The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter. The fatted calf is killed for Spargo, Papini, Chesterton and Henry Arthur Jones. There is a bigger temporary premium put on losing your nerve in this regard than in any other.

  When men agree on a subject of controversy, they love to tell or listen to personal stories that seem to strengthen their side of the question. They laugh deliberately and enjoy a warm feeling that the case is won.

  His mind full of the odd ends of all he had read, dim tracings of thoughts whose genesis was already far away when (their dim carbons) reached his ears.

  The reason morons can stand good entertainment is that they don’t like to understand all the time. Like a nurse or child at a sophisticated lunch table. Something they could follow all through is a stirring nervous experience for them. Through a good picture they can drowse—as morons always drowse mentally through great events.

  Fifty years ago we Americans substituted melodrama for tragedy, violence for dignity under suffering. That became a quality that only women were supposed to exhibit in life or fiction—so much so that there are few novels or biographies in which the American male, tangled in an irreconcilable series of contradictions, is considered as anything but an unresourceful and cowardly weakwad.

  All the sucks on the Astor and Whitney fortunes.

  Time marches on—ruthlessly—until the Russians tried to replace their artists and scientists—then time stood still and only the pendulum functioned.

  I can watch a cigarette burn, like Esquire’s streamlines. Charly Petty’s lines are all from a cigarette, even the hair where the smoke breaks.

  Never noticed Mother’s eyes after living with her twenty years. Mrs. O. says they are like mine.

  Like all “final” people—judges, doctors, great artists, etc.

  You began by pretending to be kind (politeness). It pays so well that it becomes second nature. Some people like Jews can’t get past the artificiality of the first step.

  When people get mixed up, they try to throw out a sort of obscuring mist, and then the sharp shock of a fact—a collision!—seems to be the only thing to make them soberminded again.

  The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them, makes that tensity in you that is the secret of all charm—when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you become just another victim of self-indulgence?—breaking down the solid things around you and, moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable?

  But scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all. Or else eleven bought iron men and 3000 ninnies. God preserve you from that vacuum foundry!

  There is this to be said for the Happy Ending: that the healthy man goes from love to love.

  Reversion to childhood typical of the only child.

  Nine girls out of ten can stand good looks without going to pieces, though only one boy out of ten ever comes out from under them.

  American farmer as a fighter comes of desperate stock as well as adventurous.

  Remember that women are ostriches about themselves; and that all men—and by this I mean every man—will tell everything, and usually more, within three months from date. Remember the daughter of * * * * who owned the * * * * Street apartment. I heard her story long before she’d left Baltimore.

  You could tell a * * * * boy by his table manners. You see they ate with the servants while their parents divorced and remarried.

  Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

  In the beginning, we are the split and splintered pieces of the basket in which we are all contained. At the end, the basket, turned upside down, has become a haystack in which we search for our own smooth identity—as if it had ever existed.

  Remember this—if you shut your mouth, you have your choice.

  The flapper never really disappeared in the twenties—she merely dropped her name, put on rubber heels and worked in the dark.

  The tackles, good or bad, are a necessary fact in life. The Tiger Inn type, little nervous system, Dickinson, McGraw, etc. Their recognition of each other.

  About finding I am not a rational type—finding it in Hollywood, I mean, in script writing. How every director must be, for instance.

  Justification of happy ending. My father and Oscar Wilde born in the same year. One ruined at forty—one “happy” at seventy. So Becky and Amelia are, in fact, true.

  A precociously tough boy makes jokes like an old man. Like saying (referring to twenty years ago): “So you laughed at me, eh?” Utterly safe kidding of people who don’t want to hurt or be hurt.

  “I explained to you that waiting is just part of the picture business. Everybody’s so much overpaid that, when something finally happens, you realize that you were making money all the time. The reason it’s slow is because one man’s keeping it all in his head, and fighting the weather and actors and accidents.”

  Beginnings of a bad education—when, from Myers’ Ancient History and concentrated attention on Roman columns, I assumed that that was standard and solid and indicative of mind and taste—and therefore was puzzled years later when Western bank architecture was deserted for more modern forms.

  I didn’t have the two top things: great animal magnetism or money. I had the two second things, though: good looks and intelligence. So I always got the top girl.

  In 1908 our Pacific and Caribbean adventures were as romantic as the G-men exploits of today.

  R

  ROUGH STUFF

  A man giving up the idea of himself as a hero. Perhaps picking his nose in a can.

  You can’t take the son of a plough manufacturer, clip off his testicles and make an artist of him.

  “Did you ever see squirrels yincing?” he asked her suddenly.

  Scenario hacks, having removed all life from a story, substituting the stink of life—a fart, a loose joke, a dirty jeer. How do they do it?

  Apology to Ogden Nash:

  Every California girl has lost at least one ovary

  And none of them has read Madame Bovary.

