The Fitzgerald Syndrome

As luck would have it I happened to have been born on December 7th.
Never mind which year. As a result, each birthday brings, with different
intensities (depending on the state of Japanese-American relations at the
time), the echo of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. While even casual
friends find it easy to remember to send a greeting card or give a call,
the association between these two coincidental events -- one a blip on the
population chart of southeastern Michigan, the other the onset of a World
War -- has, in my case, proved almost negligible. It did, however, provide
an early lesson in distinguishing my little world from the larger one
outside. For not once, not even during the most self-centered years, did
I ever suppose that the attack was a deliberate attempt to mar the
festivities of my occasion (let alone of my having been occasioned). This
despite the fact that "Happy Birthday to you" is, in my mind, still
inseparably linked with FDR's dolorous words.

This last birthday, however, stood out, certainly because it marked
the 50th anniversary of the attack during a year when the mood in the
country had already grown sullenly anti-Japanese, but also in part
because I found myself, of all places, in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Poor weather and a balky fuel pump caused my pilot friend to put his
Cessna down in Asheville during a flight taking us from Washington, D.C.,
to Memphis.

Of all places because in the late '80s I had lived for a spell in
Hendersonville, which lies a few miles from the Asheville airport. I knew
the area: knew the ponds of Carl Sandburg's goat farm, where the Chicago
poet spent summers, because that's where I had taken my dog for swims.
Knew, too, the slick used-car lots on the main drag and the implacable
greens of the golf courses on which platoons of Lacoste shirts wagered
large sums against one another as a means of enlivening
retirement.

What I didn't know back then was that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who not
only captured the spirit of the Roaring '20s but who became a charter
member of the "Lost Generation," had also been forced down in
Hendersonville, though not because of engine trouble. His wife Zelda often admitted herself
to the psychiatric ward of nearby Highland Hospital -- so he knew the lay
of the land, in more ways than one. And by then he was written
out, severely depressed, and nearly dead broke.

Though there is no plaque in town to recall his visit, it was in a
third-rate hotel called the Skyland that Fitzgerald wrote the three
essays for Esquire that together comprise "The Crack-Up" (a precursor of
Styron's Darkness Visible) today regarded as a minor masterpiece of
"confessional" literature. It was at Highland Hospital that Zelda
perished, in 1948, trapped in a fire that gutted the hospital's top
floors. Fitzgerald himself died in Hollywood of a heart attack at age 44
on December 21, 1940.

But that F. Scott plumbed the depths of his real and imagined
failures here wasn't all that stirred the broth of recollection for me
over those grounded days in Hendersonville. They also led me to associate
the novelist with another, unrelated Fitzgerald, the former President.
For the anniversary of his assassination two weeks earlier still in the
air. Was it imagination or did the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's
murder seem strangely more poignant this time round than in years past as
though the ache of an old healed injury had suddenly reasserted
itself?

It was not the crumbling of empires or dynasties that F. Scott
Fitzgerald reflected on in the "crack-up" essays he came to
Hendersonville to write. It was, instead, the crumbling of a talent and
of a self -- both his. Whether manic depression, alcoholism, mid-life
crisis, or a combination of these brought Fitzgerald down is still a
question. His own sense of it, in general, was that he peaked early, and
that he let himself be lionized into impotency afterward. It was as
though, having written so often and so well in his fiction about
fashionable parties -- bashes on Park Avenue flowered with debutantes,
those in Greenwich Village sparkling with literati, ones on Long Island
flush with industrialists -- he couldn't stop going to them until it was
too late. He had become what he chronicled, a kind of self-invention that
lost track of the distinction between art and life, between celebrity and
the workaday world, and between his characters and himself. Long after the
real parties were over, he took himself to a drab little town: "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 honor or compassion."

The self-snapshot, the one moment in time when the world is perfect
and we are perfect within it. We all have such a photo, tucked somewhere
deep in our psyches. Imagine Fitzgerald's perfection at about age 23,
forgetting the fact that his legs were rather too short for his torso. He
was, like that other, later Fitzgerald, John Kennedy, luminously
handsome. Brooks Brothers adored him, as did Scribners when his first
novel, This Side of Paradise, became an unexpected best-seller. Zelda
said yes she would marry him, and New York, fervid in a post-war boom
picked him as its young gentleman hero, saw in him all the glamor,
romance, and promise to which it inchoately aspired. He was invited
everywhere, rode in full plumage, dizzy with champagne on the top of a
taxicab down Fifth Avenue. Click went his psyche's camera. And click,
too, went the camera of our collective psyche. This is what we want. This
is what we want our best and our brightest young men to become. Let his
real life spin out as it will, and let his books speak for themselves in
the quiet of libraries and dormitories. Just leave us the snapshot, that
frozen moment in time that will prove to us that appearance matters and
that magnificence is possible, and desirable, however fleeting. We will
build the myth from there on.

Myth did indeed accumulate around the gifted young writer out of
Princeton, as later it would accumulate around an equally engaging young
President. The writer began to believe in it accommodating his work to
the demands of his social life and the literary limelight. Unlike the
President, however, he survived long enough to be able to testify to his
own undoing.

"Of course" he starts out in the first of the essays, "all life is
a process of breaking down." The test of a first-rate intelligence, he
wrote, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example,
be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them
otherwise." He must, he instructed, balance "the contradiction between
the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I
could do this ... then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from
nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring
it to earth at last."

