Ward Just

Speaker Would could you tell me you’ve been a journalist and you are a journalist and you’ve been a novelist, and I’m wondering in just in your own experience, what part about what marked the boundary, if there was one for you, did you did you was there was there a time or was there a process and an evolution where you thought, oh, I actually have not worked as a journalist for 30 years.

Speaker And the demarcation line, it was called the war in Vietnam. And I came back from the war in Vietnam after 18 months over there, and I had no desire to write journalism anymore. I hacked around with it for another year. I covered the campaign, wrote editorials for a minute and a half, but I had no fact I had lost its fascination for me. I was never tremendously interested in in the first place. Journalism for me was always a kind of a byway until I got into fiction. That’s always what I wanted to do. So it was a I was at it for 10 years. I loved it while I was doing it. But it it reached an end point and the end point was the was the war.

Speaker And in the I’ve read about your experience in the war and read that your whole first book, but.

Speaker Was it the the conundrum of what you lived through that made you think what I thought I thought particularly of the war, if it if it isn’t a disastrous love affair, the most intense of human experience is a war. Fact is unequal to that challenge. Now you can write wonderful journalism about the war and many people have and are going to go on doing it. It’s that at some point, if you’re if you’re just if if you’re trying to get beyond what I always thought of as sort of the horizon line of things, you’re going to have to depend on your imagination to do it. And that’s what I that’s what I very badly wanted to do.

Speaker And so when I was 35 years old, a little bit late in the day, I have to say, but nonetheless, I sort of abandoned the world of fact or it abandoned me when one of the other.

Speaker And Wendy, even though we’ve talked about this. Well, let me ask one other question just along that line. When did you first.

Speaker I think or maybe even know in your life that you were a writer. Very early.

Speaker 12, age 12, 13, 14.

Speaker I was the kid in the class who could always write a story.

Speaker Sometimes these stories were on paper. Sometimes they were acted out of the imagination. When I was in the fourth grade, I used to entertain the class, as it were during the we sort of had a break period. And I tell stories most mostly they were ghost stories. But I love telling stories either verbally telling stories, are telling stories that were written down. And I have been writing stories since I was 11 years old. I think at one point when I was in college, I had a shoebox full of rejection slips and I mean literally a shoebox. Maybe there were 80 or 90 of them in there from everywhere in the Atlantic and Harper’s and The New Yorker in The New Republic and all sorts of magazines, true magazine, men’s magazines, whatever.

Speaker I think if I’m remembering from what you told me only yesterday, but for me it’s a bit of a stretch, but it was about that time you first encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald, but maybe you were a little younger as a freshman thought and with all the info you can get me. How did what was your first encounter with F. Scott and your first impression?

Speaker I was 16 years old. A year.

Speaker Sorry. Let’s just start again to get my voice.

Speaker I was 16 years old. The year was 1951. My family had moved from one town to another, from Waukegan, Illinois, to Lake Forest, Illinois, Waukegan, Illinois, as a mill town in northern Illinois. And Lake Forest isn’t a mill town. It’s on the North Shore, frequently mentioned and F. Scott Fitzgerald books. Even at age 16, I was taken I was caught up with what seemed to me to be an entirely different life indeed from the life in the mill town. And my mother, I think, believing that I might need some instruction, gave me a copy of Scribner’s edition of the collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I can see it to this day. It’s got to be black. It’s got blackboards on it. And I started to devour those stories and. I think they were the they were the first things that I had that I had read up to that time. That spoke directly to me. Fitzgerald was writing about a world that I was just encountering myself. That world of the of the extremely rich. And as he’s pointed out in story after story, the sense of superiority that they felt to everybody else. I think. That my mother gave me those stories with the idea that it might be a little bit of a guide through that swamp or underbrush or whatever, you wanted to talk about it. And in many ways, in many ways, they were it was just about the same time I discovered Ernest Hemingway. There were two differences between the two. For me, the one was that at age 16, I could never imagine myself going to war, shooting a wild beast, catching a marlin on the end of a 50 yard line. But I could very easily imagine myself and indeed was at a debutante party in Lake Forest, Illinois, with everybody dancing like this westerland and playing the music over there and amazing stories taking place on the sidelines. Fitzgerald’s descriptions of all this, whether it’s in in in the rich boy, whether it’s in particularly Gatsby or just exquisite. And as I as I read them, I had a sense, ah, this is the pentimento of of a certain kind of life that I was leading up to a point, I have to say. But I’d never I’d never encountered a writer in my adult life. I mean, if you wanted to say 16, isn’t it as an adult, the age of reason anyway, I suppose who whose material was so close to my to my life. And it was a kind of it was a kind of revelation, because any life when you leave, when you’re late, when you’re leaving, it doesn’t seem especially interesting because it’s your life. It’s six years until you go to a party in Westerland and is playing. So what you read F. Scott Fitzgerald and you realize that there is layers of drama underlying everything to do with the party and the older people at the party and the younger people and the love affairs this way and that way.

