Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (540 page)

But I had been thanking the gods too long, and thanking them for nothing. I wanted to put a lament into my record, without even the background of the Euganean Hills to give it colour. There weren’t any Euganean hills that I could see.

Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice box under left-overs. ...

Hence this sequel - a cracked plate’s further history.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream - but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza - one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality...

Unless madness or drugs or drink come into it, this phase comes to a dead-end, eventually, and is succeeded by a vacuous quiet. In this you can try to estimate what has been sheared away and what is left. Only when this quiet came to me, did I realize that I had gone through two parallel experiences.

The first time was twenty years ago, when I left Princeton in junior year with a complaint diagnosed as malaria. It transpired, through an X-ray taken a dozen years later, that it had been tuberculosis - a mild case, and after a few months of rest I went back to college. But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted - and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.

Years later I realized that my failure as a big shot in college was all right - instead of serving on committees, I took a beating on English poetry; when I got the idea of what it was all about, 1 set about learning how to write. On Shaw’s principle that ‘If you don’t get what you like, you better like what you get’, it was a lucky break - at the moment it was a harsh and bitter business to know that my career as a leader of men was over.

Since that day I have not been able to fire a bad servant, and I am astonished and impressed by people who can. Some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone. Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts - he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

The other episode parallel to my current situation took place after the war, when I had again over-extended my flank. It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out at all right for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, towards the leisure class - not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.

For sixteen years I lived pretty much as this latter person, distrusting the rich, yet working for money with which to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives. During this rime I had plenty of the usual horses shot from under me - I remember some of their names - Punctured Pride, Thwarted Expectation, Faithless, Show-off, Hard Hit, Never Again. And after a while I wasn’t twenty-five, then not even thirty-five, and nothing was quite as good. But in all these years I don’t remember a moment of discouragement. I saw honest men through moods of suicidal gloom - some of them gave up and died; others adjusted themselves and went on to a larger success than mine; but my morale never sank below the level of self-disgust when I had put on some unsightly personal show. Trouble has no necessary connexion with discouragement - discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

When a new sky cut off the sun last spring, I didn’t at first relate it to what had happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Only gradually did a certain family resemblance come through - an over-extension of the flank, a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man over-drawing at his bank. In its impact this blow was more violent than the other two but it was the same in kind - a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set - simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.

In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility towards every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favour of guess work and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world - one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930,1 had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read, if only Professor Canby’s book of the month - curious children nosed at the slime of Mr Tiffany Thayer in the drug-store libraries - but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinate to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power....

I set that down as an example of what haunted me during the long night - this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent, as the chain stores have crippled the small merchant, an exterior force, unbeatable -

(I have the sense of lecturing now, looking at a watch on the desk before me and seeing how many more minutes -)

Well, when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought. After a long time I came to these conclusions, just as I write them here:

(1) That I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience. That was Edmund Wilson.

(2) That another man represented my sense of the ‘good life’, though I saw him once in a decade, and since then he might have been hung. He is in the fur business in the Northwest and wouldn’t like his name set down here. But in difficult situations I had tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.

(3) That a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me - I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull towards him when I was on a spot.

(4) That a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy (in opposition to Mrs Post’s theories of how to make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable with a sort of systematized vulgarity). This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analysed it and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.

(5) That my political conscience had scarcely existed for ten years save as an element of irony in my stuff. When I became again concerned with the system I should function under, it was a man much younger than myself who brought it to me, with a mixture of passion and fresh air.

So there was not an ‘I’ any more - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self - to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do -

(The watch is past the hour and I have barely reached my thesis. I have some doubts as to whether this is of general interest, but if anyone wants more, there is plenty left, and your editor will tell me. If you’ve had enough, say so - but not too loud, because I have the feeling that someone, I’m not sure who, is sound asleep - someone who could have helped me to keep my shop open. It wasn’t Lenin, and it wasn’t God.)

AUTHOR’S HOUSE

This artcile appeared in
Esquire
in July, 1936.

I have seen numerous photographs and read many accounts of the houses of Joan Crawford, Virginia Bruce and Claudette Colbert, usually with the hostess done up from behind with a bib explaining how on God’s earth to make a Hollywood soufflee or open a can of soup without removing the appendix in the same motion. But it has been a long time since I have seen a picture of an author’s house and it occurs to me to supply the deficiency.

Of course I must begin with an apology for writing about authors at all. In the days of the old Smart Set Mencken and Nathan had a rejection slip which notified the aspirant that they would not consider stories about painters, musicians and authors — perhaps because these classes are supposed to express themselves fully in their own work and are not a subject for portraiture. And having made the timorous bow I proceed with the portrait.

Rather than leave a somber effect at the end we begin at the bottom, in a dark damp unmodernized cellar. As your host’s pale yellow flashlight moves slowly around through the spiderwebs, past old boxes and barrels and empty bottles and parts of old machines you feel a little uneasy.

“Not a bad cellar — as cellars go, “ the author says. “You can’t see it very well and I can’t either — it’s mostly forgotten. “

“What do you mean ?”

“It’s everything I’ve forgotten — all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier.”

“You see fiction is a trick of the mind and heart composed of as many separate emotions as a magician uses in executing a pass or a palm. When you’ve learned it you forget it and leave it down here. “

“When did you learn it?”

“Oh every time I begin I have to learn it all over again in a way. But the intangibles are down here. Why I chose this God awful metier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction. Why I would choose it again. All that’s down here and I’m just as glad I can’t look at it too closely. See that dark corner?”

“Yes. “

“Well, three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer. “

Your eyes fall on another corner and you give a start of alarm.

“What’s that?” you demand.

“That?” The author tries to change the subject, moving around so as to obscure your view of the too recent mound of dirt in the corner that has made you think of certain things in police reports.

But you insist.

“That is where it is buried, “ he says.

“What’s buried?”

“That’s where I buried my love after — “ he hesitates.

“After you killed her?”

“After I killed it. “

“I don’t understand what you mean. “

The author does not look at the pile of earth.

“That is where I buried my first childish love of myself, my belief that I would never die like other people, and that I wasn’t the son of my parents but a son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world. “

He breaks off.

“But let’s get out of here. We’ll go upstairs. “

In the living room the author’s eye is immediately caught by a scene outside the window. The visitor looks — he sees some children playing football on the lawn next door.

“There is another reason why I became an author. “

“How’s that?”

“Well, I used to play football in a school and there was a coach who didn’t like me for a damn. Well, our school was going to play a game up on the Hudson, and I had been substituting for our climax runner who had been hurt the week before. I had a good day substituting for him so now that he was well and had taken his old place I was moved into what might be called the position of blocking back. I wasn’t adapted to it, perhaps because there was less glory and less stimulation. It was cold, too, and I don’t stand cold, so instead of doing my job I got thinking how grey the skies were. When the coach took me out of the game he said briefly: