The Crack Up & Confessional Essay | #262

April 6th, 2024: Greetings from Austin. I’ve been taking a couple of weeks off from writing with my in-laws in town and it’s been a good way to get a bit of distance from the book I’m writing. I think I was putting too much pressure on myself to finish a new book ASAP and am realizing I need to let the process happen at its own pace just like the last one. I’m working with my former editor again

Paula Trucks-Pape

who also has some great writing worth checking out.

+ Dad Life: I did a podcast episode with

Nat Eliason

and

sky king.

on dad life on Sky’s podcast. Sky is running a paid podcast but graciously let me share the video on my YouTube channel. I’ll likely post the audio on my feed in the coming weeks.

+ Pathless Path Meetups: next week in Boston and the following week in London

+ Podcast: I recorded a podcast with

Henry Oliver

- it’s a fun one about his book Second Act. I really enjoyed the book so am going to do a bigger writeup. Here’s our conversation.

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#1 The Story of The Crack-Up

I re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous essay “The Crack-Up,” originally published as a series of three essays in 1936 for Esquire. After a little googling, I was surprised to find that while the essays were received well by the public, his peers and the publishing world hated the “confessional” nature of it.¹

Here’s his friend, John Dos Passos:

“If you want to go to pieces I think it’s absolutely OK but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces (for Esquire)

Fitzgerald’s agent originally hated the essays and his publisher, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, hated them too, rejecting an opportunity to publish it as part of a collection three times, including once after Fitzgerald had died.

The essays are very personal, reflecting on waking up to the fact that he wasn’t quite happy with his life as it neared 40. The opening is direct:

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. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

The essay is a bit meandering and hard to read sometimes but it feels like something common today - the first-person personal essay. At the time of sharing them in Esquire, he got a large and overwhelming reader response.

But to the publisher and literary world, the writing didn’t pass their standards. Ernest Hemingway wrote to the Perkins, saying:

“seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming. I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public.”

Perkins agreed, saying it was an “indecent invasion of his own privacy.”

Eventually, Fitzgerald’s friend got the collection published in 1945, five years after he had passed with a different publishing company than the one that had published most of Fitzgerald’s work. A critic called it, “heroic self-awareness” in The Nation. The attention this work has been credited with giving Fitzgerald a resurgence as an important 20th century literary writer.

By then, the “confessional” style of the essay was a lot more resonant, or perhaps there was enough distance from the 20s and 30s to make sense of it.

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#2 Some More Essays I Read This Week

I’ve been starting my mornings reading Phillip Lopate’s anthology of essays. It’s a fun format as I can pick by style, theme, or author.

I went straight to the idleness section and found a series of what feels like tweets from Kenko, a Japanese monk from the 1300s:

“What a strange demented feeling it fives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.”

Robert Louis Stevenson writing in “An Apology for Idlers” had harsh words for the busy men among him in 1877:

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good spreaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enoughl and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open.

It’s fun to read these essays. They give you a portal into the fashions of the time and the styles of writing. Some of the writing is pretty hard to read but most capture some element of the universal which stands the test of time.

Kenko’s reflections on how things “used to be better in the past” cracked me up as we see this happen over and over and over again:

In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased. I find that even among the splendid pieces of furniture built by our master cabinetmakers, those in the old forms are the most pleasing. And as for writing letters, surviving scraps from the past reveal how superb the phrasing used to be. The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say "raise the carriage shafts" or "trim the lamp wick," but people today say "raise it" or "trim it." When they should say, "Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!" they say, "Torches! Let's have some light!" Instead of calling the place where the lectures on the Sutra of the Golden Light are delivered before the emperor "the Hall of the Imperial Lecture," they shorten it to "the Lecture Hall," a deplorable corruption, an old gentleman complained.

And finally, Samuel Johnson wrote a whole essay critiquing the people who went to seek “solitude in the country” in the 1700s:

Even the acquisition of knowledge is often much facilitated by the advantages of society: he that never compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions; he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded.

What are some of your favorite essays?

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#3 This woman lives on a boat rent-free

My friend

Jonathan Santiago

shot this video of Desiree Heveroh

“my background is actually in dentistry, I’m far off the course now…I wanted to have not regular hours…I went to Burning Man in 2013 and decided, I can’t go back into a structured cage.”

The most interesting thing about this video (which is really good) is the burning sense of aliveness that Desiree exudes. You get the sense that she’s really found her place, as weird as it seems from the outside. A fun story worth watching.

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#4 AI Songs (Are impressively good?!)

I tried this new tool, Suno, and gave it the following prompt:

A song about quitting your job and exploring the unknown and embracing a pathless path. Use the phrase pathless path as the central theme.

It generated the following song in less than a minute

Here are the lyrics:

[Verse] Clock hits five, I'm out the door
No more suit and tie, I won't conform no more
Trading office walls for open skies
I'm chasing dreams where the wild winds lie

[Verse 2] On a pathless path, I'll find my way
No rules to follow, no need to obey
No longer bound to corporate chains
I'll navigate the unknown with my own reins

[Chorus] I'm breaking free, letting go of the past
Embracing the journey, treading the pathless path
With every step, I find my soul's desire
Leaving behind the mundane, lighting my own fire

Pretty wild, you can try it here.

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1. References from: https://theamericanscholar.org/f-scott-fitzgeralds-essays-from-the-edge