← The Book Club
Loading summary
Transcript371 lines
- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society and we are delighted, aren't we, Tabby? To welcome them as the new presenting partner of the book club, which could not be more fitting.
- [00:12]
B
Absolutely. And Dominic, you actually gifted me a Folio Society book for Christmas and it's absolutely beautiful. Every detail feels considered it's a work of art. And on the 3rd of March, they are launching the Great Gatsby as part of their spring collection. And I actually have that beautiful edition here, here with me now. Look at that. Beautiful illustrations.
- [00:34]
A
Fitzgerald lets the gold gleam and then quietly shows you the cost. Which is why it's worth returning to the novel, spending a bit more time in those bright rooms and staying after the orchestra stops.
- [00:46]
B
It feels like the novel itself, the sparkle on the surface, the silence beneath. The Folio Society is a small independent publisher only owned by their employees and based in South London. Folo's design captures the shine of Gatsby's world, lingering just long enough for the hollowness to surface.
- [01:08]
A
You can order the Great Gatsby and explore the other books that we keep coming back to@folioSociety.com TheBookClub this podcast is
- [01:19]
B
brought to you by Carvana. Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy from start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time. And when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. I turned again to my new acquaintance. This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there. And this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation. For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
- [02:13]
A
I'm Gatsby.
- [02:14]
B
What? Oh, I beg your pardon.
- [02:17]
A
I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host.
- [02:20]
B
He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best you hope to Convey precisely at that point, it vanished. And I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or 2 over 30, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself, I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. So. Hello, Dominic, the man whose own smile launched a thousand podcasts. That was. Yeah, you're very welcome. That was a crucial scene in. In the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925, and it is perhaps the most celebrated of all American novels. It's a very short book, which I think people are always slightly taken aback by. It's less than 50,000 words, and yet it's seen as perhaps the classic example of the great American novel. And it's emblematic of the Jazz Age. You know, flappers, speakeasies, highball cocktails, rebellion against the status quo. And so because of that, it's generally taken to be a very frivolous and lighthearted book, but actually, it's got a core of real tragedy to it.
- [04:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So it ends with the deaths of some of the key characters, and it ends with the total disillusionment of the narrator. And actually, the Great Gatsby, in many ways, is a book about the tragedy of characters who are destroyed by their own dreams. So it's a book about wealth and pleasure, of course, as you say, the kind of. The fast cars and the high living and the parties and stuff.
- [04:22]
B
Yeah.
- [04:22]
A
But also the human cost costs of that. It's a book about the American dream, the idea of reinventing yourself and being reborn, but also the fear of that dream being punctured and the fear that we all have actually of being found out. The sort of fate that awaits us all. Tabby.
- [04:37]
B
And terrifying prospect.
- [04:40]
A
And something that actually, I think people don't bring out very often. About the Great Gatsby. I think it's a book about nostalgia and about the past and about the desire, it definitely is, to turn back the clock and to clutch onto something that's vanishing out of sight. And that's something that this character, Gatsby, who. I have to say, I felt like I. Even in a few words, I think I really captured the elusive charm of the man.
- [05:04]
B
The fraudulent old sport.
- [05:06]
A
Yeah, the fraudulent. The central falseness of the man. I feel like.
- [05:10]
B
Well, later in the episode, we'll be meeting Tom Buchanan, so maybe. Yeah, yeah.
- [05:16]
A
His cruel power. You reckon I can do that as well?
- [05:18]
B
Brutish violence.
- [05:20]
A
Brilliant.
- [05:20]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [05:21]
A
So before we get into, you know, we'll be discussing the book, we'll be discussing the Context of the 1920s and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. But first of all, Tabby, your first impressions of the book. I'm guessing you've seen the film as well, the Baz Luhrmann film.
- [05:33]
B
I have DiCaprio. Like a lot of people, I studied it for my GCSEs, and the movie came out actually in the run up to the exam itself. And then I watched it afterwards, and I loved it. You know, I loved the surface value of it. Flappers, fast cars, all of that. But it didn't make a massive impression on my mind. It didn't really stay with me. It didn't sink that deep. And then I watched the film, and I was kind of outraged by its adaptation. But actually, the film had done just what I had done with the book. Cause it's all about the surface. It's very blunt. It's all about jazz music. And at one point, for instance, Nick, the narrator, says, oh, we all drunk too much, which is always implied in the book, but never stated. And then rereading it, I mean, we'll discuss what we made of it this time. But it definitely didn't make a massive impression. I enjoyed it, but it didn't go much further than that.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah. So for me, when I first read it, I remember being struck by how much stranger it was than I was expecting. So I thought it would be a book about cocktails and parties and hedonism and whatnot. And, of course, those things are in it. But it was much more haunting and kind of oblique, I guess, than I was expecting.
- [06:40]
B
Yeah. Everything's beneath the surface, isn't it? It's all the things that aren't said. Which is why I actually think it doesn't lend itself to movie adaptations. It's really one of those books it's almost impossible to do justice to.
- [06:51]
A
I totally agree. And we're not going to spend ages on the film. No, the Baz Luhrmann film, the Leonardo DiCaprio film. The one thing that strikes me is it's so glitzy. Yeah. So sensual, so over the top. But actually, it doesn't capture the subtleties and the nuances of the book. In particular, the writing.
- [07:06]
B
Well, we'll see how our impressions change by the end of this episode. But let's start with some of the context. Baz Luhrmann actually has a wonderful montage of this at the beginning of the film. Because it's Jazz Age America.
- [07:18]
A
Yeah, exactly. So that's the period from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the Wall Street Crash in 1929, massive economic growth in America. It's the rise of the city and mass consumerism in the popular imagination. This is the roaring twenties, 100%, like
- [07:33]
B
one of the most iconic epochs ever.
- [07:35]
A
Yeah. In all sort of art deco fashion and. And all of that.
- [07:38]
B
Yeah.
- [07:39]
A
However, you know, there's a. Definitely a dark side to it because it's the decade of the second Ku Klux Klan. You see a hint of that in the racism of one of the Char, Tom Buchanan, which we'll come on to. It's the decade of prohibition, which has been enforced since January 1920. But the paradox is, on the one hand, you have prohibitions, that's the outlawing of alcohol. But at the same time, you've got bootlegging, which is smuggling of illicit alcohol. You've got illicit bars called speakeasies.
- [08:05]
B
Yeah.
- [08:06]
A
It's seen at the time as an age of excess to the point of destruction. So the New York Times in 1922 had an article on the new phenomenon of the cocktail party. And it said, you know, at the end of cocktail parties, basically, somebody always gets shot or stabbed. This sort of sense of danger, you know, of hedonism and danger going hand in hand.
- [08:25]
B
Thrilling.
- [08:26]
A
Very exciting. It's like a kind of goal hanger.
- [08:29]
B
Yeah.
- [08:29]
A
Get together.
- [08:30]
B
That's exactly how all of our parties end.
- [08:32]
A
But the Jazz Age label, obviously jazz, the emblematic music of the era, and that's popularized by one writer above all, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes a short story collection called Tales of the Jazz Age and published in 1922. And actually Tabby, that takes us very neatly to Fitzgerald himself, doesn't it?
- [08:48]
B
Yeah. And I think Fitzgerald is definitely one of those writers who it's really, really important to understand in order to kind of see the inspirations behind his book, because he's everywhere in the Great Gatsby and he really did live the Jazz Age. He was in the very middle of it all, but had a fairly mixed relationship with it. So this is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born to a middle class Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. St. Paul? Yeah. Didn't you spend some time there?
- [09:16]
A
So, unbelievably, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a year.
- [09:20]
B
What were you doing there?
- [09:21]
A
I was doing the research. My PhD. It's very cold. Like I was there over the winter. It's very.
- [09:27]
B
So you were being a kind of enfant terrible at the very heart of a.
- [09:30]
A
Do you know what this Ravel Asian
- [09:32]
B
scene of drinking and stabbing and gasping.
- [09:36]
A
I can't describe how different my life was from that. So basically I remember really vividly there was a moment where I had spent all day, like at the archive. And then I was walking back to
- [09:45]
B
my rock star, you.
