Crack Up

Like most of you, I always wondered, when rereading any Fitzgerald paperbacks, about the mysterious tome called The Crack Up, with its explicatory notation: "essays." Eventually, curiosity got the best of me and I ordered a copy and, further into eventually, it surfaced for its turn in the stack o' dreck I have to read all the time [and what a copy, a sixties-era New Directions paperback, with clippy b&w abstract collage of bursting comic book "impacts," leaving the buyer with no doubt that, hey!, this fella's cracking up over here!) . No explanation/exoneration of the devil horns at left, but many interesting articles wherein he sort of hints that he knows he has fallen apart:

This is the real end of the story. What was to be done about it will
have to rest in what used to be called the "womb of time." Suffice it to
say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that
for two years of my life I had been drawing on resources that I did not possess,
that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the
hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? -
when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring
independence.

One wants to shake him by his serge lapels and say "Dude! Knock off the sauce!"

Or, from the "Fragments" portion, where an overheard or perhaps imagined conversation contains:

"Oh, yes it is. It's not everyone that can get the dope habit from a
prominent movie picture director. In fact, it's begun already. At
this very moment, I'm full of dope. He started me on cocaine, and we're
working slowly up to heroin."

See, we always think we're modern, but we're really not.

Feel free to check back in five months for a precis of "The Vegetable: A Comedy."