The Disenchanted
by Budd Schulberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Budd SchulbergIntroduction: Anthony Burgess
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-05-27
ISBN: 1556110278
Number of pages: 408
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of The Disenchanted
Book Review: Their Own Season
Summary: 5 Stars
This book, published in 1950, is the best book on Scott Fitzgerald I've ever read, and I've read the most acclaimed autobiographies. Schulberg, who is still alive at 94, by the way, as of this writing, somehow manages, with consummate skill and pathos, through the lengthy, inebriated flashbacks herein, to capture the life of Scott and Zelda at their zenith in the 1920s as no other writer (of whom I'm aware) has:
"Even though he was quite sure of what was ahead, a vestigial, irremovable romanticism hurried him on. His mind's eye, incurably bifocal, could never stop searching for the fairy-tale maiden who made his young manhood such a time of bewitchment, when springtime was the only season and the days revolved on a lovers' spectrum of sunlight, twilight, candlelight and dawn." (p. 127 in my copy)
Somehow, in Schulberg's short, disastrous time he spent with Fitzgerald, he came to feel a profound sympathy for the artist that time (for a time) had forgotten, so much so that he is able to cast a light on the young couple (as he transmits in the delirious flashbacks) that it's difficult to believe he was only six in 1920. None of the other reviews here comment on the effect this had on Schulberg as a man and a writer. Before he met Fitzgerald, he was a left-wing, socialist ideologue who regarded Fitzgerald and his whole generation as "decadent." He began to rethink later, to the point of "naming names" to the House Unamerican Activities Committee and to writing the award-winning screenplay for "On the Waterfront."
What has this to do with his encounter with Fitzgerald? Near the end of the book is this passage: "Was it possible - and here heresy really struck deep - for an irresponsible individualist, hopelessly confused, to write a moving, maybe even profound, revelation of social breakdown?" The answer is, of course: "Yes." Until he met Fitzgerald, this would have been, well, "heresy."
I have a few quibbles with the book, such as the slurred idiom he lends to the drunken Fitzgerald. It kept reminding me of the older brother, Jamie, in O'Neil's play "Long Day's Journey Into Night." But these qualms are minor compared with overall impression of the irresponsible, besotted, dying Fitzgerald unwilling to let time have its way with him, for
"Lovers are their own season and their own time."
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