.

Postscript (2) The poor boys called on me again. I tried to discourage them by making them work but I think they liked it!

Postscript (3) Don't leave this letter around—I'm sure you will get what I'm shooting at but it would defeat its own purpose if your contemporaries happened on it.

Postscript (4) Why, if your professed affection for your family is so strong, should you have disturbed your mother enough so that she should have brought up your gloom in conversation to me? Are you a Willie boy after all?

Postscript (5) This letter expects an answer.

Notes:

¹ From camp.

xxx. Appointment of Literary Executor

Typed document signed, 1 p.

Princeton University "La Paix," Towson, Maryland

I would like my novel in its unfinished form to be sent to John Peale Bishop, c/o Guarantee Trust Company, Paris, who I appoint as my literary executor in case of misfortune. What necessary work Mr. Bishop conceives should be done on it before publication he should award himself as seems just on a percentage basis, the rest going to my heirs and assigns.

Signed F. Scott Fitzgerald
Witness Essie Jackson
Witness Isabel W Owens

August 9, 1933.

Notes:

This document refers to Tender Is the Night. Jackson was the Fitzgeralds’ cook; Owens was Fitzgerald’s secretary at “La Paix” and in Baltimore.

Essie Jackson - Servant at "La Paix."

Isabel W Owens - Fitzgerald's secretary.

xxx. TO: Sara Haardt Mencken

TLS, 1 p. New York Public Library

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland

August 23, 1933.

Dear Sara:

Please don't think me a Doubting Thomas if I remind you once more that what I said last night about Schribner's was indiscreet. Max saw only a few chapters of the book and we discussed vaguely the possibility of serialization.¹ That is the only practical basis on which the matter rests but if that were even mentioned in any literary circles you know it would immediately appear in the gossip columns as an affair all clinched and set; which might in itself prejudice the whole matter beyond redemption.—It will be several months before I am sure what's going to happen.

Such a pleasant evening we had with you both! It was absolutely necessary for me to see someone who had some nourishment to offer because I have the sense of giving it out and taking none in for the past six months.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

¹ Tender Is the Night was serialized in Scribner's Magazine (January-April 1934).

xxx. TO: W. F. Clarkson

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

September 19, 1933.

Dear Floyd:

I haven't lost interest at all, only like everybody else, I have been absorbed in personal affairs, and also the exhibit that I was to and will send to you seemed to me to have a somewhat overwhelmingly exhibitionistic cast to it, and I lost enthusiasm in that particular. However, I shall send it off the end of this week. It seems to me that a piece of writing done in the club, which has subsequently obtained national attention, should be an interesting exhibit, and that an excerpt from it dealing with an actual scene at Princeton should be of interest—but whether Monsieur Palmer or Monsieur McGrath or Monsieur Orrick would agree with me is another matter. In other words: I am not a lamb going to the sacrifice. So for Christ's sake use your judgment and do not present this as the first fruit of our efforts unless it is surrounded by at least a dozen photographs of the boys making touchdowns and other successes, which in the republic are considered really worthy of mention.

Also, in what way can I serve on your committee? Though I have begun to do some research in Baltimore, the first thing shoved into your lap is a beautiful memoribilium of Fitzgerald; so I send it to you as something to keep out of sight for the present. You needn't be ashamed of it, because it has only bitten three people so far; but don't put it forward with the first batch of offerings.

P.S. Also please instruct your secretary about the spelling of my name or warn her that she will shortly be bombed from her love nest.

Notes:

Fitzgerald donated two pages from the manuscript of This Side of Paradise, corresponding to pp. 117-19 of the book, with the poem “Good Morning, Fool.”

xxx. TO John Lardner

From Turnbull.

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge Towson, Maryland

September 20, 1933

Dear John:

I was sorry not seeing you in Paris but your residence there coincided with illness in Switzerland. The whole point of calling you up was an idea that I have had for some time, which won't be less good for being old, that those articles that your father wrote could be strung into a very interesting story. Nevertheless, someone would have to work over it. Who to turn to! Much better a contemporary; consequently I have examined the possibilities. I can't do it myself because I am engrossed in work of my own, and it seems to me the next best person would be Gilbert Seldes; consequently I called Gilbert Seldes and he said he would like to do the work. I suggested to him a ten per-cent cut of whatever it nets; even if he asks more I think it would be worth your while because he is a crack editor and I would let stand whatever terms he suggests.

This is a rather difficult situation because, as I said on the phone, your father is the worst editor of his own stuff who ever turned up in a big way of the writing line, with the possible exception of Theodore Dreiser. And your mother is not especially interested in writing as such, and so I will have to turn it over to you, but I would like to turn it over as a complete idea so that you could do it or destroy it as seems fitting to you. Will you let Gilbert Seldes decide? Pass over all the material to him that you get from Wheeler, not in sections, but collect it first yourself even if it takes about a month altogether. Gilbert is one of the very first journalists in America and if anyone can make an interesting and consecutive narrative of it he can do it, and, to repeat, he is interested in the idea. When a Jew is interested he has the strong sense of the track that we other races don't even know the sprinting time of. His task is not merely an editorial one, according to my original conception, but will also include getting the stuff in order so it will tell a whole story (as much as Ring wanted to tell) of a certain period in his life. As his happens to be one of the most interesting temperaments of all the Americans of our time somebody is sure to be interested in publishing it, probably Scribners; but there I want to butt into the situation and get it done right. The Autobiography of Ring W. Lardner was merely a long short story, all full of personal anecdotes that could only have been of interest to Ring and his friends. That's what I mean by the fact that he has been a poor editor of his own stuff, and probably his sickness has not improved him in that regard, so while you must naturally tell him the idea is in progress it is much wiser for you and me to keep it in our hands. Or rather I hereby hand it over to you, with the opinion that you get from Seldes, and I would like to be called in as the doctor at the last moment when something tangible has been accomplished.

With regards to (Scarface) (Half-Wit) (Red Nose) (Pure Insult) Lardner: please give all of them my very best regards and to yourself with reiterated regrets that we didn't meet in Paris.

Yours,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[La Paix, Rodgers' Forge] [Towson, Maryland]

[September, 1933]

Dear Mrs. Turnbull:

I am going to have to not come to dinner Friday¹ (all of us, I mean), though naturally will come up in evening or afternoon to pay my respects to your mother with great pleasure—and curiosity and interest—at your convenience. We have dined out exactly four times in two years: twice with you, once at the Ridgelys, once on a ship. Without going into the whys of the precedent, it has become one, so with many thanks, I remain your friend (in this case regretful),

Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I have some documents of yours which I will cherish for a few days, unless you want them back immediately: one magazine article, one clipping, 2 letters of Andrew's (or do you save letters—if not I will file them as they seem interesting to me and form part of a series).

Notes:

¹ Beside these words Fitzgerald wrote in the margin, “What a sentence!”

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[La Paix, Rodgers' Forge] [Towson, Maryland]

[September, 1933]

Dear Mrs. Turnbull:

How would this plan seem to you? for the school trek, beginning Thursday.

You to take Thursday and Friday; then:
Our week, your week, our week, your week, your week
Our week, “, “, “, “
etc.

—This arrangement because this year your children have the far mileage to cover. Is it Oak? (I believe the dictionary spelling is “Oke.")

Your mother is utterly charming. I have never known a woman of her age to be so alive (I retract: there was also Mrs. Winthrop Chanler). I enjoyed our hour together so much. Tell her so.

Ever your chattel,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Sherwood Anderson

TLS, 1 p. Newberry Library

La Paix, Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

October 11, 1933.

Dear Sherwood:

It was damn kind of you to write me about the article.¹ I'm sure we feel the same way about Ring.

Ever yours, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ “Ring,” The New Republic (11 October 1933), Fitzgerald's tribute to Ring Lardner.

xxx. FROM: Dorothy Parker

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

After 11 October 1933

I think your piece about Ring is the finest + most moving thing I have ever read

Dorothy Parker
N.Y. City

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

TL, 2 pp. Princeton University

Rodgers' Forge, Towson, Maryland,

October 29, 1933.

Dear Dashiell:

I cannot come to a decision about the title before Monday or Tuesday. It is, naturally, to me a tremendously important question. My reasons against the lyrical title I've already told you, my reasons against the title which used the word “Doctor” I've already told you, I can also see reasons against “Dick and Nicole Diver"; so I think that I will simply have to dope over the whole thing again; but remember, if I come to no conclusion (no new conclusion) that “Richard Diver” will be the title.

The second section will reach you about the 12th of November. If there is any special reason for wanting it sooner I could probably manage it but I would prefer to have that much time at it.

About the other two installments: I had already talked to Max—after finishing the second installment, I am practically compelled to do a Post story. So the third installment may be delayed five weeks beyond the second, then the fourth will follow in three weeks more.

If this arrangement is unsatisfactory let me know but I gathered from Max that it would be all right.

Ever yours,

Mr. Fitzgerald had to leave immediately after dictating this letter so could not sign it.
I. W. Owens

xxx. Form Letters

[After 1933]

AL, 1 p. Princeton University

FORM I

My Dear——

Thank you for your very kind letter. One of the satisfactions of writing is to find that someone who has read your work thinks enough about it to write the author

Sincerely

FORM II

Thank you for your letter. My excuse for the long delay in answering is that a pile of letters were sidetracked into an answered file just before I moved from one house into another

Message

Again thank you for the interest that inspired your letter.

Sincerely

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

Wire. Princeton University

TOWSON MD 109P 1933 OCT 31 PM 1 24

HAVENT YET BEEN ABLE TO THINK UP A THING THAT I CONSIDER SATISFACTORY FOR A TITLE WHY DOES A TITLE HAVE TO BE PUBLISHED IN A PREVIEW ANYHOW IVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST IT THE IMPORTANT THING IS THAT A NOVEL BY ME IS APPEARING NO ONE WOULD REMEMBER THE TITLE OVER A WHOLE MONTH AND THIS IS NOT THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A SPECIAL VOLUME BUT SIMPLY THAT A BOOK WILL APPEAR IN SCRIBNERS IN ANY CASE THIS IS BETTER THAN HAVING AN UNSATISFACTORY TITLE PLEASE ANSWER
F SCOTT FITZGERALD.

xxx. FROM: Edward Shenton

ALS, 1 p. (fragment). Scrapbook.

Fall 1933

Princeton University

I just finished reading the final installment and will start the drawings this week. I wish I could tell you precisely how your novel affected me. Nothing comes readily to hand, except the kind of glib phrases, reviewers use. The pattern of disintegration you've created, is so subtle, adroit, so techinically proficient—and so completely moving—that the book seems to have a new form; something entirely it's own.—That's not what I mean, at least only partially. It's a swell job! Any writer would give his right arm and both legs to have done it. It's the best thing that's been written since “The Great Gatsby"—(This is going to become a “fan-letter” if I don't curb it)

Anyway—by these few incoherent sentences—you may see why I am delighted to have my drawings a permanent part of the book.² I hope to have the pleasure of meeting you sometime. Our paths have crossed often in the offices of Scribners.

Cordially Edward Shenton

Notes:

² Some of Shenton's drawings were included in the book form of the novel at Fitzgerald's request.

xxx. To Alfred Dashiell

From Turnbull

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

Xmas, 1933

Dear Fritz:

Section III (Chapters VI to IX inclusive) is being typed and goes off special delivery Wednesday evening. I was foolish to have come South as there was inevitable Xmas confusion and I only got through by working all night and all the night before. It began by being 40,000 words but I judge it will turn out between 24,000 and 29,000 after all.

While it is not weak it is perhaps a let-down from the two love affairs of Sections I and II. This was a hurried business and I intend to do the polishing on the proof. The month I lost in Bermuda was damn costly.

Now give me a real date and not a precautionary one for Section IV so I can make my plans with some rationality. You have nothing to fear—at the worst you could publish that section as it stands.

If this doesn't arrive too late “beyed” is better Deep South for “bird” than either “bed” or “buhd.” As for the “Ah guess, etc."—better change the one dialect line to “I reckon” and let it go at that.

I appreciate your interest which I feel is in the piece as well as in the magazine. Don't hesitate to pass on any comments but I'd rather get them in bulk than piecemeal. I'll probably have rewritten the whole thing by spring. Very best of Xmas greetings and tell Max only shame has prevented me thanking him for the extra loan.

Scott Fitzgerald

The psychiatrist at Hopkins says that not only is the medical stuff in II accurate but it seems the only good thing ever written on psychiatry and the—oh what the hell. Anyhow, that part's O.K.

My mother wasn't interested so it must have some merit.

1934

xxx. TO: Egbert S. Oliver

TLS, 2 pp. Original unlocated (Charles Hamilton Auction Number 61 (14 September 1972), Item #160)

1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,
January 7, 1934.

Dear Mr. Oliver:
The first help I ever had in writing in my life was from my father who read an utterly imitative Sherlock Holmes story of mine and pretended to like it.

But after that I received the most invaluable aid from one Mr. C. N. B. Wheeler then headmaster of the St. Paul Academy now the St. Paul Country Day School in St. Paul, Minnesota. 2. From Mr. Hume, then co-headmaster of the Newman School and now headmaster of the Canterbury School. 3. From Courtland Van Winkle in freshman year at Princeton—now professor of literature at Yale (he gave us the book of Job to read and I don’t think any of our preceptorial group ever quite recovered from it.) After that comes a lapse. Most of the professors seemed to me old and uninspired, or perhaps it was just that I was getting under way in my own field.

I think this answers your question. This is also my permission to make full use of it with or without my name. Sorry I am unable from circumstances of time and pressure to go into it further.

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Probably “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” St. Paul Academy Now and Then (February 1910).

On 1 February Fitzgerald wrote to Oliver: "I don't want to be quoted ... anything you may want to use from my letter is to be summarized." (Charles Hamilton Auction, # 161)

C. N. B. Wheeler.

xxx. TO: Cameron Rogers

TLS, 2 pp. University of California—Los Angeles

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 24, 1934.

Dear Cameron Rogers:

I hasten to thank you for your kind letter. It is really the nicest thing I have heard yet. It arrived simultaneously with one from Archie McLeish² so altogether I have had a good morning.

It is sometimes surprising to have a novel give an effect which was not exactly intended in the plan. Obviously Nicole is going to steal the book when it was intended as Dick Diver's story, and Nicole was to be scarely more important than Rosemary.

Again thank you for the whole-hearted cordiality of your congratulations. Let me warn you though that sections three and four have been cut for serial publication and some of their best scenes unfortunately omitted as being too racy by the Post Office department. They will be reinstalled in the book.

Sincerely,
F Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Would it seem too much like scratching your back in return for your kind words if I mentioned in this letter how much I enjoyed your book on Walt Whitman³ which I read on the way to Bermuda? Also, did you notice that in the second issue of Scribner's that really great story by Tom Wolfe⁴ and the quality of all those wood cuts of Shenton running through the magazine?

Notes:

Cameron Rogers had written Fitzgerald after reading the first two installments of Tender Is the Night: “I can think of no more moving character in contemporary fiction than Nicole nor do I readily recollect finding elsewhere writing so sensitive, so admirable in its restraint and yet so very rich in the capacity to arrest and touch the reader… Nothing in these bleak latter years has cheered me so much as this evidence that you are still so conclusively to be reckoned with as one of the four or five best American writers now alive.” (Scrapbook. Princeton)

² Archibald MacLeish had written: “Great God Scott you can write. You can write better than ever. You are a fine writer. Believe it. Believe It—not me.” (Scrapbook. Princeton)

³ The Magnificent Idler (1926).

⁴ “Four Lost Men,” Scribner's (February 1934).

xxx. TO: Chatto & Windus

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 24, 1934.

Dear Sirs:—

In particular, Mr. Frank Swinerton,¹ if he is still with you, my novel “Tender is the Night,” the very dilatory successor to “The Great Gatsby,” will be issued by Scribner's late in March. It is a long book, which is to say about 110,000 words, and you might have better luck with it than with “Gatsby.” Mr. T. S. Eliot of Faber and Faber is interested² and for that reason could I ask you to make your approximate decision from the first half which appears in the January and February numbers of Scribner's magazine. They are indicative of the tone and scope of the book. This is in order to obtain, if possible, simultaneous publications in England and here. Another question to be considered is that the book contains certain episodes which Scribner's have found not advisable to print in the magazine, in general would you say that what will get by the censors in book form here will get by the censors in England? Such things are very much liberalized here, for instance, the unexpurgated “Ulysses” is permitted. Do you know whether Hemingway's “Farewell to Arms” was published in England exactly as it was here? So consider in making your decision whether you would be using Scribner's plates or setting up the whole thing from a faintly expurgated text in London.³ I may tell you that the book is getting an extraordinary response here.

Yours very truly, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ English novelist Frank Swinnerton was an editor with Chatto & Windus.

² On 15 January Eliot wrote Fitzgerald: “Chatto and Windus is a good firm, and it would in any case be contrary to publishing ethics to attempt to seduce you away from them, but of course if you are quite free in this matter, it is up to you to send the manuscript first to whatever firm you elect.” (Princeton)

³ Chatto & Windus reset the type for Tender Is the Night, but the text was not bowdlerized.

xxx. TO: Victor Llona

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 25, 1934.

Dear Victor:

The novel is finished and will be published here in March, it is running in Scribner's magazine now. The name is “Tender is the Night” taken from Keats' “Nightingale.” As to translation into French, which you have several times mentioned to me there are two points to consider: first, the remark of Simon Kra to me some years ago to the effect that Europeans would not be interested in a novel written by an American with scenes laid in Europe. I think, however, this can be qualified by the statement that all the leading characters are American, or partly American, and even such minor characters who are not American are German Swiss. The second point to be considered is that the novel is more than twice as long as “The Great Gatsby.” So far as royalty arrangements are concerned, both translator's share and my own I would be more than willing to allocate that more liberally than before as I have never expected to make any money out of French rights anyhow, but this time we should manage to get it some time in advance to someone like Jean Cocteau. From this end the novel looks like a hit already, having increased the circulation of Scribner's magazine etc. etc.

If, on the other hand, you have other designs for the immediate future which would preclude your attempting this please let me know as someone else might be interested in the task.¹ If you can get hold of a copy of Scribner's magazine for January, which contains the first quarter of the book, you may be able to form some opinion from that. As soon as I hear from you I can ship you off complete proofs.

With very best wishes to you both.

Notes:

1 Tender Is the Night was first published in French in 1951, translated by Marguerite Chevalley.

xxx. TO: Louis Bromfield

TLS, 2 pp. Ohio State University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 29, 1934.

Dear Louis:

It was certainly damn nice of you to write me that telegram.² I have been alone with this book so long that I eagerly gobble up any morsel of praise, walk around my study for half an hour going over the book in the mind of one who so far happened to like it.

I was living in the country when I heard that you were considering Baltimore as a residence and was disappointed when a few hours later I learned that you had moved to Princeton. I wonder where you finally settled. Am out of touch with most of our mutual friends though I occasionally correspond with Ernest, Marice and Archie.² (By the way, the latter also seems to like the book so far, so maybe I am going to have some sort of succes d'estime out of it.) A writer's praise is worth that of a hundred critics, don't you think? And wasn't Gertrude Stein pretty sweet to us?³ Or was she pretty sweet to us? (as my daughter says)⁴

Again thank you for your gracious and generous telegram. With cordial best wishes to you and your family.

As ever,
F. Scott Fitzg—

P.S. By the way I must warn you, if you continue to read the story in the magazine, that the fourth + last section is cut from what it will be in book form.
FSF.

Notes:

Bromfield had wired Fitzgerald: JUST READ SECOND INSTALMENT NOVEL WONDERFUL REGARDS LOUIS BROMFIELD. (Princeton)

² Marice Hamilton and Archibald MacLeish.

³ The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas mentions Fitzgerald and Bromfield favorably.

⁴ This sentence was added in holograph.

xxx. To Mme. White

January 1934 (?)

ALS, 1 page, no date. Auction.

Dear Mme. White:
Can you manage to get those French translations (or rather corrections) back to me through Mrs. Owens Thursday or Friday? Even if incomplete I should have them back. With best wishes, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Notes:

Even a revered author has his shortcomings, and it appears that French was Fitzgerald’s undoing. Though he enjoyed his travels to Paris and the French Riviera, he was far from being a master of the Romance language, hence his need for “corrections” to his translations. Interestingly, his only child, journalist Frances Scott Fitzgerald, had been quoted as saying that his "horrendous French" and "atrocious accent" was no secret—creating a French-English hybrid of sentences. His troubles with French were alluded to via the character Dick Diver in the novel Tender Is the Night, with Diver’s inability to speak the language became a symbol of his failure and the subject of ridicule by his wife.

Possibly, this note refers to Tender Is The Night French phrases.

xxx. TO: Gilbert Seldes

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 2, 1934.

Dear Gilbert:

On second thoughts I am not very sold on “First and Last” as a Lardner title.¹ I keep thinking of Lears' “Book of Nonsense” and of “Alice in Wonderland.” While I know Ring's book will not be for children it is aimed at a somewhat childish side of us all and the title “First and Last” has a faint knell of his funeral bells in it. It is just a bit literary, and even sentimental. Please think this over. Constructively I have nothing to offer, but God damn it, that Thurber title “My Life and Hard Times” would have been wonderful. I have been fooling with the idea “On All Fours, or Compendium of the Jocose Adventures of Ring Lardner,” etc. or “Life as Viewed by a Natural” or “May I Arise and Protest.” Maybe that note will suggest something to you.

I have just thought of another item which may have been overlooked. It is the preface of “How to Write Short Stories” and explanatory notes. The preface would have to be cut; the notes containing such gems as: “This story was written on top of a Fifth Avenue bus, and some of the sheets blew away, which may account for the apparent scarcity of interesting situations.” Also another one: “This story is an example of what can be done with a stub pen.” And: “This story is an example of a story written from a title, the title being a line from Tennyson's immortal 'Hot Cross Buns.' A country-bred youth left a fortune, journeys to London 'to become a gentleman.' Adventures beset him, not the least of them being that he falls out of a toy balloon.” Could any of these wisecracks or the ones in the preface be fitted into your scheme, which I gather has been planned to be quite elastic? (I didn't see “Round Up” but I don't think that they used any of that material.)

Love to you both.

As ever, F. Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

¹ Seldes was editing a posthumous collection of Ring Lardner's writings. First and Last was the final title.

xxx. Annotations in Ring Lardner

1934 [?]

Annotations by Fitzgerald in Ring Lardner's How To Write Short Stories (1924).

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 2, 1934.

Dear Fritz:

A woman named Pauline Reinsch, 1904 Kendall Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, has read the book and been interested enough to send me a rather thorough list of errors in French and German for Sections I and II. In spite of everything there were a hell of a lot of them. I wish you would make a special note to send her page proofs of Sections III and IV the minute they are available, otherwise I am going to get one of those terrible bawlings out like Zelda did.¹ There is a certain sort of critic, who, when he is over his head, takes refuge in school marm quibbling, and another type of reader who is legitimately annoyed by inaccuracy.

By the way, where is the page proof of Sect. III you promised; also I could use another copy of your January issue, which is unprocurable around here. Have you got any report yet as to the February sales of the magazine? And have you any other reports that would be of interest to an anxious author? I am doing three galleys an evening of Section IV.

Ever yours, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Save Me the Waltz was ridiculed by critics for its many errors.

xxx. TO Glenway Wescott

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

February 6, 1934

Dear Glenway Wescott (This seems to be the form with which authors insult each other) (this letter is friendly),

About six years [ago] when I was doping out my novel Tender Is the Night, which will appear this spring, somebody told me about the departure of an American battleship from Villefranche with the attendant poules, etc. I built an episode of my book around it and spoke of it to several people. A year or so later a letter came from Ernest Hemingway telling me that you had used it for a background in a short story. His advice was that I should read it and thus avoid any duplication, but my instinct was to the contrary, and I waited until I had written my own scene before I read Goodbye to Wisconsin. There are, unavoidably, certain resemblances, but I think that I will let it stand. This letter is written to you exactly as I wrote one to Willa Cather before publication of The Great Gatsby in regard to a paragraph that strangely paralleled one of hers in The Lost Lady. I have a cruel hatred of plagiarism of one's contemporaries, and would not want you to think that I had taken to shoplifting.

What the hell did you do to Gertrude Stein that she went harsh on you? I am eagerly awaiting your next book.

With best wishes,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Mrs. Arthur J. Harris

TLS, two pages, Auction.

February 8, 1934.

Far from being one who rushes in you are an angel to write me such a kind letter. I am getting some responses from the book from writers but I am still pretty much alone with it and I'm grateful. I had not seen the Benet article but I located it immediatelyвЂ”I was rather surprised because Benet has usually been pleasant about my stuff. Something tells me he did not finish the second installment or he'd have seen that the novel does really deal with deep dark matters, screaming girls tied to the railroad tracks. To tell the truth I don't rate his opinion very highly, but I do rate his vote in the Book of the Month Club and I'm glad to check up on the thing. You would be factually an archangel to send me any corrections of the French or German. I am a simply hopeless linguist. I have a few corrections, but I am rushed for time because publication was begun on an unrevised manuscript and I have had to do my revisions in a hand to mouth fashion, checking up by turns the medical and geographical angles only when I get breathing time after the continual effort to see my people honestly. (Does this sound pretentiousвЂ”I suppose it is.) Anyhow the accuracy in strange tongues has been side-tracked and certainly hasn't been done as thoughtfully as it shouldвЂ¦P.S. Does one apologize any more for answering a hand written letter on a typewriter? P.S. 2. Who are you? Or is it none of my business? Are you a European, or have you lived a long time in Europe, and where?

Notes:

The critical article he mentions was just a few sentences in William Rose Benet's regular column 'The Phoenix Nest' in The Saturday Review of February 3, 1934. In it, Benet opines, 'Scott Fitzgerald's new novel, beginning in Scribner's, has been quite a disappointment to me,' adding that his evaluation was based on the first two installments. Even so, Benet points out, 'The man can write as always, sometimes brilliantly.'Benet was indeed one of Fitzgerald's admirers, and he was one of few contemporary reviewers to recognize The Great Gatsby as a distinctly American masterpiece. Fitzgerald also comments on the lack of copyediting for Tender Is the Night, which was riddled with spelling mistakes and errors that created chronological inconsistencies. Despite revisions, many of these made it into the book and numerous critics refused to forgive the sloppiness; Clifton Fadiman listed thirteen spelling errors in his New Yorker review.

xxx. TO: John Palmer

TL (CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 12, 1934.

Dear John:

I am sending you this letter merely as a matter of record and not with any idea of alarming any member of Zelda's family, as there is absolutely no cause for alarm. Frankly, though I know you have troubles of your own, I am doing it as a measure of self-protection, and if Newman were not so far away I would write this letter to him instead as he has been more in touch with Zelda's case. After a tremendous improvement she has had a slight relapse which makes it necessary for her to enter a clinic once more for a rest period which may be no longer than two weeks and may stretch into a month or so. To tell Mrs. Sayre a fact like this or to tell it to Marjorie, which would be the same thing, would be taking five years off her life because she would immediately link it up with Anthony's troubles.¹ Zelda and I consider it would be absolutely disastrous to do such a thing. I may even add (that I would rather you did not communicate this to Tild) as it may, in some round-robin way, reach Montgomery. I simply want to put it as a matter of record with some member of Zelda's family that she is vountarily hospitalizing herself under the advice of the same Dr. Myers who has been in charge of the case for the past two years and that it is with my entire agreement. Her own letters to her mother during this time will be headed as if she were still here with Scottie and me.

With best wishes to you all and hopes that both Tild and young John have fully recovered from their indispositions of last year and that all goes well with you, I am

Faithfully,

Notes:

¹ Zelda's brother suffered a breakdown and committed suicide in 1933.

xxx. FROM: Glenway Wescott

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

228 Madison Avenue, New York.

February 20, 1934

Dear Scott Fitzgerald,

My past and present publishers seem to be dreamy fellows, and your letter did not reach me until today. Thank you for the friendliness with which you refer to our overlapping inspiration.¹ I am glad that you have read my sailor story, liking to think that I write for such as you, and not merely for those who keep me going in our profession; I am glad that Hemingway remembered it; I am glad that you did not read it too soon, since my accidental precedence might have embarassed you somehow—it shouldn't have. I shall defend you spiritedly, if anyone is so foolish as to mention it. If need be, we can pretend that you told me of your intention to make use of the festivities of my Villefranche, years ago when we first met in your Antibes—when, in fact, I think, we talked only of Hemingway. You may wish to defend me before long on the same score: I haven't read any of TENDER IS THE NIGHT; I hear that your hero is a doctor; the sad hero of my new novel is a doctor; and God knows what similarities may result from that fact.

Miss Stein and I have never been either friends or the reverse; but if she hears some of the offensive things I've been saying about her since she worked up for herself such general celebrity, I'm afraid I can't expect her to feel friendly. We met one day last spring at Mme Pecci-Blunt's, and she asked if I had heard any news of you; presently I expressed my admiration of you, with some casual, perhaps hair-splitting reservations, saying that I did think you had a much more natural novelist's talent, a more vigorous narrative gift, than either Hemingway or myself, wondering if you felt that yourself, and felt responsible, and cared … Oh, she replied, of course he is infinitely better than you and Hemingway; if you two had talent enough you wouldn't have to work so hard; all this fuss and constipation and cuisine and rewriting … etc. Of course I thought that the amiable old bluffer had considerably missed the point, all the points. I was sure of it when she began bracketting you with Charles Henri Ford² and Bromfield and Defoe and Sir Rose, Bart., as he used to be called in Villefranche.³ She herself, I think, hasn't done an honest day's work between THREE LIVES and the AUTOBIOGRAPHY, and this last job was done just to make money; like most autobiographers, taking a rebate on the money she has spent on herself all these years. I think that her remarks on Hemingway, so sly and hard to rebut, are odious; and that her effort, aided and abetted by my old friend Fay, to set herself up as a model of normality and a judge of wholesomeness in literature, is odious and ridiculous. You see, my troubles have only begun; what if Miss Toklas should now write an autobiography of Miss Stein… ? I didn't really mind her epigram about my “syrup not flowing.” It doesn't, indeed. When people began condoling with me and baiting me, I said as much, and said that since I had been complaining about it for years and living around the corner from Miss S. for years, I wasn't surprised at her having heard it; finally the local talkers began to say that the epigram had been my own, and that she had swiped it; which of course I corrected, but still felt revenged and cheered …

Please excuse my loquacity. We're all Stein-conscious in New York just now.

With warm greetings, and my respectful compliments to Mrs Fitzgerald, if she remembers me.⁴

Yours,
G Wescott

Notes:

¹ Tender Is the Night and Wescott's story “The Sailor” in Good-Bye Wisconsin (1928) both treat American sailors at Villefranche.

² Editor, writer, and artist.

³ Sir Francis Rose, English artist; Riviera acquaintance of Fitzgerald's.

⁴ See Fitzgerald's 6 February letter to Wescott.

xxx. To Dr. Jonothan Slocum

Beacon, New York

March 12, 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.

Dear Dr. Slocum:
There are several things that I forgot to go into when you asked me had my wife ever had any long disease. She did have one case of colitis which was finally cured by an appendix operation almost ten years ago. Also, she has had two attacks of chronic asthma. The doctor who treated her in Montgomery, Alabama, firmly believes that it came from the hair of a dear’s head! Both times it happened we lived in a house with deer’s heads on the walls. He tested her for every other known irritant but we never did get to testing for the deer’s bead because at that time we came north fo Johns Hopkins where the asthma disappeared. By the way, in case of recurrence she is hypersensitive to adrenalin. Instead of stimulating her it has twice slowed down her pulse to the danger point.

Now about a financial element which I forgot to mention. Zelda has absolutely no sense about money, though she is not particularly self-indulgent. This is partly my fault as I gave word in Switzerland for her to have every luxury in the line of Paris clothes and so forth that she wanted, because I felt she needed cheering up after her long ascetic effort in the ballet. At that time I made a great deal of money (for me). Later at Hopkins, when my income had been curtailed, she went on another shopping spree, literally buying everything that caught her eye, so the doctors wrote me about it. Here she is liable to do the same thing and under present conditions it is no go any more. I want her to profit by all the facilities of the clinic but every extra must be curtailed as far as possible. What provoked this was a wire in which she seemed to want everything in the house except the kitchen utensil, sent to New York, a very expensive process added to all the cost of shipping the pictures for her exposition.

I have hopes that a little later, if she is still there, I can give her more leeway, but at present I am engaged in the most complicated negotiations with moving picture companies. Between that and Zelda and a state of rather ill health, I haven’t had time to cultivate my usual source of revenue, the source of revenue being the Saturday Evening Post.

As soon as you get any positive impression about her condition please let me know as it effects the very plans that I make day to day. If her hospitalization tends to extend further than two to three months, I should be inclined to go to Hollywood where an author can make a very quick turnover. Frankly I should hate it like hell, as we have just settled here.

It was a pleasure meeting you and feeling not only tremendously pleased with you beautiful plant but also coming to the conclusion that you are perhaps the very best man to help Zelda at present.

With all best wishes.
Yours sincerely,

P.S. I might remind you that Zelda’s artistic materials alone, not including typing, come to approximately fifty dollars a month, so you see altogether she is getting about eight-tenths of the family income.

xxx. FROM: Thomas Wolfe

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

March 1934

Dear Scott:

Thanks for your note. It's good to hear from you again. I'll be delighted to visit Zelda's exhibition when I'm in town. I live in Brooklyn now and it's sometimes hard to get over to Manhattan in daytime, but I should like to see her painting before the exhibition is over.

Scott, I want to tell you how glad I am that your book is being published next month, and also what a fine book it is. I read it as it came out in Scribner's Magazine and even read the proofs of the last two installments. I tell you this because I got the jump on most readers in this way. I thought you'd be interested to know that the people in the book are even more real and living now than they were at the time I read it. It seems to me you've gone deeper in this book than in anything you ever wrote. I don't pretend to know anything about the book business and have no idea whether it will have a big sale or not, but I do know that other people are going to feel about it as I do. I think it's the best work you've done so far, and I know you'll understand what I mean and won't mind if I get a kind of selfish hope and joy out of your own success. I have sweated blood these last four years on an enormous manuscript of my own, and the knowledge that you have now come through with this fine book makes me want to cheer. I felt a personal interest in parts of the book where you described places we had been together, particularly Glion and Caux and that funicular that goes up the mountain. I don't think anyone will know just how good that piece of writing is unless he has been there.

This is all for the present. I am still working like hell but I'd like to see you if you come up here. Meanwhile, I am wishing for the best kind of success in every way for your book when it is published.¹

Yours, Tom Wolfe

Notes:

¹ See Fitzgerald's 2 April letter to Wolfe.

xxx. TO: Houghton Mifflin

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD 440A 1934 MAR 17 AM 5 O2
HATE QUIBBLING IN NARROW TIMES BUT YOUR NEWS CARRIES IMPLICATION THAT BOTTOME GIVES FULL LOAF TO MY HALF LOAF ABOUT PSYCHIATRY¹ STOP ITS FAIR TO CAPITALIZE RESEMBLANCE BUT SINCE YOU MADE MISSTATEMENT IN USING WORDS QUOTE CONCLUDING CHAPTERS UNQUOTE FEEL YOU SHOULD AMEND IN NEXT ISSUE
F SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

¹ In the promotional material for Phyllis Bottome's Private Worlds, a novel that dealt with psychiatry, Houghton Mifflin compared it with Tender Is the Night.

xxx. TO: Samuel Marx

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 22, 1934.

Dear Sam:

You were wrong! The letter to Cukor² dealt with the idea of Gable playing "Gatsby.” “Tender is the Night” is still an unknown quanity.³ Would rather like to come out there now that the main chore is finished. It seems to be that or the Saturday Evening Post and I long for variety—but at any price (and I am cherishing none of the illusions of 1931 about money) I wouldn't come out there with any such lineup as I had to face last time. Who is this Joan Crawford? Is she the one who preaches in the Los Angeles temple, or is that Greta McArthur? With best wishes to Madame and to you,

Ever yours, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Director George Cukor.

³ Neither of these movies was made.

xxx. To Dr. Jonothan Slocum

Beacon, New York

March 22, 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.

Dear Dr. Slocum:
Thanks for your letter. I have no preconceived idea of what length hospitalization is best and will always defer to your judgment.

A minor point: can a nurse bring Zelda to New York early on the 29th to hand her over to me to see her picture exhibit, and then escort her back to Craig House in the evening? It is, of course. little out of key, but not seeing her pictures hung after all this effort would be a disappointment. I will be responsible for her during the day (or night also if you think it not incompatible with her cure for her to stay in New York that long. In my opinion it would do no harm as there would be simply no time to set up the old machinery of quarreling).

Secondly, I had wanted to take my daughter to some quiet Adirondack place for her Easter holiday and my plans included the daughter spending a day and night with her mother at Craig House—a cot would be put in the room perhaps—wherefrom I would pick her up the following day and go to our destination. If I do not hear from you I will presume that both these projects are O.K. with you.

Small item that may or may not be of interest: Zelda is almost totally blind in one eye from some childish accident. Little by little things seem to leak out. (Eventually I will probably tell you she is she illegitimate daughter of Franz Joseph and the mother of Mari Hati and that I am Harpo Marx.)

As to her writing: there is no longer any competitive element involved. There was a time when she was romping in on what I considered ‘my’ material, disguising her characters under such subtle names as F. Scott Fitzpatrick, when I thought she was tearing at the very roots of my profession, in other words, of our existence. She finally gor she idea and desisted, but rather bitterly. At any rate all that element of competition in material which I had to turn into money, or if possible, into art, and which she was competent to turn only into essentially inefficient effort, we can now assume to be in the past.

She can write in the sense that all non-professionals who have a gift for words, can write. Somebody once said that every intelligent American thought that they could always sell a plot of Iand, make a good speech and write a play. Her equipment is better than that but it does boil down to the slang phrase she can’t take it. She can’t stand criticism: she hasn’t the patience to revise: she has no conception of how fast the world slips from under one’s feet and her getting up sophomoric Aristotliana in a few months cannot bridge the gaps in her education; nevertheless, she can write. She writes a brilliant letter and has made marked successes in short character studies and has an extraordinary talent for metaphor and simile. Along that line, with the realism of having to write her stuff to sell she could be, say, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and such magazines as publish short pieces.

A]so, since the failure of her dancing she has a complex about writing. She has seen me do it as apparently some automatic function of the human machine, lying dormant in everyone; she shares in this ply, the American vulgar opinion of the arts: that they are something that people do when they have nothing else to do. She takes heightened nervous sensitivity, the incorrigible instinct to make better and better as a matter of course in me, those being two, among many, of the things which she is incapable of ‘taking’ herself. When fronted with fait accompli she is as impressed as any yokel, and as a yokel she clings to the idea that the thing has all been done with a beautiful intention rather than with a dirty, sweating, heartbreaking effort extending over a long period of time when enthusiasm and all the other flowers have wilted.

The points for her writing are: the use of her verbal facility,the feeling of nor being hampered in what she wants to do by arbitrary decision of mins the possible great success, who knows! Against her writing there is the nervous strain of the work itself, the nervous strain of recapitulating old agonies best left forgotten, and the inefficient technique predicating years to perfect, which kills most of what she writes, and the melancholia depending upon unfavorable reception of her work by critics.

This, then, is the general line-up on the business of her writing as far an I have been able to analyze it, which may help Dr. Blankenship or whoever is most intimately in contact with her.

Thank you immensely for your letter.
Very Sincerely Yours,

xxx. To Gilbert Seldes

26 March 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland

xxx. TO: Dale Warren

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 28, 1934.

Dear Dale:

My God! My God! I didn't think when I made all that fuss about nothing that I was digging at an old Princetonian. Forget it and forgive me. I enjoyed Phyllis Bottome's book but my own instinct is for things more dynamic and more closely knit and I've never been able to get deeply absorbed about these long chatty English novels. With best wishes and hoping to see you soon.

Yours
Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Warren had answered Fitzgerald's 17 March wire to Houghton Mifflin. See Warren's “(Signed) F.S.F.,” article.

xxx. To Dr. Jonothan Slocum

Beacon, New York

April 2, 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Dr. Slocum:
I didn’t come up because there seemed no particular necessity since so little has developed there. (Thank God!) The only times that my opinions are of any value are when I have spent protracted time with my wife and can see her tired and under the harassments of life, as well as in a holiday humor, as she was in New York.

The exhibition, as she may have told you, was a weird affair of sizable and enthusiastic clusters of people, and of long blanks where Zelda and the curator sat alone in the studio, waiting for someone to appear. Whether or not this the normal condition of art exhibits I am not familiar enough to know. Nor is she—and I can’t guess at her reaction, except she seemed sunk. Unfortunately her backer himself has also been a mental patient and seems to react to reverses in a melancholy way instead of being stimulated by them.

In the medley of chores that descended upon me in New York I am not sure whether or not I sent you a copy of my book [Note: Tender is the Night was just published that month], with what indirect light it may throw on my wife’s problem. In any case I am sending you another as soon as I can get a supply down here, also the long promised copy of my wife’s book.

I shall be in New York in about ten days and if you think it advisable I would like to bring my wife down again for a last look at her show. If my coming to Beacon seems to you of any practical benefit I am at your service any time.
With very best wishes,

xxx. To Philip Lenhart

c. April 1934

Inscription in The Great Gatsby. Glenn Horowitz.

