Crack Up Scott Fitzgerald\'s \"The Crack Up\"

Crack Up

Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up" (1936) fits Phillip Lopate's definition of a personal essay in the sense that its tone is intimate, conversational and informal, rather than being structured like some formal, textbook-style (usually very boring) essay with a 'serious' purpose and the thesis statement in the first paragraph. Fitzgerald does offer "candor and self-disclosure," probably more than the readers wanted to know, and in the familiar, conversational style that is one of the hallmarks of the personal essay (Lopate, 1997, p. xxiii). Although many people today will not realize it, the essay also went strongly "against the grain of popular opinion" in the America of the 1930s, since that was the age of commitment among writers and intellectuals -- almost always on the Left. This was the period of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front, so writers were expected to take a stand against oppression and injustice, rather than talk about how tired and burned out they were like Fitzgerald does. Instead of joining the Marxist or Popular Front cause, he asserts quite openly that he simply does not care any longer, and lacks the physical and mental energy to even pretend to care. He feels old before his time, generally disillusioned and exhausted, and to him if not to his critics on the Left, the country seemed to be in much the same condition after the end of the great boom of the 1920s. His crack up was also that of the United States and indeed the entire world over the past seventeen years, but he can find no reason for hope that it will be healed, either in religion or politics. At best, the whole tone of the essay is one of cynicism, gloom and existential despair, even though it might appear to be superficially playful or humorous.

Radical and activist readers might simply have taken this essay at face value, missing the more serious point at the end, and just dismissing him as selfish, egotistical and self-indulgent, wallowing in his own petty concerns when the world was in turmoil. Perhaps they never liked him at all, or his characters like Jake Gatsby and the entire decade of the 1920s. After all, that was the decade of Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford, Calvin Coolidge and the revived Ku Klux Klan. All of that was supposedly swept aside by the crash of 1929 and the revival of progressive and labor politics in the 1930s. At the end of the essay, though, Fitzgerald states that burn out and depression are the normal condition of humanity, at least in this period of history, and that any personal happiness he might once have felt was as "unnatural as the Boom" of the 1920s (Fitzgerald, 1936, 1997, p. 531). He does not expect that life is going to be very pleasant in the future, and in fact he suspects that his will be over before he reaches the age of fifty. In fact, he died in 1940 when he was only forty-four years old, which was not exactly a ripe old age even by the standards of the pre-antibiotic era. Most importantly of all, Fitzgerald states flatly that "my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over" (Fitzgerald, p. 531). So gloomy is his condition that he does not even seem able to summon up sufficient strength and willpower even to commit suicide, although he gives no real hint that he fears the near approach of death. Although Fitzgerald does not say it openly, he would probably regard that as a welcome release, although unfortunately he did end up living just long enough to witness the beginning of another world war that was already being widely predicted when he wrote "The Crack Up" in 1936.

Probably the best way to read "The Crack Up" is to start at the end, where Fitzgerald reveals this theme that sounded so much like burn-out and existentialist writers of the post-1945 period rather than the engaged ones of the 1930s. Then hos opening line about how "all life is a process of breaking down" takes on new meaning (Fitzgerald, p. 520). Clearly he does not mean that only his own individual life has become a premature victim to the laws on entropy, but the United States as a whole and by extension the entire world. For many years, he was able to hide this reality from himself and even hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time, which sounds eerily similar to the totalitarian doublethink that was central to George Orwell's 1984. Of course, for Orwell, this was not a sign of intelligence at all but rather insanity, even though it served the purposes of the Party elites in the Stalinist police state he described in the novel. Fitzgerald had become rich and famous in the capitalist America of the 1920s, however, and even accepted the dominant propaganda of the time that held that individual initiative and effort would bring success and happiness. At the same time, he also suspected that the entire system was as much a sham and a fraud as Jake Gatsby, which is to say that it was actually a criminal system under the surface. Like most people of the 1920s, though, he was not concerned with the general problems of society, which according to the free market/laissez faire ideology of Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, would eventually fix themselves.