Beschreibung:

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. Two typed letters signed ("Scott," the first in pencil, the second in ink) to his literary agent Harold Ober, Baltimore, 4 April and 31 May 1936. Together 5 pages, 4to.; the first letter double-spaced, light staining, a few marginal tears, an inch horizontal section torn away from bottom margin of second sheet; the second letter single-spaced, light browning; both letters with stamped receipts and pencilled annotations from Ober's office. "I'D RATHER PUT ZELDA IN A PUBLIC INSANE ASYLUM AND LIVE ON 'ESQUIRE'S' $200 A MONTH" Poignant letters from "The Crack-Up Years": his confessional pieces telling of his sudden descent from a life of success and glamour to one of drinking, emptiness and despair were running that spring in Esquire . 4 April (sending Ober the story 'The Pearl and the Fur'): "I think you will like this story ... Things having reached a stalemate here with Zelda [who was at the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital outside Baltimore], I am moving her [on 8 April] on the advice of several doctors to a new environment, a sanitarium in Ashville [North Carolina], where I will probably again have to pass the summer ... If you feel pretty confident of this story can you advance me $200 which will enable me to make the transfer to Asheville. It will have to be done with the aid of a trained nurse as she is still in a most dangerous and violent condition. When the story sells, and I feel confident it will ["The Pearl and the Fur" has never been published], I should also like to count on $2000 of the proceeds ... I hadn't wanted to revise 'I'd Die for You' because I suppose the suicide theme pretty well damns it [the story is unpublished] ... As to the Owen story for the [ Saturday Evening ] Post I felt more hopeful and am rather surprised that you had no bidders ... I don't think it is first rate but it has good things in it and somebody ought to like it..." 31 May: "When I finished that story ['Cyclone in Silent Land,' about a nurse nicknamed Trouble, not published until the Post March 1937 issue] I felt absolutely sure it was the best story I had written in a year ... When they [the Post ] keep declining stories on such grounds as purely moral ones as in the case of 'Intimate Strangers' and 'Crazy Sunday' or because they are overbought with medieval stuff as in the case of the first Philippe story, or because the heroine is married in the first chapter as in the fortune telling story ... it seems to indicate that [the editor George Horace] Lorimer is no longer sold on me...Every story of mine that the Post throws and which goes into the open market adds to the impression that I am slipping ... It has been a pretty awful winter and if these two stories sell and I can write another good one between now and the 15th things should look better... I'd rather put Zelda in a public insane asylum and live on Esquire's $200 a month because I can count on it and because he [Arnold Gingrich] believes in me than see my morale being gradually sucked away by this struggle in the big time ... I come tired and dispirited to my work and leave it sick and exhausted and the fact that I am largely responsible for all this situation has nothing to do with the question and simply reproaching me about it only adds to the trouble. The thing is I must take some drastic means and get out of it. If there's any Hollywood idea in the offing this summer would be as good a time as any to take it up..." (Fitzgerald would go to Hollywood in July of the following year.) Neither letter is in the various editions of Fitzgerald letters and is apparently unpublished. (2)