A Life in Letters Page 7
Again, I’m anxious to get it published soon so it can go in a collection I plan for next fall. I think if you offer it to them as a novellette without mentioning that its been the rounds but simply saying that I asked you to send it to them, they will take it. Of course if you’d rather not deal with Smart Set send it to me.
I suppose that I have been more trouble to you with less profit than any writer whose work you have yet handled but I have every confidence that when my play comes out we will square the whole thing. You have advanced me everything so far sold in America and I imagine the few pounds earned in England have been used up in type writing bills ect.
But I am going to call on you again to advance me, if you will, five hundred dollars on Benjamin Button. Don’t bother to telegraph unless you can’t.
I am rather discouraged that a cheap story like The Popular Girl written in one week while the baby was being born brings $1500.00 + a genuinely imaginative thing into which I put three weeks real entheusiasm like The Diamond in the Sky brings not a thing. But, by God + Lorimer,2 I’m going to make a fortune yet.
F Scott Fitzgerald
I note what you say about my “travel stories” I start on them in two weeks when I finish my play F.S.F.
TO: Edmund Wilson
1922
ALS, 2 pp. Yale University
626 Goodrich Ave, St. Paul, Minn
Feb 6th 1921
Dear Bunny—
I read your letter in a chastened mood. My whole point was that you read the book a long time ago in its informal condition, before its final revision and before your own critisisms had strained out some of the broken cork—that, therefore, while as a critic seeing the book for the first time you would, of course, have to speak the truth whether it hurt me financially or not, still that this case was somewhat different and that a pre-publication review which contained private information destined (in my opinion) to hurt the sale of my book, was something of which I had a legitimate right to complain. My specification of “financial” injury is simply a private remark to you—it would be absurd for me to pretend to be indifferent to money, and very few men with a family they care for can be. Besides, you know that in these two novels I have not suppressed anything with the idea of making money by the suppression but I think I am quite justified in asking you to suppress a detail of my private life—and it seems to me that a financial reason is as good as any, rather better in fact, according to Samuel Butler, than to spare my family.
I had forgotten, as a matter of fact, that those Spotlight things are supposed to be personal. Please don’t think that I minded the Maury thing. I was simply congratulating you on inventing a more witty parody than I thought I had made. Still I was tight that night and may have said it. The actual quotation from my first draft is quite correct—I didn’t say it wasn’t.
This is a quibbling letter and I hope it doesn’t sound ill natured. It isn’t. I simply felt that your letter put me in a bad light and I hasten to explain my objections.
As a matter of fact I am immensely grateful to you for the article and tried to tell you so in my letter. Despite the fact that I am not quite insane about “What Maisie Knew”1 as you prophecied I would be I admire your judgements in almost every way more than those of anyone else I know, and I value your opinion on my stuff. In your first letter you said yourself that it was O.K. to object to the booze thing and your quarrel with me seems to be that I gave you a perfectly unaffected and honest answer when I told you I feared financial injury.2
As you have a 1st edition of the book I won’t send you another but will give it my invaluable autograph when I reach New York. I had intended that Perkins should send me the novel to autograph first.
I think its too bad that you have gone to all this trouble over the article and I’m afraid I have put you to it. Anyway its a complicated subject + I can excuse myself better when I see you sometime next month. But I feel quite sure that if Mencken in doing a Literary Spotlight on Drieser had remarked in dead earnest that Drieser’s having four wives had had considerable influence on his work, Drieser would have raised a slight howl. And if he had remarked that Drieser was really the hero of all the seductions mentioned in The Titan I think Drieser would have torn his hair—and complained, at least, that he wanted to save such data for his privately printed editions.
As Ever
F. Scott Fitz-Hardy
TO: Charles Scribner II
TLS, 4 pp. Princeton University
626 Goodrich Avenue,
St. Paul, Minnesota,
April 19th, 1922.
Dear Mr. Scribner:
I am consumed by an idea and I can’t resist asking you about it. It’s probably a chestnut, but it might not have occurred to you before in just this form.
No doubt you know of the success that Boni and Liveright have made of their “Modern Library”. Within the last month Doubleday Page & Company have withdrawn the titles that were theirs from Boni’s modern library, and gone in on their own hook with a “Lambskin Library”. For this they have chosen so far about 18 titles from their past publications—some of them books of merit (Frank Norris and Conrad, for instance) and some of them trashy, but all books that at one time or another have been sensational either as popular successes or as possible contributions to American literature. The Lambskin Library is cheap, bound uniformly in red leather (or imitation leather), and makes, I believe, a larger appeal to the buyer than the A. L. Burt reprints, for its uniformity gives it a sort of permanence, a place of honor in the scraggly library that adorns every small home. Besides that, it is a much easier thing for a bookseller to display and keep up. The titles are numbered and it gives people a chance to sample writers by one book in this edition. Also it keeps before the public such books as have once been popular and have since been forgotten.
