Understanding American Identity: the Significance of American Expatriatism and Hollywood in the Works of F

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Understanding American Identity: The Significance of American Expatriatism and Hollywood in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amelia Margo Reyes, B.A.

A Thesis

Literature

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Approved

Dr. Michael Borshuk Chair of Committee

Dr. Yuan Shu

Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School

May, 2018

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Acknowledgments

I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Michael Borshuk and Dr. Yuan Shu for guiding me through this process. Dr. Borshuk, I thank you for our almost weekly meetings because they did help me in being less hesitant in my writing, and for banning the word

“perhaps”. I would also like to extend my gratitude to all my loved ones who supported me in this journey of academic exploration, research, and intensive writing.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

I. FRAGILITY OF AMERICAN IDENTITY IN TENDER IS THE NIGHT ...... 6

II. THE HOLLYWOOD EFFECT ON AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON ...... 44

CONCLUSION ...... 81

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 88

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Introduction

In the time between the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s, American culture

experienced several movements that defined what it means to be an American.

Specifically, these series of movements have been collectively labeled as American

Modernism, and the separate movements within American Modernism each contain

variations of critical thoughts on nationalism, culture, and identity. As Walter Benn

Michaels explains in his book, Our America, American modernism consists of three

distinct groups of creative thinkers and writers: the “Lost Generation,” regionalism, and

post-Depression (pluralism). This project looks more closely at F. Scott Fitzgerald who

wrote across these Modernist groups with his focus on personal loss throughout his

works. Though he is more well-known for being a part of the “Lost Generation” as well

as his use of jazz literary themes in The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald offers a

critique of American culture and the popular conception of American identity that

emerges from mass culture.

In the following chapters, I look specifically at his late period works, Tender is

the Night (1934) and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941, posthumously) because

Fitzgerald holds a complex critique within these texts about the rapidly transformative state of American identity. I argue that Fitzgerald views American culture shifting its focus away from traditional values to a new set of values that prioritizes material wealth as a standard for exceptionality. American culture’s shift then directly impacts Americans by establishing a standard of living and the promotion of a homogenized identity for all

Americans to aspire to, especially with the popularization of the lofty American Dream

ideal in 1931. In Fitzgerald’s perspective, the fashioning of a singular identity and

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lifestyle does not equate to all Americans being exceptional; rather, this cultural motion defies individuality, freedom, and personal happiness.

In chapter one, I focus on Tender is the Night and how it sets the tone for

Fitzgerald’s over-arching critique of American identity, American culture’s belief in money, and the nightmarish transformation of the American Dream. When writing

Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald must have been aware of how morally eroding the Great

Depression was for many Americans. Fitzgerald’s novel about American expatriates in

Europe suggests a keen awareness of this because on the surface level, Fitzgerald satirically presents its characters as desperately working to attain some form of success either through material wealth or social status. His characters collectively represent the post-Gatsby group who were so ingrained in the idea of lavish parties and enjoying their youth. Now that these characters are older, and the social climate in America remains fairly gloomy, they insert themselves onto a European stage to play out their delayed reactions to the changing American culture. However, Fitzgerald presents a deeper, more serious comment on the transforming American identity in reaction to the Great

Depression and the social stigma of being a failure1. Each character presents a persona that illustrates success in a shallow, materialistic manner, yet the character has no choice but to perform his or her contrived identities because they all seek one goal: achieving the

American Dream.

1 Rita Barnard’s book, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathaniel West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s extensively discusses the cultural shift that emerged from the Great Depression and into the Modern culture. First, there was an emphasis on working hard now to reap the benefits of success. After the Great Depression, it became culturally acceptable to not wait to benefit from success. Thus, instant gratification became the norm for American culture. 2

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Fitzgerald then adds to the mix of American characters some European characters

which presents another layer of critical commentary on American identity. The novel provides subtle comparisons between European and American culture based off of the interactions and conversations the Americans hold with European characters. Fitzgerald

presents his cast of American characters as materialistic and uniform in thought; and

when the American characters interact with European characters, their representation of

American identity illustrates a collective malleability in values whereas the European

characters are always steadfast in theirs. For instance, half-French Tommy Barban and

American Dick Diver briefly argue over who is better suited for Dick’s mentally frail

wife Nicole. As soon as the argument starts, Dick immediately gives up his role as

Nicole’s husband because he lacks not only youth but also the conviction to be a

successful husband after Tommy has proven Dick’s failure. Fitzgerald illustrates in the

American characters how their identities are constructed around an ideal that is ultimately

unattainable and unachievable. Even when confronted with experiences with death, loss,

or even helplessness, these American characters embody the antithesis of American

values: individualism, freedom, and pursuit of happiness. Fitzgerald reasons as to why

these Americans vastly differ from the culturally promoted ideal of Americaness is due to

the fact that many of these characters believe in looking the part instead of living it2.

In chapter two, I focus on The Love of the Last Tycoon where Fitzgerald has

considerably changed his dark outlook of American identity to one that is slightly

optimistic because of the influence of Hollywood. Between 1931 and 1940, Fitzgerald

2 One character in particular, Mary North, significantly represents Fitzgerald’s point about American identity being shallow. Mary consistently shows her desire to reach the same economic and social status as the Divers, and when she does achieve it through her second marriage, she becomes an entirely different person. 3

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had been living in American and had experienced several cultural instances that became

developed material for his last unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. After

returning from Europe, Fitzgerald became immediately associated with Hollywood and

even became a contracted screenwriter for M-G-M Studios in 1937. Fitzgerald has been characterized by many critics as desperate for money, elitist toward the rising film medium, and entirely pessimistic about the state of the modern, more international

American identity. However, other critics like Michael Glenday and Tom Cerasulo have proved the opposite of the negative attributes associated to Fitzgerald. Even though

Fitzgerald did have some debt, he actually was paid fairly well as a screenwriter and even found film to be the future of American culture: “In the 1920s, shortly before writing his editor that ‘lowbrows go to the movies,’ Fitzgerald told his friends that Hollywood was the future. He and his contemporaries began to recognize that motion pictures would allow them to reach larger audiences than the theatre or books ever could” (Cerasulo 5).

As for his negative thoughts on American identity, Fitzgerald illustrates in The Love of the Last Tycoon a developing comment that is not a moral lesson for readers, rather the novel is a call to acknowledge how quickly American culture forgets its traditional values in the pursuit of modernization and material wealth.

Fitzgerald’s work in Hollywood and the connections with other Modernist writers significantly impacted his view of American culture, which resulted in the development of The Love of the Last Tycoon. While working in Hollywood, he must have seen American culture’s movement to forget the Great Depression and World War I, and enjoy the various by-products of popular culture, particular films. At the same time,

Fitzgerald also saw some cause for concern that reinforced his earlier critique of

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American identity in Tender is the Night: a shift to a new, more commercialized identity

shaped by films. The Love of the Last Tycoon features Fitzgerald’s second hero with the

first being Jay Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s choice of creating another hero is a rarity since

many of his protagonists are usually flawed. However, Monroe Stahr symbolizes

Fitzgerald’s ideals of what American identity should strive to emulate. Stahr is a

“wonder-boy” Hollywood producer who came from a small Jewish-immigrant

neighborhood and gained material and social success through hard work which is an

ironic since as a film producer Stahr consistently makes movies that avoid recreating his

modest rise to success. Rather, most of the films Stahr produces and creates are ones that

are glamourous and easy to mass produce. Even though Fitzgerald presents Stahr as the

most authentic character in the novel, he surrounds Stahr with characters who have been

shaped by these types of films and perpetuate the pretentious nature of American identity

with their conflation of material success and achieving the American Dream. Stahr

ultimately withers in the fictional Hollywood environment where everyone betrays him

for their own form of short-term happiness. Fitzgerald also continues his comparison of

American and European cultures with the inclusion of British national Kathleen Moore, the love interest for Stahr. However, the European character submits to the glamour of

Hollywood and American culture by also betraying Stahr for a contrived version of happiness with another man. Ultimately, Fitzgerald views American identity as growing

through the influence of Hollywood but are affected from commercialization of the

American experience, which would remove American culture further away from the hard

work ethic that yields personal success toward a culture that values instant success at any cost.

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Chapter One

Fragility of American Identity in Tender is the Night

In a personal inscription to a friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald called Tender is the Night

(Tender) a “confession of faith” (qtd in Introduction xv), a claim uncharacteristic to the way the novel is popularly described: dramatic encounters between old and new cultures, dying romances, lives unfulfilled, and an obsession with living according to a high lifestyle. Most scholarly criticism on Tender emphasizes the psychological interpretations of critical characters, but never mention Fitzgerald’s personal metaphor for the text. The phrase “confession of faith” conveys a strong religious belief in something undeniably true but also kept secret between confessor and penitent. As Fitzgerald imagined his work’s meaning, as evident in his “confession of faith” remark, within a global setting at the turn of the century, Americans’ faith lies in identity and the confession focuses on how that identity is constructed. In this chapter, I will evaluate identity as a form of faith for the American characters in Tender and examine the ways Fitzgerald views the construction of these characters’ identities as shameful and contradictory to what

American identity purports to represent.

When Fitzgerald published Tender in 1933, his understanding of American identity came from recent national events and the growing cultural thought of American exceptionalism, which would continue to influence the American Dream3. Fitzgerald discerns in the novel how the idea of a widespread, monolithic identity contradicts

3 James Truslow Adams defines the American Dream in his 1931 text, The Epic of America, well before its popular connotations in the 1950s. It is interesting to note that Truslow also engages how material success is conflated with the American Dream: “—we came to insist upon business and money-making and material improvement as good in themselves…how size and statistics of material development came to be more important in our eyes than quality and spiritual matters” (406). 6

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America’s long-standing values of individualism, freedom, and pursuit of happiness. In this criticism, Fitzgerald is similar with other Modernist writers of his time. On a national modernist sphere of influence scholar Lawrence Levine perfectly surmises here the black-and-white cultural opinion of success that makes Fitzgerald question his understanding of American identity. According to Levine, Americans strongly believe in the idea of success as an achievement of the pursuit of happiness value, however as

American culture developed, so did the ideology of material success the emerged after the Great Depression: “...that [Americans] were the architects of their own fortunes, the masters of their own fate; that material success was a sign of virtue, and failure a sign of personal worthlessness; that poverty was not merely unfortunate, but somehow disreputable, even sinful; that unemployment was an indication of indolence and failure”

(214). The pressure to attain materialistic success unhinged Fitzgerald personally as seen in Tender and other works because Americans are not really architects of “their own fate” and echoed in Fitzgerald’s “confession of faith” remarks. Success is already constructed for Americans and visualized by the material success that Levine mentions here; however, Fitzgerald finds the overwhelming support for this American mentality extremely inauthentic as suggested in his “confession of faith” remarks. The origin of not only Fitzgerald’s concerns, but of other American Modernists like William Faulkner and

John Steinbeck, can be traced back to the Great Depression since it was from this period of American history that catapulted capitalism and material success.

Some scholars also reference Leo Lowenthal’s idea of idol of production and idol of consumption when discussing American Modernism, certain tropes that ultimately influence Fitzgerald’s knowledge of American culture for his last two novels. In

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particular, as Rita Barnard argues in her book, The Great Depression and the Culture of

Abundance, pre-Depression era cultural norms centered around the idol of production, the logic that hard work yields earned success; however, after the Depression era, American culture became obsessed with the idol of consumption where instant gratification became the cultural goal (30). Fitzgerald is certainly aware of the shift from slow to instant success in Tender in dramatizing how Dick Diver falls from his lofty social position among the small group of American expatriates. Much of his struggles within the novel stem from his inability to attach his name to something culturally significant, which

Barnard also details as a then-current ideological phenomenon occurring in America:

“This elimination of work (on the level of ideology, that is) is not easily construed as liberating or empowering; on the contrary, it reflects a narrowing of the possibilities of individual achievement in an increasingly monopolized and mechanized economic system” (29).

Fitzgerald’s illustration of American culture’s growing obsession with money and class structure appears in several of his works during the period between the World Wars in an effort to not only be considered as a serious American writer, but also to comment on the development of American identity. His late period works- Tender and The Love of the Last Tycoon- engage in a recurring Modernist concern of the 1930s: being alienated from the familiar to the point that life lacks purpose or value, especially when one lacks money. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s essay, “The Name and Nature of

Modernism” describes the definition and cultural attributes of Modernism applicable to

Fitzgerald’s Modernist perspective on American identity. Fitzgerald’s sense of social pressures to be successful and represent that success through material items during the

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Great Depression and World Wars fits with Bradbury and McFarlane’s three-part

definition of Modernist movement. The first two points engage with cultural changes that

shaped national responses like fashion, and more relevant, personal displacement.

However, the third definition of Modernism expands the personal displacement as a cultural one: “This leaves a third category for those overwhelming dislocations, those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions…” (19). Fitzgerald’s focus on the idea of American identity and what it truly means to be an American while in the middle of global-power uncertainty complicates the American progress narrative. Modern American culture perpetuates the idea that American identity can withstand national adversity, yet Fitzgerald presents his

Tender characters’ failure to maintain their “successful” identities as the complication.

Like other American Modernists, Fitzgerald strongly believes in the failure of

American identity to develop into a substantial one that fulfills its characteristic values of individualism and freedom. Fredrick Jameson in his article, “The End of Temporality” defines Modernism as a movement meant to recapture the feeling of completeness, a summation that accurately represents Fitzgerald’s intentions (701). Furthermore,

Fitzgerald challenges the popular idea of American identity and culture representing nothing more than a mere novelty or a shadow within European culture. In his essay,

“Nationalism and the Modern American Canon,” Mark Morrisson explains why

Fitzgerald and other American Modernists attempt to answer the question of what it means to be American: “—[M]any American writers (modernist or not) were grappling with the ‘American-ness’ of their own writing, seeking to understand what could define

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their literature as a national literature and not a provincial footnote to English literature”

(12). Fitzgerald’s novels attempt to comment on American society and its relations within, as well as outside, of itself.

In Fitzgerald’s last works, the reader sees a more direct commentary about national identity on Fitzgerald’s part with the use of his American expatriate and

European cast of characters. Tender presents how American and European characters obsess over the performance of their social identity and objectify others in the novel to solidify their social performance among other characters. The Love of the Last Tycoon focuses on the performative aspect of American identity that ultimately becomes the social currency of identity-making: Hollywood. The contrast between the two cultures critically frames Fitzgerald’s commentary on how cultures produce shallow identities to differentiate each other, when both are similar and subjective to the authority of ideology and not democratic free-will. Scholar James Bloom writes in his article, “The Occidental

Tourist: The Counter-Occidentalist Gaze in Fitzgerald’s Last Novels,” how Fitzgerald fulfills Edward Said’s argument about how Western civilization (occident) persuades itself into believing its naturally endowed legitimacy (111). Fitzgerald presents his characters in Tender as people who fulfilled the American Dream through material success and idealize high American identity, yet each character fail to fulfill what

Truslow defines the American identity is: “It has been a dream of being able to grow to the fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class” (405).

