The Burning of Los Angeles
West and Fitzgerald
This is the first in an ongoing series covering the literature of Los Angeles from classic novels and non-fiction to detective books, science fiction and comics, examining the world’s greatest city from all possible angles.
‘There are no second acts in American lives’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and there was no second act for him. Instantly famous upon the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack aged forty-four in his Hollywood apartment virtually forgotten by the literary world.
He had been troubled for years; his alcoholism exacerbated by the mental illness of his beloved wife – by 1939 he was drinking forty beers a day. The decline had been long but steady. After the success of his first two books, The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 23,000 copies, with good reviews failing to make up for tepid commercial reception. In 1930, his wife Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia after attempting to kill herself, Fitzgerald and their nine-year-old daughter, by grabbing the steering wheel of a moving car. By the time the Great Depression was at its height Fitzgerald’s tales of the Jazz Age were deeply out of fashion. His books weren’t selling, his health was terrible, and he was broke, struggling to pay the mounting expenses for Zelda’s psychiatric treatment. In ‘The Crack-Up’, an autobiographical essay that he wrote for Esquire, Fitzgerald states that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise’. Fitzgerald judged himself to have failed that test, he had ‘prematurely cracked’. There was nothing left for him but to seek solace in Hollywood.
When novels struggled to support him, Fitzgerald wrote stories for magazines, and when those failed too, he swallowed his pride and became a screenwriter. Ensconced in the exotic-sounding yet affordable Garden of Allah hotel in West Hollywood he toiled over screenplays. Finally solvent because of his lucrative contract, the work nonetheless destroyed Fitzgerald. He misunderstood the assignment, trying to create art in what was in fact an industry – It’s called the film business not film art. His screenplays were overwrought, but they were also by butchered studio executives. Billy Wilder likened Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood to that of ‘a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job’. William Faulkner was able to combine literary genius, hack screenplay work and alcoholism, but Fitzgerald seemingly didn’t have the same ‘first-rate intelligence’.
There was a glimmer of hope in his final year. Finally able to remain sober, aided by a conspicuous amount of Coca-Cola and chocolate, Fitzgerald was hard at work on a new novel. He was in a healthy relationship with British-born gossip columnist Shielah Graham and aimed to turn his Hollywood experience into a work to rival The Great Gatsby. Yet bad omens were everywhere. His last royalty check from Scribner’s was for $13.13, a number both strikingly low and strikingly unluckily. He suffered from bouts of ill health, moving to a ground floor apartment to avoid straining his heart after a cardiac spasm.
Smart enough to recognise his own failure but also not to give in to resentment Fitzgerald wrote, on the opening page of his unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon, that ‘you can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes.’ Fitzgerald, towards the end, finally understood Hollywood. The Last Tycoon, though incomplete, might be the best thing he ever wrote; a summation of the promise of the West, a mirror image of Gatsby. Joan Didion, who read The Great Gatsby over and over again, said that ‘to really understand the book, you have to know about the east, about what it means to buck up against the east.’ Fitzgerald knew what it meant, but so did another writer, Nathanael West.
Nathanael West was born in New York in October 1903, a smidge younger than his ‘Lost Generation’ contemporaries; young enough not to have his life bisected by the First World War like Hemingway, Faulkner etc. Importantly, West was born Nathan Weinstein, the child of Lithuanian Jews, making him a Jewish novelist, but perhaps a self-hating one. He was the first Jew to be published in the Library of America series, but was never a quintessentially Jewish novelist, not in the same way that the literary titans of the latter half of the 20th century – Bellow, Roth, Mailer – were. Allegedly the name change had nothing to do with antisemitism, but this is doubtful. There was more to it than simply following Horace Greely’s advice to ‘go West, young man’.
West lived in Paris for a stint as a young man – seemingly a perquisite for that generation of artists – but quickly returned to the United States, to work odd jobs and continue working on his writing, something he had been interested in from a young age. His job as the manager of a New York hotel became his big break. He often helped out fellow writers including Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, who recalled that ‘we all lived there half-free, sometimes all-free’. Undemanding night work gave him plenty of time to think, and plenty of his material which became the basis of his first real novel Miss Lonelyhearts.
Unlike Fitzgerald, West’s career never had the precipitous ups and downs; he was never a success. But that also meant that he never had a fall. Miss Lonelyhearts, a black comedy about a newspaper advice columnist during the Great Depression, had many admirers amongst critics and writers, but not amongst the book-buying public. By 1936, his first three books had earned him $780 in total; not money that one could live on. In 1933 he moved to Hollywood to work on an adaptation of Miss Lonelyhearts but it was changed beyond recognition by the powers that be. Nevertheless, West managed to make a living for himself. Whereas Fitzgerald failed at writing good scripts, West succeeded at writing exactly the bad scripts that the studios were looking for.
His hard work – eight-hour days, six days a week – paid off and West was able to take three or four months a year to work on his writing. Out of this came what is perhaps his masterpiece The Day of the Locust. It was an even more cynical look at the movie business than The Last Tycoon. The novel follows Tod Hackett, a studio artist who pines after the beautiful but untalented aspiring actress Faye Greener. The characters are unsympathetic and grotesque –a family of eskimos, a fake cowboy, and a brothel madam, play supporting roles. The story culminates in a violent riot at the scene of a movie premiere; the Hollywood lie giving way to a fascist apocalypse. West was a deep pessimist, the writer of what literary critic Harold Bloom called ‘wonderfully unpleasant books.’ Unpleasant and cynical, but not unfunny. West’s writing was satirical and at times close to surreal – the dwarf bookie Abe Kusich from The Day of the Locust, especially during the nasty cockfighting scene, is basically Lynchian.
The pessimism of West is probably why he never sold well. Americans were happy to read about the failure of the American dream, they were all too willing to believe that Hollywood was seedy and sinful, but they still needed someone to root for. The Day of the Locust was moralistic, but not in the way that Americans like so much, it was too episodic and bleak for that. West refused to pander. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published in the same year as West’s book but outsold him 430,000 to 1464. West sympathised with the plight of the masses, but Steinbeck praised and flattered them. The Grapes of Wrath idolises the common man, whilst The Day of the Locust prophesises their capacity for catastrophe. The history of the 20th century would prove more confirmatory for West’s view of human nature than Steinbeck’s.
Whilst The Day of the Locust didn’t bring financial success for West, he was in a good place in his life. In 1939 he met Eileen McKenney, who was working for Disney at the time, and they married in April 1940. Around that time, he also sold several scripts, for his highest price yet, and had firmly established himself in the business. He also began planning a fifth novel. In December 1940, on his way back from a hunting trip he and his wife were killed in a car accident. He was thirty-seven years old and died only one day after his mentor F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had heard news of his friend’s death that morning.
West wasn’t destroyed by the Hollywood system – he saw what it did to Fitzgerald and was determined to survive it. In the end, he did more damage to it, by describing the nightmare in his precise, compressed, lyrical, unsettling way, than it ever did to him. But fate was not on side. Undoubtedly, he had several novels left in him, and many of them would have been great or on the edge of being great. He was less of a failure and more of a tragedy, though both are produced by Los Angeles in large number, and both, as Fitzgerald and West attest, continue to hold our interest.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.