The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Before I got around to writing up my thoughts on Pnin, I read, or read most of, this collection of writings by F. Scott Fitzgerald. After I read What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg’s story of a mediocre talent bull-dozing his way through Hollywood, I thought again of the lovely fragments of Fitzgerald’s Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at his death. I wondered if there were any other of his writings available from that last decade.

Like The Last Tycoon, The Crack-Up was put together following Fitzgerald’s death by his friend and editor, Edmund Wilson. “The Crack-Up” itself is an essay in three parts, published in the February, March, and April editions of Esquire magazine in 1936, and titled individually, “The Crack-Up”, “Pasting It Together”, and “Handle With Care”. It’s a confessional of Fitzgerald having lost the ability, or perhaps the nerve, to write. It’s melancholy. It’s honest. He vaguely recounts some bad news received from a doctor, “I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence” and then decides he needs to be away from people. (This may have been a re-occurence of a tuberculosis infection diagnosed while at Princeton.) He stays away two years, “trying resolutely not to think–instead I made lists–made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in…” And etc. And presumably lists like the two that show up elsewhere in this volume: a list of hotels, and a list of possessions.

“And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.” But during the two years, he has lost something. He diagnoses his problem as having burnt through the capital of resources that he accumulated earlier in his life but never replenished. He goes into a little more detail in part two, but that’s the thesis: that his early success spun off energy, but while he was spinning he wasn’t living new kinds of experiences or entertaining maturing thoughts that could keep him going. For Part Three you might expect Fitzgerald to have discovered a way out, but instead, he resigns himself further. Having realized that he’s become an empty shell he asks, “So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years?” “The Crack-Up” is a story of dark depression. It ends with Fitzgerald distrusting even his earlier happiness and concluding, “So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.”

The other pieces in the collection are autobiographical articles published in the 1930s. Taken together and in chronological order they create a glancing autobiography. He begins (1931) with some recollections of the preceding decade: “Echoes of the Jazz Age”. Admittedly it sounds rather exciting. Then memories of his entrance into New York, following his mid-West youth and Princeton years: “My Lost City” (1932). In that piece, he references one of the famous lines people know from Fitzgerald, “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.” He means the bust of October, 1929.

“Ring” from 1933, is a meditation on the diminishing legacy of Ring Lardner, an early writing hero who died that year. Fitzgerald faults his friend with the same tragedy that he assigns to himself three years later: that Lardner’s early success tied to his love of youthful pleasures (Baseball, in Lardner’s case, Jazz-age excesses for Fitzgerald), stunted Lardner’s ability to encounter new experiences. “However deep Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance’s diamond.” And later, of his writing style, “He kept on recording but he no longer projected.”

“Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number–” is bylined “By F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald”. It’s a sort of memoir in verse, dated “May-June 1934”, formed from a list of hotels and experiences in those hotels from throughout their lives. It begins, “We are married” and then moves year by year through the decade of the 20s up through 1933. Each hotel memory gets a sentence or two, or three. It’s really gorgeous writing, by the way. “Auction – Model 1934” from the following month is another list. This one consists of the Fitzgerald’s possessions and memories attached as they move to a new home and try to discard items from out of storage. “Sleeping and Waking” from December, 1934 is an account of insomnia brought on at first by a mosquito and then prolonged by his two persistent life regrets of not playing football in college and not serving overseas in the war. “Waste and horror–what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable.” This leads well to “The Crack-Up” followed by a final piece called, “Early Success” from 1937, which does tell that happy tale, but regretfully. “The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power–at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will power and fate have each contributed…”

The rest of the book is a reproduction of selections from Fitzgerald’s notebooks. I skimmed these, finding little of interest. And a final selection includes letters from and to Fitzgerald. I skimmed these also. The letter from Gertrude Stein following the publication of The Great Gatsby sounds exactly like Gertrude Stein. “Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book.” I didn’t realize she wrote like that even when it wasn’t for publication!

I was frustrated in my goal of reading more about Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood, where he lived from 1937 until his death in 1940. There’s nothing here about that. None of his screenwriting work made it on to film, as far as I’m aware. His physical and mental health were pretty much gone by the time, although The Last Tycoon, what we have of it, evidences a great writer still at the top of his powers.