Letters

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dearest Scottie

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) attended Princeton University but did not graduate. He was com­mis­sioned in the army and when stationed at Camp Sheridan he met his future wife, Zelda, about whom he writes in this letter. He wrote copy in an advertising agency in New York while trying to succeed as a novelist. His best known books are This Side of Paradise (1920), which draws upon his experiences at college; The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Tales of Jazz Age (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender is the Night (1934). The letter that follows reflects not only his disappointment in his daughter and his feeling of bitterness about his marriage but also conveys his sadness that his dream was aborted.

Dearest Scottie:

I don’t think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice¾bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I’m talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an “authority,” and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you¾for the young can’t believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.

      When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided¾she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

      It was too late also for me to recoup the damage¾I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years till my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink[1] and forgetting.

      The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds¾she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage¾sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy¾she’s passed that failing on to you.

      For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit¾nothing but “getting by” and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them¾their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

      My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don’t want to change you. But I don’t want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energies and my earnings for people who talk my language.

      I have begun to fear that you don’t. You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this. People like _____ _____and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.

      You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes¾but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore (and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you) represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother’s illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that. . . .

      To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a “wild society girl,” vintage of 1925, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it¾it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere,” your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life¾a real dream of your own¾and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late¾as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge¾now your conversation is as commonplace as if you’d spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School¾what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.

      I shall come East in September to meet your boat¾but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn’t likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will¾or want to¾remains to be seen.

Daddy

      P.S. If you keep the diary, please don’t let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I’m not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don’t try to be witty in the writing, unless it’s natural¾just true and real.

      P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time? I wrote it over twice.

Suggestions for Discussion

1.     How would you describe the philosophical differences between Fitzgerald and Scottie’s mother?

2.     What do you infer was Fitzgerald’s dream?

3.     How valid do you think is Fitzgerald’s comparison of the mind of a child with that of an adolescent?

4.     Partly by inference the writer provides a picture of Scottie’s recent life. What details do you learn of it?

Suggestions for Writing

1.     Write the letter that your mother or father might write to you.

2.     Imagine you have received a critical letter from your mother or father. How would you answer it?

3.     Is it true that the young can’t believe in the youth of their fathers (or mothers)?

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[1] Victimized by his own indulgences and influenced by the mental breakdowns of his wife as well as by the failures of his writing, Fitzgerald became a compulsive drinker.