West of Sunset

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2015-10-01
Journal	The F Scott Fitzgerald Review
Authors	Steven Goldleaf

Abstract

Where biography and literary criticism fail (because they must, by definition, fail) is in the confident explication of their subjects’ unrecorded thoughts. Any biographer or critic who dares opine on the precise thought process that caused a crucial decision to be made (or not to be made) at a particular juncture is stepping over the line of propriety. And that thought process is often the thing we wonder about most. We know, for example, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply conflicted in his feelings about his estranged wife Zelda in the late 1930s: he felt loyalty toward her; he felt sorry for her; he felt sad about her; he felt love for her; he felt frustration, anger, affection, attraction, guilt, and empathy, usually in a mélange of proportions that varied from day to day. But how to tell which emotion he felt, and how strongly, on a particular hour of a particular day?Over a period of years, we know he felt all these emotions, and more, because of the changing tones of his letters to her, mostly addressed to the North Carolina sanitarium in which she was residing, in letters to the mental-health staff caring for her there, in the letters he wrote to his friends about his difficult marriage and the high cost (emotional and otherwise) of maintaining Zelda’s care, and in letters to their daughter Scottie, protecting her against her mother’s outbursts and inappropriate behavior while, at the same time, trying to keep some sort of peace between his wife and his daughter. And of course, apart from his letters, we have other bases for knowing how Fitzgerald thought about Zelda: the observations of his contemporaries, extrapolations from his published and unpublished writing, and the judgments of writers since Fitzgerald’s time who have tried to convey what he must have, or might have, been thinking. But on this, as on so many other subjects, no writer of non-fiction can really speculate with any authority, and most sensible ones decline to do so.But not so fiction writers! As Stewart O’Nan displays in his tour-de-force novel West of Sunset, entering Fitzgerald’s mind is his challenge and his triumph. Other successful writers of historical fiction about literary figures in recent years have elevated this subgenre to stellar heights. (David Lodge and Colm Toibin eerily, both in 2004, wrote novels that delved into the inscrutable mind of Henry James; Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf and Martha Cooley on T. S. Eliot have done likewise.) The subgenre, also known as biofiction, is able to illustrate what no biographer can do more than hint at: the inner workings of their subjects’ minds. It must be a great temptation to try to imitate, as well, the patterns in these thoughts of their subjects’ singular prose styles, but this temptation is neatly sidestepped here. What emerges instead is a plausible rendition of Fitzgerald’s brain, shorn of the thoughtful, excited style of his published words. We can perhaps guess at the internal rhythms of his mind by looking through his notebooks, but O’Nan’s inventiveness goes much further, yielding a version of Fitzgerald that is both familiar and fresh, and always plausible.The scope of West of Sunset is surprising, both for the incidents it includes and those it excludes. The novel begins with Fitzgerald about to travel from North Carolina out to Hollywood, and it ends with Fitzgerald’s death on the West Coast nearly four years later, but the main focus is on the months immediately following his arrival in California. (Very little in this novel is dated precisely, keeping the casual reader from realizing how much of the plot is concentrated into that first year.) The first 200 pages take us from Fitzgerald’s arrival in Hollywood in the summer of 1937 through the release of Three Comrades, the movie made from his only credited screenplay, which premiered in early June 1938; the remaining eighty-eight pages cover the two-and-a-half years until his death, so it is only technically accurate to say that this novel covers his final years.The Hollywood portion alone of Fitzgerald’s forty-four-year life, of course, is rich in material; but O’Nan, free to use the biographical material and to embellish it as he pleases, omits certain well-documented sensational incidents from the biography, such as Fitzgerald firing a gun at Sheilah Graham in his apartment, or him challenging a reporter to a duel for misrepresenting Graham in print, or him lunching with Shirley Temple’s mother to discuss the role he hoped her daughter would play (opposite Cary Grant) in the film version of “Babylon Revisited.” (The lunch with Mrs. Temple is minimized and summarized in West of Sunset rather than entirely omitted.) Similarly, O’Nan’s novel mentions in passing the name of Aldous Huxley, whose appearance as the British novelist “Boxley” in Fitzgerald’s manuscript of The Last Tycoon may be the most colorful and often-quoted scene in the truncated novel, but O’Nan avoids recreating any scenes with Huxley’s eccentric character. Likewise, idiosyncratic American writers whom Fitzgerald knew quite well, such as John O’Hara and Nathanael West, are also only briefly mentioned. (O’Nan mentions each writer’s “wife” months or years before the marriages took place. West had not even met the woman he would marry at the point O’Nan refers to her as his wife.)The novel emphasizes Fitzgerald’s screenwriting at the expense of his fiction. In the case of The Last Tycoon, which Fitzgerald was planning rather than writing when West of Sunset is mostly set, this makes eminent sense. There is also no mention of the Pat Hobby stories, which Fitzgerald began writing in 1939, and very little mention of his business dealings with Arnold Gingrich, the editor of Esquire, which published the Hobby stories throughout Fitzgerald’s final year. It would have been edifying to present what Fitzgerald might have felt about this oddball character of his, a hack screenwriter a few levels lower on Hollywood’s pecking order than Fitzgerald was himself: Amused? Contemptuous? Pitying? Missing also are such delightful and colorful vignettes as Fitzgerald’s