- [09:46]
A
My rented basement and through the snow drifts. And I genuinely thought if I fell into a snow drift now no one would notice. I thought my body wouldn't be discovered for ages. But also no one would miss me. No one knows I exist.
- [10:00]
B
Just getting eaten by Alsatians like the next summer. That's very Great Gatsby, though, in a way.
- [10:06]
A
So that gives you. Yeah. A man who know Mr. Nobody from nowhere has disappeared.
- [10:11]
B
All right.
- [10:11]
A
In the snow. Exactly. So, yeah, that my life was not like for sure.
- [10:15]
B
Not. Not one bit. He was actually. This is a really fun detail. He named after a guy called Francis Scott Key, a cousin. And he wrote the Star Spangled Banner.
- [10:24]
A
Yeah. Which had not yet been adopted as the American national anthem.
- [10:27]
B
Yeah. Which I didn't know.
- [10:29]
A
30s, I think.
- [10:29]
B
I didn't realize it was so recent.
- [10:31]
A
But Fitzgerald, he has a kind of. He's middle class, so he's. He's not, you know, super establishment or elite, but he still goes to private schools, doesn't he?
- [10:39]
B
He has quite a charmed life, for sure. Yeah. He goes to private school. You know, he's clearly a gifted writer, even from that stage. And then he goes to Princeton where he's made to feel like a bit of an outsider because he's a Catholic. And again, there's in the Great Gatsby's narrator. And now we come to what is definitely one of the key moments of his story. So during a Christmas holiday, he met and fell in love with a 16 year old girl called Genevra King. And their doomed romance is just a massive inspiration for the Great Gatsby. People often think that it was his wife Zelda, who we'll come to in due course, who's kind of the main inspiration for the book. But it's not. It's this romance that he has with this Geneva King. And she's a very rich debutante. She's one of the, what was called the four Debs or something like that. And they were the four most sought after, wealthiest, most attractive debutantes of that season. So she's very rich, from posh Lake Forest, Chicago. You know, it's all about tennis, golf, finishing schools. And her father, though, when, when Fitzgerald was courting her, allegedly said poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.
- [11:44]
A
Oh my gosh, that's harsh.
- [11:45]
B
And that's very, very harsh. Yeah, very. And he's absolutely gutted by this. I mean, he's almost suicidal. And so he enlists in the US army to fight in the First World War, hoping that he'll get killed. But he never actually goes to France and ends up spending the war in a series of army barracks.
- [12:00]
A
Is that where he meets Zelda?
- [12:01]
B
So this is where he meets the iconic Zelda Fitzgerald. So it's 1918. He's at Camp Sheridan in Alabama, and he meets another rich, fashionable, slightly nuts debutante. And she's a Southern belle with very intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South.
- [12:18]
A
Okay, that's a bad sign.
- [12:19]
B
Very, very dodgy sign from the. And she's called Zelda Serre. And he's clearly still in love with Geneva. In fact, I think he's probably in love with her the rest of his life. You know, he's still writing to her. He's begging her to get back with him. But then she writes to tell him that she's married a rich Chicago businessman. And three days later, so obviously massively on the rebound, he tells Zelda that he loves her and they become a couple. But she won't agree to marry him either until Fitzgerald makes something of himself till he makes a bit of money. So he tries advertising in New York after the war. He and Zelda have this very turbulent, on, off sort of relationship going on. He considers suicide again. And this will also kind of continue for the rest of his life. And then he decides to have one more go at becoming a novelist. And he finally finds success with a very famous book. And this is called this side of paradise, and it's a huge hit, and it comes out in 1920, and it's very much based on his time at Princeton. So it's like love affairs, parties, you know, right from that stage, he's drawing on his own life. So finally, he and Zelda get married, and they become the fashionable literary couple of the early 1920s. They're constantly in the papers for partying. Zelda is the definitive flapper. She even writes a long essay in defense of flappers. And then in 1921, she gives birth to their daughter, Frances Scotty Fitzgerald. This poor child has a very turbulent life. And there's a really interesting story about how when she emerges from anaesthesia, she says, isn't she smart? She has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful. And a fool, a beautiful little fool.
- [13:53]
A
Oh, that's a line from the Great Gatsby.
- [13:56]
B
That's a line directly. Yeah. Taken from the Great Gatsby.
- [14:00]
A
Right, so let's move forward to the summer of 1923. Fitzgerald is 26. So he's, you know, he's quite a handsome guy in a kind of slightly fey way.
- [14:08]
B
But he's in the photos of him, he's quite attractive.
- [14:11]
A
But he's already beginning to sink into dissipation, isn't he? Even at this stage, Zelda, clever, witty and whatnot, but she's, she's, she's quite hard work. I think it's.
- [14:21]
B
Yeah.
- [14:22]
A
I mean, obviously it's big spoiler. She's going to end up in a lot of kind of institutions, mental institutions and so on.
- [14:28]
B
Can I, I have a fun, fun detail about Zelda.
- [14:30]
A
I'd like a fun detail. I love a fun detail.
- [14:32]
B
You live for it. I named my dog after Zelda Fitzgerald.
- [14:36]
A
Oh, my God.
- [14:37]
B
Yeah. A blonde, deeply neurotic spaniel. So.
- [14:41]
A
Wow. Yeah, it's apartment very apt.
- [14:43]
B
Yeah.
- [14:44]
A
There you go. And they're both massive drinkers, aren't they? I mean, this is the, this is the core of their, their issue is that they're basically functional alcoholics, high functioning alcoholics.
- [14:53]
B
Zelda was so notorious that when they were living in New York, the police detained her near Queensborough Bridge, I think, because they thought that she was this person called the Bobbed haired bandit, who was an infamous spree robbery because she was so famous and notorious that they were like, oh, it must be Zelda Fitzgerald.
- [15:11]
A
Wow. And it wasn't her.
- [15:12]
B
And it wasn't her. But she was very shaken by the whole thing. And that's why they ended up moving to Paris.
- [15:17]
A
Well, but before they go to France, they're living on Long island, which is where the Great Gatsby is set. They're living in a place called Great Neck. And Great Neck basically is this hangout. It's a former fishing village. It's now become a massive celeb hangout in the early 1920s. So movie stars and whatnot, and people call it the Hollywood of the East. And Great Neck in the book is a place called West Egg. Across the bay is a. A sort of slightly more up marketplace called Sans Point, which is in the book East Egg. It's kind of more old money and less flashy. And when he's there, Fitzgerald is clearly, you know, he's fascinated by these issues of class and status and exactly where you sit in the hierarchy. Definitely, as we'll see, you know, there's a big party lifestyle and he throws himself into it. And he's always, you know, first to the. To the drinks cabinet.
- [16:03]
B
Yeah.
- [16:03]
A
But at the same time, he's kind of repelled by it. And I think there's a self loathing about all the party scene that Zelda doesn't have.
- [16:11]
B
I don't think. I think she very much, you know, leads him astray in that. In that regard.
- [16:17]
A
But to go back to the Great Gatsby, because this is when he starts thinking about the Great Gatsby.
- [16:21]
B
Yeah.
- [16:21]
A
The big inspiration for this really is that doomed romance with his first love, isn't it?
- [16:25]
B
Yeah, definitely it is. He writes to a friend at one point, actually, which is so telling. The whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it. And actually, interestingly, during their relationship, Ginevra wrote a very Gatsby like story and sent it to Fitzgerald in which a female character is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man who cheats on her. But all the while she's pining for this young love of hers.
- [16:54]
A
So she's pining for him too?
- [16:56]
B
Yeah, I think she is pining for him, but I think he kind of represents an escape that is not really a reality. And they actually ended up reuniting in later life when she left her husband. And it's a disaster because Fitzgerald's so nervous that he gets really, really drunk.
- [17:09]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [17:09]
B
And messes the whole thing up. Yeah, it's really interesting.
- [17:12]
A
God, such a shame.
- [17:13]
B
Such a shame. So, but he's still married to Zelda at this time, which shows you how tumultuous their relationship was. Anyway, so he ends up writing a first draft of the Great Gatsby, but he isn't happy with it. And then in spring 1924, he and Zelda move to the south of France and he tries again and their marriage is in total crisis. At this point, Zelda's had an affair with a French aviator, or allegedly the guy himself totally denied it, said she'd made the whole thing up. And then as a result of this, she ends up overdosing on sleeping pills. And this again will recur throughout their life. And so in that, I think that's a inspiration on the Great Gatsby. It's like the idea of shattered romantic illusions. An ideal of love that can't ever live up to one's hopes for it, I suppose.
