In November of 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson from Hollywood about the novel on which he was then working:

I think my novel is good. 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. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it, but nobody seems to be going to.

On December 21, 1940, the day after he had written the first episode of the sixth chapter of his book, Fitzgerald died. In 1941 Scribner's published all there was of The Last Tycoon, along with part of Fitzgerald's notes for its completion, as edited by Edmund Wilson. The uncompleted novel closely matches Fitzgerald's description of it: it shows signs of being good; it reveals the author's firsthand knowledge of his subject (Fitzgerald had been in Hollywood three years); its mood, like that of a drama or of Fitzgerald's most perfectly realized book, The Great Gatsby, is upstream throughout.

Perhaps we cannot take too literally Fitzgerald's statement that he "honestly hoped somebody else would write it"—the "it" referring to the particular story Fitzgerald had in mind, the story of one of the truly great men of the movies and of how he was defeated by the hugeness of the industry and the smallness of the men who superseded him in power. But at least we know, as Fitzgerald knew, that such a story had not yet been written.

Only one notable novel about Hollywood, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, appeared before the time of Fitzgerald's death. West's subject was Hollywood but not exclusively the movie industry. All Hollywood is affected by the movies, of course; West dealt with the inhabitants of Hollywood who live on the periphery of the industry—his narrator is a minor artist at one of the studios, the girl in the book sometimes works as an extra, and there is a movie cowboy. The main character, however, has nothing to do with the movies at all; he is one of the characteristic Hollywood immigrants, an Iowan, who, because his doctor had "an authoritative manner," moved to California for a "rest." West, then, chose for his characters people who might be called the more typical residents of Hollywood; certainly they outnumber movie magnates by several thousand to one. But West's people are never what we like to think of as normal. He refers to them as "the cream of American madmen"; their only solace is found in mob violence, cockfights, and bawdy houses. If West felt that the cream of American madmen were in Hollywood, he did not mean to imply that the rest of the American bottle is not liberally filled with milk. He had, several years earlier, indicated his predilection for madmen: his previous novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, though set in New York, is not one whit less grotesque, less downright horrible, than his book about Hollywood.

Fitzgerald made a comment about The Day of the Locust—a somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment, it seems to me. He said:

The book, though it puts Gorki's "The Lower Depths" in the class with "The Tale of Benjamin Bunny," certainly has scenes of extraordinary power—if that phrase is still in use.

Fitzgerald went on to name the points in The Day of the Locust which particularly impressed him. He did not say, however, that he thought it was a fine book. Certainly it was not the book that he wanted to write. Fitzgerald, while he did not overlook unpleasantness, did not see America, humanity, or Hollywood with quite the jaundiced eye with which West saw it. Fitzgerald was interested, not in abnormality (however common it may have seemed to West), but in the problems of a conscientious artist, perhaps of himself, perhaps of a movie producer faced with an industry which had grown bigger than anyone in it. Fitzgerald placed himself within this industry and wrote exclusively about its members. The outer Hollywood, whose eccentricities quite likely derive as much from the presence of the movies as from the accident of climate, was only incidental to his story.

The Last Tycoon is primarily the story of Monroe Stahr, a producer who rules his studio "with a radiance that is almost moribund in its phosphorescence." But one could easily say that the book has two heroes: one, Monroe Stahr, a creation of the author; the other, Hollywood, the radiant Hollywood of an earlier decade (Fitzgerald set the time of the action as 1935—"to obtain detachment"), which existed as a piece of history, ripe for anyone's artistic purposes. The tragedy in the book is a dual one: the doom of the movie industry is sealed by the decline of its last individualist; when Monroe Stahr dies, it becomes certain that the lavish, romantic past of the early Hollywood will never return. If The Great Gatsby can be viewed in broad interpretation as the tragedy of a man who outlives his dreams, The Last Tycoon can be thought of as a tragedy of a man who, for a time, remains great while his surroundings, the old order of a creative Hollywood, deteriorate. In this novel the man and his surroundings are inextricably interwoven; in no previous work was Fitzgerald able to integrate two themes so successfully.

