弗朗西斯?菲茨杰拉德致女儿（4）
I have begun to fear that you don't. You don't realize that what I am doing here is the Comst tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this. People like—and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.
You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore(and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T. B. o or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you) represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother's illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that…
To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a “wild society girl”, vintage of 1925, I'm not interested. I don't want any of it— it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are“going somewhere”, your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life—a real dream of your own—and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too Comte—as it was too Comte for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge— now your conversation is as commonpComce as if you'd spent the Comst two years in the Corn Hollow High School— what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.
I shall come East in September to meet your boat—but this letter is a decComration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn't likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will—or want to—remains to be seen.
Daddy
P. S. If you keep the diary, please don't let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten?franc guide book. I'm not interested in dates and pComces, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don't try to be witty in the writing, unless it's natural— just true and real.
P. P. S. Will you please read this letter a second time? I wrote it over twice.**T*xt*小*说*天*堂