The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Well, then, so was Christ showing off.”

  “Prowling the rattlers”—robbing freight cars.

  Beginning of a story, Incorrigible.

  Father: Who do you admire?

  Son: Andy Gump. Who do you think I admire—George Washington? Grow up!

  “With a piquant face and all the chic in the world. This is because I was educated in Paris and this in turn I owe to someone’s chance remark to Cousin Arietta that she had a nice big daughter who was only twenty-two or three at the time. It took three bromides to calk Cousin Arietta and I started for the Convent of the Sacré-Coeur next day.”

  Kitty, if you write on that pillow with my lipstick!

  People’s home—a lovely home.

  “Am I right or wrong?” he asked the head waiter. The answer was obvious—he was right—gloriously and everlastingly right. Interesting, too.

  “I’m giving a dinner tonight, some very fine cultivated people. I want you to come. I sent a note to your cabin.”

  “For God’s sake,” Lew groaned, “I don’t want to meet any people. I know some people.”

  “Look me up in the Social Register.”

  “You hate people, don’t you?”

  “Yes, and you do, too.”

  “I hate them like hell.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. But not that anyhow. If I’m cold I’m not always going to use it to learn their secrets by finding them off guard and vulnerable. And I’m not going around saying I’m fond of people when I mean I’m so damned used to their reactions to my personal charm that I can’t do without it. Getting emptier and emptier. Love is shy. I thought from the first that no one who thought about it like you did ever had it.”

  “Oh, have you got an engagement with your drug-taking friend in Monte Carlo?”

  He sat down and began putting on his shoes.

  “I shouldn’t have told you that. I suppose you think he’ll convert me to the habit.”

  “I certainly don’t think it’s a very profitable association.”

  “Oh, yes it is. It’s not everybody who can get the dope habit from a prominent moving picture director. In fact, it’s begun already. At this very moment I’m full of dope. He started me on cocaine, and we’re working slowly up to heroin.”

  “That isn’t really funny, Francis.”

  “Excuse me. I was trying to be funny and I know you don’t like my way of being funny.”

  She countered his growing bitterness by adopting a tone of calm patience.

  In Virginia the Italian children say:

  “Lincoln threw blacks out; now they’re back.”

  “The white people fit the Yankees.”

  “Yankees are white people.”

  “Not I ever hear tell of.”

  I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that.

  “Just a couple of old drunks, just a couply of ol-l-ld circus clowns.”

  “I’m in a hurry.

  “I’m in a hurry— I’m in a hurry.”

  “What are you in a hurry about?”

  “I can’t explain— I’m in a hurry.”

  “This is a tough girl and I’m taking her to a tough place.”

  Three hundred a day die in auto accidents in the U. S. A.

  Man looking at aeroplane: “That’s one of them new gyropractors.”

  Bijou, regarding her cigarette fingers: “Oh, Trevah! Get me the pumice stone.”

  His life was a sort of dream, as are most lives with the mainspring left out.

  Suddenly her face resumed that expression which can only come from studying moving picture magazines over and over, and only be described as one long blond wish toward something—a wish that you’d have a wedlock with the youth of Shirley Temple, the earning power of Clark Gable; the love of Clark Gable and the talent of Charles Laughton—and with a bright smile the girl was gone:

  Feel wide awake—no, but at least I feel born, which is more than I did the first time I woke up.

  The cartoon cat licked the cartoon kitten and a girl behind me said, “Isn’t that sweet?”

  We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like a lot of dropped trays.

  Q. What did he die of? A. He died of jus’ dieability.

  “Hello, Sam.” When you were a good guest, you knew the names of the servants, the smallest babies, and the oldest aunts. “Is Bonny in?”

  “I like writers. If you speak to a writer, you often get an answer.”

  Woman says about husband that he keeps bringing whole great masses of dogs back from the pound.

  “We haven’t got any more gin,” he said. “Will you have a bromide?” he added hopefully.

  Long engagement: nothing to do but to marry or quarrel, so I decided to quarrel.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said, using the scented “I.”

  “Remember you’re physically repulsive to me.”

  “Learn young about hard work and good manners—and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.”

  Now it’s all as useless as repeating a dream.

  “I’m going to break that stubborn stupid part of you that thinks that any American woman who has met Brancusi is automatically a genius and entitled ever after to leave the dishes and walk around with her head in the clouds.”