- [18:00]
A
And he's still working on the book, isn't he? Because he originally had Been thinking about setting in the 19th century.
- [18:04]
B
Yeah.
- [18:05]
A
And now he. And he was going to call it among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, which is, I think, a terrible title, but not as bad as some of the titles he later. With which he later flirts.
- [18:14]
B
I don't think it's a bad title. I think it's good. It sums up the book quite well.
- [18:18]
A
It does, I guess so. The other thing is, when he's in France, he's got. He becomes interested in this idea of basing it on a great sort of Roman classic, which is Petronius's Satiricon, which is from the late first century ad, and there's a whole section of Satiricon which is about a guy called Trimalchio.
- [18:34]
B
Yeah.
- [18:35]
A
Trimalchio is a former slave who has basically got his freedom and he's nouveau riche. He's a kind of parvenu. He's very vulgar. He has this huge dinner party to show off his fortune to other kind of top Romans. Top Romans. And he's telling. I'm sure this must be some more. Must be some more specific. Yeah, I'm sure there is expression for this, but I'm just going to call them top Romans.
- [18:57]
B
Nice.
- [18:57]
A
So he's telling loads of tall stories about himself, Trimalchio and showing off. And he actually. It ends with him talking about his own death and staging a mock funeral for himself. And Fitzgerald found all this really interesting and suggestive and he wanted to call the book Trimalchio in West Egg. This is Mad, which I think is a bad title. And when he sent it into his publishers, he made a huge fuss, saying, I want to call the Great Gatsby, Trimalke and West Egg. And they basically said no. And then his other suggested titles, you see this.
- [19:26]
B
So he wanted.
- [19:26]
A
He said, I could call it Gold Hatted Gatsby, which I think. I think Hatted doesn't belong in a title.
- [19:33]
B
It sounds like a Bond. A Bond movie title.
- [19:37]
A
Oh, well, this really is a Bond movie title. Or at least the song from a Bond film or something. The High Bouncing Lover.
- [19:46]
B
Yeah, that's like a PG Wodehouse pastiche or something.
- [19:50]
A
Totally mad. Yeah. Anyway, so he finishes the book in 1924, in October 1924. His editor is a guy called Maxwell Perkins.
- [19:58]
B
Really, really famous editor. He was Tom Wolf's editor as well, wasn't he?
- [20:02]
A
Oh, was he?
- [20:03]
B
Yeah.
- [20:03]
A
Wow.
- [20:03]
B
They had a very, very famous relationship.
- [20:06]
A
So Maxwell Perkins is one of those editors who's very into. American editors, are always more interventionist than British ones. Yeah, so he's very interventionist, gets to do loads of rewrites, and actually deserves a fair bit of credit for the finished book.
- [20:19]
B
Yeah, he definitely does. I mean, Fitzgerald always kicks back against the title, which is a really good one, the Great Gatsby, but he never makes his peace with it. But another really interesting massive inspiration was the COVID of the book. And it must be one of the most famous book covers ever. And it's called Celestial Eyes. And it's kind of this art deco image of these two massive eyes floating in a deep, deep blue sky. And it's like, yeah, blue landscape, the eyes of a flapper. And then you have this quite sensual mouth underneath. And it was by a very unknown Catalan artist called Francis Kougar. And Fitzgerald's big mate, Ernest Hemingway said that it looked like the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. And there's so many interesting tidbits about Hemingway and Fitzgerald's relationship, but nevertheless, Fitzgerald absolutely loved it. And he actually revised the Great Gatsby to match the COVID Smash the COVID Yeah.
- [21:14]
A
I love that detail.
- [21:14]
B
That is so rare. It's so rare. And that plays up. No, never. Massively plays up the themes of kind of eyes and blindness and, like, there's this omniscient watcher or whatever it is. But we'll come back to that later on.
- [21:27]
A
Just on the Hemingway thing, Tabby, I think it would be really remiss of you not to tell your anecdotes. Your watch, you've already shared with me. Is there not some issue with Hemingway and Fitzgerald having to go into the gents to inspect each other's equipment?
- [21:37]
B
Yeah, yeah, there is. There is. So basically, Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald absolutely loathed each other.
- [21:43]
A
Right?
- [21:43]
B
He thought she was nuts. And she thought. She used to say that his overt masculinity hid his secret homosexuality. And she used to mock him about it all the time. And so he started saying that she was trying to destroy F. Scott Fitzgerald. And the way that she was going about this was by going to parties and telling everyone that he had a very small penis.
- [22:03]
A
Oh, my God.
- [22:03]
B
So Hemingway said, no, no, this is absolutely not right. I'm gonna be a top friend and I'm gonna prove everyone that this is not the case. So he took F. Scott Fitzgerald into a public loo, examined it, and came out and confirmed to everyone that he had an average sized penis after all.
- [22:19]
A
Oh, my God. I think you enjoyed telling that too much.
- [22:22]
B
So much. But I don't know if that makes it worse. You hope to, like, stage a robust defense. And you have to celebrate him. Quite average.
- [22:30]
A
Yeah, exactly. You were there. Fitzgerald standing there next to him with his face falling.
- [22:35]
B
That's the best part of this whole episode. I've been building up to that for days. Anyway, back to the Great Gatsby.
- [22:40]
A
Back to the Great Gatsby. Actually, we should just say what happened to Fitzgerald and Zelda because. Yeah, we're going to talk about the book for the rest of the thing. But it is sad, isn't it? Because Zelda, basically, she was in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of her life. She had electroshock therapy, and actually she died of a fire in a mental institution.
- [22:57]
B
They think now that she probably had bipolar by the time they said that she has schizophrenia.
- [23:03]
A
And Fitzgerald, he basically just drank himself to death. He sank into complete alcoholism.
- [23:09]
B
Yeah.
- [23:10]
A
And here's a. He died of failure in Hollywood in 1940. And at that point, basically, people said, he's just a footnote in history. No one will care about him. Didn't they? Because his books had stopped selling. Do you see this fact about his royalties?
- [23:20]
B
Yeah. It's absolutely tragic that in the last 12 months of his life, his royalties came to exactly $13.13.
- [23:30]
A
It's like my royalties, Tabby.
- [23:31]
B
Oh, God. I know. Let's hope that your half million word historical tomes. Yeah. Remain the best sellers that they are.
- [23:38]
A
Also, they have a better funeral than Fitzgerald. At his funeral. The. He had an episcopalian funeral. Only 20 people went. And the minister said afterwards, the only reason I agreed to give the service was to get his body in the ground. He was a no good drunken bum, and the world was well rid of him.
- [23:51]
B
Yeah. And there's a terrifying tragic symmetry there with. With the Great Gatsby, actually. And the thing is, he was always criticized for trying to be too commercial with his writing to write for writing, to make money. But he said that with the Great Gatsby, it was going to be a work of art. It was going to have nothing to do with money. And then it was. It was quite negatively received.
- [24:09]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [24:09]
B
Which.
- [24:10]
A
Which broke his heart, as we'll get on to. All right, so let's talk a little bit about that book. Yeah. I guess the first thing about it that strikes you is the sensuality of it. Do you think?
- [24:19]
B
Overwhelmingly so.
- [24:20]
A
Yeah.
- [24:20]
B
Yeah.
- [24:21]
A
So it's kind of full of music and color and kind of, you know, I don't know, shimmering dresses and stuff. And people, you know, parties with cocktails. I mean, that does that. That's the Parrot. That's the stereotype of it.
- [24:33]
B
Yeah.
- [24:33]
A
But when you first read it, it to kind of miss all that, is it?
- [24:37]
B
But also he has these minute details. He's an incredible builder of kind of tension. And, you know, there's a very fraught scene where he sort of describes a sweating bottle of whiskey. And it's just. It creates a very sort of tense atmosphere. It's masterful, actually, I think. And yeah, you're right. But there is this kind of general impression of kind of beautiful women, shimmering dresses, people kind of wandering through shady gardens, bottomless cocktails. It's quite impressionistic. Like I always think there's Renoir's painting, the Luncheon of the Boating Party. And it's kind of lots of figures in and around each other, kind of lounging and their faces are never articulated. You never see specific details, but it's kind of a mass of bodies and colour. And that's very. The Great Gatsby.
