Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Obits

I was reading the obituaries of F Scott Fitzgerald the other day. I had some time between classes and the college had a very old collection of miscellaneous articles. In there were the New York Times and other papers convering Fitzgeralds death. They were not kind. The NY Times and others lamented how Fitzgerald had squandered his talent. How he had written about topics that were light and frivolous and the spoiled generation of the twenties. They surmised that maybe The Great Gatsby might survive him but that was probably a long shot.

And the other papers were worse. Many of the editors hacked poor Fitz apart. Saying he had some talent but ultimately he was a drunk and he got what he deserved dying at the ripe old age of forty four. They didn't even bother summing up The Great Gatsby accurately calling it a bootlegger story and dismissing his work as a flash in the pan. The real world had real problems and Fitzgerald had essentially written about nothing

And so it went on. They were unanimous in their prediction that he was a minor player in the literary field and that Gatsby had merit but that the author and the book probably would not stand the test of time. Of course Fitzgerald was out of print and out of mind at the time. Their collective jaws would certainly hit the floor at his legacy now and The Great Gatsby's place as a corner stone of our collective literary heritage.

Of course all those editors are dead and forgotten now. The last laugh was Scotts.

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The Pitcher

Fitzgeralds Last Laugh on Hemingway

The two titans of literature in the early twentieth century never really vied for the spot of Best Writer at all. Hemingway knocked out Fitzgerald right after he gave him a leg up by writing to Max Perkins and telling him about a young writer in Paris who is the real thing. The real thing then turned his back on Fitzgerald and pilloried him in print, disparaged him to his editor, and then left him in the dust with publications, movies, media, becoming the HE MAN writer while Scott hacked it out in a hotel room in Baltimore and then later died in Hollywood a broken man. The Great Gatsby and the rest of his work cooled in Scribner warehouses with little demand.

Now lets fast forward to 2013. The mannered Hemingway prose has not translated well. Still widely read as high school fare and universally admired but not modern nor could anyone see one of his books being made into a contemporary movie with Leo and the Toby. But maybe I'm wrong that someone could take another crack at For Whom The Bell Tolls or Old Man and Sea or Farewell To Arms but there is lacking that modern story. And that is what Fitzgerald gave us with Gatsby a modern story for the ages that has crashed back onto the bestseller list and beckons to  us from airports and drugstores. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Because Hemingway did treat him like a drunken has been from the beginning. He set his sites on crushing Fitzgerald and anyone else got close to him. There was to be only one man in the ring and that was Ernest Hemingway but now with both men gone and the Hemingway megaphone long silence, Fitzgerald seems to be the one in the ring with both hands held high. Jay Gatz has been transported through the years and we can relate and that effable Fitzgerald prose has no equal. Even Hemingway cant touch it.

And so Fitz did have the last laugh. The ninety eight pound weakling came back stronger than ever and kicked the bully straight back on his ass.

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Five Things You Dont Know About The Great Gatsby

Here are five things you don't know about The Great Gatsby:

1. Fitzgerald was not crazy about the name and preferred High Hatted Golden Lover or Trimalchio. Even just before printing he thought about changing the name an his editor Max Perkins said it was too late.

2. The critical reception for The Great Gatsby was not good. The novel was criticized for being tawdry and superficial. And for being too short. Only a few reviewers realized The Great Gatsby was something great.

3. The book did not sell well. It barely sold out it's first printing and Fitzgerald made more money off the sale of the movie rights than the book. He had to go back to writing Saturday Evening Post stories to make money.

4. When Fitzgerald died The Great Gatsby was not out of print. It was worse than that. It was sitting in warehouses with virtually no demand. Effectively being out of print at his death.

5. There have been two movies made of The Great Gatsby. The first one was a silent film made in the twenties. The second one was made in the seventies by Francis Ford Coppola with Robert Redford. The reviews were not good and the movie was not a big hit with the public. The feeling was that the novel is too  literary, too dependent on Fitzgerald's prose to ever be made into a good movie. We will see.

Rocket Man...the American Dream Upside Down
 

Gatsby's American Dream

With the new movie almost out it is fitting to reflect on the American Dream once again as put forth by Jay Gatsby. I assume you read the book and know Gatsby's story of bootlegger turned landed gentry and ready to secure the girl of his dreams Daisy Buchanan. Ah the green light at the end of the dock that means so much. Gatsby's dream. The American dream. That beacon in the Long Island night that represents all we want but cannot obtain.

