When F. Scott Fitzgerald cracked up

A photograph and a few words ...

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 realise 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 is realised suddenly indeed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Crack-Up'

One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is 'Backlisted'. Sponsored by the crowd-funding publisher 'Unbound', it features a guest (usually a writer) who chooses a book they love and that they feel deserves a broader audience. As you'd expect, the books chosen are an eclectic mix. Some examples are Erskine Childers', 'Riddle of the Sands', Colin MacInnes', 'Absolute Beginners', 'Cocaine Nights' by J G Ballard and 'Memento More' by Muriel Spark. I recently listened to an episode featuring 'The Crack-Up,' a book by a favourite writer of mine, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In truth, the publication of the book discussed in the podcast was some five years after Fitzgerald's death. However, Fitzgerald was very much alive on the publication of the bulk of the book's content in 1936 as a series of three essays he wrote for Esquire magazine. Those essays delve into Fitzgerald's profound disillusionment, self-doubt, and anxieties that plagued him as he struggled with his writing. The essays offer a powerful and unsettling glimpse into the abyss of a fractured psyche. However, their publication was much to the dismay of the literary world of the time. Today, society encourages you to share publicly your inner turmoil and battles with psychological demons as part of good mental health and well-being, but not ninety years ago. Angry criticism and put-downs of Fitzgerald and his essays came rapidly. And especially from those he called friends.

For example, the novelist John Dos Passos wrote to Fitzgerald in bewilderment, 

"Christ, man…. How do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? … We're living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history … If you want to go to pieces I think it's absolutely OK but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich [the editor of Esquire].

The Jazz Age, with its emphasis on hedonism, liberation, and flapper culture, provided the backdrop for Fitzgerald's early success. His novels captured the era's zeitgeist, propelling him and his wife, Zelda, to celebrity status. However, the elements that drove his literary success also contributed to his turmoil. The fast-paced lifestyle, fuelled by alcohol and extravagant spending, masked more profound anxieties and insecurities. The pressure to keep a public image of effortless success while battling internal demons intensified his inner conflicts.

Fitzgerald's masterful writing becomes a window into his emotional landscape in the essays. Through a skilful blend of literary techniques, particularly symbolism, metaphor, and stream of consciousness, Fitzgerald paints a vivid picture of his internal struggles, anxieties, and disillusionment with so-called success and happiness.

Fitzgerald used those same techniques to remarkable effect in his novels, capturing the essence of the 'Lost Generation' with his poignant prose. However, his writing transcends mere storytelling. Fitzgerald imbues seemingly ordinary objects with profound symbolic significance. In 'The Great Gatsby,' the green light across the bay portrays Gatsby's unfulfilled desire for Daisy Buchanan and the unattainable American Dream. One can yearn for a glittering past but never recapture it as forever it shimmers just out of reach. The light highlights Gatsby's longing and disillusionment. Similarly, the Valley of Ashes, a desolate wasteland in the novel, symbolises moral decay and emptiness within the wealthy society. The harsh landscape starkly contrasts the extravagant parties in West Egg, reflecting the hollowness beneath the surface of materialism and social climbing.

Employing metaphor to bridge the gap between the concrete and the abstract, Fitzgerald allows readers to glimpse an emotional state. In 'Tender is the Night', the protagonist, Dick Diver, compares himself to a cracked drinking glass, saying, "There were cracks in me from top to bottom." This metaphor powerfully conveys Dick's internal fragmentation and the unravelling of his carefully constructed façade.

Furthermore, in 'The Beautiful and Damned', Fitzgerald uses the metaphor of a "dying fall" to describe Anthony Patch's descent into alcoholism. This metaphor paints a vivid picture of Anthony's physical decline. It symbolises the gradual erosion of his hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

Fitzgerald used a stream of consciousness to delve deep into his character's inner thoughts and feelings, often mirroring his struggles. For example, the fragmented sentences and unfiltered thoughts in 'The Great Gatsby' show the narrator, Nick Carraway's, disillusionment with the wealthy society he sees. Similarly, the rambling thoughts and introspection of Dick Diver in 'Tender is the Night' reveal his anxieties about ageing, professional stagnation, and marital discord, reflecting Fitzgerald's anxieties and disillusionment with his success.

By seamlessly integrating symbolism, metaphor, and stream of consciousness, Fitzgerald transcends mere narration in his novels and creates a deeply personal connection with the reader. These techniques serve as a conduit, allowing Fitzgerald to express his emotional complexities, anxieties, and disillusionment while immersing the reader in his characters' emotional journeys. As readers navigate the symbolic landscapes and decipher the metaphorical language, they glimpse Fitzgerald's emotional state, forever intertwined with his crafted stories.

