Richard Lehan

Speaker What is this idea of an exhausted past, was Scott getting out?

Speaker Well, I think what Fitzgerald was getting at was that they had occurred in American history a radical transition, and that was the loss of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century.

Speaker And what he really saw was that at that point, there was a shift of emphasis, a kind of shifting in the gravity, historical gravity away from the frontier, where someone like James J. Hill, whom he grew up with knowing in insane St. Paul to the city, and it was in the in the city that he then sends his main character, Jay Gatsby, to try to create himself rather than to the to the frontier.

Speaker Now, as you know, from the beginning, I met riveted by F. Scott, the paradox, the paradoxes, Scott Fitzgerald, especially the fact that he was reaching for a kind of a glittering prize that he knew to be false. And it’s why this idea of old money e could you possibly and you I’ve read from you and learned from you about that is what is that aspect of show? Is there a paradox between his personal yearnings and what he knew to be good or evil? And is there a paradox in other aspects as well as, for instance, a city that he yearns for and yet seems to represent something? Or am I overreaching? Is that too simplified?

Speaker Well, I think there was a real ambivalence on Fitzgerald’s part. He grew up in St. Paul and saw people like James J. Hill, who had a fantastic amount of money. And then he went to a prep school in the east that he went to Princeton, where he became exposed again to the rich. I think his experience with Ginevra King, whom he was very much in love with in the Princeton days, and being told by someone, maybe Ginevra, his father, that poor boys don’t marry rich girls was a deciding factor in in his development.

Speaker So he both admired the rich. And on the other hand, he distrusted them, at least emotionally distrusted them. And so much of his fiction, so much of his writing takes the position of the outsider, somebody who wants desperately to be a part of the rich, but who is somehow cast outside of them. And ultimately, his attitude toward the rich, I think began to begin to change where he saw the more self-indulgent and a little bit more ruthless, willing to use the power that they had at their disposal in a way that he found morally questionable. And it was in this context, I think, that he he looked at the city as a structure that someone like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby has certain control over and can use in a powerful way, in contrast to rural America, where things were far more familiar and where the the power of money was not quite so extreme. And to that extent, there is a kind of paradox of of admiring the rich at the same time as distrusting them or admiring the city of being wanting to be a part of the vitality of the city at the same time as looking to rural America for the kind of values that he thought had been lost in the past.

Speaker With Saint Paul?

Speaker Yeah, well, Saint Paul was, I think, far more rural than than certainly New York was when he was contrasting New York and St. Paul in the in The Great Gatsby. And you’ll remember that passage in which he talks about all of the houses in The Great Gatsby, having those in St. Paul having the names of the people who have lived in them from generation to generation, where there is that terrible sense of anonymity and impersonality characteristic of the of the houses in New York.

Speaker West New York, this was New York, the glittering what made Scott, what was it in his temperament? Was it in his sensitivity? Was what seemed what was it about him that made him, do you think, wanted to lunge to the east and to where and what was there for him? What was this? Because that’s a big thing.

Speaker Well, it was a center, really, of all of America. Washington, D.C. was in Boston, wasn’t he? After the rise of the Erie Canal back in the 19th century, New York was the major American city. And anyone who wanted to realize the kind of essential self a higher self went to New York. That’s where his publisher was Scribner’s. That’s where most of the major writers were living at the time. And people like Dreiser, for example, were living in New York, in New York. And I think that he he felt that that’s where the energy was and that’s where he wanted to be.

Speaker With Scott, temperamentally, do you think an outsider? Was this something that was just. Was he as a writer? He he seemed to be a. Most comfortable, you seem to me an acute observer, but there was always the idea of being at the edge instead of the center of the light. Mm hmm. And yet he was showing off to move to the center of the light. Is there something to that? Why not?

Speaker Well, I think that he wanted very much to be in the center, but that he realized very quickly that he didn’t have the credentials to be the center of, say, Tom Buchanans world, the major character in the in The Great Gatsby. And it was to that extent that he saw there was a certain emotional advantage to write a story from the point of view of the of the outsider of someone like like Gatsby, for example. And this led to what he called in his writing about his own writing, The Dying Fall, that sense of sadness that comes when someone wants something so desperately and yet cannot quite achieve it.

