Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Comparing Writers and Actors)

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.” — American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Last Tycoon, edited by Edmund Wilson (1941)

My favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was born on this day in 1896 in St. Paul, MN. Though his prose is marked by the feathery style of poetry, his literary aspirations revolved, to one extent or another, around acting:

*In the short story “The Captured Shadow,” his youthful alter ego, Basil Duke Lee, casts a girl he has a crush on as the lead of a play he’s written;

*As a student at the now-defunct Cardinal Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, he loved the opportunity to take the train into New York to catch plays;

*In college, he wrote music and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club, the university's undergraduate musical comedy troupe;

*In 1923, hoping for a Broadway smash, he wrote (and invested money in) his only published play, The Vegetable, only to see it die after a single performance in Atlantic City;

*Though no record of it has ever been found, the actress Lois Moran claimed to have arranged a screen test for the author—which, predictably, did not work out well; and

*In his later years, as he struggled with creditors and alcoholism, Fitzgerald found much-needed temporary employment (and eventual heartbreak) as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Well, no matter. To his credit, Fitzgerald recognized the potential for motion pictures as a new art form, and even in its unfinished form The Last Tycoon may well still be the best novel ever written about Hollywood.

(For an interesting take on a surprising Fitzgeraldian influence on a recent film-- Damien Chazelle’s sprawling examination of the transition from the silent to sound eras, Babylon—see Kathy Fennessy’s December 2022 post from the “Seattle Film Blog.”)