However, although Fitzgerald's first novel burst onto the literary scene with much acclaim, his follow-on work did not sell well. Even what became his masterpiece, which now regularly sits near the top of any list of great novels, 'The Great Gatsby', sold poorly on its first publication. Fitzgerald's ability to capture the glitz and tawdry glamour of the Jazz Age became tarnished. By 1936, he found himself grappling with professional and personal struggles and financial difficulties, his wife Zelda's mental health issues, and his oppressive dependence on alcohol. The result was 'The Crack-Up', a dark contrast to those shining earlier works, revealing a man grappling with his identity as he offers insight into the creative process and the challenges writers face. He writes about the pressure to continually produce work as good as or better than earlier efforts and the anxiety that comes with the fear of failure. He also describes the loneliness of the writing life. The isolation that comes from spending long hours alone with one's thoughts and words.

As a literary icon of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald experienced the fleeting euphoria of fame and fortune, only for the harsh realities of human frailty and impermanence to confront him. His disillusionment with the shallow pursuits of wealth and status underscores a broader critique of American society, where pursuing material success often comes at the expense of deeper existential fulfilment. The notion of the 'Crack-up' serves as a metaphor for the breakdown of illusions and the shattering of idealised visions of self and society. Fitzgerald's own experiences of personal and professional setbacks resonate with universal truths about the fragility of human ambition and the inevitability of disillusionment. Through his introspective musings, he invites readers to confront their vulnerabilities and the uncomfortable truths beneath the surface of their lives.

The 1929 stock market crash sent shockwaves through American society, and Fitzgerald's life was no exception. His financial security vanished, mirroring the collapse of the carefree spirit of the Jazz Age. This economic insecurity, coupled with Zelda's worsening mental health, plunged him into a deep depression. The loss of his financial security and the decline of his wife's health further added to the weight of his artistic struggles. He felt pressure to replicate his early success, a burden magnified by the changed literary landscape during the Depression.

Yet, in sharing the description of his breakdown, Fitzgerald keeps much hidden. There is nothing about his drinking 'benders' nor his affair, lack of money, nor that he was bereft of writing ideas. He makes no mention of his despair over Zelda. Rather, his writing is in a wry, self-deprecating style. But what Fitzgerald did reveal through his prose, as he navigated the tumultuous terrain of his psyche, confronting his vulnerabilities and insecurities, was an exploration of identity as he grapples with the dissonance between his public persona and private self. The fact that he'd revealed it through the pages of a magazine rather than a novel seemed to annoy his many (so-called) friends. 

Ernest Hemingway also quickly criticised Fitzgerald, writing to Maxwell Perkins, their mutual editor, in a letter sent immediately after the first 'Crack-Up' essay appeared. Hemingway offers Perkins that Fitzgerald,

"seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire piece seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming. I always knew he couldn't think—he never could—but he had a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public."

Hemingway reflects the stereotypical image of a man of that era – stoic, unemotional, and striving for success, and he didn't stop with just a letter to Perkins. In his short story, 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' which also appeared in Esquire. Hemingway uses an exchange between his characters that many believe is a veil on a supposed conversation between him and Fitzgerald, who said, "The very rich are different from you and me," thereby allowing Hemingway to offer the arch reply, "Yes, they have more money."

Hemingway made that exchange up, although that hasn't stopped people from quoting Fitzgerald's 'words' ever since. Fitzgerald wasn't even at the lunch at which another spoke the words. Max Perkins was present and recounted that it was Hemingway who said, "I am getting to know the rich." To which the literary critic Mary Colum, the third person at the table, said, "The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money." One can't help but think that a residue of jealousy remained in Hemingway, attributing the exchange to Fitzgerald, and taking for himself the memorable put-down. After all, the already literary star, Fitzgerald, gave Hemingway his first opportunity by arranging for the unknown and struggling writer to meet Perkins in the 1920s.

Fitzgerald was born into an era where rigid gender roles dictated societal expectations. His upbringing instilled an intense desire to achieve wealth and social status, mirroring the values of the time. However, Fitzgerald also harboured deep sensitivity and a yearning for artistic expression, qualities often considered incompatible with the then-traditional notions of masculinity. This internal conflict likely contributed to his struggles with self-doubt and his tendency to mask his vulnerabilities with an often-superficial facade.

In a letter to his once-lover Beatrice Dance, Fitzgerald recounted that he tried to defend himself against Hemingway's comments, apparently protesting the scathing criticism of his once-friend in "a somewhat indignant letter". Unsurprisingly, Hemingway remained unrepentant. Fitzgerald goes on in his letter to Beatrice that Hemingway thought, "Since I had chosen to expose my private life so 'shamelessly,' in Esquire… he felt that it was sort of an open season for me." Fitzgerald did plan to respond in what he described as "a hell of a letter." But, on second thought, he decided not to send it. 

"Too often literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War." 

Fitzgerald also notes that Hemingway "is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy."

