Maureen Howard

Maureen Howard: Because I come from Bridgeport, Connecticut, an industrial city, I think that the American dream for me was never pastoral. It was much more a dream of something, I believe. And I didn’t think it was a dream that people could get along together. It was a city full of immigrants, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Irish and a Jewish section with markets and so forth. And I really have a feeling that it made an imprint on me, that we were almost living it for a while. And then, of course, it broke down. You might think what we’re usually talking about is the idea of being able on a personal level, to achieve to become whatever we want to become. And I I suppose I feel that my dear old Bridgeport at that time held out great promise of that sort. In terms of education and career and family, it was quite different, I think then the desire for pastoral.

Interviewer: So what you hear the words the American dream. Can you tell me some of the pictures that come to mind of the ideas? Are your pictures. Do you think at all? Pictures sometimes.

Maureen Howard: Yeah, I think of something. I would presume you might feel very corny. Now I think of something like a Memorial Day parade with everybody marching, you know, from the Polish church, their band and the Germans and they the Irish flaunting themselves as we tend to do. And the the Italian school, Saint Rae Fields and all of that in the sense of the show of the parade, at least, which, of course, is only the flamboyant surface, all of it momentarily working and having a joy to it.

Interviewer: Being the dream. Yes, of course. Does the American dream still have hold currency today?

Maureen Howard: Yes, I think it does. Obviously it does. It has for all the people who are still arriving. I mean, we’re still we were a country of immigrants. We are a country of immigrants.

Interviewer: The American dream only for immigrants. And if you’re born here, if your family’s three or four generations, there is no American dream.

Maureen Howard: I think it’s fresher, a lot fresher for people who have recently come here. I think that it is it would be odd to embrace it wholeheartedly if you understand the past of your own city, your own family. I mean, that’s really why we read literature, why we study history. Well, what about to find out the flaws?

Interviewer: What about literature? What what role do you think the dream plays in in our literature?

Maureen Howard: Oh, I think that the the idea of the American dream in one form or another enters into an enormous amount of major work from Whitman, Emerson and novels that that Gatsby and sister carry all Dreiser the American dream was was something that had to be fully examined and not just examined, but explored in terms of story. What stories can it yield? What achievement and what disappointment?

Interviewer: That’s great. Thank you. So let’s talk about one of the sort of more popular and simple simple notions of the American dream, Horatio Alger. How do you think the dream behind it becomes popularized for many Americans and they think of the American dream? I think from your bootstraps.

Maureen Howard: Well, the idea that if you work hard enough, if you are a serious and earnest person and you work hard enough, nothing will stand in your way. You will make it. You will. That’s a little different, though, than, say, the idea of a Franklin or a Barnum who were extraordinary in their inventions of themselves. Well, because they were both showmen. They were. And the showman and they wanted to perform for a larger public, in a sense, and become and that both their success in terms of money, fame, their names being known, is phenomenal. But partly because they had the dream in their mind as part of a great show.

Interviewer: So that idea of reinventing has to be.

Maureen Howard: To reinvent oneself. Yes.

Interviewer: What about Alger? You’re talking about Alger. What is he doing differently?

Maureen Howard: Well, I think if it is more a work, because I get my Alger boys story, the sense that if you make out lists of things to do, if you go according to the rules, if you are heroic and and in small ways in your community, you become, then it’s the idea of of of the hero. One of the things I like in both Gatsby and in this typical American is the lists that are made out by Young The Young by Jimmy GATT’s Before He Is Gatsby and by Ralph Chang lists as to if you follow these rules of good hard study and getting ahead carefully and being honest and that’s straight. Her Horatio Alger stuff doesn’t work for either of them, but we know that it’s a great dream.

Interviewer: It might work. OK, let’s move on. And we have a sex. I don’t know. Introduces us to we here in the middle of a commuter train station. What’s going on?

Maureen Howard: Well, you see, Lily is the beautiful exception to the mass of people who are hustling about their daily lives. And she is stalled. She’s seen by the man who is going to be the man who will not ever take on the real lovers role in the novel. And so Selden, of course. And Lauren Seldon, huh?

Interviewer: Where are they now?

Maureen Howard: Where they are in Grand Central. He sees her. And the thing that’s marvelous about it is you get his view of this beautiful woman in the midst of the contrast between and he’s one of the things he thinks immediately is how much money it must have taken to make her as though she is a thing. She’s a beautiful thing there. And she’s terribly out of place and she’s getting ready to leave. Oh, she’s getting. She’s between one visit at a fine country house and the next. And this is the kind of mishap that she’s there at all. It’s not her place.