- [25:22]
A
Yeah. So I think that that style reminds me a little bit of somebody like Joseph Conrad, who actually was one of Fitzgerald's favorite writers. Like, it's always a little bit elusive and always a bit at the edge of your vision. Nothing is ever quite in focus and clear. And actually Nostromo, Conrad's brilliant book, was one of Fitzgerald, I think, was Fitzgerald's fate. He said it was his favorite book of the last 50 years. And what he got from Conrad was this idea of a narrator. So Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Yeah, Famous, famous narrator. A narrator who's sort of telling. He's telling you the story and he's also telling you what he thinks the story means. But at the same time he's not necessarily reliable. So you always have to be a little bit skeptical of what the narrator is telling you. Which I guess brings us to the central. The person who's telling us the Great Gatsby, which is this guy Nick, Nick Carraway.
- [26:14]
B
And it's so interesting because in the initial drafts of the Great Gatsby, he wrote it as having an omniscient narrator. It wasn't from Nick's perspective. And that totally transforms the whole story because Nick is actually. He's almost a version of Fitzgerald. You know, they're both from kind of middle class Midwestern families, both Ivy League, but they're both kind of somewhat outsiders to the worlds that they are a part of, the worlds that they're describing. And Nick says of himself, I'm one of the few honest people that I've ever known. But then everything that happens in the book kind of leads us to question that.
- [26:45]
A
Right. Because he. He doesn't necessarily behave in an honest way.
- [26:48]
B
No. Right.
- [26:48]
A
He's a. He's a participant in a lot of the deceptions that happen. They're looking at love triangle deceptions. And actually it's an interesting thing because class is such a big theme in this whole book. Nick boasts about his family. At the beginning, he says, oh, we've been prominent in the Midwest for three generations. But then he goes on to say that they are kind of a bit of a fraud in themselves. So the Caraways, he says, we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buckley. But then he says, well, actually the founder of our family came to America in the 1850s. He sent a substitute in his place to the American Civil War. He basically started a hardware business. In other words, quite a fraudulent and banal beginning. And actually, at one point when Nick, he moves to work in finance, doesn't he, in the. In the East Coast. And he says how he's bought all these. These books, these books on banking, Red and Gold, like New Money from the Mint. And actually, that is what Gatsby is going to do later on is have all these sort of flashy books to show off learning that he doesn't really have.
- [27:45]
B
He's like a later iteration of what Gatsby is trying to be. Exactly.
- [27:49]
A
Well, they're sort of, I think, Nick and Gatsby. I mean, Nick is fascinated by Gatsby, but they're kind of versions of each other. Yeah, definitely Fitzgerald, I think. So anyway, Nick in the book, he moves to Long island from the Midwest, as Fitzgerald did, and that brings him into contact with these two people, Daisy and Tom. So Daisy is his cousin, second cousin once removed, and he knew Tom in college and he's very impressed by them because they are like a secret society to him. Reminds me actually of the Secret History which we're going to be doing on this show.
- [28:16]
B
There are echoes of the Great Gatsby throughout the Secret History, which we've both. Both kind of reading recently. Yeah, it's so true. Because also, I mean, Tom and Daisy are properly like, they're it. They are old money. They're everything that people like Gatsby aspire to be. So. And Tom is kind of like. He's a bit of a classic rugger lad, I guess.
- [28:36]
A
He's quite stupid.
- [28:37]
B
He plays polo. Yeah, he's stupid, brash, very violent. He's played by Joel Edgerton in, In the film very well, actually. He's from A very rich Chicago family, went to Yale, played football. He has shining arrogant eyes, enormous power in his cruel body. And there's an ongoing joke in the book that everyone that Gatsby refers to him as. As the polo player and he doesn't like that at all. So just straight. Straight out of your university friends, right? Yeah.
- [29:08]
A
Thank you. I'm. There's no doubt in my mind that you know loads.
- [29:11]
B
You love polo.
- [29:13]
A
You know loads of people like him. Come on.
- [29:14]
B
I. I shouldn't have.
- [29:16]
A
Yeah, you shouldn't have opened.
- [29:17]
B
Invited you.
- [29:18]
A
You shouldn't have opened that Pandora's box.
- [29:20]
B
But he's married to Daisy and then Daisy. Yeah.
- [29:23]
A
Now Daisy, do you see yourself in Daisy?
- [29:27]
B
I like to think of myself as more of a Jordan Baker really. Swing.
- [29:31]
A
Having said, do you see yourself and Daisy? I then looked at the notes and saw the words brittle, comma, insubstantial.
- [29:36]
B
Insubstantial boasts how sophisticated she is. God, that's uncanny actually. It's like looking in the mirror. Terrifying.
- [29:43]
A
And Daisy has a voice full of money. No one would say that if you Ted.
- [29:46]
B
No one would ever say that to me.
- [29:49]
A
Yeah, but they're terrible people, aren't they? Ultimately.
- [29:52]
B
But there's something utterly, utterly alluring about Daisy. Like there's an immaterial immateriality to her because it's always about her voice. We never really hear what Nick looks like. But equally we never really know what Daisy looks like. And yet everyone has such a strong sense of her of being this kind of waif with big eyes. She's described as. She's very slender, kind of immaterial. But she's also unhappy in her marriage to. To Tom because Tom is having an affair. And there's this scene at the very beginning when Nick first meets them all at this very elegant lunch party and her friend Jordan Baker whispers kind of waspishly in Nick's ear that all about this affair and that the mistress is always calling. And actually Jordan Baker is based on a real person too.
- [30:34]
A
Right. So she's the great. What's she. Golf. Is it golf?
- [30:37]
B
Yeah. Edith Cummings and she was Geneva Kings best friend.
- [30:41]
A
Right.
- [30:41]
B
In real life. So.
- [30:43]
A
So she's the character having a relationship with Nick.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah. And she cheats. No one is what they appear to be. No.
- [30:48]
A
And actually a couple of quick things about Tom and Daisy. Tom is a racist. So Tom is reading these pseudo scientific racist books he's whittering on constantly about the white race is going to be submerged.
- [30:58]
B
Yeah.
- [30:58]
A
And actually Daisy agrees with him on this and she says at one point we've got to beat them down.
- [31:02]
B
Yeah. She sort of jokingly. She's very carelessly flings it away. And there's this wonderful, wonderful quote about them. It's one of my favorite lines in. In the whole book. And it's. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made. And that is sums them up perfectly.
- [31:25]
A
It does, yeah. The careless people. And to be frank, I mean, there are lots of people like that. I mean, I can think of people I know who are like Tom and Daisy.
- [31:31]
B
Yeah, I'm sure. I think we all do.
- [31:32]
A
And then there's Gatsby himself. So let's talk a bit about Gatsby before we get into the break. Gatsby, in the first couple of chapters of the book, he's alluded to he's a neighbor of theirs in Long Island. But he's a mystery. He doesn't really exist as a physical being. He's just a sort of compilation of. Of rumors and anecdotes, a lot of which are kind of mad and wrong. Right.
- [31:52]
B
Yeah. Like at the parties that Nick attends before he meets Gatsby, there are all sorts of things. Like people say he's the cousin of the Kaiser. Somebody thought he killed a man once. He was a German spy during the war. No, it can't be that because he was in the American army during the war. No one knows any about him, and no one knows where or how he got his money from. But there is gossip that he's a bootlegger.
- [32:14]
A
Yes.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah. And people. People think that he may have been the nephew of von Hindenburg or whatever it is.
- [32:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. And that sort of mystery reflects what Fitzgerald himself said about Gatsby. So Fitzgerald later said to a friend, the friend had complained about Gatsby and said, I can't work out who he is. And Fitzgerald said, you're right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself. He started as one man I knew and then changed into myself and the man he knew. You've. You know who this bloke is? You've done some digging on this.