Three things hinder the making of a complete analysis of The Last Tycoon as it stands in the 1941 Scribner edition. The first is that the notes are cursed by the same kind of deficiency that Edmund Wilson later saw and roundly condemned in Matthiessen's edition of Henry James' notebooks—incompleteness. Only a few of the hundreds of notes that Fitzgerald made are included here. In the second place, some of the notes which are appended are meaningless: they indicate only that the author meant to change a certain passage, or that a new incident was to be included, the nature of which it is often impossible to determine. Finally, the book has the deficiencies of any uncompleted work: since the artist has not yet put his work into final focus, the completed portions are distorted. Fitzgerald had not yet decided how the novel was to end. As a result, we see him merely suggesting a character who in one version of the ending (Fitzgerald suggests at least three separate endings) might conceivably have played a part demanding much more than mere suggestion earlier in the book. In short, it becomes difficult to evaluate separate incidents as they stand; and even the significance of the major event of the finished portion—the romance between Stahr and Kathleen—cannot be fully determined from what we have been given here. However, we do have enough material to make an analysis of Fitzgerald's writing techniques and the form he intended for the novel, and to make such an analysis is the purpose of this paper.

One outline which Fitzgerald made tells us that the novel was to have been about 60,000 words long and to have been divided into nine chapters. As we now have it, the novel reaches a length of 70,000 words, an indication that, despite the cutting which would inevitably have come, Fitzgerald had underestimated the scope of his project. As Edmund Wilson points out in his Foreword, "the subject here was more complex than it had been in The Great Gatsby," which was primarily the story of a man. The Last Tycoon, however, is both the story of a man and an examination of his surroundings, surroundings that were in many ways as important as the man himself. Yet, despite the generous proportions of the work, the reader does not get the impression that Fitzgerald is splashing paint on his canvas indiscriminately. His control of his brush is much firmer than it had been in the creation of his previous work, Tender Is the Night; it is as if he approached The Last Tycoon with much more regard for structure, and, consequently, that he was able to handle the enlarged canvas which was essential for this work.

Fitzgerald's regard for the structure of the novel, and his fidelity to his original concept of it, cannot be stressed enough. The same outline that gives us an estimate of the word length also indicates the nine chapter divisions as well as the detailed division of chapters into specific episodes. Up to the first episode in the sixth chapter, which is as far as he wrote, Fitzgerald made no deviation from that outline. Unfortunately, not all his notes are dated, and it is therefore impossible to tell how far in advance of the actual period of writing this diagrammatic outline was prepared. But there is every indication that, despite the changes which took place between the first plotting given by Fitzgerald to his publisher in September, 1939, and this outline, Fitzgerald had laid in detail the foundation for the episode structure of the novel. Only the ending and the identity of the personality who was to bring about Stahr's death remained puzzling questions for Fitzgerald, and even in making these decisions the problem had become more that of selecting, from many possibilities, one solution that would produce the desired effect than it was of determining the effect desired. But more important than the planning of the plot (it might be supposed that any author would be aware of the important nature of a preplanned plot) is the fact that Fitzgerald set to work on these chapters and episodes with a larger purpose in mind.

Fitzgerald thought of the structure of this novel in terms of the drama. Any number of similarities between dramatic techniques of structure and handling and those employed in The Last Tycoon come to mind as one reads the novel and the notes. The question becomes: how much of this similarity did Fitzgerald intend? There is no doubt that he did think of the novel as a tragedy, and it is perhaps inevitable that the roots of tragedy in drama would come to his mind as a basis for structure. Such is the association that he seems to have made. In his outline he divides his nine chapters into five acts (he so labels them), and gives each act a title: Stahr, Stahr and Kathleen, The Struggle, Defeat, Epilogue. Fitzgerald evidently made this five-act division in direct imitation of the classic drama, and, having made the division, deliberately fitted his chapters into it. Throughout the novel there are many pieces of evidence to substantiate this reasoning.

For instance, the "completely upstream" mood is a fundamental characteristic of dramatic tragedy. The Last Tycoon is much like The Great Gatsby in this respect and unlike Tender Is the Night, which is much less tragic in its implication and hence much more uneven in its mood. Perhaps Fitzgerald realized that part of the weakness of Tender Is the Night was the diffusion of intensity. At any rate, in The Last Tycoon there is every indication that although each "act" reaches a peak of intensity in its concluding episodes—another characteristic of act-division in drama—the book as a whole would have followed a pattern of increasing tension. Fitzgerald even arranged his time (the novel starts in June and ends in early October) so that his reader would get, according to one of his notes, a sense of increasing heat, culminating in Stahr's final fling at romance and the plot to murder him.