Baltymore, Maryland (?)

For Phil Lenhart from F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let me make a comment—this is an attempt at the ...

xxx. TO: Thomas Wolfe

TLS, 2 pp. Harvard University

1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,

April 2, 1934

Dear Arthur, Garfield, Harrison & Hayes:
Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome. It is hard to believe that it was in the summer of 1930 we went up the mountainside together—some of our experiences have become legendary to me and I am not sure even if they happened at all. One story, (a lie or a truth), which I am in the habit of telling, is how you put out the lights of Lake Geneva with a Gargantuan gesture, so that I don’t know any more whether I was with you when it happened, or whether it ever happened at all!

I am so glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish. Again thanks for your generous appreciation.

Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald + Arthur, Garfield, Harrison & Hayes

Notes:

American Presidents treated in Wolfe’s story “The Four Lost Men,” Scribner’s Magazine (February 1934).

Praising Tender Is the Night.

Fitzgerald claimed that the tall Wolfe broke power lines in Switzerland while gesticulating (Wolfe, waving his arms as he talked, had snapped an overhead wire and caused a blackout).

xxx. TO John Jamieson

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

April 7, 1934

Dear Mr. Jamieson:

I thought Leighton's article ⁴ had a sort of fruity bitterness about it but I was not at the time in a position of answering it—and I was amused by the severe kidding that Ernest Hemingway gave it. I am absolutely sure that more sweat and blood went into the creation of, say, A Farewell to Arms than into Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel. I agree with you that the latter is not heavily weighted, but to me it sounds less like a rough draft than like a small section of Proust.

I was interested also in your analysis of the influences upon my own books. I never read a French author, except the usual prep-school classics, until I was twenty, but Thackeray I had read over and over by the time I was sixteen, so as far as I am concerned you guessed right.

In any case let me thank you many times for your interest in Gatsby (by the way, the Modern Library is bringing it out again this spring) and your courtesy in sending me your observations. With very best wishes in hopes that we may meet in the near future,

Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

⁴ “An Autopsy and a Prescription” by Lawrence Leighton in Hound and Horn, July-September, 1932.

Fitzgerald's annotations to this article.

xxx. TO: Louis Bromfield

TLS, 2 pp. Ohio State University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 7, 1934.

Dear Louis:

Again it was good to hear from you. My book comes out the twelfth and meanwhile, I sent you an advanced copy in care of your publishers.

Indeed, we are not only growing middle-aged, we are middle-aged, and being treaded down by that very young generation, that I agree with you, hasn't as much talent as ours. But remember, we flowered, or failed to flower, in days of Florentine splendor, while most of these kids have been up against it for half a decade. However, I must frankly admit that all their work does essentially bore me (haven't read this Farrell¹) and seems very thin and doctrinaire and unworked at and giving the final effect of all having been derived from some Work I never saw by some Great Craftsman I never saw and am not sure ever existed. All in all, I feel patient with them though for they didn't know what now seems the Golden Age.

With very best wishes to you and yours, I am

Faithfully,
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ James T. Farrell, author of Young Lonigan (1932).

xxx. To Dr. Jonothan Slocum

Beacon, New York

April 8, 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.

Dear Dr. Slocum:
I have the last report about Zelda, telling of her reactions to New York. There is something about it that fills me with disquiet, and a disquiet associated with the first push of her sickness. I would like to ask you if there’s any well established theory about the recurrences of these acute phases where the patient must be hospitalized—are they provoked by once more having to face circumstances that were the ones they failed to face in ordinary life, or, are they more liable to be conditioned upon some pre-breakdown cause, such as a familial tendency—or upon both? If the rhythm of the recurrences of this patient’s serious breakdowns could be parallel, even roughly, to how well she survives a given day—if such a fantastic notion can be entertained—then I would like to know whether it has ever been observed and recorded and if there is a theory about it. Please believe that I am by no means begging you for a snap judgment upon Zelda’s case, particularly because I realize that not only is every case strongly individual but, also because you have not yet had adequate time to watch her in all manifestations of her illness.

However, since my life, my daughter’s life, my plans, and my financial arrangement have each time been determined by what happens to my wife, I would grasp eagerly at any theory which would dare to prophesy the number of and interval between these breakdowns. This would be of value to me in my dealings with her and eliminate some of the fumbling in a void which has made me often lose my temper at her irresponsibility and, at other times, have an unfortunate inability to reassure her about her condition. To some extent beyond all physicians, she turns to me, largely through habit, and when I can stand as one who is sure of his ground I am doubly reinforced in helping her.

As I said to you: the theory of dementia praecox is widely held in these parts, and most popularly set down in Henderson and Gillespie’s tex book, does not convince me. I would rather have Zelda a sane mystic than a mad realist, or as I expressed it in my book ‘better a sane crook than a mad Puritan.’ this seems to be going over into philosophy but my great worry is that time is slipping by, life is slipping by, and we have no life. If she were an anti-social person who did not want to face life and pull her own weight that would be one story, but her passionate love of life and her absolute inability to meet it, seems so tragic that it is scarcely to be endured.

To the advantage of what she describes contemptuously as ‘Teutonic morality’ there is at least an attempt at making (perhaps arbitrarily) a sort of hierarchy of the values so that the most desirable aims are placed in their proper relation to each other. This appeals to me more if only for the therapeutic utility of a patient organizing his mind this way. The danger, of course, would be that, once at liberty, the superimposed set of values would tend to grow dim and thin and the old habits of disorganization would fight through and reestablish their demonical dominance.

Nevertheless, just as in the wisdom of Europeans there are times when one does not explain things to a child but simply says they are true, so the re-education of an adult might be planned on some such line (given that adult’s proper respect for her mentor and the patience to instill this series of values).

The doubts and objections to such a theory are based on whether the real re-education of an adult person, such as my wife, is possible, but - there is also the question of ‘Any port in a storm.’ If this patient is sinking into a certain vagueness and apathy, is going down-hill, it might be advisable to revolutionize certain aspects of her treatment.

The brashness of this from an amateur may annoy you - its only excuse is that it comes from a very concerned and very worried mind.
Very sincerely yours,

xxx. FROM: Louis Bromfield

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

April 1934

Dear Scott—

Two copies of the book—one signed—arrived and I was delighted to have them. Needless to say they are in great demand among the neighbors. All of us—and that means 3 hard-boiled readers—Mary myself and George Hawkins who keeps me at work and squeezes the pennies from wretched movie magnates editors etc—found it full of the real stuff. There are certain pages which are unforgettable and there is a beautiful quality about the whole performance. It is I should think permanent. That we should see deeper into it than the older or younger reader is inevitable. They dont know what its about. Ive just embarked on a ponderous novel on the same theme—save that the whole setting is as different as possible. I've gone the whole hog. My “hero,” surrounded by all the blessings in the world, simply goes out to the garage and shoots himself—fifteen years after the war.¹ Anyway its all a fascinating business, this writing. As to the “Younger generation” most of them seem pretty “arty” and self-conscious and the hard-boiled school is the most tiresome of all. Perhaps when they become middle-aged like ourselves they'll outgrow it. We did know the golden age. Hot or cold, we were very lucky. I never knew it more profoundly than during the past winter when a lot of Princeton undergraduates crossed my path.

Life here is extremely quiet. I fiddle around the garden all day and work at night. I never liked Paris and now it is a morgue. I haven't spent a night there since my return a month ago. But I'm saving up for London where I have fun.

Drop me a line with news of yourself. I'm planted here until October save for a month in Cornwall. Then back to Broadway and Mr. Jed Harris² for a play, which will be [my new] experience. Thank you for the book and for having written it.

As always—Louis Bromfield

Notes:

¹ The Man Who Had Everything (1935).

² Theatrical producer.

xxx. FROM: James Branch Cabell

11 April 1934

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Scott Fitzgerald:

Completely, admiringly, and a bit enviously, have I relished each page of Tender Is the Night. I think it a superb piece of writing—solid (in the word's best sense), urbane, true, and unfailingly picturesque. To call it your best book were mere idle understatement: it is immeasurably your best book.

All luck to it and you. And all my thanks for remembering me thus handsomely, in a fashion so pleasure giving.

Yours faithfully, James Branch Cabell

xxx. Dorothy Parker

Inscription in Tender is the Night (1934)

April 1934

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Dotty
This is better than the magazine
Love always
Scott
Dorothy Parker
c/o The New Yorker

xxx. To: Carl Van Vechten

Inscription in Tender is the Night (1934). Yale University

April 1934

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Carl:
Glad you liked the thing. This is better than the serialized version. Scott Fitzgerald

Inscription in Tender Is The Night (1934).

xxx. FROM: Carl Van Vechten

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

April 1934

Dear Scott, Thanks for sending me Tender is the Night. I read it at once and it seems to me to be a very poignant book. I was swept almost at once into the undertow of meanings and feelings. It is by no means as clear as Gatsby, but very possibly it is even a greater performance. There are passages which are almost unbearable in their deflected intensity. But I didnt believe the end. Anyway, congratulations.

Love to Zelda!

Someday when you are in town, please give me a ring and come in to be photographed. The number is Circle 7-3399.

best silver dolphins to you!

Wednesday. Carlo V. V.

Perhaps best of all I like the way your gallant creatures carry on against time, against space, almost against history.

xxx. To: John O'Hara

Inscription in Tender is the Night (1934). Pennsylvania State University.

April 1934

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear John: May we meet soon in equally Celtic but more communicable condition
Scott Fitz

xxx. FROM: John O'Hara

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

April 1934

Dear Scott:

Thank you, for myself and my bibliophile grandchildren, for the inscribed copy of Tender Is the Night. The little bastards will have to be satisfied with cut leaves, because I am reading the novel once again, having read it in the magazine, in galley proof, and now. I will say now that Tender Is the Night is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side of Paradise. As I told you once before, I don't read many books, but the same ones over again. Right now I can't think of any other book clearly enough to make a comparison between it and Tender Is the Night, and I guess in its way that is the most important thing I've ever said about any book.

You helped me finish my novel.¹ I finished it yesterday. The little we talked when you were in New York did it. I reasoned that the best parts of my novel will be said to derive from Fitzgerald, and I think I have muffed my story, but I became reconciled to having done that after talking to you and reading Tender Is the Night in proof. No one else can write like that, and I haven't tried, but the best parts of my novel are facile pupils of The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby. I was bushed, as Dottie² says, and the fact that I need money terribly was enough to make me say the hell with my book until you talked to me and seemed to accept me. So then I went ahead and finished my second-rate novel in peace. My message to the world is ~~Fuck~~ it! I know this is not the right, the classical (as Hergesheimer would punctuate it), attitude, but I can write better than Louis Bromfield, Tiffany Thayer, Kathleen Norris, Erskine Caldwell or Mike Gold, so I am not the worst writer there is. I never won anything, except a German helmet for writing an essay on Our Flag, and a couple of Father Lasance's My Prayer Book's for spelling bees.

Please look me up when you come to New York, and thank you for the book.

John O'Hara

Notes:

¹ Appointment in Samarra (1934).

² Dorothy Parker.

~~Fuck~~ - Fitzgerald crossed out this word.

xxx. To: Malcolm Cowley

Inscription in Tender is the Night (1934). Auction.

Early April 1934

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Malcolm:
Please don't review this--I know how you'd do it. Put a young man on it--oh hell--use your own judgement, as you will anyhow.
Ever yours, Scott

xxx. FROM: Malcolm Cowley

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

April 13, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am reading snatches of “Tender is the Night"—one chapter here, one chapter there, as I usually do with novels before I can bring myself to sit down ambitiously and read them straight through. All I can say so far is that there are some swell side-shows in it. The one very near the end, of the English Countess and Mary North and the kick in the sailor pants, is absolutely immense. In spite of what you say, I think I ought to review the book myself¹ rather than pass it along to one of the young guys who would ask why you weren't a proletarian novelist. I am sure to be late with it, because I am just finishing up the last six pages of my own book.² The hungry linotype machines are now eating the rest of it.

Thanks a lot for your list of neglected novels.³ The next time you jump into New York, U.S.A., let me know you are in town instead of sitting mournfully at Tony's.

As ever, Malcolm

Notes:

¹ In his review in The New Republic (6 June 1934) Cowley said that some of the characters in Tender Is the Night are “self-contradictory” because Fitzgerald had changed his attitudes during the long period of working on the novel.

² Exile's Return (1934).

³ “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read,” The New Republic (18 April 1934), 283. Fitzgerald's list included Miss Lonelyhearts, Sing Before Breakfast, I Thought of Daisy, Through the Wheat.

xxx. TO: Howard Coxe

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 15, 1934.

Dear Hungry:

There wasn't the faintest intention of using you as a character in my novel. There was only an intention of reproducing what was just about the rottenest thing that ever happened to me in my life.² I don't think that anyone would possibly associate the character of Collis Clay³ with you; nor do I think that it recapitulates in any way what happened during that eventful night. I must say, however, that having gone through hell on that occasion, I am often groggy about recalling it, and I do remember, through the dim midst of blood, that it was you as well as Zelda who helped me out of jail.

The fact that I happened to remember a breach of tact on your part at the time springs probably from a quarrel we had a month and a half later, which I resented very deeply, perhaps unjustly, perhaps because I was still a little cuckoo on account of the shock of the beating.

But I hope that when we met years afterwards in the Ritz bar (I believe you were with George Piper) that the thing was written off as far as I was concerned, because I don't believe in carrying on old quarrels, and have gotten beyond the age when it gives me any satisfaction.

So, let me reassure you—my use of Collis Clay was purely a part of my artistic purpose in the book (remember, for instance, I started him in Paris, and this was before I had any intention of associating him with the character in Rome). And so, there is no question of renewing old grudges on my part, and you can show this letter to anybody.

Also, if this does not seem a satisfactory account for what I have written, I will be glad to meet you at any place at any time and make what proper physical amends you might deem necessary.

What you did that night, as I say, I am perhaps not prepared to properly estimate.

In any case, I read your Florentine novel with the greatest delight, and have only failed to see the new book because of tremendous pressure of work.

So you see from the foregoing that the character was not intended to be any possible portrait of my impression of you, but simply was part of the (so called) artistic intention of the book.

With best wishes,
Scott

Notes:

² Fitzgerald was beaten by the Roman police in 1924.

³ In Book II, Ch. 21, of Tender Is the Night Dick Diver is beaten by the police in Rome after getting drunk with Collis Clay.

xxx. TO John Jamieson

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

April 15, 1934

Dear Mr. Jamieson:

Thank you, immensely, for sending me your article. I agree with you entirely, as goes without saying, in your analysis of Gatsby. He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance. It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called “Absolution,” in my book All the Sad Young Men was intended to be a picture of his early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery.

Again, thanks!

With very best wishes,
Yours,
Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Christian Gauss

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

April 23, 1934

Dear Mr. Gauss:

Your full and generous letter reached me just before I went off on a three-day vacation. I cannot tell you how it pleased me.¹ There comes a time when a writer writes only for certain people and where the opinion of the others is of little less than no importance at all and you are one of the people for whom I, subconsciously, write. From the time that you put in a good word for my first book, then bound for Scribners, I have appreciated your opinion and advice. I remember the one thing you said against The Great Gatsby in Paris some seven years ago when we saw something of each other with Ernest Hemingway; the fact that I had over-used the expression of “windows blooming with light” has stuck with me to the present day, and I think had a large and valuable influence in some of my problems.

I wish to God I could join you and Bunny on your junket but I am simply swamped by the hangover of the book and with domestic affairs so I don't think I will see Princeton before June, and, believe me, I regret it very much because there is much more that I want to talk to you about than literature.

Scribners writes that they are sending me your book which I think I have read almost entire in its scattered form but which I will pursue again with deep pleasure.

With best regards to Mrs. Gauss and admiration for your beautiful red-headed progeny, I am

Ever yours,
(even in red crayon, the only thing available)
Scott Fitzg——

Notes:

¹ Gauss had written to congratulate Fitzgerald on Tender Is the Night.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

TLS, 2 pp. Enoch Pratt Free Library

1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,

April 23, 1934.

Dear Menck:
I am afraid that I am going to have to violate your favorite code of morals—the breaking of engagements—because I’ve got to go to New York about trying to capitalize on my novel in the movies.

Without wanting to add to your mass of accumulated correspondence just as you’ve cleared it away, I would like to say in regard to my book that there was a deliberate intention in every part of it except the first. The first part, the romantic introduction, was too long and too elaborated, largely because of the fact that it had been written over a series of years with varying plans, but everything else in the book conformed to a definite intention and if I had to start to write it again tomorrow I would adopt the same plan, irrespective of the fact of whether I had, in this case, brought it off or not brought it off. That is what most of the critics fail to understand (outside of the fact that they fail to recognize and identify anything in the book) that the motif of the “dying fall” was absolutely deliberate and did not come from any diminuition of vitality, but from a definite plan.

That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemmingway and I worked out—probably from Conrad’s preface to “The Nigger”—and it has been the greatest “credo” in my life, ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known, except in so far as I have my natural obligation to my family—to provide for them. I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud, if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose—and that is no sentimental yapping about being disinterested. It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

With terrific regrets that I probably wont be back in time to hear your harrowing African adventures, and compare them with my own, and with best regards always to my favorite Venus, Sara, I am

As ever,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891).

1 The whole letter relates to Tender Is the Night.

1 Mrs. H. L. Mencken.

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

H. L. Mencken 704 Cathedral St. Baltimore

April 26, 1934

Dear Scott:

I am sorry indeed that you won’t be here the rest of the week. Let me hear of it as soon as you get back, and we can have a session. I'll probably have to go to New York myself next week, but if so it will be only for a few days. I hate the town and never go near it if I can help it.

I hope you don’t let yourself be upset by a few silly notices. The quality of book reviewing in the American newspapers is really appalling. Reviews are printed by imbeciles who know nothing whatever about the process of writing, and hence usually miss the author’s intentions completely. I think your own scheme is a capital one, and that you have carried it out very effectively in the book.2

My “Treatise on Right and Wrong” is getting the usual violent denunciations, but it seems to be selling fairly well and I am confident¹ that it will make its way. My books always start off badly, but usually they keep on selling for a long while.

Please remember me to Zelda. I surely hope that she is making good progress.²

Yours,

^[1] In a letter to Mencken dated April 23, 1934. F. Scott Fitzgerald had complained that the critics had misunderstood his intentions in writing Tender Is the Night; the motif of the “dying fall”, he said, was not a result of his own waning dynamism, but it was a deliberate intention throughout.

² His wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was in the hospital under treatment for a psychopathic condition.

xxx. To Gilbert Seldes

TLS, 2 1/8 pages, Auction

26 April 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland

Thank you for your appreciation of the novel. I never had any doubt after the weeks and months of half-sleepless work on the thing that it had some special merit and value but it is so nice to see an appreciation of it so early embodied - especially at the present moment when it can do so much good.

On the whole the press has been very good except for one blank, in the case of the New York Times by some student who didn't seem to know what the thing was all about, so they carried it in a small block on the third page - the only tragedy of that to me is that it is the reference journal of the old maid librarians of the Great West. However, your review, more than any other, has given me the most satisfaction and again I thank you for liking the book… As ever, venomously, and even subtly, Scott.

P. S. I was too excited in New York to ask you how the editing of the Lardner book comes along.

Tell me if anything new breaks in that line.

P. S. 2. You may be interested to know: I have just sold Amanda and Maxwell Perkins to the movies for a practically inexhaustible sum. I tried to throw you in - but no go! - they wouldn't take you so I'm keeping you for blotting paper or left field - but I don't even know if you'll blot! I broke all engagements and took you, fully dressed, around to the printery but there were no complications even if the cough does keep up! So you can stop worrying - or else begin! Amanda and I are very happy here. She does not regret her past life with you, regarding it merely as perfectly terrible! We have drowned the children! The mother didn't seem to mind it after the first few years! Then turn back and jog left and right back up into Westport, Connecticut and like it! - or like John [Peale] Bishop and forget Katherine Hepburn or whoever it was who came up against his burning loins. He and I and Amanda are happy! S.

Notes:

Fitzgerald writes two weeks after the publication of Tender Is the Night:

[Seldes gave the novel a rave review in the New York Evening Journal, 12 April 1934, the day of publication.]

[Seldes had edited a collection of Lardner's writings, First and Last, just about to be published.]

xxx. FROM: Robert Benchley

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

April 29th, 1934

Dear Scott:

It was damned nice of you to write in your book for me. I don't remember ever having said anything that appears on page 25,¹ or on any other page, but I would have given my two expensivly-filled eye-teeth to have written just one page of the book.

Honestly, Scott, I think that it is a beautiful piece of work, not only technically, but emotionally. I haven't had a book get hold of me like that for years. As a journeyman writer, I can not even conceive of anyone's being able to do that scene in the Guaranty Trust, just from the point of view of sheer manipulation of words, to say nothing of the observation contained in it. And the feeling of the whole book is so strong upon me, even now, that I am oppressed by a not-quite-vague-enough fear that several people I am fond of are very unhappy.

I hope that you, yourself, are not any unhappier than is called for in the general blueprint specifications for Living. Please don't be. Anyone who gets down on his stomach and crawls all afternoon around a yard playing tin-soldiers with a lot of kids, shouldn't be made too unhappy. I cry a little every time I think of you that afternoon in Antibes.

Thanks again for thinking of me, and look me up the next time you come to town. My number is Vanderbilt 3-6498.

Gratefully, Bob.

Notes:

¹ Book I, Ch. 4, of Tender Is the Night: the conversation on the beach among Abe, Mary, and Nicole. The copy sent to Benchley is unlocated.

xxx. FROM: John Dos Passos

April 1934

ALS, 3 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Scott—

Reading Tender Is the Night—the book—I got entirely a different impression from reading the couple of [ ] in Scribners. It's so tightly knit together that it cant be read in pieces. The layout and construction of the damn thing is enormously impressive, all building up to a final paragraph that'll certainly be quoted in all the future textbooks. The only thing of that sort that disappointed me was the end of book II—where Rosemary first catches on that there's something wierd about Nicole. Something about the phrasing 'verbal inhumanity' threw me off the track. The whole conception of the book is enormous—and so carefully understated that—so far as I know—not a single reviewer discovered it. I think probably the less the reviewers can find out about a book the better it is. The part I liked best was the stuff about the clinic in Zurich & Diver's clinic later—the chapter where Nicole goes off her head at the little carnival is a knockout. I like Baby Warren & the English bitch best among the characters. For some reason I couldn't believe very thoroughly in the main people—how much that is due to knowing some of the models from which the various phases were sketched I dont know. For some reason all American books about us in Europe make me feel as if I were reading The Marble Faun¹—I got that feeling from The Sun Also Rises & I get the feeling from Tender is the Night—I don't know if that's entirely a knock, but I think it is. Still even Turgeniev's people aren't so hot when they're in foreign parts. Maybe characters are like the President of the United States & go to pieces when they leave home. But as the picture of the collapse of one of the great after the war imperial illusions, it's great. The way you first lay in the pretty picture and then start digging under the surface is immense—and gives you a kind of junction of your two types of writing that ought to be damned useful in the future: the Sat. Eve. Post wish fulfilment stuff as a top layer and the real investigation of living organisms underneath. I think you pulled it off in every detail except the main characters—& after all most main characters are a lot of dummies (if it had pulled off the main characters it would have been in the War & Peace class) I certainly felt impressed when I finished it, and I must admit that I was enormously thrown off by the beginning (that later turns out to have been very good). By the time I was half way through I was entirely under the book's thumb, in spite of it being written in a style I'm a little leary of, and in spite of continuous doubts about the people. It's a damned impressive piece of work—Hope to see you in Baltimore Friday or Saturday—we are going down to assist Horsley Gantt in a matrimonial venture—

Yrs Dos

Notes:

¹ By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860).

xxx. FROM: Cary Ross

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

525 East 86th Street N.Y.C.

May 4 '34

Dear Scott

I figure my expenses on the exhibition to be around $15000. I sold four of Marian Hines' photographs for $1500 a piece + she insisted that I deduct her share of expenses from the amount I had taken in, so I kept $4522 and sent her a check for $1500.

I have so far collected $25000 for Zelda's pictures as follows:

The Gerald Murphys—oil “Chinese Theater”—$20000
Dorothy Parker—two water color drawings 3500
Mrs. Thomas Daniel—water color drawing 1500
Total $25000

I am enclosing check for $15000 representing this amount less $10000 which I have kept for my expenses. I am still owed $78.75, as follows:

Thomas Hitchcock Jr. $1500
Mrs. Robert Lovett 1625
Muriel Draper 1500
Mrs. Maxwell Perkins 3250
Total $78.75

And will of course turn this amount over to you when collected. Mrs. Perkins took two water-color drawings. “The Plaid Shirt” and “Spring in the Country” preferring these two to the “Russian Stable,” oil, on second thought, she told me on the telephone early this week.

I am delivering all pictures sold to-day or to-morrow with careful labels giving name of artist, title, when + where exhibited on the back, but am holding “Au Claire de la Lune” purchased by Hitchcock until we can arrange about Zelda's signature which he requested.

It is quite possible that I may be able to take it to her to Beacon to sign sometime between May 14 and May 26 if that turns out eventually to be the best way to have it done. I would like to see the place in any case—Zelda writes me that it is so pretty there.

If I don't hear from you in the mean time I will try to reach you by telephone in Baltimore some time the week-end of March 12—+ I wonder if High Quist will win the Preakness? I hope I can get a tip from Mrs. Owens before the race.

Ever yours Cary

Oh I forget to say that Mabel Luhan¹ wrote from the west that she would like to buy Zelda's oil “Portrait in Thorns” if it weren't too expensive. I wrote her that I had it priced at $20000 but that I remembered Zelda saying once she did not want to sell it + would have to inquire of you + Zelda + let her know later—which I will.
C.R.

Notes:

¹ Mabel Dodge Luhan, friend of writers and painters. “Portrait in Thorns” was a painting of Fitzgerald with a crown of thorns. Mrs. Luhan apparently did not buy this portrait, and it remains unlocated. See James Thurber, “Scott in Thorns,” The Reporter (17 April 1951).

xxx. To: Edna

April (?) 1934

Inscription in Tender Is The Night (1934).

xxx. To Dr. Rex Blankenship

Beacon, New York

May 4, 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.

Dear Dr. Blankenship:
I gather that you were in immediate charge of my wife’s case. I have just fully realized that her brother was not a schizophrenic but a manic depressive, that in fact the hospital in which he died simply characterized his condition as ‘depressed,’ though he had touches of suicidal and homicidal mania. If at any time it comes naturally to disassociate in my wife’s mind her own tendency to schizophrenia from her brother’s case I think it would be invaluable if you could do so. That is to say, there is a new defeatism in her arising from the fact that she believes the whole case to be familial and the whole family doomed. The only actual resemblance between the various sisters and the brother is that they are all unstable.

I think this might be important, in fact, very important because I have noticed a definite tendency in her to give up since her brother’s death.
With very best wishes.
Sincerely,

xxx. TO: Mabel Dodge Luhan

CC, 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland,

May 10, 1934

Dear Mrs. Luhan:
I was tremendously pleased and touched by your letter and by your communication to the Tribune. It always strikes me as very strange when I find new people in the world, because I always crystallize any immediate group in which I move as being an all-sufficient, all-inclusive cross-section of the world, at the time I know it (the group)—this all the more because a man with the mobility of the writing profession and a certain notoriety thinks that he has a good deal of choice as to whom he will know. That from the outer bleakness, where you were only a name to me, you should have felt a necessity of communicating an emotion felt about a stranger, gave me again the feeling that Conrad expresses as “the solidarity of innumerable human hearts,” at times a pretty good feeling, and your letter came to me at one of those times. Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers, who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention. In the case of this book your appreciation has given me more pleasure than any other, not excepting Gilbert Seldes who seemed to think that I had done completely what I started out to do and that it was worth doing.

With gratitude for that necessity in you which made you take the special trouble, the extra steps, which reassured me that even at the moment of popping out something new I was reaching someone by air mail—and with the added declaration that I want to see you,

I am
Yours most cordially,
P.S. My excuse for dictating this is a sprained arm.

Notes:

Luhan’s letter to the editor (May 6, 1934) praised Tender Is the Night.

xxx. FROM: Matthew Josephson

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Gaylordsville, Conn.

May 15, 1934

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,

I was delighted to find your book waiting for me when I returned about two weeks ago from a long stay in the very geography it evokes. I waited until I could read it before writing you about your kindness in thinking of me and saying all those nice things about one of my things.²

I found my mind going back to the novel repeatedly, several days after I had put it aside. It certainly looks like the best thing you've done since This Side of Paradise—and of course utterly different. (I have always hoped for the opportunity to tell you that this young novel is a landmark in the history of morals as well as literature, not to mention its general riotousness.) In Tender Is the Night, it is significant that the author changes and grows. I felt that the first half represented the best work in it, its best writing. Both selection of materials and style seemed a little less well in the second half, roughly speaking, (almost too roughly), though there were pages I liked a good deal there too. But throughout the book the ambitious form or structure lent importance and unity, in a degree not found in your other novels. The apotheosis of Nicole accompanied by the steady decline and fall of Diver made a contrapuntal music; a very strange “situation” (such as old Henry James would have loved, and certainly would have concealed, restrained and developed in the same way). Light fell backward over the whole book, from the very end.

Rosemary was for me the best characterization, because I have always felt so much mystification about the type. Diver, who was achieved as a tragic figure, after all, was also full of a special interest for me. And a piece of experimental writing in a middle, transitional passage—the retrospective airplaine-honeymoon flight across resort Europe struck me as an awfully good, poetic performance; by itself, as good a thing of its kind as I have seen anywhere in recent years.

Thanks very much again for a novel that is not easily classified nor easily forgotten.
Matthew Josephson

Notes:

² Fitzgerald had sent Josephson an inscribed copy of Tender Is the Night: “Dear Mathew Josephson Save for the swell organization of 'Zola' + your reproduction of it, this would never have reached the stalls—I'll skip the obvious remarks with best wishes + high hopes for you Scott Fitzgerald.” (University of Rochester Library) Josephson's Zola and His Time (1928) included the plans for Les Rougon-Macquarts.

xxx. FROM: Richard L. Simon

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

May 16th, 1934.

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

My horrible signature embarrasses me. I wrote to you as a reader of your book. Now you forge my signature on an envelope and ask me, dear sir, who are you? That's the embarrassing part. I am Richard L. Simon, known to the trade as Simon of Simon and Schuster. In emerging from the anonymity of an undecipherable signature, I can only that I wrote you the other day, as I do now, not as a publisher, but as if I were a lady of the lady's club of Grand Rapids who thinks you are a grand writer and has the impulse to tell you so.

Cordially yours, Richard L. Simon

Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.

xxx. TO: T. S. Eliot

TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

May 21, 1934.

Dear Eliot:

I want to thank you for your generous remark about my work which you permitted Scribner's to use and also to apologize and regret terribly that they used a line from a personal letter of yours on the jacket.¹ They promised me that they wanted to use some material like that only to show to their salesmen and I was shocked when I saw what they had done. If Chatto & Windus would be inclined to use the American edition blurbs I think you could head it off by phoning them to cut out the one about Henry James. I know how I would feel if anyone used as publicity what I had written in a personal letter. With very best wishes always and a great desire to see you again.

Faithfully,

Notes:

1 The dust jacket of Tender Is the Night quoted Eliot: “I have been waiting impatiently for another book by Mr. Scott Fitzgerald, with more eagerness and curiosity than I should feel towards the work of any of his contemporaries, except that of Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” At the time of The Great Gatsby Eliot wrote Fitzgerald that the novel “seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”

xxx. TO: Dr. William Elgin

TL(CC), 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

May 21, 1934.

Dear Dr. Elgin:

While I covered most of the old ground on Saturday there are a couple of immediate things that I'd like to go into. I don't think I stressed how much such a matter as swimming means to my wife and her morale. It will be convenient for my secretary, Mrs. Owens, to pick her up there any morning, take her for a swim and deliver her back in two hours. I stress this because I think the swimming really saved her for two summers here and I know that the skiing had a tremendous effect on her in Switzerland while certain elements of ergo-therapy² are not very effective with her because of her poor eye sight and consequent occasional headaches.

I will of course abide by any decision of yours not to see her for a couple of weeks, but in regard to this remember that I have only seen her twice in two months and neither time long enough to have had the faintest nervous friction with her—and sometimes I have a very strong power of raising her morale when she inclines toward apathy.

I inclose a note to her on practical matters which you would be kind to have delivered.

I must tell you that while I have been very convinced and even dogmatic about the idea that she should not write serious fiction at present still I am not unamenable to change in that regard. For it there is to be said that she grew better in the three months at Hopkins where it was allowed and she grew apathetic in the two months at Craig House where she was continually disuaded. Also, it provides a direction and might lessen the sense that I am frustrating her.

The things against it, such as reawakening betes noires, my inability to keep her writing within reasonable bounds at home, her inability to take disappointments healthily, etc. I went over with you Friday but would appreciate it if you would weigh these factors, one set against the other, because there you can control automatically the time she works at it and because even in the broader aspect of the matter my initial position may be absolutely wrong.

Notes:

² Work therapy.

xxx. TO: Samuel Marx

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

May 21, 1934.

Dear Sam:

Apropos of a proposed treatment of my book which went to you (by the way Publishers Weekly lists it as national third best seller this week) you will remember that I collaborated on that first treatment with a kid named Charles Warren who has shown a remarkable talent for the theatre in writing, composing and directing two shows which have packed them in and had repeat weeks here in Baltimore and in Princeton. My intention, if Tender is the Night was sold immediately, was to back him in going out there and seeing if he could help round it into shape. So far the offers have been unsatisfactory, considering the work put on it—nevertheless, Warren has planned to brave Hollywood even without the permit to enter which a definite connection would be to him. He will be without acquaintance there save for such letters as I can give him. I would be much in your debt if you will see him, give him what advice you can about finding an opening. His talents are amazingly varied—he writes, composes, draws and has this aforesaid general gift for the theatre—and I have a feeling that he should fit in there somewhere within a short time and should go close to the top, in fact I haven't believed in anybody so strongly since Ernest Hemingway. Incidentally, he is not a highbrow, his instincts are toward practical showmanship, which is why I engaged him, as a sort of complement to me.

Perhaps you could arrange to let him look around the lot for a few hours, lend him a few sample treatments that he could take back to his hotel and study and also some story that he could work on without salary.¹

With best regards to the madam and to yourself.

Ever your friend, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Warren did not succeed in finding employment as a screenwriter at this time, but later became a writer-producer for television.

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

May 31, 1934

Dear Margaret:

I know it was very annoying for me to have lost my temper in public and I want to apologize to you both, for the discomfort that I know I gave you. There are certain subjects that simply do not belong to an afternoon tea and, while I still think that Mrs. Perce's arguments were almost maddening enough to justify homicide, I appreciate that it was no role of mine to intrude my intensity of feeling upon a group who had expected a quiet tea party.

Ever yours faithfully,
Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I'm sorry this is typed but I seem to have contracted Scottie's poison ivy and my hands are swathed in bandages.

xxx. To Gilbert Seldes

TLS, 3 pages, Auction.

31 May 1934

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Gilbert:
Just read the Lardner collection. At first I was disappointed because I had expected there would be enough stuff for an omnibus and I still feel that it could have stood more weight. However, looking over those syndicate articles I realize what you were up against-even many of those which you were compelled to use are rather definitely dated and I think you did the best you could with the material at hand.

Anyhow, I've had a further hunch on the matter which is this: the short one-act plays at the end do stand up but they would not play in any conventional sense because so much of the nonsense is embodied in the stage directions, but if they were done, as I believe one was, for the Authors League Fete or the Dutch Treat Club with Benchley and Stewart clowning the whole business, I believe they would play very well. Now doping along on the subject, it seems to me an evening of five nonsense plays would be monotonous no matter how funny they were, but just suppose, taking over the technique of the Grand Guignol, two of those plays were alternated with something macabre. When the Grand Guignol failed in New York it seems to me that I remember that all the plays were plays of horror and the minute the novelty wore off it closed up shop. If the fault of too much of a good thing were repeated this whole hunch might flop, but mightn't some enterprising producer be interested in a thoroughly balanced program if we could get the material together? I don't know whether there are any good horror one-acters in America but we might pick up a couple of the Grand Guignol hits very cheaply or get somebody to dredge something out of Edgar Allan Poe. What do you think of this idea? Do you think there's any money in it? If we do it we ought to get started immediately. I am terribly tied up in work and also not being on the spot could not efficiently go into it. I hand you the suggestion for what it is worth and I wish you would let me know what you think of it. In any case I would be glad to aid in any advisory capacity.

My novel seems to go pretty well. I haven't been able to make up my mind entirely how good it is because most of the reviewers have been so entirely cuckoo in their effect of saying in one line that the thing comes off entirely because it is technically so well done and others say it comes off in spite of all its technical faults. No two reviewers-and I am speaking only of the big shots-agree who was the leading character. Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic seems to be chiefly impressed by a man who only appears once in the whole picture-in any case my total impression is that a whole lot of people just skimmed through the book for the story and it simply cannot be read that way. In any case, your review and Mabel Dodge Luhan's enthusiasm made it all worthwhile to me.

Love to Amanda and the children.
Ever yours,

Notes:

Seldes’s edition of Ring Lardner [First and Last]

[Robert] Benchley

[Donald Ogden] Stewart

your review - in the New York Evening Journal

Mabel Dodge Luhan’s enthusiasm - in a letter to the editor of the New York Herald-Tribune of 6 May praising the novel.

xxx. Questionnaire for Gilbert Seldes

unknown date 1934

ANS, 1 page, Auction

[upper left corner] Dear Gilbert, make the best of this, Scott.

Mr. Fitzgerald
THE DUNLAP QUESTION

You make a quick survey of your whole life, remembering all your pains ans all your pleasures. Then suppose you are compelled to make the following decision, with no alternative:

1. Live through your whole life again, just exactly as before, with no opportunity to better it by your present experience, or 2. Die instantly. Which would you choose? To live again? To die at once?" Fitzgerald has answered "Yes" to the question "To live again?" and has added: "Begs the question but I'll try to answer it."

The questionnaire follows up this basic question with seven additional ones, to which Fitzgerald's responses range from a simple check mark or a "Yes" to a full sentence.

To the query, "Do you think that the more sensitive a person is the more likely he or she is to choose the instant death?", Fitzgerald answers: "It's a question of vitality, not of experience or logic", and has added upside down (with a connecting line) in the top margin, "Read your 'Eclesiastes' [sic]".

To the question, "Do you think that the wiser or more philosophical a person is the more he would choose to live again? Or to die?", Fitzgerald writes: "Live in youth. Die at the proper time."

Asked to "Name the particular event or factor which most influenced your decision," he answers: "Death of what you loved [continued with a connecting line at the bottom of the page] and whether or not it was irreparable."

xxx. FROM: Malcolm Cowley

May 1934

TLS, 1 p. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Dear Scott:

Here is the review. I'm not especially proud of it. After waiting all this time, and writing it against your wishes, I should have given you something better. I wanted to write you a long letter about the book, which I liked more and was more deeply impressed by than the review seems to say.—Outside of all I said here, I think the double introduction interfered with the novel more than anything else—I mean the presenting of all the characters through Rosemary's eyes and then the going back to tell the story from 1919 to 1924; there is confusion of time here that bothers most of the readers with whom I have talked. Wouldn't it have been better to have the story develop directly from Rosemary's meeting with the Divers?¹ As soon as Dick fell in love with Rosemary his first instinct would be to tell her all about himself, even at the risk of a spiritual infidelity to his wife—that would have obviated the second introduction. You were certainly right in saying that the sideshows were fine—some of them are unforgettable.

My own book is out today, and I'm getting a swell run-around from the critics. I wish some of them had read it.

If I pass through Baltimore around the first of July, is there any chance of my seeing you?

As ever, Malcolm

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald subsequently attempted to reorganize a copy of Tender Is the Night into straight chronological order. This edition was edited by Cowley in 1951 as “The Author's Final Version.”

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Robert Raynolds

5 Montague Terrace Brooklyn, New York

July 8, 1934

Dear Bob:

Thanks for your note. Yes, we have all stewed in our grease here, but I have kept busy and have not minded it so much this time.

It seems unbelievable, but Perkins and I finished getting the manuscript ready for the printer last night. There are still three full scenes to be written, and parts of a few other scenes to be completed, but he wants to start getting the stuff to the printer at once. As for myself, I am fighting against an overwhelming reluctance to let it go. There are so many things I want to go back over and fill in and revise, and all my beautiful notes I long to chink in somehow, and he is doing his best to restrain me in these designs.

I had lunch with Perkins and Scott Fitzgerald yesterday, and Scott tried to console me about the cutting by saying that “you never cut anything out of a book that you regret later.” I wonder if this is true. Anyway, I shall do all I can in what time is left to me, and then I suppose I will have to leave the matter on the lap of the gods and Maxwell Perkins. After all these years of bitter labor, and sometimes of despairing hope, I have come to have a strange and deep affection for this great hacked and battered creature of a manuscript as if it were my son—and now I hate to see it go.