And of course Gatsby is done in by the darkness of the American Dream. It is the price right? We know now the high price of the dream because we have been living it for the last five years. Only a few can hit such heights and those that do usually lose some part of themselves as Gatsby did. Fitzgerald put forth the idea that this dream comes with too high a price and in fact it can kill you which of course it did with Gatsby.

And we are  now at a point where the American dream has turned upside down. Our houses worth less than we owe, jobs still scarce, money not abundant. And we are looking now for something we might have missed and left behind us. And of course there is nothing new as Fitzgerald says at the end of Gatsby in the most eloquent line in American literature. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

Still so true.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

The Letters of Max Perkins and F Scott Fitzgerald

I read letters. I am a sucker for any book of literary correspondence which I suppose is a bit like reading over someones shoulder but since people don't write letters anymore it is also a dying art form if not already dead. So I have been reading an old book of the correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins. The legendary Scribner editor handled alot of the greats of course. Hemingway and Fitzgerald among them.

So what do you get when you read a book like this? Well you get a lot of envy because Perkins is just about as close as you will ever come to the Saintly editor. Scott needs money or advice or anything and Max accommodates him. Fitzgerald suggests books and Perkins does his best to publish them. It's almost unbelievable There is no editorial board , no sales meetings to get approval from. Perkins seems to make decisions and it just happens.

Of course the discussions of his books are fascinating. The back and forth between Scott and Max shows how a lot of his books took shape. And of course money is very central to alot of the discussions and Perkins seemed almost as much banker as editor. I am doing a horrible job summing up this book but that is because reading letters is like reading mini novels and it doesn't really fit into the world today. The real gems are found between the lines.

And yet, you can't help but feel there is a reason this type of world had to end. It is almost too idyllic in a sense and maybe too civilized. Certainly World War II obliterated the Perkins Fitzgerald world as much as his death in 1940. Still it is a pleasure to read about a time when novelists were kings and editors were Gods.

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Rocket Man Paperback or Kindle

Fitzgerald in Hollywood

A book came out thirty years ago about F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood. We all know Fitzgerald as the novelist of Gatsby and his tragic story, but what is less known is what happened to him in Hollywood and why he went and really how far gone he was as a writer. Fitzgerald died in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 44 and after reading of his years there it does seem to tie up this last sad act of his life. The novelist would have appreciated this story line.

But the book, Crazy Sundays, contention is that Fitzgerald just didn't go to Hollywood to get money to pay for his institutionalized wife and his daughter in private schools and his mountain of debt. It is Arnold Lathams contention that F. Scott Fitzgerald had lost all faith in his ability as a serious writer of novels and short stories and wanted to turn into nothing short of a David O' Selznick. It is a big contention and one that Latham backs up with Fitzgerald adventures and failures in his Hollywood years.

Many writers went to Hollywood in the thirties. Odgen Nash, Faulkner to name a few. The clear intention of these writers was to get paid. They did not want to become moguls. Not so with Fitzgerald. Latham argues, he really saw movies as all that was left to him. Barely functioning as an on again off again alcoholic, Fitzgerald bounces through Hollywood getting fired, messing up screenplays, writing very good scripts then having them torn apart by producers. While hobnobbing with every star of his time from Gable to Tracy to Crawford, Fitzgerald becomes increasinglypathetic as the washed up writer looking for the crumbs from the great and near greats.

It is hard to read this old book without losing some of the tarnish of the Fitzgerald legend. One even wonders if he didn't accidentally write Gatsby and maybe this man trying to learn how to write basic scenes in Hollywood was the real Fitzgerald. He just seemed so unliterary and yet you understand that he was truly at the end of his rope financially, spiritually, physically. When his old friend Hemingway comes to town Fitzgerald could not even face him. Clearly he had ceded the high ground long ago.

But of course Gatsby is a great novel, maybe one of the greatest and his short stories sparkle like gems. And that is what people remember him for and he is still read of course while the producers and directors who rewrote his scripts, treated him like little more than a hired auto mechanic and eventually fired him, are just dust. So, even if Arnold Latham's thesis is correct, history has a funny way of sifting out the truth. As a writer you go through times of your life you are not proud of where survival is paramount. Fitzgerald, one suspects, knew these were not great years and that what he was doing was certainly beneath him.

