Staying Up Late With F. Scott Fitzgerald

​Truly, I have never met a Princetonian who didn't appear to need a good kick in the teeth.

There was an excellent article in last week's New Yorker​ about a nauseating new fad: the memoir of failure. The piece is hidden behind the paywall, sadly, but it's an overview of four or five books written in the last decade by novelists who responded to failure by devoting their literary talents to the ancient art of self-pity. They launched themselves into self-destruction like it's what they had been dreaming of all along, developing substance abuse problems, alienating their families, and sometimes turning on the novel altogether. The memoir is a form that lends itself to self-indulgence, and this takes that to a whole new level—self-flagellating in a last, desperate attempt to impress the crowd, and finding an audience of people eager to gawk at your grotesquerie. Blech, amirite?

For a day or two, these hacks had me worried that, if dealt a creative setback or two, I might sink to their level. Then I realized I have a secret weapon in reserve, one that should keep me from ever fetishizing my own failure: I'm not a total chump. Funny how that can come in handy, right?​

None of that matters, really, except to explain why I was thinking about The Crack Up​, a sort of ur-text for the literature of failure, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the period between his literary success and his Hollywood failure. Charmed by a sexy cover, I picked up The Crack Up​ years ago, but never took it down from my bookshelf until the New Yorker​ story stoked my creative fear. Unable to sleep last night, I started reading the accompanying essays, which included heartbreaking meditations on Fitzgerald's lost New York, and tiresome humor pieces co-written by Zelda Fitzgerald. All in all, good reading.

Fitzgerald's prose is so lush, and the world he conjures up is so inviting, that it's natural to want to pretend you belong. Yes, Scott, I do miss the feeling of awe and inspiration that New York gave me once. Yes, Scott, I do think jazz is nifty. Yes, Scott, I do think I would like a cocktail. As soon as you try to join your yoke to his, you find how hard it is to keep up. Well no, Scott, I've never gotten tired of the Riviera. No, Scott, I've never tossed off a Broadway play just for the paycheck. No, Scott, I don't spend most weeknights staying out past dawn. For Christ's sake, Scott, I have a real fucking job!​

In one of the essays, he mentions that he and Zelda burned through $400,000 during the '20s—roughly $5 million in boring old 2013 money. And that's why it's impossible to relate to the guy. I may have similarly complex ideas about love, art, and New York City—but I don't have the cash to explore them day and night. He was living in a Bertie Wooster world, and I live in Lena Dunham's. Sheesh. 

This was all seemed quite complicated to my sleep-deprived, four a.m. mind. And then I stumbled upon something that made all my prickly thoughts go away. In "Sleeping and Waking," Fitzgerald writes about insomnia, bridging our divide in an instant. He writes of the moment that "those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two," dividing into "the 'first sweet sleep of night' and the last deep sleep of morning," and separated by "a sinister, ever widening interval." This is an experience I've been enjoying since high school. As long as I don't have to get up in the morning, a few hours' wakefulness in the middle of the night is just an inconvenience. But if it's caused my mosquito, he and I will both lose our minds.

For two or three New York summers, I had an air conditioner specially designed to let mosquitos in from the outside. I became highly sensitive to their bite, and would wake just a few second after they had finished dining on me, aware that I had a visitor in the room but clueless as to where he was. Knowing that I would not be able to fall back asleep until the tormenter was dead, dead, dead, I would turn on the light, perch on my bed, and go hunting—either with a rolled up towel or that day's New York Times​. Repeat this three or four times a week, or until your girlfriend becomes so angry that she purchases a mosquito net. Fitzgerald's had only one such bout with mosquitodom, but it was no less dramatic:

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality—a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death. This personality appeared all by himself in September on the twentieth floor of a New York hotel, as out of place as an armadillo. He was the result of New Jersey’s decreased appropriation for swamp drainage, which had sent him and other younger sons into neighboring states for food.
The night was warm—but after the first encounter, the vague slappings of the air, the futile searches, the punishment of my own ears a split second too late, I followed the ancient formula and drew the sheet over my head.
And so there continued the old story, the bitings through the sheet, the sniping of exposed sections of hand holding the sheet in place, the pulling up of the blanket with ensuing suffocation—followed by the psychological change of attitude, increasing wakefulness, wild impotent anger—finally a second hunt.
This inaugurated the maniacal phase—the crawl under the bed with the standing lamp for torch, the tour of the room with final detection of the insect’s retreat on the ceiling and attack with knotted towels, the wounding of oneself—my God!
— After that there was a short convalescence that my opponent seemed aware of, for he perched insolently beside my head—but I missed again.
At last, after another half hour that whipped the nerves into a frantic state of alertness came the Pyrrhic victory, and the small mangled spot of blood, my blood, on the headboard of the bed.

​Since that night, his sleep became fragile. (Being a confirmed alcoholic probably didn't help.) Mine is fragile too, but I don't mind it. Awake in the middle of the night, I get to read neat stuff by neat dudes like F. Scott Fitzgerald. No matter how different he and I are, I can imagine us meeting in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and sharing war stories about killing mosquitos.

The Silly Baseball Tournament That Made My March

​Mentioned in the article, the famous leg kick of Sadaharu Oh.

