Anathemas and Admirations (68 page)

F
OR SOME, lucidity is a primordial gift, a privilege, even a sort of grace. They have no need to acquire it, to strain toward it; they are predestined to it. All their experiences concur to make them transparent to themselves. Stricken with clear-sightedness, they do not even suffer from it, so closely does it define them. If they live in a perpetual crisis, they accept that crisis quite naturally: it is imminent to their existence. For others, lucidity is a belated result, the fruit of an accident, of an internal rupture occurring at a specific moment. Hitherto, enclosed within an agreeable opacity, they adhered to the obvious aspects of things, without weighing or even divining their vacuity. Suddenly they are disabused and somehow engaged in spite of themselves in the career of knowledge; suddenly they are stumbling among unbreathable truths, for which nothing has prepared them. Hence they resent their new condition, regarding it not at all as a favor but as a “blow.” Nothing prepared Scott Fitzgerald to face or to endure such unbreathable truths; the effort he made to adapt himself to them, however, has a pathos all its own.

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of 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.”

These are not considerations by a brilliant, fashionable novelist. . . .
This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Last Tycoon
: if Fitzgerald had limited himself to those novels, he would present no more than a literary interest. Fortunately he is also the author of that text
The Crack-Up
, from which I have just quoted the opening and in which he describes his failure, his only great
success
.

As a young man, he was dominated by a single obsession: to become a “successful literary man.” He did so. He experienced notoriety and even a genuine sort of glory. (An incomprehensible thing for me: T. S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald that he had read
The Great Gatsby
three times!) Money obsessed him: he wanted to make money, and he talked about it shamelessly. In his letters, as in his notebooks, he keeps coming back to it, to such a degree that we sometimes wonder whether we are in the presence of a writer or a businessman. Not that I dislike correspondence in which material problems are discussed; I prefer it a thousand times to the (falsely spiritualized) kind that slides over them or swathes them in poetry. But there is the manner and the tone. How many of Rilke’s letters I once loved so much now seem insipid and bloodless! They never allude to the shabby side of penury. Intended for posterity, their “nobility” sickens me. The angels always live next door to the poor. Doesn’t it seem that there’s a certain offhandedness or a calculated naïveté in writing such things
at such length
in letters addressed to duchesses? To play the pure spirit borders on indecency. I don’t believe in Rilke’s angels; I believe even less in his poor. Too “distinguished,” they lack cynicism, that salt of poverty. On the other hand, the letters of a Baudelaire or a Dostoyevsky, begging letters, touch me by their suppliant, desperate, gasping tone. You feel that they talk about money because they can’t make any, that they were born poor and will remain poor, whatever happens. Poverty is consubstantial with them. They hardly aspire to success, since they know they can never achieve it. Now, what embarrasses me in Fitzgerald, in the early Fitzgerald, is that he aspires to success and achieves it. But fortunately, his success will be only a detour, an eclipse of his consciousness, before awakening to himself, to the revelation that he “will never be as good a man again.” Fitzgerald died in 1940, at the age of forty-four; his crisis occurred around 1935—1936, the period when he wrote the articles that constitute
The Crack-Up
. Before this date, the crucial event in his life remained his marriage to Zelda. Together they led the artificial existence of Americans on the Côte d’Azur. Later he would describe his stay in Europe as “seven years of waste and tragedy,” seven years when they indulged every extravagance, as though haunted by a secret desire to exhaust themselves, to empty themselves out. The inevitable happened: Zelda collapsed into schizophrenia and survived her husband only to die in an asylum fire. He had said of her, “Zelda is a case, and not a person.” No doubt he meant that she was of interest only to psychiatry. He, on the other hand, would be a person: a case answerable to psychology or to history.

“My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books — and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural — unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.”

I leave aside Fitzgerald’s complacency in regarding himself as the expression of a “lost generation” or in interpreting his own crisis from external givens. For that crisis, if it emanated solely from a contingency, would lose all its scope. Insofar as they are specifically American, the revelations of
The Crack-Up
concern only literary history, or history itself. As inner experiences, however, they partake of an essence, of an intensity, that transcends contingencies and continents.

“What has just happened to me . . .”: what had happened to Fitzgerald? He had lived in the intoxication of success, wanted happiness at all costs, aspired to become a writer of the first importance. Literally and figuratively, he had lived asleep. But then sleep left him. He began to wake, and what he discovered in his waking filled him with horror. A clear-sighted sterility submerged and paralyzed him.

Insomnia sheds a light on us which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously, we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against ourselves. From it, and at the expense of our health, we seek something else: dangerous, harmful truths, everything that sleep has kept us from glimpsing. Yet our insomnia liberates us from our facility and our fictions only to confront us with a blocked horizon:
it illuminates our impasses
. It dooms us while it delivers us: an ambiguity inseparable from the experience of the night. This experience Fitzgerald tried in vain to escape. It assailed him, crushed him, it was too profound for his spirit. Would he turn to God? He detested lying — which is to say that he had no access to religion. The nocturnal universe rose before him like an absolute. Nor had he any access to metaphysics, though he would be forced toward it. Obviously he was not ripe for his nights.

“The horror has come now like a storm — what if this night prefigured the night after death — what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope — only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four.”

In truths aside from the mystic and the man who is prey to a grand passion, who is really ripe for his nights? We may desire to lose sleep if we are believers, but if we are without any certainty, how to remain for hours and hours in a tête-à-tête with ourselves? We can reproach Fitzgerald for not divining the importance of the night as an occasion for or a method of knowledge, as an enriching disaster, but we cannot remain insensitive to the pathos of his vigils, when the “repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic” was for him the consequence of his denial of God, of his incapacity to be an accomplice in the greatest metaphysical fraud, in the supreme lie of our nights.

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering — this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutory day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the mornings day after day.”

The daytime truths have no validity in the “real dark night of the soul.” And instead of blessing it as a source of revelations, Fitzgerald curses that night, identifies it with his collapse, and denies it all value as knowledge.
He has a Pascalian experience without the Pascalian spirit
. Like all frivolous men, he trembles at venturing further into himself. Yet a fatality impels him onward. He resists extending his being to its limits, and he reaches them in spite of himself. The extremity to which he accedes, far from being the result of a plenitude, is the expression of a broken spirit: it is the boundlessness of the Flaw, it is the negative experience of the infinite. His sickness plunges down to the very sources of affectivity. This he will explain himself in a text that gives us the key to his troubles:

“I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy —
why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”

A
crucial text, a sick man’s text. In order to understand its importance, let us try to define, by contrast, the behavior of the healthy man, the active man. Let us grant ourselves, to this effect, a supplement of health. . . .

However contradictory and intense our states, normally we master them, we manage to neutralize them: “health” is the faculty we possess of keeping a certain distance from them. A well-balanced being always manages to slide over his depths or to thread his way across his own abysses. Health — the condition of action — presupposes a flight from oneself, a desertion of ourselves. No true action without the fascination of the
object
. When we act, our inner states count only by their relation to the external world; they have no intrinsic value, hence it is permissible for us to master them. If we should happen to be sad, we are so
on account
of a specific situation, an incident, or a distinct reality.

The sick man proceeds entirely otherwise. He realizes his states in themselves — his sadness sadly, his melancholy melancholically — and he espouses, he experiences, all tragedy tragically. He is merely
subject
, and nothing but. If he identifies himself with the objects of his horror or of his compassion, these objects constitute for him only various modalities of himself. To be sick is to coincide totally with oneself.

“Every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. . . I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations were only what I remembered I
should
do, from other days.”

Divorced from reality, which Zelda was to know in its irreparable aspect, Fitzgerald was lucky enough to experience in an attenuated form: a schizophrenia for litterateurs. . . . Let us add — another piece of luck for him — that he was expert at “self-pity.” His abuse of it preserved him from total ruin. This is not a paradox. An excess of sympathy for ourselves preserves our reason, for such brooding over our miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from a reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation. Have no pity for those who pity themselves; they will never give way altogether. . . .

Fitzgerald survived his crisis without surmounting it completely. He hoped nonetheless to find a balance between “the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; between the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to succeed.” His-being, he thought, would then continue its course “as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.”

These fits of pride were accidental. Deep in himself, he would have liked to return, in his relations with men, to the subterfuges of conventional existence; he would have liked to
retreat
. To do so, he would assume a mask.

“A smile — ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, . . . a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vendor in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera. . . .”

His crises would lead him not to mysticism or to a final despair or to suicide, but to disillusion. “The sign
CAVE CANEM
is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.” He was enough of an aesthete to modify his misanthropy with irony and to introduce a note of elegance into the economy of his disasters. His casual style lets us glimpse what we might call the charm of a broken life. I should even add that one is “modern” to the degree that one is sensitive to this charm. Reaction of the disabused, no doubt — of individuals who, incapable of resorting to a metaphysical background or to a transcendent form of salvation, cling to their woes with complacency, as to accepted defeats. Disillusion is the equilibrium of the defeated. And it was as a defeated man that Fitzgerald, after conceiving the pitiless truths of
The Crack-Up,
went to Hollywood to look for success — always success — in which, moreover, he could no longer believe. At the end of a Pascalian experience, to write screenplays! In his last years, it was as if he no longer aspired to anything but compromising his abysses, swallowing his neuroses — as if, in his heart of hearts, he felt himself unworthy of the downfall he had just suffered. “I speak with the authority of failure,” he had said one day. Except that with time, he degraded this failure, stripped it of all its spiritual value. Nor should we be surprised: in the “real dark night of the soul,” he struggled more as a victim than as a hero. The same is true of all those who live their drama solely in terms of psychology; unsuited to perceiving an exterior absolute to combat or to yield to, they eternally relapse into themselves in order to vegetate, ultimately,
beneath
the truths they have glimpsed. They are, once again, disillusioned, for disillusion — retreat after a defeat — is characteristic of the individual who cannot destroy himself by a disaster, nor endure it to the end in order to triumph over it. Disillusion is the “semi-tragic” hypostatized. And since Fitzgerald could not remain worthy of his own drama, we cannot count him among those of high anguish. The interest he offers for us consists precisely in that disproportion between the inadequacy of his means and the extent of anxiety that he experienced.