The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?

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In this podcast we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, bills they should read, or has already read and loved. Today, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. So F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby is a book about car crashes, exotic cocktails, extraordinary affairs. It's about the American dream gone wrong, and it ends with some of the most famous lines in literature. Curiously enough, it wasn't a huge success when it was published in 1925. It was almost forgotten by the time of Fitzgerald's death 15 years later. But since then, slowly but surely, and had a better and had a better lot of adaptations, there are six movie adaptations of Great Gatsby plus two musicals and a sort of immersive experience that actually goes for eight hours. Great Gatsby's come to be seen not just as a great novel, but possibly the Great American novel. So in this episode, we're going to find out why this book about 1920s New York and Long Island has only become more relevant and potent with the passing of time. John T. Can you kick us off with a little flavor of what the text is like? Yeah, I'm going to do a short extract from when Nick Caraway, who's the narrator of The Great Gatsby, talks about his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, who turns out to be the woman that J. Gatsby is in love with. Nick Caraway says, "I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes, and a bright, passionate mouth. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget. A singing compulsion, a whispered "listen", a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since, and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I mean, if you're not in love with Daisy Buchanan, by the time you've read that paragraph, you've got no capacity to love. You don't have a heart. I've always loved those lines that description of a character. What a brilliant innovation about how to give us a character through their voice. And Daisy's voice, you know, it's not just that it defines her. It actually turns out to be this vehicle on which the plot turns towards the end. So we'll find out why. But remember the voice, the voice that whispered "listen". Yes, and I'm going to whisper "listen" now, as I ask you to listen to a brief synopsis of the story, so we know what we're talking about. So Nick Caraway recently graduated from Yale, has decided to become a bonds trader, which is the 1920s phrase for an investment banker and financial speculator. He moved to a small house by the shore on Long Island near New York. He finds himself next door to a vast faux-french mansion built by the mysterious Jay Gatsby. And Gatsby has these amazing lavish outrageous parties every weekend, but no one actually knows who he is. It turns out that Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan, the woman with the voice. The woman with the whispering voice, a woman he met five years earlier during the war, who lives in another large house just across the bay with her rich polo-playing husband, Tom Buchanan. In the mix is also their friend, a professional golf player called Jordan Baker, who Nick couples up with during the book. And as Nick gets to know Gatsby, it turns out that Gatsby has purchased his house entirely in the hope of impressing Daisy and winning her back. Tom, Daisy's husband, meanwhile, is having it in a fair. with the local garage owner's wife, he's a ghastly woman called Myrtle. And the novel's. Yeah, you're a Myrtle fan. And the novel's. I suppose she's just in it, I mean, she's honest, isn't she? She's keeping it real. And she's getting what she can get from. And the novel shuttles between New York where the male characters work and have affairs and Long Island sounds where they entertain and spend the weekends. Gatsby and Daisy are reunited, they're having an affair, but when it comes to the crunch, Daisy won't leave Tom. On the way back from an especially acrimonious and drunken lunch at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Daisy drives Gatsby's car and hits and kills her husband, Tom's mistress, Myrtle. So Sophie, that must be a disappointment to you, isn't it? As a Myrtle fan. As a Myrtle fan. In Rageful Revenge, believing Gatsby to be his wife's killer, the garage owner shoots Gatsby, and then himself, leaving Tom and Daisy to drive off into the sunset, Scott 3. Good pun on the words "Scott there." I always think about that, even as I scripted it. And wondering if you'd give me a shout out for it. Yeah, it is. It's a great pun. Yeah. So, you know, this is sort of a stalker novel. Gatsby's whole career, his life, his house, his parties, it's all in the service of trying to find and get Daisy back. There's a literary critic called Merve Mray who writes in a very sprightly and engaging way and she's come up with this concept of what she calls the longing man. And Gatsby is sort of exhibit A of the longing man. Mray describes these people for whom yearning indecision impossibility, the frustrated agency of romance proves endlessly fascinating to the longing man. He believes in soulmates, in beloveds, and in the inevitability of cultivating his feelings for them, in cultivating his feelings through them, which I just find a very on-point, amusing description of people like Jay Gatsby, who's kind of a great character, but he's also a ridiculous character. John T, we've come to the moment in the show where we talk about why this book is a classic. So for me, it's that it's basically a dream turned into an nightmare. It's the American dream gone wrong, but it's also a fable of pleasure and decadence and glamour that now sort of feels gone forever and I wonder whether even at the time that Fitzgerald was writing it already felt gone. So it's got these big themes, new money versus old university men as they're called, people who've gone to college versus people who are entirely in business. It's about post-war America versus pre-war nostalgia for a certain kind of stability. There are great drinks in it, forging rickies that clicked full of ice, mint tulips, champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. Those are just a few moments. We don't even have finger bowls now. So that's why it's a classic for me. What about you? I just loved rereading this. I read it as a teenager and I haven't read it since. Reading it last week, it is so incredibly good. That's the first thing to say about it. I don't think I had a sense of humor as a teenager because so many of these books we've been reading Sophie having not read for a couple of decades. I'm surprised at how many of them just have this wonderful humor about them and the great Gatsby is no exception. It's so funny and quirky and I don't remember any of that about it, but the prose is just incredible as well. It's like a poem. Every word is perfect and building up to those unforgettable last lines, the characters are extraordinary and it does like no other book managed to speak to a particular moment in history and a particular place. So for me, it's a classic because it just technically and stylistically and in every way is flawless. I can't pick a single hole in this book. I had the same experience rereading it just like wow and it's partly because it's so short. Fitzgerald's less good in the longer books, Tender is the night and well last, I guess he didn't finish before he died, but when he gets longer, he's not. That's unfair to say he's less good when he's dead. Or dying. Yeah, sure. But there's not even the concession of the book that really amps up what could otherwise be the slightly labored quality of his prose poem. It was amazing and I think you're right. It's kind of funny as well. What's the secret for a few in this book? Yeah, I'm worried this is going to be a bit ponderous and tedious for the listeners, but I hope it's going to be good for the people writing essays about the great Gatsby. I think there's an allegory going on in this book. It's nominally about these big characters and their their their wheelings and dealings with one another and affairs of the heart, but I think that he's writing about the history of America, the Civil War, the Industrial Age, America's entry into the First World War as fatal flaws that America can never recover from. America has as it were been unfaithful to