Speaker And so it was a revelation to me in that process. It seems to me that Scott Fitzgerald had an uncanny. Ear for the undercurrent of American ambition and class that we I don’t know, even to this day, I almost want to say, well, I know we don’t have classes in American society.

Speaker We’ve been taught that. What is it about? What’s your what was your reaction then? But I want to say more generally ask, what is it about Scott and class in America?

Speaker Does anyone know what he did to Henry James is is close. I think Scott Fitzgerald is the great explicated of American capitalism, the gangster side of American capitalism. Gatsby was a gangster. And particularly at the time that Fitzgerald was growing up, although in certain respects not too terribly different today, there was this gangster side to capitalism. I think Fitzgerald saw that better than anybody. He’s there’s a passage in Tender is the Night, about halfway through where he talks about Nicole Diver.

Speaker And and it’s a passage that begins for her, for her.

Speaker Meiners toiled 12 hours a day for her Mexican peasants, drilled Chiclet out of the trees for her. Farmers in the upper Midwest toiled until well after sundown to bring the wheat in. They called over being a nickel warren as their maiden name, being the heiress of an extremely large lake forest fortune. I think it’s a great thing. The way Fitzgerald takes that and personalizes it personalizes it to her. This is fortune just didn’t arise. It just didn’t, you know, appear in a bank account somewhere. People were working their hands to the bone, making this for her family. And it’s then handed down to her in The Great Gatsby the financial details that Fitzgerald gets into. At the end of the book, Nick Carraway gets a telephone call from somebody who thinks that Gatsby is still alive. And the voice over the phone says young so-and-so was caught the other day handing the securities across the teller’s desk. Well, you say, what does that mean? Well, what that means is that Gatsby was dealing in stolen stolen securities. What is what it means? Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the 19 19 World Series and played with the faith of 50 million people.

Speaker But on the other hand, it seems to me there’s The Gatsby.

Speaker The gangster had a higher place in Fitzgerald’s esteem than Buchanan up the old money there. So there was even a can you confirm that Buchanan is a thug?

Speaker He’s stupid.

Speaker I’m sorry. You want to stop you and just say Tommy Cannon and great guest. Yes. Just identify our chairman right on.

Speaker Tom Buchanan. And The Great Gatsby is a thug. He’s stupid, but more than stupid. He’s ignorant. Tom Buchanan, who came down from Lake Forest with a string of polo ponies as the way the is the way the line goes. Fitzgerald has no interest in the Tom Buchanans of this world. They’re good for minor characters. They’re good for his furnishings. The people he really has an interest in are the strivers. Gatsby, who begins at the side of a man wonderfully named Cody, who I remember as a kind of a riverboat character, Cody, the name, and immediately summoning up Buffalo Bill Cody as a kind of a roughneck and so forth. That’s where Jay Gatsby begins to transform himself to Jay Gatsby, someone like that who has this huge romantic conception of American life, very much like Fitzgerald at the Fitzgerald’s creation.

Speaker After all, plainly, there’s an affinity between the two of them.

Speaker But there’s also the gangster side, Scott himself.

Speaker Confusingly, but to me, a very touching way was just viscerally attracted to the light of the old money that he saw through, you know, just was fascinated by it and drawn to it the way he was the litter of New York. Yes.

