At the depths of his despair, convinced that he would be relegated to the dust bin of literary history, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the now-famous line “There are no second acts in American lives.” This was a personal notion of Fitzgerald’s, of course, a reflection of his self-pity and remorse over his inability to kick-start his once-glorious career back into gear.
Today, decades after Fitzgerald penned that phrase, it’s hard to think of a literary quote that’s become as shopworn. It’s maddening actually. A quick run of “There are no second acts in American lives” in Google News, for instance, unveils the following:
In the March 16 edition of the U.K. Guardian, Tim Rich begins his profile of soccer great David Beckham with the following:
After taking a Beckham-sized salary to decamp to Los Angeles to recreate the glories of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night for Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald remarked sadly that “there are no second acts in American lives”. Fitzgerald conclusively proved his point by drinking himself to death while producing unusable scripts that had no chance of ending up as a film.
Fitzgerald was relatively clean and sober at the time of his death on December 21, 1940. It was the second of two heart attacks that laid him low. But that’s another matter.
Moving on. On March 16, Noelle Crombie writes in the Sunday Oregonian:
And here’s the Seattle Times’ take on the spectacular fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. If you think Spitzer’s career is all washed up, think again. Bottom line: F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been all wrong when he famously said, “There are no second acts in American lives. Says one American history prof, “In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. It happens all the time.”
Well, I’m glad the Prof set the record straight. On the same day as the Guardian and Oregonian nods, Augusta Chronicle columnist Bill Kirby remarks:
F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for saying “There are no second acts in American lives,” implying that you get one chance to get it right.
Of course, that’s not true.
There are second chances all around us
I suppose if Fitzgerald had struck the words “American lives” from his reflection — again, a personal reflection — lazy journalists the world over would be forced to defend or deconstruct some other literary phrase that snuck into our cultural anthropology by accident.
Get some new material, people.