The first "act" in the novel corresponds to the exposition in drama: Stahr is introduced, and the conflict between Hollywood's growing commercialism and Stahr's individuality is proposed. "Acts" two and three correspond to the development in drama: Stahr's failure to win the girl who might save him from destruction, and his struggle with the forces in Hollywood which are determined to extinguish tycoons of his type. The climax is reached when Stahr, himself plotted against, falls to the level of his opponent in attempting to bring about Brady's death, but boards a plane for the East before he makes his decision to stop the plot, and is therefore unable to do so. The plane crashes, and the epilogue, in which the funeral of Stahr takes place and a prophecy of Hollywood's future is given, corresponds to the last, tapering-off scenes in the classic drama, in which, after a resounding climax which usually included a few violent deaths, the stage was cleared, the moral driven home, and the audience given a few minutes to wipe their tear-stained faces and bring themselves back to reality before emerging into the flat world.

Although Fitzgerald, in writing a novel, was under no obligation to use the artificial arrangements of material which the more restricted form of a drama demands, a reader of The Last Tycoon is struck by the number of conventional dramatic techniques that he does use. In the first chapter, for instance, Schwartz, a down-and-out Hollywood underling heading for the West Coast on the same plane as Stahr, is attempting to get to talk to Stahr in order to secure footing for a new start. Stahr turns him down, and Schwartz sends a note to Stahr before committing suicide. The note is ominous and vague, but, like an omen in the first act of a classical drama, it announces the coming of Stahr's fall. It is interesting, also, looking at the novel from a dramatic point of view, that Stahr too meets his death while taking a transcontinental plane trip—this time in the opposite direction. Dramatically, one event in one part of the novel is balanced by a similar event in another part.

This arrangement of similar events at the beginning and at the end of the novel, in each case in an altered way or with an ironical twist (a common arrangement in drama), occurs again and again in The Last Tycoon. Following this pattern, in the first chapter Cecilia Brady, Schwartz, and Wiley White cannot enter The Hermitage, near which their plane is grounded. The event becomes a symbol of Hollywood's failure to understand and express the heart of America's tradition. Later in the novel Stahr himself, who earlier would have been able to connect Hollywood and America's past, now weakened by the opposition of commercial Hollywood to his high standards, becomes ill in Washington and is unable to make a tour of the city, the symbol of America's heritage, as he had planned. Similarly, Stahr is represented in studio conferences at the beginning of the novel as a leading constructive force in Hollywood. Fitzgerald had planned to show, later in the novel, Stahr's weakened position in a similar series of conferences in which he would be unable to make decisions such as his earlier one to produce a money-losing picture. Thus, too, Stahr's early and beautiful tryst with Kathleen was to have been contrasted with an abortive attempt to recapture their love in the stifling atmosphere of summer heat and lost hopes. These incidents are examples of the dramatically calculated balancing of events at various stages in the novel, and these events reflect the fall that has taken place in the protagonist. We see in such contrasts Fitzgerald's attempt to impose a kind of dramatic order on his novel.

After all, the subject matter itself, Hollywood, fits a dramatic presentation beautifully. There can be no doubt that Fitzgerald thought so, and that he even imitated Hollywood's dramatic technique as he portrayed the movie industry. That technique is explained early in the novel, during one of the conferences Stahr has with Boxley, a novelist turned script writer. Boxley, it seems, has fallen down on a writing assignment, and Stahr has put two hacks to work with Boxley to help speed up the job. Boxley is disgruntled about how the hacks spoil his ideas:

"Why don't you write it yourself ?" asked Stahr.
"I have. I sent you some."
"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more."

Stahr then tells Boxley what he wants by setting up an imaginary story situation and arousing Boxley's interest in it. The point of Stahr's method of storytelling is that interest is action. Later we see Boxley taking over a script and applying the lesson he has learned from Stahr. But it is also a lesson which Fitzgerald evidently had learned from his work in Hollywood, the theory of which he applied in writing The Last Tycoon. Included in Fitzgerald's notes is one which he had written in capital letters: ACTION IS CHARACTER. In another note he speaks of a chapter in which he planned to give Stahr's background:

Each statement that I make about him must contain at the end of every few hundred words some pointed anecdote or story to keep it alive. I do not want it to have the ring of an analysis. I want it to have as much drama throughout as the story of old Laemmle himself on the telephone.

