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Of course, like
Gatsby, Stahr is a potential tragic figure because when you stand so high above
the crowd, you have a long way to fall if you stumble or if someone pushes...
or you decide to fall anyway, as the volition, the sensation, the romantic
madness that exists between hope and failure is preferable to the corroding
loneliness. Stahr is living on borrowed time anyway as he has a heart
condition, a weak spring in the clock. During a flood on the studio lot caused
by the L.A./Long Beach earthquake of 1933, he spots a woman who appears to be a
dead ringer for his deceased wife, the screen star Minna Davis. In the
confusion, the woman disappears, but Stahr soon tracks her down as he would a
potential starlet seen on the street or in a drugstore. It's a short, intense
romance. Kathleen Moore -- born in Ireland, educated in England -- is like
Cinderella after the divorce -- experienced, exciting, fatal. She belongs, it
seems, to another, leaves Stahr cruelly wounded and hitting the bottle. Cecelia
fills the vacancy and the story ends -- or at least ends as much of the story
as was written when it was interrupted by Fitzgerald's death from a heart
attack on December 21, 1940.
Oddly, there is a
narrative unity in the fragment that exists, like a long short story that
wanders on too far, engages too many satellite characters, yet seems to be
complete if romance is the only issue at stake. Kathleen Moore can be dismissed
to the supernatural, along with the 'old Monroe Stahr' (who was a sort of Ayn
Rand Superman, too lucky to be real), and Cecelia Brady gets her man, albeit
reduced by alcohol and a new found dissipation that makes him more human, more
real. The ellipsis leaves the future uncertain... but could it be any other way
for a hero with a terminal heart condition, never mind a ghost in the
closet?
Yet, it must be
admitted, the end is too sudden; there are too many scenes missing, too many
characters left waiting in the wings. And of course you know Fitzgerald's notes
sketched further scenes to come. As Edmund Wilson, the critic and friend of
Fitzgerald who edited Tycoon for publication says:
"(Fitzgerald) had
originally planned that the novel should be about 60,000 words long, but he had
written at the time of his death about 70,000 words without, as will be seen
from his outline, having told much more than half his story. He had calculated,
when he began, on leaving himself a margin of 10,000 words for cutting; but it
seems certain that the novel would have run longer than the proposed 60,000
words. The subject was here more complex than it had been in The Great
Gatsby—the picture of the Hollywood studios required more space for its
presentation than the background of the drinking life of Long Island; and the
characters needed more room for their development."
The story starts on an
airliner flying from New York to Los Angeles which is forced to set down in
Nashville for a few hours to sit out a storm coming up the Mississippi Valley.
Stahr is travelling under the alias 'Mr. Smith' with a couple of other studio
men, a writer called Wylie White and a Jewish producer called Mannie Schwartz,
although Stahr has the 'bridal suite' for himself at the front of the plane.
Cecelia is also on board, returning home for the summer after a semester at
Bennington College, an Ivy League school for the Arts where, she says, the
instructors fear and hate Hollywood instinctively. The modernity is exquisite,
not only because of the clean geometry of the writing, but because the setting
is on an airliner, an entirely new form of travel introduced to the public in
parallel with the talkies in the late twenties, as if its dreamy vernacular was
yet another Hollywood invention. The fact that Stahr flies in isolated luxury
in his own suite seems preposterous, because surely there were no aircraft in
the early thirties that would have a conceit such as a 'bridal suite'... the
detail is fantastic, like a Jules Verne invention, and you wonder if Fitzgerald
was just wandering into his Diamond Big as the Ritz mode, letting fantasy
sketch the politics... Hollywood mogul, lots of dough, carries on like Captain
Nemo.
Fitzgerald doesn't
name the aircraft model, although the writing is naturalistic and authentic.
The early workhorse aircraft for the transcontinental routes was the Ford
Trimotor, an elegant radial engine machine that could carry nineteen
passengers, or twelve if their seating was convertible to sleeping bunks,
although this seems an unlikely candidate for Fitzgerald's scenario.
Quite possibly he was
thinking of a German airliner, the
Fokker F-32,
a four engine Art Deco leviathan that Western Air Express (later became TWA)
used for its luxury-minded clientele flying in and out of Glendale, California,
in the early thirties. This Fokker monoplane was designed for fantasy,
affording the passengers the illusion of flying in small rooms decorated with
art panels, lighting sconces, and cushioned davenports beside the curtained
windows. In the early 1930s it was a long flight from the east coast to the
west coast, as these aircraft usually had to land and refuel every 500 miles,
and avoided night flying as they navigated by following natural landmarks and
painted concrete arrows set into the landscape. And landing just to avoid bad
weather -- as happens in The Last Tycoon -- was common, and passengers often
had to spend time in hotels and/or take the train for some sections of the
journey.
However, the Nashville
stop isn't entirely at the service of realism, as Fitzgerald sets up the tease
romance between the ambitious writer Wylie White and the young adventuress
Cecelia Brady by having them hire a taxi and visit The Hermitage, the home of
America's 10th President, Andrew Jackson, where they sit on the steps and await
the dawn, talk about Hollywood and flirt. There seems to be no reason for The
Hermitage scene other than the fact that Mannie Schwartz, who accompanies the
couple as a "chaperone" decides he's abandoning the journey back to Hollywood,
although the reason isn't immediately clear. He writes a note, gives it to
Wylie to pass along to 'Mr. Smith'. When they reboard the plane, Cecelia
realizes 'Mr. Smith' is in fact Monroe Stahr, an associate of her father,
someone she has known since childhood, a man 15 years her senior, an easy
romantic fixation for the young and restless Bennington junior. As for Schwartz
-- himself once the CEO of a movie combine "like United Artists" -- it seems
he's lost favour with Stahr, the boss of bosses, and has decided to drop out
entirely. Just what the reason is remains in the political shadow of the
culture that Stahr casts; you might not think of it at the time, but perhaps
it's an omen, a signal of things to come. While Schwartz carries an air of
quiet defeat and resignation, you're not sure what his direction will be --
suicide or revenge or the gutter or resurrection. Within the story fragment
that exists, the true meaning and function of this character remains moot,
although his cautionary note to Stahr perhaps says it all:
Dear Monroe, You
are the best of them all. I have always admired your mentality so when you turn
against me I know it's no use! I must be no good and am not going to continue
the journey let me warn you once again look out! I know. Your friend MANNIE'
In the 1977 Elia Kazan
film version the ending is written as an act of treachery when Pat Brady
(Robert Mitchum) calls a board meeting and has Stahr (Robert de Niro) removed
from power, advised to "take a vacation". There is due cause for this -- Stahr
got drunk and punched the 'communist' union leader Brimmer (Jack Nicholson)
when they failed to come to an agreement about the rights of some studio
members of The Screenwriters' Guild. While Stahr got the worst of the fight, it
was witnessed by Brady who uses the incident as an opportunity to displace his
partner and stymie the budding romance with his daughter Cecelia. While Stahr's
case of hubris might have its own rationale for this studio putsch, the
political subtleties are just too subtle as filmed. Despite its A-list cast --
Robert de Niro, Theresa Russell, Ray Milland, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson,
Dana Andrews, Donald Pleasance, John Carradine, Anjelica Huston -- and a script
by the premier stage dramatist of the day, Harold Pinter, the film fails to
capture Fitzgerald's cultural insight and story mysticism.
It doesn't help that
Kazan and Pinter skipped the plane (Chapter 1) entirely, opted to start their
story right on the studio lot, working up a montage from the screening room and
the soundstage, thereby ditching Fitzgerald's perfectly good set-up that
introduces the hero obliquely through the eyes of Cecelia Brady and uses the
metaphor of flight to romanticize the Hollywood 'high-flyer' set. The visual
possibilities of this period in American history when airline travel was still
a novelty were, for some reason, ignored. Either Kazan or Pinter were too
stage-locked in their thinking or there was a budgetary constraint that led to
this aesthetic blunder. It certainly helped kill the magic. While the (not so)
secret world of the studio film set with the actors and technicians doing their
thing has some appeal to the curious public, it all makes for a messy immersion
into the world of Monroe Stahr which is just the back story to his romance. A
cameo by Jeanne Moreau playing the diva during a film shoot does not replace
the plot function of the ingenue Cecelia Brady, the hopeful writer Wylie White,
the condemned producer Mannie Schwartz, and the man with the gold nugget ring
with the embossed letter 'S' (as if he was Superman) who reads scripts in the
plane's bridal suite and sits with the pilots in the cockpit:
'Stahr sat up front
all afternoon. While we slid off the endless desert and over the table lands,
dyed with many colors like the white sands we dyed with colors when I was a
child. Then in the late afternoon, the peaks themselves -- the Mountains of the
Frozen Saw -- slid under our propellers and we were close to
home.
