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description= Reflections on books and art;
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the other stuff from the wilson volume they re very short just six pages or so long but like all fitzgerald packed with insights and magical phrases but the most striking thing about all three little pieces is the way they tremble on the brink of incoherence his essays about the jazz age or early success have a clarity and a logic about them in these ones there s the ghost of such logic and clarity but also frequent moments when the text melts away into high sounding but puzzling phrases it s not quite incoherent but it isn t clarity either it s tempting to say he was drunk when he wrote them except we know he was sober the simplest explanation is that he was still struggling with the material in a way he wasn t with the cut and dried jazz age and early success essays 1 the crack up esquire february 1936 the first essay kicks off with several uncontroversial generalities one is that the external blows you receive in life are easy to recognise and deal with it s the blows that come within which are harder to detect and longer lasting in their effects except that he doesn t express it as clearly as i ve just done and appears at moments to muddle up what he s trying to say then he states another almost cliché namely that as an adult you have to accept that life is hopeless and futile but to go on with it anyway this instantly reminded me of the italian marxist antonio gramsci s saying pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will but most adults don t need fitzgerald or gramsci to tell them they are inexorably heading towards the grave but in the meantime chin up make the most of things le vot says that in these essays he uses a new pare down style the gorgeousness of his early style is long gone true but he s still capable of the orotund phrase trembling on the brink of meaninglessness take this paragraph the first sentence makes sense but the second sentence and especially its conclusion about gravity what does that mean life ten years ago was largely a personal matter i must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to succeed and more than these the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future if i could do this through the common ills domestic professional and personal then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last malcolm cowley in his introduction to tender is the night points out that fitzgerald liked the sound of words but often paid a lot less attention to their sense let alone their spelling which he was notoriously dreadful at these three essays contain more than their fair share of fine sounding but puzzling formulations or indications that he hadn t quite shaped it correctly so on the next page he s explaining that in line with the theory he stated at the outset of the difference between external blows and internal blows to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow but with a reprieve life has a varying offensive it takes a moment to decode this and then to wonder why he wasn t capable of phrasing it more clearly and then of remembering that right at the start of the essay he himself doesn t state his thesis very clearly putting it in a rather muddled contradictory way that s what i mean by the evident traces throughout the pieces that he was still struggling with the material in this spirit it s a little difficult to make out what actually happened i think what happened is a doctor gave him a worrying prognosis he doesn t say what of let s guess heart disease since this is what killed him four years after these essays were written as a result he wanted to be absolutely alone went off to live somewhere isolated communed with himself made lots of lists about all aspects of his life etc this self isolating seems to have gone on for two years and then some time later he is given a reprieve told that he s better and it was then not when he was given the bad news about some fatal illness but when he was told it was actually ok it was then that he cracked he is brilliant at analysing why i began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that i did not possess that i had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt what was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that further i realized that in those two years in order to preserve something an inner hush maybe maybe not i had weaned myself from all the things i used to love that every act of life from the morning tooth brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort i saw that for a long time i had not liked people and things but only followed the rickety old pretence of liking i saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love that my casual relations with an editor a tobacco seller the child of a friend were only what i remembered i should do from other days all in the same month i became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio the advertisements in the magazines the screech of tracks the dead silence of the country contemptuous at human softness immediately if secretively quarrelsome toward hardness hating the night when i couldn t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night it s not really a mental collapse is it into complete incapacity he retains all his faculties he just sees everything as empty and develops irrational dislikes i couldn t stand the sight of celts english politicians strangers virginians negroes light or dark hunting people all retail clerks and middlemen in general all writers i avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class whereas just as irrationally and arbitrarily he likes doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well brought up boy children from about eight years old on old men men over seventy sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned i liked katharine hepburn s face on the screen a woman friend le vot tells us it was his friend nora flynn who tried to gently coax him into drinking less le vot pages 284 295 tries to talk him round telling him to see the crack in the world at large rather than in him to externalise it it doesn t help he gets nearer the issue when he says it s a question of vitality and not having vitality without vitality the zest for life or even in interest in life everything is still there but lacking all colour and savour his explanation bursts into view with great clarity of all natural forces vitality is the incommunicable one but then characteristically fades withdraws becomes blurred in days when juice came into one as an article without duty one tried to distribute it but always without success came into one as an article without duty again takes a moment to unpack and decipher and when you do it makes sense but the experience of the pieces is of beautiful shiny things shimmering into view and then disappearing again under the grey waves 2 handle with care esquire march 1936 there appears to be some confusion with titles the piece titled handle with care in the penguin edition i have appears online under the title pasting it together while the penguin handle with care appears under the online title pasting it together maybe