I am glad to know you are so near the end of your own. I judge that my own idea of being near the end and yours differ radically, and you will probably see the real end sooner than I do. I think Perkins’ benevolently crafty design is to start giving this tiling to the printer at once so that there will no longer be any possible drawing back on my part. He has already carefully impressed it upon my mind that the thing that costs is not so much the setting up into print but keeping the setters-up waiting once they have begun.

<…>

xxx. FROM: Dr. O. L. Forel

TLS, 1 p. (in French; the letter has been translated by Mary Borelli, Professor of Romance Languages, University of South Carolina), Scrapbook. Princeton University

13 July 1934

Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald c/o Charles Scribner's Sons New-York City

Dear Sir,

I am truly ashamed at having waited so long to thank you for the book that you sent me. I read it with great interest, particularly because of the observations that were made at Prangins and that you used. I congratulate you however for having been able to treat your subject freely by transposing reality into a world of fiction. I admit that I am always a little on the defense when I see laymen approach subjects as complicated as those that regard psychiatry. And I am relieved when I discover that the amateur point of view has been maintained. The development of the personality of your characters is described in a very suggestive manner and I greatly appreciated your picture of American life in the United States and in Europe.

I hope that you have every reason to be satisfied with Mrs. Fitzgerald's state of health. Here all is well, although we regret, it goes without saying, that we hardly see any Americans anymore.

Once again thank you and I remain yours sincerely,

O. L. Forel

xxx. TO: Rosalind Sayre Smith

TL(CC), 4 pp. (“Not to be mailed File only” appears at the top of the letter), Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

July 19, 1934.

Dear Rosalind:

It was good to have our second conversation but your letter has snapped me back to our first which is the essential trouble between us. I am not going to call your mother into consultation nor have I ever called anybody into consultation on this problem except the trained technicians who are dealing with it. In any given case there has got to be one doctor, one man who must stand for a final solution. When I called on you and Newman in Switzerland in 1930 it was only to have one member of your family know what I was doing and why I was doing it. (I did not fail to appreciate his interest and yours on that occasion, but after all he has other commitments and could only give me what help he could spare.) The final reservations in this case must remain with me. To disparage all the sweat that has gone off me and out of me since it began is simply absurd, and every time it is done it causes more harm than good because it upsets me and makes things hard for Zelda. Whenever I handle the case by myself it goes well; whenever I have an impulse that I haven't been keeping you posted and tell you about it I run into that same old Puritanism that makes drinking unmoral, that makes all thinking done with the help of drink invalidated and I am put down to a level of a person whose opinion can't be trusted and that reaches the doctors in the case and they get confused and it all has to start over again.

To summarize: somebody in your family, preferably Newman, must get it straight in his mind that Mrs. Sayre is an old woman, that you are irreparably prejudiced against me, that Newman himself naturally hasn't the time to go into this thing very deeply and that it must all be left to me. If it were practical for you to investigate this case like Sherlock Holmes you would find in the first corridor the proper clues. They are: that somebody is trying to reconstruct a broken egg shell, which is a terrible problem, and that there is the money and effort that must contribute to this solution, the definite things that are near it and bearing on it, such as Scottie to be explicit.

But, Rosalind, every time that I tried to face what I consider facts I've run up against obsolete family prides, against such situations as that of the real facts of Anthony's death were concealed from me.

So I have come to think that outside of formal letters which I will try to do once a month I had best conceal what facts emerge and what decisions are to be made from all of you until they are faits accomplis.

I agree with you absolutely that none of us have either spare time or spare energy at this moment to devote to recriminations but I must cling to my point of view that despite what wisdom you may show in helping me with the problem of Scottie, on the problem of Zelda you are completely blinded, even I accuse you of being purposely blinded.

Faithfully,

P.S. To say that my conclusions have ever been influenced by drink is as absurd as to think that Grant's '64 and '65 campaigns were influenced by the fact that he needed stimulant and used it. There is the tangible fact of a very successful novel and many highly-paid-for short stories in my case and in holding to any such point of view and allow yourself to be placed with those who put over prohibition and almost ruined the nation with it.

P.S.S. The question of Scottie's future is not decided but I like Mrs. Robinson-Duff² and that bats highest with me at the moment. Will keep you informed.

Notes:

² Frances Robinson-Duff, director of an acting studio in New York. Scottie was not sent there.

xxx. TO: Don Swann

TLS, 1 p. Unlocated

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

July 26, 1934.

Dear Don:

This is the best I can do. Only thing I want to ask you is first, that after your book is published all rights to use this in any way, such as in a collection of stray pieces, etc. reverts to me.

Secondly, that you do not make any changes, that is, if you want to change the word “mansion” to the word “manor” that is O.K. with me, but if you want to change “beautiful mansion” to “magnificent manor” that would utterly defeat the rhythm and so the purpose of the introduction. It would be exactly as if I took one of your etchings of Holder Hall at Princeton and drew a black oblong around one of the windows to indicate to my mother where I lived.¹

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

¹ Swann was working on Colonial and Historic Homes of Maryland (Baltimore: Etchcrafters Art Guild, 1939), for which Fitzgerald wrote the foreword.

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[Middleburg, Virginia]

[Summer, 1934]

Dear Andrew:

I'm down here in Virginia recuperating from a siege of two stories by fishing and ruminating. Wish to heaven I could see you before you go and would promise to tell you nothing about life on a ranch, as Scottie tells me my moralities are becoming a strain. (Ungrateful woman—as if my prophecies have ever been wrong about her.)

Only remember—west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act.

A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Yours for the Purple Sage,
Scott Fitz——

xxx. TO: Rosalind Sayre Smith

CC, 8pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue,

Baltimore, Maryland,

August 8, 1934.

Dear Rosalind:

Your letter unsettled my intentions, or rather my idea of the means by which to put them into effect. I was trying to do so many things in New York that I must have been confused in leaving with the idea that you approved of the governess business. I had foreseen the difficulties attendant upon such a radical step as this but had determined to overcome them somehow. The problem of Scottie was so adequately solved during Zelda’s sickness in Switzerland by the combination of the Cours Dieterlen and Mlle. Sereze that I hoped to repeat it on a larger scale this winter.

Let me list first what is impractical about the present regime and about alternatives:

1. There is no probability (let alone certainty) that Zelda and I will be able to make a place for her in the east beyond that of bearing a well known name.

2. I would not want to deliberately make of her a middle-westerner, or a southerner.

3. So the purely social education that she is now getting is essentially directionless.

4. All indications point to the fact that in the next generation there ain’t going to be any young millionaires to snatch off.

5. Scottie has an essentially artistic temperament; though at present she is at the most conventional of all ages; I can’t see her settling down at eighteen into a conventional marriage.

6. The actual objections to her going to day-school here are that either she would be living alone with me—with unending work ahead of me and not too much good time to give to a child—or else with Zelda and me in case it is recommended that Zelda spend the fall and winter in a new attempt to brave the world. In either case the atmosphere will not be conducive to the even tenor advisable for a child at that important age.

7. Such social alternatives as a straight country boarding school, or semi-boarding school in New York (such as you suggest) or else Spence or Brierly—all these lead into the same blank alley. Scottie has no talent such as a musical one that could be developed locally at the Peabody here or the Boston Conservatory.

To isolate Scottie with a governess wasn’t my idea. The governess would serve as chaperone, teacher, and general guide, to a planned regime which I would constantly oversee; Scottie would go to a “social” dancing class in New York, and also to some sort of gymnastic association or club where she could have swimming and basket-ball. She would pass the week-ends either here or with friends in New York—I have friends there who have children exactly her age and if she managed to find so many friends in Paris among foreign people the question of her being lonely in New York is absolutely non-existent.

Now let me list what is in favor of my plan as conceived:

1. Scottie seems to have a varied talent which may express itself in any one of a number of ways. The theatre is the great universal of all talents. In the modern theatre every single bent is represented and by starting in early she would be learning the fundamentals not of one career but of half a dozen.

2. One of the reasons that the world shows little practical achievement by sons and daughters of talented people—with notable exceptions, of course—is that the son or daughter of a man who has sung an opera, written a book, or painted a picture, is inclined to think that that achievement will stand in place of any effort of his own. It is much easier for Scottie to play being the daughter of a writer than to get down and write something herself, and I have noticed increasing tendencies toward that under present conditions. She used to write, with real pleasure and pride, little poems or stories for our Christmases and anniversaries. Now she’s inclined to say, “What’s the use? Daddy will do my writing for me”—Beyond that, Rosalind, she accepts the idea of most American children that Constance Bennett will do her acting for her and Bing Crosby her crooning. If I didn’t see Scottie grimacing, posing, practising in front of mirrors and dressing herself up to the gills on all possible occasions, I would conclude that she had no desire for a public existence, but the contrary is true. She wants a lime-light and the question is whether it will be a healthy one of effort, or else one of these half-botched careers like Zelda’s—of running yourself ragged for purely social ends and then trying to give the broken remnants to people and getting melancholia because people won’t snap at it.

My point here is, that, as far as I can judge, Scottie is by nature and destiny a potential artist.

3. Broke off here for a moment to discuss the question with Mrs. Owens and was reminded of the fact that Scottie can always change from an artistic to a social career but the reverse is very difficult. (My God, Rosalind! if you would see the manuscripts that come my way from idle lawyers and bored housewives, who decided that they would take up literature in their “spare time”! It’s as if I rushed into Johns Hopkins this afternoon, asking for a scalpel and an appendicitis patient, on the basis that I had an uncle who was a doctor, and people told me in my youth that I would make a good surgeon.) The pith of this is that only professionals function—capably within a profession—just as the time to begin ballet is about eleven years old, so the age to get used to the stage is at about thirteen or fourteen.

4. New York is the only possible center for Show Business (the boys and girls of Broadway persist in leaving the definite article out of that phrase.) The position of amateur teachers in society schools is less than nothing. To put Scottie with some defeated actress teaching for Miss This-Or-Thats would be to devitalize the whole idea. The moment Zelda entered Eglarova’s ballet school she saw the difference between amateur and professional training. The fact that the shift from play to work led to disaster in Zelda’s case has no bearing on this situation; if at any moment I find that Scottie has not the physical or nervous vitality to stand the rigors of real work, I shall snatch her out as quick as a blink.

But in the case of Miss Duff-Robinson I think of how the Renaissance artists trained men in their studios and trained them well because the pupils did a great portion of their work for them—the system of apprenticing in the middle ages derives its value from that fact. Her whole livelyhood depends not on any fake “diplomas” but on the actual accomplishments of her pupils. As for the amateur teachers—well, I could teach Scottie as much about the stage here in our own parlor.

5. Having gone this far with the French I want to keep it up, and with a few more years of this part-time tutoring she will inevitably lose her bilinguality that I spent thousands of dollars sustaining by importing governess, etc. Even the private tutoring here has started to slip, insofar as her accent and vocabulary are concerned, though her constructions are still holding up well enough.

And now to discuss such factors as might militate against this plan:

1. Child snatched from healthy home influences, neighborhood activities, etc. thrown immature into the great world. But where are these healthy home influences, neighborhood activities, etc? Though I forbid a radio in the house she can go around the corner at any moment and sit in with other innocents on “Oh You Nasty Man” and other bucolic classics.

2. As to friends: with every move we make Scottie has kicked about leaving tried and true friends behind her. In the upshot, however, it is a struggle to get her to so much as answer the letters of her late pals. She makes friends so easily and has so much curiosity about people that she is not essentially a loyal child or one who is ever liable to be very lonely. She has been to two camps from here without any untoward sense of pining away. Only once in her life have I seen her actively miss anyone for more than a few days and that was in the case of Mlle. Sereze.

3. She will be less outdoors but she will have compensatory indoor exercise. One can’t have everything.

I wish you would read this letter a couple of times, because I have written it partly to help me make up my own mind about Scottie’s year, and I’ve spent a conscientious morning at it. If you see any loop-holes in my reasoning, please let me know. I am always ready to reconsider and there is a whole month before I will get to the actual engaging of a governess. (By the way she will have to be an actual native born Frenchwoman.) Miss Duff-Robinson, in tentatively agreeing to take her, made a point of her advantage in having that language. Zelda, in a clear-thinking moment was enthusiastic about the idea (though of course she would rather have had ballet for which Scottie is totally unfitted both physically and rhythmically.)

Best wishes to you both and hopes that your annoying uncertainty of domicile will be shortly liquidated.

Notes:

The Cours Dieterlin was a Paris school that Scottie Fitzgerald attended; Mlle. Sereze was one of her governesses.

Drama teacher.

xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University Baltimore, Maryland

1307 Park Avenue

August 17, 1934.

Sweet Cecie,

My reactions always about leaving your vicinity are a curse at its uncertain weather and a feeling that I have come to see you. in an exhausted condition. This trip was no exception to the rule. Perhaps my very need for you and your descendants to keep my life going along is the explanation—however, when my visits happen, these situations repeat themselves.

In my most systematic manner:—

1. Do I owe any money, do you think?, on the last day that I haven't accounted for? I am pretty dim about leaving the Monticello, and told Mrs. Owens only a resume of what I might have spent there.

2. Do you and your children love me as much as I love you?

3. Did I forget a safety pin in the middle of your parlor rug?—this is probably the most important point of all.

Every moment with you all has a quality immediately of something so far remembered that it calls up half-forgotten things: like something somebody said to you when you were ten; or else something so far in the future that it makes one think of an inspiration and a hope.

I suppose that is always true of experiences that one has undergone at an emotional age. I am so afraid of spoiling anything in my relation to you and the daughters, and having been rather a bull in china shops lately, have been conscious of heading in that direction.

I am now reading Baron Marlot's “Reminiscences of the Napoleonic Campaigns” and going in for tactics on a big scale. Also awaiting the arrival of Scotty in about ten days and may ship her off to you for two or three days if plans coincide.

My respect and love to Aunt Elise¹ and warnings to all four progeny and for yourself my dearest love always.
Scott

P.S. Any advice that you can give Mrs. Owens I will appreciate. She seems to be a little bit undecided what she will do or where she will stay; but if she does end up in your region and calls you, advise her to the best of your capacities. Could you realize that this is the first vacation she has had in almost three years?

Notes:

¹ Eliza Key Delihant.

xxx. TO: Cecilia Delihant Taylor (Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci)

c. August 1934 [Postmarked August 17, 1934]

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Baltimore, Maryland

Dearest Ceci

Mrs. Owens says you asked her about the picture—I did get it. Didn’t you get yours? Let me know.

Everything here goes rather badly. Zelda no better—your correspondent in rotten health + two movie ventures gone to pot—one for Gracie Allen + Geo. Burns that damn near went over + took 2 wks’ work + they liked + wanted to buy— + Paramount stepped on. It’s like a tailor left with a made-to-order suit—no one to sell it to. So back to the Post.

(By the way I have a new series in the Red Bk.)

Hope to hell the whoopies are well, + all the kids.

Love Always
Scott

P.S. Appropos of our conversation it will interest you to know that I’ve given up politics. For two years I’ve gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in—considering at last such crazy solutions as the one I had in mind in Norfolk. I have become disgusted with the party leadership + have only health enough left for my literary work, so I’m on the sidelines. It had become a strain making speeches at “Leagues against Imperialistic War,”+ their treatment of the negro question finished me. This is confidential, of course

Notes:

According to an undated newspaper clipping in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University, Fitzgerald spoke at a Johns Hopkins University Liberal Club antiwar rally on the subject “How the War Came to Princeton.”

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 1 p. Columbia University Baltimore, Maryland

1307 Park Avenue

August 17, 1934.

Dear Bennett,

Called up about the preface, with which I am not satisfied;¹ talked with Don Klopfer,² telling him that I would like proof as quickly as possible on the piece.

Thanks for your generous offer. I could not take advantage of it without asking for so many books that it would confuse me to have them around. I am going to ask you this, however. I would like one copy of Tom Wolfe's “Look Homeward, Angel” sent to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock, at Old Westbury, Long Island, with my compliments. (Incidentally, I congratulate you on bringing it out, because it is certainly one of the finest books of the last ten years)—and I would like a copy for myself.

Also I would like ten or fifteen copies of “The Great Gatsby” when it is issued.

With congratulations for having profited, as I gather you did, from your foreign explorations,

Yours ever, Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

¹ In 1934 The Great Gatsby was reprinted in The Modem Library, and Fitzgerald received $50 for writing an introduction. Another letter to Cerf dated 17 August returns the corrected proof for the introduction. For an account of Fitzgerald's correspondence with Random House in 1934 see Andrew B. Myers, “ 'I Am Used to Being Dunned,' “ Columbia Library Columns, XXV (February 1976), 28-39.

² Co-founder of Random House.

xxx. TO: Dr. Harry M. Murdock

TL(CC), 4 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

August 28, 1934.

Dear Dr. Murdock,

As you probably know, I saw my wife yesterday and spent an hour and a half with her. It was much better than any of the nine or ten times that I have seen her since she broke down again last January. She seemed in every way exactly like the girl I used to know. But, perhaps for that reason, it seemed to both of us very sad and she cried in my arms and we felt that the summer slipping by was typical of the way life is slipping by for both of us. Which brings me to the point of this letter.

As I tried to indicate to you:

Dr. Forel's treatment of this problem was very different from Dr. Meyer's and all my sympathies were with the former. During the entire time with Dr. Meyer, I could never get from him, save in one letter, an idea of his point of view. He seemed to believe:

(1) that Zelda should not get too hospital-minded;

(2) that I drank too much, which complicated the whole matter; and

(3) that I was a work horse with the nervous system of a Swiss peasant.

He was very generous with his time, but that time (save that he always had rather a temporary moral effect on Zelda) seemed largely unprofitable. Great sheaves of notes on our interviews were taken by Dr. Rennie but the notes disappeared into the archives with no upshot. He would not permit her to return to his clinic for short stays, which was my favorite point.

Just suppose that the fear of her growing hospitalized is valid. I would many times rather have Zelda live with me part of the time and go to rest cures and hospitals for part of the time than have her remain for long years of our lives in hospitals on the faint chance that when she came out she would suddenly become completely social. And from my point of view, the feeling that I could call on a hospital for a month or two—have her come back to me provisionally and then return for a few weeks-would have been a tremendous relief.

Now for the second point: I realize that the following theory is qualified by the fact that perhaps a first cure of the malady is easier than a second or a third. Yet I believe that if Dr. Meyer had seen the situation in a less Puritan light he had more chance to help her to a permanent cure than either Dr. Forel at the time of her terrible eczema and total disorientation, or you at the time of her katatonic state. But he made less use of his advantage, because he could never seem to appreciate that my writing was more important than hers by a large margin because of the years of preparation for it, and the professional experience, and because my writing kept the mare going, while Zelda's belongs to the luxury trade. In other words, he encouraged the damn woman's desire to express herself as if she hadn't broken down on that point twice before.

He never bothered to compare our books nor, living in his own generation and in his own cerebral world, would he have got the counter-implications or the nuances of either of them. There are, of course, universals both medical and moral behind this case but in a changing world he failed to get any of the contemporary sidelights which change their values. He never really believed that I worked very hard, had a serious reputation or made money.

Once he had done what he could with Zelda, he simply shoved her on to me during two and a half years of the most tremendous work of my life, refused to take her back, and offered instead the singularly barren three-cornered conversations. At the end of a year I was half crazy myself and then the heavy drinking began. He laid down a schedule for Zelda but gave me no power to enforce it. And what threat could I hold over Zelda—save some kind of brute force—unless I had the right to say that if she did not do this or that, she must go back to the clinic. Zelda, for the most part, puts up a much more sympathetic face than I do. She is generally, paradoxical as it may seem, in much better control of her nerves and she sold Dr. Meyer the idea that her life was as socially useful as mine. But she never could sell it to our daughter or to our immediate household. She walked out on too many things.

This letter is drawing on but it is so hard to make a series of points over a telephone. I am getting at last to the main thesis about which I was circling. When Zelda became better after the year and a half of her first illness, Dr. Forel encouraged us to take short trips of ten miles or so, at first with a nurse, to dinner in Geneva for instance; then a few long daytime trips; then to visit me for a night at the hotel where I was living, always with the understanding that her permanent headquarters was the clinic and holding her room for her there. After a half-dozen of these, we went on a ten-day holiday, after which she again returned to the clinic for two or three weeks. In other words, his method was to wean her away, while Dr. Meyer's was God knows what.

I am not trying to discuss the comparative merits of the two, except from the pragmatic attitude: in Zelda's case the first one worked because it gave her hope and refuge at the same time, while Dr. Meyer's theoretical plan was, in her case, a failure. He gave back to me both times a woman not one whit better than when she went in. She seemed to have more self-control, less tension, and he assumed that if these conditions did not persist at home, the guilty element must be myself. If that is reasoning, then San Francisco Bay is full of grape juice.

Of course, the immediate putting into effect any such plan if you should approve of it, may be affected by her collapse up at Dr. Slocum's,¹ but I wish you would think this over and discuss it with whatever doctors are in touch with the case out there—if any of them have the time to read this letter. It would give both Zelda and me some practical hope for the future and something upon which I could found my plans.

Could you give me an appointment for some time during the next week, so I might hear your opinions?

With many thanks for your interest and best wishes,

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 2 pp. (with 1 p. typed list). Columbia University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

August 30, 1934.

Dear Bennet

It was nice to take a look at you through sober eyes, + in spite of the fact that the afternoon was largely devoted to Fitzgeraldiana the impression remains with me. The reason I didn't head the subject into more impersonal channels was because you all seemed to be interested—and intimate details of another's past are always interesting.

Hey! do you think that I am so illiterate as to have only the few Modern Library books that are in the British-American section of fiction of my library? It is scattered all over the house at the moment, but in the different shelves of history, philosophy, etc. I counted twenty-five after you left. For your stupidity I am going to take you up on your offer, pick ten titles and ask you for them. They are appended to this letter.

Anyhow I had a most pleasant afternoon seeing you and shall certainly call on you when I come to New York.

Ever yours, Scott Fitzg—

Golden Ass	88
Beaudelaire	70
Jungle Peace	30
Don Quixote	174
Borgias	192
Tom Jones	185
W.S.Gilbert	113
Suetonius	188
Gibbon	G6 G7
Restoration Plays	G10

xxx. TO: Christian Gauss

Original unlocated. Text from Turnbull

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

September 7, 1934

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is a wild idea of mine, conditioned by the fact that my physician thinks I am in a solitary rut and that I ought to have outside interests. Well, outside interests generally mean for me women, liquor or some form of exhibitionism. The third seems to be most practical at the present moment, wherefore I would like to give a series of lectures at Princeton, say eight, on the actual business of creating fiction. There would be no charge and I would consider it a favor if I were allowed to do this in a University lecture hall. (Incidentally, to safeguard you from my elaborate reputation, I would pledge my word to do no drinking in Princeton save what might be served at your table if you should provide me with luncheon before one of these attempts.)

The lectures I’ve not planned but they would be, in general, the history of say:

1. What Constitutes the Creative Temperament.

2. What Creative Material Is.

3. Its Organization.

And so forth and so on.

This would be absolutely first-hand stuff and there might be a barrier to crash in regard to the English Department, and if you don’t think this is the time to do it don’t hesitate to let me know frankly. So many bogus characters have shown up in Princeton trying to preach what they have never been able to practice, that I think even if I reach only half a dozen incipient talents the thing might be worthwhile from the scholastic point of view, and will be selfishly worthwhile to me—I would like to time these lectures so that they would come on the afternoon or eve of athletic events that I would like to see.

You will know best how to sound out the powers-that-be in the English Department. I have a hunch that Gerould rather likes me and I like Root whether he likes me or not…

This is an arrow in the dark. I feel I never knew so much about my stuff as I now know, about the technique concerned, and I can’t think of anywhere I would like to disseminate this egotistic feeling more than at Princeton.

This all might come to something, you know!

Hope you had a fine summer abroad. With my respects to Mrs. Gauss.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzg

P.S. Naturally, after my wretched performance at the Cottage Club you might be cynical about my ability to handle an audience, but my suggestion is that the first lecture should be announced as a single, and if there is further demand we could go from thence to thither.

Notes:

Robert K. Root, Princeton English professor.

Fitzgerald had previously gotten drunk when invited to speak at the Cottage Club.

xxx. FROM: Nathanael West

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

September 11, '34

My dear Mr. Fitzgerald,

You have been kind enough to say that you liked my novel, Miss Lonelyhearts.

I am applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship¹ and I need references for it. I wonder if you would be willing to let me use your name as a reference? It would be enormously valuable to me. I am writing to you, a stranger, because I know very few people, almost none whose names would mean anything to the committee, and apparently the references are the most important part of the application.

As you know, the committee will probably submit my plan for future work to you if you give me permission to use your name as reference. This will be a nuisance, of course, but the plan is a very brief one and you are only obliged to say whether you think it is good or not.

If you can see your way to do this, it will make me very happy.

Sincerely, Nathanael West

Notes:

¹ West was planning “A novel about the moral ideas of the generation which graduated from college in 1924.” He did not receive the grant. See Jay Martin, “Fitzgerald Recommends Nathanael West for a Guggenheim,” Fitzgerald /Hemingway Annual 1971.

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 1 p. Columbia University

September 15th, 1934

1307 Park Ave. Baltimore, Md.

Dear Bennett:—

I want to: thank you first for the generous present of books;

Second, to acknowledge the check for the preface;

And, third, to make a grumble, not against you but against myself. I do not like the preface. Reading it over it seems to have both flipness and incoherance, two qualities which the story that succeeds it manages to avoid. Please answer for me the following questions: Can it be changed in subsequent editions?¹ I should naturally be willing to pay for it myself, out of respective royalties or even in cash. If this is practical—the whole thing being naturally in foundry,—Wouldn't it be simpler for me to rewrite the whole preface, in spite of the fact that my revisins will comprise merely the excision of a paragraph and the change of a couple of key sentences?

Planning to be in New York toward the end of the week (meaning week of 16th), and will deliver copy—if you answer me these questions upon receipt of this letter.

It was fine seeing you. Sorry This complication mars my satisfaction in the handsome re-issue.

Ever Yours, Scott

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Per Scottie Fitzgerald, typing (note this)

Notes:

¹ Cerf replied on 17 September: “If you want to write a new preface to appear in second and all subsequent editions in the Modern Library, go to it.” (Columbia) Fitzgerald did not have an opportunity to revise his introduction because the Modern Library reprinting of The Great Gatsby was discontinued.

xxx. TO: Guggenheim Foundation

September 25, 1934

TLS, 1 p. Guggenheim

Dear Sirs:

Today Nathanael West asked me for a letter of reference on behalf of his application for a Guggenheim fellowship.

—and, in the same post, came a consignment of a reprint by the Modern Library of a novel of mine, THE GREAT GATSBY, which had a new preface that included the statement that I thought young writers in America were being harmed now for the lack of a public, and I had mentioned specifically Nathanael West.

I don't know on what basis the Guggenheim fellowships are given but I know some of the people who have profited by them, and, while many of the men have been chosen worthily and well, such as Thomas Wolfe and Allen Tate, there have been others who have been sent to Europe who have not been worth their salt, and who—in the eventuality—have proved nothing.

I have sometimes felt that you have put especial emphasis on poetry while I think that the most living literary form in America at the moment is prose fiction. In my opinion Nathanael West is a potential leader in the field of prose fiction. He seems to me entirely equipped to go over on the fellowship.

With best wishes to the custodians of the great idea.

Sincerely yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

xxx. TO: Marvin Chauncey Ross

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

September 26, 1934.

Dear Mr. Ross:

I will do everything in my power to add to the pleasure of Miss Gertrude Stein's triumphal return visit to Baltimore but she has older friends than me here, such as Miss Etta Cohn, who also are in a position to do more for her as I am a most recent resident. My suggestion is that you assign me any particular service I can render in that connection and I will be glad to do it, but outside of entertaining here in my house, if she has the time to spare, I cannot see exactly how I can be of much assistance.

Please let me hear further on this because I am under much obligation to Miss Stein and am very fond of her.

Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: V. F. Calverton

TLS, 1 p. New York Public Library

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

September 26, 1934.

Dear Calverton:

Your letter reached me on my return from an arduous and unsuccessful foray to New York during which I left my hotel room only once and that once to have my story curtly turned down. Am here in slews of work but am still looking forward to our next meeting if you give me plenty of notice.

I did see Grattan's review in the Modern Monthly² and I believe it pleased me more than any that I got. Sometime I want to meet him and thank him personally for his interest—and I thank you for yours which probably called the book to his attention.

Am waiting for “Passing of the Gods” and will report on it either by letter or in person.

Yours ever, Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

² Hartley Grattan's review of Tender Is the Night (July 1934).

xxx. TO: Christian Gauss

Original unlocated. Text reprinted from Turnbull

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

September 26, 1934

Dear Dean Gauss:

I know about “The Club” and they asked me last year to come and lecture. What I have against that is that it is sponsored by undergraduates which detracts from speaking under the authoritative aegis of the University, and second, because my plan was a series of lectures and not one that I could develop in a single evening. Also they were meant to be pretty serious stuff, that is, written out rather than spoken from notes, straight lectures rather than preceptorials. However, if the powers-that-be feel it inadvisable I can only yield the point and postpone the idea until a more favorable year.

Glad you enjoyed your rest abroad and escaped Miriam Hopkins’jumping out of the second-story window onto your shoulders. But I suppose you’ve been kidded to death about that already and I know you took it with your usual sense of humor.

Best wishes always,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Fitzgerald was not invited to give lectures.

xxx. TO: Mrs. William Hamm (Marie Hersey)

TLS, 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland,

October 4, 1934.

Dear Marie:
It seems late to answer your letter as at the time it was written you were in heavy marital difficulties about your two children and were still sailing under the name of Carroll. Since then I hear sensational news about you, but not from you, and worry sometimes if the kidnappers will get you, as you seem to move largely in an atmosphere of kidnappers, both of children and adults. I suppose that you are settled down in St. Paul for good. For a long time I have wanted to come back to spend a few weeks but life seems to get crowded in the late thirties and I don’t know when the chance will come.

Scottie has become acclimated to Baltimore but I’d like to have her pull a sort of Gertrude Harris a little later to the extent of having a debut out there. So a few years may see us settled there for at least a summer. This in spite of the fact that, having rambled so much, I no longer regard St. Paul as my home any more than the Eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an Easterner and I went East to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. It was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater etc.—though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia. Anyhow all recent reports paint it as a city of gloom and certainly the ones from the remnants of the McQuillan family are anything but cheerful. Baltimore is very nice, and with plenty of cousins and Princetonians if I were in a social mood, and I can look out the window and see a statue of the great, great uncle, and all three of us like it here. There, have I rambled on long enough?

I send you this letter as a desperate bid for some news of St. Paul and the following people: the Kalmans, Flandraus, Jacksons, Clarks and Kid Ordway. I suppose Dud and Grace are now completely expatriated to Chicago and I know that Joe and Lou will most likely never return. Who runs things now? So many of us have emigrated, Katharine Tighe, etc. and so many new names keep popping up whenever I get hold of a St. Paul paper that I cling in spirit to the few friends I still have there.

With affection from Zelda and love always from me,
Scott

P.S. Don’t omit to add news mostly about yourself.

Notes:

An approximate description of Francis Scott Key; Fitzgerald's great, great, great grandfather and Key's grandfather were brothers.

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 1 p. Columbia University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

October 10, 1934.

Dear Bennett:

I meant it about rewriting that preface. Please give me a couple of weeks warning when and if you are going to print up another batch. The preface is incoherent. I am not even going to revise it, but simply do it over again.

Ever yours, Scott Fitzg

xxx. TO: V. F. Calverton

TLS, 2 pp. [The italicized sentences in this letter may not have been underlined by Fitzgerald.] New York Public Library

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

October 17, 1934.

Dear George:

Someone called here today representing herself as your secretary, though why in God's name you should have a secretary in Maryland I don't know, and asked if I had got a copy of “The Passing of the Gods.” I have been absorbed with it for the last four days and never suspected anybody of such erudition. It is inevitable that in destroying a moral system you should, in the same breath, create one—and I did not adhere in all points to the creation. You are a modern Lecky and I congratulate you on the achievement. My one objection is the high overtone of economics, which eventually defeats its own purpose, or so it seems to me. For the rest, the synthesis of anthropology, sociology and philosophy, salted with good eighteenth century rationalism, seem like a triumph.

Please give me jiggers on this date with Grattan.

Best always, Scott

xxx. Inscription TO Neil Brooks

Inscription in Tender Is The Night (1934)

From Sotheby's.

c. October, 1934

"For Nell: As we ~~lie~~ sit here on the old ~~bed~~ swing we often think of you. Miss Garbo realizes that you have had no past & feels no real jealousy when I speak of our 'platonic' friendship (you remember our encounter in the family waste basket?) But all is over between us ~~Nell Mary~~ Nell, and Gretta [sic] feels the same way I do—we wish you the best of happiness (and Marlene joins us), even if you weren't able to make F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Fitzgerald's Ledger, in October 1934 entry ("Elizebeth at Nell Brookes, the Nashes, Sally Reggs, O’Hara, Gingrich, Mrs. Owens ill. Alice Wooten. Bought the Ford").

Nell Brooks was a friend of Elizebeth [Elizabeth] Lemmon.

Fitzgerald is pretending to be with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

TLS, 1 p. Columbia University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

November 20, 1934.

Dear Bennett:

Goldwin is considering “Tender is the Night” with Miriam Hopkins in the role of Nicole.¹ If you can honestly see her in that light for God's sake drop her a line telling her so, though I don't know whether she will have any say in the final choice. When I thought that the thing would be sold immediately she was one of the three (the others were Hepburn and Harding) that I could see in the role, which requires intelligent handling, but of all of them she was my favorite.

People still marvel at your giant editions which I keep on display but the daughter can't understand why a modern library publishes Apuleuis and Suitonieus.

Ever yours Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

¹ The movie was not made.

xxx. TO: Carmel Myers

TL(CC), 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

November 21, 1934.

Dear Carmel:

This will seem the voice of a ghost out of the past, but you are equally a ghost to me since I was unable to reach you through Metro with a copy of my last spring's book which I was trying to force upon you. The point is this: there is a personal favor that I want done out there and I have been at sea about whom to call on because I am so out of touch with the coast. Asking King Vidor to do something is about as impractical as asking Franklin Roosevelt to run out in the pantry and bring me a box of matches, I hardly know Dick Barthelmess any more and by an irony of fate the younger generation seems a little bit younger and farther away than any other, so it's to a poor frail defenseless female that I turn in my predicament.

There is a kid (male) out there of whom I am very fond. He went out working on a treatment of “Tender is the Night” with some money that I had paid him for his collaboration on the job and Sam Marks at Metro finally gave him a job writing script on the lot; whereupon young Bill proceeded to come in for hard luck developing four weeks of sickness in a hospital and then, after a fortnight on his feet, a relapse which shot him back into boarding house hospitalization for another three weeks. Metro believed in him and saw him through his first illness but of course in the second one began to lose faith. I haven't, however, because if there's a finer universal talent in his generation than he has (he's only twenty-two) I will be astonished. My intention is to back him insofar as my means will allow. The immediate occasion is that his family here are half crazy with worry about him because he has that Spartan quality of depriving himself of food when he has an objective in mind. I want some responsible person to call on him at his headquarters, 6434 Yucca Street, Hollywood, and look over his physical condition and if it looks as if he is in bad shape get in touch with his doctor—and if, God forbid, the situation seems in any way menacing, to wire me here immediately.

Carmel, if I weren't so fond of this boy and if my affection for you had suffered with the years, I would not dare call on you for this. My only other idea was to ask Bart Cormack or Dwight Taylor² to do it for me but young Warren (for some reason, although his name is Charles Warren, he is universally known here as Bill Warren) is very proud and would be much more likely to put on a crust before a man and conceal his real condition, where with a woman he would be more inclined to let the truth emerge. Please do this for me, Carmel. I am sure in any case that you will like Warren who is a gifted free-hand composer among his many talents. Any courtesy that you could show him would be tremendously appreciated because he is in one of those sloughs of despond when he needs help and if the help gets there a little late it might get too late indeed.

Ever yours devotedly,

P.S. Could not for the hell of it think of how Ralph spelled his last name and had to wire Madam Selznick to be sure of this reaching you.

Notes:

² Screenwriters.

xxx. Inscription TO: Carmel Myers

Inscription in Tender Is The Night

November 1934 (?)

For Carmel
from one always
faithful, & sometimes
even tight,
Scott

xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor

TLS, 2 pp. (with holograph postscript). Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

November 22, 1934.

Dearest Ceci:

In these parts it has been only a round of unending work. When you see Hume thank him for his legal advice but tell him that, alas! The story came to no proper fruition. I have been concentrating on this medieval series which started in the Red Book in the early autumn and will be continued all winter; and also I am correcting proofs on my collection "Taps at Reveille” which will come out in the spring. All my movie plans seem to be cursed, though there is now a very promising nibble on “Tender is the Night.” (for Miriam Hopkins, one of you rebel gals from “Joja") Zelda does well, though she still doesn't want to make the leap back into life. Scottie is a dear and is doing her work better than last year, and the process of growing up with its accompanying struggles and disillusions absorbs more of her energy than I like. I don't quite see her making a trip at Thanksgiving but be sure that when the proper occasion arises there is no one I would rather she had a holiday with than you.

Love
Scott—

Notes:

“Tender” hasn't come thru financially in England but it got fine reviews from the important press, London Times, Manchester Guardian Spectator, G. B. Stern in the Telegraph ect its being translated into Hungarian + some Syrian dialect! My God!

xxx. TO Gertrude Stein

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

November 23, 1934

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

Ever since you've been in this country I have been looking forward to a meeting with you and ever since news of your arrival became the town topic of Baltimore I had determined that I would give you such pleasures as I could command in these parts. Knowing how you are going to be hymned and sung I leave the details to you. I have a small but efficient establishment here and would be more than delighted to give you lunch alone, dinner alone, lunch alone and a group of your choosing, dinner alone and a group of your choosing, lunch alone and a group of my choosing, dinner alone and a group of my choosing. Also I offer you tea, breakfast, midnight supper—in fact anything that you can possibly suggest, and as many of them, so you see you have one devoted slave in this vicinity who tenders you material homage. All I ask of you is to tell me in advance how many hours and occasions you will be able to give me.

With affection always,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. FROM: Gertrude Stein

ALS, 4 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

November 1934

My dear friend,

I do so much want to see you to be with you and to have a long talk with you, here we are and it has been a most lively time, and very very often during that time I have been thinking of you. We will be in Baltimore between Christmas and New Year, and I do hope you will be there too,¹ I want so much to see you and talk to you and listen to you, I liked a lot of Tender is the Night, and I am sure that you will do some more, and I will very carefully order another one. Will you let me know care of Mrs. Julian Stein, Rose Hill, Pikesville Md. whether you will be there when I am there, I do most awfully want to see you, I am liking being here immensely it means a lot to me in every way but all that and everything else we will tell about when we meet²

Always Gtde St—

Notes:

¹ Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas visited the Fitzgeralds in Baltimore during the Christmas holidays.

² See Fitzgerald's 23 November letter to Stein in Letters.

xxx. FROM: Arnold Gingrich

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Late 1934

Dear Scott, you are well nigh incredibly nice, about the nicest guy I ever met, I think, and I want you to know I think so, because probably I didn't convey that feeling at all coherently. If I didn't convey it at all, it is because I was drinking you up for the two hours I had and selfishly not giving a damn about maintaining the mutuality of the exchange.

For a long time after I left you I kept thinking about what guts it was to ask you for fiction and I'm sorry. I don't want to ask you to give it away when you know you can sell it.² If you do the short one for the book and something about it makes it unavailable for Scribners (which seems a hell of a remote possibility—) then of course I'll dance and make other appropriate gestures and noises if I can have it. But I would be an All-American heel to ask for it on any other basis.

As for the things you can write easily and in between the major efforts, that's different. Those I will ask for and hope to get often. This last one is a honey.³

Knopf likes my novel very swell, in fact better than I do myself. He says himself that he probably ought to be afraid of his own enthusiasm for it—that the chances are pretty slim that it's as good a book as he thinks it is. I asked him to send you a set of advance proofs, and if you would review it for the New Republic or somebody it would be of a piece with my idea of what a fine fella you are, but if you should decide not to that idea would still not be affected.⁴

Rupert Brooke was my first idol, in '17 and thereabouts, but you were the second and you wear better.

It would be awful to see you piss away your talent in Hollywood again, and I hope it won't come to that. Because, regarding the written word like a musical instrument, you are the supreme virtuoso—nobody can draw a purer finer tone from the string of an English sentence—and what the hell has the written word to do with Hollywood?

Have been busy as hell since I started this, and now the day's gone. Better sign off. I'll write you again when I get a chance. They moved my office while I was gone and all is pandemonium here.

I'll return the Necromancers.⁵ Haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

If I can do you any good in any way let me know.

Cordialy Arnold Gingrich

Notes:

² Fitzgerald's first fiction appearances in Esquire were “The Fiend” (January 1935) and “The Night Before Chancellorsville” (February 1935). The top price Esquire paid was $250.

³ “Sleeping and Waking,” Esquire (December 1934).

⁴ Cast Down the Laurel (1935). Fitzgerald did not review Gingrich's novel but provided a statement for the dust jacket: “Beautifully written, startling in form, and promising other equally good things to come. It pleases me beyond measure that Arnold Gingrich has brought off this book, which has the same scope and appeal of his editorial ventures.”