  S

  SCENES AND SITUATIONS

  Sir Francis Elliot, King George, the barley water and champagne.

  The big toy banks with candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows on slow hills toward the dark sky.

  “What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”

  “Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.

  Blind man’s buff and fiancée with no chin.

  Colored woman and dead Jewish baby.

  “There’s no use looking at things, because you don’t like things,” remarked Raines, in answer to his polite interest.

  “No,” said Charlie frankly, “I don’t.”

  “You like only rhythms, with things marking the beats, and now your rhythm is broken.”

  The orchestra was playing a Wiener Walzer, and suddenly she had the sensation that the chords were extending themselves, that each bar of three-four time was bending in the middle, dropping a little and thus drawing itself out, until the waltz itself, like a phonograph running down, became a torture.

  She stood there in the middle of an enormous quiet. The pursuing feet that had thundered in her dream had stopped. There was a steady, singing silence.

  Perhaps that slate we looked at once, that was all the grey blue we’d ever know in life—where the dark brown tide receded, the slate came. It was indescribable as the dress beside him (the color of hours of a long human day)—blue like misery, blue for the shy-away from happiness—“If I could [touch?] that shade everything would be a
ll right forever . . . ” Touch it? Touch.

  For me an unhappy day on the Rivera, 1926:

  The bouillabaisse.

  The baby gar.

  (Maurice—the first Peter Arno cartoons about Hie and Whoops.)

  Who would save the weakest swimmer.

  (The quarrel.)

  Isolation of two in end of boat.

  Gerald and Walker at Villefranche.

  Archie and the car on my eyebrow.

  The swim au naturel, but not.

  Didn’t evenings sometimes end on a high note and not fade out vaguely in bars? After ten o’clock every night she felt she was the only real being in a colony of ghosts, that she was surrounded by utterly intangible figures who retreated whenever she stretched out her hand.

  When he gets sober for six months and can’t stand any of the people he’s liked when drunk.

  The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out behind the window, and Forrest had rum in his tea.

  Josephine Baker’s chocolate arabesques. Chorus from her show.

  In front of the shops in the Rue de Castiglione, proprietors and patrons were on the sidewalk gazing upward, for the Graf Zeppelin, shining and glorious, symbol of escape and destruction—of escape, if necessary, through destruction— glided in the Paris sky. He heard a woman say in French that it would not astonish her if that commenced to let fall the bombs.

  (Not funny now—1939.)

  Why didn’t they back away? Why didn’t they back right up, walking backward down the Rue de Castiglione, across the Rue de Rivoli, through the Tuileries Gardens, still walking backward as fast as they could till they grew vague and faded out across the river?

  Lying awake in bed that night, he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another. When the last van had rumbled out of hearing, the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn.

  Almost at once Josephine realized that everybody there except herself was crazy. She knew it incontrovertibly, although the only person of outward eccentricity was a robust woman in a frock coat and grey morning trousers. Their frightened eyes lifted to the young girl’s elegant clothes, her confident, beautiful face, and they turned from her rudely in self-protection.

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “Kiss you.”

  A spasm of timidity, quickly controlled, went over her face.

  “I’m all dirty.”

  “Don’t you kiss people when they’re all dirty?”

  “I don’t kiss people. I’m just before that generation. We’ll find you a nice young girl you can kiss.”

  “There aren’t any nice young girls—you’re the only one I like.”

  “I’m not nice. I’m a hard woman.”

  The woman who snatched her children away on the boat just to be exclusive—exclusive from what?

  She laughed sweetly.

  “Where you been?”

  “Skiing. But every time I go away that doesn’t mean you can go dance with a whole lot of gigolo numbers from Cairo. Why does he hold his hand parallel to the floor when he dances? Does he think he’s stilling the waves? Does he think the floor’s going to swing up and crack him?”

  “He’s a Greek, honey.”

  A small car, red in color and slung at that proximity to the ground which indicated both speed of motion and speed of life. It was a Blatz Wildcat. Occupying it, in the posture of aloof exhaustion exacted by the sloping seat, was a blond, gay, baby-faced girl.

  They floated off, immediately entering upon a long echoing darkness. Somewhere far ahead a group in another boat were singing, their voices now remote and romantic, now nearer and yet more mysterious, as the canal doubled back and the boats passed close to each other with an invisible veil between. The continual bump-bump of the boat against the wooden sides. They slid into a red glow—a stage set of hell, with grinning demons and lurid paper fires—then again into the darkness, with the gently lapping water and the passing of the singing boat now near, now far away.

  He paused speculatively to vault the high hydrant in front of the Van Schellinger house, wondering if one did such things in long trousers and if he would ever do it again.

  “Do away with yourself,” he demanded, startled. “You? Why on earth—”

  “Oh, I’ve almost done it twice. I get the horrors—usually when something goes wrong with my art. Once they said I fell in the bathtub when I only jumped in, and another time somebody closed a window before I could get to it.”

