F. Scott Fitzgerald on Mastering the Muse and How He Wrote His Debut Novel to Win the Love of His Life

“…as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse she trotted obediently around and became an erratic mistress if not a steady wife.”

On March 26, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, a tale of love gone awry in the grip of greed and status-seeking as a young man, whose story parallels Fitzgerald’s own life, undergoes a harrowing sexual and intellectual awakening.

The publication of the novel carried a special kind of urgency for Fitzgerald. The previous summer, Zelda Sayre, whom the 22-year-old author had spent several years courting, had broken up with him on the grounds that he couldn’t maintain the life she wanted for herself. Determined to win her back, Fitzgerald set out to become a successful novelist. He built upon an earlier unpublished novel entitled The Romantic Egotist and sent the new manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

In this July 26th, 1919 letter from the excellent F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (public library) — which also gave us the author on the secret to great writing — a young and hopeful Fitzgerald, full of earnest aplomb, articulates a broader truth about how creativity works:

This is in no sense a revision of the ill-fated Romantic Egotist but it contains some of the former material improved and worked over and bears a strong family resemblance besides.

But while the other was a tedious, disconnected casserole this is [sic] definate attempt at a big novel and I really believe I have hit it, as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse she trotted obediently around and became an erratic mistress if not a steady wife.

In another letter to Perkins, dated August 16th, 1919, Fitzgerald explains his title choice:

The title has been changed to
This Side of Paradise
from those lines of Rupert Brookes
…Well, this side of paradise
There’s little comfort in the wise.

The original dust jacket cover for This Side of Paradise

In the same letter, Fitzgerald does the math on the book:

Book One contains about 35,000 words
The Interlude ” ” 4,000 words
Book Two ” ” 47,000 words
Total ” ” 86,000 words

Then, later in the letter, a more meditative take on the math:

The book contains a little over ninety thousand words. I certainly think the hero gets somewhere.

I await anxiously your verdict.

Sincerely
F Scott Fitzgerald

This Side of Paradise was published to great critical success. Zelda, whom Fitzgerald dubbed “the first American flapper,” soon agreed to marry him and they embarked upon a tempestuous relationship, riddled with the author’s alcoholism, Zelda’s schizophrenia diagnosis, and the couple’s general inability to cope with celebrity at such a young age.

Bonus: Last October, This Side of Paradise was released as a beautifully minimalist Penguin Classics hardcover designed by the inimitable Coralie Bickford-Smith, who captures the elegance and glamor of the Art Deco era in her signature style of subdued yet infinitely expressive patterns.

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Advice on Advice from Literary Greats

Cultivating the wisdom to know when to ignore wisdom.

There’s indisputable value in turning to our greatest heroes for wisdom on everything from how to find our purpose to the balance of rationality and intuition to the key to happiness to the secret of life. But blindly following advice, even from the greatest of minds, is a recipe for disappointment since, after all, every human experience is different from every other. Gathered here are five pieces of anti-advice from literary greats — mostly on writing, but also applicable to life at large — reminding us that, sometimes, the best advice is to ignore advice.

JOHN STEINBECK

Even though he issued six timeless tips on writing, John Steinbeck followed them with a sort of caveat cautioning against relying too heavily on such advice:

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

GEORGE ORWELL

In 1946, George Orwell issued a similar list of six rules for writers, the last of which is a disclaimer to the rest of the list:

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

STEPHEN KING

While feedback and input are a critical form of advice, they too can warp our own ideals. Stephen King puts it best:

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

JACK KEROUAC

Popular opinion is, of course, a form of feedback and, as such, implicit peer advice. Jack Kerouac — whose 30 tips on writing and life are among the most follow-worthy advice there is — cautions against it, echoing Paul Graham’s thoughts on prestige:

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

An essential part of advice is, in fact, knowing when to ignore it. The excellent Advice to Writers recounts the story of Charlotte Brontë, who in 1845 wrote to the British poet Robert Southey to ask whether to be a successful writer. He replied with “cool admonition”:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are, you will be less eager for celebrity.”

Brontë, of course, chose to ignore his advice and, along with her sisters Emily and Anne, produced a wealth of poetry under male pseudonyms before publishing Jane Eyre the following year.

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Jack Kerouac’s List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life

“No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.”

In the year of reading more and writing better, we’ve absorbed David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes Jack Kerouac — cultural icon, symbolism sage, exquisite idealist — with his 30-point list, entitled Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. With items like “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge” and “Accept loss forever,” the list is as much a blueprint for writing as it is a meditation on life. It was eventually included in The Portable Jack Kerouac (public library) — the same treasure trove of stories, poems, letters, and essays on Buddhism that gave us Kerouac on kindness, the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” and the crucial difference between genius and talent.

Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo, 1965

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The list was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem “Howl” was written — which is of little surprise, given Ginsberg readily admitted Kerouac’s influence and even noted in the dedication of Howl and Other Poems that he took the title from Kerouac.