escorting of Sheilah Graham to the premiere performance of a play based on “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” that turned out to be a very casual student reading, Fitzgerald’s contemplation of a pseudonym to publish future short stories under (his own name being in his view passé), or his motivations for mailing to “Scott Fitzgerald, Garden of Allah” a breezy postcard announcing his new living arrangements (from, of course, Scott Fitzgerald of the Garden of Allah). It would have been interesting to learn what O’Nan felt was going through Fitzgerald’s mind as he placed this bizarre postcard in the U.S. mail, and what he felt as he received it a few days afterward.Even more interesting, because even more novel, are the inclusions in West of Sunset: a major character, functioning as Fitzgerald’s confidante and pal, is Humphrey Bogart, a figure who fails to make even one appearance in the indices of Fitzgerald’s major biographers, such as Matthew J. Bruccoli, Jeffrey Meyers, or Scott Donaldson, which is not to say that Bogart and Fitzgerald were not acquainted, just that the portrait painted of Bogart here is much fuller than one thinks of when reflecting on Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years. Bogart had sparred with Fitzgerald on a previous visit to Los Angeles (they first met in the early 1930s with Fitzgerald landing a punch, and creating a scar, on Bogart’s face), and this portrait is of course of the pre-Casablanca, pre-Bacall actor, whose ironic and cynical take on Hollywood and women (and the women of Hollywood) helps Fitzgerald acclimatize swiftly to his new environment.By far the most significant addition to the standard accounts of Fitzgerald’s final years is the strong emphasis O’Nan places on Fitzgerald’s time outside of California, specifically the time and energy and money he spent on the East Coast visiting his wife and his daughter, sometimes together, sometimes separately. The trips he took back East—to North Carolina, to Alabama, to Cuba—to see Zelda are at the center of the novel, as are the letters he wrote to her and she to him, and the dialogue O’Nan places on the lips of these two intoxicating (and often intoxicated) figures is lengthy, full of meaningful details, and bears the ring of truth. The convincing quality of these extended dialogues shifts the emphasis from the West Coast to the East in his final years, and reminds us of the centrality of Zelda throughout the last half of Fitzgerald’s life.This strategy has a sound basis, though not an immediately obvious one: Fitzgerald’s relationship with Sheilah Graham has been copiously documented, by Graham in her numerous memoirs of Fitzgerald’s final years, of course, but also by the other writers who were in Hollywood, by Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon, which uses their relationship thinly disguised, by studio records showing what Fitzgerald worked on and when, by Frances Kroll Ring’s charming memoir of her years as Fitzgerald’s personal secretary, and on and on, while the numerous trips back east to keep his marriage patched up and his family intact are hardly documented at all, only in the correspondence among F. Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald, much of which looks forward hopefully to better days rather than dwelling on the actual incidents that occurred the last time any one of them saw each other. What actually occurred between these family members was often disastrous, and sometimes disturbing, as you might expect the encounters of an estranged family to be when that family consists of an adulterous alcoholic, a mental patient suffering from severe delusions, and their teenaged daughter. Although Scottie later wrote essays describing some of these family get-togethers in general terms, none of the three Fitzgeralds contemporaneously wrote anything reliably documenting the conversations that transpired among them as they drove hired cars from Zelda’s mental ward to various beach resorts, or telling what dynamic emerged when they stayed in these hotels, and that is what O’Nan most valuably supplies here. (His diction-levels—e.g., “hired” rather than “rented” cars—is reliably excellent, with only a few lapses: did writers in the 1930s speak of “pulling an all-nighter” or of “parameters” in a non-technical sense?) The question of what exactly happened, what exactly was said, and what exactly was thought, when this close but incompatible couple spent nights in seaside hotel rooms, sometimes with Scottie in the adjoining room, is sensitive and plausible—we may not enthusiastically accept every one of O’Nan’s imaginary visions, but we may prefer them to asking, “Who knows?”West of Sunset is at its most affecting in its rendering of Zelda’s personality, showing how the remnants of her charm still tugged at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart; but it may be even better in its depiction of the relationship between Fitzgerald and his seventeen-year-old daughter, who comes across less as a tender victim of a broken home than she does as Fitzgerald’s most understanding ally in his struggle to treat Zelda kindly and wisely and well. Scottie emerges finally not as a child who needs to be cared for but almost as a caregiver to her father, as a mature adult whom he relies on for counsel.O’Nan tells this story from Fitzgerald’s perspective, allowing him to omit scenes and dialogues, especially when Fitzgerald might have forgotten them or even when he blacks out entirely. One early chapter ends effectively with Fitzgerald taking a few drinks, waking up without his wallet on someone’s lawn, and phoning Graham, who is furious at the bewildered writer for speaking to her “like that”—we are as bewildered and as uncomprehending as Fitzgerald is, having been deprived, as he has, of any memory of the conversation that so offended Graham. Of course, what O’Nan is presenting is the fictionalized documentation of these conversations and dynamics, but that is the vice and virtue of novels about historical figures, virtuous when plausible, vicious when ludicrous. O’Nan is almost exclusively a virtuous writer in West of Sunset.

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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.13.1.273