The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

To mangle a line from Donnie Brasco:
If Sonny (the) Red says you’re a rat then you’re a rat. (fink, stoolie, snitch)
That’s it with Budd Schulberg and the special pleading from On the Waterfront which he wrote won’t serve. Being a friendly witness for HUAC puts you in line for a liberal OBE (one behind the ear).

What of the novel?(published 1950) It’s good, an insider story that has its evasions and who better to tell it than Schulberg whose father was a bigshot producer who allowed him to attend writer conferences as a kid. As a student at Dartmouth he went with Scott Fitzgerald on a script doctoring escapade and the Manly Halliday and Ann Loeb represent the writer and his lover Sheila Graham. Much is made of her Semitic profile but strangely enough there are no other Jews in Hollywood. Possibly Budd was on the run from Sammy (What makes Sammy run? which was accused of being anti-Semitic. As it happen Sheila Graham was Jewish but here I am getting caught up in the parallels with real life. It’s just a novel and coming from someone who wrote for the screen it has at times a broad storyboard feel to it. Consciousness as a personal viewpoint oscillates between Manly Halliday and Shep Stearns a junior writer whose Love on Ice story is with Victor Milgrim for consideration. This Victor is one of the best things in the book and is probably based on someone that Schulberg knew well. He is a grotesque anglophile snob who is anxious to use Manly to give himself artistic credibility and thereby get in with the Webster/Dartmouth governing body. An honorary degree. Dr. Victor indeed!

When the call to see Milgrim finally comes Shep is introduced to Manly Halliday who has decided that his debts are so large that he must whore just a little @ 2000$ a week for 10 weeks. This is January 29th. 1939 because that very day Barcelona just fell to the Loyalists. (Answer the question Mr.Schulberg) A lot of money even now. The rough diamond of the script will be given the artistic polish by the great but ‘all washed up’ writer whom Shep had written about for a college thesis. Adhering to the ‘no second acts’ trope Shep thought him dead, devoured by bears or rats with pink eyes.

The horror and the hilarity of the disintegration of Manly Halliday started by bubbly on the plane going to New York is described in detail. No sleep, benzedrine, alcohol and the snow and ice of winter Webster coupled with the uncanny cunning of the drunkard hastens the story to a debacle which is well told. Fitzgerald had left much documentary evidence behind him and from it all a credible voice is transcribed by Schulberg’s large talent. Flashbacks to the Manly/Jere//Scott/Zelda deadly dyad cover their frenetic partying including one given to celebrate a screen dog star. Quite funny in a dispiriting sort of way.

Great book, sort of sidelined by the the still fashionable leftism of Hollywood and scribbling intelligentsia. It is credited with playing a part in the Fitzgerald revival.

The Great Gatsby and other legends

Of course I had to go on and read The Great Gatsby which I supplemented with The Crack-Up, The Complete Pat Hobby Stories and Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. Gatsby is fresh as the early morning dew before the sprinklers and their false rainbows are turned on. Effortlessness is such hard work and it requires a level of anxiety that does not stifle the rising image or the phrase that is like a clew that brings a writer out of the maze. Scott kept a notebook full of such glow-worm phrases. Like those lights they cheered by a momentary illumination that did not last long enough to be a distraction. There are very few of those 'look at me no hands' phrases in Gatsby, more in Tender and Pat Hobby was punched in the mouth by Hemingway. Some crack about Priapus Maximus.

What happened? Of AA he said:

AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group, I was never a joiner.

But like the man said, he was a member of Alcoholics Enormous before it was invented and it would only have helped him as a repository of stories. Was Pat Hobby rock bottom, an excellent prognosis? If it wasn't, it was a good foundation anyways. But the party was over and it was time to go. In the apartment of his inamorata, a proper title for a gossip columnist, as he was eating a Hershey bar and making notes in the latest Princeton Alumini Weekly the cloakèd figure with a scythe called. That last phrase would have been one that might have made it to his notebook, without the mower. Leave out the mower.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The beginning of the first edition of Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald is for me one of the great openings in literature. That he should have thought to change it and substitute historical time for dream time is an indication of how played out he was and addicted to the glamour of being loved like Dick Diver himself. He admits to the starlet Rosemary Hoyt that he is not practising as a doctor but may well go back to it someday. In reality though and it is a truth that Mrs. McKiscoe stumbles on during a 4th. of July party at their home on the Riviera, the Diver menage is a troisee with Nicole, Dick and the shadow Dr.Dick. What they have is a mobile nerve clinic and he is the pet doctor that the wealthy Warrens have bought. Isn't this what he was educated for says Baby Warren the older sister of Nicole at a later stage in the novel. Harsh as it sounds Baby has his number.

Baby looked calmly at her sister.
“We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.”
“Dick was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.”
Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:
“That’s what he was educated for.”

If the story had been told according to the revised version which Malcolm Cowley does his best to justify, it turns into a case history and we are left with an inevitable unfolding. The marriage has been founded on the basis of a transference between fragile Nicole and the strong handsome Doctor. Her healing must mean that the transference has been worked through and the relationship is at an end. When her father is reported to be dying and asking to see her, Dick does not want to tell her about this because of the supposed trauma this might bring on. That is a real fear but it also has the aspect of keeping her sealed like Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin. When in fact through the wife of his partner in the clinic Nicole finds out she rushes to see her father. However when she arrives he has left the hotel though genuinely moribund. There is a comedic ‘Freddie’ aspect to the father.

Nicole’s willingness to attempt reconciliation with her father is the beginning of her healing and the end of the Diver dispensation. There is a Hemingway figure in the form of Tommy Barban, a soldier of fortune, with an eighth of his skull missing but the rest of him intact ready to step in and bring Nicole and the children along with him into brusque sanity.

Rosemary Hoyt is the star of Daddy's Girl, Nicole was also Daddy's girl, an event which precipitated her onset of schizophrenia. The first section, the glamourous one is related from the perspective of Rosemary which is appropriate. We are told:

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

What is a prayer rug in the idiom of Hollywood but a fantastical suspension in a celluloid imaginal. This is palace of props which include the workroom of the Doctor where the papers which are to be the basis of a new work on psychiatry are gathered. Rosemary suspects that there is something not quite right with the Diver family. Why is Barban fighting a duel with McKiscoe? She worries her pretty little head which her mother keeps screwed on.

There are plenty of comic moments in the book. Baby Warren brings out the best in him:

“You put on your hat and come with me right away.”
The mention of his hat alarmed the Consul who began to clean his spectacles hurriedly and to ruffle his papers. This proved of no avail: the American Woman, aroused, stood over him; the clean-sweeping irrational temper that had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent, was too much for him. He rang for the vice-consul—Baby had won.