The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Before her eyes would pass in turn a prodigious, prodigal Latin American or a lady whose title blazed with history or that almost mythological figure, an international banker, or even a great Hollywood star with her hat pulled down over her face lest it be apparent that no one recognized her— all these being great figures to her—and Dick would say something kind, really kind, about them, and they would recede out of the far vista as a stark naked Argentine, a stuffed chemise of the society column, Dinah’s uncle, or an actress pleased to see Seth—when we really possessed him, when he preferred us.

  “I’m pretty tired,” he said—unfortunately, because this gave her an advantage: she wasn’t tired; while his mind and body moved in a tedious half-time like a slow moving picture, her nerves were crowded with feverish traffic. She tried to think of some mischief.

  * * * * in the limousine at Meadowbrook, getting as small as the man he was arguing with.

  Scene toward end of déménagement—distressing amount of goods, five phonographs, eight pairs of dark glasses, wasteful reduplication, etc.

  During the ride the young man held his attention coolly away from his mother, unwilling to follow her eyes in any direction or even to notice his surroundings except when at a revealing turn the sky and sea dropped before them and he said, “It’s hot as hell,” in a decided voice.

  She sat down on the water closet with a coquettish smile. Her eyes, glazed a few minutes since, were full of impish malice.

  “I would like to enjoy,” said the man, “but I can only hope and remember. What the hell—leave me my reactions even though they’re faint beside yours. Let me see things my own way.”

  “You mean you don’t want me to talk?”

  “I mean we come up here, and before I can register, before I can realize that this is the Atlantic Ocean, you’ve analyzed it like a chemist, like a chemist who painted, or a painter who studied chemistry, and it’s all diminished, and I say ‘Yes it does remind me of a delicatessen shop—’ ”

  “Let you alone—”

  He lived his life, then, as an honored man. But from time to time he would indulge his habit of eating mountain grass in preference to valley grass, a habit formed during those early days outside the herd.

  “Oke!” said the herd.

  Some of them would watch his curious munching and shake their heads. Some of them, though, grouped together and said: “If we eat that grass, that will make us honored like him.”

  They tried it and it had the negative result of such follies.

  “Why, she’s your wife—I can’t imagine touching your wife.” Having heard this said to a husband ten minutes before the most passionate attempts to maneuver the wife into bed.

  He ran a low fever that evening and the mosquito netting bound him down into a little stifling space. But the morning was fresh and fair, and he remembered that with a little vigilance there is seldom the necessity of being alone with oneself.

  He got up suddenly, stumbling through the shrubbery, and followed an almost obliterated path to the house, starting at the whirring sound of a blackbird which rose out of the grass close by. The front porch sagged dangerously at his step as he pushed open the door. There was no sound inside, except the steady slow throb of silence.

  “Let’s not talk about such things now. I’ll tell you something funny instead.” Her look was not one of eager anticipation, but he continued, “By merely looking around, you can review the largest battalion of the Boys I’ve seen collected in one place. This hotel seems to be a clearing house for them—” He returned the nod of a pale and shaky Georgian who sat down at a table across the room. “That young man looks somewhat retired from life. The little devil I came down to see is hopeless. You’d like him—if he comes in, I’ll introduce him.”

  As he was speaking, the flow into the bar began. Nicole’s fatigue accepted Dick’s ill-advised words and mingled with the fantastic Koran that presently appeared. She saw the males gathered down at the bar: the tall gangling ones; the little pert ones with round thin shoulders; the broad ones with the faces of Nero and Oscar Wilde, or of senators—faces that dissolved suddenly into girlish fatuity, or twisted into leers; the nervous ones who hitched and twitched, jerking open their eyes very wide, and laughed hysterically; the handsome, passive and dumb men who turned their profiles this way and that; the pimply, stodgy men with delicate gestures; or the raw ones with very red lips and frail curly bodies, their shrill voluble tones piping their favorite word “treacherous” above the hot volume of talk; the ones over-self-conscious who glared with eager politeness toward every noise; among them were English types with great racial self-control, Balkan types, one small cooing Siamese. “I think now,” Nicole said, “I think I’m going to bed.”

  “I think so, too.”

  —Goodby, you unfortunates. Goodby, Hotel of Three Worlds.

  In a moving automobile sat a Southern gentleman accompanied by his body-servant. He was on his way, after a fashion, to New York, but he was somewhat hampered by the fact that the upper and lower portions of his automobile were no longer in exact juxtaposition. In fact, from time to time the two riders would dismount, shove the body on to the chassis, corner to corner, and then continue onward, vibrating slightly in involuntary unison with the motor.

  Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood, and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom.

  Almost a whole chapter on the man’s attempt to educate his children without knowing where he stands himself—amid difficulties.