⁵ Possibly Robert Hugh Benson's The Necromancers (1909).

xxx. FROM: Sara Murphy

c. 1934

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

Sunday

Dear Scott,—

We were sorry not to see you again—but it seemed, under the circumstances better not to—

Please don't think that Zelda's condition is not very near to our hearts,—(+ we hope + pray it is + will not be as serious as you seemed to think)—and that all your misfortunes are not, in part, ours too—But at times it seems best, for the very sake of our affection for you,—not to let your manners (let us call it)—throw it off its equilibrium—even momentarily—We have no doubt of the loyalty of your affections (+ we hope you haven't of ours)—but consideration for other people's feelings, opinions or even time is Completely left out of your makeup—I have always told you you haven't the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like—+ have never (yet) seen the slightest reason for changing this opinion, “half-baked” as you consider it! You don't even know what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too)—that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself— the same holds good of your feelings for your friends—in lesser degree,—Why,—for instance should you trample on other people's feelings continually with things you permit yourself to say + do—owing partly to the self-indulgence of drinking too much—+ becoming someone else (uninvited)—instead of the Scott we know, + love + admire,—unless from the greatest egotism, + sureness that you are tighter than anyone else? I called it “Manners” but it is more serious—It is that you are only thinking of yourself.

Be as angry with me as you like, Scott—it may be true that “toute verite n'est pas bonne a dire” but I feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write you: that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make—or ruin lives.

Please, please let us know Zelda's news. Dos¹ is here + says she seemed so well when you all went out together 10 days ago—I think of her all the time—

Forgive me if you can,—but you must try to learn, for your own good, + your adored family's good—Some distrust for your behaviour to all other human beings. Your infuriating but devoted + rather wise old friend-Sara

Notes:

¹ John Dos Passos.

xxx. TO: Gertrude Stein

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

1307 Park Avenue,

Baltimore, Maryland,

December 29, 1934.

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

It was a disappointment to think that you would not be here for another meeting. I was somewhat stupid-got with the Christmas spirit, but I enjoyed the one idea that you did develop and, like everything else you say, it will sing in my ears long after everything else about that afternoon is dust and ashes. You were the same fine fire to everyone who sat upon your hearth—for it was your hearth, because you carry home with you wherever you are—a home before which we have all always warmed ourselves.

It meant so much to Zelda, giving her a tangible sense of her own existence, for you to have liked two of her pictures enough to want to own them. For the other people there, the impression was perhaps more vague, but everyone felt their Christmas eve was well spent in the company of your handsome face and wise mind—and sentences “that never leak.”

All affection to you and Alice,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Stein had remarked that sentences must not have bad plumbing and must not leak.

xxx. To Miss Keistler

Circa 1934 (?), Auction

Unknown location

Dear Miss Keistler ...

1935

xxx. FROM: G. B. Stern

ALS, 4 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

Jan 3rd [1935]

Dear Scott Fitzgerald

There's a genial old man in New York who collects celebrities; + about twice a week he rings me up + bellows: “Good morning. How are you?” (“Not at all well”)—“That's fine! Now is there any one you'd like especially to meet + I'll get him for you!”

Then, regularly, I answer: “Yes: Scott Fitzgerald,” + that seems to stump him…. So he rings off.

But it happens to be true. And as it looks as though we were not going to meet, I'll take Dorothy Parker's advice + write to you. Because we were talking, yesterday, about “Tender is the Night,” + what a magnificent piece of work it was, + how it made these Massive Masterpieces look silly + heavy-jowled, + how it turned us inside-out when we read it + didn't put us back again, + what lovely sensitive ironic writing was in it; + we talked like that for quite a long time, till Dorothy said that you'd like to hear, perhaps, how I felt about it. As a matter of fact, if you read your reviews, you would know, to a certain extent, how I felt about it, because I did it for the Daily Telegraph. But one fan letter more or less in your mail can't do any harm. And I'm not altogether sure that “Tender is the Night” was appreciated enough or for the right reasons. People are such chumps.

You won't stop writing, will you, whatever happens. I'll give you a list of at least a Hundred Best Authors (Ancient + Modern) whose books I could easily spare. But not yours.

Yours

G B Stern

Notes:

G. B. Stern had reviewed Tender Is the Night in the London Daily Telegraph.

xxx. TO: Brooks Bowman¹

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

January 16, 1935.

Dear Mr. Bowman:

As one of those who considers this year's performance the best in ten years and also as one of those who consider your achievement both as actor and composer the brightest spot in it I take the liberty of addressing this suggestion to you. For a long time there has been the lack of any new Princeton songs, either suitable to stadium or to senior singing. Several people have spoken to me about it recently on the basis that I used to write the lyrics and a greater part of the shows back in '15, '16, '17 and was a former officer of the club.

My suggestion is this: that your song “East of the Sun” with a few changes in the lyric could be made a fine piece for senior singing. The general line would be:

“East of the sun, west of the moon
Lies Princeton,
South of the south, north of the north
Lies Princeton,
Here in my heart etc. etc.
Lies Princeton.”

The idea being, of course, that Princeton to Princeton men lies outside of time and space. It's an over-sentimental conception but perhaps might mean something to the older alumni. If practical, you might try it out with the Glee Club quartet.

Again congratulations to all of you for a really fine show which indicated that there's life in the old girl yet, as I had begun to doubt.

Yours F. Scott Fitzgerald '17

Notes:

Bowman wrote “East of the Sun” for the 1934-35 Triangle Club show, Stags at Bay.; Fitzgerald's suggestion was not acted on.

xxx. To: Marion Green

February 1935 (?)

Tryon, North Carolina

The best wishes from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his neighbour in Tryon

Inscription in The Great Gatsby (1934).

xxx. TO: Chatto & Windus

TL(CC), 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

February 26, 1935.

Dear Sirs:

My books of short stories have had unusual success in this country. Three have been published, selling 15,000 to 20,000 copies each, and another is to be published this spring. Save for the short stories of O'Henry they are about the only collections that have had much sale in this country for a decade. I wonder if you would be interested in publishing a volume of them containing twenty-one of my stories selected from the four volumes.¹ They would be

(1) The Offshore Pirate
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
The Ice Palace
Benediction

These four from “Flappers and Philosophers” which Collins published in England twelve years ago without success

(2) May Day
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

From “Tales of the Jazz Age” which Collins published in England ten years ago, also without success.

(3) The Rich Boy
Absolution
The Baby Party
Rags Martin Jones and the P—of W—

From “All the Sad Young Men” never published in England.

(4) The Scandal Detectives
The Freshest Boy
He Thinks He's Wonderful
First Blood
The Woman with a Past
The Last of the Belles
A Short Trip Home
Crazy Sunday
Babylon Revisited

From “Taps at Reveille” which appears here next month.

(5) The Intimate Strangers (from McCalls Magazine 1935)

The actual bulk of such a collection might be appealing to the library patron in England. I know that there also only occasional Katherine Mansfield catches the popular fancy. Nevertheless, I put this up to you in the hope that by publishing my books there and publishing them closer together I might build up some sort of English public, as both from the press and from the individual reports there is nothing in my work which is necessarily unintelligible or antipathetic to the British mind.

Very truly yours,

Notes:

¹ This collection was not published.

xxx. TO Dean M. Stewart

TLS, 2 pp. Auction

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

February 28, 1935

It seems to me that somebody in the Little Colonel books, was it Joyce's mother, had to go to Kansas on account of weak lungs and from the reference to your letter I gather that you or one of your family has been similarly afflicted. I went through that mill in undergraduate days and I can deeply sympathize - if I am right in my guess. I have a good critical mind, young lady, and your observations upon the undersigned were sharp and perhaps too much to the point to make me entirely comfortable. During the long enforced seclusion of writing 'Tender is the Night' I deflated my horizon so much that in the last few months it seemed I could hardly breathe in it; lately I've been going out a little more because there is a limit, as you suggest, to what one can dredge out of the domestic racket, especially as mine has been quite as melancholy as is called for by the general specifications for life.

The Red Book story was an escape. Since you seem interested it was the beginning of a series for the Post and was prompted by the escape complex. The idea was to publish eight or ten episodes of Philippe's youthful career and then evolve that into a novel, a perfectly serious novel. The obstacle was the Post who were not interested. The Red Book paid only half the price and I was on rather a financial spot and had to write Post stories so it was four months before the next story reached the Red Book. However, they now have three more and will be getting on with them shortly. They have been fun to write and I do them with none of the strain that accompanied the Post stories of youth and love. So much for your guesses being right and half right. I am awfully glad that you saw Philippe was a perfectly honest beginning of something.

I hope to the devil this isn't a Greely letter. I don't write those to such as you, lady, and I do honestly hope we meet.
Faitthfully,
F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Alice Richardson

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

February 28, 1935

Lovely Alicia:

You are in receipt of a communication from a man who has been in the southland and has not touched liquor for a month and, because some things in the last few months are a little hazy, you will have to be more explicit as to what the other letters were.¹ As I remember, the two department store tie-ups that I had were through Brown Wanamaker and Cupid Simon. I am enclosing a letter to my publisher. It seems to me there were other angles that we talked about, but what they were I don't remember. On a long chance I am enclosing one also to Charlie MacArthur. Of course script girls are made, not born. He and Ben Hecht have their own plant now and you might strike him at the right moment. Beyond that I am pretty blank, that is, I could suggest nothing that Carmer couldn't suggest or that you would not find yourself. However, if you remember any further suggestions I made, write them to me and I will come through with the letters.

Now as to the manuscript.² It won't do, Alice. It is in part too personal and in part not personal enough. It is really not English to write such a sentence as “Her tonsils were in terrible shape,” which gives rather a revolting picture of the lady's throat. I appreciate your sparing me on the alcoholic side, at the same time the picture of a writer living in a dressing gown isn't sufficiently new or startling to give personality interest. Due to the fact that my books no longer have the national circulation they used to have but sell chiefly in big cities, the interest in such articles would be limited to magazines such as The New Yorker whose readers would not consider the company of an author very exciting after all. This is sad but true and it was a bad guess of mine to think it could be steered into something marketable. It's like those episodes that are funny when they happen but don't bear telling.

I hope to heaven things go well with you, Alice, and that these letters may, by some chance, bear some fruit.

Faithfully,
Scott Fitzg

Notes:

¹ Alice Richardson, who had been Fitzgerald's secretary, was job-hunting in New York and had asked him for letters of introduction.

² A short memoir by Alice Richardson, describing her experience as Fitzgerald's secretary.

xxx. TO: Lois Moran

TLS, 3 pp. Lois Moran Young

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 8, 1935.

Note the date! Had no adress till
Lew Azrael gave me one a few minutes ago¹

Dear Lois,

I was touched that you all called me up on your wedding day,² and it more than made up for the somewhat chilled receptions I had come to expect from your telephone. Could I have been there I'd have loved it—the marriage of Columbine, (and Lou Azrael told me it wasn't far from that, with all sorts of amusing circumstances,).

I believe you are going to be just as happy as it is possible for anybody to be with a dash of the Celt in them. For many reasons I want to see you again before many more years drift by and hear about the singing and hear about you and how all your funny old idealisms have worked out. (You will probably like me better because I don't drink any more.)

I have a book of short stories called “Taps at Reveille” coming out in a few weeks and I thought of including that old piece “Jacob's Ladder”³ but I found that I had so thoroughly disemboweled it of its best descriptions for “Tender is the Night” that it would be offering an empty shell.

This seems an odd congratulatory letter to write to a lady who once played such an important role in my life, but it doesn't seem from this distance that your marriage has changed anything about you—I think one of the strongest impressions I ever got of the absolute seperateness of people, of old friends, of differing destinies and directions was that day in the Belvedere three years ago when you unwound a little of your life for me—gave me glimpses into all the years that I knew nothing of. Somehow we always expect old friends to be static until we see them again, and after thirty this is to some extent realized—but in case of one who started so early and so galvanically as you did, the changes are rung so quickly that no one could be anything but rather confused and dazzled.

I have never quite forgiven you, by the way, for the remark that you made in the dressing room at Ford's that you “had me on the spot” that day. My mind was never working faster than then; all that was true was that I was tired and abstracted. You probably don't even remember the episode, but keep it in mind, young lady, to quote old Sage Fitzgerald, you can stab a man anywhere but in his pride; never touch that unless you mean murder. Anyhow, I love you tremendously always and wish all happiness to you and yours.

Your Chattel Scott Fitzg

Notes:

¹ In holograph; the envelope is postmarked 6 May. Louis Azrael was a Baltimore journalist.

² Miss Moran had married airline executive Collier Young.

³ The Saturday Evening Post (20 August 1927). Fitzgerald had written this story about a young actress after meeting Miss Moran.

xxx. TO: Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 15, 1935.

Dear Margaret,

I was delighted to have the Little Review as I never see it, however, I do not like Canby as I think he is a coward, a trimmer and a hedger. The book¹ is certainly getting all the publicity that could be demanded. I was personally disappointed in it coming after “Look Homeward Angel.” But nothing that he did could be undistinguished in its way. What disappointed me was the gawky and profuse way in which he handled his material. I will have a copy by the end of next week. Would you like to read it, or have you it?

It was very sweet what you had to say about Zelda. Things are black there and I do not know how it is going to turn out. I want to see you soon.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

¹ Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River (1935).

xxx. TO: Roger Burlingame

TLS, 1 p. Syracuse University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 23, 1935.

Dear Roger:

I was surprised and delighted at the tremendous advances that your book makes.¹ I was interested in Dan Andrews from start to finish and thought his problem was handled with great imagination and sympathy. The only story I can compare it to is the ancient and honorable high flight of Mr. Hugh Walpole (whom I don't otherwise admire) in “The Gods and Mr. Perrin” which you may have read. But I think yours is superior in every way. Many congratulations! I am especially delighted in your aptness in choosing the theme. I felt that in your first novel² about the young man in business that you were handicapped from the start.

With all congratulations, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

1 Cartwheels (1935).

2 Susan Shane (Scribners, 1926).

xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich

Telegram, Syracuse University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 23, 1935.

Story mailed it is called Shaggys Morning a fifteen hundred words ...

xxx. TO: James Boyd

TLS, 2 pp. University of North Carolina

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 26, 1935.

Dear Jim:

It was great seeing you and your removal honestly leaves a gap. I made a short trip to New York which, while it reminded me that I have lost much of my old enthusiasm for talk and groups, also reminded me of the vacuum in which I have been living down here. If I have anything in common with a man intellectually here our pasts seem to have been very different, and if, on the contrary, our pasts have been the same, there is no intellectual meeting ground. I feel like the old maid you mentioned one day who “grew less desirable and more particular.”

Max was tremendously enthusiastic about your new book² feeling that it was immensely in advance of the part published. I mean he was enthusiastic in his absolutely Grade A manner and left me full of curiosity.

I see a faint chance of a jaunt toward North Carolina in six weeks or so, but only a faint one, and I'd love to spend a day or two with you if things are breaking right.

I hope you and your wife are both much better and that we will all look back to this winter simply as a winter of discontent.

Ever yours, Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

² Roll River (Scribners, 1935).

xxx. TO: V. F. Calverton

TLS, 1 p. New York Public Library

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 26, 1935.

Dear George:

The best thing I can think of is a recent strain of poetry.¹ The trouble of sending fiction is that Gingrich of Esquire has stepped into the breach with an honorarium of $250 for such pieces as cannot possibly get into the popular magazines. So as long as this lasts, selling stories for less is giving money away—and I can't do that while I am still in debt. That, frankly, is the situation.

You are right that the house here is growing to be a habit and it takes a tidal wave to move me out of it. However, I am growing damn sick of it and would love to see you, but if I go to your house what the hell could I do with Scottie? Let's hope she is invited somewhere next week end or the one after that. She is invited Fri. I think²

Ever yrs Scott

Notes:

¹ Calverton had solicited a contribution from Fitzgerald for The Modern Monthly. Fitzgerald did not appear in this magazine.

² The last sentence was added in holograph.

xxx. To: Isabell Owens

c. April 1935

Tryon, North Carolina

For Isabell Owens
Hoping we'll both be able to look back ...

Inscription in Taps At Reveille (1935).

xxx. TO: Robert Penn Warren

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 5, 1935.

Dear Mr. Warren:

Thanks for your letter. I wish to God I had something for you, especially as I undertand that Louisiana State University is to be the Athens of the nation. Seriously, I haven't a thing available but I'll certainly send something when I have.

You have the beginnings of a nice list there and I wish you the greatest success in your venture.

I, too, am sorry we did not meet again in Paris. My God, how I'd like to be there now!

Sincerely, F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Warren was at that time editing The Southern Review.

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 24, 1935.

Dearest Bert:

Your letter came at a moment when I was thinking of you. Twice in the last three years I've tried to get in touch with you when in New York but each time you were in Europe or Florida. Naturally, much has happened since that time. My wife recovered, and relapsed, and is still in uncertain health in a sanitarium; we have lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and Baltimore, Maryland, where were are now; I have published two books and wonder if you have read them; I no longer drink and have gotten very old; have never run into such easy pickings since that white purse, though the fence I went to still insists it was a phoney and the $23.70 he gave me was mostly for the letters he found inside it.

Often think of your wild wit and of our three curious pilgrimages ending with a somewhat unfortunate one in Paris with a hotel keeper's wife shrieking curses through the telephone.

I have your address and on every one of my infrequent visits to New York I will faithfully give you a call and see if I can round you up.

Always affectionately yours, Scott

xxx. TO Alexander Woollcott

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dear Alec:

That was damn nice of you to write me about the poem.¹ I was surprised at the number of people who liked it but I was especially delighted to hear from you after so long. It pleased me too that you liked Tender Is the Night.

I thought it was awfully nice of you to have that mention of Patrick Murphy in your broadcast. Sweet Jesus, you have become famous!

I have seen one of the Woollcott girls act at Bryn Mawr School; I have talked to a second one in person about her short stories; and a third one is in the same class at Bryn Mawr with my daughter, so I feel as if I knew the whole family. This is a big city and it is almost as rare to look up people as it would be in New York, but I am looking forward to running into them sometime and I will give your name as a recommendation.

I am engrossed in a new literary project but it will be another year before it develops because I am feeling somewhat plucked and old as I approach forty. I have been for some time a teetotaler with the chief intention of fooling the kind friends who predicted for me an alcoholic grave.

With my very best wishes to you always, Alec,

Your friend,
Scott Fitz——-

Notes:

¹ “Lamp in a Window,” The New Yorker, March 23, 1935.

xxx. TO Zoe Akins

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dearest Zoe:

That was a hell of a nice thing you wrote me about the poem. There was a good deal of emotion in it but I was nevertheless surprised that it was noticed as much as it was, it being the first poem I have written in thirteen years.

Zelda is no better at the moment but spring and summer always represent a hope for improvement; in trying for a cure in these cases the difficult period is always the protecting of her during a readjustment to life when she returns to it, and I fall far short in this regard, being usually an agitated and turbulent sort of person myself. Scottie is fine and I will ask her about the moving picture stars.

I am delighted that The Old Maid is still on Broadway. It is still talked about here by those who went to it with me. No news with me except that I don't drink any more, many moons now since liquor of any kind has touched these lips. Tender Is the Night is being dramatized. I've always thought that the advantageous contract I made in the case of The Great Gatsby was thanks to your sound advice.

Always affectionately yours,
Scott Fitz

xxx. TO: C. A. Wright

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

April 24, 1935.

Dear Mr. Wright:

I was on the “Tiger” staff at Princeton for three years and got out many issues of it, though I was not chairman. It was never as big a thing at Princeton as was the “Record” at Yale or the “Widow” at Cornell because most of the local wit was concentrated on producing the hullabaloo of the Triangle show, and lately the “Intime” reviews. My time was chiefly notable for the first acknowledgment in print that girls would be girls and the first use in the east of such words as “necking” and “petting” exemplified by a series which I started and Arthur Hope, the author of “She Loves Me Not,” continued. It was called “International Petting Cues.”²

With best wishes, F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

C. A. Wright had written Fitzgerald for a statement about college humor magazines.

² “Intercollegiate Petting Cues,” The Princeton Tiger (10 November 1917).

xxx. TO: Mrs. Albert Kibble, Jr.

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University Baltimore, Maryland

The Penetentiary, Louisville, Ky.,

April 24, 1935.

Dear Mrs. Kibble:

I got your letter here in the Penetentiary just as I was about to be hanged for murder. I think I am probably your half-brother and another half-brother is in the Maryland State Penetentiary charged with forgery. It is all a put up job as we Dukes are descended from the great Duke of Marlborough and have always been able to make a living by crime without being caught. There is a big petition here to spare my life and if I am spared the noose I would love to visit you in Pickford and stay as long as you like—like a year or so. I am not a harmful man except sometimes when I am irritated or when the food is bad, so you can feel perfectly safe. I am also handy around the house to crack safes, forge checks or deal with wicked neighbors as I am a good shot.

Please write me care of my attorney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, as they will not let me receive mail here.

Yours till the trap falls, Basil Duke

Notes:

Mrs. Kibble had seen one of the Basil Duke Lee stories and had written to Basil Duke Lee c/o The Saturday Evening Post inquiring if he was her lost half-brother. Fitzgerald exchanged letters with Mrs. Kibble, pretending to be Basil Duke and Duke's lawyer. He mentioned these letters in “Author's House” (Esquire, July 1936), reproving himself for his cruelty: “You can pay a little money but what can you do for meddling with a human heart? A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.”

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

TLS, 2 pp. New York Public Library

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland,

April 29, 1935.

Dear Menck:

Here is the Gertrude Stein story “Melanctha.” Remember that it came out around 1909. Anderson and Hemingway have acknowledged their enormous debt to it. And the curious power achieved by repetition wisely used is here at a peak that she never reached again. I am particularly fond of the passages where Melanctha is “so blue” and I think by God that it is the best conveying of an inconsolable gloom that I have ever read. Please read some of it.

The very loneliness in which its huge jump landed her is responsible for the crazy warping of her career and I hate to see you making generalities about her that made me definitely feel bad, just as when you jumped at conclusions about Hemingway's early work.

Got an odd reaction from seeing you the other night—of finding you, if I may be so bold as to say it, in a curious state of isolation neither sought for nor avoided. I suppose if one creates a world so wilfully, effectually and completely as you have for instance, there is nothing much to do except to live in it. I find myself increasingly in a similar position, a barber who trusts only his own razors. At present everybody is too young for me or too old, too malleable or too set, and for my purposes there is really not a great selection of food at the intellectual banquet. This is too complicated to elaborate here. I simply want to say that I can understand and respect your aloneness.

Always cordially and admiringly, Scott Fitzg

P.S. I hope Sarah is improving with the season—Zelda is.

xxx. TO: John Biggs

Spring 1935

ALS, 2 pp. Auction

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear John:

I must have phoned you at a busy moment. Haven't had such a lecture since I left the army. Sorry as hell the insurance people have bothered you. I was sick as hell from Nov. To March. & didn't see how I could get the premium paid that was due Jan 15th. So with the help of a pint of whiskey I got out of bed here & went up to Wilmington where I went to bed again & phoned Donaldson because I thought sure the thing was going to lapse. I must say he was very nice. (About borrowing on it—didn't you suggest to me it was the thing to do in these warfare times? Not that it matters for I had to do it anyhow).

About coming to Wilmington—since I've been well enough to move about I have my invalid in Carolina, my mother in a Washington hospital & a daughter here finishing her school year. I'll try to make it for the pleasure of seeing you. On the financial side I don't think I can be reformed. I have good resiliency when the health is all right & a great deal of this sickness was due to the strain under which Tender was written. The strain caused defeat, ergo overwork, ergo nerves, drink & a whole vicious cycle that led eventually to hurting heart & lungs. I was well last fall after two months rest but there was again debt & it started all over again. If you can solve that one you've got me.

It's not true what you say about public institutions and I know. They're all right in hopeless cases, certainly they're better than little say private clinics, but in case like Zelda's, who's as sane as you and me part of time it would be the end of hope and struggle. I had a moment of discouragement last fall when my own health failed again & I wrote those Esquire articles—but that moment has passed & unless there's some bad break another month should see the worst over & Scotty's and my standard of living reduced to the lowest point consonant with my work.

I'm terribly sorry about Anna and Charlie (You are lucky to have a good constitution). That seems to be the great place for asthma—wasn't Anna cured there before—and I hope you'll be reunited soon. This stilted style is the result of long days work and doesn't express my sympathy—give her my love when you write.

I shall be here till June 10th (The address is The Cambridge Arms, Charles at 34th). I shall try to get there, and I don't forgive you for never calling me when you're in Baltimore. My phone is under the name of the appartment [sic].

Ever Your Friend, Scott

Notes:

Fitzgerald wrote this letter in the spring of 1935, when he was living in Baltimore; it's written to John Biggs (Princeton Class of 1918) who was Fitzgerald's roommate at Princeton, and later served as executor and trustee of Fitzgerald's estate. By his "invalid" he meant his estranged wife Zelda, who was first struck by schizophrenia in 1930 and was thereafter hospitalized throughout the 1930s. Fitzgerald had finished Tender is the Night in Baltimore, and it was published in 1934 to mixed reviews. The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a psychiatrist nearly ruined by his mental patient wife. Realizing that the novel would not solve his financial troubles, Fitzgerald sought to write himself out of debt with magazine stories. He published several pieces in Esquire that fall, including the essay "Sleeping and Waking" and two short stories, "The Fiend" and "The Night Before Chancellorsville."

Fitzgerald was notorious for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, which took a heavy toll on his health. He also suffered from recurrent tuberculosis, and went to North Carolina to seek treatment with his daughter Scottie in February 1935. He wrote "Lo, the Poor Peacock!" that month, a story about a man ruined by the Depression who tries to raise his daughter while his wife is hospitalized. After returning to Baltimore, tests showed his tuberculosis as inactive, but x-rays revealed progressive lung damage. He returned to North Carolina again that summer.

xxx. TO: James Boyd

Spring 1935

ALS, 2 pp. University of North Carolina

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Jim:

I groan when I think what a bore I must have been the other night—reading you two of my own pieces + telling you a preposterous story of an Eton-Harrow cricket match (Jack Churchill did take us to one + we left early, but it wasn't like that at all. And then keeping you up with an entire scenario of a prospective novel. You must have envied yourself the evening with Pat O'Mara.

Almost always when I've been working hard what little color there is in my personality goes out of it. I should insert a proper interval of prayer before seeing anyone. It was, however, great to see you, and if I'd been content to let you + Bill¹ have a good time without intruding myself things wouldn't have been so irritating (this is on the assumption that you are fond of me as I am of you, else you wouldn't have stayed at all).

Anyhow apologies are always a little more wearying than what they apologize for. Warm regards to the progeny and to Kate and high hopes that she, and the rest of us, will climb out of this valley of illness

Ever Yours
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Probably William Leonard of Baltimore.

xxx. TO James Boyd

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

May 2, 1935

Dear Jim:

I started Roll River in a copy Max Perkins sent me and recapitulated The Dark Shore, of which I missed one issue in Scribner's, then in the copy which you were kind enough to send me I read Toward Morning.¹ I could say a hell of a lot of nice things about the book—the whole war episode from the landing to the return, the reunion scene with his wife which is one of the best little touches in the book, the mine scene per se, the generousness of talent, the sense that you really do know about all those people—but in view of the fine press you are beginning to get I want to make a few cavils.

In the first place there is the question of Clara. The obvious model for such a picture of a woman as heroine and later as priestess of accumulated experience is of course Beatrix Esmond, later Madam Bernstein in Esmond and The Virginians. Madam Bernstein is a projection of Beatrix but she lives in her own right and what we recognize in her is Beatrix's enormous vitality and how life both preserved it and transmuted it. I can't honestly think that the elder Clara has that vividness, or preserves much of the younger Clara, and your failure to bring this off is the biggest fault of the book as a whole for she was your strongest thread to draw it together with.

One more point is that I have the same penchant as you at the moment for letting a theme unravel at the end, so to speak, as things do in life rather than to cut it off short, but I feel that this can be achieved without having the writing itself become exhausted. It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can't be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring. For example: your rag-tag-and-bob-tail of continental troops filing past in the dark latter days of the Revolution were for the most part somewhat discouraged farmers, and the impression of a dogged discouragement was beautifully conveyed because you had the vitality to invent a tremendously vivid picture which wasn't a bit discouraging artistically. You did not let their state dampen your power to describe, nor their exhaustion drag you down; but in the last part of Toward Morning both the foreshortening and the lack of any such writing as there is in the best passages of The Dark Shore show that you have let the oldness of your protagonists communicate itself to you. This may be nonsense. It is one of those things that is easy to say after the event. This letter should be really to congratulate you on a fine book and to thank you for the enjoyment it gave me.

All quiet here. In a week or so I am off for the summer. You made a conquest in Elizabeth Lemmon who was very enthusiastic about Roll River and who has returned to The Old Dominion. ¹ The Dark Shore and Toward Morning were Books I and II of Boyd's Roll River.

As your sister-in-law has probably told you I tried like hell to get you at the Belvedere. The Ed Poes wanted to have you for dinner.

I have been in Tryon since I saw you and found Southern Pines a surprisingly long distance away from it, but I shall be in Carolina again this summer, will you?

With the most cordial good wishes,
Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO Arnold Gingrich

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

May 8, 1935

Dear Arnold:

Scottie was delighted to get the check from Abramson. I don't know what in God's name he wants it for but he's welcome to it. It's a nice little piece for that age so you have pleased her immensely and don't reproach yourself.

As to health, the body had been gradually sliding toward annihilation for two years but the process didn't get acute until about six months ago, and when it did, it went fast. I was doing my stuff on gin, cigarettes, bromides, and hope. Finally, the stuff itself was getting rather watery so I decided to get away while I was still on my feet. I laid up, or rather down, in Tryon, North Carolina, recuperated quickly, decided to quit drinking for a few years (which has honestly been no trouble so far) and am back here feeling quite myself.² I tell you these dull details at length because your letter seemed really interested, and an inquiry about health is practically irresistible at my age.

I've followed the career of Cast Down the Laurel³ with interest. You certainly got the top press and I was gratified. (Finished Part III by the way and like it best of all!)

Will be here till heaven knows when, except possibly a short Easter trip somewhere with my daughter.

Ever yours,
Scott Fitz

P.S. I haven't forgotten that I owe you a $200.00 article, but I am sewed up with S.E.P. fiction for a few weeks more.

P.S. 2. Again let me tell you that I appreciate that nice little compliment to Scottie about the poem.

Notes:

² The winter and spring of 1935 Fitzgerald made a conscientious effort to overcome his drinking, but he did not succeed until the winter of 1937.

³ A novel by Gingrich.

xxx. TO Arnold Gingrich

From Turnbull.

[1307 Park Avenue] [Baltimore, Maryland]

May 11, 1935

Dear Arnold:

That was a damn nice letter to write me, but, my God, I have suddenly reached a change of life in which everything I have written seems terrible, an odd state of things because usually I pore over my own stuff crying aloud from time to time in ecstasy, “What a man!” I don't like anybody else's work either. I wish there was something to do except read. Women and liquor take up so much time and get you into so much trouble. I wish I liked music like you do but it simply makes me want to howl when certain notes are struck.

Esquire holds up beautifully but my dog story was rotten.¹ I have two other short plots which I swear I will do for you within the next two months. I still owe you one. Your literary plans are frightening but of course everybody is always behind; still, it is exceptional to be so particularly far behind.

Best wishes always,
Scott Fitz

Notes:

¹ “Shaggy's Morning,” Esquire, May, 1935.

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

May 11, 1935

Dear Margaret:

The lilies are wonderful. First I gave them to Scottie and then I took them back. I rushed to my window and called you just as your Ford rolled out of sight. I wanted to see you before I left, which is now, for a protracted sojourn in the country, probably Carolina, still seeking to get back the hours of sleep that I lost in '33 and '34. I am closing the house but am coming back in June to pack Scottie off to camp.

I think of you all so often and I miss keeping up with Andrew and Eleanor, their woes and joys and changes. Through Scottie's eyes they lack reality, Andrew becomes a schemer of Machiavellian hue, Eleanor remains the child who just never will be as old as Scottie no matter how hard she tries, as though she were an Alice who had just perversely lost her growing cake. I still hear the wings of a career beating about her. As for Andrew I shall have to catch up as much as possible when I take him to the football game next autumn, though I wish I knew what he was going to do this summer.

I have a fair story in the current McCall's if you run into it. La Paix must be grand now—I wish Zelda could walk through it, but alas, she is far too sick. When she is a little better and can go outside will you call on her sometime? I will let you know. She will be pretty lonesome when I am away and I hate like the devil to leave her but it is doctor's orders.

Always affectionately,
Scott

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

H. L. Mencken 704 Cathedral St. Baltimore

May 23, 1935

Dear Scott:

Sara’s illness distracted me from the Stein book, but I have now finished reading it.¹ I agree with you thoroughly that there is some excellent stuff in it. In all three of the stories La Stein shows an excellent feeling for character, and some of her minor observations are extremely astute. However, I still hold to the doctrine that her writing is bad. Some of the English in “The Good Anna” is really dreadful, and more than once she forgets on one page what she has written on some previous page, and so falls into transparent contradictions and other absurdities.

At bottom, of course, such things as “The Gentle Lena” are simply sentimental tales of a familiar sort. Nevertheless, she brings something new to them. I believe that if “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” had reached me in my editorial days I’d have printed them. But I don’t think I’d have printed them without sending them back for a few repairs.

Carl Van Vechten’s enthusiasm is hardly to be taken seriously. Carl is a great fan for literary oddities, and whenever he happens upon delicatessen of that sort he starts beating the drums. To be sure, he has thus made some propaganda for really first-rate authors, but I think it is only fair to say that he has also whooped up some duds.

The fact that La Stein greatly impressed Sherwood Anderson is completely irrelevant. On all this earth there is no more unreliable literary guide than Sherwood. His estimates of his own stories are usually wrong, and his estimates of the work of other men are even worse.

Sara was making good progress when she succumbed to what seems to have been a mild flu. She has been in bed ever since. I hope, however, to take her northward about the first of June. The Baltimore Summer is too hot and muggy for her, and I am thinking of settling her in the Adirondacks until September.

Are you still on the water-wagon? If you ever slip off far enough to indulge yourself in a few rounds of beer I hope you let me hear of it. I’d like very much to have a sitting.

Yours,
M.

Notes:

¹ The Stein book: Three Lives.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

Late May 1935

ALS, 2 pp. Goucher College

Grove Park Inn letterhead Asheville, North Carolina

Dear Menk: I'm sorry as hell about all this nuisance to Sara. That's the hell of getting older. It occurred to me the other day that I'm never in a group any more without their being one deaf person—

—My God! There is a convention of laundrymen here + a party next door has been telling for 10 minutes how a man named Bill vomited on his two long-haired dogs.

Anyhow you shouldn't have gone to that trouble of writing me about Gertrude Stien though your conclusions interest me.¹ I remember the contradiction in sense—somebody is dead + then alive again, in Melanctha, I think. But I believe you would have felt the book more remarkable had you read it in 1922 as Wilson + I did. She has been so imitated + thru Ernest her very rythm has gone into the styles of so many people. I agree that Carl² is too inclined to rapture on his Ronald Firbanks ect. but I still believe Gertrude Stien is some sort of a punctuation mark in literary history.

I am here resting, very bored + rather uninspired by my surroundings but here I stay another month by Doctor's orders. So I wont be able to have an evening with you, much as I'd like it. Saw George³ a moment in New York—he looked handsome + young for his years. He was with the embryonic Tully.

With Warmest regards to you both
Scott Fitzg

There hasn't been a novel worth reading in one solid year, English or American.

Notes:

¹ See Mencken's 23 May 1935 letter about Three Lives.

² Probably Carl Van Vechten.

³ George Jean Nathan.

xxx. FROM: Gertrude Stein

Spring 1935

ALS, 2 pp. Scrapbook. Princeton University

My dear Scottie

Here we are at home and the birds and some of the birds nightingales and at first coming back was very strange but now it is very nice, very nice and quiet I thank you, I did like being with you all in Baltimore and here we have Zelda's picture and it is a very beautiful picture and it gives us a lot of pleasure, I wonder where you are and what you are doing, and I hope you are doing it very well whatever it is, you know that I am very fond of you and hope this finds you the same, do let us know about yourself we are here until October and love to you all over and over again

Always Gtde Stein

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

ALS, 1 p. Goucher College

1 June 1935

Grove Park Inn letterhead Asheville, North Carolina

Dear Menk:

It is so terribly sad. Sara's fine life was all too short. My thoughts are all with you tonight¹

Scott Fitzg

Notes:

¹ Sara Haardt Mencken died on 31 May 1935.

xxx. To Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci)

From Turnbull.

Asheville, North Carolina Grove Park Inn

June 11, 1935

Dearest Ceci:

By now the Result-of-an-Irresistible-Impulse will be among you. I am enclosing a check with which I hope you will buy her as much gayety as she deserves. Don't let her go out with any sixteen-year-old boys who have managed to amass a charred keg and an automobile license as their Start-in-Life. Really I mean this. My great concern with Scottie for the next five years will be to keep her from being mashed up in an automobile accident.

I love you as always—and that is no perfunctory statement.

Isn't Mother a funny old wraith? Didn't you get a suggestion of the Witches' Cave from several of the things that she said that night at 2400?

Always affectionately,

Scott

P.S. I mean that, about any unreliable Virginia boys taking my pet around. I will never forget that it was a Norfolk number (later drowned in the South American swamps) who gave me my first drink of whiskey. Scottie hasn't got three sisters—she has only got me. Watch her please!

What a typist this one turned out to be!

xxx. TO: Don Swann

c. July 1935

ALS, 2 pp. Grove Park Inn letterhead, unlocated (Published in facsimile by Architectural Digest, 33, July-August 1976, 113)

Grove Park Inn letterhead Asheville, North Carolina

Dear Don:

If I seemed unappreceative of the etching of Tudor Hall it was because I was in a somewhat distraught mood—I'm delighted with it + very proud to own it. The reason I didn't want the one of Hampton was because the Pleausance Ridgely from whom I descended, antedated the present mansion by a generation + I thought it would be pretentious of me to hang it for that reason. But direct ancestors did live in Tudor Hall so you can imagine the pleasure it gives me.

(What do copies sell for by the way?)

I was a little disturbed by Don Junior—he is a fine man; and I'm sorry he has such sharp edges + hope that girl isn't putting him through any special hells.

Affection to All of You Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

Fitzgerald spent time at the Grove Park Inn, situated in Asheville, North Carolina, during the summers of 1935 and 1936, recuperating from ill health in the clean mountain air. He rented two rooms at a time—one for sleeping and one for writing—opting for basic accommodations that overlooked the main entrance so that he could observe the comings and goings of beautiful women. Fitzgerald had previously written a foreword for Don Swann's book of etchings, Colonial and Historic Homes of Maryland, which included an image of Tudor Hall in Leonardtown. In the foreword, he said 'there must be hundreds and hundreds of families in such an old state whose ancestral memories are richer and fuller than mine,' but that he considered himself 'a native of the Maryland Free State through ancestry and adoption,' mentioning names of family legends such as 'Caleb Godwin of Hockley-in-ye-Hole, or Philip Key of Tudor Hall, or Pleasance Ridgely.' To underscore his association with the state, he signed off on the piece with his full name—shared with the Maryland poet of 'Star Spangled Banner' fame—'Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.'

xxx. TO: Unknown [? to Donn Swann ?]

1935 (?)

Affection to All of You Scott Fitzg—

Inscription in The Great Gatsby (1925).

xxx. TO: James and Katherine Boyd

Summer 1935

ALS, 4 pp. University of North Carolina

Hotel Stafford letterhead, Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Boyds:

Thank you. In better form I might have been a better guest¹ but you couldn't have been better hosts even at a moment when anything that wasn't absolutely—that wasn't near perfection made me want to throw a brick at it. One sometimes needs tolerance at a moment when he has least himself.

Jim—remember all the things I did like about “Roll on Sweet Missoula” (I forget the exact name)² and not my theoretical objections to certain ideas of yours as to what the novel should drive at. In spite of everything those are dangerous subjects as we grow older, no matter what we say, unless the discussion is remote from anything of ours, like discussing someone elses children in any terms except polite compliments. It comes so close to our only justification for living.

So if you ever get in doubt about anything about the theory of the novel, consult young Burt—he will set you straight. From now on I'm never going to embark on European travel without a few words with him. He must have been invaluable to Struthers³ + Katherine.

I hope that the ills of the flesh plague you both less + less. I feel much better and have just sold the Post an idea that occurred to me on the train about Lincoln as our best writer, for $5ooo.⁴ I make him something like Geo. Lorimer, though—with a touch of Hoover + J. P. Morgan.

Page just caught the train + we talked for an hour—gosh he's interesting, + I stupidly hadn't guessed it. The depression governor of N.C. then came along + I went to bed leaving them to their sins.

So farewell to the pines + gracious houses + happy children, + all good things to you both from

Your Friend Scott F.

P.S. If you're ever wrapping things, send The Long Hunt to Ashville. I'll be there in a wk.

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald had visited the Boyds at Southern Pines, N.C.