Open The Last Tycoon at any point and it will be obvious that Stahr's dramatic method has been applied, and that there is a difference in technique from that of Fitzgerald's earlier works. Gone is the expansive and speculative rhetoric of his first four novels. Every page is packed with things happening. Rarely does Fitzgerald stop his physical action or mental action through conversation to go omnisciently into a character's mind. The pace is fast, kaleidoscopic. Chapters two and three and the first part of chapter four, dealing with Stahr at the studio and presenting Hollywood in action, are a panorama of quick-shifted scenes. The action is movie-like, eminently suited to the material. At one point Fitzgerald calls a group gathered for a conference "the cast" and gives a brief sketch of each "actor." When Fitzgerald wishes to slow down the pace, as in the romantic scenes between Stahr and Kathleen, he slows down the action and the scene-shifting. But even then the tale is not static; things happen to his lovers. When he wishes to remind his reader of the Hollywood theme permeating the romance, he inserts such bizarre Hollywood touches as an orangoutang introduced to Stahr by telephone, or a Negro fishing for grunion in front of Stahr's house because the motion-picture people have prohibited his fishing on Malibu Beach.

Fitzgerald's use of dramatic techniques results not only in a change in style from his earlier books but also in a change in his whole approach to the problem of writing. One of Fitzgerald's weaknesses had always been his inability to separate himself from his material. For instance, he confessed that as he wrote The Great Gatsby he identified himself more and more with his hero until, at the end of his writing, the two became one. However, the drama form requires an exercising of the imagination in such a way that the author speaks through his characters, who nevertheless retain their identity. Objectivity of craftsmanship is one of the chief characteristics of the drama. Like Yeats, Fitzgerald became more objective as he worked with a dramatic medium. In The Last Tycoon lyricism yields to classical hardness; obvious personal interference in his writing gives way to omniscient objectivity. The happy ability Fitzgerald has for seeing things sharply is evident in The Last Tycoon, but they are seen less obviously by the author than by the characters.

But for Fitzgerald to use the techniques of drama, whether of the classical drama or of Hollywood, was not enough to guarantee a unified structure in his book. There remained the problem of integrating his themes (one that had especially bothered him in Tender Is the Night) and of fixing his point of view. It is profitable in estimating Fitzgerald's final growth as an artist to view each of these problems separately and in detail.

Fitzgerald tells us (through his letters) that Hollywood had disappointed him. "My dreams about this place are shattered," he said in one letter; and in another, "Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference." He set out, then, in The Last Tycoon, to picture Hollywood as he saw it, exactly and honestly. He also tried to analyze what had happened to the Hollywood which, up to that point, had been leavened by a faith in the artistic possibilities of the movie medium. His conclusions, as one sees them in The Last Tycoon, were that the Hollywood of the past had been directed by individuals who had the movie qualities which he so much admired in his earlier novel-heroes—honesty, charm, creativity, consistency, and loyalty to an ideal—and that the power of these men had been undermined by the baser commercial brains of the industry, typified by Brady, and by the organization of labor by men like Brimmer, the Communist.

The solution of the problem of how to integrate the fall of a hero with the fall of Hollywood must have seemed obvious. He would present Hollywood through a study of the last of the individualists, the last great tycoon. He would picture Hollywood through the faithful representation of one of the men who saw it clearly. Cecilia Brady announces the plan on the first page of the book:

It [Hollywood] can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand one of these men.

Thus the personal tragedy and the Hollywood tragedy are never allowed to be separated; while one has the stage the other insists on attention. That Fitzgerald saw the danger of letting either slip out of view is apparent from his notes and from the novel itself. In the chapter which pictures one of Stahr's typical days, for instance, the attention is on Hollywood. As already mentioned, the scenes shift rapidly. However, in order to avoid an overweighted interest in the Hollywood theme, Fitzgerald constantly brings in Stahr's personal story. Stahr had, the night before, found a love and lost her. During the day his efforts to locate the girl hold together the brief sketches of Hollywood routines. In his notes Fitzgerald indicates how intentional his method was:

Chapters (C and D) are equal to guest list and Gatsby's party. Throw everything into this, with selection. They must have a plot, though, leading to 13.

