Ann Douglas

Speaker Fitzgerald was a natural writer in the sense that he had a gift for language, he had Felicity, meaning that lucky thing when you hit upon exactly the right word, when the rhythm of your sentence works. However, he was not a natural writer in that the sentences all put together didn’t necessarily do what he wanted to do and some of them weren’t what he wanted them to be.

Speaker He once said, speaking about himself and Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway, his friend and also his greatest rival, of course, was the most famous new prose writer of his generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald had done a lot to promote Hemingway’s career being slightly the elder, and Hemingway loved to talk about how he rewrote A Satins 500 times. And, you know, it was all this kind of mighty mail process. And Fitzgerald was always treated by their mutual friends, like Edmund Wilson is kind of a charming boy who, you know, who was full of high spirits and irreverent and impudent and a bit silly, a bit naive, who just kind of went home and wrote. And as Fitzgerald said later in his career, he said, is the biggest misconception in the world. I am the tortoise and Ernest Hemingway is the hare. And now we know a lot more about how each man wrote. In other words, we have different drafts of things they did. And it becomes quite clear that Fitzgerald is right, not that Hemingway didn’t rewrite, but that Fitzgerald was one of the great writers of American fiction, meaning we know that Gatsby went through a number of drafts. Now we have, in fact, at least one draft published. The next to final draft tender is The Night, his amazing story of a dissolving marriage and a dissolving man that was very autobiographical, that went through so many permutations has been a whole book just describing the evolution of the plot. He was someone, for example, who rewrote in galleys, which many authors want to. It’s very expensive because the types been set. Publishers discourage it. Fitzgerald wrote all over his galleys pain, of course, for the changes himself. In other words, he was actually a perfectionist and it took him a long time to get things exactly the way he wanted them. So he he had a natural gift and he also had what he liked to think of as his professional equipment, which was a capacity for endless hard work.

Speaker And Scott had an idea that talent was finite, that you could you did use your talent and and you described to me once the marvelous analogy of having to mine that talent, but also a finite process. I wonder if you could help me with that idea, the way the process of that work. And and I guess almost the irony that one is using. Oh, yeah.

Speaker Fix Fitzgerald had, I’m sure. Sorry.

Speaker Fitzgerald had a very strong sense that talent was almost like a physical property or a resource like gold or like diamonds in the ground, that you had to mine it and the supply would not be forever. In his 30s, in the midst of alcoholism, his wife, Zelda’s hospitalizations suffering a kind of dark night of the soul himself. He wrote a number of essays called the Crack-Up Essays about what this process of dissolution was like.

Speaker And it’s very striking that it’s full of images of bankruptcy and running out and running dry. It’s as though he didn’t completely trust here. This most gifted of man didn’t completely trust that if you, so to speak, cut down the trees, they would grow back. And partly that was the thinking of a lot of people of his time in that Hemingway, for example, believed that a man had a finite number of orgasms and a finite amount of energy in his life, and that you could run through those or you could waste them in some way. It’s it’s an idea that’s still turning up, say, Norman Mailer, in the 50s and 60s. It’s in a way, it’s a certain kind of male idea that I think what we’re we’re sort of past. But there’s more to it than that with Fitzgerald. You know, we always have to remember, here’s this Irish Catholic kid from a mixed class family, meaning mother’s got money but isn’t terribly well bred. Dad’s awfully well bred but weak and hasn’t made very much of himself. He he belongs, but he doesn’t. He’s always negotiating all these status and class and country club boundaries. And what he had to begin with was tremendous luck, tremendous charm.

Speaker And he got some very good breaks. And he himself writes about this. If you’ve had success early, there’s a fear. I’ve used it all up. Oh, my God, I peaked at 18. Now, there was another side of Fitzgerald that was perfectly aware, even as he was writing, say, the Crack-Up essays in the 30s. But most of all, I think the last tycoon in the late 30s that his gift was still there. And when he’s writing The Last Tycoon near what turns out to be the end of his life in his letters, the thrill for him is I can still do it. I can still make the magic happen. He said once that he wanted to get all these books done, he had a whole series of them. By the time he was 50, he was actually going to be dead in a year or so. So he obviously didn’t, but it’s going to get them all done, he said. Because at 50, a man becomes someone else and he may no longer have access to his earlier selves, which Fitzgerald, like most writers, know where the source of his inspiration.

Speaker So he was kind of, you know, poised between these. On the one hand, the tremendous fear that he had been a reckless person and had squandered this treasure. You know, he didn’t have a diamond quite as big as the Ritz, but he had a good sized one and maybe he wasted it. And then intermittently and it came most when he was writing, as he said, living deep inside the work, you know, in the process of creating it. His letters written about writing The Last Tycoon or much earlier about The Great Gatsby writing it and what it’s like to live in the life of the imagination. Everything else pales by comparison to it. So he did trust it, but it was a fairy godmother. In other words, he had to trust something he didn’t understand to keep renewing the supply. And he didn’t. And he didn’t always trust it. Again, you know, this is just an acute version of most artists creative predicament. I had that gift once. Do I still have it now? We only know that at the end of his life, from the evidence we have at 44, he very much still had his gift.

Speaker Scott was hugely self-conscious. It seems to me he was almost keeping diaries in utero.

Speaker I mean, he was right and he was temperamentally thin skinned and self-conscious. Yes, he was the thing that our adorable child, adorable child side of him, the thing that.

Speaker Helped me me enormously with Scott was when I realized through all of the insecurity, he had it well, I’m not talking about the real double vision he had, but he he needed to he wanted to belong. He wanted to be accepted. He wanted to go. And we’ll get to this, but we can do it now, too. He wanted to get to the glittering prize New York and where the action was. And it was just in his blood. He wanted to be a emancipated and he escaped.

Speaker But at the same time, you mean from, say, St. Paul? Yes, definitely. And having been there, you know why?

Speaker Exactly. But at the same time, he saw through to the hollow part of inherited money, even at least I this is even in this side of paradise. If one rereads is even there, it seems to me and I wonder that paradox of desperately needing what he saw through is sort of at the heart of I think what we’re trying to do is it is it sort of is it my imagination or you know, I think Fitzgerald as an outsider could never get over his sense of the difference between those who had been born to money and social position and those who had not.

Speaker As many people know, he said once the rich are different from us, Hemingway supposedly said, oh, they’re richer. Actually, we know the exchange didn’t really go like that. But leaving that aside, he was right. The rich are different and he knew it because he had not been born rich and he didn’t grow up rich and he had been born Irish Catholic. It’s always important to remember that. I mean, Edmund Wilson told him, you can be our first important Irish Catholic writer. And, you know, he sort of wanted Fitzgerald to do for Catholicism, say what what James Farrell was going to do in the next decade for working class Catholicism in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. That just wasn’t Fitzgerald’s gift. He was going to use that class consciousness to see the class above him from the outside, both as someone who wants to be inside, who wants to be where the action was. He’s you know, he is one of those moth’s drawn to the light. He wants to be in the big city in New York or glittering and white, as he calls it, in the early thirties. He wants to be part of this, but he’s never going to lose his sense, as he tells us in the Krake essays, that these people’s power and money cost other people something. They mean exclusion. For others, they mean less for other people. Fitzgerald actually has an uncanny ear and eye for the person who is shut out by these powerful, rich, entitled people. Gatsby himself in The Great Gatsby. But even more importantly, I think because Gatsby lives on many planes is Mertle, who is Tom Buchanans mistress? And she’s basically her husband runs a gas station in Long Island. You know, she is a working class girl. She’s vulgar and she is crazy about Tom. He is the whole world to her. She is just his mistress that he wants to show off to a few friends she gets brutally run over. Tom is presumably somewhat upset, but Fitzgerald insisted that he keep a detail describing that her breast was cut off by the oncoming car that struck her down, which in fact was driven by Daisy. And he just said to his editor, that’s important. That has to be there. And to me, I thought, he’s saying it’s mutilation. What’s been done is mutilation of her womanhood, of her heart. It ought to be ugly. It ought to be grotesque. These people cost things and they don’t pay the cost. Somebody else does. So he had a double vision. In that sense, he is not someone who, you know, just hooks in who gains on tray and becomes the most smitten member of a kind of elite circle. And a number of writers and people, of course, do that. He came inside, but he never forgot, as he put it, that this guy, he’s. Socializing with 300 years before was calling for Fitzgeralds girl as his right because he was the lord of the manor, so that since that class means power and it means brutality and it means exclusion and it means charm and culture and wealth. It’s a complex vision. And he’s keeping both sides of that equation in his mind, which was hard for him in the 30s when his literary circles were turning Marxist.

Speaker And Scott, it seems to me.

Speaker Even if I’m beginning to believe you are by what you said, that he was sort of temperamentally he was an outsider almost. Whatever happened to him at St. Paul St. Paul does not accept him now. He’s still not accepted. Yes. With the garbage can. I guess not. Well, the garbage can and also the whole idea of any there’s a local guy there who I like very much.