² Fitzgerald was playing on the title of Boyd's Roll River.

³ Writer Maxwell Struthers Burt.

⁴ This was a joke.

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

[Summer, 1935]

Dear Andrew:

Thanks for remembering me with a letter on Frances' new typewriter. Haven't seen you to really talk for such a long time that I scarcely know you except thru Scottie. She tells me you are a low-lifer and in trouble with the police for passing some of the Weyerhauser kidnap jack but I say, “Don't believe it—Andrew is all right. There is nothing the matter with the boy except his character, environment, family, body, mind, past and future, and he will probably turn out O.K. in the end.” But what an end!

So far as Constable is concerned—I don't want you to run him down. He's all right—not as good as his substitute Rulon-Miller but all right. And I'm glad. In fact I got him elected captain—I came into the room in a blackbeard disguise during the conclave and pled with them. “See here,” I said, “a good back hasn't come out of Gilman since Slagle, and they're starving for somebody to admire, them kids are. Pretty soon they'll begin to turn to dolls like 'Apples' Fitzpatrick and 'Mozart' Hopney—” but I stopped myself at this juncture. I enclose Fritz Crisler's answer.¹

Always your friend,
Scott Fitz——-

Notes:

¹ The enclosure, an actual letter from Crisler, contained a postscript in Fitzgerald's handwriting which said, “I have had Constable elected captain as a favor to your young friend Turnbull.”

xxx. TO Julian Street

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

[Summer, 1935]

Dear Street:

Thanks for your letter—I mean really thanks. It was a most generous gesture and came at a time when I was wondering if anyone I respected read my stories—not that exactly, but if they liked them or if I was losing my grip in that medium—that is, of writing “high-priced” stories and still having them make sense. It was easier when I was young and believed in things and hoped that life might be a happy matter for some people. But as you learn that happiness is a prerogative of the perennial children of this world, and not too many of them, it becomes increasingly difficult.

Again thanks—my mind goes back often to several pleasant afternoons in Paris with you.

Faithfully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[Grove Park Inn] [Asheville, North Carolina]

[June, 1935]

Dear Margaret:

What a nice letter you write! I quoted to Zelda tonight (in a letter) the part about “Scottie in yellow ruffles… with Andrew, Jack and Clarence … forming the dark half of the design.”

Also the inevitable fatalism that creeps into all womanhood, the almost lust for death as the culmination of experience; to quote you again, “life being made up of hope, and a little fulfillment.” The hell it is—too much fulfillment from a man's point of view, if he has been one of those who wanted to identify himself with it utterly. It's so fast, so sweeping along, that he walks stumbling and crying out, wondering sometimes where he is, or where the others are, or if they existed, or whether he's hurt anybody, but not much time to wonder, only sweeping along again with his only choice being between blindness or being muscle-bound from caution-conservatism-cowardice, the three great C's I've tied up together, though God knows I'm capable of all three….

I became so metaphysical there that I had to destroy what I'd written. Anyhow I think that the fatalism of women can be confused with radicalism but is neither radical nor conservative to any extent. But a man's life is a more gorgeous thing, I think, if he's one of the fortunate. Oh, well—these generalities set ill upon a man of my age.

Thank you for asking Scottie out. You have been good to her. I like it when she goes to your house and gets a sense of the continuity of life that her own choppy existence hasn't given her. I want her to be pretty hard but if she has to be a condottiere to a certain extent, I like her to know that all people don't.

I am benefiting by my rest here, gaining weight, exuberance. But living alone leaves so many loopholes for brooding and when I do face the whole tragedy of Zelda it is simply a day lost. I think I feel it more now than at any time since its inception. She seems so helpless and pitiful. Liquor used to help put it out of mind, and it was one of the many services my old friend Barleycorn did me. However he had outlived his usefulness in that as well as all other regards.

I hear it is beautiful here, but without people all places are the same to me. I'd rather be at La Paix watching thru my iron grille one of your tribe moving about the garden, and wondering if Zelda had yet thrown the tennis racquet at Mr. Crosley.¹

What a ten months this has been for Frances—good God! a lifetime for some people. Blessings on her—she is a fine person.

All my affectionate good wishes to you and yours,
Scott Fitz

Notes:

¹ A tennis pro who gave Zelda lessons on the grass court at La Paix.

xxx. To: Laura Guthrie

c. June 1935

Inscription in Tender Is The Night (1934). Bruccoli

Asheville, North Carolina

F. Scott Fitzgerald
request s the pleasure of Laura Guthrie's company in Europe 1917—1930

Notes:

This inscription page has been removed from the book.

xxx. TO: Laura Guthrie

Postmarked 29 July 1935

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

New York City

Sweet Laura:

This is no longer funny. Just what has happened will not surprise you, but it fills me with a profound disgust. I have become involved again + am moving to another hotel, because it means no more work is possible here. Dont women have anything more to do than to sit around and make love + drink beer? This time my emotions arn't even faintly involved and I'm such a wreck physically that I expect the heart, liver and lungs to collapse again at a moments notice—six weeks of late hours, beer and talk, talk, talk.

So I'm moving to the Hotel Pennsylvania, not half so nice to write in but where I'll be completely anonymous + not possibly run into anyone I know, and I'll try to get this silly preoccupation off my mind.

A long telegram from “Terre Haute” reached me here. It was sent to the Algonquin (how she remembered I stayed here?) + to lake Lure in duplicate. Utterly indiscreet as they might have been returned to her as undelivered. They leave Terre Haute the first of August + the ladies “may remain at the Inn a few days after that. I dont mind another parting, if it is a real parting + is not in that atmosphere of scandal + desperate risk so I shall probably go to Lake Lure from here (that is by way of Baltimore to arrive August 2nd. When I know she's alone I'll get in touch with her—not before. I don't even think I want to return to the Inn while she's there. It would be the same story over again + everyone would be less amused + less patient. And if it wasn't the same story it would just spoil something that was very nice.

Oh hell, I don't know what to do—about anything. All this seems very trivial when compared to such major problems as Zelda's health or your projected divorce, and work, + the revolution. Anyhow—wires to the Pennsylvania till further notice—hold mail for awhile.

With Love Always Scott Fitzg

A telegram from Terre Haute has just cleared up matters somewhat. Evidently Eleanor wants to go back to Ashville—in other words I am to be driven away, at least temporarily. So I think I'll go to Hendersonville or Saluda—Lake Lure is too hot.

So—my schedule will be

Hotel Pennsylvania till Tuesday—then Princeton (The Princeton Inn) for one night, then Baltimore for Wed night + Thursday. (Hotel Stafford). Arrive Ashville Friday morning—not going to hotel but as follows:

Before going to Hendersonville I want to see her—I want to see you too of course but I want to see her first because my plans depend on her stay at Grove Park. So I wish you would get word to the little devil when she returns to the Inn (not thru Eleanor, not in writing, + preferably after the consort leaves Wed.), that I will meet her at 11.30 Friday at that rathskeller place in the same position as Battita's bk. shop but one street further down the hill. She'll understand—tell her the place we had the bad caviarre. Don't tell her I'm arriving that morning. Tell her nothing.

Probably we'll talk for a couple of hours. If you are engaged that afternoon leave word where you are. You might tell the hotel I'll be back eventually—but as vaguely as possible—Ive been delayed by business + by sickness of my wife, any damn thing. But that if Im not back within another wk. I'll clear out my stuff.

All right—well, there's a plan at last. Nothing hurt but old man work—who is most important of all.

xxx. TO: Sara Murphy

August 15, 1935

ALS, 4 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly

Asheville, North Carolina

Dearest Sara

Today a letter from Gerald, a week old, telling me this + that about the awful organ music around us, made me think of you, and I mean think of you (of all people in the world you know the distinction). In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character—in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender:

“Her face was hard + lovely + pitiful”

and again

“He had been heavy, belly-frightened with love of her for years”

—in those and in a hundred other places I tried to evoke not you but the effect that you produce on men—the echoes and reverberations—a poor return for what you have given by your living presence, but nevertheless an artist’s (what a word!) sincere attempt to preserve a true fragment rather than a “portrait” by Mr. Sargent. And someday in spite of all the affectionate skepticism you felt toward the brash young man you met on the Riviera eleven years ago, you’ll let me have my little corner of you where I know you better than anybody—yes, even better than Gerald. And if it should perhaps be your left ear (you hate anyone to examine any single part of your person, no matter how appreciatively—that’s why you wore bright clothes) on June evenings on Thursday from 11:00 to 11:15 here’s what I’d say.

That not one thing you’ve done is for nothing. If you lost everything you brought into the world—if your works were burnt in the public square the law of compensation would still act (I am too moved by what I am saying to write it as well as I’d like). You are part of our times, part of the history of our race. The people whose lives you’ve touched directly or indirectly have reacted to the corporate bundle of atoms that’s you in a good way. I have seen you again + again at a time of confusion take the hard course almost blindly because long after your powers of ratiocination were exhausted you clung to the idea of dauntless courage. You were the one who said:

“All right, I’ll take the black checker men.”

I know that you + Gerald are one + it is hard to separate one of you from the other, in such a matter for example as the love + encouragement you chose to give to people who were full of life rather than to others, equally interesting and less exigent, who were frozen into rigid names. I don’t praise you for this—it was the little more, the little immeasurable portion of a millimeter, the thing at the absolute top that makes the difference between a World’s Champion and an also-ran, the little glance when you were sitting with Archie on the sofa that you threw at me and said:

“And—Scott!”

taking me in too, and with a heart so milked of compassion by your dearest ones that no person in the world but you would have that little more to spare.

Well—I got somewhat excited there. The point is: I rather like you, + I think that perhaps you have the makings of a good woman.

Gerald had invited me to come up for a weekend in the fall, probably Sept.

It’s odd that when I read over this letter it seems to convey no particular point, yet I’m going to send it. Like Cole’s eloquent little song.

“I think it’ll tell you how great you are.”

From your everlasting friend,
Scott

Notes:

Fitzgerald is referring to the last line of the verse in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.”

xxx. To: Eylin Convay

c. 1935

For Eylin Conway from her friend
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Inscription in Tender Is The Night (1934).

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

August 1935

AL, 6 pp. Princeton University

Asheville, North Carolina

I guess nobody won + everybody lost. This is your first tragedy—my second. I think I shall never let my heart go out of myself again. I somehow think you will, and if you do, that you will have learned something from all this so that your bill from the florist will be for laurel + gardenias—instead of white roses.

As this day wanes there is still no image of you emerging—only a memory of beauty and love and pain. The whole thing became a complete universal transcending the You that I first envisaged, so that what you did didn't matter because you could do no wrong. What you did became the standard of Tightness.

Things are falling into shape a little—I managed to write several nessessary letters, send out laundry + get a little of what passes for sleep. However, if I don't feel better tomorrow I shall get me a doctor + join the procession of casualties which has followed in the wake of all this. Still no solid food, skin in a shambles, a hell of a cough + a vision so blurred that I'm beginning to hang on to things again. I know its all beer + cigarettes but I want to be reassured. If I could ever get it through my head that I'm thirty-eight not twenty-eight!

I broke off my letter to lie down a minute and opened a magazine to an article about Texas—you are everywhere around me, I cant see myself going into that dining room again or on to the verandah. Except that I have reached a zero hour as to work I would move on somewhere. I wonder if you went to New Orleans + saw your friend Cagen and what you think about + if you are all set up in your house and seeing old friends and with new plans stirring. Summer is full + rich tonight with heat lightening over the mountains. I wish I liked something except you.

There are so many memories and such varied ones that an endless series of images passes before my eyes Mostly unconnected, without hope and without solution. Something is over. I had been looking for you a long time I think here + there about the world and when I found you there occurs this tragedy or this mess depending on whether Im introverting or extraverting on the matter. All I know is I'd like to sit for a thousand years and look at you and hear your voice with the lovely pathetic little "peep” at the crecendo of the stutter. I think the word lovely comes into my mind oftenest when I think of you.

Everything harsh that passed between us that awful day I blame on that champagne which I practically forced on you + my own garrulousness with Eleanor so let's try to think of happier things that came before. There was some rouge, do you remember? And a moon at the castle and some soap and Mr Hirsch, and thousands of Sanos and some tears and an insurance mans parade + Mr. Fry's odd find, and some stairs and an elevator and taxis and beer at breakfast, and so much laughter. And a rathskeller and a green lake and a bandage on my arm and a pink dress and a blue dress and rayon shirts and canned ale and a few golden hairs on my black sweater and you in my heart when I woke up + when I went to sleep and—Goodbye darling Beatrice.

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

August 1935

ALS, 5 pp. (Although the letter contains no salutation, it appears to be complete), Princeton University

Asheville, North Carolina

The writ of habeus corpus that extradited you was not a surprise but it was a shock. Of course you were right to go—anything less than a complete separation would have been a perfectly futile temporizing.

But you have become the only being with whom I have any desire to communicate any more and when you were gone there was the awful stillness of a desert.

Love seems to be like that, unexpected, often tragic, always terribly mortal and fragile.

When this reaches you a little of the past, our past, will have already died, so I'm trying to write without the emotion I feel. For the moment we are both life-tired, utterly weary—and unreconciled. The old dizziness has come back (dont worry—it'll probably leave in a day or so) + I simply lie + think. Except that I hate to think of you in the heat of Tennesee I am glad I didn't have to go again. And to stay here with Hop + Doctor Cade² between us was impossible. I didn't even mind much when they ganged up on us + could have faced fifty more of them with you at my side—but that was not to be.

This is letter number 4, the others having been destroyed, each one antiquated by the changing conditions. Some day darling Beatrice I will write something about you “that the world will not willingly let die,” but that time isn't yet and I cannot get much into the form of a letter. So let me simply clear up some loose ends:

The telegram fell into my hands by utter accident. (Do not blame Laura—she has been so kind and patient, and even wise within the limits of her curiously warped cosmos with its archaic demonology). I did not brood about it but I did think about it, and am still unaware what was in your dear distraught mind. It seemed to refer to some specific harm I had done you. And while there's been plenty of general harm done, any battle presupposes certain casualties. So I could only decide that you suspected some disloyalty to us. There has never been any, there have been some indiscretions but darling, in all good humor and even delight in your naivette the palm must certainly be handed to you in that regard. But after you called from Chattanoga I am quite agreed to consider it as something hysterical and exhausted, and unless you choose to bring it up again it is forgotten. There could be an indefinate series of post mortems about these last four days—but let's dont.

Eleanor is out of my thots. Dr. Cade doesn't agree with me, + broad-minded as he was about the triangular situation, he was very firm about “hands off” on the question of Eleanor. So, while I preserve my own opinions, I wont even restate them to you. And niether of us can be very smug about the neglect she came in for. Nevertheless there's a contradiction somewhere + I don't see why—oh hell, let's as Scotty says, skip it. I am too sick + miserable to think today. There doesn't seem to be anything in the world but you + me. You are the lovliest human being I have ever known.

Oh darlin I cant write any more. There is lots more to say + if you'll send me some safe adress I'll write you there. I love you—you are chrystal clear, blown glass with the sun cutting always very suddenly across it.

Thank you for the Sanos.³ I am sending you some books

Your loving Scott

Goodbye goodbye, you are part of me forever

Notes:

² Mrs. Dance's husband and their family physician.

³ Denicotinized cigarettes.

xxx. TO Margaret Case Harriman

From Turnbull.

Hotel Stafford Baltimore, [Maryland]

[August, 1935]

[The first page of this letter is missing.]

Anyhow I knew later that you knew all this. I started to come to New York yesterday afternoon, to see you, because I thought you'd think I'd run out on you, instead of on my own wretched state of mind and health (not a bit helped by a three-hour session with Zelda's doctors), got as far as Philadelphia, phoned from there to the Algonquin to change my forwarding address to The Stafford instead of my house, and took the train back to Baltimore. When I see you again I want everything to be right—even if I find you engrossed in a love affair with Geo V. and have no time for me.

I am still swollen up like a barrel but have reduced my beer consumption to nine bottles today. My spots are fading, but I still have a faint hope they may turn out to be leprosy and end my exigent private life forever so I can go on writing unperturbed.

Sweet Jesus! They have now disappeared from the torso and appeared on the sides of my neck! The end has come! Oh, if I had but known!

While I think of it—in regard to Joe Hergesheimer. Of course he is more established than I am, in the same way that Hugh Walpole is more “established” than D. H. Lawrence—established with whom? And I like his talent in half a dozen fine scenes and don't compare Walpole to him intellectually. But it is simply another sort of writing. Almost everything I write in novels goes, for better or worse, into the subconscious of the reader. People have told me years later things like “The Story of Benjamin Button” in the form of an anecdote, having long forgotten who wrote it. This is probably the most egotistic thing about my writing I've ever put into script or even said (it's one of those matters like the question of being a 1.1. that has to be left to demonstration—but in the former case [literary] the matter takes a spread of years). Everyone who has read Java Head knows that Hergesheimer wrote it—even those who remember a fairly novel torch cry from Cytherea, “I want to be outraged,” will remember Hergesheimer. But his two highest flights, the only two that really became part of the conscience of our race, probably wouldn't be remembered. The awful loneliness of the girl and the man in the forest in Episode I of the Three Black Pennies (the rest of the 3 legged thing was n.g. pretentious and superimposed form)—and the other was the burning of Linda's mother's hair in a permanent.

Surely that is a very mild contribution to have made to the human consciousness!

This letter is getting as long as the other. I remember so many things you said—about how New Yorkers' lives were spaced to have always something, there was no time left for loneliness—oh, there's so much to hear you say, no matter how much I'd be cynical about—

Affectionately,
Scott

I may be North again in three weeks—I must go to Carolina first and write one story or two.

Postcript: In the morning.

I sent a telegram. I feel so sick—I'm lying in a gallon of sweat as I write this—that I'd call a doctor except I've been through this before and would be ashamed to ask him what to do when I know! I hope the telegram was coherent. Will try to lie here and discipline myself and note down what goes thru my head in fever and make something out of these lost three days.

And I can all too well see us sitting together in “one of those outdoor cafes or whatever they call them.”

Whatever they call them!

xxx. TO James Boyd

From Turnbull.

[Grove Park Inn] [Asheville, North Carolina]

[August, 1935]

Dear Jim:

Long Hunt came. I read it immediately. I liked it—it has the same quality of all your books, and yourself is in it. (To digress for a minute—I've had several clippings lately that found qualities in common between your work and mine. I was trying to think what they were, for God knows our subject matter, pasts, etc., have been miles apart, but I think I know—it's a sort of nostalgic sadness that runs through them. I don't know whether it's because we both read Keats a lot when we were young, or because we neither of us have been entirely well men throughout a large part of our maturity but there is undoubtedly a similarity of mood between The Dark Shore and Tender Is the Night. God what a parenthesis.)

Anyhow Long Hunt is a haunting book. I have quarrels with it as I have with every book ever written, including one's own, of course, but I like it because of its sharp individuality that follows it through the—wait a minute, let me start that sentence over. You have a strong sense of the common good, the common weal, whether in tribes, frontier cities, “society,” etc., but the individuality never deserts you. They are both you.

I have just emerged not totally unscathed, I'm afraid, from a short violent love affair which will account for the somewhat sentimental cadence of this letter and for the lack of ink in the vicinity.¹ It's no one I ever mentioned to you but it was in the bag when I came to Southern Pines and I had done much better to let it alone because this was scarcely a time in my life for one more emotion. Still it's done now and tied up in cellophane and—and maybe someday I'll get a chapter out of it. God, what a hell of a profession to be a writer. One is one simply because one can't help it. Much better to follow the Long Hunt. With all regards and good wishes to you both—hope we meet again this summer. You write a nice letter—I wish I did.

Your Friend,
Scott Fitzg

Notes:

¹ The letter was written in pencil.

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

c. 6 August 1935

ALS, 3 pp. New York Public Library

Asheville, North Carolina

Dear Menk:

Without any desire to begin a sleeveless correspondence I have found the urge to write you irresistable. In a world that in the last five years has become for me a world of children it was so damn nice to meet a man again, to know that one's shoulders wern't the only ones that were broken + bowed a bit trying to carry the awful burden of responsibility out of this dark cavern (Jesus, what a metaphor!)

We have both lived too deeply in our own generations to have much communication except with a mutual respect but that you accepted me as an equeal—even tho it was the exterior factor of a terriblee mutual grief that acted as the catylitic agent—settled something that had been haunting me about my relations with men since my tacit break with Ernest Hemmingway. I suppose like most people whose stuff is creative fiction there is a touch of the feminine in me (never in any sense tactile—I have always been woman crazy, God knows)—but there are times when it is nice to think that there are other wheel horses pulling the whole load of human grief + dispair, + trying to the best of their ability to mould it into form—the thing that made Lincoln sit down in Jeff Davis' chair in Richmond and ask the guards to leave him alone there for a minute Dont answer this. It's really nothing but a bread + butter letter

Yrs
F. Scott Fitzg

Postsript

As to George.¹ It was so damn hot + it seemed awful to keep you standing there in the hall, so I didn't finish what Id intended. There was one point in 1920 when Geo. was older than me, + then there was suddenly a point where I was older than he was—about the time I was 26. Geo. was + wanted to remain a young man + I wanted to grow old + live + break, with my race. There was no further communication except my gratitude to him for first recognizing that I had a style. In the matter of discussing him no apologetics (your word!) are nessessary between you + me.
FSF

Notes:

¹ George Jean Nathan.

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

ALS , 2 pp. Princeton University

11 Aug. '35

Dear Scott:—

If at any time during this late summer or Fall you are to be free for a week-end (one during which I am going to Saranac Lake) I'd like so much to take you up with me. I go every 2 weeks. A train leaves at 1015 p.m. (daylight),—one reaches here at 730 Monday a.m.

It has occurred to me in all this that you alone have always—known shall I say?—or felt?—that Sara was—that there was about Sara—something infinitely touching,—something infinitely sad. Life begins to mark her for a kind of cumulous tragedy, I sometimes think.¹ Surely only those who have been as honest and trusting with life as she has really suffer. What irony! She needs nourishment—from adults—from those who are fond of her.

[Patrick's temperature and pulse remain where they descended. His appetite is failing. The poison causes this, the doctors say. He has lost 7 pounds since he went to Saranac Lake.]² This drains Sara. I can tell from her voice.

I wonder so much how Zelda is.—It has been worrying us too,—your health. Be careful, Scott,—about everything!

your affectionate admonisher, Gerald

I'd like to feel I know where you are from time to time.
G.

Notes:

¹ One of the Murphys' sons, Baoth, had died that year; the other son, Patrick, had tuberculosis.

² Murphy's brackets.

See Fitzgerald's 15 August letter to Sara Murphy

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

Wire. Princeton University

ASHEVILLE NCAR 506P 1935 AUG 20 PM 4 40
TAKE YOUR MEDICINE AND GO ON STOP THE WORLD WASNT BUILT FOR A PARLOR CAR BUT THE BRAVE INHERIT THE RAILROAD SYSTEM STOP COURAGE OUGHT TO MEAN SOMETHING TO US NOW¹
UNSIGNED.

Notes:

¹ Beatrice Dance had been hospitalized in San Antonio.

xxx. FROM: Sara Murphy

ALS, 4 pp. Princeton University

Aug 20 [1935]

P.O. Box 423 Saranac Lake

My dearest Scott,—I was (+ am) touched beyond words at your sweet letter—it did me a lot of good too—thank you for wanting to,—+ writing it—(I so often want to do things + then don't) It is a moment when I am raw to the feelings toward me of my friends (like the man who scraped his fingers to feel the combinations of safes.)—So that any demonstration of affection,—not to mention a regular “letter of recommendation” such as you sent me,—throws me into a comfortable state of basking—

I don't think the world is a very nice place—And all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, + be very very grateful for one's friends—because they are the best there is,—+ make up for many another thing that is lacking—And it seems not to matter nearly so much what one thinks or things—as what one feels about them.

I hope you are coming up to see us in Sept.? Gerald said he thought you would + we are all delighted. Would you like to bring Scotty?

There isn't the least danger, as the guest-house is separate—and all Patrick's dishes, silver, + laundry even are done apart. And we have had lots of guest-children + so take infinite precautions. We should love to see her again. I should love to see Zelda too—I think of her face so often, + so wish it had been drawn (not painted, drawn.) It is rather like a young Indian's face, except for the smouldering eyes. At night, I remember, if she was excited, they turned black—+ impenetrable—but always full of impatience—at something—, the world I think—she wasn't of it anyhow—not really

I loved her. + felt a sympathetic vibration to her violence. But she wasn't throttled,—you mustnt ever think she was except by herself—She had an inward life + feelings that I don't suppose anyone ever touched—not even you—She probably thought terribly dangerous secret thoughts—+ had pent-in rebellions. Some of it showed through her eyes,—but only to those who loved her. Why do I use the past tense?—Because she may very well be all right yet. I have been thinking about her a great deal lately—I read a Christian Science book the other day—(to please a C. Scientist friend)—And it said the easiest people (for them) to cure were those who were out of their minds. Why don't you try it? It might very well be true. Anything might be true, Scott, + will for you, if you like. Because God knows we have all of us tried every material aid we or anybody else could think of—It might be a good thing to turn to the spiritual + hope the bon Dieu won't notice that it is a last resort!

We all send love, + hope to see you Sometime Soon. And thank you for the Comforting letter—I needed it—

Your old halfbaked but affectionate friend—(for good, as You must know.)
Sara.

How are you?

xxx. TO Beatrice Dance

From Turnbull (here name of recipient was deleted).

[Grove Park Inn] [Asheville, North Carolina]

[Early September, 1935]

Beatrice:

This is going to be as tough a letter to read as it is to write. When I was young I found a line in Samuel Butler's Notebooks—the worst thing that can happen to a man is the loss of his health, the second worst the loss of his money. All other things are of minor importance.

This is only a half truth but there are many times in life when most of us, and especially women, must live on half truths. The utter synthesis between what we want and what we can have is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my youth when I had it, or thought I did.

The point of the Butler quotation is that in times of unhappiness and emotional stress that seemed beyond endurance, I used it as a structure, upon which to build up a hierarchy of comparative values:

—This comes first.

—This comes second.

This is what you, Beatrice, are not doing!

Your charm and the heightened womanliness that makes you attractive to men depends on what Ernest Hemingway once called (in an entirely different connection) “grace under pressure.” The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them makes that tensity in you that is the secret of all charm—when you let that balance become disturbed, don't you become just another victim of self-indulgence?—breaking down the solid things around you and, moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable?—imagine having to have had to call in Doctor Cole in this matter! The indignity! I have plenty [of] cause to be cynical about women's nervous resistance, but frankly I am concerned with my misjudgment in thinking you were one of the strong—and I can't believe I was mistaken.

The tough part of the letter is to send you this enclosure—which you should read now [a loving, dependent letter from Zelda]—

—now you've read it?

There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them—and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty. When people get mixed up they try to throw out a sort of obscuring mist, and then the sharp shock of a fact—a collision seems to be the only thing to make them sober-minded again. You once said, “Zelda is your love!” (only you said “lu-uv"). And I gave her all the youth and freshness that was in me. And it's a sort of investment that is as tangible as my talent, my child, my money. That you had the same sort of appeal to me, deep down in the gut, doesn't change the other.

The harshness of this letter will have served its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence outside you—and in doing so remind you that you have an existence outside of me. I don't belittle your fine intelligence by supposing that anything written here need be said, but I thought maybe the manner of saying it might emphasize those old dull truths by which we live. We can't just let our worlds crash around us like a lot of dropped trays.

—You have got to be good.

—Your sense of superiority depends upon the picture of yourself as being good, of being large and generous and all-comprehending, and just and brave and all-forgiving. But if you are not good, if you don't preserve a sense of comparative values, those qualities turn against you—and your love is a mess and your courage is a slaughter.

Scott

xxx. TO: Laura Guthrie

ALS, 6 pp. Princeton University

Hotel Stafford stationery. Baltimore, Maryland

[pm Sept. 23, 1935]

Sweet Laura:

This can’t be more than a note to answer your nice letter.

The news from the West is pretty terrible—I have seen plenty people disappointed in love from old maids who thought they had lost their only chance to Dorothy Parker who tried to kill herself when Charlie MacArthur threw her over—but I never saw a girl who had so much, take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more so it could scarcely be classed even as a dissapointment—merely one of those semi-tragic facts that must be faced. Its very strange, and sad. I have nothing from her except the wire.

For myself all goes well. I woke up on the train after a fine sleep, came to the hotel + went to work with Mrs Owens before noon. We discussed all the “ifs” and will decide nothing before a week. Scottie arrived like a sun goddess at 5.00 o’clock, all radiant + glowing. We had a happy evening walking and walking the dark streets. The next morning she was invited to visit in the country for the wk end + I continued my picking up of lose ends. First Zelda—she was fine, almost herself, has only one nurse now + has no more intention of doing away with herself. It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have, even now, closer to her than to any other human being. This is not a denial of other emotions—oh, you understand.

The bank matter was all straight—yours were the only checks that suffered. I’m sorry as hell for the inconvenience.

Send me the page of notes with the stuff about the Ashville flower carnival—I’m going to write one story here—I mapped it out today. I want to see how well I can stand this climate under working conditions. Though I still think I will be back in Ashville in two weeks. Also better tell Post Office my adress is here; they probably have hospital or Inn.

I have heard of Col. Bryan. Young Page, by the way, is not the boy I took him for. He was not head of the Princetonian but only copy editor, + no great sensation. I was thinking of another man. Have ordered the Wm. Boyce Thompson book for you.

My story is about Carolina

I have stopped all connections with M. Barleycorn

The exema is almost gone but not quite

Baltimore is warm but pleasant—I love it more than I thought—it is so rich with memories—it is nice to look up the street + see the statue of my great uncle, + to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda + I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought + not melancholy at all.

Tell me your news.

Lovingly + gratefully
Scott

Notes:

Mrs. Guthrie served as confidante of and typist for Fitzgerald in Asheville.

Beatrice Dance, a married woman with whom Fitzgerald had a brief affair during the summer of 1935.

The Magnate: William Boyce Thompson and His Time (1935), by Hermann Hagedorn.

xxx. To Christian Gauss

From Turnbull.

Hotel Stafford Baltimore, Maryland

September 30, 1935

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is an imposition coming at the very beginning of the term when I know you are busy, so if you can grant this favor please do it at your leisure. As you know my daughter was brought up in France and I have conscientiously labored to keep her bilingual. This is now reduced to fortnightly conversations with a French woman and to supplement this I wanted some work in grammar—I mean advanced grammar. She is rather widely read in French (Hugo, Dumas, Moliere. etc., and the classic poets) and I'd like to have for her some junior and senior French examination papers which I can have administered to her here. Is it within your power to have a sheaf of old ones dug up for me, or can you tell me where I can find some?

This is an odd request coming from such a wretched linguistic scholar as I was.

With best wishes to you always and with high hopes of seeing you sometime this fall,

Ever yours,
Scott Fitzg

xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich

Telegram, Syracuse University

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland,

October 4, 1935.

PLANE DUE CAMDEN AIRPORT 820 A TODAY EASTERN LINES ...

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

Cambridge Arms Baltimore, Maryland

[Fall, 1935]

Dear Margaret:

Pardon! We moved. I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. All politesse ceased to exist for a thick week during which I lived in a haze of cigarette smoke and nervous querulousness. I don't even know why I wrote you about Scottie save that on my occasional emergencies all matters in the outside world seemed of equally vital importance—or unimportance: the N.R.A. and the Princeton-Williams game, the decline of the democratic dogma and the faint worry of a child. Anyhow, thanks.

I destroyed Andrew's letter—he is so level-headed in his analyses and he keeps growing. I wish I knew him better but I won't though, until he is about 19. He might know me but I won't know him because until then he will give me a presentation of himself that he thinks will impress or please me. This will not prevent him, I repeat, from finding out more and more about me if we meet often.

I know this Pell's brother who was in '28. This one ² had a school in New England for awhile, didn't he, or was assistant headmaster somewhere or taught at St. Mark's? I've heard well of him. He was in Ivy, I think, and well liked, but on principle I'm against schoolmarms, male or female—though there's just the ghost of one in me. Common sense tells me that there are rules but, like all modern men, the shade of Rousseau haunts me. (Bertrand Russell's Rousseau school is a flop—I know that at practically first hand—I've seen and talked to both parents and products.) That's too big a subject for a letter and we've probably talked of it before.

Zelda is much much better—I've taken her out twice; suicidal tendency vanishing—interest in life returning.

Please enclose this to Andrew when you write.

Oh—I know what I wanted to tell you—I think I'm about to write a series of sketches for radio about father and daughter—I'll tell you about it when we meet. In a week we'll be in our real apartment (this is a substitute) in the same building, and you and Frances must come and give us your benediction, or are there only dates and cotillions now? We talk about you all a lot.

Always affectionately,
Scott Fitzg——

The Harvard game is November 9th—just a reminder.

Notes:

² Walden Pell, headmaster of St. Andrew's School.

xxx. TO Joseph Hergesheimer

From Turnbull.

[Baltimore, Maryland]

[Probably Fall, 1935]

Dear Joe:

You talked to someone who didn't like this book¹—I don't know who, or why they didn't. But I could tell in the Stafford Bar that afternoon when you said that it was “almost impossible to write a book about an actress” that you hadn't read it thru because the actress fades out of it in the first third and is only a catalytic agent.

Sometime will you open it at the middle, perhaps at page 155, and read on for five or ten minutes—? If it were not for my sincere admiration for your judgment I would forego this plea. You were not the only one repelled by the apparent triviality of the opening—I would like this favorite among my books to have another chance in the crystal light of your taste.

Ever yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Page 155—et seq.

Notes:

¹ Tender Is the Night. This letter was Fitzgerald's inscription to Hergesheimer.

xxx. To Isabel Owens

ALS, 2 pages, in pencil, with original holograph envelope. Auction.

Hendersonville, N.C.

9 November 1935

The Post story was begun & dished as I'm not sending out another doubtful, thank you. I'd Die for You evidently hasn't sold yet, nor the radio idea (which of course will be slow). This money came from Esquire. I can't see coming back with the Post story unfinished & trying to do it with the inevitable storms breaking around. Everything was going well until the offspring of my Tryon friend arrived with the idea that I was playing fast and loose with Mama. My God! when he probably couldn't be sure who his own father is --…. I had to let this snippy Etonian kid (and they're trained to be snooty) - I had to let him sass me when I could have killed him, this time without beer openers!… All is well now but it cost me three days work.

Notes:

Fitzgerald's Tryon friend was Nora Phipps Flynn, one of the famous Langhorne girls of Virginia, and a sister of Nancy Astor. Her husband, Lefty, had been a football star at Yale, and a Hollywood actor and stuntman. It was her Etonian son, Tommy, who provided Anthony Powell with the title for his novel A Question of Upbringing.

xxx. To Isabel Owens

ALS, 1 page, in pencil. Auction.

Hendersonville, N.C.

November 1935

Gradually feeling better but no plans at this moment. Here is $50 to carry on with. Scotty is with the M. B. Flinns in Tryon & well taken care of for four or five days anyhow. You will get a wire from Wilmington or word from a lawyer in Balt. relative to apartment squabble. Still intend to bluff out of lease if humanly possible. In any case can't work there possibly with that music. Send me what ms. you have when you have a real address, also any news. More later.

Have sent 1st National that stock cert with instructions to sell. Find out what they realized on it.

xxx. TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy

Wire. Honoria Murphy Donnelly

BALTIMORE MD
1935 DEC 26 AM 8 15
WE THREE WERE TOGETHER TODAY AND WE THOUGHT OF ALL FIVE OF YOU AS ALWAYS TOGETHER
SCOTT AND GELDA.

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

I suppose that we are two blatherskites living in stone huts in some distant Irish valley. You and I, I mean. I count so on my rare dish of talk with you. I guess we are Irish.

31 Dec. '35

Dear Scott:—

I have been here since the 24th. Honoria¹ was here also with us and went to the Myers at Bedford Village for New Year's day. To-morrow I return to New York.

We have thought of you very much these days and wondered if our wire would reach you. It was good to hear from you and that you were able to be together. Thank you for that message, Scott. Of all our friends, it seems to me that you alone knew how we felt these days,—still feel. You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel. Sara's courage and the amazing job which she is doing for Patrick make unbearably poignant the tragedy of what has happened—what life has tried to do to her. I know now that what you said in “Tender is the Night” is true. Only the invented part of our life,—the unreal part—has had any scheme any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed. In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot,—the children, their growth, their health, their future. How ugly and blasting it can be;—and how idly ruthless.

When you come North let me talk to you. I am probably going to England to the factories late this month. “Trade” has proven an efficient drug,—harmful but efficient.

Our love to you all, Gerald

Hotel Russel, 45 Park Avenue N.Y.C.

Notes:

¹ The Murphys' daughter.

1936

xxx. TO Julian Street

From Turnbull.

Cambridge Arms Apartments 1 East 34th Street Baltimore, Maryland

February 24, 1936

Dear Mr. Street:

That was an awfully nice letter. Like the other it has made me think that you are indeed a friend even though we have seldom met. There is a third article which completes the trilogy of depression.² Of course now that things seem a little brighter, or at least the intensity of that despair is fading, I can see that the writing of them was a sort of catharsis but at the time of writing them what I said seemed absolutely real. And may I add that this is no claim to being completely out of the woods except that I would not be inclined to write that way again under the present circumstances. I see, too, that an unfriendly critic might damn the series as the whining of a spoilt baby, but in that case so is most poetry the complaints of the eternally youthful thing that persists in the writer and merely the fact that this is prose separates it from a great many of the mutterings of Shelley, Stephen Crane and Verlaine. I am not comparing this in quality with great poems of lamentation. I am simply saying that it is not essentially different in mood.

Thank you again for your letter. I wish we could meet sometime soon when I have fully emerged from this small abyss.

Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² “The “Crack-Up” series.

xxx. TO: Leslie McFarlane

February 26, 1936

ALS, 1 page, accompanied by the original mailing envelope addressed in Fitzgerald's hand, Auction

There is a 3rd piece to come in Esquire in which the writer emerges somewhat from his abyss. I am glad I wrote the article, or rather the three short articles, not because they furnished any special catharsis but because they evoked such letters as yours from various literary men and women. One of the ghastly aspects of my gloom was a horrible feeling that I wasn't being read. And I'd rather have a sharp criticism of my pet child Tender Is the Night such as yours was, than the feeling of pouring out endless words to fall upon us ears as I had had.

I rather think I'm done as a writer—maybe not, of course. The fact that I can still write a vivid metaphor or solve a technical problem with some suavity wouldn't be an indication one way or another. However time will tell, and in the meanwhile I appreciate the goodness of heart that prompted your letter.

Notes:

Fitzgerald first makes reference to three essays he wrote for Esquire— 'The Crack-Up,' 'Pasting It Together,' and 'Handle With Care'—published consecutively in the first three months of 1936. The final essay—the one in which "the writer emerges somewhat from his abyss"—begins: 'I have spoken in these pages of how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack-up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred.' In the piece, he hopelessly describes a coming-to-terms with some disappointments in his life, concluding that 'the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.' In this letter, he goes on to reply to criticism of his "pet child" Tender Is the Night, which he considered to be his greatest novel. Published in 1934 after nearly ten years of on-and-off work, it initially received a tepid response from critics. It would be Fitzgerald's last novel published during his lifetime, lending some credence to his sorrowful remark: "I rather think I'm done as a writer."

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

TLS, 4 pp. Princeton University

Cambridge Arms Apartment, Baltimore, Maryland,

March 6, 1936.

Six months have passed away and I think I can write you objectively. For myself don't take that little trilogy in Esquire too seriously.¹ For yourself I knew you would come back to life. The occasion for this letter is the disturbing note about Eleanor. Has she destroyed, or do you think she has the data that I got from New Haven?

There is one last article to appear next month in Esquire. I started to enclose it but haven't it.

My regards to Hop and to Dr. Cade, though the former will naturally not feel very warm about them, and for the latter I have a certain cynicism. I don't think a diagnostician can set himself up as a psychiatrist. The field is simply too large. We've been over that before in Asheville.

What on God's earth I could have told him that upset you has been on my mind all autumn, and I still can't imagine how in the short conversation between Cade and me anything disturbing could have transpired. Still, I remember how I upset Eleanor in ten minutes, so anything is possible. I remember our conversations as about like this:

a. His career as a medical man in Texas.

b. You and Hop and my instinctive liking for Hop and continued reiteration on my part that there was no question of any further continuance of our “affair.” To resume: that the grief it inevitably caused Hop would be an essentially maturing element in his life—a viewpoint from which I privately was in doubt about, but didn't argue over.

c. Some stray talk on his part about Tula's² custody, as if you and I were headed for divorce and remarriage, and about the fact that you had once been rich—as if I was some sort of fortune hunter. An idea that he persistently couldn't erase from his mind.

d. That Eleanor was a blind—my concern about her and such matters being utterly bogus. I showed him something from the American Psychiatric View that had just come in, to convince him differently, but it didn't seem to take.

That's all I can remember of our conversations on those tragic mornings with all of us in a state of frayed nerves.

I know Hop and I talked only of college and the military profession, and vaguely of Eleanor—and of perhaps a few trifles. We were both so upset we might have murdered each other if we'd discussed you so we instinctively avoided the subject.

