Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (551 page)

However, that’s of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one - but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost
have
to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I’m not afraid of it for you. I don’t want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive and is fine  if founded on positive virtues, work, courage, etc., but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always - and it is a nice thing to have. I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.

Signs and portents of your persistent conceit: Mrs Owens t said to me (and Mrs Owens loves you), ‘For the first time in a long while Scottie was nice, and not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.’

Because, I guess, for the first time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours - a chance they never had, of belonging to ‘high society.’ Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I’d have checked you on that) - but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all - your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you!
You did not use one bit of y
our
mind, one little spot!
to think what
they
were thinking, or help them!

You went to Norfolk and gave out the information (via the Taylors, via Annabel,
via
mother) that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn’t matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You know it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of ‘promoting yourself.’ But those signs of one big catastrophe (it’ll come - I want to minimize it for you, but it can’t be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are
a young
member of the
human race,
who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen ‘popular girls’ of 15 become utterly
déclassé
in six months because they were essentially selfish.) You and Peaches  (who isn’t selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more and more that less pretty girls will be attaching the solider, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you and Peaches are intelligent but both of you will be warped by this early attention,
and something tells me she
won’t
lost her head;
she hasn’t the ‘gift of gab’ as you have - her laughter and her silence takes the place of much. That’s why I wish to God you would write something when you have time - if only a one act play about how girls art in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.

I grow weary, but I probably won’t write again for a month. Don’t answer this, justifying yourself - of
course
I know you’re doing the best you ‘can.’ The points of the letter are:

1st You did spill over, rashly!

2nd You are getting over the selfish period - thank God! 3rd But it’ll take one more big kick, and I want it to be mild, so your backside won’t suffer too much.

4th I wish you’d get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people - what they say and how they behave.

With
dearest
love, Your simply so-perfect too-too Daddy

Please,
turn back and read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton - oh yeah!

New York City

July, 1935

Darlin’:

Am on a flying visit to New York. Spent yesterday afternoon with, of all people, Elissa Landi. She sailed for Europe last night. She is very nice.

I am not going to write you much this summer but you know my heart is with you always. Remember the one thing about riding - that you can’t be as reckless at it as you can about swimming, because there’s another factor besides yourself involved, the
horse. So
that no matter how good you were if the horse was bad there might be trouble. Different from diving, for example, where you have only yourself to blame. The point is, don’t do anything or try anything that the riding master doesn’t approve of. He knows just the point you’ve reached at handling the mount.

Good-by double durling. Aunt Rosalind, Mr Ober and Mr Perkins all invite you to spend a few days with them in N.Y. when camp is over. We shall see. I leave for the South Monday.

Your utterly irresistible,

Daddy

Grove
Park
Inn

Asheville, North Carolina August
4,
1935

Darling:

I always thought the first book of that series was one of the most exciting books I ever read. Ernest Hemingway thought so too. Please read it with a view to a possible dramatization of it and tell me your opinion. I never went any further in that series than the first one on account of no English versions being available.

I am glad you fell off your horse. Here in Carolina the only conveyance is by zebra. I have one zebra named Clarence.

My correspondence is now limited to five people: Elissa Landi, Mrs Roosevelt, Aquilla, and a fourth whom I need scarcely mention, because I hardly know his name.

Darling, I am working hard and getting very well.

Please unleash yourself in your letters to your mother without mentioning
riding catastrophies
which might make her nervous.

Give my affectionate regards to Virginia, Helen  and Betty and tell your counselor what a really obnoxious person you might turn out to be unless carefully watched.

Your stoogie —

Daddy

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North
Carolina

July, 1936

Darling:

O.K. about the tutoring. Let it slide. But I hate to let one season slip by at your age without one difficult advance.

Do something for me! I’m proud of the swimming but summer’s only summer. Give me a time maybe, and know always I’m thinking of you and for you, and my plans will come to you as soon as crystallized, sometime in August. Slim chance of my getting up to Pennsylvania. All Europe ideas definitely out. Spain was what I wanted to see and Spain is in what the newsmen call the ‘throes of revolution.’

Your mother likes your letters so much. Hope you have nice tent mates. I don’t agree with Mrs Tappan on that subject, but that’s a whole story and I know whatever the situation is you’ll make the best of it in your own courageous way.

Oh darling Scottie - I don’t want to force you but it does please me when you can make a connection between the Louisiana Purchase and why Fred Astaire lifts up his left hind foot for the world’s pleasure. I want you to be among the best of your race and not waste yourself on trivial aims. To be useful and proud - is that too much to ask?

