"The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois – men of thought, mind
you, 'impractical' men, 'idealist' have done more to decide the food you eat
and the things you think + do than all the millions of Roosevelts and
Rockerfellars."
F. Scott Fitzgerald – literary legend, master of the muse,
star of early book ads, and one amazing dad – was born 116 years ago this week.
In 1920, shortly after the publication of his debut novel,
This Side of Paradise, he received a piece of "hate mail" criticizing
the book as an affront to the respectable members of society, particularly
those in power. Fitzgerald's feisty, brilliant response, found in F. Scott
Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (public library), pulls into question – just as
his fiction famously does – the superficial values high society holds so dear,
touching on everything from education to ethics to politics to creative legacy
with equal parts insight and irreverence:
TO: Robert D. Clark
38 W 59th St.
New York City
Feb 9th 1920
Dear Bob:
Your letter riled me to such an extent that I'm answering
immediatly. Who are all these 'real people' who 'create business and politics'?
and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep
sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheap-jacks
who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections. I can't
pick up a paper here without finding that some of these 'real people' who will
not be satisfied only with 'a brilliant mind' (I quote you) have just gone up
to Sing Sing for a stay – Brindell and Hegerman, two pillars of society, went
this morning.
Who in hell ever respected Shelley, Whitman, Poe, O. Henry,
Verlaine, Swinburne, Villon, Shakespeare ect when they were alive. Shelley +
Swinburne were fired from college; Verlaine + O Henry were in jail. The rest
were drunkards or wasters and told generally by the merchants and petty
politicians and jitney messiahs of their day that real people wouldn't stand it
And the merchants and messiahs, the shrewd + the dull, are dust – and the
others live on.
Just occasionally a man like Shaw who was called an immoralist
50 times worse than me back in the 90ties, lives on long enough so that the
world grows up to him. What he believed in 1890 was heresy then – by by now its
almost respectable. It seems to me I've let myself be dominated by
'authorities' for too long – the headmaster of Newman, S.P. A, Princeton, my
regiment, my business boss – who knew no more than me, in fact I should say
these 5 were all distinctly my mental inferiors. And that's all that counts!
The Rosseaus, Marxes, Tolstois – men of thought, mind you, 'impractical' men,
'idealist' have done more to decide the food you eat and the things you think +
do than all the millions of Roosevelts and Rockerfellars that strut for 20 yrs.
or so mouthing such phrases as 100% American (which means 99% village idiot),
and die with a little pleasing flattery to the silly and cruel old God they've
set up in their hearts.