  “You look to me like a very ordinary three-piece suit.”

  Man to Woman: “You look as if you wanted excitement—is that true?”

  “Go and sleep with a cheapskate—go on—it’d do you good. It would take another little tuck in your soul and you’d fit better, be more comfortable.”

  “Francis says he wants to go away and try his personality on a lot of new people.”

  “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.”

  “I have decided that the office cannot continue to hold both you and me. One of us must go—which shall it be?”

  “Well, Mr. Wrackham, your name is painted on the doors—I suppose it would be simpler if you stayed.”

  “My last husband was thrown from his horse. You must learn to ride.” He takes one look around uneasily for a horse.

  “We throw in one of these flowers. You know how frails are—if a stone sails in, they put up a yelp—if it’s a rose, they think there’s the Prince of Wales at last.”

  “That one about the four girls named Meg who fall down the rabbit hole.”

  “He wants to make a goddess out of me and I want to be Mickey Mouse.”

  “Yes mam, if necessary. Look here, you take a girl and she goes into some café where she’s got no business to go. Well, then, her escort he gets a little too much to drink an’ he goes to sleep an’ then some fella comes up and says, ‘Hello, sweet mamma,’ or whatever one of those mashers says up here. What does she do? She can’t scream, on account of no real lady will scream nowadays—no—she just reaches down in her pocket and slips her fingers into a pair of Powell’s defensive brass-knuckles, debutante’s size, executes what I call the Society Hook, and Wham! that big fella’s on his way to the cellar.”

  “Well-what—What’s the guitar for?” whispered the awed Amanthis. “Do they have to knock somebody over with the guitar?”

  “No, mam!” exclaimed Jim in horror. “No mam. In my course no lady would be taught to raise a guitar against anybody. I teach ’em to play. Shucks! you ought to hear ’em. Why, when I’ve given ’em two lessons, you’d think some of ’em was colored.”

  “What are they doing?” whispered Amanthis to Jim.

  “That there’s a course in southern accent. Lot of young men up here want to learn southern accent—so we teach it—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Eastern Shore, Ole Virginian. Some of ’em even want straight nigger—for song purposes.”

  “The time I fell off a closet shelf.”

  “You what?”

&n
bsp; “I fell off a shelf—and he put it in the paper.”

  “Well, what were you doing?”

  “I just happened to be up on a shelf and I fell off.”

  “Oh, don’t say it.”

  “I’ve stopped giving any further explanations. Anyhow, father said it was news.”

  D

  DESCRIPTIONS OF THINGS AND ATMOSPHERES

  The wind shivered over the leaves, over the white casements—then as if it was beauty it could not stand, jumped out the window and climbed down from the cornice on the corner.

  Then it came to ground. All that had happened was that green had blown through the wind and back and returned to settle on the same red walls, waving it forever after as a green flag, a heavy, ever bearded, ever unshaven flag, like water when you drop a petal in it, like a woman’s dress, and then the little trickles that wound about the casements— faint, somnescent and gone.

  After that silence—the wind blowing the curtains. The cross child you had to scold. The moment had gone. The moment had come and existed for a minute. A lacy light played once more—a scherzo, no, a new prelude to ever blooming, ever greening, and he was sorry for what he had ever said or thought.

  Once more the wind was dead. There was only one leaf flickering against the white casement. Perhaps there was someone back of it being happy.

  The pleasant, ostentatious boulevard was lined at prosperous intervals with New England Colonial houses—without ship models in the hall. When the inhabitants moved out here, the ship models had at last been given to the children. The next street was a complete exhibit of the Spanish-bungalow phase of West Coast architecture; while two streets over, the cylindrical windows and round towers of 1897—melancholy antiques which sheltered swamis, yogis, fortune tellers, dressmakers, dancing teachers, art academies and chiropractors—looked down now upon brisk busses and trolley cars. A little walk around the block could, if you were feeling old that day, be a discouraging affair.

  On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their knees marked by the red stains of the mercuro-chrome era, played with toys with a purpose—beams that taught engineering, soldiers that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood. When the dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for them. Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.

  Days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory.

  Dyed Siberian horses.

  As thin as a repeated dream.

  The sea was coming up in little intimidating rushes.

  The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.

  Lost in the immensity of surf aceless blue sky like air piled on air.

  A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another— as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder.