the pieces themselves had a crack up opens by explaining that the magazine editors thought the first piece raised issues it didn t address so requested another fitzgerald pads things out by referring to himself as a cracked plate the kind you wonder whether to throw away or keep that might on reflection be ok to keep crackers in or stash away in the pantry so in a gag he says this piece is hence this sequel a cracked plate s further history by this point if not before i realised fitzgerald is not really describing a nervous breakdown or collapse so much as depression suddenly for no reason and for the first time in his life he becomes paralysed with depression every aspect of life loses its savour he just wants to avoid people all hours of the day feel like 3am when you carefully list all your failings and shortcomings it is a leak through which unknown to myself my enthusiasm and my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away friends criticised him for the indiscreetness of the essays not so much the description of mental illness as such itself quite a vogue in the middle 1930s when a number of famous writers had nervous breakdowns but the dirty washing of his personal life he held up for the world s scrutiny hemingway criticised them to john dos passos and fitzgerald s editor maxwell perkins thus in the first piece he mentions his regret at being neither tall nor muscular enough to play in the college football team in this one he harks back to two crucial moments in his young manhood one was during his university days again at princeton the prestigious east coast university he tells us how at a crucial moment in his undergraduate career he was diagnosed with malaria and forced to go home to rest for a few months during those few months he lost his opportunity to achieve certain offices the chief one was the presidency of the triangle club a musical comedy idea and also i dropped back a class to me college would never be the same it seemed on one march afternoon that i had lost every single thing i wanted there were to be no badges of pride no medals after all he now reckons something inside him snapped some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone the second one concerned the love of his life presumably zelda sayre they met and fell in love while he was stationed at an army base in the south at montgomery alabama in 1917 being trained before shipping off to the great war when he was demobbed without ever getting to france another type of failure and source of frustration he returned to new york to get a good job to make him a viable prospect for marriage and lived for his letters from his southern belle but eventually his prospects remaining poor zelda broke the engagement off now less than a year later he had the novel he d been working on accepted he became famous began earning serious money from his stories and zelda changed her mind and accepted him they were married in april 1920 fitzgerald doesn t give us any of this information in fact zelda is nowhere named in the three pieces but he frets about her rejection of him when he was poor and the experience of relative poverty clearly still rankles the man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust an animosity towards the leisure class not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant in the years since then i have never been able to stop wondering where my friends money came from i recognise the experience and the feeling the smouldering hatred of a peasant maybe that characterises some of my feelings in this blog anyway he tells us that for the 16 years that followed from marriage in 1920 to the crack up in 1936 he lived fine distrusting the rich but earning enough money to share some of their mobility and grace he endured various setbacks and blows to his pride but survived them better than some friends and fellow writers again he makes the fine distinction that it s not the obvious external blows that do for you it s something from within trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement discouragement has a germ of its own as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint only slowly has he realised that the crack up bears similarities to the first two setbacks he s just described when a new sky cut off the sun last spring i didn t at first relate it to what had happened fifteen or twenty years ago only gradually did a certain family resemblance come through an over extension of the flank a burning of the candle at both ends a call upon physical resources that i did not command like a man over drawing at his bank in its impact this blow was more violent than the other two but it was the same in kind a feeling that i was standing at twilight on a deserted range with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down no problem set simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing the most quotable part is like a man over drawing at his bank which i ve seen quoted elsewhere but for me the most striking bit is the notion of the sun being cut off or occluded depression is like the sun going black and what this means that faith or belief in any activities leaks away in this silence there was a vast irresponsibility towards every obligation a deflation of all my values a passionate belief in order a disregard of motives or consequences in favour of guess work and prophecy a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world one by one these and other convictions were swept away as part of this he takes the opportunity to take a swipe at film as a medium and an industry being broadly anti film i agree and enjoyed his little diatribe i saw that the novel which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that whether in the hands of hollywood merchants or russian idealists was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought the most obvious emotion it was an art in which words were subordinate to images where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration it s very similar to virginia woolf s dismissal of film in her essay on cinema where she witheringly describes how film reduces the psychological complexity of great works of literature to a handful of trite visual clichés so we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world so we spell them out in words of one syllable written too in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy a kiss is love a broken cup is jealousy a grin is happiness death is a hearse obviously all the more ironic as fitzgerald in his last years had become a writer in hollywood here he is biting the hand that fed him then again he seems to imply that this criticism was itself a form of self contempt a way of attacking himself he exaggerates the alleged decline of the medium which made his fortune the novel in order to make his own plight more extreme forced to think he says he has come to five conclusions about his life 1 for twenty years edmund wilson has been his intellectual conscience i e has done his serious thinking for him 2 another man whose name he won t give has represented for him the moral good life not a writer but a guy in the fur business in the northwest in difficult situations...
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