Speaker But Scott, I think, also saw through it wasn’t I mean, I guess I’m wondering, it’s not just that he didn’t have the credentials, even going back to this side of paradise, it seemed to me that he saw through and to the problem of inherited money the waste. Or is that is that being too generous to Scott Fitzgerald?

Speaker No, I think that he had great questions about how money was inherited, how it was passed on, and ultimately how it was used to create a kind of power for us that ultimately led to a certain kind of immorality that he certainly characterizes in The Great Gatsby.

Speaker And you’ve written and talked to me about the idea of The Great Gatsby as an inverted W. Mm hmm. And I wonder, with all the energy you can muster, if you could explain that idea to someone who’s who’s never heard what is what is what does it mean in the context of Scott Fitzgerald?

Speaker Well, the the formalistic Western usually involves an Easterner who comes to the to the West and who has to become acclimated to a new culture. Usually in that formula, there is some kind of a shootout between the good man and the and the bad man. And ultimately the the hero wins out and either disappears in the tradition of the Lone Ranger or settles down and becomes domesticated. What The Great Gatsby does is ultimately reverse that that formula, sending the Westerner, in this case, the Midwest to the to the to the east. And it involves a shootout between Time Buchanan and Gatsby that takes place at the Plaza Hotel near the end of the of The Great Gatsby. It’s a metaphorical shootout, but it’s just as devastating because after time you can and gets through with Gatsby. He really has no future.

Speaker And ultimately, as he is defeated, it’s at that point that the novel churns with the with the reversal of the formula is the bad guy who wins out and ultimately is the bad guy who rides into the sunset.

Speaker And this is what we see through through Nick Nick Caraways eyes with Scott aware of this idea, this inverted Western might have. Do you think this is a. I don’t mean an interpretation of viewers, but it’s literally an idea that he might have had in his mind.

Speaker Well, he said, yes, they came from if you if you will, of course, read The Great Gatsby closely, you realize that he makes use of the theme of the West and particularly at the at the end with the reference to Hopalong Cassidy for for example. And I’m sure that he knew Westies, the Virginian. And it strikes me that in creating this opposition between the East and the West and creating a kind of shootout, if you will, a verbal shootout at the Plaza Hotel that he was making use of all of the elements of the West and whether he was really self-conscious of it or not.

Speaker I have a feeling that he probably was self-conscious because of the other references that pick up the theme of the Western in the in the novel itself.

Speaker Where did in Fitzgerald’s world in Fitzgerald’s prism? Was there a kind of parallax view running in much that he wrote a kind of a vision of America that he could make you? I mean, my sense is he makes you feel the air of the history. And it was a very wise perspective. Did that exist? And if so. What’s the larger picture is this is the city a glittering prize or in general, does it mean the enlightened to man? And we should define that term if there is such a thing? Mm hmm. The man with his feet firmly rooted in the form and nature. Is this a devastating loss represented by the city?

Speaker Well, I think the idea of the Parallax view is a nice way of of talking about it, because what we mean by the public’s view is that there is a foreground and a background and you can’t keep the two of them in focus at the same time. And I think this is something that describes a good deal of what is happening. And in Fitzgerald’s fiction, so many of his characters do come from what I suppose you would call rural America. But they really want to go to the to the city because it’s in the city that they can create this heightened sense of of self. But once they get into the city, there is a code at work that many of them, Gatsby and in particular, is not really aware of, and they run into opposition that ultimately is destructive. They ultimately come into a composite competition with characters like Tom Buchanan, who I think in their ruthless way make use of a system that they control in ways that the the you know, the the young, naive aspiring doesn’t really fully understand. And to this extent, is is that a disadvantage? So I think the kind of almost up oppositional view towards America, it was a place in which one could invent oneself, as Gatsby does. But the contradictions that Gatsby creates in inventing himself lead in many ways to his own undoing. So there was a certain trepidation. There was a certain kind of of wariness about the way you would invent yourself in America, in the way that you would fit in.

Speaker And there was that establishment. And he always felt, I think, that that establishment was self protective, it was enclosed. And to this extent, the young man who tries to go beyond his limits can never really achieve success in America. So to that extent, he was kind of dimethoate mythologising the whole idea of of America as the land of opportunity, the land of success.

Speaker But ironically, he seemed to love in his own pedigree the idea of a bit of a touch of aristocracy that served with Francis Scott Key. Yes. So how does that work out? I mean, you seem to like the idea of an American aristocracy and old.

Speaker Well, the idea of an American aristocracy, I think, was in some ways different from his looking at the established rich and particularly the way they worked in the city. There was a almost a kind of Jeffersonian vision to go to Fitzgerald, a look back to an America that had a kind of rural human aristocracy and that this yeoman aristocracy to which his father, I think he thought belong was being really replaced after the civil war by a kind of ruthless industrialist who didn’t really have the sense of virtue, the sense of of of manners that the old aristocracy had. And it was the loss of these virtues that he bewailed in a good many of his of his novels and certainly in the prose that he wrote at the time.

Speaker How does Monroes star fit in to this sort of American dynamic of the old work ethic?

Speaker The patriarch.

Speaker Forces that are at work to undermine the past. Hmm.

Speaker Well, the new star is the boy genius of the last tycoon. He is the producer who has come to Hollywood with certain idealised notions of what Hollywood can and should be.

Speaker He runs into a good deal of trouble with these ideas because the industry is really very materialistic, very commercial minded, and ultimately wants to make money at the expense of creating first rate films. And it’s this competition between the kind of integrity that he brings to Hollywood and the commercial nature of Hollywood that leads, at least in part, to his destruction. It’s a theme that Fitzgerald uses over and over again.

Speaker He uses it with Dick Diver and Tender is the Night and of course, with Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.

Speaker What the the theme of the the young boy genius with certain idealized notions ultimately confronting a commercial industrial, a more crass America and never really being able to overcome the power of this, what shall I say, established structure?

Speaker Was Scott Fitzgerald in some degree, I know it’s dangerous about writers to read them into their fiction and so on, but Scott seems to be almost the opposite. You have to be careful to include him. Was he part of the boy genius of Dick Diver Monroe’s star? And did he use it? Sort of looked on to that. And it’s natural to you. Did he use characters perhaps as masks to try out identities? Are he already tried them out and then exploited them for his fiction?

Speaker Well, I think one of the key things in talking about Fitzgerald, a man and relationship to America, is that his fame came fairly early. I mean, with this side of paradise in 1920, he had written a national bestseller and had established a bank account that was immense for a young writer at that time. And then he became, in many ways in the early 20s, the spokesman for the youth of America. And to that extent, he was in the limelight very quickly in his career. And as he went along, he never was able, I think, to sustain that kind of identity. And I think that this always was something that he looked at with ambivalent eyes, that is, that there was a certain kind of prestige that he had in the 20s that had disappeared in the in the 30s. And when this was coupled with his own physical sickness and, of course, the mental breakdown of his wife, it only increased his sense of somehow being displaced in a world that at one time or another he he owned in a truly romantic way.

Speaker Did you mention to me once that to some degree you felt the reverse? Well, that the characters were almost like masks to Scott in some to some degree of him trying on different persona. I’m not sure if I remember that right from. From 87 but 97 when we first talked, but what does that mean? A man trying on a mask? I sort of thought of work the other way. He mind his own life for his fiction, not the other way around.

Speaker Oh, I think he did. I’m not sure that the two are really contradictory. I mean, there’s no question that he wrote out of his own deepest emotions. In fact, he said that he could never really create a character that he couldn’t identify with. And so many of these characters, of course, take on a certain kind of mask admirably.

Speaker And the main character in this side of paradise becomes very cynical. For example, Anthony Patch in the Beautiful and Damned becomes uses himself up. I mean, exhausting his energy in trying to in some ways sustain what he thinks the ideal of America should be.

Speaker Gatsby is the character who puts on a number of masks testing to see which one will win the the the golden girl that he wants so desperately. And Dick Diver does in some ways the same thing. He is the psychiatrist, but he’s also the the boy genius psychiatrist who makes breakthroughs very early in his career and could never quite sustain them later on.

Speaker And of course, the boy genius of them all is the real star of the the last tycoon who once again draws on a kind of innate ability, but finds that innate ability not really enough to sustain him in a very competitive commercial material world.

Speaker So there are, I think, a good, good many masks, but the masks tend to take on the same kind of of dimension, almost in some cases, formalistic way of the idealized boy genius confronting America and confronting a ruthlessness that he had never quite anticipated and in the way that he created himself.

Speaker And West’s Fitzgerald’s diagnosis pretty bleak for this country, meaning this idea that we’re born forward ceaselessly into the past. I’m sure I’m misquoting, but that idea when we are, we are doomed to succeed and therefore to fail at the same time, in his view.

Speaker Well, there’s no question that his ideals are always located in the past so that the American hero is always chasing a kind of mirage. This is the story of Gatsby, who instead of going to the frontier where his demeanor might have led to success, comes to the city and tries to compete in the social established world of Tom Buchanan, where it’s definitely going to lead to failure.

Speaker So to that extent, trying to trying to to to attain an ideal that has already been exhausted, as he believe that the frontier had been exhausted leads to a kind of destructiveness that he captures so brilliantly in those last lines of The Great Gatsby. Which are so we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Speaker It’s got this idea of us being a fine, having a finite resource of talent, a physical energy and being seems to me that he really believed that about himself that you used up. Mm hmm. And you had to kind of mine it out and then you might run out of the resource. Is that did he feel bad about both himself individuals, but also maybe about the country? There’s a parallel, I think.

Speaker I think that he really felt that that talent was a physical, tangible thing and that you had so much energy. And if you used it one way, you could not use it another way. And so many of his characters dicked over in Anthony Patch or the two most conspicuous in this context, use their energy in such a totally absurd way that they’re never able to realize their full potential themselves and to this extent partake of a destructive process.

Speaker I think Fitzgerald saw at some point that his own life replicated or duplicated exactly that process, that he used up a good deal of the energy that he had with particularly with with alcohol to the extent that he never was fully able to realize himself as as a writer. But in some ways, if he hadn’t used that, if he hadn’t wasted his talent, he would not have had the understanding of wasted talent that becomes such a brilliant part of his own writing. So there is a kind of paradox connected with his own life in terms of the themes that he is working with and the very nature of of of his own fate. And to the extent that he was both defeated by the prospect for the prospects of of of the writer that is at the very end of his career, his books either were out of print or they were not selling at all. And then 10 years later, there is a kind of resurrection. And Fitzgerald becomes used in particularly college classrooms and in the university to the extent that he has The Great Gatsby. So something like 300000 copies a year now, making Fitzgerald certainly one of the more or perhaps even the most established writer that we have in the American canon.

Speaker I mean, there is that kind of of of paradox, there is cut the failure that somehow turns to success, as well as the success that oftentimes turns to failure. The two, it seems to me, go hand in glove in the world that he has created.

Speaker Was there any carrot it’s got created where the success actually lasted for more than the ephemeral moment or didn’t do the character to success? In other words, was there any character that might be emblematic of Scott’s own success, albeit Act three?

Speaker I guess one would have to say, yeah, no, I don’t think that there is any character who sustains a kind of success, who sustains a kind of identity that allows him to go beyond the the limits of his own genius in a world that ultimately is both commercial and materialistic. It’s this sense of the ideal that ultimately flounders in that kind of world where the well, the idealized character could never really pursue what he wants to pursue because there is too much that confronts him, too much that opposes him. So I can’t think of any character who who sustains that ideal for for any length of time. You can go through the major writers. I’ve been through the major characters, and each one becomes in some ways the victim of his own ideals and the limitations that he experiences in trying to realize those ideals. You can go through the major characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald and see that there is really no character who is able to sustain that ideal against the the limitations that he confronts in a commercial, materialistic America.

Speaker And to that extent, there is a kind of, I think, indictment of what America has finally become. Fitzgerald, I think, was very much indebted to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and of course, one of the major themes of the wasteland is that whole sense of the rise, really of material pursuits to the extent that we have lost the kind of spiritual meaning, a spiritual dimension, that from both, I think, Fitzgerald and Eliot’s point of view as a form of cultural defeat.

Speaker With Scott, reader and admirer, oh, very much so, and yes, yes, I mean, he he admired the way the TSA is the wasteland immensely. And I think I’ve learned a lot from it to the extent that he even uses symbolic characters like the old man who replicates the character of Torrisi as the blind prophet that Elliott uses in the in the wasteland.

Speaker And when he finished The Great Gatsby, the first one of the first people he sent a copy to was, of course, T.S. Eliot, who responded very enthusiastically, saying that it was a major advance in American fiction since the works of Henry James. So there was, I think, not only an influence, but I think there was a kind of common admiration between the between the two. The other influence on the early Fitzgerald, of course, was was Joseph Conrad. And in a novel, like a novella, like The Heart of Darkness, you see exactly the same thing. A man who goes into the jungle and ultimately is consumed by a kind of rapacity. That is a kind of greed that leads to his own own destruction. This is a theme that would have, I think, touched Fitzgerald as well.

Speaker T.S. Eliot, the wasteland. As our context, the Valley of the Ashes, I think was and maybe also the heart of darkness. Mm hmm.

Speaker For someone who barely remembers the novel, perhaps helping a little bit with the Valley of Ashes, is there a parallel between the way the idea of the wasteland, the heart of darkness and the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby is a symbol really of of an exhausted America, of an America that has used itself up the custodian of the Valley of Ashes as a man named George Wilson. And in some ways, I think Fitzgerald was depicting symbolically President Wilson, who after the the First World War tried to formulate the League of Nations and was ultimately defeated, actually went through America on a train to promulgate the League of Nations and had a severe stroke in Colorado and was brought back to Washington, where he really was an invalid. The rest of his term, his last years were really in office, were run by his aides and by his and by his wife. And I think that one of the things Fitzgerald was suggesting with the Valley of Ashes is that, again, this theme of the idealized, this man with the idealized vision of America, who is ultimately defeated by it, embodied in this case by George Wilson, a man with the same name and the presidential name George to go with it, defeated in in in exactly the way that so many of Fitzgerald’s other characters are defeated in anticipating the defeat of Gatsby himself. And it’s in this context that we really see what is exhausted, what is burned out, what has been used, and again, connects with that whole theme of the of the past. The used a past that still becomes a kind of mirage to us, which we we struggle to achieve, even though it is long gone, even though even though it is exhausted. Now, there’s no question that I think Fitzgerald got this idea from T.S. Eliot, the wasteland and what you find in the Valley of Ashes is a kind of of of grotesque reality, its nature that has been inverted, its nature that has been turned back on itself. And this whole sense of the grotesque is something that underlies, I think, so much of what Fitzgerald was trying to say about America with its splendid possibilities that had somehow been turned back upon itself to the extent that the Valley of Ashes kind of symbolizes that. And I suppose you could make a comparison between that and the jungles that Marlowe goes into in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, that whole sense of a world that eats up its occupants in a way that is destructive.

Speaker Could you tell me I’m sorry to ask a mechanical question. What is the Valley of Ashes? Just, you know, valleys of this anymore?

Speaker Yeah, the the Valley of Ashes was simply a dump yard, a junk yard that was located between Long Island and Manhattan that people would ultimately go by on the train.

Speaker And there was a road that ran a lot parallel to the to the railroad tracks. So that what you you have literally is it’s a kind of junkyard and it becomes a kind of junkyard of dreams, if you will, of a burnt up dreams. It’s interesting that George Wilson, the custodian of the Valley of Ashes, is described as a Ashin fantastic character. His whole his own sense of dream, his whole sense of what he could be in America has been used up and and exhausted. He’s thinking of going back to the to the West because what he wanted in the east, he never he never found. And to that extent, there is a kind of equivalence between the the personal junkyard of expectation and dreams and the physical junkyard that embodies the valley of ashes.

