posted on 11 Dec 2022

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg might be a new name to a lot of people but if you’re an aficionado of cinema history you’ll surely know him as the writer of ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Harder They Come’ and ‘A Face in the Crowd’. But Schulberg was also a considerable novelist and many critics would nominate his 1950 publication, The Disenchanted, as his most accomplished and affecting piece of work.

In 1939 Schulberg was making his way as a young 25 year-old screen writer and had written a pretty hopeless first draft of a project based on events at the Dartmouth College Winter Carnival. The studio wanted to bring in someone who could sprinkle a bit of magic on the writing and lend a weighty name to the film credits and came up with Scott Fitzgerald, now a middle-aged fading star of the Jazz Age. A decade before, Fitzgerald had produced The Great Gatsby and was the undisputed king of the US literary scene but now, in his mid-forties, Fitzgerald’s life was in a doom-loop of drink and depression. Schulberg was, at first dazzled by meeting one of heroes, only to be disillusioned by the experience and deeply saddened by Fitzgerald’s death barely twelve months later.

This real life collaboration lies at the heart of Schulberg’s novel but it is not just a fictionalised version of that specific experience: the book tries to explore the nature of fame, the author as hero and the gap between reputation, public opinion and reality.

Shep Stearns is an aspiring screen writer who is pitching his script for a light and frothy movie called ‘Love On Ice’ to studio movie mogul Victor Milgrim and he gets the news he’s been waiting for: he’s going to get a chance to work up the idea but only if he works with the legendary novelist, Manley Halliday. Shep is absolutely delighted and star-struck because Halliday is one of his literary heroes – although the great man’s reputation hasn’t really survived the transition from the Twenties Jazz Age to the Thirties Modernism and now, only in his mid-forties he looks and sounds like a worn-out old man.

Shep also discovers that Halliday has no real knowledge or feel for the movie-writing business and Milgrim only wants him involved for his name. Halliday just needs the money. He’s also an alcoholic and has been painfully on the wagon for seven months, guided by his live-in lover/carer, Ann but is always trembling on the edge of breakdown. Increasingly he can only live in his imagination, remembering his past glory days and the explosive relationship with his first wife, Jere, who, now with her own mental health issues, lives in New York.

Milgim sets the two writers some laughably impossible deadlines and randomly wants to take Halliday to events to show him off like a trophy. As Shep and Halliday get to know each other, Shep begins to see him as a flawed human being rather than as a literary icon. Then the two are sent on a trip to the college that is meant to be the setting for this still non-existent script and Halliday falls cataclysmically off the wagon and begins a spiral of decline that sees him make a disastrous visit to see his first wife and a hopeless effort to impress the new generation of students at the college where he’s invited to speak.

Schulberg takes us deep into Halliday’s psyche and it’s quite a gruelling journey but equally important is Shep’s personal journey of understanding. Both Halliday and Shep are disillusioned in their own ways but it’s Shep’s disillusionment that is most telling because he has to come to terms with how his previous hero-worship has just been confounded but fundamentally challenged.

The autobiographical nature of the book and the obvious parallels between Halliday/ Fitgerald and Stearns/Schulberg add an extra dimension of interest but the fidelity of that story really isn’t important to the success of the book. It’s a finely written, dense novel that stands in its own right as an artistic achievement and certainly deserves a wider audience than it has.

A paperback version of the book was reprinted by Allison & Busby in 1983 and copies can be easily found on the second-hand market for well under £10.

 

Terry Potter

December 2022