integrity, but grew frustrated with Fitzgerald’s tendency toward making his literature commercial. However, most of Fitzgerald’s novels did not perform that well, so a large part of his income came from magazine work, writing short stories that, by their very nature, had to conform to editorial requirements. Nine years after The Great Gatsby, he had struggled to complete his final novel Tender Is The Night. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, the book was received with disappointment, and the decline of his writing career continued unabated. In the latter half of the 1930s, he found work developing movie scripts and carried out further commercial writing. By the time of his death, his literary career had died, too.
In hindsight, Fitzgerald’s work is regarded variously, but The Great Gatsby has become the quintessential American classic. Some feel that Fitzgerald’s talent would have been better focused on his novel writing, but fiscal matters always dictated that he continue with his commercial work. However, Hemingway may have been a heavyweight writer but he was certainly not a contented man. For him the praise he garnered for each new book was a fix. When he ran out of ideas, he suffered severe depression and ultimately took his own life with a shotgun. Fitzgerald battled on in a workmanlike manner even when plaudits were a distant memory. Fitzgerald the legendary writer has now outlived Fitzgerald the man several times over.
CONTENTS
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
Though I haven’t ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party—or so I was told. I put this down only to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.
I was going to write my memoirs once, The Producer’s Daughter, but at eighteen you never quite get around to anything like that. It’s just as well—it would have been as flat as an old column of Lolly Parsons’. My father was in the picture business as another man might be in cotton or steel, and I took it tranquilly. At the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house. I knew what you were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately unhorrified.
This is easy to say, but harder to make people understand. When I was at Bennington some of the English teachers who pretended an indifference to Hollywood or its products, really hated it. Hated it way down deep as a threat to their existence. Even before that, when I was in a convent, a sweet little nun asked me to get her a script of a screen play so she could “teach her class about movie writing” as she had taught them about the essay and the short story. I got the script for her, and I suppose she puzzled over it and puzzled over it, but it was never mentioned in class, and she gave it back to me with an air of offended surprise and not a single comment. That’s what I half expect to happen to this story.
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand one of those men.
The world from an airplane I knew. Father always had us travel back and forth that way from school and college. After my sister died when I was a junior, I travelled to and fro alone, and the journey always made me think of her, made me somewhat solemn and subdued. Sometimes there were picture people I knew on board the plane, and occasionally there was an attractive college boy—but not often during the depression. I seldom really fell asleep during the trip, what with thoughts of Eleanor and the sense of that sharp rip between coast and coast—at least not till we had left those lonely little airports in Tennessee.
This trip was so rough that the passengers divided early into those who turned in right away and those who didn’t want to turn in at all. There were two of these latter right across from me, and I was pretty sure from their fragmentary conversation that they were from Hollywood—one of them because he looked like it: a middle-aged Jew, who alternately talked with nervous excitement or else crouched as if ready to spring, in a harrowing silence; the other a pale, plain, stocky man of thirty, whom I was sure I had seen before. He had been to the house or something. But it might have been when I was a little girl, and so I wasn’t offended that he didn’t recognize me.
The stewardess—she was tall, handsome and flashing dark, a type that they seemed to run to—asked me if she could make up my berth.
“—and, dear, do you want an aspirin?” She perched on the side of the seat and rocked precariously to and fro with the June hurricane. “—or nembutal?”
“No.”
“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I’ve had no time to ask you.” She sat down beside me and buckled us both in. “Do you want some gum?”
This reminded me to get rid of the piece that had been boring me for hours. I wrapped it in a piece of magazine and put it into the automatic ash-holder.
“I can always tell people are nice,” the stewardess said approvingly, “if they wrap their gum in paper before they put it in there.”
We sat for awhile in the half-light of the swaying car. It was vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. We were all lingering—and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, had to keep reminding herself why she was there.
She and I talked about a young actress I knew, whom she had flown West with two years before. It was in the very lowest time of the depression, and the young actress kept staring out the window in such an intent way that the stewardess was afraid she was contemplating a leap. It appeared though that she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.
“I know what mother and I are going to do,” she confided to the stewardess. “We’re coming out to the Yellowstone and we’re just going to live simply till it all blows over. Then we’ll come back. They don’t kill artists—you know?”
The proposition pleased me. It conjured up a pretty picture of the actress and her mother being fed by kind Tory bears who brought them honey, and by gentle fawns who fetched extra milk from the does and then lingered near to make pillows for their heads at night. In turn I told the stewardess about the lawyer and the director who told their plans to Father one night in those brave days. If the bonus army conquered Washington, the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he