Speaker Would you know, St. Paul’s isn’t the place to understand Fitzgerald. Right. But well, Princeton, after all, you know, he did flunk out.

Speaker I mean, we can’t expect too much from Princeton, but but St. Paul, Princeton, academia, very still. And and the cat, his own graveyard. Now he’s on the outside of the right wall, at least originally. Yeah, but he was moved.

Speaker How is he? The house is is this guy who seems always to have been drawn to the light, as you said. It’s. Wasn’t he most comfortable just out, just at the edge of the circle of the light? And how’s he doing now?

Speaker I think Fitzgerald knew that he was going to be inside the elite circles of society or any group he really came to, meaning he goes to prep school, he goes to Princeton, he flunks out, he comes to New York. He becomes a star. He’s amazed. Suddenly he’s news because he’s written on this side of paradise, what was then considered a shocking book. But he knows all along that how can he be the archetype of what New York wanted when actually he really never spent any time in New York until he was in his late teens when he came in from Princeton. But he didn’t move there, you know, till he till about 1919, 1920, with the publication of his first novel.

Speaker So every place, whether he’s welcomed as an outsider, are fought. And so his writings about it, both his journals and his letters, as well as his fiction, he’s he’s always straddling that. I don’t think that means he’s comfortable there, except that whatever position is the one constantly assigned to the one, you keep finding yourself. And if you’re just a betwixt and between person, you do get used to that. You begin if you’re a writer like Fitzgerald, you begin to explore that. That’s a very interesting place for literature. And again, Fitzgerald was situated within a class and status like map that many Americans try to pretend doesn’t exist. And some of it can look pretty silly today. You know, if we go back to this side of paradise or to the Basil and Josephine stories that he wrote about growing up, it’s you know, it’s the kind of stuff we all go through in fifth grade. Are you my best friend today? You know, today Nancy isn’t speaking to me, though. Yesterday she gave me her books to carry, you know, this kind of thing. But Fitzgerald is suggesting not that, you know, that’s his serious topic, though it is, but that that’s how society works all the way through. We just call it something else, these rituals of exclusion and inclusion.

Speaker So it’s his place. He doesn’t have much choice about it. Now, the other thing is that Fitzgerald is divided between being a fan. He’s one of the great fans of American culture. And I don’t mean that he loves all of American culture, but I mean, he’s interested in popular art. He’s picking up popular music. He’s got a very nice ear for what songs are popular or what sanes are in fashion. You know, he even notes in the 20s that the Negro blues are suddenly the rage and what that’s adding to the cultural mix he is critical of and yet enthralled by Hollywood.

Speaker He’s probably the only writer who really gets that Hollywood is in the writers business, even while it’s very hostile to many of the actual writers, including himself, whom it employs in that business, which is that they were making it up through their own belief and passing it off as true. It only works if you believe it while it’s happening. Scene is believing that fascinated him. So he’s a fan and that’s gotten him into a lot of trouble with the academy. You know, people and literary studies and cultural studies, as it’s called today. They don’t really want someone who’s saying, isn’t this amazing? Isn’t this fabulous? You know, this is still despite writing the greatest epitaph for Wonder and it’s death in American life, Fitzgerald went on feeling wonder about a whole series of things throughout his life. So he’s a fan in ways, as I say, that make him not serious enough in his own day, particularly as the climate got more Marxist. But throughout, you know, dismissed as this frivolous little boy with his face pressed against the glass or today in academic studies. On the other hand, he’s situated in this map of class and status that isn’t particularly of interest to the academy. That’s actually the big, dirty secret of American society. And he’s every bit as interested in it as James Farrell or Theodore. Riser and there, you know, naturalistic, we are in the big city, we are with the working classes, I mean, great novels that they wrote from that perspective, but that’s Fitzgerald’s preoccupation, too. So it’s again, Fitzgerald is a man of very delicate balancing acts. He’s the fan and he’s the absolute never to be convinced skeptic who sees all the dirty linen, who picks up on all of the things that aren’t being said.

Speaker Critics in academia have been very tough on Fitzgerald, in part because how do you deconstruct your magic? Yeah, and also the power of the verb in the way he. Could you help me with that again? Sure, sure. Is it what is it that gives this what is this special power of the music of his language as well as the content?

