Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“ THE DISENCHANTED” by Budd Schulberg (first published in 1950)
Budd Schulberg? Now there’s a name not to conjure with. If you’re fifty or younger, you’ve probably never heard of him, but in the 1940s and 1950s he was a major literary and cultural figure in the U.S.A.; and much to my surprise, when I’d read his novel The Disenchanted, I discovered that his work still has a large band of admirers in America. Budd Schulberg (1914-2009) - full name Seymour Wilson Schulberg – was more-or-less born in Hollywood. His father B.P. Schulberg was a producer of films working mainly in the Paramount studio. Budd worked his way in writing stories and scenarios for studios before he launched out into writing novels. He knew Hollywood inside-out. Probably his best-known novel is still What Makes Sammy Run?, a scathing account of a pushy young Hollywood exec trying to get ahead in the Dream Factory. Because this obnoxious character was Jewish, some critics accused Budd Schulberg, who was Jewish, of being a self-loathing Jew. But this accusation didn’t amount to much. For moviegoers, in the 1950s Budd Schulberg was best known for writing the screenplay of the much admired film On the Waterfront. But in 1950, his novel The Disenchanted was published. Some pundits call it Schulberg’s masterpiece. The late Anthony Burgess included it in his list of the 99 Best Novels Written in the 20th Century.
A quick synopsis : In the late 1930s, the Hollywood studio boss Victor Milgrim assigns his callow young minion Stearns – usually nicknamed “Shep” – to look after the author Manley Halliday and supervise him as he writes the synopsis for a romantic commercial movie called Love on Ice. Manley is demeaned by having to write such rubbish, but he desperately needs the money. In the 1920s he was a greatly celebrated author, the man of the Jazz Age, eagerly read and paid huge fees for his short-stories and novels. But now he is largely a wash-out and an alcoholic who has created only one novel on the early 1930s. His mistress Ann Loeb has almost coaxed him out of drinking… but not quite. Shep finds it almost impossible to get Halliday writing the synopsis because Halliday keeps drifting off into fugues about how things used to be and he keeps asking for a drink. Victor Milgrim keeps asking how the scenario is getting on and he is repeatedly fobbed off. Milgrim orders Shep to take Halliday over from California to the East Coast, to scout out locations that would be right for the snow-laden film Love on Ice. Milgrim has another agenda. Like so many studio bosses, he wants to gain cultural prestige by being seen as a truly creative artist. He hopes that he can get an honorary doctorate from the Ivy League university that was Manley Halliday’s alma mater, and he plans to present Halliday as his greatest inspiration. But things go badly wrong. Flying to the East Coast, Halliday begins to take up very heavy drinking again. Shep can’t control him. The boozing becomes titanic. Halliday often drinks himself into a stupor. Halliday drunkenly picks fights with waiters and bar-tenders. Halliday gratuitously insults important people. And yet, amazingly and through his alcoholic mist, Halliday can still whip up plausible scenarios from thin air. Once or twice, Halliday (and Shep) present scenarios ad lib that almost enchant Milgrim. But it ends in disaster. Drunk, staggering, dishevelled, unshaven and barely coherent, Halliday appears before the academics and students of the university and is immediately a laughing stock. Worse, in the winter carnival related to the university, Halliday makes a public fool of himself as he flops about in the snow. Milgrim fires Halliday and Shep and sends them both packing. Halliday has spent so much time in snow and ice that his feet become gangrenous and his persistent alcoholism is leading him to total physical collapse. As he lies in hospital, he summons Jere, the wife he had divorced but whom he still thinks of as his romantic ideal… but when she arrives he can’t recognise her. She is not the glamourous young woman he once knew. Then he dies. But after Halliday’s death, Shep reads three chapters of a novel that Halliday hadn’t finished and realises that it could have become Halliday’s masterpiece.
Now what have we got here? A famous American author who was the best-selling idol of the early 1920s but who, by the 1930s, was almost a has-been. A man who embraced the Jazz Age and then discovered those partying days were over. An author who, to make some money, unwillingly took up writing scenarios and dialogue in Hollywood. A man who left behind an unfinished novel which some people thought could have become a masterpiece. An alcoholic who died before his time. Who could this possibly be? The battered old Penguin copy of The Disenchanted that I have on my shelf says coyly in the blurb “Many people have seen in this the story of the final years of one of America’s finest novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Frankly, that is putting it mildly. The Disenchanted is saturated with Fitzgerald, and Budd Schulberg was the man to write it as he had known Fitzgerald personally. In 1939, the year before Fitzgerald died, the studio Schulberg worked for directed him to collaborate with Fitzgerald on a frivolous screenplay called Winter Carnival (obviously the novel’s Love on Ice). It was a catastrophe. It is easy to pick out which characters were based on which real people, but Schulberg was careful not to write until Fitzgerald was dead (in 1940) and Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was dead (in 1948). Schulberg wrote in 1949-50. Of course Schulberg changes some details to cover himself. Halliday’s mistress in his last years Ann Loeb is obviously Fitzgerald’s mistress in his last years the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham who, to her credit, did actually try to wean Fitzgerald off the drink, although Schulberg makes this character more of an intellectual than Sheilah Graham ever was. The wife Halliday divorced, Jere, is clearly Zelda, although Fitzgerald and Zelda never divorced. The Fitzgeralds had a little girl they called “Scotty”. Schulberg gives Halliday and Jere a boy called Douglas. Schulberg knew that Zelda aspired to excel in the arts. She tried, without success, to be a ballerina, although she did write one palatable novel. Schulberg makes Jere trying to excel by translating French poetry, especially Rimbaud. And of course he does have Jere / Zelda psychologically damaged. As for the people who ran Hollywood, they could be any number of real people, and there are some very minor characters drawn from reality. There are suggestions of the casual affairs Fitzgerald and Zelda (Halliday and Jere) had, and Schulberg refers to a silent-movie star called Mona Moray who had an affair with Halliday. (Fitzgerald had an affair with a silent film star called Lois Moran – which is a bit on the nose).
