F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Autobiography PDF

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rZGERALD A Short Autobiography Edited by James L. W. West III ^ 1 oal An fi m the r hat oe eh ty ns, and dro r.\ ew s prooe eveali ^ a ^ |»r. Drew t eliW':Ji| ok;';4itWs;«,-  m u \ « h- J' « ‘i 4  R0061478095 01/2012 F. Scott Fitzgerald A Short Autobiography Edited by James L. W. West III 1 ut PALM BEACH COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM 3650 Summit Boulevard West Palm Beach, FL 33406-4198 SCRIBNER New York London Toronto Sydney  SCRIBNER A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Introduction and compilation copyright © 2011 by James L. W. West III All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner trade paperback edition August 2011 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. The Simon 8t Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. DESIGNED BY ERICH MOBBING Manufactured in the United States of America 3579 10 8642 Library of Gongress Gataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-1-4391-9906-0 ISBN 978-1-4391-9907-7 (ebook)  Contents Preface vii Textual Note xiii Who’s Who—and Why (1920) 1 An Interview with Mr. Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920) 5 Three Cities (1921) 8 What I Think and Feel at 25 (1922) 11 Imagination—and a Few Mothers (1923) 25 How to Live on $36,000 a Year (1924) 35 How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year (1924) 51 "Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!” (1924) 72 How to Waste Material— A Note on My Generation (1926) 85 Princeton (1927) 92 A Short Autobiography (with acknowledgements to Nathan) (1929) 105 Girls Believe in Girls (1930) 109 Salesmanship in the Champs-Elysees (1930) 116 The Death of My Father (unfinished) {1931) 118 One Hundred False Starts (1933) 121 V  vi Contents Author’s House (1936) 133 Afternoon of an Author (1936) 141 An Author’s Mother (1936) 149 My Generation (1939/1940) 154 Annotations 163 Acknowledgments 195 About the Author 197  Preface “I have cleaner hands in the case of non-fiction than in fiction.” —Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, April 2, 1936 This book presents a selection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal writings from 1920 to 1940, the entire span of his professional career. He was a fine autobiographical writer, blessed with a supple style, a capacious memory, and a great fund of experience on which to draw. He wrote about himself with insight and humor, adopting poses and reinventing himself as the occasion required. In his earliest efforts he was exuberant and cocky, though unsure about how to manage his new fame; during his middle years he was serious and professional-minded, addressing problems of authorship and inspiration; in the late pieces he was reflective and elegiac, looking back on the Jazz Age, which he had named, with affection and only a few regrets. Twice during the last decade of his life, once in 1934 and again in 1936, Fitzgerald proposed a collection such as this one to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. “I have never published any personal stuff between covers because I have needed it all for my fiction,” Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins on May 15, 1934. vii  viii Preface “Nevertheless, a good many of my articles and random pieces have attracted a really quite wide attention.” Per¬ kins was skeptical about such a book and suggested that a volume of stories might sell more briskly. Fitzgerald obliged by assembling one of his best collections of short fiction, Taps at Reveille, which Scribner’s published in the spring of 1935, and which performed moderately well at the bookshops, selling some 5,000 copies. Fitzgerald did not, however, abandon the idea of put¬ ting together a collection of his personal writings. Fie again proposed such a book to Perkins in the spring of 1936, about a year after Taps at Reveille was published. “The greater part of these articles are intensely per¬ sonal,” he explained; “that is to say, while a newspaper man has to find something to write his daily or weekly article about, I have written articles entirely when the impetus came from within.” Perkins remained lukewarm: “You write non-fiction wonderfully well,” he said. “Your observations are brilliant and acute, and your presenta¬ tions of real characters... most admirable.” But Perkins had doubts about the appeal of such a collection to read¬ ers and suggested that Fitzgerald write a different kind of book, “a reminiscent book,—not autobiographical, but reminiscent.” Fitzgerald must have been intrigued by Perkins’ suggestion, but in the spring of 1936 he needed to invest his creative energies in producing stories for the high-paying magazines and, he hoped, in writing a new novel. Fie could not justify composing, from the ground up, the kind of book Perkins had in mind. Fitzgerald put the idea for a collection of personal writings on hold and did not mention it again in his letters to Perkins. In the summer of 1937 he departed from North Carolina, where he had been living, and traveled to the West Coast to take a scriptwriting job with Metro-Coldwyn-Mayer. He spent his last years in Hollywood and died there in  Preface IX December 1940, with a new novel called The Last Tycoon under way, but without having brought his autobiographi¬ cal writings together into a book. If Fitzgerald had been able to publish such a collec¬ tion, it would have given him a chance to reclaim con¬ trol of his public image. He had not worried much about that image during the early years of his career. He had always been depicted in the press as a handsome, tal¬ ented, successful young author. He and his wife, Zelda, had become celebrities; they had learned how to charm inter\4ewers and how to provide dependably good copy. During the 1930s, however, Fitzgerald’s relationship with the press deteriorated, reaching a low point on Septem¬ ber 25, 1936, when a reporter named Michel Mok pub¬ lished an expose of him in the New York Post. This piece, entitled “The Other Side of Paradise,” presented Fitzger¬ ald as a washed-up alcoholic, mired in self-pity. A col¬ lection of personal writings would have given Fitzgerald a chance to counter this image and present himself in a different light—as a mature and thoughtful literary artist. In 1945, five years after Fitzgerald’s death, his friend Edmund Wilson assembled a collection of the nonfiction and published it with New Directions under the title The Crack-Up. This volume was made up of late pieces, all composed during the final seven years of Fitzgerald’s life. To these writings Wilson added some selections from the notebooks, two collaborations with Zelda, and several letters from contemporaries praising Fitzgerald’s work. The Crack-Up presents Fitzgerald as an apologist for the 1920s, a chronicler of remorse and regret, and a student of failure and lost hope. There is nothing incorrect about this image, but it has come, perhaps unduly, to dominate writing and thinking about him. This is not the image that he wanted to present when he made his proposals to Perkins in 1934 and 1936.  X Preface The items in the present volume show another side of Fitzgerald—extroverted, witty, and very much in tune with his times. Many of these pieces emphasize his play¬ fulness and sense of fun. They also show his seriousness about the craft of writing and his acute interest in his contemporaries. Highlights include “Who’s Who—and Why,” “What I Think and Feel at 25,” and an amusing self-interrogation called “An Interview with Mr. Fitzger¬ ald,” all written early in his career to satisfy the curiosity of his public. “Princeton,” which draws on his years as a college student, is filled with mixed emotions: regret for his failures as an undergraduate mingled with admira¬ tion for what his university had come to represent. “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practi¬ cally Nothing a Year” are very funny essays about how money slips through the fingers of the newly prosperous. The mysteries of literary inspiration are explored in “One Hundred False Starts” and “Afternoon of an Author,” both addressed to anyone who aspires to make a living by put¬ ting words to paper. “The Death of My Father” is a medi¬ tation on the senior Fitzgerald, a man who represented for his son an earlier period of gentility and good man¬ ners. “A Short Autobiography” (a catalogue of potations imbibed) and “Salesmanship in the Champs-Elysees” (a take on the French and their droll ways) are amus¬ ing bagatelles. “My Generation,” written near the end of Fitzgerald’s life, is a lookback at the times through which he had lived and the people who had shaped his era. It’s worth mentioning that Fitzgerald wrote the items in this collection for money. He was a professional author with no other job, no trust fund, and no independent source of income. He made his way on what he earned with his pen. He kept a record of funds received in a per¬ sonal ledger: for the pieces published in this collection he was paid a total of $9,225. This sum translates into  Preface XI more than $100,000 in buying power today. Fitzgerald published these pieces in prominent outlets, including the New Yorker, The Bookman, the Saturday Evening Post, College Humor, American Magazine, Ladies’ Home Jour¬ nal, and Esquire. He knew how to reach his audience; he also knew how to be compensated for what he wrote. He wanted to make money and to be taken seriously— a difficult combination for any author to pull off. The pieces collected here are amusing to read but are also full of keen insights about American society, ambition and fame, the expatriate scene in Europe, and the literary life. One of the myths about Fitzgerald, a myth he some¬ times encouraged, was that he was quick and facile and that composition came easily to him. His manuscripts and typescripts tell a different story. He was rarely able to produce good writing spontaneously; usually he arrived at a publishable text only after much revising, cutting, polishing, and recasting. Preserved among his papers at Princeton are manuscripts and typescripts for most of the items in this collection. These documents testify to the work that Fitzgerald put into these pieces. For exam¬ ple, five typescripts in two different versions are extant for “Author’s House”; three variant typescripts survive for “Afternoon of an Author”; six typescripts, all bear¬ ing handwritten revisions, are preserved for “My Gen¬ eration.” Fitzgerald took pains with these pieces and released them for print only after much literary labor. Fitzgerald’s life ran parallel to the peaks and dips and spasms of American society. For him the 1910s were a hopeful time of striving and idealism; the 1920s were boom years filled with new pleasures; the 1930s were an extended period of reflection and retrenchment. He would have captured all of that in a personal memoir. If he had lived into the 1940s he would have had a great deal to say about that decade as well—a period during  xii Preface which his country went through a second great war, very different from the one in which he and his college class¬ mates had participated. A memoir by Fitzgerald would have been a brilliant performance, comparable to Ger¬ trude Stein’s The Autohiography of Alice B. Toklas and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It’s regrettable that Fitzgerald did not write such a book, but he did leave behind a substantial body of personal writing, from which the items in this collection have been taken. His writings about his own life retain their bite and freshness; they teach important lessons and offer insights into his professionalism and his genius. J.L.W.W. III Quotations in this preface are taken from Fitzgerald to Perkins, May 15, 1934, and April 2, 1936, and from Perkins to Fitzgerald, March 26, 1936. These letters are published in Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 197, 228-29.  