The "13" he refers to is the point in the story at which Stahr and Kathleen get together. While Fitzgerald develops his picture of Hollywood, he keeps the reader conscious of Stahr's search for Kathleen. The seduction scene in the fifth chapter, which develops the theme of Stahr's personal tragedy, is kept from complete isolation from the Hollywood theme by the bizarre touches mentioned above.

The whole episode of Stahr's romance with Kathleen needed to have significance for either or both of the main themes of the book. In his original draft Fitzgerald called the love affair "the meat of the book." As first plotted, Stahr needs Kathleen (then called Thalia) to give him strength; he is physically sick as well as knee-deep in the struggle with his rival, Brady. Stahr lets Kathleen go, however, because she is "poor, unfortunate, and tagged with a middle-class exterior which doesn't fit in with the grandeur Stahr demands of life," as Fitzgerald says in his notes. Later Stahr realizes how much he needs Kathleen; they are going to be married, but on a trip East he is killed.

Such a romance would have been the meat of the book. Fitzgerald must have felt, however, that his book was not meant to be primarily a love story, and in later drafts he molded the Kathleen-Stahr affair more and more into his main themes. It seems likely that he would have realized, as he wrote on and reread, that the heavy emphasis on the sheer romance of the affair in the early chapters as we have them would have seemed out of place in view of the development of the Stahr-versus-Hollywood theme in the latter half of the book. Certainly the transition from romance to intrigue would have been awkward—and already begins to seem so.

In the published version of the book (which, when one tries to judge it, must always be carefully kept separate both from Fitzgerald's early plans and from what he might have done before the book reached the presses), Kathleen plays a fairly large part both in precipitating Stahr's crack-up and in the Stahr-Brady conflict. Stahr no longer hesitates because Kathleen is a middle-class figure. He does hesitate, but merely to be sure that his reason is ruling over his emotions; and in this brief interval Kathleen marries someone else. Her action becomes a factor which hastens his disintegration. The two attempt to get together again after her marriage, but are never successful in doing so. The girl "who promises to give life back to him" never is his, and thus she becomes part of his tragedy. Fitzgerald later decided to use Kathleen's husband, too. He was to be a tool for Brady, either by having him sue Stahr for alienation of affection at Brady's direction, or by some other yet undetermined means. We see now that romance-for-romance's-sake is subordinated, and that Fitzgerald made this decision to strengthen his book. The Last Tycoon, therefore, became more than a tragic romance.

Fitzgerald may have vacillated about the degrees of emphasis to be put on the Hollywood, tragic, and romantic themes, but his choice of a method of narration for the book never wavered. This choice is, obviously, among the first and most fundamental decisions which an author projecting a novel must make. He must decide from what point of view the story is to be told. Basically, he has two choices: he can have the story narrated by one individual, who may or may not be the central character; or he can, so to speak, tell the story himself, as an "omniscient author" writing in the third person rather than in the first. When an author decides to write a first-person narrative, so that the whole action will be seen through the eyes of one character, the author's problem is to manipulate his narrator so that he is constantly in a position from which he can view the principal actions of the other characters. The Great Gatsby is an almost textbook-perfect example of successful first-person narration. On the other hand, Tender Is the Night, in which Fitzgerald used the omniscient—author point of view, is a rather good example of what happens when the author loses control of his omniscience and allows it to encompass the minds and view-points of too many characters. As a result of this lack of control, a reader of Tender Is the Night finds himself, well into the story, still uncertain as to which character the book will eventually center upon. The fact is that Fitzgerald had great difficulty in writing Tender Is the Night, and as soon as it was published he realized that it was structurally faulty. He may have decided, as a result of this experience, that the first-person narrative form gives a book more unity and intensity. At any rate, he chose to return to this form, or point of view, for The Last Tycoon.

In the original outline of the book which he sent to his publishers, he set forth this plan:

Cecilia [Brady] 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. She is, all at once, intelligent, cynical, but understanding and kindly toward the people, great and small, who are of Hollywood.

Cecilia remained the narrator of the book through all his subsequent outlinings and plot revisions, and there can be no doubt that his choice of Cecilia was a natural and a good one. And yet, despite his certainty in this matter, there are very vulnerable points, as far as point of view goes, in The Last Tycoon. Adequate handling of point of view is not dependent alone upon a good choice of narrative character.

