"The Last Tycoon" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the last and unfinished novel by FSF and it is a sympathetic portrait of movie mogul Monroe Stahr who is the chief executive of a paternalistic film studio in Hollywood. Stahr is hard working and focussed on churning out a new movie every eight days but at the same time he is dedicated to developing talent and developing this new art form. By accident, during an earthquake, Stahr meets a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: they embark on a romantic love affair even though she is about to get married.

The book is narrated by Celia, the daughter of Stahr's partner in the studio, who has a crush on Stahr and wants to make love to him while he just sees her as his partner's daughter. It swings in and out of the first person. Stahr is portrayed as compellingly human behind the move facade.

One particular feature of the book, which is a first draft and includes some errors and inconsistencies, is the way Fitzgerald wove real movie actors and film people in and out of the story. This gives the book extra verisimilitude.

Fitzgerald is very touching when he takes Stahr and Kathleen and moves them from strangers to lovers. The dialogue hints at unknown back stories which will inevitably complicate their romance. What they do is normal, yet they are moving closer together, yet there is nothing inevitable about what happens until the final moments. This was beautifully and delicately handled.

But my favourite scene is the one where Stahr is teaching a writer how to write for the movies and I imagine this must have been based on a personal experience of Fitzgerald's. Stahr diagnoses that the reason that the writer is disaffected is that he somehow sees movie scripting as unworthy because he sees movies as being mass-produced assembly-line creations which own everything to cliche and nothing to art. The writer wants to have melodrama everywhere. Stahr then paints a word picture of a movie scene:

"Suppose you're in your office .... A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her - idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table .... She has two dimes and a nickel - and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match by the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window - but just then your telephone rings. The girls picks it up, says hello - listens - and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' ....

What a start to a story. Proof that movies can be as great an art form as novels. Later in the book the writer, who still feels this is all beneath him, is taken by Stahr into a meeting where the writing teams on another movie have got stuck and he starts to sort it out.

I loved this book! (Although the synopsis of what Fitzgerald planned for the rest of it made me shout out: "No, that isn't how this develops!"

Fitzgerald also wrote The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

October 2014; 169 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tender is the night" by F Scott Fitzgerald

"Tender is the night, and haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne" wrote Keats in his Ode to a Nightingale. But who in Fitzgerald's complex novel is the nightingale who "wast not born for death"?

Is it the hero, the intriguingly-named Dick Diver (Fitzgerald has quite a lot of sometimes crude phallic imagery), who is the master of ceremonies and trend-setter at the Riviera beach in the opening scenes but whose infatuation with film starlet Rosemary Hoyt (who starred in Daddy's girl and is contractually and temperamentally unable to grow up) and the cares and worries imposed by looking after his wife Nicole (who is schizophrenic as the result of her father raping her when she was a little girl)  lead to his problems with alcohol, his eventual social death and final disappearance? Certainly Dick is the only who who seems to grow old in the novel. And so Dick represents the real world while the bright young things frolic in France.

Perhaps Dick is also Fitzgerald himself, worn down with his care of Zelda, and unable to fulfil the promise of his early work (Dick writers a medical text book as a young man which is a big hit but his muse deserts him and his work becomes an endless rearrangement of his first magnum opus).

If this is Dick's tragedy and he is the tragic hero, where did it all go wrong? His sin was, as a psychiatrist, to fall in love with a patient. As a father figure this is another reiteration of the incest theme. Does he have a tragic flaw? Perhaps it is that he allows himself to be bought too easily. There is a moment, in Paris, when he appears to have money troubles: he has to find the right bank teller to cash his cheque. But he seems to live his charmed and gilded life off his wife's money although Fitzgerald seems clear that this was not what prompted him to marry her. 

Did I enjoy the book? I found it difficult. It starts with meaningless people leading meaningless lives on a beach in the South of France (bizarrely, there is a duel fought) and then it moves to Paris where Rosemary, the perpetually reinvented virgin, throws herself at Dick and where there are two unexpected murders. The book then flashbacks to Dick meeting Nicole and rushes forward to their life after the South of France; Dick pursues Rosemary and ends up in jail. In part three Dick, urged on by Nicole, makes an appalling social gaffe, bribes two women out of a French jail, and becomes old. Since the society has no use for an old man he is thrown aside.

I adored the way Fitzgerald weaves colour into the narrative. On page 1 he mentions rose, pink, cream, purple, blue and pink again. The Riviera sea is described as agate, cornelian , green, blue and, in an obvious tribute to Homer, wine-dark. 

I was a little disappointed when I discovered that Dick "stripped off his clothes and dove literally into a heavy sleep" but perhaps this is the first use of the word literally to not mean literally. There are also clear moments of racism typical of the period when the book was written: "No mature Aryan is able to profit by a humiliation" for example. And Dick refuses to treat a homosexual although there seems to be an implicit assumption that homosexuality is a mental disease.

'Tender is the night' is a mature novel with a fascinating character at the heart of it but I found it neither a page-turner nor a great read. 

February 2014; 338 pages

Also reviewed on this blog:
Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon: still enigmatic but a little more straightforward; unfinished alas