Speaker Fitzgerald had an enormous gift for language, a kind of Keynesian. Keats was his favorite poet, sensuous feel for words that conveyed almost tactile and visual values to the reader. And he also had an instinct to make language move. He thought verbs were the most important part of sentences. In other words, it’s an animate universe. It’s one that always seems to be in motion. The curtains that blow in the window in a scene in The Great Gatsby, the wind that comes in that runs up the grass, those are as living and moving and almost breathing as the characters themselves. So this is almost literally, by an anthropologist definition, a magical universe, one in which you can’t say, here’s life and here’s dead matter. There is no such thing as permanently dead matter in N Fitzgerald. That makes him rather hard to deconstruct or to analyze from an academic viewpoint. And right now the Academy is not very interested in language and writing. Fitzgerald does very well when a group of writers get together and decide who is, you know, who wrote the great novel of the 20th century, he apparently turns up at the top of the list for the Americans there, you would have a very different poll of if you did, who was of most interest to the academy.

Speaker What does it mean that F. Scott Fitzgerald or indeed any writer but Scott, who is moderate, is a modern writer? I don’t know what that means.

Speaker Scott Fitzgerald is a modern writer, though he’s not always seen that way, in part because he was living in the modern age. He was living in the age in which most of the world, as we understand it today, was put into place. People had records and talking pictures and jazz bands and cars and airplanes and short skirts and make up for respectable women and cigarettes. Well, I guess they aren’t so respectable now, but certainly there’s no distinction between women or men smoking all those things. If you and I were transported back to New York in the 1920s, there’d be many changes, but we would be more at home than someone in the 1920s would be if he were transported back to the 1990s in New York. So in other words, partly he’s living at a time when the modern world is being put in place and he is sensitive to the atmosphere, to the climate of his times. He knows that history, history has its own, whether some people call that the zeitgeist. But I like to think of it as histories, whether what a period feels like, why, for example, you look at a certain telephone, say, the French telephone that comes in in 1927 that has the has the hook and isn’t on the wall anymore. Why can you look at that and figure out everything that’s going on about that culture? You know, why does art affects the way people dress, the way they walk down the street changed. Fitzgerald was just the man to catch that. So he’s in a sense, like a literary photographer in that he is picking up every difference in the way people move and speak and feel the way the buildings look, not just, oh, it’s a new building. You know, he climbs the Empire State Building as soon as it’s open. But what does how does the very air of New York change now that it’s got this building dominating its landscape, as it then did for. Gerald is on Kanaly alert to all that, so he’s modern because he lived in the modern era and because he caught it, you know, he caught it the way a lens would catch it. He’s also modern because he’s interested in writing and writing. He’s a very self-conscious writer. He’s literally interested in the other moderns and learns from them. T.S. Eliot, who wrote The Wasteland right around the same time that Fitzgerald published his first novel, T.S. Eliot, became the formative influence on The Great Gatsby, meaning and he taught him later to Sheila Graham, his Hollywood lover, in the in the 30s. So he’s picking up on Joyce. He loves Gertrude Stein. Arguably, he understands that, in fact, she’s a comic writer and is just having the time of her life at a time when very few people did. Stein, in fact, very much admired Fitzgerald as well. He’s probably the first writer who reads Hemingway and says, this is it. This is the voice of my generation. What a dazzlingly generous thing to do. But just meaning he’s a modern also because he spots who the other important moderns are and he learns from them.

Speaker You were saying is Fitzgerald helps me live my life. And the issue, which we don’t know yet in the film, perhaps that even though it’s got to be absolutely outrageous and vicious and terrible. Is he? When sober, his instinct was to help the underdog somehow. Yes, it was. Is that an aspect of Scott’s character? And how does he help you live your life? There was some connection. Yeah. Coming up there.

Speaker Yeah, I have a couple of writers who I not only love to read, reread and teach because they’re wonderful. And Fitzgerald is at the very top of that list among the Americans, but they’re also writers who help you actually live your own life by the things that they said. Fitzgerald was to use a really old fashioned word. He was a gentleman in the sense that he was a man of honor. Now, when Fitzgerald got drunk, he could chase his nearest and dearest around the dining room table with a carving knife and scare the living daylights out of them. He could be viciously careless with underlings whom he just didn’t see. We literally didn’t see. I think it’s obvious that Fitzgerald was a blackout drinker and that this isn’t in any way excuse him, but just meaning I don’t think he probably had very vivid memories of some of these horrifying incidents. But obviously, you know, this was a writer who somewhere knew how good he was. And after about five, six years of real recognition, it was over for him and his lifetime. And he had another 14 years more to live. And he saw writers who weren’t half as good as he he saw a writer whom he considered better, Hemingway, but exalted 500 times more than he was. This is stuff that is you know, you do your best in your conscious life, but remove the inhibitions. And for Fitzgerald, that was through alcohol and the bitterness and rage that I mean, imagine that this man, one of the most gifted American writers ever went to his grave believing I know I wasn’t much, but in my small way, I was an original. I always hope that he’s looking down from heaven at this moment and seeing that he is a byword, that documentaries are being done about him, that he’s ranked higher than Ernest Hemingway. He couldn’t possibly have believed that. Even so, he knew he wasn’t being given his do. So, I guess I am excusing him a little. But what’s more important to me is that when he was in possession of his senses, he was not only smart, he was loyal. He was a man of principle.

