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

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 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