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Fitzgerald’s Tender resents a reflection of American culture and identity against

the backdrop of European culture, yet the reflection illustrates a subtle imperfection to the

reader that suggests an underlying discourse of identity politics. At first glance, the

displayed image of these characters in the novel looks exceptional because of their superficially luxurious way. The characters are not struggling for a better life because they live a better life without much reflection about what occurs beyond their social circle. The characters are able to achieve this because of their vast personal wealth or affiliation with someone of vast wealth. Fitzgerald’s decision to create a micro-society sample that reflects his understanding of American society offers in some aspects an anti-

nationalist view since many of these characters fail to live up to the idealized American

Dream. Benedict Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism, offers an explanation for how literature in modern eras

capture the reflection of a nationalist movement driven by culture and ideology. Though

he discusses much earlier periods, Anderson’s explanation of how nationalism of a

specific country traverses between individuals and influences national expectations for

the individual is useful for analyzing how Fitzgerald’s characters in Tender enact

American cultural trends like expatriatism. According to Anderson, the critical element

that effectively reflects nationalism in many American Modernist4 texts stem from the

“pathological experience” of ideology passed through the “convergence of capitalism and print technology” (46). Fitzgerald’s American expatriate characters each have a critical

4 Celena E. Kush’s article, ““How the West Was One: American Modernism's Song of Itself”, 2002 elaborates on this literary phenomenon: “From Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson to Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and Marianne Moore’s ‘‘Virginia Britannia’’ and ‘‘Enough: Jamestown, 1607–1957,’’ many modernists, both expatriate in American Literature and ‘‘homemade,’’ showed their preoccupation with American national identity, an interest that translates more broadly into nation building practice in the cultural arena” (521-522). 11

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role to perform in the novel, so their professional and social identities are not just minor details.

Rather, Fitzgerald uses these characters’ identities to formulate a critical look at what American culture views to be successfully achieved American dreams and valued as exceptional. The entire American cast consists of somewhat established persons in this

1930s setting: Nicole Diver, an American heiress; Dick Diver, a washed-up, yet still well- regarded psychologist; Rosemary Hoyt, the rising American celebrity with her mother

Mrs. Spears, who is active in wealthy social circles, and other characters who are accomplished individuals of minor fame. However, the exceptionality among the characters is presented at a materialistic level, and not an intellectual level. Fitzgerald’s characters are limited to how they outwardly present themselves to other characters and to each other.

For instance, Dick Diver conveys a caricature of American identity that Fitzgerald criticizes as inauthentic and self-important. When Dick initiates a contest with randomly chosen strangers, particularly other Americans, on physical presentation, he proudly gloats that he is “the only” one to have a perfect presentation: “Dick said no American man had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with” (Fitzgerald 51). The self-imposed exceptionality for these characters is not genuine, nor organic, rather the significance of one’s self-worth relies on a physical pretense. In his focus on Dick Diver, Fitzgerald reflects on the American obsession of being exceptional: “Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there or stand there…Dick was paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated” (91).

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Fitzgerald’s focus on Dick Diver’s performance of superficially looking

exceptional instead of actually being exceptional further intensifies the differences

between American and European cultural perspectives. Here, Fitzgerald’s comment on

how inauthentic American identity makes itself to be develops into a critical comment on

how American identity removes itself from the familiarity of European culture. The comparison between American and European cultures in the form of Tender’s characters suggests Fitzgerald’s views about how American’s identity weighs itself by its economic value and aspires to illustrate external than internal success. Fitzgerald’s characterization of American identity tethered to economic value relates back to the discussion of

American culture pivoting toward an idol of consumption than an idol of production.

Walter Benn Michaels’ text, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, offers a critical discussion on culture’s being the determinant of a nation’s identity that extends the idol of consumption and Fitzgerald’s unhinged mind on money. Michaels explains that during the Modernist period, national identities and cultures could be subjected to other, stronger nations: “—because your culture cannot simply be equated with what ever you actually do and believe, it no longer becomes something that can be lost or stolen, reclaimed or repudiated” (19). Fitzgerald’s characters aspire to grasp material wealth so as to be in control of their personal authority and identity. However, the over-reliance on material goods to illustrate success becomes problematic for Fitzgerald when it is the culture that pushes the individual and not the individual who determines personal success.

In contrast, the European culture as represented by its select characters does not value the materiality of success, but rather these characters seek personal success.

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Fitzgerald’s “confession of faith” remark must mean that American identity is not created by individualism but rather by a systematically produced persona commodified within the materialistic ethos of the American Dream. Truslow defined the American Dream as a social achievement in which everyone attains his or her full potential for happiness and not “struggle to make a living”; he even warns about conflating this goal with a materialistic one (405-406). Yet American culture, as judged by Fitzgerald, has developed the American Dream to be a purely materialistic goal. In one aspect, the

American characters achieve a part of the original idea of the American Dream by culturally seasoning themselves by living in Europe. Their experiences in Europe fulfill part of the American Dream in that these characters have time and money to spend instead of working hard to obtain such a privileged rite of passage. Furthermore, the reader sees the characters’ commodified personae in four ways: the narrative’s frame of money and authority; physical displays of luxury among the characters; the disparity between European and American life values; and, the worth of a person’s reputation.

Fitzgerald’s framing of money and authority around Tender’s narrative and its central characters suggests a conflation of the two: having money allows one authority over others, and the more one has then the more power one possesses. Characters exhibit an obsession with amassing wealth and power because attaining both assets would result in the characters’ successfully performing exceptionalism and the American Dream.

However, a distinct binary between Americans and Europeans emerges through the characters’ interactions with each other: materiality and concreteness. Fitzgerald attempts to reconcile the distinction between cultures and criticize how over-reliant American identity is on symbolic material things. His purpose suggests a desire to reveal how

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American ideals like individualism and the American Dream are systematically set to be unattainable and contrived.

Fitzgerald’s evaluation of both American and European characters suggests a negative perspective of American identity for not being realistic, or as authentic as its

European counterpart. In the few instances of European characters’ interacting with

American characters, their dialogue shows Europeans displaying a similar condescending attitude as Fitzgerald toward particular characters. These European characters also work to remind American characters of their faith in money and its influence. For example,

Fitzgerald’s critique of Americans and money can be seen in Franz’s business proposition to Dick while both are on winter holiday. Baby appears in this scene as another form of reminder about Dick’s incapacity to earn his identity and living. She, along with Nicole, owns him and even represents a successful integration into European society that Dick can never achieve with his lack of professional success. Dick identifies the subtle cultural critique of being an American in Europe and his response to Franz’s proposition illustrates his personal frustration with the identity he performs:

“In your experience, Baby,” he demanded, “have you found that when a European

wants to see an American very pressingly it is invariably something concerned

with money?”

“What is it?” she said innocently.

“This young Privat-dozent thinks that he and I ought to launch into big business

and try to attract nervous breakdowns from America.”

Worried, Franz stared at Baby as Dick continued:

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“But who are we, Franz? You bear a big name and I’ve written two textbooks. Is

that enough to attract anybody? And I haven’t got that much money--I haven’t got

a tenth of it.” Franz smiled cynically. (Fitzgerald 175)

Dick expresses a mutually acknowledged truth about the two different cultures:

Americans have money and are easy to approach while Europeans seek out Americans with possibly exploitative intentions. However, there is a deeper observation about the two cultures’ relationship that Fitzgerald comments on in this interaction between Franz and Dick.

First, the obsession evident in this exchange stems from the compulsion in establishing each other’s distinct cultural identity, which reveals a contested psychological terrain over who has the higher authority. Dick points out the intellectual exceptionalism that Franz represents, the European prestige, while Dick represents the self-made exceptionalism characteristic of American identity. Dick’s association with money through his marriage to Nicole makes him valuable to Franz, but Dick is envious of not having the same name recognition as Franz and wealth of his own. Here Dick fails at representing the ideal of American identity because he lacks the two qualifiers that make him socially exceptional and it is through the juxtaposition with a more authoritative European character that the reader sees American identity as visibly faulty.

Conversely, Franz knowingly appeals to Dick’s obsession with wanting to distinguish himself through amassing money and attaining a well-known reputation. Yet Dick calls

attention to Franz’s “cynical” intentions (175). Here, the European character Franz

displays an obsession to establish authority by using people to serve personal interests.

Again, this interaction between cultures illustrates Fitzgerald’s critique of American

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identity as lesser than European identity, but Fitzgerald also provides a critique of

European identity. Franz needs Dick to be active in his project in order to gain enough reputation among Americans for his clinic to be well-regarded and funded. Dick needs wealth in order to buy into, or maintain, his performance as the only exceptional

American in Europe in contrast to the many faceless American men.

The exploitative obsession between the two cultures can also be seen in other

European and American exchanges. Once there is an opportunity for something to be gained--money or meaningful connections like love--European characters in Tender uses

American characters to achieve self-interest and contradict the highly esteemed value associated with European culture. For example, when Dohlmer speaks with Devereux

Warren about the source of Nicole’s illness, both perform an act that reflects how

Europeans and Americans both use people to achieve their cultural identity, albeit in mutually distinct ways. In this scene, the American Warren seeks to use material wealth and reputation to continue his performance of propriety while the European Dohlmer desires to be the authoritative justice.

Fitzgerald portrays Dohlmer as sympathetic toward Nicole’s case since he did prevent Warren from ever seeing Nicole again, even after her marriage to Dick. However, there is a particular section from Dohlmer’s perspective that speaks to this character’s underlying motive in distancing Warren: “Once in his youth he could have gone to

Chicago as fellow and docent at the university, and perhaps become rich there and owned his own clinic instead of being only a minor shareholder in a clinic” (Fitzgerald 127, my emphasis). When Dohlmer realizes Nicole was raped by her father, coupled with his internal revelation to the reader of his past ambitions, there is reason to believe

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Dohlmer’s request that Warren remove himself from Nicole was not a noble action.

Dohlmer stands to gain something of value by keeping Nicole at the clinic for five years, especially since Warren “seemed chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever leak back to America” (130). Dohlmer’s watching over Nicole at his clinic and under his medical care would suggest that Warren would do anything to ensure the story of his raping of Nicole would not become public knowledge, and as he told Dohlmer: “money is no object” (128). At the same time, Warren displays an obsessive compulsion in doing anything that money can do to keep his secret away from American society’s knowledge.

Warren’s abandonment of Nicole in Europe protects his identity as an exceptional, wealthy American gentleman, and not the sleazy exploitive character attributed to

American identity. Fitzgerald’s characterization of this degenerate American character supports how the American characters use material items, such as money, to embellish and maintain a disingenuous persona.

However, not all European characters in the novel pursue a financially incentivized scheme to exploit American characters. To add a deeper layer of the difference between these cultures and their cultural identities, Fitzgerald presents a

European character who compulsively seeks a genuine, emotional reprieve that he cannot attain for himself. Fitzgerald's decision to include a not-so negative presentation of

European identity could suggest Fitzgerald’s opinion about an authentic identity. In his characterization of the American cast, Fitzgerald illustrates their lack of authentic emotions such as love. Meaningful connections among the Americans are calculated and serve as another method to enhance their exceptionality and performance. In the case of half-French Tommy Barban and his initially one-sided infatuation with Nicole, Tommy’s

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affection for her can be cast as a form of lust yet his commitment to her throughout the past five years suggests a meaningful love for Nicole. A meaningful love illustrates actual purpose and reveals one’s true nature, yet the Americans in the novel use relationships for selfish gains like embellishing their shallow personas. Tommy focuses on Nicole

instead of on other American women because they both suffer from traumatic

experiences, they do not care for money, and both are deeply affected by the pretense that

surrounds their identities.

It is important to note in the following passage the comparison Fitzgerald makes

by presenting Tommy’s reason for pining after Nicole and juxtaposing it with

Rosemary’s motive for being romantically interested in Dick. In the following passage,

Tommy and Rosemary are talking to each other after the dinner party at the Divers’ Villa

Diana:

“What war?”

“What war? Any war. I haven’t seen a paper lately but I suppose there’s a war—

there always is.”

“Don’t you care what you fight for?”

“Not at all--so long as I’m well treated. When I’m in a rut I come to see the

Divers, because then I know that in a few weeks I’ll want to go to war.”

Rosemary stiffened.

“You like the Divers,” she reminded him.

“Of course--especially her--but they make me want to go to war.” (30).

In this specific section, Fitzgerald conveys two discourses reinforcing his negative

commentary on American identity. The first discourse centers around the idea of war

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with physical combat and real-life consequences. American identity fails to fully engage the first discourse because many of these American characters flee at the slightest occurrence of violence. If violence penetrated these characters’ lives, then the performance they craft would be ruined and the American Dream would be truly unattainable5. This discourse leads into the second, and more significant, discourse, which is the comparison of how one culture seeks genuine emotion while the other culture seeks to exploit emotion for materialistic gain. In this dialogue, Fitzgerald characterizes Tommy as a European searching for any “war” to insert himself into and experience a genuine emotion similar to the love he feels for Nicole. Tommy does not seek lust to satisfy himself; instead he desires for genuine emotion that could develop his identity as an individual. He willingly throws himself into the possibility of an actual death in war to feel some genuine emotion in place of the disappointment he feels from not obtaining Nicole. Tommy is willing to exploit Nicole in a way that is not entirely negative as her father exploited her, but is self-serving because this love, or attention, from her would benefit him. Just as Tommy tells Rosemary before this dialogue, he has no home to return to, unlike his American companions (30). Home does not exist because there is no one present or no location left to represent a home for him, and the closest thing to a home for Tommy is a grave in his native France. Tommy’s resolution here is intense, desperate, and a serious ultimatum that shakes Rosemary because her idea of love revolves around what could help her grow closer to succeeding part of the American

Dream: living life instead of pretending to live it.

5 Truslow in his Epilogue of The Epic of America calls on a sentimental cohesive movement among American society to develop into a better society (415). 20

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Rosemary’s confusion as to why Tommy would prefer the possibility of dying instead of staying in the lavish comfort of the Divers and their lifestyle illustrates

Fitzgerald’s critical distinction between American and European identities. Rosemary’s reaction suggests a naivete found in almost all of the American cast, yet the significant idea here is that she cannot understand Tommy’s obsessive need to achieve a strong emotion like love and death because American culture illustrates love as formulaic.

Rosemary may be naive to comprehend love and its complexities, but she plans and executes her culturally inspired idea of love in her pursuit of Dick. Shortly after

Rosemary and Tommy’s dialogue, Fitzgerald’s narration presents how Rosemary’s feelings for Dick are purely a strategic move for her career. Even though she has a small fortune now as an actress, a budding celebrity status in American culture, and nurturing social connections from this current European trip, Rosemary is missing an important asset to complement the identity she and her mother have carefully curated:

Rosemary was a romantic and her career had not provided many satisfactory

opportunities on that score. Her mother, with the idea of a career for Rosemary,

would not tolerate any such spurious substitutes as the excitations available on all

sides, and indeed Rosemary was already beyond that--she was In the movies but

not at all At them. So when she had seen approval of Dick Diver in her mother’s

face it meant that he was “the real thing”; it meant permission to go as far as she

could. (31)

What can be gleaned here in Fitzgerald’s narration about Rosemary’s romantic inclination for the singularly marvelous Dick Diver is that her feelings are not genuine like Tommy’s. Her ideas of love are shallow since they stem from Dick’s physical

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presentation and style that Rosemary understands as exceptionally high-class.

Rosemary’s mother concludes that Dick would provide the necessary physical attributes

and connections that would help propel Rosemary further into the upper echelons of

American society. Rosemary has something to gain from being romantically linked to

Dick, and her mother never intercedes on moral grounds to stop her daughter from

pursuing a relationship with an older, already married man.

