West of Sunset
Are there really “no second acts in American lives,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes for The Last Tycoon, his last, unfinished novel? This question is at the heart of Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset, a poignant biographical novel about the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, when he was struggling to pay off his debts and stay afloat by writing for the movies, come to terms with the fact that he and his mentally ill wife Zelda had no future together, and write his Hollywood novel, which he hoped would be a masterpiece on a par with The Great Gatsby.
O’Nan’s interest is not in the high-flying Jazz Age jet-setter of the 1920s, but rather the man stunned by how far his star had fallen since those heady times in Cannes and Saint-Tropez. We meet his Fitzgerald, post-Depression and post-crackup, in 1937, “holed up in the Smokies in a tired resort hotel” close to Zelda’s private clinic – an institution whose fees, along with their daughter Scottie’s boarding school tuition, he really can’t afford. At forty, he feels old, leading an unsettled, transient life that exacerbates the lingering effects of tuberculosis, an as-yet-undiagnosed heart condition, and a major drinking problem. He views himself as the victim of “a series of setbacks he ascribed to bad luck.”
The sympathetic portrait that emerges in O’Nan’s novel, written in a tight third person hewing closely to “Scott’s” point of view, is sobering if not always sober. Determined to redeem himself, the down-but-not-out author heads west, where he suffers the indignities of the studio system, powerlessly shunted from one film project to the next for a weekly paycheck and the hopes of an ever-elusive credit. He’s in good company: his co-workers at “Metro” include the tart-tongued Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, but that’s small consolation. “You can’t spin gold out of shit,” Parker snaps about the tribulations of doctoring others’ screenplays.
West of Sunset is filled with boldface names – including Humphrey Bogart, John O’Hara, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford – but these namedropped walk-ons are more effective as ready-made set décor than as characters. The one exception is Ernest Hemingway. Scott has mixed feelings about seeing his brash competitor again, having heard Hemingway’s opinion that he “had betrayed his gift.” Their uneasy relationship heightens Scott’s fears that he’s spent too much time writing for money. Hemingway, nursing a leg wound not from the Spanish front but from a botched operation for a blood clot, warns Fitzgerald of the studio politics surrounding his next assignment, Three Comrades, a movie about the ominous rise of Nazism in the years following World War I (which was to be Fitzgerald’s only screenplay credit, though his work on Gone With the Wind has since been acknowledged). Commenting patronizingly about the magazine stories Scott churns out in the early mornings before heading to the studio, Hemingway blusters, “I couldn’t write a Saturday Evening Post story to save my life.” O’Nan’s loyalties are clear in this sharp, unspoken rejoinder: “You’ve never had to, Scott thought.”
Scott’s new life in relentlessly hot and barely habitable “half beach, half desert” Los Angeles isn’t all work. He falls in love with a young Englishwoman, a blonde gossip columnist to whom he’s initially drawn because of her strong resemblance to Zelda. But Sheilah Graham isn’t the person he first takes her to be. Like Scott, Sheilah is self-made, hard-working, and ambitious. Unlike him, she’s disciplined, and has no tolerance for his drinking. Their relationship, which yo-yos between passion and estrangement, aggravates his guilt about Zelda, whom he refuses to abandon entirely, although he realizes that “For years now they’d pretended to a deathless bond, when long ago they’d stopped relying on each other for their daily happiness.” Yet Scott also knows that “Whatever happiness he might find, her misery would always be his.”
O’Nan’s narrative takes us deep inside Scott’s visits with Zelda, where he’s never sure what he’ll find – a stout catatonic zombie deadened by tranquilizers or a drawn, chip-toothed madwoman attacking her tennis instructor with a racquet. Scottie, who has few memories of a sane mother, has to be cajoled to be kind, adding to his stress. The holiday and anniversary trips – to Cuba, Miami, and Zelda’s mother’s home in Montgomery – end up bleeding together into a murky pool of hopelessness. Each is inevitably punctuated by a despairing, self-destructive bender, which ends with recriminations and drunken scenes with Sheilah.