With all my heart I appreciate your remembering me at Christmas with the gift of Fortune, and with all my heart I am sorry to have brought so much sorrow into your life.

But the purpose of this letter is again Eleanor (and you can show this letter to Hop, but not to Dr. Cade, because their are strictures on him in it.) I think the place for her is Chicago. See if she has that data. If the situation becomes difficult write or wire me here and I can get information from the tops in Baltimore without any trouble.

With dearest affection always, Scott Fitzg

P.S. I did also say to Dr. Cade: that I went away to avoid the situation. Not in any case to avoid you! Perhaps that confused what he told you.

P.S. 2. Remember this: houses grow larger and streets bigger after we have left them. At least I have always found it that way.

Notes:

¹ “The Crack-Up” (February 1936), “Pasting It Together” (March 1936), and “Handle with Care” (April 1936).

² Tylah Dance.

xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor

c. Spring 1936

TLS, 1 p. (with holograph postscripts). Princeton University

Asheville, North Carolina

Tuesday afternoon

Dearest Ceci,

Things have been in a wild mess here since Christmas with literally nothing but sickness. Zelda's been worse and your correspondent (for several months now a worthy citizen who touches no liquor in any form) is a very distracted man. Hence he is not the best company for a child on her spring vacation, especially as Scottie has been living high on a diet of parties and is beginning to believe all life is a dance. If you can keep her three or four days while I get a story in motion you'd be a life saver indeed.

I enclose check for fifteen dollars which would cover her expenses.

With much love to you all and wishes that I could see you too.
Scott

This seems silly—but Scotty is precocious—don't let any 15 yr. old rake kill her in a drunken auto—ah me—the sins of the fathers!

P.S.2 She has a ghost of a cold. If she seems stuffy + cross it may mean a tempo. This is just an improbability from an old worrier.

xxx. TO Arnold Gingrich

From Turnbull.

[The Cambridge Arms] [Baltimore, Maryland]

March 20, 1936

Dear Arnold:

In my “Ant” satire,¹ phrase

Lebanon School for the Blind

should be changed to

New Jersey School for Drug Addicts.

It will be an easy change to make, easy to find in such a short piece. It seems important because the former seems in poor taste because of war blind, etc.

This is a good issue—fine piece by Ernest, and I enjoyed the Mex divorce. Haven't got through the issue.

I get letters from all over (mostly from writers) about the “Crack-Up” series: Alec Woollcott, Julian Street, G. B. Stern, Nancy Hoyt, James Boyd, etc., and from old friends, and naturally am rather touched. What the general response is is more questionable but there have been many of those too.

I will have another piece along shortly but I know there's no hurry and I'm doing a ballet story or trying to for Goldwyn and Miriam Hopkins. Let me know when you want it.

Ever yours,
Scott Fitz

Please don't forget this change in “Ants.”

Notes:

¹ “The Ants at Princeton,” Esquire, June, 1936.

xxx. TO: Sara Murphy

March 30, 1936

ALS, 2 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly

Dearest Sara (and Gerald too, if he’s not in London)

I want news of you. The winter has presented too many problems here for me to come north, even as far as New York + my last word of you was by kindness of Archie—and not too encouraging.

If you read the little trilogy I wrote for Esquire you know I went through a sort of “dark night of the soul” last autumn, and again and again my thoughts reverted to you and Gerald, and I reminded myself that nothing had happened to me with the awful suddenness of your tragedy of a year ago, nothing so utterly conclusive and irreparable. I saw your face, Sara, as I saw it a year ago this month, and Gerald’s face last fall when I met him in the Ritz Bar, and I felt very close to you—and correspondingly detached from Ernest, who has managed to escape the great thunderbolts, and Nora Flinn whom the Gods haven’t even shot at with much seriousness. She would probably deny that and she helped me over one black week when I thought this was probably as good a time to quit as any, but as I said to her the love of life is essentially as incommunicable as grief.

I am moving Zelda to a sanitarium in Ashville—she is no better, though the suicidal cloud was lifted—I thought over your Christian Science idea + finally decided to try it but the practitioner I hit on wanted to begin with “absent treatments,” which seemed about as effectual to me as the candles my mother keeps constantly burning to bring me back to Holy Church—so I abandoned it. Especially as Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Appollo and all the stock paraphanalea of insane asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scotty isn’t, because I’ve brought Scotty up hard as nails (Perhaps that’s fatuous, but I think I have.) Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s “terribly dangerous secret thoughts” I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her—

The only way to show me you forgive this great outpouring is to write me about yourselves. Some night when you’re not too tired, take yourself a glass of sherry and write me as lovely and revealing letter as you did before. Willy-nilly we are still in the midst of life and all true correspondence is nessessarily sporadic but a letter from you or Gerald always pulls at something awfully deep in me. I want the best news, but in any case I want to know

With Dearest Affection to You All
Scott

Cambridge Arms Appts. Baltimore Md

Notes:

The Murphys’ son Baoth had died in March 1935 of meningitis.

xxx. FROM: Sara Murphy

ALS, 8 pp. Princeton University

April 3 [1936]

Dearest Scott,—I was so glad to get your news—we have wondered So often, Gerald and I,—and Dos + Katy¹ and I—and Alice-Lee Myers and I, Where you were + how Zelda is doing + how big Scotty is,—+ how you were. Gerald is back—since the 16th March—he was gone 6 weeks—and though according to himself he had a dull + terribly busy time it must have been good for him, as change always is, as he came back looking 100% better or at least 100% more interested in the world—(which I suppose means the same thing + is the best we have.) Is that the Worthwhile school of thought? (If so, I take it back—) Anyhow he is back in harness in Mark Cross Co—+looks awfully nice, + better. A little too thin perhaps—but he says I always say that. We here on the Magic Mountain are really doing better too. I am really encouraged about Patrick—,you will be glad to hear, I know. He is still in bed (a year -)- a half!) + still has temperature—if that went down he could get up—And though he has his ups + downs which we expect, + scared us to death by having grippe about 5 or 6 weeks ago—he looks + acts—+ the symptoms are better,—+ from weighing 59 lbs last Sept. now weighs 80—So you see that is concrete evidence, even if one couldn't see + feel the change. I am sure, Scott, he is going to be allright + will yet have a good life, quiet perhaps, without violence, + yet maybe better than any of ours—in the end. I hope so indeed.

I did indeed read your trilogy in Esquire—+ think you must feel better for it—as it seemed to me to accomplish that,—get something off your chest,—if not much more not more for anybody else, I mean. Do you feel better? Do you know, I never realized, till I read those pieces (of course you won't care what your “half-baked” old friend thinks,—but you can tell me so in yr next letter.) I never realized, to what extent you thought you could run things + control your life by just wanting to—(Even I knew that much.) Do you really mean to say you honestly thought “life was something you dominated if you were any good"? Even if you meant your own life it is arrogant enough,—but life! Well if you thought that,— out of College, married, a father, travelled, seen life, etc etc—I give up. I can't fight you on paper, but there are several very loose stones in your basement, rocking the house. Let us have another argument—Sometime—(proving nothing, + neither side giving way an inch!!) Oh how wrong you are,—Scott, about so many things—but nevertheless go on,—I hope you do?—regarding Gerald + me—as your “inalienable friends"—But I do think Henley's man who said “my head is bloody but unbowed” is better than you on your old rifle range—They are both heroics if you like,—but the first is cheerfuller. If you just won't admit a thing it doesn't exist (as much.)—Even not admitting,—rebelling, dragging one's feet + fighting every inch of the way, one must admit one can't control it—one has to take it,—+ as well as possible—That is all I know—I remember once your saying to me—in Montana at Harry's Bar,² you + Dotty³ were talking about your disappointments, + you turned to me + said: I don't suppose you have ever known despair? I remember it so well as I was furious, + thought my God the man thinks no one knows despair who isn't a writer + can describe it. This is my feeling about your articles.—You mustn't think from this that I can't know + feel what you have been through—+ do think + feel about it oftener than you think—You have been cheated (as we all have been in one way or another) but to have Zelda's wisdom taken away,—which would have meant everything to you,—is crueller even than death. She would have felt all the right things through the bad times—and found the words to help,—for you, + for her real friends—I miss her too—You have had a horrible time—worse than any of us, I think—and it has gone on for so long—that is what gets us, + saps our vitality—your spirit, + courage are an example to us all—(Even though I do think your thinking processes are faulty!) And we will always have a warm spot in the heart, + a lighted candle for you—That is forever.—

With love—Your old + very devoted (though irritating) friend—
Sara

I didn't know I was going to write such a long letter! And no writer either. When are you coming up to see us? And you never said how you were yourself?⁴

Notes:

¹ John and Katy Dos Passos.

² When Patrick was being treated for tuberculosis at Montana-Vermala in the Swiss Alps, the Murphys took over a local tavern and named it Harry's Bar.

³ Dorothy Parker.

⁴ See Fitzgerald's 30 March letter to the Murphys in Letters.

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

[The Cambridge Arms] [Baltimore, Maryland]

[Spring, 1936]

Dear Margaret:

Just a footnote to our conversation: you of course recognized the allusion to William James' remark when I spoke of “tender-minded” and “tough-minded” and said that I was the former and you the latter. It has no relation to sensitiveness but rather to sensibility. And I am not at all sure which I am. I think perhaps the creative worker has the privilege of jumping from one attitude to the other, or of balancing on the line. I am continually surprised both by my softness and by my hardiness.

Ever yours,
Scott Fitz

Read the article by Antheil if you get the last Esquire.

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.

April 21, 1936.

Dear Beatrice,

Just got your wire about my story¹ and being at the Grove Park Inn I am irresistibly impelled to write you. The wire was forwarded from Baltimore.

My wife had reached a stalemate there and I had brought her here to Dr. Robert Carroll's² hospital. He seems to stand as one of the best psychiatrists in the East—and naturally in finding out that a man of such stature was in Asheville, I was reminded of our men at Appalachian Hall last summer. But apparently that is regarded in high psychiatric circles as mostly front.

Dr. Carroll's place is on the outskirts of town here, and Zelda seems comparatively happy there. She is no longer in a suicidal state but has an equally difficult halucination which I won't go into. It seems pretty certain she will never be able to function in the world again, at least not without a companion. But I am always full of hope, and a miracle may still happen.

In my quarter things are brighter than they were last year at this time when life was a matter of the sick trying to help the sick. The other day I took her to Chimney Rock where her family used to come when she was a child. And in trying (unsuccessfully) to locate the boarding house where they had stayed, the cloud of tragedy seemed sometimes to lift. As I told you, sometimes one would never know she was ill.

Thanks for your remembering about my story. Daughter also liked it and it seems to be having quite a circulation at her school.

The winter went with the usual difficulty specified for men these last few years, and I was glad to get back to Asheville with a few weeks of rest in view. My daughter is going to Miss Walker's school next fall and Vassar two years from this autumn—at least that is the plan. She wants to have some sort of debut, East or West, and I am taking her to Saint Paul this summer for the first time since she was an infant. Then I think we will go to Europe for a few weeks in June.

This letter seems largely taken up with my domestic affairs. I meant it to be otherwise. The hotel is startlingly familiar with Mr. Frye, Mrs. Reeves, and Mrs. Guthrie telling fortunes sometimes, and Mr. Barnett, and Mac and Ulysses and Charlie, and Mr. Rickey, who married his daughter the other day to a man about his own age, and Mrs. Dooley always looking like a diamond. And Asheville is the same with brightly painted working girls down town. I asked whether the set-up at the Castle had changed, but it seems Mrs. What's-her-name has sold out.

The movie magazine clipping arrived—seems there was some prize offered for the best letter. But Scottie sent her letter to three magazines and they all published it. It was a Pyrrhic victory because she didn't get the prize. She said she constructed it on the best models.

I think of you always and hope that things go well with you. I am glad that Eleanor's illness was no more serious.

Always, with deepest affection, Scott

Notes:

¹ Possibly “Fate in Her Hands,” The American Magazine (April 1936), a story about a fortune-teller that was loosely based on Laura Guthrie.

² Psychiatrist at Highland Hospital.

xxx. TO Asa Bushnell.

From Turnbull.

[The Cambridge Arms] Baltimore, Maryland

April 27, 1936

Dear Asa:

Is this a crazy idea? Perhaps architects will laugh at it but a recent editorial in an Alumni News asked for suggestions. My idea is to have as a building for the library a reproduction of what was torn down to make way for the present library. This part of the library would be above ground, and a series of subterranean galleries covered with glass brick radiating therefrom would house the books.

These galleries would (according to the type of book they carried, scientific, cultural, etc.) shoot in the direction of some convenient hall; for example, the gallery served with scientific books would lead toward the laboratories, that with religious books toward the Chapel reading room, etc.

The idea of a sort of subway, served (as I should envisage it) by electric trucks, and passing a series of alcoves, lit overhead by skylights paralleling the present walks, or by the aforementioned glass brick, is certainly revolutionary. But it would keep the library in the center of the campus. It would solve so many problems, and without violating any of the strategical plan for future Princeton architectural development.¹ What do you think?

Ever yours,
Scott

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald accompanied his letter with illustrative diagrams.

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

Wire. Columbia University

BALTIMORE MD 402A 1936 MAY 16 AM 5 17
WOULD YOU CONSIDER PUBLISHING TENDER IS THE NIGHT IN THE MODERN LIBRARY IF I MADE CERTAIN CHANGES TOWARD THE END WHICH I SEE NOW ARE ESSENTIAL COMMA IT WOULD MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE SPLIT UP OF THE TWO PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS STOP OR DO YOU THINK THAT ONCE PUBLISHED A BOOK IS FOREVER CRYSTALIZED PLEASE ANSWER CAMBRIDGE ARMS CHARLES STREET BALTIMORE MARYLAND
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

The novel was not included in the Modern Library.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

May 1936

Asheville, North Carolina(?)

Dear Kaly:

Thanks for your most prompt response. In general the plans are vague, largely hovering betwen taking Scottina to Europe or to St. Paul + contingent, as always, on the condition of my invalid. I dont know what the gddam hell to do about that + I am trying to be hard-boiled about it, but as you know, it's a life-long consecration + all the friends I ever had couldn't argue me out of the idea that that's where my first duty lies.

I'm getting sentimental on you when this was to be a practical letter. What I didn't make clear in my telegram was that I wanted a parking place for Scottie (who is a little beauty by the way + the current belle of Baltimore) and then to leave her there + go back to Zelda in N.C. I don't want her to go to a dude ranch but I want her to have some sense of life in the middle-west + to have some friends there. I guess I've left my idea as vague as I started it. My own heart is here as always, yet a part of me will always live in St. Paul which I think of as a tough + usually impolite titty and am indeblet to for the ability to take it. I am not a snooty man, Kaly, + you'll have to interpret this arrogance in the light of what you know of me. Its perhaps a weakness in myself that makes me cling to the civilized + sophisticated. But I want daughter to know St. Paul

I will write or wire more specifly next week

Ever Your Devoted Old Friend Scott

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

After 15 May 1936

Cambridge Arms, Charles St., Baltimore

That was a very beautiful Easter present. It came one day when I was feeling rather sorry for myself having just written the second of a new series for Esquire on the autobiographical side (to be called “Author's House,” “Afternoon of an Author” ect.)¹ and they were so nice and white and filmy.

Your long letter cleared up many things that had puzzled me. Our medical tycoon was single-minded, to put it mildly. I was amused at the “gorilla” motif as I hadn't credited him with such powers of invention. I'm glad Eleanor is off luminol. I lived on those coal-tar derivatives for months last year and its really a form of getting mildly drunk and leaves a very definate hang-over.

I shall be in Ashville again about the 15th of June (it will have been a year since we first went to the Castle that night with Mr. Jewishman). After that my plans are very vague—I feel more acted apon than acting as Scottie grows up and I sign applications for school and for Vassar. I suppose there will always be bursts of vitality or impatience, but for the time I am simply a medium for the care of two helpless people in a somewhat formidable universe. I could go to Europe and absorb some ideas, I could go to Hollywood and absorb gold, but I feel ham-strung by circumstances and will possibly end by sending Scottie to camp again and staying in Ashville. I have such a nice appartment here with my library around me that I hate like the devil to go into storage again without even the prospect of really living abroad, but there is no particular point of my living alone in Baltimore now that I've moved Zelda to Carolina. One thing I'm sure of—that I'll spend next winter on the Caribean Sea. I'm starting a long thing that will take at least two years and I want to start it outside the borders of our melancholy nation, which I find more attractive at a distance.

This is all egotistic and remote to you. I never picture you as you are now but as you were last summer, in my sight and out of it, for you were just as real when you were in Highlands. I hope you awfully happy—someday, a long time from now, I'm going to write about you really but in a way that wont hurt anyone + that only you + I will understand
Scott

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald included a 15 May telegram from Arnold Gingrich: GOOD IS HARDLY THE WORD ITS PERFECT STOP NOT A WORD MISSING AND NOT A WORD AMISS STOP VARIATIONS ON THAT THEME WILL BE WELCOME UNTIL DOOMSDAY STOP MANY THANKS AND BEST WISHES.

xxx. TO: Adelaide Neall

RTLS, 2 pp.—with holograph last line and postscript. Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The Cambridge Arms,

Baltimore, Maryland,

June 5, 1936.

Dear Miss Neale:

I appreciated your interest yesterday. I think that if one cares about a metier (sp.) it is almost necessary to learn it over again every few years. Somewhere about the middle of “Tender is the Night” I seemed to have lost my touch on the short story—by touch I mean the exact balance, how much plot, how much character, how much background you can crowd into a limited number of words. It is a nice adjustment and essentially depends upon the enthusiasm with which you approach a given subject. In the last two years I’ve only too often realized that many of my stories were built rather than written.

Still and however, one is limited by one’s experience and I’ve decided to go with the series of medical stories hoping to unearth something new—and as a beginning have decided to rewrite this story with the original as a skeleton.

With best wishes to all of you and many thanks for your personal interest in the prospected series
F Scott Fitzgerald

(On re-reading this, it sounds somewhat stilted but I trust you’ll understand that I dont mind critisism a bit—the critics are always wrong (including you!) but they are always right in the sense that they make one re-examine one’s artistic conscience.
F.S.F.

Notes:

The projected series featured a nurse named Trouble. After rejecting the first story in the series, The Saturday Evening Post reluctantly accepted the second—“Trouble”—which it did not publish until March 1937. “Trouble” was the last of Fitzgerald’s sixty-five Post stories.

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

1 East 34th Street, Baltimore, Maryland,

June 10, 1936.

Beatrice:

The books were wonderful. The doctor's book I am in the middle of now; the Santyana novel seems to be one of those things one must at least look over though I approach it with a vast skepticism—not skepticism for the man as he is top notch in his profession, but skepticism for anyone trying to play with a metier that is not his own. However, I have always held that every intelligent person has at least one good novel in him and one of my favorite novels, Samuel Butler's “Way of All Flesh,” was written by a man who was essentially a scientist. At any rate I will report on “The Last Puritan” later. As for the third book I am so glad to get it.¹ Mencken usually sends me his small books but a big expensive thing like that no writer could live and give all his friends copies. I have an earlier edition of the work but this, of course, supercedes it. Looking at my library at this minute I don't think I now have the earlier edition after all. In any case he seems to have added an awful lot—

—At all events your taste is always impeccable.

You enclosed me a story by Roarke Bradford and I am ashamed to say that I haven't dipped into it yet; I admired Marc Connelly's dramatization of “Green Pastures” but I've been in the middle of a couple of stories and I always hate to read anybody else's fiction when I am working on something myself.

Next point (does this sound very official?) I think you'll like a series of sketches I'm starting in Esquire next month, very personal and similar to the Crack-up series. The first one is “Author's House” and the second “Afternoon of an Author” and the third I haven't done yet. They will be respectively in the July, August and September issues and they can tell you more about myself than I ever could in a letter because unfortunately, in my profession correspondence has to be sacrificed to the commercial side of being a literary man and I am probably the worst letter writer in the world.

And you are one of the best.

I hope you'll have a good time in California. My plans are still as vague as vague but I think I shall be able to make up my mind by another week or ten days.

With dearest affection always, Scott

Notes:

¹ The American Language, Fourth Edition (1936).

xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

2400 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.,

June 13, 1936.

Dear Cici: This is less a bread-and-butter letter than a necessary expletive; there is certainly no use in rubbing it in on an ignorant and selfish person, but the little display that we witnessed yesterday is an illumination indeed. Supposing I had gone up to your mother and said “Tom¹ is a bad priest,” or supposing I had gone up to Clifton² and said “you are a bad naval officer and a poor aviator,” can you imagine the repercussion. And yet a certain party felt quite entitled to let me know that she hadn't liked any of my stories lately, that her husband agreed with her, and one was supposed to take it with equanimity. The insolence was such that I could only be amused at the time, but looking at it in perspective I have succumbed to a certain irritation.

However, that was the only bitter spot to mar a perfect day with all of you. Please deliver the following messages for me.

To Aunt Elise, that I looked over the little book she gave me the other night and got much pleasure from it.

To Sally Pope, that when I get back to Baltimore, I will do the little sentence of description that I wrote about her on the beach and send her a carbon so that she will know that I have used it.

To. Teah, that I congratulate her (as I do all your children) on their power of producing lovely progeny.

To Hume with thanks for the use of his razor, and to Charlie with regrets that we didn't meet this time.

And to you most of all my dearest love.

Mother has had a bad morning. She wasn't able to hold on any nourishment, so I had the nurse keep taking the pulse, and the medical doctor arrived about an hour and a half ago and gave her some intervenous nourishment, which is done with a hypodermic. I will be able to be here the rest of the day with her, but have got to get back to Baltimore tonight and think I will send Scottie over tomorrow rather than try to make it two days in succession myself, because it is still necessary to steer the middle course between keeping her old heart nourished and at the same time feed her enough sedatives to keep her from ruining the operation. The situation is well in hand and I can only thank you with all my heart for your cooperation. Am counting on Annabelle arriving Tuesday morning.

With dearest love always,
Scott

Notes:

¹ Thomas Delihant.

² Fitzgerald's sister was married to Clifton Sprague, a naval officer.

xxx. FROM: Gilbert Seldes

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

Mantoloking New Jersey

June 26 [1936]

Dear Scott:

I haven't minded my own business for years, why should I start now. Please don't be annoyed—I know you won't be offended—by my discussing your professional affairs with you.

Max told me of the book you are proposing and of his opposition and when I told him what I thought, he thought it wouldn't be a bad idea if I wrote you.¹ First, you must know that I have in ingrained dislike of all books not written to be books, but collected from scattering magazine pieces. That prejudices me right away.

But more important, Scott, is that you seem more and more to me an essential figure in America and sooner or later you will have to say your complete say, not only in fiction, but in the facts about yourself and the part you played at the beginning and what you think of it now. And that sort of book, of supreme importance, will have all the edge taken off it, if you now publish the raw material, the mere fact without the thought. (I know that some of the pieces, especially lately, haven't been mere fact. But the general turnout of such a book as you could make from unassociated pieces would be the jumble of episode and fact—and you have meaning to give to them.)

Moreover, I am convinced that out of such a book, the reviewers first and a great part of the public later, would select a few spectacular episodes from the golden age and slide over the rest. They couldn't do that if the whole thing were integrated, the trivial and the tragic and everything all part of a single thing.

I know that you've had hard going lately, Scott, and it always enchants me when, in spite of your difficulties, you come through so steadily and so well with your stories and your Esquire pieces have shown me, perhaps I'm wrong, a direction you're taking, although I don't follow you into ruin and the rest, but I think you are being thoughtful and this is precisely the time when a book would be germinating or gestating or whatever that process is. I don't think it's the time for a synthetic, put-together work.

See paragraph one of this letter and forgive me if you disagree with me.

Amanda sends all her love to you and Zelda and Scotty and so do I.

Yours always Gilbert

Notes:

¹ On 2 April 1936 Fitzgerald sent Perkins a plan for a collection of his articles. Perkins responded 16 June: “My great objection to it is that you could do such a very fine book of reminiscences at some time, and if you publish this, you greatly compromise the possibilities of ever doing such a book.”

xxx. To: Unknown

June 1936

Autograph in From diary of poet Leonard Van Noppen (?).

xxx. TO Robert R. Dunn

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

[Probably Summer, 1936]

Dear Bob:

This is sheer impulse for no close friend ever passed so completely and abruptly out of my life as you did—except by death. Our whole adult life till now has passed without a single communication, unless I count a few chance encounters with your father fifteen years ago.

Is your mother living? Are you married? Has life been kind or bitter to you? I assume you know something about me from happening on my stuff here and there, but I know nothing about you. I remember a talk with Norma Talmadge (not Nash!) where your name figured, and meeting a fraternity brother of your “delegation” on a bout between Naples and Marseille (name forgotten)—and I sometimes dream of you. In the dream you're always very snooty and high-hat.

Life's too short for you not to answer this. If your mother lives, give her my eternal homage, unqualified by the fact that she was always skeptical of me. She was one of the most fascinating women I ever knew.

Your old friend,
Scott

xxx. To: Leonard (?)

June 1936

Inscription in Thomas Wolfe's From Death To Morning.

Leonard
Reegby Road - Baltimore
June 1936
from Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.,

July 21, 1936.

Dear Dr. Carroll:

Not take up your time unduely, let me sketch my last meeting with Zelda so that before I go away, which will be on next Sunday night, we can have some talk with a little of the underbrush cleared away.

… [One hundred fifty-six words omitted by the editor Bruccoli.]

Since I have been here I have gotten off of liquor and I am in the condition that I had meant to be on my arrival. I feel so much better that it seems almost on the cards for me to come back to Asheville for the rest of the summer after these few days that I must spend on my mother's business in Baltimore. I have no report yet from Dr. Ringer about whether or not there is any lingering t.b. but I know I am pretty damn well worn out and I know too that I would not want to make a change of base to another health place nor to to some trolley-end like Blowing Rock where I could not get typing down or find any of the props of civilization. So even if you do not think it advisable for me to see much of Zelda, would object to me remaining here through August—here at the Inn, I mean, or at the Manor if I can get more satisfactory rates there? (I am summer-conditioned and my best chance of recuperating vitality comes in summer, and something tells me that this one may just be my last chance.)

Giving you time to answer that question, let me say a word about Mrs. Sayre. Her relations with her daughter are as rudimentary now as they were at the nipple stage. I verily think in spite of the straight talk last April she fully expected to spend this summer in a rocking chair talking to her and going against all your attempts to activate Zelda's mind and body. The sick part of Zelda of course welcomes the chance to sit on her bottom and stay a few months in slow motion. So far as Mrs. Sayre is concerned my influence is null. She has only to tag me with “drinks too much” and for her simple mind that counts my judgment out. So I wish you would take as much of that on your broad shoulders as you conveniently can. You will see her today, Tuesday, and I will get in touch with you the day following.

Very truly yours,

xxx. TO: Rita Swann

TLS, 1 p. Bruccoli

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.,

July 21, 1936.

Dear Rita:

I am afraid that was somewhat confused over the phone but I was in such confusion when leaving that I scarcely understood the thing myself. It seems that for a son or daughter to declare a parent incompetent some third party, beyond the testifying child and testifying doctor, is required to give a disinterested opinion as to whether the heir or prospective trustee is acting in good faith or is trying to racket the aged out of their wherewithal.¹ Now, Rita, if I have to ask you to testify that I was not insane, you are the last person I would call upon because I know that you have always thought that I was. All the more reason for your knowing that I would not have the Caponi-craft to wizard my mother out of her money.

A letter from Ed Poe² says that I must appear in my stocking feet at the Rockville courthouse at 2 o'clock next Monday the 27th. Whether you, as the mysterious ghost assuring the law of my probity, will have to appear or not or merely make a deposition will best be answered if you call Ed Poe at Plaza 5610.

If necessary and if you can spare the time we could all ride over together.

I find in my papers among unanswered a carbon of the preface to Don's book of etchings. You remember in the first version I ghosted for Governor Ritchie, then revised it leaving him out, and I have a dim memory that you wanted something further done to this one; or am I wrong and did the draft get there by mistake?

Very best to you all, Afftly, Scott

Notes:

¹ The matter was dropped; Fitzgerald's mother was not declared incompetent.

² Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald's Baltimore lawyer.

xxx. TO Bennett Cerf

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

July 23, 1936

Dear Bennett:

Temporarily I am no longer a Baltimorean, so I am afraid we will not be able to talk personally unless you are this far South. From your letter I guess that you are a little cagey about shooting at Tender Is the Night at the moment and I have no idea how many of a Modern Library edition of a book it is necessary to sell to make it pay its way.

I have an idea that even among your clientele the actual bulk of a book, the weight of it in the hand, has something to do with buyer psychology. That is, that you would do better with, say, Willa Cather's My Antonia than you would with Lost Lady. All the first Modern Library books were small. Your tendency toward the giant size shows that you [are] alive to this psychological trait in the potential buyer.

To that extent you might have luck with Tender Is the Night. As you may know, Tender Is the Night hung around between sixth and twelfth best seller through its publishing season (spring of '34) which was a terrible one, while The Great Gatsby, which was a light little volume barely touching 50,000 words, was a rank commercial failure and was only on best-seller lists its first week during a fine season (the spring of 1925). As a succes d'estime Gatsby outshone This Side of Paradise and Beautiful and Damned but I do not believe its sale to this day, outside your Modern Library edition, has passed 25,000 copies in America. Of course the Continental sales in German, French and Scandinavian have added a great deal to that.

Since actual distribution of Tender Is the Night was small in spite of its place on the best-selling list, it might be a much better bet than The Great Gatsby and there is always recurrent interest in This Side of Paradise (a calling, indeed, by this time).

I would like to have another book on your list, not from vanity (take a bow, Mr. Cerf), but simply because I think that two books would be stronger than one in building up a permanent interest among those whose destiny leads them to accept my observation as part of their cosmology. Do let me hear from you.

Ever yours,
[Scott]

xxx. TO: John O’Hara

TL, 2 pp. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, N.C.

July 25, 1936

Dear John:

Your letter got side-tracked in moving and has just turned up. Possibly I may have answered it before and if I did everything I said was true and if what I say now contradicts everything I said before that is all true too. Before I tell you how to write your new novel let me tell you about affairs here.

There are no affairs here.

We will now turn to your new novel. You quoted in your letter a very cryptic passage from the wonderful advice that I give to people. It sounds exactly like the advice that Ernest and I used to throw back and forth at each other, none of which ever had any effect—the only effect I ever had on Ernest was to get him in a receptive mood and say let’s cut everything that goes before this. The the pieces got mislaid and he caould never find the part that I said to cut out. And so he published it without that and later we agreed that it was a very wise cut. This is not literally true and I don’t want it established as part of the Hemingway Legend, but it’s just about as far as one writer can go in helping another. Years later when Ernest was writing Farewell to Arms he was in doubt about the ending and marketed around to half a dozen people for their advice. I worked like hell on the idea and only succeeded in evolving a philosophy in his mind utterly contrary to everything that he thought an ending should be and later convinced me that he was right and made me end Tender Is the Night on a fade away instead of a staccato. Didn’t we talk about this once before—I seem to see your large ear in the way of my voice.

There is some element that can as well as not be expressed by the dietitian’s word roughage or up-stream by which you can judge yourself as a novelist or as a personality (the fact recently quated by Middleton Murray) that John Keats felt that creative talent is essentially without character is empiric: the acceptance of disorganization is another matter because it eventually implies a lesion of vitality. I have just written a long letter to an admirer or mourner as to why I do not believe in Psychoanalysis for the disintegration of that thing, that judgment, the extinction of that light is much more to be dreaded than any material loss.

We are creatures bounding from each other’s shoulders, feeling already the feet of new creatures upon our backs bounding again toward an invisible and illusory trapeze (at present played by the short winded Saroyans). If the calf no longer flexes the bound will not be so high. In any case the outstretched arms will never reach that swinging thing because when life has been well lived one can make an adjustment and become the second man in the pyramid. It is when life has been ill lived one is the third man; the first man always falls to his death, a fact that has haunted Ernest all his life.

This is all rather poor metaphysics expressed in ineffectual images, Again and again in my books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good as I intended to be (and you must know that what I mean by good is the modern don’t-hurt-a-hair-of-anybody’s-head-and-kill-a-hundred-thousand-people-if-necessary—in other words a personal conscience and meaning by the personal conscience yourself stripped in white midnight before your own God).

To take off with my whole weight (Charlie MacArthur continually urges me) if my suggestion about the bucolic background for a novel makes any sense it is embraced in the paragraph you requoted to me. I certainly think you should undertake something more ambitious and I know to my own sorrow that to contemplate and project a long work is often an excuse for laziness. But let me pass along a suggestion:

Invent a system Zolawsque (see the appendix to Josephson’s Life of Zola in which he gives Zola’s plan for the first Rougon-Macquart book), but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up somthing as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.

After all who am I to be giving you advice? I dare to do so only because I know that you are at heat a humble man and not resentful of anything said by one who wishes you well.

(This is being taken down by a young man from Brown University who is wilting visibly as he writes after a session with the many concerns that seem to surround a man of forty and the hieroglyphics of a half-done Post story to decipher tomorrow. He sends his regards or does he? Do you? No answer. He says he wonders what would happen if he would write a postscript to this thing.)

So much for tonight. If this seems toilet paper you can also use it to wipe Dr. Daniel Ogden Stewart’s mouth when he finally gets the kick in the ass that he has been asking for so long. I want one lens of his double monocle to set up here in Carolina in an astronomical station to be able to see human life as cheaply as he has seen it.

Ever your friend,

Ernest Hemingway’s note in the margin of the first page: This is all nonsense. He is referring to my cutting the first paragraphs of a story called Fifty Grand. It is a funny story which I would be glad to give you if you like
E. H.

Notes:

Critic and editor John Middleton Murry wrote several studies of Keats.

William Saroyan’s story collection The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze had appeared in 1934.

Matthew Josephson’s Zola and His Time (1929).

Donald Ogden Stewart had become an active radical spokesman after many years of associating with the very rich.

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

30 July '36

Dear Scott:—

I find that I can go just so long without knowing how you all are;—where you all are. Just so long is at an end now. Send me a card or something. I leave the hospital to-morrow without my tonsils,—and go to camp for most of August. Sara has taken—or rather bought very advantageously—a well-built one of Edith Wharton's era which she has somehow transformed into something outside of New Orlean's—gay, light, colored rooms, white rugs, a small jungle of indoor exotic palms and plants,—mexican metalware partout, etc. The old guard of Upper St. Regis is fluttered in the dove-cote. We are on a quiet remote lake. Patrick likes it very much and is holding his own. It is Sara who needs attention now. I want to get her to Europe for a month. Her inconsolability,—and her present anxiety over Patrick begin to tell on her. She refuses to release her tense grip and is burning white. The same pride in not sparing herself that her mother had,—has come to her now. There is little one can do for her. Even her loneliness I cannot reach. She is gay,—energetic,—but is not well.

One day riding down alone through Vermont I had a long conversation with you and asked you many questions,—abstract, they were. I wish I might know yr. answers one day.

We have seen Dos + Katy often. They are so fond of you as are we. Please send us some word. We wonder so and somehow must know,—soon. Just a telegram or card.

Aff'y. Gerald.

Camp Adeline, Paul Smith's, New York.

xxx. TO: Ethel Walker Smith

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.,

August 17, 1936.

Dear Mrs. Smith:

Your letter has encouraged me very much because both daughter and I had long looked forward to the time she could enter your school, which by every evidence seems “tops.”

To go to bat financially the situation is as follows. Stretching my budget every which way I do not see how I can afford more than $100 a month plus the $400 dressing charge and there seems to be an awful gap between that and the $2200 which it ordinarily comes to. From that you can judge whether you think any adjustment of your rates in this case is possible.

Just for my satisfaction daughter took the French examinations at Bryn Mawr for the two classes below the final class (they have curious designations of their own which I have never quite been able to master) and got marks of 98 and 96 without having cracked a French book except for her private pleasure in eight months. She led her class in English and English composition with marks in the early 90s and was third in her class in history with 89, fell off a little in Latin to, I think, 79 and made a curious flop in mathematics. She is a year ahead in that and her year's standing was enough to pull her over but she carelessly did not turn over her paper and find four more questions on the other side until five minutes before the hour was up and came home to me in dispair saying she had answered only a little over half the questions. For the whole year I think her standing was either third or fourth in an exceptionally smart class of twenty-eight. There is no exact rating at Bryn Mawr as to that.

She is a conscientious, straight-forward person and I don't honestly want her to be brilliant in the scintillating sense and dread it when I see the signs of fatal facility in her. At Vassar I want her to follow some such line as a premedical course or one that will equip her for scientific research. If she is going to write (which God forbid!) I'd rather the necessity came from anything except a fundamentally literary training.

The world seems full of people seeking for self-expression with nothing to express. So often during the depression friends have sent me manuscripts accompanied by condescending little notes:

“Not so much doing in the real estate line now so I thought I would take a little time off and write some short stories and I'd like you to look this one over.”

It is much as if I should rush into Johns Hopkins Hospital demanding a scalpel to take out an appendix with on the basis that I had always thought it would be fun to be a surgeon.

In the event that you see your way clear to taking daughter it is of course understood that if the sky brightens for me next year I will try to pay the regular rate; my address will be here until further notice. A few weeks ago I managed to break my shoulder swimming and it is even now doubtful whether I can travel within the next fortnight after which I may have to go to Hollywood to recoup my battered finances.

I should try to fly back, however, for a day or so in order to make your acquaintance and bring daughter personally to the school.

Arthritis is a terrible thing. I have seen two good friends through awful sieges of it and can think of nothing that makes one more helpless and gives one the sense of the awful futility of illness. My deepest sympathy.

Sincerely

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University

August 1936

Dear Scott:—

The mood of my letter must have been wrong. I feel a kind of disloyalty to Sara in giving you the impression that she admits to herself even remotely the fact of what she is withstanding. Her resilience is formibable,—when one considers that she faces squarely the truth about everything every minute of the day. I do not know what goes on in her mind. I doubt if two human creatures ultimately succeed in sharing grief. But I should never have made you think that she shows the slightest sign of what she's undergoing. Indeed everyone remarks her gayety and becomingness. She's never looked prettier. This camp is a bower.

Your article I have not read due to an oath I took with myself upon returning here from Europe last March that I would no longer read the newspapers and magazines. As a result I've lived with: “Le Rouge et le Noir,” “The Return of the Native,” “The Last Puritan,” “Arctic Adventure,” “Barchester Towers,” “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard,"—and now Dos' new book,—which I admire very much.¹ It has all recreated a kind of distant region in which I enjoy living,—and I find my mind freed.

As for life (as they call it) I find it turning out to be the very thing that I'd always suspected it to be: a very badly-schemed and wasteful process. Having felt it to be such, I find that I don't mind it as much: For those who believe in it (and believe in being in it and of it) [such as—Sara,—and you, I suppose]² it must be a very painful experience. I find that my only fear is what other people may be suffering. Sometimes the thought is well-nigh intolerable. However, I find myself learning again not to take life at its own tragical value.

Your shoulder sounds painful. I hope it doesn't continue so long. Thank you for your letter. It brought much with it. Santayana describes his man at the end as an “ascetic without belief,"—I find that I have inadvertently been enjoying a kind of self-imposed incredulous self-denial for more than a year. It's insulation, at least against idle wear and tear. It's not what we do but what we do with our minds that counts. Our greatest affection to you,

Gerald.

Cummings says:—

“We live for that which dies, and die for that which lives.” Is it true?
G

Notes:

¹ The Big Money (1936).

² Murphy's brackets.

xxx. TO: Annabel Fitzgerald Sprague

Unlocated fragment—reprinted from Turnbull

August 1936?

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Annabel:

It has been a rather terrible day and tomorrow promises to be no better, but after that I’m going to—got to—put Mother out of my mind for a day or so. I’ll summarize what happened.

It was sad taking her from the hotel, the only home she knew for fifteen years, to die—and to go thru her things. The slippers and corset she was married in, Louisa’s dolls in tissue paper, old letters and souvenirs, and collected scrap paper, and diaries that began and got nowhere, all her prides and sorrows and disappointments all come to nothing, and her lugged away like so much useless flesh the world had got thru with—

Mother and I never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality, but when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her and how she clung, to the end, to all things that would remind her of moments of snatched happiness. So I couldn’t bear to throw out anything, even that rug, and it all goes to storage. [The rest of the letter is unavailable.]

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

CC, 1 p. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn,

Asheville, N.C.,

August 13, 1936.

Dear Bennett:

The revision job would take the form, to a large extent, of a certain new alignment of the scenes—without changing their order in any case. Some such line as this:

That the parts instead of being one, two, and three (they were one, two, three and four in the magazine serial) would include in several cases sudden stops and part headings which would be to some extent explanatory; certain pages would have to be inserted bearing merely headings. Part two, for example, should say in a terse and graceful way that the scene is now back on the Riviera in the fall after these events have taken place, or that, This brings us up to where Rosemary first encounters the Divers. Those examples are not accurate to my intention nor are they at all couched as I would have them, but that’s the general idea. (Do you remember the number of subheads I used in “This Side of Paradise”—at that time a rather novel experiment, the germ of which I borrowed from Bernard Shaw’s preface headings to his plays; indeed that was one of the few consciously original things in “This Side of Paradise”.)

