Powell and Fitzgerald

Though he never transformed it into fiction--saying in a 1975 Paris Review interview that "you really never know what things are going to be suitable material for books. And for some reason I've never thought it was suitable material"--Anthony Powell's brief sojourn in Hollywood in 1937 has long been an object of fascination for me. What might have happened had he managed to latch onto A Yank at Oxford and begin to make a name for himself as a reliable writer of screenplays? Would we have had no Dance? Without the war years--and the particularly English perspective on them--the sequence is hard to imagine. Could we somehow have had a US-focused version, inflected with the strange mix of Hollywood falseness, wartime boosterism, and almost unfathomable industrial growth that was Los Angeles in the 1940s?

Nowadays, to the extent that Powell's Hollywood period is known at all, it's for his brief meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Side note to those possessing a time machine: some of us would really appreciate a bit more detail about the time he met Douglas Fairbanks. Was Fairbanks wearing a shirt? Were his arms akimbo? Did he laugh with insouciance? (No, yes, no, I presume.)) Powell goes into it a bit in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, an account that includes a brilliant aside that I've quoted before:

One could not fail to notice the tone in which people in Hollywood spoke of Fitzgerald. It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of some doubtful promise as a screenwriter.

What I didn't realize until recently was that Powell had written about the encounter, and his Hollywood time in general, at much greater length. The piece, originally published in the Times Saturday Review on October 3, 1970, was included in the Hemingway-Fitzgerald Annual for 1971, and it's well worth seeking out if you have access to a good library.

Powell's account of his own experience is as droll as you'd expect:

Of efforts to become a Hollywood script writer there is little more to say than that they were unsuccessful. My American agent had died during our weeks on the high seas. The replacement was antipathetic. This was getting off to a bad start.

The meetings that followed, Powell, says, were "pursuing the mirage":

One became familiar not so much with the bum's rush, to use an old fashioned expression,as that stagnation of movement, total inanition where any action is concerned, to some extent characteristic of all theatrical administration, more especially when the art of the film is in question.

"To some extent characteristic" feels like the most fundamental Powellian phrase: he's categorizing, which is one of his essential modes, but at the same time he's leaving a gap--individuality, even as one necessarily sorts by type, is what matters.

What follows is a brief account of the accommodations, the lifestyle (as glimpsed by a more or less determined outsider), and the people--and then he gets to Fitzgerald:

He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit and lightish tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs--seen for the most part years later--do not do justice to him. Possibly he was a person who at once became self-conscious when before a camera. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was immediately aware of a sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerousness that undoubtedly lay beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, but not in the least broken down, as he has sometimes been described at this period. In a railway carriage or bar, one would have wondered who this man could be.

Powell and Fitzgerald seem to have hit it off, apparently monopolizing the conversation to such an extent that Fitzgerald eventually realized that neither Violet Powell, or their other luncheon companion, Elliott Morgan, had gotten a word in, a situation he good-naturedly tried to remedy.

What's of particular interest is Fitzgerald's assessment, at that moment, of his legacy. He was at low ebb, and knew it:

We talked of his own books. He dismissed any idea that they would ever be read in England. It certainly seemed unlikely then--a good example of the vicissitudes of authorship--that within 10 years and a world war everything Fitzgerald had written would be in print in a London edition.

In the Paris Review interview, Powell credits Cyril Connolly, who was for a time all but the sole champion of Fitzgerald in the UK, for insuring that he knew of--and admired--Fitzgerald's work.

In the original article, Powell notes something that he only alluded to in the his memoirs: this was a moment--in fact, the very day--when a lot was happening in Fitzgerald's life. That evening, he would have dinner, for the first time, with Sheilah Graham, the woman who would be his companion in the final years of his life. Despite the emotional upheaval that surely accompanied the success of that dinner, Fitzgerald followed through with a note of thanks to the Powells for a pleasant lunch, and the gift of some books.

Even late, rackety Fitzgerald could regularly come through with some class.

Once more into notebooks--but this time Fitzgerald's!