itself and its own founding principles. It's what the writer and and journalist Nick Bryant calls America's forever war with itself. Although it's about the 1920s and a very specific place for you, it's about American history up until that. Yeah, it's about America's endlessly tortured internal divisions. Again, it's one of the reasons that makes it so amazing that great Gatsby so short. You know, you could have got very long We do. with this one. As I fear we are beginning to become so have you got a secret? No I'm going to concur with your secret. Okay good yeah my secret was a good one I thought. Right can you give us some detail on the biography take us through Fitzgerald's biography up to the writing of Catsby? Yeah he's born in St. Paul Minnesota so he's born in the Midwest towards the end of the 19th century. His mother came from a wealthy family and had a private income. His father however was a salesman for Proctor and Gamble. Proctor and Gamble was a big consumer goods company in the 19th century and still is. And the big traumatic event in Fitzgerald's life when he's 12 is his father lost his job and never really got over the failure he was never able to work again and I think for the young Fitzgerald seeing his father humiliated and reduced filled Fitzgerald with this drive and idea that he had to be successful. So I think that's the first thing and all through his career he's never an aesthetic writer who's just writing for arts sake he's always about the market he's always studying what the gaps are he wants to succeed he wants to make a lot of money he doesn't want to end up like his father so if any of our listeners have heard those stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda partying in fountains through the 1920s and riding on the top of taxi cabs there's this completely frivolous side to Fitzgerald and an alcoholic side he becomes alcoholic very young but alongside that is he is incredibly determined to be not just a successful writer but the most successful writer in America. And it's funny because that fusion of massive ambition and total frivolity sort of coalesces in his having gone to Princeton in the so it must have been in the period before the 1920s and he has some great description of what the experience was like of being an English major at Princeton. Right I like this because it made me think of you so far as an English. I am an English professor at Princeton. Fitzgerald found most of his teachers at Princeton disappointing and characterise some as having an uncanny knack of making literature this tasteful to young men. So if he do you as one of the teachers at Princeton have an uncanny knack of making literature this tasteful to young men? I'm sorry to say that I think I probably do you get these teaching evaluations all the time and one of mine once said she doesn't teach us anything all she does is talk about the books. Well hang on isn't that teacher? What were you meant to be talking about? I don't know but I did not give satisfaction to a young man. Right okay. You are keeping alive Princeton's elastious tradition. When I first went to Princeton so I've been teaching at Princeton now for about 20 years when I first went everyone was writing their senior thesis their sort of final paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald. They'd be you know a clutch of them every year. They should have been a collective noun for Princeton thesis written about F. Scott Fitzgerald you know 20 or so. He's sort of out of fashion now but I think he's a vomit a vomit of essays. Yes a vomit of essays good I like that very nice but his spirit sort of lives on I think in the architecture and the greenery of Princeton and then he wrote this side of paradise didn't he about the sort of Princeton period which was his first great literary success? Yes he after graduating he joined the army because the First World War had broken out and he went into training and he began writing an early version of this side of paradise at that time and interestingly right from the start he's determined that this book will capture what he calls my generation in America he's very hooked on the idea that his writing should be capturing the experience of a generation while he's enlisted in the army and I should say he never actually makes it to Europe to fight he seems to spend a lot of time being posted around southern states on endless training. Yes. Escapades but never actually gets sent over and at one stage he stationed near Montgomery in Alabama where he meets a southern bell called Zelda whose father is a judge she's very spirited and very likeable so Scott Fitzgerald has met Zelda and he's then been posted elsewhere and he writes he's endless love letters to her and Zelda after a while she's a few years younger she's 18 she has enough and she writes back Scott you've been so sweet about writing but I'm so damn tired of being told that you used to wonder why they kept princesses and towers you're written that verbatim in your last six letters it's dreadfully hard to write so very much and so many of your letters sound forced I know you love me darling and I love you more than anything in the world but if it's going to be much longer we just can't keep up this frantic writing that's so great isn't it I love it yeah and they have a very tumultuous relationship they married just a few weeks after the side of paradise has been published in in 1920 it's very successful and it makes Fitzgerald who's still in his early 20s a young star of the literary scene he and Zelda moved to New York and boy oh boy they live it up and 1920s New York is a place to be it's coming out of the First World War people want to just have fun and party and they are just going for it they're hitting the drinks they're jumping and fountain yes and he gave the name the jazz age for this decade he called the jazz age the gaudiest grandest spree in history that the whole time was just his one long passing yeah and and again that's informing the world of the great dance very much so and it's your sense isn't it that when Fitzgerald called the jazz age he's not really talking about jazz per se he doesn't mean that the music of African Americans no he's unfortunately because I'm dying soon on this podcast to have a long riff on jazz because I love jazz music it's your reformation and I thought Gatsby might provide me a way in but no when you read up about Fitzgerald's understanding of the word jazz he's not very interested in jazz as a musical form no it's very white it's a very sort of white man's drinking jazz it is yeah so to get to the writing of great Gatsby he follows up this side of paradise with a second book called The Beautiful Under Damned which also does pretty well he then wastes a lot of time working on a play with a terrible title terrible title the vegetable which vegetable was he the vegetable's not you know the vegetables not going to be success anyway he puts a lot of time and a lot of money into getting this staged and it's a complete catastrophe and so Fitzgerald is already he's only is still in his mid 20s but his drinking is tippling into alcoholism he's got the failure of the vegetable behind him and he decides he needs to write a truly great novel and he and Zelda to in order to get away from the New York partying moved to a small village in Long Island called Great Neck which is where they live in Gatsby exactly call it egg they call it West egg and East egg so there's a there's a popular misconception about the great Gatsby which is that it's set in the Hamptons it's it's not set in the Hamptons for two reasons one it's not set there and two the Hamptons didn't exist in the 1920s which is to say that there wasn't a fashionable holiday resort out on the far east and end of Long Island that these were very much commuter suburbs for for Nick Caraway so if you go to Great Neck now it's pleasant houses with three to four bedrooms garages lots of lawn sprinkling systems but it's not usually afluent or anything like that like I used to drive out there if I wanted to go to a good plant nursery or get the car service it was it's that kind of a place get your winter tires and and when you mentioned the Hamptons for those of us you haven't had the privilege of living in New York for a couple of decades are the Hamptons also in Long Island is that so the Hamptons are in Long Island but they're further east towards the