[Miller is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on such American writers as Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, and J. D. Salinger. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of The Last Tycoon.]

In spite of all his physical and spiritual difficulties near the end of his life, Fitzgerald ambitiously began The Last Tycoon in Hollywood, where he spent the greater part of his last years writing for the motion pictures. There is a kind of heroic determination in his letters to his daughter during this period: "Any how I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don't drink. I am not a great man but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur." On November 25, 1940, Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I think my novel [The Last Tycoon] is good. I've written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but it is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally.… This sounds like a bitter letter—I'd rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter." Fitzgerald's acute consciousness of the swift passage of time now seems like a prophetic awareness of approaching death. He died within the month, in December, 1940, without completing his novel, but it was published posthumously with his notes and plans in 1941.

In September, 1940, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend: "But it [The Last Tycoon] is as detached from me as Gatsby was, in intent anyhow." In another letter, in which he outlined the story for Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald said, "If one book could ever be 'like' another, I should say it is more 'like' The Great Gatsby than any other of my books." Given only its rough, unfinished state, it is impossible to know whether The Last Tycoon would have achieved or surpassed the brilliance of The Great Gatsby. But Edmund Wilson, who edited the fragment, together with Fitzgerald's notes, has pointed out the chief value of Fitzgerald's last novel: "This draft of The Last Tycoon … represents that point in the artist's work where he has assembled and organized his material and acquired a firm grasp of his theme, but he has not yet brought it finally into focus." In other words, the creative act is "frozen" in all the complexity of its intricate movement; it is fixed in time for all the curious to see. The effect is not unlike a visit behind the stage, where all the machinery and costumes and stage furniture are available for inspection.

John Dos Passos wrote extraordinarily powerful praise for this last novel: "It is tragic that Scott Fitzgerald did not live to finish The Last Tycoon. Even as it stands I have an idea that it will turn out to be one of those literary fragments that from time to time appear in the stream of a culture and profoundly influence the course of future events" ["A Note on Fitzgerald," The Crack-Up]. What struck Dos Passos so forcibly—the book's "unshakable moral attitude"—has not (as yet, anyway) been widely remarked or unusually influential. Indeed, there has been a tendency in Fitzgerald criticism to regard the book as something less in achievement, realized or potential, than The Great Gatsby. Typical is an opinion from The Times Literary Supplement: "It is hard to agree with the many critics who have said that The Last Tycoon would have crowned Fitzgerald's achievement.… Although the novel has a kind of distinction that clung to Fitzgerald's writing, even in the depths of his least engaging journalism, there is nothing in this final book to compare with The Great Gatsby."

It is, of course, highly speculative and probably unprofitable to judge a work in terms of what it might have become had it been finished. It is perhaps better to accept the work for what it is, an unfinished novel of a highly gifted writer, valuable for revealing how a genuine craftsman goes about his craft. As with Dickens' Edwin Drood, each reader can finish the novel to his own taste, on the basis of all the clues he can find.

Fitzgerald had exploited his knowledge of Hollywood before, notably in his short stories "Magnetism" (1928) and "Crazy Sunday" (1932). But never before had he attempted such an ambitious narrative, not just set in Hollywood but about Hollywood. He intended not only to tell a story but to describe a way of life. In its scope, then, The Last Tycoon resembles Tender Is the Night more than The Great Gatsby. The outline published with the unfinished novel permits us to reconstruct the action that Fitzgerald intended to portray. The protagonist is Monroe Stahr, a high-powered Hollywood producer who, at thirty-five, is at the peak of his influence and productivity. Since the death of his beloved wife, he has, as a kind of compensation, driven himself in his work to the point of emotional and physical exhaustion. Although he is pursued by Cecilia Brady, his associate's young daughter, his interest is aroused only by Kathleen Moore, an English woman who resembles his late wife. His encounter with Kathleen, although it is romantically consummated, comes too late to prevent her planned marriage with an American who had previously extricated her from an unhappy life with a displaced European king. Stahr's attention is absorbed by the labor problems of the studio and particularly by the Communist manipulation of the workers, and he finds himself deeply involved in a power-struggle with Cecilia's corrupt and scheming father, Pat Brady. In all the liaisons, double-dealing, and black-mailing, Stahr attempts to maintain his moral equilibrium, but gradually he becomes entangled in the malignant morass surrounding him. He plots Brady's murder, and just as he realizes the degradation of the act and decides to call it off, he is killed in a plane crash.