Speaker Would you taste that maybe more profoundly than you would think with that apparent paradox as a fresh thought, the the the forms of the rich, what they kept in their wallets, what they had on the what the pictures on the walls, the automobiles that they drove, the size of their houses, the horses that they rode, the books in the bookcases, if any. These are these furnishings. If he understood, he understood, understood better than as well as any American writer how to make a life out of those. But more than that, more than than just a catalog of of of trade names, which he didn’t go in much for. Interestingly, he seemed to see, again, the pentimento behind them. There’s there’s the there’s the portrait on the wall and there’s the pentimento of the portrait. That’s what Fitzgerald saw. He saw the shadow. Joseph Conrad talks about it, a shadow line that divides youth and maturity. It was one of Fitzgerald’s great one of his great talents that he seemed to see that Shadowline in all of his characters, the line that divides youth from maturity. And some people never seem to be able to cross that line. Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby being the best example. He’s an eternal bully adolescent is what he is, and a portrait that is beautifully drawn of somebody who’s an absolute son of a bitch who has to be said.

Speaker And Mr. Wilson in the Valley of Ashes, yes, who is what is Mr. Wilson represent and what is the Valley of Ashes again, putting us in the term of that context?

Speaker I’m sorry, that particular novel, if you would, the Valley of Ashes in the in in The Great Gatsby always represented to me a kind of purgatory. It’s the place where you had to go through to get from Manhattan to up to the south, to the north shore of Long Island and all of its great houses. Mr. Wilson, I think Fitzgerald was probably his most memorable portrait of what you might call a member of the American proletariat, a man who’s being deceived by his wife, a man who is.

Speaker Beaten down by the world, and at the end, he picks up a gun and he kills Gatsby as a kind of a finally his cup ran over Wilson’s Cup, ran over elsewhere in one of the novels I can’t remember which he talks about, you have two kinds of rebellion, and it can be the fire of a revolutionary or the sullen resentment of a peasant.

Speaker Wilson is the sullen resiled resentment of the peasant who at that at that extreme moment picks up a revolver and says, I’m going to set things right.

Speaker And the strange thing to me is that Scott Fitzgerald was both the smoldering peasant and unlike what and like Gatsby, he was viscerally drawn. And we got a little off of this, I think, before he was viscerally drawn to the flame, you know, like the hammer.

Speaker No old money yet. And I thought that was misread tremendously about him because I think his lifestyle became and I don’t know, we’ll get into why he was disowned by the academy. But what about that paradox is a true one?

Speaker Well, I think it is true. I, I think it has a special. Poignance in the Midwest at the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was growing up in the Midwest, a town like Minneapolis, St. Paul, where an old and old family, an old moneyed family, could be, could be, could be reckoned in days. Call it to generations, a generation and a half. It was really you just had to wait a little bit of time and you can enter that aristocracy yourself. Money was the ticket, although not the only ticket in the East, it was a little bit more difficult. Maybe maybe an old family that had money for three generations in the Midwest at that time. It was to maybe a generation and a half. I think to use his well wrought image, you could press your nose a little closer to the glass of the country club in the Midwest than you can in the East. It was still out of reach for you, but it was only a little bit out of reach in the East. Yet it was not that I mean, that to to enter that world was really not attainable for you. Fitzgerald Great. You know, several great themes. One of his great themes, I think, is the American Stryver, the one who won’t quit, will just keep clawing until he or it has to be said she gets what ever it is that they that they won.

Speaker He happened to choose as his venue for his stories and novels, The Rich.

Speaker He could as easily have chosen a great writer or a great artist or to become a superb brain surgeon or to become an even more superb shoemaker. He didn’t choose that.

Speaker He chose the the great thing that America was all about, specifically in the 1920s money. And what went with money, a certain kind of class money could buy you class in the United States will take you a minute, but you could do that. Can’t do that in Europe. I mean, that’s you know, some of those European families are eight or nine hundred years old. Nothing is going to buy you into that. That sort of stands alone. Not quite so true in the United States.

Speaker And he knew that. But he also wanted. Yeah, he wanted. He wanted it. This guy wanted. Did he not? I don’t think it was loading this, but but he wanted acceptance and attention. It was almost part of his it was his part of his temperament it seems.

Speaker Yeah. It’s the yes.

Speaker Excuse me. He was the Cuban social critic all wrapped together. Drew is it’s the.

