Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (595 page)

Were beauty for an afternoon.

It’s pretty good but of course fades right out before John’s. By the way I struck a novel that you’d like, Out of Due Titne by Mrs Wilfred Ward. I don’t suppose this is the due time to tell you that, though. I think that
The
New
Machiavelli is
the greatest English novel of the century. I’ve given up the summer to drinking (gin) and philosophy (James and Schopenhauer and Bergson).

Most of the time I’ve been bored to death - Wasn’t it tragic about Jack Newlin? I hardly knew poor Gaily. Do write me the details.

I almost went to Russia on a commission in August but didn’t so I’m sending you one of my passport pictures - if the censor doesn’t remove it for some reason - It looks rather Teutonic but I can prove myself a Celt by signing myself

Very sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cottage Club

Princeton,

New Jersey

Fall,1917

Dear Bunny: —

I’ve been intending to write you before but as you see I’ve had a change of scene and the necessary travail thereof has stolen time.

Your poem came to John Biggs, my room-mate, and we’ll put it in the next number - however it was practically illegible so I’m sending you my copy (hazarded) which you’ll kindly correct and send back -

I’m here starting my senior year and still waiting for my commission. I’ll send you the Lit  or no - you’ve subscribed, haven’t you?

Saw your friend Larry Noyes in St Paul and got beautifully stewed after a party he gave. - He got beautifully full of canned wrath -I don’t imagine we’d agree on much -

Do write John Bishop and tell him not to call his book Green Fruit.

Alec is an ensign. I’m enclosing you a clever letter from Town- send Martin which I wish you’d send back.

Princeton is stupid but Gauss and Gerould are here. I’m taking naught but Philosophy and English -I told Gauss you’d sailed (I’d heard as much) but I’ll contradict the rumor.

Have you read Wells’ Boon, the Mind
of the Race
(Doran, 1916). It’s marvelous! (Debutante expression.)

The Lit is prosperous - Biggs and I do the prose - Creese and Keller (a junior who’ll be chairman) and I the poetry. However any contributions would be etc., etc.

Young Benêt (at New Haven) is getting out a book of verse before Xmas that I fear will obscure John Peale’s. His subjects are less
precieuse
and decadent. John is really an anachronism in this country at this time - people want ideas and not fabrics.

I’m rather bored here but I see Shane Leslie occasionally and read Wells and Rousseau. I read Mrs Gerould’s
British Novelists Limited
and think she underestimates Wells but is right in putting Mackenzie at the head of his school. She seems to disregard Barrie and Chesterton whom I should put above Bennett or in fact anyone except Wells.

Do you realize that Shaw is 61, Wells 51, Chesterton 41, Leslie 31 and I 21? (Too bad I haven’t a better man for 31.1 can hear your addition to this remark.)

Oh and that awful little — (a sort of attenuated super-

fruit) is still around (ex ‘16 - now ‘17 1/2). He belongs to a preceptorial where I am trying to demolish the Wordsworth legend - and contributes such elevating freshman-cultural generalities as ‘Why I’m suah that romanticism is only a cross-section of reality, Dr Murch.’

Yes - Jack Newlin is dead - killed in ambulance service. He was, potentially, a great artist.

Here is a poem I just had accepted by
Poet Lore.

THE WAY OF PURGATION

A fathom deep in sleep I lie

With old desires, restrained before;

To clamor life-ward with a cry

As dark flies out the greying door.

And so in quest of creeds to share

I seek assertive day again;

But old monotony is there -

Long, long avenues of rain.

Oh might I rise again! Might I

Throw off the throbs of that old wine -

See the new morning mass the sky

With fairy towers, line on line -

End each mirage in the high air

A symbol, not a dream again!

But old monotony is there -

Long, long avenues of rain.

No -I have no more stuff of John’s -I ask but never receive. If Hillquit gets the mayoralty of New York it means a new era. Twenty million Russians from South Russia have come over to the Roman Church.

I can go to Italy if I like as private secretary of a man (a priest) who is going to Cardinal Gibbons’ representative to discuss the war with the Pope (American Catholic point of view - which is most loyal - barring the Sinn Fein - 40% of Pershing’s army are Irish Catholics). Do write.

Gaelically yours,

Scott Fitzgerald

I remind myself lately of Pendennis, Sentimental Tommy (who was not sentimental and whom Barrie never understood), Michael Fane, Maurice Avery and Guy Hazelwood.

Fort
Leavenworth,
Kansas

January
10, 1918

Dear Bunny; Your last refuge from the cool sophistries of the shattered world is destroyed! I have left Princeton. I am now Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald of the 45th Infantry (regulars). My present address is
clo
Q. P.O.B.

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas

After February 26th

593 Summmit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota will always find me, forwarded.

- So the short, swift chain of the Princeton intellectuals (Brooks clothes, clean ears and, withal, a lack of mental priggish- ness... Whipple, Wilson, Bishop, Fitzgerald...) have passed along the path of the generation - leaving their shining crown upon the gloss and unworthiness of John Biggs’ head.

One of your poems I sent on to the
Lit
and I’ll send the other when I’ve read it again. I wonder if you ever got the
Lit
I sent you... so I enclosed you two pictures; well, give one to some poor motherless Poilu fairy who has no dream. This is smutty and forced but in an atmosphere of cabbage...

John’s book came out in December and though I’ve written him reams (Rheims) of praise, I think he’s made poor use of his material. It is a thin Green Book.

