Callahan FScottFitzgeralds 1996
Callahan FScottFitzgeralds 1996
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Twentieth Century Literature
JOHN F. CALLAHAN
Since the first stirrings of the F. Scott Fitzgerald revival in the 1940s,
readers have been fascinated by the oppositions in his work and char-
acter. Critics from several different generations have noted how
Fitzgerald used his conflicts to explore the origins and fate of the
American dream and the related idea of the nation.' The contradic-
tions he experienced and put into fiction heighten the implications o
the dream for individual lives: the promise and possibilities, violatio
and corruptions of those ideals of nationhood and personality
"dreamed into being," as Ralph Ellison phrased it, "out of the chaos
and darkness of the feudal past."2 Fitzgerald embodied in his tissues
and nervous system the fluid polarities of American experience: success
and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare.
"I did not care what it was all about," Hemingway's Jake Barnes
confessed in The Sun Also Rises. "All I wanted to know was how to live
in it."3 Fitzgerald, who named and chronicled that brash, schizo-
phrenic decade, was no stranger to the dissipation of values and the
pursuit of sensation in the Jazz Age of the 1920s. But for all that, he
strained to know what life is all about and how to live in it. To him,
Hemingway's it was not simply existence and the soul's dark night of
melancholia and despair. It also stood for an American reality that,
combined with "an extraordinary gift for hope" and a "romantic
readiness,"4 led to the extravagant promise identified with America
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and the intense, devastating loss felt when the dream fails
another of its guises.
Face to face with his own breakdown, Fitzgerald traced hi
change of mind and mood in his letters and Crack-Up pieces.
conviction during his amazing early success in his 20s tha
something you dominated if you were any good,"5 Fitzgerald,
of his life, came to embrace "the sense that life is essentially a
its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming
not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that
of struggle."6 Abraham Lincoln was Fitzgerald's American exe
this "wise and tragic sense of life" (Turnbull, Letters [L] 96).
Last Tycoon (LT) he associates Monroe Stahr's commitment to
movie industry closer to an ideal mix of art and entertain
Lincoln's creative response to the contradictions of Americ
racy embodied in the Union.
Fitzgerald's invocation of Lincoln recalls the proud and
claim he made to his daughter from Hollywood. "I don't d
wrote; then, as if freed from a demon's grasp, he recounted
civil war he fought to keep his writer's gift intact: "I am not a
but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of
and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential
some sort of epic grandeur." "Some sort" he qualifies, as if
for the ironic, self-deflating admission in the next sentence.
after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort" (L 62
Fitzgerald did preserve the "essential value" of his talent; the
left confirm that. Like Lincoln who lived only long enough t
out what a truly reconstructed nation might look like, Fitzge
defeated in his attempt to finish his last novel. Yet what he
the more poignant because, finished, The Last Tycoon might
and reformulated the intractable oppositions of The Great Ga
Tender Is the Night.
375
After Tender Is the Night and before his fresh start in Hollywood i
1937, Fitzgerald reflected on his earlier search for an equilibrium
craft, reputation, and power as expressed in the literary vocation and
his large personal ambition. "It seemed," he remembered,
a romantic business to be a successful literary man-you were not
ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had
was probably longer-lived-you were never going to have the
power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you
were certainly more independent.
To the end, like the vivid, still-evolving Monroe Stahr in The Last
Tycoon, Fitzgerald stays in motion, keeps the dialectic between life and
craft going, if not to resolution-"Of course within the practice of
your trade you were forever unsatisfied" (CU 69-70)-at least in
pursuit of new and unrealized novelistic possibilities. "But I, for one,
would not have chosen any other" (CU 69-70), he concludes, and
keeps faith with his vocation by writing about craft and character in
the life of a gifted movie man, whose form Fitzgerald feared might
subordinate the novel, "which at my maturity was the strongest and
supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one
human being to another," to "a mechanical and communal art that,
whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists,
was capable of rendering only the tritest thought, the most obvious
emotion" (CU 78).