In this comparison to Tommy, Fitzgerald critiques the American identity for

obsessing over luxury and material goods for the sole purpose of making one look

exceptional instead of genuinely carving out an identity from real emotions. Fitzgerald

suggests the European identity lies within the constant need to be the standard model

while also using the same exploitive methods as the American characters. For instance,

even when Tommy and Rosemary fulfill their desires, a significant difference in their

reactions occur. For Tommy, being with Nicole in an intimate moment means an abstract

yet fulfilling experience for him: “It was very bright where they were and as Tommy kissed her she felt him losing himself in the whiteness of her cheeks and her white teeth and her cool brow and the hand that touched his face” (298). Fitzgerald’s emphasis on

Nicole’s body being purely white reads as if Tommy’s emptiness is being absolved by fulfilling their affair. Tommy becomes the hero to Nicole when finally motivated to confront Dick with the intention of stealing Nicole away from the contrived performance of a happy, successful American family.

Looking at Rosemary’s and Dick’s interaction with each other after having sex, the reality of their relationship and attraction is revealed, as Fitzgerald writes, ‘ “It’s

difficult.” [Rosemary] was suddenly crying. “Dick, I do love you, never anybody like

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you. But what have you got for me?”’ (218, my emphasis). Rosemary’s inquiry about what else Dick can give her in this relationship is telling of how shallow her feelings are for Dick, perhaps because he had come to her as an older man with less important contacts and waning usability. In Fitzgerald’s comparison of European characters and

American characters, he presents an opinion that both cultural identities are limited, but a clear binary emerges: artifice-substance. These instances suggest Fitzgerald’s confession about American identity is that this abstract concept is ultimately driven by external motives and not genuine motives.

Fitzgerald’s presentation of American identity against the backdrop of culturally worshiped European metropolises invoke a deeper assessment of what it means to be an

American in an unfamiliar territory. European characters provoke questions as to why the

American characters are unable to comprehend the cultural changes in post-war America, specifically the idea of individualism and the American Dream. Fitzgerald establishes in the beginning of the novel how the European setting works to counteract American individualism by commanding the expatriate cast to work as a collective, uniformly.

American culture relies on individualism to create exceptionalism in the vast identities that collectively create American identity. To be exceptional is to be unique in personality; however, Fitzgerald establishes his characters as only being exceptional on a material level. The American characters constantly strive for attaining profitable connections with others from higher social classes while abroad. Other American characters express the hope to go back to America and become wealthy. The overarching goal for the American cast is to benefit financially and socially while in Europe, but this unified ambition does not result in individualism. Rather, the characters’ hopes to reach

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the common end goal of being financially well-off and their methods of obtaining that goal are too constructed to invoke individualism. There lacks further personal development for the American characters once they have enough money to do anything they desire. These American characters are frozen in their lives to the point that life is automatic as they strive to attain their goals, which is seen primarily in Dick and Nicole

Diver, Rosemary, and even Mary North.

Fitzgerald’s establishing of the Americans’ homogenized thought in a European setting illustrates how the American characters contradict the individualistic principles critical to American identity. In a scene with Rosemary dining with her mother in the

“summer resort of notable and fashionable people,” (3) they discuss in a distant manner the order of business for Rosemary. However, Fitzgerald presents a complex commentary from these socially rising American women who are first disappointed with the French social scene and more so about the lack of attention they receive from the resort’s patrons: “After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here” (13).

Fitzgerald’s narration of these characters’ observing the Hôtel des Étrangers’ vastly American crowd overall conveys boredom from the two women because there is no opportunity to refine their reputations even more. Emphasizing the flatness of other

American travelers suggests that there was no one in the crowd who is unique or of a higher standard. Every person in the lunchroom was of the same social status, and though

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this notion may suggest Rosemary and her mother are being individualistic here, their true goal is to align themselves within a higher social group. Interacting with a higher social group results in uniformity, not individuality, because the characters seem more disappointed that their thoughts were not reflected or shaped by “the minds of others.”

Rosemary’s and Mrs. Spears’ inability to join in with the American masses not only conveys a sense of elitism, but it also suggests they are uncomfortable with the idea of being individualistic. However, Rosemary and her mother soon find themselves entering into the Divers’ empire of misfortune and uniformity, an element of familiarity for the both of them.

In looking at the Divers themselves, Fitzgerald emphasizes that Dick and Nicole are the ones who have lived the longest without their true individual selves. They hide behind the vast Warren fortune, gather sycophants who want the association by acquaintance title, and would rather live for the jovial, entertaining high lifestyle than focus on the reality of their situation. Both Dick and Nicole are broken individuals who hide their tragedies, and they also have children from their own creation but the idea of even stepping into the role of family rarely comes to mind for these characters. As Abe

North explains to Rosemary, and even the reader, the Divers have created a persona for themselves that they cannot break out of:

“Do you like it here--this place?”

“They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his

noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two

Divers. (17)

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Abe’s glorification of the Divers for creating the social space is interesting because though the statement conveys their exceptionality and uniqueness as individuals, there is a specific reason for their investment in this area. As Nicole explains after Abe’s statement, the reason was purely economically incentivized, and Dick also reaffirms that more Americans would be attracted to this “tropical” location with the new management adjustments (17-18). The Divers fail to express a form of individualism because their intention to attract more Americans serves them economically and socially. Nicole expresses that she and Dick receive a part of earnings from visitors when she says their suggestion to Gausse has “paid its way and this year it’s doing even better” (17). The descent of American tourists to the resort hotel socially benefits the Divers in that they attract more people to not only spend money in their property and entertain them, but also to distract from their dysfunction.

Dick Diver in particular is a dysfunctional character because he lost his sense of individuality with the years spent on creating an entertaining space for Nicole. Much like

Rosemary who hopes to culturally season herself for her reputation, Dick also came to

Europe to legitimize his authority as a psychologist. Fitzgerald characterizes Dick as an up-and-coming scholar with academic achievements and ambitions by naming him an

“Oxford Rhodes Scholar” and reminding us that Dick finished his degree at Johns

Hopkins (116). Dick had a unique identity in his ambition to become an expert in his field and work with an internationally renowned psychoanalytical scholar, yet upon meeting Nicole in Zurich, Dick loses his unique identity: “[O]nce in the laboratories of the university of Zurich, delicately poking at the cervical of a brain, he had felt like a toy-

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maker rather than like the tornado, who had hurried through the old red buildings of

Hopkins” (118).

Dick begins experiencing disillusionment with his own talents, which pushes

Dick away from his lofty goals and fulfil Fitzgerald’s commentary on American identity.

Even though Fitzgerald creates a vision of the fresh, young Dick filled with potential, he

shortens time to illustrate an aged version of himself that lacks direction and ambition.

Dick’s comparison of himself to a toy-maker signifies the shift from individualism to

uniformist. Even though Dick is in control of what he makes, or of the identities he

makes for others, Dick is not quite doing the work he envisioned for himself. The implied

communal problem his patients are experiencing is the psychological effects from the

First World War. There is no new ground for him to break or theorize any new ailments if

a majority of the patients have the same issues. The monotonous diagnosis and treatment

cycle perhaps made Nicole and her case more enticing than just her youthfulness and

wealth. Dick eventually falls into the same repetitive routine with Nicole; however, the

loss of his individual identity is greater here because Dick has nothing to show that he did

something with his life.

Fitzgerald presents Dick’s identity crisis as multi-layered in the two factual roles

created for Dick--husband and doctor. Those roles and their complexities are present in

the novel, but they are not the emphasis of Dick’s crisis or of Fitzgerald’s commentary on

American identity because the husband-doctor identities bridge the real problems

Fitzgerald saw in the culture’s representation. Dick’s dual husband and doctor identities are embedded with certain obligatory social rules, yet Dick cannot separate the two roles since he has to perform both every time Nicole is present. The pressure to perform these

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roles well lies heavily on Dick, and limits his own personal choice of identity

(individualism) because Nicole depends on him to faithfully fulfill his duties. Nicole’s

schizophrenic outbursts result from Dick’s failure to uphold his constricting identities,

which stunts his individualism. She is both employer and wife, two roles that dictate

much of Dick’s actions and personality. For example, Book Two’s second depiction of

Nicole losing her control stems from a letter written by Dick’s spurned love interest (186-

187).

Dick’s decision to kiss the girl means that he not only fails to be a faithful

husband, but also signifies his declining capability of being a good doctor. However, it

makes more sense that Nicole would be upset more at Dick’s failure to be a professional

in his workplace instead of being an unfaithful husband because the loss of a professional

identity would mean failure among their social group. Here again, Fitzgerald’s

commentary on how money affects identity and individuality illustrates how money is

more often controlling than liberating. Every character in Fitzgerald’s novel has more than one identity; however, a deeper issue appears in between the roles of husband and doctor that speaks to Fitzgerald’s commentary on American identity. Fitzgerald prescribes a performative role to Dick that reveals the character’s identity crisis is not just an absence of individualism, but of purpose, in that there is no reward or meaningful gratification from his relationship with Nicole. American identity without individualism and purpose contradict the cultural conception of being American. Ralph Ellison’s essay,

“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”6, discusses the racial discrimination behind applying a social mask to African Americans, which then continued to defined their

6 Though Ellison is applying his discussion of masks and societal roles in a racial context, the idea of performative identities being applied and enforced are similar to the discussion here. 28

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identity in America. Though Fitzgerald engages in the topic of race, he and Ellison have similar thoughts as to how identity is contrived and applied; here Ellison says, “The mask was an inseparable part of the national iconography” (48). In this context, Ellison criticizes how every American has a role to play in front of others and on an international stage. Ultimately, Ellison and Fitzgerald both critique how theatrical American life is in order to maintain America’s well-known reputation as individualistic and opportunistic.

American culture publicizes values such as individualism, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness to define its cultural identity, but Fitzgerald critiques throughout the novel how these values are mythologized. Self-invention conveys the idea of being unique from others and exceptional beyond a materialistic perspective. Yet, many of the

American characters in the novel, including Dick, fail to fully develop their individual identities while in Europe. The characters do perform a self-invention, but Fitzgerald presents this process as flimsy and too reliant on a luxurious, material environment in order for the characters’ identities to be presented in the novel. For example, Nicole’s reflection on Dick’s ceremonious preparation for the dinner party in Book One observes how much Dick relies on these “bad parties” to establish meaning for himself as a performer:

But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable

experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing

the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how

many years...So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his

preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he

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evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had

said or done. (27-28)

Others’ investment and belief in Dick to provide a safe, encouraging space to develop

their sense of individual exceptionalism illustrates how American identity is a mere

pretense. However, the negative aspect of this parasitic relationship circles back to the idea that Dick is performing a show for Nicole’s benefit and not for his benefit or for the

others in the novel. The entire Dick Diver experience is one that makes an individual feel

unique and not seen as the collective group of boring Americans, yet he transforms these

individuals into equal-leveled players for Nicole’s entertainment. In this particular

section, Dick arranges for a dinner party at his and Nicole’s villa for the American cast to

say farewell and conclude the summer season for those returning to America. As

Fitzgerald identifies particular characters in this party scene, they all do not have a

distinct presence or significant dialogue because the scene is meant to isolate how the

Divers are in control of this luxurious environment: “the two Divers began suddenly to

warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of

their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that

country well left behind” (34).

Dick’s ability to effectively charm his supporting cast into playing with him for

Nicole, and Nicole’s quietly absorbing the elegant environment and characters, results in

many of these characters having a false sense of individualism. Dick is indeed performing

the role of toy-maker by shaping gullible people into one-dimensional characters, and the

process of being self-invented while in Europe is ultimately a sham. Nicole’s quiet role in

this elaborate, psychological setup is actually a more commanding role that further

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agitates Dick’s identity crisis because he is driven to step further outside his husband- doctor role. Nicole’s unstable temperament enables Dick’s performative role while also robbing him of his own sense of identity and purpose: in order to keep Nicole’s insanity at bay, Dick must entertain her in various capacities, yet the tedious aspect of watching over her prevents him from professionally, or personally, developing. Her authority is seen in Dick’s summary of what occurred between Nicole and Mrs. McKisco on the night of the dinner party: “there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he found

[Nicole] in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well” (168).

This scene illustrates Nicole’s power over her performers when she does not allow Mrs. McKisco to use the bathroom and relieve herself physically and psychologically. Mrs. McKisco cannot access the one room that is most private in all of the house to seek whatever physical relief she needs, but the bathroom also provides a space for her to be herself away from the others. Nicole’s maniacal laughter is a questionable response to the situation, yet this action illustrates her authority over the other characters’ fantasies about themselves. Her laughter suggests that Nicole sees through the parade of Americans Dick has organized since this cast, or in this case Mrs.

McKisco, is not willing to accept that their procured sense of individualism is a lie.

However, Nicole is able to laugh at and judge her toys because she too repressed her true self for the sake of keeping up an image for father. Fitzgerald’s argument revolves around the inauthentic process of developing an identity, especially when the process is influenced by money. Yet, the novel also brings attention to an internal conflict concerning Nicole’s authority that was established by her traumatic experiences and

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social freedom through her vast fortune. Repressing the trauma of her father’s assault and

living with him like nothing happened gives Nicole authority to judge the other

characters who hide behind a persona. While Nicole blocks Mrs. McKisco’s path, she

also mentions how the key was thrown away; presumably that as lady of the house, it was

Nicole who did the action. Only she can sneak away into the most private rooms of her

house to take off the performative mask, but everyone else, including Dick, cannot as the

house belongs to her and not something that Dick owns (170).

After years of being more than just a husband and a doctor, Dick grows tired of

trying to fill Nicole with substance to the point that his obligation to fulfill both identities negatively impact his own sense of identity. His personal self-reinvention from prodigy student to struggling psychology professional and then to the perfect gentleman who is married to an heiress without any accomplishment to his name makes Dick appealing for the rags-to-riches stories dominant in the Depression era. Dick’s process of becoming a self-determining individual is a regression that supports Fitzgerald’s critique of American identity: individuality is contrived. When Dick is alone in Rome and has come across a slightly older Rosemary, he takes his chance to fulfill what would have happened in Paris and re-affirm his identity as the perfect gentleman. Rosemary is key to this process because she offers him the youthful attention Dick once received from Nicole.

Furthermore, Rosemary does not require the same psychological needs that Nicole demands and can serve Dick as an empty receptacle that could revitalize his identity of a prized, successful man that he created with Nicole: “The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside of him” (208).

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Dick sees Rosemary as a new opportunity, or better yet a new patient, that could

yield a fresh sense of identity, which Nicole can no longer provide. Dick’s emphasis on

immersing himself with Rosemary’s personality is both significant and disturbing. First,

Dick’s wanting to “enclose” Rosemary’s existence as a person suggests his desire to

control her. This speaks to Dick’s desire to reinvent himself since he has no true authority

in his relationship with Nicole. She owns everything because of the Warren money and

entangles him in the Warren problems without much of his permission. Second, Dick’s

attachment to Rosemary, and vice-versa, disturbingly reflects an earlier point about

American identity being contrived. The suggestion that Rosemary’s identity would not

exist “outside of him” is a careful calculation on his part and not mutual consent.