Interviewer: Right. And so it saves her. Why won’t describe will you answer it in some ways as someone who costs a great deal to make a great deal to make. Yes. Beautiful language. Wonderful. Yeah. How do you imagine for a moment that Lily Bart is a real person? How do you imagine, Lily? How do you see her in your mind’s eye?

Maureen Howard: How do I see her physically? How do you call? Well, I wish I could see her free of the illustrations that were in Harper’s when it was first published in which she has very grand hats and beautiful dresses and marvelous Gibson girl hair piled high and hot, her head held high and so forth. So I suppose I’m a little bit stuck with that image, but if I can be clever enough to zoom back back away from it, I see her as exquisite as as truly even with the other women in the novel who are very good looking. Beautifully kept in every way. I see her as exceptionally beautiful, someone who you would turn and stop and look at a woman. Who is that striking?

Interviewer: Do you find her beauty is frail? Or is it a strong, very frail person?

Maureen Howard: No, I don’t think of her as frail at all. I think I don’t think of her as dainty and frail. I think of her as fully there in body. And that’s one of the things that’s sad about her tale, because physically, she seems to me on the page fully there. And yet her physical worth. The actual worth of her body as a woman is never properly considered by any man or by her family, right.

Interviewer: By anybody, anybody. Where do you think Warton is getting her inspiration for Lily? Is this just all being conjured up by a great writer’s imagination?

Maureen Howard: No, I think that she’s getting her inspiration from the fact that she has gone back to.

Interviewer: And ask you to stop to just write out of film. So what was your other. Produces. OK. Maureen, what do you think Wharton’s getting her inspiration for Lily Bart. Is it just all being conjured from her imagination?

Maureen Howard: Oh, not completely. I think that one of the main things about that novel, which is her, I think, most splendid work. Henry James did not fully believe her mentor did not fully believe in her earlier work. And he wrote her a letter and said, do New York meaning do the society you come from. Get right down to it. Don’t fiddle with worlds you don’t know. And so I think the inspiration was probably James telling her to go ahead and and do the bold thing. It’s the bold thing. It’s her society. It’s the life that she was in part leading. She knew it well. And it was going to be, in a way, writing that novel. It’s a great exposure. Tremendous exposure. And she did it. She took out she took him seriously. And she went ahead and did it. And yes, there’s a great deal of inspiration from the James letter. On the other hand, I think that novel also is enormously well crafted. And it also reflects, obviously, her position as a woman who’s Edith Wharton’s own position as a woman. Well, she, too, was trapped in society and unable to work at what she wanted to disapproved of for being more than a lily bart, more than a wonderfully rich hostess society woman. But I think that the other thing that it reflects that we have to keep in mind, too, is how extraordinarily bright and well-read she was and what she brought self educated. For the most part, what she brought to that book was everything she had to give.

Interviewer: Well, I understand that question. Let’s talk about that for a second. What are the options for a woman like you before? And how does Edith Wharton deal with those brought off limited options?

Maureen Howard: Well, the options weren’t many for her. I mean, she’d made a marriage to a sporty fellow who was very much of her class, who mismanaged her money and obviously couldn’t keep up with her at the dinner table, really with the conversation. And she was so extraordinarily limited by her family’s disapproval, her mother in particular, and she had to start to find ways to break out because she and his fiance. And so, in a sense, she was really suffering. She had great mental problems and a break down.

Interviewer: Let’s hold off on that for a second. I want to get that in order to work.

Maureen Howard: It affords her.

Interviewer: What do I care? Pardon? Got it. Let’s start. What what what what are we talking about?

Maureen Howard: About her. Her her career and writing. Her writing was a way of self definition. A way of finding. A way to define herself as a woman. First of all, as a woman who is.

Interviewer: OK. Writing was what to work on was it was a play thing. Was it just a hobby?

Maureen Howard: Oh no, I don’t think it was. You know, it’s very hard. I don’t believe even when she started, she did a book on decoration of houses and such and began to write. That was a little bit in the beginning avocation. But very, very soon it became vocation, a real calling. She was able to make that distinction pretty early on. And what did you have for her in her own life? Her identity? She was Edith Wharton. She was Mrs. Wharton to the world. Now, not just to the parties in the Berkshires or Newport or Paris. She was a woman writer, a woman who had made her own way, who was able, therefore, to transform the society. She lived in two extraordinary stories that that were painful errors. And she herself absolutely herself. She is in a position to transform. She’s able to transform herself. Yes, of course. She transformed herself. And and it’s. You mean. Yes. She transforms herself. But on the other hand, the transformation of her characters or their inability to transform Lily Bart in House of Mirth finally cannot quite transform herself. It isn’t it? She is. The limits are still there. The irresolution, the idea that she cannot decide to step over into a world in which she could be more.