What has all the marks of a melodramatic plot turns out to be remarkably believable, if not commonplace, in Fitzgerald's skillful rendering, at least in the six finished chapters of the projected nine. His notes show him taking great care to work out the method for telling his story. The most notable technical device he has hit upon is to use the young, somewhat sophisticated, partly naive girl, Cecilia Brady, as narrator: "This love affair [between Stahr and Kathleen] is the meat of the book—though I am going to treat it … as it comes through to Cecilia. That is to say by making Cecilia, at the moment of her telling the story, an intelligent and observant woman, I shall grant myself the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the actions of the characters. Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a God-like knowledge of all events that happen to my characters." The clarity with which Fitzgerald saw his method is remarkable, and the return to the craft of Gatsby—and Conrad—is unmistakable.

In creating an appropriate narrator, Fitzgerald was no doubt discovering his own attitude toward his material. It would have been easy, in depicting a Hollywood tycoon, to perpetuate a stereotype, either Hollywood's romantic conception of its own, or an anti-Hollywood caricature. Distance, Fitzgerald saw, would be everything if he were to escape both cynicism and sentimentality. Cecilia would provide just the right tone for making Monroe Stahr breathe the breath of life: "Cecilia is the narrator because I think I know exactly how such a person would react to my story. She is of the movies but not in them. She probably was born the day The Birth of a Nation was previewed and Rudolf Valentino came to her fifth birthday party. So she is, all at once, intelligent, cynical, but understanding and kindly toward the people, great or small, who are of Hollywood." Cecilia does provide the breathless quality that we have come to identify as that special evocation of Hollywood—but without compromising the serious note that Fitzgerald wanted to sound. Her freshness, not unlike Rosemary Hoyt's in Tender Is the Night, revitalizes what might be tired material. Her bright young passion for Stahr endows him with a glamour that does not cheapen or mock.

From the opening page Cecilia beckons us into the novel and onto the plane which is carrying her home to Hollywood. We feel the immediacy of the events taking place—but we sense a distance, too. Before very many pages, we learn that the events, though vivid, are filtering through time, when Cecilia says, "I wonder what I looked like in that dawn, five years ago." This casual remark, we discover, has more meaning than at first appears when we reach Fitzgerald's notes and come upon the fragments he had once written for the opening of the novel and then discarded. These passages are written from still another point of view—two men who have encountered a fascinating young woman in a hospital in the canyons of Colorado: "this girl's face in the sunset, and with the fever, seemed to share some of the primordial rose tints of that 'natural wonder.'" She is, of course, Cecilia, wasting away with tuberculosis, recalling for her visitors the events of five years ago—the events of The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald decided, and it seems wisely, that the whole scene was too gloomy for an opening to his story, but he intended to place it at the end to add its depressing note to the tragedy which preceded. Upon discovering these plans for Cecilia, we come to understand why, though resembling Rosemary Hoyt, she transcends her greenness and naivete. We come to know the source of the cynicism that tinges her intelligence. In trying to capture the feelings and tone of a young girl, product of Hollywood, from the inside (after all, Rosemary Hoyt was viewed from outside), Fitzgerald was hazarding a great deal. In placing her, and thus her recollections, in a sanatorium five years after the events, perhaps he was narrowing the gap between her perspective and his own, beset as he was by the illnesses of his last years. However that may be, Cecilia seems to come off with immense skill, providing the precisely right angle of vision, physical and emotional, for the story of Monroe Stahr.

But, as Fitzgerald indicated in one of his notes, he did not leave the whole task to Cecilia. In letting her "imagine the actions of the characters," he freed himself from the absurdity of inventing excuses for her being present at or learning about everything that had to be represented in the action. A brief account of the six finished chapters will show the ease with which he moved into and out of Cecilia's orbit. Chapter I describes the return flight to Hollywood, all narrated by Cecilia and introducing Monroe Stahr as the mysterious Mr. Smith ironically occupying the "bridal suite." Chapter II describes in a few vivid strokes the flooding of the studio lots (as the result of the earthquake) and Monroe Stahr's glimpse of the woman who resembles his dead wife floating by on a studio prop, "a huge head of the Goddess Siva." The first part of the chapter is Cecilia's, and she explains how she reconstructed the latter part:" … it was Robby [Robinson, Stahr's trouble-shooter] who later told me how Stahr found his love that night."

