The Crack-Up
F. Scott Fitzgerald
AL MA CL AS S I CS
Alma Classics
an imprint of
alma books ltd
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
The Crack-Up first published as a collection in 1945
This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018
Edited text and notes © Alma Books Ltd
Extra Material © Richard Parker
Cover design: Will Dady
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn: 978-1-84749-718-5
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed
to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and
acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any
unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error
in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other-
wise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is
sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
The Crack-Up 1
Autobiographical Pieces3
Echoes of the Jazz Age3
My Lost City13
Ring24
“Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number —”30
Auction – Model 193445
Sleeping and Waking52
The Crack-Up58
Pasting It Together64
Handle with Care70
Early Success75
The Notebooks81
Note on the Text237
Notes237
Extra Material 261
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Life 263
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Works 273
Select Bibliography 278
Other books by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
published by Alma Classics
All the Sad Young Men
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Basil and Josephine
The Beautiful and Damned
Flappers and Philosophers
The Great Gatsby
Image on the Heart and Other Stories
The Intimate Strangers and Other Stories
The Last Tycoon
The Last of the Belles and Other Stories
The Love Boat and Other Stories
The Pat Hobby Stories
Tales of the Jazz Age
Tender Is the Night
This Side of Paradise
The Crack-Up
Autobiographical Pieces
Echoes of the Jazz Age
November 1931
It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective, and
without being suspected of premature arteriosclerosis. Many
people still succumb to violent retching when they happen upon
any of its characteristic words – words which have since yielded
in vividness to the coinages of the underworld. It is as dead as
were the Yellow Nineties* in 1902. Yet the present writer already
looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and
gave him more money than he had dreamt of, simply for telling
people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done
with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.
The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its
bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October 1929 began about
the time of the May Day riots in 1919.* When the police rode
down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in
Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the
more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn’t
remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began
plugging it,* but we did know that such tyranny belonged in the
jittery little countries of south Europe. If goose-livered business-
men had this effect on the government, then maybe we had gone
to war for J.P. Morgan’s loans* after all. But, because we were
tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak
of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers.*
Presently we began to have slices of the national cake, and our
idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama
out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and
Vanzetti.* The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolu-
tionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around
3
the crack-up
in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap – “I
know I had it” – and the muzhik blouse. It was characteristic of
the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of
excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to
blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States;
a stylish young man hurried over to represent to us the throne of
England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the
old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by
his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made
the ultimate decision in our national affairs.* But such matters
apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits
by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed
to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and
loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of
man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence
to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of
France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his
civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen’s clothes – symbol of “the
power that man must hold and that passes from race to race”.*
We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any
longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated during
the European War, we had begun combing the unknown south
and west for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready
to hand.
The first social revelation created a sensation out of all propor-
tion to its novelty. As far back as 1915, the unchaperoned young
people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of
that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him “self-
reliant”. At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such
favourable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged
and the old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there
were references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number
of the Yale Record or the Princeton Tiger.
4
echoes of the jazz age
But petting in its more audacious manifestations was confined to
the wealthier classes – among other young people the old standard
prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a proposal was
expected, as young officers in strange cities sometimes discovered
to their dismay. Only in 1920 did the veil finally fall – the Jazz
Age was in flower. Scarcely had the staider citizens of the repub-
lic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the
generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of
the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way
and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls
dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted
its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of
morals than through lack of taste. May one offer in exhibit the
year 1922! That was the peak of the younger generation, for though
the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.
The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders,
leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken
aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with
ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the
place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The
younger generation was starred no longer.
A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The pre-
cocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come
about with or without prohibition – they were implicit in the
attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions. (Our
South, for example, is tropical and early maturing – it has never
been part of the wisdom of France and Spain to let young girls go
unchaperoned at sixteen and seventeen.) But the general decision
to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921 had
more complicated origins.
The word jazz in its progress towards respectability has meant
first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state
of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the
lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all
the forces that menace them are still active – wherefore eat, drink
5
the crack-up
and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But different causes had now
brought about a corresponding state in America – though there
were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a
whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face
peered into the family circle. Never did they dream that they
had contributed to it. The honest citizens of every class, who
believed in a strict public morality and were powerful enough to
enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would
necessarily be served by criminals and quacks, and do not really
believe it today. Rich righteousness had always been able to buy
honest and intelligent servants to free the slaves or the Cubans,
so when this attempt collapsed, our elders stood firm with all the
stubbornness of people involved in a weak case, preserving their
righteousness and losing their children. Silver-haired women and
men with fine old faces, people who never did a consciously dis-
honest thing in their lives, still assure each other in the apartment
hotels of New York and Boston and Washington that “there’s a
whole generation growing up that will never know the taste of
liquor”. Meanwhile, their granddaughters pass the well-thumbed
copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover* around the boarding school and,
if they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen.
But the generation who reached maturity between 1875 and 1895
continue to believe what they want to believe.
Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920,
Heywood Broun* announced that all this hubbub was nonsense,
that young men didn’t kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly people
over twenty-five came in for an intensive education. Let me trace
some of the revelations vouchsafed them by reference to a dozen
works written for various types of mentality during the decade. We
begin with the suggestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life
(Jurgen, 1919);* then we learn that there’s a lot of sex around if we
only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920),* that adolescents lead very
amorous lives (This Side of Paradise, 1920),* that there are a lot of
neglected Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921),* that older people
don’t always resist sudden temptations (Cytherea, 1922),* that
6
echoes of the jazz age
girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming Youth,
1922),* that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922),* that
glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat,
1924),* that in fact they devote most of their time to it (The Vortex,
1926),* that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
1928),* and finally that there are abnormal variations (The Well of
Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).*
In my opinion, the erotic element in these works, even The
Sheik written for children in the key of Peter Rabbit, did not one
particle of harm. Everything they described, and much more, was
familiar in our contemporary life. The majority of the theses were
honest and elucidating – their effect was to restore some dignity
to the male as opposed to the he-man in American life. (“And
what is a ‘He-man’?” demanded Gertrude Stein* one day. “Isn’t
it a large enough order to fill out to the dimensions of all that ‘a
man’ has meant in the past? A ‘He-man’!”) The married woman
can now discover whether she is being cheated, or whether sex
is just something to be endured, and her compensation should
be to establish a tyranny of the spirit, as her mother may have
hinted. Perhaps many women found that love was meant to be
fun. Anyhow, the objectors lost their tawdry little case, which is
one reason why our literature is now the most living in the world.
Contrary to popular opinion, the movies of the Jazz Age had
no effect upon its morals. The social attitude of the producers
was timid, behind the times and banal – for example, no picture
mirrored even faintly the younger generation until 1923, when
magazines had already been started to celebrate it and it had
long ceased to be news. There were a few feeble splutters and
then Clara Bow in Flaming Youth;* promptly the Hollywood
hacks ran the theme into its cinematographic grave. Throughout
the Jazz Age the movies got no farther than Mrs Jiggs,* keeping
up with its most blatant superficialities. This was no doubt due
to the censorship as well as to innate conditions in the industry.
In any case, the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power,
served by great filling stations full of money.
7
the crack-up
The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty, had
joined the dance. We greybeards (to tread down F.P.A.)* remember
the uproar when in 1912 grandmothers of forty tossed away their
crutches and took lessons in the tango and the Castle Walk.* A
dozen years later a woman might pack the Green Hat with her
other affairs as she set off for Europe or New York, but Savonarola
was too busy flogging dead horses in Augean stables* of his own
creation to notice. Society, even in small cities, now dined in
separate chambers, and the sober table learnt about the gay table
only from hearsay. There were very few people left at the sober
table. One of its former glories, the less sought-after girls who
had become resigned to sublimating a probable celibacy, came
across Freud and Jung* in seeking their intellectual recompense
and came tearing back into the fray.
By 1926, the universal preoccupation with sex had become a
nuisance. (I remember a perfectly mated, contented young mother
asking my wife’s advice about “having an affair right away”,
though she had no one especially in mind, “because don’t you
think it’s sort of undignified when you get much over thirty?”)
For a while, bootleg Negro records with their phallic euphemisms
made everything suggestive, and simultaneously came a wave of
erotic plays – young girls from finishing schools packed the gal-
leries to hear about the romance of being a lesbian, and George
Jean Nathan* protested. Then one young producer lost his head
entirely, drank a beauty’s alcoholic bathwater and went to the
penitentiary.* Somehow his pathetic attempt at romance belongs
to the Jazz Age, while his contemporary in prison, Ruth Snyder,*
had to be hoisted into it by the tabloids – she was, as The Daily
News hinted deliciously to gourmets, about “to cook, and sizzle,
AND FRY!” in the electric chair.
The gay elements of society had divided into two main streams,
one flowing towards Palm Beach and Deauville, and the other,
much smaller, towards the summer Riviera. One could get away
with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed
to have something to do with art. From 1926 to 1929, the great
8
echoes of the jazz age
years of the Cap d’Antibes, this corner of France was dominated
by a group quite distinct from that American society which is
dominated by Europeans. Pretty much of anything went at Antibes
– by 1929, at the most gorgeous paradise for swimmers on the
Mediterranean no one swam any more, save for a short hangover
dip at noon. There was a picturesque graduation of steep rocks
over the sea, and somebody’s valet and an occasional English girl
used to dive from them, but the Americans were content to dis-
cuss each other in the bar. This was indicative of something that
was taking place in the homeland – Americans were getting soft.