Interviewer: What does Warton does work doesn’t allow her characters the same ability that she.

Maureen Howard: Once in a while she does in House of Mirth.

Interviewer: Well, it was well, we have the same options that you have.

Maureen Howard: No, no, no. Lily doesn’t have the same options because Lily is the beautiful society woman, unmarried and unmarried at the advanced age of twenty nine. So she’s over the hill, in a sense, for those days. And she is she is limited because she never wants anything as much as Warton wanted her career, her art. The desire isn’t strong enough. She backs away from physical desire. She backs away from letting herself be transformed or transforming herself into a full woman.

Interviewer: Great. So let me stop for a second, buddy, because, again, those are two problems.

Maureen Howard: The one is we work. Oh, okay. Lily’s problems. The first one is that she absolutely has to get married because marriage will mean money. She must get married and she has a plan to get married. She is the man picked out a rather foolish man, a man with lots of money. And of course, she doesn’t really have any draw to him at all. And she can’t do it. She and every time the idea of marriage comes up to an inappropriate person or to a person who financially would be appropriate, but they are emotionally totally inappropriate for her, so it’s not going to work. Her second problem is plain old money cash. And she’s never smart about it, never smart enough. In fact, it’s a wonderful portrayed that must have been close to Wharton’s own sense of herself. Well, when she realized at one point that Teddy had made bad investments, that in fact she’d been duped. And then she made her own fortune, you know, writing.

Interviewer: I want to ask you to go back a bit. Yeah. We’re not going to go. She’d been duped. We don’t have enough background. Let’s start with Harrison Rice. Is the guy. She really. Yes. Yeah. You think the warden is sort of. I always imagined that she’s the one who’s talking about her own marriage. Oh, yeah. Talk to me about that. What do you how do you see Piercey Rice and how do you see Wharton’s understanding of him? Where does her knowledge of a guy like Percy come from?

Maureen Howard: Well, I think her knowledge of a man like Percy Grise comes from many of the men. She must have known and probably Teddy Wharton, who really had, as far as we understand from all the biographies and all had very little depth to him. And. Hersi Grice is. She has fun with Percy Grice. I mean, one of the things about Warton is she can do caricature and she can be very funny and she slices purse Cryos up. He really is an empty vessel or an empty suit. We might say. And he collects books but doesn’t read them. He has the money to buy extravagant first editions, which he will never read. And she understood Lili gets that and knows she is just on the verge of knowing so much and knows that it would be a disaster and it would be boring beyond belief to marry him. And so she really messes the whole deal up all by herself.

Interviewer: Great. So help me then. Let’s shift. There’s this man. Name is right.

Maureen Howard: Well, I think finally that he’s weak. Lawrence Selden is enormously attractive to her and enormously attractive in that society because he reads the books and because he seems to have a sense of freedom. He talks to her about freedom and he talks to her about freedom of the spirit, meaning he can stand to the side of that society and doesn’t have to depend on. He does have a career. He’s a lawyer, but he is not enormously wealthy. But he’s part of that society. So he seems to be able to go some place else to this free place. Republic of this. Of the spirit he calls it, which she romanticizes and thinks that it’s some place you can actually go to. And she keeps that all through the novel. That’s in her head.

Interviewer: But she seems in some ways almost smarter than them because she says, you can go to the Republic of the Spirit. You need money. Were you? OK, let’s start with the tableau of moment. Can you describe for me that, sir? OK, let’s start with the tableau, the vault moment. Can you describe for me that scene? I mean, I read it. I read it. I read it. What what is going on?