Chapters III and IV omit Cecilia almost entirely, but she introduces them:" … I have determined to give you a glimpse of [Stahr] functioning, which is my excuse for what follows. It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on 'A Producer's Day' and partly from my imagination. More often I have blocked in the ordinary events myself, while the stranger ones are true." After some of the most brilliantly finished passages of the novel, describing Stahr setting an inhuman pace at his job, Cecilia steps in to wind up Chapter IV:

That was substantially a day of Stahr's. I don't know about the illness, when it started, etc., because he was secretive, but I know he fainted a couple of times that month because Father told me [the doctor predicts Stahr's death within months]. Prince Agge [a studio visitor] is my authority for the luncheon in the commissary where he told them he was going to make a picture that would lose money—which was something, considering the men he had to deal with and that he held a big block of stock and had a profit-sharing contract.

And Wylie White [a writer] told me a lot, which I believed because he felt Stahr intensely with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. As for me, I was head over heels in love with him then, and you can take what I say for what it's worth.

Chapter V alternates the point of view between Cecilia and Stahr, first person and third, with scenes developing the affair between Stahr and Kathleen Moore (the woman on the Siva head) counterpointed with scenes portraying the frantic Cecilia trying to discover the facts of Stahr's secret love life. In this chapter, there are some awkward touches; for example, at one point we read: "This is Cecilia taking up the narrative in person." But in general the difficult technical feat is carried off with unobtrusive skill, not calling attention to itself. Chapter VI is again given over largely to Cecilia, as it is through her (and her connections in the East, at Bennington) that Stahr arranges to meet the Communist, Brimmer. Her presence at their friendly discussions and her attempt at intervention when the argument threatens to become a brawl (Stahr, disappointed in the loss of Kathleen, is drinking heavily) seem not like technical manipulation at all but like natural advances in the action of the novel. The chapter breaks off, incomplete—and indeed none of these chapters may be regarded as finished. Fitzgerald wrote on the last draft of his first chapter: "Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don't look [at previous draft]. Rewrite from mood." In all their unfinished state, these six chapters reveal a novelist in full command of his craft, wresting from his abundant material the full range of its rich possibilities.

The last note included with The LAst Tycoon is written in capitals, as a kind of warning, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." Fitzgerald's novel seems to be something of a demonstration of this "rule." We are never told directly what kind of man Monroe Stahr is, but we are shown continuously through his varied activities—and, furthermore, we see him as many others see him, each through his own distorting lens. It is not easy, then, to assess the special quality of his being that arouses such a complex mixture of respect and distaste, irony and awe. But this complexity is not new with Fitzgerald's heroes—Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver both attracted and repelled. Though radically different in their motives and their careers, their lives and their milieus, all these heroes, in spite of their shortcomings, share a kind of moral awareness that ultimately wins our grudging admiration.

In his haunting search for the woman who resembles his dead wife, Stahr resembles Gatsby in his determined pursuit of Daisy. Both men try in some sense to repossess the past, and both are doomed to emotional disappointment. But although Stahr in the savage dedication to his profession and in the lordly manner in which he operates resembles Gatsby imperiously managing his far-flung enterprises—both are tycoons—there is a creative aspect to Stahr's endeavor that is missing from Gatsby's. Stahr is, after all, boldly willing to make a picture for its intrinsic value, even though it will lose money. Gatsby's shabby business ventures are certainly immoral and probably illegal. In a way, Stahr is an inside-out Dick Diver. While Diver cannot find in himself the will or the drive to stick to his serious profession, Stahr can find almost nothing else; while Diver squanders the rich emotional resources of his being, Stahr seems almost unable to reach the depths where his emotional life lies buried.

Stahr is a modern American type, consumed by ambition, deriving from his work the kind of emotional satisfaction an ordinary man expects from marriage. He has the traits of the mythical American pioneer, tremendous energy and drive, a variety of skills, immense resources of cunning and craft—and a fundamental sense of fair play. He is a pioneer of a new frontier, America's last—Hollywood, California. But he is also the last tycoon; his notions of running a large, complex business enterprise are primitive and old-fashioned. He holds every detail and decision to himself, and he cannot rise above the paternalistic view in labor relations. He is the American self-made man, with all his virtues and all his faults. Although unread, he is creative; although autocratic, he is fair. In short, he is a unique example of a specimen fast fading from the American scene, displaced by organization men and corporate images.

The Hollywood of Stahr's day has already passed, and nobody has captured its essence more vividly than Fitzgerald. By portraying in detail one of Stahr's days, Fitzgerald captures the essence of a fabulous industry and a bygone era. Whether in his office hounded by visitors and phone calls, in a story conference with directors and writers, at an executive luncheon with builders and owners, or in his private theater viewing rushes, Stahr remains cool-headed through a multitude of demands and decisions. Right or wrong, he must decide, and decide he does, ingeniously combining sound judgment, intuitive insight, and shrewd guesswork. In situations in which indecisiveness would be ruinous, Stahr cuts boldly through the uncertainties with his firm command—and cooly accepts the shattering responsibilities for being wrong as he takes for his own the considerable rewards for being right.

