Response to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up"

I have a difficult time reacting to this essay. I wonder what it must have been like to know F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wonder the same thing about Emily Dickinson, who practically didn't leave her home for the last two decades of her life. I don’t know the specifics of Fitzgerald’s life, but in the this essay, he describes the process of “cracking up” and the inevitable withdrawing from people, society, etc. that follows such an event. Fitzgerald’s language is abstract (beautiful but abstract) and difficult to synthesize and understand. Cracking up occurs when “an exceptionally optimistic young man” has a “leak through which . . . [his] enthusiasm and [his] vitality . . . steadily and prematurely [trickle] away” (528).

Fitzgerald cracked during his late twenties/early thirties. Present day synonyms for “cracking up” might include having a mid-life crisis or a mental breakdown. Fitzgerald states at the very beginning: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down.” But what makes a crack-up distinct is its subtle “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” (520).

A crack in a person occurs without the person realizing it until later, perhaps ten years down the line like Fitzgerald. The crack is a leak that drains the person of his/her former values. The remaining empty plate, the empty shell, persists with some sort of altered, impaired function. Fitzgerald claims that he is only a writer now—not the optimistic young man who viewed “a new chore [as] only a nice prospect for the next day” (521). Now he is pasted together and thinks that “the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness” (531). I won't lie, Fitzgerald sounds pretty depressing to my young, somewhat optimistic ears.