Book Review: The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Edmund Wilson (1945) on my Fitzgerald bookshelf, with Fitzgerald matchbooks in the front. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920's.

After his death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a posthumous boost in popularity that has continued, pretty much unabated, to the present day. The Crack-Up, a 1945 collection edited by Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson, was one of the volumes that contributed to the elevation of Fitzgerald’s reputation. 

The book The Crack-Up takes its title from three autobiographical essays, “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting it Together,” and “Handle with Care,” that were published in Esquire magazine in February, March, and April of 1936, respectively. These essays presented F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of his lowest ebbs personally and professionally. 

What’s so remarkable about the “Crack-Up” essays in hindsight is not how much Fitzgerald tells us about his personal life, but how little. Thanks to numerous biographies of Fitzgerald, we now know much more about what was happening in his life at the time he wrote these essays, and it’s very clear that everything was falling apart. After his wife Zelda’s third mental breakdown in 1934, Scott was coming to terms with the fact that she would most likely never be “cured” and that they would probably never live together again. Fitzgerald was also experiencing writer’s block, and he felt as though he couldn’t go on pounding out short stories for The Saturday Evening Post anymore. Fitzgerald was grasping at straws for material in 1935, writing a story from the point of view of a dog, “Shaggy’s Morning,” and trying to write a series of short stories set in medieval France that he hoped to expand into a novel—the “Count of Darkness” series. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, always problematic, was now totally out of control. Fitzgerald had a lot to be depressed about, but he doesn’t bring any of those problems into the essays. In the first essay, he specifically rules out drinking as a cause of any of his problems! And throughout the three essays he never refers to any of Zelda’s mental health issues. 

Reaction to the three essays at the time was mixed, to put it politely. Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, didn’t think the essays should have been published, which was why the book The Crack-Up was brought out by Edmund Wilson’s New Directions press instead. Other writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos thought the essays showed weakness on Fitzgerald’s part by admitting that everything in his personal life wasn’t all sunshine and puppies. 

The Crack-Up essays include some of Fitzgerald’s most famous quotes:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” (p.69)

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” (p.75) 

The Crack-Up also includes other personal essays that Fitzgerald wrote in the 1930’s, like his moving remembrance of the writer Ring Lardner, who was Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Great Neck, Long Island in the 1920’s. All of the essays are excellent and give the reader additional insight into this great writer’s interior life. Readers can also see some connections between the essays. In “The Crack-Up” Scott’s two great juvenile disappointments—not playing college football and not seeing combat in World War I—are the two fantasies that he uses to fall asleep in “Sleeping and Waking.” Two of the essays, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number—“ and “Auction—Model 1934” were credited to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but we now know that they were written by Zelda and revised by Scott. They paint an interesting picture of the Fitzgeralds’ peripatetic existence during the 1920’s and 1930’s. 

After the essays, Edmund Wilson added a generous selection of material from Fitzgerald’s notebooks. Fitzgerald was always jotting down notes, and everything in his life was fair game to be included in his short stories or novels. At some point in the 1930’s he had his notes typed up and organized into alphabetical categories, ranging from “Anecdotes” to “Youth and Army.” It’s revealing of Fitzgerald’s interest in the fairer sex that one of the longest categories is “Descriptions of Girls.” Fitzgerald’s notebooks were published in book form in full in 1978, making the excerpts in The Crack-Up now seem somewhat superfluous. Why read 60% of the notebooks when you can read 100% of the notebooks elsewhere? 

Perhaps a better question would be; who is the target audience for the notebooks? For a devoted F. Scott Fitzgerald buff, they are a fascinating look into his writing process. That being said, reading them straight through is a bit tedious, and there are numerous entries that have a special meaning for only one person in the world: F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t know how interesting a casual Fitzgerald fan would find the notebooks, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for just skipping over them entirely. 

The Crack-Up also includes some of Fitzgerald’s letters, including several to Edmund Wilson, and numerous letters to his daughter Scottie. The Crack-Up was the first publication of any of Fitzgerald’s letters, and since that time, several collections of his letters have been published. Fitzgerald’s letters give us some sense of his personality, and you get an idea of his quicksilver intelligence and sharp mind. Fitzgerald was an astute observer of the human condition, and in his letters you get a sense of the charm, charisma, and vitality he must have exuded in person. 

Wilson included three letters from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, and T.S. Eliot praising The Great Gatsby, and it’s interesting that even though the novel did not make a great splash among the reading public at the time, these notable authors saw that it was a remarkable piece of writing. Eliot wrote that it “seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” (The Crack-Up, p.310) 

The Crack-Up also includes several essays about Fitzgerald and his writing. Paul Rosenfeld’s is quite interesting, as it’s from early 1925, just before The Great Gatsby was published. However, I think Rosenfeld underestimates Fitzgerald’s use of irony. Glenway Wescott’s essay, published after Fitzgerald’s death, is incisive about his writing, but also carries some of the condescension from critics that was so prevalent in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Wescott writes: “I think Fitzgerald must have been the worst educated man in the world…When he was a freshman, did the seniors teach him a manly technique of drinking, with the price and penalty of the several degrees of excess of it?” (The Crack-Up, p.329) Well, no, I don’t think anyone taught Fitzgerald “a manly technique of drinking,” and even if someone did, it wouldn’t have necessarily helped him. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, and it was an illness that he struggled with throughout his life. Learning how to drink safely wasn’t as easy as Wescott would like to have us imagine.

Wescott continues: “The rest of us, his writing friends and rivals, thought that he had the best narrative gift of the century. Did the English department at Princeton try to develop his admiration of that fact about himself, and make him feel the burden and the pleasure of it?” (The Crack-Up, p.329) So, it’s the fault of the English department at Princeton that Fitzgerald didn’t appreciate his own talent? That’s odd logic. How did Ernest Hemingway appreciate his own talent, since he never went to college and didn’t have professors to inform him of his skill? The English department at Princeton wasn’t exactly kindling the flame of literature in Scott’s heart. In a 1927 essay titled “Princeton,” Fitzgerald wrote that the university had “a surprisingly pallid English department, top-heavy, undistinguished and with an uncanny knack of making literature distasteful to young men.” (A Short Autobiography, p.97-8) When Fitzgerald was at Princeton, no attention was paid to American literature. As he wrote in a book review, “No one of my English professors in college ever suggested to his class that books were being written in America.” (FSF In His Own Time, p.126) If the great books weren’t being written in America, why would his professors have paid attention to Fitzgerald’s writing?

There is plenty of excellent writing on display throughout The Crack-Up, and while Fitzgerald left us with a significant body of work for his short time on this planet, there is sadness in reading The Crack-Up as well. With Fitzgerald I can’t help but wonder what might have been. What if Scott had been allotted more time than a mere 44 trips around the sun? Would the brilliant passages in his notebooks have worked their way into more timeless novels and short stories? We can only imagine.