For instance, in Book One, Dick and Rosemary initiate their affair while in Paris,

which then leads Dick exhibiting his controlling concern over her identity. He wants

Rosemary to be dependent on him, much like Nicole does, and he accomplishes this feat

by seducing Rosemary and taking charge of their intimate encounters: “Come and sit on

my lap close to me, he said softly, “and let me see about your lovely mouth” (105). Dick

also displays his controlling nature in Rosemary’s identity when their dream-like state

abruptly pauses because of the death of the Black man in Rosemary’s hotel room. A

serious real-life crime occurs in her room, yet Dick focuses on an issue that threatens their chance to capitalize on their illicit affair: “second, that if the situation were allowed to develop naturally, no power on earth could keep the smear off Rosemary--the paint

was scarcely dry on the Arbuckle case” (110). Dick’s reference to the famous Fatty

Arbuckle case signifies the worth of reputation to one’s public identity and establishes

Fitzgerald’s early critique of Hollywood, which he expands on in his novel Tycoon. The

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Fatty Arbuckle case was one of Hollywood’s earliest scandals that illustrated how the

successful celebrity status is not only revered among Americans but also quickly ruined if

the celebrity acts out of social expectations. Here, Fitzgerald presents Rosemary’s potential ruination as an issue that would affect her social reputation and limit her

prospect of attaining material success.

Fitzgerald establishes that Dick is not after Rosemary’s Hollywood fame (the

failed screen test Rosemary sets up while in Paris), but rather the reinvention her youth

tantalizes him with a new identity that he could take on and perform easily. However,

after attaining Rosemary, Dick is left unsatisfied because Rosemary cannot offer anything

else for him to solidify his identity. Rosemary is still the childlike actress fulfilling her

“Daddy’s Girl” role with Dick; to strengthen her Hollywood identity as commanding as

Nicole’s identity, she needs other men with a more visible identity that is recognizable to

American culture. She depends on him to nurture her and make her more mature;

however this moment of disillusionment furthers Dick’s identity crisis to the point that he

loses himself in an Italian jail:

What had happened to him was so awful that nothing could make any

difference unless he could choke it to death, and, as this was unlikely, he

was hopeless. He would be a different person henceforward, and in his

raw state he had bizarre feelings of what the new self would be. The

matter had about it the impersonal quality of an act of God. No mature

Aryan is able to profit by a humiliation; when he forgives it has become

part of his life, he has identified himself with the thing which has

humiliated him--an upshot that in this case was impossible. (233)

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When faced with real-life consequences, like death or trouble with the law, Fitzgerald’s characters cannot cope with the possibility of losing their contrived personas. Reputation and association are significantly important to these characters because these elements bolster their personas in a positive light. In this passage, Dick admits to himself that a new identity is being formed from this experience that he can no longer continue to perform for Nicole or this life in Europe. Though Dick cannot recover from this experience. As Dick says in the passage, if he forgives and accepts his humiliation, then this version of Dick--the broken, lost man-- will become a part of his identity.

The second component of American identity that Fitzgerald critiques through

Dick and other American characters is how these characters attempt to achieve happiness, or in this case a form of the “American Dream”, through their contrived personas.

Happiness remains an ambiguous term, but for these American characters and its application as a form of the “American Dream,” the term equates to social and financial success. This idea is seen in Mary North’s conversation with Rosemary about her and

Abe North’s plan for after the season: “He’ll be writing music in America and I’ll be working at singing in Munich, so when we get together again, there’ll be nothing we can’t do” (61). Mary’s idea of success is a source of happiness for her that was present in the young, hopeful Dick. However, the presently older Dick has abandoned the search for a long-term source of success and replaced the need with a steady flow of short-term forms of social success by gathering others to supplement his performative role.

At the same time, Dick’s inability to establish any agency based on true exceptionalism conveys a lack of individualism and reinforces Fitzgerald’s idea of

American identity as insubstantial. As a performer, Dick constantly reprises the role of a

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singularly charming man who could lure others into a seasonal attraction for Nicole. Dick

never portrays a different persona because he is incapable of being a different character

nor is there any one to equally balance his performance. Much like how Rosemary is

restricted by her “Daddy’s Girl” character, Dick is stuck with the perfect gentleman

identity. Yet, Fitzgerald illustrates how Dick lacks purpose when he is off-duty from

Nicole: “Never had a move been contemplated without Dick’s figuring his share. Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class when he was alone, with the cheapest wine, and good care of his clothes, and penalizing himself for any extravagances, he maintained a qualified financial independence” (170). The uniformity that renders Dick without individuality nor any desire to change is seen here with his inability to fulfill his role of performer when distant from Nicole. On his own, Dick transforms into someone unexceptional and relegates himself to a role of a self-conscious man. However, being a struggling man who cannot afford the luxuries his wife could easily afford is the insult to

Dick and what really motivates him to continue to be a performer.

Dick also expresses guilt, and perhaps shame, for relying on Nicole to provide the material aspect of happiness by living in spaces built specifically for their entertainment.

Yet, living in this comfortably regimented life provides an essential element of happiness and the “American Dream”: security. For Dick to be unable to provide for himself, or willing to fully restart his career in psychology, suggests his lifestyle with Nicole provides a security that prevents him from being a complete failure and living in destitution. The goal for all the American characters is to be secure financially and strive to enjoy the success they construe as their exceptional American identity. The characters’ sense of security through their identities is weak due to their identities being shallowly

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constructed, which results in an obsession to justify their identities through performances

and conspicuous consumption. Through this process of justification that the characters engage with in the narrative, Fitzgerald presents American identity as not an individualistic experience, but rather a uniform experience constructed around the idea of surviving life and not living life.

When Dick does resume his profession as a doctor in Book Two, the reader sees his professional development stunted by his lack of motivation to be committed to a life that helps others and worsens his identity crisis. Dick is too preoccupied with his own issues to fully accept that he is a fraud, but the turning point for this character is when he compares himself to a gigolo (201). Because his main identity is built around Nicole’s money and nothing else of his own creation, Dick’s comparison is critical in illustrating how he too is replaceable and his identity has no meaning:

“We can’t go on like this,” Nicole suggested. “Or can we?--What do you think?”

Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, “Some of the

time I think it’s my fault--I’ve ruined you.”

“So I’m ruined, am I?” he inquired pleasantly.

“I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things--now you seem to want

to smash them up.” (267)

The idea of Dick’s being ruined and destructive are the telling markers of disillusionment

with his pursuit of happiness and so-called individualized identity. At this point in the

novel, Dick is in his early forties and to has lived through restrictive performances for

Nicole’s happiness, which result in his failure. There is no motivation for Dick because

there is no one, besides Nicole and Rosemary, who would be able to provide him some

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form of purpose for his identity. All of Dick’s charms and persuasiveness have been revealed, in addition to the variety of rumors that surround him, which prevents any individualistic development.

As for Nicole and her role in creating and pursuing happiness, she does not seek the same form of security that Dick and other characters search for because she already attained it through her family’s wealth. Instead, what Nicole seeks is an emotional security that obscures her traumatic past without being mindful of how she is affecting those who provide her with such security. Fitzgerald’s design of connecting Nicole and

Dick through marriage also suggests another critique of American identity among the economically high classes. For instance, both Dick and Nicole represent the two groups that bifurcate American identity: the haves and the have-nots. The choice to put two cultural representations in a marriage articulates how there is a mutual need that can only be fulfilled through an ideological system. This system--American identity--justifies the idea that success is destined for every person but must be obtained through some form of work. However, the idea of work and obtainment is left morally questionable; and this is seen in Tender with how every character uses each other in a manipulative manner.

Nicole especially represents this idea in her own search for happiness because the method of using Dick to “treat” her is proven to be unsustainable.

First, Nicole is not aware of reality or the particular emotions of others around her. In chapter X of Book Two, Fitzgerald provides a section narrated through Nicole who provides an expedited account of her life with Dick. Though it is acknowledged that

Nicole is mentally ill, she still has the ability to understand the role Dick is performing but has no motivation to help him:

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Life is fun with Dick--the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying

to hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick. You

will walk differently alone, dear, through thicker atmosphere, forcing your way

through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You

will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You

are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from

it. (160)

In this particular scene, Nicole expresses her enjoyment of a chaotic yet positive moment.

Both Dick and Nicole are the center of attention, and it is that same emotional feeling that

Nicole seeks for her idea of happiness. However, she also recognizes that Dick is unable to stay within this center-life experience. In the same space, there is no tangible purpose

for either Nicole or Dick to latch on to, which is fine with Nicole because the thrill of

being center-stage satisfies her. For Dick, as explored a bit before this section, he views

this experience as a part of the expectations of performing for Nicole with diminished

returns for him. There is no purpose for Dick, nor any form of emotional outreach from

Nicole to nurture his sense of happiness.

As time passes, even the idea of performing becomes a difficult task for an aging

Dick. Nicole’s perception of Dick being tired and his desire for solitude contradicts the

lifestyle and personas he and Nicole have made for themselves. Dick and Nicole attract

the attention of other Americans who want to associate themselves with established, well

known expatriates with the intention of socially developing their contrived personas

(crafting unoriginal individual identities) and reaping from the successes such

associations (pathway to receiving material happiness). This constant exposure over time

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would eventually reveal Dick’s professional shortcomings and increase his personal identity crisis, which connects back to Nicole’s observation of eyes watching Dick. Yet

Dick eventually, and unwillingly, develops from the spectacle of a unique American gentleman to the spectacle of failed man; his transformation is not an “insulated” effect since other American men, such as Abe North, will also follow this social ruination. In the instance of Abe North, he is an accomplished American musician who was a spectacle revered for his talent, yet he failed to continue the spectacle and became a negative kind of spectacle back in America with his death a speakeasy club (199). The knowledge of Abe’s death weighs on Dick’s mind, but Nicole is unable to understand his inner crisis since she is only willing to follow him and not direct his actions.

In anticipation of Dick’s departure, the second aspect that makes Nicole’s search for happiness unsustainable is her own switch from Dick to the younger Tommy Barban because it restarts the process she and Dick made years before. Similar to Dick, Tommy is aimless in his pursuit of happiness and a sense of identity. However the critical dissimilarity between the men is seen in each other’s confidence in their identity. Tommy feels secure about who he is and his own personal success, minus the emotional obsession he has toward Nicole:

“Are you rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.

“Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I

have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes

well.”

“Dick’s getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.

(274)

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In this passage, Tommy represents everything Dick can never be because of his obsession

with personal and professional failure. He cannot cope with the idea that his performance

for Nicole, who does not need to do anything to attain material success or happiness,

yields diminishing results. Tommy, on the other hand, illustrates a confidence in his

individuality by being open with what he wants (Nicole) and the fact that he

acknowledges his finances are a fraction of Nicole's wealth. Essentially, Tommy and

Nicole can gain what they seek from each other effectively, or for the time being.

The most telling scene that shows Nicole superimposing her expectations of Dick

onto Tommy is the scene after Dick has embarrassed himself at the boat party: “The sight

of Tommy in clothes borrowed from Dick moved her sadly, falsely, as though Tommy

were not able to afford such clothes” (278). Fitzgerald does not elaborate on what exactly

Nicole views of Tommy as insincere or artificial about him or his appearance. In fact, the

idea of Tommy in Dick’s clothes suggests a very noticeable transition of Nicole’s love

for Dick to Tommy that correlates with Fitzgerald’s commentary on American identity.

Nicole could have felt enticement, anxiety, or even shock, at her soon-to-be lover wearing her husband’s clothes because the whole idea seems forbidden.

Instead, Fitzgerald casts Nicole’s overall reaction as insincere since Tommy cannot live up to Dick’s reputation in her eyes and suggests her objectifying Tommy as something to fulfill her needs. In terms of Fitzgerald’s idea on American identity in this period, the focus centers on the deliberate construction of that identity without any significant emotion. The building of an identity is sterilized by the process an American character goes through to become unique, which is an insincere and artificial system.

Fitzgerald casts these characters as extremely devoted to their contrived identities that it

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becomes a form of faith. As Dick reflects earlier in the book, his want in life applies to all

the characters: “--he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in” (133). Ultimately, Dick and the other characters cannot achieve any of those characteristics and remain stuck on the man-made pebble beach like extras in a film.

Many critics of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night discuss a close-reading of central characters’ psychological deterioration throughout the novel. Usually the critical focus falls on Dick and Nicole Diver, especially with how both are characterized by

Fitzgerald as mentally unbalanced due to the burdens of marriage, economic, or through a gender discourse7. Though those critical readings are valid, Fitzgerald’s novel of

American expatriates living abroad and in social roles elicits a more complex

commentary on American identity. Daniel Joseph Singal’s article, “Towards a Definition

of American Modernism,” articulates how developing American nationalism and

European influences explain Fitzgerald’s intention behind Tender is the Night: “What all

these various manifestations of Modernism had in common was a passion not only for

opening the self to new levels of experience, but also for fusing together disparate

elements of that experience into new and original "wholes," to the point where one can

speak of an "integrative mode" as the basis of the new culture” (12).

I extend this thought by arguing that Fitzgerald illustrates how American identity

is contrived to accomplish a uniform expectation: to be exceptional. The terrible

7 A few articles that exemplify what I mean here: Linda De Roche’s “Sanatorium Society: The ‘Good’ Place in Tender is the Night”; William Blazek’s “Some Fault in the Plan: Fitzgerald’s Critique of Psychiatry in Tender is the Night”; and Faith Pullin’s “Gender Anxiety: The Unresolved Dialectic of Fitzgerald’s Writing.” 42

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“confession of faith” Fitzgerald notes to his friend about the book revolves around how

American identity like a system of faith produces and disseminates knowledge or understanding of life. However, it is the process of creation and dissemination that

Fitzgerald views as the problem by displaying how these mostly American characters obsessively try to craft a “unique” individual identity. Even after when some of the characters attain the social title of being exceptional, Fitzgerald presents how happiness or a sense of satisfaction does not occur for these characters, especially Dick Diver. As

Baby Warren, Nicole’s sister, reflects on Dick’s transformation into a social pariah, she states an observation that could be applied to all of the other American characters: “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up” (312).

Fitzgerald creates a text that contradicts expectations of the American experience abroad and how it transforms the American identity as more unique than others back in

America. Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, Abe, and Mary are all Americans seeking to enrich their individual selves with the intention of attaining some form of happiness through social establishment or economic prosperity. Yet, all of these characters succumb to losing their heads either by actual death or professional and social failure because their intentions are superficial. Ultimately, the confession that Fitzgerald writes about is how

American identity is built on the obsession of surviving life instead of living it. The characters are consumed by their search for materialistic security, using anyone and everyone to ensure an individualistic survival under the guise of the “American Dream,” through the specific elements of individualism and pursuit of happiness.

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Chapter 2

The Hollywood Effect on American Identity in The Love of the Last Tycoon

In the seven years between Tender is the Night (1934) and his unfinished novel, The Love

of the Last Tycoon (1941), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s perception of American identity changed

considerably. Moving from a perception of American identity that emphasized a loss of

traditional values to a less cynical perspective, Fitzgerald presents a conflicting yet

optimistic idea of American identity in The Love of the Last Tycoon (Tycoon) that focuses

on an authentic representation of Americaness, much like in Tender. In Matthew

Bruccoli’s introduction to Tycoon, he shares a prospectus letter Fitzgerald sent to the

editor of Collier’s magazine for financial support to finish writing the novel. Fitzgerald

himself conveys the critical significance this new novel would have on American culture:

“If one book could ever be ‘like’ another, I should say it is more like The Great Gatsby

than any other of my books. But I hope [The Love of the Last Tycoon] will be entirely different--I hope it will be something new, arouse new emotions, perhaps even a way of looking at a certain phenomena” (Bruccoli xiii).

