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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:08]
B
Hello, it's Anthony Scaramucci. Welcome to Dominic Sambrook, who is the co host of the Rest is History, but has a brand new podcast out. And so I'm a bibliophile, big time bookworm. I'm super excited about your podcast and the title of the podcast is the Book Club. Of course. Dominic is a friend of the show and close personal friend of mine. Dom, tell us a little bit about this new podcast idea that you've come up with.
- [00:37]
A
Well, Anthony, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the Rest Is Politics us. Now you have your own book club show, of course, called Open Book, don't you? Which is a great show and an inspiration for us. My producer, the Rest Is History. Tabitha, Syra and I love talking about books. We talk about fiction. What we're doing in the book club is every week we're taking a different novel and we look at the history behind the novel, we look at the author's biography, what they're trying to do. So sometimes they are great works of literature, Then might be 1984 or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein, and sometimes they are more contemporary. So we've literally just recorded an episode. I imagine, Anthony, you're not a huge fan of the romantasy genre, which is fantasy meets romance, generally read by teenage girls or women in their 20s and early 30s.
- [01:26]
B
Are these like the Fabio guys that are like walking around on the COVID Is that the guys?
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A
You're probably. There's a bit of that. There's a bit of that.
- [01:32]
B
I'm probably too intimidated for that, Dom, maybe. Right, exactly. Probably too insecure for that. But go ahead, keep going.
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A
Our first episode, which came out a couple of weeks ago, was about Wuthering Heights to tie in with the film. And we've done an episode about Kazuya Shigeru's book Never Let Me Go. And we're just going to do a whole variety of books and we kind of rate them. We talk about what we like, what we didn't like. It's a lot of fun.
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B
Okay, how do you select the book? Time. I'm dying to know.
- [01:56]
A
So we take it in turns. Basically. It's what Tabby wants to do and what I want to do. We're a generation apart, so that's a kind of fun dynamic. And each week we alternate so we might have an absolute classic, you know, let's say Frankenstein or Dracula. John Steinbeck's book, East of Eden or the Hound of the Baskervilles. And then on the other week we will have something more and more offbeat, maybe something that people read when they were a teenager. So there's a real kind of balance to it, which makes it good fun. It makes it fun for us to read.
- [02:24]
B
There's a vision here though, Dom. I want you to tell us the vision because, I mean, I can hear the vision in my own words. It's like I want to draw a new group of people in. I think I've been blown away, you probably have been blown away at the demographics of Goal hangers, podcast community. It's actually a young demographic.
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A
Exactly.
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B
People think that they want two minute shorts on YouTube, but they actually want a 45 minute, real rigorous discussion about something. So tell us the vision here.
- [02:52]
A
So the vision is, I think it's the stories behind the greatest stories ever told. But what we're trying to do is to reach out to, as you say, particularly a young audience and to explain to people that reading books is not just. It's not just doing homework, it's not just good for you and improving. Of course it is all those things, but it's fun. It's a brilliant way to spend your time, to escape into a world, to read some of the greatest novels ever written and to just enjoy it for that, you know, you don't have to worry about what you're reading. There's not going to be a test. It's just for fun. It's just a brilliant way. It's good and it genuinely is good for you, that moment of reflection, to step in someone else's shoes, to escape from your daily cares. I mean, you know as well as anybody that we're kind of beleaguered with stuff, with information, with bad news at the moment. And this is a brilliant way of escaping also.
- [03:42]
B
It's part of the world's greatest conversation. Both, both living authors and those that have passed from our time. You have this opportunity to delve into what their thoughts were and the conversation that they're sharing with the rest of us here. Right, Dom, One of my favorite books is the Great Gatsby. A little trivia about me. I actually grew up in East Egg. And so if you know the story of the Great Gatsby, you know, my family's from the middle class area, sort of frankly, where the servants were. But on the waterfront in Sands Point is what Jay Gatsby was writing about. And of course, when I was a kid, you know, probably 10, 12 years old, they used to go out on my dad's fishing boat with him and we used To Regal. And at these gigantic waterfront mansions. Unfortunately, Dominic, some of those mansions were torn down. There's still a few there that have been preserved, thankfully. But what a great story that is. Will you be delving into the Great Gatsby?
- [04:38]
A
That episode is coming out. It was one of the first books we wanted to do. I think there is an argument, Anthony, I don't know if you'd agree, that it is the greatest of American novels because it's about the American dream. So you have the character Nick Carraway, who's the narrator, and he. He's come from the Midwest and he comes out east to the east coast to all the wealth and the glitz and the glamour of the East coast and 20s, the roaring 20s. And he meets this guy called Jay Gatsby. Nobody knows where Gatsby's come from. Is he a bootlegger? You know, how has he made his money? Is he a criminal or what? And there's this world of the cocktail parties and the speakeasies and the fast cars and all this kind of thing. But there's this kind of hollowness there, this anxiety that basically the American dream is built on sand and that you'll be caught out at some point. You know, you'll be found out. And we explore that. We explore the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the context of the 20s. And we talk about what the book says about America and America's vision of itself and why the book still speaks to us, which I think it absolutely does. It. And if it. I mean, I guess it would still speak to you because it's about, you know, lots of things that you're interested in is about politics, it's about finance, it's about making something of yourself. It's about aspiration. All of those kinds of things that, I mean, you talk about a lot on your show.