There were signs everywhere: we still won the Olympic Games,
but with champions whose names had few vowels in them – teams
composed, like the fighting Irish combination of Notre Dame,
of fresh overseas blood. Once the French became really inter-
ested, the Davis Cup gravitated automatically to their intensity
in competition. The vacant lots of the Middle-Western cities were
built up now – except for a short period in school, we were not
turning out to be an athletic people like the British, after all. The
hare and the tortoise. Of course, if we wanted to we could be in
a minute; we still had all those reserves of ancestral vitality, but
one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms
and a fat pot and couldn’t say boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian.
Shades of Van Bibber!* No utopian ideal, God knows. Even golf,
once considered an effeminate game, had seemed very strenuous
of late – an emasculated form appeared and proved just right.
By 1927, a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly
signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of
crossword puzzles. I remember a fellow expatriate opening a letter
from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home and be
revitalized by the hardy, bracing qualities of the native soil. It was
a strong letter and it affected us both deeply, until we noticed that
it was headed from a nerve sanitarium in Pennsylvania.
By this time, contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear
into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife and
himself on Long Island, another tumbled “accidentally” from a
9
the crack-up
skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper
in New York. One was killed in a speakeasy in Chicago; another
was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York and crawled home
to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by
a maniac’s axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These
are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for – these
were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the
depression but during the boom.
In the spring of ’27, something bright and alien flashed across
the sky. A young Minnesotan* who seemed to have had nothing
to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment
people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and
thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by
flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimit-
able air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and
the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more.
Nevertheless, Americans were wandering ever more widely –
friends seemed eternally bound for Russia, Persia, Abyssinia and
Central Africa. And by 1928 Paris had grown suffocating. With
each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the
quality fell off, until towards the end there was something sinister
about the crazy boatloads. They were no longer the simple pa and
ma and son and daughter, infinitely superior in their qualities of
kindness and curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but
fantastic Neanderthals who believed something, something vague
that you remembered from a very cheap novel. I remember an
Italian on a steamer who promenaded the deck in an American
Reserve Officer’s uniform picking quarrels in broken English
with Americans who criticized their own institutions in the bar. I
remember a fat Jewess, inlaid with diamonds, who sat behind us
at the Russian ballet and said as the curtain rose, “Thad’s luffly:
dey ought to baint a bicture of it.” This was low comedy, but it
was evident that money and power were falling into the hands of
people in comparison with whom the leader of a village Soviet
would be a gold mine of judgement and culture. There were
10
echoes of the jazz age
citizens travelling in luxury in 1928 and 1929 who, in the distortion
of their new condition, had the human value of Pekinese, bivalves,
cretins, goats. I remember the judge from some New York district
who had taken his daughter to see the Bayeux Tapestries and
made a scene in the papers advocating their segregation because
one scene was immoral. But in those days life was like the race in
Alice in Wonderland: there was a prize for everyone.
The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age.
There was the phase of the necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb
murder* (I remember the time my wife was arrested on Queensboro
Bridge on the suspicion of being the “Bob-haired Bandit”)* and
the John Held clothes.* In the second phase such phenomena as
sex and murder became more mature, if much more conventional.
Middle age must be served, and pyjamas came to the beach to
save fat thighs and flabby calves from competition with the one-
piece bathing suit. Finally, skirts came down and everything was
concealed. Everybody was at scratch now. Let’s go…
But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most
expensive orgy in history was over.
It ended two years ago,* because the utter confidence which
was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take
long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two
years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War.
It was borrowed time anyhow – the whole upper tenth of a nation
living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of
chorus girls. But moralizing is easy now, and it was pleasant to be
in one’s twenties in such a certain and unworried time. Even when
you were broke you didn’t worry about money, because it was in
such profusion around you. Towards the end one had a struggle
to pay one’s share; it was almost a favour to accept hospitality
that required any travelling. Charm, notoriety, mere good man-
ners weighed more than money as a social asset. This was rather
splendid, but things were getting thinner and thinner as the eternal
necessary human values tried to spread over all that expansion.
Writers were geniuses on the strength of one respectable book or
11
the crack-up
play; just as during the War officers of four months’ experience
commanded hundreds of men, so there were now many little fish
lording it over great big bowls. In the theatrical world, extravagant
productions were carried by a few second-rate stars, and so on up
the scale into politics, where it was difficult to interest good men in
positions of the highest importance and responsibility, importance
and responsibility far exceeding that of business executives, but
which paid only five or six thousand a year.
Now once more the belt is tight, and we summon the proper
expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth.
Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums,
an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into
the early Twenties, when we drank wood alcohol and every day
in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abor-
tive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater
dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said, “Yes, we have
no bananas,” and it seemed only a question of a few years before
the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those
who saw things as they were – and it all seems rosy and romantic
to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so
intensely about our surroundings any more.
12