In the whirlwind that is Stahr's day, a multitude of characters emerge briefly, are vividly there, and then fade from view. Fitzgerald's genius for handling an immense cast of characters in confined space is here again put to the test, as it was in the accounts of Gatsby's parties or in the description of life on the Riviera beaches in Tender Is the Night—and again his achievement is brilliant. In a few fine strokes, a telling phrase, Fitzgerald brings a minor functionary or an important personage springing to life.

Jacques La Borwitz, the studio commissar, "had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone." Mr. Roderiguez, famous and successful actor, has fallen out with his wife and pours out his problems to Stahr: "I think Rainy Day grossed twenty-five thousand in DÈS Moines and broke all records in St. Louis and did twenty-seven thousand in Kansas City. My fan mail's way up, and there I am afraid to go home at night, afraid to go to bed." Jane Meloney, "the best writer on construction in Hollywood,… had ulcers of the stomach, and her salary was over a hundred thousand a year." Reinmund, the supervisor, was a "handsome young opportunist" who had "an almost homosexual fixation on Stahr." Broaca, the director, had to be watched or he made the same scene over and over for his pictures: "A bunch of large dogs entered the room and jumped around the girl. Later the girl went to a stable and slapped a horse on the rump. The explanation was probably not Freudian.…" Old Marcus, top man in the company: "His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete." Red Ridingwood, the dismissed director: "It meant he would have slight, very slight loss of position—it probably meant that he could not have a third wife just now as he had planned." Birdy Peters, Brady's secretary, who, when Cecilia opens her father's office closet, "tumbled out stark naked—just like a corpse in the movies." These are only a few of the people who populate the novel, providing a backdrop of richly textured life for the story of Stahr.

If the existing chapters of The Last Tycoon reveal that the novel was to be about Stahr and about Hollywood, they suggest also that it was to be in some sense about modern life, about American life. No doubt the theme would have emerged with clarity from the finished novel, but there are enough signs to indicate Fitzgerald's direction. In the very opening chapter, the plane must land and stay over in Nashville, Tennessee, and the characters find their way out to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Accompanying Cecilia and Wylie White, the writer ("Cecilia, will you marry me, so I can share the Brady fortune?"), is Manny Schwartz, a tense ex-big-shot now rebuffed by the busy Stahr. When Cecilia and White return to the plane, Schwartz stays behind in the hopeless dawn: "He had come a long way from some Ghetto to present himself at that raw shrine… At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast—a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head."

This grotesque juxtaposition is echoed in a comic scene in the studio, when the visiting Danish Prince Agge comes upon a familiar face, Abraham Lincoln. Startled, Prince Agge continues to stare at the figure, "his legs crossed, his kindly face fixed on a forty-cent dinner, including dessert, his shawl wrapped around him as if to protect himself from the erratic air-cooling." As Prince Agge gapes, like a tourist staring "at the mummy of Lenin in the Kremlin," "Lincoln suddenly raised a triangle of pie and jammed it in his mouth." The affinity with the opening Hermitage scene seems certain, as both episodes suggest some kind of debasement of the national heritage, some kind of degeneration of a heroic vision. Though modern America sits in the presence of its own past of transcendent achievement, the vital relationship has run out, become mechanical and meaningless.

In a later chapter Fitzgerald intended to return to this estrangement between past and present, between the serious and superficial aspects of life in America. Stahr was to make a trip to Washington, D. C., but he was to be suffering from a high fever and therefore unable to see anything in its true perspective or to apprehend the meaning of what he did see. Such a scene would, of course, modify our feelings about what we witness in the first six chapters of the book, and it would also subtly affect our relationship to Stahr. And if the scene had been done in Fitzgerald's finest suggestive style, the meanings would have radiated out into many dark corners of modern life and modern America. Like The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon might well have provided a commentary on the ultimate debasement of the American dream. As it is, we must accept the chapters that we have and the notes that survived with them for what they actually are—interesting evidence of Fitzgerald's involvement not only with plot but with technique as well. The outpourings of This Side of Padise—the novel of saturation—have long since been replaced by a style that is the result of conscious and avowed concern for structure and selection.

James E. Miller, Jr., in his F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique, New York University Press, 1964, 173 p.