WELLS COLLEGE
AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 27, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

This is just to let you know that the MS of the checklist has got back to me and how grateful I am for all the suggestions and corrections. I should have said when I sent it to you that I didn't bother to put all the accents in on the carbons; my typewriter doesn't have accents and I have to put them in by hand. I did put them in the original which went to Princeton.

I shall check over the *Poetry* items again. I did check every item in the original, but of course mistakes happen in the process of getting stuff from the original notes into the final copy. I realize that there are some dubious distinction made in separating reviews from essays. On the other hand, some sort of division of this kind is necessary where the bulk of the work is so considerable; if it makes for a few dubious distinctions, that just has to be borne.

I shall get into the library in the next day or so and check each of your corrections and suggestions. I just wanted you to know how grateful I am for all the work you did here. As you perhaps saw, Julian Boyd's son was drowned last week in a skating accident and this may cause some delay all around, for he is, of course, dreadfully broken up.

As ever,

Archard.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

May 19, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

It is my fault about Coggeshall; you told me to ask Mary about him last summer, when we were in Wellfleet, and I forgot to. I am going to go over the printed list as carefully as I can -- short of rechecking with the originals -- and put together a little note of corrections for the next issue of the Chronicle; if you pick up or hear of any other errors in the next couple of months, will you pass them on to me? And would you like me, very politely, to add a couple of corrections to Gauss's piece while I'm about it? I do hate to let errors of fact go when we know better. The Gauss piece seemed to me a little carelessly written -- I mean verbally -- anyway, as if he'd been hurried or not well or for some other reason unable to give it his best attention. Some of the best anecdotes he told me are not in the best (maybe this proves they weren't true, come to think of it).

I remember Ann very well, an intelligent girl with a lot of music and a stubborn disrespect, so far as writing went, for construction. I think she must be romanticizing about her youth if she thinks I awe anyone; I dont remember being able to put the proper fear of the lord into her about 'having a plan,' as the handbooks say, for her compositions.

Didn't you change your piece in the Chronicle a good deal? It seemed to me much better than I had remembered, well up toward top Wilson instead of middle Wilson. I think no one need worry about the checklist's not being useful to a good many people, including, in a special way, me. You think I ought to be writing my own essays and poems, and so I ought, some of the time. But if, as you point out, a great many of the people who write for the little mags are now teaching in colleges and universities, as they did not, perhaps could not, when you started writing, dont forget that they have to pay a certain price for that position still. People

still do not get much credit in even the most liberal of colleges
and universities for writing articles for the reviews (I
remember being asked by a Yale professor once if I thought it
quite the thing to be writing for a periodical called the
*Partisan Review*; I suppose this was his idea of the proper
application of Matthew Arnold's 'disinterestedness'). It's
bibliographical and historical work which still brings the
academic rewards. The university overstress this, of course,
but there is great value in it for the writer, too. No one
ought to know better than you do that a sense of the past is
something one gets only by soaking himself in the past; simply
to go through, reading round about as you go, all the Wilson
stuff is a kind of history of the period from exactly the
point of view most valuable to me. I have started in on it
again, a little, for Fitzgerald, whom I am to do for a book
the Princeton Press is bringing out in a year or so. I must say,
at the risk of depressing you further both about scholars and
the general tendency, so deplorable, to treat you and Mencken
as sages, that it fascinates me. Have you ever reused the
'Literary Spotlight' bit on *This Side of Paradise*? I cant rem-
ember that you have; it is still the best thing with the
possible exception of Elinor Glyn, who said: "Mr. Fitzgerald
is a superb artist but it is deplorable that his theme is so
unrelievedly morbid." (This was after the B & D had also been
published).

Rosemary and I are still faintly trusting a larger
hope that we may get to the Cape this summer and we shall
certainly hold you to your good invitation if we do. It is
going to be a little difficult, what with Bibby's pneumonia
draining the purse and Rosemary's family being in South
America and not able to support us in the manner to which we are
accustomed summers. But we are going to try. Tell Mary how much
we both liked the bus sketch and that we are looking forward to
the long story we hear rumors of. Rosemary sends her best.

Arthur

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

May 26, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the further corrections; I shall include them, as I take it you see no objection to that. I am not quite sure that I can read your correction for p.58; is it "<u>great</u> should read <u>as great</u>"?

I liked Rosemary's story in Cross-Section, too, though of course the fond husband is always an uncertain judge of these things; but I had the feeling she managed to get a third dimension into it without destroying the thing as a story. She says it badly needs thickening and is full of a no doubt healthy dissatisfaction with it. I do wish she could find more time to write, but, like Mary, she is weighed down with house and child. I think she has at least enough of everything except just sheer practice to make a quite competent writer.

What was so good about the Spotlight piece on Fitzgerald was that it managed to say quite clearly all the things that were wrong with "This Side of Paradise" without sounding un- sympathetic and without making the reader feel the book wasnt very interesting. This is the hard thing to do.

In haste,

WELLS COLLEGE

AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

October 6, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

I have a strong feeling that an imposition what I am about to ask is, but I find myself driven to it. I do not know if you know that Princeton is getting out a book of short essays on famous Princeton men, now dead, of the recent period. I am writing the piece on Fitzgerald. I asked to be allowed to make this mainly critical, and it was agreed to, but I have to do some biography. Most of the biographical sources quickly reveal themselves as unreliable, and I have had to go back absolutely to scratch. By doing so I have worked up a kind of outline of the external events of Fitzgerald's life, but it has big gaps in it. What I am forcing myself to ask you is; will you be good enough to glance over this outline and the selected questions appended and fill in for me any gaps you can off hand and straighten out for me some of the puzzles -- heaven knows they are not all -- raised by the questions?

It is, of course, especially annoying not to be able to get reliable biographical evidence where the life is so closely connected with the literature as in the case of Fitzgerald; you desperately feel the need for revealing anecdotes and such things. But I would rather go without them altogether than to rehash again the obviously phoney ones you find in so many of the books.

Tell Mary we were most impressed by the one-man show the New Yorker gave her story and that Rosemary and I both admired it and thought it deserved this impressive treatment.

Could I -- perhaps by working on Jay -- get hold of your book on F. before January 1945, when I have to go to print? Princeton has fifteen feet of MSS material, with which I did the best I could when I was there this summer, but I would very much like the benefit of what you did with the MSS you worked over.

-2-

When did F. work on the historical novel called "The Darkest Hour" and for how long. This seems to be a mystery.

When was F. dropped from Cottage and under what circumstances? (He dropped Cottage from the list of his clubs in Who's Who in 1934) Was he reinstated?

About Zelda I wish to be as discreet as possible. Apparently, however, F. was living by himself or with Scotty from 1932 on though spending occasional week-ends and visits with Zelda (whenever he was allowed to?). Is the impression one gets of a life-long devotion, despite some eccentricity and perhaps even considerable selfishness on Zelda's part, and despite the difficulty of the situation in later years, a correct impression?

One's impression is the F. Habitually worked close to actual people as models for his characters (e.g., Bishop for D'Invilliers, Sigourney Fay for Monsignor Darcy, Lois Moran for Rosemary). Is this true for all major characters (i.e., is it fair, for example, to combine this habit with the other indications and identify Stahr and the director in "Crazy Sunday" with Thalberg? And the girl in the latter story with Nerma Shearer?) Did this habit extend beyond mere ex-ternals and general character to actual events and relations with F. himself? All this leads up to the delicate question of what relation exists between the actual Zelda and the imaginary Nicole, if any.

Is it polite fiction that F. left college in 1916 because of illness (the college records seem to suggest he was dropped for academic reasons; if he wasn't, heaven knows what kind of grades they did drop them for)?

I would be grateful for any episodes in F's live which seem to you revealing and printable and which you are willing to give up.

WELLS COLLEGE

AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

October 14, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the offer of the page proofs of your book; it will be a great advantage to have them. I suppose it is just common sense that I come to New York and talk about the rest with you, and I appreciate your asking me to stay with you. The fact is, I dread New York and the trip (it always means much extra work before and after). Nevertheless, it will have to be done if I am to do this job properly and I shall try to drive myself into a decision during the next month or so. When I can fix on a time, I will get in touch with you to see if it fits your convenience.

Thanks again,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 16, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

I'm sorry I put you to the trouble of trying to
telephone me last Friday -- as I gather you did -- by
writing to you so late about my trip to New York. The fact
is that all along I was hoping to see you at Christmas time,
when I shall be down, but that I suddenly and unexpectedly
went to Princeton last week and thought I'd try to make some
Hay. I finally got your secretary at the *New Yorker* office
and got straightened out.

Now, can I by any chance see you during Christmas week?
I shall be in New York the 28th, the 29th -- until evening --
the 30th until 11.45. I spent my evenings the week I was
in Princeton going through the Fitzgerald stuff there and I
dug up quite a bit of *stuff* information out of it. I only
wish his correspondence were to be there. Not that anyone
ought to be reading it now, for much of it must be personal,
but it ought to be there for the future. But there are lots
of notes for the other novels of the kind there were for
*The Last Tycoon* and a good deal of stuff about the stories
and scripts, as well as much more personal stuff than I
suppose he realized. I think there is a copy, in one form or
another of everything he wrote, except the *Smart Set* stuff,
and this is very useful.

Will you drop me a line about my seeing you?

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 23, 1944.

Dear Edmund:

Dinner the night of the 28th would be very erful. Since I have already payed for half a room at the Pennsylvania, and since I shall have to be rushing around there early Friday morning on MLA business, I think I'd better stay there the night. It would be far pleasanter to stay with you and Mary, but the dirty work is what pays for the fun and I guess it had better be done with at least a minimum of honesty.

I shall make for your little house around seven on the 28th; meanwhile, if anything untoward comes up, a message at the Pennsylvania will reach me.

Love to Mary, and a Merry Christmas to you both.

WELLS COLLEGE

AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

January 29, 1945.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks a thousand times for the proofs of Crack-Up which arrived today, perhaps later than they should have, for we have been snowed in without mail for the last five days. It is snowing hard again, so this may not get out to you for another longish spell.

I have just had time to glance through the book, but the letters and notes look wonderful and it is very useful to have all the biographical material together -- what happened to "How to Live on $36,000 a Year"? Didn't you say you were including that?

Well, I'm very grateful for all this and will try to make good enough use of it to justify your trouble in sending it. It's odd, isn't it, how much closer letters make you feel to a man?

Thanks,
Anton

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, SPEECH
AND DRAMATIC ARTS

October 12, 1945.

Dear Edmund:

As you will deduce, I have, since your going to Europe, transferred
to the Indian country. One of the things that has come up here almost
immediately is the question of a Russian conference which is to be held
here next spring. The college has half a million given it by Frank Kellog
for international relations and uses part of the income from this fund
each year for a conference of this kind. One of the things they want to
do during this conference is to bring some one here to speak on the subject
of Russian literature. When I was consulted on this delicate question, I
suggested you and as always happens when you make a suggestion, I got stuck
with the job of getting in touch with you about it.