In the second of ‘The Crack-Up essays’, Fitzgerald clearly notes his literary 'friends' criticism.

"There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul." 

But Fitzgerald is intent on his cause "to put a lament into my record."

In the third essay in the series, Fitzgerald moves on from describing his condition toward a solution. He will continue to be a writer because "that is my only way of life", but he will no longer be "kind, just or generous." Did he mean that, or was it just frustration and reaction at all the distractions surrounding having something published? He writes, "I have now at last become a writer only." But he hadn't. He still cared deeply for Zelda, finding the money for both her health care in private hospitals and sending their daughter Scottie to good schools. Later he would also fall in love again, with Sheilah Graham. 

Despite Hemingway's opprobrium, Fitzgerald seems generally unfazed by the reaction of the literary set to the essays. He even suggested that Max Perkins produce a collection of autobiographical pieces, "I thought you might reconsider the subject ... the interest in this Esquire series has been so big". Despite the adverse reaction from the literary world, Fitzgerald received an astonishing number of letters from readers captivated by his willingness to reveal his wounds, with which many could identify; they, too, experienced the same boom-to-bust deflation both financially and spiritually of the Depression. Fitzgerald's literary friends thought he was simply wasting his incredible talent. Yet, that talent also meant 'The Crack-up’ echoed with 'ordinary' people. However, Max Perkins wasn't persuaded, and even he offered that in 'The Crack-Up', Fitzgerald committed an "indecent invasion of his own privacy." Perkins felt this, eventually known as, 'confessional writing', was dangerous for Fitzgerald's status as a serious writer. 

After Fitzgerald's early death from a heart attack, Edmund Wilson, the writer and critic whom Fitzgerald called his "intellectual conscience ... [f]or twenty years", edited two books by Fitzgerald. The unfinished 'The Last Tycoon' and 'The Crack-Up'. Wilson donated his editorial services to help Fitzgerald's family. Wilson admitted to Perkins that he had "hated" the essays when he first read them in Esquire. But argued, 

"if you read The Crack-Up through, you realise that it is not a discreditable confession but an account of a kind of crisis that many men of Scott's generation have gone through, and that in the end he sees a way to live by application to his work". 

Wilson approached 'New Directions', a then-recognised publisher of avant-garde work, to see 'The Crack-up' published, and in 1945, the book was born.

Within that publication of 'The Crack-up', alongside Fitzgerald's essays, there are sketches, letters, and tribute essays, including a piece by the poet and novelist Glenway Wescott, who offered "There is very little in world literature like this piece". Wescott sees the three essays as a single work, calling it "the autobiographical essay" and even comparing the pieces to Sir Walter Raleigh's verse epistle before his beheading. It isn't a sycophantic tribute, though, as Wescott also offers that Fitzgerald's treatment of his misery is

 "cheap here and there … still it is fine prose and naturally his timeliest piece today: self-autopsy and funeral sermon." 

Overall, however, Westcott is still impressed with the writing:

"one quick and thorough paragraph after another, with so little shame. … first half is written without a fault: brief easy fiery phrases." 

Fitzgerald may have been even more astute than many thought in writing his essays. Just as he had broken the mould in the publication of his first novel, a form of personal narrative came from his essays that is now both popular and positively encouraged. I see such pieces every day on Substack. What Fitzgerald described was not "just personal". He knew it was cultural: 

"My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, in a dozen men of honour and industry since the war."

Early in the opening essay, Fitzgerald offers a statement which, like many of his I see often quoted, 

"The test of a first-rate intelligence, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." 

It's something that the poet John Keats, whose poetry Fitzgerald so much admired, coined in the term 'negative capability' in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers George and Tom in 1817. Inspired by Shakespeare's work, Keats describes it as,

 "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." 

The use of negative here is not pejorative but instead implies the ability to resist explaining away what we do not understand. Today, psychologists call it detachment.

Fitzgerald continued, 

"One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible’, come true." 

In his case, the ‘impossible’ was turning the forerunner of his much-rejected first novel into the amazingly overnight renown that came at age 24 by rewriting it as 'This Side of Paradise'. That success meant he was not only a best-selling author but able to marry the love of his life and to become the man who stood for an age, even though Fitzgerald called it "the bitch goddess" of success.

At his death of a heart attack at only forty-four, Fitzgerald considered himself a 'has-been' and yet, he was then writing that much hoped-for 'first-rate novel’, the sadly unfinished 'Last Tycoon'. In ‘The Crack-Up' essays, he described the dark night of his soul (“when it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”). It was against all advice and prudence, yet many now regard, 'The Crack-Up' as the trigger of Fitzgerald's resurgence as an essential and enduring figure in 20th-century American literature. The critical response to the book in 1945 was quite different from the reception the Esquire publication of the essays had elicited. Reviewers were respectful, some even enthusiastic and in its way, it allowed everyone to share their inner angst.