I mentioned the abundance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks in Wednesday's post, which of course meant that I had to go pull them off the shelf and spend some time with them. Fitzgerald's notebooks differ from Anthony Powell's not only in their extent, but in their substance: in addition to single lines and ideas, they include many more developed thoughts, often running to a paragraph or more of prose. This one is fairly typical:

779 I went on one of those Armistice Day bats and the girl I was with drove my car into a hotel lobby and knocked down a major. He really wasn't hurt but he was shocked and they put me in Leavenworth to see whether he'd die or not. Only a couple of months--the girl's father was a big man in Kansas and they acted very well about it.

I won't quote extensively from Fitzgerald's notebooks the way I did from Powell's on Wednesday; I'll instead simply say that if you enjoy the form, and Fitzgerald, you'll enjoy this volume.

I do, however, want to share three entries that jumped out at me today as being reminiscent of Powell:

627 His old clothes with their faint smell of old clothes.

992 Family explained or damned by its dog.

1491 "Why, she's your wife--I can't imagine touching your wife." Having heard this said to a husband ten minutes before the most passionate attempts to maneuver the wife into bed.

I realize that some of what I'm reading as similarity of thought is simply the nature of the form, but even so, don't those seem like lines Powell would have enjoyed?

All of which leads me to not be able to resist closing with Powell's description of Fitzgerald, whom he met while on his brief, unsatisfactory sojourn there as a screenwriter. It's found in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling:

He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs--seen for the most part years later--do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described in this period, in the least brokendown. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's too me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

More amusingly typical of Powell is the following observation, made before he'd managed to meet Fitzgerald:

One could not fail to notice the tone in which people in Hollywood spoke of Fitzgerald. It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of some doubtful promise as a screenwriter.

Later, Powell shares a charming note that Fitzgerald sent him in thanks for a copy of From a View to a Death. Noting the manners and courtesy indicated by Fitzgerald's having taken time to send the note, he offers this aside:

I discovered only much later that a lot was happening in his own life which would have excused forgetfulness.

And thus is a Powellian plot built: in life we only learn later, and often at second-hand, what furies were secretly driving our friends and peers to distraction even as we were attempting to outpace the furies on our own tails.

Living the lush life

{Photos by rocketlass.}

"I have a theory," writes Lauren Cerand this week over at The Rumpus, "that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private sadness, and that good taste and impeccable manners are life’s consolation." What follows is a wonderful essay that interweaves pithy, epigrammatic definitions of elegance and its kin--

Glamour is constructed, elegance is acquired, and charm is innate.

--with elements of her life story and her approach to matters of fashion, furnishing, and self-presentation. It's well-handled, with Cerand coming across as neither unduly proud of nor the slightest bit uncertain about her tastes; her appreciations and definitions are infectious, bolstering the often too timid thought that yes, the sensual details of life are worth your attention, though their value may largely be self-contained, non-transferable. The moment, the day, the existence, is worth it.

It brought to mind a passage from Cyril Connolly's appreciation of the archly over-ripe pleasures of Ronald Firbank, from The Condemned Playground. "For my part," writes Connolly,

I am secretly a lyricist; the works to which I lose my heart are those that attempt, with a purity and a kind of dewy elegance, to portray the beauty of the moment, the gaiety and sadness, the fugitive distress of hedonism.

Elegance gives us something to celebrate on days when little else is on offer--on, as Fitzgerald put it, those "metropolitan days and nights . . . as tense as singing wires." Even then one's tie can be tied, one's creases pressed, one's clauses delicately balanced.

Cerand mentions in passing that in a friendless childhood in the midst of a complicated, riven family, she turned to, of all people, Machiavelli, pulling "the leather-bound edition of The Prince down from the shelf in hopes of gaining insight on how to navigate it all." And, while in the popular portrait of Machiavelli everything takes a backseat to his recommendations for ruthlessness, he, too, understood the essential respect for the world around us that elegance conveys. In the best of his letters, written on December 10, 1513 to his benefactor, Francesco Vettori, he tells of how he enters his library at the end of a day of farming:

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which is only mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

And now to straighten my tie, pour a martini, settle in at the piano, and open my lounge player's songbook. And what do I happen to be working on tonight? Nothing else but Billy Strayhorn's unparalleled account of the louche ashes of faded glamour, "Lush Life."

Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

An essay on F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned in Geoff Dyer's new collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (and, let's be honest, the quiet persistence of the Fuck Yeah Fitzgerald tumblr) led me to that novel last week. I tend to think of myself as someone who is regularly reading Fitzgerald, but the encounter with this novel made me realize that I usually engage with only a small portion of his work: The Great Gatsby, perpetually re-read and never exhausted; and his lingering mess, The Crack-Up and the notebooks. Each is in its own way perfection: the only flaw in Gatsby is a slight overheatedness, for which the jeweled sentences and the gentle complicity of Nick Carraway more than make up, while the minor matters in The Crack-Up and the notebooks are perfect in their small compass of imperfection, full of striking fragments and unforgettable lines unmoored from unfinished stories.

To read The Beautiful and Damned is to re-encounter the imperfect Fitzgerald, the Fitzgerald who was learning his craft, his generation, and his own self all at the same time. Dyer puts it well:

For more than a hundred pages, The Beautiful and Damned does not represent any kind of advance on This Side of Paradise. Isolated moments of insight cannot disguise its stylistic and structural flimsiness. The reader's heart sinks when, after less than twenty pages, Fitzgerald abandons novelistic prose and inserts one of the little playlets that should have been edited out of his first novel.* . . . Unleashed as soon as Gloria sets foot in the book, Fitzgerald's tendency to effulgence is, at first, ironically refracted through Anthony's consciousness: "Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea." Shortly afterward it takes on the tone of Fitzgerald's own lyrical yearning. A cab "moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean"; Gloria "turned up her face to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage." Fitzgerald never entirely grew out of this kind of thing--he would have been a lesser writer if he had--but he did learn to control it, to ground the lushest imagery in the actual and immediate.

There's so much more purple prose from the early going that Dyer could have cited. Want more gossamer? Here:

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

Yet even as those sentences set the eyes rolling, others show signs of Fitgerald's mature lyricisim--and, as Dyer writes, a grounding in the immediate. Take this, from the page following the gossamer feather:

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Just when the prose starts to feel too puffed up, Fitzgerald brings on the newsboys to deflate it; then, almost unnoticed, he inverts our notions of night and day, dark and light, hot and cold, giving the power and the glory, fading out, to the night and leaving the day the hangover-wracked imposition that his characters feel it to be.

The novel does, as Dyer notes, pick up considerably a ways in, and its tale of the disintegration of, respectively, Anthony, Gloria, and their marriage, has all the brutality, but none of the didacticism, of a temperance tract like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Light party scenes--of the recognizably 1920s sort that Waugh and Powell treated comically and Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson treated seriously, ending up with a sort of Fitzgerald-lite--give way to scene after scene of unalloyed disssipation. The overriding impression is of people who have been entirely unfitted, by education, upbringing, and culture, for the daily round of life, and of the powerful lure of failure--and, as Dyer puts it, "the capacity of failure to generate some kind of hideous enlightenment." By the end of the novel, its imperfections are forgotten, and all that's left is the coppery taste of destruction, pain, and emptiness portrayed with brutal precision.

The pleasures of youthful friendship

Scenes from two very different novels echoed each other in my reading this week and seemed worth sharing. First, from a fantasy novel rocketlass liked very much but that I ultimately decided wasn't for me, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind:

Thus it was that three students made their slightly erratic way back to the University. See them as they go, weaving only slightly. It is quiet, and when the belling tower strikes the late hour, it doesn't break the silence so much as it underpins it. The crickets, too, respect the silence. Their calls are like careful stitches in its fabric, almost too small to be seen.

The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamonds in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey. The University and Imre are the heats of understanding and art, the strongest of the four corners of civilization. Here on the road between the two there is nothing but old trees and long grass bending to the wind. The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifyingly beautiful.

The three boys, one dark, one light, and one--for lack of a better word--fiery, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.

And then, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned:

Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home.

His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury--who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.

The settled life of adulthood brings compensations that would have been barely comprehensible to our younger selves, but it's undeniable that something is lost along the way.

"Golden-skinned boys and girls playing roulette with highballs in every hand," or, Sunday morning coming down

Like the raucous seagulls circling Wrigley Field in the ninth inning of yesterday's game, preparing to scarf up the inevitable hot dog puke, Sunday morning waits patiently for the weekend reveler, knowing he will require its quiet for rest, regret, and recovery. For those readers who fall into that category, I offer this morning some dissipated selections from Edmund Wilson's journals of the 1920s.