What are the chances of your being back in this country by next
March and what are the chances of your being willing to come to Minnesota
to give a lecture or two on Russian literature, supposing you are back?
I presume the compensation would be satisfactory (no one has discussed this
phase of the matter with me, but you see what the Kellog fund is).

If you will not be back, or do not want to come, would you suggest
some one you think would be a possible substitute for yourself. I thought
of VNabokov (V., not M, of course), but I do not know much about these
things.

Your pieces for the New Yorker on Europe have been very fine,
especially the ones on London and Greece and the British; the kind of
travelling British imperialists do is very narrowing, isn't it?

As ever,

Arthur Mizener.

January 11, 1946.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the good word about the Fitzgerald essay; it is the best kind of encouragement possible to have you think it goes all right. It is a fact, as you guessed, that I quoted your poem from the *New Yorker*: I bought a mess of *New Yorkers* covering your stuff when I did the Checklist and had them in the office and, in a most unscholarly way no doubt, simply used what was a step away when I came to quote the passage in my paper. I will see that the quotation is corrected before the essay is printed in the Princeton book. It breaks my heart to think that, as I originally wrote it, it was 14,000 words and is now hacked down to about 8,000 -- for both Allen and *Princeton*; but I will have my revenge when I do a longer thing on Fitzgerald.

The revised text of *Tender Is the Night* was at Princeton summer before last; I suppose it is still there. The revision consisted mainly in the rearranging of the material and was not completed for the whole book. I copied the main points of it and can give them to you if you are interested.

Incidentally, I recently suggested to Jaythe possibility of a volume of unrepublished Fitzgerald stories -- there is a five-years accumulation, including things like "The Lost Decade" and "Between Planes". Jay seemed interested and suggested I write to Judge Biggs, which I have done. This raises again the question of the Fitzgerald papers in general. Do you know what has happened to them? The last I heard Princeton was about to make what seemed to me a very considerable offer for them. The thing that frightens me is that Scotty may get hold of them; when I remember your story about the letters, I shudder to think what this might mean. Has her husband enough money to make that a risk? I suppose, from what I hear, that he has. But I suppose, from what you have told me of Judge Biggs, that there is not much risk that he would not understand the dangers of not having the papers in some such public place as Princeton and would see to it that they went to such a place. But I cannot help worrying a little about it all until they are safely settled in some responsible library. Julian Boyd once offered me the job of cataloguing them for the Princeton library if Princeton got them, and this would be a priceless opportunity for getting familiar with them, so I will make a point of hoping, for selfish as well as sentimental reasons, that they go to Princeton.

There were a lot of things they could have done better about the Viking Portable it seems to me, including making a better selection of the stories and perhaps not having O'Hara write the introduction. But to have *Tender Is the Night* included makes up for a lot.

Thanks again for the encouragement, and be sure I will correct the quotation.

Clinton, New York

July 27, 1946.

Dear Edmund:

What with recuperating from my appendix and our staying at the Vineyard a much shorter time than we had originally planned to, we never got a chance to get in touch with you about our driving out to Wellfleet for a day or your coming to Edgartown. This is most disappointing to us, for I had very much looked forward to <u>enjoying</u> all the interests of Hecate County. What a wonderful thing it <u>xxiii</u> is when a really good book makes such a success. I don't suppose it improves the reading public as much as we imagine it does, but at least it means that the writer of a good book gets properly rewarded. We spent a day in Cambridge on the way here and heard of nothing else, and the book is being much cried up -- and of course down too -- even in Minnesota. Rosemary says that it is the first really beautifully <u>written</u> book she has read in a long time; I think this isolates the great virtue. I was interested to discover when we got here, where we are spending a month with a collection of people, including the Willard Thorps, that Mrs. Thorp is in the midst of <u>To The Finland Station</u>, which just shows how one thing leads to another.

I had a talk in Boston, on our way out, with Houghton Mifflin, who appear to be extremely interested in a Fitzgerald book -- at least $2500 interested. I would have liked a chance to talk this over with you had it not come so late. I am seeing Biggs at the end of the month when I shall be down in Princeton for College Boards and I told the H&H people that I did not want to make any commitments until then, though they seem very anxious to get the contract signed and publicity made because they are afraid several other people are going to try to corner the job. What I hope is that I shall be able to get the preliminary work done this year and get a Guggenheim for next year, settle some place like Princeton which is near the center of the material and do the book. I would appreciate your advice on all this if you have any. By the way, was H-M mixed up somewhere in the early stages of the Hecate County book? There seemed to be a generally green-eyed air about the whole situation.

Rosemary sends here best; the proofs on the book of Princeton biographies is just coming through, which reminds me to tell you that I have got the quotation from your poem corrected in them.

As ever,
Arthur.

Mr. Edmund Wilson
Wellfleet
Mass.

Clinton, New York

August 1, 1946.

Dear Edmund:

This prompt -- indeed, overprompt xapky -- reply comes because I want to
know if you mean you would like a personal copy of the Princeton Biographies.
Of course the New Yorker will get a copy in the natural course of things, but I
want to see you get one of your own in addition if you mean that. Just tell me
on a card in due course. I have seen some of the proofs on the -- chronologically --
early figures: Willard has them here and we have all been taking a hand on
proof-reading. Willard's own on Kirkland is particularly appropriate reading
on the grounds of the very college Kirkland founded; and Sam Monk has written a
fine one on President Smith.

I am most grateful for your offer of help toward the Guggenheim; as soon
as I have consulted my president and made quite sure of my ground with Judge Biggs,
I will take advantage of your offer. I have just heard that a pseudo-Fitzgerald story
I have written has split first prize in the Kenyon Review story contest. It
depends on your account of Fitzgerald as he was when he visited you at Wellfleet.
I don't mean there is any obvious reference to this but that the handling of the
character is based primarily on your account of him on that occasion. This will, I
hope, give it curiosity value for you.

Myself, if I were sure I had written a good book, I wouldn't care what
the grounds of its wide sale were: people are only paying what they ought to get
the book, even if they don't understand what they are paying for.

The appendix was nothing at all, except a good thing to get rid of. They
make nothing of these affairs nowadays. When I was young I remember it was
different; now you get no sympathy at all -- not even a quiet time in the hospital,
for they have you walking about and generally being uncomfortable in no time.

As ever,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.
SPEECH AND DRAMATIC ARTS
CARLETON COLLEGE
NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

Mr. Edmund Wilson
The New Yorker
25 West 43 Street
New York 18, New York

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

November 5, 1946.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks so much for taking on the job of recommending me for the Guggenheim; I know how thankless it is because I spend a lot of time at the same sort of thing for students.

I very much appreciate the seriousness with which you take my story. I doubt if it deserves it, not because I am full of modest about it or mean to take the "e'en a toy in hand here, sir" attitude about it, but simply because I imagine I know where I stop. The whole problem of putting together invention and history is difficult and perhaps it's a false kind of literature, like historical fiction proper; but it's the only kind that ever gets me started. And it seems foolish and fake to spend a lot of time after the event covering up your tracks and pretending it wasn't fact from which you started. The beginning is, of course, an invention, but it is an invention for which you are responsible. This isn't your contrast of the conventional Scott with the drunk Scott, but your account of that contrast was what set me going. Of course I had no real idea what Yale was like in those times; I was really using, there, my own fantasy about Princeton which I took with me from Hill. The weakness of the story was ending seemed to me the way the skeleton of the theme showed through. The narrative went dead and became a mechanical symbol for the point, such as it was. I struggled with this, but without improving matters greatly, though the thing was finally a little better than it began. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about Tap Day, though I have read something about its importance one place and another. MacLeish, for instance, first corrupted himself seriously on account of it (as usual, quite successfully).

I do not believe I shall be able to get east again until April, when I shall come on for College Boards. I haven't spent a Christmas at home in five years, and it's time I started. We're having young Reed Whittemore out and making an occasion of it. I don't know how they work this residence requirement in Nevada; you couldn't run up and see us for a while could you? Do come any time while you're out here, if you can. We'll make you talk, of course, but otherwise we'll behave humanely.

The story Mr. Waugh is talking about of Fitzgerald's is "Afternoon of an Author," *Esquire*, August 1936 (it was a bus, not a streetcar, he rode on). It's very personal and I would guess, probably, mostly just fact. At least all the events you can check, like his red-pencilling his stories, etc. are habitual actions of F's. It's very good.

I would very much like to see your selections from the Pat Hobey stories. I wonder if they would make a separate volume (I'm thinking of Judge Biggs here, who would very much like to make money for the estate, of course).

of course. Suppose I make my own selection of stories, so that I can
feel independent, and then we check the two lists. Let me know if you
think a single volume of stories is the right thing, or separate volumes,
one for Pat Hobey and one for the others. The Pat Hobey material would
be as good, I should think, as Pal Joey anyway. Judge Biggs was perfectly
wonderful to me when I was down there -- twice -- in August. I went down
to talk to him the first time and he gave me endless time and a wonderful
luncheon and offered me the chance to do the sorting of Scott's papers
(separating out the stuff about Zelda was of course the important thing).
Therefore I came back late in August and worked through everything, making
as exact a sorting as I could in the time. It was, of course, a priceless
opportunity for me for, though of course I could not (and ought not to
have done so anyway) have read all the stuff in the time, still I got a
very good general idea of the total situation and at least enough knowledge
about those last terrible ten years to realize the quality of them.
This will help me immeasurably, of course, even though I am honor-bound not
to use directly any of the material that has to do with Zelda's illness.
I'm telling you this not only so that you shall know how generous Judge
Biggs was to me but also because I suspect that your influence was in
the situation somewhere and I want you to know I appreciate it.

Rosemary sends her love and do come and see us while you are in
these parts if it is possible and let me know sometime what kind of volume
of Fitzgerald stories I ought in general to be aiming at.

Yours,

Box 549

Princeton, N. J.

July 21, 1947.

Dear Edmund:

I have just spent a month working my way through the Fitzgerald papers and rereading all the short stories; there are around 150 of them. I have now come up with a series of suggestions for publication and some lists of selections for Judge Bigg's consideration. And I am very anxious to have your opinion about them. You once said you had made a selection of Pat Hobby stories which you would let me use, and I am full of hope that you will have opinions on the other suggestions I have made here. I don't know if all these stories will be familiar to you; probably not; certainly not the ones which were never printed. But you will probably know enough of the stories in each list to get the general idea of the selection. If you are interested in reading any stories that you don't know, I can get copies made of them for you here, I'm sure.

