Fitzgerald is the cautionary tale among writer routines, which is what makes him worth studying more closely than some of the writers whose discipline never wobbled. For roughly a decade he ran one of the most methodical working lives in American letters, tracking every story, every dollar earned, and every working day in a set of handwritten ledgers he kept from 1919 onward. The ledgers are now at Princeton's Firestone Library, where you can still read his own accounting of the years that produced The Great Gatsby. He had the discipline, and then he lost it, and the late career is largely the story of him trying to build it again from scratch with less time and more damage.
What makes his routine useful is the record he left behind, which is unusually specific, and the gap between the years when he worked well and the years when he couldn't. The advice he gives is beside the point. Most writers don't get to see the before and after of their own collapse so clearly. Fitzgerald did, because he kept writing it down.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- Variable, often late. During his productive years on the Riviera he worked afternoons into the evening. In Hollywood at the end of his life, he forced himself onto a morning schedule and kept it with effort.
- Writing Location
- For Gatsby, the Villa Marie in Valescure, near Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d'Azur, in the spring and summer of 1924. For Tender Is the Night, rented houses along the French and Swiss coasts. For The Last Tycoon, a bungalow in Encino and later an apartment on North Laurel Avenue in Hollywood.
- Daily Output
- Roughly twelve hundred words a day during the Gatsby period, according to the ledger and his letters to Maxwell Perkins. In Hollywood, closer to three or four hundred words of fiction on a good day, carved out of a schedule dominated by studio work.
- Tools
- Pencil on yellow legal paper, then a typewriter for later drafts. He kept the ledger in pencil too, in a red account book he'd started as a boy in St. Paul.
- Famous Ritual
- The ledgers. He recorded every story sold, every dollar received, every publication date, and his own assessment of each year's working performance. Matthew Bruccoli's biography reprints pages of them.
- Books Written This Way
- The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, the Pat Hobby stories, the unfinished Love of the Last Tycoon.
The Ledgers
Fitzgerald's ledger is one of the strangest documents in twentieth-century American literature, and also one of the most practical. He started keeping it around 1919 and maintained it, on and off, until the mid-thirties. Every short story he wrote got a line. The magazine it sold to. The amount he was paid. The date the check cleared. Beside each year he wrote a short summary, sometimes only a sentence, in which he tried to judge the year's work honestly. Some years he gave himself credit. Others he was brutal.
The impulse behind the ledger is more interesting than it first appears. Fitzgerald grew up lower-middle-class in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a failed salesman, and money was the background hum of his entire childhood. When he started earning at twenty-three he seems to have been afraid the earnings weren't real unless he could see them written down. The ledger was partly a psychological tool, a way of convincing himself he was actually a working writer whose hours translated into checks. And it was partly a discipline, because once you've written "nothing" in the ledger for a month, you start to mind.
Matthew Bruccoli's biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, published in 1981, reproduces pages of the ledger and treats it as the spine of the career. What you see when you read those pages is a writer who, in his best years, had a clear grip on how much he was producing and how much it was worth. The ledger was a mirror he held up to his own output, and on the mornings he didn't want to write, the blank next to the date was often enough to get him to the desk.
Writing Gatsby
Fitzgerald and Zelda arrived in France in May 1924 and settled at the Villa Marie, a rented house near Saint-Raphaël on the Riviera. He had the partial draft of a novel he'd started in Great Neck the year before and a clear idea he was writing something better than he'd written so far. Over that spring and summer he rebuilt the book from the ground up, working in a small study on the ground floor of the villa while Zelda swam and painted and conducted the flirtation with the French aviator Edouard Jozan that would later show up, transformed, in Tender Is the Night.
The Villa Marie months were the cleanest working period of Fitzgerald's life. His letters to Maxwell Perkins from that summer are full of progress reports, word counts, and the kind of confident structural thinking that belongs to a writer who has his hours. He'd work afternoons, long into the evening, then go out. The draft was finished by the end of October. Gatsby was published in April 1925. The whole compressed arc from Villa Marie to Scribner's first edition took less than a year, and the book that came out at the end of it is the one most American novelists would trade almost anything to have written.
What I find worth noticing is that the Riviera months weren't a flight from work. They were a flight to it. Fitzgerald had left New York partly because the city was too expensive and too social for a writer trying to finish a difficult book. The Villa Marie was cheap, and the French countryside gave him fewer people to drink with. The choice of place was itself a piece of the routine. He'd engineered a few months in which the easiest thing to do all day was write.
The Hollywood Years
By 1937 the ledger had largely gone silent. Zelda was in a sanitarium in North Carolina. The magazine markets that had paid Fitzgerald ten and fifteen cents a word in the twenties had collapsed along with the economy. His own drinking had become a medical problem. He signed a contract with MGM for a thousand dollars a week, moved to Los Angeles, and set himself the task of becoming a working screenwriter while also, in the margins, rebuilding his novelist's life.
The Hollywood schedule he forced on himself is the least romantic part of his career and in some ways the most impressive. He was at the MGM offices by nine. He worked through the day on whatever script had been assigned to him, mostly punch-up work and unproduced drafts. Then, in the evenings and on weekends, he wrote fiction on the side, first the Pat Hobby stories for Esquire at two hundred and fifty dollars a piece, then The Last Tycoon. He was drinking Coca-Cola by the case, trying to stay sober, and sleeping badly. The ledger style of accounting came back in a rougher form. He kept notes on what he owed, what he'd earned, and which pages of the novel he'd managed to draft each week.
He died at forty-four of a heart attack in December 1940, with The Last Tycoon still unfinished on his desk. The pages Edmund Wilson later edited and published show a writer who had gotten back much of what he'd lost. The prose in the Tycoon manuscript is the best he'd written in a decade. He was too late to finish the book, but he'd rebuilt enough of the daily practice to know he still could have. The lesson there is more hopeful than the usual reading of his career suggests.