A Washington Post editorial on a prospective Senate run by George Allen concludes like this:
American history and politics have a rich tradition of second acts; Mr. Allen is no less plausible a candidate than others who have risen from defeat. Virginians will be justified in hoping for a candidacy from Mr. Allen that offers substance and serious policy discussion.
I’m not much interested in the subject matter but I am interested in the phrase. I think the WP’s editorial writers are hearkening back to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation from The Last Tycoon: “There are no second acts in American lives”. I think that this usage is fatuous, completely misunderstands what Fitzgerald was saying, and turns it into something trivial and, in fact, wrong.
America is a country built on second chances. Many of the people who came here (my ancestors included) had failed in some significant sense in the Old Country. America gave them a second chance. Americans believe in second chances—for most of us a second chance is our only hope. When Winston Churchill said “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”, a viewpoint learned, presumably, at his American mother’s knee, he was expressing a characteristically American viewpoint. It was stated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail”), taught to generations of schoolchildren from Palmer’s Teacher’s Manual (“Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try again. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”, quoting Edward Hickson), and urged by Vince Lombardi (“It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up again”).
I think that Fitzgerald was saying something quite different. Think of a Shakespearean play. In the first act, the main characters are introduced, the second act develops the characters and the conflict, in the third act there is a climax, in the fourth a denouement, and in the fifth a conclusion. BTW, many of the most famous events and phrases are from the second acts of Shakespeare’s plays: they are development, not climax. Think of that the next time you watch Macbeth.
In my view what Fitzgerald was saying was that American lives have no development. They are continuous second chances. Where Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing”, Americans have learned nothing and remember nothing. That’s very useful in a place where there’s always a second chance. We are the land of perpetual first acts.
