Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (609 page)

THE TEAM

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

Middleburg,
Virginia

Summer,
1934

Dear Andrew:

I’m down here in Virginia recuperating from a siege of two stories by fishing and ruminating. Wish to heaven I could see you before you go and would promise to tell you
nothing
about life on a ranch, as Scottie tells me my moralities are becoming a strain. (Ungrateful woman - as if my prophecies have ever been wrong about her.)

Only remember - west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act.

A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Yours for the Purple Sage,

Scott Fitz —

TO ELIZABETH LEMMON

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 6, 1934

Dearest Beth:

This is the story that I got out of ‘Welbourne,’  with my novelist instinct to make copy out of social experience. I don’t think for a moment that this does any justice to ‘Welbourne’ but it might amuse you as conveying the sharp impression that the place made on me during a few weekends. Am sorry that this is not a transcription of the final draft as the Post will publish it, but in its general outlines it is the story as written.

Of course the detail about the initials of the ‘Gallant Pel- ham will identify the place to such neighbors of yours who read
The Saturday
Evening Post. As the story is so detached from any reality I am sure it won’t cause you or family any annoyance.

With love,

Scott Fitz —

Just wired you the weather killed my Manassas trip. Hope to hell you’re all right now.

TO MRS WILLIAM HAMM

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

October
4, 1934

Dear Marie:

It seems late to answer your letter....

Scottie has become acclimated to Baltimore but I’d like to have her pull a sort of Gertrude Harris a little later to the extent of having a debut out there. So a few years may see us settled there for at least a summer. This in spite of the fact that having rambled so much I no longer regard St Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an easterner and I went East to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. It was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater, etc. - though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia. Anyhow all recent reports paint it as a city of gloom and certainly the ones from the remnants of the McQuillan family are anything but cheerful. Balti-

more is very nice and with plenty of cousins and Princetonians, if I were in a social mood, and I can look out the window and see a statue of the great, great uncle, and all three of us like it here. There, have I rambled on long enough?

I send you this letter as a desperate bid for some news of St Paul and the following people: the Kalmans, Flandraus, facksons, Clarks and Kit Ordway. I suppose Dud and Grace are now completely expatriated to Chicago and I know that foe and Lou will most likely never return. Who runs things now? So many of us have emigrated - Katharine Tighe, etc. - and so many new names keep popping up whenever I get hold of a St Paul paper that I cling in spirit to the few friends I still have there. With affection from Zelda and love always from me,

Scott

P.S. Don’t omit to add news mostly about yourself.

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

November
23, 1934

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

Ever since you’ve been in this country I have been looking forward to a meeting with you and ever since news of your arrival became the town topic of Baltimore I had determined that I would give you such pleasures as I could command in these parts. Knowing how you are going to be hymned and sung I leave the details to you. I have a small but efficient establishment here and would be more than delighted to give you lunch alone, dinner alone, lunch alone and a group of your choosing, dinner alone and a group of your choosing, lunch alone and a group of my choosing, dinner alone and a group of my choosing. Also I offer you tea, breakfast, midnight supper - in fact anything that you can possibly suggest, and as many of them, so you see you have one devoted slave in this vicinity who tenders you material homage. All I ask of you is to tell me in advance how many hours and occasions you will be able to give me.

With affection always,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

1307
Park
A
venue
Baltimore,

Maryland

December
29, 1934

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

It was a disappointment to think that you would not be here for another meeting. I was somewhat stupid-got with the Christmas spirit, but I enjoyed the one idea that you
did
develop and, like everything else you say, it will sing in my ears long after everything else about that afternoon is dust and ashes. You were the same fine fire to everyone who sat upon your hearth - for it was your hearth, because you carry home with you wherever you are - a home before which we have all always warmed ourselves.

It meant so much to Zelda, giving her a tangible sense of her own existence, for you to have liked two of her pictures enough to want to own them. For the other people there, the impression was perhaps more vague, but everyone felt their Christmas Eve was well spent in the company of your handsome face and wise mind - and sentences ‘that never leak.’

All affection to you and Alice,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ALICE RICHARDSON

1307
Park
Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 28,
1935

Lovely Alicia:

You are in receipt of a communication from a man who has been in the southland and has not touched liquor for a month and, because some things in the last few months are a little hazy, you will have to be more explicit as to what the other letters were As I remember, the two department store tie-ups that I had were through Brown Wanamaker and Cupid Simon. I am enclosing a letter to my publisher. It seems to me there were other angles that we talked about, but what they were I don’t remember. On a long chance I am enclosing one also to Charlie Mac- Arthur. Of course script girls are made, not born. He and Ben Hecht have their own plant now and you might strike him at the right moment. Beyond that I am pretty blank, that is, I could suggest nothing that Carmer couldn’t suggest or that you would not find yourself. However, if you remember any further suggestions I made, write them to me and I will come through with the letters.