tip of Long Island and they were developed from the the 1950s and 60s initially as an artist's community but then eventually became this super elite quote unquote playground for lawyers and bankers and the kind of affluent classes in Manhattan so you know all the stories about people flying their helicopters out to the Hamptons for the weekend that all post dates great Gatsby that that was not happening when this story is set so I just need to clarify that no that's very good scene setting of where we are there is a local figure to where Fitzgerald and Zelda are living who is partly an inspiration for Gatsby so there was a local figure called Max Girlach who was in trouble over bootlegging and called everyone old sport in the way that Gatsby calls oh interesting everyone so there is a Gatsby figure yeah in fact despite moving to Long Island which is a bit cheaper for them by this point they've run into financial trouble they're living well beyond their means and so in order to finish the great Gatsby Fitzgerald and Zelda travel to the French Riviera which believe it or not the budget option is the budget option in the 1920s you just go and live in the French Riviera the final thing just to say before we get into the book is that in the last stages of working on the great Gatsby on the French Riviera while Fitzgerald is sitting at his desk with a furrowed brow trying to write this masterpiece Zelda's heading out on the town and having an intense flirtation probably in a fair with a French aviator called Edwajusan that's splendid - And she almost runs off with him. And I think that very much informs the plot twists towards the end of the great Gatsby where Gatsby and Daisy get back together again. And I think through the novel Fitzgerald is often identifying with J Gatsby in some ways, but I think he's also identifying at that moment with Tom Buchanan because Daisy almost leaves Tom to run off with Gatsby. - So he's sort of both the longing man and the jilted man? - Yeah, and every husband's absolute nightmare is a French aviator called Edelard Joseph. - No, that's a total joke. - What is it with your wife's life? I mean, how can you compete with that? - Yeah, you don't want that. I mean, it's one thing to have a sort of nouveau guy with a fake French chateau across the bay with 17 cars and parties every night. But French aviator? - Yeah, and you can imagine him cornering Fitzgerald in the local Beetstro in saying, "Fetzel, I may love to your wife." Really rubbing it in. - Yeah, obviously that is what he'd say. And how he'd say it, more to the point. So these are sort of Fitzgerald's salad days, aren't they? The Riviera period and the New York period after the first two books come out. You know, he's the toast of the town. The drinking hasn't become a massive problem for him yet, which it will become. They drank so much. - They drank so much. But yes, he gets Gatsby finished and we'll look later on at what happens to Fitzgerald after Gatsby. - Yeah, let's get into Gatsby. - Yeah, so take us into the start. - Right, so I think the beginning of the novel, the first third of the novel is about setting up the world of the East Coast. And it's really a kind of contest playing out in a way between the sensibility of the East Coast and the sensibility of the Midwest or the Midwest as the characters call it. So all the main characters in this novel are actually not from the East Coast. There's a period where the Buchanan's live in Chicago, so Chicago's the big city for them. And then they've kind of drifted East. So the descriptions of the East, it's supposed to come across as a very sparkly, wealthy, exciting, but ultimately unsatisfying social landscape. The novel starts with a flashback. Nick Caraway has returned from his time in New York and he's back living in the Midwest. And he says, "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." So basically he sort of can't stand the looseness and the dissipation and the lack of moral center of what Manhattan and the wealthy East Coast. And so if the Midwest has a sort of bad rep these days, doesn't it? It's sort of seen in the world of book lovers as being Trump heartland, I guess. But that's not how Fitzgerald sees to-- Yeah, now people think of the Midwest as sort of the fly-over states. But at the end of the book, does this great paragraph on what the Midwest means to him? That's my middle West, not the wheat or the prairies or the lost, sweet towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly reads thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I'm part of that, a little solemn, with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Caraway House in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West after all. Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners. And perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common, which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. So that's sort of what we're supposed to make of the geographic contest that's set up in the first part of the book. And then of course, the other flashpoint that Fitzgerald is establishing is between Tom and Daisy Buchanan and the world that they belong to and Gatsby. I want to say one more thing about the world as he sets it up. While Fitzgerald was writing the great Gatsby, he was reading extracts from Oswald Spengers to the decline of the West. This was a book of cultural history and sociology in the 1920s that was hugely influential on the Nazis. And it was hugely influential on Fitzgerald. He saw it as being one of the most important books written. And it's the idea that Western civilization that the world of America and Europe has become decadent and is collapsing. And I think it's one of the things that informs the New York Long Island world that Fitzgerald is describing. It's filled with an idea of racial degeneration. And there's a wonderful moment early in the book where Tom Buchanan is in conversation. And he says, "civilizations going to pieces broke out Tom violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Emplies by this man Goddard? Why no, I answered rather surprised by his tone." Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff. It's been proved. Yeah, Fitzgerald's got a great eye for the kind of terrible character. Does Tom's just a total, he's just a shyster, isn't he? He's unbearable. But, interestingly, he's articulating in a kind of humorous way, something which Fitzgerald is feeling at the same time. And there is this decadence running through the novel. Character's not really capable of virtues or benign. Like he sees the worst in everyone. Yes. Well, that's sort of the queesiness of the great Gatsby, I think, is that we feel the kind of moral turpitude of these characters that they have no center. And yet they're just, they're enormously alluring. And I think it's why it's been endlessly re-adapted. I mean, the characterization alone is worth reading this novel for. So Tom is introduced as a football star. In fact, he's also had military service. But whereas Gatsby's defined by his military service, Tom is defined by his career as a football star at Yale, which, by the way, is not referred to as Yale, but rather as New Haven, the town in Connecticut where Yale is. It's a piece of snobbery. Anyway, Tom, as a football player, quote, was one of those men who reached such an acute, limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savers of anticlimax. Isn't that a great description? Yes, it is. And happily true of a lot of people. A lot of people. He's described as having since then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. And the reason that he can never settle down is that according to Nick Caraway, he seeks the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. I know. I know many times. I know. I know the squad of Tom's. Yeah, I feel like there's a whole sort of admissions category in American colleges for Tom. So he gets Tom right. He gets Daisy and Jordan brilliantly right. There, these preppy Midwestern girls wearing white dresses who are every, every Tom's dream. Jordan is a golf star. She's a professional athlete. And she has a real substance to her, Jordan. I came away liking Jordan this time. But here's how Fitzgerald gets the characters of Daisy and Jordan across in the opening sections of the book. They're about to sit down to dinner and Daisy walks out and is intensely irritated that the servants have set out candles. She says, why candles? I feel like we have to read this in an American accent, John T. You can't. You know, we've avoided accents so far. But I'm going to attempt it. Why candles objected Daisy frowning? She snapped them out with her fingers. In two weeks, it'll be the longest day in the year. She looked at us all radiantly. Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it. We ought to plan something, yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the tables if she were getting into bed. So that's Daisy and Jordan just perfectly captured by that episode, I think. As you say, they're so preppy and white. Daisy, Jordan, Tom, characters. And there's a wonderful moment where Tom is having one of his racist out outbursts. And he says, now are these people begin by sneering at-- I'm not going to do it in a minute. No, no, no. I just-- Mine was obviously definitive. I think my signature is that I just turn every character in literary history into posh sounding southern English. Yeah, into a BBC documentary. I'm just going to do it. So Tom says, now are these people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next, Elthro, everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white. Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. And then Jordan says, we're all white here. I hope you can include Jordan's repost. It doesn't hold itself back. They say what they think. So then we get Gatsby. And you can tell that Fitzgerald's having fun with this. He's really showing us his writing chops. This is his description of Jay Gatsby's house. On my right, so to the right of Nick's small house, it was a colossal affair by any standard. It was a factual imitation of some hotel-devealed in Normandy with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool. And more than 40 acres of lawn and garden, it was Gatsby's mansion. The thin beard of raw ivy's great, and the gosiness of the marble swimming pool, which all the little bread crumbs that Fitzgerald throws down in this novel is going to come back in a very resonant way, because the swimming pool becomes the kind of turning point at the very end of the novel, doesn't it? He does a very clever thing Fitzgerald in that he plays with a tradition of heroes in which you don't meet the heroes straight away. There's an anticipation built up towards meeting them. So in. Shakespeare's Othello, people stand around and talk about Othello before Othello finally appears. And when he does, it's this moment of great excitement. And then Othello just becomes more heroic as the play goes on until his tragic ending. But Fitzgerald completely flips that tradition on its head. So the anticipation and build up to finally meeting Gatsby is so extreme. And then once we meet Gatsby, at every stage he becomes less interesting and compelling as a character and more flawed and human. It's very cleverly done. The moment where you've described his house and the moment where Nick Caraway realises he's accidentally met Gatsby. Nick Caraway is talking with a man who he suddenly realises is Gatsby himself, they're at a party. And he says he smiled understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced or seemed to face the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best you hoped to convey. And this is Gatsby as his father, as the proctor and gamble salesman who has perfected that bullshitty smile that makes you feel so fee that you want to buy this oven glove and copy of the encyclopedia Britannica that I am holding right now. I think it's a wonderful description. It is wonderful. And it also explains why Daisy and Gatsby are attracted to one another because Gatsby's got this voice that Wisp was listening. It seems to be built for the the person to whom she's whispering at any given moment and Gatsby's got this smile that seems to draw the person he's speaking to into his innermost circles. And it's a trick, it's empty because the more we get to know Gatsby, the less that smile has any merit to it. It's interesting that you say that because I think in some ways it is the question of this novel. Is Gatsby as empty as his house? Is he a marble swimming pool and a thin beard of ivy or is there more to Gatsby than that? Because you know Nick Kerawik at the end of the book keeps Gatsby exempt from his total condemnation of everyone else in the novel. And I actually think that readers being asked to make a decision about Gatsby. The other thing that happens in the very first part of the book is that it emerges that Tom and Daisy have a child who is possibly the least memorable figure in the book intentionally so. She randomly appears and it's one of the ways that we know that Daisy's you know just totally full of shit but in kind of a fun way when she says to Nick Kerawik, oh you know I have a kid who at the time is two years old. Although Fitzgerald actually makes a mistake in the manuscript and says that she's three. And Daisy says, and I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world. A beautiful little fool. While there's a lot of residents between Daisy and Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda was actually quite an attentive mother. So Scott Fitzgerald's and Zelda's child is called Scotty. Her real name was Pat. There's a letter that Zelda writes soon after Scotty is born, which was when Zelda was 22. And she says, "I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, lighthearted, unconventional mistress of her own fate than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual, pessimism and loneliness." She says, "I don't want Pat to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful." Which is sort of another version of the best thing a girl can be in this world as a beautiful little fool but it's a bit more substantial. And we should say that a flapper was a 1920s buzzword for a party girl essentially, right? Exactly. There's one other character we need to introduce which is Tom's mistress, My Favourite. Your Favourite. So My Favourite is the wife of the petrol station owner on the road between Long Island and New York. And Tom's basically chosen her as his mistress because she's convenient. She's literally on the road when he's driving into New York to work and can pick her up. There's not much else to sell her on, I guess. There's something sort of honorable though about Mertle and her sister actually, who's a very peripheral character in the novel but who at the end really keeps faith with Mertle the sister and won't divulge the ways in which her sister has made a fool of herself and been compromised by Tom Buchanan. And there's something real about the Wilson's, the garage owner and his wife. There's something real for example about Wilson's grief when at the end of the novel Mertle is violently killed. He's absolutely devastated by it in a way that I think rings more true than other griefs in this novel. Yeah, I mean obviously a Mertle is a ridiculous character in many ways. She's described as being sensuous in a way that certain women who are a bit overweight can be. She really tries to look nice. She gets Tom to stop and buy her an air-dale puppy dog at one point. I mean she's not a loyal wife to her husband as she lets face it. No, but if you were living in a garage on the western end of Long Island in the 1920s and a man kept driving by in a superflash car promising to buy you puppies, I mean our loyal would you be? I guess that's right. I want to ask you about the parties because I mean if people know one thing about the Great Gatsby they know it's a party book that there are these extraordinary decadent wild parties that Gatsby hosts and how did you find these parties when you reread the book? It's funny. So we've now got to the middle section of the book and you're right those are the sections of the book that that people think about when they think if the Great Gatsby and that those are the episodes that people who re-stage the book want to reconstruct. When people re-adapt the novel they're constantly trying to recreate the magic of these parties. The Baz Lerman film I think is really drawing you into the sensibility of these parties. I actually thought the parties were one of the least successful parts of the book. They're probably quite authentic in the sense that it's a bit boring to read them. It's quite hard to get across the action of a party. It is and I think that's