2 June (1924): F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins

Francis Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Europe in April 1924 with his wife, Zelda Saye, where they would stay for the next five years. During this time he maintained a close correspondence with Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, while writing The Great Gatsby (which he would send to Perkins in October of this year, with its original title of “Trimalchio in the West Egg” after Petronius’ Satyricon). Scribner’s was best known for its books by Henry James and Edith Wharton—”ultra conservative” as Fitzgerald writes below—and Perkins had to lobby hard for Fitzgerald’s work, as no one else at the publishing house liked his first novel, The Romantic Egoist. In this letter, with his usual flurry of misspelled words, Fitzgerald assures Perkins that he has no intention of leaving Scribner’s, despite rumors to the contrary, and then goes on to ridicule the stock protagonist of the simple midwestern farmer.

June 1924
14 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris, France

Dear Max:

This is the second letter I’ve written you today—I tore my first up when the letter in longhand from New Cannan telling me about Liveright arrived. I’m wiring you today as to that rumor—but also it makes it necessary to tell you something I didn’t intend to tell you.

Yesterday arrived a letter from T.R. Smith asking for my next book—saying nothing against the Scribners [sic] but just asking for it: “if I happened to be dissatisfied they would be delighted” ect. ect. [sic]. I answered at once saying that you were one of my closest friends and that my relations with Scribners had aways been so cordial and pleasant that I wouldn’t think of changeing [sic] publishers. That letter will reach him at about the time this reaches you. I have never had any other communication of any sort with Liveright or any other publisher except the very definate [sic] letter with which I answered their letter yesterday.

So much for that rumor. I am both angry at Tom who must have been in some way responsible for starting it and depressed at the fact that you could have believed it enough to mention it to me. Rumors start like this.

Smith: (a born gossip) “I hear Fitzgerald’s book isn’t selling. I think we can get him, as he’s probably blaming it on Scribners.

The Next Man: It seems Fitzgerald is dissatisfied with Scribners and Liveright is after him…

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. If you like I will sign a contract with you immediately for my next three books. The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

First. Tho [sic], as a younger son, I have not always been in sympathy with some of your publishing ideas, (which were evolved under the pre-movie, pre-high-literacy-rate conditions of twenty to forty years ago), the personality of you and Mr. Scribner, the tremendous squareness, courtesy, generosity and open-mindedness I have always met there and, if I may say it, the special consideration you have all had for me and my work, much more than make up the difference.

Second. You know my own idea on the advantages of one publisher who backs you and not your work. And my feeling about uniform books in the matter of house and binding.

Third. The curious advantage to a rather radical writer in being published by what is now an ultra conservative house.

Fourth. (and least need of saying) Do you think I could treat with another publisher while I have debt, which is both actual and a matter of honor, of over $3000.00?

Your letters are catching up with me. Curtis in Town and Country + Van Vechten in The Nation pleased me…Among people over here Ernest Hemingway + Gertrude Stien [sic] are quite entheusiastic [sic]. Except for Rascoe it has been critically only a clean sweep—and his little tribute is a result of our having snubbed his quite common and cheap promiscuous wife.

As you know, despite my admiration for Through the Wheat, I havent [sic] an enormous faith in Tom Boyd either as a personality or an artist—as I have, say, in E.E. Cummings and Hemingway. His ignorance, his presumptuous intolerance and his careless grossness which he cultivates for vitality as a man might nurse along a dandelion with the hope that it would turn out to be an onion, have always annoyed me. Like Rascoe he has never been known to refuse an invitation from his social superiors—or fail to pan them with all the venom of a James-Oliver-Curwood-He-Man when no invitations were forthcoming.

All this is preparatory to say that his new book sounds utterly lowsy [sic]—Shiela [sic] Kaye-Smith has used the stuff about the farmer having girls instead of boys and being broken up about it. The characters you mention have, every one, become stock-props in the last ten years—”Christy, the quaint old hired man” after a season in such stuff as Owen Davis’ Ice Bound must be almost ready for the burlesque circuit.

