The Hiccup №1
The first night I’m in Asheville I end up hungover in the morning, but on the second night, even though I’m still in the middle of unpacking the apartment, and on top of that, dry heaving enough to wonder if someone could actually be seasick in the mountains, I end up at the Grove Park Inn.
Me being hungover, I don’t want it to sound like it wasn’t without some deliberate, or at least a liberating, sense of purpose, me going to the Grove Park Inn, because I’d been reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald spending two summers there in the 1930s to recover from tuberculosis, among the other sorts of things he was trying to recover from after the decade he’d had in the 1920s. The two summers he was there were of course a long time ago, well before I’d moved to Asheville in June of 2021, but we did overlap in other ways, with maybe the most significant one being that I was also trying to recover some sense of self, if not myself, after the decade I’d had of my 20s.
The part about me being hungover wasn’t without its debilitation either, but I always thought the state of being hungover, while it certainly doesn’t provide any clairvoyance, either for the future or of the past, always gives me a certain sense of clarity on the present unlike anything else in this life. Seasick or not, as it were, I feel a much more pronounced perception of everything it takes to be a living being.
Not unlike a hiccup, being hungover is a good reminder that a lot of life is mostly made up of involuntary contractions. I’ve said something like that before, that being hungover is as close as one can come to being born, which is all to say, it made sense to me that the first time I made the acquaintance of the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald I was hungover.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Maybe he was hungover too. Not that I asked him if hangovers exist on the other side of time, figuring that might depend on where one ends up in the proverbial hangover from life, though it still ended up being a lot of what we’ve talked about when we’ve talked, Asheville and the other side of time.
We’ll get to more about the Grove Park Inn later in The Hiccup if you don’t mind me breaking the fourth wall — which I only bring up because I never was good at breaking the fourth wall, but since I’m not the best at building walls one-through-three either, I thought I should try to get better at breaking the other one — so, fast forward to me asking the Spirit of Fitzgerald about how he felt about The Great Gatsby entering the public domain at the precise moment everyone finished counting down to the new year on New Year’s Eve of 2020:
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
So why did I start talking through everything that came to my mind with the spirit of a twentieth-century literary figure — and on top of that, why did I start telling you everything I talked through with the spirit of a twentieth-century literary figure. Well, I found him easy to talk to, easier than talking to myself and, it goes without saying, easier to talk to than most of the twenty-first century literary figures I’ve met, but also, everyone knows the dead are better listeners than the living, even if the dead have so much more to say. And, I felt we had similar life situations, not when he was alive, but since he’d been deceased.
In my mind, I don’t know why you’d see a psychologist when you can see a psychopomp. I’ve always figured that psychology was a pseudoseance in the grand scheme of things, so, if I had to see someone, I preferred to see the Spirit of Fitzgerald, which I told him, though not in so many words, over a few pairs of oversized-but-underpriced German pilsners at a brewery by the river only a mile and a half away from the apartment I’d moved to for the summer. I told him how I had moved there because of his time in Asheville, how I’d read all about the beer cure he was on to try to get himself off of gin:
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
Britt McDermott is an artist from Atlanta, Georgia.
Sam Farahmand is a writer from Los Angeles.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is a writer from St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Hiccup is a comic series set in Asheville, North Carolina: №1, №2.