Speaker He introduced Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, the greatest literary editor of the day, and perhaps of all time he recommended him to everyone. He wrote a wonderful essay about Ernest. Is this young, vital force in American fiction? Is a young man turning a corner into the street, you know, bringing us into the mainstream? He was helpful later to to John O’Hara, for example. There’s no there is no instance of Fitzgerald doing what Hemingway routinely did, which was slapping down competitors. He welcomed them. He encouraged them. He stuck by Zelda. And Zelda is a tragic story in her own right. Fitzgerald certainly didn’t always handle this well. He had huge problems of his own. But at a time when T.S. Eliot, one of his idols, stuck his wife away in an asylum and basically forced her to get out of his life and remarried, Fitzgerald had already he had made a decision and there’s absolutely no evidence he wouldn’t have gone through with it for the rest of Zelda’s life, which it turned out was less than a decade longer than his own, which was that he would not remarry. Of course, he would support Scottie as best he could and he would keep her in hospitals and that these were priorities that nothing was to interfere with. For every angry thing he said about Zelda. And since I myself know that I would have left Zelda long ago, the fact that sometimes he said, you know, it’s my talent, I’m the writer who counts in his family, stop writing this novel about your life, which is my literary experience, ugly stuff. But how untrue is it? He was the writer. He was the one supporting her.

Speaker So all things considered, with Ernest Hemingway, with Zelda, he acted with forbearance. He was somebody who if he felt envy, he he. She was a fan, too, and it’s there he would rise to meet a fine performance always. He could trust that in himself that as you might be, and he couldn’t be human and not be jealous of Hemingway at the beginning. And more and more, as the years went by and the discrepancies between their reputations unjustly widened, even even under that provocation, when Hemingway did a good thing, it still gave him pleasure. You know, that capacity to to respond because something is moving, because something is powerful. I don’t think it it ever it ever left him. And he if you’re a writer, even if you, you know, write sort of history books, as I do, he’s got the best advice for writers in the world. Does Passo said about Fitzgerald that on most things he subjects, he considered Fitzgerald kind of silly and immature. But he said as soon as he comes to talk about writing, his mind is hard and clear as a diamond. Everything he says is worth listening to. And I think that’s right. He’s got fabulous tips for writers if you want me to go on it.

Speaker And that if it does, if I thought and this is probably just my mistake, I thought that this jumble behavior of this man and the things that come out of his mouth, that’s one department.

Speaker But when he sits down and talks about writing a paper. No, no writing. So it’s about writing.

Speaker Yes. Yes. I mean, does Pasos went further than that eventually about Fitzgerald because he’d criticized the Crack-Up essays because, you know, my God, this is the 30s. This is the Depression.

Speaker Where are you on the big issues of the day? And he kind of laughed ruefully and said, well, the answer was he was writing the greatest prose of the 30s. That’s what you know, that’s what he was doing. But so he was always smart. He is, sir. Fitzgerald was always smart about writing because he was both a natural writer and one who had to rewrite endlessly. So he thought about it and he said many wonderful things.

Speaker The one that sticks with me is he said, you have to keep going. You have to keep writing, even when it’s a psychological trick to remember why you’re doing it in the first place. And it’s that province, you know, what kind of tricks do we all have to play on ourselves to keep going in the way that really we want to go? He’s got you know, on the one hand, he’s a romantic. He’s one of the last great romantics. On the other hand, he’s a cold, clear eyed little boy, you know, figuring out exactly how this toy works and he can take it apart and put it back together, meaning he’s figured out what he needs to do as a writer and what helps other writers. He’s not someone who’s just, oh, this is what I wrote and don’t I love it. No, he’s analytical. He’s hard. He’s ruthless with himself as a writer.

Speaker And what is this, this third eye that I’m way I’m using? Yes. Scott had a feeling about American history and class. It seemed in his book, often in his work, to just be running there like a consecutive president.

Speaker Yeah. And I wonder if you could help me with that. And and if this ties together, he he more than any writer I’ve ever read, he seems to be the chronicler of the American dream. Yes. Is that sure of love?

Speaker Is there is there a way to.