My own general idea would be that a volume of Hobby stories alone would not be a good idea; I do not think they are good enough to support a book by themselves. But it might be a saleable item. My preference is for a Basil book and a second book of selections from the un-republished stories. Then maybe later a selection from all the stories. But you know much more about all this than I do. Let me have lots of opinions.

As ever,

I thought the piece on Emily Post wonderful; it made me want to go read her myself, though I don't suppose she can be as funny as you make her sound.

## 2. A Volume of Basil Duke Lee Stories

1. That Kind of Party

2. The Scandal Detectives

3. Night at the Fair

4. The Freshest Boy

5. He Thinks He's Wonderful

6. The Captured Shadow

7. The Perfect Life

8. Forging Ahead.

9. Basil and Cleopatra

Of these stories, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 were published in *Taps at Revalle*.
3, 8, and 9 were printed in the POST but never published in book form; 1 was
never published anywhere, apparently because editors objected to the suggestion
that children of 10 and 11 years of age could get excited over the idea of
playing post office; the only valid objection I can see to the story is that it
is not quite top-notch Basil; but it is still very good. The other three un-
republished stories are every bit as good as the ones Scott did republish; and
I think this Basil series is very good indeed.

## 3. A Volume of Unpublished Stories

1. The four Hobby stories in the First Group of Hobby selections (1940-1941)

2. Three Basil stories, numbers 3, 8, and 9 (1928-1930)

3. Two Gwen stories

Lo, the Poor Peacock This story was never printed, I think
Too Cute for Words (1936)

These were stories -- Scott wrote five of them altogether -- about himself
and Scottie when Scottie was about 14 or 15

4. Miscellaneous stories

The Intimate Strangers (1935) This is Scott's version of the story of Nora
and Lefty Flynn

Image on the Heart (1936)

The Long Way Out (1937)

The Lost Decade (1939)

Three Hours Between Planes (1941)

Discard This story was never printed because it was 'too obscure' for the POST editors

I Didn't Get Over (1936)

An Author's Mother (1936)

Financing Finnegan (1938)

Millionaire's Girl (1930)

Afternoon of an Author (1936) This is almost an article, since it is about Scott himself, with very little com ealment

Dear Edmund:

Box 549

Princeton, N. J.

August 6, 1947.

Thanks for your good letter. I agree with you heartily about the
need for not cluttering the scene up with hackwork Fitzgerald; I'm sure
he wouldn't himself have wanted that any more than you and I do. I don't
think -- and I gather you don't either -- that that means publishing only the
very top Fitzgerald; for that would mean perhaps a half dozen stories. It
means not going below the second rank Fitzgerald, where what you call the
Fitzgerald feeling is still strong. My own feeling is that Afternoon of an
Author gets into this class, but maybe your remark about not publishing
certain autobiographical pieces in CRACK-UP means to cover this one. I think
I think more highly of the Basil stories than you do. Of course I know "Galahad"
but it had never occurred to me to connect it with F's story, so I read it
over again today. It is, for me, a more serious story than F's because it
is not in any important sense the same story. Just the plots are the same;
how could you and F write the same story? Neither the immaturity nor the
maturity is the same in the two stories. Of its kind, I think F's story is
better than Sat. Post hackwork: You ought to read some of the Post stories
from the period before 1925. And the really pathetic things are those medieval
stories he wrote for Red Book. He had a great investment of pride and time
in them and they are dead as ducats. He even seems to have thought he was
"doing" Hemmingway (as he always called him) in the leading character.

I didn't like the Parker selections in the Portable at all. The only
first class story she included that you had not already put in the TYCOON
is "Babylon Revisited." "The Freshest Boy" is, for my money, good second drawer
Fitzgerald and "The Cut-Glass Bowl" poor second drawer and the others junk --
and not even amusing junk as is some of the stuff like "Dice, Brassknuckles
and Guitar" which F never republished at all but only scavenged for the notebooks.
It seems to me there is a lot of good stuff still left: "Winter Dreams" (good
second), "The Sensible Thing" (ditto), "Family in the Wind" (first), and some
others. All this arguing doesn't mean, however, that in general I don't
agree with you that the first thing to do, as I said either on those sheets
I sent you or in my letter to Judge Biggs, is to get out a volume of uncollected
Fitzgerald. I have just had a letter from Judge Biggs saying that he expects to
see you soon and if you and he agree to this,-- I think you do -- I shall
begin to get the stories together. The selection I sent you is oversize;
some of the stories will have to be eliminated. I did this on purpose because
I would like your judgments about them.

I always remember John Bishop once when he came up to have lunch with
Dudley Fitts and me at Barnard when we were there marking college boards. He
was in wonderful form and being anecdotal about Paris when in walked Harry Brown
and his wife of a day, hot off the Powers Model griddle and still just off
the boil. John's jaw fell right in the middle of an anecdote and never did
get properly drawn up again. The only silenter person at the table for the rest
of them was the Powers model who was keeping a face that would have horrified

Lady Wishfort from cracking open. That memory has always made Bishop an
attractive character to me. Did you notice in the correspondence of Fit-
gerald, by the way, how angry he was about "Missing All"? Incidentally,
there are , as I suppose you will remember, a great many Bishop letters
in the correspondence.

Rosemary and I still make it a hope that we shall get up to the Vineyard
and Cape sometime this summer. But her family is in Peru and I have been
bullied into taking over the poetry course here for August since the man
who was teaching it has been taken with something called "progressive
colitis" -- a name which makes bad jokes hard to resist. All this makes it
difficult. But if we can possibly work out a way to get up there, you will
here from us very promptly because we shall be inviting ourselves to stay
with you.

The Kafka piece was a delight; no one can do these things as you can, as
I once tried to say in print. I didn't think the Age of Reason very good,
and I am about to buy Mr. Burns. It is such a pleasure to see you regularly
in THE NEW YORKER and not have to read Mr. Basso's bad imitations of Clifton
Feddiman when you are expecting to get Wilson that I am on the verge of
of writing one of those letters to the editor.

Thanks for everything and for heaven's sake don't go losing MSS. as easily
as you lose your notes on the Hobby stories; these things are valuable; they
even have a price.

As ever,

There has been a cry from both *Furioso* and *The Kenyon* -- because I talk maybe
too much -- for unpublished Fitzgerald stories. There are about ten items of
this kind and I have picked out three, two of which Judge Biggs has copies
of which I hope he will show you. I think they are second drawer, but each
has very good points. They can be published if you think it a good idea.

34 Edgehill Street
Princeton, N. J.

March 22, 1948.

Dear Edmund:

A long time ago you told me that Simon's description of Max Fleischman in THE CRIME IN THE WHISTLER ROOM was really Fitzgerald's description of an evening with the bootlegger who gave him the idea for Gatsby's grandeur, and that you had repeated the description fairly literally. Ever since then I've wanted to ask you if, in a more general way, some of the characteristics of Simon -- the brashness, the defiance, the ego, the ambition -- were not also taken from the Long Island Fitzgerald.

You also told me once that you had written a poem about the trip you and Fitzgerald and Bishop and Dell took down here to Princeton for the banquet the Lit gave -- was it 1920? -- when they got the idea of keeping in touch with Lit alumni; but I can't find any such poem.

I have gathered so much material about Fitzgerald that I feel like Pluto in a roomful of flypaper and am in terror of turning out a work of undigested scholarship. Mr. Donahoe turned up three chapters of the original version of TSOP; you know, THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST.

Where are you? -- can you be seen? Princeton is very much too much with us: it even produced so unlikely a thing as a small emenation of ectoplasm with the implausible name of Truman Capote yesterday. I wonder if you can remember your letters to Fitzgerald? Some of them are very swell and you ought to come down and reread them, in spite of Princeton. Anyway, you remember Princeton in the spring? -- "May windows to the summer drunks flung wide."

Seriously (I don't mean you weren't serious enough about Burt) couldn't you both come down some time while we are here? We have Mike Oates's house till June and are full of comfort.

As ever,

34 Edgehill Street
Princeton, N. J.
April 13, 1948.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the very good letter and especially for pinning down the
Webster Hall episode for me; I have it in my notes that you told me about
the connection between that episode in the play and Fitzgerald, but my
notes were not perfectly clear and I am all straight now. I didn't mean
to imply in my letter that I thought your character was literally Fitz-
gerald; obviously not. But the resemblances, where they do exist, seemed
to me very vivid.

I am appalled to realize that what I said in my note to "News of Paris"
about the notes in Fitzgerald's Notebooks may have sounded as if I thought
you ought to have known they were stuff excerpted from stories in the
Post, etc. Why should you have? -- I was just trying to give a more general
reference to my remarks about how professionally exonomical he was about
his stuff. Harold Ober now has a tentative selection of stuff for a book of
unrepublished stories, practically what you saw last summer, except that I
am now very anxious to use the Script F made from "Babylong Revisited" if we
can get it. Houghton Mifflin seems to be extremely anxious to bring the
stories out along with my book and I suppose Ober will be able to get as
much out of them for Scottie as out of anyone else.

I have corresponded with Sheilah Graham (I took your name in vain when
I wrote her, in fact) and have had very pleasant replies from her, but she
has no intention of coming east, as far as I can make out, and I am having
a hard time dreaming up a means of getting the money to go to California to
see her. Dr. Rennie, who was here a couple of weeks ago, told me some quite
terrifying things that Sheilah had told him; she had a tough time of it, I guess,
and must have been quite wonderful in her way.

I have not started my actual writing yet, though I must begin soon. I
would give a good deal for another chance to talk to you, now that I am better
informed and I would most certainly like to read any notes you have about him.
I want to come to Boston in the next couple of weeks to see Katharine Tighe
Fessenden and perhaps you would let me run out to the Cape to see you then.
Anyway I'll let you know as soon as I find out from Mrs. Fessenden if it is
all right for me to come up. I do hope you and Eleanor will both get into
these parts this spring, but how about your running down sometime when you
are here in New York for one of your jumps? -- In addition, I mean.

I have been thinking all spring, now that I am here where I can put my
finger on the Chronicle, of doing an addendum to my checklist of your stuff.
By all means, then, let me have anything you can for this purpose. I cannot
officially speak for the Bishop checklist, but obviously the same thing ought
to be done there, so lets just go ahead and do it. Will you send the information
to me? -- especially the stuff about yourself: my pride's involved there.

Fitzgerald's letter to Scottie about his relations with Zelda is here, so
you need not worry about having misplaced it (at least what I think is the
letter you refer to: "When I was young, I lived with a great dream . . . .

Then I met your mother and the dream divided, etc").

I go back to Northfield in September. There isn't the slightest chance
in the world that Princeton would take me on, and in fact, for all the
somewhat degenerate cham, it has for all old Princeton people, I'm not
sure it would be a very good place for me to be. It's home, but home is
not always the best place to be; I spend a good deal of energy, even now,
being angry at Princeton. Besides, there are too many parties.

