THE COMPLETE WORKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

strikes one of us it strikes both: you had hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to school and college, because it was the thing to do. It’s better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

      Do you remember that weekend last March when you brought Burne Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other things — we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid — rather not!

      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 got 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.

       EMBARKING AT NIGHT

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

      “We leave tonight…

      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 tonight.”

       A letter from Amory, headed “Brest, March 11th, 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 knockout 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