“What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?”: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Last Tycoon” (1941)

Writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald or any of his works apart from the immortal The Great Gatsby is often a challenge. The writer is after all the very definition of the Jazz Age, and it is difficult to resist reading the man himself into what he wrote. His biographers have, with varying degrees of conviction, traced characteristics of the man back to his fictional characters. Then there is the mammoth that is The Great Gatsby, which overshadows everything he wrote before and after it. He is often referred to by his detractors as a writer who never quite brought his talent to full fruition, his life wrecked by marital strife, alcoholism, penury, and a deeply entrenched sense of self-doubt. How should the reader then approach his final, uncompleted work (The Love of) The Last Tycoon? Read it bearing in mind that the man who wrote it was not the same youthful Dionysus who vacationed in Paris and gave the world The Great Gatsby. It was written by a man having been to the dark side of the moon and made it back.

Many a critic have remarked that The Last Tycoon could have been Fitzgerald’s most accomplished work had it been completed. (He died of a heart attack the day after he had completed the first episode of Chapter 6.) The arguments given range from the novel’s intricate but effective narrative structure (it is told from more than one perspective) to its fully realised central character Monroe Stahr, the tycoon in the title. These are all valid reasons, but what distinguishes The Last Tycoon for me from, say, This Side of Paradise (perhaps an unfair comparison since the latter is meant as a collage of sorts) is the paradox born out of the juxtaposition of heartless realism and swooning romanticism. This paradox is nothing new in Fitzgerald’s work (The Great Gatsby immediately comes to mind), but here in The Last Tycoon it is more emphatically applied.

This has to do with the fact that the novel’s setting is 1930’s Hollywood, where Fitzgerald worked as a script-writer for MGM under humiliating circumstances up until his death in December 1940, several days before Christmas. Hollywood was not a place for a sensitive soul like Fitzgerald, and he made it clear to his friends that he detested the place and despised all those involved in its machinery. Hollywood’s cut-throat approach to financial matters is no news to the modern reader; the money-hungry, power-obsessed Hollywood Fitzgerald describes through the eyes of Cecilia (the novel’s main narrator) is therefore immediately recognisable. Cecilia has a schoolgirl crush on the older Monroe Stahr, studio executive supremo with the power of Ozymandias. But Stahr is too caught up in the machinery to notice her. Her description of Stahr is eye-opening:

What I was looking at wasn’t Stahr but a picture of him I cut out over and over: the eyes that flashed a sophisticated understanding at you and then darted up too soon into his wide brow with its ten thousand plots and plans; the face that was ageing from within, so that there were no casual furrows of worry and vexation but a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self-set struggle – or a long illness. It was handsomer to me than all the rosy tan from Coronado to Del Monte… (87)

Words like “asceticism” and “illness” perfectly capture Stahr’s character. His “illness” is physical (as we will learn later) as well as spiritual in nature. Here is a man who subsists on “ten thousand plots and plans,” without which he would probably wither and become inconsequential. This is later verified by Stahr himself in a conversation with Kathleen, a young woman resembling his dead wife whom he has fallen head over heels for:

“You do what you’re born to do,” he said gently. “About once a month somebody tries to reform me, tells me what a barren old age I’ll have when I can’t work any more. But it’s not so simple.” (100)

“But it’s not simple” is a hint to the reader that Stahr is a victim of Hollywood himself. Born into the system, he is unable to perform another role other than that of the ruthless executive. He has had to deaden the humane side of him to become who he is. The reader finds him at his most introspective when he drops the mask of the dollar-driven businessman around Kathleen. When Kathleen advises him to slow down, he gently tells her not to be a “mother.” Then the third-person narrator interrupts:

Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark. (110)

In other words, Stahr longs to be “ordinary” like all the penniless young men who “hunt for love” in darkness. His idea of love and romance is an uncomfortable one, weighed down by desperation, the realisation that he may not have long to live. (Though the novel was never completed, we do know from Fitzgerald’s detailed plans for the novel that when the curtains fall, Stahr is to die, though not necessarily in the way he has described above.)

When a man has gone through a protracted spell of loneliness, any form of love will rattle his world. This is Stahr’s predicament. His blinding love for Kathleen decentralises his hitherto perfectly organised world. Now all he can think about is to abandon all that he has and knows, and start anew, even though “anew” is not exactly succinctly defined. He convinces himself he has found “a new life,” and that he “could not let [Kathleen] go now” (139). The reader is then treated to an internal monologue:

It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now – tell her and take her away. (139)

These thoughts reveal a contradiction in him: on the one hand, he admits to himself Kathleen can save him; on the other, he casts himself in the role of a caregiver – as soon as Kathleen has made him strong. His romantic expectations are now ahead of him.

A few paragraphs later, we get to see the full scale of his desperation:

As he said goodbye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There were only ten years between them, but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him, against the whole logic of his life, to walk past her into the house now and say, ‘This is forever.’ (140)

Fitzgerald’s diction (“desperate time-need,” “a clock ticking with his heart”) leaves no doubt that this is a man who is only too aware of mortality. If he is to make something meaningful out of the remaining years, he must possess the girl. There is inclement weather ahead, of course (there always is in a Fitzgerald novel), as Kathleen is engaged to marry another man.

This is not too far removed from the doomed love between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, but The Last Tycoon employs a decidedly more dramatic tone, as if its author were (rightfully) aware of the trickling away of time and the tragedy of an unfulfilled life.