Harold Ober, his literary agent, complained that Fitzgerald was never sober. When they let her out to accompany Scott on a walk, he had to prevent her from throwing herself under a train and she demanded to be locked up again before the moon came up. He owed tens of thousands of dollars and he was down to his last 40 cents in cash. ![]() The ones that come from inside are the authentic face of the crack-up.Īccording to Fitzgerald, “a man can crack in many ways-can crack in the head-in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others, or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world or in the nerves.” Describing his own crack-up, Fitzgerald wrote that “after an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realise that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”Ī year earlier, Fitzgerald confessed that “what I might have been … is lost, spent, dissipated, unrecapturable.” By the time he wrote “The Crack-Up” in November 1935, Fitzgerald was holed up in a hotel in North Carolina, alone and living on canned food. Those that come from outside only seem to do so. He identified two kinds of blows that lead to individual collapse: “the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come from outside” and “another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it.” These blows aren’t equal. Scott Fitzgerald described this struggle in “The Crack-Up,” an essay written for Esquire in 1936. Identity is forged in the struggles of individuals, cultures, and civilisations to protect themselves against collapse.
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