'When I wasn't
dozing I was thinking that I wanted to marry Stahr, that I wanted to make him
love me....'
Beautiful, correct?
And these are not words for words' sake. Fitzgerald was writing at his modern
best -- straight clean lines that leave space for the imagination while driving
the action. If you've read any of the Pat Hobby stories -- the Hollywood series
that was published monthly in Esquire between January 1940 and May 1941 thereby
spanning Fitzgerald's last days and death -- you will experience this economy
of form at its most sublime. There's an urgency to the writing, where the story
and only the story matters, as if delivered between drinks in some Hollywood
bar. Obviously there's a 'pictorial' influence, a screenwriter's sense of
scene, an oral sense of brevity rather than pretty verbal exposition. As an
expose of life on the studio lot in the 1930s there is nothing to match these
stories. As a 'writer', Hobby is a Falstaffian hustler who was 'big' in the
silent era, and now struggles to get any screen credits at all in the talkies.
Forty-nine years old and living from fantasy to fantasy -- often ripped off
from some other wannabe sucker -- he lurches around the studio lot like a bit
player from the silents trying to keep up to the relentless future. In fact, in
one story he blunders into the middle of a live scene while trying to graft a
loan from a producer and is then forced to wear a iron stunt vest and allow
himself to be driven over by the star. Desperate for money, he agrees but the
scene goes awry and he's left in a ditch all night trapped by his iron vest
until rescued by a studio cop at dawn.
Many screenwriters no
doubt felt as if they were wearing an iron straight jacket as they laboured
cruelly, tricked by easy promises and their own desperate optimism. Fitzgerald
was definitely writing under such pressure in the three years before his death,
recovering from his 'Crack-Up' period, struggling to find the cash to pay for
his wife's medical quarantine, their daughter's school, and whatever it takes
to pay for food and lodging. It was a tough life for writers; even exalted
figures like William Faulkner and Aldous Huxley, lured to Hollywood by the
prospect of big money, struggled to pay for the groceries.
Pat was forty-nine.
He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the
'originals' he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much. But the
good old silent days you got somebody's plot and a smart secretary and gulped
benzedrine 'structure' at her six or eight hours every week. The Director took
care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who
wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work.
"I've got a list of
credits second to none," he told Jack Berners. "All I need is an idea and to
work with somebody who isn't all wet."
(A Man In The Way,
pub. in Esquire, February 1940)
Here, it's as if
Fitzgerald was reconnoitering his own fade-to-black as he too passed into
middle age, found himself writing scripts that never made the screen, or if
they did, someone else's name was on the credits. His books were out of print,
he was alcoholic, his wife in the madhouse, and he was living like a nomad. Pat
Hobby is by no means a self-portrait by Fitzgerald -- he's uneducated, doesn't
read if he can help it, never stayed married more than a month or two --
although he's a barometer of sorts. Where the examination of Hollywood studio
culture is almost naturalistic in Tycoon, in Pat Hobby the gestalt is a
full-throttle uninhibited expose. To be sure, it's often burlesque, an
absurdity that could be easy fiction, yet the authenticity is beyond any
thespian fraud dreamed up by a screenwriter with a grudge. The economy of form
in these stories approaches minimalist perfection. Although they were probably
written in haste 'for the money', their pictorial narratives move with the
montage speed of a superbly edited series of film shorts on a common
theme.
'I saw that the
novel was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that whether
in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of
reflecting only the tritest of thoughts, the most obvious emotion.'
(Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up)
Fitzgerald outlined a
possible 31 chapters or scenes for Tycoon, and only completed 17 before his
death. He imagined Stahr going for revenge against Brady, hiring an assassin to
take him out, then having second thoughts; yet before he can decommission the
hit, is killed in a plane crash in Oklahoma while en route to New York. The
appeal of this plot is in the circularity, the looping of Chapter one as the
shape of fate, and its deadly irony when considered against Stahr's cocksure
judgment.
Some say Fitzgerald
was a nasty piece of work, and seems to have had a habit of using women as
characters first and lovers second. On his first attempt at Hollywood in the
late twenties, he had an affair with the starlet Lois Moran who later ended up
as the template for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender is the Night (1934). Of course,
there's nothing unusual in this -- writers use people they know either
consciously or unconsciously all the time for their characters -- and whether
or not there is/was some moral treachery involved here is a matter of opinion
and political memory.
Kathleen Moore =
Sheilah Graham
'Stahr did not
answer. Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead
wife, identical even to the expression. Across four feet of moonlight the eyes
he knew looked back at him....'
A supernatural
event... or just a desperate widower's needy hallucination? Stahr doesn't seem
to be particularly desperate, although the minions who serve him might be. The
lack of information about his deceased wife contributes to the feeling that
this is a man who doesn't look back, who just keeps moving confidently into the
future at 24 frames per second. Yet, as we come to learn, he is a lonely man,
one who never allows his name to appear in the credits of the many films he
produces.
Stahr's romance has a
mythical sense about it, as if Fitzgerald was not only writing about himself
and Sheliah Graham, but also about that sort of Orphic love whereby the dead
lover returns from the underworld simply to draw the bereaved to the other
side. As femme fatales go, Kathleen Moore is a beautiful consolation prize
hijacked by Minna Davis for one last dance in the moonlight before Stahr's own
inevitable departure. His partially constructed beach house where he romances
Kathleen is merely an ante-chamber between sex and death, the incomplete
'present' which can only be measured by the distance between first and last
love, now one and the same. It's possible that Stahr is suffering from movie
hypnosis, whereby his aesthetic ideal is bound to come back at him in an ghost
studio that is forever inside his head. An earthquake delivered Kathleen to
him, as if the flood drew her from the underworld riding on the giant head of
Siva, and, while entirely natural in the course of events (there was an
earthquake in the Los Angeles area in 1933 that broke water mains and caused
buildings to collapse), the incident paints itself in symbolism.
Although the giant
head is detritus from a jungle set, some might think the Hindu god 'Shiva'
was/is misspelled deliberately as 'Siva' in order to suggest the Jewish ritual
of consolation for the bereaved. The ambiguity is interesting, as the Hindu
Shiva is the god of destruction (in order to make way for a new cycle of
creation), and certainly fits well with the minor disaster that has struck the
studio lot. Yet the Siva head is just a film prop, another Hollywood fiction
that serves the dream factory. So when Stahr saves his dead wife's incarnation
from the flood, perhaps he's become a victim of the fantasy he has staged so
often for the public. You can read too much into the background architecture of
Fitzgerald's narrative, of course, although incidents such as this trigger
associations.
Fitzgerald obviously
based Kathleen's character on his last paramour, Sheilah Graham, the well-known
Hollywood gossip columnist who emigrated from England in 1933, ditching an
older, paternalist husband and a gig as a chorus girl in London's West End. It
was a hot romance, a sweet mix of body beautiful and elegant words, but of
course volatile as Fitzgerald was vibrating between addiction and poverty, and
Graham was carrying secrets that only love could unlock:
As she put it in
her book College of One (1966), during his great drinking binge of 1939, he
screamed “all the secrets of [her] humble beginnings” to the nurse
taking care of him. That same day, my mother and Fitzgerald grappled over his
gun, and she made the pronouncement of which I think she was rather proud,
“Take it and shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn't pull myself out
of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.” What Fitzgerald had
screamed to the nurse, my mother eventually told me, though she never brought
herself to write it in any of her books, was that she was a Jew. (Robert Westbrook, novelist & son
of Sheilah Graham)
Fitzgerald himself was
like Bronte's Rochester, a tortured man dealing with the demons that come with
having an insane wife locked up in a private asylum and so you would expect
this part of his unhappiness to migrate into the character of Stahr. You learn
that Stahr's wife is dead some three years earlier, the circumstances left
untold within the narrative that exists. She was a movie star called Minna
Davis and while Stahr doesn't seem to suffer much from the memory -- he's too
busy with running a big movie studio to be distracted by death, it seems -- yet
his loneliness is a subtle disease, as if the memory of his dead wife is locked
in his head like a ghost, and is manifested in his hunt for Kathleen Moore,
which seems at first to be just an imprudent detour from the business at hand.
