O Glittering and White

Lately I’ve been reading The Crack-Up, which is a collection of “miscellaneous pieces” by F. Scott Fitzgerald compiled by his friend Edmund Wilson after his death: essays, notebooks and letters. Interesting stuff – I love biographies and such – and it’s made me wish desperately that I could have met the man; seems like he must have been so vivacious and magnetic and yet so sensitive. Inasmuch as genius is sexy, and genius at writing in particular, I bet he was seriously attractive.


(F. Hot Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night, indeed.)

I really enjoyed the letters he wrote to his daughter (would you say that a person reveals most about himself when he addresses his child?). He writes to her with an unsentimental, serious candidness (“I am not a great man but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort…”) which lapses now and then into affectionate banter (“I think I’ve about finished a swell flicker piece. Did you read me in the current Esquire about Orson Welles? Is it funny? Tell me. You haven’t answered a question for six letters. Better do so or I’ll dock five dollars next week to show you I’m the same old meany.”), as if she was both an adult confidante and a kid at the same time. I’ll bet he was an incredibly difficult person to have as a father – too distant, too demanding.

Example: in a letter to the 12-year-old Scottie he recommends a particular Shakespearean sonnet, dashes off a long list of things to worry about (“courage”, “cleanliness”, “horsemanship”) and not to worry about (“popular opinion”, “dolls”, “growing up”, “parents”, “boys”, “mosquitoes”, “flies”, and “insects in general”), and writes this incredible line: “I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?” His own emphasis.

Then there are the notebooks, full of raw scraps of brilliance. Browsing through the meticulously alphabetical headings, I found that the "G" category was dedicated to "Descriptions of Girls". This made me happy. You can't argue that the most intoxicating passages in Gatsby are the Daisy ones. Sure enough, gems: "A few little unattached sections of her sun-warm hair blew back and trickled against the lobe of the ear closest to him, as if to indicate that she was listening"; and "Long white gloves dripping from her forearms"; and "She gave him a side smile, half of her face, like a small white cliff"; and "Their hearts had in some way touched across two feet of Paris sunlight"; and "Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away".

Of course none of it has quite the succinct poetry of "I think you are really fit/ You're fit but my gosh don't you know it", but then nobody's perfect.