The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack soft place—even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence—that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as “progress” is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs. Except for the stage-struck young girls people come here for negative reasons—all gold rushes are essentially negative—and the young girls soon join the vicious circle. There is no group, however small, interesting as such. Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent—by whom I mean the spoiled writers, Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dotty,* Dash Hammet etc. That Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference. So is one type of commy Malraux didn’t list among his categories in Man’s Hope—but nothing would disappoint her so vehemently as success.

  I have a novel pretty well on the road. I think it will baffle and in some ways irritate what readers I have left. But it is as detached from me as Gatsby was, in intent anyhow. The new Armegeddon, far from making everything unimportant, gives me a certain lust for life again. This is undoubtedly an immature throw-back, but it’s the truth. The gloom of all causes does not affect it—I feel a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses—however misdirected…

  I would like to have some days with you and Sara. I hear distant thunder about Ernest and Archie and their doings but about you not a tenth of what I want to know.

  With affection,

  Scott

  TO GERALD AND SARA MURPHY

  Honey—that goes for Sara too:

  I have written a dozen people since who mean nothing to me—writing you I was saving for good news. I suppose pride was concerned—in that personally and publicly dreary month of Sept. last about everything went to pieces all at once and it was a long uphill pull.

  To summarize: I don’t have to tell you anything about the awful lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poisoning effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up and down and a stabilization at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed—and now for 2½ months and one short week that may have been grip—nothing at all. With it went a psychic depression over the finances and the effect on Scotty and Zelda. There was many a day when the fact that you and Sara did help me at a desperate moment. . . seemed the only pleasant human thing that had happened in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten. The thousands that I’d given and loaned—well, after the first attempts I didn’t even worry about that. There seem to be the givers and the takers and that doesn’t change. So you were never out of my mind—but even so no more present than always because this was only one of so many things.

  In the land of the living again I function rather well. My great dreams about this place are shattered and I have written half a novel* and a score of satiric pieces that are appearing in the current Esquires about it. After having to turn down a bunch of well paid jobs while I was ill there was a period when no one seemed to want me for duck soup—then a month ago a producer asked me to do a piece of my own for a small sum ($2000) and a share in the profits. The piece is Babylon Revisited and an old and not bad Post story of which the child heroine was named Honoria! I’m keeping the name.

  It looks good. I have stopped being a prophet (3rd attempt at spelling this) but I think I may be solvent in a month or so if the fever keeps subservient to what the doctors think is an exceptional resistance…

  So now you’re up to date on me and it won’t be so long again. I might say by way of counter-reproach that there’s no word of any of you in your letter. It is sad about * * * *. Writing you today has brought back so much and I could weep very easily.

  With dearest Love,

  Scott

  TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  November 8, 1940

  Dear Ernest:

  It’s a fine novel,* better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the sideshows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death—and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.

  I never got to tell you how I like To Have and to Have Not either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance—paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoiefski in their undeflected intensity.

  Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoiefski with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

  With Old Affection,

  —————

  P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November—you can’t flunk out in November) . . . What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit—how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anybody. Not even Allan Campbell who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.

  P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.

  TO EDMUND WILSON

  1403 N. Laurel Avenue

  Hollywood, Cal.

  November 25, 1940

  Dear Bunny:. . .

  I think my novel* is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but it is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.

  With best to you both,

  (signed) Scott

  P.S. This sounds like a bitter letter—I’d rewite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.

  LETTERS TO FRANCES SCOTT FITZGERALD

  August 8, 1933

  La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge,

  Towson, Maryland,

  Dear Pie:

  I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy—but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

  All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?

  I will arrange the camp bill.

  Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:

  Worry about courage

  Worry about cleanliness

  Worry about efficiency

  Worry about horsemanship . . .

  Things not to worry about:
<
br />   Don’t worry about popular opinion

  Don’t worry about dolls

  Don’t worry about the past

  Don’t worry about the future

  Don’t worry about growing up

  Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you

  Don’t worry about triumph

  Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault

  Don’t worry about mosquitoes

  Don’t worry about flies

  Don’t worry about insects in general

  Don’t worry about parents

  Don’t worry about boys

  Don’t worry about disappointments

  Don’t worry about pleasures

  Don’t worry about satisfactions

  Things to think about:

  What am I really aiming at?

  How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

  (a) Scholarship

  (b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?

  (c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

  With dearest love,

  —————

  Autumn, 1937*

  I shall somehow manage not to appear in a taxicab on Thanksgiving and thus disgrace you before all those “nice” girls. Isn’t it somewhat old-fashioned to describe girls in expensive backgrounds as “nice?” I will bet two-thirds of the girls at Miss Walker’s School have at least one grand-parent that peddled old leather in the slums of New York, Chicago, or London, and if I thought you were accepting the standards of the cosmopolitan rich, I would much rather have you in a Southern school, where scholastic standards are not so high and the word “nice” is not debased to such a ludicrous extent. I have seen the whole racket, and if there is any more disastrous road than that from Park Avenue to the Rue de la Paix and back again, I don’t know it.

  They are homeless people, ashamed of being American, unable to master the culture of another country; ashamed, usually, of their husbands, wives, grandparents, and unable to bring up descendants of whom they could be proud, even if they had the nerve to bear them, ashamed of each other yet leaning on each other’s weakness, a menace to the social order in which they live—oh, why should I go on? You know how I feel about such things. If I come up and find you gone Park Avenue, you will have to explain me away as a Georgia cracker or a Chicago killer. God help Park Avenue.

