Abstract
Accumulating debt, chronic alcoholism, ongoing trouble with Zelda, and the disappointing reception of Tender is the Night all contributed to making the years 1935 and 1936 particularly grim for F. Scott Fitzgerald. But at the end of 1935, he was still holding fast against Harold Ober’s suggestion that he take screenwriting work in Hollywood. As he put it bluntly, “No single man with a serious literary reputation has made good there.”1 Despite this high-toned epigram, Fitzgerald was not above putting his “serious literary reputation” at risk: besides peddling the sanitized movie treatment of Tender is the Night he wrote with Charles Warren, he was churning out relatively weak magazine fiction, trying to develop a somewhat ludicrous historical novel set in ninth-century France, and finally making what his peers judged a tasteless spectacle of himself by writing a series of confessional essays about his “crack-up” for Esquire magazine. Things would get worse before they got better. Hemingway treated him meanly in his 1936 story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (in an issue of Esquire in which his own self-deprecating story “Afternoon of an Author” appeared), and he reputedly attempted suicide in the wake of Michel Mok’s unflattering New York Post portrait of him as an alcoholic has-been.2 Fitzgerald fortunately emerged from this dark stage in his life and career and did what he could to make his literary reputation turn out all right in the end.
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Notes
See Alan Margolies, “Fitzgerald and Hollywood,” The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189
Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (New York: Viking, 1971), 26–44
Robert A. Martin, “Hollywood in Fitzgerald: After Paradise,” in The Short Stories ofF. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 128–29
Joss Lutz Marsh, “Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and The Last Tycoon: The American Dream and the Hollywood Dream Factory,” Literature/Film Quarterly 20.1 (1992), 3–4.
Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939), viii–ix.
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994), 196.
See Mitchell Breitwieser’s insightful remarks to this effect in “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation,” American Literary History 12 (fall 2000): 373–74; also see Mary A. McCay, “Fitzgerald’s Women: Beyond Winter Dreams,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 322–23.
It has become something of a truism in Fitzgerald criticism that he went some way in overcoming racist attitudes expressed in his earlier work: for good summary arguments in support of this, see Alan Margolies, “The Maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (spring 1997), 75–93
Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: A Biography of F Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Delta, 1983), 183–88
Matthew J. Bruccoli, “The Last of the Novelists”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Last Tycoon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 114.
Ironically, Hemingway the aging popular icon would return rather obsessively in his later works to everything connoted by those rooms over the sawmill, and he cast Fitzgerald—whose posthumous star rose for good after World War II—as the writer largely corrupted by commercial success: see Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1999), 252–71.
See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 195–208.
See Bruccoli, Last of the Novelists, 4–6, 9–10. The view of Stahr as an artist-figure is relatively commonplace, though those who read him as such tend also to assume that Fitzgerald romantically embraced, as a new kind of artist, the man who could infuse with a spirit of genius a medium driven by the imperatives of industrial organization and profit maximizing. I insist rather that Fitzgerald took this new artist’s measure in relation to residual modernist notions of purity derived from the more traditional art of literature. On Stahr as artist, see Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 163–70
Robert Giddings, “The Last Tycoon: Fitzgerald as Projectionist,” in Scott Fitzgerald: The Promises of Life, ed. A. Robert Lee (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 85–87
Mark Royden Winchell, “Fantasy Seen: Hollywood Fiction Since West,” in Los Angeles: A Collection of Original Essays, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 151–52.
Gilbert Seldes, The Movies Come From America (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), 15.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 130–31.
Lionel Trilling, Liberal Imagination (1950; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 236.
“[T]he American Tragi-Comedy inheres in [Fitzgerald’s] effort, at 40, to educate Sheilah Graham,” quips Hugh Kenner, somewhat snobbishly (A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975], 35).
See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 105–27.
My claim about Fitzgerald’s growing attraction to the figure of the Jew even within the terms of an often overtly anti-Semitic discourse of national culture in part accords with Jonathan Freedman’s more macrocosmic analysis of the Jew’s centrality to both the ideal of high culture influentially promulgated by Matthew Arnold and the figure of the alienated intellectual necessary to advance it: see The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43–54, 148–54. For other useful overviews of Fitzgerald’s representation of Jews, see Milton Hindus, F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 79–86
Ernst Renan, The Life of Jesus (1863; New York: Modern Library, 1927), 102.
Lewis Browne, Stranger Than Fiction: A Short History of the Jews from Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 304
See John F. Callahan, “Ralph Waldo Ellison, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and ‘The Dark Fields of the Republic,’” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 (2002), 133–35.
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© 2007 Michael Nowlin
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Nowlin, M. (2007). “A Gentile’s Tragedy”: Bearing the Word about Hollywood in The Love of the Last Tycoon. In: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11647-5_6
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