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On the Tragic Sense of Love in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald

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On the Tragic Sense of Love in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald On The Tragic Sense of Love in仇e Novels of F. Sco耽Fitzgerald ―chieflyin the Case of The Last Tycoon by Seiwa FUJITANI I On the Deterioration Fitzgerald has been illustrating tragedies in which love causes heroes' deterioration. Though T he Last Tycoon is an uncompleted novel, his philosophy on life in this novel can be clearly seen. His letter to his daughter indicates us his determination to write his Dphilosophy on life: Anyhow l am alive again－getting by that October did something with allits strains and necessitiesand humiliations and struggles.l don't drink. l am not a great man but sometimes l think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essentialvalue has some sort of epic grandeur. Λs the setting of The Last Tycoon Fitzgerald uses Hollywood in which the protagonist Monroe Stahr lives and works. The fact gives us some significance in reading this story since the American dream is one of his themes. Gatsby and Diver have been trying to rea】izethe American dream but Stahr is manufacturing the dreams or illusions. Hollywood is an empire that Stahr has created and he gives unity to the movies that he produces. Stahr is a leader who thinks a writer's“brains belonged to me－because l 2)know how to use them." Stahr is a pioneer of a new frontier America's last－Hollywood, California. In the first episode of "The plane," we can find Stahr sitting with the pilot and identifing himself with the pilot. Cecilia Brady who is in the movie world sees Stahr through her worshipping eyes : He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on allthe kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun。 Beatinghis wings tenaciously－finallyfrantically－andkeeping on beating them. he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then. remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settledgradually to earth(p.20). Stahr is contemplating Los Angels，from the sky. with the eyes “that can stare straight into the sun." In other words. Stahr as Icarus is flying with his man一made wings. The landing of Stahr's plane at Hollywood is symbolic of the beginning of Stahr's tragedy. In The Great Gatsby the tragedy of Gatsby lies in his failure in pursuing Daisy. The unsatisfactory love affair forms the core of The Great Gatsby. In Stahr's haunting search 65 On the Tragic Sense of Love in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald for the woman who resembles his dead wife, Stahr resembles Gatsby. But unlike The Great Gats by and Tende･r Is the Night, this novel does not deal with the protagonist's deterioration through the love affair with the heroine. Stahr is no longer the one who idealizes the woman he loves. Unlike Gatsby, Stahr does not idealize Kathleen. Gatsby finds his dream realized in Daisy whose “voice is full of money." But it is his dream that leads him to his deterioration. “Warren money" buys Diver for Nicole. As a result. Diver is spoiled by the "sweet poison" under the name of love. Gatsby and Diver idealize the American dream too much to the degi-ee where they can not have their identity and self in the real life. Fitzgerald illustrates Stahr as the movie tycoon in Hollywood. Stahr is“the king," "the helmsman," "the oracle." For the first time, Fitzgerald uses business world to illustrate this movie tycoon. Henry Dan Piper quotes Professor E. E. Cassady as saying that “the businessman has never been presented in our literature as 'a large-minded generous, 3)disinterested, heroic character.'" Fitzgerald's conception of Stahr as the movie tycoon is crystallized in the following paragraph : He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking, l suppose, a littlelike the Emperor and the Old Guard. There is no world so but it has itsheroes. and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time－through the beginnings and the great upset. when sound came, and the three years of depression, he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyaltieswere trembling now, there were clay feet everywhere ； but still he was their man, the last of princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went by （p. 27）. Untill Fitzgerald wrote The Last Tycoon, he had been dealing with the tragic ambiguities imbedded in ordinary, everyday American bourgeois eχperience. Gatsby and Diver are destroyed in a dilemma between their moral values and the American dream symbolized by money. Unlike Gatsby and Diver, Stahr is n0 longer the genteel romantic hero. There is no need for him to seek for dreams. To the contrary, he makes dream for people : Our condition is that we have to take people’sown favoritefolkloreand dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won't you give us some sugar, Mr. Boχley?" （p.105） To Stahr movies seem the power which makes the dreams America dream. In Stahr's projection room, “Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analy- sis, passed－to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded" （p， 56）. Then what is Stahr's tragedy? Kathleen is not the direct cause of his tragedyバn The Great Gats by, Gatsby is betrayed by Daisy. In Tender Is the Night, Diver is spoiled by Nicole. In this novel, it is Stahr who does not accept Kathleen. The women Gatsby and Diver love are the grace. the class, the wealth. Daisy and Nicole are identified as an embodiment of innocence or of corruption by Gatsby and Diver. However Fitzgerald's －66 － Seiwa FuJlTANI comments about Kathleen in his preliminary notes quoted by Piper says :“Stahr, for instance, was to have thrown her over because she was 'poor, unfortunate and tagged with ≪a middle-class eχterior, which doesn't fitin with the grandeur Stahr demands of life.'" There is no need for Stahr to pursue the American dream, the wealth and the class. He has acquired it in Hollywood which is a new world on the far frontier, a “mining town in lotus land" （p. 11）. The American dream pursued by people from Long Island seems to have arrived at Hollywood. II On the Setting- of Hollywood When we consider his choice of Hollywood for the setting of this novel, Fitzgerald succeeded in making the best use of it. He knew the effect of it. He had worked as a script writer in Hollywood before writing this novel and found the artistic impulse was blighted and frustrated by an industrial organization. For a creative artist it is unbearable to face a dilemma every day. One has to make a compromise to live in a social life. In this sense, unlike Gatsby and Diver, Stahr is not an idealist but a rationalist. Hollywood is a world of rationalists. It compels everybody to become a machine. Men like Schwartz can not live in Hollywood which has an equivocal milieu. He goes to the Hermitage Home of Andrew Jackson, to get“nourishment." But Cecilia who is“of the movies but not in them" does not show any interests in the Hermitage. This episode gives us an ironical conception of Hollywood. In The Great Gats by and Tender Is the Nighi, to the people. the party is the place where their significant time is spent. What is the people? The bourgeoisie. In this novel the party does not give any significance to the people. It is the work or the usual social life that gives the meaning of life to the people in Hollywood. Fitzgerald says in his letter 5）to Maxwell Perkins that this novel is“distinctly not about Hollywood." On this point Michael Millgate makes interesting comments :“Many of Fitzgerald's difficulties derived from the fact that he was, in effect, writing two novels in one ； a 'psychological' novel 6）about Monroe Stahr and a 'social' novel about Hollywoodグ Fitzgerald intended to write a “psychological" novel within the social framework of Hollywood. With Stahr's tragedy. he tried to describe a philosophical way of living. In its scope, T he Last Tycoon resembles Tender Is the Night more than The Great Gatsby. The great difference is that the pro- tagonist no longer blames the bourgeoisie for their carelessness or the corruption of moral. It is Slahr who is to blame. But his tragedy has the social and the psychological framework. Here l would like to quote Fitzgerald's letter to his daughter to illustratehis idea on life.; 〇nee one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literarytaste,to examine the validityof philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, l might callthe wise and tragic sense of life. By thisl mean the thing thatlies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare's to iVbraham Lincoln's and as far back as there are books to read一the sense thatlifeis essentiallya cheat －67－ On the Tragic Sense of Love in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and its conditions are those of defeat,and that the redeeming things are not "happiness and pleasure" but the deeper satisfactionsthat come out of the struggle.Having learned thisin theory from thelives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hellof a lot more enjoyment n out of whatever bright things come your way.
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