Now my idea is this: the Scribner Company have many more distinguished years of publishing behind them than Doubleday Page. They could produce a list twice as long of distinguished and memorable fiction and use no more than one book by each author—and it need not be the book by that author most in demand.
Take for instance Predestined and The House of Mirth. I do not know, but I imagine that those books are kept upstairs in most bookstores, and only obtained when some one is told of the work of Edith Wharton and Stephen French Whitman. They are almost as forgotten as the books of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were five years ago, before Boni’s library began its career.
To be specific, I can imagine that a Scribner library containing the following titles and selling for something under a dollar would be an enormous success:
1.
The House of Mirth (or Ethan Frome)
Edith Wharton
2.
Predestined
Stephen French Whitman
3.
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
John Fox, Jr.
5.
In Ole Kentucky
Thomas Nelson Page
6.
Sentimental Tommy
J. M. Barrie
7.
Some Civil War book by
George Barr Cable
8.
Some novel by
Henry Van Dyke
9.
Some novel by
Jackson Gregory
10.
Saint’s Progress
John Galsworthy
11.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
George Meredith
12.
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
13.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
14.
The Stolen Story
(or The Frederic Carrolls)
Jesse Lynch Williams
15.
The Damnation of Theron Ware
(I think Stone used to own this)
<
br /> Harold Frederick
16.
Soldiers of Fortune
Richard Harding Davis
17.
Some book by
Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
18.
Simple Souls
John Hastings Turner
Doubtless a glance at your old catalogues would suggest two dozen others. I have not even mentioned less popular writers such as Burt and Katherine Gerould. Nor have I gone into the possibilities of such non-fiction as a volume of Roosevelt, a volume of Huneker, or a volume of Shane Leslie.
As I say, this is quite possibly an idea which has occurred to you before and been dismissed for reasons which would not appear to me, an outsider. I am moved to the suggestion by the success of the experiments I have mentioned. They have been made possible, I believe, by the recent American strain for “culture” which expresses itself in such things as uniformity of bindings to make a library. Also the selective function of this library would appeal to many people in search of good reading matter, new or old.
One more thing and this interminably long letter is done. It may seem to you that in many cases I have chosen novels whose sale still nets a steady revenue at $1.75—and that it would be unprofitable to use such property in this way. But I have used such titles only to indicate my idea—Gallegher (which I believe is not in your subscription sets of Davis) could be substituted for Soldiers of Fortune, The Wrong Box for Treasure Island, and so on in the case of Fox, Page and Barrie. The main idea is that the known titles in the series should “carry” the little known or forgotten. That is: from the little known writer you use his best novel, such as Predestined—from the well-known writer you use his more obscure, such as Gallegher.
I apologize for imposing so upon your time, Mr. Scribner. I am merely mourning that so many good or lively books are dead so soon, or only imperfectly kept alive in the cheap and severe impermanency of the A. L. Burt editions.
I am, sir,
Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Edmund Wilson
Postmarked May 30, 1922
ALS, 3 pp. Yale University
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
HACK WRITER AND PLAGIARIST
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA1
626 Goodrich Avenue
Dear Bunny:
Your delightful letter, of which I hope you have kept a copy, arrived this a.m. + the Fitzgeralds perused it ferociously, commending especially your hope that Don gets a good screw in France.
I am so discouraged about the play that it has cheered me to know its still under consideration.2 I thot they’d burned it up.
I think you overestimate the play—tho Act I is a gem. Also I think you’re wrong about the soldier scene. Zelda, Geo. Nathan, Miller, Townsend and I think John all thot it should come out. Still I should not object to it being reinserted. Do you like my letterhead? I have jazzed up the millionaire scene in the revised version. I have not read Ulysses but I’m wild to—especially now that you mention some coincidence. Do you know where I can get it at any price? Sorry about your Smart Set novelette. I agree with you that John’s marriage is a calamity—rather—and, having the money, she’ll hold a high hand over him. Still I don’t think he’s happy and it may release him to do more creative work.
I am enormously interested in your play. Send me a copy when you can.
I’d like to meet Dos Passos—God this is a dull letter. I didn’t read your Double Dealer poem tho I heard about it and it seems to have achieved fame. The magazine is unprocurable out here.
We’re going to the country for the summer, but write me here immediately. I wish I could close in a rapsody like yours but the fire is out for the night. Harris1 sent back the play to Reynolds without comment. If you can think of a title for it jot it down + let me know.
Yield to your country complex. Zelda says how-de-do.
Ever Thine
F Scott F____
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. June 20, 1922
ALS, 3 pp. Princeton University
The Yatch Club, White Bear Lake, Minn
Dear Mr. Perkins:
The first four stories, those that will comprise the section “My Last Flappers” left here several days ago. The second four, “Fantasies” leave either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. And the last three “And So Forth” will leave here on the 24th (Sat.) + should reach you Tuesday without fail. I’m sorry I’ve been so slow on this—there’s no particular excuse except liquor and of course that isn’t any. But I vowed I’d finish a travel article + thank God its done at last.