Speaker Yes, all of that’s true. But and it’s it’s just symbolized so beautifully by the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that Jay Gatsby, staring across the sound sort of little finger of water can see. And that’s the promise of American life, that that green light is there and had a wonderful passage towards the end. You know, if we leap harder and, you know, try harder and jump higher and leap farther one day, that’s going to be ours. It’s an exceptionally romantic concept of things. But with F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is always a shadow that that lies over that that conception of of of of all you have to do is jump higher and and leap farther and try harder. And what does that do to you inside when you do that? You spent your life doing that. What do you end up as other than rich?

Speaker Limits of the brain that show 24 minutes. OK, good, let me set the frame. It seems to me that Scott understood or I don’t know if he understood that it was sort of you begin to understand with Scott that the dream is quicksilver. If it’s if it’s if it’s attainable, it’s going to vanish or backfire or something’s going to happen. Wondering about that. He seemed to have a feeling.

Speaker For the effort, not effort, for the what am I trying to say? The thinness of the great, you know, the dreaming was more important than the dream that I look at the dance, not the dancer.

Speaker Yes, I think that’s true, that it’s some part of him. He knew surely that these these things end up as ashes in your in your in your hand. But the but the dream itself, the quest itself could consume a man’s life. And in many ways it consumed it consumed Fitzgerald’s writing life. And as I say, I do think if you look at it in the context of of its time and of America’s this great citadel of capitalism where nobody writes about rich people, very, very few people write about rich people, the exploiters, as opposed to the exploited. It was a it was a grand enterprise. He was involved and I think was there.

Speaker Do you think in Scott’s work or in his vision feeling of America that came through his work, were you limited?

Speaker If you were not, could people from the alleged valley of the middle class of America or below have a chance for.

Speaker Hmm, do you think if there are elements of the dream, not just the.

Speaker Yeah, I it’s that’s an interesting thought. I have a thought that. Fitzgerald would have said. The cards are so stacked against working class and even middle class people that that it took a mighty struggle to to arrive at the at the top of the heap, as it were.

Speaker In that sense, there was something almost read about about about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Remember Nick Carraway, the narrator, and in The Great Gatsby came from roots a little bit grander than Fitzgerald. But after all, Fitzgerald had been related to Francis Scott Key, the of the composer of of of our national anthem. His own family was always kind of on the edge of the somewhere between the middle class and the lower middle class. You mentioned you in the Midwest. You measure these things by if you when you’re talking on these subjects, you measured by millimeters, I think. Yes, I think that he that he was very Mordente about the possibility of of an egalitarian American society, that we’d organized ourselves in such a way that that was that that was not in the cards.

Speaker I think that’s what he’d say.

Speaker I have one thing I’ve got to ask, and then we’re going to change mags, or I should say that could you just first only possibly believe in something else? What is pentimento mean?

Speaker Pentimento is is there’s a painting and there’s often an underpinning to the painting that that the artist has painted over. And if you look at the painting in a certain way, you can sometimes see the pentimento under, under underneath it. Lillian Hellman popularized the phrase, popularized the word in a memoir that that she wrote what she called pentimento. And it means that the under the painting, the painting behind the painting, I think that all of well, all of any great writer is between the lines. It’s between the lines of and the shadow somehow that the lines cast. And I think that’s the case with him. When we were talking about capitalism and the romance of money and the strivers, I think in Fitz-Gerald this represents another form of Eros that these are really acts of love. Gatsby in his in his quest for the the house and the shirts in the automobiles and the servants and all the rest of it. This is a kind of love. And and a lot of Fitzgerald’s characters are like that. They’re striving after these things as a kind of expression of love in the larger sense. That’s really what F. Scott Fitzgerald books are about. They’re about the forms of love. I think everything from from lust to a kind of agreed to any of the seven deadly sins that you want to mention yet not in Fitzgerald. They all come out as expressions of a kind of love, I think.

Speaker But is that or not, I’m not sure. Or he acquired goods, the big ticket items or even what customers or big ticket items? They’re not those are not gold objects of love that are that are admired by Scott or are they? I don’t know.

Speaker Well, I think I I think, again, that’s for Fitz-Gerald. It’s the girl in the bedroom. That’s the end point.

