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

Discipline, spirit, and imagination attenuated if not broken, Diver returns to America a stranger. With Nicole now acting as Fitzgerald's chronicler, the last news of Diver tells of the "big stack of papers on his desk that are known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion." So much for his craft; as for the dream of love, he becomes "entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store" (TITN 334). Homeless in spirit, Diver drifts from one lovely, lonely Finger Lakes town to another, and whatever dreams he has, he dreams in oblivion without his former promise and intensity of feeling and action.

Fitzgerald created his deepest, most realized novel out of his own predicament. His dissipation and need to write short stories for the Saturday Evening Post to sustain his and Zelda's standard of living seduced him away from his craft and to some extent his dream of love. Still, Fitzgerald bled out Tender Is the Night at La Paix--"La Paix (My God!)" (L 345)--in Rodgers Forge outside Baltimore. He brought his "big stack of papers" to completion. But when reviews were mixed and sales modest, also perhaps because, exhausted, he had no new novel taking shape in his mind, only the early medieval tale of Phillippe or The Count of Darkness, with its curiously anachronistic tilt toward Ernest Hemingway's modern code of courage, Fitzgerald sank deeper into drink and depression. Finally, as Scott Donaldson observes, Asheville, Tyron, and other North Carolina towns became suspiciously like the small towns of Diver's self-imposed exile at the end of Tender Is the Night.(14)

For more than three years after publication of Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald continued to imitate the desolate trajectory he'd projected for Dick Diver. Everything was a struggle. Perhaps "to preach at people in some acceptable form" (L 63) and to show himself an unbowed Sisyphus, without the camouflage of fiction, he dove into the confessional Crack-Up pieces. To the chagrin of those who wished him well, and even some who did not, he wrote an even more exposed confession of faith than Tender Is the Night. His low point came with the appearance of "The Other Side of Paradise," a portrait of the novelist as a broken-down man and a failed writer that appeared on his fortieth birthday in the New York Post in September of 1936. "A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star," he told the reporter. "But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity, and I lost my grip."(15) The reporter featured the empty bottles and the desolate hotel room more than Fitzgerald's words, however, and the self-inflicted blow of humiliation Fitzgerald absorbed seeing the piece in print prompted him to make an abortive gesture at suicide.

Only an offer from Hollywood less than a year later broke the pattern of waste, the spell of despair, and roused Fitzgerald from his uneasy, purgatorial hibernation. Slowly, tortuously, he came back to life as a man and a novelist. Taking another crack at Hollywood, where the "inevitable low gear of collaboration" (CU 78) had twice mocked his sense of artistic vocation, Fitzgerald renewed his "pursuit of happiness." His theme was another variation of the American dream. For as a place and an industry, Hollywood was at once the consequence and the purveyor of the dream, often an eager expression of the culture's lowest common denominator. Unlike his earlier moves, to the south of France to write Gatsby in 1924 and Baltimore to write Tender in 1932, Fitzgerald saw going to Hollywood as a lucky last chance to recoup his fortunes. He had a screenwriter's contract; perhaps if he got himself together another novel would take shape. In the meantime, riding west on the train in July 1937, Fitzgerald welcomed the chance to pay his debts, educate Scottie, care for Zelda, and keep himself. And Hollywood also offered a fresh start. "Of all natural forces," he had written in The Crack-Up, "vitality is the incommunicable one" (CU 74). And he did not flinch from taking stock of his condition. "For over three years," he wrote his cousin Ceci, "the creative side of me has been dead as hell" (L 419). So, he might have added, was the side of him that lived in relationships at a high pitch of intensity.