Experiencing The Crack-Up

Abstract

With the writing of Tender is the Night at last completed, Fitzgerald left La Paix and moved to a rented house in Baltimore in December 1933. In the previous month Zelda and he vacationed in Bermuda, but the hoped-for rest and recuperation after the final effort involved in finishing the novel were spoiled by a recurrence of his lung infection. This disappointment was an ominous herald of Fitzgerald’s increasingly troubled situation in the next stage of his literary life. In fact the years between the publication of Tender is the Night and the decision to move to Hollywood in 1937 would prove the most difficult and demoralizing of Fitzgerald’s life. His problems seemed to multiply relentlessly. It was increasingly clear that Zelda’s mental health would never be fully restored; Fitzgerald’s own health, undermined by his continuing drinking problem, was uncertain; Scottie was growing up and the costs of her education had to be met, on top of Zelda’s hospital bills. More worrying still, he was having to face the fact that the old trick of sitting down and churning out a money-winning Saturday Evening Post story was becoming increasingly difficult to perform. Creative vitality was giving way to creative exhaustion, and Fitzgerald felt more and more that with the passing of his youth his life was running down — ‘getting ready for the end’ as he once put it to a friend.¹