The Last Romantic

THE LAST TYCOON--F. Scott Fitzgerald --Scrlbner ($2.75).

When Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, aged 44, died of heart disease in Hollywood last winter (TIME, Jan. 27), he left part of a novel which he had been pondering for three years, and a voluminous pile of notes on the unwritten part of the story. There was some talk, then, of having another writer complete the novel from the notes. But Critic Edmund Wilson, friend of Fitzgerald and his "intellectual conscience," chose another way to get this truncated work before the public.

The Last Tycoon contains 128 pages of completed manuscript, covering a little more than half the story contemplated by the author; a synopsis of the rest; a selection from the notes, a letter to the publishers, some fragmentary scenes. To give bulk to the volume the publishers also reprinted in it The Great Gatsby and five Fitzgerald short stories.

In his foreword, Critic Wilson states his belief that The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald's "most mature" work, that Hero Monroe Stahr was the most thoroughly explored of all Fitzgerald characters. Stahr was an executive and creative genius of motion pictures, a "boy wonder" at 22, later boss and three-quarters owner of a big studio. Under him the movies reached a sort of golden age. After him the industry grew too complicated for one man to keep his hand on everything in a studio. Stahr "had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun." He had chosen a kingdom in the west where he saw a "new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows." There he had everything except leisure and someone he could love.

One night after an earthquake Stahr found a girl who was almost a replica of his dead wife, and they were shortly having an atmospheric affair. Chafing against a hard edge of reluctance she felt in Stahr, the girl married another man. Stahr, no drinker, got dismally drunk. Fitzgerald's manuscript stops at that point. The synopsis, and notes carry the tale down to Stahr's death in an airplane crash, and its curious aftermath.

If Monroe Stahr was the last Hollywood tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last U.S. romantic. To the end his writing was preoccupied with flowers, perfume, rain, the rustle of women's clothes, warm darkness and music in the night. He sometimes deliberately blurred his narrative line, resulting now in effective suspense, now in mere teasing. Yet this fragment contains scenes of beauty and power. Completed, it might or might not have been a Citizen Kane about the movie industry.

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