The Typist's Tale is a feature story on The Los Angeles Times website today about Frances Kroll Ring, the last person to work with F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last months of his life as he struggled to write one last novel, The Last Tycoon.
Ring, who is now 92, had a distinguished career of her own as the long-time editor of Westways magazine.
But in 1939 as a 22-year-old, who had just arrived in Los Angeles from New York, she got a temp job as typist for the famous novelist.
Fitzgerald, while only in his early 40s, was already seriously ill with the disease that would kill him.
When Ring met him, he was recovering from a booze cruise to Cuba with his wife Zelda, who after the trip had to be institutionalized in what in those days was called an asylum.
Ring recalls that Fitzgerald conducted the job interview from bed in his Encino, California home. He was too weak and perhaps too drunk to get up.
At one point during that interview, he asked her to open a bureau drawer where she expected to find folded shirts. Instead, she found neatly stacked bottles of gin.
She surmised that this was a test. Fitzgerald wanted her to know what she was getting into and the nature of the demons he was struggling against.
Fitzgerald never finished the novel Ring typed for him. He died of a heart attack in December 1940. He was 44.
Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald's last completed novel, published in 1933,is an autobiographical account of the author's descent into the bottle.
Dick Diver, the Fitzgerald character, is a famous psychiatrist who is part owner of a clinic that treats wealthy mental patients including those who a century ago were diagnosed as dipsomaniacs.
Set in Europe in the 1920s, the story begins with Dick as the hero of French beach parties attended by the rich and famous. The wine flows like wine usually does at such events and it all seems like so much summer fun in the sun.
But as the story progresses so does Dick's drinking and its characteristic self-destructiveness.
In Italy, Dick gets drunk and causes a scene. Taken to a police station, he is about to be released more or less with a warning. But walking out the door, he insists on decking a police officer, which leads to his being severely beaten and jailed.
This is said to be based on an incident from Fitzgerald's own misadventures.
Throughout the book there are keen insights into the pitfalls of the drinking life although the author was powerless to apply them to his real life.
Fitzgerald appears to have known exactly what he was doing wrong but was unable to learn from the lessons he was teaching.
This is the irony of Dr. Dick Diver.
Late in the novel, the psychiatrist's drinking has reached the point where his patients and their families are complaining to Franz, the doctor who is his partner in the clinic practice.
The confrontation between Dick and Franz is a blending of the drunk's denial that anything is wrong and a kindly and almost timid psychiatrist's attempt to get at the truth without stating the obvious.
Despite incidents including the drunken brawl at the police station, Dick tells Franz: "You must know I'm the last man to abuse liquor."
Franz replies: "Dick, I know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come--Dick, I must say frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it was not the moment to have one."
This classic understatement begins a conversation that ends with Franz buying out Dick's share of the clinic, and sending him packing.
It is followed by the unraveling of Dick's marriage, and his once famously promising medical career.
Unlike popular fiction and biographies of today, Tender Is the Night does not end with an uplifting recovery.
For all his obvious flaws, Fitzgerald was too honest to work up a happy ending for himself.
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