Maureen Howard: What’s going on in that scene in which Lily Bart costumes herself as Mrs. Loyde famous Rennolds portrayed in a diaphanous Grecians sort of gown, white caps. Well, everyone, it’s a it’s an evening in which people are doing the old tableau. You aren’t making believe they are pictures placing themselves in the in the framework of famous masterpieces. Her choice is brilliant and a disaster at the same time. It’s brilliant because she shows herself to the world, that body to the world and that beauty in a startling way. And it is very provocative and extraordinary. And the audience, as you know, the wonderful thing is that there is a gas from the audience up when the lights go on and she is seen standing there as Mrs. Lloyd. It’s a disaster because she has done something so true artistically and so revealing of a part of herself that nobody has wanted to take into account her beautiful physical presence, aside from being just beautiful in Grand Central Station and at the dinner table, but sexually, a beautiful woman who immediately the gentleman watching see her as an object, a beautiful object, and turn her into that in their minds, an object with a price.

Interviewer: Explain that to me.

Maureen Howard: Well, the some of the men who are crude crudely watch her immediately, see something that they should have seen before. See the beauty of this woman and would be happy to, in fact, pay the price to use money to get her not in marriage, but to to use their their wealth to in some way appropriate Lily as their own. Whereas Lawrence Seldon, watching her, sees only the aesthetics of the moment, not the sexuality, really.

Interviewer: So is it safe to say Louis has this moment where she has a sexuality? Is there is this there is a woman way that’s to it and the men want to have sex with her? I mean, that’s what we’re talking about, right? Yes. They want to buy sex. Right.

Maureen Howard: But the men in a way that’s, you know, terribly discreet. They they certainly want to buy her almost think of her as somebody one could purchase the remark. That’s very nice. In that scene is the poor little cousin, Gerti Farish, who says, oh, that’s the Lily we know that’s Lily because she has seen Lily Hole. And one of the nice things about Gerti thare she was a fine figure in the novel because she works with very poor people, very poor women doing her charities. Lily has been seen partially, always on. Well, partially, her problems getting worse, her own her own ignorance of money, which I think Warton was very conscious of. And I’m afraid it’s one of those things that still goes on. That women are have been until recently. What is naive about money is will we allow this to happen to her? She allows Gus Trainer to make a deal for her, which she thinks is an OK deal, but it isn’t. And she accepts money and not knowing that she’s actually accepting money and that there isn’t a solid and decent investment above the board for her. And she gets trapped, absolutely trapped and partially. She is extraordinarily ignorant. She’s even ignorant when she can’t pay the tailor and she juggles her books around and so forth. But way back, there’s a marvelous scene in the novel when her father, before her father dies and the family fortunes are already on the downward scale. Down, going down, down, down. And there are lilies of the valley on the table. And she says to her Oh, they’re so lovely. We should have every day. And her father, for once gets angry and says, Do you know the cost? Do you know the cost to the floor? It has never occurred to Lily. The cost.

Interviewer: I’m going to ask you to make. There’s a book you haven’t talked a bit about your sister Carrie. Carrie takes money from her way. Isn’t the same thing as Lily taking money from Gruss Trainer?

Maureen Howard: Oh, not at all. Because you’re different. Well, I mean, Carrie knows what she’s doing when she takes money from Drew. She’s not duped really at all. She knows the kind of deals she’s making. And Lily doesn’t know at all the kind of deal that she’s into and and presumes that everything is above board. But Carrie is wiser in that way in the ways of the world. Certainly wiser in having to do with money. And she the amount of money she everything insists to carry, every dime is accounted for. I mean, it’s an act. You can read the book as an accountant’s book. How much she has to pay her sister for room and board. How much she makes in the factory. Every to the last scene, you know, down to fifteen cents for a room on the Bowery. You know, about money. But Lily’s high minded view of society and how you juggle things about and pretend is quite a different world. And it’s she’s doomed, financially doomed.

Interviewer: So send someone to the show if we can stop is about being married. She got more and more access to the dream as the book moves on.

Maureen Howard: I think as the book moves on, she gets in terms of personal success and achievement. Lily Lily gets less American dream, and yet she gets a vision of the American dream through the poor working girls who Gerti helps.

Interviewer: But I want to talk about, if I can, about Lily. What happens to will be one of the dynamics here is that this poor girl starts this precious thing in Grand Central. What happens?

Maureen Howard: What happens to her is I have always believed that what happens to Lily is that she cannot make up her mind to be other than society wants her to be. And she does finally attempt it. Towards the end of the book, and she’s not trained. And this is done literally by Warton in the scenes where Lily works in the hat shop and she can’t do what the other girls can do with her hands. She is incapacitated by the social life and by the upbringing she’s had.

Interviewer: So what I’m saying here. Pardon? What does Warren saying with Lily’s inability to. She talks about the cable to almost put the finishing touches on a half. If only they would let her do that, right?