As Charles Eames might say, “to be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”

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5 Art and Design Projects Inspired by Literary Classics

From James Joyce to Jonah, or what the Brontë Sisters’ objectification of men has to do with Holden Caulfield.

Art inspires art, often crossing boundary lines in magnificent cross-disciplinary manifestations. As a lover of remix culture and a hopeless bookworm, I revel in the cross-pollination of visual art and literature. Here are five wonderful art and design projects, inspired by literary classics.

WAKE IN PROGRESS

In February of 2010, Paris-based designer and illustrator Stephen Crowe set out on an ambitious project — to not only read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, considered one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language, but to also illustrate it. The result is Wake in Progress — a creative feat that’s part Saul Bass, part Edward Gorey, part Lynd Ward, and yet entirely its own and entirely terrific.

First Line

Page 22

Page 25

Page 75

Page 76

Page 79: Kate Strong, a widow

Nothing that appears in Finnegans Wake is ever just one thing. How exactly do you draw a talking fox which is also a mouse, one of two arguing brothers, a pope, and modernist author Wyndham Lewis?” ~ Stephen Crowe

A number of the illustrations are available as prints.

EVERY PAGE OF MOBY DICK

Since 2009, former high school English teacher and self-taught artist Matt Kish has been drawing every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition of Herman Melville’s iconic Moby-Dick, methodically producing one gorgeous, obsessive drawing per day for 552 days using pages from discarded books and a variety of drawing tools, from ballpoint pen to crayon to ink and watercolor. Last year, the project became Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page — one of the 11 best art and design books of 2011, gathering Kish’s magnificent lo-fi drawings in a 600-page visual masterpiece of bold, breathtaking full-page illustrations that captivate eye, heart, and mind, inviting you to rediscover the Melville classic in entirely new ways.

I’ve read the book eight or nine times […] Each and every reading has revealed more and more to me and hinted tantalizingly at even greater truths and revelations that I have yet to reach. Friends often question my obsession with the novel, especially since I am not a scholar or even an educator any longer, and the best explanation I have been able to come up with is that, to me, Moby-Dick is a book about everything. God. Love. Hate. Identity. Race. Sex. Humor. Obsession. History. Work. Capitalism […] I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.” ~ Matt Kish

'...Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowel's wards.'

Ballpoint pen on paper, September 17, 2009

'But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive.'

Colored pencil and ink on found paper, August 6, 2009

'Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it - it may be - a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam'

Ink on watercolor paper, January 22, 2011

'...and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains...'

Acrylic paint, colored pencil, ink and marker on found paper, September 30, 2009

'...hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling...'

Crayon, ink and marker on found paper, November 24, 2009

'Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.'

Ink on watercolor paper, January 11, 2011

'Thou Bildad!' roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. 'Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.''

Ballpoint pen and ink on found paper, November 16, 2009

WORD BIBLE DESIGNS

In his Word project, designer Jim LePage set out to create original designs for every book of the Bible, in an exercise in self-discipline that allowed him to mary his love of design with his desire to read the Bible more. Though the impetus for the project sets off my own religious alarms, the Bible, too, is literature, and it’s hard to dismiss the refreshing approach of this literary art project. Besides, perhaps this is the kind of secular silver lining Alain de Botton promised in Religion for Atheists.

Word: 3 John

Word: Jude

Word: 2 John

Word: 2 Timothy

Word: 2 Thessalonians

Word: Nahum

HARK! A VAGRANT

From New Yorker cartoonist Kate Beaton comes Hark! A Vagrant — a witty and wonderful collection of comics about historical and literary figures and events, based on her popular web comic of the same name.

Beaton, whose background is in history and anthropology, has a remarkable penchant for conveying the momentous through the inane, aided by a truly special gift for simple, subtle, incredibly expressive caricature. From dude spotting with the Brontë Sisters to Jane Austen dodging groupies, the six-panel vignettes will make you laugh out loud and slip you a dose of education while you aren’t paying attention.

I think comics about topics like history or literature can be amazing educational tools, even at their silliest. So if you learn or look up a thing or two after reading these comics, and you’ve enjoyed them, then I will be more than pleased! If you’re just in it for the silly stuff, then there is plenty of that to go around, too.” ~ Kate Beaton

Beaton is also a masterful writer, her dialogue and captions adding depth to what’s already an absolute delight.

Originally featured here in October.

BEHOLDING HOLDEN

From writer Mike Norris and artist David Richardson comes Beholding Holden, an enchanted visual exploration of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a follow-up to their earlier collaboration on depicting the fictional Glass family.

Holden Caulfield

Old Mr. Spencer

Ackley

Stradlater, Holden's roommate at Pencey

Jane Gallagher

Sunny, the prostitute Maurice, an elevator operator moonlighting as pimp, offers Holden in Manhattan for 'five bucks a throw, fifteen bucks till noon.'

Mr. Antolini

Norris and Richardson also collaborated on a fantastic series of illustrations based on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, considered the third greatest book of the 20th century.

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