The War and the Crack-Up

It’s the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, which some call the great American novel. I devoured everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a 17-year-old, and again every 10 years or so. I’m back at it now, prompted by the anniversary, and because Fitzgerald and John Irving were the first writers who made me want to be a writer. As I try to finish my next book this August, reconnecting with Fitzgerald feels like the right way to prepare for the sprint ahead.

That brought me back to The Crack-Up.

Greil Marcus, a writer-hero I would meet later, introduced me to The Crack-Up, a three-part essay Fitzgerald wrote nearly a decade after Gatsby, which had only mixed reviews at the time. It’s a pained, funny, intuitive account of middle age, written as Fitzgerald slipped from creative stardom into isolation. Ironically, Gatsby was only recognized as a masterpiece after his death. That disappointment, in many ways, marked the beginning of his decline.

Gatsby is a dazzling dance of dreamers and hucksters, racists and radicals, longing and loneliness. The Crack-Up is uniquely personal yet deeply relatable.

Fitzgerald writes in the first lines of The Crack-Up:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Those words feel like a prescription for survival.

Here in Israel, we live that contradiction daily. We expect Hamas to embody cruelty and cynicism that stun but do not surprise, and that Hamas’ hangers-on redefine the terms “useful” and “idiot” together and apart. Yet where is the justice, and where is the sense on our side?  We’ve reached the nadir of the war in Gaza: endless suffering, little strategic gain, no real vision for the day after. The Israeli government astounds us as more brazenly incompetent, corrupt, and tone-deaf daily. 

It’s hard here. Not hopeless. But harder to hope.

My writing sabbatical begins on Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning, replaying generational horrors. I enter it cracked up like nearly everyone around me. Cracked by grief, anger, and exhaustion. Since COVID, “just functioning” has been the norm. There was a short break before the war, but not a true return. Then came October 7, and with it the daily horror, moments of unity, bitter disappointment, and a long, imbalanced slog.

Life is often just what Fitzgerald described: finding ways to hope, “to be of use” (Irving’s phrase), to keep going despite pain. But sometimes, like on Tisha B’Av, we need to crack up. To feel the cracks in our hearts. Because, as Leonard Cohen said, “that’s how the light gets in.”

I pray that when I come back to work in September, we’ll see more of that light in Israel and among our neighbors. That we’ll do more than just survive, we’ll bring hope. And I hope I finish this book, which is really about wonder, falling down, and rising up again, just like Fitzgerald taught me.