Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (565 page)

But while the other was a tedious, disconnected casserole this is definite attempt at a big novel and I really believe I have hit it, as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse she trotted obediently around and became an erratic mistress if not a steady wife.

Now what I want to ask you is this - if I send you the book by August 20th and you decide you could risk its publication (I am blatantly confident that you will) would it be brought out in October, say, or just what would decide its date of publication?

This is an odd question I realize, especially since you haven’t even seen the book, but you have been so kind in the past about my stuff that I venture to intrude once more upon your patience.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

599
Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

September 4,
1919

Dear Mr Perkins:

I sent the book today under a separate cover. I want to discuss a few things in connection with it.

You’ll notice that it contains much material from
The Romantic
Egotist.

(1) — Chapter II, Book I of the present book contains material from ‘Spires and Gargoyles,”Ha-Ha Hortense,”Babes in the Wood,’ and ‘Crescendo’ - rewritten in third person, cut down, and re-edited.

(2) — Chapter III, Book I contains material from ‘Second Descent of the Egotist’ and ‘The Devil,’ rewritten, etc.

(3) — Chapter IV, Book I contains material from ‘The Two Mystics,”Clara,’ and The End of Many Things.’

(4) — Chapter III, Book II is a revision of Eleanor in third person - with that fur incident left out.

Chapter I, Book I, and Chapters I, II, IV and V of Book II are entirely new.

You’ll see that of the old material there is all new use, outside the revision in the third person. For instance the Princeton characters of
The
R.E. - Tom, Tump, Lorry, Lumpy, Fred, Dick, Jim, Burne, Judy, Mclntyre and Jesse - have become in this book Fred, Dick, Alex, Tom, Kerry and Burne. Isabelle and Rosalind of
The
R.E. have become just Isabelle while the new Rosalind is a different person.

Beatrice is a new character. Dr Dudley becomes Monsignor Darcy; is a much better done - in fact every character is in better perspective.

The preface I leave to your discretion - perhaps it’s a little too clever-clever; likewise you may object to the literary personalities in Chapter II and Book II and to the length of the socialistic discussion in the last chapter. The book contains a little over ninety thousand words. I certainly think the hero gets somewhere.

I await anxiously your verdict Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Thornton Hancock is Henry Adams - I didn’t do him thoroughly, of course - but I knew him when I was a boy.

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

September
18, 1919

Dear Mr Perkins:

Of course I was delighted to get your letter and I’ve been in a sort of trance all day; not that I doubted you’d take it but at last I have something to show people. It has enough advertisement in St Paul already to sell several thousand copies and I think Princeton will buy it. (I’ve been a periodical, local Great-Expectations for some time in both places.)

Terms, etc., I leave to you but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book Xmas - or, say, by February? I have so many things dependent on its success - including of course a girl - not that I expect it to make me a fortune but it will have a psychological effect on me and all my surroundings and besides open up new fields. I’m in that stage where every month counts frantically and seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time. Will you let me know more exactly how that difference in time of publication influences the sale and what you mean by ‘early spring?’

Excuse this ghastly handwriting but I’m a bit nervous today. I’m beginning (last month) a very ambitious novel called
The Demon Lover
which will probably take a year. Also I’m writing short stories. I find that what I enjoy writing is always my best - every young author ought to read Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.

I’m writing quite a marvelous after-the-war story. Does Mr Bridges   think that they’re a little passé or do you think he’d like to see it?

I’ll fix up data for advertising and have a photo taken next  week with the most gigantic enjoyment (I’m trying H. G. Wells’ use of vast Garagantuan sp. words).

Well, thank you for a very happy day and numerous other favors and let me know if I’ve any possible chance for earlier publication, and give my thanks or whatever is in order to Mr Scribner or whoever else was on the deciding committee.

Probably be East next month or November.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Who picks out the cover? I’d like something that could be a set - look cheerful and important like a Shaw book. I notice Shaw, Galsworthy and Barrie do that. But Wells doesn’t - I wonder why. No need of illustrations, is there? I knew a fellow at college who’d have been a wonder for books like mine - a mixture of Aubrey Beardsley, Hogarth and Montgomery Flagg. But he got killed in the war.

Excuse this immoderately long and rambling letter but I think you’ll have to allow me several days for recuperation.

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

October
25,

1919

Dear Mr Bridges:

This is a query. I have a project. It is a work of about 20,000 words and more on the order of my novel than like these stories I’ve been doing. But it’s the sort of thing that will require a full month’s work and as
The New
Republic, Scribner’s and possibly the Atlantic Monthly are the only magazines that would publish it I don’t want to start until you assure me that there’s nothing in the project which seems to bar it from
Scribner’s
if it be
sufficiently
interesting and well done.

It is a literary forgery purporting to be selections from the notebooks of a man who is a complete literary radical from the time he’s in college thru two years in New York - finally he goes to training camp, gets bored, and enlists as a private. This is the end of the book - a note by me will say that he served in Companies E and G of the Twenty-eighth Infantry and died of appendicitis in Paris in 1918. It will be in turns cynical, ingenuous, life-saturated, critical  A few letters not addressed to Max Perkins but bearing on Fitzgerald’s relations with Scribners are included in this group.

and bitter. It will be racy and startling with opinions and personalities. I have a journal I have kept for 3 1/2  years which my book didn’t begin to exhaust, which I don’t seem to be able to draw on for stories but which certainly is, I think, highly amusing. This, thoroughly edited and revised, plus some imagination and 1/2 dozen ingredients I have in mind will be the bulk of it. It would take
2
or possibly 3 parts to publish it The tremendous success of Butler’s
Notebooks
and of Barbel- lion’s (Wells’?)
Disappointed Man
makes me think that the public loves to find out the workings of active minds in their personal problems. It will be bound to have that streak of coarseness that both Wells and Butler have but there won’t be any fames Joyce flavor to it.