- [32:44]
B
I thought this was so interesting. So the Fitzgerald's neighbor while living on Long island was a guy called Max Gerlach. And he'd been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. But then he later became A gentleman bootlegger who operated speakeasies for the Jewish mob boss in New York, Arnold Rothstein. And we'll. We'll come to him more later. He lived like a millionaire. He kind of flaunted his wealth by having massive parties. He famously never wore the same shirt twice, which is a detail about Gatsby. And apparently he referred to everyone as old sport, which is like.
- [33:19]
A
Oh, so he's very Gatsby.
- [33:20]
B
Like very, very, very Gatsby. And he used to spread very outlandish myths about himself. Like he once said, I'm a descendant of the Kaiser. So, I mean, that has Gatsby written all over it. Yeah. So interesting.
- [33:32]
A
And then we first see Gatsby physically in this very, very famous scene at the end of the chapter when he's. I mean, maybe Tabby, you want to read a little bit of it? He's gone outside and he's. Nick sees him. He's standing, looking at the stars and looking up at the heavens and in this very, very memorable and strange kind of posture. Right?
- [33:53]
B
Yeah, very odd. So. So it's written a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. And then this is the amazing bit. He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way. And far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily. I glanced seaward and distinguish nothing except a single green light, minute and far away that might have been the end of a dock.
- [34:28]
A
That green light is the thing that guides him throughout the whole book. And the color green recurs again and again, doesn't it?
- [34:35]
B
I think people who don't know much about the Great Gatsby. Everyone's heard of the green light and its meaning, as you say, it's hard to pinpoint. You know, it's kind of the embodiment of hopeless yearning. And it's something that anyone who reads the book can kind of transpose their own hopes and desires onto. It's symbolic of. Of kind of longing, isn't it?
- [34:55]
A
Yeah. Green. The color of money, of envy. But the green light, as we discover, is kind of also Daisy Buchanan. Right. And he's got this.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:04]
A
He's got this kind of yearning for days. To Buchanan. Anyway, they first meet in person, Nick and Gatsby at that party. That's the passage that I think we read or performed so magnificently at the beginning.
- [35:15]
B
Yeah.
- [35:16]
A
And he's never really physically described. He's just like. Almost like a version of Nick, isn't he? So he's, you know, he's a year or two over 30. He's elegant, but he sort of feels insubstantial. And actually, weirdly, when Nick talks to him, Nick says often Gatsby had nothing to say. There was almost nothing there.
- [35:33]
B
He's like an outline of a man, isn't he?
- [35:35]
A
Yeah.
- [35:35]
B
And he kind of tries to fill it in for other people rather than letting people make their own judgment of him. And he tells all these wild, fantastical stories. So he says I'm the son of. This is. He's trying to tell Nick about himself. He says, I'm the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West. All dead now. I was brought up in America, but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors had been educated there. For many years after that, I lived like a young raja in all the capitals of Europe, Paris, Venice, Rome. Collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago. That's the one honest thing that he said. Because that one tragic thing was. Was his. His love for Daisy.
- [36:16]
A
Yeah. So the love for Daisy, Nick's girlfriend, Jordan Baker, tells him the whole story, doesn't she? She basically says, you know, Gatsby was an officer. It's. This is very Fitzgerald and Zelda. Gatsby was a young officer and Daisy was a kind of posh girl, rich girl from Louisville, Kentucky. He fell in love with her. He courted her. He was posted overseas. But her family wouldn't let her go and see him off. You know, he was too poor. She pined. She got over it. She married this guy, Tom Buchanan. And so the question is, what's Gatsby been doing in the interim? Why has he taken the house across the bay? What is his. How has he got all his money?
- [36:54]
B
Yeah.
- [36:54]
A
And what is his plan? What is this? And what is this kind of yearning for this green light all about?
- [36:59]
B
Well, the answers to these intriguing questions are coming for Nick and also for our listeners in just a moment. But first, in true 1920s style, we'll take a break to hear from Dr. T.J. eckleberg and some of our other beloved advertisers.
- [37:15]
A
All right, see you after the break.
- [37:18]
B
Get in the game with the college branded Venmo debit card. Wreck your team with every tap and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash, a new rewards program from Venmo. No monthly fee, no minimum balance, just school pride and spending power. Get in the game and sign up for the Venmo debit card@venmo.com collegecard. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank. NA Select Schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo me stash terms max 100 cash back per month. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move. Have having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [38:18]
A
Predator Badlands now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. Here.
- [38:24]
B
You're not the Predator. You're the Predator. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray, pray, pray, pray.
- [38:32]
A
Critics are saying it's epic, stunning and breathtaking.
- [38:38]
B
Many have come here. None have survived.
- [38:43]
A
Predator Badlands now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. Rated PG 13.
- [38:51]
B
Welcome back, Dominic, you promised us answers to all these burning questions about Gatsby's money and his plans. And obviously, people who have read the book will know what's coming. But for everyone else, indulge us. Tell all.
- [39:02]
A
Tom Buchanan, at one point, who's actually Gatsby's love rival, describes him as Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And it's a phrase that says a lot about Tom's snobbery and his arrogance. But he's actually right. Gatsby is Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. He's originally James Gats from North Dakota. We discovered this about two thirds of the way through the book.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah.
- [39:23]
A
And coming from North Dakota, you could not find a place in the United States that's more provincial, more far from the metropolis and the bright lights, a more banal kind of background, but also North Dakota. Interestingly, it was a key kind of pipeline for illicit alcohol during Prohibition from Canada. So right away, the fact that he comes from North Dakota is a little signifier that he's involved in bootlegging and smuggling, just as actually Tom had had predicted. So Tom is horrible and. And just a terrible person. But he's also right about Gatsby. Gatsby's parents, we discover, were Lutheran Farmers. He went to college in Minnesota, like, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, was.
- [40:05]
B
Yeah.
- [40:05]
A
But he dropped out. And one day he was walking along Lake Superior along the sort of the. The coat. The lake shore, and he saw a yacht in trouble. And this yacht belonged to a copper tycoon called Dan Cody. Now, Dan Cody's name, you know, Dan Cody is obviously an invented character, but his name, Cody and the fact that he has made his money on the frontier from copper in the west, recalls Buffalo Bill, because Buffalo Bills.
- [40:33]
B
Oh, that's a great detail.
- [40:35]
A
Was Cody. So the very name of Dan Cody tells you that he's out there on the frontier in the west and he's made.
- [40:40]
B
And a bit dodgy.
- [40:41]
A
Yeah. Cody adopts him because he saved the yacht almost as a pet and a protege.
- [40:47]
B
Sorry. They're all these kind of things, theories that they're sort of lovers or whatever, but I think that's. Yeah, I think that's mad projection. Yeah.
- [40:53]
A
Yeah. So Gats goes aboard and over time, he renames himself a more. What seems like a more prestigious name, Jay Gatsby. Although that name too, I think the name J to an American reader in the 1920s, the most famous J in American history was a guy called Jay Gould, who had been a corrupt railroad magnate and financier and robber Barron in the 1870s and 1880s. And he had become a byword, Jay Gould, for vast wealth concealing immense corruption and crookedness. So again, the name Jay Gatsby.
- [41:29]
B
Yeah.
- [41:30]
A
Kind of is a. Is a hit, is a clue to American readers in the 20s.
- [41:33]
B
Right, yeah. Because also the thing is, we never do find out exactly how he does make his money. And, you know, there are all sorts of. He thinks he's going to be inheriting Cody's millions after he dies, but it all ends up going to his mistress, Ella. So instead, Gatsby, the implication is, goes into crime of some kind, bootlegging, maybe fixing, maybe something to do with the Mafia. Because there are all these kind of dark allusions to it throughout the book because he constantly has butlers coming up to him saying, oh, Chicago's Colin. And he sort of says, no, not now, not now.
- [42:03]
A
Great American accent, by the way. That's.
- [42:04]
B
Thank you very much. Yeah, Well, I mean, you had a sampler of it in the opening reading.
- [42:09]
A
The interesting thing about him is not really that he's a crook, though, to me.
- [42:12]
B
Yeah. He's not crooked at his soul. And he's definitely not crooked to Nick.
- [42:15]
A
No, no, he's not. I get. Although he does Tell Nick some tall stories, doesn't he?
- [42:19]
B
And he does try to recru Nick into his sort of funny, dodgy schemes.
