Disintegrating Genius

...Defoe is original in his choice of details and minute particulars, but Miss Graham slips too easily into the banal, the expected and the conventional—in one word, emptiness...

...We had some personal trouble in which I behaved very very badly...

...It is interesting, to be sure, for her to tell us how methodically Fitzgerald, at the beginning of his career, had studied a hundred Saturday Evening Post stories to help him become a popular writer, or how he applied himself with the same methodical regularity and humility to learning the technique of making motion pictures...

...He evidently studied what most intellectuals should have thought it beneath them to study...

...Mrs...

...It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime...

...With this book she attempts to turn it into a stranglehold...

...Miss Graham succeeds in proving up to die hilt that Fitzgerald drunk was a cruel and dangerous brute, who was not above wiring her employer in New York, the North American Newspaper Alliance: "Sheilah Graham today banned by every studio stop she is ruining NANA in Hollywood stop suggest you send her back to England where she belongs stop Do you know her real name is Lily Sheil...

...That, too, achieved an interest by accident rather than intention...

...When he had sobered up he followed that outburst with the following retraction: "I sent you that wire with a temperature of 102 degrees and a good deal of liquor on board...

...She proves once more, as Stanislaus Joyce did in his study of his brother James, that liquor is no respecter of persons...

...Miss Graham's book does not have quite the same importance in this respect, since she did not know Fitzgerald during so long or so creatively memorable a period...

...When she didn't remind me of Moll Flanders, she reminded me of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, Somerset Maugham's Mildred in Of Human Bondage, and finally Marcel Proust's Odette...

...All for the lack of that small but indispensable something that should make the material not merely interesting but beautiful or significant...

...Still, the exact boundary line between the fields of ethics and aesthetics is hard to draw, and probably always will be...

...She undoubtedly suffered much from this man who was not himself much of the time, but since according to her own testimony she herself inaugurated the affair by inviting him first into her apartment and then sustained the relationship after the most serious warnings (including a fantastic episode in which he threatened to kill her and she had to call in the police to help extricate her from her predicament), the comment of the judicious reader may be after the fashion of Moliere: "Tu l'as voulu, Sheilah Graham...

...She is handicapped, however, by the fact that she knew Fitzgerald only in the years of both his physical and literary decline...

...The book reminded me, too, of a book published some years ago that was similarly motivated—My Life With Dreiser by his second wife, Helen...

...There is no doubt that Sheilah Graham is a character...

...Where she does add something fresh to our knowledge, for example when she says that not only Ernest Hemingway disapproved of The Crack-Up when it originally appeared in Esquire (that we had known) but Edmund Wilson as well, we are not sure if the supposed fact is not a figment of a faulty memory...

...The failure made me think of an observation in Boris Pasternak's Dr...

...But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art...

...The difference is that I believe everything Defoe says, though I know that it is all invented, and very little that Miss Graham says, though I suppose that it is all "true...

...Please consider die telegram the mumblings of a man who was far from being himself...

...If Byron's poems pale somewhat for us with the passing of time, it is hard to believe that the reason must be sought in such accusations of incest and sadism as those made against him by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her Lady Byron Vindicated...

...author, "The Crippled Giant" IN The Far Side of Paradise, Arthur Mizener mysteriously spoke of "someone in Hollywood" with whom Scott Fitzgerald during his last years was "really in love for the first time since . . . Zelda...

...Odette most of all perhaps...

...Now Miss Graham, in collaboration with Gerold Frank (who had worked on similar books earlier with Diana Barrymore and Lillian Roth), tells the story with fulsome detail in her own autobiography...

...There were probably legal or moral reasons for the caution of this statement but it was fairly common knowledge in the literary world for a long time that the person referred to so tantalizingly was the columnist Sheilah Graham...

...There is equally little doubt that she is no artist...

...She makes Fitzgerald identify Bossuet as a preacher of the 18th century, instead of the 17th—not that the error was impossible to the whimsicallyschooled Fitzgerald, who never learned to spell accurately to the end of his life, but Miss Graham does not inspire me with confidence that it was her mentor and not she who erred...

...Zhivago: "A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters...

...But these works must, in the final analysis, stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the personal character, difficulties or deficiency of their author...

...About The Last Tycoon I am inclined to agree with the low estimate by William Troy rather than with the high one made by such men as Edmund Wilson, Stephen Vincent Benet and John Dos Passos...

...Dreiser's book, along with much worthless gravel, had contained some information useful to the literary scholar—for example, her chapter on the genesis and development of An American Tragedy...

...Beloved Infidel contains a memoir about a superior Swann (a Swann, that is, who was more than a dilettante) by an inferior Odette...

...The things that ring truest in these pages are the circumstantial descriptions of the numerous deadly drunken jogs that distinguished the last phase of Fitzgerald's life...

...It is hard to remember, at times, that the man described here is the same one who produced Gatsby, The Rich Boy, The Crack-Up and some other most remarkable works...

...As the acknowledged model for the heroine of The Last Tycoon, Kathleen, Miss Graham has already had a slippery toehold upon literary history...

...The earlier part of the story, her rise from an orphan asylum and the lowest dregs of English society to the "heights" of the London comedy stage, the international set and success as a journalist, makes for the kind of picaresque tale which Daniel Defoe gives us in Moll Flanders...

...Miss Graham's memoir adds something to the depressing picture of the disintegrating genius, familiar to us from that melodrama...

...Beloved Infidel is divided evenly between the years with Fitzgerald and the rest of Sheilah Graham's life...

...The period includes the episode recorded twice over by Budd Schulberg in The Disenchanted, the earlier novel and the current play...

...Wilson, of course, edited The Crack-Up as well as other pieces of Fitzgerald in book-form after the latter's death, so that he must have changed his mind about its value ( which would be interesting, if his initial opinion could be verified by other evidence...

...He was a very tired man in every way during those last four years in Hollywood...

...There is no reason to worry about Sheilah in connection with the studios...

...But for those already familiar with things in print by Fitzgerald and about him, this is not particularly new or striking...

...By comparison, Beloved Infidel (due to the professional touch of Gerold Frank) is a smoother performance than the Dreiser item, which, in keeping with the tradition of its subject I suppose, was an awkward kind of do-it-yourself job...

...What a wealth of material is wasted here...