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136 pages

English

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Compiled and published after Fitzgerald's death by his friend, the prominent critic and editor Edmund Wilson, The Crack-Up is a collection of writings that chronicle the author's state of mind and personal perspective on events, fellow writers and public figures of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to articles and essays such as the celebrated title piece, this volume includes a selection of Fitzgerald's notebooks, which - as well as being a repository of anecdotes and witty lines - provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the novelist's creative process, with passages that would be reworked into his fiction.An entertaining and eclectic miscellany that sheds light on the author and his times, The Crack-Up is an invaluable companion to such well-known works as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	09 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780714548791
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Crack-Up
F. Scott Fitzgerald

ALMA CLASSICS

Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Crack-Up first published as a collection in 1945 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018 Edited text and notes © Alma Books Ltd
Extra Material © Richard Parker
Cover design: Will Dady
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-718-5
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
The Crack-Up
Autobiographical Pieces
Echoes of the Jazz Age
My Lost City
Ring
“Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number —”
Auction – Model 1934
Sleeping and Waking
The Crack-Up
Pasting It Together
Handle with Care
Early Success
The Notebooks
Note on the Text
Notes

Extra Material
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Life
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Works
Select Bibliography

Other books by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD published by Alma Classics
All the Sad Young Men Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Basil and Josephine
The Beautiful and Damned Flappers and Philosophers
The Great Gatsby
Image on the Heart and Other Stories The Intimate Strangers and Other Stories
The Last Tycoon The Last of the Belles and Other Stories
The Love Boat and Other Stories
The Pat Hobby Stories
Tales of the Jazz Age
Tender Is the Night
This Side of Paradise

The Crack-Up

Autobiographical Pieces

Echoes of the Jazz Age
November 1931
It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective, and without being suspected of premature arteriosclerosis. Many people still succumb to violent retching when they happen upon any of its characteristic words – words which have since yielded in vividness to the coinages of the underworld. It is as dead as were the Yellow Nineties * in 1902. Yet the present writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamt of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.
The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October 1929 began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. * When the police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn’t remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, * but we did know that such tyranny belonged in the jittery little countries of south Europe. If goose-livered businessmen had this effect on the government, then maybe we had gone to war for J.P. Morgan’s loans * after all. But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. *
Presently we began to have slices of the national cake, and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. * The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap – “I know I had it” – and the muzhik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent to us the throne of England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate decision in our national affairs. * But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen’s clothes – symbol of “the power that man must hold and that passes from race to race”. *
We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown south and west for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand.
The first social revelation created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty. As far back as 1915, the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him “self-reliant”. At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favourable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there were references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number of the Yale Record or the Princeton Tiger .
But petting in its more audacious manifestations was confined to the wealthier classes – among other young people the old standard prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a proposal was expected, as young officers in strange cities sometimes discovered to their dismay. Only in 1920 did the veil finally fall – the Jazz Age was in flower. Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste. May one offer in exhibit the year 1922! That was the peak of the younger generation, for though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.
The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger generation was starred no longer.
A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition – they were implicit in the attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions. (Our South, for example, is tropical and early maturing – it has never been part of the wisdom of France and Spain to let young girls go unchaperoned at sixteen and seventeen.) But the general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921 had more complicated origins.
The word jazz in its progress towards respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are still active – wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But different causes had now brought about a corresponding state in America – though there were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face peered into the family circle. Never did they dream that they had contributed to it. The honest citizens of every class, who believed in a strict public morality and were powerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would necessarily be served by criminals and quacks, and do not really believe it today. Rich righteousness had always been able to buy honest and intelligent servants to free the slaves or the Cubans, so when this attempt collapsed, our elders stood firm with all the stubbornness of people involved in a weak case, preserving their righteousness and losing their children. Silver-haired women and men with fine old faces, people who never did a consciously dishonest thing in their lives, still assure each other in the apartment hotels of New York and Boston and Washington that “there’s a whole generation growing up that will never know the taste of liquor”. Meanwhile, their granddaughters pass the well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover * around the boarding school and, if they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen. But the generation who reached maturity between 1875 and 1895 continue to believe what they want to bel