- [42:22]
A
But the interesting thing about. And the thing that everyone takes away from the book is that Gatsby is a dreamer who's committed to this project of reinvent. Of remaking himself.
- [42:31]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [42:32]
A
You know, shedding his skin and taking on a new identity that becomes a very kind of familiar archetype in American fiction. So I think, for example, the most. One of the most famous ones is Ripley in the Talented Mr. Ripley.
- [42:47]
B
So many echoes of the Talented Mr. Ripley.
- [42:48]
A
Completely. Or as we'll come onto when we come to it in the later episode, the Secret History, Donna Tartt's book. These characters were playing at being something they're not. It's a really, really common theme in American. In modern American writing, I think. And he has invented a character for himself, crucially, that he thinks will appeal to Daisy. Because just like Fitzgerald himself with his first love, Gatsby has never, ever recovered from that initial disappointment with Daisy. And everything that he's doing is about turning himself into the kind of rich character that he thinks will win Daisy's heart.
- [43:23]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, he gets the house that he gets because it's across the bay from Daisy. And it's revealed that he throws these massive parties in the hope that Daisy will come to one of them one day. Fundamentally, actually misunderstanding there the chasm between old money and new money. Cause his parties are very new money. And when Daisy finally does go to one, she's slightly appalled by it all, but. So there's something very apparently romantic about that. You know, it's a kind of romantic idealism to it. But the further we get into the book, we kind of see that it's not very romantic at all because it's kind of more of an obsession. His feelings for Daisy are slightly, you know, unhealthy. He's built a whole life around them. And it's all about the pursuit of a dream.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah. Rather than about Daisy herself. Right. It's about the idealized vision of Daisy.
- [44:10]
B
It's a flawed ideal. He doesn't actually see Daisy for what she is. She's just a symbol of, like, wealth, sophistication, status, all the things that he wanted as a child, but have always been beyond his reach. And in the realization of that dream, from the moment that they've first reunited and then as their kind of love affair unfolds, you increasingly get the sense that it's, you know, all that glitters isn't Gold. It's not quite what he hoped it would be. And he's sort of trying to get round that and trying to make it this perfect ideal that it could only be from afar, in the living.
- [44:42]
A
So this takes us into the question of what the book actually, in capital letters means, if anything.
- [44:47]
B
Right.
- [44:47]
A
Well, here's the interesting thing, because when it was first released, Gatsby had this. Gatsby. I mean, the fact that I've called him Gatsby.
- [44:53]
B
I know. Freudian slip.
- [44:54]
A
Yeah, very Freudian slip. Fitzgerald thought that this book would absolutely make his name, that this would be the kind of masterpiece. And actually most early reviewers said it's not that great. And actually they said it's very superficial. The great Critic and satirist H.L. mencken famously said, it's a glorified anecdote, which I don't think anybody would say now. Not. Certainly not all these. So hundreds of thousands of people studying it as teenagers in their English literature classes.
- [45:18]
B
Yeah. It's one of the most written about study. But I mean, even preparing for this episode, I mean, never ending things about this book.
- [45:25]
A
Exactly. And just to pick up on a couple of things that really strike you about it. So first of all, I think what most people take straight away is that it's actually just a brilliant, brilliant window onto the. The sense of modernity of the 1920s. So the technology and the cars and all of that. That.
- [45:41]
B
And I think, you know what? I read one reviewer from the time who said that it was a. It described a world that most people couldn't relate to because this is actually a period of great poverty in America, et cetera. But from the safe, you know, distance of today, it doesn't matter to us that we can't understand it. It's glory. It's glorious looking into a world, you know, out of time. And as you say, it is so modern, you know, it's very fashionable, all the clothes that all the characters wear. But also, you know, it's electric lights, it's got telephones, Gatsby's got speedboats, he's got a seaplane. You know, it's all about. You know, the movie massively plays into this. Fast cars, gas stations, commuter trains. And Gatsby himself is a very, very modern figure. You know, he's a bootlegger, a bond market speculator. And it's also a book of the new mass media and consumerism. Newspapers, magazines, cars, advertisements.
- [46:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. All of which. So we mentioned before how Fitzgerald loved Joseph Conrad, the other writer that sometimes Fitzgerald Reminds me of a little bit because the way he charts all the. These very rich characters and their kind of love affairs. Is Henry James, another great American writer. But if you read. I mean, there seems to be a massive chasm between Henry James and Joseph Conrad on one side and Fitzgerald on the other. His. His books seem to belong to it. Well, they do belong to a different century. Even though the time lapse is not that great. It's. It's as though time has really speeded up and suddenly we're in a world of telephones and, you know, cocktails and all of this kind of thing. And yet at the same time, I think one of the things that I find so interesting about it is it's a book about. It's very present minded, it's set in the 20s, but all the characters are looking backwards the whole time. I mean, even somebody as unreflective as Tom Buchanan, we're told right away that basically he's constantly dreaming of some irrecoverable football game that he played at college.
- [47:30]
B
Totally. But. But also for characters like Tom and Daisy, it's kind of like the last stand of that old world for people like them. A world in which you have, you know, servants everywhere and people bring you cocktails and stuff. So. And he can feel Tom, the sense of incursion. The incursion of like new money and modernity.
- [47:47]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [47:48]
B
And I think one of the most iconic lines in the whole book is when Nick says to Gatsby, oh, you can't relive the past or something like that. And Gatsby says, well, of course you can, old sport.
- [47:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. And he's. And it's. We discover he's wrong and actually that. So there's a bit. When Gatsby first meet. Re. Meets Daisy. When he meets Daisy again. Nick has arranged it for him. They meet at Nick's house.
- [48:09]
B
I find that quite romantic.
- [48:11]
A
And at the beginning of that meeting, Gatsby knocks over, or almost knocks over a defunct mantelpiece clock. And that sort of sense of like, time has stopped in the clock. Right. But also something is broken. You know, there's. There's a. There's something flawed at the centre of his vision. This idea that you can turn back time and recover something that was lost cause. You can't.
- [48:33]
B
Yeah. It's actually quite a sort of tragic foreshadowing that moment. And the idea of something being broken brings us to a part of the book that always stuck in my mind. I'm sure it sticks in lots of People's minds. And this is the Valley of Ashes. And so obviously, this is a book really preoccupied with class. These are the working class people, the people that people like Tom and Daisy kind of use and abuse. And they're very firmly delineated. The three classes. You have, like, east egg, west egg, new money, old money, and then you have the Valley of Ashes. And that's like, where the sort of working man lives. And it's inspired by the real life Corona dumps, which are huge mounds of ash and rubbish four miles long. And this is where we come back to the eyes that we talked about on the front cover. Because there's this massive advertising billboard above this huge, gray, desolate land, you know, and it's described as being worked by ash gray men with leaden spades. And on this billboard are the gigantic eyes of Dr. T.J. eckleberg. No face, just these terrifying, enormous yellow glasses. And it's not entirely clear what it means. I mean, it could be like God watching over all the sin unfolding before his eyes. Or. Or is it maybe the false God of consumerism and advertising?
- [49:45]
A
Yeah.
- [49:46]
B
There's one point where George Wilson, who is the husband of Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle, he pulls her over to the window and he gets her, you know, and he says to her, God is. God sees everything. And they're directly in front of Dr. Eckleburg's eyes.
- [50:03]
A
I found that thing when I first read it. The idea of these two weird eyes overlooking the whole scene over this valley of ashes really re. I mean, that, to me, was the image that I remembered most from the book.
- [50:14]
B
I think a lot of people.
- [50:16]
A
Yeah, because it's so strange, right? It's so weird. And actually this is so interesting because this actually reflects not just the COVID but also one of the other big inspirations for Fitzgerald, which is the poem the Wasteland by T.S. eliot. I know you're a massive fan of the Wasteland.
- [50:29]
B
I'm a huge fan of the Wasteland. That's my favorite poem.
- [50:31]
A
Well, well, so Fitzgerald, like you, was a huge fan of it, and he sent a copy of the Great Gatsby to T.S. eliot, and he wrote, dedicated it to, and I quote, the greatest of living poets from his enthusiastic worshiper.
- [50:43]
B
No way.
