A Life in Letters Read online

  In the final paragraph of this letter to editor Maxwell Perkins (mid-July, 1922), Fitzgerald sets forth his vision of his masterpiece, the novel that was to become The Great Gatsby (Princeton University).

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

  Letters: 1907–1940

  Chapter 1: 1907–1919

  Chapter 2: 1919–1924

  Chapter 3: 1924–1930

  Chapter 4: 1930–1937

  Chapter 5: 1937–1940

  Biographical Notes

  Index

  The editor dedicates this volume to

  CHARLES SCRIBNER III

  The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bathrobe—the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: “Ah me! Ah me!” It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.

  —“Early Success” (1937)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Arlyn Bruccoli helped me to formulate the editorial plan for this volume. Eleanor Lanahan vetted the working draft and advised me on footnote policy. Kreg A. Abshire, Tracy S. Bitonti, Bruce A. Bowlin, Hoke Greiner, Merrill Horton, Jennifer A. Hynes, Cy League, Eric Roman, and Robert Trogdon, graduate research assistants in the University of South Carolina Department of English, performed their tasks splendidly. Prof. Bert Dillon, Chairman of the Department, and Prof. Paula Feldman, Director of the Graduate Program, provided all the help within their powers. Maurice and Marcia Neville made available letters from their collection, as did Douglas Wyman. Honoria Murphy Donnelly provided copies and answered questions. These librarians rendered crucial aid: Daniel Boice (University of South Carolina Libraries), William Cagle (Lilly Library, Indiana University), Vincent Fitzpatrick (Enoch Pratt Free Library), Sidney F. Huttner (University of Tulsa Library), Don Skemer and Alice Clark (Princeton University Library), Thomas F. Staley (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin), and Patricia Willis (Yale University Library). Thanks are due to Paul Gitlin (Estate of Thomas Wolfe).

  Judith S. Baughman liberally shared her good judgment and intelligence.

  M.J.B.

  Introduction

  Everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography. Characters start as self-portraits and turn into fiction, as did Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise; they start as fiction and become Fitzgerald, as did Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Jay Gatsby is pure invention and pure Fitzgerald.

  A culture hero who saw his life as characterized by “some sort of epic grandeur,” Fitzgerald functioned as a self-historiographer, as the curator of the F. Scott Fitzgerald research center. His letters reveal this concern: they were written for the record—in contrast to Ernest Hemingway’s letters, which were written for the legend. For a writer, Fitzgerald was remarkably truthful. Apart from the documentary evidence they provide, his letters are worth reading if only because he couldn’t write badly: even in routine correspondence there are flashes of wit and combinations of words that bear the Fitzgerald stamp. Fitzgerald’s wit is a defining quality of his mind.

  This volume properly includes a high proportion of letters about writing. The most important thing about Fitzgerald—about any writer—is his witing. The playboy image that has attached itself like fungus to Fitzgerald’s reputation obscures the proper assessment of his genius. Because Fitzgerald is regarded as “a natural”—a misleading claim made by civilians—his literary intelligence has been impugned. These letters amply demonstrate that when Fitzgerald wrote about literature, even informally, he wrote with the authority of a professional who had mastered his craft.

  This volume is not a supplementary collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald letters. The publisher intends for it to serve as the standard one-volume edition of Fitzgerald letters meeting the requirements of a cross-section of his readership.

  The first publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters came in The Crack-Up (1945),1 in which Edmund Wilson excerpted letters to Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie. Andrew Turnbull’s edition of The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963)2 selected many of Fitzgerald’s best letters; but the organization by recipient restricted its usefulness as an autobiographical source. Moreover, the printed texts of these letters are not accurate; Turnbull silently corrected and cut the documents. Important Fitzgerald letters have been discovered during the thirty years since the Turnbull collection. Two hundred and eleven letters printed here are not in Turnbull.

  Fitzgerald’s professional life as literary artist and commercial writer are covered in two volumes: Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (1971),1 edited by John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer, and As Ever, Scott Fitz—Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober (1972),2 edited by Bruccoli with Jennifer Atkinson. These collections make Fitzgerald’s authorial career the most thoroughly documented one among American writers.

  In 1980 Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan edited Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,3 which included previously uncollected letters from Fitzgerald, as well as letters he received. The four volumes of letters are supplemented by Fitzgerald’s autobiographical and autobibliographical Ledger (1972),4 and by The Romantic Egoists (1974),5 compiled from the Fitzgeralds’ scrapbooks and albums.

