expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish, a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years’ away. I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because, after fifty, one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think, except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.
My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing - but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmas-time this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man - a label which I had done nothing to deserve.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California October 19,1940
Dearest Zelda:
I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on Tender Is the Night at the end - I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in Little Eva, which reminds me that I saw the two — Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?
My room is covered with charts like it used to be for Tender Is the Night, telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short, as I originally planned it two yean ago, and more on the order of Gatsby.
Dearest love.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California October 23, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carroll matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money, I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th
Century-Fox to last until December 15th so I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.
I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or sideshows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.
It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.
Two thousand words today and all good.
With dearest love.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California October 26, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Ernest sent me his book and I’m in the middle of it. It is not as good as the Farewell to Arms. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments. But I imagine it would please the average type of reader, the mind who used to enjoy Sinclair Lewis, more than anything he has written. It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does. I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat. But the point is, he is making a fortune out of it - has sold it to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and as it’s the Book-of-the-Month selection he will make $50,000 from it in that form. Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.
No news except that I’m working hard, if that is news, and that Scottie’s story appears in The New Yorker this week.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 2, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Listening to the Harvard and Princeton game on the radio reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and Scottie is living now. I hear nothing from her though I imagine she is at Cambridge today.
The novel is hard as pulling teeth but that is because it is in its early character-planting phase. I feel people so less intently than I did once that this is harder. It means welding together hundreds of stray impressions and incidents to form the fabric of entire personalities. But later it should go faster. I hope all is well with you.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 9, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Got into rather a fret about Scottie last week, which however came out all right. She went to the infirmary with grippe and then in spite of my telegrams to everyone there, including the dean, Scottie and the infirmary itself, darkness seemed to close about her. I could get no information. Her weekly letter was missing. As I say, it turned out all right. She had been discharged and was probably out of town but I wrote her a strong letter that she must keep me informed of her general movements - not that I have any control over them or want any because she is after all of age and capable of looking after herself but one resents the breaking of a habit and I was used to hearing about her once a week.
I’m still absorbed in the novel which is growing under my hand - not as deft a hand as I’d like - but growing.
With dearest love always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California November 16, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I’m
