Abstract
The “Crack-Up” essays occupy an important symbolic position in critical and biographical assessments of Fitzgerald’s later years. Many contemporary readers took these essays literally and interpreted them as a straightforward account of Fitzgerald’s nervous breakdown. Quite a few respondents, including other male writers, various figures involved in the publication of Fitzgerald’s works, and many readers of Esquire, found such an open and public admission of personal problems contemptible.
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Notes
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978), #1598.
Edmund Wilson, ed., The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 71, 80. Henceforth abbreviated in text as CU.
For a meditation on the difficulty of approaching such a text from a removed critical perspective, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense(New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 154–61.
In an interesting biographical parallel, many scholars have noted Fitzgerald’s lifelong tendency to keep records and lists. As early as age fourteen, he began keeping the Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Fitzgerald Key, a diary of his romantic and social adventures. He also had a habit of making lists out of random events in his life. Critic and Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener notes that Fitzgerald used to keep lists of the various “snubs” he had suffered. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, ed. Arthur Mizener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 169.
The latter list is also addressed in Edward J. Gleason, “Going toward the Flame: Reading Allusions in Esquire Stories,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives, ed. Jackson R. Bryer, Alan Margolies, and Ruth Prigozy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 220.
For more on Fitzgerald’s tendency to make lists, see Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 2nd rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 27, 143, 220.
William Troy, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006), 29.
Charles Sweetman, “Sheltering Assets and Reorganizing Debts: Fitzgerald’s Declaration of Emotional Bankruptcy in the Crack-Up,” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 20, no. 2 (2003): 13.
Michael Nowlin, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6. Nowlin acknowledges the alternative negative connotations of literary “professionalism” as well: “The label ‘professional writer’… could readily connote something all-too-ordinary-one’s membership in a class of largely white, middle-class, well-salaried mental-laborers working in the service of the state or big business.” Nowlin, Racial Angles, 7.
In a letter to Mrs. Laura Feley on July 20, 1939, Fitzgerald provides a similar gloss on the essays, though with far more retrospective melancholy than can be read into “Handle with Care.” He says, “I don’t know whether those articles of mine in Esquire—that ‘Crack-Up’ series—represented a real nervous breakdown. In retrospect it seems more of a spiritual ‘change of life’—and a most unwilling one—it was a protest against a new set of conditions which I would have to face and a protest of my mind at having to make the psychological adjustments which would suit this new set of circumstances.” Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 589. Of course, these comments are only one of a wide range of positions Fitzgerald took on these essays in his final years.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–81.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), 276–77.
Quoted in Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 185.
As noted earlier, Esquire published stories that were significantly shorter than those accepted by the other leading magazines of the day. Gingrich also provided relatively little editorial oversight, which was unusual for such a popular publication. Stephen W. Potts, in his study of Fitzgerald’s short fiction, claims that Fitzgerald did not typically “write down” to the standards of a particular magazine, but he did have to adapt his style to the different editorial demands of Esquire. See Stephen W. Potts, The Price of Paradise: The Magazine Career of F. Scott Fitzgerald (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993), 82–90.
Ronald J. Gervais, “Fitzgerald’s ‘Euganean Hills’ Allusion in ‘the Crack-up,’” American Notes and Queries 21, no. 9–10 (1983): 139–40.
Arnold Gingrich, “Introduction,” in The Pat Hobby Stories (New York: Scribner, 1962), xxii–xxiii.
Fitzgerald’s male friends and acquaintances frequently blamed his problems on Zelda, which led early biographers to depict her in quite unflattering terms. For one particularly scathing depiction of Zelda’s effect on her husband, see Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964), 147–93.
For a more balanced assessment of the relationship between the two, see Linda Wagner-Martin, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Scott Donaldson, “The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-up,’ ” Twentieth Century Literature 26, no. 2 (1980): 180–81.
William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” in Modern British Poetry, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), www.bartleby.com/103/7.html (accessed August 10, 2010), ll. 15–16.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 140–41.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), 172.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919–1940 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), 245.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, “The Perkins-Wilson Correspondence,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1978 (1979): 65.
Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 17.
John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 228.
The relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway has been well documented in Matthew Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway. For their relationship during “The Crack-Up” period, see esp. 179–207. The above references can also be found in Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 44, 437–8.
Quoted in Donaldson, “Crisis,” 172; Robert Alan Green, “Advice at Twenty,” Esquire, April 1936.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 436.
Kirk Curnutt, “Making a ‘Clean Break’: Confession, Celebrity Journalism, Image Management and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘the Crack-up,’” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 32, no. 4 (1999): 299.
Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 10.
Mary Macfadden and Emile Gauvreau, Dumbbells and Carrot Strips: The Story of Bernarr Macfadden (New York: Holt, 1953), 218–19.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 53–54.
Quoted in George Gerbner, “The Social Role of the Confession Magazine,” Social Problems 6 (1958): 29.
Marc Dolan, Modern Lives (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1996), 206 fn. 10.
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© 2011 Timothy W. Galow
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Galow, T.W. (2011). The “Crack-Up” Essays: Masculine Identity, Modernism, and the Dissolution of Literary Values. In: Writing Celebrity. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119499_6
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