A Life in Letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

TO: Maxwell Perkins

TLS, 3 pp. Princeton University

1307 Park Avenue,

Baltimore, Maryland,

April 15, 1935.

Dear Max:

You don’t say anything about “Taps” so I gather it hasn’t caught on at all. I hope at least it will pay for itself and its corrections. There was a swell review in The Nation1; did you see it?

I went away for another week but history didn’t repeat itself and the trip was rather a waste. Thanks for the message from Ernest. I’d like to see him too and I always think of my friendship with him as being one of the high spots of life. But I still believe that such things have a mortality, perhaps in reaction to their very excessive life, and that we will never again see very much of each other. I appreciate what he said about “Tender is the Night.” Things happen all the time which make me think that it is not destined to die quite as easily as the boys-in-a-hurry prophesied. However, I made many mistakes about it from its delay onward, the biggest of which was to refuse the Literary Guild subsidy.

Haven’t seen Beth1 since I got back and am calling her up today to see if she’s here. I am waiting eagerly for a first installment of Ernest’s book.2 When are you coming south? Zelda, after a terrible crisis, is somewhat better. I am, of course, on the wagon as always, but life moves at an uninspiring gait and there is less progress than I could wish on the Mediaeval series3—all in all an annoying situation as these should be my most productive years. I’ve simply got to arrange something for this summer that will bring me to life again, but what it should be is by no means apparent.

About 1929 I wrote a story called “Outside the Cabinet Maker’s” which ran in the Century Magazine. I either lost it here or else sent it to you with the first batch of selected stories for “Taps” and it was not returned. Will you (a) see if you’ve got it? or (b) tell me what and where the Century company is now and whom I should address to get a copy of the magazine?

I’ve had a swell portrait painted at practically no charge and next time I come to New York I am going to spend a morning tearing out of your files all those preposterous masks with which you have been libeling me for the last decade.

Just found another whole paragraph in “Taps,” top of page 384, which appears in “Tender is the Night.” I’d carefully elided it and written the paragraph beneath it to replace it, but the proof readers slipped and put them both in.

Ever yours,

Scott

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