Who was the girl and why was she on a shelf to begin with? The question occurred to me recently as I confronted my home office, my writing space: lamps, desk, computer, papers, notebooks, pens, chair, shelves… ideas floating around like trash caught up in a desert whirlwind, and it all lands on the floor.
The girl who fell off the shelf. ~ F. Scott Fitzerald (a notebook entry under A - Anecdotes)
This newsletter has been my shelf, holding me up since I started it almost a year ago with a handful of subscribers who migrated over from my blog and email distribution lists. Since then, the list has doubled—thank you for being here—and I continue to write.
Welcome, New Subscribers!
It’s been three weeks, today, since I last wrote in this space. I’ve been hibernating and so deeply embedded in a pile of papers, books, ideas, and thousands of words—my own writing, revising, and editing of memoir and poetry; other authors’ engaging newsletters (Writers at Work; Living in 3D; Matters of Kinship; and Amazement Seekers); fantastic writerly podcasts on Spotify (QWERTY: A Podcast for Writers on How to Live the Writing Life; The Shit No One Tells You About Writing); self-paced writing courses (The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish); submission trackers; stuff to read: fiction and creative non-fiction; writerly discussion groups; and the unrelenting world news—that I hadn’t realized I’d fallen off the shelf.
Enter F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby. I first encountered his posthumously published The Crack-Up as an undergraduate student in 1979. I return to it often. But why? How does it help me as a writer? as a human being?
Lesson #1: It’s okay to make a mess of your life, your papers, and left-over turkey.
The Crack-Up was one of many books required for an English class on the triumvirate of twentieth-century male American writers—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—to whom I’d been introduced in high school English classes, but never really studied. Most of my college textbooks eventually went the way of book buy-back programs, but this one has traveled with me for over 40 years.
The book is not a comprehensive “complete works” collection, but was curated and edited by Fitzgerald’s dear friend, Edmund Willson, to reveal the both the writer’s genius and charm, and his descent into, as Fitzgerald himself said, “a world of bitterness.”
In addition to reprints of published articles, Wilson included unpublished papers, notebooks, and letters by Fitzgerald and letters to Fitzgerald from other authors, including Gertrude Stein and Thomas Wolfe. In so doing, Wilson constructed The Crack-Up into a semi-chronological account, thus blurring the lines between, biography, autobiography, and memoir.
As a writer and as a woman who has sometimes made a mess of things, this mashup of Fitzgerald’s polished publications and random thought-scraps never fails to encourage, amuse, and challenge me to get up off the floor and try again.
Especially at this time of year. What better season than to read about “Turkey remains and how to inter them with numerous scarce recipes”? Following Fitzgerald’s lead, you can make a Turkey Cocktail, or something he calls “Turkey remnant”—the former with vermouth and bitters, and the latter with milk of magnesia and mothballs. Something for everyone.
Lesson #2: Editing is subjective, purposeful, and judgmental—in a good way.
My sometimes reading my own books for advice. How much I know sometimes—how little at others. ~ F. Scott Fitzerald (a notebook entry under O - Observations)
Edmund Wilson had access to a goldmine of Fitzgerald source material, but for The Crack-Up, he had to be selective. Wilson chose pieces written between 1931 and 1937 that best illustrated Fitzgerald’s “state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life,” and arranged them chronologically. And he admitted to “suppressing a certain amount” to protect many otherwise identifiable characters and personalities, from New York to Hollywood to Paris.
Wilson believed that Fitzgerald may have been imitating English author Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, a thematic collection of musings, as he was “preparing a book to be read as well as a storehouse for his own convenience.”
Accordingly, Wilson preserved Fitzgerald’s own sorting and curating categories in a section of The Crack-Up called “The Note-Books.” The headings are alphabetical: A - Anecdotes and through Y - Youth and Army. I imagine a Z - Zelda section, also, but if it existed, Wilson used his best judgment, as he says, “for personal reasons.”
