Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (590 page)

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.

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 Fitzg —

Read the article by Antheil if you get the last
Esquire.

Grove
Park Inn
Asheville,

North Carolina

November n, 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’). 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

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  (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 ‘if 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 group to which she belonged.

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. Scot- tie 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

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

Fall, 1937

Dear Margaret:

I have owed you a letter for so long but these have been crowded months. I suppose Scottie told you the general line-up - after almost 3 years of intermittent illness it’s nice to be on a steady job like this - a sort of tense crossword puzzle game, creative only when you want it to be, a surprisingly interesting intellectual exercise. You mustn’t miss my first effort,
Three Comrades,
released next winter.

I’m sorry you were ill last March - a blood transfusion - that sounds serious! The news about Frances is strange and loyal and profound. I hope she finds it again - it’s not very easy if you have ‘anything to you.’ I know - though I’ve often tried desperately hard to be light of love.

Antony is a fine book - odd I almost sent it to you! Also an odd comment - several people who were ‘tops’ in English society - and I don’t mean the fast set but the inner-of-inner Duke-of-York business - told me he was ‘rather a bounder.’ I wonder what they meant -1 can sort of understand.

I have sent Andrew two seats to Harvard-Princeton and two to Navy-Princeton. They will arrive in a few weeks
addressed to me care of you
with Princeton University Athletic Association stamped on the envelope,
fust open
them and send them to Andrew with my enduring affection.

And reserve a bushel for yourself. —

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,
California

November 13, 1939

Dear Margaret:

The enclosed letter explains itself,  I am not allowed to communicate with Andrew in this regard by the club convention, nor should you send him this letter, but it would be perfectly proper for you to tell him that if a delegation of Cottage boys call on him, he might at least exchange appraising glances with them. Of
course,
he may be already set with a crowd joining some other organization - and most especially I want him to be happy in his choice of companions for his last two years.

In general my views are somewhat contrary to yours, insofar as the advantage of belonging to a larger than to a smaller corporate body. You remember how I argued, almost to the point of presumption, against your selection of Williams for him as against one of the Big Three. In the same manner, it seems to me that it would be a little better for Andrew’s future if he joined one of the so-called ‘big clubs’ at Princeton than one of the others. They are called big not because they necessarily have more members, but because they divide among themselves the leadership in most undergraduate policy. The Charter Club and the Quadrangle Club are notably among the nicer ‘small’ clubs, but only a few months ago Jimmy Stewart was telling me how it wrankled throughout his whole Princeton career that he had joined Charter instead of Cottage, which had been his father’s club. The larger group, it seems to me, though it may make for stiffer going, pays off better at the end.

Nothing would please me better than that the whole snobbish system be abolished. But it is thoroughly entrenched there, as Woodrow Wilson saw, and to boys of that impressionable age assumes an importance all out of proportion to its reality. And boys have gone through college without joining any club at all with no loss of self-respect.

In general: if Andrew goes into naturally, say Cap and Gown, with the crowd he has always known, that is all in all probably the best thing. Failing that, it would be better to go into Cottage with two or three friends than to go with some larger group into any of the lesser clubs. I haven’t seen Andrew for years now (though I’ve had pleasant glimpses of him from Scottie and from several letters which he’s written me). So this is pretty much work in the dark. One thing that distinguished ‘big clubs’ from the others is that the boys are slightly older, and more sophisticated, and rather more endowed with front. I had my choice of two of the bigger clubs and two of the smaller ones and though I might have been more
comfortable
in Quadrangle, for instance, where there were lots of literary minded boys, I was never sorry about my choice. My ideas of education still go in the direction that college like the home should be an approximation of what we are likely to expect in the world.

Let me hear some news of you and yours. Scottie seems to be settling down at last at Vassar, but I would never again want to undertake the education of a girl of whom boys have made a sort of adolescent fetish. I don’t think that down in her heart she likes it much either.

With affection,

Scott

To Christian Gauss

Edgemoor, Delaware Ellerslie

February 1,
1928

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is in elaboration of my excited telegram. As it happened I left Princeton in company with two different types and in both cases I worked the discussion around to the honor system. The freshman, a football man with whom I rode to the Junction, told me specifically (for I didn’t ask for opinions) that his roommate knew of two cases of absolute violations during tests, one man twice and another once, and ‘didn’t know whether to report it or not.’ He had known for some months. In other words the honor system no longer included his personal honor but seemed opposed to it.

I rode from the Junction to Phila with the president of a very prominent club, not my own, a Princetonian of the rather old- line, conservative, very gentlemanly type. He said he’d often participated in discussions as to whether he would report a case - and his conclusion was he didn’t know. But he knew of cases where violations had not been reported. The implication was that these were many. The utter stupidity of the business on the part of the undergraduates is what excited and depressed me to the extent of wiring you. I wanted to come back and see you but there was a whole house party here at home.

Now it seems to me that if one complete generation goes through with this attitude, that is if next year there is no class which hasn’t felt it as part of them, the chain is eternally broken and something has gone out of the life and pride of every Princeton man. But I can’t believe it could happen surreptitiously. What is behind it? I heard some talk about the ‘spirit of the honor system’ and an implication that it was being stretched too far, to cover themes, etc. If this has been done then I can understand it and the people who stretched it have, I believe, been in grave error. For after all it was a bargain, as all honor is until it becomes a tradition, and if it applied to themes what does the undergraduate get out of it? The other way he gets freedom from supervision, but themes were never written under supervision. As delicate a thing as the honor system is not at anyone’s willful and arbitrary control.

Don’t you think that, if that is so, it means that it should be
redefined in its original and
simplest
form
? Then perhaps an appeal might be made all at once, in the
Prince,
student council, by alumni (my occasionally eloquent pen is at your service) to show them the utterly perverted stupidity of what they are doing? I feel helpless and ignorant. Please enlighten me.

Always yours cordially and admiringly,

Scott Fitzg —

P.S. I’m so sorry you were let in for my ‘speech’ the other night. It was my first and last public appearance and the awful part of it was that I really did have something to say.

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

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.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 Gats by
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.