Maureen Howard: Yes, but she can’t. She is. She’s she can’t. So the little beads on. She is inept in in in any physical way in the world. She just can’t do it. And she’s like a precious under a glass bell woman who has no Krafts or. Or ability to be and work in the world just doesn’t exist for her.

Interviewer: So a tragedy to be.

Maureen Howard: I think the scenes of the heart sewing those little beads or sequins or whatever they are on the hat where she’s chided and knows that even she’s been at it for some weeks, that she can’t do what she’s just no good. It’s it is tragic to find that you’re you’re worthless in the working world. Her work has been at the dinner table. Her work has been flirtation. Her work has been charm.

Interviewer: Beautiful. That’s just that. So let’s let me have access to the drink or woman in the world. Is there anything universal about this book?

Maureen Howard: I think that the American dream in the society that Warton is depicting in the House of Mirth. Many of us would feel a well, it has happened. It has been achieved. The American dream is there. They the grandeur of these lives, the control over money and society and institutions is all happened. But then when you look closely at the lives of these characters and their dreadful marriages and their infighting and their gossip and the so-called society they live in, it’s pretty tacky. And it begins to erode. As you read through the novel, you understand that all that goes on in the House of Mirth having to do with gossip and backbiting and nasty letters and flirtations and so forth, is it undercuts completely undercuts the world that these people supposedly have achieved.

Interviewer: And so the dream for Warton or a. OK, so, yes. Well, we wouldn’t have anything as relevant today, or is it just something we should put in a museum, put on the shelf? Don’t have to read.

Maureen Howard: Art is always relevant when it is good. And when it works. And it’s an Hovell that is very fine and stands up. Is that we’re talking about. Does it stand up? Yes, of course. I mean, I wouldn’t say to what it says to us today that there are constraints upon us given our society. It doesn’t have to be the society that Lily Bart was in, particularly, though, in fact, it’s very interesting to read about those constraints. But it it is a book that in dramatizes beautifully the constraints that our world put upon us. Our various worlds we live in now need not be. We cannot experience many readers cannot experience the idea of the Vanderbilt’s grand ball or the amount of money and the estates and the breeding of horses and so forth that comes into Wharton’s world. That’s not the point. The point is, Lily, Bart is such a compelling figure and the men around her and the world around her that she has to negotiate. We all have to negotiate worlds of family and money and our sexuality or denial of our sexuality. And the moment in which she shows herself as Mrs. Lloyd is the one moment in which she is Mrs. Boyd for that moment. She is capable just for that little bit of transforming herself. But no one wants to see someone so transformed. Society says no, that’s still going on.

Interviewer: Great. OK, let’s shift gears if we can.

Maureen Howard: Oh, I don’t think so at all. I think that the idea of the working girl going to the city, it was very calm and, you know, shirtwaists had just come into style. The idea that you could wash out a strict waste and go into an office with high collared shirtwaists was there were going to be working girls. And but of course, she’s just a factory girl, which is not an office girl and needs to look for work and they’re there. The idea of the city, the vision of the city that she sees on the train before she even gets there is given to her by a man, by a slick man, Drew, a guy who says, look, you now and there’s this vision of the city, which, of course, visions of the city are so interesting throughout all of the books that we’re talking about, the vision of the city and Gatsby, the romanticized vision of the city is what he hands her. Well, it’s not very romantic when she gets there living with her sister and badgered for money and she gets a terrible job and walks the street and has turned down the innocent girl coming into the city with which is not a romantic place, which she finds to be harsh and tawdry and difficult in many ways. She Dresser does a marvelous job of observing clothes, for instance. Marvelous. Her poor little outfits from the country, from Columbia, Columbia, a city just don’t cut it and carry notices it. Oh, boy, does she know everything she sees throughout the entire book. Matters of clothes and dress. And as she goes up in the world, it’s marvelous. He’s splendid at that kind of detail.

Interviewer: So let me jump in and ask you, Will then, if she’s if she’s got this moment where she’s not doing well, she’s working in a factory, she’s playing shows, how did she get out of it? She got a great office job.

Maureen Howard: Well, she gets out of it because she decides that drew a it’s so terrible the job. And you’ll note that when she’s in the factory, she doesn’t like the gossip of the girls. She immediately knows that she is somehow different. And that’s the beginning of Carrie knowing she can be other than than Carrie Meeber from Columbia City. What if she drew a offers to support her to set her up? We’d say and he does. He sets her up and she still maintains it’s very well written. She still maintains an idea of her innocence. Still seems to hold for a bit to the idea that she is an innocent in this world and this very nice man, this terribly nice man has set her up. Well, of course, that that goes away quickly enough.

