The Crack-Up

F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Edmund Wilson

Perfect Phrases – Reading “I’d Die for You and Other Last Stories” sent me back yet again to “The Crack-Up” – the Fitzgerald collection edited by Edmund Wilson and published five years after Scott’s death. This time around, I was particularly drawn to Fitzgerald lamenting how the novel had ceased to be “the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another.” Novels, Fitzgerald continued, had lost out to movies, “an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration.” And isn’t that just the perfect phrase? “… the inevitable low gear of collaboration.” Penned by the writer who conjured so many perfect phrases.