  The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling, billowing ends of the cloths. There was Pat O’Mara, his hands, adequate enough, smoothing hair. Blow, banners, blow. You in ermine slow down, you, slow, whip, no snap, only whip wind in the corners of the tables. Can I have a flower if they don’t want one.

  On the great swell of the Blue Danube, the summer ball rocked into motion.

  A circus ring for ponies in country houses.

  A tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.

  A rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 8o’s, the country poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again.

  The groans of moribund plumbing.

  The silvery “Hey!” of a telephone.

  The curious juxtapositions made him feel the profound waves of change that were already washing this country— the desperate war that had rendered the plantation house obsolete, the industrialization that had spoiled the easygoing life centering around the old court house. And then the years yielding up eventually in the backwater of those curious young products who were neither peasants, nor bourgeois, nor scamps, but a little of all three, gathered there in front of the store.

  New York’s flashing, dynamic good looks, its tall man’s quick-step.

  Afterward they would drive around until they found the center of the summer night and park there while the enchanted silence spread over them like leaves over the babes in the wood.

  Stevedores appeared momentarily against the lighted hold of a barge and jerked quickly out of sight down an invisible incline.

  The moon came up rosy gold with a haze around.

  Whining, tinkling hoochie-coochie show.

  The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.

  Metropolitan days and nights that were tense as singing wires.

  The late sun glinted on the Mississippi flats a mile away.

  When the stars were bright enough to compete with the bright lamps.

  The limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.

  Three frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats heaped like shells along the beach. Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.

  That stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon.

  The club lay in a little valley, almost roofed over by willows, and down through their black silhouettes, in irregular blobs and patches, dripped the light of a huge harvest moon. As they parked the car, Basil’s tune of tunes, Chinatown, drifted from the windows and dissolved into its notes, which thronged like elves through the glade.

  Deep autumn had set in, with a crackling wind from the west.

  Next door they were scrubbing a building upon a lit-up platform. It was fun to see it come out all bright and new.

  The hotel we selected—The Hôtel de la Morgue—was small and silent enough to suit even the most refined taste.

  The droning of frogs in the Aislette Valley covered the sound of the bringing up of our artillery.

  In the afternoon they came to a lake. It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.

  You can order it in four sizes: demi (half a litre), distingue (one litre), formidable (three litres), and catastrophe (five litres).

  In the deep locker-room of the earth.

  The rear wall was formed by a wide flag of water, falling from a seam in the rock ceiling, and afterwards draining into some lower level cave beyond.

  Seen in a Junk Yard. Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs., plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No. 1), van, stove, auto stuff (No. 2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

  Across the street from me in Hendersonville, N. C, is a movie sign, usually with a few bulbs out in the center. It reads tonight: The Crusades: The Flaming Passion of a Woman Torn Between Two Camps.

  This is the right idea, and to aid in the campaign to prove that a woman (not women mind you—that point is granted) is at the tiller in every storm, I submit the following suggestions to draw in the elder gadgets and their tokens: Huckleberry Finn—How a Girl Chan
ged the Life of a Missouri Boy.

  A strip of straw, half-braided, that fell across another desk.

  A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city—darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.

  Memory of coming into Washington.

  All of a sudden the room struck like a clock.

  For a while the big liner, so sure and proud in the open sea, was shoved ignominiously around by the tugs, like a helpless old woman.

  There were Roman legionaries with short, bright swords and helmets and shields shining with gilt, a conqueror in his chariot with six horses, and an entourage of sparkling, plumed Roman knights, captured Gauls in chains, Greeks in buskins and tunics of Ionian blue, black Egyptians in flashing desert reds with images of Isis and Osiris, a catapult, and, in person, Hannibal, Caesar, Rameses and Alexander.

  The evening gem-play of New York was already taking place outside the window. But as Charlie gazed at it, it seemed to him tawdry and theatrical, a great keeping up of appearances after the reality was gone. Each new tower was something erected in defiance of obvious and imminent disaster; each beam of light a final despairing attempt to pretend that all was well.

  “But they had their time. For a while they represented a reality. These things are scarcely built; not a single generation saw them and passed away before we ceased to believe.”

  The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

  The blurred world seen from a merry-go-round settled into place; the merry-go-round suddenly stopped.

  The city’s quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative, pageantry and drama to the drab.

  Spring came sliding up the mountains in wedges and spear-points of green.

  Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child’s dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon. Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were—perhaps money was a form of fin. In England, property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.