Speaker Yeah, well, this probably doesn’t go on the documentary, but I just sort of it’s part of what I need to say, which is that the other way that Fitzgerald has helped me so is as a cultural historian, I feel I wrote a whole book that was basically basically an explication of two Fitzgerald essays, The Jazzers and New York. Now I’m writing a book about Hollywood and I feel that Fitzgerald stories about Hollywood and his his letters about Hollywood, that this book is an exploration of that meaning Fitzgerald. Later in his life, he like to joke. He’s the guy who flunked out of Princeton. You know, he’s the guy who was putting all his energy as an undergraduate into the Triangle Club and to, you know, being involved with school plays and who at that point, you know, his goal was Broadway and he was going to write musical comedies. And he did write, of course, a comedy that was a flop.

Speaker But Fitzgerald, more than any other 20th century American writer, gave other writers the idea of writing the great American novel, meaning the novel that got America somehow. In between covers, probably if you took a survey today of people in high school or older outside the academy and said, is there a novel about America, I think you can be pretty sure The Great Gatsby would be on almost everybody’s list. It gives you that feeling he’s writing about America. And that wasn’t he is the great author, the great writer about the American dream. But this wasn’t nebulous, this writing about America. Fitzgerald, who flunked out of Princeton, becomes a serious student of history later in Hollywood when he’s living there in the mid and late 30s as a film writer and living with Sheila Graham, the gossip columnist who was born Lily Sheila and never had a very good education. And Fitzgerald, who’s a born teacher, if a rather strict one, decides he’s going to give her a course, basically in Great Western thought and literature, and they do a lot of history. She had maps and diagrams. He was fascinated by battles, the same part of Fitzgerald that wanted to plot the football moves, loved thinking about Gettysburg as a battle so that underneath that, this is America, the green breast of the new world famous lines from great Gatsby’s clothes underneath. That is a very solid, real knowledge of what American history was about, as well as this wonderful atmospheric quality of picking up all the fashions and the signs that make a period, you know, specifically at a given time and place. I think you could even argue that Fitzgerald is the first novelist who brings history into the regular novel, not the historical novel, but the contemporary to its own time novel, you could say. And those crack up essays that are not just about himself cracking up under alcoholism and depression and Zelda’s crackups in the 30s, they are about America’s crack up. It’s the beginning of new journalism, actually, when journalists say we’re going to write about the current world, but we’re going to put ourselves into the mix, it’s still going to be real. It’s going to really be about the world and it’s going to include history, but it’s going to be this mix of subjective and objective, that mix in which you have history, a kind of atmospheric sense of the times and your own subjectivity, which he did very directly. And the first person Crack-Up essays but was doing in the novel. He brought those things together into the American novel in a way that nobody had ever done before.

Speaker It was great and we’ll get to the American dream no matter what we’re doing. This is really important. What I’m going to ask, because I’m going to get maybe culture follows money Willson’s that you’ve raised. Yes. Remind me of. Yes. And America.

Speaker Fitzgerald says that now I thought I know it’s Fitzgerald says that because Ebony Wilson is saying, you know, you want to go and you want to see all these sites. And Fitzgerald on his very first European trip already, you know, in his early 20s, writes back and says, you know, a lot of it is very uninteresting to him and that what he’s discovering is that America is setting the fashions. And he says culture follows money very soon. New York, not London or Paris, will be the world’s capital of culture, which, of course, proved to be true perhaps within the decade, certainly within a couple of decades. And again, there’s that you know, it was artificial for Fitzgerald to and he wisely didn’t do it to try to buy into the Marxist mode of the 1930s. I would actually say that Fitzgerald was the one real Marxist of the bunch. In this one sense. He always understood that culture was about money, that underlying culture was the people who supported it, the institutions that supported it, the money that supported it. His famous line to Edmund Wilson culture follows money. Therefore, New York and the United States are going to be setting the world’s fashions in everything from the stock market to ladies nylons before the decade is out. And again, you know, he was simply right about that. He was uncanny, actually, in his sense of not just what had gone before, not just what was happening right now. And he has a journalist’s sense of the right now ness of things, but also what’s right over the horizon.

Speaker Even while he is nostalgic for the past, here was this guy who escaped from the Midwest and here was New York.

Speaker Feelings, as we know, were more complicated than that, were more complicated because unlike you or I, he’s from there. You were. Yeah. But go ahead. Just just meaning, you know, there is that famous passage in Gatsby, we were all from the Midwest, Daisy, Tom and I.