Speaker I seem to be an odd man out on this theory, but I. It seems to me when Nick Carraway goes back again to finding our terms for us at the end of Gatsby, goes back to, I think, St. Paul, that there’s a kind of a triumph in that, in that the old value he’s defeated, but his return represents perhaps he’s he’s been defeated by the wrong forces and he’s going back to something better. But maybe that’s too optimistic. And what is it, a defeat when Nick goes back to St. Paul, where this film starts and Scott gets emancipated from? Is it a defeat or is it? Scott Fitzgerald’s signal of help is a moral triumph.

Speaker You know, I think there’s an extreme ambivalence with the ending of The Great Gatsby, and it can and has been read really into a very different context. On the one hand, you can read it that he simply has been defeated by the American establishment, embodied by Tom Buchanan, and in some ways takes that defeat back to the Midwest, to his father’s hardware store, which he is ultimately going going back to.

Speaker On the other hand, you can see it as a kind of of moral triumph that he looks to the east and realizes that it was a mistake for him to come there in the first place. It’s a little bit like the the the theme of The Wizard of Oz that you don’t have to go looking over the rainbow for your ideal. It can be in your own backyard and that he goes back to the world, that he is familiar with the world where the moral values that he treasured are still somewhat in place. And to that extent, he is not simply escaping the East with a sense of nothing to look forward to.

Speaker But he is going back to an America that he still feels has a certain kind of residual value that the East has lost. Who is he? Nick? Nick Carraway is going back to the to the Midwest, to the West, where there is this residual value that he thinks America, particularly east, the east coast of America, has lost.

Speaker And who was Nick Carraway just in a pricey term in the Great Lakes, Nick?

Speaker Nick Carraway is the the narrator of the of The Great Gatsby, the man who tells Gatsby story in a way that Gatsby could never tell it himself. And to this extent, he becomes one of the principal characters in the in the novel, he tells us at one point that he is the most honest character that he has ever met. But by the time we get through the novel, we know that. But that is not literally true, that he is he has his own ambivalences, moral ambivalences as well, which make him really a truly human character, not just for his.

Speaker This is a very important question as far as I’m selfishly speaking, because in the film, in this film, at least, we’re concentrating a lot on the period when Scott struggling to write tender is the night Zelda is either at Johns Hopkins or Sheppard Pratt, et cetera. And I’m wondering, did Scott. Maybe fear that he, like Dick Diver, is going to use himself trying to preserve this woman’s sanity or restore this woman’s sanity, is there any context you can give us? Have him reading himself into characters, finite resources, et cetera, et cetera. Anything to that?

Speaker Well, again, I think that what he is using is the theme of what he called the cruel rage that came with that. Yeah, that was what F. Scott Fitzgerald is using is what he called the theme of the of the cruel rich. That is the, again, the American establishment that buys this boy genius psychiatrist to take care of an invalid wife. And to that extent, he does become a kind of victim, if you will, of the established world and their established money. And to that and to that extent, he once again depicts a character who becomes victimized, if you will, by the money that they they control the same way as I think he felt that he had been victimized by the Ginevra King family back in his in his Princeton days. But one of the problems that I find with Fitzgerald, particularly the later works of Fitzgerald, is that there is this radical transformation from the boy genius who has so much control over his own life to a character who suddenly is very weak and ultimately exhausted and depleted by the experiences that he confronts. This is not just, I think, true with Dick Diver, but I think it’s also true with Monroe Starr and the contrast between the kind of self sufficiency that they have at the beginning of the novel. And the total depletion by the end of the novel sometimes comes so quickly that there is, I think, an in jambon, a certain kind of of implausibility that we feel in the in the reading. I don’t think he ever quite mastered that whole sense of depletion that he uses over and over again in his fiction, because the characters at the beginning are so strong and at the weak or off. And at the end they’re often so weak that there is this radical contrast between who they are and what they what they can do and what they mean as characters.

Speaker Is it possibly because he was running out of gas and therefore himself and therefore this contrast was more present in his mind?