Meeting Irving Thalberg, Fitzgerald becomes more open to the
craft of the movies as practiced in Hollywood. Like Fitzgerald the
novelist, Monroe Stahr produces movies, not opportunistically (for the
most part) but from within. There is a fluidity to Fitzgerald's concep-
tion of Stahr missing from Gatsby and his dream, so ill defined in its
worldly guise, so obsessive and absolute in its fixation on Daisy; and
missing also from the aspiring hubris of Dick Diver, trapped by his
misguided, innocent mingling of love and vocation in his dream of
personality in Tender Is the Night. Stahr, like the writer who created him,
learns that daring to function can be a first step toward loosening the
paralyzing grip of "opposed ideas."
376
377
In The Last Tycoon Fitzgerald does for the American dream what
Ralph Ellison argues every serious novel does for the craft of fiction.
Even as a fragment, the work extends the range of idea and
phenomena associated with the dream. As a man and a writer, he
became at home in that country of discipline and craft he had discov-
ered but, later lamented, did not truly settle down in until it was too
late. As he wrote to his daughter Scottie, a student and aspiring writer
at Vassar, I wish I'd said "at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my
line-from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty-without
this I am nothing"' (L 79). In 1939 and 1940, The Last Tycoon did come
first. But burdened with expenses, lacking the quick, lucrative Saturday
Evening Post markets of his youth, lacking in any case the "romantic
readiness" to write stories with happy endings, and in sporadic, failing
health, Fitzgerald had to balance his novel with other work, and eke it
out in pieces. Nevertheless, he ended up a writer's writer. From that
single window, he looked beyond his circumstances and saw the
American dream not as a personal matter and no longer a nostalgic,
romantic possibility but as a continuing defining characteristic of the
American nation and its people. Far from being behind him, as Nick
Carraway had claimed in The Great Gatsby, the dream, refigured in The
Last Tycoon, is a recurring phenomenon in each phase, place, and guise
of Fitzgerald's imagination of American experience.
The American story, Fitzgerald wrote late in life, "is the history of all
aspiration-not just the American dream but the human dream...."8
The story that Fitzgerald told was his version of a dream hauntingly
personal and national. "When I was your age," he wrote his daughter in
1938, "I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how
to speak of it and make people listen." Like Keats, who, Fitzgerald imag-
ined, was sustained to the end by his "hope of being among the English
poets" (CU81), Fitzgerald aspired to be among the novelists. But, as he
confessed to his daughter in a bone-scraping passage, he compromised
his artist's dream by indulging the very thing that inspired it-romantic
love. Of his marriage to Zelda, he wrote in retrospect, "I was a man
divided-she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for
my dream" (L 32). The imbalance Fitzgerald attributed to Zelda was
also his own tension and tendency. Nevertheless, what gave his life and
work such fascination was exactly that dream of mingling craft and
378
379
What if we were to read Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tyc
projections of that sometime struggle, sometime alliance between
erty and the pursuit of happiness? As human impulses, property a
pursuit of happiness are sometimes contradictory, sometimes com
mentary metaphors for experience. Let property stand for
compulsion to divide the world and contain experience within
arbitrary boundaries. And let the "pursuit of happiness" become
nation's embrace of the complexity, fluidity, and possibility o
human personality. In Jefferson's time, if not so strongly in Fitz
or our own, the "pursuit of happiness" also implied individual res
bility for the "spirit of public happiness" that John Adams felt so stro
in the colonies, which he judged the American Revolution won al
before it began. Jefferson did not include the word public, but his
implies the individual's integration of desire with responsibility,
fulfillment with the work of the world. In short, in this promissory i
American context, the pursuit of happiness was bound up with c
ship, and citizenship with each individual's responsibility for demo
The first thing to be said about Fitzgerald's novels is that
enactments of the American dream are expressed in the love aff
worldly ambitions of Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr.
Great Gatsby (TGG), Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon, the
of the dream differs, but in each case, the hero is, like Fitzge
man divided," yet he seeks to integrate love of a woman with
plishment in the world. Telling his story to Nick Carraway after
lost Daisy Fay for the second and last time, Gatsby remembe
when he first met her, he felt like the latest plunderer in the line
Cody, his metaphorical father, and a mythical figure who, in Fitz
interpretation, "brought back to the Eastern seaboard the sav
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon." Sensitive to the demarca-
tions of background, money, and status, Gatsby
knew he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. Howev
glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at presen
penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the in
ible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders.
