The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “I’ve given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I’ve had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make the guests go home.”

  Mother had explained his faults to Seth and found him extremely understanding.

  She wanted to be ringmaster—for a while. In somebody else’s circus—a father’s circus. “Look here, my father owns this circus. Give me the whip. I don’t know how or why I snap it, but my father owns this circus. Give me your mask, clown—acrobat, your trapeze, etc.”

  * * * * was a social impressario of considerable ability but her ambition had driven her to please so many worthless people that she had become, so to speak, a sort of lowest common denominator of all her clients.

  Zelda on Gerald’s Irishness, face moving first.

  Hates old things, the past, Provence. A courtier.

  Constance Talmadge on my middle-class snobbishness. Also Fanny Brice.

  There is undoubtedly something funny about not being a lady, or rather about being a gold digger. You’ve got to laugh a lot like * * * * and* * * *

  Once tried to get up a ship’s party on a ferry boat.

  You had to have a head of lettuce and mayonnaise, and she realized vaguely that the latter was seldom found in a wild state. Brought up in apartment hotels and married at the beginning of the delicatessen age, Vivian had not learned to cook anything save a strange fluid that in emergencies she evolved from coffee bean; she was most familiar with the product of the soil in such highly evolved forms as “triple combination sandwiches.” A farm to her was a place where weary butterflies retired with their lovers after the last fade-out in the movies.

  Vivian Barnaby was just what her husband had made her, no masterpiece. She was pretty in a plaintive key, so was the child, and momentarily when you first met them you liked them for a certain innocence, a blowy immaturity— momentarily, that was all.

  Perhaps a drunk with great bursts of sentimentality or resentment or maudlin grief.

  He saw men acutely and he saw them small, and he was not invariably amused—it was obvious that his occasional dry humor was washed over the brim of an over-full vessel. Francis’ first instinct was to defer to him as to an older man, a method of not bothering him, but he saw that Herkimer turned away from delicacy even more than from the commonness to which he was adjusted.

  Roscoe’s gestures increasingly large and increasingly fall short. Again he “hates old things.”

  Greatest vitality goes into displeasure and discontent.

  Irving—on the bust at fifty.

  He said that, no matter what happened, he always carried about his own can of olive oil. He had a large collection of lead soldiers and considered Ludendorf’s memoirs one of the greatest books ever written. When McKisco said that history was already ruined by too much about war, Monsieur Brugerol’s mouth twisted fiercely under his hooked nose, and he answered that history is a figured curtain, hiding that terrible door into the past through which we all must go.

  Capable of imaginative rudeness.

  Mother always waiting in waiting-rooms an hour early, etc., pulled forward by an irresistible urge of boredom and vitality.

  * * * * talks in several more syllables than she thinks in.

  He was one of those men who had a charger; she always knew it was tethered outside, chafing at its bit. But now, for once, she didn’t hear it, though she listened for the distant snort and fidgeting of hoofs.

  Like most men who do not smoke, he was seldom still, and his moments of immobility were more taut and noticeable.

  Someone with a low voice who feels humble about it.

  About a man looking as if he was made up for a role he couldn’t play.

  Mrs. Smith had been born on the edge of an imaginary precipice and had lived there ever since, looking over the precipice every half hour in horror, and yet unable to get herself away.

  Surprised that a creature so emotionally tender and torn as himself should have been able to set up such strong defenses around his will.

  My father is very much alive at something over a hundred, and always resents the fact that the fathers of most of the principal characters in my books are dead before the book begins. To please him, I once had a father stagger in and out at the end of the book, but he was far from flattered— however, this is a short word on money-lending. Father passed on to me certain ineradicable tastes in poetry: The Raven and The Bells, The Prisoner of Chillón.

  One button always showed at the front of his trousers.

  Family explained or damned by its dogs.

  Girl’s tenderness against man’s bogus humility.

  The drunk on Majestic and his hundred yard dash.

  Bogus girl who reads Ulysses—Wharton gives her a pain in the eye.

  As to Ernest as a boy: reckless, adventurous, etc. Yet it is undeniable that the dark was peopled for him. His bravery and acquired characteristics.

  All girls know some way to kill time, but * * * * knows all the ways.

  I never know what * * * * is—I only know what she’s like. This year she seems to have a certain community of purpose with the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  For * * * * Communism is a spiritual exercise. He’s making it his own.

  * * * * : An intellectual simpleton: He pleases you, not by direct design, but because his desire to please is so intense that it is disarming. He pleases you most perhaps when his very words are irritants.

  Boy from the Tropics: That wonderful book Soldiers of Fortune was a “gross misrepresentation.” He was least objectionable when he talked about what they did to Igorrotes and how there were natives in the backhills of Luzon who had tails of real fur.