Cecilia, at the time of the action of the book, is a junior at Bennington, and is home for the summer. Perhaps Fitzgerald felt that he had some insight into the workings of the undergraduate mind, for his daughter, Scotty, was corresponding with him from college at the time he was writing his last novel. Cecilia's Hollywood upbringing is another mark in her favor, as Fitzgerald pointed out. Besides, she has the dual advantage of two other involvements which make her a participant in the story, although she is not a major figure in it: she is the daughter of Stahr's antagonist, Brady, and she is in love with Stahr. Despite these close associations, she is a perfect mouthpiece for Fitzgerald because of her ability to detach herself from her surroundings: "I took it tranquilly," she tells us. "At the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house. I knew what you were supposed to think about it, but I was obstinately unhorrified." She sees the best and the worst in Hollywood and reports them, honestly. Even when her disgust at what she sees should, by all rights, be overwhelming, she manages to stifle it somehow: seeing her father (whom she dislikes greatly) just after his mid-day encounter with his secretary, she is struck not so much by her father's action as by the degradation of the girl, "stuffed … naked into a hole in the wall in the middle of a business day."

In Cecilia, Fitzgerald not only selected a good character to view the action but also made her much more a part of the novel than he had made Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. His approach is different. The reader of the earlier book sees the character of Gatsby developing as it is revealed to the mind of Nick Carraway, and as Nick develops it for himself. Nick's own character remains rather static throughout. The character of Cecilia, on the other hand, develops, pathetically, along with that of Stahr, the hero of the book. His tragedy becomes hers. At the start of the novel she is a rather giddy young person, but as the novel grows she changes. She is struck by the pathos of Stahr's situation, until, at the end of the novel, stricken by the deaths of both her father and Stahr, she breaks down physically herself (as Fitzgerald planned it). He had even considered the idea of revealing at the end of the book that her story was being told by two fellow-tuberculosis patients to whom she had related it, thus making his novel a second-hand second-hand narrative. Exactly what the book would have gained by the use of such a tortured device is hard to say. This complicated machinery would not have altered Cecilia's story; and this story, though it is not essential to the novel (Fitzgerald omitted parts of it in his outline for a serial version), does add a great deal both to the pathos of the book and to its unity.

The partial failure of Fitzgerald's use of Cecilia is the result of the weaknesses inherent in the first-person narrative form, as well as of Fitzgerald's method of surmounting these weaknesses. The drawbacks of the strictly firstperson narrative technique are obvious: the narrator ordinarily can report only what he actually witnesses or what he hears from someone who was a witness, and the latter plan cannot be used too often lest the verisimilitude of the narrative be destroyed. Nor can the narrator enter directly into the minds of the other characters. A first-person narration is comparatively easy to handle when the narrator is the hero of the story, but when, as is Cecilia or Nick, he is a secondary character, the task of the author becomes much more ticklish. Fitzgerald wanted to give himself more latitude than he was entitled to, and decided to grant himself "the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her [Cecilia] imagine the actions of the characters." Fitzgerald hoped to get the impact of a first-person narrative and yet avail himself of the convenience of omniscience. As a fullgrown author, Fitzgerald should have known that the answer to the Elizabethan proverb-maker's question, "Would yee both eat your cake and have your cake?" is no.

At the very beginning of the book the reader becomes aware of Cecilia's limitations as a narrator, and it is not long before Fitzgerald's awkward manipulation of her becomes as annoying as his disruptive interference with the established point of view in some of his earlier books. In the first chapter alone there are three incidents which are reported to Cecilia by other people: Wylie White tells her, after the plane ride, about Schwartz's note; the hostess tells her of a conversation between the pilot and Stahr; and the pilot tells her, years later, of his conversations with Stahr. Each of these incidents is important either to the development of Stahr's character or to the view of Hollywood which Fitzgerald wishes the reader to have. Yet the reader's acceptance of the narrative is not strengthened by the contrived coincidence necessary to develop these points.