I enclose you the jacket of my latest book. I have decided to write in Scandinavian from now on!

Your devoted

Daddy

Grove P
ark Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina July
31, 1936

Darling:

I am enclosing in this some pictures that tell a sad story. I had a terrific accident and broke my shoulder. I thought I would be very smart and do some diving and after a year and a half of inactivity I stretched my muscles too much in the air and broke my shoulder. It has all been very troublesome and expensive but I have tried to be as cheerful as possible about it and everyone has been very kind; the people here have rigged up a curious writing board for me so that I work with my hand over my head rather like this.

I enclose money for your present small needs. It may be that the expenses of this injury will preclude your going to an expensive school this fall but life sometimes does those things to you and I know you are brave and able to adjust yourself to changing

‘Fitzgerald had drawn a picture of himself seated at his writing board.

conditions and to know that all the effort that I have will be thrown into your education and the care of your mother. If I had not had this operation on my shoulder the doctor tells me I would never have been able to raise my arm above my shoulder again. It is still an open bet as to whether or not I will ever be able to raise it above my shoulder.

I am proud of you and I am only a little angered by the fact that you have not managed to read more than one of the French books.

Sunday night I leave for Baltimore and you can write me either there care of Mrs Owens or here where I am returning. Isn’t it lucky I did not go to Spain after all! Or maybe it would have been rather fun.

Your loving Daddy Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina
October 20,
1936

Dearest Scottina:

I had already decided to go up Thanksgiving which I will do, God willing, and so on your own suggestion I have killed the idea of going up on your birthday. You seem to understand the fact that I cannot afford at the moment to make two trips within the same month; so I know you won’t be unduly disappointed.

To finish up news of me, the arm is really definitely out of danger and I am going to be able to use it again, which I doubted for three or four weeks. Went out to a football game with the Flynns last Saturday, the same sort of game exactly that we went to last fall at very much the same time. Lefty was his usual handsome self and Nora was charming as always. They asked about you repeatedly, and not because they thought they ought to but because they have a real affection for you, and I mean both of them. They were so happy to know that you are getting along so well at your school.

Confirming my Christmas plans, they are, briefly: that we shall have a party for you in Baltimore at the Belvedere or the Stafford, if we can afford it! Then the actual Christmas Day will be spent either here with your mother (it won’t be like that awful Christmas in Switzerland), or else you and your mother and the trained nurse will go to Montgomery and spend Christmas with your grandmother; perhaps with a little time afterwards in Baltimore before you go back to school.

Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for a moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will, by itself, invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Why are you whining about such matters as study hall, etc., when you deliberately picked this school as the place you wanted to go above all places? Of course it is hard. Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.

Scott Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina November 17, 1936

Dearest Pie:

I got a School Letter saying that Thanksgiving Day is best, and it is better for me that way. There is no particular advantage in going out two or three times rather than one, without particular objectives; the idea is to go out once and have a good time. I’ll be delighted to meet whoever you want, and our engagement is on Thanksgiving Day.

(This is a parenthesis: I got the little charms that you sent me for my birthday, the bells dangling and the mule, and appreciated your thought of me - you little donkey!)

Park Avenue girls are hard, aren’t they? Usually the daughters of ‘up-and-coming’ men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It’s the ‘Yankee push’ to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of fay Gould who began by peddling bad buttons to a county and ended, with the same system of peddler’s morals, by peddling five dollar railroads to a nation.

Don’t mistake me. I think of myself always as a northerner - and I think of you the same way. Nevertheless, we are all of one nation and you will find all the lassitude and laziness there that you despise, enough to fill Savannah and Charleston, just as down here you will find the same ‘go getter’ principle in the Carolinas.

I don’t know whether you will stay there another year - it all depends on your marks and your work, and I can’t give you the particular view of life that I have (which as you know is a tragic one), without dulling your enthusiasm. A whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that it is your duty to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain
esprit.

Now, insofar as your course is concerned, there is no question of your dropping mathematics and taking the easiest way to go into Vassar, and being one of the girls fitted for nothing except to reflect other people without having any particular character of your own. I want you to take mathematics up to the limit of what the school offers. I want you to take physics and I want you to take chemistry. I don’t care about your English courses or your French courses at present. If you don’t know two languages and the ways that men chose to express their thoughts in those languages by this time, then you don’t sound like my daughter. You are an only child, but that doesn’t give you any right to impose on that fact.