Footnotes

ʻFREDDIE BARTHOLOMEW'S GRANDFATHER THE OLD EARL OF TREACLE' – F. Scott Fitzgerald to Anthony Powell, parodying English and American manners (and tweaking him on the status of his wife, Lady Violet, daughter of the Earl of Longford).

Powell was a keen admirer of Fitzgerald, noting in a journal entry that he must have read The Great Gatsby at least fifty times; and indeed Gatsby has often been cited as an influence on his Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Powell has left us several accounts of their meeting, which took place in the canteen of the MGM studio in company with his wife, Lady Violet (see ʻHollywood Canteen: A memoir of Scott Fitzgerald in 1937' in Fitzgerald/ Hemingway Annual 3 (1971), pp.71-80; and To Keep the Ball Rolling, pp.250-56, where this letter is printed). At that time, Fitzgerald was employed as a scriptwriter, a career that Powell himself was trying to follow.

Fitzgerald's years of fame were behind him: ʻIn those days it is hard to remember that in 1937 the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a novelist was scarcely at all known in the United Kingdom. The Great Gatsby had appeared in England in 1926, making no stir at all... Fitzgerald's reputation, such as it was, rested on the recommendation of a few critics... Cyril Connolly being responsible for drawing my attention to a novelist for whom I at once felt enthusiasm. In the U.S., though in quite another manner... Fitzgerald's position as a writer was almost equally unsatisfactory. This once famous figure, golden boy, prototype of the "Jazz Age", was all but forgotten... One could not fail to notice the tone in which people in Hollywood spoke of Fitzgerald. It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of somewhat doubtful promise as an aspiring scriptwriter. "Meet him? Of course Scott will be very pleased indeed to find an Englishman who knows his work. He says he's never gone over in England, and never will." So all was arranged... For convenience this lunch would take place at the MGM commissary. I noted the engagement in my book for Tuesday, 20 July, 1937; as it turned out, a date of some consequence to Fitzgerald himself... He was a smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs – seen for the most part years later – do not do justice to him... Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity' (To Keep the Ball Rolling, p.250-1).

Powell promised to send him a copy of From a View to a Death, which this letter acknowledges; the reference to "dukes" – Fitzgerald's term for the beau monde – is, as Powell puts it in his memoirs, ʻto those British social categories adumbrated in the commissary' (p.255). That evening Fitzgerald was to dine with his daughter and Sheilah Graham: ʻAt the end of the dinner Fitzgerald drove Sheilah Graham home. That night was the beginning of their love affair. It lasted throughout the years, not many by this time, which remained to him' (p.256).