  A chapter in which their kid comes to him for homosexuality, and a consequent long consideration of homosexuality from some such attitude as a Groton father thinking it’s maybe all right for social reasons.

  Tremendous American generosity, without comment.

  In the shadow of the Pope’s palace at Avignon our Greek guide, an exile from the butcheries in Smyrna, told us with wild enthusiasm of his cousin, a restaurateur and an Elk of Terre Haute, Indiana.

  “He wears a high hat and a blue coat with epaulettes and blue braid and green trousers, and carries a gold sword in his hand, and marches down the main street once a year behind a big band, and—”

  Meeting Cole Porter in Ritz.

  We all went to hear Chaliapin that night; after the second act, he stayed out in the bar talking to the barmaids and then joined us afterwards, a tall unsteady figure, pale as the phantom of the opera himself descending the great staircase.

  Imagine saying to * * * *, apropos of his brother’s death: “Well, he must have been an awful pig.”

  “They don’t allow us and the other rich boys to go to anything except comedies and kidnappings and things like that. The comedies are the things I like.”

  “Who? Chaplin?”

  “Who?”

  “Charlie Chaplin.”

  Obviously the words failed to record.

  “No, the—you know, the comedies.”

  “Who do you like?” Bill asked.

  “Oh—” The boy considered, “Well, I like Garbo and Dietrich and Constance Bennett.”

  “Their things are comedies?”

  “They’re the funniest ones.”

  “Funniest what?”

  “Funniest comedies.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, they try to do this passionate stuff all the time.”

  “Then somebody told us about ’party girls.’ Business men with clients from out of town sometimes wanted to give them a big time—singing and dancing and champagne, all that sort of thing, make them feel like regular fellows seeing New York. So they’d hire a room in a restaurant and invite a dozen party girls. All it required was to have a good evening dress and to sit next to some middle-aged man for two hours and laugh at his jokes and maybe kiss him goodnight. Somet
imes you’d find a fifty dollar bill in your napkin when you sat down at table.”

  Most Pleasant Trips:

  Auto Paris-Zürich

  Auto Zelda and Sap and I

  Auto Ernest and I North

  P.L.M. going North, 1925

  Cherbourg-Paris

  Havre-Paris

  South to Norfolk

  Around Lake Geneva

  Most Unpleasant Trips:

  Auto Zelda and I South

  Around Lake Como

  Mentone

  California

  Quebec

  North from Norfolk

  * * * * and * * * *

  “The somewhat nervous little man at the desk,” after a long conversation as to whether the celebrity is “just folks,” “just like anybody else,” etc., with the nervous little man caustic and resentful, divulges himself suddenly as the celebrity.

  She had never done anything for love before. She didn’t know what it meant. When her hand struck the bulb she still didn’t know it, nor while the shattered glass made a nuisance by the bedside.

  NOSTALGIA OR THE FLIGHT OF THE HEART

  Young St. Paul

  Florida

  Norfolk

  Burgundy

  Montgomery as it was

  Paris Left Bank

  New York 1911,1917,1920

  Hopkins

  Bermuda a little

  Chicago

  Wheatley Hills

  Capri

  Old boarding house or summer hotel

  Place across from Niagara

  Annecy

  The First Ships

  First London

  Second Paris

  Provence

  Riviera (Antibes, St. Raphaël, St. Tropez, Nice, Monte Carlo, Cannes, St. Paul)

  Gstaad

  Randolph

  Placid

  Frontenac

  Early White Bear

  Woodstock

  Princeton 1 st and 2nd years

  Yale

  Newman as grad.

  Deal Beach

  Athens, Georgia

  Sorrento

  Marseilles

  Battlefields

  Virginia Beach

  Orvieto

  Bou Saada

  Territet

  Other Playgrounds: Rockville and Charleston, Montana

  Washington

  Deal, Ellerslie.

  The Sport Roadster: When I was a boy I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz—in those days the Stutz was the stamp of the romantic life—a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn. But in point of fact, the best I could manage was the intermittent use of the family car. If I were willing to endure the most unaristocratic groanings and vibrations, I could torture it up to fifty miles an hour.

  But no matter how passionately I slouched down in the seat, I couldn’t make it look like a Stutz. One day I lowered the top and opened the windshield, and with the car thus pathetically jazzed up, took my mother and another lady down town shopping.

  It was a scorching day. The sun blazed down upon us, the molten air blew like the breath of a furnace into our faces—through the open windshield. I could literally feel the sunburn deepening on me, block by block. It was appalling.

  The two ladies fanned themselves uneasily. I don’t believe either of them quite realized what the trouble was. But I, even with the perspiration pouring into my eyes, found sight to envy the owner of a peagreen cut-down flivver which oozed by us through the heat.

  My passengers visited a series of stores. I waited in the sun, still slouched down, and with that sort of half-sneer on my face which I had noted was peculiar to drivers of racing cars. The heat continued to be terrific.

