F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up": Despair and the Personal Essay

Introduction: The Personal Essay and Fitzgerald's Confessional Voice

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" (1936) fits Phillip Lopate's definition of a personal essay in several important respects. Its tone is intimate, conversational, and informal rather than structured like a formal, thesis-driven academic piece. Fitzgerald offers genuine "candor and self-disclosure," probably more than his readers wanted to encounter, and does so in the familiar, conversational style that is one of the hallmarks of the personal essay form (Lopate, 1997, p. xxiii). Although many readers today may not immediately recognize it, the essay also went strongly against the grain of popular opinion in 1930s America, an era of deep political 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. Writers were expected to take a stand against oppression and injustice rather than speak candidly about how tired and burned out they felt. Instead of joining the Marxist or Popular Front cause, Fitzgerald asserts quite openly that he simply does not care any longer and lacks the physical and mental energy to even pretend otherwise. 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 following the end of the great boom of the 1920s. His crack-up was also that of the United States and, by extension, the entire world over the preceding seventeen years, and he can find no reason for hope that it will be healed, either in religion or in politics. At best, the overall tone of the essay is one of cynicism, gloom, and existential despair, even if it occasionally appears superficially playful or humorous.

Against the Grain: Fitzgerald and 1930s Literary Culture

Radical and activist readers might simply have taken this essay at face value, missing the more serious point embedded in its conclusion, and dismissed Fitzgerald as selfish, egotistical, and self-indulgent — someone wallowing in petty personal concerns while the world burned. Perhaps they had never warmed to him or to characters like Jay Gatsby, or to the entire cultural decade he so vividly represented. After all, the 1920s were 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, however, Fitzgerald states that burnout and depression are the normal condition of humanity, at least during 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 will be pleasant in the future. In fact, he suspects his own life will be over before he reaches fifty. He died in 1940 at the age of forty-four — not exactly a ripe old age even by the standards of the pre-antibiotic era. Most tellingly, 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 deep is his condition that he seems unable to summon even sufficient will to consider suicide, though he gives no real hint that he fears death's approach. Although Fitzgerald does not say it openly, he would likely have regarded death as a welcome release — though he lived just long enough to witness the beginning of another world war already being widely predicted when he wrote "The Crack-Up" in 1936.

Reading from the End: Entropy, Breakdown, and the Boom's Collapse

Probably the best way to read "The Crack-Up" is to start at the end, where Fitzgerald reveals a theme that sounds far more like the burn-out and existentialist writers of the post-1945 period than the engaged, committed writers of the 1930s. Read this way, his famous opening line — that "all life is a process of breaking down" — takes on new meaning (Fitzgerald, p. 520). He clearly does not mean that only his own individual life has fallen prey prematurely to the laws of entropy, but that the United States as a whole, and by extension the entire world, has undergone the same process.

For many years, he was able to hide this reality from himself and even hold two contradictory ideas in his mind simultaneously, which sounds eerily similar to the totalitarian doublethink that is central to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. For Orwell, of course, this capacity was not a sign of intelligence but of insanity — even as it served the purposes of the Party elites in the Stalinist police state he described. Fitzgerald had become rich and famous in the capitalist America of the 1920s and had largely accepted the dominant ideology of the time: 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 as Jay Gatsby himself — a criminal enterprise under its respectable surface. Like most people of the 1920s, however, he was not deeply concerned with broader social problems, which the free-market, laissez-faire ideology of Coolidge and Herbert Hoover promised would eventually fix themselves.

Conclusion: A Lost Generation Voice in the Wrong Decade

Any limited faith that Fitzgerald might have had in the consumerism, individualism, and gospel of the self-made men of the 1920s had been shattered, but he had nothing to replace it with. This was naturally the type of personal essay that would have infuriated many of his radical and Leftist critics in the 1930s, since it was essentially an announcement that he lacked the energy and enthusiasm to join any cause. He had a very good understanding of recent history and of everything that had gone wrong in the world since the 1914–18 war, but he could offer no real hope that it could be fixed. In this respect, he remained always a Lost Generation writer of the 1920s and therefore seemed profoundly out of place in the very different atmosphere of the decade that followed.

References

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1936, 1997). "The Crack-Up." In Phillip Lopate (ed.), The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Anchor Books.