A possible reading of what Fitzgerald believed was the “certain phenomena” his book would invoke lies with its subject: Hollywood. The growing influence Hollywood had on American identity in the late 1930s was due to the flocking of literary writers and critics to Hollywood. As film scholar John Parris Springer explains about Hollywood’s integral role in the late Modernist movement: “[Hollywood stories] can be seen as series of efforts to explore Hollywood’s significance within the larger framework of American life and values” (11). Fitzgerald viewed the earlier part of the 1930s as a time when

American culture visibly shifted to conflating material wealth with the abstract American

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Dream. Ultimately, American culture’s promise of equal opportunity and success through hard work became less viable for Fitzgerald, and as a stranger in his own nation, he noticed American identity began to characterize itself through mass production, consumption and instant gratification.8 In one of his personal essays called “One

Hundred False Starts” (1933), Fitzgerald not only describes the difficulties of being an aged, yet experienced writer but also comments on how ineffective his commentary on

American culture seems to be:

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three

great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that

it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded

and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated

and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before…[But] the decision as to

when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other

people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime (Fitzgerald 86-89).

While Fitzgerald was writing Tender and Tycoon, he had recently returned from his expatriate lifestyle, his wife Zelda resided in a sanitorium, and he struggled to support himself and his daughter9. Yet, upon his re-immersion into American society, Fitzgerald found that American culture and identity were not completely succumbing to a materialistic culture; rather, both America and its cultural identity were transforming into a more visually pleasing and modern one with the development of Hollywood. Though

8 Recall, as Leo Lowenthal’s “Triumphs of Mass Idols” first articulates the idols of production and idols of consumption. The idol of consumption in particular becomes a staple of American culture due to the growth of capitalism post-Depression era. 9 Though some scholars like Michael K. Glenday and Tom Cerasulo provide evidence that Fitzgerald was not in as much debt as others describe him to be. In fact, Fitzgerald was one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood toward the end of his life. 45

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Fitzgerald viewed Hollywood in a slightly positive manner, he still found American society’s willingness to forget culturally seismic shifts, like The Great Depression and

World War I, as a product of Hollywood’s commercialization inauthentic identities for

Americans to mimic in their daily lives (Cerasulo 6-7).

Fitzgerald’s attraction to Hollywood and its influential movers within the industry stemmed from the fact that most of these people achieved success through hard work.

Fitzgerald saw how these early Hollywood producers illustrated their exceptionality in presenting visual content that would effectively reach Americans through mass production and distribution. Springer further explains how Hollywood and its early beginnings influenced American culture and what made this new innovation appealing for Modernist writers:

Hollywood was (and still is) a source of values and beliefs, a focus for mass

desires and expectations, the center of the complex cultural pedagogy that has left

few aspects of the American scene untouched…embodying a complex,

contradictory set of cultural arguments and social values that would transform it

into a symbolic microcosm of the best and worst in American life” (4-5).

To extend Springer’s comment on how influential Hollywood is in terms of defining modern American identity today, it could be argued that Tycoon would have had the same influence as The Great Gatsby in terms of shaping a generation of American culture10. If The Great Gatsby embodied the moral looseness of the Jazz Age with its reckless characters, then Tycoon self-reflexively critiqued the way American audiences

10 Though The Great Gatsby was not widely read at the time of its publication, a Fitzgerald revitalization in the 1950s did reconsidered the novel’s importance to American culture in the 1920s as a signal representation. 46

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mimicked the fantasies they saw on film. However, the influence Hollywood has over

American culture complicates Fitzgerald’s commentary on the status of American

identity. There still remains a cultural emphasis in America on accumulating material

items as a measurement of achieving the American Dream as Fitzgerald had illustrated

earlier in Tender. Fitzgerald finds that the social problem is that an obsession with gaining wealth and showing one’s wealth results in ingenuine identities, which

contradicts the essence of the American Dream and Americanness.

In addition to the aforementioned problem, Fitzgerald’s Tycoon illustrates the

danger of Americans’ willingness to copy fictional, performative roles from the cinema

because such an action further removes Americans from fulfilling the true ideals of the

American Dream: “a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be

able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized

by others for what they are” (Adams 404). The danger to which Fitzgerald alludes in

Tycoon, as enacted by other characters in the novel, is Hollywood’s encouraging a social

norm in which some characters do not attain their fullest potential through their natural

capabilities. Instead, these characters focus on objectifying and using others to reach the

highest stature in Hollywood; this microcosmic society’s workings, I argue, is

Fitzgerald’s reflection of macrocosmic problems in 1937, when the novel is set.

Hollywood attracted Fitzgerald’s attention late in the 1930s and revitalized his

writing ideas not just because of Hollywood’s influence on shaping American identity,

but also because of its globalizing effect. American cinema presented more narratives and

performative archetypes for audiences to emulate in their daily lives, while Hollywood

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served as the physical link to cinematic fantasies11. Tom Cerasulo articulates this general

observation in more specific terms in his text, Authors Out Here: Fitzgerald, West,

Parker, and Schulberg in Hollywood, as he argues how many American intellectuals

failed to see what Fitzgerald and other aging Modernist writers were attracted to in

Hollywood:

But as writers bemoaned the waning cultural importance of literature in a market

flooded with commodities, many secretly envied film’s power to reach masses

and its wonderfully democratic possibilities…Fitzgerald told friends that

Hollywood was the future. He and his contemporaries began to recognize that

motion pictures would allow them to reach larger audiences than the theatre or

books ever could. (5)

Cerasulo’s argument and analysis of how Fitzgerald viewed Hollywood speaks to the

cultural impact of film on American identity as he worked through Tycoon and even the

Pat Hobby Stories. In writing about Hollywood and featuring characters inspired by well- known and influential Hollywood members, Fitzgerald ultimately comments on how

American mixes traditional values with modern ones. I argue throughout this chapter that

Fitzgerald presents a critique of American identity that continues to comment on the unsustainable method of performing identities that move Americans away from traditional values and from achieving the true intentions of the American Dream. At the same time, Fitzgerald also finds that unique individuals, mostly represented by Monroe

Stahr in the novel, who are capable of achieving success through hard work cannot

11 Paul Cooke’s World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood discusses the globalizing effect of American cinema in European countries: “—globalization in the film industry is leading inexorably to homogenization, or more specifically to Americanization, where the only films that are shown, and ultimately that will be made, will come from the United States” (7). 48

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presently survive in the transforming American culture. Fitzgerald believed the new decade held potential for American culture to progress in a way that changes the cultural identity into one more aligned with traditional American values, but this belief in

Hollywood’s effect on American culture and identity left him cynical about American identity formation (Callahan 374)12.

In his biography of Fitzgerald, Michael K. Glenday quotes the novelist’s companion Sheila Graham as she briefly explains what Fitzgerald had intended for

Tycoon: “Fitzgerald’s completed novel might well have revealed what was ‘wonderful in it as well as all the rest,’ since he told her, ‘he wanted his story about the movie world not only to reveal its faults...but also to extol its virtues and capture its glamour’” (111).

Graham’s description may be an initial intention on Fitzgerald’s part, because the novel illustrates how the faults in Hollywood culture and cinema outweigh its positive aspects.

For one thing, none of the characters truly convey themselves as happy individuals who enjoy life even though most of these individuals have seemingly achieved the American

Dream through professional successes. Fitzgerald’s characters in Tycoon face issues concerning how to socially and economically sustain their masks, perform effectively within their identity’s role, and convince others of their honest variation on American identity.

In Tender, Fitzgerald fashions his American characters to obsessively focus on improving their outward presentation of their identity by acquiring money to determine not just social rank, but also illustrate how close those characters have reached the

12 John F. Callahan’s article, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Evolving American Dream” has an interesting section about how Fitzgerald’s own experience in trying to live the American Dream provided him an authority on the polarities of the American experience: “success and failure, illusion and disillusionment, dream and nightmare” (374). 49

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American Dream. The American characters use material items to satisfy the one value

every American aspires to achieve: happiness; however, Fitzgerald views the hollow

happiness as an American experience that characterizes the nation’s identity negatively

when compared to the integrity associated with European identity (Weston 89). Dick

Diver, Nicole Diver, and Rosemary Hoyt are central American characters who pretend to

live a life that has been directed by their individual choices, and not through the influence

of capitalism. However, the characters are unmasked to show the contradictions of their

life-choices and how they fail to fully achieve the American Dream. In comparison to

Tender, Tycoon also presents a narrative about unmasking superficial identities.

Fitzgerald's characters in both Tender and Tycoon have enough wealth to create a fake performance of individualism since they do not have to work to earn money (for the most part) to live freely. Money is the religious ideology of Americans, which Fitzgerald finds to be insubstantial. I argued in the previous chapter that Fitzgerald’s characters ruin each other and themselves to present his perception of American identity as one that shallowly illustrates success and uniqueness. The characters in Tender obsessively work to perform happy and unique American identities because they are compelled by their need to play out the ideal American life. The diminishing return of performing restrictive roles, especially seen in the case of Dick Diver, results in a dark commentary on

Fitzgerald’s part about how American identity is contrived by insincere material and

economic influences.

Scholars in both literature and film studies regard Fitzgerald’s writing about

Hollywood as an effort to assert the importance of film within a broader Modernist

aesthetic. In his book, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity, Jonathan Goldman

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argues that Modernist authors “attempt to set themselves apart from early twentieth- century popular entertainment”: “The texts that have come to define elite culture…make this idea of the exceptional personality available to popular culture, thus sharing in the re- shaping of celebrity discourse over the final years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth” (2). Following Goldman’s logic, Modernist literature influences popular culture through the texts that define this literary genre, then the texts also isolate the writers of such texts and transforms the writers’ roles into that of a celebrity. The

Modernist movement is defined by the mass response of de-familiarization to an evolving world and feeling unrelatable to the average person. By these general observations,

Hollywood and celebrities are similar to Modernism and Modernist writers like

Fitzgerald. Cerasulo unknowingly extends Goldman’s idea of connecting Hollywood to

Modernism when explaining the common rational of famous Modernist writers who began to work in Hollywood: “working in Hollywood not only made writers further question their professional roles; it also deepened their anxiety about their cultural roles…[their jobs] allowed them to study at its epicenter the theme of American dreaming and its discontents that runs throughout their fiction” (6).

For Fitzgerald, authentic identities cultivated by hard work seemed like a myth for the average American, yet Hollywood’s capability of reaching larger audiences could make the myth of this production idol realistic. The cultural influence that Hollywood held over American culture by feeding into mass desire and the want for entertainment as a way of forgetting the past could also explain Fitzgerald’s decision to set Tycoon in

Hollywood with a solitary hero13. Springer also explains the appeal of Hollywood for

13 The solitary hero, Monroe Stahr, was based on an actual person with whom Fitzgerald was familiar: Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. Roland Flamini’s biography of Thalberg conveys how authentic and 51

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writers like Fitzgerald lie in part the mingling of commerce and art: “Fitzgerald was

fascinated by the personalities and the lives of the people who made films, partly because

they moved in a world of affluence and leisure to which he had always aspired, but also

because of their flare for the theatrical, their sense of self-as-a-performance” (210).

Springer’s emphasis on an exceptional individual as unreachable and a very real group of people who had awareness of their “self-as-a-performance” enlightens Fitzgerald’s obsession with Hollywood. The characters in Tycoon, much like the characters in Tender, operate opposite of what Fitzgerald observed while working in Hollywood. Many of the characters do not present a knowledge of themselves as performers because many do not know who they are, nor do they seem to care about reclaiming their authentic identities.

The only person Fitzgerald endows in the novel with this understanding is the hero

Monroe Stahr, who comes from a harsh early life only to be successful through hard work

(Fitzgerald 97). Ultimately, Fitzgerald presents another commentary on American identity in Tycoon that is similar to Tender’s critique: true Americanness is being threatened by a cultural shift that emphasizes material wealth and performance.

The particular characters who interact the most with each other and fulfill

Fitzgerald’s commentary on American identity are film-producing royalty Cecelia Brady,

“wonder-boy” producer Monroe Stahr, drunk screenwriter Wylie White, and film-star lookalike Kathleen Moore. Each character understands they all have a role to perform in their fictional version of Hollywood, especially since reputation defines a person; yet they all face moments when their masks fall during unpredictable, or rather unscripted,

rare Thalberg’s personality was to others, including Fitzgerald: “you have a portrait of a driven young man, a genius in his own way, desperately racing against time with two objectives--to leave his imprint on a world of fantasies, dreams, and American folklore and to make as much money as possible” (6). 52

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moments of discourse. Fitzgerald presents the narrative in a very visually driven style, which is seen in the constant references to how the process of filmmaking determine which stories are what the audiences want to see and how the characters are unreal. As critic Jamal Assadi discusses in his chapter “Cinema People,” Fitzgerald especially focuses on these moments when characters drop their acts to reveal vulnerability (145).

However, I would like to extend Assadi’s claim further because these characters are for the most part emulating identities that are popularized in literature and now film.

When the unmasking occurs, characters become incapacitated by the anxiety of being out-of-character, which relates to the idea of acting American and acting un-

American. Most of the characters, except for Monroe Stahr, pretend to be typical

Americans who aspire to achieve the national Dream, yet Fitzgerald seemingly suggests through these characters’ pretenses, they only act American and achieve the American

Dream on a shallow scale. When the characters reveal moments of truth about themselves, they become un-American and their value among others plummets to questionable social worth. This conception is best seen in the moment when Stahr finds that his love interest Kathleen has been engaged to another man, which is a secret truth to her that she never mentioned to Stahr.

Kathleen, a British national, comes to Hollywood for what is supposed to be a new start from a rigid and abusive relationship she left behind in Europe. Essentially,

Kathleen attempts to be American in that she tries to satisfy the American Dream by

seeking prospect in love and life in the Land of Opportunity. Though Fitzgerald presents

her intentions as authentic, he complicates her identity by mixing in an illicit affair with

Stahr that is spurred on by the fact that she resembles Stahr’s deceased actress-wife.

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When Stahr confronts Kathleen about her engagement, she responds by shifting the focus

on to Stahr for breaking character: “ ‘Oh cheer up!’ she said surprisingly. ‘This doesn’t sound like you. It is Stahr, isn’t it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?’ ” (111, Fitzgerald’s emphasis.) When Stahr is not affected by her attempt to re-center their shallow romance,

Kathleen then pleads: “ “Oh please wake up,’ she begged. ‘I want to see you. I can’t explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand’ ” (111). In these

reactions, Kathleen has been Americanized not just by her physical resemblance to an

American actress, but also through the lure of an instantly gratifying life without much

work on her part, the kind of characteristic that Fitzgerald criticizes in his view of

American identity. Kathleen’s ingenuine Americaness also works as a critique of

American culture in that it, and not a specific person, influenced her to mimic fiction

instead of living in reality. Even Stahr’s final thoughts of her illustrate his realization of how much her life choices are built on theatrical notions: “she wants to see if I’m in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she’d consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won’t consider it till I’ve committed myself” (115). Many of the characters like

Kathleen have more than one identity to them and have a specific moment of unmasking in the novel that illustrates the faults of Hollywood in American culture.