Going further in utilizing Conrad's scheme of omnipotence, Fitzgerald has Cecilia report a typical studio day of Stahr, reconstructed, as she says, partly from a paper she wrote in college called "A Producer's Day" and partly from incidents she knew to be true. He has her justify this method by telling of Stahr's efforts to parry the spying of his competitors by working in secret, and the reason seems adequate enough to make her "reconstruction" acceptable. After all, it does not matter whether or not the reader has an exact description of a particular day in Stahr's life; actually, the description of a "typical" day is more representative and useful in coming to an understanding of the man. What becomes disturbing, however, is Cecilia's use of her imagination, which must have been extremely fertile, to describe in exact detail personal encounters such as Stahr's romantic afternoon with Kathleen. At such points the reader is likely to have one of two reactions: either he forgets that Cecilia is supposed to be telling the story and accepts the incident as if it were told by an omniscient author; or he realizes that Cecilia's imagination, vivid though it may have been, could not possibly have hit on the exact words and actions of two other characters at an intimate moment, and he has to accept this afternoon, too, as a "reconstruction." The question arises, then, whether such an atypical, even unique, afternoon in Stahr's life could have been reconstructed with enough accuracy to warrant its inclusion in its full detail. Most readers, it seems to me, will not give full credence to such an imaginative chronicle.

One cannot help comparing this unwarranted extension of the narrator's powers to the completely legitimate use of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. In that book Fitzgerald never let himself forget that he was seeing the story through Nick Carraway's eyes. That simple consistency seems to be the answer to the debated question of whether or not Fitzgerald should have revealed what went on between Gatsby and Daisy after their reunion. Nick could not possibly have known, for, like Cecilia's his sources of information were limited. The author had to choose between changing his narrative approach in order to include descriptions of their meetings, or omitting those episodes entirely. The omissions in The Great Gatsby seem, in comparison with the attempts at inclusion in The Last Tycoon, by far the more graceful way out of the dilemma.

There are passages in The Great Gatsby in which Nick uses his imagination to reconstruct events, but they are always events which are plainly related to Nick in the course of the story; instead of using the words of his informant, he uses his own. Usually he is reconstructing events which took place before the story opened. The passages are always short enough to prevent Nick's slipping out of the reader's mind. Again, The Last Tycoon provides an unfortunate contrast. Fitzgerald himself realized that, throughout many passages, Cecilia was likely to be forgotten; he has her bring herself back by saying "This is Cecilia taking up the story." Where, the reader may well ask, had she been during all the preceding narration, and who had been "taking up the story"?

Another subtle difference between Nick's narration and Cecilia's is that, when Fitzgerald has Nick reconstruct emotions, Nick's narration always conveys the surface degree of emotion which a spectator, or a hearer, would be able to reconstruct without violating truth, not the private details of such scenes as the Stahr-Kathleen love affair. And yet to sacrifice the Stahr-Kathleen episodes would have meant sacrificing the element of a love story in the novel. If Fitzgerald wanted to retain this element and still make his book a consistent, successful example of first-person narration, he would, I think, have had to handle differently the episodes which Cecilia does not witness herself. I cannot presume to solve Fitzgerald's problem and say what he should have done. But, giving him credit for the ability shown in a past performance, in The Great Gatsby, I like to think that, had he lived to finish the book, he would have found a satisfactory solution.

There is no doubt that he would have had to make some changes, for as the novel progresses the control of narration seems to become less and less firm. Sometimes the poor reader, if he ever was conscious that the events were being related to Cecilia, hears a completely new and unidentified voice—God's?—such as in the last part of chapter five, when this personage advises Stahr to take Kathleen while he can:

… It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now—tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it, but far away over the night The American has changed his plans.… In the morning he will be here.

The most charitable thing that can be said about such passages is that they probably would never have seen print if Fitzgerald had lived to correct his proofs. An editor, not being able to remonstrate with a dead author, evidently feels morally bound not to edit him.

The Last Tycoon, had Fitzgerald lived to complete it, would have been the first step on his road back from physical and moral exhaustion. It was his last attempt to reassert himself, to find strength through the discipline of his craft. Despite the harrowing conditions under which he wrote the book, and with all its technical limitations, this fragment, with Fitzgerald's notes, reveals a maturity of conception which would very likely have made this book his finest work. Along with his new-found dramatic objectivity, Fitzgerald adopted a change of prose style for his book. It is not the style of The Great Gatsby, but both styles are identifiable as Fitzgerald at his best, which was very good indeed. I have mentioned sharpness and hardness. The sharpness of Fitzgerald's observation and the hardness of his narration are like the fine cruel point of a diamond cutting glass, and the results are just as true.

Robert E. Maurer, "F Scott Fitzgerald's Unfinished Novel, 'The Last Tycoon'" in Bucknell University Studies, Vol. 111, No. 3, May, 1952, pp. 139-56.