Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (617 page)

A friend then took, or promised to take, the songs to Paramount, but nothing came of that and, as time was passing, I thought I’d make another onslaught on M-G-M. This time, I got an introduction from my producer to the top man in the music department, Mr Finston. He seemed more practical than anyone I had talked to and I asked him what would happen if young authors got no hearing on the ground that perhaps they might bring suit for plagiarism. I told him the number of people who had turned down my own stuff when I was young, but that never had anyone refused to read it, and tried to make him see it from the point of view of the incipient young musical talent who actually had something to offer. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t have them played over. However, he did say that he would definitely get her an audition in New York, where for some reason they haven’t got the overwhelming fear of law suits which hangs over the moving pictures. He promised me (and I am writing for the carbon copy of his letter to Miss Hoffman - and I will check on it) that he would see positively that her stuff got an audition in New York from the people with whom they deal there, perhaps a musical subsidiary of the M-G-M office.

This seems little to have accomplished after this long wait. Perhaps there is some secret trick to breaking in that I don’t know, but there was the experience of — , an accomplished musician, after ten years which was far from encouraging. It seems to be a very crowded profession. Certainly my advice to her is to follow exactly what Finston says in his letter because, though he was not especially encouraging, he seemed an utterly honest man and was trying to do the best he could as a favor to the producer who introduced me. He said also that he was returning the music to her in your care.

I will now answer letters (which I do all in great gobs every two months). The party that Peaches and Scottie gave seems a long way off now but I am glad it was a success and that the ticket matter straightened itself out. Peggy’s account of the other festivities of Christmas fill me with a vague melancholy which is not even nostalgia, that is, I would never want to go through the time of life again Peaches and Scottie are in, but I am sorry for anyone who believes as much as they must believe. There is something very special to be written about the psychology of pretty girls. Lately I have run into two who were great belles of my time and who are now ravaged with dope. The reason is that life promises so very much to a pretty girl between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five that she never quite recovers from it. By pretty girl I mean what used to be called the belle type, the type with ‘it.’ Ernest Hemingway once said that you could never go back emotionally, or, with more accuracy, sensationally; having had a sensation in the emotional sense, one would not be inclined to be content with a lesser sensation, so a belle nowadays, unless sobered by a flock of children, is liable to go on seeking the intensity of that game of playing with men. None of our colleges have succeeded in inventing anything to compete with the kind of love that doesn’t have to be paid for with responsibility.

I think Scottie at fourteen was in a fair way to a disproportionate youth. Lacking Peaches’ calm temperament, she had projected herself into the world of sixteen and, of course, was taking it all much more hysterically than a girl of sixteen would. The convent-like attitude of Miss Walker’s was just right for her. I think she caught up on her precocity by a full year and I am not afraid for her now in the same way that I was then. These are the days, I should think, when the next star on the horizon is the chance, remote but always possible, of an unfortunate early marriage or an equally unfortunate early love affair. I found that Scottie, with the one man she could invite to school this year - for the senior tea - had chosen a Princeton boy now in his last year at YaleLawSchool. I suppose it was nothing but sheer bravado. There she, when the other girls were writing to prep school and college boys, would dazzle them by producing an actual man of the world. I put my foot down immediately, because a boy of that age, if he happened to be loose in principle, could twist a sixteen-year-old girl around his finger. The boy happened to be a nice boy, but the idea was absolutely bogus and phoney. Every once in a while, such delusions of grandeur overtake my daughter - is the same true of Peaches?

I wouldn’t tell Scottie this but I am really not very concerned about whether she remains a virgin after the âge of twenty, but I think it is of the greatest importance that the girl doesn’t throw herself away for any trivial or inessential reason, and every year makes such a difference. I stilf believe in the strictest chaperonage, formal or secret (by which I mean a pretty close check upon a girl’s movements), because my theory follows Pope’s statement that Evil (I am using the word in its old-fashioned sense), first looked upon as terrible, longer looked upon as tolerable, finally becomes attractive. He said it much better, with a beautiful rhyme. Also, I am hot against a child of Scottie’s background ever having any traffic with liquor, and don’t like cigarettes either, simply because it takes up so much unnecessary energy and is such a comfort to the idler and the loafer. Moreover, if she ever takes up a sedentary profession like mine, it will be awful for her. I smoked myself right into T.B. Did you notice the recent pronunciamento about cigarettes in Time? So you see, in general I am still the old-fashioned parent.