  “You ought to be careful.”

  “I am careful. I keep a lady with me always—but she couldn’t come East because she was going to be married.”

  Sending orchestra second rate champagne—never, never do it again.

  Gerald walking Paris.

  Once in his room and reassured by the British stability of them, the ingenuity of the poor asserted itself. He began literally to wind himself up in his clothes. He undressed, put on two suits of underwear and over that four shirts and two suits of clothes, together with two white piqué vests. Every pocket he stuffed with ties, socks, studs, gold-backed brushes and a few toilet articles. Panting audibly, he struggled into an overcoat. His derby looked empty, so he filled it with collars and held them in place with some handkerchiefs. Then, rocking a little on his feet, he regarded himself in the mirror.

  He might possibly manage it—if only a steady stream of perspiration had not started to flow from somewhere up high in the edifice and kept pouring streams of various temperatures down his body, until they were absorbed in the heavy blotting paper of three pairs of socks that crowded his shoes.

  Moving cautiously, like Tweedledum before the battle, he traversed the hall and rang for the elevator. The boy looked at him curiously, but made no comment, though another passenger made a dry reference to Admiral Byrd. Through the lobby he moved, a gigantic figure of a man. Perhaps the clerks at the desk had a subconscious sense of something being wrong, but he was gone too quickly for them to do anything about it.

  “Taxi, sir?” the doorman inquired, solicitous at Val’s pale face.

  Unable to answer, Val tried to shake his head, but, this also proving impossible, he emitted a low negative groan. The sun was attracted to his bulk as lightning is attracted to metal, as he staggered out toward a bus. Up on top, he thought; it would be cooler up on top.

  His training as a hall-room boy stood him in good stead now; he fought his way up the winding stair as if it had been the social ladder. Then, drenched and suffocating, he sank down upon a bench, the bourgeois blood of many Mr. Joneses pumping strong in his heart. Not for Val to sit upon a trunk and kick his heels and wait for the end; there was fight in him yet.

  * * * * married into a family of boarding house aristocrats in Charleston and they didn’t like him. But outside of Charleston their prestige depended on him, so that they took it out in mild abuse. There was a coast guard officer in the family that was always going to jump down his throat with a loaded revolver. When his wife broke down, the father used to go to the hospital, and after getting his prestige with the doctors from poor * * * *’s shows, he’d tear into him. * * * * ducking around Europe at the time, sleeping with chambermaids and raising hell on the quiet generally. “Jesus Christ,” he used to say, “they climb up on your shoulders and then pull your nose.”

  A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn (enlarge—Hotel Don Ce-sar at pink dawn—the gulf.)

  Children’s Hour: “Kiddies, I’d be the last one to ask you to begin smoking before, say, six, but remember we are in the depths of a depression—the depths of a depression from four to six, through the courtesy of the American Cigarette Company—and you represent a potential market of forty million smokers.”

  The city had been merely an unfamiliar rhythm persisting outside the windows of an American Express Hotel, with days
composed of such casual punctuation marks as going for the mail or taking auto rides that did not go back and forth but always in a circle.

  Dogs appraising buildings.

  A taxi tipping over on a nervous night.

  Throwing away jewelry, burning clothes.

  She told him a wonderful plot she had for a “Scenario,” and then repeated to him the outline of The Miracle Man. He gave her the address of Joe Gibney in Hollywood as someone who might be interested. Joe was the studio bootlegger. Perhaps she suspected his evasion, for now she cast him an angry glance and whispered to her companions. She would go to his next six pictures to see if he had stolen her idea.

  In the corner a huge American negro with his arms around a lovely French tart, roared a song to her in a rich beautiful voice and suddenly Melarky’s Tennessee instincts were remembered and aroused.

  Man fascinated by girl finds she’s showing off for someone else.

  The missing raft hurried desolately before a light wind with its sail tied, until the rotten canvas suddenly split and shredded away. When night came, it went off on its own again, speeding along the dark tide as if driven by a ghostly propellor.

  Scene equivalent to my last afternoon with Gerald, for benefit of two women. Portentousness.

  How I scared away a customer from the Hôtel de la Paix.

  The problem as to whether it was a duty or a favor when she helped the English nurse down the steps with the perambulator. The English nurse always said “Please,” and “Thanks very much,” but Dolores hated her and would have liked without any special excitement to beat her insensible. Like most Latins under the stimulus of American life, she had irresistible impulses toward violence.

  Jules had dark circles under his eyes. Yesterday he had closed out the greatest problem of his life by settling with his ex-wife for two hundred thousand dollars. He had married too young, and the former slavey from the Quebec slums had taken to drugs upon her failure to rise with him. Yesterday, in the presence of lawyers, her final gesture had been to smash his finger with the base of a telephone.