Fitzgerald mostly criticizes Hollywood for projecting a pleasing, non-threatening image of American life that contradicts the traditional American values that Fitzgerald finds is missing in this new era, specifically individuality. Fitzgerald’s perspective on the vision-based identity of American culture describes the phenomenon as entirely deceptive

and absurd. In Tender, the phenomena of acquiring and maintaining a contrived identity

to be performed stems from publicized reputation. For example, Book 3 focuses on the

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fall of Dick Diver, the central force behind the producing of inauthentic identities among

other American characters through his own contrived performances. Dick begins to

unravel his identity as an exceptional man with his increasing alcohol abuse while

working at the clinic he helped establish with doctor Franz. With their most recent patient leaving the clinic because Dick smelled of alcohol, Dick has been transformed by others’ opinion of him from meticulously gifted to a failure illustrates how pretentious Dick was throughout his career: “As for Franz, once Kathe’s idea had had time to sink in, he never after believed that Dick was a serious person” (242).

For the group of Americans in that novel, one’s image and the materialistic props

that visualize his and her economic value represent the standard American’s hold for a

successful identity. Having wealth, opulence, and the freedom to “enjoy” life is the base

understanding of the American Dream because each element listed before creates a sense

of freedom. Fitzgerald presents his characters in Tender as achieving the physical

attributes of success and living a grander lifestyle; however, the process of achieving

such a socially successful reputation contradicts the definitive attributes of American

culture: individualism and freedom. Furthermore, the characters in Tender rely on money

to sustain a performance of their identity. Fitzgerald criticizes the over-reliance on money to support an insubstantial identity, which then ultimately leads to the characters’ psychological breakdowns because of the complex maintenance of inauthentic identities.

Through the characters’ interaction in the novel, Fitzgerald establishes that American identity is influenced by reputation and physical appearance.

In The Love of the Last Tycoon, identity is based on images illustrated through film, which accelerates the inauthentic process of producing an identity to which all

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Americans can aspire. Cultural ideas of what an American should represent and perform in society are now mass-produced and consumed due to the rising influence of

Hollywood films, yet Fitzgerald seems to view this new transformation with a hesitant gaze. Fitzgerald’s observation of American identity molded by Hollywood speaks to his own beliefs about how Tycoon would be seen as the next era-defining text. It stands to reason that his intentions with Tycoon lie with what he thought The Great Gatsby had failed to do: to critically comment on American society’s investment in success stories represented by celebrities in Hollywood. Films give audiences pleasing ideals to aspire or dream to achieve, and Fitzgerald’s critique is most evident when Stahr engages with screenwriters working on his project: “Our condition is that we have to take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar.

So won’t you give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?” (107). Stahr’s asking one of his screenwriters to “sugar” a story, make it more attractive for audiences to flock to, subtly suggests how cinematic stories compel Americans to measure their lives and happiness with character archetypes and tropes visually acted out on the screen. Fitzgerald seems to view the audiences’ impulse to consume these identities and fictional stories without any question as extremely troubling.

Fitzgerald dramatizes the interaction between the novel’s characters to portray how Americans project identities from film unto themselves. Unlike Tender, the characters in Tycoon are blank in terms of emotional expression and identity that renders them unable to understand real-life “nightmarish” instances like failure or even death.

The characters lack of personality and emotion results from an intimate connection to the materiality of Hollywood. Some of the characters have already achieved fame and

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fortune, so there is no purpose for their existing beyond exporting fantasies of real-life

American Dream myths. The characters’ lack of purpose speaks to Fitzgerald’s view of

American identity as contrived and materialistic. For instance, when Cecelia Brady is

first introduced in the novel, she is a young woman who not only grew up in Hollywood,

but also presents an identity molded by films. Cecelia is removed from reality just as

Nicole Diver and Rosemary Hoyt are when she finds herself wanting to establish a

meaningful connection to another person, particularly Monroe Stahr:

I still like to think that if he’d been a poor boy and nearer my age I could have

managed it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he

didn’t have; some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures--

”42nd Street,” for example, had a great influence on me. It’s more than possible

that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what

I was. (18).

What is striking in this passage is an acknowledgment by Cecelia, and soon other characters, that she has nothing to offer to Stahr. Cecelia is not talking about money because they both have quite a large amount of it, as suggested in the text; instead,

Cecelia means that she cannot offer Stahr the meaningful connection that he craves from his dead wife. Furthermore, Cecelia’s admittance about relying on a film to help understand and communicate romantic ideals reinforces Fitzgerald’s thoughts about how

Hollywood problematizes real life interactions. Springer also describes Hollywood as initially a romantic idea of this microcosmic society that Fitzgerald found appealing in the 1920s. Yet, when writing Tycoon, he felt that Hollywood was an, “institutionalization of the culture of the image by an industry geared for mass production and distribution”

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(Springer 209). Even the film that Cecelia mentions in the passage is one of the early

films that began the backstage-life archetype14.

The reference seems contradictory to what 42nd Street culturally signifies in

Hollywood and in America; the film was lauded for its cheerfulness and bright

representation of backstage-life for a musical. Yet, when Cecelia invokes that public

knowledge by mentioning the film title for her failed courtship of Stahr, Fitzgerald takes

the opportunity to present his own version of backstage-life from the perspective of

producers and film “royalty”. This backstage vision that Fitzgerald presents in Tycoon

lacks the cheeriness and happy ending typically seen by the genre. The intention here is

to not only disprove the unrealistic presentation, rather Fitzgerald provides a glimpse of

the inauthentic identities films create for Americans to consume and fail to become. In

closely examining how Cecelia, Stahr, Wylie, and Kathleen interact with each other, they

each have in common Fitzgerald’s idea of American identity lies in the fact that all

consider themselves as failures in love, success, and life.

Beginning with a critical look at Cecelia Brady, Fitzgerald presents this character

as one who is mostly a blank template but closely influenced by the celebrity lifestyle and

visual trends seen in films. Unlike Rosemary Hoyt, Cecelia does not have the problem of

being stuck with a prescribed identity of a “daddy’s girl”. Instead, she maintains an

empty identity and cannot maintain a true identity that represents herself. The emptiness

of her character applies to Fitzgerald’s view of American society because she needs to

have a pre-conceived identity in order to become unique. Furthermore, Fitzgerald

14 Backstage-life is a musical genre of theatre and film where the focus of the narrative is the production of a film or performance. See Scott McMillion’s chapter “The Drama of Numbers” from his book The Musical as a Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows. 58

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presents Cecelia in the opening of the novel as detached from reality, and others, because of the role she needs to perform as the “producer’s daughter”: “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 to only to indicate the even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round…The world from an airplane I knew” (3). Cecelia’s comments about being familiar with the art of Hollywood business and viewing the world from a removed position exhibits the use of the backstage-life genre for Fitzgerald’s commentary. The Backstage-life genre focuses on the discourses of people behind the production of the performance and presents a more honest illustration that undermines the pleasant visual version of culture such as

American life. Perception is the critical element in the backstage-life genre, and Gautam

Kundu discusses why perception in Fitzgerald’s novels is more than just act of helping the reader register critical parts of the texts: “Rather, [perception] is an act of moral energy that entails a continuing responsiveness and fidelity, not only to a seen world that is in continual change but also to a world created and made gorgeous…that nevertheless moves toward eventual disintegration and dissolution” (34).

Cecelia, and other Hollywood workers, must maintain this outward perspective of the “created and made” American life in the novel for Fitzgerald to emphasize that the new Hollywood-inspired culture is unsustainable for American identity. What makes

American culture “created and made gorgeous” as an unsustainable environment is that it pressures individuals in the novel into performing contrived identities that are forced onto them through the influence film and filmmaking. The disintegration and dissolution that

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occurs, especially with characters like Cecelia, applies to not just the individual but also to what the American individual symbolizes within and outside of American culture.

For instance Cecelia notes how in the face of possibly crashing to their deaths because of heavy storms, she and the particular Hollywood group who fashion identities lack any emotional reaction: “We sat for a while in the 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” (5). Cecelia’s description of the situation reveals her blank expression of character, especially when she uses the verb lingering. The word aptly describes her character because she, like other Americans, waits for an identity to be introduced and then mimics the identity’s performative actions to fulfill the image.

Immediately after her sense of lingering is realized, one of her identities is unwillingly thrown to her the moment her last name is mentioned and Wylie White loudly exclaims,

“Are you Cecelia Brady? He demanded accusingly, as if I’d been holding out on him”

(6).

At this point, Wylie forces Cecelia to take on the identity of a producer’s daughter. She has no choice to say no, so she must act the part of a Hollywood producer’s daughter without much enjoyment from the encounter. While traveling around with

Wylie, Cecelia maintains the mannerisms appropriate to her identity as a part of

Hollywood’s influential persons. She presents herself as well-educated, calculating, and understanding of the relationship “between the powers in Hollywood and their satellites”:

“We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood unless they wear a sign saying that their axe has been thoroughly ground elsewhere, and that in any case it’s not going to fall on our

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necks--in other words unless they’re a celebrity. And they’d better look out even then” (6,

11). For Cecelia, the automatic change of personalities is a by-product of her upbringing and staying within the same social circle. She belongs to an exclusive group of people who know each other’s reputation fairly well, so the pressure for Cecelia to perform her role is heightened by her close affiliation to the powers of Hollywood.

The pressure to maintain the expected role of a producer’s daughter is also seen in her failed romantic attempts. However, when she faces the reality of her father and

Stahr’s failing to live up to their persona’s expectations, Cecelia becomes unable to understand their unmasked moments for what they really are: instances of their real selves. To Fitzgerald, her inactions relate to the idea that American identity relies on shallow conceptions that limit people from expressing a natural emotional reaction to serious problems or issues. Throughout the novel, Cecelia presents herself as a model daughter in some aspects. She currently pursues a college degree, is not really involved in the exploitative side of Hollywood productions, and even tries to bring in an older actress for her father to hire. Cecelia conveys the noble aspect of being a producer’s daughter; however, the troubling aspect of her persona lies with how she responds to her father’s affair with his secretary after finding the lady naked in her Father’s work closet:

But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here--producer’s blood, I

thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the placid sunshine. It

was no use--I felt just black and awful. I had always been proud of my body--I

had a way of thinking of it as geometric which made everything it did seem all

right and there was probably not any kind of place, including churches and offices

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and shrines, where people had not embraced--but no one has ever stuffed me

naked into a hole in the wall in the middle of the business day. (105)

The most unexpected part of the issue concerning Cecelia’s father having an affair with his secretary is not the act of sex itself, but the fact that he had his affair in his office. Pat

Brady’s office is a sacred space where film deals are made, where celebrities begin their careers, and other elements that lead to the expansion of Hollywood. Instead of performing the role of a powerful producer the hard-working Stahr shows himself to be,

Pat Brady unmasks himself as a seedy, perverted old man. Cecelia had subconsciously thought of her father as sub-par to Stahr, as seen in her first interaction with her father in the novel: “What did father look like? I couldn’t describe him except for once in New

York when I met him where I didn’t expect to; I was aware of a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself and I wished he’d move on—and then I saw he was Father. Afterward, I was shocked at my impression” (22). Cecelia’s emphasis on her father’s look, the fact that she did not expand more on where exactly she found him in

New York, and simply not being able to recognize her father in the first place illustrates

Fitzgerald’s point on how this fictional American society relies immensely on performance to reinforce identity.

Yet Cecelia adopts a blank persona that allows her to be malleable in her identity and able to traverse Hollywood’s social circles. Ideally, the idea of a controlled blank persona suggests Cecelia would have a choice in what kind of identity to perform in front of others. Much like in Tender, the American characters are beholden to perform the appearance of exceptional Americans even though many of these characters have failed in achieving success. Dick in particular fits this example since he is introduced as a

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successful psychologist but has only published a general textbook that lacks merit in his field in addition to not having practiced his skills in the past seven years. Here, Cecelia has no choice about what identities to take on and must pick an identity set by her father and other characters (who also happen to be males). Fitzgerald later narrates in Tycoon that Cecelia is no longer speaking to her father, but the reason why is never clearly stated.

Nonetheless, her father’s affair embarrasses her, which affects her reputation among the small Hollywood social circle. His mistake forces her to be seen by others as the daughter of scandalous Pat Brady who stuck his naked mistress into his office closet. Again, Wylie puts into perspective Cecelia’s value within Hollywood by calling attention to who her family is: “You’ve got one great card, Celia--your valuation of yourself. Do you think anybody would look at you if you weren’t Pat Brady’s daughter?” (68).

Shifting back to her father’s unmasking moment, Cecelia is not truly upset with her father for sleeping with his secretary Birdy Peters, as it had been established that her mother had died well before this event. What does upset her is the fact that her Father having sex “in the middle of the business day” goes against his persona of a hard- working film executive producer (better represented by Monroe Stahr) and the treatment of Birdy. Specifically, Cecelia finds the humiliating treatment of Birdy to be the most upsetting than her father having an affair:

I ran across to it and opened it and Father’s secretary Birdy Peters tumbled out

stark naked—just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of stifling,

stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor with one hand still clutching some

clothes and lay on the floor bathed in sweat… “Cover her up,” I said, covering her

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up myself with a rug from the couch. “Cover her up!” I left the office. (104,

Fitzgerald’s emphasis)

Cecelia relates to the image of a naked woman stuffed into “a hole in the wall” because seeing Birdy’s humiliating state visualizes how Cecelia too is forced to be someone she is not. Birdy is bare naked without any brand clothing on her that would indicate a personality, and the compromising state that she is in leads others to view Birdy as a mistress, or worse15. Birdy’s fate is implied by her sudden exile from the production office, which further solidifies Birdy’s ruined reputation (104). Birdy’s placement in the closet also illustrates Fitzgerald’s view of identities as items to be collected and worn, or in this case discarded. Like Birdy, Cecelia goes through the process of socially dressing herself to be the producer’s daughter. Cecelia, and even Birdy, reflect Fitzgerald’s overall critique that a process which limits full individuality still exists in his replication of modern American culture.

Another aspect to consider about Fitzgerald’s Hollywood world of contrived and restrictive identities is that there appears to be a set of subversive rules and regulations for these characters. These restrictions further inhibit characters from becoming truly individualistic. Cecelia and the others live in a rather fantastical world where a production set could immediately transfer one from one city to another without the harsh aspects of reality. Even in the production room where producers like Stahr work to shape an appealing projection of American life for the general audience through film, there never was a display of truly gritty sex scene in those early films. Fitzgerald suggests here in the novel the real-life regulations imposed on Hollywood known as the Motion Picture

15 Though the branding of American clothing was not entirely an obsession of the time, but Birdy is not wearing anything that is fashionable. 64

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Code, or rather the Hays Code, that was in effect from 1930 to 1968. Interestingly,

Thalberg served on the committee that formed an earlier basis of these regulations called

the “Do’s and Be Carefuls” that was began in 1927, in response to the Fatty Arbuckle

case (Flamini 83)16. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald seems to ironically use these moral

codes in his suggestive, yet indirect descriptions of profanity, nudity, or sex as seen in

Stahr and Kathleen’s sex scene (88). Yet Fitzgerald breaks the pattern with this particular scene with the description of Birdy Peters tumbling out naked and sweaty from a closet.

Fitzgerald seemingly makes a point of how restrictive moral guidelines are with

characters unable to abide the rules that work to produce a pleasant vision of American

life. Here, Cecelia has never been exposed to real-life sex or even a realistic romance; she has some knowledge of those concepts through her connection to films but not enough as she retrospectively thinks, “but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn’t already have; some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures…it’s more than possible that some if the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was” (18). Again, Cecelia’s lack of an individualistic persona and a steady diet of movies that present ideas of who she should be as a American woman will eventually ruin her sense of identity because these idyllic film personas are controlled by regulations that are ultimately unrealistic.