I'll start with a scene, interpolated by Wilson years later as he re-read his notebooks, that is enough to strike horror into the heart of any man who can recall his first illicit visit to a certain carefully monitored drug store aisle:

I decided that I had now been innocent long enough and decided to buy a condom. I went to a drugstore on Greenwich Avenue and watched nervously from outside to be sure that there were no women there. I then went in and inquired. The clerk withdrew to the back counter and produced a condom of rubber, which he highly recommended, blowing it up like a balloon in order to show me how reliable it was. But the condom, thus distended, burst, and this turned out to be something of an omen. I soon got over my shyness with women, but I was a victim of many of the hazards of sex--from which I might have been saved by previous experience: abortions, gonorrhea, entanglements, a broken heart.

What I wonder is whether that druggist put on the same demonstration for every young man who asked for a condom, or if he sensed a particular susceptibility to embarrassment in Wilson? And, with that in mind: might it all have been a prank, the condom intentionally ruptured to throw a fright into the affected fop who'd had the temerity to inquire about it?

Along those lines, this account of Wilson's friend Ted Paramore, from 1921, is lively and ridiculous in its portrayal of uncertain young male sexuality:

The girl he got away from Donald Douglas. --"She wasn't very good. She wasn't very pretty but she had a good body." --She finally made him feel so ashamed, however, that he gave her up: "She said, 'You make me feel as if I were on a barren plain whipped by a bitter wind!' --And I ---!" --business of hanging his head in abasement. --But the first time he had been to see her, he was enormously set up the next morning--he came in to see me, beaming, and said it had restored his self-confidence. She had "made him breakfast and everything."

It strikes me that any woman who can come up with that image of the barren plain probably deserved better than the apparently feckless Paramore, who, elsewhere in the journal, is seen attending a ball as a "vulture,"

that is, he went as a stag and spent the evening trying to pass out old men and steal their young mistresses.

Now, in reverse of the way things usually progress, we'll move from sex to drink. Having expressed doubt about Ted Paramore, it seems only fair to let him offer a bit of irrefutable wisdom:

"At these parties they get absolutely soused, then they begin to get Ritzy, and at the same time they keep falling off the chairs. You can't try to high-hat everybody and fall off chairs at the same time."

Then, a brief look in on a 1921 party at the apartment of Cleon Throckmorton, a theatrical set designer:

I came in and found the room full of people whom I took at first to be the cast of Orpheus. I went over to Catherine Throckmorton and we sat down together--she was just drunk enough to be partly speechless and to have assumed, as she often does under those circumstances, a bogus foreign accent.

Finally, because a night of drinking with Edmund Wilson wouldn't be complete without Ring Lardner and Scott Fitzgerald, here's an early morning--following a late-night--scene at Lardner's house:

Zelda had gone to sleep in an armchair, and covered herself with a shawl. . . . Lardner read teh golf rules aloud. (This was a little book put out by the local golf club. Lardner read these rules at length with a cold and somber scor that was funny, yet really conveyed his disgust with his successful suburban life.) --Then we went back to the Fitzgeralds' Lardner and I started talkign abotu the oil scandal, and Fitz fell asleep in his chair. Lardner and I went on talking about baseball, Heywood Broun, Lardner's writing, the Americanized Carmen, the Rascoes, etc. Deep blue patches appeared at the windows. I couldn't at first think what they were--then I realized it was the dawn. The birds tuned up one at a time It grew light. It was seven o'clock. Scott asked what we had been talking about. Lardner said we had been talking about him. --"I suppose you analyzed me ruthlessly."

Am I wrong, when I picture the livers of that generation, in imagining something just sub-Lovecraftian in its inchoate horror?

Now that we've reached the morning after, lest you harbor hopes that your gentleman's gentleman might sidle quietly into your room with a restorative, you first might want to be reminded that not all servants are as reliably comforting as Jeeves:

At dinner, Mrs Murphy sat mumbling about the butler-they always did manage to have such sinister servants, don't you now? "I really feel there's something wrong about him--I'm really afraid of him--even though his wife is such a good cook, I really think I'll have to discharge him!" "Well, Mother, I really don't think you're very good if you allow yourself to be intimidated by your own servants!" "Well, but you don't have to be in the house with him continually as I do--I really don't think it's safe to be in the house alone with him--I really think I'll have to let him go!"