Speaker I think that what you find with Fitzgerald is that his early success gave him that sense that there was a world out there that he could conquer. And then when that early success disappeared in the in the depression years of the 30s, he was never quite able to reconcile the early success with what was certainly a contrast to that. He may not want to call it failure at that time, but but certainly it was a much more difficult road that he was on at that point than at the beginning of his of his career. And when you combine that with zoners illness and his own physical illness at the time, plus his own alcohol, alcoholism, one of the things that I think that you see is that he has this image of the the young boy genius who was himself at one time, and now this image of the depleted man who is also himself now. And he puts the two of them together in ways that I think he found totally convincing because he had lived both experiences. But in but in the fiction itself, with the two come together so quickly and and run on parallel tracks, there is a certain kind of transition that I think the reader has difficulty with.

Speaker What attracted you to Scott Fitzgerald, all the. I’ve never asked you this, but I’m very curious as to what what. First, I know he wasn’t the explosive at all and hasn’t been in your work, but he’s been a major part of your. You’ve given a lot of thought, this guy.

Speaker Well, I guess I’ve always been interested in the the way literature intersects with with the culture, and it seems to me that Fitzgerald has been the most brilliant, what shall I say, analyst of of the American culture, the man who was able to see all of the opportunities that America offered, particularly to the to the young and to the ambitious, and at the same time saw the impediments that were also in the way of of that kind of success, of that kind of of glittering gold. And it strikes me that no one has really quite come to grasp with the essence of America in the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald did.

Speaker Is there an irony in what happened postmortem? I mean, what he see an irony with this incredible success after I know this is a wildly different question, but might been able to deal with it or would have seen it with detached irony?

Speaker Well, I have a feeling that he never would have quite understood what had happened to him, because I think that he saw so much of America in terms of the foreground. That is the the battle itself between success and failure. And what happened in the 50s after the authorized biography and the Budd Schulberg novel brought attention to Fitzgerald, was in some ways a response of America to the experience that he had revealed in his fiction rather than to some kind of glorification of the man after his death.

Speaker So I think that it was the fact that he had experienced America. So what shall I say from such opposite points of view and had been able to reconcile those in his fiction that gives that fiction the power that made him so successful after his death.

Speaker Very well said, and can I ask you again that I mean, this is hard, but it’s a weird Scott that we’re sitting here in 2001, but looking back at the last century or looking back at our literary history of American writers, where does he fit in? How does one characterize him with the beginning of something new with the unique ways was. Was he the beginning of sort of a reportage incorporating life and fiction in a way, no. In any way? Where does he deal with the jargon of our trade? Or if you are afraid, I might not be presumptuous. Mm hmm.

Speaker Well, I think that what he did was. I’m sorry. Can we use. Yeah, that I think one of the things that Fitzgerald did was to borrow a great deal from the modernist movement that he in many ways had had inherited the works of T.S. Eliot, the works of art of Joseph Conrad.

Speaker And to that extent, he was creating a realist fiction that is a fiction that had a realist content, but that also superimposed on that realist conveyed a kind of symbolic meaning. And it’s through the the symbolic meaning that I think his his works take on dimension. I mean, a novel like The Great Gatsby is is is deceptively simple. But would you begin to think of what the Valley of Ashes mean and what Tom Buchanan means and what Gatsby means and the way that Nick Carraway is seeing these characters in terms of the implication beyond them simply being individuals? It takes on a dimension that describes really what is going on in America. He actually thought of calling the novel under the red, white and blue because he thought that that captured the kind of of expanded vision that was part of the of the novel itself. And to to this extent, I think that he owes a great deal to the modernist movement that created layers of meaning. I mean, you find this in the wasteland, for example, at the same time as he was a part of the realist tradition and made use of ideas that he found, for example, in Willa Cather and even in his early work that he found and in theatre. Dreiser, I mean, there is a kind of naturalistic elements that that whole sense of of one being a part of one’s environment that you find in the beautiful and the damned. So he was a man who combined a good deal of what was going on in the literary world and turned it into something that was peculiarly his own. And to that extent, I think there’s a power in the novels that don’t always get into films. It’s one of the reasons that his novels, I think, are greater than any kind of film adaptation of them.

Speaker Until this one very important question, I’m forgetting Spangler’s first name, Oswald. Oswald Spengler. And the idea of. I’m a monolithic ethnic group culture. Yeah, definitely informed Fitzgerald to some degree, but what I guess I don’t know was. How did this how did how did this idea of the multi of a polyglot America? Tie in with Scott’s vision of the. Failed to dream. Mm hmm. How does this work?