Textual Note The texts for fifteen of the nineteen items in this collec¬ tion are taken from My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920- 1940, a volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 2005 by Cambridge Uni¬ versity Press. The texts in the Cambridge series have been newly established from original manuscripts, typescripts, and other materials in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University Fibrary. Passages excised by magazine editors for reasons of space have been restored. Fitzgerald’s char¬ acteristic pointing and word division have been followed, including his habit of occasionally omitting the comma that divides the two clauses of a compound sentence, his inconsistent use of the final comma in a series, and his habit of placing titles of books, newspapers, and other publications within quotation marks in order to reserve italics for emphasis. A full record of textual variants is included in the Cambridge volume, together with exten¬ sive explanatory notes, from which the annotations in the present volume are drawn. The texts of “An Inter¬ view with Mr. Fitzgerald,” “Three Cities,” “Salesmanship in the Champs-Elysees,” and “The Death of My Father” have been taken from their first periodical appearances. xiii  *. I 1. *. 1'. » — -j tl' I.{ iiir*- Mi -i. i-.*. i.*-(»«i > 'it. ’ -.1 f * t^nf;'i u/it ri< li.ujtflv Ml J :,' (. >1. If. My wife and I were married in New York in the spring of 1920, when prices were higher than they had been within the memory of man. In the light of after events it seems fitting that our career should have started at that precise point in time. I had just received a large check from the movies and I felt a little patronizing toward the millionaires riding down Fifth Avenue in their limousines—because my income had a way of doubling every month. This was actually the case. It had done so for several months— I had made only thirty-five dollars the previous August, while here in April I was making three thousand—and it seemed as if it was going to do so forever. At the end of the year it must reach half a million. Of course with such a state of affairs, economy seemed a waste of time. So we went to live at the most expensive hotel in New York, intending to wait there until enough money accumulated for a trip abroad. To make a long story short, after we had been mar¬ ried for three months I found one day to my horror that I didn’t have a dollar in the world, and the weekly hotel bill for two hundred dollars would be due next day. I remember the mixed feelings with which I issued from the bank on hearing the news. “What’s the matter?’’ demanded my wife anxiously, as I joined her on the sidewalk. “You look depressed.” “I’m not depressed,” I answered cheerfully; “I’m just surprised. We haven’t got any money.” “Haven’t got any money,” she repeated calmly, and we began to walk up the Avenue in a sort of trance. “Well, let’s go to the movies,” she suggested jovially. It all seemed so tranquil that I was not a bit cast down. The cashier had not even scowled at me. I had walked in and said to him, “How much money have I got?” And he had looked in a big book and answered, “None.”  A Short Autobiography 37 That was all. There were no harsh words, no blows. And I knew that there was nothing to worry about. I was now a successful author, and when successful authors ran out of money all they had to do was to sign checks. I wasn’t poor—they couldn’t fool me. Poverty meant being depressed and living in a small remote room and eating at a rotisserie on the corner, while I—^why, it was impos¬ sible that I should be poor! I was living at the best hotel in New York! My first step was to try to sell my only possession— my $1,000 bond. It was the first of many times I made the attempt. In all financial crises, I dig it out and with it go hopefully to the bank, supposing that, as it never fails to pay the proper interest, it has at last assumed a tan¬ gible value. But as I have never been able to sell it, it has gradually acquired the sacredness of a family heirloom. It is always referred to by my wife as “your bond,” and it was once turned in at the Subway offices after I left it by accident on a car seat! This particular crisis passed next morning when the discovery that publishers sometimes advance royalties sent me hurriedly to mine. So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave. For the first three years of our marriage our income averaged a little more than $20,000 a year. We indulged in such luxuries as a baby and a trip to Europe, and always money seemed to come easier and easier with less and less effort, until we felt that with just a little more margin to come and go on we could begin to save. We left the Middle West and moved east to a town about fifteen miles from New York, where we rented a house for $300 a month. We hired a nurse for $90 a  38 F. Scott Fitzgerald month; a man and his wife—they acted as butler, chauf¬ feur, yard man, cook, parlor maid and chambermaid— for $160 a month; and a laundress, who came twice a week, for $36 a month. This year of 1923, we told each other, was to be our saving year. We were going to earn $24,000, and live on $18,000, thus giving us a surplus of $6,000 with which to buy safety and security for our old age. We were going to do better at last. Now as everyone knows, when you want to do better you first buy a book and print your name in the front of it in capital letters. So my wife bought a book, and every bill that came to the house was carefully entered in it, so that we could watch living expenses and cut them away to almost nothing-—or at least to $1,500 a month. We had, however, reckoned without our town. It is one of those little towns springing up on all sides of New York which are built especially for those who have made money suddenly but have never had money before. My wife and I are, of course, members of this newly rich class. That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times sus¬ pected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed. Now when you say “newly rich” you picture a middle- aged and corpulent man who has a tendency to remove his collar at formal dinners and is in perpetual hot water with his ambitious wife and her titled friends. As a mem¬ ber of the newly rich class, I assure you that this pic¬ ture is entirely libelous. I myself, for example, am a mild, slightly used young man of twenty-seven, and what cor¬ pulence I may have developed is for the present a strictly confidential matter between my tailor and me. We once dined with a bona fide nobleman, but we were both far  A Short Autobiography 39 too frightened to take off our collars or even to demand corned beef and cabbage. Nevertheless we live in a town especially prepared for keeping money in circulation. When we came here, a year ago, there were, all together, seven merchants engaged in the purveyance of food—three grocers, three butchers and a fishman. But when the word went around in food-purveying circles that the town was filling up with the recently enriched as fast as houses could be built for them, the rush of butch¬ ers, grocers, fishmen and delicatessen men became enor¬ mous. Trainloads of them arrived daily with signs and scales in hand to stake out a claim and sprinkle sawdust upon it. It was like the gold rush of ’49, or a big bonanza of the ’70’s. Older and larger cities were denuded of their stores. Inside of a year eighteen food dealers had set up shop in our main street and might be seen any day wait¬ ing in their doorways with alluring and deceitful smiles. Hawng long been somewhat overcharged by the seven previous food purveyors we all naturally rushed to the new men, who made it known by large numerical signs in their windows that they intended practically to give food away. But once we were snared, the prices began to rise alarmingly, until all of us scurried like frightened mice from one new man to another, seeking only justice, and seeking it in vain. What had happened, of course, was that there were too many food purveyors for the population. It was abso¬ lutely impossible for eighteen of them to subsist on the town and at the same time charge moderate prices. So each was waiting for some of the others to give up and move away; meanwhile the only way the rest of them could carry their loans from the bank was by selling things at two or three times the prices in the city fifteen miles away. And that is how our town became the most expensive one in the world.  40 F. Scott Fitzgerald Now in magazine articles people always get together and found community stores, but none of us would con¬ sider such a step. It would absolutely ruin us with our neighbors, who would suspect that we actually cared about our money. When I suggested one day to a local lady of wealth—whose husband, by the way, is reputed to have made his money by vending illicit liquids—that I start a community store known as “F. Scott Fitzgerald—Fresh Meats,” she was horrified. So the idea was abandoned. But in spite of the groceries, we began the year in high hopes. My first play was to be presented in the autumn, and even if living in the East forced our expenses a little over $1,500 a month, the play would easily make up for the difference. We knew what colossal sums were earned on play royalties, and just to be sure, we asked several playwrights what was the maximum that could be earned on a year’s run. I never allowed myself to be rash. I took a sum halfway between the maximum and the minimum, and put that down as what we could fairly count on its earning. I think my figures came to about $100,000. It was a pleasant year; we always had this delightful event of the play to look forward to. When the play suc¬ ceeded we could buy a house, and saving money would be so easy that we could do it blindfolded with both hands tied behind our backs. As if in happy anticipation we had a small windfall in March from an unexpected source—a moving picture— and for almost the first time in our lives we had enough surplus to buy some bonds. Of course we had “my” bond, and every six months I clipped the little coupon and cashed it, but we were so used to it that we never counted it as money. It was simply a warning never to tie up cash where we couldn’t get at it in time of need. No, the thing to buy was Liberty Bonds, and we bought four of them. It was a very exciting business. I descended  A Short Autobiography 41 to a shining and impressive room downstairs, and under the chaperonage of a guard deposited my $4,000 in Lib¬ erty Bonds, together with “my” bond, in a little tin box to which I alone had the key. I left the bank, feeling decidedly solid. I had at last accumulated a capital. I hadn’t exactly accumulated it, but there it was anyhow, and if I had died next day it would have