Perhaps, like Wilson himself, you're fortunate enough to need little restorative aside from the Sunday itself:

That vague and charming feeling of coming to (no doubt a dose of aspirin contributed to these sensations) after having been drunk the night before, very late in the day--of going out and finding the warm May day, the people out on the Avenue in their Sunday clothes and riding on the top of the buses; of lying inside and hearing, from behind the lowered shades, where a bright sun comes in through a hole, the cries of children playing in the street and the sound of boat whistles. We leave the windows up during the day and the shades up at night: we don't need to shut ourselves up any longer.

And, if you can make it through the fog-headed morning,

At night, the park in a warm obscurity plaited with the bright pearls of lamps, the taxis moving on their errands--they seem more genial, more attractive now--the first soft mysteries of the city summer.

Swozzled or sober, enjoy this first real summer Sunday of the year, secure in the knowledge that there are plenty more to come--maybe not that endless string that stretched before us in childhood, but a sufficient number for the more modest ambitions of adulthood.

To be read, may I take the liberty to suggest, with a dry gin martini

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some offerings from the I've Been Reading Lately bar today: belly up and pick your poison.

1 Having just written about the Amises, I was glad to discover last night in the new issue of Bookforum an article by Alexander Waugh on Kingsley Amis's books on booze . . . of which there are not one, not two, but three! My first reaction was that Amis, a champion tippler (whose monthly bill for Scotch topped £1,000 in the 1970s) and the best writer on drunkenness since Noah first snarfed the grape and rucked up his robes, ought to be a good source for recommendations about drink, but Waugh rightly questions that assumption:

[I]t is worth ruminating for a moment on the question of whether a person who drinks as much as Kingsley Amis did is, or is not, a reliable expert on the subject. You would think that someone who had devoted so much of his life to alcohol would know a thing a two about it—and he certainly did—but are the taste recommendations of alcoholics useful to people who drink only moderately? As an immoderate imbiber myself, I am not the best placed to answer this question, though I cannot imagine that the average two-glasses-of-wine-a-day man is going to think very highly of some of Amis’s recommendations—Bloody Mary with tomato ketchup and no Tabasco, red wine with lemonade, a pint of Guinness mixed with gin and ginger beer (this he erroneously claims to be the invention of my grandfather Evelyn Waugh), Scotch whisky with fried eggs. And who but a committed alcoholic could possibly wish for a glass of the “Tigne Rose,” an Amis cocktail made up of one tot of gin, one tot of whisky, one tot of rum, one tot of vodka, and one tot of brandy? Alcoholics have special cravings that obfuscate, warp, and exaggerate their tastes and, like committed sex maniacs, are often prepared to try almost anything.

The scariest thing about that paragraph for me is that I've encountered—though thank god not tasted—a tomato ketchup Bloody Mary, prepared by Jose, one of the hash-addled South African moving men with whom I shared a horrid travelers' house in north London's Neasden neighborhood in the mid-90s. Not only did Jose seem to have no qualms about making—and heartily quaffing—the aforementioned abomination, he didn't even seem to realize that his concoction was unusual. Thinking of its corn-syrup-thickened redness oozing down his chin still induces a shudder.

2 From Amis's book On Drink (1972), Waugh quotes the following brutally perceptive passage about hangovers:

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Even those among us whose deepest appreciation for drink is more notional—even literary—than actual can recognize familiar elements in that description, however much we might prefer to banish them from memory.

3 Since Anthony Powell featured in the discussion of the Amises the other night, I ought to note that Powell, too, is very good when writing on drink and drunks. On the recommendation of Ed at the Dizzies, we've been slowly making our way through the 1997 BBC adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time, and one of the many surprising pleasures of the film has been the skill at playing drunk evinced by the actor cast as the hopeless alcoholic Charles Stringham; his wide-eyed efforts to effect a hopeless pretense of sobriety on entering a room elicit equal parts sympathetic pain and horrified laughter.

4 At various times in Dance, many of Powell's characters make appearances while deep in their cups. I particularly like this description, from At Lady Molly's (1957), of the extremely minor character Hegarty, who is employed alongside Nick Jenkins as a screenwriter by a dismally shabby film studio:

Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life—burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony—and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty year before, the banality of which had persuaded some director that it would "make a picture." This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

5 In his notebook, which was published in 2001 as A Writer's Notebook, Powell vented a bit, from bitter experience, about film executives:

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.

Invective is such a pleasure when balanced and properly coiled, concealing until the last the venomous stinger.

6 For a long time, I've vaguely imagined that the drunken Hegarty incorporated characteristics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Powell met while working in Hollywood. Checking the third volume of Powell's autobiography, Faces in My Time (1980), however, I find that the two never actually worked together; in fact, their acquaintance was limited to a single long and amiable lunch. But I did discover the following description of Fitzgerald, which you'll surely agree is timely:

His air could be though a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least broken-down. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's to me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

Powell also describes memorably the tone in which Hollywood figures spoke of Fitzgerald:

It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of somewhat doubtful promise as an aspiring scriptwriter.

7 To wrap this up, I'll turn to back to Powell's notebooks, which include plenty of entries touching on drink.

At a party, make up your mind whether you are going to go all out for women, food or drink. You can't have all three.

In quarantine for a hangover.

"I might come in and have a drink with you." "You might come in; a drink depends on my hospitality."

Life is a comedy for those who drink, and a tragedy for those who eat.

A wine snob boasts that he has some bottles corked with corks made from Proust's soundproof room.

A rich left-winger who put his trust in Marx and kept his sherry dry.

A bore, who at worst would explain the meaning of life.

Though the final entry, you'll have noticed, didn't explicitly mention alcohol, I included it nonetheless; I find it nearly impossible to imagine the bore reaching his worst state without the timely assistance of strong drink.

Ignorance and Impudent Puppies, or, A Postscript to Edmund Wilson Week

Though I'll continue reading away at the new Library of America volumes here and there for a good long while, I'll close Edmund Wilson Week with two entries from James Laughlin's wonderful autobiography in scrapbook form, The Way It Wasn't (2006):

WILSON, EDMUND

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up went through about five printings and we keep it in print. But it got me in Dutch with Edmund Wilson because the papers came from him and I didn't show him proofs until it was too late. He had systematically crossed out the name of every friend they'd had at Princeton, though the book said nothing bad about them. And I put the names back in, John Peal Bishop and this one and that one. Edmund wrote to me on one of his cards, "You are an impudent puppy."

Which isn't as bad as the assessment of Wilson himself that one of Laughlin's authors delivered:

DAHLBERG

DREADFUL EDWARD

I should have spotted from something he said when I first took him out to lunch that Edward Dahlberg was going to be a problem. Over a BLT on 4th Street (no New Directions author has ever been lunched at the Four Seasons) Edward told me, quite seriously, that Edmund Wilson was "a very ignorant man."

"I have supressed the worst of my aberrations."

Oh, these are going to be fun: the Library of America has just issued two volumes of Edmund Wilson's literary essays and reviews. Just flipping through the first volume, I find, appropos of my realization yesterday that I needed to read more Edith Wharton, from the March 1923 issue of Vanity Fair:

Has Mrs. Wharton ever been given her rightful place as the foremost of living American novelists and one of the foremost living novelists of the world?

I don't know whether she reached that point during her lifetime, but her critical standing seems pretty solid now. Then, as if Wilson knows exactly what to write to get me to clap my hat on my head and light out for the bookshop, he continues,

Has Thomas Hardy ever done anything better than Ethan Frome?

Then there's a piece on Ring Lardner from the July 1924 issue of the Dial. Wilson takes Lardner, whom he, along with Fitzgerald, counted as a friend, to task for "being timid about coming forward in the role of serious writer." Comparing Lardner to Sinclair Lewis, he writes,

[W]hen Lardner comes closest to Lewis, as in the story called The Golden Honeymoon, he is less likely than Lewis to caricature, and hence to falsify, because he is primarily interested in studying a kind of person rather than in drawing up an indictment

--which seems to perfectly describe both Lardner's sympathetic openness and Lewis's brutally accurate satire, so vicious it's draining. But Wilson goes even farther, first leveling some more pointed criticism before taking what even eighty years later seems a breathtaking leap:

For all his saturnine tone, his apparent scorn of vulgar values, he seems committed to popular journalism. He does not even care to admit that he has tried to do work on a higher level. . . . Yet he would seem to come closer than anyone else among living American writers to possessing the combination of qualities that made Huckleberry Finn a masterpiece.

