F. Scott Fitzgerald's evolving American Dream: the "pursuit of happiness" in Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996 by John F. Callahan

Perhaps because of Fitzgerald's struggles and his paradoxical, sometimes exhilarated serenity alongside the pain and loss reflected in the diminishing hourglass of his life, in The Last Tycoon he was able at least to break the stalemate between previously opposed ideas. For this reason, Fitzgerald's passing before he could finish The Last Tycoon is an incalculable loss, only to be guessed at from the drafts he left, however much in progress, and his rich, copious notes, charts, and outlines. With Hollywood as milieu and the producer Stahr as protagonist, the American dream becomes even more identified with the urge to integrate private and public pursuits of happiness than in Fitzgerald's other novels.

In The Last Tycoon Fitzgerald does for the American dream what Ralph Ellison argues every serious novel does for the craft of fiction. Even as a fragment, the work extends the range of idea and phenomena associated with the dream. As a man and a writer, he became at home in that country of discipline and craft he had discovered but, later lamented, did not truly settle down in until it was too late. As he wrote to his daughter Scottie, a student and aspiring writer at Vassar, I wish I'd said "at the end of The Great Gatsby: `I've found my line--from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty--without this I am nothing'" (L 79). In 1939 and 1940, The Last Tycoon did come first. But burdened with expenses, lacking the quick, lucrative Saturday Evening Post markets of his youth, lacking in any case the "romantic readiness" to write stories with happy endings, and in sporadic, failing health, Fitzgerald had to balance his novel with other work, and eke it out in pieces. Nevertheless, he ended up a writer's writer. From that single window, he looked beyond his circumstances and saw the American dream not as a personal matter and no longer a nostalgic, romantic possibility but as a continuing defining characteristic of the American nation and its people. Far from being behind him, as Nick Carraway had claimed in The Great Gatsby, the dream, refigured in The Last Tycoon, is a recurring phenomenon in each phase, place, and guise of Fitzgerald's imagination of American experience.

The American story, Fitzgerald wrote late in life, "is the history of all aspiration--not just the American dream but the human dream...."(8) The story that Fitzgerald told was his version of a dream hauntingly personal and national. "When I was your age," he wrote his daughter in 1938, "I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen." Like Keats, who, Fitzgerald imagined, was sustained to the end by his "hope of being among the English poets" (CU 81), Fitzgerald aspired to be among the novelists. But, as he confessed to his daughter in a bone-scraping passage, he compromised his artist's dream by indulging the very thing that inspired it--romantic love. Of his marriage to Zelda, he wrote in retrospect, "I was a man divided--she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream" (L 32). The imbalance Fitzgerald attributed to Zelda was also his own tension and tendency. Nevertheless, what gave his life and work such fascination was exactly that dream of mingling craft and accomplishment with love--first with Zelda, and at the end in more muted fashion with Sheilah Graham, his companion in Hollywood.