So it is fitting, that in the end, even Hollywood could not  outshine a literary legend.

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The green Light at the end of our dock

Well you have heard by now Daisy Buchanan's mansion has been torn down due to the price of upkeep. Forty five hundred a day. High price for a literary touchstone. But still, it does seem to fall in with the times and who can forget that green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It is really the heart of Gatsby. The young man who yearns for so much and yet he cannot touch it and there is that green light out in the harbor, a symbol for all that he aspires too and yet can not have.

You cannot read Fitzgerald's early masterpiece of the last century and not think about its relation to where we are now. Gatsby of course wants it all and cannot have it. He is rich but he does not have the girl and so he has nothing. And we have nothing now. We have the fabulously wealthy but the very heart of the American Dream Fitzgerald saw as being corrupted has been fully diseased. Greedy unseen forces did Gatsby iin a much earlier part of our history. The Tom Buchanan's of the world who stood in for the larger world that really held the power and money.

And we have found now that the dream does have a high price. An entire country has suffered of course for the extravagance Gatsby paid for with his life. Certainly this mansion Gatsby saw as having all that life could offer is touching in its demolition because life has lost even the chimera glamour of that old dream. During Fitzgerald's time the American Dream was still being formed, but he saw it's Horatio Algier underside and left the cautionary tale of Gatsby's fate.

So the old mansion is no longer. And I assume the green light at the end of Daisy's dock burned out years before. All we are left with is the novel and the glow of our own fading dreams.

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Rocket Man will blast off this summer

The Writer's Dream

My life changed in one summer. I had just signed a two book deal with Bantam after years of struggling in total obscurity and actually been  paid good money after making nothing for years and now was on my way to the Big Apple to ink the deal and have dinner with my new editor and agent. A  year before my manuscripts had been sitting in the basement in a box where I put all those books and stories that never see the light of day, but events had flipped on their head as they tend to do in the careers of writers and acrobats and now I was headed for a victory tour of sorts.

The dinner was on the lower East side in a French restaurant with Conan O'Brien at the next table and you sort of leave the table and float down the street in the warm summer night because finally finally you have broken through to the other side. I didnt' know exactly what the other side would bring, but the biggest change is you have to adjust the way you think about yourself. Failure had been the shadow following me for years and I really wasn't used to that new ghost called success, but here she was. And so I sat and made small talk with the two people who could potentially launch my stalled literary career and then it was over and I was waking up the next morning.

I went for a run and then walked down through Manhattan still hung over and buzzing on adrenalin. I was due to meet my agent again that evening, but for now I was free and I drifted into an old bookstore and bought two very old editions of Fitzgerald Short Stories( Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers)  They were the original Scribner binding with the cut pages and the slightly smaller than trade size. Second editions that I picked up for a hundred bucks, but I was making money now. And then I started walking down Fifth Avenue and that's when it hit me.

It was summer in Manhattan and one of those hot blowy days where everyone has left. I walked with my two books and knew then something had ended. I had struggled for ten years to get published and now I had and whatever happened next would be consumed with business and sales and publisher agent shenanigans. And so I walked and walked and walked those empty streets with my two copies of Fitzgerald on that hot summer day in Manhattan. I walked that whole island.

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Rocket Man will be out in January

Writing From Emotion

F Scott Fitzgerald once said he had start out with an emotion: "something near and dear to my heart." That closely comes to my own philosophy of writing. Emotion is what guides the pen of any serious fiction writer--not plot. The plot is sitting there in the background but the pen flows along with the emotion felt by the writer at that moment. The reader will respond to that emotion and plot will become secondary.

Which brings us to Fitzgerald's second edict: character is action. If you create a compelling character then you have action. Again, plot is secondary. The character will either draw the reader in or he or she will not. But it will be the character that keeps the reluctant reader in there even if NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Plot belongs to formulaic movies and sitcoms and any other form of cheap entertainment.

So when you sit down to write that novel or short story then start with the emotion or the hurt that you are feeling. The fight with your wife parents friends should be paramount as you crash across your page. Most of the great novels carry the reader with character and emotion with plot running a distant third.

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