Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (558 page)

April 5, 1939

Dearest: Thanks for your letter.

When you get time give me a sort of budget of what you did with the money I sent you. I mean, estimate roughly what became of it. Also, did you take any planes to and from SeaIsland or Asheville? As I wrote you, most of those eastern lines are safe after the first February. In spite of the storm you ran into on way back East last fall, I think it’s rather old-fashioned not get used to airplane travel and use it as a convenience. You made a great impression on your mother. How different a year ago at Virginia Beach when you seemed as far apart the poles, during those dreary tennis games and golf lessons!

Of course, the fact that she is so much better accounts for a good deal of it, but I believe that was the time you had first discovered love, in the person of — , and were in a sort of drugged coma until you could get back to Baltimore.

Spring was always an awful time for me about work. I always felt that in the long boredom of winter there was nothing else to do but study. But I lost the feeling in the long, dreamy spring days and managed to be in scholastic hot water by June. I can’t tell you what to do about it - all my suggestions seem to be very remote and academic. But if I were with you and we could talk again like we used to, I might lift you out of your trouble about concentration. It really isn’t so hard, even with dreamy people like you and me - it’s just that we feel so damned secure at times as long as there’s enough in the bank to buy the next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through the next ordeal. Our danger is imagining that we have resources - material and moral - which we haven’t got. One of the reasons I find myself so consistently in valleys of depression is that every few years I seem to be climbing uphill to recover from some bankruptcy. Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess. I thought I was so strong that I never would be ill and suddenly I was ill for three years, and faced with a long, slow uphill climb. Wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve - so that if on a night you had set aside to study for a philosophy test you learned that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help, you could skip that night and find you had a reserve of one or two days preparation to draw on. But I think that, like me, you will be something of a fool in that regard all your life, so I am wasting my words.

Query: Are you taking up the swimming during the spring term? I hope tremendously you will, but I suppose that’s been decided already. If not, what are you doing for spring athletics?

Query No. 2: Is there any way - and don’t kid me - in which you can take driving lessons? Also, if you get time - and this is not important - give me a slight picture of what the life is at Sea Island. Also, when you get time, write your mother, because I’ve been putting off a visit to her and may possibly have to be here three weeks longer on this damned picture and she probably feels that I’m never coming.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

P.S. Got a nice thank-you letter from Frances Turnbull for the check I sent her.

5521
Amestoy
Avenue

Encino,
California

May
6, 1939

Dearest:

I am sending you four weeks’ allowance and hope you can make it go. Found your very sweet letter when I got back.
Please
pay up your debts in full. You know if things get really out of hand you can always call on me, but I am in for a little siege of illness and I will have to count pennies for a few months until this time is over, so don’t splurge on any new big spring wardrobe.

Plans for June all depend on factors that I am absolutely unable to regulate now. Literally, I do not know what we are liable to do. In spite of the fact that I have this house and may possibly bring your mother out here for a month or so (now this must absolutely not be mentioned in any letter to her because everything is ready by the hospital and I haven’t yet divulged any plans to Dr Carroll) I still don’t see you out here. You see, it would inevitably force us into that old relationship which was unsuccessful five years ago in Baltimore of my being more or less in the unpleasant position of a spy on your private affairs.

I am turning over several possibilities in my mind. One of them is would you like to go to Russia with a group of girls on an economically organized tour? I am sure such things must be going on at Vassar and you need only make inquiries about it and give me the data. I mean something for three or four weeks. I agree I don’t want you to go back to France this summer. But it might just be an experience to go to Russia on some non-deluxe affair. Form your own opinion about how the experiment might work-out. I have several more strings to my bow, but I am not telling you all of them at once. But Hollywood - why?

What do you want to do out here? I can no more see you as a reader in a studio wading through bad novels and worse magazine stories all summer and being so dog-tired at the end of the day that you would probably be ready for anything, even these empty-headed California boys. The question of getting you a test has occurred to me too, but I have got at least three or four reasons against it. First, I believe you ought to wait another year - — second, I want you to have one more year at Vassar and then make your debut in Baltimore. Suppose you were good? Then it would completely upset the applecart which we have elaborately set up back East. And what else can you do out here? Do you want to come out and be my secretary? Let us laugh
quietly and mirthlessly
with
a Boris Karloff ring.
As for some of the ideas you had before, it skips my mind whether we discussed them, but I remember one of them was whether you should go to summer stock in one of those New England towns. Honey, I may as well hand you over to the white slavers and make a thorough job of it. For girls like you, it is nothing but a complete playtime job and strong competition between the girls to see who gets the honor of being seduced by the leading man.

Doubtless all sorts of ideas have occurred to you and, if so, why not list them and send them to me - maybe we will find out of them one that fits both our ideas.

I think I have answered almost everything in your letter and I have another idea about the driving which I am going to leave for another month because it seems to me almost dangerous for a girl your age not to know how to drive.

Dearest love.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

July, 1939

My plan would be to start you out here the last day of the month - — that is ten days from the time of writing this letter. The only thing that would prevent this would be some unexpected turn of illness. This is unlikely, but possible. I don’t know how this trip is going to work out and feel a certain trepidation. I am of course not drinking and haven’t been for a long time, but any illness is liable to have a certain toxic effect on the system and you may find me depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic - all these qualities more intensified than you have previously experienced them in me. Beyond this I am working very hard and the last thing I want at the end of day is a problem while, as it is natural at your age, what you want at the end of the day is excitement. I tell you all this because lately we had planned so many meetings with anticipation and they turned out to be flops. Perhaps forewarned will be forearmed.