Speaker The the great the great quest is the seduction. The girl in the bedroom is that’s that’s the that’s the period at the end of the sentence. But there’s a it’s a very long running sentence and it’s the sentence that captivates him I think. And in Gatsby, the it’s the making of the money. How you go about that, that results in the automobiles, the furs, the shirts, all of these things that he acquires, the mansions, the automobiles, and they come as a natural consequence of the devotion that he has put in to recreating himself, recreating, recreating himself and finding the wherewithal to buy all these things. It’s the wherewithal as opposed to as opposed to the end product, I think.

Speaker Speaking of all of that above, can you tell me in a kind of proper form, who was Ginevra King and what did she represent, Scott?

Speaker I have never Ginevra King represented the absolute top rung of Lake Forest Society one 50 years ago when I was hanging out in in Lake Forest. Her name was still mentioned from time to time as a as a girlfriend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who threw her, threw him over. I don’t know the details of the romance. I don’t know why she threw him over or indeed how much of this had become a myth by them by the middle of the 19th. By the middle of the 1950s. But she was she was one of those people that were occasionally talked about as a very romantic character from the 1920s, gorgeous woman who apparently.

Speaker Gorgeous woman, it would seem, I don’t want to push you into a definition you don’t know, but what is Ginevra King or representative of what Scott would have considered in addition to Van Buren of money?

Speaker Oh, I think he has that as a fresh thought. I think he. Yes, Ginevra King. Represented not only beauty and brains, I believe, but also the security of that old North Shore Chicago money and my say, the 1920s, some of that money might have been even as old as three generations. No, not too many. Not too much. Not not every family by any means. But a lot of them had made their money back in the early part of the Gilded Age. And so that seemed to be Scott Fitzgerald’s definition was three generations of wealth made oil money in America. And it was true in the 1920s. That’s a true fact.

Speaker Isn’t it? Well, I’m like, oh, my God, oh, my thing anymore.

Speaker But let me ask you, I want to get this in about gas people for again. We don’t have this gets a little bit of housekeeping information for us, but very important and has to do with money.

Speaker Why did Scott and Zelda decide to move to Paris or to France? I should say at the end is circa 1920. At the end of what? I’m sorry. Well, before, because about 20. I think so, yeah. Before the crash. What what what was behind that decision, as you understand?

Speaker I think there was a tremendous pull artistically. The many of the expatriates, I think had two motives.

Speaker Motive A was that it was a lot cheaper to live in Europe than it was in the United States. Motive B was that as they then divided up the world, you could leave the American Babbitts at home. Remember, Prohibition was still alive and very much alive in the United States. It certainly wasn’t in Europe. I think Europe represented to them third thing a lot more fun than what was going on in the United States at the time, even in Long Island or the north shore of Chicago or the north shore of Boston on the north shores that we have in the United States of there in the city of New York. It was a it was a freer, much livelier and in the contemporary sense, a much sexier venue. Right. Than in the United States. And for all those reasons, the Fitzgeralds, along with a lot of other people, were were attracted to Europe.

Speaker I thought you told me or until the Catholic made a distinction which is in contradiction.

Speaker You just said this in a way when Scott got to power, when they moved to Paris or Italy, to France, and he wrote The Great Gatsby in a relatively short, very short amount of time in his that he wasn’t writing as an expatriate. He was simply writing. Well, I don’t know already that my book would be Refugee, Fiscal and Social Access. That is that true? I think I’m going to shut up.

Speaker Yeah, I think that is true of Fitzgerald was not living in France as an expatriate in the sense that Ernest Hemingway was an expatriate. Ernest Hemingway was a genuine expatriate. Fitzgerald No. He simply brought his material with him from Long Island to to Paris. They didn’t really live there for very long. I think it was in the vicinity of three years or something like that. They never entered in my understanding. They never entered into French life in the way that, say, for example, Hemingway did. And a lot of the expatriates that were sort of in Hemingway’s circle, he he he went there because it was the exciting place to be. It was cheap and it was sort of sexy being in Europe at that time.

Speaker That’s why I think he went there.

Speaker And can you tell me about the process that he brought Gatsby? I mean, he was by then, of course, with Scribner’s and Max Perkins. Right. And this side of paradise was a huge hit. And I guess his second novel, less so. But he was now a big name. Yeah. And I’m just wondering what is was was just a gestation period of Gatsby long. Short. Can you help me on that?

