The Jazz Age

THE CRACK-UP--F. Scott Fitzgerald--New Directions ($3.50).

When Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald died at 44, in Christmas-week of 1940, he left behind a handful of brilliant novels and collections of short stories (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby) and an unfillable gap in the ranks of Postwar I's "lost generation." Wrote Novelist Glenway Wescott, "he was a kind of king of our American youth."

Now Critic Edmund Wilson has made a book of his friend's glittering, tragic life. It is in part a collection of essays, poems and letters written about Fitzgerald by his admirers (including Poets T. S. Eliot and John Peale Bishop, Critic Paul Rosenfeld, Novelist Wescott, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe). But the bulk of The Crack-Up consists of selections from Fitzgerald's own essays, stories, notebooks and letters, including the famed scarifying confession (published in Esquire in 1936) in which Fitzgerald explained his decline from high-ranking novelist to Hollywood hack. The result is an extraordinary character-study, wholly free from reticence or whitewash. Readers who hope to recapture the lilt and flame of flapper days will find themselves staring at the clogged ash trays and unwashed glasses of the morning after.

Scott Fitzgerald was barely 20, fresh from Princeton and a brief spell in uniform, when he saw "the unexpended nervous energy of the war years exploded [into] an age of miracles ... an age of art ... an age of excess." Suddenly, spontaneously, the Jazz Age had begun. "Life was like the race in Alice in Wonderland, there was a prize for everyone.''

At first, despite his good looks, wit and charm, it seemed that there would be no prize for young Fitzgerald. His girl broke their engagement because he had no money. At 21, he felt passe--"God! How I miss my youth!" he wrote to his friend Bishop. Then, between jobs, he sat down and poured into This Side of Paradise the romantic memories of his happy college days. Within two weeks of its appearance, Fitzgerald had the cash not only to win back and marry his girl, but to enter the jazziest, gayest time of his life.

"Incalculable city," wrote Fitzgerald. "What ensued was only one of a thousand success stories of those gaudy days. . . . I, who knew less of [New York] society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stagline, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product." Actresses whom he had worshipped from afar now eagerly lunched at his apartment. When he stepped into a public fountain in the small hours, the gossip columns turned the splash into a tidal wave. The morning after a mild argument with a cop, he read: "Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise." It was a life which passed incessantly "through strange doors into strange apartments, with intermittent swings in taxis through the soft nights. . . . We were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal. Many who were not alcoholics were lit up four days out of seven. . . . Frayed nerves were strewn everywhere. . . . The hangover became a part of the day."

Like his friends, Fitzgerald caroused freely. But unlike most of them he also produced novels and short stories with passion and vigor--just, he said, as "certain racehorses run for the pure joy of running." The product, Critic Rosenfeld points out, had a double quality. Its pictures of the period were brilliantly illustrative: e.g., "a boy drawing gasoline out of an automobile tank so that a girl can clean her satin shoe ... a young fellow sitting in his B.V.D.s after a bath running his hand down his naked skin in indolent satisfaction . . . two bucks from a pump-and-slipper dance throwing hash by the handful around Childs' at 6 a.m." But now the stories were increasingly marked by what Rosenfeld calls Fitzgerald's sense of "the quality of brutishness, of dull indirection and degraded sensibility running through [the] American life of the hour."

In his finest, most applauded novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald succeeded superbly in portraying the hollowness of his racketeer-hero's life. But it was not until the crash had turned his New York playground into an "echoing tomb" where "cocktail parties [rang] with [cries of] 'Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!' " that his tone grew truly grim. Even so, he still had money, good looks, devoted friends, popularity. His passion for work continued ; he sold stories to the richer magazines; he went to work in Hollywood.

But as time advanced, Fitzgerald found himself less & less in tune with it. The accent on youth remained on him, but it seemed to have left everybody else. Some of his friends had died; a few had gone insane ; others had suddenly grown intensely serious and were reading Karl Marx. The literary limelight was no longer on him but on the novelist he most admired, Ernest Hemingway.

In 1934 he marked the turning point in his life with a carefully written, ambitious, disappointing novel about insanity, Tender Is the Night. By 1935, his body had begun to crack. He drank too much; he was dogged by insomnia; he drugged himself with Napoleonic dreams of military prowess and imaginary victories on the Princeton football field. He was haunted by adolescent disappointments, such as having lost the presidency of a sophomore club and not having gone over seas in the war. He described himself as a man "standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in [his] hands and the targets down."

"Christ, man!" exploded Dos Passes, "how do you find time ... to worry about all that stuff? . . . We're living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history -- if you want to go to pieces I think it's absolutely O.K. but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it . . . instead of spilling it in little pieces." And soon Fitzgerald, with amazing fortitude, set out to do just that. "I never blame failure," he told his daughter Frances, "but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort." In The Last Tycoon he made a last, powerful effort both to create an objective character and to explain his own dilemma -- that of a man torn between the "moneyed celebrity" of Hollywood and his ambition to do honest work. He had developed, says Dos Passos, "a real, grand style," and had reached "a firmly anchored ethical standard . . . something that American writing has been struggling towards for half a century." But, halfway through The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald died of a heart ailment.

Edmund Wilson has chosen the pieces for The Crack-Up so carefully that they lead in a straight, chronological line from Fitzgerald's youth and glory to his maturity and misery. Every aspect of his life and work -- the brilliant, the second-rate, the real, the illusory -- is shown. Readers may differ on the question of Fitzgerald's survival value, but they will respect Author Wescott's statement that Fitzgerald's life and fate mirrored the life and fate of a whole period of American life. "He was our darling, our genius, our fool. ... He lived and he wrote at last like a scapegoat, and now has departed like one."

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