Fitzgerald Francis Scott - The crack-up: with other miscellaneous pieces, excerpts from note-books and letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas

F(RANCIS) SCOTT(KEY) FITZGERALD was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896. He attended Princeton for three years before joining the Army in 1917, where he served as aide-de-camp to General J. A. Ryan. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre; they had one daughter. He died in 1940. With the publication in 1920 of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald gained immediately both popularity and critical attention. Among his other well-known works are: The Great Gatsby (1925), All Sad Young Men (short stories, 1926), and Tender Is the Night (1934). The Crack-Up was originally published by New Directions in 1945.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

EDITED BY EDMUND WILSON

With other miscellaneous pieces, excerpts from note-books and letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos and essays and poems by Paul Rosenfeld, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson

Copyright 1931 by Charles Scribners Sons
Copyright 1933 by Editorial Publications, Inc.
Copyright 1934, 1936 by Esquire, Inc.
Copyright 1937 by Pocket Book Publishing Co.
(Renewed 1964 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan)
Copyright 1945 by New Directions Publishing
Corporation Copyright 1945 by Elena Wilson

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Of the pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald reprinted here, Echoes of the Jazz Age first appeared in Scribners Magazine; Ring in The New Republic; Early Success in American Cavalcade; and all the rest in Esquire. The poem called Lamp in the Window and the introductory verses by the editor were published first in The New Yorker. The essay by Mr. Rosenfeld is reprinted from his book Men Seen. The poem by Mr, Bishop, the essay by Mr. Wescott, and part of the essay by Mr, Dos Passos originally appeared in The New Republic, Acknowledgment is due Cosmopolitan Magazine for permission to include My Lost City, which was bought but never published by it.

The editor is indebted to Mrs. Samuel Lanahan, Miss Peggy Wood Weaver, Mr. Gerald Murphy and the late John Peale Bishop for supplying him with letters from Fitzgerald; to Miss Gertrude Stein, Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. John Dos Passos and the literary executors of Thomas Wolfe and Edith Wharton for permission to print letters written to Fitzgerald; and to Mr. Harold Ober and Mr. Maxwell Perkins for help in collecting Fitzgeralds articles.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review; no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

ISBN 978-0-8112-1971-6

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

THREE LETTERS ABOUT THE GREAT GATSBY
from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and T. S. Eliot

SCOTT, your last fragments I arrange tonight,
Assigning commas, setting accents right,
As once I punctuated, spelled and trimmed
When, passing in a Princeton springhow dimmed
By this damned quarter-century and more!
You left your Shadow Laurels at my door.
That was a drama webbed of dreams: the scene
A shimmering beglamored bluish-green
Soiled Paris wineshop; the sad hero one
Who loved applause but had his life alone;
Who fed on drink for weeks; forgot to eat,
Worked feverishly, nourished on defeat
A lyric pride, and lent a lyric voice
To all the tongueless knavish tavern boys,
The liquor-ridden, the illiterate;
Got stabbed one midnight by a tavern-mate
Betrayed, but self-betrayed by stealthy sins
And faded to the sound of violins.

Tonight, in this dark long Atlantic gale,
I set in order such another tale,
While tons of wind that take the world for scope
Rock blackened waters where marauders grope
Our blue and bathed-in Massachusetts ocean;
The Cape shakes with the depth-bombs dumbed concussion;
And guns can interrupt me in these rooms,
Where now I seek to breathe again the fumes
Of iridescent drinking-dens, retrace
The bright hotels, regain the eager pace
You tell of.... Scott, the bright hotels turn bleak;
The pace limps or stamps; the wines are weak;
The horns and violins come faint tonight.
A rim of darkness that devours light
Runs like the wall of flame that eats the land;
Blood, brain and labor pour into the sand;
And here, among our comrades of the trade,
Some buzz like husks, some stammer, much afraid,
Some mellowly give tongue and join the drag
Like hounds that bay the bounding anise-bag,
Some swallow darkness and sit hunched and dull,
The stunned beasts stupor in the monkey-skull.

I climbed, a quarter-century and more
Played out, the college steps, unlatched my door,
And, creature strange to college, found you there:
The pale skin, hard green eyes, and yellow hair
Intently pinching out before a glass
Some pimples left by parties at the Nass;
Nor did you stop abashed, thus pocked and blotched,
But kept on peering while I stood and watched.
Tonight, from days more distant now, we find,
Than holidays in France were, left behind,
Than spring of graduation from the fall
That saw us grubbing below City Hall,
Through storm and darkness, Times contrary stream,
There glides amazingly your mirrors beam
To bring before me still, glazed mirror-wise,
The glitter of the hard and emerald eyes.
The cornea tough, the aqueous chamber cold,
Those glassy optic bulbs that globe and hold
They pass their image on to what they mint,
To blue ice or light buds attune their tint,
And leave us, to turn over, iris-fired,
Not the great Ritz-sized diamond you desired
But jewels in a handful, lying loose:
Flawed amethysts; the moonstones milky blues;
Chill blues of pale transparent tourmaline;
Opals of shifty yellow, chartreuse green,
Wherein a vein vermilion flees and flickers
Tight phials of the spirits light mixed liquors;
Some tinsel zircons, common turquoise; but
Two emeralds, green and lucid, one half-cut,
One cut consummatelyboth take their place
In Letters most expensive Cartier case.

And there I have set them out for final show,
And come to the tasks dead-end, and dread to know
Those eyes struck dark, dissolving in a wrecked
And darkened world, that gleam of intellect
That spilled into the spectrum of tune, taste,
Scent, color, living speech, is gone, is lost;
And we must dwell among the ragged stumps