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:
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:
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:
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."
posted by Hallovian at 2:17 PM
1 Comments:
I give a lot of credit to a guy who can step away from his own tragedies enough, even while he's going through them, to fictionalize them. I suppose it was his way of processing them.
Check out "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and skip to the part where the class, made up of Muslim fundamentalists and progressives, put "Gatsby" on trial. Gatsby is probably overrated as you say, but, like Shakespeare, it did manage to touch upon and crystallize some essential human truths -- scenarios that persist regardless of the age.
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