As his character is revealed through action rather than exposition, and his
interest in this unknown trespasser on the studio lot could well be nothing
more than a movie man's business intuition that this babe would look good on
the screen, Stahr's motive is ambiguous at first... and perhaps he doesn't know
his reasons himself beyond the fact that this woman is a dead ringer for Minna
Davis.
There's a faint
Jamesian ghost story motif at work here, and although the modernism keeps the
supernatural distant, it's keen enough to drive a sense of romantic tragedy in
the making.
There were two
revolutions at the close of the twenties -- the stock market crash and the
advent of the "talkies' -- and both figure heavily in the cultural turmoil that
landscapes the action in The Last Tycoon. The lack of spending money affected
box office intakes and the talkies affected the entire movie production
routine. Before, it was "tell the story in pictures" but in the thirties the
pictures had to coexist with dialogue, so there was a large influx of
professional writers, hopeful journalists and elite novelists and playwrights
like Aldous Huxley and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike Huxley, Fitzgerald grasped
the format requirements quickly, as his Pat Hobby stories about a hustling
screenwriter reveal, and the pared down modernist narrative style that came out
of films is in full force in The Last Tycoon. The 'Conference' session scenes
that Stahr conducts with his producers and writers are a true insider's view of
the process. Producers struggle to find 'the story' and stay on budget while
writers struggle to write in scenes and be pictorial before being verbal... but
verbal nonetheless.
The pictorial method
came out of 'the silents' and in a sense film never left it as an aesthetic
anchor. Even in action films today dialogue is mere noise, a dumbed down lyric
that's just part of the soundtrack where emotion is best served by an atonal
melody. How different is this from yesterday's orchestra or lone pianist
emoting from the twilight below the screen? Still, the close up with a
supporting monologue was now part of the drama, and the verbal skills of the
theatre dramatist were in demand. The 'talkies' introduced an intellectual
level and intellectuals were brought in to work in 'pairs' -- usually a man
with a woman to get both sides of the dialogue, or a neophyte with an
established pro -- even if oftentimes their efforts went unread or if used,
their names never appeared in the credits. In The Last Tycoon, Stahr has a
chain of 'pairs' writing on the same story, each a backup or alternative to the
pair in front. Usually these pairs worked in ignorance of one another, although
not naive to the possibility. This assembly line method of writing pairs was an
innovation attributed to Irving Thalberg, the famous boy wonder producer at
MGM, who died aged 37 in 1936 of heart failure, and is still considered by many
commentators and Hollywood historians to be the greatest figure ever in the
economic evolution and aesthetic shaping of the film industry.
So it's no surprise
that most people think Fitzgerald's character Monroe Stahr was based mostly on
Irving Thalberg -- like Thalberg, Stahr was married to a movie star and
suffered from a congenital heart defect, and was known to already be living
beyond his years. Yet Stahr is also like Fitzgerald himself, blessed with early
success and the sense of invincibility that such success brings. And love -- O
tainted love -- which is both a reward and a future punishment, perhaps for
unwitting arrogance, or perhaps capricious fate. Fitzgerald loses Zelda to
madness, and Stahr loses Minna to early death... and then, like Fitzgerald,
Stahr suffers a "crack-up" when Kathleen chooses an old lover, leaves him in
the lurch. Stahr's emotional geography is something very familiar to the
writer, an autobiographical surrogate dressed in mythological possibility.
Perhaps because he
exists only in a narrative fragment, Stahr isn't particularly real or even
sympathetic as a character, especially when he appears in the 3rd person -- his
'close-up' -- and you get to see the private Stahr, the off-stage Stahr.
There's something insubstantial about him, as if he can only be seen in the
long view, through the eyes of others. He is most real when seen through
Cecelia's P.O.V. Love is blind, the saying goes, yet here love is clear.
"He was born
sleepless, without a talent or the desire for it," she says.
And later: "(Stahr)
was a marker in industry like Edison and Lumiere and Griffith and Chaplin. He
led pictures way up past the range and power of the theatre, reaching a sort of
golden age before the censorship in 1933."
Well, perhaps it's the
P.O.V. shift that dims the portrait, removes the light. Fitzgerald builds Stahr
as an idea, a quasi-Nietzschean superman, the sort of Promethean hero that Ayn
Rand developed in antipathy to communism and its sublimation of the individual.
Stahr is a master of the 'quick read', both of scenarios and people. And an
individualist.
Boxley =
Huxley?
Boxley, rhymes with
Huxley, so who knows, maybe Fitzgerald used Aldous Huxley for this character,
the English novelist whom Stahr has under contract, even though he doesn't know
how to write a film script. Huxley had the same problems and frustrations as
'Boxley' with both the studio system and trying to master the 'pictorial'
method of screenwriting. When he and his wife Maria first arrived in Hollywood
in 1937, they put up in the Garden of Allah, where both S.J. Perelman and
Fitzgerald were staying, so Fitzgerald would've seen first-hand Huxley's naive
entry into the motion picture industry.
Actually Stahr -- like
his real-life model, Irving Thalberg -- handles the frustrated novelist
diplomatically, and their encounter reveals his legendary 'long-view' way of
doing business. The Boxley name -- like Huxley -- has cachet, which the studio
can benefit from even if nothing he writes actually makes the screen. Besides,
as Stahr says, sooner or later he'll figure it out. This scene has a certain
authenticity to it, and while amusing, doesn't discredit Boxley/Huxley, and
illustrates Stahr's industrial approach to the art.
Another clue that
Boxley resembles Huxley is that Huxley worked on a screen play about Madame
Curie, which Fitzgerald later took over. What happened to Huxley's 145 page
attempt? According to Salka Viertel, the writer who eventually got the screen
credit, the producer gave it to his secretary to read, who proclaimed that "it
stank" and was therefore immediately forgotten.
In 1938 Huxley wrote a
novel called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan based on Randolph Hearst the
newspaper tycoon; it might have had some influence on Orson Welles and his
Hearst project, Citizen Kane, and likewise on Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald has a
heart-felt line in The Crack-Up which describes both himself and Stahr: "The
ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothing to nothingness." The fatalism
here underscores the romanticism of both success and tragedy, and the paradox
of life and death. As it stands, there's no way of knowing if Fitzgerald's hero
is a winner or a loser within the human scale of such measurements. You suspect
that like his previous heroes, Stahr is a slave to beauty, the hidden muse
behind his art... albeit that his art is industrial art, a dark room seance for
the masses. The familiar Fitzgerald masochism is there, the need to suffer in
order to keep the flame alive. When Orpheus failed in his attempt to recover
Eurydice from the Underworld, he went homosexual, and as a consequence was
ripped to pieces by some jealous Thracian women... apparently. While Fitzgerald
didn't project this fate onto Stahr exactly, he was to be destroyed in an
aircrash, a counterpoint irony to the hit he ordered on Brady.
If you have a copy of
Tycoon that includes Fitzgerald's notes for the rest of the novel, you can
consider the work as a post-modern narrative that allows the reader to impose
his or her own preferences, decide the fate of the characters. Mannie Schwartz
commits suicide... Brady manipulates a film editor into killing Stahr...
Kathleen reappears as the film editor's lover... maybe the plane is
booby-trapped... maybe the wreckage is found by some teenagers who loot the
baggage, forget to tell the authorities about the bodies in the snow... maybe
there's a big Hollywood funeral... or maybe Stahr and Kathleen end up on a nice
warm beach before Pearl Harbor changes everything. Fitzgerald hadn't decided;
he was mulling options.
Perhaps one should
look at the ending of The Great Gatsby to see how it might've gone for Tycoon,
as writers repeat patterns, and Fitzgerald was no different. The summation
would come from Cecelia Brady, as she is the correlation to Nick Carraway, the
bedazzled neighbour who befriends Jay Gatsby and is the only mourner at his
funeral. Because the studio is run by a majority of Jewish businessmen, that
angle would be explored, just as it is in Gatsby when Carraway visits
Wolfsheim, Gatsby's business partner in a futile quest to get him to appear at
the funeral. Gatsby was shot in his swimming pool by mistake, although the
shooter thought it was no mistake, merely drew the wrong conclusion from the
right information; this sort of ironic justice would play out in The Last
Tycoon.
A roman à
clef masterpiece? Possibly. The Last Tycoon is certainly a historical
marker for all sorts of reasons beyond its importance within Fitzgerald's work.
But if this fragment -- this uncompleted novel -- was all that Fitzgerald had
ever written, would there be enough cultural gravity out there to keep it going
like, say, that other famous fragment, Coleridge's Kubla Khan?
© LR
September 2016
The Last Tycoon
at Amazon: US | Canada | UK
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