We do very much want to meet Eleanor and very much hope you will both
be down this way this spring. Meanwhile, I shall make sure I see you anyway
by attacking Wellfleet when I come to Boston. Thanks again for being so
generous about everything and I'll let you know in a week or so when I
intend to come to Boston -- I mean when Mrs. Bessenden will see me.

As ever,

I had cocktails at the Mixsell's the other day with Ludlow Fawler; I had
always thought Anson Hunter was bigger. It just shows.

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 9, 1948.

Dear Edmund:

Last night I was looking through THE IMPORTANCE OF SCRUTINY and came across a wonderful little essay of Santyana's called "Tragic Philosophy" in which he compares Dante and Shakespeare in exactly the same vein as you were comparing them last spring. As you might suspect, to be sure, he thinks better of Shakespeare's dream of a world than you do. But the essay reminded me immediately of what you were saying last spring and on the chance that you might not have seen it, I thought that it might be worth mentioning. Reed showed me your poem about the Pond which FURIOSO is publishing. There was only time to get through it a couple of times quickly before he had to rush it to the printer in order to make the next issue and I never did get to the point where I could hear properly that grick 'rhyming': either I was too self-conscious about it, or couldn't hear it at all; but its theoretically a wonderful idea; it ought to hold the lines together without being obtrusive at all, once you get used to it. As far as I was able to get into it, the poem itself seemed to me a fine thing. This is the way the world ends. Meanwhile, a merry Christmas to you and Elena from us both.

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 20, 1948.

Dear Edmund:

Yes, I know the Shakespeare-Dante argument is old enough, and
Santyana's line not knew. But he does it beautifully, little as I agree
with it myself (Leavis answers him in the next piece in Bentley's collection
and manages, I think, to be right but in a prose which is suffers horribly
after Santyana). On the early plays: I have just been rereading KING JOHN
and have realized for the first time that at that stage in his career
S. could do the Kyd kind of rhetorical, public blank verse better than any
of them. Constance and Pandulph are really wonderful in their way. The
enclosed is, I'm afraid, a little pedantic but may entertain you when you
get to B & F in your en masse reading of the Elizabethans and Jacobans.
I have got Fitzgerald to 1930 and hope to get some good blows in this
vacation.

AS ever,

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

March 27, 1949.

Dear Edmund:

It was good to hear from you and thanks for the Butterfield letter.
I picked up for the library last year one of these special copies of
TSOP from a bookseller -- probably for more than Mr. Butterfield paid for
his. There is some discussion of this little publicity gag in the Perkins-
Fitzgerald correspondence. Isn't it like Fitzgerald, on such an occasion,
to have written "The idea of writing it came on the first of last July:
it was a substitute form of dissipation." There is after all a great deal
of the kind of truth most people never speak in public there. You have given
Reed a great lift by sending him your poems for FURIOSO. We hope to get east
about the second week of June.

In haste,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
CARLETON COLLEGE
NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

Mr. Edmund Wilson
C/o Eitingon
Hillcrest Park
Stamford, Conn.

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

October 10, 1949.

Dear Edmund:

I'm sorry we missed you when you were in Red Bank; the war, out here, breaks out about the middle of September. Thanks for the lead about the Bishop poem; Mrs. Bishop has been very kind to me so far, and I think that if the trail leads back to her -- and I shall set about finding out at once -- she will help me. By the way, while I'm on this subject, do you remember whether the following lines are yours or Bishop's:

I was always clever enough
To make the clever upperclassmen notice me;
I could make one poem by Browning,
One play by Shaw,
And part of a novel by Meredith
Go further than most people
Could do with the reading of years;
And I could always be cynically amusing at the expense
Of those who were cleverer than I
And from whom I borrowed freely,
But whose cleverness
Was not of the kind that is effective
In the February of sophomore year. . . .
No doubt by senior year
I would have been on every committee in college,
But I made one slip:
I flunked out in the middle of junior year.

They appeared in "Gossip" in the Lit for January 1916. The column is credited to you and Bishop in the annual index, but Fitzgerald -- *seven* years later -- quoted 11. 3-7 in an interview and ascribed them to you. The HARPER'S BAZAAR piece is certainly not a part of the book; it is a cut down version of a lecture I did at Virginia two years ago. HB was very good to me about letting me have my own way, but of course I had to cut what mattered most to me. I'm not especially proud of the piece, though I hope it is no disgrace.

I got through the first draft of the book this summer and came back here with the intention of revising until Christmas, when the ms. is due. But Scottie found four scrapbooks which everyone thought lost for good, so I have to work material from them in. And Ludlow Fowler sent me about 20 letters he found in his attic, ditto (lots of detail about the events on which "The Rich Boy" is based). I am unhappy about the quality of the writing in the first draft of my book and want to work on it a great deal. Not that work will solve that kind of a problem, but maybe it will help. I wish God had made me a better natural writer.

If your going to read plays that Dekker had a hand in you must be prepared
for plenty that's bad; he was a sort of cross between Odet & Kauфman,
Arthur.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

October 24, 1949.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks very much for the information about the poem in *Gossip*; I will use it in my note if I may. Hekker's social prose could be wonderful, as in THE BULL'S HORNBOOK, though even there I think for my money he wasn't so entertaining as Greene, who also, though no great shakes at that, wrote some interesting plays (FRIAR BACON is not contemptible even if it is, as it might be, an imitation of Marlowe). Thanks again.

Arthur.

Wellfleet, Mass.

November 10, 1949

Dear Arthur,

I have just remembered an anecdote about Scott that you may not know. It was told me years ago by the Gormans (Herbert Gorman, who wrote the book about Joyce). Scott called on Joyce in Paris and was as usual when meeting writers he admired thrown off his balance by awe. He addressed Joyce as "sir" and asked him whether it didn't make him feel very proud to realize what he had done. Joyce replied that he _was_ sometimes tempted to be proud, but that he tried to suppress this tendency. Scott then announced that, as a tribute to Joyce's genius - to show his abasement in its presence - he was going to jump out the window. Joyce caught hold of him and held him back as he was going over the window-sill - and said afterwards: "That young man must be mad - I'm afraid he'll do himself some injury!"

And here are two other literary stories which Scott told me himself. He met Galsworthy at some party that was given for him in London. "I said to him: 'Mr. Galsworthy, you are one of the three living writers that I admire most in the world: you and Joseph Conrad and Anatole France!'" I asked what Galsworthy had said to that. "I don't think he liked it much," he said. "He knew he wasn't that good." He had described Galsworthy to me as "just what you'd think: a fine quiet reticent English gentleman," and I am sure that Scott

2

had interpreted as a reaction against his own insincerity, about which he had a bad conscience, what would really have been simply the cool response of an Englishman to a gross public compliment.

When he was in Capri, he went to see Compton Mackenzie. I asked about their conversation. "I asked him," he said, "why he had petered out and never written anything that was any good since Sinister Street and those early novels." "What did he say to that?" "He said it wasn't true." Scott then went on to tell me his theory that the trouble with Mackenzie was that he had missed the great experience of the war. I have thought about this recently since I have been reading up Mackenzie's books from the point where we all dropped him. It is not true at all that he missed the war. He was physically in such bad shape that nobody would accept him for service till Sir Ian Hamilton, who liked his novels, heard that he wanted to get into the service and gave him a job in the Gallipoli campaign, which enabled him, without actually fighting, to see a certain amount of fighting. When Mackenzie's health broke down, Hamilton sent him to Athens, where he had a very lively and rather dangerous career andhead of the British Secret Service. He has written four volumes of memoirs and several novels about it, though I don't believe any of them had yet come out at the time that Scott himself felt that he had missed the war. It was as if, when he came later to read books about it, he decided that he had been greatly to blame for not having had any real idea of what had been going on at that time, and he suddenly produced his old trench helmet which had never seen

3

the shores of France and hung it up in his bedroom at Wil-
mington and would surprise his visitors there by showing them,
as if it were a revelation, a book of pictures of horribly
mutilated soldiers.

I suppose you have looked into the early Mackenzie,
whose influence on Scott can't be overestimated. (The curious
thing is that Zelda wrote like Mackenzie, too. I don't know
whether she got it at firsthand or through Scott or what.)
But what strikes me, in reading Mackenzie today, is that,
much better educated though he was than Scott, Scott's best
is far better than Mackenzie's. Mackenzie is a very odd
literary case. I may write something about him someday. He
gets less attention now than he deserves. He has been - except
perhaps in Carnival and Grey and Pauline - completely lacking
in intensity and almost completely extraverted. I have a
theory - his mother, I believe, was an American woman from the
South and his father a Scottish actor - that he represents a
peculiar breed: romantic but extroverted, intelligent but
superficial, quixotic but rather mild - that is due to this
mingling of strains and that doesn't find any appropriate role
in the English public school system in which he was brought
up. His reminiscences of the war - so full of the enjoyment
of adventure and moving quickly through foreign lands and so
ercritically detached toward the British cause, which he is
supposed to be there to serve - might almost have been written
by an American. In his later years, he went to live in Scot-
land and interested himself in Scotch affairs - is now doing a
series of Scotch novels. He is, as I say, an anomalous case.

4

His career has been disappointing, but I would rather read him than Somerset Maugham, for he seems to me a real and rather remarkably gifted writer. I met him in London four years ago at a rather dreary literary gathering and, unexpectedly, enjoyed him more than anybody else that evening. I was astonished, among all the limp and the dim, to find him so cheerful and brisk, small and wiry and full of energy and delighted with himself.

I hadn't meant to go on at this length - it seems to be turning into notes for my Mackenzie essay.

As ever,

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

November 16, 1949.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks very, very much for the stories about Fitzgerald. I am just in the throes of my revision, trimming, adding, rewriting, and I shall work them in immediately. They are very characteristic, aren't they? -- I mean of his whole attitude of awed respect for great writers and his tendency to make social gestures which, while true to his emotions, were not true to his literary judgments coldly made. They are very nice dramatic examples.

I'm fascinated that you have been rereading Compton Mackenzie. Ever since I started on this job I've wanted to go back and read the whole crew of novelists of that time. I got a little started on Wells reading what I needed to for Fitzgerald, but of course I have never got beyond SINISTER STREET in Mackenzie -- except for one I picked up to read on the train once -- MEN OF THE SEA, I think it was called. It was not very interesting. Any now, since Virginia Woolf made her belligerent and silly attack on Bennett no one who is likely to get a hearing has said much about these novelists, who after all, even if you were rebelling against them, were an important force for the modern novel. The only thing I remember off-hand that takes them seriously is Norman Nicholson's MAN AND LITERATURE; and while he is a fairly intelligent person, his book is sketchy and ax-grinding. I hope you will do something serious on Mackenzie and thus drive people back to taking a look at their ancestors. As a matter of fact we could stand to take a good look closer to home and recanvass the novelists of the twenties. I can't find anyone except Trilling who has ever said what a primitive and silly-lush sort of writer Cathér is or how very badly Hergesheimer writes or what unmitigated balderdash people like Van Vechten were turning out to such applause.