yielded my wife $212 a year for life—or for just as long as she cared to live on that amount. “That,” I said to myself with some satisfaction, “is what is called providing for the wife and children. Now all I have to do is to deposit the $100,000 from my play and then we’re through with worry forever.” I found that from this time on I had less tendency to worry about current expenses. What if we did spend a few hundred too much now and then? What if our gro¬ cery bills did vary mysteriously from $85 to $ 165 a month, according as to how closely we watched the kitchen? Didn’t I have bonds in the bank? Trying to keep under $1,500 a month the way things were going was merely niggardly. We were going to save on a scale that would make such petty economies seem like counting pennies. The coupons on “my” bond are always sent to an office on lower Broadway. Where Liberty Bond coupons are sent I never had a chance to find out, as I didn’t have the pleasure of clipping any. Two of them I was unfortu¬ nately compelled to dispose of just one month after I first locked them up. I had begun a new novel, you see, and it occurred to me it would be much better business in the end to keep at the novel and live on the Liberty Bonds while I was writing it. Unfortunately the novel progressed slowly, while the Liberty Bonds went at an alarming rate of speed. The novel was interrupted whenever there was any sound above a whisper in the house, while the Lib¬ erty Bonds were never interrupted at all.  42 F. Scott Fitzgerald And the summer drifted too. It was an exquisite sum¬ mer and it became a habit with many world-weary New Yorkers to pass their weekends at the Fitzgerald house in the country. Along near the end of a balmy and insidious August I realized with a shock that only three chapters of my novel were done—and in the little tin safety-deposit vault, only “my" bond remained. There it lay—paying storage on itself and a few dollars more. But never mind; in a little while the box would be bursting with savings. I'd have to hire a twin box next door. But the play was going into rehearsal in two months. To tide over the interval there were two courses open to me—I could sit down and write some short stories or I could continue to work on the novel and borrow the money to live on. Lulled into a sense of security by our sanguine anticipations I decided on the latter course, and my publishers lent me enough to pay our bills until the opening night. So I went back to my novel, and the months and money melted away; but one morning in October I sat in the cold interior of a New York theatre and heard the cast read through the first act of my play. It was magnifi¬ cent; my estimate had been too low. I could almost hear the people scrambling for seats, hear the ghostly voices of the movie magnates as they bid against one another for the picture rights. The novel was now laid aside; my days were spent at the theatre and my nights in revising and improving the two or three little weak spots in what was to be the success of the year. The time approached and life became a breathless affair. The November bills came in, were glanced at, and punched onto a bill file on the bookcase. More important questions were in the air. A disgusted letter arrived from an editor telling me I had written only two short stories  A Short Autobiography 43 during the entire year. But what did that matter? The main thing was that our second comedian got the wrong intonation in his first-act exit line. The play opened in Atlantic City in November. It was a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out; people rustled their programs and talked audibly in bored impatient whispers. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors strug¬ gled heroically on. There was a fruitless week of patching and revising, and then we gave up and came home. To my profound astonishment the year, the great year, was almost over. I was $5,000 in debt, and my one idea was to get in touch with a reliable poorhouse where we could hire a room and bath for nothing a week. But one satisfaction nobody could take from us. We had spent $36,000, and pur¬ chased for one year the right to be members of the newly rich class. What more can money buy? The first move, of course, was to get out “my” bond, take it to the bank and offer it for sale. A very nice old man at a shining table was firm as to its value as security, but he promised that if I became overdrawn he would call me up on the phone and give me a chance to make good. No, he never went to lunch with depositors. He considered writers a shiftless class, he said, and assured me that the whole bank was absolutely burglarproof from cellar to roof. Too discouraged even to put the bond back in the now yawning deposit box, I tucked it gloomily into my pocket and went home. There was no help for it—I must go to work. I had exhausted my resources and there was noth¬ ing else to do. In the train I listed all our possessions on which, if it came to that, we could possibly raise money. Here is the list;  44 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1 Oil stove, damaged. 9 Electric lamps, all varieties. 2 Bookcases with books to match. 1 Cigarette humidor, made by a convict. 2 Framed crayon portraits of my wife and me. 1 Medium-priced automobile, 1921 model. 1 Bond, par value $1,000; actual value unknown. “Let’s cut down expenses right away,” began my wife when I reached home. “There’s a new grocery in town where you pay cash and everything costs only half what it does anywhere else. I can take the car every morning and—” “Cash!” I began to laugh at this. “Cash!” The one thing it was impossible for us to do now was to pay cash. It was too late to pay cash. We had no cash to pay. We should rather have gone down on our knees and thanked the butcher and grocer for letting us charge. An enormous economic fact became clear to me at that moment—the rarity of cash, the latitude of choice that cash allows. “Well,” she remarked thoughtfully, “that’s too bad. But at least we don’t need three servants. We’ll get a Japanese to do general housework, and I’ll be nurse for awhile until you get us out of danger.” “Let them go?” I demanded incredulously. “But we can’t let them go! We’d have to pay them an extra two weeks each. Why, to get them out of the house would cost us $125—in cash! Besides, it’s nice to have the butler; if we have an awful smash we can send him up to New York to hold us a place in the bread line.” “Well, then, how can we economize?” “We can’t. We’re too poor to economize. Economy is a luxury. We could have economized last summer—but now our only salvation is in extravagance.”  A Short Autobiography 45 “How about a smaller house?” “Impossible! Moving is the most expensive thing in the world; and besides, I couldn’t work during the confusion. No,” I went on, “I’ll just have to get out of this mess the only way I know how, by making more money. Then when we’ve got something in the bank we can decide what we’d better do.” Over our garage is a large bare room whither I now retired with pencil, paper and the oil stove, emerging the next afternoon at five o’clock with a 7,000-word story. That was something; it would pay the rent and last month’s overdue bills. It took twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class, but within that time we had paid our debts, and the cause for immediate worry was over. But I was far from satisfied with the whole affair. A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent con¬ dition of life. 1 wanted to find out where the $36,000 had gone. Thirty-six thousand is not very wealthy—not yacht-and- Palm-Beach wealthy—but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36,000 had bought nothing at all. So I dug up my miscellaneous account books, and my wife dug up her complete household record for the year 1923, and we made out the monthly average. Here it is: HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES APPORTIONED PER MONTH Income tax.$198.00 Food.. 202.00 Rent.. 300.00  46 F. Scott Fitzgerald Coal, wood, ice, gas, light, phone and water.114.50 Servants.295.00 Golf clubs.105.50 Clothes—three people.158.00 Doctor and dentist. 42.50 Drugs and cigarettes. 32.50 Automobile. 25.00 Books. 14.50 All other household expenses.112.50 Total.$1,600.00 “Well, that’s not bad,” we thought when we had got thus far. “Some of the items are pretty high, especially food and servants. But there’s about everything accounted for, and it’s only a little more than half our income.” Then we worked out the average monthly expendi¬ tures that could be included under pleasure. Hotel bills—this meant spending the night or charging meals in New York.$51.00 Trips—only two, but apportioned per month. 43.00 Theatre tickets. 55.00 Barber and hairdresser. 25.00 Charity and loans. 15.00 Taxis. 15.00 Gambling—this dark heading covers bridge, craps and football bets. 33.00 Restaurant parties. 70.00 Entertaining. 70.00 Miscellaneous. 23.00 Total.$400.00 Some of these items were pretty high. They will seem higher to a Westerner than to a New Yorker. Fifty-five  A Short Autobiography 47 dollars for theatre tickets means between three and five shows a month, depending on the type of show and how long it’s been running. Football games are also included in this, as well as ringside seats to the Dempsey-Firpo fight. As for the amount marked “restaurant parties’’—$70 would perhaps take three couples to a popular after¬ theatre cabaret—but it would be a close shave. We added the items marked “pleasure” to the items marked “household expenses,” and obtained a monthly total. “Fine,” I said. “Just $3,000. Now at least we’ll know where to cut down, because we know where it goes.” She frowned; then a puzzled, awed expression passed over her face. “What’s the matter?” I demanded. “Isn’t it all right? Are some of the items wrong?” “It isn’t the items,” she said staggeringly; “it’s the total. This only adds up to $2,000 a month.” I was incredulous, but she nodded. “But listen,” I protested; “my bank statements show that we’ve spent $3,000 a month. You don’t mean to say that eveiy^ month we lose $1,000?” “This only adds up to $2,000,” she protested, “so we must have.” “Give me the pencil.” For an hour I worked over the accounts in silence, but to no avail. “Why, this is impossible!” I insisted. “People don’t lose $12,000 in a year. It’s just—it’s just missing.” There was a ring at the doorbell and I walked over to answer it, still dazed by these figures. It was the Bank- lands, our neighbors from over the way. “Good heavens!” I announced. “We’ve just lost $ 12,000!” Bankland stepped back alertly. “Burglars?” he inquired.  48 F. Scott Fitzgerald “Ghosts,” answered my wife. Mrs. Bankland looked nervously around. “Really?” We explained the situation, the mysterious third of our income that had vanished into thin air. “Well, what we do,” said Mrs. Bankland, “is, we have a budget.” “We have a budget,” agreed Bankland, “and we stick absolutely to it. If the skies fall we don’t go over any item of that budget. That’s the only way to live sensibly and save money.” “That’s what we ought to do,” I agreed. Mrs. Bankland nodded enthusiastically. “It’s a wonderful scheme,” she went on. “We make a certain deposit every month, and all I save on it I can have for myself to do anything I want with.” I could see that my own wife was visibly excited. “That’s what I want to do,” she broke out suddenly. “Have a budget. Everybody does it that has any sense.” “I pity anyone that doesn’t use that system,” said Bank- land solemnly. “Think of the inducement to economy— the extra money my wife’ll have for clothes.” “How much have you saved so far?” my wife inquired eagerly of Mrs. Bankland. “So far?” repeated Mrs. Bankland. “Oh, I haven’t had a chance so far. You see we only began the system yes¬ terday.” “Yesterday!” we cried. “Just yesterday,” agreed Bankland darkly. “But I wish to heaven I’d started it a year ago. I’ve been working over our accounts all week, and do you know, Fitzgerald, every month there’s $2,000 I can’t account for to save my soul.”  A Short Autobiography 49 Our financial troubles are now over. We have perma¬ nently left the newly rich class and installed the budget system. It is simple and sensible, and I can explain it to you in a few words. You consider your income as an enor¬ mous pie all cut up into slices, each slice representing one class of expenses. Somebody has worked it all out; so you know just what proportion of your income you can spend on each slice. There is even a slice for founding universities, if you go in for that. For instance, the amount you spend on the theatre should be half your drug-store bill. This will enable us to see one play every five and a half months, or two and a half plays a year. We have already picked out the first one, but if it isn’t running five and a half months from now we shall be that much ahead. Our allowance for news¬ papers should be only a quarter of what we spend on self-improvement, so we are considering whether to get the Sunday paper once a month or to subscribe for an almanac. According to the budget we will be allowed only three-quarters of a servant, so we are on the lookout for a one-legged cook who can come six days a week. And apparently the author of the budget book lives in a town where you can still go to the movies for a nickel and get a shave for a dime. But we are going to give up the expen¬ diture called “Foreign missions, etc.,” and apply it to the life of crime instead. Altogether, outside of the fact that there is no slice allowed for “missing” it seems to be a very complete book, and according to the testimonials in the back, if we make $36,000 again this year, the chances are that we’ll save at least $35,000. “But we can’t get any of that first $36,000 back,” I complained around the house. “If we just had something to show for it I wouldn’t feel so absurd.”  50 F. Scott Fitzgerald My wife thought a long while. “The only thing you can do,” she said finally, “is to write a magazine article and call it ‘How to Live on $36,000 a Year.’” “What a silly suggestion!” I replied coldly. —Saturday Evening Post, April 5, 1924  How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year I “All right,” I said hopefully, “what did it come to for the month?” “Two thousand three hundred and twenty dollars and eighty-two cents.” It was the fifth of five long months during which we had tried by every device we knew of to bring the figure of our expenditures safely below the figure of our income. We had succeeded in buying less clothes, less food and fewer luxuries—in fact, we had succeeded in everything except in saving money. “Let’s give up,” said my wife gloomily. “Look—here’s another bill 1 haven’t even opened.” “It isn’t a bill—it’s got a French stamp.” It was a letter. I read it aloud and when I finished we looked at each other in a wild expectant way. “I don’t see why everybody doesn’t come over here,” it said. “I am now writing from a little inn in France where I just had a meal fit for a king, washed down with cham¬ pagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents. It costs about one-tenth as much to live over here. From where I sit I can see the smoky peaks of the Alps rising behind a town that was old before Alexander the Great was born—” 51  52 F. Scott Fitzgerald By the time we had read the letter for the third time we were in our car bound for New York. As we rushed into the steamship office half an hour later, overturning a rolltop desk and bumping an office boy up against the wall, the agent looked up with mild surprise. “Don’t utter a word,” he said. “You’re the twelfth this morning and I understand. You’ve just got a letter from a friend in Europe telling you how cheap everything is and you want to sail right away. How many?” “One child,” we told him breathlessly. “Good!” he exclaimed, spreading out a deck of cards on his flat table. “The suits read that you are going on a long unexpected journey, that you have illness ahead of you and that you will soon meet a number of dark men and women who mean you no good.” As we threw him heavily from the window his voice floated up to us from somewhere between the sixteenth story and the street: ‘You sail one week from tomorrow.” II Now when a family goes abroad to economize, they don’t go to the Wembley exhibition or the Olympic games—in fact they don’t go to London and Paris at all but hasten to the Riviera, which is the southern coast of France and which is reputed to be the cheapest as well as the most beautiful locality in the world. Moreover we were going to the Riviera out of season, which is something like going to Palm Beach for July. When the Riviera season finishes in late spring, all the wealthy British and Americans move up to Deauville and Trouville, and all the gambling houses and fashionable milliners and jewelers and second-story men close up their establishments and follow their quarry  A Short Autobiography 53 north. Immediately prices fall. The native Rivierans, who have been living on rice and fish all winter, come out of their caves and buy a bottle of red wine and splash about for a bit in their own blue sea. For two reformed spendthrifts the Riviera in summer had exactly the right sound. So we put our house in the hands of six real-estate agents and steamed off to France amid the deafening applause of a crowd of friends on the dock—both of whom waved wildly until we were out of sight. We felt that we had escaped—from extravagance and clamor and from all the wild extremes among which we had dwelt for five hectic years, from the tradesman who laid for us and the nurse who bullied us and the “couple” who kept our house for us and knew us all too well. We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives, with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever,—and with a capital of just over seven thousand dollars. The sun coming through high French windows woke us one week later. Outside we could hear the high clear honk of strange auto-horns and we remembered that we were in Paris. The baby was already sitting up in her cot ringing the bells which summoned the different/owctiow- naires of the hotel as though she had determined to start the day immediately. It was indeed her day, for we were in Paris for no other reason than to get her a nurse. “Entrez!” we shouted together as there was a knock at the door. A handsome waiter opened it and stepped inside whereupon our child ceased her harmonizing upon the bells and regarded him with marked disfavor. “Iss a madamoselle who waited out in the street,” he remarked. “Speak French,” I said sternly. “We’re all French here.”  54 F. Scott Fitzgerald He spoke French for some time. “All right,” I interrupted after a moment. “Now say that again very slowly in English; I didn’t quite understand.” “His name’s Entrez,” remarked the baby helpfully. “Be that as it may,” I flared up, “his French strikes me as very bad.” We discovered finally that an English governess was outside to answer our advertisement in the paper. “Tell her to come in.” After an interval a tall, languid person in a Rue de la Paix hat strolled into the room and we tried to look as dig¬ nified as is possible when sitting up in bed. “You’re Americans?” she said, seating herself with scornful care. “Yes.” “I understand you want a nurse. Is this the child?” Yes, maam. (Here is some high-born lady of the English court, we thought, in temporarily reduced circumstances.) “I’ve had a great deal of experience,” she said, advanc¬ ing upon our child and attempting unsuccessfully to take her hand. “I’m practically a trained nurse; I’m a lady born and I never complain.” “Complain of what?” demanded my wife. The applicant waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, the food, for example.” “Eook here,” I asked suspiciously, “before we go any further, let me ask what salary you’ve been getting.” “For you,” she hesitated, “one hundred dollars a month.” “Oh, you wouldn’t have to do the cooking too,” we assured her; “it’s just to take care of one child.” She arose and adjusted her feather boa with fine scorn. “You’d better get a French nurse,” she said, “if you’re that kind of people. She won’t open the windows at night  A Short Autobiography 55 and your baby will never learn tbe Freneh word for ‘tub’ but you’ll only bave to pay ber ten dollars a month.” “Good-bye,” we said together. “I’ll come for fifty.” “Good-bye,” we repeated. “For forty,—and I’ll do the baby’s washing.” “We wouldn’t take you for your board.” The hotel trembled slightly as she closed the door. “Where’s the lady gone?” asked our child. “She’s hunting Americans,” we said. “She looked in the hotel register and thought she saw Ghicago written after our names.” We are always witty like that with the baby—she con¬ siders us the most amusing couple she has ever known. After breakfast I went to the Paris branch of our Amer¬ ican bank to get money, but I had no sooner entered it than I wished myself at the hotel, or at least that I had gone in by the back way, for I had evidently been recog¬ nized and an enormous crowd began to gather outside. The crowd grew and I considered going to the window and making them a speech but I thought that might only increase the disturbance so I looked around intending to ask someone’s advice. I recognized no one, however, except one of the bank officials and a Mr. and Mrs. Doug¬ las Fairbanks from America, who were buying francs at a counter in the rear. So I decided not to show myself and, sure enough, by the time I had cashed my check the crowd had given up and melted away. I think now that we did well to get away from Paris in nine days—which, after all, was only a week more than we had intended. Every morning a new boat-load of Americans poured into the boulevards and every after¬ noon our room at the hotel was filled with familiar faces until, except that there was no faint taste of wood-alcohol in the refreshments, we might have been in New York. But  56 F. Scott Fitzgerald at last, with six thousand five hundred dollars remaining and with an English nurse whom we engaged for twenty- six dollars a month, we boarded the train for the Riviera, the hot sweet South of France. When your eyes first fall upon the Mediterranean you know at once why it was here that man first stood erect and stretched out his arms toward the sun. It is a blue sea—or rather it is too blue for that hackneyed phrase which has described every muddy pool from pole to pole. It is the fairy blue of Maxfield Parrish’s pictures, blue like blue books, blue oil, blue eyes, and in the shadow of the mountains a green belt of land runs along the coast for a hundred miles and makes a playground for the world. The Riviera! The names of its resorts, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, call up the memory of a hundred kings and princes who have lost their thrones and come here to die, of mysterious rajahs and beys flinging blue diamonds to English dancing girls, of Russian millionaires tossing away fortunes at roulette in the lost caviar days before the war. From Charles Dickens to Catherine de Medici, from Prince Edward of Wales in the height of his popularity to Oscar Wilde in the depth of his disgrace, the whole world has come here to forget or to rejoice, to hide its face or have its fling, to build white palaces out of the spoils of oppression or to write the books which some¬ times batter those palaces down. Under striped awnings beside the sea grand dukes and gamblers and diplomats and noble courtesans and Balkan czars smoked their slow cigarettes while 1913 drifted into 1914 without a quiver of the calendar, and the fury gathered in the north that was to sweep three-fourths of them away. We reached Hyeres, the town of our destination, in the blazing noon, aware immediately of the tropic’s breath as it oozed out of the massed pines. A cabby with a large  A Short Autobiography 57 egg-shaped carbuncle in the center of his forehead strug¬ gled with a uniformed hotel porter for the possession of our grips. “Je suis a stranger here,” I said in flawless French. “Je veux aller to le best hotel dans le town.” The porter pointed to an imposing autobus in the sta¬ tion drive. On the side was painted “Grand Hotel de Paris et de Rome.” “Which is the best?” I asked. For answer he picked up our heaviest grip, balanced it a moment in his hand, hit the cabby a crashing blow on the forehead—I immediately understood the gradual growth of the carbuncle—and then pressed us firmly toward the car. I tossed several nickels—or rather francs—upon the prostrate carbuncular man. “Isn’t it hot,” remarked the nurse. “I like it very much indeed,” I responded, mopping my forehead and attempting a cool smile. I felt that the moral responsibility was with me—I had picked out Hyeres for no more reason than that a friend had once spent a win¬ ter there. Besides we hadn’t come here to keep cool—we had come here to economize, to live on practically noth¬ ing a year. “Nevertheless, it’s hot,” said my wife, and a moment later the child shouted “Coat off!” in no uncertain voice. “He must think we want to see the town,” I said when, after driving for a mile along a palm-lined road, we stopped in an ancient, Mexican-looking square. “Hold on!” This last was in alarm for he was hurriedly disembark¬ ing our baggage in front of a dilapidated quick-lunch emporium. On a ragged awning over its door were the words “Grand Hotel de Paris et de Rome.” “Is this a joke?” I demanded. “Did I tell you to go to the best hotel in town?” “Here it is,” he said.  58 F. Scott Fitzgerald “No it isn’t. This is the worst one. This is the worst hotel I ever saw.” “I am the proprietor,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got a baby here”—the nurse oblig¬ ingly held up the baby—“and we want a more modern hotel, with a bath.” “We have a bath.” “I mean a private bath.” “We will not use while you are here. All the big hotels have shut up themselves for during the summer.” “I don’t believe him for a minute,” said my wife. I looked around helplessly. Two scanty, hungry women had come out of the door and were looking voraciously at our baggage. Suddenly I heard the sound of slow hoofs and glancing up I beheld the carbuncular man driving disconsolately up the dusty street. “What’s le best hotel dans le town?” I shouted at him. “Non, non, non, non!” he cried, waving his reins excit¬ edly. “Jardin Hotel open!” As the proprietor of the Grand Hotel of Paris and of Rome dropped my grip and started toward the cabby at a run, I turned to the hungry women accusingly. “What do you mean by having a bus like this?” I demanded. I felt very American and superior; I intimated that if the morals of the French people were in this decadent state I regretted that we had ever entered the war. “Daddy’s hot too,” remarked the baby irrelevantly. “I am not hot!” “Daddy had better stop talking and find us a hotel,” remarked the English nurse, “before we all melt away.” It was the work of but an hour to pay off the proprietor of the Hotel de Paris et de Rome, to add damages for his wounded feelings and to install ourselves in the Hotel du Jardin, on the edge of town.  A Short Autobiography 59 “Hyeres,” says my guidebook, “is the very oldest and warmest of the Riviera winter resorts and is now fre¬ quented almost exclusively by the English.” But when we arrived there late in May, even the English, except the very oldest and warmest, had moved away. The Hotel du Jardin bore traces of having been inhabited—the halls were littered with innumerable old copies of the “Illus¬ trated London News”—but now, as we found at dinner, only a superannuated dozen, a slowly decaying dozen, a solemn and dispirited dozen remained. But we were to be there merely while we searched for a villa, and it had the advantage of being amazingly cheap for a first-class hotel—the rate for four of us, including meals, was one hundred and fifty francs, less than eight dollars a day. The real-estate agent, an energetic young gentleman with his pants buttoned snugly around his chest, called on us next morning. “Dozens of villas,” he said enthusiastically. “We will take the horse and buggy and go see.” It was a simmering morning, but the streets already swarmed with the faces of Southern France—dark faces, for there is an Arab streak along the Riviera, left from turbulent, forgotten centuries. Once the Moors harried the coast for gain, and later, as they swept up through Spain in mad glory, they threw out frontier towns along the shores as outposts for their conquest of the world. They were not the first people, or the last, that have tried to overrun France—all that remains now for proud Mos¬ lem hopes is an occasional Moorish tower and the tragic glint of black Eastern eyes. “Now this villa rents for thirty dollars a month,” said the real-estate agent as we stopped at a small house on the edge of town. “What’s the matter with it?” asked my wife suspiciously.  60 F. Scott Fitzgerald “Nothing at all. It is superb. It has six rooms and a well.” “A well?” “A hne well.” “Do you mean it has no bathroom?” “Not what you would call an actual bathroom.” “Drive on,” we said. It was obvious by noon that there were no villas to be let in Hyeres. They were all too hot, too small, too dirty, or too triste, an expressive word which implies that the mad marquis still walks through the halls in his shroud. “Yes, we have no villas today,” remarked the agent, smiling. “That’s a very old played-out joke,” I said, “and I am too hot to laugh.” Our clothes were hanging on us like wet towels but when I had established our identity by a scar on my left hand we were admitted to the hotel. I decided to ask one of the lingering Englishmen if there was perhaps another quiet town nearby. Now, asking something of an American or a French¬ man is a definite thing—the only difference is that you can understand the American’s reply. But getting an answer from an Englishman is about as complicated as borrowing a match from the Secretary of State. The first one I approached dropped his paper, looked at me in hor¬ ror and bolted precipitately from the room. This discon¬ certed me for a moment but luckily my eyes fell on a man whom I had seen being wheeled in to dinner. “Good morning,” I said. “Could you tell me—” He jerked spasmodically, but to my relief, he was unable to leave his seat. “I wonder if you know a town where I could get a villa for the summer.” “Don’t know any at all,” he said coldly. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”  A Short Autobiography 61 He didn’t exactly pronounce the last sentence but I could read the words as they issued from his eyes. “I suppose you’re a newcomer too,” I suggested. “I’ve been here every winter for sixteen years. ” Pretending to detect an invitation in this, I drew up my chair. “Then you must know some town,” I assured him. “Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo.” “But they’re too expensive. I want a quiet place to do a lot of work.” “Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. All quiet in summer. Don’t know any others. Wouldn’t tell you if I did. Good day.” Upstairs the nurse was counting the mosquito bites on the baby, all received during the night, and my wife was adding them up in a big book. “Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo,” I said. “I’m glad we’re going to leave this broiling town,” remarked the nurse. “I think we’d better try Cannes.” “I think so too,” said my wife eagerly. “I hear it’s very gay—I mean, it’s no economy to stay where you can’t work, and I don’t believe we can get a villa here after all.” “Let’s go on the big boat,” said the baby suddenly. “Silence! We’ve come to the Riviera and we’re here to stay. So we decided to leave the nurse and baby in Hyeres and run up to Cannes, which is a more fashionable town in a more northerly situation along the shore. Now when you “run up” to somewhere, you have to have an automo¬ bile, so we bought the only new one in town next day. It had the power of six horses—the age of the horses was not stated—and it was so small that we loomed out of it like giants; so small that you could run it under the veran¬ dah for the night. It had no lock, no speedometer, no  62 F. Scott Fitzgerald gauge, and its cost, including the parcel-post charge, was seven hundred and fifty dollars. We started for Cannes in it and, except for the warm exhaust when other cars drove over us, we found the trip comparatively cool. All the celebrities of Europe have spent a season in Cannes—even the Man with the Iron Mask whiled away twelve years on an island off its shore. Its gorgeous vil¬ las are built of stone so soft that it is sawed instead of hewed. We looked at four of them next morning. They were small, neat and clean—^you could have matched them in any suburb of Los Angeles. They rented at sixty- five dollars a month. “I like them,” said my wife firmly. “Let’s rent one. They look awfully easy to run.” “We didn’t come abroad to find a house that was easy to run,” I objected. “How could I write looking out on a—” I glanced out the window and my eyes met a splen¬ did view of the sea, “—where I’d hear every whisper in the house.” So we moved on to the fourth villa, the wonderful fourth villa, the memory of which still causes me to lie awake and hope that some bright day will find me there. It rose in white marble out of a great hill, like a chateau, like a castle of old. The very taxi-cab that took us there had romance in its front seat. “Did you notice our driverT’ said the agent, leaning toward me. “He used to be a Russian millionaire.” We peered through the glass at him—a thin dispirited man who ordered the gears about with a lordly air. “The town is full of them,” said the agent. “They’re glad to get jobs as chauffeurs, butlers or waiters—the women work as femmes de chamhre in the hotels.” “Why don’t they open tea rooms like Americans do?” “Most of them aren’t fit for anything. We’re awfully sorry for them, but—” He leaned forward and tapped  A Short Autobiography 63 on the glass. “Would you mind driving a little faster? We haven’t got all day!” “Look,” he said when we reached the chateau on the hill. “There’s the Grand Duke Michael’s villa next door.” “You mean he’s the butler there?” “Oh, no. He’s got money. He’s gone north for the sum- mer. When we had entered through scrolled brass gates that creaked massively as gates should for a king, and when the blinds had been drawn we were in a high cen¬ tral hall hung with ancestral portraits of knights in armor and courtiers in satin and brocade. It was like a movie set. Flights of marble stairs rose in solid dignity to form a grand gallery into which light dropped through blue fig¬ ured glass upon a mosaic floor. It was modern too,—with huge clean beds and a model kitchen and three bath¬ rooms and a solemn, silent study overlooking the sea. “It belonged to a Russian general,” said the agent, “killed in Silesia during the war.” “How much is it?” “For the summer—one hundred and ten dollars a month.” “Done!” I said. “Fix up the lease right away. My wife will go to Hyeres immediately to get the—” “Just a minute,” she said, frowning. “How many ser¬ vants will it take to run this house?” “Why, I should say—” the agent glanced at us sharply and hesitated. “About five.” “I should say about eight.” She turned to me. “Let’s go to Newport and rent the Vanderbilt house instead.” “Remember,” said the agent, “you’ve got the Grand Duke Michael on your left.” “Will he come to see us?” I inquired. “He would, of course,” explained the agent, “only, you see, he’s gone away.”  64 F. Scott Fitzgerald We held debate upon the mosaic floor. My theory was that I couldn’t work in the little houses and that this would be a real investment because of its romantic inspi¬ ration. My wife’s theory was that eight servants eat a lot of food and that it simply wouldn’t do. We apologized to the agent, shook hands respectfully with the million¬ aire taxi-driver, and gave him five francs, and in a state of great dejection returned to Hyeres. “Here’s the hotel bill,” said my wife as we went despon¬ dently in to dinner. “Thank heaven it’s only fifty-five dollars.” I opened it. To my amazement, tax after tax had been added beneath the bill—government tax, city tax, a ten per cent tax to re-tip tbe servants and the special tax for Americans besides—and the fifty-five dollars had swol¬ len to one hundred and twenty-seven. I looked gloomily at a nameless piece of meat soaked in a lifeless gravy which reclined on my plate. “I think it’s goat’s meat,” said the nurse, following my eyes. She turned to my wife. “Did you ever taste goat’s meat, Mrs. Fitzgerald?” But Mrs. Fitzgerald had never tasted goat’s meat and Mrs. Fitzgerald had fled. As I wandered dismally about the hotel next day, hop¬ ing that our house on Long Island hadn’t been rented so that we could go home for the summer, I noticed that the halls were even more deserted than usual. There seemed to be more old copies of the “Illustrated London News” about, and more empty chairs. At dinner we had the goat again. As I looked around the empty dining room I sud¬ denly realized that the last Englishman had taken his cane and his conscience and fled to London. No wonder there was goat—it would have been a miracle had there been anything else but goat. The management was keep¬ ing open a two-hundred-room hotel for us alone!  A Short Autobiography 65 III Hyeres grew warmer and we rested there in a helpless daze. We knew now why Catherine de Medici had cho¬ sen it for her favorite resort. A month of it in the summer and she must have returned to Paris with a dozen St. Bar¬ tholomew’s sizzling in her head. In vain we took trips to Nice, to Antibes, to Ste. Maxime—we were worried now; a fourth of our seven thousand had slipped away. Then one morning just hve weeks after we had left New York we got off the train at a little town called St. Raphael that we had never considered before. It was a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it, carnival that would venture forth into the streets before night. We knew that we would love to live in it and we asked a citizen the whereabouts of the real-estate agency. “Ah, for that you had far better ask the King!” he exclaimed. A principality! A second Monaco! We had not known there were two of them along the French shore. “And a bank that will cash a letter of credit?” “For that, too, you must ask the King.” He pointed the way toward the palace down a long shady street, and my wife hurriedly produced a mirror and began powdering her face. “But our dusty clothes?” I said modestly. “Do you think the King will—” He considered. “I’m not sure about clothes,” he answered. “But I think—^yes, I think the King will attend to that for you too. I hadn’t meant that, but we thanked him and with much inward trepidation proceeded toward the imperial  66 F. Scott Fitzgerald domain. After half an hour, when royal turrets had failed to rise against the sky, I stopped another man. “Can you tell us the way to the imperial palace?” “The what?” “We want to get an interview with His Majesty—His Majesty the King.” The word “King” caught his attention. His mouth opened understandingly and he pointed to a sign over our heads: “W. F. King,” I read, “Anglo-American Bank, Real- Estate Agency, Railroad Tickets, Insurance, Tours and Excursions, Circulating Library.” The potentate turned out to be a brisk efficient Englishman of middle age who had gradually acquired St. Raphael to himself over a period of twenty years. “We are Americans come to Europe to economize,” I told him. “WeVe combed the Riviera from Nice to Hyeres and haven’t been able to find a villa. Meanwhile our money is leaking gradually away.” He leaned back and pressed a button and almost immediately a lean, gaunt woman appeared in the door. “This is Marthe,” he said, “your cook.” We could hardly believe our ears. “Do you mean you have a villa for us?” “I have already selected one,” he said. “My agents saw you getting off the train.” He pressed another button and a second woman stood respectfully beside the first. “This is Jeanne, your femme de chamhre. She does the mending, too, and waits on the table. You pay her thir¬ teen dollars a month and you pay Marthe sixteen dol¬ lars. Marthe does the marketing, however, and expects to make a little on the side for herself.” “But the villa?”— “The lease is being made out now. The price is seventy-  A Short Autobiography 67 nine dollars a month and your check is good with me. We move you in tomorrow.” Within an hour we had seen our home, a clean cool villa set in a large garden on a hill above town. It was what we had been looking for all along. There was a summerhouse and a sand pile and two bathrooms and roses for breakfast and a gardener who called me milord. When we had paid the rent, only thirty-five hundred dol¬ lars, half our original capital, remained. But we felt that at last we could begin to live on practically nothing a year. IV In the late afternoon of September 1st, 1924, a distin¬ guished-looking young man, accompanied by a young lady in a short, bright blue bathing suit, might have been seen lying on a sandy beach in France. Both of them were burned to a deep chocolate brown so that at first they seemed to be of Egyptian origin; but closer inspec¬ tion showed that their faces had an Aryan cast and that their voices, when they spoke, had a faintly nasal. North American ring. Near them played a small black child with cotton-white hair who from time to time beat a tin spoon upon a pail and shouted, “Regardez-moi!” in no uncertain voice. Out of the casino nearby drifted weird rococo music— a song dealing with the non-possession of a specific yellow fruit in a certain otherwise well-stocked store. Waiters, both Senegalese and European, rushed around among the bathers with many-colored drinks, pausing now and then to chase away the children of the poor, who were dressing and undressing with neither modesty nor self-consciousness, upon the sand.  68 F. Scott Fitzgerald “Hasn’t it been a good summer!” said the young man, lazily. “We’ve become absolutely French.” “And the French are such an aesthetic people,” said the young lady, listening for a moment to the banana music. “They know how to live. Think of all the nice things they have to eat!” “Delicious things! Heavenly things!” exclaimed the young man, spreading some American deviled ham on some biscuits marked Springfield, Illinois. “But then they’ve studied the food question for two thousand years.” “And things are so cheap here!” cried the young lady enthusiastically. “Think of perfume! Perfume that would cost fifteen dollars in New York, you can get here for five.” The young man struck a Swedish match and lit an American cigarette. “The trouble with most Americans in France,” he remarked sonorously, “is that they won’t lead a real French life. They hang around the big hotels and exchange opin¬ ions fresh from the States.” “I know,” she agreed. “That’s exactly what it said in the ‘New York Times’ this morning.” The American music ended and the English nurse arose, implying that it was time the child went home to supper. With a sigh, the young man arose too and shook himself violently, scattering a great quantity of sand. “We’ve got to stop on the way and get some Arizon-oil gasoline,” he said. “That last stuff was awful.” “The check, suh,” said a Senegalese waiter with an accent from well below the Mason-Dixon Line. “That’ll be ten francs fo’ two glasses of beer.” The young man handed him the equivalent of seventy cents in the gold-colored hat-checks of France. Beer was perhaps a little higher than in America, but then he had had the privilege of hearing the historic banana song on a real, or almost real, jazz band. And waiting for him at  A Short Autobiography 69 home was a regular French supper—baked beans from the quaint old Norman town of Akron, Ohio, an omelette fragrant with la Chicago bacon and a cup of English tea. But perhaps you have already recognized in these two cultured Europeans the same barbaric Americans who had left America just five months before. And perhaps you wonder that the change could have come about so quickly. The secret is that they had entered fully into the life of the Old World. Instead of patronizing “tourist” hotels they had made excursions to quaint little out-of- the-way restaurants, with the real Erench atmosphere, where supper for two rarely came to more than ten or fif¬ teen dollars. Not for them the glittering capitals—Paris, Brussels, Rome—they were content with short trips to beautiful historic old towns, such as Monte Carlo, where they once left their automobile with a kindly garage man who paid their hotel bill and bought them tickets home. Yes, our summer had been a complete success. And we had lived on practically nothing—that is, on practi¬ cally nothing except our original seven thousand dollars. It was all gone! The trouble is that we had come to the Riviera out of season,—that is, out of one season but in the middle of another. Eor in summer the people who are “trying to economize” come south and the shrewd Erench know that this class is the very easiest game of all—as people who are trying to get something for nothing are very liable to be. Exactly where the money went we don’t know—we never do. There were the servants for example; I was very fond of Marthe and Jeanne (and afterwards of their sis¬ ters Eugenie and Serpolette, who came in to help) but on my own initiative it would never have occurred to me to insure them all. Yet that was the law. If Jeanne suffo¬ cated in her mosquito netting, if Marthe tripped over a  70 F. Scott Fitzgerald bone and broke her thumb I was responsible. I wouldn’t have minded so much except that the “little on the side” that Marthe made in doing our marketing amounted, as 1 figure, to about forty-five per cent. Our weekly bills at the grocer’s and the butcher’s aver¬ aged sixty-five dollars—or higher than they had ever been in an expensive Long Island town. Whatever the meat actually cost it was almost invariably inedible, while as for the milk every drop of it had to be boiled because the cows were tubercular in France. For fresh vegetables we had tomatoes and a little asparagus, that was all—the only garlic that can be put over on us must be adminis¬ tered in sleep. I wondered often how the Riviera middle class—the bank clerk, say, who supports a family on from forty to seventy dollars a month—manages to keep alive. “It’s even worse in winter,” a little French girl told us on the beach. “The English and Americans drive the prices up until we can’t buy and we don’t know what to do. My sister had to go to Marseilles and find work and she’s only fourteen. Next winter I’ll go too.” There simply isn’t enough to go around—and the Amer¬ icans who, because of their own high standard of material comfort, want the best obtainable, naturally have to pay. And in addition, the sharp French tradesmen are always ready to take advantage of a careless American eye. “I don’t like this bill,” I said to the food-and-ice deliv¬ erer. “I arranged to pay you five francs and not eight francs a day.” He became unintelligible for a moment to gain time. “My wife added it up,” he said. Those valuable Riviera wives! Always they are adding up their husbands’ accounts and the dear ladies simply don’t know one figure from another. Such a talent in the wife of a railroad president would be an asset worth many million dollars.  A Short Autobiography 71 It is twilight as I write this and out of my window dark¬ ening banks of trees, set one clump behind another in many greens, slope down to the evening sea. The flaming sun has collapsed behind the peaks of the Esterels and the moon already hovers over the Roman aqueducts of Frejus, five miles away. In half an hour Renee and Bobbe, officers of aviation, are coming to dinner in their white ducks and Renee, who is only twenty-three and has never recovered from having missed the war, will tell us roman¬ tically how he wants to smoke opium in Peking and how he writes a few things “for myself alone.” Afterwards in the garden their white uniforms will grow dimmer as the more liquid dark comes down, until they, like the heavy roses and the nightingales in the pines, will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land. And though we have saved nothing we have danced the carmagnole and, except for the day when my wife took the mosquito lotion for a mouth wash and the time when I tried to smoke a French cigarette and, as Ring Fardner would say, “swooned,” we haven’t yet been sorry that we came. The dark-brown child is knocking at the door to bid me good-night. “Going on the big boat. Daddy?” she says in broken English. “No.” “Why?” “Because we’re going to try it for another year, and besides—think of perfume!” We are always like that with the baby. She considers us the wittiest couple she has ever known. —Saturday Evening Post, September 20, 1924  ‘'Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!'’ The original younger generation (I mean, of course, the one that burst forth back in 1919 and got itself thoroughly talked over) used to be periodically squelched with that ominous refrain. Well, the original younger generation are parents now. They are looking at the new world which has established itself out of the confusion of the war, and trying to decide just how their children’s education shall differ from their own. When I say education I mean the whole bag of hab¬ its and ideals and prejudices that children receive from their parents between the ages of two and sixteen. I mean more than that—I mean what my own father meant when he said one day that he hoped my life would be different from his. He wanted me to have a better equipment than he had with which to face the world. All parents want that for their children—except those so smug and self-satisfied that they hope their children will be exactly like themselves. For one parent who sits back at forty now and says to his offspring: “Look upon this perfect man (or woman) that the Lord made as an example for you”— There are three who believe the children should be an improvement on their parents, who want their children 72  A Short Autobiography 73 not to follow blindly in their steps but rather to profit by their mistakes. Now, ideals, conventions, even truth itself, are con¬ tinually changing things so that the milk of one genera¬ tion may be the poison of the next. The young Americans of my time have seen one of these transformations with their own eyes, and for this reason they will not make the initial mistake of trying to teach their children too much. Before a man is thirty he has already accumulated, along with a little wisdom, a great quantity of dust and rubbish in his mind, and the difficulty is to let the children profit by what is wise without unloading the dust and rubbish on them too. We can only try to do better at it than the last generation did—when a generation succeeds in doing it completely, in handing down all its discoveries and none of its delusions, its children shall inherit the earth. To begin with, my child will have to face conditions of which 1 am utterly unaware. He may live in a communist state or marry a girl from Mars or sit under an electric fan at the North Pole. Only one thing can 1 be sure of about the world in which he will live—it will not be as cheer¬ ful a world as the world into which 1 was born. Never had faith in the destiny of man reached such a height as during the nineties—seldom has it ebbed so low as it has now. When we see around us a great decay in ideals of conduct there is some fundamental cause behind it. It is impossible to be vicious in a vacuum. Something serious (which only professional evangelists, cheap novelists, and corrupt politicians profess to understand) is the matter with the world. It will be a strong heart that can fight its way upstream in these troubled waters and not be, like my generation, a bit cynical, a bit weary, and a bit sad. We have seen the war and its attendant ferocity, the hys¬ teria both of the communists and, over here, of the “100%  74 F. Scott Fitzgerald Americans,” the cheating of the wounded veterans, the administration corruption, the prohibition scandal—what wonder if we are almost afraid to open the newspapers in the morning lest our eyes fall on some new rift in civiliza¬ tion, some new vileness in the dark chamber which we call the human heart! On such a world our children are now opening their eyes. Not long ago I was in a room where lay a young mother whose first child had just been born. She was a young woman of exceptional culture and education who had always had the good things of this world and who can expect to have them until she dies. When she awakened from the ether she turned to the nurse with a question, and bending over her the nurse whispered: “You have a beautiful little girl.” “A girl?” The young mother’s eyes opened and then closed again. Suddenly she began to cry. “All right,” she said brokenly, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool!” Of course, despite everything, few of us are sick enough, or perhaps logical enough, for such pessimism. We do not want our daughters to be beautiful little fools or our sons to be mere “healthy animals,” despite the suf¬ fering that it might save them. More than that, we want them to have ideas above the bank book and the com¬ fortable bouse. We want them to be decent, honorable, and, if I can no longer conscientiously add law-abiding, at least capable of voting against laws which they cannot obey. I can imagine a young father born as I was in the mid¬ dle nineties talldng somewhat like this to his brand-new son: “I don’t want you to be like me,” he says, standing over the baby’s bed. “I want you to have time for the finer  A Short Autobiography 75 things in life. I want you to go into politics where not one man in ten has clean hands, and keep your hands clean. Or if you’re a business man 1 want you to be a better kind of business man than I am. Why, my son, except for a few detective stories, I haven’t read a book since I left college. My idea of amusement is to play golf or bridge with a lot of people just as dumb as I am, with a bottle of bootleg gin on the side so we won’t know how dull we are. I don’t know anything about science, or literature, or art, or architecture, or even economics. I believe everything I read in the papers, just like my janitor does. Except for my business I’m almost a half-wit, scarcely fit to vote— but I want you to be something better, and I’m going to give you a chance, so help me God.” Now, that isn’t at all what his own father said to him way back in 1896. The older man probably talked some¬ thing like this: “I want you to be a success. I want you to work hard and make a lot of money. Don’t let anybody cheat you, and don’t cheat anybody else, or you’ll get put in jail. Remem¬ ber, you’re an American”—(here substitute Englishman, Frenchman, or German, for the same speech was being made in many languages)—“and we’re much better than any other race, so just remember that everything we don’t believe right here in this nation is pretty sure to be wrong. I went to college and I read the papers, so I ought to know.” You recognize this? It is the philosophy of the nine¬ teenth century, the philosophy of personal selfishness and national conceit that led to the Great War and was indirectly responsible for the bloody deaths of many mil¬ lion young men. At any rate, the new baby, our baby, starts out with something a little different. Having been in the war, and perhaps seen actual fighting, his father doesn’t hate the  76 F. Scott Fitzgerald Germans—he leaves that to the non-combatants—and maybe he remembers that life in Paris can be just as pleas¬ ant as life in Podunk, Indiana. He doesn’t give a whoop whether his son sings the national anthem in school, because he knows that surface patriotism means less than nothing, and that Grover Gleveland Bergdoll’s child¬ ish treble once piped out “My Gountry, ’Tis of Thee” at Teacher’s command. This young father hasn’t any unnat¬ ural faith in the schools anyhow—good as they are— because he knows the teachers are people just like him, not geniuses, but simply hard-working, half-educated young men and women who earn their bread by doing the best they can. He knows that the schools are of neces¬ sity a stereotyping agency in a somewhat stereotyped country. What the child will learn are the ideals of a busy shopkeeper, with side glances at the pictures of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington on the wall—those two romantic Presidents who are fast being made into illus¬ trations for Sunday-school books by silly biographers and sloppy short-story writers. No, the young father knows that his children are not likely to find ideals in school with which to face the mod¬ ern world. If the child’s soul is going to bear any imprint except a few outworn rubber stamps, he must get his inspiration at home. A school system is such a colossal undertaking that it must often be regulated by conve¬ nience. But the young father does not have to tell his children shoddy lies about life because of convenience. And I don’t believe he will—the bitterest critics of this generation cannot accuse it of mock modesty. Its chil¬ dren will have at least that advantage over my contem¬ poraries, who learned all the filthy words in the English language before they knew anything of the side of life they so grossly misrepresented. Now I don’t mean to give the impression that the  A Short Autobiography 77 young men and women of my generation are bulging with a hundred sure-fire ways of turning children into veritable Abraham Lincolns. On the contrary, they will be inclined to protect their children from the canned rubbish at large in the world. They know that the knowledge of one good book, Van Loon’s “Story of Mankind’’ for example, is worth a list of a hundred “Children’s Classics” compiled by some senile professor. And as they dread canned cul¬ ture for their child so, more than against anything else, will they protect him from the canned inspiration that has become a national nuisance. The friendship of one older man of wisdom and character is a great boon—but such men are rare, there are not three to every city. And the substitute, the lectures by professional educationalists and boy-thrillers, represents, I think, a very real danger. It is the danger of overstimulation. A boy or a girl that comes home every day from school with a new idea about beautifying the home or collecting old clothes for the Lap¬ landers or making one noble sacrifice every week, is not a boy or girl whose brain will be anything but a cluttered bird’s nest in a few years. I do not want my child’s mind stimulated by every quack in the world, from paid patriots to moving-picture magnates who have rummaged among the ash heaps for shoddy ideas to give to the young. Even¬ tually, of course, the child will grow tired both of the radio and of uplifting the neighbors, and there is no individual means of diversion to which I object—but the contin¬ ual round of them dulls a child’s enthusiasm and perma¬ nently injures his mind. He is unable to enjoy or even to understand everything that is not presented to him in canned, predigested form—canned music, canned inspiration, even canned play—until it is no wonder that when he is a man he will be ripe for canned opinions and canned ideals. “But,” objects the realist, “your children will grow up  78 F. Scott Fitzgerald like mine into a world over which you have no control. If you forbid him all these things, will you not be setting up a ring of prohibitions around him—just as a short while since you objected to having about you?” I’m going to try and answer that question, but first I want to discuss one important respect in which my child’s attitude toward life will be different from my own. It is simply this: whatever respect he may hold for the opinions of age will be taken from him. Unless my mind fails and I join the common conspiracy to teach children that their parents are better than they are, I shall teach my child to respect nothing because it is old, but only those things which he considers worthy of respect. I shall tell him that I know very little more than he knows about the purpose of life in this world, and I shall send him to school with the warning that the teacher is just as igno¬ rant as I am. This is because I want my children to feel alone. I want them to take life seriously from the begin¬ ning with neither dependency nor a sense of humor, and I want them to know the truth—that they are lost in a strange world compared to which the mystery of all the caves and forests is as nothing. The Russian Jewish news¬ boy on the streets of New York has an enormous commer¬ cial advantage over our children, because he feels alone. He is aware of the vastness and mercilessness of life, and he gets his own knowledge of humanity for himself. Each time he falls down he is not picked up and set on his feet. I cannot give my son that advantage without exposing him to the thousand dangers of a vagabond’s life—but I can make him feel mentally alone, as every great man has been in his heart—alone in his convictions which he forms for himself, and in his character which expresses those convictions. Not only will I force no standards on my son but I will question what others tell him about life. A supreme confidence is one of a man’s greatest assets.  A Short Autobiography 79 and we know from the story of our great men that it comes only through self-reliance—and nothing that can be told my son will be of any value to him beside what he finds out for himself. All I can do is watch the vultures who swarm outside with conventional lies for his ear. The best friend we ever have in our adolescence is the one who teaches us to question and to doubt—I would be that kind of friend to my son. Here, then, are five ways in which my child’s early world will be different from my own: First—He will be less provincial, less patriotic. He will be taught that a citizen of the world is of more value to Podunk, Indiana, than is a citizen of Podunk, Indiana, to Podunk, Indiana. He will be taught to look closely at American ideals, to laugh at those that are absurd, to scorn those that are narrow and small, and give his best to those few in which he believes. Second—He will know everything about his body from his head to his feet before he is ten years old. It is bet¬ ter that he should know this than that he should learn to read and write. Third—He will be put as little as possible in the way of constant stimulation whether by men or by machines. Any enthusiasm he has will be questioned, and if it is mob enthusiasm—he who lynches negroes and he who weeps over Pollyanna is equally low at heart—it will be laughed out of him as something unworthy. Fourth—He shall not respect age unless it is worthy in itself, but he shall look with suspicion on all that his elders say. If he does not agree with them he shall hold his own opinions rather than theirs, not only because he may prove to be right but because he must find out for himself that fire burns. Fifth—He shall take life seriously and feel always alone: that no one is guiding him, no one directing him.  80 F. Scott Fitzgerald and that he must form his own convictions and standards in a world where no one knows much more than another. He’ll have then, I hope with all my heart, these five things—a citizenship in the world, a knowledge of the body in which he is to live, a hatred of sham, a suspicion of authority, and a lonely heart. Their five opposites— patriotism, modesty, general enthusiasm, faith, and good- fellowship—I leave to the pious office boys of the last generation. They are not for our children. That much I can do—further than that it depends on the capabilities of the boy—on his intelligence and his inherent honor. Let us suppose that, having these things, he came to me at fourteen and said; “Father, show me a good great man.” I would have to look around in the living world and find someone worthy of his admiration. Now no generation in the history of America has ever been so dull, so worthless, so devoid of ideas as that gen¬ eration which is now between forty and sixty years old— the men who were young in the nineties. I do not, of course, refer to the exceptional people in that genera¬ tion, but to the general run of “educated” men. They are, as a rule, ill-read, intolerant, pathetic in their mental and spiritual poverty, sharp in business, and bored at home. Culturally they are not only below their own fathers who were fed on Huxley, Spencer, Newman, Carlyle, Emer¬ son, Darwin, and Lamb, but they are also below their much-abused sons who read Freud, Remy de Gourmont, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, and Anatole France. They were brought up on Anthony Hope and are slowly growing senile on J. S. Fletcher’s detective stories and “Foster’s Bridge.” They claim that such things “relax their minds,” which means that they are too illiterate to enjoy anything else. To hear them talk, of course, you would think that they had each individually invented the wire-  A Short Autobiography 81 less telegraph, the moving picture, and the telephone— in point of fact, they are almost barbarians. Whom could my generation look up to in such a crowd? Whom, in fact, could we look up to at all when we were young? My own heroes were men my own age or a little older—men like Ted Coy, the Yale football star. I admired Richard Harding Davis in default of someone better, a certain obscure Jesuit priest, and, occasionally, Theodore Roosevelt. In Taft, McKinley, Bryan, Generals Miles and Shafter, Admirals Schley and Dewey, William Dean How¬ ells, Remington, Carnegie, James J. Hill, Rockefeller, and John Drew, the popular figures of twenty years ago, a little boy could find little that was inspiring. There are good men in this list—notably Dewey and Hill, but they are not men to whom a little boy’s heart can go out, not men like Stonewall Jackson, Father Damien, George Rogers Clark, Major Andre, Byron, Jeb Stuart, Garibaldi, Dick¬ ens, Roger Williams, or General Gordon. They were not men half as good as these. Not one of them sounded any high note of heroism, no clear and distinct call to some¬ thing above and beyond life. Later, when I was grown, I learned to admire a few other Americans of that gen¬ eration—Stanford White, E. H. Harriman, and Stephen Crane. Here were figures more romantic, men of great dreams, of high faith in their work, who looked beyond the petty ideals of the American nineties—Harriman with his transcontinental railroad, and White with his vision of a new architectural America. But in my lifetime these three men, whose free spirits were incapable of hypocrisy, moved under a cloud. Now, ten years from today, 1 hope that if my son comes to me and says, “Father, show me a good man,” I can point out something better for him to admire than shrewd poli¬ ticians or paragons of thrift. Some of those who went to prison for their consciences’ sake in 1917 are of my gen-  82 F. Scott Fitzgerald eration, and some who left legs and arms in France and came back to curse not the Germans but the “dollar-a- year men” who fought the war from easy chairs. There have been writers already in my time who have lifted up their voices fearlessly in scorn of sham and hypocrisy and corruption—Cummings, Otto Braun, Dos Passos, Wil¬ son, Ferguson, Thomas Boyd. And in politics there have been young men like Cleveland and Bruce at Princeton, whose names were in the papers before they were twenty because they scrutinized rather than accepted blindly the institutions under which they lived. Oh, we shall have something to show our sons, I think—to point at and say—not, perhaps, “There is a perfect man,” but “There is a man who has tried, who has faced life thinking that it could be fuller and freer than it is now and hoping that in some way he could help to make it so.” The women of my generation present a somewhat dif¬ ferent problem—I mean the young women who were lately flappers and now have babies at their breasts. Per¬ sonally I can no more imagine having fallen in love with an old-fashioned girl than with an Amazon—but I think that on the whole the young women of the well-to-do middle classes are somewhat below the men. I refer to the depen¬ dent woman, the ex-society girl. She was pr