Sunday, February 17, 2013

John Dos Passos Writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Biblioklept

Why Scott?you poor miserable bastard, it was damn handsome of you to write me. Had just heard about your shoulder and was on the edge of writing when I got your letter. Must be damned painful and annoying. Let us know how you are. Katy sends love and condolences. We often talk about you and wish we could get to see you.

I?ve been wanting to see you, naturally, to argue about your Esquire?articles [The Crack-Up]?Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? If you don?t want to do stuff on your own, why not get a reporting job somewhere. After all not many people write as well as you do. Here you?ve gone and spent forty years in perfecting an elegant and complicated piece of machinery (tool I was going to say) and the next forty years is the time to use it?or as long as the murderous forces of history will let you. God damn it, I feel frightful myself?I have that false Etruscan feeling of sitting on my tail at home while etcetera etcetera is on the march to Rome ?but I have two things laid out I want to finish up and I?m trying to take a course in American history and most of the time the course of world events seems so frightful that I feel absolutely paralysed?and the feeling that I?ve got to hurry to get stuff out before the big boys close down on us. We?re living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history?if you want to go to pieces I think it?s absolutely O. K. but I think you ought to write a first rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich?and anyway, in pieces or not, I wish I could get an hour?s talk with you now and then, Scott, and damn sorry about the shoulder. Forgive the locker room peptalk.

Yrs, Dos.

(1936; republished in New Directions? edition of?The Crack-Up).

Source: http://biblioklept.org/2013/02/16/john-dos-passos-writes-f-scott-fitzgerald/

breaking dawn part 2 breaking dawn part 2 Jennifer Lacy Honey Baked Ham hostess israel AMA

No comments:

Post a Comment