Fitzgerald Unfinished

In Hollywood one day last month, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald phoned the doctor to put off his visit until next day. Fitzgerald was writing, did not want to be disturbed. He kept on writing the next morning, too. When the doctor got there a little later, Novelist Fitzgerald's heart had stopped.

Nostalgic Fitzgerald fans realized that the "lost generation" had died with him. They wondered what he had been racing death to write. Last week they penetrated several wrappings of reticence to find out. Fitzgerald was writing a novel about Hollywood. Its hero was a movie producer. As "a gag title," Fitzgerald called his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon--A Western, expected it to run a little longer than The Great Gatsby (218 pages). He had begun writing it some five months before his death. Though secretive about his progress, he mentioned the novel in letters to Scribner's Editor Maxwell Perkins and to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald's fellow Princetonian and "intellectual conscience." Perkins had even seen the first chapter, liked it.

At the time of his death Fitzgerald had completed an outline and 37,000 words of Draft No. 1, which he expected to finish within a month. Friends were sure The Love of the Last Tycoon would be published in some form, perhaps under some other title.

Others thought that after the typical Fitzgerald ending of Fitzgerald's life, a Fitzgerald novel reworked by somebody else might come as something of an anticlimax. They wondered who could rework it anyway. Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), Fitzgerald's great & good friend, for whose literary recognition he generously pled in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby, was dead too. At the home of Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, Fitzgerald attended his last party (and his first in many a day) on Friday, Dec. 13. Day after Fitzgerald died, Novelist West and Eileen McKenney were killed in an auto crash (four days before the play based on Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen became a Broadway hit).

Perhaps John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra) could polish off the script. But though characters in O'Hara novels sometimes refer to each other as "Fitzgerald characters," O'Hara is more a Hemingway derivative, belongs less among the sad young men than with U. S. Literature's dead-end kids : James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), pseudonymous Richard Hallas (real name Eric Knight).

Fitzgerald, in fact, was the sole author of his own dilemmas. He was the last survivor of a generation that never grew up--or rather of its period of hectic ar rested development. This period he had fixed memorably in a series of remarkable prose movies: This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and Damned, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men.

When the jazzed arteries had begun to calcify, and the bravely broken hearts began to miss a beat, Fitzgerald slowed down too. Between The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald published no novels. For the last three years he lived in Hollywood, tranquilly, soberly, almost clinically (friends claim he had not had a drink for years), but also somewhat like the last passenger pigeon in the Cincinnati zoo.

He wrote stories for Esquire, worked on scenarios for the movies. He needed the money to keep his daughter Frances Scott ("Scottie") at Vassar, where she is now a junior. But when Zanuck asked him to do some work on his forthcoming Brooklyn Bridge, Fitzgerald rebelled. Said he: "You've already made that picture ten times, I can't add anything to it."

He kept in touch with many young writers whose work he patiently encouraged. Though they were separated by a continent in space, almost as far in time, he kept in touch with his daughter, who also writes. At twelve she had told a newshawk that Father knew only old-fashioned things like the jazz age. Last year Scottie read The Beautiful and Damned, wrote her father that she could never be such a good writer. There is nothing lost about daughter Scottie. If anything, she is old for her years (19).

The generation which Fitzgerald celebrated managed to prolong its mental childhood to the age of 21. Really violent adolescence set in at 25. By 30 the physical survivors flickered into a relatively tranquil senescence. But they had been deeply seared by a blinding flash of revelation that life is at bottom brutal, and most of them clung to their cushioning cynicism years after the psychic shock had passed. They had to. Cynicism was the lost generation's only morale.

Before the last cocktail had been downed and the last dance danced this generation had lived through: 1) World War I, which for the first time brought out into the open the crisis in western civilization of which the lost generation was also a symptom ; 2) the beginnings of a social revolution which came to be called Communism and Fascism; 3) the abdication of an older generation almost as lost as the younger.

How much of this Fitzgerald understood is clear from the somewhat sophomoric conversation on Socialism that closes This Side of Paradise. In fiction he never got beyond this. He consciously limited his literary field to what he could see with his own eyes--the campus, the undergraduate clubhouse, the resorts, the hotels, the boudoirs, the country clubs, the North Shore of Long Island. Then, as he and the lost generation ran down together, he tried and almost succeeded in recapturing its final psychopathic spasms in Europe (Tender Is the Night).

To write down what he saw he developed a brilliant, surfacy prose, an ability to strike off a scene or a portrait in a dozen visual words whose cadence is a part of the mood; the power to evoke lyrically (with occasional lapses into tremolo) a moonlight night at Princeton, a summer dawn, reaches of land and water; a vest-pocket Proust's preoccupation with houses, furniture, streets. He had a masculine power to recreate the sensuous opulence of young women; a curiously feminine habit of seeing at a glance not only the color of people's hair and the shape of their chins, but of seeing at the same glance what color their hair would be, how many chins they would have ten years hence. Nobody else set down so accurately the syncopated mood of a generation that was at best pathetic, at worst self-pathetic. Fitzgerald shared his generation's faults. The farther he could stand off from his generation, the better he wrote (The Great Gatsby). The more he was like his generation, the better they liked him (This Side of Paradise).

With many a chuckle Critic Wilson used to tell a story about his friend. It is symbolic. In Baltimore Fitzgerald used to have an ardent fan. For some time they carried on a brisk and intelligent literary correspondence. Fitzgerald had never met the young man, thought he ought to have him over for supper. The Fitzgeralds were living then in their big, rather empty house at Rodgers Forge, Md. (Fitzgerald was a great-grandnephew of Francis Scott Key; an aunt of his father was Mary Surratt, hanged after the assassination of Lincoln). The house stands in big grounds with a drive that curves around through smooth lawns.

The Fitzgeralds waited supper as long as they could. Nobody came. They were having coffee when a car tore around the drive at 50 miles an hour. With a scream of brakes it tried to stop in front of the house, skidded, dug two big ruts in the perfect turf. Out tumbled a young man who staggered to the door. Fitzgerald opened it. Apparently the youth had been fortifying himself for hours for this ordeal. He teetered a moment, stared wildly at his host and said: "Mr. Fitzgerald, you have made me what I am today." Then he passed out cold on the doorsill.

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