Speaker And, you know, I still see the wreaths on the I sit on the windows of the trains and Sumit Avenue and, you know, the respectable homes and the way Gatsby starts with Nick talking about his father, who’s clearly was from the Midwest and has given him that’s that, you know, conservative in the nicest way side of Fitzgerald. What your father told you is always important. Your mother tends to get forgotten in and does Beatrice. But anyway. But that sense of there is wisdom in the past and the Midwest has some of that wisdom for Fitzgerald. And those of us who fled from New Jersey or Connecticut to New York are in very different circumstances.

Speaker But let me ask this. I’ve had this feeling that Nick Carraway at the end of Great Gatsby and if we could place ourselves and we do this, if he goes back to the Midwest, and I my feeling has been and apparently no one agrees with me that that this is not a defeat for Britain, that even in the author’s view, perhaps he’s going back to something that is more honest.

Speaker Yeah. And I and therefore, this is not slinking back to outside of the outside of the circle of light. How do you feel about Nick Caraways going back home at the end of The Great Gatsby?

Speaker I want to get my voice out of you at the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, who’s narrated the whole story of Gatsby and Daisy and Tom. And we’ve by now seen Daisy kill Myrtle and we’ve seen Tom get Gatsby killed. And Nick has seen all these things as well. And he’s in a kind of bleak place.

Speaker And he meets Tom on the street. And Tom, at first, he refuses to shake his hand because partly he doesn’t understand what Tom knew and what he didn’t. But he’s heartsick and he’s realised that Gatsby, who’s from the Midwest as he is, as Tom, in fact, is that Gatsby was worth a whole bunch of them put together that for all his shady business dealings, he had a kind of integrity and he had honor. He was like a knight keeping a vigil outside Daisy’s house. Well, of course, Daisy is inside planning never to see him again or talk to him again and to run off, not even telling her husband that essentially she murdered his girlfriend and they’re going to retreat into their vast carelessness. So Nick is disillusioned with this. He’d wanted to be in New York. He’d wanted to be on Long Island, even in the wrong part of Long Island. He was going into stocks. He was going to be cashing in, but he’s turned 30. His father, his thoughts about his father open the book. He wants to go home. He needs to get away from this world of corruption in real life. Zelda and Scott left the city for Zelda to have their only child, Scottie, because they wanted to be away from all that glamour and loneliness, as Fitzgerald put it.

Speaker And Nick is doing the same. My own feeling is that Nick might stay there back in St. Paul’s or wherever the rest of his life, or he might five years from now, at a different point in his life, come back. I don’t think he is signed and sealed and this is it forever. He’s moving. The novel is a very restless novel. Everybody’s moving around and there are a lot of people who’ve just moved into America, which is another way in which the novel is modern and has set a kind of model for many writers. Afterwards, Fitzgerald loved Henry James and Edith Wharton. But if you go to Edith Wharton and Henry James’s novels written some of them, Wharton’s and James’s, but Pretty Wharton’s written, you know, during Fitzgerald’s lifetime about even New York. What they leave out is they leave out that there are a lot of Jews now here, not just one, as in House of Mirth, but quite a few Jews in finding. Ants running things that even, you know, had a big party in the most fashionable part of Long Island, like the one held by Gatsby, the guest list is full of names that Nick and none of the characters that we see could possibly pronounce. These are immigrants from other parts of the world who have money. So New York is modernity. It’s the place where, as Nick thinks to himself, when he and Gatsby go across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, he thinks, you know, here anything can happen for a while. He doesn’t want to be in a place where anything can happen. He wants to know what’s going to happen. But since everyone’s moved back and forth several times already and people are moving across this landscape, it’s a landscape. It’s as though you couldn’t get a picture of it that would hold because you’d be seeing whole populations, you know, the way the novel ends, which is with the first settlers or the first explorers coming into, you know, they’ve come from somewhere and they’ll go back. America is motion in this vision, motion between classes. And then, of course, punishment slapped on you motions from foreign shores. There are blacks who clearly have come from Harlem and presumably before that bux, as they’re called in Nick’s mind, who are who have a white chauffeur. I mean, this is there in a car as fancy as Gadsby’s. This is class mobility, race, mobility, geographic mobility. Everything is moving. Nick wants to get away from that. But it’s the law of American life as the novel in its style, in everything about us, about it has has told us. So I don’t think we can be sure that he won’t move again.

Speaker And was he’s leaving New York, this polyglot I don’t know if I write this, but he’s retreating to our treating, you know, to a white haven.

Speaker But corruption is part of this mix that becomes unattractive.

