F. Scott Fitzgerald Tells His 11-Year-Old Daughter What to Worry About (and Not Worry About) in Life, 1933

in Letters, Literature | September 24th, 2013

Born 117 years ago today in St. Paul, Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that somewhat louche denizen—some might say inventor—of the “Jazz Age,” has been immortalized as the tender young man we see above: Princeton dropout, writer of The Great Gatsby, boozy companion to beautiful Southern belle flapper Zelda Sayre. Amidst all the glamorization of his best and worst qualities, it’s easy to forget that Fitzgerald was also the father of a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who went on to have her own successful career as a writer. Unlike the children of some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, Frances thrived, which must be some testament to her father’s parenting (and to Zelda’s as well, though she allegedly hoped, like Daisy Buchanan, that her daughter would become a “beautiful little fool”).

We get more than a hint of Fitzgerald’s fatherly character in a wonderful little letter that he sent to her in August of 1933, when Frances was away at summer camp. Fitzgerald, renowned for his extremes, counsels an almost Epicurean middle way—distilling, perhaps, hard lessons learned during his decline in the thirties (which he wrote of candidly in “The Crack Up”). He concludes with a list of things for his daughter to worry and not worry about. It’s a very touching missive that I look forward to sharing with my daughter some day. I’ll have my own advice and silly in-jokes for her, but Fitzgerald provides a very wise literary supplement. Below is the full letter, published in the New York Times in 1958. The typos, we might assume, are all sic, given Fitzgerald’s penchant for such errors:

AUGUST 8, 1933
LA PAIX RODGERS’ FORGE
TOWSON, MATYLAND

DEAR PIE:

I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy– but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds…

I think of you, and always pleasantly, but 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?…

Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship…
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
© Am I trying to make my body a useful intrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

“Nothing Good Gets Away”: John Steinbeck Offers Love Advice in a Letter to His Son (1958)

Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Story “May Day,” and Nearly All of His Other Work, Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

in Art, Letters | September 23rd, 2013

Click for larger image

Important twentieth-century painters, as every student of art history learns, didn’t tend to sail smoothly through existence. Those even a little interested in famed Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo have heard much about the travails both romantic and physical she endured in her short life. But in this lesser-known instance, another artist suffered, and Kahlo offered the solace. Available to view from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, we have here a letter Kahlo sent to Georgia O’Keeffe, painter of blossoms and southwest American landscapes (and more besides), on March 1st, 1933. At that time, O’Keeffe, who the year before had struggled and failed to complete a mural project for Radio City Music Hall on time, lived through the aftermath of a nervous breakdown which had hospitalized her (diagnosis: “psychoneurosis”), sent her to no less remote a locale than Bermuda to recuperate, and prevented her from painting again until 1934.

Kahlo’s letter, sent from Detroit where her muralist husband Diego Rivera had taken a commission for 27 frescoes at the Institute of the Arts, runs as follows:

Georgia,

Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you ? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.

Frieda

“Clearly Kahlo hoped for a deeper friendship, or perhaps more, with O’Keeffe, when she and Diego went to New York a few weeks later,” writes Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own. “From there, she wrote to a friend on 11 April (by which time O’Keeffe had gone to Bermuda to convalesce) that because of O’Keeffe’s illness there had been no lovemaking between them that time. A boastful exaggeration of their closeness? Knowing Kahlo’s predilection for sexual hyperbole, this seems likely.”

via A Piece of Monologue, A Writer’s Ruminations

The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips

Watch Moving Short Films of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife (1909)

in Letters, Life, Literature | September 23rd, 2013

Writer and artist Alistair Gentry once proposed a lecture series he called “One Eyed Monster.” Central to the project is what Gentry calls “the cult of James Joyce,” an exemplar of a larger phenomenon: “the vulture-like picking over of the creative and material legacies of dead artists.” “Untalented and noncreative people,” writes Gentry, “are able to build lasting careers from what one might call the Talented Dead.” Gentry’s judgment may seem harsh, but the questions he asks are incisive and should give pause to scholars (and bloggers) who make their livings combing through the personal effects of dead artists, and to everyone who takes a special interest, prurient or otherwise, in such artifacts. Just what is it we hope to find in artists’ personal letters that we can’t find in their public work? I’m not sure I have an answer to that question, especially in reference to James Joyce’s “dirty letters” to his wife and chief muse, Nora.

The letters are by turns scandalous, titillating, romantic, poetic, and often downright funny, and they were written for Nora’s eyes alone in a correspondence initiated by her in November of 1909, while Joyce was in Dublin and she was in Trieste raising their two children in very straitened circumstances. Nora hoped to keep Joyce away from courtesans by feeding his fantasies in writing, and Joyce needed to woo Nora again—she had threatened to leave him for his lack of financial support. In the letters, they remind each other of their first date on June 16, 1904 (subsequently memorialized as “Bloomsday,” the date on which all of Ulysses is set). We learn quite a lot about Joyce’s predilections, much less about Nora’s, whose side of the correspondence seems to have disappeared. Declared lost for some time, Joyce’s first reply letter to Nora in the “dirty letters” sequence was recently discovered and auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 2004.

I do not excerpt here any of the language from Joyce’s subsequent letters, not for modesty’s sake but because there is far too much of it to choose from. If those prudish censors of Ulysses had read this exchange, they might have dropped dead from grave wounds to their sense of decorum. As far as I can ascertain, the letters exist in publication only in the out-of-print Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by pre-eminent Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, and in a somewhat truncated form on this site. Alistair Gentry has done us the favor of transcribing the letters as they appear in Ellmann’s Selected Letters on his site here. Of our interest in them, he asks:

Does anyone have the right to read things that were clearly meant only for two specific people…? Now that they have been exposed to the world’s gaze, albeit in a fairly limited fashion, does anybody except these two (who are dead) have any right to make objections about or exercise control over the manner in which these private documents and records of intimacy are used?

Questions worth considering, if not answered easily. Nevertheless, despite his critical misgivings, Gentry writes: “These letters stand on their own as brilliant and, dare I say, arousing Joycean writing. In my opinion they’re definitely worth reading.” I must say I agree. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus once wrote in a diary entry: “Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language—an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue.” In the “dirty letters,” we get to see the great alchemist of ordinary language and experience practically revel in the most vulgar confessions.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Raymond Chandler Denounces Strangers on a Train in Sharply-Worded Letter to Alfred Hitchcock

in Film, Letters | August 29th, 2013

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Alfred Hitchcock, like several other of the twentieth century’s best-known auteurs, made some of his most widely seen work by turning books into movies. Or rather, he hired other writers to turn these books into screenplays, which he then turned into movies — which, the way these things go, often bore little ultimate resemblance to their source material. In the case of his 1951 picture Strangers on a Train, based upon The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith’s first novel of the same name, Hitchcock burned through a few such hired hands. First he engaged Whitfield Cook, whose treatment bolstered the novel’s homoerotic subtext. Then he importuned a series of the brightest living lights of American literature — Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett — to have a go at the full screenplay, none of whom could bring themselves sign on to the job. Then along came the only respected “name” writer who could rise — or, given that many at first thought Highsmith’s novel tawdry, sink — to the job: Philip Marlowe’s creator, Raymond Chandler.

The Big Sleep author wrote and submitted a first draft of Strangers on a Train. Then a second. He would hear no feedback from the director except the message informing him of his firing. Hitchcock pursued “Shakespeare of Hollywood” Ben Hecht to come up with the next draft, but Hecht offered his young assistant Czenzi Ormonde instead. Together with Hitchcock’s wife and associate producer, Ormonde completely rewrote the script in less than three weeks. When Chandler later got hold of the film’s final script, he sent Hitchcock his assessment, as featured on Letters of Note:

December 6th, 1950

Dear Hitch,

In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay—for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity—in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing your mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a “far less brilliant mind than mine” to guess what they were.

Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I’m not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They’ll know damn well I didn’t. I shouldn’t have minded in the least if you had produced a better script—believe me. I shouldn’t. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It’s no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.

(Signed, ‘Raymond Chandler’)

Note that Chandler, ever the writer, points out his own “extremely cumbersome sentence” even as he summons so much vitriol for what he considers a lifeless script. As a longtime resident of Los Angeles by this point, and one who had already worked on the screenplays for The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity, he knew well the procedures of “the standard Hollywood depravity.” But nothing, to his mind, could excuse such “clichés,” “faceless characters,” and dialogue that “says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied.” We could all, no matter what sort of work we do, learn from Chandler’s unwavering attention to his craft, and we’d do especially well to bear in mind his preemptive objection to the argument that, hey, at least he got a big check: “Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.”