To go back to Miss Hoffman - took one song to a party where I knew Rodgers and Hart were going to be, and had it played over. Rodgers thought it was very good, but all he could advise me to do was to try to get it played over in some studio. I didn’t know him well enough to ask him to do anything about it. So you see that this appears to be the wrong door to knock at. There is something about Hollywood, everybody very highly paid and camping on the job, which makes it harder to approach from here than if one is in New York with the magic of distance giving desirability. Not only has no one been willing to give the stuff a break but no one has been able to tell me - and that includes Irving Berlin, with whom I talked about six months ago, before I got this music - just what gets a song-writer a start. Somehow, they get involved with a manager, a lyric writer, a playwright, and a show is staged and a show clicks. They are part of the line-up and it seems to miraculously make them professionals. They don’t seem to cross that line alone in the way writers do. I remember at Princeton, Cam Clark and others used to come down and pick the best of the hundred or so compositions composed on the campus. There seems to be nothing like that in the professional world, at least out here, and it is terrible to think how many good songs go unpublished when old hacks, such as Romberg has become, continue to grind out repetitions of themselves for operettas. It simply can’t be bucked from here.

With affection to you both, and regrets that this is such a pessimistic report, Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. Been doing a picture for Joan Crawford. About one-third through. Is an original and quite a different job from the dramatization of
Three Comrades.
However, this time I have the best producer in Hollywood, a fine showman who keeps me from any amateur errors, and I hope to finish the picture alone. Do you remember Ted Paramore of Hill? He was my collaborator on
Three Comrades.

TO MISS MARTHA FEUERHERM

Hollywood,
California

March 16,
1938

My dear Miss Feuerherm:

In regard to your letter about F. Scott Fitzgerald we refer you to the following: F. Scott
Fitzgerald: His
Youth
and Parentage
- C. B. Ansbrucher, Berlin. Privately Printed.

F. Scott
Fitzgerald: The Image and the Man
- Irene Kramer Thurston. Brentano’s, 1937.

Fitzgerald As I Knew Him - J. B. Carstairs. Scribners, 1928. F. Scott Fitzgerald
and the Rise of Islam.
Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1922.

The Women Who Knew F. Scott Fitzgerald -
Marie, Comtesse de Segours. Editions Galantiere, Paris.

I hope that these books will serve your purpose.

Sincerely yours,

J. P. Carms Secretary

TO FRANCES TURNBULL

5521
Amestoy
Avenue

Encino, California

November 9,1938

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you
begin
to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have
only
your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into
Oliver Twist
the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories, In Our Time, went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In
This Side of Paradise
I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional, having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing, can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming - the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it, or whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that want the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to analyze why this story isn’t salable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell
your
stories, no one would be more interested than Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent - which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

TO BUDD SCHULBERG

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February
28, 1939

Dear Budd:

I didn’t send my Dartmouth impressions   because I know that when one is once separated from a picture any advice is rather gratuitous - seems to come from a long and uninformed distance. However, if Walter t still wants to use the Indian school for a prologue it would be very funny if the Indian students were being solemnly addressed by Ebenezer when you cut outside and pick up young squaws approaching on snow shoes, bursting into the school and dancing around with the young braves. From there you could dissolve to the station and the arrival of the girls.

Also your introduction of some character at the station might be a student smashing baggage, followed by a newly arrived girl. And his turning suddenly, mutual recognition: the pay-off is his finding that he has picked up the baggage of his own girl.

On that same working-your-way-through basis, I got a kick from the student waiters going out of character and talking to the guests - like the man who hired himself out to do that sort of thing.

The picture seems temporarily very far away, and I am engrossed in work of my own. But I wish you well, and I won’t forget the real pleasure of knowing you, and your patience as I got more and more out of hand under the strain. In retrospect, going East under those circumstances seems one of the silliest mistakes I ever made.

Always your friend,

Scott

TO JUDGE JOHN BIGGS, JR

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

Spring, 1939

Dear John:

Your letter with its family chronicle fascinated me. It was nice to catch up a little. I remember Baba as a wild fascinating little witch with a vague touch of WutheringHeights about her as she wrestled with her brothers. One girl in a family of boys has her dangers - like one boy in a family of girls who inevitably has a touch of the milksop - anyhow I’m glad Baba has temperament and sorry you’ve had to send her to reform school so young....

As to sons - that’s another question. I’d feel on a big spot if I were you. the you’re not a worrier. With daughter I can feel sure she’s about like me - very little of her mother save the good looks - like me with less positive artistic talent and much more natural social talent. She hasn’t the
loneliness
of the artist - though one can’t be sure that means anything. Ernest wasn’t lonely superficially - what I mean is that in spite of the fact that Scottie edited her school paper and wrote the school play she doesn’t
care
- doesn’t care deeply and passionately so that she feels the necessity to say. And it’s just as well. Nothing is more fatuous than the American habit of labeling one of their four children as the artist on a sort of family tap day as if the percentage of artists who made any kind of go of the lousy business was one to four. It’s much closer to 1 to 400,000. You’ve got to have the egotism of a maniac with the clear triple-thinking of a Flaubert. The amount of initial talent or let us say skill and facility is a very small element in the long struggle whose most happy end can only be a mercifully swift exhaustion. Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned - the empty shell of a gift long since accepted and consumed?