But to see The Disenchanted only in terms of Hollywood gossip would be to grossly underrate what Schulberg is up to. His novel is mainly concerned not with how Hollywood works, but how society changes and the decades gather their own styles. What was fashionable, stylish and modern quickly becomes outdated, passe and slightly ridiculous. Schulberg interrupts his sequential narrative a number of times with what he calls “Old Business” – that is, reveries and memories in Halliday’s mind as he recalls his past, sometimes speaking out loud to Shep – meeting Jere in Paris after the [First World] War had finished; the hedonistic, heavy-drinking lives they lived in the early 1920s; their failed attempts to clean themselves up by going to Mexico in search of sobriety; their break up and Jere’s declining mental health. Looking back, most of Halliday’s memories become negatives.
In Chapter 9 Schulberg has Halliday looking back on the 1920s “They seemed always to be having so much fun. Yet looking back it was the casualties, the tragedies that stuck up in his mind like telephone poles stretching across the desolate landscape of the past; once the good times had run glistening and taut and wire-fine from pole to pole, but ill winds and the ravages of time had torn them down. Now only the poles remained, giant uncrossed crosses marking the route he had taken.”
In the third “Old Business” section, Halliday remembers his domestic life with Jere in the 1920s thus : “It was all moonlight and champagne at first, like being on a long date, or like those slick stories of gay crossings and Riviera nights. I wrote some of them myself, God help me. When we were good we were very very peaches-and-creamy head-in-the-clouds castle-in-the-sky good the way our public believed us and wanted us to be. And when we were bad we were horrid to each other, though that was our secret for a long time. Whenever we were out we were those amusing Hallidays; they’re so charming, so witty, so perfect together, that they adore each other like a couple of kids, and after all their Success – we must ask them for dinner, for the week-end, for the winter…”
In the fifth “Old Business”, Halliday remembers how it all soured in the late 1920s “Alcohol had always loosened his wits and his sense of festival, but now it only dragged him down into despondency and evil temper. For the first time in his life he was thrown out of a speak[easy] for insulting a guest; another time when he started a fight he would have been booked for disorderly conduct if [a friend] hadn’t come to his rescue and pulled some strings.”
Repeatedly, Halliday sees his past as time lost in trivia. And in the 1930s, where most of the novel is set, the world is so different from the 1920s, with the Depression having hit and then with another major war looming. The age of flappers, parties, booze and general selfish hedonism is a bad memory. Early in the novel, twenty-something Shep frets over the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, while forty-ish Halliday is still dealing with the past. Shep has a very ambiguous attitude towards the esteemed writers of the 1920s, thinking in Chapter 5 “What a jolly, irresponsible year 1925 must have been, with stocks going up, gin going down, and nothing more serious to worry about than this morning’s hangover. And yet, as Halliday had pointed out, it wasn’t all glitter, jitter, and right-off -the boat. There was that serious work, damned hard work, and damned good work; strange how the decade that had made a virtue of irresponsibility, produced more responsible artists than an American decade before and since. The big writers had been producing in those days, with books appearing regularly in healthy flow. There was nothing like it now.” [Then Shep lists T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos… and Halliday – but of course not Fitzgerald]. A “decade that had made a virtue of irresponsibility” is Shep’s real verdict on Halliday / Fitzgerald’s era.
And yet there is – for me at any rate – a very good coda. In Chapter 15, Shep reads Halliday’s unfinished novel: “He hurried on through the second chapter into the third, amazed by the sharpness of the imagery, the fresh impact of the words. But the best Halliday had always been that. This had something more, Shep was beginning to see. A maturity, a wisdom about people and the fabric of their lives. A capacity not merely for feeling pain but for interpreting pain. Even the best of old Halliday had been marred at times by a certain callowness, a naivete that seemed to confuse misbehaviour with sophistication, a blurring of perspective. But this was the work of a sure hand, with the insight of the rare author who can appraise what he loves and love what he condemns.”
Yes! Precisely! If you have read on this blog my The Definitive Judgment on F. Scott Fitzgerald, you would have noted that one of the things I dislike about Fitzgerald’s work is his callow, romantic naivete, especially with regard to women, and the pseudo-sophistication of his humour. So does Budd Schulberg - and he gently debunks the yearning for the past that fills so many of Fitzgerald’s tales, especially in the form of unattainable young women. By having Shep read Halliday’s unfinished novel, Schulberg is obviously referring to Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. Halliday was at last maturing, just as Fitzgerald was… but he died without finishing what could have been his best novel.
Two last footnotes: It is extraordinary to see in this novel that in the 1930s, the 1920s are seen as ancient history, even if they are only a few years past. Public attitudes really are fickle.
And that title The Disenchanted
– doesn’t it refer not only to Halliday and the people he lets down, but also
us having our ideas of the exciting “Roaring” Twenties destroyed?
Footnote: I apologise for giving you yet another book about F. Scott Fitzgerald after I had promised not to write another piece about him, but i couldn't pass over this novel.
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