  L

  LITERARY

  * * * * * * * *’s Book: It was wonderful. I couldn’t lay it down, was impelled on the contrary to hurry through it. In fact I finished it in six and a half minutes while getting shaved in the Continental Hotel. It is what we call a book written at a fine pace. As for the high spots, there are so many that it is difficult to pick them, but I could select.

  Nothing is any more permitted in fiction like stage convention of keeping people on stage by coincidences.

  Edgar Wallace—G. A. Henty.

  Must listen for conversation à la Joyce.

  Livid, demean, jejune—all misused.

  In a transition from, say fight or action interest to love and woman interest, the transition cannot be abrupt. The man must be before or after an event to be interested in women; that is, if he is a man and not a weakwad.

  Fault in transition in Musa Dagh book. After battle, right to Julia. Sometimes clumsy. Better an interval. You cannot tie two so different masculine emotions by the same thread.

  Nevertheless, value of Ernest’s feeling about the pure heart when writing—in other words, the comparatively pure heart, the “house in order.”

  Zelda’s style formed on her letters to her mother—an attempt to make visual, etc.

  This Side of Paradise: A Romance and a Reading List.

  The Sun Also Rises: A Romance and a Guide Book.

  Resent the attempt of the boys and girls who tried to bury me before I was dead.

  Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory my younger, Anthony my worry, Dick my comparatively good brother, but all of them far from home. When I have the courage to put the old white light on the home of my heart, then. . .

  Shakespeare—whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying.

  Forbearance, good word.

  I can never remember the times when I wrote anything—This Side of Paradise time or Beautiful and Damned and Gatsby time, for instance. Lived in story.

  Idea for an essay on the “Lilies that fester” sonnet.

  That Willa Cather’s poem shall stand at the beginning of Mediaeval* and that it shall be the story of Ernest.
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  What are successful backgrounds nowadays—think— Coquette?

  Shows in which you forget background, remember no help from description. Gas stations is the type.

  Just as Stendhal’s portrait of a Byronic man made Le Rouge et le Noir, so couldn’t my portrait of Ernest as Philippe make the real modern man?

  But there was one consolation:

  They could never use any of Mr. Hemingway’s four-letter words, because that was for fourth class and fourth class has been abolished—

  (The first class was allowed to cheat a little on the matter.)

  But on the other hand, they could never use any two-letter words like NO. They had to use three-letter words like YES!

  A character who spends all his time trying to break down stray and careless aphorisms of great men. Give him a name and list him under characters and note aphorisms as they pop up in reading.

  There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.

  The great hitch-hike to glory that’s going to make them good artisans—able to repair the car much in the manner of the cars in this jacket frieze.

  And such condescension toward the creative life—Tolstoi caught the sense of the Napoleonic wars out in the street from the man in the street; his comments on fiction, which would make any old 1864 copy of Leslie’s more humanly valuable than The Red Badge of Courage; the idealization of all that passes through his empty mind; his hatred of all people who formed the world in which he lives; a political Oscar Wilde peddling in the provinces the plums he took from our pudding; his role of Jesus cursing. You can see him going from prize fight to first night to baseball game— maybe even to women—[people?] trying to put back into movement the very things Lenin regretted that he might have destroyed—gracelessness and ugliness, for its own sake. Gentlemen, proletarians—for a prize skunk I give you Mr. * * * *

  D. H. Lawrence’s great attempt to synthesize animal and emotional—things he left out. Essential pre-Marxian. Just as I am essentially Marxian.

  She had written a book about optimism called Wake Up and Dream, which had the beautiful rusty glow of a convenient half-truth—a book that left out illness and death, war, insanity, and all measure of achievement, with titillating comfortability. She had also written a wretched novel and a subsequent volume telling her friends how to write fiction, so she was on her way to being a prophet in the great American Tradition.

  When Whitman said “O Pioneers,” he said all.

  Byron’s mountains warm.

  Didn’t Hemingway say this in effect: If Tom Wolfe ever learns to separate what he gets from books from what he gets from life, he will be an original. All you can get from books is rhythm and technique. He’s half-grown artistically—this is truer than what Ernest said about him. But when I’ve criticized him (several times in talk), I’ve felt mad afterwards. Putting sharp weapons in the hands of his inferiors.

  Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

  Work out my hard-luck season—my most productive seasons, etc.

  Conrad’s secret theory examined: He knew that things do transpire about people. Therefore he wrote the truth and transposed it to parallel to give that quality, adding confusion however to his structure. Nevertheless, there is in his scheme a desire to imitate life which is in all the big shots. Have I such an idea in the composition of this book?

  Conrad influenced by Man Without a Country.

  No English painting because of their putting everything into words.

  Chapter in slow motion.

  Right to pretty heroines.

  Exact equivalent of escape mechanism in Little Colonel books is in escape mechanism of Greta Garbo films.

  Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval. This fact is not altered by the circumstance that his work may take the form of satire, for satire is the subtle flattery of a certain minority in a nation. The greatest grow out of these periods as the tall head of the crop. They may seem not to be affected, but they are.

  Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

  Tarkington: I have a horror of going into a personal debauch and coming out of it devitalized with no interest except an acute observation of the behavior of colored people, children and dogs.

  The queer slanting effect of the substantive, the future imperfect, a matter of intuition or ear to O’Hara, is unknown to careful writers like Bunny and John.

  My feelings on rereading Imagination and a Few Mothers and realizing that it had probably influenced Mrs. Swann’s whole life.

  I thought Waldo Frank was just the pen name that a whole lot of other writers used for symposiums.

  When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

  Man reads good reviews of his book so many times that he begins finally to remodel his style on them and use their rhythms.

  Realistic details like Dostoievsky glasses.

  Re Cole Porter: vide the ending of Mrs. Lowesboro Something, which does not bother even to be a paraphrase of Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste.

  The Scandal of “English Teaching.”

  The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—the charm of women and the courage of men. The Nineteenth Century glorified the merchant’s cowardly son. Now a reaction.

  Taking things hard—from * * * * to * * * *:* That’s the stamp that goes into my books so that people can read it blind like Braille.

  The Steinbeck scene. Out of touch with that life. The exact observation there.

  Bunny Wilson writing his Renan before Christ is deified.

  Analysis of Tender:

  I Case History 151-212: 61 pp. (change moon, p. 212),

  II Rosemary’s Angle 3-104: 101 pp.

  III Casualties 104-148, 212-224: 55 pp.

  IV Escape 225-306: 82 pp.

  V The Way Home 306-408: 103 pp.

  Hope of Heaven [a novel by John O’Hara]: He didn’t bite off anything to chew on. He just began chewing with nothing in his mouth.

  I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

  M

  MOMENTS (WHAT PEOPLE DO)

  Dogs:

  We went through a routine, with a lot of false starts, charges, leg and throat holds, rolling over, and escapes.

  I only barked a little in the bass to stretch my throat— I’m not one of the kind always shooting off their muzzle.

  We followed a tall lady for awhile—no particular reason except she had a parcel with meat in it—we knew we wouldn’t get any, but you never can tell. Sometimes I just feel like shutting my eyes and just following somebody pretending they’re yours or that they’re taking you somewhere.

  The Brain wasn’t there yet but the Beard was. He got out that damn pole and tried to kid me again, holding it out and jabbering—a long time ago I figured out that his object is to see if I’m fool enough to jump over it. But I don’t bite, just walk around it. Then he tried the trick they all do—held my paws and tried to balance me up on the end of my spine. I never could figure out the point of that one.

  I wanted to lick him, but when I came really close he snarled, “Scram!”, and got half up on his haunches. He thought I was going to eat him just because he was down.

  The little boy said, “Get away, you!”, and it made me feel bad because I’ve never eaten a dog in my life and would not unless I was very hungry.

  I must have had a hundred bones around here and I don’t know why I save them. I never find them again unless accidentally, but I just can’t stand leaving them around.

  Thinking the world w
as going to start over with the things they could make of cellophane. Because for a moment everyone was making things of cellophane.

  The idea of the grande dame slightly tight is one of the least impressive in the world. You know: “The foreign office will hear about this, hic!”

  I once financed the great grandson of the great Morgan.

  It was an old pistol, for as he took it away from her a slice of pearl came off the handle and fell on the floor.

  Some kind of small animal that looked all wrong, “as if it were turned inside out,” had emerged from the forest, regarded them curiously for a moment and hurried mysteriously away.

  They were all hungry now, and sitting jaded beside the stream they developed individual tendencies to look around for a sign “Restaurant” or strain their ears for the tinkle of a dinner bell.

  In Manila Mr. Barnaby had struck her with a whisk broom because she had ruined his life.

  Nurses clucking. As if that confirmed some idea of life that they had held for long.

  Dorothy Parker going Victorian, making up for the past by weeping—a sort of deliberate retrogression.

  He put out a mosquito on the paper and erased its body with the rubber.

  Her mouth fell open comically, she balanced a moment.

  She was asleep—he stood for a moment beside her bed, sorry for her, because she was asleep, and because she had set her slippers beside her bed.

  Everyone suddenly stiffened—after a terrible moment, Mrs. Littleton, by making herself figuratively into oil, managed to ooze a few words through.

  Only a fat Victorian pin-cushion filled with an assorted variety of many-colored-headed pins seemed to assure her that a well-brought-up girl would do the right thing.

  They ran for it through a blinding white hot crash.

  He cocked one miserable eye at the bright tropical stars.

  Belina, the young Corsican, yelled with glory as he bounced his aeroplane across the sky.

  The inebriated American who had invited him to lunch thought at first that Val was a son of the czar.

  “Dramatic club! Oh gosh!” cried the girl. “Did you hear that? She thinks it’s a dramatic club, like Miss Pinkerton’s school.” In a moment her uninfectious laughter died away.