The Love of the Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up by F Scott Fitzgerald

Author:F Scott Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907429699
Publisher: Stacey Publishing Limited

CHAPTER 6

I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise, and when I came back didn’t go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August – if Stahr hadn’t called me up one day at home.

‘I want you to arrange something, Celia – I want to meet a Communist Party member.’

‘Which one?’ I asked, somewhat startled.

Any one.’

‘Haven’t you got plenty out there?’

‘I mean one of their organisers – from New York.’

The summer before I had been all politics – I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college, and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from The New Masses around somewhere.

‘Will you promise him immunity?’ I asked, joking.

‘Oh, yes,’ Stahr answered seriously. ‘I won’t hurt him. Get one that can talk – tell him to bring one of his books along.’

He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the ‘I am’ cult.

‘Do you want a blonde or a brunette?’

‘Oh, get a man,’ he said hastily.

Hearing Stahr’s voice cheered me up – since I had barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it – changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air.

‘I don’t think your father ought to know,’ he said. ‘Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?’

‘Oh, they don’t dress up any more,’ I said.

It was harder to arrange than I thought – Stahr’s negotiations with the Writers’ Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr’s ‘proposition’ was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off Doctor Caligari and Salvator Dali’s Le Chien Andalou, possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian films back in the twenties, and on Wylie White’s suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page ‘treatment’ of the Communist Manifesto.

But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books – and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt away – he cherished the parvenu’s passionate loyalty to an imaginary past.

The meeting took place in what I called the ‘processed leather room’ – it was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane’s years ago, and the term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator’s room: an angora wool carpet the colour of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable – you hardly dared walk

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