"The Crack-Up"
Fitzgerald's mid-career breakdown, written with ruined elegance. "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." The confessional essay before it was a genre. More honest than any of his fiction.
The complaints start with tone: one reviewer says Fitzgerald “wallows in self pity” in the title essay, and the original 1945 critics agreed, faulting him for lacking “the mental equipment to adjust to the demands of maturity” and dismissing him as “feeling a little too sorry for himself.” The Notebooks section, twenty categories of anecdotes running past 150 pages, is where readers stall or start skimming, and the Letters section feels thin, a handful of samples rather than real correspondence. Editor Edmund Wilson's trimming draws its own fire: readers who know Fitzgerald's fuller notebooks through later editions say this version is “missing some of Fitzgerald's best jottings.” The book closes with tribute poems and miscellany that read as added on, not chosen by the author himself.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
