Letters to His Daughter, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Introduction by Scottie Fitzgerald, 1965. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters give readers a glimpse of the man behind the beautiful sentences of his short stories and novels. The first collection of Fitzgerald’s letters appeared in 1963, and two years later Letters to His Daughter was published, featuring an introduction by Scottie Fitzgerald. (She’s referred to as “Francis Fitzgerald Lanahan” on the book jacket.) In his letters to Scottie, we see Fitzgerald in all his complexity. He is, by turns, pedantic, domineering, charming, funny, nostalgic, and sweet.
The letters in this book date from Scottie’s teenage years. After Zelda’s third mental breakdown in 1934, Scott was coming to terms with the fact that Zelda would most likely never be “cured” of her mental illness. Fitzgerald spiraled for a while—the period covered in his “Crack-Up” essays of 1936, but he pulled himself together, got a job as a screenwriter for MGM, and moved to Hollywood in 1937. Scottie was at boarding school, and thus much of Fitzgerald’s parenting was done via letters.
Scott wanted to guide Scottie through these years, as he knew from his own experience how difficult adolescence could be. Fitzgerald had struggled through school, flunking out of Princeton University, forcing him to repeat his junior year. Ultimately, Fitzgerald enlisted in the US Army in 1917 and never completed his college degree.
While Scott is certainly overbearing, he’s also not totally crazy to be so worried about Scottie’s grades. She was kicked out of Ethel Walker’s School after she graduated, while studying for her college board exams.
Fitzgerald writes to Scottie about a dyed blonde streak in her hair, which seems like a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, but he also writes that three people have written him about her hair, which seems equally ridiculous. It’s possible he was exaggerating the number, but someone must have written him about Scottie’s hair, how else could he have known? Yes, he’s being slightly ridiculous, but other people are also being ridiculous by writing to him about Scottie’s hair.
The key to the whole book is Scott’s admitting, “you are so much like me” (p.45). This is exactly why he is pedantic and pestering, because he knew Scottie was so similar to him. And he wanted her to avoid the same mistakes that he made.
In October of 1937, Scott writes: “You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life. There is no other time but now.” (p.27) That might be a bit much for a 16-year-old to digest, but it’s fantastic advice for anyone, at any age.
Fitzgerald hit upon one of the main themes in his work when he wrote “my generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.” (p.57) This theme reverberates throughout Fitzgerald’s work: he is eager to see the old Victorian morality die off, but he questions what values people will choose to live by now. Fitzgerald constructed a moral code for himself that did not come from organized religion. Fitzgerald also saw how people who had no moral code floundered without a clear direction.
Even though Fitzgerald, who was raised Catholic, had no use for organized religion, he had high praise for the book of Ecclesiastes, encouraging Scottie to read it. “Remember when you’re reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world.” (p.64) This is notable as it’s one of the few positive mentions of anything related to religion in Fitzgerald’s writings.
Fitzgerald’s erudition is on full display in his letters—it’s abundantly clear how well-read he was. He writes “certainly you will agree that Marxism does not concern itself with vague sophistries but weds itself to the most practical mechanics of material revolution.” (p.82) You might not expect the author of The Great Gatsby to be so well-versed in Communism, but Fitzgerald was a complicated fellow. That was part of the genius of Fitzgerald; he was able to describe the glittering surfaces and also the rot underneath.
Fitzgerald was sympathetic to left-wing politics of the 1930’s, but he had no time for Communism as an ideology, finding it far too restrictive and rigid. He wrote to Scottie in 1940: “Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion...”. (p.105)
While reading the book, I was amazed at how much money Scottie was getting. Her weekly allowance of $13.85 would be $315 in 2024. That’s a good amount of money for a teenager at boarding school/college. Scott sent Scottie $350 for a trip, that would be $8,100 in 2024! I would love it if my parents had ever sent me $8,000 for a trip during college.
Fitzgerald was always recommending books to Scottie. Fitzgerald was an admirer of Joseph Conrad’s writing, as evidenced from this 1939 letter: “Lord Jim is a great book—the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good?” (p.96) Having recently read Lord Jim, I was struck by Fitzgerald’s mentioning it, and I wonder if Conrad’s use of the partially involved narrator in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness influenced Fitzgerald’s use of Nick Carraway as a partially involved narrator in The Great Gatsby.
A tidbit that I found especially fascinating was that Fitzgerald had promised to himself “I would never write anything about my own father and mother till they had been at least ten years dead...”. (p.118) Fitzgerald never made it past his self-imposed timeline: his father died in 1931, his mother died in 1936, and Fitzgerald died in 1940. For a writer who mined his own life as much as Fitzgerald did, it’s remarkable how little he wrote about his parents. Reading about his self-imposed timeline, I wonder if this is part of the reason why Fitzgerald wrote about his parents so little. Although I don’t think if Fitzgerald had lived longer he would have written some shocking novel about his parents. Fitzgerald had a reticence when it came to certain aspects of his private life. In his “Crack-Up” essays, for example, as much as he tells the reader about the problems and issues in his life, he doesn’t mention the two largest challenges of his private life: Zelda’s mental illness and his own alcoholism. For some reason, he kept those challenges to himself.
Letters to His Daughter is a fascinating look at F. Scott Fitzgerald during what would be the last years of his life, and the reader cannot help but feel a sadness when Fitzgerald’s life was cut short by a heart attack at age 44.