- [50:44]
A
And that in the Wasteland, as you will remember, there's a character, Tiresias, this kind of blind seer into the future. And T.J. eckleberg, T.S. eliot, they're not so different. And at one point, Nick wonders if Eckleberg, and I quote, sank down into eternal blindness like Tiresias. So this clearly, you know, this. I mean, this is the Valley of Ashes is the Wasteland from T.S. eliot's great modernist poem, which is basically for people who don't know, it's a poem written in the early 1920s that's trying to capture the experience of Western civilization after the First World War. Kind of broken into fragments and whatnot. And it's haunted by death and despair and all of this kind of thing.
- [51:28]
B
Yeah, definitely. But I mean, you made a very impressive observation, didn't you?
- [51:33]
A
Oh, thanks.
- [51:34]
B
Yeah, thanks. Fabulous piece of my answer. I can't believe I had to remind you.
- [51:40]
A
You were so thrilled day and I was so proud of myself.
- [51:43]
B
Yeah.
- [51:44]
A
So there's a bit in the book when Nick's talking about Gatsby's parties and he says, in the Blue Gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperers and the champagne and the stars. And that reminded me of a line in a T.S. eliot poem called Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where he says in the. What's it in the something? The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
- [52:04]
B
Yeah, right.
- [52:05]
A
And. And in Prufrock, the Elliot poem, he's basically, Elliot is saying, all these parties, very insubstantial and everybody's actually alienated and they're making ch. Chat. But actually their lives are empty and hollow, you know, and such a good time and. But that's what the. That's true of Gatsby's parties as well. Right. And I love the way that Fitzgerald writes the party scenes and the Great Gatsby, because I think I remember reading when I reread them this time, I thought that is like what parties are like. Their succession totally of slightly disconnected images. The more you drink, you can't remember now why you're talking to this person. And suddenly you're in a different place entirely and you don't know how you got there. And all of this.
- [52:43]
B
I think this is your unique experience of parties, to be honest.
- [52:46]
A
But maybe I just have. I just have really fun parties.
- [52:48]
B
Yeah, really, really fun. Calls to mind some of your journeys back to Chipping Norton from our team get togethers. But, you know, sitting on a 4am train wondering how you got there, but you are actually right. There's such a hollowness at the center of these parties and even Gatsby's massive ones. And there's this enormous sense of excitement and everything's so beautiful and it's colors and there's vast trays of peeled or like oranges coming and going. But there's a creeping sense that either this kind of joyous balloon is going to just deflate and you're going to feel every second of it and feel utterly hollowed out as a result, or it's going to burst.
- [53:21]
A
Yeah.
- [53:22]
B
And then again, everything's destroyed. There's nothing at the center. And people come for the wrong reasons. People don't really know each other.
- [53:27]
A
The people who are there are painted in the most kind of scathing possible terms, aren't they? So they all have the most ludicrous names. There's a great passage, the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a man called Bunsen, who I'm going to knew Yale. And Dr. Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, the Cat Lips and the Bembergs, and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon, who afterwards strangled his wife. And they've got ridiculous American names. I mean, obviously, obviously. But also their lives are absurd and dark and violent violence. Yeah. And I guess you could say in this passage, you know, so much of the book is very sensitive and nuanced, but there are moments where Fitzgerald kind of tips into caricature. So not just with the parties, but also, you know, you mentioned the mob and all of it. So there's a character called Meyer Wolfsheim, and he really is a very unappealing caricature of a corrupt Jewish gambler.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah, I think Fitzgerald lets himself down there.
- [54:26]
A
I think he does. His cufflinks are human teeth. Yeah, he fixed the World Series in 1919. He's obviously based on the character you've already mentioned, Arnold Rothstein, who is the head of the Jewish mob in New York City. But the portrait of him is frankly anti Semitic, I would say.
- [54:42]
B
Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. But the interesting thing as well about the parties is they are actually. You know, we described how there's nothing really at the center of them. They're sort of fake. And there's a confusion to them. It's actually during the course of these parties that we get the first hit. Hints that Gatsby's life is false and. And that he's a fraud. And, you know, if. If F. Scott Fitzgerald strays into caricature from time to time, this is done with immense skill and subtlety. So, for instance, we start with, like, his house. It's sort of. It's described as an imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy with a tower on one side that was the
- [55:19]
A
most excellent French accent, by the way.
- [55:21]
B
Thank you so much. Yeah. Actually I make a point of really exacerbating my Englishness when I speak in French. Hotel de Ville in Normandy continue. With a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool. And so this may have been modelled on Falaise, who was Harry. That's Harry Guggenheim's mansion across the bay at Sands Point. And it's kind of a mock Gothic castle. But the thing about Gatsby's house is it's trying to be what the Buchanan's house is. And like for instance, it's covered in ivy to try and make it look old, but the ivy is. Is brand new and bright green. He doesn't understand that you can't be in that world unless you're born into that world.
- [56:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't. It's like people used to say of the Tory politician Michael Heseltine.
- [56:10]
B
Oh, that was a bridge I didn't see. Comic.
- [56:11]
A
This is an unexpected. Like he's the kind of man who buys his own furniture.
- [56:16]
B
No.
- [56:16]
A
In other words. Yeah.
- [56:17]
B
Surely not.
- [56:18]
A
Other tourists would say this off him. Right.
- [56:20]
B
Yeah.
- [56:20]
A
So. And actually there's a wonderful scene in the library.
- [56:23]
B
I love this.
- [56:24]
A
So. With a man with massive owl eyed spectacles. So he's like Dr. Eckleberg or he's like God or whatever. He's a man who's. Can see things.
- [56:32]
B
Yeah.
- [56:32]
A
And he's looking at Gatsby's books and he's amazed that they're real. He says, I thought they'd be cardboard. He says of Gatsby's library. It's a triumph. What thoroughness, what realism. He knew when to stop too. He didn't cut the pages. In other words, he hasn't actually read the books.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah.
- [56:46]
A
And there's a sort of, you know, it's fake. It's a set, Holly. It's. It's a Hollywood backdrop. And the whole thing is. Is designed. And Gatsby's clothes are fake, aren't they? Because Tom says of him at one point, so harsh. Do you want, do you want to
- [57:02]
B
do the line, Tabby, an Oxford man, like heli is. He wears a pink suit. And in fairness, I mean, who has a pink suit?
- [57:08]
A
And I'm an Oxford man. So, you know.
- [57:11]
B
Yeah, yeah. Uncanny. And you have dodgy dealings with the mafia.
- [57:16]
A
Exactly.
- [57:17]
B
It all fits together. Tom's very snobbish comment there. It brings us back to the class thing, which is just. It's everywhere in this book and it's the sense that Gatsby can just never transcend this outsider status. You know, he'll never fit in, he'll never make it. And I think that deep down that's kind of what Daisy is for him. It's not that he loves this woman necessarily, you know, the nuances of her personality. It's what she represents. And I actually think maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald had that a little bit with Geneva King. You know, it's a ticket into a gilded world that is always out of reach.
- [57:51]
A
That's feeling that is so. It was so common to lots of listeners. So common to all of us. Yeah. You know, there are so many scene moments in the book where there's. Nick thinks of somebody outside the party looking in through the windows or something. And that feeling that we all have sometimes that there's an exclusive party going on and we're not invited and we'll never get in and we'll never be accepted. Because even if we're not wearing a
- [58:12]
B
pink suit, even if we're not wearing
- [58:13]
A
a pink suit, our essential pink suitedness will identify us as an outsider.
- [58:18]
B
It's writ large all over our faces.
- [58:20]
A
Yeah, exactly. And there's a very sort of almost a poignant moment at the end when.
- [58:24]
B
Oh yeah, big spoiler.
- [58:26]
A
Gatsby's father turns up and he shows Nick this book that his son had when he was a boy with a kind of timetable in which he said, you know, practice elocution, poison how to attain it. Read an improving book or magazine once a week. The basic touching that, yeah, Gatsby had this sort of to do list to try and improve himself. And what that's doing, of course, is it's mocking all these characters in kind of late 19th century, early 20th century books. There's a character, this kind of a writer called Horatio Alger, who specialized in this. Characters who improve themselves and rose up and climbed the ladder. The American dream. They made something themselves. And actually one of the lessons of the Great Gatsby is you can't. You can try to do it, but you'll be dragged back, you'll be found out and it will end horribly.