Interviewer: So they get married, right?

Maureen Howard: No.

Interviewer: Or how they get set up?

Maureen Howard: Well, I mean, obviously, she lives out of wedlock. And one of the things that I love that he does in the use of names in that novel in Sister Carrie, the title is Sister Carrie. And she is Carrie Meeber. And when they live together, Douai and Carrie in the rooming house, she is called Mrs. Drew Away. What else can be said? And later in the novel, when Hearst Wood takes her off, spirits her off. She is called not Mrs. Hearst Wood, but they make up a phony name. She is Mrs. Wheeler. There’s a whole play of names within the book with Marvelous. And she is able to keep transforming herself and finally finds a name that fits her. And that is the name of the actress. She becomes Carrie Madina.

Interviewer: Well, Wolf, I carry with you one more.

Maureen Howard: No, I don’t think she’s a gold digger at all. I think that she actually is a soul, a fairly good soul. Who knows that she has to survive. Dreiser, as well as Warton were ever so interested in Darwinian thought and the idea of survival of the fittest. Lily Bart is not fit finally and does not survive. Carrie is right out there in the world and knows that she’s got to survive. And she has moments of hesitation, but they are only moments and they go by very quickly moments. And there she sits by the window. Dreiser keeps putting her by a window where she contemplates and looks back to the past. The home she came from in the past. But those moments go by very quickly and she shakes them off and goes ahead.

Interviewer: Is something different happening? Carrie’s relationship to the world and what his relationship to the world?

Maureen Howard: Oh, yes, I do. Well, I think I think what happens first of all, Lily, Bart and the tableau vivant is posing and is silent. It is no words are given to her and she is by herself isolated. There is no one in the frame with her. Carrie is onstage with others and she’s a rank immature. But suddenly she seems to feel the situation with the other characters in this dreadful little melodrama that she’s taken a role in. And she feels it. And she’s able to bring the emotion forward and able to change herself into that character and sustain it.

Interviewer: But I guess what I’m trying to drive out here is that they both have to be characters right there. And they’re both in some ways. Are they both objects or or not?

Maureen Howard: Well, for everyone, you know, for that moment, she’s very much an object to. And her Eastwood looks at her and says he’s really wowed by the performance. And his thought, I believe, is she has done something above what he can be, which is tremendous insight on his part and there for he wants her. You know, the idea that she is his will be his is very important, but then it’s possession to possess her. Once again, she is an object to the man looking on. Isn’t that anyway, Simmons? Oh, it is. Except that Carrie goes beyond that. Carrie grows. It is what it is. It is very much the idea of woman as object. And the an object to be possessed by the eye and an object to be taken in as. As a not as a full human whatsoever. However, a woman. However, the real thing is that Carrie is able to keep going and going.

Interviewer: And he’s managed to kind of leave these men in the dark.

Maureen Howard: And she and and she can depart. She can depart from scene. She is not forever sent. The movement forward is extraordinary in her life.

Interviewer: Why do you think Dreiser ends that moment? We can talk about that moment when Carrie. When you have you’ve seen first we know well, we’ve had people talking about earthward at one point, Harry Beckham, and she looked fine and closed and understood how different she was from.

Maureen Howard: His clothes are ever so much better than Driveway’s flashy clothes. You know, all of that. Yeah. She sees. And his manner. Yes, his elegance.

Interviewer: Carrie understands what I want. They would throw away at that moment.

Maureen Howard: Well, there’s a there’s a tussle. It goes on for a while. The idea of whether she will or will not leave, but her Swades pursuit of her is pretty hot and heavy. He has discovered passion carries not a gold digger. She doesn’t enter that kind of script. She is she is more fully rounded. Carrie is never a caricature. She’s a full character. And her agreements with drew away and with men in general and with Hearst would later have a great deal to do with surviving. She’s a survivor. That’s different than being a gold digger. And she puts an enormous amount into her life day after day. She’s not asking to be carried free. Not really.

Interviewer: So at the end of the book, do you see Carrie as this great unadulterated success?