Speaker Well, it is what Nick wants to go back to the Midwest, because what he was going to find, there are people who stayed in the Midwest, Gadsby’s from the Midwest, he’s from the Midwest. Tom’s got Midwest connections. In other words, what he’s really getting away from and needs a break from is this motion, this class and geographic mobility. If he were just going I mean, it’s the same American people. They brought you the cast of characters that have in many ways disillusioned him. But so he’s not going back because the people there are better life is simpler because he’ll go back inevitably to the people who are still there, New York.

Speaker The American economy suddenly accelerates in the 20s, Scott is attracted to the light, but he seems almost straight. Is it inevitable that this expat from St. Paul would had to come to the light and. It seems to me varnishing that all these gifts came to bear on, they both ignited at the same time the economy in New York.

Speaker And I’m wondering, could you give me an idea as an idea of that combination and how how big his success was this side of paradise?

Speaker Was it like a rock star?

Speaker How did it go from Fitzgerald had wonderful timing at a number of junctures in his early career. First of all, he was born in the same year that movies were born and the first commercial exhibitions of movies in 1896. Fitzgerald is born. And I think his life in one way or another is going to be intertwined with the movies. He comes to New York. Well, first he comes to Princeton and travels in to New York, but he really comes to New York after the First World War. As New York is taking off, the United States is in a position it’s never been in before in its history, which is there’s been this world war that basically devastated the great European powers while only revving up the United States is what we would call its industrial military complex. So the growth, the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. And New York is the capital in a way that it never will be sense simply because Los Angeles is really just beginning to get off the ground. Chicago is still a very distant second. Philadelphia, Boston, they’re fading. New York is really it. It’s where foreign artists want to come. Jazz is being born, you know, which is obviously perhaps the single most valuable, unique cultural contribution this country has made to the world. All these things are happening, focused in New York. And Fitzgerald gets there, as he probably would have wanted to do, even fifteen or forty years sooner because he’s a writer. And that’s where publishing is has always been, but has been increasingly centralized in New York from the mid 19th century on anyway. But he arrives at a time when, as you know, as he has, he says, we were the top nation. You know, who could tell us anymore what was fashionable and what was fun? And New York was the place that decided what was fashionable and what was fun. So Fitzgerald, who had a kind of take off personality in that he would pick up on the atmosphere, he would hear the cues, he would go with the bit of dialogue he overheard in the next room and make something of it, a tactic he does wonderfully in some of his fiction as well. Anyway, with that extraordinary sensitive equipment, he comes along at the time when movies are born, the media are born, the United States is taking off, and he works at the head of it and he arrives in New York and he has a novel. He wants to publish This Side of paradise, which, well, a charming novel is probably not one that anyone would say, well, if you really want the best of Fitzgerald and you can only read one book, you would not pick that book. But it is impudent and fresh and irreverent, it seemed to me. Maxwell Perkins, as as many people know, he had to fight basically the whole board of Scribner’s, and he eventually threatened to resign because his idea was, if you’re going to turn away talent like this, what in the world am I doing here? A wonderful story about Maxwell Perkins. Anyway, you know, the book was seen as daring. Now, it really wasn’t daring formally. It was a kind of loose, baggy novel. Basically, he was going to make tremendous strides, you know, within five years with Great Gatsby, it was subject matter. Here’s this book in which young people, teenagers are salesmen of their own personalities. And it’s it’s the world of some of these teen comedies of today, you know, full of malice and ambition and and sex, you know, hardly the way the older generation wanted to see them. And Fitzgerald was a lovely looking man, and he was married to a gorgeous and charming and flagrantly outrageous young woman. Zelda Zelda was nineteen. Fitzgerald was just 23 or 24, meaning they were really young. He had a book that was a bestseller and he clicked. It isn’t. There were bigger bestsellers that year, it wasn’t because the book was just off the stratosphere in terms of publishing lists, it was because everyone was convinced that this was really the next new thing and because there was already a very sophisticated publicity culture in this city and elsewhere, but particularly in New York here, where the ideal spokesman for the young, they were gorgeous, they were wild, they did crazy thing things. They jumped in fountains when they’d had too much to drink, they took off their clothes, which luckily didn’t make the the the public press. One writer describes meeting Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and he’s been drinking too much. This is the 20s. This is prohibition. This is rotgut. Jan, people are not only drinking too much, but they’re drinking poison. So the effects are often bad anyway. You know, he’s kind of coming out of an alcoholic haze and he looks up and he said in the two most beautiful people in the world were coming towards me, smiling. You know, this was one of the great moments of this particular man’s life. And that impression can never be this much fun. Can there be this much style? And sometimes it takes outsiders to personify a city or a place to itself. So they became the personification of this new, glamorous, glittering, daring sort of off the charts of respectability, New York that was coming into into being.