The Last Tycoon

An Unfinished Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, together with ’The Great Gatsby’ and Selected Stories. Scribner’s $2.75.

THERE is something deeply touching about the last letters from a friend who is dead. On rare occasions this same pathos surrounds a posthumous book, as it certainly does this last and unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I believe that Fitzgerald developed a greater sense of intimacy between himself and his readers than any other American of my time. He was in a sense our Childe Harold, our Young Werther; his was the voice of our generation. In his life as in his writing there was the élan of the First World War, the glamour of the easy-spending ‘20s, and the bitter disillusion that followed. And when tragedy slowed down his writing we took the accident with a personal disappointment: it was one more grievous example of how American aspirations are halted in mid-career.

With The Great Gatsby, that superb short novel of the violently disorganized life on Long Island in Prohibition, Fitzgerald came to the peak of his first period. In the short stories that followed, and more conspicuously in Tender Is the Night, that novel of psychiatry so baffling, so disjointed, and in part so charged with anguish, one saw the author struggling toward maturity. It was anyone’s guess whether he would ever arrive. But that he did arrive, bringing with him a book of great power, clarity, and characterization, we now know. His friend Edmund Wilson has presented with skill and intuition Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Last Tycoon. To the manuscript, which was two-thirds complete, he has fitted the author’s notes, the outline and those fine passages in which the novelist’s mind had raced ahead. Thus we have the feel and scope of the story, partly by execution, partly by intent, and if it is less than Fitzgerald would have lived to give us, it is less only in degree.

Many good writers have tried to tell the story of Hollywood, and the best they could produce was a blurred snapshot, distorted by the venality, coarseness, and brutality that belong in the picture but are only a part of it. If Fitzgerald has succeeded where others have failed, it is first and foremost because of his preoccupation with one man’s character. Stahr, the Napoleon of producers, who knows all there is to know about pictures, is neither the lecherous nor loud caricature that we are so often shown, but a man, dynamic, fastidious, and lonely. You follow Stahr with that intent absorption, that eager expectancy, which are Fitzgerald at his best. ‘This,’ you say, ‘is the most imaginative character he has ever drawn.’ Part of Fitzgerald’s success here is derived from his perfect sense of balance. It we accept Stahr’s power and authority, it is because we actually see him in action, see what he does in the rushes, at the directors’ luncheons and with the experts in his projection room; we watch the ceaseless byplay between Stahr and his secretary, and we know what virtuosity the man has. Following Stahr naturally feeds our curiosity about the technical side of Hollywood, but always in incidents that reveal the detail as they give life to the narrative. We see his partners, Marcus and Brady; Pete Zavras, ‘the best camera man in Hollywood’; Wylie White, the smart writer from the East; George Boxley, the condescending one from England. We see the women who love him — Cecilia, Brady’s daughter, fresh home from Bennington and the person who tells the story; and Kathleen, the refugee who reminds him so passionately of his dead wife. We hear the racy Hollywood idiom. We sense the promiscuity, the money poison, the muttering presence of Labor, and the vulgarity, but they are shown to us without the exaggeration or vindictiveness that has ruined so many a novel.

The story is truncated just as Macbeth begins to slip. The scene with Brimmer, the Labor leader, is indicative of what was to come. There are loose ends and surface blemishes. Fitzgerald’s problem of how to make Cecilia the interlocutor is always troublesome. And characters like Robby and Kathleen are tantalizing in our half-knowledge. But in contrast to these imperfections the finished passages stand out with strength and skill. Stahr’s premonition of death is more than fiction, tor Fitzgerald had received his own warning while he was writing this novel.

It is sad that a book which has gone so far and brilliantly to explore a new medium could not have been finished as the author saw it in his mind.

saw EDWARD WEEKS

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