Well, once I get Fitzgerald off my back I hope I will have the energy to tackle some of these things. If you do Mackenzie, you will certainly start up an interest and other people will follow.

Thanks again for the stories.

As ever,

## Quotations from the letters of Edmund Wilson:

"I am sick of it myself. Perhaps you can infuse into it some of the fresh, effervescence of youth for which you are so justly celebrated."
To Fitzgerald, August 28, 1915

"Yours for what you choose to consider the Celtic strain in us and which, whatever it is, for all our laziness and ignorance, does separate from the optimistic and sentimental mass of our countrymen, in company with yourself, Edmund Wilson, Jr."
To Fitzgerald, October 7, 1917

"I have just read your novel with more delight than I can well tell you. It ought to be a classic in a class with *The Young Visitors*, Amory Blaine should rank with Mr. Salteena . . . Your hero is an unreal imitation of Michael Fane who was himself unreal and who was last seen in the role of the veriest cardboard best seller hero being nursed back to life in the Balkans . . . as an intellectual [Amory] is a fake of the first water and I read his views on art, politics, religion, and society with more riotous mirth than I should care to have you know . . . in the latter part of the book, you make Amory the hero of a series of dramatic encounters with all the naive and romantic gusto of a small boy imagining himself as a brave hunter of Indians. . . .

Cultivate a universal irony and read something other than contemporary British novelists."
To Fitzgerald, November 21, 1919

"It sounds like an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end."
To Fitzgerald, November 21, 1919

"I'm sorry about the other day but you are sometimes a hard guy to get along with and I'm told I'm not wonderful in this respect either. What I object to is precisely the 'scholar and vulgarian,' 'you helped memorize than I helped you' business . . . . I've certainly laid you under contribution in the past in the concoction of my literary personae and I don't blame you or object a bit if you do the same with me. But just don't make yourself disagreeable about it after asking me to lunch, you mug, if you expect me to eat any with you."
To Fitzgerald, December 4, 1933

"Cancel your passage and come to Paris for the summer!"
To Fitzgerald, July 5, 1921

"I think you have a much better grasp on your subject than you usually have -- you know what end and point you are working for as isn't always the case with you."
To Fitzgerald, May 26, 1922

"[Zelda's] review of The Damned I thought fine, and [her] thing in The Metropolitan I liked less."
To Fitzgerald, May 26, 1922

EDMUND WILSON

No Saturday Evening Post stuff, understand! Let us have the Army as it

is, -- Come now! clear your mind of cant! brace up your artistic con-
science, which was always the weakest part of your talent! forget for a
moment the phosphorescences of the decaying Church of Rome: Banish
whatever sentimentalities may still cling about you from college! Con-
centrate in one whort story a world of tragedy, comedy, irony and beauty!!
-- I await your manuscript with impatience.

To Fitzgerald, August 9, 1919

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

January 3, 1950.

Dear Edmuni :

Thanks very very much for the permission to quote from your letters to Fitzgerald. Of course I won't quote the one you'd rather have left out, though I'm sorry you would. Fitzgerald's own letters show he took the argument seriously and blamed himself for it and didn't really feel right about his part in it for some time. What I was arguing was that the quarrel was really a manifestation of his loss of confidence, which was leading him to strike out, unhappily, at random. Like it or not, you are bound to run through the book as Fitzgerald's "literary conscience"; when he quarreled with his literary conscience, I thought, it was a measure of his state of mind. That is why I took the time to explain this quarrel (it takes about a page and a half). I was quoting your letter to give a non-Fitzgerald view of the argument; I was also quoting it just because I thought it an admirable letter in itself. I take pleasure -- if you will forgive my saying it quite so directly -- in quoting what will put Wilson in a good light.

But I don't mean to sound as if I were arguing with you about your decision. I appreciate very much indeed all you have done for me about this book and intend to say so as prominently as possible in the foreword. I certainly don't want to appear to be disagreeing with your decision about this letter, except, as I say, to make clear that I had a plan in using it.

Incidentally, you may be amused to know that Harold Ober point-blank refuses to have me quote from his letters to Fitzgerald at all. It doesn't really matter, of course; I was only quoting him in order to establish facts which can still be stated in my own words. It's just more of Ober. Mrs. Bishop and Mrs. Perkins have been wonderful about letters -- and Mrs. Turnbull. I am still waiting -- anxiously -- to hear from Hemingway. Some of his letters are entertaining and I'd hate to lose them. This whole part of the business has an interest I hadn't anticipated.

I'm just back from a meeting of the Princeton Graduate School alumni at which we all gave them hell about being old fogies. I was proud of my profession by the time it was over. Have you seen that there is a new club febella
ion on? -- shades of Richard Cleveland; they got something over 600 out of 788 sophomores to say they wouldn't join a club unless the clubs guaranteed to take in every last sophomore. There was great old stewing about it while I was there.

Thanks again for the permission to quote.

As ever,

January 9, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

I just had my girl type off the section of the ms. in which the reference
to the letter in question occurs. I eliminated the letter from the ms. Before
the final typescript was made, so that I cannot send you a carbon. This is
how the passage read before the letter was taken out (I apologize for the
state of the copy; I told the girl to copy it exactly as it was, with the
result that she omitted all the pencilled corrections).

As you see, I can cut from two sentences before the quoted portion of the
letter to the end of the letter without losing the thread of the argument.
What I lose is a concrete particular, a first-hand account of the actual
argument, and a letter which, as I say, seems to me a considerable credit
to Wilson. Well, I do not want, as I said in my first letter, to appear to be
forcing your hand about this quotation. I'll get along without it if you
have any feeling at all against my using it. But if you really haven't any
feeling, I'd be glad of a chance to print it.

With most of *Tender Is the Night* off his hands he felt he owed himself a vacation and decided to take Zelda to Bermuda for Christmas. Before they went, they moved from La Paix to a smaller house at 1307 Park Avenue in Baltimore. This move was made partly for financial reasons and partly because Fitzgerald sensed that another period of his life had ended and did not want to stay at La Paix. On the way to Bermuda he had luncheon with Wilson in New York and quarrelled with him viciously. The cause of the quarrel was not so much Wilson as a loss of fundamental self-confidence in a man to whom self-confidence was vitally necessary. Wilson's letter to him about the quarrel shows the cause clearly.

I'm sorry about the other day -- he wrote -- but you are sometimes a hard guy to get along with and I'm told I'm not wonderful in this respect either. What I object to is precisely the "scholar and vulgarian," "you helped me more than I helped you" business. . . . I've certainly laid you under contribution in the past in the concoction of my literary personae and I don't blame you or object a bit if you do the same with me. But just don't make yourself disagreeable about it after asking me to lunch, you mug, if you expect me to eat any with you.

Perhaps suspecting this cause ("Last of real self-confidence," he noted in February), he did not forgive himself easily; he was still "haunted by [the] Wilson quarrel" a month later. It was not until March, when he and Wilson spent an evening discussing *Tender Is the Night* in the old way, that he was happy again about their relations and able "to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out." The Bermuda trip was a failure; Fitzgerald was down with pleurisy all the time they were there. They were back in time for their first Christmas at 1307 Park Avenue and Fitzgerald set to work on the last installment of *Tender Is the Night* and the proofs for the books. This work was interrupted abruptly by Zelda's third break-down.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

January 17, 1950

Dear Edmund:

I'm humiliated to have failed so signally to guess right about what lay
behind the letters between you and Fitzgerald. I'm afraid the one thing I never
allowed for was your being off balance at the time. Of course I based what I
said about a conversation about Tender and his relief over the ironing out of
the squabble on the letter in THE CRACK-UP on p. 278.

But I am very much pleased to have the right of the matter and I will of
course rewrite the passage I sent you in the light of your account. Under the
circumstances, I think it would be best to omit the letter we were discussing
altogether, not raise the question of what the motivations for the misunderstand
ing were, and focus attention simply on the evident anxiety with which
Fitzgerald discovered himself at odds with you; that seems to me plain sailing,
for the reference to the argument in his Ledger -- about his still being dis-
turbed about it a month later -- is clear enough. I'm afraid I got fascinated
by the business of putting together a number of obviously related but fragment
ary references in various letters and let my speculation get the better of my
caution. It is always a problem in a job like this one, of course, to know where
to stop speculation about the relations of fragmentary material. It comes up
constantly. Well, I will follow the course outlined above in rewriting if that
seems the best way to you.

May I bring up -- with great hesitation -- the question of whether you
would consider reading my book in proof? I don't want to impose on you, and
heaven knows I've asked you for far more help than I ought to have already.
But it would be invaluable to me to have your reading if it would by any chance
entertain you enough to make you willing? I am sending off the finished ms. --
I feel fairly confident now -- the end of this week.

I have made for myself a working bibliography of Fitzgerald's stories and
articles which I have used in doing the book, but I have not made an exhaustive
check of every last sentence he wrote -- a massive collection it is -- nor have
I made a systematic check of my own notes. So I do not plan to publish the
bibliography in the book. Even if I had it in shape, it would be a space-eater,
and I'd rather give the space to the two appendices I now have -- the General
Plan for TITN and a passage selected from a ms. to show his way of revising.
But I would be glad to make my bibliographical notes available to anybody you
recommend. Thanks, thanks.

As ever,

I thought your letter to FURIOSO about Goodman's review right on the mark. He
writes like a plumber, a bad plumber, messing in muck and remedying nothing.
Reed hasn't told me what he plans to do about it, but I hope he publishes it
in the next issue.