  This abundance of evidence in the published collections of Fitzgerald’s letters is inconvenient for general readers—those outside academia who have maintained the classic status of his work by reading it. Accordingly, Charles Scribner III proposed a single-volume collection that would organize the best of the collected and unpublished Fitzgerald letters in chronological order. The principle of selection recommended by Mr. Scribner was that letters be chosen on the basis of their autobiographical content: hence A Life in Letters. This editorial rationale is appropriate because Fitzgerald’s life and work were inseparable. His writing, both fiction and nonfiction, was a form of historiography, for he regarded his career as emblematic of American life.

  There are disappointing gaps in Fitzgerald’s extant correspondence. Neither Ginevra King nor Zelda Sayre preserved his love letters. Only a few letters to his parents survive.
His letters to Father Sigourney Fay have not been found.

  EDITORIAL NOTE

  A rule of publishing holds that volumes of letters sell poorly because they are hard to read. But it is an editor’s task to make the letters usable. Fitzgerald’s letters—particularly his humorous letters—have a density of topical and literary references; they require their own cultural literacy. The editor of this volume was initially advised to keep footnoting at a minimum because of anticipated reader resistance to footnotes: it is assumed that so-called general readers find footnotes distracting. Nevertheless, when sample letters were tested on a cross-section of readers, it became clear that reader puzzlement or frustration was a much stronger response than irritation at the footnote apparatus.

  Accordingly, this volume footnotes literary references and figures who were Fitzgerald’s friends or who influenced him. Jokes have not been explicated. Great authors and classic works of literature have not been identified. Lists of celebrities (see September 21, 1925, letter to John Peale Bishop) and passing mentions of public figures (see the letter to Bishop from Capri, late March 1925) have not been explained. There will be objections to this policy on the basis that Fitzgerald’s writings, public and private, expressed his sense of social history; whatever he wrote was motivated by the instinct to record the way it was at a time and place. Yet full documentation of Fitzgerald’s correspondence would require an additional volume. This Life in Letters provides what the editor and his advisers regard as necessary explanations and identifications. The brief account of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career and the chronologies assist readers to make necessary connections among the letters.

  There are no silent deletions or revisions. The letters have been transcribed exactly as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote them—with the exception of the few stipulated cases where words have been omitted. Unlocated letters published in the Turnbull volume have perforce been reprinted from these texts.

  Fitzgerald was a bad speller—so were other major authors—but his alleged “illiteracy” has been grossly exaggerated. He wrote what he heard. His ear for sentence structure and his sense of paragraph development were close to perfect.

  Each letter is provided with an identifying heading, thus:

  Recipient

  Assigned date (if required)

  Description and location of document

  Assigned place of writing (if required)

  The return address and date are printed as they appear on the letter; but the address of the recipient has not been transcribed. Spaced hyphens in typed letters have been printed as dashes. Standard acronyms are used in the description rubric: ALS—Autograph Letter Signed (a letter written in Fitzgerald’s hand and signed by him); TLS—Typed Letter Signed (a typed letter signed by Fitzgerald); TL—Typed Letter (unsigned); CC—Carbon Copy; R—Revised in Fitzgerald’s hand (RTLS designates a typed letter with Fitzgerald’s handwritten revisions and his signature). Fitzgerald did not type; the typed letters in this volume were secretarial.

  M.J.B.

  August 21, 1993

  A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

  The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.

  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.

  Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and he became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen.

  During 1911–1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. His college friends included Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

  In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda broke their engagement.

  Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise; it was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.

  In the fall-winter of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories about young love introduced a fresh character: the independent, determined young American woman who appeared in “The Offshore Pirate” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Fitzgerald’s more ambitious stories, such as “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set, which had a small circulation.

  The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work.

  After a riotous summer in Westport, Connecticut, the Fitzgeralds took an apartment in New York City; there he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. When Zelda became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child; Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald was born in October 1921.

  Fitzgerald expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable; in the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. The political satire—subtitled “From President to Postman”—failed at its try out in November 1923, and Fitzgerald wrote his way out of debt with short stories. The distractions of Great Neck and New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his third novel. During this time his drinking increased. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, but he wrote sober. Zelda regularly got “tight,” but she was not an alcoholic. There were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking bouts.

  Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irre
sponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern with love and success, his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration—the idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with “The Jazz Age”: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

  The Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 seeking tranquillity for his work. He wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The extent of the affair—if it was in fact consummated—is not known. On the Riviera the Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy.

  The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924–1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.

  In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway—then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle—with whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway’s personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating between Paris and the Riviera.