Like Fitzgerald (can I really say that???), I have notebooks upon notebooks (and boxes and file folders and envelopes) filled with random ideas, pleasurable vocabulary, stories, poems, and old magazines; old letters and post cards; fortunes (the kind that come inside cookies or on tea-bag tags) and photographs—the stuff of creativity.
But as my loving partner reminds me, all those things must be edited judiciously. “No one wants the kitchen sink,” he says, “especially if it’s full of dirty dishes.”
Lesson #3: A writer’s jottings and musings are never wasted (and perhaps never read!)
I was drawn to the The Crack-Up then, as now, for Fitzgerald’s distinctly American voice and his humanity, simultaneously individual and universal. And sometimes a bit nonsensical, especially in the Note-Books section:
This isn’t the South. This is the center of the country. We’re only polite half the time.
All is lost save memory.
I never blame failure—there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
“The time I fell off a closet shelf.” “You what?” “I fell off a shelf—” “Well, what were you doing?” “I just happened to be up on a shelf and I fell off.”
According to Wilson, Fitzgerald rarely translated the content of the notebooks into essay or fiction until he was working on later works, such as Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon.
You can read more about Fitzgerald’s publisher in a recent Lit Hub article, Charles Scribner III looks back at his family’s multigenerational history of publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald, which happened to show up as I was writing this piece, much to my delight. Several times, I recognized the quotations as having come from pieces in The Crack-Up (A New Directions Paperback, 1931; 1945).
Always as I write, I am sorting and sifting, selecting shiny pieces of sea glass and shell, and letting the rest fall back to the shore. Some of the sifting takes place in my head, some of it in notebooks. Below are some recent jottings that may or may not be useful to anyone, myself included. Regardless, I’ll keep going, keep jotting, keep musing. Here’s a sampling of what’s in my current notebook (random, uncategorized), in case you care to take a peek:
Awareness. A gentle way of being in the world, or a way of being gentle in the world.
If I were to write a new poem today, it would be about longing. A meditation on wanting, aching. And reconciling all that desire with accepting, not striving to have things be other than they are.
She looks familiar, but I can’t place her. Maybe I’ve just been in Albuquerque so long, everyone looks familiar.
A lunar eclipse: when earth casts its bloody shadow.
I feel like a house with all the doors open—front door, back door, side doors—and there’s nobody home.
Chorus of crickets sent their song to the moon. Then the one chirping body with a thousand voices suddenly stopped singing at 4:00 a.m.. Silence in unison.
“Gabriel’s Oboe,” Marconi, The Mission
New stasis: I learned to live with uncertainty because I knew I possessed whatever I needed to keep going.
What took so long? And wondering if others ask themselves that same question.
Even when what we thought were core beliefs, what we thought was truth for us, changes over time, we can adapt. Tap into agency.
I recently checked out a book from the library, Letters to a Young Novelist, by Mario Vargas Llosa. I’m not young, not a novelist, and I don’t know Llosa from Lorca. But I thought maybe there would be something in it for me and for you, too. I started reading the first letter, but then as I sometimes do when I approach a new-to-me book, I flipped to the last page of the final letter:
That is why no one can teach anyone else to create…. [W]e must teach ourselves, stumbling, falling, and picking ourselves up over and over again…. [W]hat I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you’re read in my letters about the structure of the novel, and just sit down and write.
It all comes down to that.
Until next time.
Your turn to share! Take a page from Fitzgerald and write an A - Anecdote, O - Observation, or something U - Unclassified! What are you looking for, and forward to, in 2024? I plan to improve this newsletter—perhaps with more audio (reading my own poetry), more focused writing, a word-a-week feature? Not sure yet. Open to ideas!
Thanks, Andi. Ms. Lorca's observation is wonderful: "That is why no one can teach anyone else to create…. [W]e must teach ourselves, stumbling, falling, and picking ourselves up over and over again…" That's why have so many bumps on my knees!
Eight floating around is impressive!