The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself (view source)

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 So what was the response to the “Crack-Up” articles in Esquire? Scott Donaldson, writing in , says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression” (“Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ). Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of angst, but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in . Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression” (Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” ), as Donaldson has said? Is there little else?
 Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness” (). She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:
 :The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’ (Hampl )
+ We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a macho culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in Heart of Darkness (); he had not written under a nom de plume as George Eliot had done.11 Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.
+We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” ().12 It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations” (Hampl ).13 Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .” (“The Crack-Up,” ). Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (The Crack-Up, ). There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.14 It is also true that while something is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style” (Hampl ), much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.15 Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his  article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines” (“The Crisis,” ). Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?
+I said earlier that there was much literary art in Fitzgerald’s apparent selfdisclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of angst and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations—to characters such as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby () or Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting  article in The Mailer Review, comparing
+Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,
+:Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of selfunderstanding” that set the book apart from those of his s contemporaries and writers ever since (Kazin and Solotaroff ). It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. (–)
+Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact” (“The Crisis,” ).16 Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby (.)17
+It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is not restricted to the personal revelations of “The CrackUp.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:
+:What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable. (xi)
+Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive chronicler of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his  essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive post-mortem of the s.
+:The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . 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 ducs and the casualness of chorus girls. (The Crack-Up, ).
+This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his  “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the ’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss” (xi) or his own description of the Jazz Age— were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective angst, his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his  short story, “Benediction”:
+:With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively. (Mangum, “Introduction” xx)
 . . .