Saturday, December 1, 2018

The Crack Up (1936)

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

• His works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age.

• Even though Fitzgerald wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character,
was unable to manage his own finances.

• The 1936-37 period is known as the “Crack-Up.”

• The Great Depression.

• The essays stand today as a compelling psychological portrait and an illustration of

an important Fitzgerald theme.

STORY SUMMARY : (Part 1)

• Fitzgerald says that ‘life is a process of breaking down.’ but the most powerful blows
are the ones which don’t make their effect apparent. You never know and when you
realize, it’s abrupt.

• “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.” His philosophy. Like –
“Sense of Futility of Effort’ and the ‘Sense of Necessity of Struggle’

• If a person is good, he/she dominates his/her life. Maybe writers are not as
successful as the film actors but they have independence. Fitzgerald couldn’t have
chosen any other trade to do.

• He consoled himself by saying “by 49, it’ll be all right.” But 10 years before that, he
cracked-up prematurely.

• Crack in head; crack in body and crack in nerve are the three cracks of the human
life. His was the last kind which didn’t come with a blow.

• He lived without much caring about anything, including his talent.

• His instinct said he should be alone even though he wasn’t a loner. But now, he
desired to be alone, absolutely one.

• He began making lists, like of football players, cavalry leaders, cities, women he had
crush on, people he let himself subbed by and tore them up and he felt well.

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• He cracked up like an ‘old plate’ and what happens after it is known as “the womb of
time.”

• In those two years, he deprived himself of everything he loved, in order to preserve

something deep inside. He also realized that for a long time, he had not liked people
or things and just pretended to like them. His casual relations were simply a matter of
habit.

• He began to hate nights because sleep eluded him and days because they led to
nights.

• He liked few categories of people like doctors, girl children up to the age of thirteen
and well brought-up boy from about eight years old and old friends only if he had to
meet them once a year.

• A woman asked him to stop feeling sorry about himself and suggested that he should
think of his ‘crack-up’ as a crack in the Grand Canyon stating that world is what
people want it to be. After listening to her, he felt something.

• The first part of the essay ends with the author saying that he could leave her place
and “go away into the world of bitterness.”

STORY SUMMARY : (Part 2)

• His expectations of the 40s didn’t turn out to be what he thought. Some thought that
the writer has touched on too many aspects without seriously considering them
closely.

• Author says that he has been, for quite long, thanking the Gods and that too without
any reason.

• This part is for the further history of the cracked-plate. For once, a plate is cracked, it
can never be mixed with other plates in dishpan, though it become necessary to
keep it back in the pantry.

• The only short cure of author’s suffering is to consider people who are in poverty and
physical suffering. The idea is, to minimize your own pain by imagining their suffering
which is of higher degree.

• But sometimes, this short cure doesn’t work when it is 3’O clock in the night. In the
dark night of the soul, the author says, it is always 3’O clock.

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• Sometimes, the idea of finding oneself lost in the comfort of dreams because a
distant dream itself. The purpose behind this idea, – not to witness to ‘disintegration
of one’s own personality.’

• When he entered this phase of quietness, after having cracked-up, he realized that he
had lived “two parallel experiences.”

• The first – diagnosed with malaria with years later, after an x-ray turned out to be a
mild tuberculosis. After it, the college wouldn’t have been same again as he dropped
off classes.

• After realizing this loss of everything, he took solace in the female company.

• He began learning how to write and to attain peace in what he got, even if it wasn’t
what he wanted.

• His career as a leader man was over and he could never fire a bad servant since
then.

• His sole pleasures became writing letters to a girl, who lived in a different city. His
relationship ended with the girl on financial grounds so he began writing a novel
instead of letters. In 1921, he got married with the same girl with the money he
received for the novel.

• For the next sixteen years, Fitzgerald lived with the animosity towards the rich.

• His life was troubled but never felt discouragement. Trouble and discouragement,
says the author, are two different things, in fact they are as different as arthritis and
stiff joint.

• Last spring, when he cracked up again, he noticed the pattern in his previous crack
ups like a pattern on a beach. He simply was in the midst of a silence where he could
hear anything but ‘his own breath.’

• Written words became Hollywood movies and to him, it was indignified to see the
power to written words crumble under another power.

• He came to many conclusions including that there was not an “I” anymore. He didn’t
have a self and this felt strange to him.

• At the end of this Part, he asks the reader if they want more of his “Crack-Ups.” If
they don’t, they should say but not too loud as someone is asleep.




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SHORT SUMMARY (Part 3) :

• Following the lines of Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Fitzgerald writes he
had a heart and he felt too much – “I felt – therefore I was.”

• He explains that there was a time when people came to him for advice but now times
and things have changed, his enthusiasm and vitality is drained.

• Later, he went to a small town to introspect why his attitude towards sadness has
become sad; tragic towards tragedy and melancholic towards melancholy.

• Now, the only way of life for him was to be the writer, and therefore he must continue
to be the one. But given the circumstances, he would cease every attempt to
become a kind or generous man.

• He says that he must stop giving away, while receiving nothing in return. He went
home and threw all the letters in to the waste basket, which had come in his absence
and which wanted something from him without offering nothing in return.

• Though it made him feel villainous, like the men who wouldn’t care if the world
tumbled in the chaos. After these lines of rejection, there always comes a smile. The
author is still working on it.