If the experiment proves upsetting I will have no further choice than to pack you off East somewhere again, but there are several friends here whom you could visit for a time if we failed to make a satisfactory household. So the trip will be worthwhile. Also I am more of a solitary than I have ever been but I don’t think that will worry you because you had your dosages of motion pictures stars on two other trips. To describe how humorless I feel about life at this point you have simply to read the Tarking- ton story called ‘Sinful Dadda Little’ in the Post issue of July 22 (still current, I believe) and remember that I read it without a particle of amusement but with a complete disgust at ‘Dadda’ for not drowning the two debutantes at the end.

Probably I am underestimating you, as everyone seems to be pleased with your good manners and your ‘attitude’ (I know you hate that word) this summer - notably Mrs Owens and your mother. But you left a most unpleasant impression behind last autumn with many people, and I would much rather not see you at all than see you without loving you. Your home is Vassar. Anything else to be supplied at present is a mockery of a home. It is too bad it should be this way but the only thing is to treat it as a visit and for us both to remember the rules of common courtesy towards each other. I take my sleeping pills regularly between eleven and twelve so we won’t have any of those midnight wrangles that disfigured your June and September visits. Can’t the party wait till you get here to discuss? Beneath all this, you understand, I have so much to talk to you about. (Incidentally, your memory has played you false about the philosophy.

If the taking of it was a mistake it was mine not yours. I chose it one day when we were sitting on my bed with the catalogue at the beach a year ago. And I had some correspondence with Vassar trying to get you into the course at all. The history and French are as much a mystery to me as you say they are to you.)

Please give your mother this enclosed letter when you are alone with her as I don’t want it to go through the sanitarium. (Changed. Am writing her

Zelda separately. Enclosed is for yours and her expenses at boarding house.)

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. I am pretty definitely breaking with Ober but he doesn’t know it yet.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

July, 1939

I am certainly glad that you’re up and around and sorry that your selection of post-Flaubertan realism depressed you. I certainly wouldn’t begin Henry James with The Portrait of a Lady which is in his ‘late second manner’ and full of mannerisms. Why don’t you read
Roderick Hudson or Daisy
Miller first?
Lord Jim
is a great book - the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good? Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a
True Confession.

I wish I could say the same about a recent article in
Mademoiselle.
I grant you the grace of having been merely a dupe as I warned you you would be - for I cannot believe that you would announce that you pursued your education yourself while I went around to the speakeasies. There’s nothing to do about it now, but in future please call yourself by any name that doesn’t sound like mine in your writings. You must have wanted fifty dollars awfully bad to let them print such a trite and perverted version of your youth, unless you mean that it was the Fred Astaire pictures that taught you that gallant stance upon ‘your own two feet.’ This isn’t in the nature of quarreling but you certainly owe me an explanation because I see no earmarks of the ‘dutiful daughter’ about any of it.

By the time you get this it will be the eleventh. Your plan was to leave for California the fourteenth - your mother’s has varied between a trip to Virginia Beach and a quiet time at Saluda. Both of you have something on me because I can’t quite decide what is best. I am waiting to hear from Montgomery about the exact state of your grandmother’s health and also to make up my mind how much work I can undertake in the studios and under what conditions - a matter which depends on X rays, the willingness of the studio to let me work at home, and other such factors.

I want to have you out here for part of the summer. I have a nice cottage in the country, but very far out in the country, and utterly inaccessible if one doesn’t drive well. Whether a piano here would be practical or not I don’t know (remember how I felt about radio) but all that might be arranged if the personal equation were not doubtful (a situation for which for the moment I take full blame). Since I stopped picture work three months ago, I have been through not only a T.B. flare-up but also a nervous breakdown of such severity that for a time it threatened to paralyze both arms - or to quote the doctor: ‘The good Lord tapped you on the shoulder.’ While I am running no fever above 99, I don’t know what this return to picture work is going to do and when and if my health blows up you know what a poor family man I am. It seems best - and I am merely feeling my way as I Write this letter - for you to spend at least another week in the East and you might as well spend it in or near Asheville, especially as it gives your mother such a great pleasure. A long pilgrimage with her would almost certainly require a nurse and run into expense as all trips that your mother and I make have a way of doing.

However, if things seem more stabilized out here toward the end of this month I may change my mind and bring you out here and let your mother go to Montgomery. For the moment, there is nothing for you to do but wait and get along as well as possible with your music and writing and what money I can send you. I have a bill from Dr Hamman for $25.00. Either he was very dilatory or you didn’t go to see him till the end of your visit in Baltimore for his diagnosis arrived the day of the operation and it was money thrown away. He seemed to agree, however, that four times out of five you would have had eventual trouble with the appendix.

I have sent for your marks. If you get them, airmail them to me. If they average around ‘B’ I should think you’ve done well in pulling yourself out of a very difficult hole.

You can read as much or as little of this letter to your mother as you want. I don’t mean it to be disagreeable, but I was naturally surprised when instead of carrying out your announced intention of writing about the difference between northern and southern girls you chose to ride on my shoulder and beat me on the head with a wooden spoon.