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anyone, he will be a writer and only a writer, even though this means
surrendering the burden and the glory of being a complete human
person. As a declaration of the necessary economy of energy, this
would be well and good; but such is Fitzgerald's vehemence that his
statement seems to carry all the old illusion of the writer's privileged
and magical position, as if at the dead end of everything he still refused
to admit that he suffered as a man and not as a writer, that his was a
human defeat and not the failure of a literary career. A man, in that
extremity, ought to know that writing just isn't that important. In a
similar tone (and he may have had it directly from Fitzgerald's mouth)
Schulberg has his hero, facing death, cry out,
"Give me ten years. Ten
years ot nothing but work. Never, never let it come second again."
Fitzgerald's biography would seem to establish just the opposite point:
the work must always come second, for life, put second, catches up with
you in the long run. No doubt Fitzgerald, remembering all those parties
with Zelda, may have thought he had put life first and work second,
but that was only the illusion of life; and it would have been better for
his work if at a certain period, instead of forcing himself to write on
alcohol, he had given it up and tried to reorganize himself so that his
writing might eventually flow from another depth.
In the dark night of the soul-Fitzgerald tells us, mixing insomnia
with metaphysical anguish-it is always three o'clock in the morning;
the words have now a fashionable ring, though he appears to have
fidgeted so much before that darkness that it is rather surprising that
he should
be
taken as its authoritative witness. At such moments the
only salvation may lie in the darkness itself, before which the ego must
consent to flicker out, to give up its feeble claims: the renunciation
may
in
fact turn out to be unnecessary, but only the man who has
reached that point is capable of the ultimate reconcilement with life.
Though Fitzgerald is voluble about the hopes he has renounced,
his
volubility itself is too nervous, as if he were still clutching, somewhere at
the back of his mind, at the shroud of his dear departed youthful suc–
cess, the "first act" that would never be repeated. This nervous clutch
at the ego seems
to
be something that dies harder in writers than in other
sections of the population. But here too, one can't help wondering
whether Fitzgerald understood more in his fiction than in his life,
and for the effect of final ambiguity one might throw
in
that simple
but quite wonderful remark by the narrator of
The Last Tycoon:
"Writers aren't people exactly."
If
"The Crack-up" does not show us Fitzgerald making
the
ultimate
act of submission to life, nevertheless he does in that work-with
his