["Wellfleet,\nCape Cod, Mass.\nJanuary 27, 1950", "Dear Arthur,", "I'll be glad to read the Ms. Do send it - if possible, a copy that I can make marginal comments on. I'll be here through next week, but we're going to New York soon after that, so address me at the _New Yorker_.", "I was just going to send you some minor corrections for the chapters that appeared in P. R. P. 9: Stanley Dell was driving and drank little, if anything. He was rather embarrassed by the whole thing. The properties were bought, not in New Brunswick, but in New York before we left. We did not happen to \"catch sight\" of Christian: it was one of our aims to crown him. It is not quite accurate to say that Scott \"danced around the car and shouted the praises of the weather.\" It was simply that he was exhilarated to the point of making an ecstatic speech - something like, \"Isn't this wonderful! - Princeton! May! Old friends!\"", "p. 18: Don't you think that George Nathan, who is a peppery little man, might legitimately object to what you say about his \"making love to Zelda\" and that other people might object to what you say about her \"cooperating\"? I may have told you this story myself, but, after all, what does anybody know about what passed between the parties in a case like this. Scott was certainly jealous but he was neurotically jealous of Zelda, anyway. I don't think that anything more can be decently said than that Zelda was often admired by Scott's friends, that she was accustomed to admiration, like all Southern belles, who expect it and do not repulse it, and that Scott was sometimes jealous.", "p. 31: As John "shop told me the garbage story, Zelda had nothing to do with it. As you note later, she was not given to malignant jokes. Archie MacLeish came out and punched Scott's head - though of course you oughtn't to put this in.", "p. 32: I think you ought to mention that the moment after Scott had kicked the old woman's basket he offered her a thousand-franc note or something on that scale. I have heard this story twice, from Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker.", "Aside from this, I think that you have been remarkably good at getting the hang of Scott in the various relationships and phases.", "Love to Rosemary. I hope that Reed Whittemore told her that I approved of her Cather review.", "As ever,"]

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

February 4, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the additions and corrections, which are just the kind
of thing I most anxious to be careful about. So many of these stories you
told me walking from dinner back to your place, or late at night, that
by the time I got back to the hotel and jotted down my notes on them, I was
sure to have blurred details and knew it. I will correct the lit banquet story
as you suggest. I'm glad you caught that point about the garbage story;
of course it's not in character for Zelda and I'm glad she wasn't in on it.
Mrs. Murphy also wrote me about F's remorse after kicking them basket of
nuts. Mr. Murphy told me the story and left that detail out. You are very
perceptive about Nathan; he has already snapped my head off about it. The
difficulty lies in the ambiguity of the phrase "make love to" (damn the
English language anyway); All I really meant was "flirted" a word which
is, in my mind, associated with horsehair sofas and creaking stays; so I
found almost unhappy "synonym." I have already rewritten the passage along the
lines you outlined. Actually, I am morally certain F had some justification
for his anger at Nathan. Not that he was not often foolishly jealous and not
that I suspect Zelda of having been taking a long lead in his case, but that
under all the joking Nathan does appear to have been giving it a real try.
Not that that is either here or there so far as the book is concerned.

I am enormously grateful that you will read the book in ms. That's messy
job and I know it. I'll get a carbon to you as quickly as possible. Back in
middle December, I wrote Scottie to ask if she would xerox it like to read it.
When I didn't hear from her after a month, I asked you. While my letter was
winging its way to you, Scottie wired me to send the ms. to her; she'd like to
read it. So I sent it. Then came your letter saying you would read it. What
I've done, therefore, is to write Scottie a line telling her you have offered
to help me and asking her to pass the carbon along to you as soon as she has
finished with it. I hope this will be reasonably soon after you get to NYC.
If you don't get it within ten days or two weeks, will you let me have a
card saying so? I'm sorry about this hitch, but I can't bring myself to let
my last carbon out of my hands, especially as I want to keep making these
corrections. (it wasn't practical to make more than four copies, and HM had to
have two).

Thanks again for everything. Don't worry that Rosemary hasn't been savoring
your approval of her Cather piece for days. Like many females, she's timid
beneath the surface air of confidence; she was scared to death at her own
boldness; she couldn't have had support from a better quarter. Reed tells me
he is printing your Goodman letter, which is good.

Yours,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

March 1, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

Many, many thanks for your wonderful letter about the book. I don't have any hesitation at all in saying that I will take all your censures as fact. I am myself much too close to the book myself to be a good judge of the over-all impression it makes, of its tone as a whole, and if you say it is overly gloomy and gives the impression -- good God! -- that I do not love the memory of Scott Fitzgerald, I certainly want to eliminate that. Perhaps you are right that, having lived through the thirties at a formative time in my life, I have a settled (and unconscious) feeling for the defeat rather than the triumph. If this be so, the unconsciousness on my part will have given the thing freer play than it would otherwise have had. Consciously I know that there was at work in me a desire not to sound like an uncritical admirer and I may have strained at this because I am so much an admirer, and ended by leaning over backwards. In any event, whatever the causes of this failure of tone, -- and I am sure if you say it exists, it does -- I want to do all I can to correct it. All I can may not, of course, be enough, but all I can, I will.

You may be right about the delay in getting to the biography itself at the beginning and about the length at which I deal with the novels. I am delighted to think there is a possibility of cutting these parts; it will make the whole book shorter, which I would like it to be. I will cut, cut drastically. I hope you will make marginal suggestions for this purpose so that I may know in particular what you mean by stuff that is too obvious, etc. Re the deference to KR opinions in the matter of good writers contributing to popular magazines, I supposed myself to be saying that, though F sometimes wrote badly for them, still the KR kind of opinion about such writers was on the whole ignorant and foolish. I will try to make that clearer.

As for Ober (does Scottie do the right thing to show Ober my book without even asking me if she could?), I am acutely aware of not liking him. He played me an extremely dirty trick about the book of short stories; he sold several stories that I dug up for him and sold them at high prices and treated me like a janitor about them all; he refused point blank to allow me to quote at all from his letters to F; he refused to let me read F's letters to him. I short, he has done nothing to endear himself to me. Nor has he ever been willing to talk to me about F. Consequently, I was thrown back on F's descriptions of him for my impression of him. I was honestly trying to represent him as honestly as I could, not to run him down. That's why I quoted F's letter about all Ober had done for him; that's why I said Ober knew all to well what kind of life he was living and no doubt acted on sensible business principles in refusing at the end to lend any more money (after all, it was sheer generosity to lend it ever; he was not obligated). But don't I have to say that I played hell with F by making this decision? Well, you tell me how to play up the good side of Ober so as to keep the impression more in balance than it is. As for Annabel, I remembered all the time I was working your impression that she had been important to Scott understanding. I asked constantly in St. Paul and among the people who had known him as a boy about this possibility. I could find no one who agreed to this idea or to give me anything concrete to hang an assertion of it on. I thought I ought not to try to

assert it therefore. As for the impression that he was an only child, I expect I
must work in a casual reference to Annabel here and there. Her omission is an
oversight; she never turned up naturally, and of course I wasn't thinking directly
of any need to get her in. I will try to correct this.

I sent in a carefully typed ms. to Houghton Mifflin because, when I asked
Paul Brooks if he wanted my rough typescript, he said no, to finish it off.
But I did not mean to suggest by that to them or anyone that I thought the
book not subject to revision. I certainly wouldn't have asked you to read it
if I hadn't been ready to change -- I hope. I do not know how much revision I
can do this summer. I have undertaken to teach a course at the Kenyon School of
English, and that will keep me pretty busy. But I will certainly set to work
the minute I get your detailed comments on the ms.

I am aware of how badly I sometimes write -- almost always because I inflate.
I do not always see the particular instances until they are pointed out to me.
But do not hesitate to point them out to me. I would much rather improve than have
my feelings spared. Indeed, please believe in general that nothing you could say
to me by way of criticism is likely to make me belligerent. I have too much
respect for your understanding and integrity ever to respond that way. I will say
that your hope that I would produce something of classic of its kind in this book
is a hope I never shared. What hard work can do, I can do; perhaps I can do
a little more than that. But I do not honestly believe I can do much nearly the
much more necessary to make a kind of classic. I hope this does not sound like
a lot of mea culpa-ing. I am really only trying to say that I am grateful for
your having ever supposed I could do that much, sorry to have disappointed you,
surprised that you would ever have expected it.

Finally, many thanks for all the time and trouble you have given this job;
I will try my damnedest to take full advantage of your advice.

PS. I meant to say, re the discussions of the novels, that while I am sure you
must be right, that they are too long, my guess is that you over-rate what
"any not too stupid reader gets out of reading" them. I expect more explanation
of the structure of Gatsby, for instance, than you seem to be allowing for is
necessary. But we'll see how this works out in detail. I also meant to say
that the "appalling" about Zelda's dancing at the Casino is Gerald Murphy's
word. Probably it is too strong, an Irish extravagance. I think I was enough
under the sway of his telling the story when I wrote that passage not to be
very critical of him. He does tell a story with great effect.

17 East 84 Street

New York, 28, 1950

March 3, 1950

Dear Arthur:

I was glad to get your amiable letter and know that you
had not been offended by my criticisms. I am sorry that you
can't take the summer to work on the Fitzgerald book. If it
is merely a question of money and you are not irrevocable
committed to Kenyon, I should think that Houghton Mifflin
might be induced to advance you something more. It would pay
off for them as well as for you.

About Ober: one of his main characteristics seems to be
an overcautiousness that is probably getting worse with age.
He seems to live in continual fear of acting inadvisedly or
precipitately. I had some difficulties with him over The
Crack-Up, but got over them and am on very good terms with
him. It is a pity that he did not see you. I had a talk with
him the other day, and he made some specific criticisms -
about your description of Scott's father, for example, whom
he knew - that might be useful to you. I understand that he
has written you or is going to write you. Do you feel that
you could ask again to talk to him? He tells me that he and
Max Perkins decided at a given point, in the hope of producing
a beneficial effect, that they would stop lending Scott money.

About Annabel: my point is simply that, however un-
interesting you may think her, she is a biographical fact about
Scott with which the reader ought to be acquainted. I think
you even ought to explain what became of her. My old friend
Larry Noyes of St. Paul told me that she was remarkably
beautiful and described to me the amazement of her dance
partners when she would give them the lines Scott had taught
her, such as "Do you believe in God?" and "Let me know if
my eyelashes tickle."

Since I wrote you, I have got hold of a copy of Zelda's
Save Me the Waltz, which I hadn't seen since it came out.
Though I have also sent off the MS, I have the impression that
you have quoted or depended on the novel in such a way some-
times as to make it appear that you have some kind of direct
authority for attributing behavior or thoughts to Zelda which
are actually out of the story. Of course you would give your
source in the notes; but wouldn't it be a mistake to take
incidents in the story as literally true - since so much of
it is obviously fictitious? I am thinking of the episode of
the aviator and his departure and the heroine's tearing up his
letter and photograph, etc. Have you independent confirmation
that all this really happened as she tells it.

Is there any chance of your getting to New York? Well
be here in this apartment through the first three weeks of
this month, anyway.

As ever,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

March 6, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

Clear your mind of any notion that you can offend me by saying what you think about my book. It may be no fun to take, but that's got nothing to do with offense; besides, I am dead certain the book will be the better for your advice, and, if I can carry out the program you outline, a great deal better.

What you say about the Kenyon School and my getting free for the summer is, I'm sorry to say, pretty nearly impossible. I have signed a contract, their catalogue is out, I am committed beyond redemption. But by taking a drastic line about my commitments here for the rest of the spring and by using that part of the summer -- about half of it -- which is not sold to Kenyon, I think I can free more time for work than you are allowing for. It is not, in any event, a matter of money. Kenyon's money is good and I shall be glad to have it, but I could survive without it.