History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer and his Hired Man Christy
(Both guaranteed to be utterly full of the Feel of the Soil)

1855—English Peasant discovered by Geo. Elliot in Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner ect.

1888—Given intellectual interpretation by Hardy in Jude and Tess

1890—Found in France by Zola in Germinal

1900—Crowds of Scandinavians, Hamsun, Bojer, ect. [sic], tear him bodily from the Russian, and after a peep at Hardy, Hamlin Garland finds him in the Middle West.

Most of that, however, was literature. It was something pulled by the individual out of life and only partly with the aid of models in other literatures.

2nd. Period

1914—Shiela [sic] Kaye-Smith frankly imitates Hardy, produces two good books + begins to imitate herself

1915—Brett Young discovers him in the coal country

1916—Robert Frost discovers him in New England

1917—Sherwood Anderson discovers him in Ohio

1918—Willa Cather turns him Swede

1920—Eugene O’Neill puts him on the boards in Different + Beyond Horizon

1922—Ruth Suckow gets in before the door closes

These people were all good second raters (except Anderson)—but they exhausted the ground, the type was all set. All was over.

3rd. Period

The Cheap skates discover him—Bad critics and novelists ect.

1923 Homer Croy writes West of the Water Tower

1924 Edna Ferber turns from her flip jewish [sic] saleswoman for a strong silent earthy carrot grower and the Great Soul of Charley Towne thrills to her passionately. Real and Earthy struggle

1926 TOM BOYD, WRITES, NOVEL, ABOUT, INARTICULATE, FARMER, WHO, IS CLOSE TO SOIL, AND, HIS, HIRED, MAN CHRISTY!

STRONG! VITAL! REAL!

As a matter of fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% of the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English + Russian peasants were—and, if he has any sensitivity whatsoever (except a most sentimental conception of himself, which our writers persistently shut their eyes to) he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking for the static in a world that for almost a hundred years has simply not been static. Isn’t it a 4th rate imagination that can find only that old property farmer in all this amazing time and land? And anything that ten people a year can do well enough to pass a muster has become so easy that it isn’t worth the doing.

I can not diassociate a man from his work—That this Wescott (who is an effeminate Oxford fairy) and Tom Boyd and Burton Rascoe (whose real ambition is to lock themselves in to a stinking little appartment [sic] and screw each others’ wives) are going to tell us mere superficial “craftsmen” like Hergeshiemer, Wharton, Tarkington and me about the Great Beautiful Appreciation they have of the Great Beautiful life of the Manure Wielder—rather turns my stomach. The real people like Gertrude Stien (with whom I’ve talked) and Conrad…have respect for people whose materials may not touch theirs at a single point. But the fourth rate and highly derivative people like Tom are loud in their outcry against any subject matter that doesn’t come out of the old, old bag which their betters have used and thrown away.

For example there is an impression among the thoughtless (including Tom) that Sherwood Anderson is a man of profound ideas who is “handicapped by his inarticulateness.” As a matter of fact Anderson is a man of practically no ideas—but he is one of the very best and finest writers of the English language today. God, he can write! Tom could never get such rythms [sic] in his life as there are on the pages of Winesburg Ohio—Simple! The words on the lips of the critics makes me hilarious: Anderson’s style is about as simple as an engine room full of dynamos. But Tom flatters himself that he can sit down for five months and by dressing up a few heart throbs in overalls produce literature.

It amazes me, Max, to see with your discernment and your fine intelligence, fall for that whole complicated fake. Your chief critical flaw is to confuse mere earnestness with artistic sincerity. On two of Ring’s jackets have been statements that he never wrote a dishonest word (maybe it’s one jacket). But Ring and many of the very greatest artists have written thousands of words in plays, poems and novels which weren’t even faintly sincere or ernest and were yet artisticly [sic] sincere. The latter term is not a synonym for plodding ernestness. Zola did not say the last word about literature; not even the first…

Good luck to Drummond. I’m sure one or two critics will mistake it for profound stuff—maybe even Mencken who has a weakness in that direction. But I think you should look closer.

With best wishes as always, Max.

Your Friend. Scott.

From The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor. Ed. by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli Bruccoli and Judith Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press (2004).

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