He could not do it, for his arrow, like John F. Kennedy's, did not
complete its flight. In Fitzgerald's case, the deflective force was
generated from within, blurring the miraculous talent that had created
The Great Gatsby. In Hendersonville, he brooded over his lost vitality,
trying to come to grips with it scarcely able to separate himself from
"the dead hand of the past." The President fell victim to a force
generated from without, though its precise origin eludes us, Oliver
Stone's film notwithstanding.

It is a total anachronism to apply Fitzgerald's words with any
specificity to the much later event in Dealey Plaza. Nevertheless,
reading them in the ghost-laden air of Hendersonville this past December
lent them the kind of timelessness that makes the sequences of ordinary
history more or less irrelevant. There is not so much prophecy in these
essays as universality.

"Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows
that do the dramatic side of the work -- 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. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick -- the
second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized
suddenly indeed."

Odd how cultural models are transmitted across generations, and how
blows -- outer and inner -- reverberate in the lives of those who are touched
or fashioned by such models. Take John Burnside Value, for example. You
won't have heard of him, but he is the agent that for me, links F. Scott
to JFK . I met Value in the army in West Germany where we were privates
together for a time in the late '50s. While most of our circle had given
themselves over to Hemingway and spent their leaves trout fishing in the
Pyrenees, Value and his wife went either to Paris or ski resorts in
Switzerland. It was not that he was more delicate than the others.
Indeed, with a few drinks under his belt, he became routinely pugilistic.
Rather, Value pursued a different agenda: the socially prominent, preppy,
well-dressed, sophisticated, martini-drinking urban writer. That was his
model. In other words, F. Scott, though with a more Bostonian flavor.
That Value had married a Boston Fitzgerald -- of the Honey Fitz Curly
branch -- added yet more polish to his dashingly elegant manner.

Though we stayed friends for a few years in New York after the
army, I lost touch with John after he moved to New Hampshire to run a
small newspaper. His wife lost touch with him, too, but didn't divorce
him since she was a strict Catholic. All I knew was that he was drinking
heavily, getting out the paper, and pinning his hopes on the Kennedys. He
had long since forgotten F. Scott Fitzgerald, doting instead on Jack, the
Senator from Massachusetts, though not failing to point out that even
Jack could not measure up to his older brother Joe, killed in WWII.
Clearly, John Value had retouched his inner snapshot, if ever so
slightly.

Improbably enough, as I learned toward the end of the two years I
lived in Hendersonville, Value died, in the mid'60s, late one night by
drowning after he drove his car off a bridge into a lake in New
Hampshire. The mutual acquaintance who informed me emphasized that he was
alone at the time, though he said nothing about alcoholic blood
content.

On my way to the dining room of the Biltmore Hotel in Asheville for
a birthday supper with my pilot friend, I picked up Life and Vanity Fair
at the newsstand. In the background, coming from the cocktail lounge, I
could hear a network news broadcast discussing whether or not FDR knew in
advance that the Japanese would attack. Life focused on the Stone film
and the American obsession with the Kennedys and the assassination,
reviewing in great detail various conspiracy theories and publishing, for
the second time it claimed, the frame from the Zapruder film showing a
pink fountain rising from the President's head at the moment it was
struck by a bullet. But the cover, in black and white, showed JFK in his
prime. Dazzling smile. Windswept hair. The snapshot. The perfect world
and he perfect within it. "Jesus, he was a handsome man," said my friend
when he saw it.

Vanity Fair went to Palm Springs and paraded an album of a
different sort, dissolution of a different sort. Ted atop a woman in a
runabout, the wreckage of the car that went off the bridge at
Chappaquiddick, and on the article's opening spread a portrait of the
senator in a blue pinstripe suit, dandruff and all.

You could say, in Fitzgerald's parlance, that the blow that came
from outside -- the bullet or bullets in Dallas -- spared JFK the physics of
the rest of his life; forestalled forever blows that might later have
emerged from within; kept him sort of mythically embalmed. Like writers,
senators, and all things mortal, he would surely have wound down, though
no one can say with what grace. Still, the sound of that lethal, outer
blow resounded through our lives as though the Grand Canyon itself had
cracked and split our eardrums.

Toward the end of the first crack-up essay, Fitzgerald recounts
telling a woman friend about his breakdown and despair:

"Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen -- she said.
"Suppose this wasn't a crack in you -- suppose it was a crack in the Grand
Canyon."

"The crack's in me," I said heroically.

"Listen! The world only exists in your eyes -- your conception of it.
You can make it as big or small as you want to. And you're trying to be a
little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the
world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your
apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you
that's cracked -- it's the Grand Canyon."

Fitzgerald was right, for he had lost the sense that what he
thought or wrote or imagined could matter beyond the confines of his own
self. He had swung about 180 degrees, from an inability to detach himself
from "the objects of his horror or compassion" to an inability to relate
to them at all, let alone manipulate them.

But she was also right, knowing that the sheer force of selfhood
reverberates out to a larger world, through individual acts and sometimes
through the myths built upon such acts.
The President's death was such an act, but so was his life.
And so for that matter was Fitzgerald's life,
despite that it wound down so aridly. That he admitted as much makes him
a different kind of hero -- not the gay blade of the Jazz Age but the
introspective observer bent on honing his honesty, even while warding off
the blows coming from within.

No, when you or I do something or something happens to us, the
Grand Canyon doesn't crack. But the illusion is nice. During that dinner
at the Biltmore I asked my pilot friend whether he thought it might just
be possible that the Japanese had me in mind when they attacked Pearl
Harbor. "Ridiculous," he replied.