  Finally my mother’s friend came out of the store and I helped her into the car. She sank down into the seat—then rose quickly up again.

  “Ah!” she said wildly.

  She had burned herself.

  When we reached home, I offered—most unusually—to take them both for a long ride—anywhere they wished to go. They said politely that they were going for a little walk to cool off!

  As they turned into Crest Avenue, the new cathedral, immense and unfinished in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghost of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses built in the gloomy go’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cochères which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with high circular windows that corseted the second stories.

  The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall, with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord, and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street. Beyond the first half mile it became newer, essayed ventures in terraced lawns, in concoctions of stucco or in granite mansions which imitated through a variety of gradual refinements the marble contours of the Petit Trianon. The houses of this phase rushed by the roadster for a succession of minutes; then the way turned and the car was headed directly into the moonlight, which swept toward it like the lamp of some gigantic motorcycle far up the avenue.

  Past the low Corinthian lines of the Christian Science Temple, past a block of dark frame horrors, a deserted row of grim red brick—an unfortunate experiment of the late 90’s—then new houses again, bright blinding flowery lawns. These swept by, faded past, enjoying their moment of grandeur; then waiting there in the moonlight to be outmoded as had the frame, cupolaed mansions of lower down and the brownstone piles of older Crest Avenue in their turn.

  The roofs lowered suddenly, the lots narrowed, the houses shrank up in size and shaded off into bungalows. These held the street for the last mile, to the bend in the river which terminated the prideful avenue at the statue of Chelsea Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot was the first governor—and almost the last of Anglo-Saxon blood.

  All the way thus far Yanci had not spoken, absorbed still in the annoyance of the evening, yet soothed somehow by the fresh air of Northern November that rushed by them. She must take her fur coat out of storage next day, she thought.

  “Where are we now?”

  As they slowed down, Scott looked up curiously at the pompous stone figure, clear in the crisp moonlight, with one hand on a book and the forefinger of the other pointing, as though with reproachful symbolism, directly at some construction work going on in the street.

  “This is the end of Crest Avenue,” said Yanci, turning to him. “This is our show street.”

  “A museum of American architectural failures.”

  Once upon a time Princeton was a leafy campus where the students went in for understatement, and if they had earned a P, wore it on the inside of the sweater, displaying only the orange seams, as if the letter were only faintly deserved. The professors were patient men who prudently kept their daughters out of contact with the students. Half a dozen great estates ringed the township, which was inhabited by townsmen and darkies—these latter the avowed descendents of body servants brought north by southerners before the Civil War.

  Nowadays Princeton is an “advantageous residential vicinity”—in consequence of which young ladies dressed in riding habits, with fashionable manners, may be encountered lounging in the students’ clubs on Prospect Avenue. The local society no longer has a professional, almost military homogeneity—it is leavened with many frivolous people, and has “sets” and antennae extending to New York and Philadelphia.

  The constant endeavor of trained nurses in a patient’s room is to get all movable articles out before the doctor arrives, approximating
as closely as possible the stripped look of an operating chamber. The result is like that obtained in the case of a dog burying a bone: it is the burying that matters, not the bone.—In the meantime, after the nurses’ departure, missed or forgotten objects turn up in the corners of strange drawers and escritoires. The hanging of trousers is another matter the technique of which must be part of the nurses’ course. From the decorums of Hopkins to the casualness of the Pacific, they are seized by both cuffs, twisted several times in reverse, placed in one corner of the hanger and left to dangle rather like a man hanged. The same nurse may go home and put away a pair of slacks in perfect shape for future wearing, but no man ever left a hospital with the same crease that he had when he went in.

  They had been run into by a school bus, which lay, burning from the mouth, half on its side against a tall bank of the road, with the little girls screaming as they stumbled out the back.

  A young man phoned from a city far off, then from a city near by, then from downtown, informing me that he was coming to call, though he had never seen me. He arrived eventually with a great ripping up of garden borders, a four-ply rip in a new lawn, a watch pointing accurately and unforgivably at 3 A.M. But he was prepared to disarm me with the force of his compliment, the intensity of the impulse that had brought him to my door. “Here I am at last,” he said, teetering triumphantly. “I had to see you. I feel I owe you more than I can say. I feel that you formed my life.”

  Hearing Hitler’s speech while going down Sunset Boulevard in a car.

  T

  TITLES

  Journal of a Pointless Life.

  Red and yellow villas, called Fleur du Bois, Mon Nid, or Sans Souci.

  Wore Out His Welcome.

  “Your Cake”

  Jack a Dull Boy.

  Dark Circles.

  The Parvenu Hat.

  Talks to a Drunk.

  The firing of Jasbo Merribo. Sketch.

  Tall Women.

  Birds in the Bush.

  Travels of a Nation.