Of course you can’t possibly commit yourself until you’ve seen it but as I say I’d want to know before I start if a work of that nature would be intrinsically hostile to the policy of Scribner’s
Magazine.
With apologies for intruding upon your patience once again I am

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota circa
January 10,
1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I was delighted to hear from you - and tickled to death that W. E. Hill liked my book and has done the cover. I admire him more than any artist in the country. I can hardly wait to see it I came home in a thoroughly nervous alcoholic state and revised two tales that went the complete rounds of the magazines last April. I did ‘em in four days and sent ‘em to Reynolds in the hopes he could get enough for ‘em so that I could go South, because I’m afraid I’m about to develop tuberculosis. Last Monday he sent me a check for a thousand from the Post for ‘em so I’m leaving for New Orleans tomorrow night. I’ll write you my address when I have one - meanwhile, anything sent here will be forwarded.

Now for several questions. When would a novel have to be finished to have it published serially and then brought out by you for the fall season? Do you think a book on the type of my first one would have any chance of being accepted for serial publication by any magazine? I want to start it but I don’t want to get broke in the middle and start in and have to write short stories again - because I don’t enjoy it and just do it for money. There’s nothing in collections of short stories is there? About how many copies of
John O’May
were sold?

Everything goes serenely except that I feel written out on this short stuff. I’ve had two vaudeville offers for my current play in Smart
Set
and I’ve just sent $1000 worth of movies to the Metro people. I have two stories for Mr Bridges, both stuck in the middle, and two
Post
stories cut off in their first paragraphs.

My Drunkard’s
Holiday
and
Diary of a Literary Failure
are also defunct.

The more I think of that advertisement I wrote for my book the more I dislike it. Please don’t use it unless you have it already set up in which case I’ll make a few small changes in proof and it’ll have to go.

I’m deadly curious to see if Hill’s picture looks like the real ‘Rosalind.’  I suppose he did either the boudoir scene or the mellow parting. May be in New York in March if I can get rid of this damn cough. By the way, I liked Maxwell Burt’s ‘Cup of Tea’so well that I wrote him a note about it and got a very pleasant one in return. He’s sort of Richard Harding Davis, only literary instead of journalistic - but he’s the only real romanticist there is. We have the daughters of Henry James - Gerould, Glaspell  and the other female psychological hair-splitters and the Yiddish descendants of O. Henry - Fanny and Edna and that’s all - except Burt, so I like him.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitz -

2900
Prytania StreetNew Orleans, Louisiana January 21,
1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I am returning herewith the first batch of proofs, corrected. There is one change I would like to have you make if you can possibly see your way clear to doing it. It is in regard to the type used in those subheadings throughout the chapters, such as ‘A kiss for Amory’ and ‘Preparatory to the great adventure’ - you know what I mean.

Now I have a very strong instinct about having those in a different sort of type. It may seem a small point but I got the idea originally from the Shaw prefaces and the exact sort of type
does
make a difference. Those subheadings are intended as commentaries, sort of whimsical
commentaries
rather more than they are intended as titles, and the correct type would be that sort used in the first two words of the book. The words ‘Amory Blaine’ that begin Chapter one are in exactly the sort of type I mean. I don’t know what you call it but it has capitals slightly bigger than the ones in the present subheadings and the first letter of the important words is slightly bigger.

I should have explained that to you before - you see, I think that this sort of type I mean gives the sort of effect of a marginalia - really doesn’t break it up as much as these small, severe headings you’re using now.

Of course this is my fault but I feel very strongly about it so if it can be done without inconvenience I wish you’d have it fixed up.

As ever, Scott Fitzgerald F S. It looks damn good. Thanks for your letter. O. Henry said this was a story town - but it’s too consciously that - just as a Hugh Walpole character is too consciously a character.

2900
Prytania StreetNew Orleans, Louisiana February
3,

1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I certainly touched the depths of depression tonight. The action on that book,
Madeline,
has knocked hell out of my new novel,
Darling Heart,
which turned completely on the seduction of the girl in the second chapter. I was afraid all along because of Susan Lennox and the agitation against Dreiser but this is the final blow. I don’t know what I’ll do now - what in hell is the use of trying to write decent fiction if a bunch of old women refuse to let anyone hear the truth!

I’ve fallen lately under the influence of an author who’s quite changed my point of view. He’s a chestnut to you, no doubt, but I’ve just discovered him - Frank Norris. I think McTeague and
Vandover
are both excellent. I told you last November that I’d read
Salt
by his brother Charles and was quite enthusiastic about it. Odd! There are things in
Paradise
that might have been written by Norris - those drunken scenes, for instance - in fact, all the realism. I wish I’d stuck to it throughout! Another of my discoveries is H. L. Mencken who is certainly a factor in present day literature. In fact I’m not so cocksure about things as I was last summer - this fellow Conrad seems to be pretty good after all.

I’ve decided I’d rather not use Nathan’s t name at all in connection with my book and in fact that whole foreword strikes me as being rather weak. Couldn’t one of your advertising men write it?

I’m glad you’re fixing it up about those subtitles. I’m anxiously awaiting the cover.

Those stories I sold the Post will start to appear February 21st. I have ‘Dalyrimple’ and ‘Benediction’ in the current Smart Set and I had a one-act play in the January number which got several vaudeville offers. Read it if you can. It was called ‘Porcelain and Pink’ and it’s excellent. Smart Set,
Scribner’s
and
Post
are the only three magazines.