This being the first biography of Fitzgerald I have read, this review is not so much a critique of the Broccoli’s comprehensive account of the writer’s life, more a reaction to what it tells us about the man, his marriage, and the business of writing.
Firstly, the account of the Fitzgerald’s marriage is heartbreaking. The way two people can be so perfect for one another and so toxic at the same time. In spite of the collapse of their relationship, the love they continued to share, a broken, useless, destructive love, is present in the letters they continued to send one another. Fitzgerald doesn’t come out of the story well; but neither does Zelda. They are both flawed and feast off each other’s flaws, flaws which once nourished their genius but later consumed it.
Fitzgerald in Hollywood is another film in itself. The greatest writer of his generation treated like just another hack. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out for screenwriting, (or perhaps he was), but this sequence of the biography speaks to the way in which Hollywood is a business, reputations are meaningless, and even the greatest talents are potentially talentless within this world.
Fitzgerald was a drunk, just as much as Bukowski. Why did he drink? In order to place a distance between himself and the world he inhabited which matched his soul’s distance? The irony of the world’s most elegant writer getting into fights, getting slung out of the theatre, behaving in a manner so embarrassing that even his closest friends turned their backs on him, is immense. But perhaps his elegance had no real place in the word, only in fiction. As a way of coping with the feeling of lacking any sense of belonging, he drank to excess. Drink insulates one against the cruelty of the world, but it also insulates against feeling like you don’t really belong.
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