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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)
Revision as of 11:39, 27 February 2021
, 27 February 2021Again, more major corrections and additions in §2. Please be careful as you add. This is a complex essay. (Missing Dickstein ref in original.)
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) (Corrected many refs in first §; added notes. More careful attention should be paid when remediating, esp. in ref and punctuation placement.) |
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) (Again, more major corrections and additions in §2. Please be careful as you add. This is a complex essay. (Missing Dickstein ref in original.)) |
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=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) === | === Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) === | ||
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, The Crack-Up, appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three | Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note, | ||
{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }} | |||
This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task. | |||
So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, 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.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} 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 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} 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: | |||
I said earlier that there was much literary art in Fitzgerald’s apparent self- disclosure 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 (1925) or Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, | {{quote|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.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }} | ||
{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self- understanding” that set the book apart from those of his | |||
We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, 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'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} 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.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}{{efn|“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}} }} 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.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}}{{efn|“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} }} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} 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.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} 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 self-disclosure 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'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes, | |||
{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . 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.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }} | |||
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.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} 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.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|xxxx|p=x}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }} | |||
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 Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes: | |||
{{quote|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.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=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 1931 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 1920s. | |||
{{quote|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 [1929], 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.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }} | |||
This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=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 1920 short story, “Benediction”: | |||
{{quote|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.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }} | |||
In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom. | |||
In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others. | |||
It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.” | |||
===The Cultural Context of the 1930s=== | |||
. . . | |||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||
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* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}} | * {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date= | * {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}} | * {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }} | ||
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* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}} | * {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}} | * {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date= | * {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}} | ||
{{Refend}} | {{Refend}} | ||