I fried my brain this month watching international baseball. I found myself cheering for men in a hideous USA jersey, only slightly wishing that American national teams would go back to the way they dressed in the '50s, and leave navy blue to rot. When the US got eliminated, I cheered for anybody else I could find.​ (And loudly—on Sunday night, I found myself yelling at Japanese men on my TV, "Come on! String a few hits together!" then muttering my traditional, affectionate, "fucking bastards." When I love a sports team, that's how I show I care. When I love a person, I'm much nicer.) So, as I do, I wrote about it—once again, for The Classical

Before the rest of the people—who and how many remain unclear—who cared about Team USA learned it, every Mets fan knew it couldn't last. David Wright was on the big stage again, for the first time since Adam Wainwright's curveball to Carlos Beltran began its fateful, unhittable break in 2006, and he was playing like an Avenger. Square-jawed, muscle-bound, tongue stuck out like bush league bowler, Wright kept coming to bat in high-pressure situations, and kept delivering—none more fantastically than the grand slam that sent the United States into the second round. Articles were referring to Wright, the Mets' captain, as Captain America. Mets fans knew what was coming next.
For a long, happy moment, it seemed the last star of Flushing was about to do the impossible: get American fans interested in baseball's would-be World Cup. But because every superhero needs a weakness, Wright was playing hurt. For the entirety of the Classic, he had been nursing a rib injury: a lingering soreness that pained him not in play, but while he was sleeping and "just lounging around." When Wright was recalled to Camp Wilpon in Port St. Lucie on Friday of last week, the Mets medical staff—doubtless through a state-of-the-art application of leeches and a scientific bleeding regimen—decided that Wright should be encased in bubble wrap until after the start of the regular season. Wright's back has been an ongoing concern ever since he and Ike Davis ran into each other in 2011—an all time Metsian play—and Captain Flushing must not get hurt again. Mets fans always think the end is near. This time it happened to be true.

Have no fear, the rest of it isn't about the Mets. And unlike the article I posted below, which the Internet hated, people seemed to like this one. Good thing. It was hard, and I didn't get paid. Don't tell anybody—I'll watch baseball for free.​

Baldwin Reminds Shia, "I'm Not Your Fucking Chief"

The still-simmering Alec Baldwin/Shia LaBeouf feud is starting to mesmerize me—mostly because it's not really a feud. It's like a nerdy kid is trying to pick a fight with the captain of the football team, and Mr. QB Handsome has to keep telling ​him to back down before he gets hurt. Today, for no reason at all, LaBeouf released some new emails. Once again, they're more puzzling than enlightening, and they seem to make him look bad. The highlight:

Baldwin: “We start Monday. But I’m so fucking tired.”
LaBeouf: “I’m a hustler. I don’t get tired. I’m 26, chief.”
Baldwin: “Listen, boy. I’m not your fuckin’ chief. You got that? Ha. Hahahahaha. Let’s go.”
What does this tell us about the creative process of famous actors? Nothing. But it’s a nice reminder that most actors are children at heart, incapable of letting someone else have the last word. Shia LaBeouf is clearly not cut out from Broadway, and it was good of him to quit the show as soon as he realized that. Remember—he didn’t force these producers to cast him. They picked him for the sake of name recognition, and nothing more. If he’s being excoriated for cutting and running, I think it’s because the critical establishment feels like it’s been cheated out of a pan.
And Alec Baldwin? Well, I’m happy to see that in private email conversations, he’s just as crazy as I like to imagine. If LaBeouf thinks he can turn New York against Baldwin with screenshots of fairly innocuous emails, he’s proved something I’ve long said about film actors. A job that requires you to work for no more than 45 seconds at a time does not do much for your capacity for critical thought.

​I've got more on the "feud" as a whole over at Bullett​. Check it out, fella.

When James Met Nora: An Eight Paragraph Love Story

​Posts about James Joyce are to be illustrated only with this picture.

Like all recovering English majors, I've always been mesmerized by June 16, 1904. The date on which Ulysses​ takes place, it is also the day that James Joyce's first date with his beloved—the wonderfully named Galway maiden, Nora Barnacle. It's easy to picture James and Nora strolling by the River Liffey, punning and thinking about Hamlet​.

But as described in this lovely excerpt from Richard Ellman's biography—which I found, for some reason, on this nifty blog—James and Nora's meeting was much more ordinary, and all the sweeter for it.

The experience of love was almost new to [Joyce] in fact, though he had often considered it in imagination. A transitory interest in his cousin Katsy Murray had been followed by the stronger, but unexpressed and unrequited, interest in Mary Sheehy. He shocked Stanlislaus [Joyce's brother] a little by quoting with approval a remark of a Dublin wit, ‘Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month and parturiates once a year.’ Yet tenderness was as natural to him as coarseness, and secretly he dreamed of falling in love with someone he did not know, a gentle lady, the flower of many generations, to whom he should speak in the ceremonious accents of Chamber Music.
Instead, on June 10, 1904, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street in Dublin when he caught sight of a tall, good-looking young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride. When he spoke to her she answered pertly enough to allow the conversation to continue. She took him, with his yachting cap, for a sailor, and from his blue eyes thought for a moment he might be Swedish.
Joyce found she was employed at Finn’s Hotel, a slightly exalted rooming house, and her lilting speech confessed that she was from Galway City. She had been born there, to parents who lived in Sullivan’s Lane, on March 21, 1884. Her name was a little comic, Nora Barnacle, but this too might be an omen of felicitous adhesion. (As Joyce’s father was to say when he heard much later her last name was Barnacle, ‘She’ll never leave him.’) After some talk it was agreed they should meet in front of Sir William Wilde’s house at the turning of Merrion Square on June 14. But Nora Barnacle failed to appear, and Joyce sent her a note in some dejection:
60 Shelbourne Road
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!
—James A. Joyce 15 June 1904
The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again.
To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death. He would tell her later, “You made me a man.” June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband.

​Joyce's work is weighed down with so much critical blather, but at heart, he was a man with a sense of humor. How nice to see him being happy. 

On a related note, would it be too too cute to name a character in something Nora Barnacle? It's such an unbelievably wonderful name—I want to hear it every day.​