The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  She knew that she herself was superior in something to the girls who criticized her—though she often confused her superiority with the homage it inspired.

  Too soon they were responding to Josephine with a fatal sameness, a lack of temperament that blurred their personalities.

  Cocktails before meals like Americans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whiskey-and-soda like the English, and, as they were no longer in the twenties, this preposterous mélange, that was like some gigantic cocktail in a nightmare.

  Do you know what your affair was founded on? On sorrow. You got sorry for each other.

  Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

  Arbitrary groups formed by the hazards of money or geography may be sufficiently quarrelsome and dull, but for sheer unpleasantness the condition of young people who have been thrust together by a common unpopularity can be compared only with that of prisoners herded in a cell. In Basil’s eyes the guests at the little dinner the following night were a collection of cripples.

  I can even live with a lie (even someone else’s lie—can always spot them because imaginative creation is my business and I am probably one of the most expert liars in the world and expect everybody to discount nine-tenths of what I say), but I have made two rules in attempting to be both an intellectual and a man of honor simultaneously—that I do not tell myself lies that will be of value to myself, and secondly, I do not lie to myself.

  They went on to the party. It was a housewarming, with Hawaiian musicians in attendance, and the guests were largely of the old crowd. People who had been in the early Griffith pictures, even though they were scarcely thirty, were considered to be of the old crowd; they were different from those coming along now and they were conscious of it.

  The combination of a desire for glory and an inability to endure the monotony it entails puts many people in the asylum. Glory comes from the unchanging din-din-din of one supreme gift.

  France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter—it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

  The real plot of all Little Theatre plays, the one that transpires through whatever play they’re officially acting, is how the young gosling actor of fourteen ever managed to be in love with the leading woman of forty and what’s going to come of the situation. The reality of this gives that blurred air that the performances always have.

  It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries, because we think of ourselves as so strong and incorruptible, but our children’s friends must show a blank service record.

  What would you rather be loved for, your beauty, your intrinsic worth, your money?

  First two vanish and are replaced by their equivalents: beauty, by charm and tact; spirituality and energy, by experience and intelligence. Third never knows any change.

  Why do whores have husky voices?

  After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains. The young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there.

  Perhaps that life is constantly renewed, and glamour and beauty make way for it.

  “A pair of thoroughbreds, those two,” said the other woman complacently, meaning that she admitted them to be her equals.

  Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

  One advantage of politeness is to be able to deal with women on their own grounds, to please or to torture the enemy, as it may prove necessary. And not to fire random shots and flowers from the pure male camp many miles away.

  Advantage of politeness: Extending out of ordinary world, etc.

  Actors the clue to much.

  It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.

  But the world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.

  You can usually scare a certain amount of brains into a woman but usually you can’t make them stick.

  Force of a proverb in another language.

  He felt then that if the pilgrimage eastward of the rare poisonous flower of his race was the end of the adventure which had started westward three hundred years ago, if the long serpent of the curiosity had turned too sharp upon itself, cramping its bowels, bursting its shining skin, at least there had been a journey; like to the satisfaction of a man coming to die—one of those human things that one can never understand unless one has made such a journey and heard the man give thanks with the husbanded breath. The frontiers were gone—there were no more barbarians. The short gallop of the last great race, the polyglot, the hated and the despised, the crass and scorned, had gone—at least it was not a meaningless extinction up an alley.

  Despairingly and miserably, to what purpose neither knew, as people in fires save things they don’t want and have long disliked.

  He had one of those minds so incomprehensible to the literary man, which are illiterate not through insensibility but through the fact that the past and future are with them contemporary with the present, having no special value or pathos of their own.

  No learning without effort—educational movies.

  When we do something mean to a friend we think of it as an exception in our relations with him, but as a matter of fact it has immediately become the type thing. We have just one time.

  My sometimes reading my own books for advice. How much I know sometimes—how little at others.

  This being in love is great—you get a lot of compliments and begin to think you’re a great guy.

  Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects. Everything eventually transpires—but if they start at a high pitch as at the last meeting of Ernest, Bunny and me, their meeting is spoiled. It does not matter who sets the theme or what it is.

  If you’re strong enough, there are no precedents.

  Gertrude Harris about pleasure of giving. The excess.

  Didn’t finish idea today that lack of success of physical sheer power in my life made trouble. Fighting through intellectual power—parallel in life of modern woman— courage in Zelda, etc.

