Book ReviewWelcome to Book Chat, the first of a weekly column in which we’re going to discuss many things bookish: chat with authors, talk about publishing, romp back and forth through the centuries, and more often than not recommend a pick of the week. Fasten your seat belts because we’re going to go from history to histrionics, biography to biology, thrillers to classics to easy reads for that perfect day on the beach, and maybe even some philosophy for your serious side . . . fiction, non-fiction, old and new. This is a column for people who love all kinds of books.
But first you’re probably wondering, who is this guy Robert Westbrook? Let me introduce myself. I am a writer. It’s what I do for a living. I’ve published 11 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and I’m on the final draft of #12. I began writing professionally when I was 16 and my first book was published when I was 17, a youthful effort (clearly) which I’m happy to say is out of print. My mother was a writer before me. And today, besides writing my own books (I’m currently doing a mystery series that I’ll tell you about next week), I teach creative writing in New Mexico, where my wife Gail and I live.
Why do people write? For as many different reasons as there are writers, I suspect. In my case, I have often felt that I came to writing haunted, obliquely, by the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald, an author who has been for me both a guardian angel and a curse. The story is this:
On December 21, 1940, the author of THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT stood up abruptly from a green armchair in the living room of a small and somewhat shabby Hollywood apartment, grabbed hold of the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. He was 44 years old. The living room in which Scott died belonged to my mother, a Hollywood gossip columnist who went by the name of Sheilah Graham. They had spent the previous three and a half years of their lives together. An odd relationship: a great author down on his luck and a pretty young woman with big ambitions and very little formal education. Scott had come to Hollywood in 1937, at a time when he was $40,000 in debt to his agent, dismissed by the critics, forgotten by the public, and struggling to stay sober. His life had crashed. His wife, Zelda, was in a mental institution back east and Scott had desperate hopes of making money as a screenwriter.
My mother, for her part, was a Cockney girl who had grown up in an orphanage in England and was trying to pass herself off as an English aristocrat -- a kind of female Jay Gatsby, critics have sometimes remarked, whose past was the invention of her romantic imagination. Scott Fitzgerald saw through my mother rather easily and took it upon himself to become her teacher, setting up a program of learning which he liked to call “The F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One.” Scott and Sheilah’s love affair was rarely a smooth one. But it was passionate and, on my mother’s part, enduring. She never got over Scott’s death, literally at her feet. Five years later, when I was born, she decided that I would be a writer and carry on his tradition.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mother’s lap, opening the encyclopedia to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, and being told about this wonderful, talented man who died with $300 to his name, suffering from the neglect of his contemporaries and who had become such a legend after his death.
It wasn’t easy, I can attest, to try to live up to my mother’s expectations for me and walk in the shadow of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Next week: The second (and final) installment of “So who is Robert Westbrook?”
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