GREEN FRUIT

(One man here remarked that he didn’t read it because Green Fruit always gave him a pain in the a — !)

by JOHN PEA LE BISHOP ist Lt Inf. R.C.

SHERMAN FRENCH CO.

BOSTON

In section one (‘Souls and Fabrics’) are ‘Boudoir,’ The Nassau Inn’ and of all things ‘Fillipo’s Wife,’ a relic of his decadent sophomore days. ‘Claudius’ and other documents in obscurity adorn this section.

Section two contains the Elspeth poems - which I think are rotten. Section three is ‘Poems out of Jersey and Virginia’ and has ‘Campbell Hall,”Millville’ and much saccharine sentiment about how much white bodies pleased him and how, nevertheless, he was about to take his turn with crushed brains (this slender thought done over in poem after poem). This is my confidential opinion, however; if he knew what a nut I considered him for leaving out ‘Ganymede’ and ‘Salem Water’ and ‘Francis Thompson’ and ‘Prayer’ and all the things that might have given body to his work, he’d drop me from his writing list. The book closed with the dedication to Townsend Martin which is on the circular I enclose. I have seen no reviews of it yet.

THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST

by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

.. the Best is over

You may complain and sigh

Oh Silly Lover...’

Rupert Brooke

“Experience is the name Tubby gives to his mistakes.’

Oscar Wilde

Chas Scribner’s Sons (Maybe!) MCMXVIII

There are twenty-three chapters, all but five are written, and it is poetry, prose,
vers libre
and every mood of a temperamental temperature. It purports to be the picaresque ramble of one Stephen Palms from the San Francisco fire thru school, Princeton, to the end, where at twenty-one he writes his autobiography at the Princeton aviation school. It shows traces of Tarkington, Chesterton, Chambers, Wells, Benson (Robert Hugh), Rupert Brooke and includes Compton-Mackenzie-like love affairs and three psychic adventures including an encounter with the devil in a harlot’s apartment.

It rather damns much of Princeton but it’s nothing to what it thinks of men and human nature in general. I can most nearly describe it by calling it a prose, modernistic
Childe Harold
and really if Scribners takes it I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight. I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation...

In my right hand bunk sleeps the editor of
Contemporary Verse
(ex), Devereux Josephs, Harvard ‘15 and a peach - on my left side is G. C. King, a Harvard crazy man who is
dramatizing
War
and Peace;
but you see I’m lucky in being well protected from the Philistines.

The Lit continues slowly but I haven’t received the December issue yet so I can’t pronounce on the quality.

This insolent war has carried off Stuart Walcott in France, as you may know, and really is beginning to irritate me - but the maudlin sentiment of most people is still the spear in my side. In everything except my romantic Chestertonian orthodoxy I still agree with the early Wells on human nature and the ‘no hope for Tono Bungay’ theory.

God! How I miss my youth - that’s only relative of course but already lines are beginning to coarsen
in other people
and that’s the sure sign. I don’t think you ever realized at Princeton the childlike simplicity that lay behind all my petty sophistication and my lack of a real sense of honor. I’d be a wicked man if it wasn’t for that and now that’s disappearing...

Well I’m overstepping and boring you and using up my novel’s material so goodbye. Do write and let’s keep in touch if you like. God bless you.

Celtically,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bishop’s address:

Lieut, John Peale Bishop (He’s a 1st Lt)

334th Infantry Camp Taylor, Kentucky

599 Summit
Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

August 15,

1919

Dear Bunny:

Delighted to get your letter. I am deep in the throes of a new novel. Which is the best title?

(1) —
The Education of a Personage
(2)
— The Romantic
Egotist (3)
— This Side of Paradise
I am sending it to Scribners - they liked my first one. Am enclosing two letters from them that might amuse you. Please return them.

I have just finished the story for your book.It’s not written yet. An American girl falls in love with an officer Français at a southern camp.

Since I last saw you I’ve tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death but foiled, as have been so many good men, by the sex and the state I have returned to literature.

Have sold three or four cheap stories to Amuricun magazines.

Will start on story for you about 25th d’Aout (as the French say or do not say) which is about 10 days off.

I am ashamed to say that my Catholicism is scarcely more than a memory - no, that’s wrong, it’s more than that; at any rate I go not to the church nor mumble stray nothings over crystalline beads.

May be in N’York in September or early October.

Is John Bishop in
hoc terrain?

Remember me to Larry Noyes. I’m afraid he’s very much off me. I don’t think he’s seen me sober for many years.

For God’s sake, Bunny, write a novel and don’t waste your time editing collections. It’ll get to be a habit.

That sounds crass and discordant but you know what I mean.

Yours in the Holder  group,

Scott Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Probably
September,
1919

Dear Bunny:

Scribners has accepted my book for publication late in the winter. You’ll call it sensational but it really is neither sentimental nor trashy.

I’ll probably be East in November and I’ll call you up or come to see you or something. Haven’t had time to hit a story for you yet Better not count on me as the w. of i. or the E.S. are rather dry.

Yrs. faithfully,

Francis S. Fitzgerald

Hotel Cecil London, England

May, 1921

Dear Bunny:

Of course I’m wild with jealousy! Do you think you can indecently parade this obscene success before my envious disposition, with
equanimity?
You are mistaken.

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo- Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it’s a shame that England and America didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art! Italy has no one. When Anatole France dies French literature will be a silly jealous rehashing of technical quarrels. They’re thru and done. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aesthe- ticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generations as the English are now.