Books: Bigger Than the Ritz

THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD edited by Andrew Turnbull. 615 pages. Scribner. $10.

Scott Fitzgerald would today be forgotten as a Princetonian playboy who was a silly young man in a silly time—the ’20s—were it not for the fact that he was a silly young man of genius. It was his genius to vibrate like a tuning fork to the music of his time. When the ’20s died on Black Thursday of 1929 and the times went bad, Fitzgerald went sour with them. Although he wrote better, he was on the wrong note; having been monstrously overrewarded for his early tripe, he was cruelly undervalued when—after heroic effort—he made a fine novelist of himself.

One of his wonderfully open, eloquent and touching letters records his astonishment at learning that his old Princeton classmate, Edmund Wilson, a man whom he regarded as his literary conscience, was suddenly to be heard expounding Marxist sociology. “Up Mallarmé!” was Fitzgerald’s reaction to the dawn of a decade that was to be hostile to his esthetic creed.

Record of Defeats. “Poor Scott,” as all his friends woundingly referred to him at one time or another, did not have mere bad luck. He drank, as he lived, generously, and this fact alone put him at a disadvantage with people. His early letters record his triumphs over the demon gin; his defeats were recorded by others. Because he was a famous young man, he could never anonymously fall down a flight of stairs or insult his hostess or make a howling clown of himself, because someone was always there industriously to record a momentary superiority to a man who had temporarily made an idiot of himself. He had the further bad fortune to be a romantic and, what is more, a romantic who was foolish enough to marry the heroine of his own novels. Scott’s Zelda was the love object a worse and more prudent man would have rejected when the tinsel tarnished. Fitzgerald stayed in love.

“Be proud and useful” was his advice to his beautiful daughter “Scottie.” It was the fate of the father to be too proud by half, and to be praised for his faults rather than his virtues. These considerations lend a double pathos to the reading of his letters. He was rich: he was young and successful: and the diamond of his genius seemed as big as the Ritz. But the letters inexorably trace him to a Hollywood hotel where he worried about his weekly rent and Scottie’s account at “Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck.” He wondered aloud in letters to his agent, Harold Ober (who coldly cut off his credit), why the price of a Scott Fitzgerald story had gone down from $3,500 to $250. “Are they not worth more?” he asked.

They were, but he had pushed too many zircons on the market to expect an honest price for the real mineral.

Dogged Devotion. Princeton, N.J., the Hotel Cecil, London, Villa Paquita, Juan-les-Pins, France, La Paix, Rodger’s Ford, Towson, Md., and the Garden of Allah Hotel, Hollywood, are the datelines of his letters, and they are printed by Editor Turnbull, who is also Fitzgerald’s biographer, in the sensible fashion of grouping them with the people they were addressed to. Mostly they are to his mother, his daughter, his agent, his editor at Scribner (Maxwell Perkins), to his old Princeton pals, Wilson and John Peale Bishop. What shines through them all is his dogged devotion to his craft and to his friends.

The heart of Fitzgerald’s dilemma in the world was that he understood that somehow his talent was involved with his neurosis. He did not “believe in psychoanalysis”; he was afraid that, if “cured,” it would cost him his gift. There is tragic sincerity in his letter to John O’Hara that “the extinction of that light is much more to be dreaded than any material loss.” This is not the letter of a weak man.