The whole essay reads as what it surely was meant to be: a direct, public challenge to a talented writer who was not, in Wilson's opinion, measuring up.

Sadly, we already know the answer to the question Wilson asks later,

Will Ring Lardner, then, go on to his Huckleberry Finn or has he already told all he knows?

For what Wilson wonders about in prospect in 1924, Fitzgerald would wonder about his friend in retrospect less than a decade later, in the obituary appreciation of Lardner that I wrote about recently. "So one is haunted," Fitzgerald wrote, "not only by a sense of personal loss but by a conviction that Ring got less percentage of himself down on paper than any other American of the first flight."

In my earlier post on that obituary, I pointed out that as Fitzgerald was writing about Lardner, surely he also was thinking about his own frittering away of his talent. And in fact, two years before challenging Lardner, Wilson had publicly challenged his friend Fitzgerald, too, who had just published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922):

[H]e has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.

That's candidness to the point of brutality, and I wonder how Fitzgerald took it. (A task for my next library visit!) But even as he calls This Side of Paradise (1920) "a preposterous farrago," slashes Fitzgerald for his slack language, and even mixes in some personal criticism--"Conversations about politics or general ideas have a way of snapping back to Fitzgerald"--Wilson is clearly aiming to urge his friend to push past what is easy or comfortable. To that end, he mixes in serious, though measured praise. This Side of Paradise is "exciting" and "animated with life," and

[I]t would be quite unfair to subject Scott Fitzgerald, who is still in his twenties and has presumably most of his work before him, to a rigorous overhauling. His restless imagination may yet produce something durable.

He saves his strongest praise for the conclusion, where, though still couched in doubts, it obviously points a possible way for his friend to better understand--and thus deploy--his own talent:

But, in any case, even the work that Fitzgerald has done up to date has a certain moral importance. In his very expression of the anarchy by which he finds himself bewildered, of his revolt which cannot fix on an object, he is typical of the war generation--the generation so memorably described on the last page of This Side of Paradise as "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken."

It's interesting to come across this pair of essays a week after
I lamented the news that V. S. Naipaul dismisses the work of his longtime friend Anthony Powell in his most recent collection; while both writers are harshly criticizing friends, their differences in moral standing in doing so seem stark.

Powell, after all, is dead; nothing Naipaul says will make him a better writer. And while it is not incumbent on everyone to avoid speaking ill of the dead, a friend should surely hold fire in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Though I've not yet read Naipaul's piece on Powell, his striking lack of generosity--especially when set in contrast to Fitzgerald's honest yet appreciative assessment of Lardner--will render it extremely difficult to approach without distaste, and even doubt.

Wilson's words, on the other hand, though surely hurtful at the time (possibly even unnecessarily so, as there's a sense in both essays of the brash overconfidence of youth, of words running away with him) are far easier to justify, aimed as they were at the stimulation of talents that he clearly admired--and delivered while the men were still around to take issue with them or even prove him wrong. It's easy to imagine both Fitzgerald and Lardner cursing Wilson, maybe even to his face, but it's hard to imagine them dismissing his critique out of hand.

"New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world."

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's "My Lost City," collected in The Crack-Up (1945)

"What news from New York?"
"Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster."
"Nothing more?"
"Nothing. Radios blare in the street."

No blogging for a few days, as we're off to New York for the weekend.

"Ring made no enemies, because he was kind."

In introducing my Ring Lardner imitation the other day, though I apologized to Lardner's fans, I forgot to apologize to his ghost. But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is right about Lardner, with whom he was close friends for many years, I shouldn't be worried:

It is hard to understand but I don't think he really gave a damn about anything except his personal relations with a few people. A case in point was his attitude to those imitators who lifted everything except the shirt off his back--only Hemingway has been more thoroughly frisked--it worried the imitators more than it worried Ring. His attitude was that if they got stuck in the process he'd help them over any tough place.