Don’t forget that I want another proof of the Table of Contents. There’s been one addition to the first section and one substitution in the 3d. Its damn good now, far superior to Flappers + the title, jacket + other books ought to sell at least 10,000 copies and I hope 15,000. You can see from the ms. how I’ve changed the stories. I cut out my last Metropolitan story not because it wasn’t technically excellent but simply because it lacked vitality. The only story about which I’m in doubt is The Camel’s Back. But I’ve decided to use it—it has some excellent comedy + was in one O. Henry Collection—though of course that’s against it. Here are some suggested blurbs.
1. Contains the famous “Porcelain and Pink Story”—the bath-tub classic—as well as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and nine other tales. In this book Mr. F. has developed his gifts as a satiric humorist to a point rivalled by few if any living American writers. The lazy meanderings of a brilliant and powerful imagination.
2. TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE
Satyre upon a Saxaphone by the most brilliant of the younger novelists. He sets down “My Last Flappers” and then proceeds in section two to fresher and more fantastic fields. You may like or dislike his work but it will never bore you.
3. TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE
Have you met “Mr. Icky” and followed the ghastly carreer of “Benjamin Button”? A medly of Bath-tubs, diamond mountains, Fitzgerald Flappers and Jellybeans.
Ten acts of lustrous farce—and one other.
That’s probably pretty much bunk but I’m all for advertising it as a cheerful book and not as “eleven of Mr. Fitzgerald’s best stories by the y.a. of T.S.O.P.”
Thank you immensely for the $1000.00. and also for the Phila. Ledger picture. Has the book gone over 40,000 yet? I’m delighted you like Boyd.1 He hasn’t a very original mind—that is: he’s too young to be qiute his own man intellectually but he’s on the right track + if he can read much more of the 18th century—and the middle ages and ease up on the moderns he’ll grow at an amazing rate. When I send on this last bunch of stories I may start my novel2 and I may not. Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think. It will concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually + will be centered on a smaller period of time. It will have a catholic element. I’m not quite sure whether I’m ready to start it quite yet or not. I’ll write next week + tell you more definate plans.
As Ever
F Scott Fitzgerald
TO: Edmund Wilson
ALS, 3 pp. Yale University
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
June 25th 1922
Dear Bunny:
Thank you for giving the play to Craven—and again for your interest in it in general. I’m afraid I think you overestimate it—because I have just been fixing up “Mr. Icky” for my fall book and it does not seem very good to me. I am about to start a revision of the play—also to find a name. I’ll send it to Hopkins1 next So far it has only been to Miller, Harris + The Theatre Guild. I’d give anything if Craven would play that part. I wrote it, as the text says, with him in mind. I agree with you that Anna Christie2 was vastly overestimated.
Your description of the wedding amused us violently. I’m writing a Dunciad3 on the critics to the tune of the Princton faculty song.
Here is one verse.
Whatever Umpty Dumpty damns
His errors sound like epigrams
He tidies up his mental turds
By neat arrangement of the words.
Am going to write another play whatever becomes of this one. The Beautiful + Damned has had a very satisfactory but not inspiring sale. We thought it’d go far beyond Paradise but it hasn’t. It was a dire mistake to serialize it. Three Soldiers and Cytherea4 took the edge off it by the time it was published.
I wonder if John’s insatiable penis has drunk its fill at last. He probably never left his bed during the trip. Did you like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz or did you read it. Its in my new book anyhow.
What do you think of Rascoe’s page. Its excellent of course compared to The Times or Herald but I think your critisism of his Frank-Harrassment5 of his conversations hit the mark. There is something faintly repellant in his manner—in writing I mean. Who is this professionally quaint Kenhelm Digby.6 He is kittenish beyond credibility + I hate his guts. Is it Morley or Benêt? I have Ullyses from the Brick Row Bookshop + am starting it. I wish it was layed in America—there is something about middle-class Ireland, that depresses me inordinately—I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked. Expect to go either south
or to New York in October
for the winter.
Ever Thine F. Scott Fitz.
TO: Maxwell Perkins
c. August 12, 1922
ALS, 2 pp. Princeton University
The Yatch Club
White Bear Lake
Minn
Dear Mr. Perkins—
I’ve labored over these proofs for a week and feel as if I never want to see a short story again. Thanks the information about Canadian + Australian publishers. You ought to penalize the lighted-match-girl twenty yards.
Now as to Tarquin of Cheapside. It first appeared in the Nassau Literary Magazine at Princeton and Katherine Fullerton Gerrould reviewing the issue for the Daily Princetonian gave it high praise, called it “beautifully written” and tickled me with the first public praise my writing has ever had. When Mencken printed it in the Smart set it drew letters of praise from George O’Niell, the poet and Zoe Akins.1 Structurally it is almost perfect and next to The Off-Shore Pirate I like it better than any story I have ever written.