PARTISAN REVIEW
uncanny sensitivity to the American emotions that victimized
him–
put his finger on the error of his past that is still the present error of
American civilization: "Life," he says, speaking of his own youth, "was
something you dominated if you were any good." The ideal of mastery
of self or (within limitations) of fate is one thing, but the domination
of life in which American civilization believes
is
something very
dif–
ferent. It is the belief that life may somehow be dominated
f110m the
outside,
almost as if we Americans possessed a power that could suspend
us above our Self, luck, limitations, and death; so that life appears
eventually as something not so much to be lived as
to
be conquered,
defiantly as American technology has conquered and dominated its con–
tinent, or casually as, in the common illusion, you might think of domi–
nating insomnia by taking a pill.
Almost certainly, Fitzgerald at the time of writing "The Crack-up"
did not have left even the physical resources necessary to accomplish a
real emotional renewal, and it would be unfair to be preaching at him if
one were not also addressing oneself as an American, realizing that a
certain brittle quality in his life, and even in his writings, corresponds to
a real lack of emotional depth in American life generally. I do not think
the present boom will succeed
in
blowing up the Fitzgerald legend into
a great myth for America; on the other hand, there is no doubt about
the symbolic aspect of his figure, and the way
in
which
his
image can
accompany us through certain avenues of our metropolitan existence. On
the positive side, the emotional innocence of the American
is
also a con–
dition of discovery, and Fitzgerald's work without his wide-eyed romanti–
cism would not be filled with so many things sharply seen and sharply felt
--so that his figure
is
with us too at those moments when we have to
remind some of our refugee friends that we Americans, though child–
ish, are not so childish as the foreigner thinks and that we see a good
deal more sometimes than the foreigner imagines. Reading "The
Crack-up" against the total background of Fitzgerald's life, we need
not find it fantastic to recall another literary expression of a break–
down : Dante exclaiming at the beginning of
The Divine Comedy,
"In
the middle of the journey of my life I found myself' in a dark wood
where the straight way was lost," Ah, how simple life was then, when
every experience had its name, every error its opposed and saving
truth, and every disaster could be fitted into its redeeming place in
the absolute hierarchy, By comparison "The Crack-up" is only a piece
of journalism, but, such as it is and with all its limitations of insight,
taken with the whole of Fitzgerald's career, it brings us to the center of