Speaker From his perch, it was it was like, let me keep it out of here. It was relatively short, the gestation period of The Great Gatsby. But I think there are times in a writer’s life when the idea arrives fully blown in your mind and all of a sudden it just it just comes out in a great rush. And if your normal gestation period for a novel is three years, all of a sudden you find yourself writing one in two or you find yourself writing one in a year or under a year, that somehow you are perfectly at that moment in your life, you are perfectly married up with this subject that has arrived. These processes are very mysterious. And you, I believe and you can’t lay it to one thing and another one thing is, is the one thing that you can say is that whatever it was about the life in Europe, it it provided some sort of provided some some sort of framework in which he could write every day, write very well. And at the end of whatever time period it was, I forgot. Now all of a sudden you arrive with The Great Gatsby, which is as close to a perfect novel as our as our literature has. These are very mysterious things, and you can’t pin it down to one thing or another. But all of a sudden there’s a point where you’re just writing with tremendous speed and and fluency and you seem to have you seem to have everything in your mind at once. And I think that’s what happened to him with with Gatsby.

Speaker Why is Gadsby, in your view, why, why, why isn’t this all in some many people’s opinion about an almost or maybe the perfect American novel? It seems to answer some epic need that we have or some quite.

Speaker Well, it it brought a lot of threads of American life together in a very short space. The Great Gatsby, in terms of its length, is scarcely more than a novella. It’s not very long. It’s got a tremendous amount that’s packed into it. And I think I think certainly for a writer, as you look, as you read through it, you can’t think of anything you would change. You can’t think of anything you would add, and you can’t think of anything that you that you’d take away. The opening is is is is like a diamond. The ending is like a diamond. And everything in the middle is like a diamond. By which I mean it’s it’s beautifully shaped and it’s hard rock stuff there in a soft spot in my judgment. There isn’t a soft spot in the in the book and all of this done on a very short trajectory. It’s it’s as I say, it’s not a very long novel, but it’s got a tremendous amount to it with lots of characters, which is a very, very difficult thing to do technically. In a short book of characters, beautifully drawn, vividly drawn in a few lines. I mean, just one example to me. One of the most interesting characters in Gatsby has always been Jordan Baker. Jordan Baker is Nick Carraway is sort of inamorata.

Speaker And eventually it breaks up about page 15 or 20, Fitz Fitzgerald causus carroway to say to himself, I had heard an unpleasant story about her once. I’d forgotten what it was. 20 pages after that, you learn that she’s a professional golfer, she’s sort of at the top of the PGA Tour women’s division at the time, and there was a story that she had moved her ball, improved her life, in other words.

Speaker But then the caddy retracted the story. Her partner said, well, perhaps she was mistaken. It dropped out of sight. It never got into the newspapers. But the story sort of sort of got around. Among friends, Fitzgerald’s comment on this is something like. Dishonesty in a woman is something you almost always forgive. And with that, Jordan Baker and her and her lying on the golf course I know just comes into sort of full relief. She’s only on stage for four or five pages of the damn book, maybe maybe six pages, but not much more than that. But she’s a very, very vivid character indeed. And these people are all through Clip’s Springer, Meyer Wolfsheim, their mother, four or five of them who are unforgettable in a very short space of time, Scott, seem to have an uncanny ear.

Speaker For the sort of tidal flow as new as the tidal wave was of our American, our recent Communicare only American history, it’s a kind of this you used the word pentimento scholar. I know where we’ve talked to rigidly and uses the word kind of a parallax view. It’s always something running below the surface. But is that something in an uncanny ear for.

Speaker Oh, yeah. It’s an image shot. Yeah, I think. I think with Fitzgerald’s language, particularly in his day, in his dialogue, there’s a kind of an undertow. There’s a line in again from Gatsby where a love affair has fallen apart and somebody said they didn’t like each other. And Fitzgerald’s comment about them or if this joke caused us to have someone say Carroway, I think in any case, it was just personal. Yeah. That that one line just says volumes about the way people deceived themselves and deceive others and sort of go through life and go through life and in a in a sort of cocoon, I think, of their own making the thing that, you know, as you go into and try to pass these novels that you that one tends to forget. And it can be stated in a simple sentence, Fitzgerald wrote beautifully. He had a exquisite command of metaphor and and simile that just was just it was it was it was effortless, effortless. The green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock, the when Gatsby is showing showing Daisy his wardrobe and the shirts tumble out under the under the bed one shirt after another. And he names the colors of the shirts. Fitzgerald doesn’t name there. They aren’t obvious colors. Therefore, I don’t I can’t even remember what they are now. But they’re not so simple as red, blue and white shirts. They’re it’s it’s a much more elaborate thing. And at the end of it, God, you think that you are sort of in some South African jungle looking at the colors that you’d see. They’re exotic.

Speaker In other words, you use the word effortless. And I’ve sort of now that we’ve been here, Catherine, I’ve waded through and maybe too many manuscripts.

Speaker This guy looked I mean, he I got I’ve also been quite struck me correctly on this about that, that he was a catch phrase as he was not only one of the great writers, but one of the great writers of America. Yes.

Speaker And I wonder, what is your sense about as a writer of great accomplishment yourself, was Scott defining the word in any way you want to a natural way?

Speaker Yes.

Speaker Of all that, it doesn’t mean that he works less hard than other writers who don’t have perhaps quite the talent. It means that.

Speaker Things will occur to him in a kind of natural way that would maybe take lesser writers a little bit longer to get to roughly the same place. F. Scott Fitzgerald, I think, was not content with the thought that just flew into his head. You’d want to revise that, wouldn’t you? You’d want to keep turning the sentence and turning it and turning it and turning it until you had it. Until you had exactly what it was that that you wanted. That’s where the hard work, the hard work comes in, is taking B plus or A minus material and making it a material when you know perfectly well that you can get by with with the with the B plus or minus material. Some of the stories in the short in the collected short stories were written in an evening, probably with a glass at his side of three or four thousand word story. When he was broke. He used to turn these things out in one evening or over a weekend. Many of these stories are quite good. They’re not at the level of his very best stories, which required, I think, a bit more wit where he he paid more attention, worked harder at him because he realized he had a heavier you know, he had a heavier thing in his hands, I believe.

Speaker Waiting for that door and just remembering our kitchen time, particularly this question, did do you think that do you think somehow his churning out of short stories and sometimes articles with the fiscal clock running constantly in his mind, do you think that hurt him in any way as a writer?

Speaker I do think it hurt him.

Speaker I am quick to add I’m sorry, I want to just start again, please, but if you could if you could help me with the subject.

Speaker The.

Speaker The haste with which he was obliged to write short stories, articles, bits and pieces of memoir, particularly in the 1930s, didn’t do much good because, among other things, I think it exhausted him.

Speaker He talked about himself at the end of his life as a kind of a bankrupt that he had drawn on his account and drawn and drawn and drawn. And now he was overdrawn.

Speaker Tremendously hard work. Writing, writing can do that to you.

Speaker Sometimes you just get overdrawn. He overdrawn and your moral account has become depleted. And yet the fragment that exists of the last tycoon, his last uncompleted novel, which he was working on at the time of his death, has got some passages of great beauty. And to the extent that we can see where he was going with it is a fully coherent piece of work. And he was totally broken down at that point.

Speaker Can you tell me I’m shifting from the from the great rush of The Great Gatsby and they created this mysterious creative process. Could you tell me in a.

Speaker What is your understanding of the formative period of tender is the night it went on forever?

Speaker Actually, it was about seven years, I think. Yes. Can you tell me as a fresh thought?

Speaker I think I know what my understanding I think is probably the common understanding was that Zelda had her breakdown at that point. They’d moved back to the United States in really uncertain circumstances. Gatsby did not make him the sort of money that I think he thought that he that he thought he would get.

Speaker He was scrambling all the time for money and and at the same time had undertaken in many ways the most ambitious of his books. A Tender is the night. Tender is the night, as you look at it now is formally a kind of mess. It’s a book in which I believe that the the the parts are greater than the whole. It’s not coherent as a novel. There’s stuff in there, I believe, that shouldn’t be in there. There’s stuff that isn’t there that probably ought to be their book probably should have been a tad shorter than it is. I think you look through the composition of of that novel and. It’s a very troubled voice that’s behind that book. I think I don’t it’s not my place and I’m not interested in doing so trashing any of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are passages in there that are marvelous. It’s it’s the form. It’s the formal as a formal novel. It’s just it’s not put together in exactly the right way. It needs more carpentry. The everything that’s there is fine. It’s in some of it. It’s in the wrong place. And and and I think presented not quite the way it ought to be.