By seeing what her father did and finding Birdy in her sexualized state, Cecelia is left disillusioned, realizing that being a producer’s daughter is much less glamorous than she earlier thought. Being a producer’s daughter gives her no pleasure, and that specific persona is incapable of developing into some new identity. Furthermore, money is not an

16 Recall page 34 for the importance of the Fatty Arbuckle case. 65

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issue or a form of obsession for Cecelia because she was born into a wealthy family. She

resembles Nicole in that Cecelia does not need to work for money, success, or happiness,

but they both reveal unsatisfied lives. Both Nicole and Cecelia experience disappointment

from men they admire and hope to be fulfilled by those men. Yet no one can handle the

burden of maintaining insincere personas because the other characters have never been

born into a wealthy social group. Furthermore, Cecelia, like Nicole, has enough money to

buy happiness and act it out yet she cannot enact happiness on her own, and needs

someone to help her facilitate the happy facade. Cecelia must have someone by her side

to strengthen the image of an exceptional producer’s daughter because she could risk the

danger of being viewed as eccentric or desperate like the washed-up actress named

Martha Dodd (102). Cecelia needs to construct herself visually because Hollywood culture dictates that the only way to legitimize one’s success is by “fulfilling” the

American Dream and American culture’s ideals. The only way that Cecelia can achieve visual happiness is by acquiring a co-star to perform the ultimate form of happiness-- a publicized romantic relationship with someone within the industry. Cecelia cannot work with someone beneath her Hollywood status, since her agency is restricted by a hierarchical culture headed by men. She needs someone to give her purpose and elevate her to a more important identity, which is something Cecelia thinks can be attained by possessing Stahr. Stahr, like Dick to Rosemary, holds a useful social image that would develop Cecelia’s identity into something more than a producer’s daughter. Stahr represents a higher authority figure to others in their Hollywood circle, so Cecelia’s objectification of him is a social power play for an identity beyond a producer’s daughter, a doting lover to someone who needs caring:

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“I’ll stand there and bloom. After [Monroe] kisses me as you would a child--”

“That’s all in my script,” complained Wylie. “And I’ve got to show it to [Monroe]

tomorrow.”

“--he’ll sit down and put his face in his hands and say he never thought of me like

that.”

“You mean you get in a little fast work during the kiss.”

“I bloom, I told you. How often do I have to tell you I bloom.”

---

“Then he says it seems as if he was always meant to be this way.”

“Right in the industry. Producer’s blood.” [Wylie] pretended to shiver. “I’d hate

to have a transfusion of that.” (69).

Cecelia’s strong conviction in her blooming into a different person/identity shows her expectations of romancing Stahr and how the relationship would change her for the better. Stahr provides an interesting challenge to Cecelia in that they both are financially well-off and that she does not need to display how wealthy she is in order to gain his attention. Even the act of “blooming” conveys an organic process of character development contrary to the produced identity that American culture and Hollywood deem as appropriate. However, Wylie’s comments foreshadow, Cecelia’s romantic delusions indicate her complete disappointment in Stahr’s identity. Wylie again brings attention to how Cecelia’s constructs her identity through films and ultimately how her overall identity lies within the producer’s daughter role. Wylie’s claims of how her imagined dialogue to Stahr is in his script suggests Stahr knows this romantic trope, which defeats her delusion about blooming into a new identity. All the characters in

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Tycoon are seemingly aware of the inauthentic emotions and identities they take on, but

they have no choice in saying no to their allotted identity because as Cecelia imagines,

they are “always meant to be this way.”

Cecelia’s expectations of Stahr is that he falls in love with her like in the movies because her identity as a producer’s daughter makes her valuable. However, Stahr does not fall for her because he is enchanted with another woman--Kathleen Moore-- who

physically looks like his dead wife but acts differently from that prescribed identity. Even

toward the end of Tycoon, Stahr is not the same confident man who is calmly in control

of how identities were visually presented. Instead, Cecelia sees him at his lowest point

when drunk and confronting a Communist party member: “I wished it had been ten years

ago...Stahr twenty-five just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with exhaustion and drink” (127).

Cecelia’s wish to return to a time when Stahr effectively portrays his prescribed identity of wonder-boy film producer reinforces the weight of her disappointment toward him. She can no longer aspire to bloom into the role of a devoted lover nor can she happily fulfill the ritualistic idea of marrying within the industry’s royalty because he fails to live up to his identity. Stahr displays himself as weak, old, tired and drunk, all of which are attributes that defy the constructed idea of what a successful producer looks like. Cecelia ultimately does not know what to do with Stahr or herself except stay with him until everything else unravels, especially since at the end of the novel she seemingly

does marry him. Cecelia’s obsession with living life as seen from films suggests a

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shallow understanding of identity since there is nothing about her that qualifies a strong

agency for herself. In the end, her identity relies on a select few in the novel and those

same people are tired of continuing on with the happy display of achieving the American

Dream.

Fitzgerald represents the inauthentic process of molding an American identity through Stahr’s character development as a producer in Hollywood a vocation that

renders him as another toy-maker like Dick in Tender. Stahr’s role as a producer is

critical in this analysis because, traditionally, a producer’s role in the film industry is to

gauge what audiences want to see in films. Thus, Fitzgerald presents Stahr as the only

character who truly understands American identity and cultural desire. Yet Stahr is also

part of the problem in making general audiences want desperately to be a part of

Hollywood and be a part of that high social circle: “He told [the playwrights the

Marquands] kindly that he was taking them from the picture and putting them on another

where there was less pressure, more time. As he had half expected they begged to stay on

the first picture, seeing a quicker credit even though it was shared with others. The

system was a shame, he admitted—gross, commercial, to be deplored. He had originated

is—a fact that he did not mention” (58). Fitzgerald makes Stahr not only the hero of the

novel, but also acutely aware of how the Hollywood machine works for the purpose of

critiquing the broad appeal of Hollywood. In the quote, there are two things Stahr

suggests about the husband-wife playwright team that reflects Fitzgerald’s disdain for

inauthentic people17. First, Stahr suggests the Marquands are performing badly in that

17 There is also the aged actress named Martha Dodd who welcomes any attention from the producer’s circle: “Martha Dodd was an agricultural girl who had never quite understood what had happened to her and had nothing to show for it except a washed out look about the eyes. She still believed that the life she had tasted was reality and this was only a long waiting” (102). 69

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they are not creating a good script. Second, the Marquands are seen through Stahr’s view

as desperate to have their name associated with a large-budget film. The Marquands

essentially represent the growing American cultural attitude of instant gratification without doing the hard work, in contrast to Stahr who worked his way up from the Bronx

(115).

Fitzgerald also plays with the idea of Europeans being drawn to the novelty of

Hollywood through the character Kathleen Moore, a British woman who seeks a new life and marriage from an unnamed American man. In Tender, the reader sees a distinction

being made between European characters and American characters based on the value of

identity and money. Fitzgerald focuses on the negative aspect of both values when

exploring and commenting on American identity through the main characters. In contrast,

Fitzgerald offers an American hero with immigrant roots in Tycoon (Stahr) who also has

achieved the American Dream. However, Fitzgerald’s characters who have seemingly

achieved the American Dream, exhibit a contradiction. First, that the American Dream--

individualism, success, and happiness—is only achieved through the acquisition of vast

amounts of money. Second, once the American Dream is attained, then those who attain

it must perform the act of “living” the American Dream, or showing a fake, materialistic

version of it popularized in early films: “Hollywood was linked to the emerging ethos of

leisure and consumption in American society” (Springer 39). This wanting to capture the

American Dream with material success is embodied in Tycoon with struggling.

The question Fitzgerald poses through the failures of his characters seems to be

about how long the characters can maintain the performance and adapt in a culture that

continuously shifts its identity with materialistic things. Stahr in particular is a rare hero

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in Fitzgerald’s works because unlike his first fictional hero Jay Gatsby, Stahr embodies the traditional hard work ethic that Fitzgerald admired. Stahr illustrates a rags-to-riches story in which he is motivated to work hard and be successful unlike Gatsby since his wealth was achieved by working in an organized crime group (97). However, Stahr is set up to fail much like Gatsby through death and betrayal; In Fitzgerald’s notes for Tycoon, he planned for Stahr to die in a plane crash and have local children pickpocket the dead instead of reporting the crash to authorities (xii). If Fitzgerald had written this scene as a part of the final draft, the children pilfering through the dead’s belongings would grimly illustrate the meaninglessness of a symbol for traditional, authentic American values.

Specifically, Stahr would represent the meaninglessness of the values Fitzgerald believes

American culture is losing with commercialization, industry, and eventually capitalism.

The children who take valuable items from Stahr’s corpse illustrate the general mass

American society willing to consume any valuable to increase their material wealth. Even in Fitzgerald’s notes about this scene, he explains the children are fascinated by the

“possessions of wealthy men” to a degree that psychologically affects them as they grow older and have revealed the crash site:

Give the impression that Jim is all right—that Frances is faintly corrupted and

may possibly go off in a year or so in search of adventure and may turn into

anything from a gold digger to a prostitute and that Dan has been completely

corrupted and will spend the rest of his life looking for a chance to get something

for nothing (154).

Fitzgerald’s intention with this scene, as he indicates further in his notes, is to not present a moral tale. Instead, the entirety of Tycoon is meant to serve as an illustration of how

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American culture and identity vastly differs from what Fitzgerald has seen in recent

decades. Stahr is the only character that Fitzgerald sees as a person who does not conflate

material wealth with success and illustrates Stahr’s work ethic as so.

Fitzgerald uses Stahr’s extremely successful career as a producer with

international ties to be a comment on American identity as manipulative and contrived.

Stahr’s understanding, and acceptance of what American identity amounts to allows him

to create visual content for all Americans to view, digest, and eventually aspire to. Stahr

is also beholden to perform what the general American audience believes a Hollywood

producer’s role should be, and this is where Fitzgerald sets Stahr up for failure in the

novel. Stahr must live up to what others perceive him to be as well as continue his quest

for success as the wonder-boy producer.

When Stahr is introduced by Cecelia, she initially characterizes his identity as a well-known producer with the ability to draw in others and maintain a commanding role.

Similar to Dick, Stahr is personable, attractive, and powerful— all the things Dick had

aspired to but failed to actually live up to in Tender. However, Stahr displays an

awareness that his identity is wrapped up in the narrative of his success. He lives up to his own celebrity, almost to a fault, as seen in the airplane scene filled with other Hollywood

workers and Cecelia:

He darted in and out of the role of “one of the boys” with dexterity--but on the

whole I should say he wasn’t one of them. But he knew how to shut them up, how

to draw into the background, how to listen. From where he stood (and though he

was not a tall man it always seemed high up) he watched the multitudinous

practicalities of his world like a proud young shepherd, to whom night and day

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had never mattered. He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire

for it. (15)

In this scene, other characters define who Stahr is to them: a producer who can reach

different types of Hollywood workers and beyond. The most interesting part about the

attributes that Cecelia applies to Stahr is that they appear mythological and almost unreal.

Stahr’s ability to silence the people beneath him makes sense since he is structurally

above them. Yet, his ability to disappear, observe, and listen to the scenes of American

identities interacting together conveys a glamorous version of what Stahr mostly likely

does for his profession. Fitzgerald seemingly presents a complete version of a valuable

American man who lives a fulfilled life with almost enviable power. However, Stahr is

struggling as much as any other character to maintain the successful film tycoon image in

this novel. Any real person would break under the stress of living up to a powerfully

prescribed image as the one Cecelia and others put onto Stahr. In actuality, Stahr cannot

live up to his original identity as a personable film producer for two reasons: Stahr still mourns his wife’s death three years prior to the novel’s beginning; he is an aging, sick producer who is no longer the fresh “boy wonder” of film producing. Overall, Stahr is entirely dedicated to his work as a film producer not because he lives for his career, but rather because he needs to continue to live up to his celebrity status among Hollywood executives. Fitzgerald then uses Stahr’s failure to live up to the expectations of a film producer as another representation of failing to maintain a visual presentation of success.

Stahr becomes a failed hero in the novel because his obsession and relationship with Kathleen Moore unravels his façade. Fitzgerald makes an interesting choice in providing a European character with a face that is well-known to Hollywood culture.

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Again, Fitzgerald presents a commentary about European-American relations through these characters that is more difficult to discern here due to the novel’s incompleteness.

Yet, Kathleen’s presence in Hollywood, and briefly in Stahr’s life, foreshadows

American culture’s attractiveness to European culture since she did flee from Europe to

Hollywood. Their interactions throughout the book present a deeper discussion of what an American identity is to a European perspective. In the end, Kathleen finds Stahr to be a good man but not good enough to leave her fiancé because Stahr is not honest with himself about who he is and what he wants from life.

The first part of the issue with Kathleen is that she looks almost identical to

Stahr’s deceased wife, which unnerves him beneath his identity of a calculated producer:

“Smiling faintly at him not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across four feet of moonlight the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead, the smile lingered changed according to pattern, the lips parted--the same. An awful fear went over him and he wanted to cry aloud” (26).

Kathleen’s similarity to Stahr’s dead wife is coincidental but it is difficult for the reader to assume that Stahr has never seen another lookalike from the vast amount of American actresses he works with on a daily basis. Fitzgerald intends to make Kathleen special because even though it is not explicitly stated yet that she is a British citizen, Kathleen represents the conventional idea at the time of European identity as a richer heritage than the novelty of American identity. Kathleen tries to assimilate into American identity by moving to Hollywood and she has the face of deceased famous actress to help her mix into this identity-obsessed culture; but it is because she retains some of her European identity that makes her special enough to have an effect on Stahr.

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As stated in the passage, Stahr takes stock of Kathleen’s looks and compares them

to Minna. What makes Kathleen more special is that she apologizes for trespassing and

leaves, which makes her at first un-American. An American, like Kathleen’s companion, would instead play to her looks to appeal to Stahr’s other identity: Minna Davis’ husband and producer. Kathleen’s choice to not make this emotional appeal is very un-American because in the pursuit of the American Dream, many Americans take advantage of anyone and anything in order to achieve it (as seen in Tender) (65-66). Her quick departure from this scene confuses Stahr to the point that he does nothing to help control the chaos of the flooded movie set. The shock of meeting Kathleen unravels Stahr’s dominating identity as an extremely efficient and effective film producer as seen at the end of their initial meeting: “Then he took a tentative step to see if the weakness had gone out of his knees...men began to stream by--every second one glancing at him smiling speaking Hello Monroe...Hello Mr. Stahr...wet night, Mr.

Stahr...Monroe...Monroe...Stahr...Stahr...Stahr (27). Stahr lost control of his identity as the meticulous and diligent wonder boy producer to just the physical likeness Kathleen holds to Minna. His slip of the producer’s mask suggests a weakness in his professional identity and foreshadows his failure to live up to his performative role. Eerily, faceless and unidentified Hollywood workers repeat Stahr’s name almost in a chant-like form to bring Stahr back to his senses so he can continue to do the work he was originally called to do. Stahr’s ensuing obsession with finding Kathleen marks the beginning of his failure in maintaining the film producer status he worked hard to achieve.

