WRITERS AND MADNESS
21
External pressures abet the internal tensions, which become unendur–
able, and at long last comes that slide over into the more tranquil
and private self-indulgence of fantasy with a consequent weakening of
the reality principle. One (a critic) develops a private language;
another spins out elaborate literary theories without content or rele–
vance; a third has maintained his literary alertness and eye for rele–
vance through a sheer aggressiveness which has cost
him
his
ability
to maintain personal relations-and which appears therefore in his
work as a mutilation too. Scott Fitzgerald's confidante in "The Crack–
up" (perhaps his most mature piece of writing, at that) gives him
the extraordinary advice:
((Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in
yvu-suppose it was in the Grand Canyon .
...
By God, if I ever
cracked, I'd try to make the whole world crack with me."
And she
was right and profound, but Fitzgerald was tied by too many strings
to the values of American life to see her truth. His crack-up was the
dawning of a truth upon
him
which he could not completely grasp or
recognize intellectually. Swift in that position would have seen that
the crack is in the Grand Canyon, in the whole world, in the total
human face about him.
If
he is powerful enough-now against greater
odds-to make the world crack in his work, the writer has at the least
the gratification of revenge, and the ego that deeper conquest (de–
scribed above) where its anguish now seems no more than an appro–
priate response to a world portrayed (and with some fidelity) as
cracked. But, alas, these energies which seek reality and are capable
of transforming the neurotic mass into the writer's special and unique
vision of the world can also be blocked by the external difficulties in
the literary situation. And when that happens we open the door, as
Freud says, to the psychoses- at any rate, to the breakdown and
crack-up.
5.
Abi Viator
Et Imitare Si Pote,-is*
And so I am brought back into the center of my theme.
If
I
appeat;ed to have abandoned the theme of neurosis fcir the difficulties,
external and internal, that confront the modem writer, it was only
because these difficulties as part of his alienation are the aggravating
causes and public face of his madness.
But why (in the end) should it be the writer's fate- more than
of any other intellectual profession-to confront this crack in the face
of the world? Because his subject is the very world of experience as
*
From Swift's epitaph: "Go, traveler, and imitate him if you can."