Speaker Can you tell me again and maybe that’s form if I can get my question.

Speaker The weather was tender easily, right? Not that anything in wrong, but just in terms of sheer and what’s your impression of what’s your own impression of the novel?

Speaker Scott Fitzgerald’s family had broken apart. Zelda was in an institution, his daughter was still very young, he had terrible money problems because of The Great Gatsby, had not brought him the sort of sort of cash return that he wanted. He was drinking like crazy. And so they came back from Europe and he began work on Tender’s the night. It took him an unconscionably long time to finish. And you can see that I believe in the architecture of the book. It’s like a mansion with these beautiful rooms in it, and you have the mansion is kind of misshapen. There are here’s a three floors and over there is four floors. And over there is a basement that’s barely furnished individually. Each room individually is fabulous. The house itself is. Almost ramshackle. And I believe that’s the problem with tender is the night its composition. Is incoherent. Things are in there that should be out there should be other things that are that are present that that are not there. I always thought of it as a book where the parts are much greater than the whole. Interestingly, this is no reason not to read the book, because what’s there is so good that you say to yourself, my God, if he’d just taken six months on plumbing, just plumbing, getting, you know, the parts to fit together.

Speaker But.

Speaker He had to get the book out, and I think maybe he had worn himself so in the writing that he said, I can’t work on this thing anymore. It’s got to be published the way it is. And so it was to much less acclaim than Great Gatsby and much less money also.

Speaker What are the Crack-Up? What what was the crackdown essay in kindergarten terms? I know it’s a series of essays. And why did it create such a stir?

Speaker And help me with all the interviews. Look, the Crack-Up.

Speaker I’m sorry. Wait, let me give me some.

Speaker The Crack-Up created such a stir because people thought that they had laid that Fitzgerald had laid himself far to bare. People believed that it was a kind of extended whine, I don’t agree with that, but a lot of people felt that and I said, why is he doing this to himself? The crack up is a series of essays and little pursues, at least in its paperback version. It can be summed up by one of the most remarkable of his sentences that sits there, stands alone. And the sentence, it hasn’t given any context. You don’t know when it was written, but it reads as follows. Pull your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and let me tell you a story.

Speaker It’s a precipice book, the the crackup and the reader looking at it wonders when the leg of that chair is going to slip over the edge of the precipice and the writer is going to disappear. It’s a line by line and piece by piece. It’s an amazing piece of work.

Speaker Probably his reputation would have been helped if he’d withheld 25 percent of the material, but he didn’t want to do that. And that’s what we have.

Speaker We’ve got the cracking of essays.

Speaker Ah, but I’d like to just try one more crack at it, which is a risk in the original form, what were the Crack-Up essays, meaning just in terms of a series of articles. But why do you think?

Speaker In that we’re so used to confessional television now and confessional writing, I was completely shocked at the amount of everyone was horrified by these things and what seemed quite mild, an admirable man who helped me with that.

Speaker In today’s terms. The Crack-Up is a kind of a mild confessional because we hear so much of this nonsense on television and elsewhere, when the stories were published and when the essays were published in Esquire in the middle 1930s, they were sort of electrifying. They seemed to readers and to many of Fitzgerald’s critics as of quite unseemly bearing of his soul, the sort of thing that a writer should not do. He was letting people too far into his heart.

Speaker More than that, people thought they were whiny, complaining.

Speaker Whining and complaining, and so they were not received with any tremendous enthusiasm except by the editors of Esquire. Why did he do this? I think he probably did it. The proximate cause with the proximate reason would be money.

Speaker But the second reason is sometimes things arrive in a writer’s mind and they seem to use powerful enough that you cannot resist writing them down and sending them to a magazine or a book publisher and seeing and having them published. It becomes almost a kind of obsession with you. And my guess is that something of that sort happened with Fitzgerald. He was he was feeling, you should pardon the expression, he was feeling his pain so deeply.

Speaker He was so in another phrase of his nervously broken down, struggling terribly with drinking that these stories arrived and he wrote them down and collected the checks. And at that point, he needed every dime he could get. I think it was a kind of compulsion.