F Scott Fitzgerald
Reading writer’s letters is one of my great pleasures. It is like finally getting to hang out with the cool kid you heretofore only watched enviously across the playground and discovering he is even cooler than you imagined. I’m working my way through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s A Life In Letters, a collection of witty, desperate, frightfully intelligent correspondence. Despite success and fame he had a hard run of it, but was never too miserable to be brilliant, as the following note to close friend Ernest Hemingway demonstrates…
Just taken another chapter [of Tender Is The Night] to typists + its left me in a terrible mood of depression as to whether its any good or not. In 2 1/2 mos. I’ve been here I’ve written 20,000 words on it… I’ve paid for it with the usual nervous depressions and such drinking manners as the lowest bistrop (bistrot?) boy would scorn. My latest tendency is to collapse about 11.00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, + tell interested friends or acquaintances that I havn’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda and often implying current company — after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange palaces.
Cila Warncke 