“Forget your personal tragedy… Good writers always come back. Always.”
In the spring of 1934, just before giving his best writing and career advice to a budding author who had traveled across the country on a coal train to see him, Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899-July 2, 1961) was contacted for advice by his old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Despite having opposing political ideologies and worldviews, the two had forged a close friendship a decade earlier and corresponded with frankness about their beliefs, their challenges, and the nuances of their shared profession.
After the success of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald took a nine-year hiatus from writing and publishing to deal with his addiction. He had just published Tender Is the Night and was asking his old friend for feedback. Hemingway did not hold back; he launched a missile of tough love that was absolutely brilliant and rife with sobering advice for any writer. It was not nearly as polite as Beckett’s or as intellectually elegant as Margaret Fuller’s, but it was nonetheless very effective.
Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, the treasure trove of wisdom and delight expertly curated by Shaun Usher, which also gave us young Hunter S. Thompson’s advice on living a meaningful life and E.B. White’s inspiring words to a man who had lost faith in humanity, contains a spirited letter from 36-year-old Hemingway to 39-year-old Fitzgerald on May 10, 1934. Hemingway writes:
Dear Scott:
Both I and I didn’t like it. Goddamn, Dos took it with him, so I can’t refer to that wonderful opening description of Sara and Gerald. so if I do something wrong -). Once you started playing about with them, Scott, you couldn’t change them into other people or make them come from places they didn’t come from. Because actual people are made by their parents and the things that happen to them, it is impossible to make them behave in a way that they would not naturally do while writing about them. The best thing is an invention, but you can’t create anything that will never come to pass.
When we are at our best, we should make everything up, but we should make it up so honestly that it will actually happen that way later.
Goddamn it, you tampered with people’s pasts and futures to create case studies that were amazingly fabricated rather than actual individuals. You are the best writer in the world, but you have such terrible talent that you should just give up. For the love of God, Scott, don’t compromise and write honestly, no matter who or what it hurts. If you knew enough about Gerald and Sara, for example, you could write a wonderful book about them, and if it were true, they wouldn’t feel anything other than passingly.
There were wonderful places, and neither anyone else nor any of the boys could write a book that would read half as well as one that wasn’t written by them. However, you cheated way too much on this one. You also don’t have to… You stopped listening long ago, with the exception of hearing your own queries answered. You included useful content that wasn’t necessary. A writer gets dried out by that (we all get dried out). That’s not a personal jab at you, but I’m not listening. That is the source of everything. Observing and hearing. Your vision is adequate. However, you give up listening.
Hemingway tempers his fervor at this point after realizing that he has worked himself up into a boiling pot of justified, albeit well-intentioned, anger:
Much better than I say, actually. However, it falls short of your potential. He then makes a benevolent turn by offering advice on how to deal with — that is, how not to hear — the criticisms, whether they are internal or external:
They have all these other acrobats that won’t leap, and we are like lousy dang acrobats but we make some very good jumps, bo.
Write for Christ’s sake and don’t care about what the boys will think, whether it’s a masterpiece, or anything else. I write everything from one page of brilliance to ninety-one pages of dreck. I try to dispose of the trash in the trash can. You believe that in order to survive and let others live, you must publish garbage.
Hemingway advises Fitzgerald to avoid self-pity and instead transform his suffering into creative strength, a concept that Marina Abramovic would later reaffirm in her reflection on using trauma as the basis for art:
forgetting your own tragedy We are all grumpy from the beginning, and you especially need to suffer greatly before you can write critically. However, use it when you’re hurt – don’t abuse it. Be as devoted to it as a scientist, but don’t consider anything to be important simply because it affects you or a member of your family. Bo, you’re not a tragic figure, as you can see. Me neither. We are all writers, thus writing is what we ought to do.
This is interrupted by another charmingly self-aware statement halfway through:
If you gave me a burst at this time, I wouldn’t hold it against you. Telling others how to write, live, die, etc. is amazing, Jesus.
After a short tirade on how Fitzgerald’s tumultuous relationship with Zelda is contributing to his decline in creativity and spirituality, Hemingway gives one more cheer:
Good authors always return, Scott. Always. When you thought you were so amazing, you were only half as terrific as you are today. You know, at the time, I never gave Gatsby such thought. Compared to before, your writing ability has doubled. All you have to do is write honestly without worrying about how it will turn out.
Go on and write.
However, I adore you and would love the chance to talk to you occasionally.
Always your friend.
Add Hemingway’s advice on writing, the necessary books any aspiring writer should read, the perils of ego, and his brief, stunning Nobel Prize acceptance speech to this particular section of the utterly fantastic Letters of Note before reading Fitzgerald’s own tips on the key to excellent writing. Both authors have committed to writing wisdom that ranks among the most illustrious and enduring pieces of craft advice in recorded history.