Maureen Howard: No, she can never be a full success. I mean, she’s a success in the theater. Her name is in Lights. She’s made it. It’s marvelous. But she meets yet another man who’s rather a Laurence Seldon, a man who advises her about real books. She should be reading not trash. And that there is of marvelous theater, not her theater, that she’s vaudeville sort of thing. She’s doing musical. And the whole idea of once again, yearning and longing and knowing there’s still some place to go comes upon her. And so that last paragraph. Oh, Carrie. Oh, Carrie. All the names, the false names are gone. We go back to Dreiser’s elegiac voice coming in at the end saying, Oh, Carrie. Oh, Carrie. Sitting by the window, longing. Throughout the novel. Yearning and longing, therefore never sated. She can never be sated. Happiness doesn’t exist.

Interviewer: So what do you think we’ve got to write? What do you think we come away from these two books? What are they saying to us, Carrie? What is carrying Lily? There’s just maybe one or two different stories. Maybe they have nothing to say about women in the dream or women in society today. Do they speak to each other?

Maureen Howard: Oh, I think the two books I have always thought, though, I have never found any real documentation of it. But I know that Warton had read Dreiser. And of course, this was his first the first big book, OK? The first book. I know that there is a connection there, but I’ve not I can’t particularly maintain that it is. So on the other hand, I think that the idea of a woman’s journey to transformation or lack of transformation is documented in in both of these books through marvelous writing and tremendous storytelling. Both books have about them a lot of melodrama. Have a good deal of complexity in terms of relationship. The main character with men and you have a woman who doesn’t survive, who cannot exit from the world in which she was born, cannot fully leave it behind, but knows something better is there. And you have Carrie, who is so clever even as a young, when she first gets to town, sees and understands and wants to know how do you do it? How am I going to be someone other than the girl from Colombia City? She does it. How comfortable it would be to have your own place. She has never she has never had a place of her own. Ever.

Interviewer: Does Carrie share that fate? Because we lost the silence as Carrie share the same fate of not being able to move beyond the boundaries that she starts off with.

Maureen Howard: No, I don’t think so. I mean, I think for one thing, Carrie never seems to really.

Interviewer: All right. Julie Yarrow, create a character like that’s. What’s he trying to do?

Maureen Howard: Well, I think if we think in terms of Nick Carraway. His assessment of Gatsby is that he wants a hero and the only hero he can get hold of is Gatsby, who is a flawed hero. But nevertheless, given the world around him, is is the one figure who actually is the most romantic and at the same time.

Interviewer: Let me cut you off. Yeah, I guess before we go, I want to know, I mean, this Gatsby always really well. Does he always of his dog. Is this a money person with the same kind of dough? Gatsby. Say we’re good. No.

Maureen Howard: Gatsby has somehow gotten this money. We do know from the novel where he gets it from. But on the other hand, no, he’s a poor boy from Minnesota. Well, Fitzgerald goes back to the Midwest for his depiction of both Carroway and Jay Gatsby or Jimmy Getz as we finally find out when his dad comes to the sad, sad and the funeral. But he’s he’s in love with me.

Interviewer: Where are we? So his gaffe is what’s Gatsby in pursuit of? Is he just one good property? Is that the real estate values that draw him out to Long Island?

Maureen Howard: Oh, no. He’s drawn out to Long Island because the green light at the end of the wharf there across the way that he sees Daisy, Daisy, who is symbolizes she is the romantic past. She is a time when he was innocent, young, poor soldier who fell in love with her when he was down south. Training. Oh, it’s just it’s the pathetic thing about his great establishment. And all that he sets up is that the pursuit of the object, of his desire is not worthy of him. So is Daisy the dream? Yeah. Yeah. Daisy has become the dream, though. I mean, of course, he he knows perfectly well what the American dream was. When you look at the marvelous notes he made as a boy as to what you must achieve in life and his instructions when he was in the Midwest, he wanted but the American dream, in his pursuit of it and in his growing into Gatsby, leaving Jimmy GATT’s behind, has become corrupted.

Interviewer: So how do you think this is the sort of story this as rich as other that Fitzgerald is just kind of conjuring? I mean, talk to me about St. Paul and work where Fitzgerald lived. What? Make your way up, summer.

Maureen Howard: Yeah. Summit Avenue. I went out to Minneapolis, St. Paul and I was visiting Patricia Hample, who’s a fine writer who lives there and was born there. And she drove me up some an avenue to show me Fitzgerald’s house. But the thing about Summit Avenue is it starts down low and goes up, up, up. And as you go up Summit Avenue, the houses get grander and grander, beautiful Italian villas. And at the very top was the club, the most important country club, city club, where society everybody who belonged was there. And the view below of the river and the town below you. It’s the pinnacle. And Fitzgerald lived about halfway up in the house that looked like a brownstone. And I. I’m fictionalizing now. This isn’t biography. But I felt at that moment that I understood Fitzgerald’s yearning, his yearning for social position and class and why he was so caught by it always why it interested him that much. It it was so important to him, a Catholic kid who was only halfway up Summit Avenue.