There would be certain changes but I would supply the equivalent line lengths. I have not my plan with me; it seems to be in Baltimore. But I know how printing costs are. It was evolved to have a very minimum of replacement. There is not more than one complete sentence that I want to eliminate, one that has offended many people and that I admit is out of Dick’s character: “I never did go in for making love to dry loins.” It is a strong line but definitely offensive. These are all the changes I contemplated with in addition some minor spelling corrections such as would disturb nothing but what was within a printed line. There will be no pushing over of paragraphs or disorganization of the present set-up except in the aforesaid inserted pages. I don’t want to change anything in the book but sometimes by a single word change one can throw a new emphasis or give a new value to the exact same scene or setting.

Ever yours,

Notes:

On the proposed Modern Library edition of Tender Is the Night.

xxx. TO: Annabel Fitzgerald Sprague

TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.,

September 10, 1936.

Dear Annabel:

Thank you for your fully detailed letter about Mother's effects, etc.¹ In answer to your questions, do what you think advisable. Scotty might like the radio but there are so many things on my mind that I can't say what to do about her personal property, though such things as a suitcase etc. are of some value you can estimate to each of us and the clothes I leave entirely up to you.

There are certain household articles that you may already have disposed of or that may not be worth putting in storage, such as the marble fisher boy. Can't we let all that wait, because the business of the money and the coincidence of my illness have become very pressing to me.

Since a year ago last February I have succeeded in getting myself into more debt than you can imagine and the two months of sickness here in Asheville have made the situation much worse. You can imagine such items as $450 for the operation and being so helpless so far as moving around was concerned that it was necessary to have day and night nurses and it comes down to a choice with me of either keeping up my insurance which for $60,000, though I have borrowed on it heavily or sacrificing the insurance and keeping what comparatively small amount may still be due me from mother's legacy. It is infinitely more logical for me to convert my share into cash and keep up the insurance because the possibilities (you must understand that I have been out of my room twice in the last six weeks and that all work has been terrifically crippled both in amount and in its general cheerfulness and salability under the influence of pain and of worry about mother,'the usual concerns of Zelda and Scottie)—so much is this so that my insurance policy is in danger unless I could convert my inheritance into cash.

At first glance this would seem a pity but it is absolutely inevitable. I have got to take six weeks rest as the doctors have told me frankly the chances of my lasting out another winter are getting thinner and thinner and I would either be dead or be a jibbering nervous wreck in some sanatorium, in either case leaving very insufficient protection for two helpless dependents.

I have thought the matter over from every angle. There is nothing to borrow on the insurance. My debt to Scribner's has reached its limit and my agent, Harold Ober can afford to lend me no more until I can complete two or three stories necessary to cover it.

I am already writing again and will continue to write under any circumstances but it would be suicidal to keep on writing at this nervous tensity, often with no help but what can be gotten out of a bottle of gin. Save for one month last May and some enforced weeks' vacation after this accident I have taken no time off for over eight years except for three weeks in Bermuda where I lay in bed with plurisy. A few week ends at Virginia beach are no substitute as the tendency is to make whoopee and come back feeling worse than when you started.

I want six to eight weeks of not worrying about a single thing and of not writing under pressure and only for a couple of hours a day.

This story of becoming a nervous wreck at forty is not pretty but I want to make you understand that the only way such a rest can possibly be arranged is the aforesaid conversion of my share of mother's money into protection for my life insurance policy. There is no use reproaching me for past extravagances nor for my failure to get contol of the liquor situation under these conditions of strain.

During this time I have been in a night club exactly three times and have used the liquor for purposes of work or of accomplishing some duty for which I no longer have the physical or nervous energy. I am completely on the spot, have talked the matter over and thought it over from every angle and I think that mother and father would have agreed with me. In fact, most of the money that mother advanced me was for purposes of just such a rest but unfortunately it always had to be poured into taking care of Zelda, paying nurses and doctors' bills of my own during past two and three day breakdowns and the inevitable insurance.

My earning powers have been inevitably dimmed in the last two years by this and by the depression which has cut almost in half my actual income before 1932 up to this year when it was going along at a better clip until mother's collapse and this accident. There is no reason why in decent health I couldn't write myself out of this mess, being still under forty and having the necessary connections and reputation.

I want you to talk this over with Cliff. Meanwhile there will occur the inevitable business of dividing the estate. Mrs. Owens has in my files the exact amounts which mother lent me and the best thing would be for me to technically return them to the estate by means of vouchers and then when we started the fifty-fifty division it would be necessary for me to take out my vouchers while you chose the equivalent from paying bonds. Once I had back all my vouchers then I in turn would choose turn, and turn about with you till we had reached the wonderful South American stocks which Wharton-Smith managed to unload upon her and so on.

I want to do this as soon as possible and I would like to do it in Rockville, Maryland according to the advice in the enclosed letter of Mr. Bartlett's.

It looks now as if this ten day arthritis which has actually extended much longer than that is almost over. At least I am on my feet in the room today and have been able to finish a story by dictating it. I should like to come north by the 20th.

Cliff and Annabel would have to renounce their executorship to some banker or lawyer in Rockville which was her legal residence when she died. Outside of actual division the word “administering” in this letter seems meaningless. Once you have your share you are yourself administratrix of it, are you not?

Had mother known the whole situation I am sure whe would have agreed to the emergency because the difference between $60,000 and $7,000 or $8,000 is quite apparent in my case and you could do as you like about clipping your own coupons or having an administrator do it. Any extra expense incurred by this procedure I should expect to meet. To you it would seem to make so little difference and to me so much. Anxiously awaiting your answer in general to this arrangement I am

Your brother,

Notes:

¹ Mrs. Fitzgerald had died in early September, leaving an estate of $42,000.

xxx. TO Beatrice Dance

From Turnbull.

[Grove Park Inn] Asheville, North Carolina

September 15, 1936

Dear Beatrice:

The last two months have been such a feverish nightmare, day and night, sickness and that sort of thing, that I haven't very clear memories of what letters I have written and what I haven't. Today for the first time, I am really systematizing things under the proper headings of: “Immediate,” “Semi-Immediate,” “Mother's Death,” “Financial,” “Scottie's School,” “Work,” etc., etc.

—so I am by no means sure whether I have to thank you for the fine kimono which I am wearing at present (alas! I have used it so much that you would scarcely know that it is only a month old), or whether only for the gorgeous sweater which I have so reverently laid away to save for more robust days) but really you must not inundate me with such tokens. I am embarrassed. It is impossible for me to send up equivalent incense to your memory—much more than a memory, you know that.

Your letters were bright—and melancholy in the practically arctic night of the past ten months. I have never had so many things go wrong and with such defiant persistence. By an irony which quite fits into the picture, the legacy which I received from my mother's death (after being too ill to go to her death bed or her funeral) is the luckiest event of some time. She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her, and it would have been quite within her character to have died that I might live.

Thank you for your wire today. People have received this Esquire article with mingled feeling—not a few of them think it was a terrific mistake to have written any of them from “Crack-Up.” On the other hand, I get innumerable “fan letters” and requests to republish them in the Reader's Digest, and several anthologists' requests, which I prudently refused.

My Hollywood deal (which, as it happened, I could not have gone through with because of my shoulder) was seriously compromised by their general tone. It seems to have implied to some people that I was a complete moral and artistic bankrupt.

Now—I come to some things I may have written you before. Did I tell you that I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in the old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water—a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and that when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o'clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued by Mac? It was a hot night, and I was soaking wet in the cast so I caught cold on the tile floor of the bathroom, and a form of arthritis called “myotosis” developed, which involved all of the joints on that side of the body, so back to the bed I went and I have been cursing and groaning without cessation until about three days ago when the devil began to abandon me. During this time Mother died in the North and a dozen other things seemed to happen at once, so that it will take me several months to clear the wreckage of a completely wasted summer, productive of one mediocre short story and two or three shorts….

The summer was to have been devoted to Zelda and I have seen her exactly five times, her doctors feeling proud of her improvement and knowing that it would depress her to see me ill or in pain.

As to Ernest, at first I resented his use of my name in the story ¹ and I wrote him a somewhat indignant letter, telling him it must not be republished in a book. He answered, agreeing, but rather resentfully, and saying that he felt that since I had chosen to expose my private life so “shamelessly” in Esquire, he felt that it was sort of an open season for me, and I wrote him a hell of a letter which would have been sudden death for somebody the next time we met, and decided, hell, let it go. Too often literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War. I consider it an example of approaching maturity on my part and am proud of my self control. He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

I am glad you have had a happy summer and have been amused by such reports as your running into our Grove Park Inn friend.

Scott

Notes:

¹ “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

xxx. TO: Annabel Fitzgerald Sprague

TLS, 1 p. Bruccoli

Asheville, N.C.,

September 16th, 1936

Dear Annabelle:

This letter is a sort of general O.K. I note the objections instead of marking them:

Zelda would like handkerchiefs and kimono, but I am sure not the dress.

The radio might as well be kept for Scottie as I gave away ours when I left in payment for some small debt. It was the same type.

Whatever became of that gorgeous opera cloak, sort of Venitien brocade?

Take what furniture you want, naturally. You might divy up on things like good pratical wardrobe trunks and suit-cases—I leave that to you.

We do not want the oil painting of the sheep but I somehow would like the marble Fisher boy.

I gather from Clif's telegram that there is nothing in my letter to you with which he disagrees. In that case, it is plain sailing.

I had an idea that Mother might have meant that the estate was to be administered and beneficiaries receive only the income. With this, as I told you in my letter, I disagree emphatically because of the reasons stated in the letter. I agree with Clif as to having Ed Poe be made Administrator of the estate. I do not understand by what possible technicality it will take six months to settle the estate but knowing that the capital will be divided, I will be enabled, if necessary, to borrow on the expectation and with the proceeds fix up my insurance and thus get over this difficult autumn.

I still have a drawer full of stuff of Mother's, mostly old stubs, which have gone over to the best of my ability. Can you think of anything that I should do with them?

I shall always regret not having been able to be with you during this and appreciate all that you did and the way you did it.

Love, Scott

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Asheville, N.C.,

Sept. 19th, 1936

Dear Colly:

Thank you for your letter.

Mother did not know she was dying and did not suffer.

A most surprising thing in the death of a parent is not how little it affects you, but how much. When your Father or Mother has been morbidly perched on the edge of life, when they are gone, even though you have long ceased to have any dependnce on them, there is a sense of being deserted.

Mother's death was rather wretched from a purely selfish point of view because I could not be there. I split the clavicle of my shoulder and am just out of bed after seven weeks of it—caused by trying to show off for Zelda, on the first day that I could swim in a year and a half.

Mother's death made me sad in connection with so many deaths of people dear to me in the last two years, beginning with Ring's cashing in; after that Emily Vanderbilt shot herself on a lonely Montana ranch last summer which gave me the blues. (Do you remember the girl that looked like an ashe blond's scroll on a telephone board, whom you liked so much one night in Paris—well that is as melancholy a subject as the financial one). As you asked me to give you the whole history:

I am sort of floating at the moment and will probably go back to Hollywood as soon as my arm heals.

Talbert's¹ final collapse is the death of an enemy for me, though I liked the guy enormously. He had an idea that his wife and I were playing around, which was absolute nonsense, but I think even so that he killed the idea of either Hopkins or Frederick Marsh doing “Tender is the Night.”²

All story prices are cut somewhat. Book sales are no where but established Writers are better off than the poor bastards who are just getting started.

The Esquire pieces³ were written in a mood of depression. Don't put too much credence in them as being reflections as to how I feel now.

Have I answered your principal questions? Oh! one more, Scottie got a scholarship to a very expensive school, the Edith Walker School in Connecticut, on her fine record with remission of tuition of about one-half, and Zelda of whom you were most anxious to hear, and whom I seem to have left until the last moment, is infinitely better. There is a chance, which I go to sleep hoping for, that she may be out into the world again—on a somewhat short string to be sure, by April or May.

I hope you and Sandy did not go to much trouble preparing for us because I wrote you in a weird and at an undetermined time.

With all appreciation of your hospitality and affection to you both always, I am

Sincerely yours, Scott

Notes:

¹ Irving Thalberg.

² Neither Miriam Hopkins nor Fredric March was under contract to MGM at the time.

³ The “Crack-Up” articles.

xxx. TO: John Dos Passos

TLS, l p. University of Virginia

Asheville, N.C., Grove Park Inn,

Sept. 21st, 1936

Dear Dos:

Just finished reading the Book.¹ Parts of it simply interferes with everything that I do, so that I quote back to them in my own mind as though they were things I experiended. I said to some one the other day, “A Cuban boy that I knew once"—and then I said, “Girl I knew that knew a Cuban boy once,” and then I said, “A book I read about a Cuban boy once.” It goes right into everything I have ever read, felt or experienced and I am writing this because I am living here and I haven't read “Mary French” which I hear is the best of all, but “Margie”² and “Charlie” and the “Incidentals” have been the most exciting things to me, that is, between the time I broke my shoulder last July and the blowing up of Gerald and Sallie³ in the Alcazar.

With affectionate regards to you both always,
Scott
dictated—I have a cracked shoulder

Notes:

¹ The Big Money.

² Fitzgerald drew an arrow from this word and noted: “God help us!”

³ Fitzgerald drew an arrow from this word with a question mark; the reference is to Gerald and Sara Murphy.

xxx. TO Cameron Rogers

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

September 21, 1936

Dear Rogers:

Manila Galleon arrived last week. I was reminded all through of Victory, just as Conrad I suppose was reminded of something when he wrote Victory. I loved it.

I have been with a broken shoulder and there were only two books in the bad times that I could let the nurses read to me—Manila Galleon and Mencken's American Language.

I had the sense of an utterly vacant sky, without the blue of the Caribbean, sort of a yellow-white. It made me ill at ease and made me want to go back to Europe at all cost, or at least to some seaboard where the only colors were those of my own scars and breeches and the only glint that of my own sword.

Your friend and admirer,
Scott Fitz

xxx. To: Curtis Carroll Davis

c. 1936

Inscription in Taps At Reveille.

For Carroll Davis
from an old editor of The Nassau Lit. To a young editor of The Yale Litt. F> Scott Fitzgerald
Baltimore 1936

xxx. FROM: Bob and Raye Sylvester

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

Sept 26. [1936] 4 A.M. no less!

Dear Sport;

Have just finished reading a particularly atrocious story by some heeb working for the N.Y. Post² (and wouldn't old man Curtis³ spin in his grave if he ever saw a copy of it?) about my favorite author a-wasting and a-pining away down there in the fairly deep south.

Well, I'm sorry but you've just got to quit it. To quote that other melancholy soul, the late Dr. Lardner, I and Mother just won't have it. This is no time for you to be falling apart and if you haven't already thrown this somewhat impertinent message down the …. er … receptacle I intend to tell you why you've got to quit it.

In the first place, you're too old. Like the man with incipient tuberculosis, or whatever it is, you should have become more and more immune with the passing of each year. The time for you to have done a tailspin is long since past—so stop trying to catch up with something that's way behind you.

Secondly, you know too much. If the only writer in this whole goddamned, beJesus world who can understand kids and write about them as they should be written about is going to go off on some screwball tear and act like a child then the time has come for us all to run screaming up the steps of St. Patricks and give up.

Thirdly, and pardon my grammar, you can't let us down. When I think of the thousands—nay, millions—of words I have wasted in arguing your value in oh, how many, saloons with such kindred souls as Walker, Connelly, Sullivan, Lardner pere, Lardner fils, Hecht, O'Hara, March etc., I feel that I should warn you that in folding up on me you are robbing someone you don't even know of a very valuable saloon argument. And you know how hard it is to find an A No. 1 saloon argument. Mine is “Fitzgerald will live. Ceasar's Gallic Wars will be forgotten!”

Seriously, Mom and I are terribly sorry to hear that you're ill and unhappy. I suppose you get all sorts of letters from such screwballs as ourselves and perhaps this won't cheer you at all, much less amuse you. But we'd like to cheer you and we'd like to see you well in a hurry and have you turn out one such really fine book as was “Tender Is The Night.” Anyone who has been through anything or thought of life at all knows what an exceptional piece of work that was, and how much of your life's blood must have gone into its making.

The Best
Bob and Raye Sylvester

Notes:

² Michel Mok had interviewed Fitzgerald in Asheville on his fortieth birthday and published an article in the Post depicting him as a broken drunk: “The Other Side of Paradise/Scott Fitzgerald, 40,/Engulfed. in Despair/Broken in Health He Spends Birthday Re/gretting that He Has Lost Faith in his Star.” (25 September 1936)

³ Cyrus Curtis, publisher of the New York Evening Post.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

Wire, 2 pp. Princeton University

ASHEVILLE NCAR 442P 1936 OCT 5 PM 5 20
OSCAR KALMAN, BROKER WELL KNOWN
PHONE AND DLR OFFICE OR REISDENCE TONIGHT
MOTHER LEFT ME SECURITIES OF MARKET VALUE OF ABOUT TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS AND AN ADMINISTRATOR HAS ONLY JUST BEEN APPOINTED WHO TELLS ME THAT BY MARYLAND LAW I CANT HAVE THEM FOR SIX MONTHS AND NO BALTIMORE BANK WILL ADVISE MONEY ON THEM UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS STOP I HAVE BEEN IN BED TEN WEEKS WITH BROKEN SHOULDER AND CONSEQUENT ARTHRITIES INCAPACITATING ME FOR WORK UNTIL THIS WEEK AND AM HEAD OVER HEELS IN DEBT TO PUBLISHER AND INSURANCE COMPANY ANDSOFORTH WITH PERSONAL OBLIGATIONS EMBARRASSING TO STATE IN TELEGRAM STOP CANNOT EVEN PAY TYPISTS OR BUY MEDICINE STOP I NEED ONE THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY AND FIVE THOUSAND WITHIN THE WEEK STOP CAN YOU CONSULT WITH ANNABEL MCQUILLAN HOW I CAN RAISE THIS AS PERSONAL LOAN SECURED BY NOTE OF HAND OR LIEN DUE ON LIQUIDATION OF LEGACY AT ANY INTEREST AND WIRE ME TONIGHT IF POSSIBLE AT GROVEPARK INN ASHEVILLE AS TO WHAT MIGHT BE DONE STOP THIS IS ABSOLUTELY LAST RECOURSE
SCOTT FITZGERALD.

Notes:

ADVISE was crossed out and ADVANCE written in.

Kalman arranged the loan.

Fitzgerald’s aunt.

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Fred W. Wolfe

865 First Avenue New York, N.Y.

October 5, 1936

Dear Fred:

Just a note to tell you I am back at this address, that I have your note saying you may be up here about the middle of October and that I am delighted. I have two rooms here, with two comfortable couches in one and a good double bed in the other, so the matter of putting you up with me is easy. Will you just do this, please?—because, as you know, our family is not noted for punctuality: let me know exactly when you are coming, so that I can be here, and there will be no confusion or mistake in our meeting arrangements... Meanwhile, until I hear from you, with love to all and best wishes,

P.S. There is a poor, desperate, unhappy man staying at the Grove Park Inn. ¹ He is a man of great talent but he is throwing it away on drink and worry over his misfortunes. Perkins thought if Mama went to see him and talked to him, it might do some good—to tell him that at the age of forty he is at his prime and has nothing to worry about if he will just take hold again and begin to work. His name, I forgot to say, is Scott Fitzgerald, and a New York paper has just published a miserable interview with him— it was a lousy trick, a rotten ... piece of journalism, going to see a man in that condition, gaining his confidence, and then betraying him. I myself have suffered at the hands of these rats, and I know what they can do. But I don’t know whether it’s a good idea for Mama to see him—in his condition, he might resent it and think we were sorry for him, etc.—so better wait until I write again.

Notes:

1 In Asheville.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Asheville, N.C.,

Grove Park Inn,

October 10, 1936.

Dear Kallie

Above and beyond the egotism that seems to descend upon a sick man, like a dark cloud, I have been able to appreciate the kindness and friendliness with which you have come to my assistance. I do not know very many rich people well, in spite of the fact that my life has been cast among rich people—certainly only two well enough to have called upon in this emergency, the first personal loan I have ever asked for—though I have made heavy drains on my publishers and agents at times.

I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered and tried to set up a household in Baltimore which I was ill equipped to sustain. I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda (who is in a sanitarium near here, better, but still a mental patient, as perhaps she always will be) to a pool near here and tried a high dive with muscles that had not been exercised, by the doctors’ orders, for two years; and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings, so that the ball of the ball-and-socket joint hung two and one-half inches below the socket joint. It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing called “Miotosis” which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate, and then a return to the impotency of the trouble. The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. (She earned a scholarship to a very expensive school—Miss Walker’s, do you know it? She is now in school and apparently very happy).

The nervous system is pretty well shot. You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking to keep up what morale has been necessary—think of it any way you want to; I know, thank God, you are no moralist. I know you have lent this money on the ask-me-no-question basis, but I feel I owe you this explanation.

For Heaven’s sake, please try to expedite the loan. The first time in my life I have known what it is to be hog-tied by lack of money, as you know how casually I have always dealt with it.

I want to bring Scottie West at Easter and, seeing her, you will see how much I still have to live for, in spite of a year in a slough of despond.

Ever afftly yours,
Scott Fitzg—

Notes:

Mr. and Mrs. C. O. Kalman of St. Paul were old friends of Scott and Zelda.

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Hamilton Basso

865 First Avenue New York, N.Y.

October 14, 1936

Dear Ham:

<…>

Like you, I feel pretty bad about Scott. I wish something could be done about him, but I don’t know what. I had thought of asking my mother to go round and see him, and also of asking some people I know, but I don’t know how much good it would do. He might resent it, especially if he thought any one was trying to help him or felt sorry for him.

I don't know whether you saw the interview which appeared here in The New York Evening Post. It made me sick, and I felt and still feel that some one ought to do something about him. I told Max Perkins so. His attitude, of course, and the Scribner attitude, apparently, is that any attempt at answering a thing like this, or of denouncing such journalistic practice, only adds fuel to the flames and makes the situation worse than ever. I suppose there is a lot of truth in this but I wonder just how much longer we’ve got to sit by meekly and submissively in the world while the scavengers, the shysters, the traducers and the filth-purveyors of every sort are allowed to go their way unchecked. It almost makes me long for dear old Adolph and his S. S. men. They at least could put a stop to a good many of our own accepted forms of thugdom. Of course, in doing so they would establish another and much more powerful one of their own, and there's the rub.

As you say, it looks as if Scott were bent on committing professional suicide, but if a man in his present condition is determined to destroy himself, I think it is a vile and cowardly act on the part of other people to help him along in his intent. From what I have heard from Max, the interviewer got in to see Scott, played him up sympathetically with conversation, gained his confidence and let him spew the whole thing out—all about being lost, done for, defeated, unable to get back and, what was worst of all, all about Zelda being in the sanitarium and all the rest of the miserable business. From the very tone of the interview it was evident what condition Scott was in at the time, and that he could not have been fully aware of what he was saying...

The whole thing was smeared all over the first page of the paper and, like your pal Sherwood ¹, I want to know why. I can't see what possible news value it has—what possible public service it can achieve—why the illness, alcoholism, mental ill health of a writer, together with the mental illness of his wife, is a matter that should be aired for the instruction of the American public. It was a cheap, sensational piece of journalism, and the thing that gets me sore is that I have met the man who owns the paper, and met his wife, and had dinner in their home, and they preened themselves upon their liberalism. His paper is forever attacking Hearst for his vicious and unprincipled methods, and now this great liberal, this spokesman of decent journalism, perpetrates a thing like this. As Perkins said, one of the bitter and disheartening things in life is to find out how many of these people who set themselves up as liberals, as champions of decent living, turn out in the end to be just as filthy a flock of vultures as the worst of them.

Well, the thing is done now, and there's no use talking about it any more. Like you, I want to do something for Scott but when I think about it I come up against a blank wall and end by thinking that maybe I'll give him a good swift kick and tell him, for Cod’s sake, to come out of it. And. of course. I know that would do no good either. I was thinking of his career the other day and, in a way, it seems to me that his greatest misfortune in life has been that he was a child of fortune. Most of us stick around and plug ahead hoping that Lady Luck may hit us with a spare horseshoe. But Scott, at the beginning, had horseshoes rained on him by the whole damn cavalry. I think that this, in a way, unfitted him for what was to follow. He not only had one of the best breaks that any one ever had, he got a very tough break too. I hope that, in a way, I got a bit prepared for it after my experience with “Look Homeward, Angel.”

Knowing what I did about the career of the book, how the entire population of my home town wanted to draw and quarter me, how eminent reviewers, such as Mr. Harry Hansen, headed their reviews with such master strokes of sarcasm as “Ah, Life, Life,” ² etc., how everybody asked if I could ever write another book and how quickly they began to say I never would—I say I was able to smile a trifle grimly a year ago after the publication of “Of Time and the River," when I read that my career had been a bed of roses from the beginning, that “Look Homeward, Angel” had been greeted with a hurricane of applause, that my path from that time on had been as smooth as velvet. I know what happened then. I think I know what is likely to happen to me now until I get another book done. It's not going to be easy to take. But it’s not going to be quite the bitter and disillusioning experience that it was five or six years ago. You know, as well as I do, how quickly they can turn, how desperately hard it is to prevail, when they make up their minds about you.

I had that happen to me a year ago, when a volume of stories came out and I am certainly not bitter about the reception of the stories. I am not sore about it. I’m only telling you that most of the criticism was as the minds made up in advance saw it. The things they'd begun to go for me for in “Of Time and the River,” were carried right over and plastered on my book of stories. The stories, it appeared, were not stories at all but sections that Max Perkins and I had scissored out of the manuscript of “Of Time and The River.” There was a page or two which described the movement of a regiment of negroes through a pier at Newport News during the war, and the great Mr. Chamberlain, in his critique, inquired. “We have negroes here, negroes in the mass, a regiment of negroes. But where is Booker T. Washington, where is Joe Louis, where is Father Divine, etc.?” ³ Where indeed? Where, oh where? For that matter, where is the Queen of Sheba, where is Leonardo Da Vinci, where is Tiglath Pilezar? Gone with the wind, I suppose. The thing that made me tough, however, saved me from apoplectic strangulation, and, in fact, gave me a sort of haughty indifference, was the earnest and no doubt pigheaded belief shared in by Max Perkins and a few other people that the best single piece of writing, the truest, the most carefully planned, and in the end the most unassailable that I've ever done is in that book. ⁴ I’m not going to tell you what it is. Apparently, most of the critics didn't take the trouble to read it, and those that did, for the most part, dismissed it as chaotic, formless, a river of incondite and meaningless energy. Well. I'll stick to the piece and I'm willing to wait I don't believe it's gone with the wind. I think the time will come when some one will really read it. So I don’t feel bad about it or about the book.

Scott, I think, had a similar experience but a much more bitter one. My own feeling is that he never got justice from the critics for “Tender Is the Night.” I admit deficiencies and weaknesses in the book, but I still think that he went deeper in the book and did better writing in it than in any of his previous books. But their minds, of course, were for the most part made up in advance. For years they've been saying that he would never write anything else and accordingly he suffered.

I still feel he has it in him to do fine work. I still feel something ought to be done about him and for him. But when he himself is so set against doing anything for himself, so bent, apparently, upon announcing, publishing and consummating his own ruin, who in the name of God can help him?

I did not mean this letter to be so long or take on such a melancholy hue. I wish I could be down there for a few days, to talk to you and see the mountains at this time. ⁵ I know how lovely they are. I’m afraid I can’t make it at present, but will you do this for me, Ham? When you write me, and I hope it will be soon, will you tell me something about New Orleans, give me the names of a few people there? I’ve never gone around carrying letters of introduction. I promise not to bother your friends, but there is just a chance that during the winter I might get down there for a few days, and if I should I’d deeply appreciate any advice or information you could give me. So far as I’m concerned you are the greatest living authority on New Orleansiana. ⁶

This is all, now. I pray for the success of “Courthouse Square.” I know you have put your heart and your life in it. I know how deeply your integrity is involved in everything you do, and I hope that now you will get your true and fitting reward. It is bound to come sooner or later but I hope you get it while you still have the mischievous twinkle in your flashing eye.

Meanwhile, with love to you and the Missus, and to them thar hills,

Notes:

1 Sherwood Anderson.

2 This was the title of Hansen's Review of Look Homeward, Angel in the October 26, 1929, issue of The New York World.

3 John Chamberlain’s review of From Death to Morning was in The Sew York Times on Friday, November 15, 1935. What it actually said was this: “In The Face of the War,’ one sees the black troops, 'powerful big men, naive and wondering as children, incorrigibly unsuited to the military discipline.’ But one does not see W. E. B. DuBois, or Abram Harris or Joe Louis, strongly marked individuals, marching by in the column of black troops. Yet the column must have contained men closer to DuBois or Harris or Joe Louis than to the generalized portrait that emerges from the Wolfe pages.”

4 “The Web of Earth.”

5 Basso was living at Pisgah Forest, N.C.

6 Basso was born and grew up in New Orleans, and began his career as a newspaper reporter there.

xxx. TO: Barrett H. Clark

TLS, 1 p. Yale University

Grove Park Inn Asheville, N.C.

October 16, 1936

Dear Mr. Clark:

“Vegetable” reads well, but it simply won't play, and I would be doing you a disservice and you would be doing an equal disservice to the prospective producers to offer it to them as part of any repertory. It reads well, but there is some difference between the first and second acts that is so disparate that every time a Little Theatre has produced it (and many of them have tried it), it has been a failure in a big way. This is not to say that I do not realize that the thing reads well, or that I am not tremendously grateful for your interest, but simply to say that I can't give you the permission that you ask.

Sincerely yours, F Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

TLS, 1 p. University of Florida

Grove Park Inn Asheville, N.C.

October 16, 1936

Dear Miss Rawlings:

I will answer your questions individually. The best bootlegger in Asheville is the liquor store opposite the George Vanderbilt Hotel, behind the Battery Park. It is a liquor store selling, in a respectable way, wines, beers, port and sherry, but not above yielding up a pint of Bourbon or gin or what have you. Just mention me, and if that doesn't work try to put a tough look on your face.

I do want to meet you very much. I admire “South Wind Under”² and that so-often-reprinted story about the man who had been in prison and came back,³ and also the other long short story (again I forget the name—maybe you are too complicated with your titles) that won the O. Henry Memorial prize the year before last.⁴

Somehow, I don't want to go to Pisgah Forest, and the idea of going shopping with a woman, even if she had pottery in mind, makes me a little jittery, much as was reported in a recent issue of Time magazine. In short, papa is an invalid, and if you want to see him enough you can always find him pacing up and down in his room at Grove Park Inn.

I didn't know that you had had a serious injury, and please accept my condolences. Mine has been a most absurd thing; I contracted it by trying to do a swan dive from a high board after a year of enforced quietude—probably the first man that ever broke his shoulder in the air.

Can't I be a stop on your way to Pisgah Forest? Give me warning and I shall be shaven and, if not dressed, at least properly attired.

Your admirer, Scott

Notes:

Perkins had asked Rawlings to look up Fitzgerald.

² South Moon Under (1933).

³ “The Pardon.”

⁴ “Gal Young Un.”

xxx. To Hugh F. B. Kerr

From Turnbull

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

October 22, 1936

Dear Mr. Kerr:

There is one great publisher in America, and that is Charles Scribner's Sons. Their list includes, as you must know, Hemingway, Wolfe, etc., and has included at most times young Erskine Caldwell and (for the magazine, at least) William Faulkner. There is no question that they are more open to talent than any other publisher because of their resources, first, and because of the tradition of taking a chance on a talent that has not yet got itself an audience.

I am out of Baltimore in Asheville where I have been ill and I am unable to see you or read your manuscript or estimate what you have to offer, but I think by all odds the wisest thing to do is to send your manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, where you will be read carefully and with imagination by a staff of three or four men who have managed to pick out some of the most extraordinary books of our time, after other publishers have turned them down.

If they should decide that it was not to their advantage to publish your manuscript, send copies of this correspondence to my agent, Harold Ober, at 40 East 49th Street, New York City, and he might be able to give you better advice. If in the future your novel is published and makes a success, I should suggest that you put all rights in his hands. He will charge you ten per cent, but in sixteen years of professional writing he has saved me much more than ten per cent.

Now, have I told you anything you want to know? Again, I am sorry that I cannot read your novel until it is in type, but I am laboring under tremendous obligations here and there is simply not the physical time. This is exactly the same advice that I gave Ernest Hemingway many years ago and is based on a long career which has touched the publishing business in general.

Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. From John Dos Passos

[from The Crack-Up, 1945]

[October?, 1936]

Truro, Mass.

Why Scott—you poor miserable bastard, it was damn handsome of you to write me. Had just heard about your shoulder and was on the edge of writing when I got your letter. Must be damned painful and annoying. Let us know how you are. Katy sends love and condolences. We often talk about you and wish we could get to see you.

I’ve been wanting to see you, naturally, to argue about your Esquire articles—Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? If you don’t want to do stuff on your own, why not get a reporting job somewhere. After all not many people write as well as you do. Here you’ve gone and spent forty years in perfecting an elegant and complicated piece of machinery (tool I was going to say) and the next forty years is the time to use it—or as long as the murderous forces of history will let you. God damn it, I feel frightful myself—I have that false Etruscan feeling of sitting on my tail at home while etcetera etcetera is on the march to Rome —but I have two things laid out I want to finish up and I’m trying to take a course in American history and most of the time the course of world events seems so frightful that I feel absolutely paralysed—and the feeling that I’ve got to hurry to get stuff out before the big boys close down on us. We’re living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history—if you want to go to pieces I think it’s absolutely O. K. but I think you ought to write a first rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich—and anyway, in pieces or not, I wish I could get an hour’s talk with you now and then, Scott, and damn sorry about the shoulder. Forgive the locker room peptalk.

Yrs, Dos.

Notes:

Fitzgerald was forty years old September 24, 1936, and had broken his collarbone the summer before. There are references in the letter to these two events.

Esquire articles - The Crack-Up.

xxx. To Isabel Owens

Asheville, N.C.

October 22, 1936

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C.

October 22, 1936

I am going North without fail for Thanksgiving and spend at least one day in Baltimore… If I have to have an all-day session with Ed Poe we will arrange some meeting that does not conflict with that, and I will stay two days. “On clothes he wants from storage”, and “there are other lost articles: (can’t you hear me say ’full colon’?) one is part of a silver set”, [and money matters].
Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes ... For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness

It would be nice if you could tell me where certain articles are that I stored: my wife's skating skirt Scotty has been wearing, and my wife's two pairs of skiing boots - the tall ones from Quebec and the ones from Switzerland - are both in heavy demand and I have not even an idea as to where I packed them, though I think they are in one of those miscellaneous trunks. There are other lost articles … It will save time if you will in the meantime have gotten in touch with the Storage company and perhaps have been able to make a visit there to see that in that gray bandbox of Zelda's there are the brush and mirror …

if you provided people with purposeful activities, good diet, exercise, fresh air and clean water ... that would be helpful for them

Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Pauline Brownell

undated - probably November 1936

Pauline:
I wrote you a month ago but it seemed a silly letter. I’ve had a strange two months trying to pull together the fragments of a lost year and I wonder if life will ever again make much sense… I wonder if you are happier—somehow you seemed so when I saw you, even to my alcoholic eye. God, I hope so—it was sad to see anyone so young and with so much stuff in such a state of depression. I wish I could have helped you as you tried to help me. Anyhow I want to see you… and talk to you and hear your adventures. Best to George [Pauline’s husband]
Always afftly Scott.

xxx. TO: Adelaide Neall

TLS, 1 p. Library of Congress

Grove Park Inn Asheville, N.C.

October 23, 1936

Dear Miss Nealle:

I hope you are going to be able to schedule Trouble² soon. I have practically finished a story I think you will like, and naturally I don't want too much time to elapse between stories in the Post. I have thought that you underestimated Trouble as a story, and if you can make any possible constructive suggestion about it, please do so, but I like it as it stands now. In reading over the carbon copy, I am still sure I like it.

The new story has been delayed by an arthritis that set in on top of my breaking my shoulder.

In the Clipping Bureau I saw that the interview by Michael Mock had been repeated in a Philadelphia paper and I thought you or Mr. Lorimer might have seen it. The thing was so absurd that I am ashamed of myself for my credulity in being taken in. I had it investigated and found that the pictures showing the difference between Scott Fitzgerald at 21 and Scott Fitzgerald on his fortieth brithday, as well as the whole tone of the interview, before he arrived here in Asheville. It was so little true that the nurse who was on duty with me at the time was shocked at what he had written. He had composed the whole thing from two old articles in Esquire of about a year ago, and I can no more imagine myself saying the things that were attributed to me than you can. When I want to be dramatic I do it in my own way, certainly, and my own style. All my friends were shocked, and I was almost glad that my mother was dead so as not to have seen it, and I wired my daughter's school, Miss Walker's, at Simsbury, Connecticut, so that she could not see it, when excerpts of it were reprinted in Time magazine.

With best wishes always,
F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

² Fitzgerald's last Saturday Evening Post story (6 March 1937).

xxx. TO Mrs. William Hamm

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

October 28, 1936

Dear Marie:

It was damn nice of you to write me. That article in Time (not to mention the three “Crack-Up” articles in Esquire) brought so many letters from old friends, ranging from such as you—and I think of you as about my oldest real friend, certainly my first love—to men that had been in my Company in the army, addressed to “Dear Lieutenant.” Thank you for your thoughtfulness in trying to cheer me up. However, child, life is more complicated than that. There has been some question in my mind whether I should ever have written the Esquire articles. Ernest Hemingway wrote me an irritable letter in which he bawled me out for having been so public about what were essentially private affairs and should be written about in fiction or not at all.

As to the article in Time, it came from an interview in the New York Evening Post written by a man who presumably had come all the way from New York to talk to me about my fortieth birthday. He spread it across three columns in the Post, with a picture of me as I was at twenty-one and an entirely faked-up picture of me as I was at forty. None of the remarks attributed to me did I make to him. They were taken word by word from the first “Crack-Up” article. I saw him because he had come a long way, and I had a temperature of 103 with arthritis, after a ten weeks' siege in and out of bed. He was an s. o. b. and I should have guessed it. As soon as the Time article came out I wired Miss Walker's School in Simsbury, which Scottie has just entered, to keep it from her if possible, and I think she escaped reading it.

I am leading a dull life convalescing, but am planning to go to New York next month and am actually writing again after a long interval of incapacity to do anything.

Indeed, I do know Lefty and Nora Flynn. We three and Zelda (she is still ill and in and out of sanitariums) went to a football game last week. Yesterday she called me up from downstairs in the hotel to say she was in a fashion show and would I come behind the scenes. Zelda and I are going over to dine with them sometime next week. During the mood of depression that I seem to have fallen into about a year ago she was a saint to me; took care of Scottie for a month one time under the most peculiar circumstances, and is altogether, in my opinion, one of the world's most delightful women. But if you know her, there is no need to tell you that.

Saw something of Joe with the Kalmans in Paris—my God, is it six years ago? But since then they have vanished. St. Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it still is home to me; but the people that make it so are now only such a few—the Kalmans, Nonnie, Bob Clarke and a scattering of others. I don't know what I would have to say to so many people who once meant so much to me. An amazing letter came out of the West from Bob Dunn a few months ago saying that he had tried to get in touch with me the last time I was in Hollywood. We exchanged a little local gossip by correspondence, but the trying to keep alive a friendship at long distance is a difficult business. Do you remember one time at the Cottage Club at Princeton, about 1927, when I came up behind you and grabbed you by the arms in a great crowd and said in your ear, “This is somebody you know very well,” but I might have been almost anyone, so far as you knew.

I know you went through hell, Marie, with your first marriage, and all that kidnapping of the children, and of course when my son named, I believe, John Fitzgerald, kidnapped your husband (or was he then your fiance?) I was shocked at his daring to molest you. I wrote him a letter to the penitentiary in which I said that if he wanted to kidnap anybody to leave Marie alone, because she was beginning to have a neurosis on the matter. John has been a good son to me, sending me most of the Weyerhauser ransom money, but the trouble is, I blew it in, Marie.

Well, well, for the rest of the news—my mother died at a ripe old age last summer. If you answer this, tell me how is your mother, who always daily frightened me, and for whom I also had a peculiar admiration because she somehow played the part that Alice Brady plays currently of a completely haywire person who always really had a grip on things.

I thought __ __ was not particularly interesting but very nice. Her father is the oldest settler in this hotel, a retired newspaper publisher, and the man she married looked to me like one of his contemporaries.

It seems strange to hear you say you have just moved in from Lake Minnetonka instead of from White Bear. The cities were growing close when we were young, but are they now so close together that such places as White Bear Lake and Minnetonka are the same thing?