• He intends to bring sharp bitterness in his voice which makes people believe that not
only they are welcome, but they are not even tolerated.

• Even if someone is dying of starvation outside his window, he will quickly go out and
give him a smile and a voice and wait till someone raises a nickel to call the
ambulance. Only if ‘there would be any copy in it for him’

• He has only become a writer and not the man he wanted to become and he let it go
without any trace of regret.

• He says that his past happiness was not natural, it was unnatural just like the Boom
(Economic Boom)

• He says that he shall have to learn to live with his ‘new dispensation’ for he doesn’t
like people.

• He says that there is a permanent sign above his door : ‘Cave Canem (Beware the
Dog) and ends the article by saying – “I will try to be a correct animal though, and if
you throw me a bone with enough meat on it. I may even lick your hand.”

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ANALYSIS :

• John Dos Passos – “How did you find time in the middle of general conflagration
(Great Depression)

• In the Crack-Up, Fitzgerald not only reveals his breakdown and collapse, but also
offers a cool analysis of it. No one has ever achieved the level of eloquence in
analyzing his/her person breakdown.

• He begins with the idea that if a person is any good, he should be able to dominate
life. Almost every character in Fitzgerald’s novels clings onto the hope of recovering
the past. But in recovering it, they lose the idea of himself.

• Fitzgerald called working in Hollywood as a scriptwriter as “whoring” as they tainted

the quality of written words in the form of pictures.

• Echoes of Jazz Age – He called it an age of miracle, it was an age of art, it was an
age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

• All of a sudden, he realizes his crack up. A crack up which came with a feeling of
relief, a feeling of getting better. Here two things are worth noting – the idea of age
and the idea of ambition.

• Fitzgerald always considered one’s age and one’s ambition as a self-defeating

Faustian contract. For him, age and ambition are ideas which are doomed to end up
in suffering and withering self.

• He says that he didn’t want to see any people at all. And once you start identifying
with the people you meet, you start feeling varying emotions. (Emotions ascribable to
Wellington at Waterloo)

• The mention of Wellington is mock-heroic. Because he was the British soldier under
whose leadership Napoleon Bonaparte’s army was defeated at Waterloo.

• One can only realize one’s own breakdown or collapse when one is not in suffering.

• Fitzgerald says that breakdown has to rest in what used to be called “Womb of
Time.”

• He described hearing a “grave sentence” from a doctor. He consumed himself into

making lists. He felt stronger. (And cracked like an old plate as soon as he heard the
news)

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• He knows all of the arguments against cracking up, he knows he is not actually a bad
person and his life has amounted to something but when you are in the Mode of Full
Crack-Up, even those comforting thoughts are no longer available.

• He became more aware of his self than ever. He became aware of his likes/dislikes,
the inhumane characteristics, which he says is a true sign of cracking up.

• He conversed with a woman – “unappealing role of Job’s comforter.” referring to the

Book of Job in the Bible. In this sense, a Job’s comforter is one who while pretending
to offer comfort is actually discouraging and demoralizing the person in need of
comfort.

• It is not neccessary for a cracked-up person to end up in asylum as they are not
insane.

• Fitzgerald mentions the suicidal tendencies of honest men in “The Echoes of Jazz
Age”. Moreover, they happened not during the Depression but during the Boom.

• When the final blow came, he found himself in absolute silence.

• The subordination of written words to pictures disturbed Fitzgerald even though later
in his life, we went on to write for Hollywood. He wasn’t able to forgive himself for
that and mocked himself by the character of ‘Pat Hobby’

• He plays with Descartes – “I think therefore I am” by changing it to “I felt therefore I

was.”

• In the quiet, he comes to the idea that he should simply be a writer and not the kind
and generous man he once desired to be. His every dream and every bit of reality has
crumpled down to nothingness. To showcase it, he tells how he will ignore a young
writer or a starving man dying under his window.

• He says he has cleared his slate and has only become a writer. But it is untrue, for
most of the worries of his life (Zelda’s health, Scottie’s education etc) were still intact.

• “Negro lady cuts loose a rival…..” The reference to black female sexuality is evident.
It was common to consider the sexuality of a black female as loose, uncontrollable.

• Fitzgerald’s degradation of himself to the level of an animal may be shockingly

outrageous, but it also emphasizes the intensity of his mental breakdown and the
state of helplessness to which he had succumbed.






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Critical Remarks :

• Lionell Trilling – “heroic self-awareness.”

• Glenway Wescott – “the denial of alcoholism”

• Andrews Wanning – “a desperate effort at self-disclosure.”

• These autobiographical essays were in a way, biographical as he didn’t really

reveal the details of his personal life and the causations of his breakdown.
Including “Fitzgerald’s alcoholism”

• His articles look more like an “apologia” rather than a confession. Fitzgerald
blamed other reasons for his crack-up, they were elsewhere but in himself.

• Although there is a certain sense of autobiography in the essays, there also is

an air of fictionalization of self.

• Fitz attitude in the articles in to find the reasons of his crack up and not to offer
one.

• It is also important to note the change of tense in the Descartes’ statement. It

may be an attempt of his changed self which thinks of the world less now.

• “Alienation from self” is one theme behind Fitzgerald’s collapse.

• Later, Fitzgerald referred to his articles as “biography” instead of

“autobiography”. This silly mistake, according to Robert Sklar captures that the
man described in the essay is not the man who wrote about him.



~fin.~