BOOKS
549'
all, not a very varied upper middle-class life.
It
is not only in the recur–
rence of the ambiguous delight and disillusion. There are the milieux,
for instance: how thoroughly and carefully he used every physical back–
ground with which he was familiar: the Middle West of St. Paul, Prince–
ton, New York, Long Island, Zelda's South, the bars and the beaches of
the rich in two continents. Of the limitations these imposed on him,
Fitzgerald was thoroughly aware: "So many writers, Conrad for in–
stance," he wrote to his daughter, "have been aided by being brought up
in a metier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of ma–
terial and, more important, an attitude from which to
vie~
the world.
So much writing nowadays suffers from lack of an attitude and from
sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social
life. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs."
Was sheer lack of material the reason for the falling-off in simple
volume of output in the last fifteen years of Fitzgerald's life? It may
have contributed. At any rate it is suggestive that between 1920 and 1925
he published three novels in which he used (or used up?) the back–
grounds of his youth; that much later, in 1934, he drew on the interna–
tional background of bars, beaches and asylums for
Tender Is the Night;
and that, ironically, the pot-boiling excursion to Hollywood gave him
new material for his last serious work, the unfinished
Last Tycoon.
But perhaps the drain on his emotions was even more serious. "I
have asked a lot of my emotions," says one of the notes, "one hundred
and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because
there was one little drop of something-not blood, not a tear, not my
seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra
I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now." Certainly there
are signs of an emotional exhaustion in the later books. As others have
noticed, there is never any really satisfactory reason given for Dick Diver's
break up in
Tender Is the Night.
But Fitzgerald's dearest implication is
that Doctor Diver breaks up because he has cured Nicole by an almost
physical transference of his own balance and will. Did Fitzgerald see
Nicole as Diver's work of creation, did he transfer to him a feeling of
the exhaustion of achievement? At any rate the reason seems to make
better sense for Fitzgerald than it does for Doctor Diver.
f\s for
The Last Tycoon,
its promise, it seems to me, has been ex–
travagantly over-estimated for the most generous reasons by his friends.
It is true that it is about the only novel yet attempted to take Hollywood
seriously; it is also true that Fitzgerald was certainly trying for what Dos
Passos has called a wider "frame of reference for common humanity''
than he had managed before. But it doesn't seem to come out right. In
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald had started with personal dilemmas and a
sort of self-examination and ended by creating a fable that had indeed
Dos Passos' wider frame. In
The Last Tycoon
he apparently began with
the frame and ended with the personal dilemmas and the self-projection