  They had a dignity and straightforwardness about them from the fact that they had worked in pictures before pictures were bathed in a golden haze of success. They were still rather humble before their amazing triumph, and thus, unlike the new generation, who took it all for granted, they were constantly in touch with reality. Half a dozen or so of the women were especially aware of being unique. No one had come along to fill their places; here and there a pretty face had caught the public imagination for a year, but those of the old crowd were already legends, ageless and disembodied. With all this they were still young enough to believe that they would go on forever.

  Like a bad play where there is nothing to do but pick out the actors that look most like real people and watch them until, like amateurs, their true existence has become speculatively interesting.

  Something in his nature never got over things, never accepted his sudden rise to fame, because all the steps weren’t there.

  Francis says he’s tired of a life like a full glass of water, relations with people a series of charades, you never do the whole world.

  Is snubbed when he dramatizes himself as victim of American failure.

  De Sano: If you use both logic and imagination you can destroy everything in the
world between them.

  Men hate to stay in hotel run by woman.

  Women vice versa.

  The American capitol, not being New York, was of enormous importance in our history. It had saved the Union from the mobs in ’63—but, on the other hand, the intellectual drifted to the Metropolis and our politics were childish from lack of his criticism.

  Each of us thinks his own life has been, etc.

  Fairy can only stand young girls on stage, where they’re speaking other people’s lines.

  The laugh generated by Fred Stone’s “I’m so nervous,” in The Wizard of Oz justified a whole generation in cultivating nerves.

  Subject of control: British pitch—from strength easy, from nervous effort hard—therefore a moral question?

  It seemed to her that the dance was woman’s interpretation of music; instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render Tschaikowsky and Stravinsky; and feet could be as eloquent in Chopiniana as voices in The Ring. At the bottom, it was something sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals; at the top, it was Pavlova and art.

  To record one must be unwary.

  They would like to have been her, but not to have paid the price in self-control.

  Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

  Afternoons came in retrospect to have a more enduring value of their own. Nights are their own fulfillment—we possess them and not their memory, save for certain nights that open out into a novel and startling dawn. But perhaps it is only that it is easier to remember afternoons.

  “They come over so the children can learn French,” said Abe gloomily. “They all just slip down through Europe like nails in a sack, until they stick out of it a little into the Mediterranean Sea.”

  I heard a child called Venice in a movie theatre at night. First Michael Arlen generation. The sort of picture you’d expect, and it was night.

  I’ve noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That’s because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.

  Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.

  A large personality is built on such a structure that we scarcely realize its dimensions while it is being built; it keeps up its monstrous development, flinging out as many unaccountable commitments as the limbs on an octopus, growing until we scarcely recognize its shadows—so large has it become beyond that of ordinary people. Except we can recognize the dimensions of the shadow in the horizontal twilight of the coffin.

  It becomes such a valuable thing that it is a pity when it is killed, and those nature lovers among us should watch its growth; it is difficult to reproduce scientifically; and if allowed to die, may not re-occur for many years.

  You and Seth can be radicals and show your children how you look in the bathtub, because you’re both so good, but people who really experiment with themselves find out that all the old things are true.

  My theory of partial arbitrary covering of skin as protection from cold—furred Dolmans, Roman shin-guards, etc.

  “You can be nice to someone without falling into their arms” almost always means “You can be awful to somebody without their knowing it.”

  She never realized that, whenever she mustered all the cold cruelty with which she could dominate over the wide-open sensitivity that she lived on but could never know—she never knew that, later, in a form of revenge, when his wounds were well, his sores closed, he would inevitably crush down on her with a pressure she could no more comprehend than his sensitivity. It contained the same elements—only his suffering was now made over into suffering for her—even more fatal for not being deliberate.

  She was plagued by the devastating small one-ring selfishness of some women. For instance, to a statement that a man had been on sentry duty all night, she would oppose the fragment of truth that he had somewhere snatched two legitimate hours of sleep, and thus discredit his ability to take the punishment of a twenty-one hour day. This seems to be one of the last achievements women are likely to wrest from men, but, having made the confusion of mere patience with work, they are not inclined to surrender the point graciously.

  The word “manly” ruined by commercial use.

  On Operations: Being a soldier takes the life out of you, as was the experience of Philip Sidney; being a good poet removes or invalidates the nervous system; being a politician or statesman operates only on the conscience, and is as simple as the removal of the heart which too often goes with doctoring. The removal of the soul consequent on being a successful merchant is accomplished practically without pain.

