Francis Fitzgerald - The Last Tycoon

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon . Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

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When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Love of the Last Tycoon remained unfinished and unpublished. The novel – renamed The Last Tycoon on publication – was published posthumously in 1941 after it had been completed and edited from the unfinished manuscript by a friend of Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson.

The novel falls into a genre known as roman à clef , a French phrase which literally means ‘novel to key’. The phrase is applied to novels that are essentially true stories based on real people and situations, but thinly veiled as fiction. The plot of The Last Tycoon is largely based on an observation of the power-play between a Hollywood film producer and a studio boss, and is interwoven with other aspects of life and love.

In terms of literary style, the book contains a blend of first- and third-person narratives. Some scenes are recounted twice, once from each perspective, to emphasize the point that memory is subjective, and so one person’s recollection of an event or conversation, a person or place, will naturally differ from another’s. The repetition of the story-telling therefore highlights this discrepancy in the recollection and retelling of the same memory. By using this style, Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates his understanding of human behaviour and interaction, a feature of his writing that made him one of the great novelists of the twentieth century.

Debate often rages over whether or not unfinished novels should be completed and published after the death of the author; since no one can ever know the author’s true intentions, the artistic integrity of their work is potentially at risk. Over the years, The Last Tycoon has been successfully adapted for television, stage and film, demonstrating that much of the novel’s appeal is based on its plot – an aspect of the novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald himself created.

Fitzgerald wrote a number of short stories, which were packed in a single volume entitled Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). The best-known of these shorts is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , in which the eponymous central character ages in reverse. He is born old and decrepit and then goes through all of the other stages of life until he eventually dies as a newborn baby. What makes the tale most interesting is the juxtaposition between Benjamin and the people with whom he has relationships, because his life is being carried out in the opposite direction to theirs.

A similar device is used in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991), except that the whole world is played backward, so that curious concepts are explored, such as doctors causing injuries, instead of healing them. Also, the reader eventually realizes that the central character is an erstwhile Holocaust doctor when his reverse life takes him to a younger age. Of course, this concept of playing with time was first investigated by H. G. Wells in his novel The Time Machine (1895). In this story Wells has the central character existing in real time, but the machine enables him to travel both forward and backward in time.

There are ten other shorts in Tales of the Jazz Age . Some examine the human characteristics that made the Jazz Age what it was, such as the excess, frivolity, vanity, pretensions, and cultural hysteria brought about by the mood following World War I.

Just as the Restoration in England generated a kind of lighthearted optimism after the suppressive atmosphere under the Puritans, so the Jazz Age was a kind of celebration of life after so much death in Europe. It was marked by the popularity of jazz music and an associated dance craze, but would all come to an end in the early 1930s with the Great Depression.

Exploring the topic of excess in this collection is the tale A Diamond as Big as the Ritz. In this story, Fitzgerald gives the central character a dilemma to solve. In his quest to become rich, Percy Washington discovers a mountain comprising a single diamond, but he realizes that if he saturates the market with diamonds, they will become commonplace and have no value. Both stories highlight Fitzgerald’s underlying inclination to experiment with intellectual and philosophical concepts in his work. This is largely why he is regarded as a literary writer, rather than merely a teller of tales.

On face value, much of his writing would seem to be amusing comment on his own “Smart Set” lifestyle and aimed at others from the same milieu, but Fitzgerald was an intelligent man with considerable depth to his thinking. It is just that he also knew how to be commercial enough to make money from his writing, which demanded a layer of gloss and polish. His was a world of inherited privilege, inhabited by pseudo-intellectuals and posers. He himself made several trips to Paris and the French Riviera, where he cultivated and honed a lifestyle that went hand in hand with his writing style. He wrote about what he knew, but he injected other elements to facilitate his curiosity about the human condition and give his writing greater literary weight.