- [59:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [59:11]
A
Which brings us to the end of the book.
- [59:12]
B
Tabby. Yeah. And I love. I think this is just such a brilliantly written scene. Cause it's a boiling hot day. So quite like the go between. So there's this relentless beating heat and it reflects the emotional temperature, you know, all the characters. It's basically a moment of real revelation for everybody. And it's building to this massive crescendo. But ironically, what triggers this massive denouement is that it's a lunch at the Buchanan's house that Gatsby is attending. And Daisy says to him, oh, you're so cool. You always look so cool. Which shows that she actually does know him. And I actually think slight, you know, did always slightly love him. The way that she and Gatsby are looking at each other is Tom Buchanan finally realizes that there is something going on between them. And he's absolutely appalled by this. He's very shaken by it. Even though he's always had affairs, he possesses Daisy.
- [60:03]
A
Yeah, he realizes that they have a connection, doesn't he?
- [60:07]
B
Exactly. Exactly.
- [60:07]
A
They have a past.
- [60:08]
B
Exactly.
- [60:09]
A
And then they all go bizarrely, I mean, slightly powerful, perhaps slightly implausibly, given what's just happened. They all say, well, we'll go on this massive drive across the Valley of Ashes into New York City. They get to New York City and then they all meet up in New York City and they have a big showdown, don't they? Tom has this rant about Mr. Nobody from nowhere and says, you know, is this the fashionable thing now? You know, people can sleep with your wife? And then he really lets himself down. He says, the next thing you know, you know, people will be throwing everything overboard. And we have intermarriage between black and white. So there's the ugliness coming. Coming back out. But Gatsby still is. There's still something contrived about him. Because I always think at this point, he sounds like someone from a soap opera or from a sentimental melodrama. She never loved you. She only married you. Because I was poor. She was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake. In her heart. She never loved anybody but me. And it always. It almost feels a bit trite, I think a bit hollow, what he's saying.
- [61:04]
B
Nick says at one point during this confrontation that he can see that Gatsby knows it's all unraveling. You know, he knows it's gone. He knows it's too late. So once again, there. There's this massive clash between the sentimental ideals and the reality. Cause, you know, Daisy admits at one point she did love Tom and that actually she loves them both. And while this is enough for Tom, because he's from this old money world where basically people hurt each other, they throw themselves up against the rocks, but they never, ever break up. Because like, tradition demands that you stick together. But for Gatsby, it's not enough. Gatsby wants to sort of own Daisy entirely. Cause that's the only way that his dream can kind of reach fruition. Tom says about he and Daisy, there are things between us that you'll never know. These words seem to bite physically at Gatsby. And I always wondered that thing. There are things between us you'll never know if. That was kind of a callback to F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with Zelda. You know, they'd hurt each other so many times. They'd had abortions, miscarriages, terrible, drunken, you know, shenanigans. But they're fundamentally bound by the. These terrible, terrible things they've both witnessed and seen.
- [62:08]
A
By their suffering. Yeah. By their kind of mutual suffering.
- [62:11]
B
Yeah. And their kind of brutality with each other.
- [62:15]
A
Yeah. You know, completely. So we've probably run out of time. So we can't really get into the absolute ending. I mean, there's an amazing line, probably one of the lines of the book that always sticks in my head. We drove on toward death through the cooling twilight, because they then drive back to Long Island. And this is when the great tragedy happens, which if you've read the book or if you listen to the audiobook, you will know. Maybe we shouldn't spoil the story. For those of you who haven't, there is this incredible moment at the event. I think it's a brilliant piece of writing, One of the great pieces of writing in the 20th century when Nick, our narrator, sort of widens the focus out and he turns the whole thing into a metaphor for the American dream and for the story of America more broadly, doesn't it? Cause he thinks about Long Island.
- [63:01]
B
Oh, it's beautiful writing this.
- [63:02]
A
And he says, the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes. A fresh green breast of the new world is vanished. Trees. The trees that had made way for Gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. And that dream, the dream, is not just the dream of Daisy or of the green light. It's the dream of becoming new, of starting again, of reinventing yourself and the world. And that's been Gatsby's dream throughout, hasn't it? But it's turned out disastrously, as we'll discover at this point in the book.
- [63:35]
B
Yeah, tragedy.
- [63:37]
A
Because it's a dream that kills people.
- [63:38]
B
Yeah, it destroys people's lives. And Gatsby pays a very, very high price for building his whole life around a single hope, a single desire, and a single dream. You know, it's this theme again that runs throughout the book that you can't turn back the clock even with the kind of force of will that Gatsby has at his disposal, the determination that he has from being a young boy. You just can't do that. You can't undo the past lost.
- [64:03]
A
Yeah, so it's very melancholy. I mean, actually, that's the one thing I really took from. It's a really, really melancholy book. And actually the last lines, the most melancholy of all, one of the most brilliant passages, I think, in all literature.
- [64:14]
B
I could not agree more. Yeah, I totally agree.
- [64:16]
A
Do you want to give us. Do you want to give us a burst? Abby, come on. Of course you do. But don't do it. But don't do it in your American.
- [64:21]
B
No, I won't. I don't. I won't. It's far too poignant. I don't want to. I don't want to make people sob. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the Green knight at the end of Daisy's Dock. He'd come a long way to this blue lawn. And his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. Somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out further. And one fine morning. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. And that final line, the boats against the current, is what was written on F. Scott Fitzgerald's headstone.
- [65:20]
A
Oh, wow. That's a good detail. I didn't know that. Wow. That's very, very poignant detail.
- [65:25]
B
Yeah.
- [65:26]
A
All right. So we have to always give these things marks out of 10, don't we? And how. What are we marking in this week?
- [65:32]
B
I thought initially that we should do it in green lights, but actually, given that this episode has been really about you, maybe we should do it in pink suits. Wow.
- [65:41]
A
I didn't see that coming. But, yeah, I agree. Pink suits is the best thing. So who's going to go first? Should I go first?
- [65:47]
B
You go first.
- [65:47]
A
Yeah, I'm actually going to give it. Do you know what? I've actually. Actually, this is a mad thing, but during the recording, I've actually increased my mark.
- [65:54]
B
Wow.
- [65:54]
A
So I've increased it from. I've been so persuaded by the power of your analysis.
- [65:58]
B
Thank you, Dominic.
- [65:59]
A
Priest it from eight to nine.
- [66:02]
B
Oh, wow.
- [66:03]
A
I'm going to nine because I think I'm. I'm docking a mark. Only because I don't really care about the characters particularly.
- [66:10]
B
All right, fair enough.
- [66:10]
A
I don't find it has a massive emotional heft with me, but I think in terms of pure writing, line by line writing, it's as good a book as was written in the 20th century and as good a book as you'll ever read. And I, I. Yeah, I think the. The layers of nuance are tremendous. So, yeah, nine out of ten.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah, I. I hate to admit, but I totally agree. I. I think this is one of the great books. It's just definitely one of the greatest books that's come out of America, if not the greatest. So I'm gonna give it 9 out of 10. I just couldn't believe this. Yeah, but it's the power of the writing and the nuance and the subtlety. I'm gonna doc a mark, though, because he does flirt with caricatures.
- [66:51]
A
Okay, so we're not. We're not. We're not doing what we should be doing, which is disagreeing agreeably. We're actually.
- [66:56]
B
That was never the tagline.
- [66:57]
A
We're agreeing disagreeably.
- [67:00]
B
Exactly. We're reluctantly agreeing.
- [67:02]
A
Yeah. Okay, so remind us, Tabby, what's coming up?
- [67:06]
B
So next week we are doing hamnet. So if you've seen the movie that's just come up out.
- [67:10]
A
Yeah. Maggie o'.
- [67:11]
B
Farrell. Very intriguing. Yeah, I. I can't wait to do that, actually. It's one of my favorite books.
- [67:15]
A
Wonderful.
- [67:15]
B
Lots to come.
- [67:16]
A
All right. Lots to come. Thank you so much, Tabby. Everybody, enjoy your cocktails and your pink suits. Thank you very much. That was really good fun. Bye. Bye. Bye.