I took those lines from Fitzgerald's obituary remembrance of Lardner, who died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight, which is included in The Crack-Up (1945), the Edmund Wilson-edited book of Fitzgerald odds and ends. The whole obituary is worth reading. Fitzgerald appraises his friend with a clear-eyed honesty that would seem cruel were it not rooted in a deep appreciation of Lardner's underlying talent:

So one is haunted not only by a sense of personal loss but by a conviction that Ring got less percentage of himself down on paper than any other American of the first flight.

Fitzgerald attributes Lardner's failure to his early years covering baseball:

A writer can spin on about his adventures after thirty, after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance's diamond. . . . It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer.

That attribution seems to reflect Fitzgerald's own preoccupation with youth--he already saw his best years fading behind him though he was only thirty-seven--at least as much as they reflect the reality of the difficulties facing Lardner. In fact, the whole obituary, with its lament of lost promise, of a genius fallen silent at a young age, is impossible to read without thinking that Fitzgerald is writing about himself, too, and maybe even realizes it.

He kept on recording but he no longer projected, and this accumulation, which he has taken with him to the grave, crippled his spirit in the latter years. . . . He had agreed with himself to speak only with a small portion of his mind.

Another writer whom that description brings to mind is J. D. Salinger--who names Lardner as one of Holden Caulfield's favorite writers in A Catcher in the Rye.

Despite the wasted talent, despite the sadness and frustration that Fitzgerald identifies, the impression one is left with after his words is of a man who was, as the lines I used for this post's headline indicate, kind and attentive, loyal to his friends if not to his talent:

The woes of many people haunted him--for example, the doctor's death sentence pronounced upon Tad, the cartoonist (who, in fact, nearly outlived Ring)--it was as if he believed he could and ought to do something about such things. . . . So he was inclined to turn his cosmic sense of responsibility into the channel of solving other people's problems--finding someone an introduction to a theatrical manager, placing a friend in a job, maneuvering a man into a golf club. The effort made was often out of proportion to the situation.

As for Lardner's wit, which survived his loss of faith in his writing, Fitzgerald demonstrates it nicely by reproducing a refreshingly odd telegram Lardner to sent him and Zelda:

WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK AND WHY PLEASE ANSWER

Ultimately, though, Fitzgerald concludes in sadness--not so much because of the art Lardner might have written and didn't, but because he felt inadequate in his friendship:

At no time did I feel that I had known him enough, or that anyone knew him--it was not the feeling that there was more stuff in him and that it should come out, it was rather a qualitative difference, it was rather as though, due to some inadequacy in one's self, one had not penetrated to something unsolved, new and unsaid. That is why one wishes that Ring had written down a larger proportion of what was in his mind and heart. It would have saved him longer for us, and that in itself would be something. But I would like to know what it was, and now I will go on wishing--what did Ring want, how did he want things to be, how did he think things were?

From our perspective, nearly seventy-five years later, we can acknowledge Fitzgerald's personal lament while being a bit more forgiving about the work itself. People are still reading and enjoying You Know Me Al--as they're still reading The Great Gatsby--and that seems like an achievement to be proud of, regardless of what might have been.

{P.S. I was put in the mind to go back to Fitzgerald today by a nice post at Light Reading about the joys of flawed books. It's well worth checking out.}

Marlowe and Millay

The way I ended up reading about Edna St. Vincent Millay is fairly typical of my reading habits. I was reading some bits of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, and that led me to thinking about Zelda Fitzgerald, so I went to my local bookstore looking for Nancy Milford’s acclaimed biography of her. It was out of stock, but I happened to see Savage Beauty and, since Millay had recently popped up in my mind while I was thinking about Christopher Marlowe, I picked it up.

And now I realize that “First Fig” wasn’t quite the right poem to refer to when writing about Marlowe. On leaving Cambridge, Marlowe most likely had the option of using his connections and degree to get himself a comfortable living in some country parish, performing his church duties and having plenty of time to write, as Swift and Sterne, among others, would later do. If, as David Riggs would have it, Marlowe’s refusal to pretend belief caused him to choose the rackety, uncertain life of the theatre instead, then the appropriate poem, really, would be “Second Fig”:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!