About Ober. After considering your letter, I wrote off to Scottie about him, to the effect that I did not want to do anything to make her life more complicated and that if anything I had said about Ober disturbed her, I would be glad to omit it. I don't want to be difficult about the old goat and I think you are probably right in describing his motives for acting as he has. The result of his acting on these motives, so far as I am concerned personally, has been that he has treated me shabbily and, as it has seemed to me, sometimes insultingly. There is a long history of this stuff with which I do not want to bore you. Certainly I have no hesitation about swallowing my pride and asking him once more for help if anyone thinks that will do any good: the book is more important than my pride. I will wait to see if he writes me, and if he does not in due course, I will write him.

It is possible, re his assertion that he and Perkins decided not to lend F any more money, that Ober sincerely believes that and that Perkins assented when Ober suggested this course of action. But the facts are that Perkins correspondence indicates that he did not share the notion that the effect of this tactic would be beneficial or that he acted on it (actually, around this time, when he inherited a little money, Perkins immediately offered it to Fitzgerald and had his offer accepted very promptly indeed). All this is, of course, not really the point. The point is the effect on Fitzgerald of Ober's action. I want to do justice to Ober's motives, his sincerity, his natural tendency to act on business principles; I want especially to, as I told Scottie, because I am conscious of feeling that he has been unjust to me and I do not want that to influence my account of him. But the thing I want most to do is to make clear the effect of his action on F.

You are quite right about Annabel and I shall certainly work her in in the way you suggest. My correspondence with her bears out your feeling that she was no intellectual giant, and her pictures, I must say, suggest also that your impression of her beauty is somewhat exaggerated. Your point about Save Me the Waltz is a good one. I shall look over my quotations from it to be sure I have not

slipped into a kind of Lytton Strachey effect. As nearly as you can be sure about anything of this sort, I am sure about Zelda and René Silve, the French aviator. But there certainly should be no suggestion that the exact gestures of SMTW were Zelda's; I didn't realize I was leaving that impression. Thanks for warning me about this. To be sure, SMTW is in innumerable details of its *action* quite literal (I listed some of them in a footnote, you may remember). Perhaps this was the result of Scott's influence on Z. But that doesn't justify the kind of confusion of fact with the novel that you suggest I may make. I'll look to it.

Once more, many thanks for the immense amount of trouble you have taken over all this -- the reading of me, the rereading of even Zelda's novel, etc. I am, as Hemingway would say, truly grateful.

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

March 6, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

This is just to tell you that the MS. has arrived, that I am very grateful for the extensive informative annotation you have done, that I am really puzzled by your response to the passages you have marked "wisecrack" and "superior-sounding crack" and "rubbing it in". Of course I'll change them all, because I don't want to risk that impression on anyone. But look: "There is no doubt that a successful novel would have done much for his morale, but whether it would have done enough is not so certain." You circle "not so certain" and say it is "a superior-sounding crack". But what it says is that I am -- and I think others ought to be -- uncertain whether a successful novel would have been enough to revive Fitzgerald's morale to the point where he would have been as happy and self-confident as he had been earlier. Over and over he said of himself that he was a person who needed self-confidence, that he never did his best work except when people did not doubt him at all and he could think of himself with assurance, that he was easily tipped off balance. I think these things are true. He was, I think, hit very hard by the delay of his work after GATSBY. Whether a big success, even at the point I am writing about, would have brought back the old, happy, delightful and confident

Fitzgerald seems to me very questionable; whether a success, that is, would have
done enough for his morale seems to me not so certain. But I don't mean to be
raising the question of my judgment here; I really am puzzled to know why this
sentence is a superior-sounding crack? I think it sad that Fitzgerald was con-
structed that way, because he was bound to take some knocks and bound therefore
to suffer from impaired morale. His helplessness, the thinness of his skin in
this respect, seems to me touching. Surely it comes out in the angry reply to
Robert Penn Warren's compliment about TSOP? I wouldn't bother you about this ex-
cept that you say in one of these notes that I have a good many of these
cracks which you haven't marked; I woukd like to be sure I understand about this
one so that I can recognize the unmarked ones. Let me have just a line or two on
this point if you have time.

Your detailed comments about the Princeton chapter are wonderful, and I am
especially pleased to have you catch so many occasions when I haven't properly
prepared for people or events (e.g., Zelda). It's nearly impossible to be aware
of those things when you know the narrative order as you do when you've written
the thing yourself.

PS. I would very much like to have the Mencken piece in the *New Yorker* where
Dreiser's party is discussed if you can have them send it to me. Thanks for
offering.

THIS SIDE OF CARD IS FOR ADDRESS

Mr. Edmund Wilson

17 East 84 Street

New York 28, New York

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Dear Edmund:

I have just started in at the beginning of the revision
and I note your comment on my remark in the forward that I
I wd. not have written the book without your permission. Of
course I don't want to you argue with your feeling here. On
the other hand I really wouldn't have tried this job unless I
had first been sure you wouldn't (I asked you about that
the very first time we talked). I want to say that. If your
"permission" is the wrong word to convey this feeling, will
you suggest the right one? I cd. say: "...would not have
attempted to write this book unless I had been sure Mr. Ed-
mund Wilson would not" -- or so.

Sunday

Dear Edmund:

I am just back from a strenuous ten days at College Board readings and about to plunge into a week of catching up, so I break the sabbath and Rosemary's unfamiliar typewriter to send a line of thanks for your trouble in getting the Mencken article sent me. I think I see your point about the passage in the book saying "that a book would have done enough for his morale is not so certain." I can now take care of such things. It is all very well for you to say "let the story tell itself"; who wouldn't do that if, in the process, he could manipulate the reader's response so completely as you do in things like the Pop Rolfe piece? -- sure. But I can't do that and know it.

About the "crash New York society" thing. I quote Scott as having said, at the age of fourteen, that his ambition was to be a baseball player, an actor, or a priest -- or to crash New York society." I am glad you are convinced about Ludlow Fowler and "The Rich Boy." I told you that once and you brushed me off very firmly (that's a joke, god damn it).

"Approval" suits me fine for the reference to you in the Foreword of the book. I do really want to say something about that part of the business.

I have had a long and very explicit -- and very generous -- letter from Scottie, not saying much that you didn't say, but saying it differently and in some cases with extremely valuable facts hitherto unknown to me (she seems to think I must have known all these things and left them out from some impulse to make Scott and Zelda look bad. Perhaps that's an unconscious compliment to my talents for research, but it is certainly a conscious uncompliment to my ability to convey what I feel).

As usual, many thanks.

Arthur.

Mr, Edmund Wilson
17 East 84 Street
New York 28, New York

Wellfleet,
Cape Cod, Mass.

April 4, 1950

Dear Arthur:

I have badgered you enough about the Fitzgerald book, but I had been thinking of sending you some general tips and your last letter encourages me to do so.

It is important, in writing a biography, to remember that you are telling a story and that the problems of presenting the material are in many ways just the same as those of presenting a subject of fiction. You cannot take for granted, on the part of the reader, any knowledge whatever of your particular subject. You have to introduce it to him so that he will understand it every step of the way, and you have to create your characters and background and situations just as you would those of fiction. You must put yourself in the reader's place. The *Kenyon Review* and the rest of them are not a particularly good school for this, because they are always making allusions to writers and movements and books without explaining what these things mean to them (very often they don't quite know). They assume that the reader will have read the same books and made the same assumptions as themselves.

And the biographer has not only to choose and place every detail of his picture, but to calculate the tone of every sentence. It is quite obvious that, in dealing with Scott, you have produced, by not hitting the tone, an effect you didn't intend. This has sometimes happened to me when some completely irrelevant feeling has got into something I was writing. To correct it, you have to approach the thing in a perfectly objective way and readjust it step by step, systematically so as to put it in a different light. In spite of the fact that the biographer is given his materials in the shape of letters, memoirs, etc. he is just as much responsible for the portrait that emerges as Scott was for the Great Gatsby.

But, in dealing with the given data, you do have a different problem from the writer of sheer fiction, because you have to have some principles for deciding what constitutes evidence. Biographers, of course, have dealt with this problem in a variety of different ways. It is always a lot of trouble to check on facts, and, in the case of an amusing or romantic character, anecdotes grow rapidly into legends. I recommend, in this connection, that book about Henry James called *The Legend of the Master*, in which the author tries to run down the truth about some of the most famous James anecdotes. When I was writing about Lenin in the *Finland Station*, I tended to accept the memoirs published in the Soviet Union. I hadn't realized how early the deliberate mythmaking had been begun. Now, I am not at all sure that some of my details of his return to Russia were not

2

made up out of the whole cloth for the purposes of a volume of
eulogies, of the authenticity of which I was convinced by the
proletarian status of the supposed witnesses, but by which I may
well have been taken in. Trossky, whose first volume of a life
of Lenin is one of the best things on the subject, does not even
believe in the memoir published by Lenin's sister, which I decided
to accept. You don't have any such baffling problem in finding out
about Scott, but it is always an awful nuisance to try to get at
the truth behind conflicting accounts, and though you are scrupulous
and scholarly with texts, you have not had any occasion before to train
yourself in examining evidence. In regard to the nut-kicking
incident, for example, (if it was nuts: I thought it was something
else, which shows how legends vary) I suggest that you write to
John Dos Passos (Spence's Point, Westmoreland P.O., Westmoreland Co.,
Virginia), explaining that you have heard several versions and
asking him exactly what happened. He was there and he is a very
clear observer and is likely to tell you the truth.

Well, I seem to be having a field day as an Elder Biographer
giving advice. Don't feel, by the way, that you are bound to
accept all my or anybody else's suggestions about the MS.

As ever,

CARLETON COLLEGE

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

April

March 8, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for your really helpful letter. It comes at a time when I can appreciate its good sense most. I have been plugging away eight hours a day (much of it spent glaring into space and mumbling sentences to myself) over my ms. -- spring vacation. I have been doing my level best to follow very much the principles you outline in your letter, especially those that have to do with tone. I know THE LEGEND OF THE MASTER and I think I realized the difficulties about anecdotes; at one time I considered using nothing that came to me by word of mouth. Then I decided that if an anecdote seemed to me to bring out a significant point I would use it and identify my source very carefully. I still think this is a sound enough way to go about it, though doubtless I have used bad judgment about significance at various points.

