the last tycoon (fitzgerald)

The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel, and there’s something fitting about this in so many ways, as so much of Fitzgerald’s writing is about the unattainable, the out-of-reach. Furthermore, it feels as though the author was perhaps, like his protagonist, Stahr, at the end of the line, conscious of his fragrant mortality. The novel is about a dying man, and the writer knew of what he was speaking.

The novel is full of comments about the role of the writer in Hollywood. Cecilia, the narrator, daughter of a fellow producer, says: “I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails… they were spoken of in the same way when they were not around - except for a species called playwrights who… were treated with respect if they did not stay long - if they did they sank with the others into the white collar class.”

Fitzgerald, perhaps his era’s finest novelist, looks on with a jaundiced detachment at the way the movies changed the pecking order of image and word, relegating the writer to the role of a factotum deployed to help realise the dreams of the great visionaries such as Stahr. At another point Celia says: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” Stahr has a pragmatic attitude to narrative, which is something embodied by actors telling the public want they want to hear. “Our condition is that we have to take people’s own folklore and dress it up and give it back to them.” This feels as true today as it was back then, even if some of the folklore is now cannibalising itself (Star Wars, Marvel, The Crown).

At one point Stahr decides to make a film about revolutionary Russia and watches Chien Andalou and Dr Cagliari, with Fitzgerald adding the brilliantly subversive note that “he had the script department get him up a two page treatment of the Communist Manifesto”. Perhaps we can sense here Fitzgerald seeing how cinema and its adjuncts would eat politics whole and repackage it for the masses, in order to make a profit. But it’s Fitzgerald who is the cynic, rather than Stahr, finding himself trapped in a world where the values he inherited are being used in a back lot for a B-feature.