intentional. I don't think Fitzgerald thought I'm going to write a book about glamorous parties and I think that's the difference between him and film director Baz Lerman. I mean Baz Lerman often has style over substance that makes these visually extraordinary films which often lack any emotional core to them and I think Fitzgerald for him the parties have background stuff which is how a story ought to work right. You don't read a story for a great party scene. You read a story because you care about the characters. One of the things that I've noticed whenever I've tried to write set piece scenes like a party is how incredibly difficult it is because it's hard to sustain dramatic tension through an action that involves so many different people and you're saying that that's Fitzgerald's point that the thread is kept by the main characters not by the party. His point is that the parties are hollow so Gatsby in order to try and woo Daisy Buchanan back into his life. He's bought the house opposite the bay from her. He's having these parties which are supposed to be exciting and glamorous but the guests just turn up because they've heard it's a house you can go party at. They don't even know the host. Even Gatsby himself is very vague about them and he says to Nick Carroway later when he's describing his plan that he wants to make himself look exciting for Daisy. He says I keep the house always full of interesting people night and day. People who do interesting things celebrated people and of course there's nothing less interesting. Then I have some celebrated people. Yes. I think the point is that the parties are meant to be just kind of hollow in it. Yeah, great. I like that a lot and Fitzgerald was sort of hit and miss with these titles. When he got them right they were fantastic. This side of Paradise Tender is the night. The great Gatsby. When he got them wrong they didn't work at all. So the vegetable but also the original title of Gatsby which was Tremauquio. Which is a terrible title. Terrible title. No way with this of Endure. The Tremauquio is a character from one of the surviving fragments of Petronius's Roman book, the satiricon. But he's a host. Tremauquio is a former slave who's become a newvo rich millionaire and he throws these extraordinarily extravagant parties where people are eating you know bizarre bits of animal as food. Sort of whole birds. He saw Gatsby as being a Tremauquio character. But it's not a good title because 99.99% of any population has not heard of Tremauquio. And his editor said please don't call it that because A, it's unpenounceable and B, no one knows what you're talking about. Yeah and also that there's something sort of empty and hollow and meaningless yet deeply resonant about the great Gatsby as a phrase that just exactly summed up the book. I'm definitely far more interesting than Tremauquio in Petronius's novel. Gatsby has this kind of yearning and absence of his core where Tremauquio is just vulgar. Yeah with grape's around his head and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing you'll note about the party sequences is the just unimaginable quantity of alcohol that's consumed during prohibition in the US. So prohibition started after the First World War by something called the Volstead Act. But it started during the war as a kind of austerity measure. In 1919, Congress privated the sale of alcohol and intoxicating liquors. It was very hard to implement and to monitor but technically speaking alcohol could not legally be bought and sold. So the fact that there's so much to drink at Gatsby's parties and no mention is made of it is just a flame in the face of prohibition. And that would have been very exciting for readers at the time wouldn't it? Yes. If you're struggling to buy alcohol, a book which is dropping in an exotic cocktail every page is going to be very satisfying. Where the booze is never not flowing exactly. Gatsby hooks onto Nick Caraway quite quickly and Nick Caraway can't really understand why Gatsby is so friendly to him. But it soon transpires. It's because Nick is Daisy's cousin and Gatsby's realized that his best chance of being able to meet Daisy again is through Nick. And so Nick and the narrator starts to be used, doesn't he? Gatsby's cultivating this relationship with one end in mind that Nick will bring about a reunion between he, Gatsby and Daisy. Exactly. And this finally succeeds. So let's turn briefly to the scene in which Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy over to his house, which is next door to Gatsby's. And there's a nicely turned moment when Daisy arrives at this house and she's extraordinarily rude about it. Yes. And Gatsby who wants to reunion with Daisy to be perfect, even though it's going to be at Nick's house rather than his own becomes obsessed with Nick's lawn being too long. It's a wonderful detail that Gatsby channels all his anxiety into the length of Nick's lawn and has his gardeners sent over to make the lawn look immaculate. Despite the fact that it's pouring rain on the morning, but he's going to show up, yes. And when Daisy does show up, she says, "Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?" To Nick, how could anybody possibly live in a house this shabby and pathetic? Daisy's a great character. So they do have their reunion, Daisy and Gatsby. And at first it's an exquisitely awkward scene which for sure does a great job of I think. The Gatsby's sort of forced casualness as he leans against the mantle about to drop the clock. The clock. And he can't speak because he's been waiting for this moment for five years. Yes. But then things warm up. Things warm up and Nick gives them half an ad to himself. And he goes and stands under a dripping tree in the backyard. And when he comes back in, he says, "Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror." But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed without a word or a gesture of exaltation, a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. So it is this scene of them being reunited. And I think we are meant to understand that Gatsby and Daisy, they're attraction to one another and they're loved, what if you want to call it, they're passionate for one another. It's real. It is real. And at that moment Gatsby then takes them all over back to his house. And there's just an example of Fitzgerald's extraordinary way of writing where he never does the obvious thing. Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of his house and Daisy's suitably impressed because it's a vast mansion. And out of awkwardness, he marches into his bedroom and starts showing his wardrobe. He wants his shirt. He wants Daisy to see how wealthy he's been. And there's this scene where he's taking out piles of shirts and just throwing them on the bed one by one. And then at this point Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. There's such beautiful shirts she sobbed her voice muffled in the thick folds. It makes me sad because I've never seen such such beautiful shirts before. I mean, what an amazing piece of writing. It's completely, completely amazing because it's sort of real and not real at the same time. You feel Daisy's just hallucinatory hysteria and having been forced back into this relationship with a man who, you know, she had a passing affair with five years previously. It's just kind of can't compute it. At the same time, she means it. Yeah, I think a lesser writer would have their conversation being very on the nose like, I've never been able to forget you said Gatsby and Daisy would say, oh yes, sort of me too, but I married someone else and then come and think of it again. And instead, it's all channeled into this exchange about the shirts. And I think she takes all of her emotional confusion and just cries about shirts. Yes. And it also goes back to this thing of how part of the brilliance of the novel rests on it being so short, you know, because he's forced to compress all these ideas, all this emotion into these snapshot moments like Daisy pressing her face into the shirts. Or the other sort of motif in the middle section of the novel just before we get to the end is this dangerous driving motif. So there's a real culture of driving accidents in the great Gatsby. There's a massive focus on a pre-seat belt, pre-dui, pre-breath testing driving culture. And the whole plot kind of turns on it. There's this great moment at the end of one of the parties where Nick Caraway is trying to leave and he realizes that there's been some kefuffle in the driveway, which turns out to be a sort of minor automobile accident. And one of the characters who has been at the party who's become known as allies steps out of this car that's caught the edge of the wall as he's driven out of the driveway. The cars flipped over and it's ripped one of the wheels off. He's someone asks allies, you know, what on earth happened? This is a scene of total catastrophe. Don't ask me, said allies, washing his hands at the whole matter. I know very little about driving next to nothing. It happened and that's all I know. And everyone keeps saying to him, how can he be driving a car when you don't know how? And then allies says, you don't understand, I wasn't driving. There is another man in the car. The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained, as the door of the coupé swung slowly open, the crowd, it was now a crowd stepped back involuntarily. And when the door had opened wide, there was a ghostly pause. Then very gradually, part by part, a pale dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pouring tentatively at the ground with a large, uncertain dancing shoe. And he says, did we run out of gas? You know, these just really nicely turned known. So clever, because Fitzgerald writes in the book, I think he knows quite early on that the climax of the book is going to come around the car crash. Yeah. Myrtle, as we said at the start, is killed by Daisy driving the car. And Fitzgerald decides he doesn't want that just to come out of the blue and look like a kind of forced plot turn. So three car crashes and total happen in the great Gatsby. And they escalate in terms of impact and danger. So the one you read is one of the early ones. And of course, rule of three, by the time you've had two, you instinctively know that there needs to be a third car crash right. And that's what he's building up to. And you assume that it will be relatively trivial, that the stakes are not that high, that once again, someone's going to step out with a dancing shoe. But the last car crash is an actual tragedy. And Myrtle is killed in a really very horrible way. Should we should let's move into the end of the book. Yeah. So the last section of the novel revolves around the question of whether Daisy is going to leave Tom or not. The only thing that we haven't yet mentioned, I've realised, John T is the green light, the motive of the green light, which is such a big thing in this novel. I was pressing about that a minute ago while we were talking about something else. I don't think it's too late. Let's chew on the green light in. So early in the book, the first time Nick Caraway sees Gatsby, he's at his house, he's just moved in, he's looking at his neighbor's house, which is Gatsby's house, and he sees a man come out in the darkness. So it's more of a silhouette. And he sees the man look across the bay and there's a green light on the other side of the water. And he holds his arms out to it and then goes back into the house. And what Nick Caraway realises later is that that green light is the light at the end of the dock of Daisy's house when he keeps the boats. And so this becomes a motive in the book, the idea of reaching out for the green light, of reaching out for something in the past, for reaching out for a lost love, for reaching out for hope, and it becomes an embodiment of the American dream, the idea that if you strive, you can reach across the darkness and take whatever you want. So that's the motive. Exactly. And just to add to that, if you've ever spent time in places like Long Island Sound or Maine or Rhode Island, that image of the green dock light across a still dark body of water, it's extremely resonant, it actually does say summertime in America. So it was a wonderful choice on Fitzgerald's part to load it up with this sort of meaning that is also not meaning. I think that's one of the things that Fitzgerald does so brilliantly is he, you know, there's barely a sentence in this novel that you couldn't quote in English, I say, that seems to be just rich with symbolic resonance. There's the eyes on the Long Island Expressway when you're driving into New York, TJ Eckelberg's eyes, which is actually just an ad for an optician. They seem to mean something, really profound. There are these ash piles, again, by the side of the road as you're driving from Long Island into Manhattan. And those, by the way, the ash piles seem to be a reference to TSA, Eliot's Wasteland. So Fitzgerald was very impressed by the Wasteland, which was published a couple of years before. And so he creates his own Wasteland in between Long Island and New York, the characters have to pass through. Yes. We haven't killed off Myrtle. We digress. Yeah, let's get back to Myrtle. So the end culminates in this confrontation between Tom and Gatsby. And the question is, who is going to win this contest? Is it going to be new money, idealism, the American dream, or is it going to be the sheer brutality of old money and privilege that's represented by the figure of Tom Buchanan? So it all comes to a head when Daisy has organized a lunch at the Buchanan's house on West Egg. And she's invited Nick. He's come back on the train from New York City. And he knows what's happening. He knows that the setup is that Gatsby is daring Daisy to actually leave Tom. So at the lunch, there's this moment where Tom sees the intimacy between Gatsby and Daisy and he sees it because of the way Daisy speaks to Gatsby with a voice of too much knowledge, of too much intimacy. Is she whispering, listen. I think she's whispering, listen. And Nick says she's got an indiscreet voice. It's when the motif of Daisy's voice really starts paying off. Tom sees what's going on. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago. It's also in this scene that Nick finally explains to us what it is about Daisy's voice that is so utterly seductive. And he says, "Her voice is full of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that Rose and Felonet, the jingle of it, the symbol song of it." Doesn't seem that sexy to us. I think to say that someone's voice is full of money. I think it's very sexy. Do you? Oh, interesting. Oh, good. Come on. I like it. Okay, so your Gatsby here. It does it for you. If a voice sounds of money, who isn't drawn to that? Love it. That was an insight moment for me, John T. Oh, I revealed myself unwittingly. Yes. Everyone's always revealing themselves in this novel. So in the aftermath of this reveal where Tom sees that they must be having an affair, he starts trying to find out who Gatsby really is and Nick says to him that he's an Oxford man and Tom says, "An Oxford man like Heli is, he wears a pink suit." So this is very accurate. I'm an Oxford man. Yeah. I never wore a pink suit. I've never seen you wear a pink suit. You've not ordered any of my friends. So I think Tom's definitely on something. He's not an Oxford man. And it actually turns out that Gatsby was very briefly an Oxford just for five months because it was a special program that was offered to soldiers after the armistice at the end of the First World War. Okay. Kill off my at all. Right. I know you want my little dead, but we've got to explain how Fitzgerald stages the confrontation scene in terms of the dynamic of the relationships between Tom, Daisy and Gatsby. Because Gatsby basically pushes and pushes until he says, "Your wife doesn't love you. She's never loved you. She loves me." And Tom is just like, "Are you kidding? Are you out of your mind?" And Tom says of himself, "Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back and in my heart I love her all the time." And there's something about the sheer determination of Tom's assertions here where we know that he's going to get the upper hand and Gatsby's going to go down. And this is Fitzgerald winning back Zelda after her flirtation with Edelage. With the age. With the French Aviation. So Gatsby is Edelage or San and this is the same. Yeah. And the boy does he go down. So Tom says, "That's a lie. She didn't even know you're alive. Why? There are things between Daisy and me that you'll never know. Things neither of us can ever forget." And I think it's actually, it's a very accurate depiction of what would actually be said in a scene of that kind. And Daisy sort of