With affection always,
Scott

xxx. FROM: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Fall 1936

Sunday Night

Dear Scott:

I've just finished “The Great Gatsby” again—

I have no business trying to write you about it now, because I'm all torn up again—much worse than when I read it ten years ago—You were wise so young—I'm only beginning to know some of the things you must have been born, knowing—

The book resolves itself into the strangest feeling of a crystal globe, or one of the immense soap bubbles we achieved as children, if it could hold its shape and color without breaking—It is so beautiful, it is so clairvoyant, it is so heart-breaking—

Please, how can you talk of security when the only security is the loveliness of the dream? And you are right to think that anything can be mended, and life can be cut to order, like a diamond—But turn about is fair play, and you must give life the same privilege—to mend and change you, and to cut new facets—I suppose you know that nothing is wasted—The hell you've been through isn't wasted—All you have to do, ever, is to forget everything and turn that terrible, clear white light you possess, on the minds and emotions of the people it stirs you to write about—That's your security—

I enjoyed myself unreasonably talking with you, and have no apologies for not letting you get the rest your nurse was having fits about—I think you probably needed that kind of talk as much as I did—only we kept darting up so many alleys—and a perfectly sane outsider would have thought we were a pair of articulate panthers, the way we took turns pacing up and down—You'll have to pace with me on my thirty-foot farmhouse porch this winter—we could pass each other comfortably—

I was high from the really very decent wines and I suppose the talk, as far as Spruce Pine—I got absent-minded once and found myself at the foot of Mt Mitchell—a man told me I could go over the mountain—having been up it in broad daylight, driving myself and paralyzed with terror that I wouldn't admit, I about-faced shamelessly and retraced the fourteen erroneous miles—

The reason I keep doing this—and this—is that the period broke off my typewriter a few days ago—When I try to end a sentence in all decisiveness, I just get a blur, like this There are always connotations in dashes, anyway—none in blurs¹

So many thanks for your hospitality—

I'm writing Max, who sounded to me a bit worried about you, a favorable report—and an honest one—Good God, man, you're all right—Don't let anybody hurry you—not that you would—When you're sore through and through—I don't mean physically—it has to heal in its own way—Don't I know—If anyone knew how good my little 32 revolver has looked to me sometimes—

Don't ever write to me politely, answering a letter—but anytime you really want to call me “obvious” or what else was it, I'd enjoy having you do it—

Don't repeat to Max or anyone the small bit I told you about the book I have in mind after this one—But I'm longing to get to it, and dreading it, for if I can say one-tenth of what I want to, it will be perfectly beautiful—Then, when of course, it isn't, I'll consider the 32 again, or maybe do a Cross Creek Cleopatra with a rattlesnake—

Again, thank you—
Marjorie

Notes:

¹ The blurs have not been transcribed.

xxx. To: Annah Williamson

c. October 1936

Inscription in Taps At Reveille. Bruccoli.

For Annah Williamson—other people were young once, just like you. They broke their hearts over things that now seem trivial. But they were their own hearts, and they had the right to meddle with them in their own way F. Scott Fitzgerald Ashville 1936 Courtesy of D. W.

Notes:

Annah Williamson D. W. means Dorothy Williamson, Fitzgerald's nurse in Asheville.

xxx. To: Shirley Britt

c. October 1936

Inscription in Tender Is The Night. Pennsylvania State University

For Shirley Britt from the man who winked at her in the subway on Easter Day 1914 F. Scott Fitzgerald Ashville, 1936 Tipped off by Martha Marie Shank

xxx. TO: V. F. Calverton

TLS, 1 p. New York Public Library

Grove Park Inn Asheville, N.C.

November 4, 1936

Dear George:

The Man Inside¹ came and filled me with strange emotions. I hardly know what to say until I have looked over parts of it again. You remember a conversation we had late one night in which you told me something about your relations with your wife—probably the best conversation we have ever had. It reminded me of that and I was alternately attracted and repelled by your use of documentation, which I suppose comes from your long journalistic and scientific training, and your attempt to weave Joli Coeur into a romance that hesitates between being realistic and picaresque.

To a great extent I have used the accepted technique of my time, feeling that what observations I have made need all the help that I can give the reader to carry on with them, and the more radical (I thought) my idea was, the more determinedly have I clothed it in sheep's wool and sugar-coated it, to change the metaphor.

If you do not mind criticism from a friend who admires you and who admires The Man Inside, I feel that the more nebulous your thought has been, the more inclined you are to throw a cloud around it, and again and again to try to resolve that cloud into a simple declarative fact expressed as an opinion or an apposition, with the naivete of a child pricking a balloon. I will have to see you to talk about it more fully. I hope to God it does well. You have done so much for other people that I would like to see you evolve some form in which your talent for fiction can appear to best advantage, and you are on the way to doing that here.

As ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Calverton's The Man Inside: Being the Record of the Strange Adventures of Allen Steele Among the Xulus (Scribners, 1936).

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

Grove Park Inn Asheville, North Carolina

November 11, 1936

Dear Margaret:

Only the fact that I have been incapacitated by a broken shoulder has broken the tradition of taking Andrew to a game beside the hall of his grandfather ("Pepper Constable").¹ I am sending him two tickets to the last Princeton game and if he doesn't want to use them he can give them to someone else who wants to.

Andrew is a brave fighter and I admire, sometimes, his stubbornness and his reticence just as much as I would like him in the sunshine when I have tried to give him what I have found from life. He has the potentialities of being absolutely first-rate. I hope he read War and Peace; and I wish I had had the advantage when I was a child of parents and friends who knew more than I did.

With dearest love to you all,

Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹A Princeton football star.

xxx. TO: Bob and Raye Sylvester

TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University

November 12, 1936

GROVE PARK INN, Asheville, N.C.

Dear Bob and Raye Sylvester:

The thing is this: that you go along thinking, this is the way things are, and that is all right; you go along at the same time saying that this is the way things should be, but you are not sure; and you keep your tongue in your cheek about how things will be, but the safest prophecy is the most dismal.

Now, second: you go along thinking that you will get by no matter what; you think that the methods you have used are all right. Then you come up, because the first two don't fit together, and you never thought you had any character, anyhow.

Sincerely yours,

xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney

[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).

Grove Park Inn ¹ Asheville, N.C.

November 12, 1936

Dear Margaret:

My daughter is coming past Baltimore the 22nd of December, and I have a theory that she should not get out of touch with Baltimore. In solution, I would ask this favor: that you would come and receive with Mrs. Bayard Turnbull and Mrs. Stanley Woodward² at a practically breathless tea dance. I don’t know whether any of you know each other or whether other exigencies may take you away on the afternoon that I suggest, but if you could just drop in for a moment I would feel as flattered as could be, and if you can’t do that, will you please send me a line making the best possible alibi.

Seriously, I wish you could come down for just a second and I hope like hell that you are well enough to be able to travel into Baltimore. But if you can’t, I am sure that Peaches will represent you adequately.

With affection to you both, Scott Fitzgerald

Notes

1. Fitzgerald lived at the Grove Park Inn for the last half of 1936, while Zelda Fitzgerald was a patient at Highland Hospital in Asheville.

2. Margaret Turnbull and Annie Laurie Woodward were Baltimore friends of the Fitzgeralds. The Fitzgeralds lived at La Paix, a property owned by Bayard and Margaret Turnbull, in 1932 and 1933. The Turnbulls’ son Andrew became a friend of Fitzgerald’s and one of his earliest biographers and editors of his letters.

xxx. Bank Check

November 17, 1936

First National Bank check, 7.75 x 3, filled out in another hand and signed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, payable to Grove Park Inn for $10.

Notes

Fitzgerald spent time at the Grove Park Inn, situated in Asheville, North Carolina, during the summers of 1935 and 1936, recuperating from ill health in the clean mountain air. He rented two rooms at a time—one for sleeping and one for writing—opting for basic accommodations that overlooked the main entrance so that he could observe the comings and goings of beautiful women. While staying there in 1936, he experienced a series of traumas—he helped to transfer his wife Zelda to Highland Hospital for psychiatric treatment, broke his shoulder while diving into a swimming pool, and suffered from writer's block. He invited New York Post reporter Michael Mok to the Grove Park Inn to do a story on him in September, but the resulting article—'The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair'—plunged him into a deep, brooding depression. Although Fitzgerald went to the Grove Park Inn seeking solace and relaxation, this became one of the darkest periods of his life.

xxx. To Pauline Brownell

undated - probably November 1936

Pauline:
Last night, tossing into the wastebasket the tattered shreds of a sweater once brought back to life by you—remember?—It occurred to me that you took with you some shirts&things you said ought to be mended… will you stick it in a box&give it to the bus driver?… I still come to Ashville [sic] once a month but simply pick up Zelda&take her out… She is much better… Even tho you don’t answer letters I think of you and wonder about you… We did have a lot of good times mixed in with the bad.
F…

xxx. To Pete Finney and Margaret “Peggy” Finney

[TS, signed undated, December 1936] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).

The Stafford ¹ Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Peggy,

In terrific haste I send you back this. As I said on the phone there are no words to express certain obligations.

Scott

Notes

1 This undated letter is written from the hotel at which Fitzgerald stayed while planning and giving the dance for Scottie mentioned in the previous letter. Margaret “Peggy” Finney had said yes to his request in that letter that she help receive Scottie’s guests. I believe this letter immediately precedes the dance.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

TLS, 1 p. Princeton University

GROVE PARK INN, Asheville, N.C.

December 12, 1936

Dear Kally:

The situation is essentially the same. For more than six months I have been too ill to do any decent work. But it is changed in this regard: that since you loaned me that $6,000 I have also borrowed $2,000 from the Scribner Company (to whom I already owe heavy advances on books yet to be written and marketed). I am up and around to the extent that I am finishing a story this week, and I am going to meet daughter, Scottie, in Baltimore, on the 22nd.

Will you lend me $1500, on assignment to be mailed you as soon as it can be prepared by Ed Poe, in Baltimore (already asked for, on the presumption that you will be able to lend me this money)?¹

There is no reason in the world why you should not charge me interest on this. God knows, nobody else has hesitated during this time of the plague of the locusts; and while I know that it has been a gesture of friendship on your part, still it would aid my self respect if you would pretend that it has a business foundation. Please wire me if such an arrangement is practicable, or if your other commitments make it impossible.

Ever yours, Scott

Notes:

¹ Kalman made the loan.

xxx. Projected List of Collected Works

c. 1936

Holograph document, 1 p. Princeton.

Asheville, North Carolina (?)

Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

Fitzgerald's plan for a projected edition of his collected works.

1937

xxx. TO: Marie Shank

Wire. Princeton University

BALTIMORE MD JAN 7 A [1937]
MISS MARIE SHANK
FAR FROM LEAVING ASHEVILLE FOR GOOD IT LOOKS LIKE MY HEADQUARTERS FOR A LONG TIME MY IDEA IS TO CONSTITUTE YOU AS SORT OF A ONE PERSON UNOFFICIAL TRUST FUND ARRANGEMENT IN MY EFFORT TO PAY OFF MY DEBTS THAT IS TO SAY I WOULD PAY YOU SOME SIZEABLE AMOUNT EACH WEEK AND YOU WOULD DISTRIBUTE IT AS YOU THOUGHT PROPER AND THAT ALL MAIL WOULD COME THROUGH YOU SO THAT I COULD GO TO A HIDEAWAY WITHOUT THE EVERPRESSING WORRY OF DEBT ON MY BACK STOP NATURALLY YOU WOULD TAKE WHAT COMMISSION YOU THOUGHT JUST FOR SUCH SERVICE BUT IN ANY CASE IT IS TOO MUCH FOR ME STOP THIS IS ENTIRELY CONFIDENTIAL NATURALLY STOP WILL BE IN ASHEVILLE TOWARD END THIS WEEK AND WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU
S SCOTT FITZGERALD.

xxx. From Gerald and Sara Murphy

Jan. 30, 1937,

FSF Papers, Princeton, Box 40:

PATRICK DIED PEACEFULLY THIS MORNING LOVE SARA GERALD 445 PM.

xxx. To Gerald and Sara Murphy

From Turnbull.

Oak Hall Hotel Tryon, North Carolina

January 31, 1937

Dearest Gerald and Sara:

The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that [it] is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice.¹ I can see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln's in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.

But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail death-ward. Fate can't have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort of joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.

Scott

Notes:

¹ The Murphys' other son, Patrick, had died of tuberculosis.

xxx. Inscription TO: Dr. Nardini

Winter 1937

Inscription in Taps At Reveille (1935). Bruccoli.

From a hypochondriac
to his favorite prey

Scott Fitzgerald to
Dr Nardini
Winter 1937

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

ALS, 5 pp. Princeton University

Early 1937

Hotel Stafford letterhead, Baltimore, Maryland

Beatrice:

Your letter reached me an hour after I had left Hopkins where I had been laid up a week with grippe—so its odd you mentioned it.

The clinic there which goes in for diagnosis over a long or short period is the Phipps Clinic. The head is Dr. Adolph Meyer but you could communicate through Dr. Thomas Rennie, whom I will speak to, with the assurance that my name wont ever be mentioned to Eleanor.

I'm glad to say goodbye to the most calamitous year of my life and it was fitting end to spend Xmas to New Years in hospital instead with Scotty. I stayed up long enough to give her a tea dance (supposedly for 50 children, actually for 80) + then collapsed + handed her over to friends. She went down alone to Ashville to spend a few days with her mother + Nora Flinn.¹ She is with me now—when I've put her on the train I'll go south again probably either Tryon or the East Coast of Florida. I have got back almost the complete use of my arm and plan a year of intensive work to make up for this summer + fall.

So much for my somewhat uninspiring history. Did you or did you not send me another subscription to Fortune—I guess as much for a December issue arrived. It is a gorgeous magazine and this may amuse you—Scotty picked out her school from their article on the “ten best schools” last year + it was the one I wanted her to choose, even tho the article said frankly it was the strictest school in the country. She has done extremely well there, leading the school in two subjects + her class in two more. I think I told you she has a scholarship—else I couldn't have afforded it this year.

My God! This certainly is the proud parent. But you are too. I'd love to have seen Tulah in her long taffeta. I somehow don't think you will lose her as I have managed to lose Scottie. The latter is simply a carefully chaperoned waif and I hope it wont end by her flinging herself into some too early and disastrous marriage.

There is a phone call from below that my lawyer is here—his name is Edgar Allen Poe Jr. Concieve of that—Edgar Allen Poe and Francis Scott Key, the two Baltimore poets a hundred years after!

So goodbye and dearest affection always
Scott

Notes:

¹ Nora Flynn was a friend of Fitzgerald's in Tryon, N.C., who tried to help him stay on the wagon.

xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance

Early 1937

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Tryon, North Carolina

Beatrice:

Your letter was disturbing. Its awful that you have been sick again. Finding that liquor was out of all controll with me I simply stopped it entirely the first of the year, even my beloved beer, and life seems niether better nor worse except better a little in the early morning and somewhat lonlier at night. Hated to stop as I enjoyed it so but it was responsible for that silly accident to some extent—I mean the dive was all right but I wouldn't have tried it without Dutch rashness. And that silly piece in Time was read by all friends, relatives ect, giving a general impression that papa was really thru this time.

After a quiet winter, seeing only a few old friends, I'm going north + then perhaps to Hollywood for a few months, first showing myself at daughter's school where she complains I'm the mystery man. My invalid, after vast improvement, so that I even planned to take her to the beach for awhile, has distressingly collapsed again. With each collapse she moves perceptibly backward—there is no good end in sight. She is very sweet and tragic For the majority of creative people life is a pretty mean trick. There are only moments and its childish to hope for more. And hope was once so much fun, such a graceful virtue.

Im so glad about Eleanor. It really solves her problem doesn't it—I mean completely.

Letters are so egotistic nessessarily but about my recent stuff that you've liked I can't agree with you. It seems to lack any special brilliance or glow and in an attempt to get a new attitude I'm writing a play, or rather some plays.¹ Being such an experienced technician I've been inclined and tempted lately to cover lack of story +feeling about the story with mere description or else set off damp fireworks to give an artificial life. A play has such bare bones that it makes me aware always of the characters + whether or not they're travelling. My first (in 1923) was a failure, my only serious flop, + I have a detached interest to see what the drama, my first love, holds for me. (God that sounds stilted, but it's true)

Fortune + Life come + I think of you—as if I needed that. I wish I could see you but of course it's impossible. I'm going to write a play for you—I love your letters

Devotedly Scott

Notes:

¹ These plays were not completed and are unidentified.

xxx. TO: Adelaide Neall

Early 1937

ALS, 1 p. R. Sherrod

Tryon, North Carolina

Dear Miss Neall:

Thanks for your note and for scheduling the Trouble story. 1937 better be good—'35 and '36 were one long doctor's bill.

“Gwen” (otherwise “Scottie”)¹ is the healthy member of the family-she has a sort of half scholarship at Miss Walker's in Conneticut. My wife is better and for the first time in a long time I have no ailment to complain about.

I hope all goes well with you and I'd like to see you. I am thinking of taking up horses and dogs so I can write for the Post again—joking aside I want to discover some new vien which will interest both me and the public. I feel as if I were a contemporary of Richard Harding Davis and Eleanor Glynn² and yet my seniors by twenty years—Willa Cather, Ferber et al. seem to live zestfully in the present. Its a little too early for an autobiography of my era though I've even considered that.³ In any case I'll be sending you something within a fortnight. I've sold you only 16 stories in 5 years, as compared to 36 straight in the five years before that. Of course there was a novel in there, two yrs. long. With Best Wishes

F Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

¹ Fitzgerald had sold two stories to the Post about a teenage girl named Gwen who was based on his daughter Scottie.

² Davis was an adventure writer and war correspondent at the turn of the century; Elinor Glyn was best known for her romantic novel Three Weeks (1907).

³ Written in the margin in another hand: “No, it isn't too early.”

xxx. TO: Fred B. Millet

Postmarked 27 February 1937

ALS, 3 pp. Yale University

Tryon, North Carolina

Dr. Professor Millet:

This is pretty complete to date, more so than any bibliography I have ever written. Hope it answers your purpose

Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald Sept 24th, 1896—St. Paul, Minn

Son of Edward + Mary Fitzgerald. Married (1920)—Zelda Sayre—Montgomery Ala (Author of a novel Save me the Waltze and of short stories alone + with her husband

One daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (1921)

Educated Princeton Univ (1913-1917)

War (not overseas): 2nd Lt. 45th Inf.—1st Lt. Aide-de-Camp to Brig. Gen J. A. Ryan

Has lived near New York, in Europe (six years), in Wilmington, Baltimore and North Carolina.

Adress c/o Charles Scribners, 599 5th Ave New York City

Works

Novels.

This side of Paradise 1920
The Beautiful and Damned 1922
The Great Gatsby 1925
Tender is the Night 1934

Stories

Flappers and Philosophers
Tales of the Jazz Age
All the Sad Young Men
Taps at Revielle

(Contributed to thirty or forty magazines, principally the Saturday Evening Post. First story accepted by Mencken + Nathan for the old Smart Set in 1919. Previously had written for undergratuate publications and written the libretto several years for the Princeton Triangle Club—once with Edmund Wilson Jr.)

Play

The Vegetable produced in Atlantic City 1923 with Ernest Truax

Movies

The Chorus Girl's Romance. Metro 1920 Viola Dana (From my story Head + Shoulders)

The Off Shore Pirate. Metro 1921 Viola Dana (From my story same title)

The Husband Hunter Fox 1921, Elien Percy (From my Story, Myra Meets His Family)

Conductor 1492 (From my story The Camel's Back. Warner 1922

The Beautiful and Damned Warner 1922 (Kenneth Harlan + Marie Prevost) (From my novel)

The Great Gatsby Paramount 1926 (Warner Baxter + Lois Wilson (From my novel)

Have also worked on several movies in New York and Hollywood.

***

Hobbies: Swimming, mild fishing, history, especially military, bucolic but civilzed travel, food and wine, imaginary problems of organization, if this makes sense.

***

Oil Picture Painted by David Silvette (5 N. 2nd St. Richmond Va. He has reproductions of it.²)

Notes:

² Now at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

From Turnbull.

Oak Hall [Hotel] Tryon, North Carolina

[Spring, 1937]

Dear Margaret:

What a lovely letter you write. I am timorous in answering you, having no flair for letters—my old ones reread make me wince.

And now, assuming that there are 20 intelligent women in Baltimore (isn't the proper word “bright” or “clever?") I spring to answer you.

I think your first topic is the best of the two ² (the second embraces all feminism and will lead to triteness) but it's not perfect. It's awfully yes or no—has the aristocrat got money?—if “it” hasn't it had better be born into the middle of the middle classes in a small town. If you had money and were not Russian or Spanish it was certainly an advantage to be an aristocrat up to now. One might not be invited out much or have a king give up his throne in one's honor or be as well known as Harlow and Low outside the county, and certainly one had to kneel to the monied nobility, but it had its compensations. Tories have such true-and-tried indignations that they are practically formed at ten.

Oh, well—Tolstoi didn't like it—which leads me to ask if Andrew finished War and Peace or has D. H. Lawrence come between them? He seemed fine at Xmas. The time will come when all adults will spend the holidays in bed as I did and you apparently. I came down here and went on the white list for another long stretch and am finding it dull and not even conducive to work. Not that I miss the liquor which gives me but little elation in my old age but it is gloomy to see how few things I really care about when I see clearly. I support Zelda's contention that it were best to begin at the pole and work south to the Riviera and likewise add that one should have first drunk at 35 and progress to a champagne-pink three score and ten.

I should think Andrew would love Look Homeward, Angel and A Farewell to Arms.

Reading over Eleanor's sweet little note gave me pleasure. Scottie does well, leading the school in French and English and apparently being very serious after her Xmas debauch.

I think of you often in your garden. Hasn't my ghost become pretty dim at La Paix?

Always affectionately,
Scott

Notes:

² Margaret Turnbull had asked Fitzgerald's advice about topics for a discussion group to which she belonged.

xxx. TO Mr. And Mrs. Eben Finney

From Turnbull.

[Oak Hall Hotel] [Tryon, North Carolina]

[Spring, 1937]

Dear Pete and Peggy:

It was swell of you to write me and I don't know yet how you found out where my wandering daughter was. Coincidental with your telegram came one from her saying she had expected to wire me tomorrow and is coming by Spartanburg, not Asheville as ordered, with me in the act of leaving a call for six o'clock to meet her in Asheville! Ah, me—or youth, hell, or something.

Still as I let her down Xmas I shall forgive the lapse. There isn't really much I can do about it. She expects it to be dull here but she'll find it quite gay. I want to get to know her again—I'm in fine shape again (for forty)—not so much as a glass-beer since January, and perhaps she'll approve of me.

I think of you often and your kindness to her in the chilling emergencies of the past year. Someday I'm going to write about the series of calamities that led up to the awful state I was in Xmas. A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself. Because of this—I mean too many anxieties and too much introspection—I'm going to Hollywood next month and extrovert awhile, do a picture on order for Harlow and Robert Taylor and then some other work for Metro if they want me to stay on. I might take Scottie there this summer.

This little town is as full of Princetonians as Baltimore and fuller of sunshine. I was never a part of Baltimore but in spite of much personal unhappiness there, I mean chiefly illnesses, I love the place and am grateful to its general urbanity and sophistication for much kindness—with your kindness to Scottie coming first. I think I like it next to any city except New York but I'm [too] confirmed a wanderer to have been content there.

I hope the Peacherino ¹ is as beautiful and blooming as ever and that you, Peggy, are strong enough now to do whatever you want to do. I still think of your lovely house with the June sunlight on the pool and the black-brown children being ravenously happy.

With every good wish to you all,

Ever your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I still don't see how you got Scottie's address unless you phoned Miss Walker's. I didn't even know Sally Simmons' father's name!

Notes:

¹ The Finneys' daughter, Peaches.

xxx. TO: Corey Ford

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Tryon, N.C.

That always reminds me of you + your Rover Boys—didn’t you read Dave Porter too? → Oak Hall

April 1937

Dear Corey:
I think you have read or heard that I’ve been in a somewhat bitter temper for a year, and that led you to say to yourself “It might cheer the poor bastard up to think he’s not forgotten.” Whatever was the impulse that made you write it did cheer me up and the idea that people have such thoughts + do something so concrete about it is the most cheering thought of all.

I had been sick as hell for a year and took an extra one to get over it morally for as a child of the bitch goddess I began trying to fight it with 2 quarts a day + got into an awful psychological jam. However I came back to life last January after the newspapers began cracking at me (it was rather a shock—nobody ever tried to interfere with Ring Lardner’s utterly private life, but I had myself to blame with those indiscreet Esquire articles) and decided to be an example to myself. I now admire myself almost as much as Wm Seabrook, Mary McLane and Casanova.

Maybe this has nothing to do with why you wrote me. Anyhow thank you more than I can say. Im sorry our meetings have been so brief—the last at Marice Hamilton’s in February, 1931. My God, where have these six years gone—whole months go by and nothing seems to happen. Is that just middle-age? I’d like to do a lot of liesurely things now but there seems to be no time. Yours F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notes:

American humorist.

“Rover Boys,” a series of books for boys by Edward Stratemeyer; David Dixon Porter, naval historian and novelist.

William Seabrook wrote Asylum (1935), about his treatment for alcoholism; Mary MacLane was the author of The Story of Mary MacLane (1902). Both books were regarded as shocking when they were published.

xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor (To Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci))

ALS, 1 p. Princeton University

Spring 1937

Dearest Ceci:

Zelda is at
Highland’s Hospital
Ashville, N.C.

She is much much better. So am I. I stopped drinking in January and have been concentrating on other mischief, such as work, which is even duller, or seems so to me at present. But Scottie must be educated + Zelda can’t starve. As for me I’d had enough of the whole wretched mess some years ago + seen thru a sober eye find it more appalling than ever.

With Dearest Love Always
Scott

Oak Hall
Tryon, N.C.

xxx. To: Dorothy Bissell

April 1937

Inscription in The Great Gatsby (1925).

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In memory of hot arguments over the Supreme Court and the autonomy of Barcelona

xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney

[MS, pencil, signed undated (late May/June 1937) written from Tryon, North Carolina] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).

Dear Pete + Peggy:

It was swell of you to wire me and I don’t know yet how you found out where my wandering daughter was.¹ Coincidental with your telegram came one from her saying she had expected to wire me tomorrow + is coming by Spartansburg not Ashville as ordered, with me in the act of leaving a call for six oclock to meet her in Ashville! ² Ah, me—or youth hell, or something.

Still as I let her down Xmas³ I shall forgive the lapse. There isn’t really much I can do about it. She expects it to be dull here but she’ll find it quite gay. I want to get to know her again—I’m in fine shape again (for forty)—not so much as a glass-beer since January, + perhaps she’ll approve of me.

I think of you often and your kindness to her in the chilling emergencies of the past year. Some day I’m going to write about the series of calamities that led up to the awful state I was in Xmas. A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself. Because of this— I mean too many anxieties + too much introspection I’m going to Hollywood next month + extravert awhile, do a picture on order for Harlowe + Robert Taylor and then some other work for Metro if they want me to stay on.⁴ I might take Scotty there this summer.

This little town is as full of Princetonians as Baltimore + fuller of sunshine. I was never a part of Baltimore, but in spite of much personal unhappiness there, I mean chiefly illnesses, I love the place and am grateful to its general urbanity + sophistication for much kindness—with your kindness to Scottie coming first. I think I like it next to any city except New York but I’m confirmed a wanderer to have been content there.

I hope the Peacherino is as beautiful + blooming as ever and that you, Peggy, are strong enough now to do whatever you want to do. I still think of your lovely house with the June sunlight on the pool + the black-brown children being ravenously happy.

With every good wish to you all, Ever your friend,

F Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I still don’t see how you got Scottie’s address unless you phoned Miss Walkers. I didn’t even know Sally Simmon’s father’s name!

Notes

A redacted version of this letter was published in Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Turnbull, 569-70.

1. Frances Scott Fitzgerald attended the Ethel Walker boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut, in September 1936. Scottie had evidently gone away at the end of term in May 1937 with a school friend, Sally Simmons; the vacation is not mentioned in Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie, the Daughter of...: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). During the next two years— with her mother hospitalized and her father in California—Scottie would spend much time with the Finneys, and then with the family of Harold Ober (1881-1959), Fitzgerald’s longtime agent and friend.

2. Zelda remained a patient at Highland while Fitzgerald lived nearby at the Oak Hall Hotel in Tryon from January to June 1937.

3. On December 22, 1936, Fitzgerald indeed gave the afternoon tea dance for Scottie that he discusses in the earlier letters. The dance, at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, turned into a disaster when he got extremely drunk. Scottie went home with the Finneys “in a state of semi-hysteria,” as she recalled later, and Fitzgerald ended up in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Lanahan, Scottie, 97.

4. Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in July under contract as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM had released, in March 1937, Personal Property, starring Robert Taylor (1911-1969) and Jean Harlow (1911-1937). The first screenplay Fitzgerald worked on, and his only Hollywood screen credit, was for Three Comrades (1938), starring Taylor. Harlow’s shocking early death on June 7, 1937, stunned the film world and was widely reported; Fitzgerald would have known of it, so this letter predates it.

5. Margaret Courtauld Finney was nicknamed “Peaches” as a girl. Fitzgerald loved pet names and here amplifies hers.

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

June 1937

ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University

Tryon, North Carolina

Dear Kaly:

Well, you certainly gave me a generous helping hand out of a nightmare and now that it is paid up—as far as such an ‘obligation’ can be paid—I want to tell you that I’ve been constantly thinking of what you did with gratitude and appreciation. What got me into the two years mess that reached its lowest point in the fall of 1936 was the usual combination of circumstances. A predjudiced enemy might say it was all drink, a fond mama might say it was a run of ill-luck, a banker might say it was ‘not providing’ for the future in better days, a psychiatrist might say it was a nervous collapse—it was perhaps partly all these things—the effect was to fantastic prevent me from doing any work at the very age when presumably one is at the height of one’s powers. My life looked like a hopeless mess there for awhile and the point was I didn’t want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good Goddamn.

Luckily a few people had faith in me, or perhaps only kindliness—there was a doctor that was interested and some old friends who simply couldn’t believe it was me. I hurt myself professionally no end but did no great damage to private relations—Scottie being away at school, Zelda in a sanitarium + myself in North Carolina where I saw no people at all. And for six months (I went on the complete wagon, not even beer, in January) I have been steadily coming back, first physically + finally financially, tho that’s only just begun and I’m afraid I’ll have to go to Hollywood before accumulating any surplus.

So much for me and I don’t think it will ever happen again. I want to come to St Paul sometime this summer, probably on my way to or from the coast, + I want to be sure you’re there, so write me if + when you + Sandy will be gone to Europe to fight with Gen. Franco for the rights of labor and the 20 hr. day. Scribners, 597 5th Ave is a permanent address for me, though in person I am usually in Carolina near Zelda. I took her out swimming yesterday + we talked of you. Again my deepest gratitude

With Affection Always
Scott Fitzg—

xxx. To Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci)

From Turnbull.

[En route to Hollywood]

[Postmarked July 5, 1937]

Dear Ceci:

Just a line about my whereabouts. I'm going out here for two years on a big contract financially. My health's equal to it now and the movie people are convinced I'm on the wagon and worth buying.

It's a hell of a prospect in every other way except money but for the present and for over 3 years the creative side of me has been dead as hell. Scottie is in New York; Helen Hayes and Charlie MacArthur are bringing her out to me in July. Helen isn't working, as she has 40 more weeks as Queen Victoria on the road, so she's keeping an eye on Scottie out here while Charlie and I work.

Could Scottie spend a few days with you in September? I think you'd like her a lot now. She took her preliminaries for Vassar this spring.

Dearest love always.
Scott

WHO'S WHO

Madame Lubov Egorova - Zelda Fitzgerald’s ballet teacher in Paris.

Dr. Oscar Forel - Head psychiatrist at Les Rives de Prangins clinic.

Bert Barr - When Fitzgerald sailed for America on 29 January to attend his father's funeral, he met Bert Barr (Mrs. Louis Goldstein) on the New York, which docked 6 February. She was a member of the party with Texas oilman Herman Cornell and convinced Fitzgerald that she was a professional card sharp. The story “On Your Own” was inspired by this shipboard meeting. See Esquire (30 January 1979), 67, for a note on Bert Barr.

Alice Lee Myers - Mr. and Mrs. Richard Myers were close friends of the Murphys.

Alfred Dashiell - Editor of Scribner's Magazine.

Norma Shearer Thalberg Actress; wife of Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM and model for Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon.

Dr. Mildred Squires - Of the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University; Zelda Fitzgerald dedicated Save Me the Waltz to Dr. Squires.

Bennett Cerf - The founding partner of Random House who was trying to reverse the ban on Joyce's Ulysses and had solicited statements from leading writers.

Cary Ross - An aspiring writer who later became the proprietor of the gallery where Zelda Fitzgerald's paintings were exhibited in 1934.

Dr. Thomas Rennie - Psychiatrist at Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Gregg Dougherty - Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald's who joined the Princeton chemistry department.

Lawrence Lee - A member of the University of Virginia staff.

Charles W. Donahoe - One of Fitzgerald's closest friends at Newman and Princeton

Isaac Benesch - See here the special article on this letter.

John O’Hara, whose first novel, Appointment in Samarra, would be published in 1934, had written Fitzgerald in 1933 a fan letter about one of his Saturday Evening Post stories.

Francis Swann - A member of the Vagabond Players, a Baltimore amateur theatrical group.

W. F. Clarkson - Member of a committee assembling memorabilia for the Cottage Club (Fitzgerald donated two pages from the manuscript of This Side of Paradise,).

Edward Shenton - Illustrator for the Scribner's Magazine serialization of Tender Is the Night.

Egbert S. Oliver - Of Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

Cameron Rogers - Biographer who had written Fitzgerald

Louis Bromfield - Novelist who knew Fitzgerald in Paris

Samuel Marx - MGM story editor.

Howard Coxe - Author of Passage to the Sky (1929), a novel set in Florence. Coxe graduated from Princeton in 1920 and had met Fitzgerald in Rome in 1924.

Mabel Dodge Luhan - Wealthy patroness of the arts.

Matthew Josephson - Critic, editor, and biographer.

Dr. William Elgin - Psychiatrist on the staff of Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Md.

Rosalind Sayre Smith - Zelda Fitzgerald’s sister.

Dr. Harry M. Murdock - Director of Craig House.

Marvin Chauncey Ross - Manager of Stein's American lecture tour.

V. F. Calverton - Nom de plume of George Goetz, editor of The Modern Monthly and author or editor of some twenty books on political and sociological topics.

Mrs. William Hamm - the former Marie Hersey, Marie Hersey Hamm.

Carmel Myers - Fitzgerald had met Miss Myers in 1924 when she was making Ben-Hur in Rome.

Arnold Gingrich - Editor of Esquire magazine.

G. B. Stern - Gladys Bronwyn Stern, English novelist. She was best known for her Matriarch series, published 1919-35.

Brooks Bowman - Princeton undergraduate who wrote “East of the Sun” for the 1934-35 Triangle Club show, Stags at Bay.

Alice Richardson - was Fitzgerald's secretary

James Boyd - Princeton-educated novelist; author of Drums (1925), Marching On (1927), and The Long Hunt (1930).

C. A. Wright - An editor of the University of Pennsylvania Punch Bowl

Mrs. Albert Kibble, Jr. - see the story behind this correspondent in Fitzgerald's “Author's House”

Laura Guthrie - A fortune-teller at the Grove Park Inn who had literary ambitions and became Fitzgerald's secretary-confidante. Mrs. Guthrie served as confidante of and typist for Fitzgerald in Asheville. See Laura Guthrie Hearne, “A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Esquire (December 1964).

Beatrice Dance - A married woman with whom Fitzgerald had an affair in Asheville in 1935 while she was staying at the Grove Park Inn with her invalid sister Eleanor.

Leslie McFarlane writer and journalist , the ghostwriter of several Hardy Boys novels

Asa Bushnell - Princeton's graduate manager of athletics and a former clubmate of Fitzgerald.

Robert R. Dunn - had grown up with Fitzgerald in St. Paul.

Ethel Walker Smith - Headmistress of the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., which Scottie entered in fall 1936.

Annabel Fitzgerald Sprague - Mrs. Clifton Sprague, Fitzgerald's sister.

Bob and Raye Sylvester - Bob Sylvester was a New York Daily News columnist.

Barrett H. Clark - Drama critic who was at that time executive director of the Dramatists Play Service.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Scribners author who wrote fiction set in Florida.

Hugh F. B. Kerr - a Baltimorean who had met Fitzgerald casually and had written to ask his advice about getting a novel published.

Pauline Brownell - a registered nurse who took care of him when he hurt his shoulder in a diving accident in July 1936.

Adelaide Neall - Fiction editor at The Saturday Evening Post.

Pete Finney and Margaret "Peggy" Finney - parents of Margaret “Peaches” Finney who was a friend of Scottie.

Fred B. Millet - Author of Contemporary American Authors (1940).

Corey Ford - Rereading The Great Gatsby had prompted Ford to write Fitzgerald a fan letter.

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was the most influential literary and social critic in America during the 1920s. With George Jean Nathan he edited The Smart Set, the first magazine to pay for Fitzgerald’s stories. Two of Fitzgerald’s best stories, “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set. Mencken later published “Absolution” and “Crazy Sunday” in the American Mercury. In his 1921 review of Mencken’s Prejudices Fitzgerald stated that “he has done more for the national letters than any man alive.”

Gerald Murphy (1888–1964) and Sara Murphy (1883–1975) were an affluent expatriate American couple the Fitzgeralds met on the Riviera in 1924. Gerald painted, and the Murphys were involved in the arts. They were fabled hosts at their Villa America on Cap d’Antibes. Fitzgerald wrote of Murphy that “a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy… This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.” Tender Is the Night is dedicated “To Gerald and Sara Many Fetes.” See Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After (New York: Times Books, 1982).

Julian Street was born in Chicago in 1879. He came to New York at the age of seventeen. There he found work as a reporter on the New York Mail and Express and his productive life as a journalist, a writer of short stories and essays, and as an author of travel books and novels had begun. Street’s experience as a newspaper reporter was followed by a partnership with a friend, Frank Finney, with whom he formed an advertising firm. In New York Julian Street had acquired a more than casual interest in the theater—he served as a drama critic—although The Country Cousin, which had a successful run on the stage in 1917, was his one adventure in playwriting, and this was in collaboration with Booth Tarkington '93. In the 1920's fiction and articles dealing with the contemporary scene appeared in the big circulation magazines—Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Red Book Magazine among others—and one more travel book followed. Collections of Street's stories were published in After Thirty (1919), Cross-Sections (1923), and Mr. Bisbee's Princess and Other Stories (1925). Mysterious Japan appeared in 1921. Rita Coventry, a novel, was published in 1922. With his first wife, Ada, Street wrote Tides, a novel published in 1926.

Philip Lenhart was a former Harvard tennis star and a newspaper book reviever.

Malcolm Cowley was book review editor of The New Republic

Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970) writer and cultural critic

Curtis Carroll Davis in 1936 a Yale undergraduate; later a biographer and essayist.

Annah Williamson a relative of Dorothy Williamson (D. W.), Fitzgerald's nurse in Asheville.

Shirley Britt was proprietor of Asheville secretarial service.

Tom Lineaweaver was Fitzgerald’s longtime friend and former Princeton classmate.

These Letters were published in books: A Life in Letters (1993); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980); The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963).

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In LettersThe Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald

CONTENTS

Chapter 4: Summer 1930 – July 1937

xxx. TO: Rosalind Sayre Smith

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Madame Lubov Egorova

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

xxx. TO: Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald

xxx. TO: Thomas Wolfe

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To A. S. Frere-Reeves

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To John Hall Wheelock

xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Henry T. Volkening

xxx. TO: H. L. and Sara Mencken

xxx. TO: Judge and Mrs. A. D. Sayre

xxx. Bank Check

1931

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. To Mrs. Richard Taylor (aka Cousin Ceci)

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: Alice Lee Myers

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman

xxx. To Gilbert Seldes

xxx. To Paul Eldridge

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

xxx. FROM: Gerald Murphy

xxx. Inscription TO: Samuel Marx

xxx. FROM: Norma Shearer Thalberg

xxx. TO: Bert Barr

xxx. FROM: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

1932

xxx. TO Dayton (?) Kohler

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

xxx. TO: Dr. Mildred Squires

xxx. To Tom Lineaweaver

xxx. To Miss Sillcot

xxx. TO: Dr. Oscar Forel

xxx. From Gertrude Stein

xxx. TO: Gertrude Stein

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO: H. L. Mencken

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

xxx. TO: Bennett Cerf

xxx. TO: Cary Ross

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

xxx. From H. L. Mencken To F. Scott Fitzgerald

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

xxx. TO: Alice Lee Myers

xxx. TO Richard Knight

xxx. TO: Dr. Thomas Rennie

xxx. TO: Alfred Dashiell

xxx. TO: Gregg Dougherty

1933

xxx. To Christian Gauss

xxx. FROM: T. S. Eliot

xxx. TO: Thomas Rennie

xxx. TO: Dr. Adolf Meyer

xxx. TO: Dr. Adolf Meyer

xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull

xxx. TO Malcolm Cowley

xxx. TO: Lawrence Lee

xxx. TO Charles W. Donahoe

xxx. TO: Isaac Benesch

xxx. TO: Mrs. H. H. Prouse

xxx. TO: John O’Hara

xxx. To Mr. Lester Roberts

xxx. TO: Francis Swann

xxx. TO: George Jean Nathan

xxx. TO Andrew Turnbull

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In Letters
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald