The Property of
A GENTLEMAN
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT. Autograph letter signed ("F. Scott Fitzgerald") to the American novelist Cyril Hume, whose first book, Wife of the Centaur, had just appeared, Great Neck, Long Island, n.d. [1923]. 3 pages, 4to, on rectos of three leaves, usual fold creases.
Details
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT. Autograph letter signed ("F. Scott Fitzgerald") to the American novelist Cyril Hume, whose first book, Wife of the Centaur, had just appeared, Great Neck, Long Island, n.d. [1923]. 3 pages, 4to, on rectos of three leaves, usual fold creases.
FITZGERALD QUOTES CONRAD: "TO MAKE YOU HEAR, TO MAKE YOU FEEL, ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE..."
An excellent letter entirely devoted to a critique of Wife of the Centaur (Hume had sent Fitzgerald a copy): "...I read it with the greatest interest and it strikes me as an excellent and most amusing first novel...Now I'll tell you the things I was less enthusiastic about: 1st. The long polyphonic prose passages which seemed to me without true significance and which without doubt interupt [sic] the flow of the narrative. 2nd. The scenes at school...This 'history of a young man' business is intrinsicly [sic] an exhausted art form anyhow -- because it always tends to a dumping of dozens of very youthful experiences and impressions in the reader's lap with a profound air of importance. My own novel [This Side of Paradise, 1920] & [Stephen Vincent] Benét's [The Beginning of Wisdom, 1921] suffered from this. Elliot Paul in Indelible and Impromptu [1922 & 1923] did a better job...The only really gorgeous novel of this type for years has, of course, been [James Joyce's] The [sic] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1917] because it was done with the most rigid and austere sense of selection..."
"...My objection to the polyphonic passages is that they often follow other pages from which you have not bothered to delete trite phrases and unmemorial clichés [Fitzgerald gives several examples]...I found these just now at random & it makes your high spots look mere...to find slovenly work in your narrative. But you have an abounding interest in things, a style that needs work on it, but seems sound at bottom & most of all an ability to convey feeling or, as [Joseph] Conrad says in his famous preface [to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'] 'to make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see'..." Hume had been a fellow student of Fitzgerald's at the Newman School (1911-13); as a novelist he had a vogue in the 1920s. Not in Letters, ed. J. Bruccoli, and presumably unpublished.
FITZGERALD QUOTES CONRAD: "TO MAKE YOU HEAR, TO MAKE YOU FEEL, ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE..."
An excellent letter entirely devoted to a critique of Wife of the Centaur (Hume had sent Fitzgerald a copy): "...I read it with the greatest interest and it strikes me as an excellent and most amusing first novel...Now I'll tell you the things I was less enthusiastic about: 1st. The long polyphonic prose passages which seemed to me without true significance and which without doubt interupt [sic] the flow of the narrative. 2nd. The scenes at school...This 'history of a young man' business is intrinsicly [sic] an exhausted art form anyhow -- because it always tends to a dumping of dozens of very youthful experiences and impressions in the reader's lap with a profound air of importance. My own novel [This Side of Paradise, 1920] & [Stephen Vincent] Benét's [The Beginning of Wisdom, 1921] suffered from this. Elliot Paul in Indelible and Impromptu [1922 & 1923] did a better job...The only really gorgeous novel of this type for years has, of course, been [James Joyce's] The [sic] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1917] because it was done with the most rigid and austere sense of selection..."
"...My objection to the polyphonic passages is that they often follow other pages from which you have not bothered to delete trite phrases and unmemorial clichés [Fitzgerald gives several examples]...I found these just now at random & it makes your high spots look mere...to find slovenly work in your narrative. But you have an abounding interest in things, a style that needs work on it, but seems sound at bottom & most of all an ability to convey feeling or, as [Joseph] Conrad says in his famous preface [to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'] 'to make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see'..." Hume had been a fellow student of Fitzgerald's at the Newman School (1911-13); as a novelist he had a vogue in the 1920s. Not in Letters, ed. J. Bruccoli, and presumably unpublished.