backpedals. She says to Gatsby, "You want too much. I love you now. Isn't that enough? I can't help what's passed. I did love him once, but I loved you too." She's sort of saying, "Yeah, I loved you both in different ways at different times." Which is actually one of the few true things that Daisy says in this novel. And Gatsby won't have it. So, you know, we get this kind of stalemate between Tom and Gatsby. And Tom basically dismisses the whole scene. He tells Gatsby that he's a fraud. And this is the genius moment. Tom tells Gatsby and Daisy to drive back to the house on Long Island together in Gatsby's car. And a less brutal and aggressive man than Tom would probably have swept up his wife and told Gatsby to go packing. That he tells Gatsby to drive Daisy back to Long Island. And that is a sign that he knows that the victory is his. But what we don't know as the reader is that to settle her nerves, Daisy has actually decided to drive the car. Gatsby is not driving. And as they speed back toward Westeg, Mertel in a parallel scene because her husband has discovered that she has been unfaithful, although he doesn't know that it's with Tom Buchanan, Mertel escapes the garage where she's been locked up by the furious Mr. Wilson. She escapes the garage and she somehow sort of runs onto the road. And the car being driven by Daisy swirves to actually avoid an oncoming car. It's quite a complicated piece of road safety setup. The car swirves, hits Mertel at speed, rips the breast off her chest. It's intensely violent. And when they find the body afterwards, fits Gerald, it's part of this very pessimistic view of humanity and he just reduces these human beings to sort of abattoir. Yeah, bodyguard. Fitzgerald writes they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little and giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. That's a great line, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So Mertel's dead. I did it, John D. I killed her. You killed Mertel? Yeah. What happened then? Well, after that, it's all over for Gatsby. Daisy's goes back to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby takes the rap for the death of Mertel. He doesn't tell anyone that Daisy was in fact driving the car. Mertel's husband, because he saw, I think it's a yellow sports car. It's a yellow sports car. A big yellow sports car, which very interestingly is identified by the one black character in this novel. It says a pale, well dressed negro identifies the car. The yellow car is Tom's car, but Gatsby's driving it. And the question is how does Mr Wilson find out? There's a moment in the sort of aftermath of the accident where Tom goes up to Mr Wilson and he says something almost too quiet to be heard. And it turns out that what he says is that Gatsby was driving the car. So Tom shops Gatsby. Yes. And at this moment, all of the glamour of Long Island has gone for Nick Caraway. He realises he's at the heart of this very sordid affair that somebody's been killed. And the way that Nick Caraway is the narrator describes events now is incredibly nihilistic and pessimistic. There's an amazing description where he imagines what would have happened with that car wreck the next day. And he says, "I supposed to be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots. That's blood in the dust." And some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him. And he could tell it no longer. And Mertel Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten. Yes. It's this motif of the solidity and safety of the Midwest versus the flightiness and artificiality of the East Coast. And actually Nick ends up having the last and I think best summary of the Buchanan's. In the last sections of the novel, he actually becomes very dismissive and judgmental about the way that the Buchanan's have handled the whole situation. And he said, "It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made." That word careless has become a real touchstone for this novel that the defining characteristic of people of the kind of wealth that the Buchanan's have is that they are careless. And it is true. And by contrast actually, I think that Nick retains a sort of respect and sympathy for Gatsby because Gatsby, his heart broken in this kind of over-determined moment, sums it up by taking his blow-up inflatable lilot his marble swimming pool and deciding that he's not going to take any telephone calls, he's just going to spend the afternoon in the pool. It's not very heroic, is it? The peak of complete despair. It's very demanding. When normally in the section somebody would go and shoot themselves on a cliff top, he just throws himself on a lilo and a swimming pool. In a swimming pool, though, it's a really brilliant paying off of the swimming pool motif. But the bit I wanted to read is Nick's imagined description of Gatsby's despair. No telephone message arrived, so Gatsby never hears from Daisy again. But the Butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock, until long after there was anyone to give it if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. The whole thing is exposing Gatsby not to be a hero at all, and we talked earlier about the build up to Gatsby's first appearances as the host of these very glamorous parties and then that winning piercing smile that seems to validate you. And actually at the end, he so reduced and exposed that he can't even take his own life as a proper, not realistic here to do. He just sort of bobs about on the swimming pool. And in fact, it's Mr Wilson, who is the husband of Mertel, who having worked out that Gatsby was in the car with Daisy when it hit Mertel. He's the one who has a gun and takes it over to Gatsby's house and shoots him in the swimming pool and then goes and shoots himself on the lawn. You see, I told you the Wilson's have a kind of soul to the - You're totally convinced. - I called it. Just the heart and soul of the book. - And the book ends, of course, in possibly the most famous final lines of any book. I'm trying to, anyway, it dollars. - It's very famous, so will you read it to us? - Yes, it's back to the Green Light motif, which fortunately we did manage to shoe horn in earlier. And Nick Caraway just ends by saying, "Gatsby believed in the Green Light, the Augustic future that year by year "we seeds before us. "It alluded us then, but that's no matter. "Tomorrow we will run faster, "stretch out our arms further, "and then one fine morning, "so we beat on boats against the current, "born back seasonously into the past." - It's almost completely meaningless. (laughing) - First of all, Augustic future. - Let's have a moment with that. - So that word is very often misinterpreted and people think it is all Giazdic. - Yes. - Which is like an all G, but Fitzgerald was very insistent when question, it was all, he meant it. - It was like an orgasm. - Yeah. - So the future is orgasmic, and he just said, "Orgastic instead." - Yes. - Yes, orgasmic future, that's a weird combination of words. - Weird, weird. - But why do you think it's meaningless? I mean, it makes sense to me, which is saying, "Gatsby believed in the Green Light, "which I suppose is that hope, the American dream." And you chase after it and you think that if we push ourselves further, if we read it, - We'll find it. - If we re-dend it, we'll find it. - We'll find it. - If we cover to cover. - If we have enough ivy on the houses. - If we keep on achieving, we will get it. And instead, we just dragged back by our own history. - Seaslessly into the past. - Yeah, so for me, it makes real sense. - No, you've classed it right. - No, I'm 100% retracted, everything I said. You just told me what it meant. I'm one over by it and two it. And actually, per the conversation that we opened with, it explains the intense preoccupation with history in this book, in which this novel is a sort of allegory for the American past, as opposed to an allegory for the future. It's a book that is continually drawing. It's own narrative back to the past. You have to keep remembering the things that have come up in the story before. You have to remember that there's the Green Light. You have to remember that there have been traffic accidents. - It's quite a radical idea, because there's a moment where Nick and Gatsby are having an exchange and Gatsby's blowing on about his love for Daisy and five years before and he's never got it for it. And Nick