“There are no second acts in American lives.”
One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most-quoted and most-debated lines appeared in two works, first in the 1932 essay, “My Lost City,” about the New York of the Jazz Age, then, a decade later, in the notes to what would become “The Last Tycoon,” where the line seemed to mean the opposite of what the author intended in the earlier piece.
You’ve likely heard it used in that first context, meaning, more or less, “There are no second chances.” If you miss the brass ring on your first go ‘round, tough luck. “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on, “ said Khayyám, an undeniable truth consonant with the mood of Fitzgerald’s 1932 remembrance.
But is that what he meant nine years later, in his own second or third act in Hollywood, penning the notes for what others would complete as his last, great drama?
In strict, three-act narrative structure, with which Fitzgerald was intimately familiar in his days as Shiela Graham’s “Beloved Infidel,” the second act is not a second chance, a reset. Whether you see the round journey of the hero in its most rudimentary form or in the strict, stylized form demanded by Hollywood, part two of the hero story is no happily ever after.
Act II is when the shit gets real.
Job on the dunghill. George Bailey friendless in the snow on the bridge. Gilgamesh fresh from his bath finding the flower of eternal life’s been stolen. Act II’s a bitch. All that can be hoped is that the hero can learn from what is happening, and somehow emerge, as Coleridge put it, “a sadder and a wiser man.”
America, I’m afraid, is about to learn that there are indeed second acts.
Far from being over, our dance with the novel coronavirus of 2019 has just entered serious 1918 territory. We are facing re-infections with a far more communicable strain of the virus, which also appears to have more dire health consequences in groups that were relatively untouched by earlier surges.
The anecdotal evening news segments we’re starting to see, starring earnest faces in oxygen masks saying lines like, “This is serious” and “I wish I’d known,” will soon be a flood of televised regret. Pleas of “Don’t make the mistake I made” will be our summer catch phrases.
My countrymen will likely soon learn what Fitzgerald himself began to see before he was felled by that Butterfinger bar: There really are second acts in American lives.
There are not, sadly, second lives.