Speaker Well, Oswald Spengler was a tremendously powerful spokesman after the First World War. Of course, he was writing from a German point of view and Germany had lost the First World War. So he saw a process of decline, cultural and historical decline taking place. And one of the things that he felt was responsible for that decline is that the the Western world in Germany in particular, was moving away from the soil, was moving away from its roots, and that with the rise of the big cities, particularly the megalopolis, they were losing a value system that ultimately was responsible, responsible for this whole process of decline. Now, Fitzgerald makes, I think, a good deal of use of this, a great use of this in The Great Gatsby when he shows in a place like New York, for example, all of the different ethnicities that have moved into the city and created a kind of multiversity that today, I suppose we look at in a kind of ideal way. At that time, I think he had mixed feelings about where this was taking America between, if I remember correctly, between 18, 18, 19, 20. There were 20 million immigrants that came into America at that period of time. And I think that he was looking at whether or not America as a kind of of new nation could absorb that kind of a multiplicity of of ethnicity and of of cultural meaning. And to that extent, he was raising a question that I suppose is is still with us, still with us today, unfortunately, because of World War two in the Holocaust and things of that nature. It’s become a very sensitive question. And even to somehow broach it as a question becomes a little delicate. But I think that’s exactly what he was doing in the in The Great Gatsby with that passage that describes the the ethnicity of the of the city and, of course, the character like Meyer Wolfsheim in that whole sense of an underworld that was being taken over by very by various kinds of ethnic groups. So there was, I think, on Fitzgerald’s part of a certain affinity to what Spengler was saying. Even though Spengler was saying it about Germany, Fitzgerald thought that the parallel could apply to could apply to America. And the thing that, of course, Spengler was also saying was that there was going to be in Germany the rise of what he thought would be the military Caesar’s. So that in some ways, back in the early 20s, Spengler anticipates the rise of Hitler. But in America, he talked about the rise of the moneyed Caesar’s. And to this extent, of course, it fit in perfectly with what Fitzgerald was saying about Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby so that he discovered, I think, primarily in terms of secondary reading, the discussions of Spengler, rather than perhaps reading Spengler directly, he discovered somebody that had a certain affinity to the so the main ideas of what he was trying to say in his early work. And of course, by the time he got to to tender is the night he gave a long interview in which he documents the influence of Spengler on his own thinking.

Speaker Meyer Wolfsheim, is it true when Rose Star is a hmm, she wigram with you, but I’m really thinking of Meyer Wolfsheim and Star Wolfsheim. I didn’t think was a villain. Star certainly wasn’t a villain. Jews were outsiders much in our culture. How does that all tie together?

Speaker Well, I don’t just because of ethnicity. They didn’t. He did not. I think look at them as villains. He looked at them as Eric and we said, can you just tell us who them is? He did not look at the at the foreigners who came to America as so much as villains as they were outsiders and therefore who had to struggle to become part of the establishment, which, of course, was in keeping with almost everything that he wrote. So to a certain extent, there was a kind of affinity to to these people at the same time as there was a kind of Spengler in question of could America absorb so many people of different cultural backgrounds?

Speaker And to this extent, I think that it was, again, this ambivalence that runs through Fitzgerald, the sense of contradiction that runs through him about America and about the place of people in America takes over.

Speaker There’s a great you’re great and we’re almost, almost really finished. There is a great danger in doing a project like this. We were actually talking about it last night at dinner before you became incoherent that you begin to idealize the subject. We I I’m particularly the one I guess one has to worry about. And with Scott, there were many things that were unattractive, both as a human being. And to me, as a writer, they were great guests, but there were some negatives as well. How about for you or are we defying this man now? Suddenly he’s risen from the dead. He’s got a huge success. I don’t mean we in the film, but in general, is there a danger? What’s wrong with this guy?

Speaker Well, I think that the contradictions are part of the power and part of the the reasons that we’re so attracted to him, because we’re all in many ways a product of our own contradictions. He’s our contradictory America. He saw America where there was the the possibility of tremendous success at the same time as he saw the impediments that lay in the way in the way of that success on a personal level.