Meanwhile, "he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he
her believe he was a person from much the same stratum as herself
Gatsby pursues Daisy knowing that her sense of happiness and the
380
381
382
"France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it
still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter." In this passage from
"The Swimmers," a 1929 story later distilled into his Notebooks,
Fitzgerald evokes the anguished intense patriotism he finds in
American faces from Abraham Lincoln's to those of the "country boys
dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies
withered" (CU 197). For Fitzgerald that American "quality of the idea"
finds most worthy expression in the impulse to offer the best of your-
self on behalf of someone or something greater than yourself. Directed
toward the world, a "willingness of the heart" intensifies the individual's
feelings and experience. In Tender Is the Night (TITN) as in Gatsby, the
dream of love and accomplishment is distorted by the values of prop-
erty and possession. Like Gatsby, Dick Diver has large ambitions: "...
to be a good psychologist-maybe to be the greatest one that ever
lived."'2 Dick's colleague, the stolid Swiss, Franz Gregorovius, stops
short hearing his friend's pronouncement, as did the aspiring
American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, when the undergraduate
Fitzgerald declared: "I want to be one of the greatest writers who have
ever lived, don't you?"'3 Like Fitzgerald, Diver mingles love with ambi-
tion, though passively, almost as an afterthought: "He wanted to be
loved too, if he could fit it in" (TITN 23).
383
For her part, Nicole, like Daisy, only more poignantly, veer
between two selves. Cured, she embraces her heritage as her rob
baron grandfather Warren's daughter; her white crook's eyes signify
proprietary attitude toward the world. More vividly and knowingly th
before, she becomes the goddess of monopoly and dynasty descri
early in the novel. "For her sake trains began their run at Chicago an
traversed the round belly of the continent to California." Nicole,
the whole system swayed and thundered onward," is, in Europe, rem
product and beneficiary of her family's multinational corporate inte
ests. Like Daisy, Nicole "has too much money"; like Gatsby, Dick Dive
"can't beat that" (TITN 113, 311).
Yet in Tender Is The Night, the matter is not so simple. Marryin
Nicole, Dick takes on a task demanding a heroic and perhaps a t
stringent discipline and self-denial. After the most violent and thre
ening of Nicole's schizophrenic episodes, he realizes that "someh
[he] and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and comp
384
385
taking shape in his mind, only the early medieval tale of Phi
The Count of Darkness, with its curiously anachronistic tilt tow
Hemingway's modern code of courage, Fitzgerald sank de
drink and depression. Finally, as Scott Donaldson observes,
Tyron, and other North Carolina towns became suspiciousl
small towns of Diver's self-imposed exile at the end of T
the Night.14
For more than three years after publication of Tender Is the Night,
Fitzgerald continued to imitate the desolate trajectory he'd projected
for Dick Diver. Everything was a struggle. Perhaps "to preach at people
in some acceptable form" (L 63) and to show himself an unbowed
Sisyphus, without the camouflage of fiction, he dove into the confes-
sional Crack-Up pieces. To the chagrin of those who wished him well,
and even some who did not, he wrote an even more exposed confession
of faith than Tender Is the Night. His low point came with the appearance
of "The Other Side of Paradise," a portrait of the novelist as a broken-
down man and a failed writer that appeared on his fortieth birthday in
the New York Post in September of 1936. "A writer like me must have an
utter confidence, an utter faith in his star," he told the reporter. "But
through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something
happened to that sense of immunity, and I lost my grip."'5 The reporter
featured the empty bottles and the desolate hotel room more than
Fitzgerald's words, however, and the self-inflicted blow of humiliation
Fitzgerald absorbed seeing the piece in print prompted him to make an
abortive gesture at suicide.