Fitzgerald portrays Stahr’s emotional connection to Kathleen as a failure in that

American identity is beholden to a certain standard and work ethic. Americans obsess

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over amassing as much money as possible because it is the only way to achieve the

American Dream and materialistically display victory. Kathleen’s presence disrupts

Stahr’s work ethic and his focus, both of which are vital elements to his success as a film producer. Part of his slippage is due to his emotion toward Minna and Kathleen, but

Kathleen confuses him more because she does not act like the manipulative people with which he is familiar in Hollywood. What the distraction in the form of Kathleen says about American identity, as represented by Stahr, is that strong emotions like love betray the performative role that is bound to an individual. The act of performing an identity involves assimilating the mannerisms and emotions that define the identity, which contradicts the idea of American individualism and exceptionalism. Both concepts are generally defined as unique attributes that an individual creates, but Fitzgerald presents another more realistic comment on both attributes through Stahr’s struggle to maintain his culturally defined identity. Kathleen as an outsider to American culture can see how socially pressured Stahr must feel to sustain the identity of a powerful film producer:

“She searched his face. She thought, like everyone, that he seemed tired--then she forgot

it at the impression he gave of a brazier out of doors on a cool night” (65). At the same

time, Stahr finds Kathleen to be exotically unique compared to the other women with

whom he interacts professionally with in Hollywood: “He was glad that there was a

beauty in the world that would not be weighed in the scales of the casting department”

(67).

The parallel between these characters’ measurement of one another adds another

layer to how American identity is interpreted by a European gaze and an American gaze.

Kathleen’s description of Stahr and everyone else in Hollywood seeming like they were

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exhausted usually is never applied to that culture. For one thing, Cecelia and Wylie

describe the work of Stahr as almost god-like and without any visible hint of exhaustion

or emotion. In any case, Kathleen sees and acknowledges the strange switch of Stahr’s

identity as insincere. Immediately after this scene and throughout the novel, Stahr tries to

lure Kathleen out from her protective personality with some success. Kathleen holds

secrets of her own that do not necessarily fit with the identity Stahr has placed on her:

Minna but not Minna.

Though Fitzgerald does not provide the reader much of an introduction or glimpse as to who Minna was in the novel, it can be interpreted by Stahr’s longing and reminiscence of her that Minna perfectly performed her role as a wife and allowed him to mold her into a great actress. Kathleen is nothing like Minna in that she defies the idea of being valued by a casting department, or in other words, Hollywood’s cultural standards.

Overall, Stahr’s inability to present her one honest vision of himself to her pushes

Kathleen to ultimately reject him:

“You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all

Americans.”

“Don’t start trusting Americans too implicitly,” [Monroe] said, smiling.

“They may be out in the open but they change very fast.”

[Kathleen] looked concerned.

“Do they?”

“Very fast and all at once,” he said. “And nothing ever changes them back.”

“You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans.” (116)

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Stahr’s acknowledgment of how quickly he takes on and sheds a variety of identities gives Kathleen plausible reason to not break off her engagement with the anonymous

American. His switching between identities brings into question his ability to secure a real form of happiness. Kathleen flees to Hollywood in search of a meaningful happiness that had long been denied to her by a former lover. Ironically, she would not find her greatest desires in a city full of film props and people eager to perform a character different from their true selves. Stahr himself cannot break away from his identity as a successful film producer because there is no reason to not pretend to be something more than what he currently is: a dying old man. The concept of the American Dream does not include the idea of giving up, but rather emphasizes the work hard ethic. Stahr’s inability to break from his work life and live an actually free life with Kathleen comes from the fact that he is approaching the end of his life without even living from his success: “He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark” (91).

Stahr’s desire to become one of the masses and not his exceptional self indicates some form of authenticity in that he is willing to give up a life of hard work and reap its pleasures that is promised in the American Dream. Yet, Stahr becomes disappointed with the Hollywood world around him, an environment he had a hand in creating: other producers, like Cecelia’s father, want him to fail; Cecelia wants to trap Stahr in a marriage of convenience; Wylie half-admires, half-detests him for over-working the writers; and Kathleen leaves Stahr for a man she does not love but will provide her the normal, safe life for which she learns. Fitzgerald fashions Stahr to be the ideal hard-

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working American man, but the idea that this hero loses, and even dies, at the end

invokes questions as to why the hero is isolated. Fitzgerald intended for the characters

who surround Stahr to be the focus of the novel because it is their actions toward Stahr

that eventually led him to his demise. The emphasis of the other characters as the

collective reason as to why Stahr meets his demise explains Fitzgerald’s choice in

featuring more details on other characters than Stahr himself. It also reinforces

Fitzgerald’s thoughts of how the world around him has become unfamiliar as well as

socially toxic.

In one of his last essays, Fitzgerald writes in “My Generation” an explanation as

to why he feels so conflicted about the current age of American culture as seen in most of

his work. Fitzgerald explains that he is one of the few people who acknowledge being

through several cultural ages: his formative years were impacted by the Progressive era;

then as a young man World War I occurred and so did the death of many men his age;

and finally, at the time of his writing Tycoon, World War II was unfolding. Fitzgerald

voices his concern about who is in charge of shaping American culture: “So we inherited

two worlds—the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world is growing as remote as another country, however close in time” (194). The growing disparity between former American values and modernized American values are visualized for Fitzgerald in the development of the American film industry and Hollywood culture. The glamorousness, youth, beauty,

and luxury project on to screens where the mass general public easily accesses such

content, yet Fitzgerald ultimately finds the masses flocking to insubstantial ideas as

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troubling since the Great Depression recently reached its end at the time the novel was

written.

Even though Fitzgerald found the mechanical innovation of Hollywood to be

impressive in terms of reaching wider audiences, he was also keen in questioning what

the mass-produced content was actually saying to the audiences. In that question,

Fitzgerald saw both a negative and positive opportunity to influence American culture, and thus American identity. As his notes indicate, Fitzgerald did not want his readers to view Tycoon as a moral lesson in mannerisms; rather I argue that he meant for the novel to confront how Americans present themselves in comparison to someone who embodies the traditional American values. Fitzgerald views the then-current decade focuses on acquiring material wealth such as large estates and other luxuries as a form of successfully realizing the American Dream. Ultimately, material items are inconsequential to actually being happy since such wealthy items can be taken away, even in death.

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Conclusion

“How Can You Get Ideas off Salary?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald has been famously characterized through a few unflattering sketches of him and his work which have long been ingrained in literary studies. Despite having a large collection of short stories, a decent number of novels, and a variety of personal essays, Fitzgerald has largely been associated with one just work: The Great

Gatsby (1925). Many consider The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s greatest work, but the

publicity for just this one text problematizes Fitzgerald’s expansive reflection on the state

of American culture and American identity. For one thing, The Great Gatsby has made

Fitzgerald into a certain type of American Modernist writer that was hard to break free of

for him (Bruccoli 34). He became popularly known as a “prophet for the Jazz age” and

even defined the Roaring Twenties with his prose from that singular novel. Then,

Fitzgerald became even more well-known because of his time in Paris, France as one of

the “Lost Generation” writers.

Fitzgerald has been pigeonholed into an idea that actually limits his true capacity

as a Modernist writer; Fitzgerald expresses his thoughts of more than just loss beyond the

glamourous images, evocative lyricism, and visual descriptiveness. His mourning is not

just a loss of traditional American values or of the meaninglessness behind material

extravagances; rather, Fitzgerald mourns for the quick unmasking of one’s individual

identity for a homogenized, artificial one without much afterthought. Fitzgerald mainly

attributes the wide-spread disregard of a collective American identity that still fulfilled

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the democratic ideals that define American culture through the Great Depression and the

World Wars18.

Critic Malcolm Cowley also spoke about Fitzgerald’s status among scholars and

readers as a writer of the 1920s. Even though Cowley writes this observation of

Fitzgerald twenty years after he publishes Exile’s Return, his description of Fitzgerald’s

writing ethos still maintains some merit in understanding Fitzgerald’s cultural impact:

“He combined intimacy with distance; he seemed to be standing inside and outside the

period at the same time…” (293). Among his own contemporaries, Fitzgerald cultivated a

strong understanding of where American culture was heading before the World Wars,

and even after in the rise of Hollywood and the family-oriented cultural rhetoric.

Though most critics categorize Fitzgerald’s works as novels in which characters

obsess over money, his works illustrate the social effect of capitalism by presenting how

characters economically value each other. Money in his novels is just props for the

characters to use as a method of emphasizing not just disillusionment with others but also

their loss of agency. Fitzgerald views that an endless amount of money allows one to be

free in the sense that there are no barriers to obtaining materialistic happiness. However,

this sense of freedom is limited in capacity and a performance must be put on by said

individual to keep the myth of achievement of the American Dream alive. Furthermore,

many of Fitzgerald’s characters exhibit signs of being helpless when confronted with

their true identities, usually ones that symbolize failure and a lack of individuality.

18 Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek reflects on the Passion of the Real and how it appears to be a sociological phenomenon that repeats after large-scale, violent event: “The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality - the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality” (5-6). A phenomenon that Fitzgerald seems to be aware of in his own experiences from living in the pre- and post- war years. 82

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Little research has been done on his last two novels—Tender is the Night (1934) and The

Love of the Last Tycoon (1941)—as well as little to no critical inclusion of these works in

literary studies. An exclusion of Fitzgerald’s late works in both research and discussion

limits Fitzgerald’s complex, yet morphing commentary on the American landscape from

the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. These past two chapters focused exclusively on Tender

is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon because both explored American cultural identities at critically historical moments that shaped American culture: the end of World

War I and the beginning of Hollywood. At first glance, it would seem difficult to find a connection between these two novels besides the Fitzgeraldian tropes of youth, glamourous groups and individuals, celebrities, and affluence. However, Tender is the

Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon both deal with the theme of finality for the

individual as well as for American culture. Fitzgerald firmly believed in some of the

characterizing traits of American identity that have been disbursed and popularized

through culture. The embodiment of these traits can be found in the subtle references to

American President Abraham Lincoln, since in Tender is the Night the most hopeful and

tragic character is named Abe North and there is also a scene in The Love of the Last

Tycoon that involves a man in a President Lincoln costume19. Fitzgerald’s view of

President Lincoln was most likely influenced by the Progressive era culture, which used

the former President’s growing reputation as a hero of democracy who emphasized the

19 On page 48 of the novel, Fitzgerald briefly introduces a visiting Scandinavian prince who is also an investor for one of Stahr’s films. In the commissary he sees an actor dressed as President Lincoln and makes an interesting observation that reflects Fitzgerald’s admiration for the American president: “—Now Prince Agge, who was in America at last, stared as a tourist at the mummy of Lenin in the Kremlin. This then was Lincoln.” 83

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significance of individualism, self-made rhetoric, and human liberty20. Yet, Fitzgerald

believes American identity is turning away from believing in being self-made to falling

into order for an artificial hierarchy without much resistance. The world that Fitzgerald

creates for his characters to perform in reveals his perception of what it means to be an

American: achieving the American Dream21.

In Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald presents a collection of American expatriates

who illustrate their shallow achievements as exceptional Americans. Every American presented in the novel has a specific identity they must perform in order to present a pleasing visualization of false exceptionality. Interestingly, Fitzgerald integrates a few

European characters into this narrative of Americans struggling to maintain their identity of exceptional Americans. Essentially Fitzgerald has paralleled the popular connotations of these two national identities in the novel—the rigid European and malleable

American—with the intention of illustrating how Americans conflate material wealth and social status as achievements of American Dream. Furthermore, Fitzgerald extends this discussion by presenting the identities each character performs in confronting realistic, and even deadly, situations as un-American because these identities contradict critical

American values (individualism, personal freedom, and pursuit of happiness). Fitzgerald ultimately offers a cautionary tale of how American culture’s pressure to present a shallow identity of success propped up by material items leads to a false knowledge of what it means to be American.

20 Allen C. Guelzo, “A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’s Place in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History” Lincoln’s America, 1809-1865, edited by Joseph R. Forneiri and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, Southern Illinois UP, 2008. pp 7-27. 21 See more about representation, creating knowledge (episteme) in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. A connection can be made that Fitzgerald is one of the few Modernist writers who question and establish a cultural episteme. 84

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Fitzgerald’s last unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, holds a more

complex commentary on American identity and culture because Fitzgerald’s intention is

split between hopeful and pessimistic views on current events. Though this split

commentary may be explained by the fact that the novel is incomplete, some of

Fitzgerald’s remaining notes support his own conflict in understanding modern American

culture. Fitzgerald was deeply influenced by Hollywood, film, the mechanical

innovations that shifted the film industry from the silent era to the modern film era with

sound. Fitzgerald has popularly been sketched as a bitter, has-been author who struggled

to finance his life after living extravagantly in Europe22 and detested the low quality of

art produced for the masses via Hollywood.

Yet, Fitzgerald actually viewed Hollywood for its usefulness and took advantage

of his time as a screenwriter at M-G-M Studios to sharpen his visual descriptiveness. It was while he was working in Hollywood that he found the subject of his next book:

Irving Thalberg. Thalberg represented everything Fitzgerald believed to be a true representation of American values, the hard work ethic that yielded a self-made, great man who had achieved the American Dream. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald fashions the protagonist Monroe Stahr to resemble Thalberg for the sake of Fitzgerald’s continued social commentary. Stahr, an uncharacteristic Fitzgeraldian hero, struggles to continue being the successful “wonder-boy” producer. Everyone in this small Hollywood social environment holds Stahr hostage to this identity, even though Stahr truly desires to attain one last semblance of happiness with a woman who looks eerily like his dead wife.

The characters who surround Stahr contribute to the controlling Hollywood environment

22 Cowley, page 292. 85

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that again conflates material success with achieving the American Dream, but this time the characters’ corruption in values influence their work in producing films. Stahr ultimately withers in the fictional Hollywood environment where everyone betrays him for their own form of short-term happiness; this is seen visibly in his lover Kathleen’s abrupt exit to resume her fairytale ending with an un-named American. Fitzgerald’s novel is not a moral story, but a story meant to shock readers by confronting them with harsh descriptions of failure.

More work with this narrative in the past two chapters can be expanded in looking at Fitzgerald’s final content: The Pat Hobby Stories (1940-1941). The character Pat

Hobby is not as serious as Dick Diver and Monroe Stahr, and Fitzgerald meant for this series to be taken satirically, so it is not uncommon for scholars to overlook Fitzgerald’s final collection of stories before he died. Pat Hobby illustrates the lazy American that

Fitzgerald found deplorable in his novels, yet Pat offers many interesting critical one- liners on the subject of art and commercialization. For instance, Pat has made his way into a senior producer’s office hoping to pitch an idea and have a job for a few months, yet Pat’s idea of easy-money is halted:

“You bring me an idea,” said Jack Berners. “Things are tight. We can’t put a man

on salary unless he’s got an idea.”

“How can you get ideas off salary?” Pat demanded (14, emphasis by Fitzgerald)

In this brief conversation, Fitzgerald illustrates through Pat’s agitated and surprised reaction about how the film industry operates with its creative workers. Pat’s demand evokes questions regarding the price of ideas, how those ideas are commercialized, and what are the standards these ideas must conform to in order to be profitable for mass

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consumption in American culture. Fitzgerald presents a series of discourses he

experienced in Hollywood as a screenwriter that indicated the shift of using art to

illustrate American nationalism. However, his works about Hollywood also provide the

opportunity to observe the changes Hollywood experiences before it is affected by the

Red Scare, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. More research and discussion are needed to explore this topic more, especially in the case of The Pat Hobby and other novels that

focus on Hollywood.

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