style="font-size:15px;"> Dearest love.Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California May 4, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I sympathize with your desire to do something. Why can’t you hire a cool room somewhere for a studio? All you’d need is an easel, a chair and a couch and I think you have an easel somewhere. I think with Marjorie’s help you could get it for almost nothing and perhaps after next week I can help more (I go according to the fever - if it stays around 99 I feel rash, if it runs up over a degree at a daily average I get alarmed and think we mustn’t get stony broke like last fall). My ambition is to pay the government who’ve laid off me so far. I don’t know what they’d annex except my scrapbook.
Will return the clipping Monday - she’s a smooth enough kid* (for which I take most of the credit except for the mouth, legs and personal charm, and barring the wit which comes from us both) - anyhow she’s the best kind a good deal of figuring out could do. She’s not as honest as either you or me but maybe she didn’t have as much to conceal.
I hope you’re happy. I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side) - I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics. If you did I d advise you to try some short stories. You never could plot for shocks but you might try something along the line of Gogol’s The Cloak’ or Chekhov’s ‘The Darling.’ They are both in the Modern Library’s Best Russian Short Stories which the local Carnegie may have in stock.
Don’t waste your poor little income on wires to me - unless the money doesn’t come.
Yours at about 99.7,
Scott
P.S. Love to all. Excuse the bitter tone. I’ve overworked on the goddamn movie and am in bed for the day.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
May 11, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Sorry I wrote you such a cross letter last week and I miss getting an answer from you. Things are better. The awful cough I had died down, the temperature fell and I’ve worked hard this week with apparently no ill effect except that I’m looking forward tomorrow to a peaceful Sunday spent in bed with Churchill’s Life of Marlborough. Funny that he should be Prime Minister at last. Do vou remember luncheon at his mother’s house in 1920 and Jack Churchill who was so hard to talk to at first and turned out to be so pleasant? And Lady Churchill’s call on the Countess of Bvnq whose butler was just like the butler in Alice in Wonderland? I thank God they’ve gotten rid of that old rapscallion, Chamberlain. It’s all terribly sad and as you can imagine I think of it night and day.
Also I think I’ve written a really brilliant continuity. It had better be for it seems to be a last life line that Hollywood has thrown me. It is a strong life line - to write as I please upon a piece of my own and if I can make a reputation out here (one of those brilliant Hollywood reputations which endure all of two months sometimes) now will be the crucial time.
Have a cynical letter from Scottie about the Princeton prom. Thank God I didn’t let her start to go at sixteen or she would be an old jade by now. Tell me something of your life there - how you like your old friends, your mother’s health, etc., and what you think you might do this summer during the hottest part. I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library edition, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.
Next week I’ll be able to send you what I think is a permanent address for me for the summer - a small apartment in the heart of the city. Next fall if the cough is still active I may have to move again to some dry inland atmosphere.
Love to all of you and especially yourself.
Dearest love.
Scott
5521Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California May 18, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
It’s hard to explain about the Saturday Evening Post matter. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, but the trouble with them goes back to the time of Lorimer’s retirement in 1935.I wrote them three stories that year and sent them about three others which they didn’t like. The last story they bought they published last in the issue and my friend, Adelaide Neil on the staff, implied to me that they didn’t want to pay that big price for stories unless they could use them in the beginning of the issue. Well, that was the time of my two-year sickness, T.B., the shoulder, etc., and you were at a most crucial point and I was foolishly trying to take care of Scottie and for one reason or another I lost the knack of writing the particular kind of stories they wanted.
As you should know from your own attempts, high-priced commercial writing for the magazines is a very definite trick. The rather special things that I brought to it, the intelligence and the good writing and even the radicalism all appealed to old Lorimer who had been a writer himself and liked style. The man who runs the magazine now is an up-and-coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who pub. lishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave fron tiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains - nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well I simply can’t do it and, as I say, I’ve tried not once but twenty times.
As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill, and I honestly don’t blame them for not taking the things that I’ve offered to them from time to time in the past three or four years. An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine did have unhappy endings - if you remember). In fact the standard of writing from the best movies, like Rebecca, is, believe it or not, much higher at present than that in the commercial magazines such as Colliers and the Post.
Thank you for your letter. California is a monotonous climate and already I am tired of the flat, scentless tone of the summer. It is fun to be working on something I like and maybe in another month I will get the promised bonus on it and be able to pay last year’s income tax and raise our standard of living a little.
Love to you all and dearest love to you.
Scott
P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs McKinney.
1401 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California June 7, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
The Harvard Summer School idea seemed better for Scottie than her going to Virginia. You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness? Now all the Montague Normans, Lady Willerts, Guinnesses, Vallam-brosas etc., who loafed with us in the South of France through many summers seem to have dug themselves into an awful pit. I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem
