The Crack-Up
Page 31
Scott Fitzgerald was one of the inventors of that kind of fame. As a man he was tragically destroyed by his own invention. As a writer his triumph was that he managed in The Great Gatsby and to a greater degree in The Last Tycoon to weld together again the two divergent halves, to fuse the conscientious worker that no creative man can ever really kill with the moneyed celebrity who aimed his stories at the twelve-year-olds. In The Last Tycoon he was even able to invest with some human dignity the pimp and pander aspects of Hollywood. There he was writing, not for highbrows or for lowbrows, but for whoever had enough elementary knowledge of the English language to read through a page of a novel.
Stahr, the prime mover of a Hollywood picture studio who is the central figure, is described with a combination of intimacy and detachment that constitutes a real advance over the treatment of such characters in all the stories that have followed Dreiser and Frank Norris. There is no trace of envy or adulation in the picture. Fitzgerald writes about Stahr, not as a poor man writing about someone rich and powerful, nor as the impotent last upthrust of some established American stock sneering at a parvenu Jew; but coolly, as a man writing about an equal he knows and understands. Immediately a frame of reference is established that takes into the warm reasonable light of all-around comprehension the Hollywood magnate and the workers on the lot and the people in the dusty sunscorched bungalows of Los Angeles. In that frame of reference acts and gestures can be described on a broad and to a certain degree passionlessly impersonal terrain of common humanity.
This establishment of a frame of reference for common humanity has been the main achievement and the main utility of writing which in other times and places has come to be called great. It requires, as well as the necessary skill with the tools of the trade, secure standards of judgment that can only be called ethical. Hollywood, the subject of The Last Tycoon, is probably the most important and the most difficult subject for our time to deal with. Whether we like it or not it is in that great bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams that the new bottom level of our culture is being created. The fact that at the end of a life of brilliant worldly successes and crushing disasters Scott Fitzgerald was engaged so ably in a work of such importance proves him to have been the first-rate novelist his friends believed him to be. In The Last Tycoon he was managing to invent a set of people seen really in the round instead of lit by an envious spotlight from above or below. The Great Gatsby remains a perfect example of this sort of treatment at an earlier, more anecdotic, more bas relief stage, but in the fragments of The Last Tycoon, you can see the beginning of a real grand style. Even in their unfinished state these fragments, I believe, are of sufficient dimensions to raise the level of American fiction to follow in some such way as Marlowe’s blank verse line raised the whole level of Elizabethan verse.
THE HOURS
by JOHN PEALE BISHOP
In the real dark night of the soul it is
always three o’clock in the morning.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
I
ALL day, knowing you dead,
I have sat in this long-windowed room,
Looking upon the sea and, dismayed
By mortal sadness, thought without thought to resume
Those hours which you and I have known—
Hours when youth like an insurgent sun
Showered ambition on an aimless air,
Hours foreboding disillusion,
Hours which now there is none to share.
Since you are dead, I live them all alone.
II
A day like any day. Though any day now
We expect death. The sky is overcast,
And shuddering cold as snow the shoreward blast.
And in the marsh, like a sea astray, now
Waters brim. This is the moment when the sea
Being most full of motion seems motionless.
Land and sea are merged. The marsh is gone. And my distress
Is at the flood. All but the dunes are drowned.
And brimming with memory I have found
All hours we ever knew, but have not found
The key. I cannot find the lost key
To the silver closet you as a wild child hid.
III
I think of all you did
And all you might have done, before undone
By death, but for the undoing of despair.
No promise such as yours when like the spring
You came, colors of jonquils in your hair,
Inspired as the wind, when woods are bare
And every silence is about to sing.
None had such promise then, and none
Your scapegrace wit or your disarming grace;
For you were bold as was Danaë’s son,
Conceived like Perseus in a dream of gold.
And there was none when you were young, not one,
So prompt in the reflecting shield to trace
The glittering aspect of a Gorgon age.
Despair no love, no fortune could assuage . . .
Was it a fault in your disastrous blood
That beat from no fortunate god,
The failure of all passion in mid-course?
You shrank from nothing as from solitude,
Lacking the still assurance, and pursued
Beyond the sad excitement by remorse.
Was it that having shaped your stare upon
The severed head of time, upheld and blind,
Upheld by the stained hair,
And seen the blood upon that sightless stare,
You looked and were made one
With the strained horror of those sightless eyes?
You looked, and were not turned to stone.
IV
You have outlasted the nocturnal terror,
The head hanging in the hanging mirror,
The hour haunted by a harrowing face.
Now you are drunk at last. And that disgrace
You sought in oblivious dives you have
At last, in the dissolution of the grave.
V
I have lived with you the hour of your humiliation.
I have seen you turn upon the others in the night
And of sad self-loathing
Concealing nothing
Heard you cry: I am lost. But you are lower!
And you had that right.
The damned do not so own to their damnation.
I have lived with you some hours of the night,
The late hour
When the lights lower,
The later hour
When the lights go out,
When the dissipation of the night is past,
Hour of the outcast and the outworn whore,
That is past three and not yet four—
When the old blackmailer waits beyond the door
And from the gutter with unpitying hands
Demands the same sad guiltiness as before,
The hour of utter destitution
When the soul knows the horror of its loss
And knows the world too poor
For restitution,
Past three o’clock
And not yet four—
When not pity, pride,
Or being brave,
Fortune, friendship, forgetfulness of drudgery
Or of drug avails, for all has been tried,
And nothing avails to save
The soul from recognition of its night.
The hour of death is always four o’clock.
It is always four o’clock in the grave.
VI
Having heard the bare word that you had died,
All day I have lingered in this lofty room,
Locked in the light of sea and cloud,
And thought, at cost of sea-hours, to illume
The hours that you and I have known,
Hours death does not condemn, nor love condone.
And I have seen the sea-light set the t
ide
In salt succession toward the sullen shore
And while the waves lost on the losing sand
Seen shores receding and the sands succumb.
The waste retreats; glimmering shores retrieve
Unproportioned plunges; the dunes restore
Drowned confines to the disputed kingdom—
Desolate mastery, since the dark has come.
The dark has come. I cannot pluck you bays,
Though here the bay grows wild. For fugitive
As surpassed fame, the leaves this sea-wind frays.
Why should I promise what I cannot give?
I cannot animate with breath
Syllables in the open mouth of death.
Dark, dark. The shore here has a habit of light.
O dark! I leave you to oblivious night!
FOOTNOTES
* 1929
* Fitzgerald had said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway had replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
* Kyle Crichton, who wrote for the New Masses under the name of Robert Forsythe.
* A Hollywood writer.
* Earlier versions of First Love, The Pope at Confession and Marching Streets appeared in A Book of Princeton Verse II, 1909, published by the Princeton University Press. First Love was there called My First Love.
* This poem appeared in the New Yorker of March 23, 1935, from which it is reprinted here. Fitzgerald did not include it in his note-books, but indicated that he wanted to correct the third line of the second stanza to read as above.
* See editor’s note at the beginning of Note-Books.
* He mentions here his first great love and a Hollywood producer whom he considered to have spoiled one of his best scripts.
* Hendersonville, North Carolina. This note was probably written in 1936 or 1937.
* Later published in a different form in Bishop’s first book of poems, Green Fruit.
* Later incorporated in a different form and set as prose in Book Two, Chapter III, of This Side of Paradise.
* Princetonians who died in the War.
* The Nassau Literary Magazine, the Princeton undergraduate magazine.
* This poem in slightly different form and without the title appears at the beginning of Book Two, Chapter V, of This Side of Paradise.
† The last three of these names refer to characters in Compton Mackenzie’s early novels.
* I had graduated from college in 1916 and had written him from France that my last solace was to think of those of our literary group who were still at Princeton. E.W.
† I had mentioned in my reply to his previous letter that he had enclosed two prints of his passport picture. E.W.
* I was trying to get together a collection of realistic stories about the war. E.W.
* This refers to Holder Hall, one of the Princeton dormitories.
* Of John V. A. Weaver’s book of poems, In American.
† This note was written in a very small hand in the middle of a sheet of paper.
‡ On the birth of his daughter.
* The Beautiful and Damned.
† These enclosures included the greater part of Maury Noble’s monologue in the chapter called Symposium, pp. 252–258.
‡ John Peale Bishop.
§ Donald Ogden Stewart.
* A series of portraits of contemporary writers published in The Bookman.
† The Undertaker’s Garland, by John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson.
‡ John Grier Hibben was president of Princeton at this time.
* The Beautiful and Damned.
* The Vegetable.
* I had been telling him how funny I thought this burlesque, which first appeared in The Smart Set and was afterwards included in Tales of the Jazz Age. E.W.
* This was a printed letterhead.
† A nonsense poem of mine published in the New Orleans Double Dealer. E.W.
* He had drawn a map of the French coast between Hyères and Nice.
† Ring Lardner’s How to Write Short Stories.
‡A friend whom he has just mentioned in a passage not printed here.
§ Absolution.
║ The Great Gatsby
* This sentence is written in pencil. The rest of the letter is in ink.
* The Great Gatsby.
* The enclosure was, as I recall it, a letter of introduction to me. But who was being introduced I cannot recall. J.P.B.
* This was an article by Mr. W. G. Thompson, counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti, called Vanzetti’s Last Statement, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly of February 1928.
† An unpublished novel by Bishop.
‡ The Cellar, a short story by Bishop, published in his collection, Many Thousands Gone.
* There follow several pages of detailed criticism of the novel, which can be of no interest to anyone but myself. J.P.B.
* This refers to a stamp with Lenin’s head, which I had put on a letter I had written him.
* Of Tender is the Night.
* Articles on Michelet, afterwards included in To The Finland Station.
* Dorothy Parker.
* The Last Tycoon.
* For Whom the Bell Tolls.
* The Last Tycoon.
* Scott Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, working for the moving pictures, during 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940, and most of the letters that follow must have been written from there. He made, however, a few short trips to the East, and this letter may have been written from an Eastern address
* The Last Tycoon.
* The name should be Wolfsheim. Hildesheim was misspelled Hildeshiem in the first edition of The Great Gatsby.
* Fitzgerald was forty years old September 24, 1936, and had broken his collarbone the summer before. There are references in the letter to these two events.
† The Crack-Up.
* This was Fitzgerald’s real address, an apartment hotel, in Hollywood.
* This essay appeared in Paul Rosenfeld’s Men Seen: Twenty-Four Modern Authors, the preface to which is dated February 14, 1925— before The Great Gatsby was published.
* This essay appeared in The New Republic of February 17, 1941, just after Fitzgerald’s death.
F(RANCIS) SCOTT(KEY) FITZGERALD was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896. He attended Princeton for three years before joining the Army in 1917, where he served as aide-de-camp to General J. A. Ryan. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre; they had one daughter. He died in 1940. With the publication in 1920 of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald gained immediately both popularity and critical attention. Among his other well-known works are: The Great Gatsby (1925), All Sad Young Men (short stories, 1926), and Tender Is the Night (1934). The Crack-Up was originally published by New Directions in 1945.