Anyhow, I have gone through the ms completely once, sentence by sentence, trying to rephrase for tone and to cut out material where it either a) might suggest what you called "a censorious attitude" or b) was of dubious character as evidence without being very valuable. In general, I have tried to re-examine the tone of every sentence and to cut to the bone my comments and to leave the material to make its own impression -- and to put the material in such a way as to suggest as friendly and sympathetic and attitude on my part as possible. In the process I have discovered that I am painfully given (just like that phrase) to the unnecessary adverb, a habit I dislike and am quick to criticize in others. I have cut out the second, delaying chapter, eliminating entirely about 2/3 of it and distributing the rest to places where I hope it fits in naturally. I have cut the TSOP chapter by 1/3 by rewriting it completely and have cut around 7500 words from the rest of the book by rephrasing and tightening. This includes the addition of a number of paragraphs in the 20's chapters calculated to stress, as you suggested, the charm and gaiety of the Fitzgeralds and a general readjusting of the comments on them so as to make them apply to the pair and not, especially, to suggest that anything was more Zelda's fault than Scott's. I think, actually, my faulty tone in the first draft was the result of leaning over backwards: I know I am always overanxious not to appear to be biased in favor of my subject (when I read a paper two years ago at the MLA on F and Dos Passos people came up afterwards to defend F to me; it ought to have been a warning).

I shall certainly write Dos Passos about the basket-kicking anecdote. As for following people's advice, I certainly wouldn't do it if I didn't think the advice good. But I do think most of what I have had is good. Anyway, even when you do your best to follow the advice of other, you probably do it with enough fondness for your own ideas so that it doesn't exactly corrupt you. Don't hesitate to badger me, as you call it. I suppose no one can take criticism without feeling a little bruised at first when it is about something he has put a lot of work into. But if the criticism is sound the bruise soon mends and then all you feel is gratitude

to the person who saved you from blundering, and you remember how much easier
it is to take criticism from those you respect and admire than from those
you don't who may review the book. Speaking of those you don't, I have never heard
from Harold Ober, so I think I will send him the revise of the passage which
deals with him, which now goes out of its way to say what a handsome fellow
he really is at heart, asking him if he has any criticism of it, and hope
that he will come through with the information you suggested he had. Maybe,
if you remember it, you might pass it along, too, for I have no great faith
in Ober's willingness to help me: I spent two years trying, unsuccessfully,
to get him to talk to me about F, even for an hour or so over lunch.

As ever,

Anton

Don't be too hard on the KENYON REVIEW; it has its faults, but they are not so bad as the faults of PMLA, which leans in the other direction. They play the Coleridge to PMLA's Southey. Of course it would be better if they were both like Doctor Johnson.

The Kenyon School of English
Gambier, Ohio

July 21, 1950.

Dear Edmund:

It occurred to me today, as I was trying to clean up the
business of securing permissions to quote, that perhaps I
ought, to be quite considerate, have asked you specifically
for such permission. I assumed that you would, as you did,
indicate anything you felt hesitant about in the original
draft. But there is also to be considered that I am quoting
the description of Fitzgerald from your poem, and the passage
about professional men of letters from your piece about being
bibliographed. These printed things are perhaps in a somewhat
different position from that of your letters.

This all reminded me that I had not properly reported
progress to you since you made your suggestions about the
first draft. I did revise extensively and as nearly as I could
in accord with your suggestions. I cut drastically -- 20,000 or
25,000 words -- made all the positive additions you suggested,
etc. All this may, of course, not produce the effect hoped for,
but that will be a failure of art, not of will. Scottie asked
to see the ms. after revision, since she had lost some of the
notes she had made for me and wanted to reread and remake them.
She thought I had improved a great deal. Meanwhile relations
between me and Mr. Ober have got back onto a basis of friendly
understanding and he has sent me the whole of his correspondence
with Fitzgerald. At about the same time, Scottie discovered all
Zelda's love letters to Scott from the time he came up to New
York in 1919 until she came there and they were married. So I got
the ms. away from HM and spent a desperate week rewriting for
this new material. The Ober letters are largely business, of course,
but they give you precise figures and a wealth of light on that
aspect of Fitzgerald's mind. Zelda's letters are largely made up
of what love-letters are, but there is occasional revelation
in them. I enclose a copy of one which may interest you; of course
it's unprintable, but too bad, I think, because it shows Zelda in
such an admirable light. The other is a letter she wrote in 1938
of which Ober had a copy; it seems to me to communicate the force
of their tragedy as nothing else I have seen.

The book is coming out in January. If it will be any fun for
you (as after all you have had to read it I would very much doubt),
I'd love to try to get you a set of proofs or whatnot. I expect
you will think all of me for doing so, but I am having a very
good time here at Kenyon, between the good students and the

Dearest --

I wanted to for your sake, because I know what a mess I'm
making and how inconvenient it's all going to be -- but I simply
*can't* and *won't* take those awful pills -- so I've thrown them
away. I'd rather take carbolic acid. You see, as long as I feel I
had the right, I don't mind what happens -- and besides, I'd
rather have a *whole family* than sacrifice my self-respect. They
just seem to place everything on the wrong basis -- and I'd feel
like a damned whore if I took even one, so you'll try to under-
stand, please Scott -- and do what you think best -- but don't
do *anything* till we *know* because God -- or something -- has always
made things right, and maybe this will be.

I love you, Darling Scott, and you love me, and we can be
thankful for that anyway --

Thanks for the book -- I don't like it --

Dearest and always Dearest Scott --

I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you
but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over
me, the suffering this *nothing* has cost would be unendurable to any
save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would
all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that of all my life
there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty
that we started with to offer you at the end.

You have been so good to me -- and all I can say is that there
was always that deeper current running through my heart: my life, you.

Now that there isn't any more happiness and home is gone and
there isn't even any past and no emotions but those that were yours
where there could be any comfort -- it is a shame that we should have
met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness
and so many dreams. Your song, ...

I want you to be happy -- if there were justice you would be
happy -- maybe you will be anyway.

Oh, Do-Do Do Do --

I love you anyway -- even if there isn't any me or any love
or even any life --

I love you.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

January 3, 1951.

Dear Edmund:

I am really glad you think the book is improved, and I am flattered
that you obviously read it through again and picked up the little
inaccuracies you did. They are not the worst I have found or heard
about already -- and the book not even out. I put Judge Biggs on
the Second United States Circuit Court, when he is -- as I knew, damn it --
on the Third. I am also naively surprised to find that I am going to be
in bad with a lot of people: I am just back from the NLA meeting in
NYC and a number of Princeton friends, for example, have already told
me (on the strength of the ATLANTIC stuff) that I am much too hard on
Princeton and the clubs. They are, of course, sorrowful, not angry, as they
tell me. I hear Dean Gauss is full of qualms about what I'll say
(but Kay Gauss Jackson, who has my generation's feelings, is not hard
on me). Well, well.

As to the inaccuracies, I suppose F's memory may have played him false.
He remembered working like a dog over the Evil Eye and there are a good
many references to Hooper and rewriting songs during rehearsals etc. He
said he had to pinch-hit for Lamb H. Of course I knew he wasn't involved
after November, but I guess I took his word for it that he really was
involved up to then.

As to my belief that you told me the story about Zelda's driving
in front of the car. I've look this up in my notes and I took it down
in your house that night you talked to me so long in New York, four years
ago now I guess it was (Mary was in bed with flu and Rosalind and I
got supper and you came home about nine?) Probably you had heard the story
from some one else and repeated it to me and I understood it as your
experience; something like that must have happened, since I could
hardly have made it up on the spot while busy listening to you and
taking notes.

I was in Boston for about five hours on my way back here and tried to call
you to say hello, but no luck. I conversed with my boss, Henry Laughlin of
-- was it the class of '14? -- he said I shouldn't say "Cottage Club" but
"The Cottage Club" and to his credit I must say he said "The Ivy Club"; matter
of fact, he said it a number of times. I never managed to get The Tower
Club in at all. Best to Elena.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, NEW YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

August 14, 1957.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks very much for the permission to use the piece about Miami. You will -- as I expect you know from previous occasions -- get a check from Holt in due course. I am very grateful, because the Miami piece is important to the book: it is just about my key example of how to use images the right way (I mean, the way the description of the birds at the beginning works all through the piece). I'm sorry you feel as you do about the Hill piece; I think it wonderfully funny about the various preachers, and the contemporary undergraduate has been so bepattered with fashionable religion of late that I think it would do him a good deal of good to listen to some one to whom the stuff didn't stick. However, I don't mean to sound as if I were trying to push you about it.

I am sorry to hear about the gout. Very had mentioned it, but Vladimir is always so full of what Wilson said that we seldom hear from him how Wilson is. Bibby got married last Saturday and we managed to get Vladimir to come (so that Vera could be there: she was full of curiosity about it). Vladimir admitted that he hadn't been to a wedding since his own, and seemed quite overcome that the service lasted only twenty minutes. I couldn't make out whether he felt this was slightly scandalous or was a blessing.

Thanks again.

February 23, 1959.

Dear Edmund:

No, not back in Ithaca; hence the delay in my replying to your
letter, which it was kind of you to write. Lord knows, I never meant
to sound disapproving of Fitzgerald (apart from not approving of dis-
approval in such matters, who the hell am I, etc?). Nor did I at
all mean to sound full of hurt feelings in saying that you felt
THE FAR SIDE (not a calumny but) "almost a calumny." I was trying to be
sure that I gave your opinion its full weight. Maybe I had a false
conception of it anyway, since you were generous enough not to express
it in print when the book was published and only expressed it in passing
even lately, in the note on Miss Graham's book: all I had to go on was
second- and third-hand reports of it and, allow what you will for ex-
aggeration, you never get these things right, I expect. Anyhow, I really
did mean, in my preface to the paperback, only to say that people I
very much respected thought the book unreliable in important ways. I'm
sorry that should be so, but it doesn't involve my coming all over
injured. Even if it did, you'd have to set off a hell of a lot of squibs
under me before you could make me forget how very generous you were to
me when I was working on the book.

I keep trying to persuade some one to let me edit Fitzgerald's
letters, but, though Harold Ober is kind and agreeable about it,
nothing much seems to come of the matter. Perhaps Scottie is reluctant;
I just don't know. But I keep on hoping. Put in a word for me if you
ever get a chance: I have a jealous feeling that Andrew Turnbull may
get in ahead of me.

Again, I very much appreciate the generous impulse of your letter,
though I refuse to take seriously this E. Wilson alias Nathaniel Bumppo
of THE PRAIRIE until I see you on a dust jacket smiling through a claud
of pipe smoke. You would be amused to hear Allen Tate, who is here this
year, exclaiming indignantly over your thinking that your reflections
are in any way connected with your being sixty; possibly his attitude
is connected with the fact that at -- is it 59? -- he is getting ready
to get married again in characteristically romantic circumstances. One
thing I know I'll never wholly understand is the real Southern gentleman's
attitude toward women -- appealing but incomprehensible. Rosemary sends
her very best to you both -- as do I.

Arthur.

What a glorious time Vladimir must be having; even we come close to getting
hired when people discover we are at Cornell and may conceivably know the
great man. Questions have been put down in Parliament about me, you!