Now as to the manuscript.It won’t do, Alice. It is in part too personal and in part not personal enough. It is really not English to write such a sentence as ‘Her tonsils were in terrible shape,’ which gives rather a revolting picture of the lady’s throat. I appreciate your sparing me on the alcoholic side, at the same time the picture of a writer living in a dressing gown isn’t sufficiently new or startling to give personality interest. Due to the fact that my books no longer have the national circulation they used to have but sell chiefly in big cities, the interest in such articles would be limited to magazines such as
The
New
Yorker
whose readers would not consider the company of an author very exciting after all. This is sad but true and it was a bad guess of mine to think it could be steered into something marketable. It’s like those episodes that are funny when they happen but don’t bear telling.

I hope to heaven things go well with you, Alice, and that these letters may, by some chance, bear some fruit.

Faithfully,

Scott Fitzg

TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dear Alec:

That was damn nice of you to write me about the poem. I was surprised at the number of people who liked it but I was especially delighted to hear from you after so long. It pleased me too that you liked
Tender Is the
Night.

I thought it was awfully nice of you to have that mention of Patrick Murphy in your broadcast. Sweet Jesus, you have become famous!

I have seen one of the Woollcott girls act at BrynMawrSchool; I have talked to a second one in person about her short stories; and a third one is in the same class at Bryn Mawr with my daughter, so I feel as if I knew the whole family. This is a big city and it is almost as rare to look up people as it would be in New York, but I am looking forward to running into them sometime and I will give your name as a recommendation.

I am engrossed in a new literary project but it will be another year before it develops because I am feeling somewhat plucked and old as I approach forty. I have been for some time a teetotaler with the chief intention of fooling the kind friends who predicted for me an alcoholic grave. With my very best wishes to you always, Alec,

Your friend,

Scott Fitz —

TO ZOË AKINS

1307
Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dearest
Zoë:

That was a hell of a nice thing you wrote about the poem. There was a good deal of emotion in it but I was nevertheless surprised that it was noticed as much as it was, it being the first poem I have written in thirteen years.

Zelda is no better at the moment but spring and summer always represent a hope for improvement; in trying for a cure in these cases the difficult period is always the protecting of her during a readjustment to life when she returns to it, and I fall far short in this regard, being usually an agitated and turbulent sort of person myself. Scottie is fine and I will ask her about the moving picture stars.

I am delighted that
The Old Maid
is still on Broadway. It is still talked about here by those who went to it with me. No news with me except that I don’t drink any more, many moons now since liquor of any kind has touched these lips.
Tender Is the Night
is being dramatized. I’ve always thought that the advantageous contract I made in the case of
The Great Gatsby
was thanks to your sound advice.

Always affectionately yours,

Scott Fitz

TO JAMES BOYD

1307 Park Avenue Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May
2,1935

Dear Jim:

I started
Roll River
in a copy Max Perkins sent me and recapitulated
The Dark Shore,
of which I missed one issue in
Scribner’s,
then in the copy which you were kind enough to send me I read Toward Morning I could say a hell of a lot of nice things about the book - the whole war episode from the landing to the return, the reunion scene with his wife which is one of the best little touches in the book, the mine scene per se, the gen- erousness of talent, the sense that you really do know about all those people - but in view of the fine press you are beginning to get I want to make a few cavils.

In the first place there is the question of Clara. The obvious model for such a picture of a woman as heroine and later as priestess of accumulated experience is of course Beatrix Esmond, later Madam Bernstein in
Esmond
and The
Virginians.
Madam Bernstein is a projection of Beatrix but she lives in her own right and what we recognize in her is Beatrix’s enormous vitality and how life both preserved it and transmuted it. I can’t honestly think that the elder Clara has that vividness, or preserves much of the younger Clara, and your failure to bring this off is the biggest fault of the book
as a
whole for she was your strongest thread to draw it together with.

One more point is that I have the same
penchant
as you at the
moment
for letting a theme
unravel
at the end, so to speak, as things do in life rather than to cut it off short, but I feel that this can be achieved without having the writing
itself
become exhausted. It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can’t be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring. For example: your rag-tag-and-bob-tail of continental troops filing past in the dark latter days of the Revolution were for the most part somewhat discouraged farmers, and the
impression
of a dogged discouragement was beautifully conveyed because you had the vitality to invent a tremendously vivid picture which wasn’t a bit discouraging artistically. You did not let their state dampen your power to describe, nor their exhaustion drag you down; but in the last part of Toward
Morning
both the foreshortening and the lack of any such writing as there is in the best passages of The Dark Shore show that you have let the oldness of your protagonists communicate itself to you. This may be nonsense. It is one of those things that is easy to say after the event. This letter should be really to congratulate you on a fine book and to thank you for the enjoyment it gave me.

All quiet here. In a week or so I am off for the summer. You made a conquest in Elizabeth Lemmon who was very enthusiastic about
Roll River
and who has returned to The Old Dominion.

As your sister-in-law has probably told you I tried like hell to get you at the Belvedere. The Ed Poes wanted to have you for dinner.