Books: The Bottom of the Glass

THE DISENCHANTED (388 pp.) — Budd Schulberg—Random House ($3.50).

“For goodness sake, Manley,” said Victor Milgrim in the sort of hearty executive bass, vibrant with command and ownership, in which big Hollywood producers are supposed to address their writers and prize great Danes. “I’m not asking you to go to Tibet.” All Producer Milgrim wanted to do was to persuade Manley Halliday, the famous novelist of the ’20s whom he had picked off the skids and put on his payroll, to fly East for a week. The idea, said Milgrim, was for Halliday to go sit under an elm at Webster College, the location for the musical he was assigned to script, and let some of the old collegiate sap rise in him.

Novelist Halliday knew the risk he would run. At 43, a diabetic and a dipso-gone-dry, he was childishly dependent on his mistress to keep him on the wagon and at work on the novel he had been trying to write for several years. Since he dared not run the lesser risk of offending Producer Milgrim, Manley Halliday did as he was told.

What happened to Halliday on his journey East is the burden of Budd Schulberg’s third and best novel, The Disenchanted. As in What Makes Sammy Run? and The Harder They Fall, Schulberg has borrowed the handy, ready-to-wear drape-shape of the thriller to dress up his story. He has filled that shoddy garment with a human being whose words and acts carry a raw, boozy reek of vitality. Manley Halliday is one of the few credible portraits of a writer in recent U.S. fiction.

The Real Toot. The fiction, moreover, is in good part fact. Novelist Schulberg* was one of the young devotees who in the early ’30s sat around Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, watched his creative fires exhaust themselves under the Hollywood pot, and remembered how those fires had lighted a generation on its way in such novels as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.

One weekend, Fitzgerald and Budd Schulberg went to Dartmouth to daub themselves with campus color for a musical Fitzgerald was scripting. Into his recollections of that toot with one of the most single-minded tooters of his time, Schulberg has stirred almost everything else he knew about Fitzgerald, and everything he felt about Fitzgerald’s self-neglected talents and the age they memorably expressed.

Author Schulberg estimates that “at least 50%, and maybe more, of the book is true.” Fitzgerald fans will therefore judge The Disenchanted as a piece of spiritual (if not entirely factual) biography, but readers without their special interest will take it for the careering, hell-in-a-hack excitement of its story.

The Fictional Binge. Manley Halliday took his first drink on the plane, and flew high all night over the U.S. and his mental blocks, but landed hard the next morning in New York and exhaustion. Benzedrine and booze revived him, and he started to work out his story line for Love on Ice with his young co-scripter, Shep Stearns; they had only one day left in which to dream up the whole plot.

That day and night, and the next, and the next, drink and sleeplessness and memories and the pressure of finishing the script dissolved Manley Halliday like a lump of sugar in the depths of an oldfashioned. The passages describing the long, lost weekend on the campus are among the most effective renderings of the binge mentality since some of Fitzgerald’s own. They follow Halliday down to the bottom of the glass and leave him there, dead among the dregs, with the tired, very tired self-epitaph: “A second chance. That’s the delusion. There never was but one.”

For The Disenchanted, Novelist Schulberg set the touch control on his typewriter at High Tragedy, but he bangs a machine so hard that the adjustment kept slipping to Tense Melodrama. The plain fact is that Fitzgerald’s story calls for a Fitzgerald to tell it. Yet Author Schulberg has thought hard, guessed shrewdly, and written the truth as he sees and feels it. His Manley Halliday may not be the whole Fitzgerald, but he is a figure to remember.

* Son of Hollywood Producer B. F. Schulberg, onetime production manager of Paramount Pictures.