  Idea that on the higher levels of human achievement— writing, Thalberg, etc.—difference is so slight, etc.

  Awful disillusion of arriving at center of supposed authority and finding need of flattery so as to be reinforced in that authority.

  The grand triumph of the people who don’t care over the people who do—the well in the sick room, nurse over patient, doctor’s jokes, their exquisite attention to my egotism, the advantage of the beloved over the lover, and the lender over the borrower, but also the sponge over the softy.

  Personality precludes inspection by vis-à-vis.

  Wanting to mother a man—wanting to keep him from spending his money on some other woman.

  The words gentleman and lady only have a concise meaning to a person just learning to be one or just having ceased to be one.

  A woman’s sense of men conspiring together and vice versa.

  You can take your choice between God and Sex. If you choose both, you’re a smug hypocrite; if neither, you get nothing.

  Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

  Some discussion of the facts that, in general: Haute bourgeoisie training is so much more enlightened that more stuffed shirts survive. Esprit de corps. Petite bourgeoisie training is rougher and selects the fittest. But proletarian training is the roughest of all, and has poorest education and least esprit de corps, is hampered by race prejudices, etc.

  Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

  In any given individual life or situation, things progress from good toward less good. But life itself never does.

  Mankind has lived through three ideas: (1) That .the capacity for leadership is hereditary, (2) that the soul is immortal, (3) that he [man] can govern as a mass and is fit and able to choose his leaders—and into a fourth, i.e. that ethics are attractive in themselves.

  Zelda’s idea: the bad things are the same in everyone; only the good are different.

  It is necessary to emphasize the individual differences between men. If you are high enough in the air, you can’t even see the leader of the parade, sometimes you can’t even see the way it’s going—and it’s necessary to know. Al Capone.

  Women took over political-religious thought, with their lack of education, their almost universal lack of knowledge of things as they are, and turned this delegated prerogative inward, cultivating all tendencies in children as individualism. This can best be looked at in the case of a conscious mother and a conscious son, such as your mother and you, where the dead or senile grandfather was still the head of the family.

  Does anyone think an angel of God appeared to George Washington and suddenly informed him that if he gave up all the allegiances that he had in Virginia, and the entire caste to which he had been born, he would become a model hero of all the school children of 1933?

  The very elements of disintegration seemed to him romantic—the vague unrest that went on back of the big tranquil lawn, the incessant small bickering that seemed to prove that in their magnificence they had no need of solidarity. Actually it meant that the old Millers, hav
ing nothing to teach, had taught their children no common good, having traded their Bavarian field-wisdom for a sort of wisdom that was current in the Middle West twenty to forty years ago, which was of no value at all. Evolved under one set of conditions, the settlement and development of the West, it seemed as academic to children growing up in a static city as the morals of the Samurai.

  He was in the safety zone. In a man this is the period between twenty-four and twenty-eight, and, however precarious for a man to rely upon and belied by marriage statistics, such a safety-zone is a reality. At that age a good man will not mistake the wide-eyed attention of eighteen for the wisdom of thirty, nor forgive thirty for lacking the freshness of eighteen. Let it even be insisted upon: a bachelor of twenty-six in his right mind is not a serious prospect.

  Women’s continual reacting reacting reacting, almost to a point of self-immolation, to forces that they haven’t caused and can’t do anything about.

  On such occasions as this, thought Scott, as his eyes still sought casually for Yanci, occurred the matings of the leftovers, the plainer, the duller, the poorer of the social world; matings actuated by the same urge toward perhaps a more glamorous destiny, yet, for all that, less beautiful and less young. Scott himself was feeling very old.

  Learning of a word or place, etc., and then seeming to run across the word or place in your reading constantly in the next few weeks.

  Use as simile: “as when one,” etc.

  You can stroke people with words.

  Advantages of children whose mother is dead.

  Weaknesses of medium point of view: (1) not attractive, (2) always borne along in practise in the trial of extreme points of view, etc.

  A man being only the sum of his initials.

  There are certain ribald stories that I heard at ten years old and never again, for I heard a new and more sophisticated set at eleven. Many years later I heard a ten-year-old boy telling another one of those old stories, and it occurred to me that it had been handed on from one ten-year-old generation to the next for an incalculable number of centuries. So with the set I learned at eleven. Each set of stories, like a secret ritual, stays always within its age-class, never growing older, because there is always a new throng of ten-year-olds to learn them, and never growing stale because these same boys will forget them at eleven. One can almost believe that there is a conscious theory behind this unofficial education.