Damned Fond of You

In 1934, F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling. Zelda was ill, his drinking had grown heavier, and Tender Is the Night, the novel he had worked on for years, had just appeared to mixed reviews. So he did what many of us writers do when the ground feels unsteady: he reached out to a friend.

The friend was Ernest Hemingway, and Hemingway didn’t flatter him. The portion of the letter rarely included in social media quote graphics is quite critical: he argued that Fitzgerald had started with real people and then altered them to serve the plot in ways that weakened the story.

But then, “for Christ sake,” he told Fitzgerald to stop worrying about what the fate of the book would be. For every page of his own work he considered a masterpiece, Hemingway admitted, he produced ninety-one pages of “shit.”

I find that remarkable for a reason that has nothing to do with the arithmetic.

Hemingway goes on to say that good writers return and that Fitzgerald is a better writer now than when he wrote Gatsby, a book Hemingway admits he hadn’t thought much of at the time. Neither of them knew yet that it would become one of the great American novels; that certainty only exists looking backward. In 1934, The Great Gatsby was still a relative commercial disappointment to its author, and Hemingway was telling him not to worry, just write.

That’s the part that stays with me. Hemingway knew exactly how much of anyone’s work ends up in the trash, said so plainly, and told his friend to keep going anyway.

Then after all the criticism, he ended:

“Anyway I’m damned fond of you and I’d like to have a chance to talk sometimes .”

“Always your friend,

Ernest.”

Perhaps writers haven’t changed that much. We still need honest readers. But what we need most is someone who knows exactly how much is sh.t, and is damned fond of us anyway.