  July 7, 1938

  I am certainly glad that you’re up and around, and sorry that your selection of Post-Flaubertian realism depressed you. I certainly wouldn’t begin Henry James with The Portrait of a Lady, which is in his “late second manner” and full of mannerisms. Why don’t you read Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller first? Lord Jim is a great book—the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good? Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession.

  Summer, 1939

  I want to have you out here for part of the summer. I have a nice cottage in the country, but very far out in the country, and utterly inaccessible if one doesn’t drive well. Whether a piano here would be practical or not I don’t know (remember how I felt about radio) but all that might be arranged if the personal equation were not doubtful (a situation for which for the moment I take full blame). Since I stopped picture work three months ago, I have been through not only a T.B. flare-up but also a nervous breakdown of such severity that for a time it threatened to paralyze both arms— or to quote the doctor: “The Good Lord tapped you on the shoulder.” While I am running no fever above 99, I don’t know what this return to picture work is going to do, and when and if my health blows up, you know what a poor family man I am. . . .

  I am of course not drinking and haven’t been for a long time, but any illness is liable to have a certain toxic effect on the system and you may find me depressing, over-nervous about small things and dogmatic—all these qualities more intensified than you have previously experienced them in me. Beyond this I am working very hard and the last thing I want at the end of the day is a problem, while, as it is natural at your age, what you want at the end of the day is excitement. I tell you all this because lately we had planned so many meetings with anticipation and they have turned out to be flops. Perhaps forewarned will be forearmed. . . .

  If the experiment proves upsetting, I will have no further choice than to pack you off East somewhere again, but there are several friends here whom you could visit for a time if we failed to make a satisfactory household. So the trip will be worthwhile. Also I am more of a solitary than I have ever been, but I don’t think that will worry you, because you had your dosages of motion picture stars on two other trips. To describe how humorless I feel about life at this point you have simply to read the Tarkington story called Sinful Dadda Little in the Post issue of July 22 (still current I believe), and remember that I read it without a particle of amusement, but with a complete disgust at Dadda for not drowning the two debutantes, at the end.

  March 15, 1940

  I think it was you who misunderstood my meaning about the comrades. The important thing is this: they had best be treated, not as people holding a certain set of liberal or conservative opinions, but rather as you might treat a set of intensely fanatical Roman Catholics among whom you might find yourself. It is not that you should not disagree with them—the important thing is that you should not argue with them. The point is that Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind (“Fascist,” “Liberal,” “Trotskyist”), and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process. They are amazingly well organized. The pith of my advice is: think what you want, the less said the better. . . .

  You must have some politeness toward ideas. You can neither cut through, nor challenge nor beat the fact that there is an organized movement over the world before which you and I as individuals are less than the dust. Some time when you feel very brave and defiant and haven’t been invited to one particular college function, read the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on The Working Day, and see if you are ever quite the same.

  Spring, 1940

  Spring was always an awful time for me about work. I always felt that in the long boredom of winter there was nothing else to do but study. But I lost the feeling in the long, dreamy spring days and managed to be in scholastic hot water by June. I can’t tell you what to do about it—all my suggestions seem to be very remote and academic. But if I were with you and we could talk again like we used to, I might lift you out of your trouble about concentration. It really isn’t so hard, even with dreamy people like you and me—it’s just that we feel so damned secure at times as long as there’s enough in the bank to buy the next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through the next ordeal. Our danger is imagining we have resources— material and moral—which we haven’t got. One of the reasons I find myself so consistently in valleys of depression is that every few years I seem to be climbing uphill to recover from some bankruptcy. Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess. I thought I was so strong that I never would be ill and suddenly I was ill for three years, and faced with a long, slow uphill climb. Wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve—so that if on a night you had set aside to study for a philosophy test, you learned that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help, you could skip that night and find you had a reserve of one or two days preparation to draw on. But I think that, like me, you will be something of a fool in that regard all your life, so I am wasting my words.

  Spring, 1940

  Anyhow I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don’t drink. I am not a great m
an but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort. . . .

  And I think when you read this book,* which will encompass the time when you knew me as an adult, you will understand how intensively I knew your world—not extensively because I was so ill and unable to get about. If I live long enough, I’ll hear your side of things, but I think your own instincts about your limitations as an artist are possibly best: you might experiment back and forth among the arts and find your niche as I found mine—but I do not believe that so far you are a “natural.”

  April 12, 1940

  You are doing exactly what I did at Princeton. I wore myself out on a musical comedy there for which I wrote book and lyrics, organized and mostly directed while the president played football. Result: I slipped way back in my work, got T.B., lost a year in college—and, irony of ironies, because of a scholastic slip I wasn’t allowed to take the presidency of the Triangle. . . .

  From your letter I guess you are doing exactly the same thing and it just makes my stomach fall out to think of it. Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get “Thank you” and that’s all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown—that somebody being the enthusiast.

  April 27, 1940

  Musical comedy is fun—I suppose more “fun” than anything else a literary person can put their talents to and it always has an air of glamor around it. . . .

  I was particularly interested in your line about “feeling that you had lost your favorite child.” God, haven’t I felt that so many times. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself, leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre. However, that’s not anything to worry about in your case for another twenty years. I am glad you are going to Princeton with whom you are going. I feel you have now somehow jumped a class. Boys like * * * * and * * * * are on a guess more “full of direction” than most of the happy-go-luckies in Cap and Gown. I don’t mean more ambition, which is a sort of general attribute at youth and is five parts hope to five parts good will, but I mean some calculated path, stemming from a talent or money or a careful directive or all of these things, to find your way through the bourgeois maze—if you feel it is worth finding. Remember this, though, among those on both sides of the fence there are a lot of slow developers, people of quality and distinction whom you should not overlook.