Only an offer from Hollywood less than a year later broke the
pattern of waste, the spell of despair, and roused Fitzgerald from his
uneasy, purgatorial hibernation. Slowly, tortuously, he came back to life
as a man and a novelist. Taking another crack at Hollywood, where the
"inevitable low gear of collaboration" (CU 78) had twice mocked his
sense of artistic vocation, Fitzgerald renewed his "pursuit of happiness."
His theme was another variation of the American dream. For as a place
and an industry, Hollywood was at once the consequence and the
purveyor of the dream, often an eager expression of the culture's
lowest common denominator. Unlike his earlier moves, to the south of
France to write Gatsby in 1924 and Baltimore to write Tender in 1932,
Fitzgerald saw going to Hollywood as a lucky last chance to recoup his
fortunes. He had a screenwriter's contract; perhaps if he got himself
together another novel would take shape. In the meantime, riding west
386
387
Like Dick Diver, Stahr's mind puts him in select company, and
Diver, Stahr is a man with a strong, specific sense of vocati
unlike Diver, Stahr distills his passion into a sustained, dis
appetite for his work. Stahr is also a Jew, whose identity as an A
outsider is more fully, consciously felt and put to more palpable
sional use than had been the case with either Gatsby or Diver.
Stahr makes it to the pinnacle in Hollywood-a world open
largely created by Jews-by virtue of his brains, judgment, lead
taste, and sense of craft and quality possible in the medium of f
its democratic accessibility and mass appeal. Compared to Lin
Fitzgerald, Stahr believes he's about to take a call from Pre
Roosevelt in front of the woman he's just recently met and
coming to love. "I've talked to him before," Stahr tells Kathleen
the phone call turns out to be from an agent whose orangu
dead ringer for McKinley" (LT 83). But Fitzgerald, always sen
the feel of a decade's turning points, implies parallels between S
protective role in the movie industry and Roosevelt's in gove
"There is no world but it has its heroes," he writes, "and Stahr was the
hero." He evokes Stahr's staying power during the evolving phases of
the movies, as well as in the making of an individual picture. "Most of
these men had been here a long time-through the beginnings and the
great upset, when sound came, and the three years of depression, he
had seen that no harm came to them." Stahr was perhaps a paternal
employer, as Roosevelt was a paternal, protective President. Both men
preside over transitional circumstances in ways more evolutionary than
revolutionary by force of character and impersonal compassionate
intelligence, and by taking a personal interest in the problems of their
constituencies. "The old loyalties were trembling now," Fitzgerald
concludes in the passage describing Stahr mingling with those who
work for him at the end of a day at the studio: "There were clay feet
everywhere; but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their
greeting was a sort of low cheer as he went by" (LT 27).
Stahr dreams of and attains knowledge and success in Hollywood's
ambiguous, often insincere world of entertainment, art, and profit, the
solitary, Cartesian way. He "did his reasoning without benefit of
books-and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of
Jewry into the late eighteenth century." About the past, Fitzgerald notes
that Stahr "could not bear to see it melt away" (LT 118). Reading this
you can't help recall Fitzgerald's elegiac prose about the early promise
388
389
390
391
"So we beat on," to echo and recast Gatsby's ending, not necess
"borne back ceaselessly into the past" (TGG 137). For in The L
Tycoon, there is a fluidity and ambiguity about property and the "pu
of happiness" missing from the social structures underlying Gatsb
Tender Is the Night. Even more than Tender Is the Night, in its protean
The Last Tycoon appears a work of ceaseless fluctuations. Unlike Ten
Tycoon's unfolding and denouement were to be governed by a m
and aesthetic principle underscored in Fitzgerald's notes. ACTIO
CHARACTER, he wrote in large block letters, and they are the
words in Edmund Wilson's edition of the fragment. As Fitzger
notes and outlines reiterate, Monroe Stahr was to struggle unt
end. He would not await his fate passively like Gatsby or, like Dick D
abdicate to a private corner of America. Fitzgerald imagines St
player to the last, and only the ironic contemporary deus ex ma
of a plane crash would interfere with his decision to call off a reta
tory murder he's arranged in sick desperation. Gatsby operates in
shadows of American violence and power; Diver becomes a s
walking Rip van Winkle in a time of transition, but Stahr lives in
392
393
NOTES
394
WORKS CITED
395