F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will be “no small stir” when I get there. How I wish you were with me! This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious.

I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your cheeks are not up to the description I have written of them, but you will smoke and read all night—

At any rate here it is:

A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the King of Foreign.

“Ochone

He is gone from me the son of my mind

And he in his golden youth like Angus Oge

Angus of the bright birds

And his mind strong and subtle like the mind of Cuchulin on Muirtheme.

Awirra sthrue

His brow is as white as the milk of the cows of Maeve

And his cheeks like the cherries of the tree

And it bending down to Mary and she feeding the Son of God.

Aveelia Vrone

His hair is like the golden collar of the Kings at Tara

And his eyes like the four gray seas of Erin.

And they swept with the mists of rain.

Mavrone go Gudyo

He to be in the joyful and red battle

Amongst the chieftains and they doing great deeds of valor

His life to go from him

It is the chords of my own soul would be loosed.

A Vich Deelish

My heart is in the heart of my son

And my life is in his life surely

A man can be twice young

In the life of his sons only.

Jia du Vaha Alanav

May the Son of God be above him and beneath him, before him and behind him

May the King of the elements cast a mist over the eyes of the King of Foreign,

May the Queen of the Graces lead him by the hand the way he can go through the midst of his enemies and they not seeing him

May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him

And he go into the fight.

Och Ochone.”

Amory—Amory—I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us is not going to last out this war…. I’ve been trying to tell you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the last few years … curiously alike we are … curiously unlike.

Good-by, dear boy, and God be with you.

Thayer Darcy .

Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an electric light. He searched in his pocket for note-book and pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously:

“We leave to-night …

Silent, we filled the still, deserted street,

A column of dim gray,

And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat

Along the moonless way;

The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet

That turned from night and day.

And so we linger on the windless decks,

See on the spectre shore

Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks …

Oh, shall we then deplore

Those futile years!

See how the sea is white!

The clouds have broken and the heavens burn

To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light

The churning of the waves about the stern

Rises to one voluminous nocturne,

… We leave to-night.”

A letter from Amory, headed “Brest, March 11 th, 1919 ,” to Lieutenant T. P. D’Invilliers, Camp Gordon. Ga.

Dear Baudelaire :—

We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who is at me elbow as I write. I don’t know what I’m going to do but I have a vague dream of going into politics. Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

Since poor Beatrice died I’ll probably have a little money, but very darn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me that my thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said Street R.R.s are losing money because of the five-cent fares. Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t read and write!—yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation, extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income tax—modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

At any rate we’ll have really knock-out rooms—you can get a job on some fashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company or whatever it is that his people own—he’s looking over my shoulder and he says it’s a brass company, but I don’t think it matters much, do you? There’s probably as much corruption in zinc-made money as brass-made money. As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

Tom, why don’t you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one you’d have to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me about, but you’d write better poetry if you were linked up to tall golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say, still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I’ll introduce you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.

Kerry’s death was a blow, so was Jesse’s to a certain extent. And I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he’s in prison under some false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic. The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good writers any more. I’m sick of Chesterton.

I’ve only discovered one soldier who passed through the much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry, so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that’s all pretty much rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children. This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that discovered God.

But us —you and me and Alec—oh, we’ll get a Jap butler and dress for dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative, emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the property owners—or throw bombs with the Bolshevik. God! Tom, I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.