Whatever your own opinion on Hitchcock, don’t forget our collection of 20 Free Hitchcock Movies Online, nor, of course, our big collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Virginia Woolf’s Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

in Letters, Literature | August 26th, 2013

It seems like a very morbid and inhuman practice to treat the suicide note as a piece of literature, even if the author of said note is a writer as famous as Virginia Woolf. And yet, why not? I can anticipate all sorts of ethical objections having to do with decency, and I share some of those sentiments. Let us not forget, however, that death has often been a literary occasion: the long tradition of recorded last words ranges from deathbed confessions to the strangely theatrical genre of the gallows speech (see Socrates, Anne Boleyn, or John Brown). Like those unforgettable figures of history, Virginia Woolf’s last scripted words are pored over by lay readers and scholars alike (see, for example, pages on Woolf’s final words from Smith College and Yale).

Woolf’s death, in March of 1941, occasioned the third of her suicide letters, and yes, it feels unseemly to linger over her last piece of prose. Perhaps it is the mode of death, suicide still being a societal taboo, thought of as tragic even when it’s undertaken calmly and rationally by someone ready to leave this world. And in many cases, especially those involving mental illness, death seems so needless, so extreme. Such was the case with Woolf, who drowned herself after a long struggle with what would probably be called today bipolar disorder. Her suicide note, written to her husband Leonard, is a haunting and beautiful document, in all its unadorned sincerity behind which much turmoil and anguish lie. See a scan of the handwritten note at the top, and read the full transcript below. Directly above, you can hear a dramatic reading of Woolf’s note, such a wrenching missive because it is not a farewell to the world at large, but rather to a trusted friend and lover.

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife: “You, Dead, Are So Much Better Than Anyone Else Alive” (1946)

in Letters, Life, Physics | August 8th, 2013

In June 1945, the 27-year-old physicist Richard Feynman lost his wife, Arline Feynman, to tuberculosis. Only 25 years old, she was Richard’s high-school sweetheart. And yet she was much more. As Lawrence Krauss writes in 2012 biography on Feynman:

Richard and Arline were soul mates. They were not clones of each other, but symbiotic opposites — each completed the other. Arline admired Richard’s obvious scientific brilliance, and Richard clearly adored the fact that she loved and understood things he could barely appreciate at the time. But what they shared, most of all, was a love of life and a spirit of adventure.

During their years together, Richard and Arline exchanged frequent letters, many now collected in the volume, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. But none is more poignant than the one written to Arline sixteen months after her death. Still despairing, still lost, Feynman wrote a cathartic letter that was sealed and never opened until his own death in 1988. Deeply touching, it reads as follows:

October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.

via the always great Letters of Note

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Johnny Rotten’s Cordial Letter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Next to the Sex Pistols, You’re ‘a Piss Stain’

in Letters, Music | July 10th, 2013

The Sex Pistols certainly weren’t the first to balk at showing up to receive a trophy at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. They were, however, notable for the style in which they declined to attend. When word came in early 2006 that the Pistols would be inducted, the band’s singer John Lydon, whose stage name was “Johnny Rotten,” faxed the Hall of Fame a handwritten note. “Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain,” wrote Lydon. “Your museum. Urine in wine. Were not coming. Were not your monkey and so what?” You can read the rest above, or watch below as a bemused Jann Wenner, co-founder of the museum, reads the letter out loud during the ceremony.

via Letters of Note

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 17 ) |

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)

in Letters, Literature | June 27th, 2013

Gertrude Stein considered herself an experimental writer and wrote what The Poetry Foundation calls “dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue,” with the result being that “commercial publishers slighted her experimental writings and critics dismissed them as incomprehensible.” Take, for example, what happened when Stein sent a manuscript to Alfred C. Fifield, a London-based publisher, and received a rejection letter mocking her prose in return. According to Letters of Note, the manuscript in question was published many years later as her modernist novel, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925). You can hear Stein reading a selection from the novel below. Also find other Gertrude Stein works in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

via Electric Literature

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 14 ) |

F. Scott Fitzgerald Tells His 11-Year-Old Daughter What to Worry About (and Not Worry About) in Life, 1933

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife (1909)

Raymond Chandler Denounces Strangers on a Train in Sharply-Worded Letter to Alfred Hitchcock

Virginia Woolf’s Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife: “You, Dead, Are So Much Better Than Anyone Else Alive” (1946)

Johnny Rotten’s Cordial Letter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Next to the Sex Pistols, You’re ‘a Piss Stain’

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)

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