THE LAST
TYCOON , An Unfinished Novel. By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scott Fitzgerald's Last Novel
By J. DONALD ADAM - November 9, 1941
It is a heavy loss to American literature
that Scott Fitzgerald died in his forties. Of that fact this volume which
Edmund Wilson has edited is convincing proof. When "Tender Is the
Night" was published a few years ago there was reason to doubt whether the
fine talent which had first fully realized itself in "The Great
Gatsby" eight years before would develop sufficiently to arrive at the
greater achievements of which it was capable. "Tender Is the Night"
was an ambitious book, but it was also a brilliant failure. Coming after so
long a lapse in Fitzgerald's serious writing, the disappointment it brought to
those who had felt in "The Great Gatsby" the hand of a major novelist
was keen.
So, too, is "The Last Tycoon" an
ambitious book, but, uncompleted though it is, one would be blind indeed not to
see that it would have been Fitzgerald's best novel and a very fine one. Even
in this truncated form it not only makes absorbing reading; it is the best
piece of creative writing that we have about one phase of American
life-Hollywood and the movies. Both in the unfinished draft and in the sheaf of
Fitzgerald's notes which Mr. Wilson has appended to the story it is plainly to
be seen how firm was his grasp of his material, how much he had deepened and
grown as an observer of life. His sudden death, we see now, was as tragic as
that of Thomas Wolfe.
Of all our novelists, Fitzgerald was by
reason of his temperament and his gifts the best fitted to explore and reveal
the inner world of the movies and of the men who make them. The subject needs a
romantic realist, which Fitzgerald was; it requires a lively sense of the
fantastic, which he had; it demands the kind of intuitive perceptions which
were his in abundance. He had lived and worked in Hollywood long enough before
he died to write from the inside out; the material was clay in his hands to be
shaped at will. One comes to the end of what he had written-something less than
half the projected work-with profound regret that he did not live to complete
the job.
As Mr. Wilson observes in his all too
brief forward, Monroe Stahr, the movie big shot about whom the story is
centered, is Fitzgerald's most fully conceived character. "Amory Blaine
and Antony Patch ['This Side of Paradise' and 'The Beautiful and Damned'] were
romantic projections of the author; Gatsby and Dick Diver were conceived more
or less objectively, but not very profoundly explored. Monroe Stahr is really
crafted from within at the same time that he is criticized by an intelligence
that has now become sure of itself and knows how to assign him to his proper
place in a large scheme of things."
We have about 60,000 words of the novel in
this uncompleted draft; it was originally planned to be of approximately that
length, but, as the appended outline shows, the chapter on which he was working
the day before his death brings the story little more than halfway to its
conclusion. Yet within these half dozen chapters, running to 128 pages,
Fitzgerald has created a memorable figure in Stahr, Hollywood's "last
tycoon"; he had marvelously conveyed the atmosphere in which a mammoth
American industry is conducted; he would have ended, we can see, by bringing it
clearly into focus as a world of its own within the larger pattern of American
life as a whole.
As
Mr. Wilsion reminds us, the main activities of the people in Fitzgerald's early
books "are big parties at which they go off like fireworks and which are
likely to leave them in pieces." It is indicative of the broader scope of
"The Last Tycoon" and of Fitzgerald's wider and deeper intentions
that the parties in this book are "incidental and unimportant."
Excellent as "The Great Gatsby" was, capturing as it did in greater
degree than any other book of the period the feel of the fantastic Twenties,
one closes it with the thought that Fitzgerald had not himself quite gotten
outside the period. There is a detachment about his handling of "The Last
Tycoon" that he could not fully achieve in "The Great Gatsby."
This is the more emphasized by the skillful technique employed in the telling
of his story. The narrator is the daughter of a big producer, an intelligent
girl, of the world of the movies, yet not in it as an active participant, who
looks back on the events she describes after a lapse of several years.
The book as Mr. Wilson has edited it has a
dual interest. There is the intrinsic interest of the story as we have it,
written with all the brilliance of which Fitzgerald was capable; and there is
besides, for those who give thought to literary craftsmanship, the pleasure of
watching his mind at work on the difficult task he had set himself. In this
respect the notes which follow the draft are fascinating reading.
Besides "The Last Tycoon," the
volume includes "The Great Gatsby and several of Fitzgerald's best short
stories. There is "May Day," a kaleidoscopic picture of New York when
the boys were coming back from the last war; that strange fantasy which
out-Hollywoods Hollywood, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"; "The
Rich Boy," an early story, but good enough to stand with his mature work;
"Absolution" and "Crazy Sunday."
In the chapter on "The James Branch
Cabell Period" which he contributed to "After the Genteel
Tradition," Peter Monro Jack observed that Fitzgerald's titles were the
best in fiction. No one, certainly, has more good ones to his credit:
"This Side of Paradise," "The Beautiful and Damned,"
"All the Sad Young Men" in particular. Mr. Jack also remarked in that
excellent essay that Fitzgerald was badly served by his contemporaries,
maintaining that "Had his extraordinary gifts met with an early astringent
criticism and a decisive set of values, he might very well have been the Proust
of his generation instead of the desperate sort of Punch that he is." The
lack of these no doubt delayed his development, but it is clear now that his
feet were set on a forward path.
From the beginning Scott Fitzgerald wrote
about the things and the people that he knew. His early material was trivial,
and like the youngsters of whom he wrote, he was himself rudderless, borne
swiftly along on a stream that empties into nothingness. But from the outset
his perceptions were keen, his feeling for words innate, his imagination quick
and strong. There was vitality in every line he wrote. But he had to get his
own values straight before he could properly do the work for which he was
fitted, and the process took heavy toll of his vitality.
Fitzgerald's career is a tragic story, but
the end is better than it might have been. And I think he will be remembered in
his generation.
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