Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Last Novel

"There are no second acts in American lives." You can find this epigram at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last, unfinished work The Last Tycoon. In 1940, there were not. The 1930's were bad to Fitzgerald: he institutionalized his wife, saw his health ruined by alcoholism, and most importantly for the purposes of this story, made what turned out to be a permanent move to Los Angeles.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the appallingly young age of 44, ruined by his drinking, having written six chapters of The Last Tycoon. His friend and Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson edited the manuscript and appended the outline and various notes on the novel.

Despite the ambitions Fitzgerald had for The Last Tycoon, its real value seems to be its presentation of Hollywood--under the old studio system--as seen by a writer. Read it to get an inside look at the industry in the 1930s, an era so close to the dawn of the movie itself that you can imagine dust rising from the streets of Burbank. In some ways Fitzgerald's Hollywood is recognizable instantly, and he sketches it brilliantly: the pathologically ruthless producer, the forgotten B-movie actor searching desperately for a toehold, the party where the anonymous newcomer is snubbed. In one wonderfully done scene, the protagonist, producer Monroe Stahr, pulls a director off the set in the middle of filming and into his limousine to fire him. The replacement director is on the set before they step into the car. As Stahr tells him the bad news, the director is stunned, and the short ride, and the conversation, end:
"How about my coat?" he asked suddenly. "I left it over a chair on the set."
"I know you did," said Stahr. "Here it is."

Fitzgerald's comic gifts and novelist's touch are on display here. Towards the end of the finished draft, Stahr wants to meet a Communist, and to prepare for the meeting--because he never reads anything for pleasure-- he has the studio's writing staff come up with a two-page synopsis of The Communist Manifesto. The narrator, Cecilia Brady, describes the aftermath of Stahr's drunken scene with the communist:

"His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I've been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him, but that was all."
In this work, writers are, by definition, drunks. Fitzgerald fills the early chapters with writers, starting with the "second-rate American intellectual" Wylie White, probably the closest Fitzgerald comes to an alter ego in The Last Tycoon. At one point a character asks after White and is met with the response, "Is he sober?" In Fitzgerald's Hollywood, writers come from the east lured by the movies' easy money and stay to become souses and hacks, generally in that order. Playwrights come out to the coast with the wrong set of assumptions and no idea of how to write in this new medium. If they stay, they are doomed, like the writing couple Mr. and Mrs. Tarleton, who discover too late Stahr's system (to wit, put two or three teams of writers on a project unbeknownst to each other and use the best version) and the paradox behind it: writers are a dime a dozen and yet indispensible to the movie-making process.

But what I see as Fitzgerald's brittleness as a writer--the way in which his work seems dated to me--is present here also. The Great Gatsby, now in the pantheon, I have always felt was a bit overrated: successful technically but somehow small and tinny, with the rawness of human emotion glossed over, missing grit and granularity.

Where Fitzgerald does distill some very modern-sounding human emotion into powerful writing is the set of essays collected as The Crack-Up. It is all too easy to deny our pre-post-modern antecedents the complex emotions and concepts we have, to think that sex was invented in 1963 or to imagine that your grandparents (or in this case perhaps Douglas Fairbanks) lived in a world of black and white. The Crack-Up disabuses one of that notion. It is a largely un-self-censored view of a man in despair, neither more nor less. The essays struck me much more forcefully than anything in The Great Gatsby or The Last Tycoon, more forcefully than the tell-all memoir or the self-obsessed YouTube video at the center of our 21st century sensibility.

The Pat Hobby stories are next on my list to read. Fitzgerald wrote these magazine pieces--the misadventures and humiliations of a hack writer trying to get work in Hollywood--during the last desperate years of his life in LA. Paul Greenberg wrote a nice essay on the Pat Hobby stories in relation to the recent writers' strike.

There is in the end a sadness to it. Reading Edmund Wilson's introduction, the novel's outline and the rough notes attached, you can't escape the pall of Fitzgerald's years of striving in Hollywood to regain personal and literary respectability. Hemingway movingly assesses the tragedy of his friend in A Moveable Feast:
"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
Hollywood was not a total bust for Fitzgerald. In 1938 he made nearly $60,000 working for MGM. That year, he wrote off $237.50 in "bad debts."

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

We Need Newspapers

News comes today that the Blethen Maine Newspapers are for sale: viz. the Kennebec Journal, Waterville Sentinel and Portland Press Herald. The story was on the front page of the Kennebec Journal this morning. Having to print this particular story would be like me posting a blog entry consisting of my own obituary. The news is not good.

The Blethen family bought the Gannett (Maine, not the other Gannett) newspapers in 1998 for $200 million. Ten years on they will be lucky to get $100 million for them, according to the article. The new car I bought in 2001 has, I'm sure, lost half of its value since then, but somehow I don't think that's the investment model the Blethens had in mind when they bought these papers.

The company, like the entire newspaper industry, is facing declining circulation and ad revenues, especially from classifieds. A full page ad in the Kennebec Journal today from CEO Frank Blethen blames in part "disruptive technologies," by which I think he means the Internet, for foiling what used to be his license to print money. But some people, apparently none of them in the newspaper industry, have figured out how to make money from disruptive technologies, like these guys.

"In my fondest dreams," Blethen says in the article, the ultimate buyer "would be some well-heeled group of Mainers that care about local ownership." That's an ugly outcome. What that means is that these once-proud papers will be sold off piecemeal, probably to some bottom-feeding investors, whence they will eventually fall to a group of civic-minded financial "angels" who are willing to lose millions to make sure three Maine cities still have daily papers, much like the wealthy liberals who kept the old weekly Maine Times afloat for many years until it became clear the paper would never regain profitability, at which point it morphed unrecognizably into a glossy monthly magazine, and then folded for good. An unseemly end, as I said.

I admit to some schadenfraude (a German word meaning "shameful joy"; don't you love German?) on hearing this news. The sale of the papers back in 1998 was an occasion for much sanctimonious self-congratulations on the part of both the Blethen and the Gannett families, which was amply displayed by the many newspaper articles on the sale, in which the phony good feeling and Elks Lodge civic boosterism was meant to make the bitter pill of this sale go down easier for us plebs, the readers, disguising that this transaction was merely two mega-wealthy families trading huge assets and that the Gannetts, for all their noble stewardship of the papers--for which they received nothing more than the satisfaction of civic duty and generations of influence, wealth and prestige--were finally cashing out to an out-of-state company--at the right moment, we now see in hindsight.

But it's not all shameful joy here in Hollywood. We need newspapers. And the future of these are not assured.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

The Rich Man's Ketchup

My wife and I were having dinner, not unheard of, on the living room sofa. This night it was a meal of frozen entrees: homestyle French fries and Quorn fake chicken nuggets, with bowls of yoghurt and fruit on the side. We were nearly out of ketchup, so I brought in some mustard and an ancient jar of cocktail sauce.

"Ah, cocktail sauce," I mused. "The rich man's ketchup."

My wife looked skeptical. "Is that really what they call it?"

"Well, it sounds like something from The Simpsons. So I doubt it. But it's a good name. Maybe this is our million dollar idea. 'The rich man's ketchup' will be the slogan. We just have to invent the sauce."

She thought for a moment over a French fry. "Condiments? I don't know. It's a pretty crowded market. Think about the condiment aisle in the supermarket. Salsas. Mustards. Ketchup." She paused." And of course catsup."

"Catsup. Now that," I said, "is the rich man's ketchup."

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