Crack-Up
Originally published in three parts spanning February, March, and April of 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack Up is so characteristically un-Fitzgerald and deserves its own special place, here. It reads almost like a blog, but for all its soul-searching, soul-cleaning, and soul-breaking sentences it carries within it the inner heartbeat of a cracked man and surprisingly, it is this strange fullness of life within the chipped facade that carries the stories to the heights reached by his other works. Fitzgerald writes labyrinthine sentences that coil outward and inward at the same time, piled with adjectives and adverbs, and dusted with a sugar of sense that sets them apart from, say, Henry James. Discursive writings of fictioneers has always held a poignant and fond place in my heart of hearts, and I think what I appreciate the most about these is their honesty. More honest than fictionalizing the dissolving marriage between Zelda, more honest than the polishing of Hollywood scripts, and more honest than his having fallen down a set of stairs from too much gin. When setting out to write the short story A Diamond as big as The Ritz, Fitzgerald explained that he had needed an outlet for his escalating wants, his fiendish fulfillment of an all-too excessive wish. This never occurred to me until now, but perhaps this is why Fitzgerald and Hemingway are often paired up in history, canons, and elsewhere --- they were polar opposites. On the one hand we have Fitz: writing to fill a void, writing in long and trilling sentences about what he wants. On the other we have Hem: writing to capture the pureness of a real moment, writing in shorter but precise sentences about what he has. Wanting and Having, perhaps the middlespace between these two bookends is, sadly, a Crack-Up. When a person mines their depths, writes voluminously about what they want and wish for the only end is a fall, a bad one, and what is left after they've licked the wounds? The space between these two men is huge, but what is so baffling is that their ends were so similar. Hem chasing reality, Fitz chasing dreams, both driven to drink and both crying from the eyes.
Below are passages from Fitzgerald's first part of The Crack Up, as it appeared in the original issue of Esquire from 1936.
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work –the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within –that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick –the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but it is realized suddenly indeed.
For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center –things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”
-And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.
Now a man can crack in many ways –can crack in the head- in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others! or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled –having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months- it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way –too much anger and too many tears.
Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.
Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone about my affairs in the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in the books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.
But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.
It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping of dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think –instead I made lists- made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrunk, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.
-And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.
-And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.
That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time.” Suffice it to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? –when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.
Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men –men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katherine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’ face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.
All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking-up.
It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death –even this time when she was cast in the usually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:
“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen –“ she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks – really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you –suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack is in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes –your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked –it’s the Grand Canyon.”
I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it –but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could have never got it –not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there –and quote to myself after I left her door:
“Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” Matthew 5-13.
