Like his famous hero Gatsby, the brilliant writer F. Scott Fitzgerald fell quickly and painfully. He became a bestseller in 1920 at the age of 23 when he published his first novel, “This Side Of Paradise.” He and his 19-year-old bride Zelda Sayre were the Prince and Princess of the Jazz Age, traveling the globe together, dancing with the glitterati in New York L.A. and Paris.
I am reading a wonderful novel about Fitzgerald’s last years by the writer Stewart O’Nan, it is grim and beautiful, it’s called “West Of Sunset.” It is a beautifully written book, it is not a happy story, it does not have a happy ending.
The Depression destroyed Fitzgerald’s soaring career. Novels and short stories about the rich fell quickly out of vogue. In the 30’s, Fitzgerald’s high life, already in decline, fell apart. Still in his 40’s, he was broke, sick from tuberculosis and heart disease and an alcoholic. His beloved Zelda was hospitalized in North Carolina for mental illness, Fitzgerald struggled to pay her hospital bills and also pay for boarding school for his teenaged daughter Scottie.
He did what many gifted writers did during the Depression, he went to work in Hollywood, working for MGM, often lonely, holed up in a building the writers called the “Iron Lung”. He hung out with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Humphrey Bogart, crossed paths with Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, played poker with Clark Gable, had a passionate affair with the gossip columnist Sheila Graham. On holidays, he traveled East to see Zelda, but the two eventually became estranged. His letters make clear that he never stop loving Zelda or, said some, trying to bully her back to health.
Zelda, who once dreamed of becoming a ballerina, died in a fire in a mental hospital in 1948, only her shoes were found. Fitzgerald died eight years earlier, he spent his last three and a three-and-a-half years in Hollywood, considered just another hack writer and treated accordingly. He never accepted his fall or got used to it, he was re-assigned, pulled off of projects, his work was dismissed, re-written, ignored or simply forgotten. It is difficult to imagine a fate like this for the author of “The Great Gatsby,” yet I know this is the writer’s life, it actually is the fate of most writers.
Writing is something you can do forever, even when you get old, yet it is, like so many creative fields, the rightful province of the young.
I remember attending a talk by John Updike, one of my favorite authors, and I was surprised to hear him tell of his living long enough to see his books forgotten, bypassed by the young, disappearing from bookstores, ignored by reviewers. I remember thinking if it could happen to him, one of America’s greatest and most prolific writers, it could happen to me. And of course, in some ways, it did.
The novel is really about a writer’s drive, much of the story is devoted to Fitzgerald’s great pride and passionate craftsmanship. He worked mostly on junk movies except for a brief stint on “Gone With The Wind.” There is a great scene where Joan Crawford ran into him in the studio canteen and discovered he was writing her movie (it never got made) and she looked him in the eye and told him frostily: “Mr. Fitzgerald, in my movies I never die and no one ever leaves me.”
O’Nan’s specialty as a writer is focusing on people who don’t quit or give up, even as the odds grow longer and longer. The novel is a powerful experience, and I have to concede it strikes close to home for me. Fitzgerald wrestled with many demons – pills, booze, Zelda’s sickness, money – but he never quit on his writing, never got lazy about his craft, never lost his pride in the details of his work, even when no one cared about his words or history or the movies he was writing for.
“Scott laughed along with them, but still, he was disappointed,” wrote O’Nan of his Fitzgerald. “He wasn’t used to having his work dismissed, the long days and weeks of fretful effort he’d devoted to it wasted, fruitless. He’d come west not just for the money but to redeem his previous failures here…what puzzled him most was that, until this morning, he thought he’d done a decent job.”
He probably had done better than that, but almost every writer knows that doesn’t always matter. Hollywood, like publishing, always goes for the masses. In a letter to Zelda, Fitzgerald tells her that he wants to take care not to save himself by sacrificing what was best in him.
As it turns out, Fitzgerald never did quite save himself or reclaim his fame. But he didn’t give up what was best in him either. That is the message and the inspiration for me and my work. Writers like me rarely make bestseller lists any longer, those lists are not filled with the kinds of books most of us write. I am getting older, the days of soaring success have perhaps past, there are fewer reviews and the big interviews are harder to come by.
Sometimes, I feel my work is dismissed, long months of hard work wasted or fruitless. My last book was loved by reviewers and practically burned by my publisher. You do wonder if you matter any longer. But like Fitzgerald (not in all ways, alas) I am resolved not to ever try saving myself by sacrificing what is the best in me. Like him, I am fortunate to keep on keeping on, and like him, I never quite abandon the idea of the Silver Cup, just waiting for my next book to come along and snatch it.
It was Fitzgerald who said “There are no second acts in American lives,” and he might well have been speaking of himself. I have to respectfully disagree with him, I have had a second act in my American life, and I have not given up on the idea of a third, or even a fourth. Fitzgerald, for all his brilliance, suffered a broken heart. He didn’t seem to know that deeply troubled, chronically ill alcoholics who can’t or won’t change rarely get another act, even if they possess great genius.
I love “West Of Sunset,” O’Nan, even though I wince a few too many times, he has written a gorgeous homage to the writer’s life.