Caraway says in a kind of really glib way, well, you can't repeat the past. What's the point of trying to go back? And Gatsby says, what do you mean you can't? Of course, you can repeat the past. And Gatsby, Nick at the end is confirming that Gatsby's right that whatever we do, we are actually drawn back into the past that we do repeat the past. And that's all we do is repeat a ad nausea. - Yeah, and Nick, I think in that exchange, where Gatsby's kind of crapping on about Daisy for our number four, Nick's a patient man, isn't he? - He is, yeah. - One good friend, good friend to Gatsby. There's a moment where Nick says, for all his, he says, like appalling sentimentalism, there is something authentic about this. There's something genuinely impassioned about the way in which Gatsby just, he cannot forget her. For him, it was the most important, the most defining moment of his life to have met Daisy. And Nick ultimately explains it as being something that is very understandable, that Gatsby, who turns out to have been from an extremely poor family. And we meet his father very briefly at the end of the book when Gatsby dies. And the father's a touching and quite sympathetic character. Nick says, Gatsby had never met anyone like Daisy before. He'd never seen a house like Daisy's before. He'd never met girls who had that much money and who were carefree in that way. And it explains why it's so compelling that her voice sounds like money. It's just this promise of safety and security and opulence and kind of glamour. - Let's talk about how the book was received. It was published in 1925. It was critically very well received, but it didn't sell. And that was a massive blow for Fitzgerald. - I hate to correct you, Johnty. But it actually was published to a mixed reception. - Oh. - So it was a mixed reception. - Not only did it not sell very much, but it wasn't even unanimously critically revered. - There are a lot of people thought it was immature and trivial. And to be honest, it makes me realize that I'm not a very good reader of contemporary fiction. 'Cause if I, I think if I had read Gatsby in 1925, I would not have realized that it was a world masterpiece. I would have thought it was immature and trivial. - I would have recognized it. - You would have known it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I have a better judgment than you do. - Yeah, and also, I mean, we haven't had a question this episode, but I'm gonna guess that you think that Tom and Gatsby and Nick all would have liked you better than me. - I'm thinking more about Fitzgerald. - Oh, okay. - I think I could probably party better with Fitzgerald than you could. - You've got more stamina, that's for sure. (laughing) - I would have thought. - You're holding up a bit of paper with a sort of error if I'm gonna read out some reviews to you. So. - Can I do it? - Yeah, go with that. - I would wish you liked to interrupt me again. - No, can't do that. - So the LA Times kind of got it right. It said, "The story is powerful as much for what is suggested as for what is told. It leaves the reader in a mood of chase and wonder in which fact after fact, implication after implication is wandered over, weighed and measured." And critic named Gilbert Sellders, who was well known in the dial, said Fitzgerald has mastered his talents and gone soaring into a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders. That's the review you want, isn't it? - It is. And I think that's the one that induced the writer's block that Fitzgerald then, and one of his friends later said, I think it was Edmund Wilson, the historian and critic, said that that review was the one that Fitzgerald kind of stopped him from writing. - Right, no, no, no. - Another bit straight away. It was like, "How could I beat that?" - Yeah, the other thing that's really, you mentioned T.S. Eliot before that he put the ash heaps in because he was thinking of the wasteland. So T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald afterwards and said, it was the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James. - Yes, he did only write Fitzgerald, because Fitzgerald sent him a copy with a very desperate needy note inside it. - Okay, but still he got the reply. - No, he could have done a neg. He could have said something like, "The choice of font by the publishers is really wonderful and not commented on the book." - Or he could have done what those people do these days with email and all unsolicited approaches, which is just a hit to lead. - So at some point we may do Tender is the night, which is Gatsby's next, and in fact the only other novel he published in his lifetime. So we don't want to go too much into what happens next in Fitzgerald's life, other than to say Fitzgerald really struggled to write another book soon afterwards. I think he was very daunted by the perfection of the great Gatsby. Also his alcoholism had really ramped up and his relationship with Zelda was deteriorating. He did manage to write and publish Tender is the night in about 1934, and then he didn't really write another book or he sort of tried to write one and he died of alcoholism or symptoms relating to in 1940. So he doesn't get beyond 40 years old or much beyond 40 years old, and he considered his life to be a complete failure by the end and he was largely forgotten. And then what happens is shortly after he dies is Gatsby re-emerges as a book. It's partly because during the Second World War copies of the great Gatsby were given to American servicemen. It was a free book. I think like over a hundred thousand copies were given away. - And they loved it. - And they loved it. - Yeah, it was a sort of cheap, remainted book that they started handing out to American servicemen as a social duty kind of thing. - And so for a younger generation of writers who have been drafted for the Second World War, they all read the great Gatsby. And so it then just began this re-emergence and escalated into being considered one of the, if not the great American novels. - Oh, exactly. - But unfortunately Fitzgerald died having no idea. - Yeah. - That's gonna be the case. - It's moving actually. So how much do you reckon you'd have to pay for a first edition of the great Gatsby today? - Well, I would reckon probably about 150,000 American dollars. - Oh, you got it right. (laughing) - Because it's written down in front of me. - Fundly enough, I would have thought it would be significantly more. When I read that, I thought that was less than I'd have expected. Listeners, it's time for everyone's favorite section of this podcast, The Worst Bit and The Best Bit. Is it overrated or is it underrated? - Well, there is no worst bit. I mean, they just isn't. - Yeah. - This is a book that has no bad bits. - No. - It's flawless. - And all the Mordland sort of cliché over determined bits and the symbols that mean too much. That's all part of what's brilliant about it. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And The Best Bit say, well, it's the dialogue. We haven't talked much about Fitzgerald's mastery of dialogue and funny dialogue, but the things the characters say are so brilliant and funny. - Yes, and the way that the dialogue carries the weight of the characterization, as we saw in that exchange between Daisy and Jordan, you know who they are after they've had that exchange about the candles. - Yes. - Have you got any worst bits or? - No, I loved it rereading it. Really loved it. - And then over, so is the great American novel overrated or underrated? - And we haven't talked about this yet, so we don't know what others gonna say. Shall I go first? - Yeah. - I'm gonna say, Junty, I'm going underrated. - Okay. - Underrated. I feel like it's out of focus. at the moment for Gerald and the Great Gatsby generally. And rereading it, I thought it was just, it was a perfect novel. I think it's underrated as well. In that my understanding of it before rereading, having not read it for a couple of decades was, "Oh yeah, we're going to read the Great Gatsby. It's, you know, I'm sure it's going to be pretty good, but it's probably going to be quite annoying in all of its time as well." And any book which is referred to is the Great American novel is guaranteed to get my hackles up. Yeah. And then I read it and went, "Oh, this is the Great American novel." It was amazing, wasn't it? Yeah. You've been listening to the Secret Life of Books.