Interviewer: It’s nice that you are going to ask you for editing purposes, not high fees. So if one were to see you finish this, if one were to see Fitzgerald’s home growing up, well, what do you make of what how would impact Fitzgerald? Well, that’s hard to your true.

Maureen Howard: I mean, to say it’s a perfectly lovely place. It’s perfectly fine. But what does it look like? It’s it’s a it looks like, uh, what we would call a Brooklyn or New York brownstone. What we’re talking about and it and it’s it’s a middle class.

Interviewer: I don’t know what we’re talking about because I my question is not there. So I need to hear you say Fitzgerald’s point at home is, oh, I see.

Maureen Howard: Fitzgerald’s boyhood home looks like what we call a brownstone. It was it is a brownstone, but it sits the other houses are not brownstone. So it’s just the two houses attached there. And they they’re it’s it’s handsome, but, you know, not as handsome as the ones that go up the AB up Summit Avenue. It’s not he wasn’t at the summit. And I think that that played a big part in his life. And I think that it has a lot to do with his ability to create Gatsby, his ability to envision someone who would want that, a state that Gatsby wants, who would want to prove to Daisy that he had.

Interviewer: So Fitzgerald tells us that Daisy. Was full of money. There’s a voice full of money. Sound like.

Maureen Howard: A voice full of money. Yes, I love that line. A voice full of money. It’s he’s the one who hears it that way. Gatsby hears it that way. Her voice is full of money because it has about it to him a rich ness of richness, of tone. We don’t we can’t take it off the page. It has memory. He doesn’t know that it’s full of money. It has to him. The sense of the girl he knew who was from a class that he couldn’t attain to the very way she speaks bespeaks money to him.

Interviewer: There’s a moment in the book when Gatsby gets a chance to win. Daisy over the court is likely to bring her. How did he do it?

Maureen Howard: Well, he has a tea part. How does he do it? He has a Tea Party, which is very genteel and proper and just lovely and is meant to be, I’m sure, a contrast to the tacky, tawdry scene of Tom Buchanan and Myrtle’s party in New York boozing it up. And the thing about the Tea Party is so delicate and they sit and talk to each other and her face is washed with tears when Nick comes back in. And then he takes her on a tour of the house and sees all the various rooms. Of course, the great scene is the shirt scene where he takes the shirts. A man makes them for me in England and he takes the shirts and throws them on the bed linen, silk, fine flannel bude and she puts her head in to the shirts and cries and says, Oh, what beautiful shirt. Well, he’s wooing her. They’re sensual, they are describe the feel love and the beautiful fabrics. He is not giving himself at that moment. He is giving his specialness and his wealth to her. These personal items that represent him. It’s a deflection almost from the sexual, though. What is sensual?

Interviewer: What do you think it says of Daisy that she’s crying over her?

Maureen Howard: She call her crying into those shirts. She’s overwhelmed. They are rich and beautiful. They’re beautiful objects. She feels them. And they represent, I presume, in some way, Gatsby. They stand in for him. And yet she could not directly say that to him. Oh, beautiful. How beautiful you are. How successful. How rich the shirts do it.

Interviewer: Beautiful. Great. So what sort of telescope? This Gatsby falls apart. Tom sort of calls it further bootlegger that he really is. The facade gives way. What do you think Fitzgerald’s saying about the American dream?

Maureen Howard: Well, I think that the Tom, of course, is enormously corrupt. Tom Buchanan, he’s a sentimental brute and corrupt. And Gatsby is also corrupt. They both deal in the same world. That’s the thing that’s marvelous that he brings together in that scene. And they are equally corrupt equally. They are rich. They are powerful. But the dream was never possessed by Tom. Tom inherited everything that we would think of or that would have been thought of as perfect American heritage, money class, Yale, the secret society, everything. Gatsby had to get it all himself. And in the journey of getting it, the dream is whittled away to the practicalities of getting the mansion, the money, the position, everything that makes him transforms him. From the good boy to Jay Gatsby, the fabulous mythical. He’s a mythical figure. He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see on the last.