Some stories are endlessly revisted: So Arthur Krystal looks again at "F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" in the Nov. 16 New Yorker. The article's title is "Slow Fade,": Once again, we see the prematurely, broken Fitzgerald failing to make it as a movie hack. I couldn't wait to read it: yes, the story is endlessly fascinating.
Once again, The New Yorker gives posthumous attention to a writer who it ignored while he was alive. As far as I know, the New Yorker's Harold Ross never published any work of Fitzgerald, who did his magazine pieces for The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Kudos to Esquire's Arnold Gingrich for continuing to publish Fitzgerald. Nor did the New Yorker publish Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck: one is hard-pressed to remember who it did publish from the era. John O'Hara?
Krystal, an essayist and screenwriter, is writing a book on Fitzgerald, who remains, like Lincoln and Shakespeare, an inexhaustible subject. When the book comes out, I'll undoubtedly rush to consume it. I'll never forget encountering "The Great Gatsby" when I was a mere youth; it was one of those books that changed my consciousness. From then on, Fitzgerald joined my pantheon of artists whose lives I can't stop studying.
The Fitzgerald Hollywood saga remains hot. A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece somewhere, I can't remember where, on Fitzgerald's friendship with Nathaniel West, the author of "Day of the Locusts" and "Miss Lonelyhearts." Fitgerald began his career befriending and aiding Ernest Hemingway and ended it as the pal of West: among his many talents, Scott had a great capacity for friendship. West was killed in an automobile accident the day after Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. Hemingway, of course, continued developing into the bloated icon, at last betraying Fitzgerald's memory with attacks in "The Movable Feast."
Krystal gives a complete examination of why Fitzgerald didn't make it in Hollywood: his writing was too literary and complicated for the movies. As a caption says, Fitzgerald, in his own words, "just couldn't make the grade as a hack," although in his hey-day in the 1920s, he churned out facile short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. It's strange that he couldn't translate that hack short story talent into movie scripts. I was reminded of the Robert Redford movie version of "The Great Gatsby," which faithfully uses dialogue from the book. The witty, inventive, searing words from the page come off as flat and wooden in the movie. This indicates why Fitzgerald's gift didn't bring good movie writing. How curious to consider that Faulkner, known for his voluminous sentences, was better than Fitzgerald at terse movie writing. Faulkner got a credit for "The Big Sleep."
But the more I ponder Fitgerald's late days, the less I'm convinced that he was such a broken writer. A year or two ago, I read Fitgerald's "Pat Hobby Stories," the result of his Hollywood experience. I was surprised at how good they were. Ribald, surrealistic, sardonically funny, the stories look at the life of a faded Hollywood writer, Pat Hobby. The stories are not as deep or rich as Fitzgerald best stories, such as "Babylon Revisted," but they have a bracing, tart, exuberant energy, which many writers would be happy to be remembered for. A few characteristics of Fitzgerald can be found in Pat, but Fitgerald, unlike Pat, continued as a productive, vibrant writer. While struggling with the Hollywood writing factory, and producing the Pat Hobby stories, he was also writing "The Last Tycoon," his unfinished, but classic, Hollywood novel. And he enjoyed the friendship of West and others.
The era does continue to fascinate: a new bio is out on Irving G. Thalberg, MGM's "boy wonder" and the model for Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr. Fitzgerald said that Monroe Stahr understood "the whole equation" of movies. Despite his struggles, Fitgerald always knew "the whole equation" of writing.