Clearly, O’Nan has tapped into a situation rife with drama, a story of hopes rising repeatedly only to be dashed – Scott’s hopes for Zelda’s recovery and his literary success, and Sheilah’s hopes for his sobriety and steadiness. Unfortunately, the drama too often devolves into maudlin melodrama. Sheilah, after breaking off her engagement to a rich Marquis, gushes, “I hurt him, Scott. I hurt him – all because you couldn’t bear to be alone. I never wanted to love you.” Later, during one of their many “tender reconciliations,” Scott reflects, “He’d had a talent for happiness once, though he was young then, and lucky. But wasn’t he lucky now, again? When he was with her like this, he could forget the past.” This might play better on old Hollywood reels than on the page.
O’Nan’s fifteenth novel shares with his earlier work a concern for people who are hit hard by life but soldier on with grace under pressure. Over the years, O’Nan has movingly inhabited an array of diverse characters — including the stalwart widow in Emily, Alone, the couple battling bankruptcy with a wild gambit in The Odds, and restaurant workers facing the closing of their franchise in Last Night at the Lobster. Yet other than Scott, his characters in West of Sunset seem paper thin, stymied and overshadowed by their names and histories. The result is that West of Sunset never achieves full liftoff as fiction in its own right.
Even without a bibliography or author’s note citing his sources, it’s evident that O’Nan has done his research, poring over scores of letters between Scott and Zelda, Scottie, Sheilah, his agent Harold Ober, and his editor, Max Perkins, in addition to biographies such as Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (1949) and Sheilah Graham’s memoirs about their relationship, Beloved Infidel (1958) (which was made into a movie in 1959 starring Deborah Kerr) and her later, more critical reassessment, The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five Years Later (1976).
Readers may find it interesting to compare O’Nan’s unswervingly sympathetic portrait of the writer with harsher judgments, which blamed Fitzgerald for Zelda’s breakdown and institutionalization. With time, even Graham offered a more mixed picture: “If ever there was a Jekyll and Hyde character, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a man of two completely different personalities,” she wrote 35 years after his 1940 death. “One Scott was kind; the other cruel. One was completely mature; the other never grew up…There was Scott the considerate husband and Scott his wife’s oppressor.” Yet Graham remained his defender on one score, and O’Nan concurs: She insists that during the last 13 months of his life he was “a sober and serious man who was diligently at work on The Last Tycoon, which Edmund Wilson believed would have been his best novel.” In response to accusations that she “traded” on their relationship in writing Beloved Infidel, she claims she wrote it specifically to refute accounts that he was a “defeated alcoholic” when he died on December 21, 1940.
While West of Sunset falls short as a novel, it does serve as a terrific foothold for discussions of Fitzgerald’s later years and an excellent companion to The Last Tycoon, his scathing portrait of Hollywood culture and dashed dreams, posthumously published in 1941. Reading the two novels in tandem highlights just how little of Fitzgerald’s experience in California was lost on him, from his demoralizing work on screenplays to his despair over Zelda and his affair with Sheilah. A comparison of the earthquake scenes in the two books is especially intriguing. With the studios scrambling to right dislodged, flooded sets, Fitzgerald’s tycoon, Monroe Stahr, catches his first tantalizing glimpse of the Englishwoman he falls so hard for, who reminds him of his dead wife. The quake draws a more pensive response from O’Nan’s hero, who reflects trenchantly, “The plates of the continental shelf – the world itself – had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he’d done the same.”
As for second acts, Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack at 44, didn’t live long enough to see his literary star rise again – a star which has continued to shine brightly all these decades later. Zelda, too, never made it to a second act; she perished in 1948 in a fire at her asylum, at age 48. But that’s another story, which has spawned a separate sheaf of biographical novels about the other half of this beguiling couple, whose great American tragedy landed them both so cruelly on the other side of paradise.