- [05:51]
B
Listen, I mean, you know that. That book has been with me as a kid because when we had our first English composition classes, that was our first book because of the lineage of the town. There's actually boat tours, Dom of the area I grew up in, where they'll take you into the scenery of the Buchanans, Daisy Buchanan, and also what they got to see back then. But for me, one of the things that's most fascinating about this. Fitzgerald dies in 1940. He's thinking the book is a failure. It's not well reviewed, by the way, by his contemporaries. But it becomes immortal because the US army ends up printing hundreds of thousands of copies. Copies of it sends it to all the servicemen in World War II and it popularizes it. And you know, listen, for me, Tom Buchanan, either the antagonist or the protagonist, depending on what side you're sitting on. But Tom Buchanan is the guy that I could never be. Dominic Sambrook. Really? Yeah, no, he's manner born, as Fitzgerald says. He has a tendency to wreck things. Of course, Gatsby's, you know, murdered and those people go on and live their carefree manner born life. You know, it's just a. It's an amazing story about class in America I think is fitting for your British listeners as well. But listen, I'm. I'm super thrilled about what you're doing with the book club.
- [07:19]
A
So actually, Anthony, we've got a treat for you now because we've actually got a little clip for you where my co presenter Tabitha and I discuss the Great Gatsby and hopefully some of your listeners will find this enjoyable.
- [07:29]
C
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.
- [07:37]
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
- [07:52]
C
one of the most iconic epochs ever. Yeah, in all.
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A
Exactly. Sort of art deco fashion and, and all of that.
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C
Yeah.
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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 characters, 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. Yeah, it's seen at the. 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.
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C
Thrilling.
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A
Very exciting. I mean, it's like, it's like a kind of goal hanger get together.
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C
That's exactly how all of our parties end.
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A
But the Jazz Age label, obviously, jazz, the emblematic music of the era, and that's popularised by one writer above all, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes a short story collection called Tales of the Jazz age, published in 1922. And actually, Tabby, that takes us very neatly to Fitzgerald himself, doesn't it?
- [09:06]
C
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?
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A
So, unbelievably, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a year.
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C
What were you doing there?
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A
I was doing the research for my PhD.
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C
Right.
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A
It's very cold. Like I was there over the winter. It's very.
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C
So you were being a kind of enfant terrible at the very heart of a.
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A
Do you know what this is?
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C
Ravel. Asian scene of drinking and stabbing and gambling.
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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 my.
- [10:04]
C
You rockstar, you.
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A
To my rented basement and through the snowdrifts. And I genuinely thought if I fell
- [10:10]
C
into a snow drift now, no one would notice.
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A
I thought my body wouldn't be discovered for ages. But also, no one would miss. No one knows I exist.
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C
Just getting eaten by Alsatians, like the next summer. That's very great Gatsby, though, in a way.
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A
So that gives you.
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C
Yeah.
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A
A man who. Mr. Nobody from nowhere has disappeared.
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C
All right.
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A
In the snow. Exactly. So, yeah. That my life was not like Fitzgerald.
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C
Yeah, not one bit. He was actually. This is a really fun detail. He was actually named after a guy called Francis Scott Key, a cousin. And he wrote the Star Spangled Banner.
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A
Yeah. Which had not yet been adopted as the American national anthem.
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C
Yeah. Which I didn't know.
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A
30s, I think.
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C
I didn't realize it was so recent.
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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?
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C
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 echoes of that in, 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 Ginevra 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 what was called the Four Debs or something like that. And they were the four most sought after, wealthiest, most attractive debutantes of that scene 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.
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A
Oh, my gosh, that's harsh.
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C
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.
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A
Is that where he meets Zelda?
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C
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.
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A
Okay, that's a bad sign.
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C
Very, very dodgy sign from the start. And she's called Zelda Serre. And he's clearly still in love with Ginevra. 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 anesthesia, she says, isn't she smart? She has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful. And a fool, a beautiful little fool.
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A
Oh, that's a line from the Great Gatsby.
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C
That's a line directly. Yeah. Taken from the Great Gatsby.
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B
Right.
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A
So let's move forward to the summer of 1923. Fitzgerald is 26. So he's all, you know, he's quite a handsome guy in a kind of slightly fey way.
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C
But he's in the photos of him, he's quite attractive.
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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.
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C
Yeah.
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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.
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C
Can I. I have a fun, fun detail about Zelda?
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A
I'd like a fun detail. I love a fun detail.
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C
You live for it. I named my dog after Zelda Fitzgerald.
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A
Oh, my God.
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C
Yeah. A blonde, deeply neurotic spaniel.
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A
So, wow.
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C
Yeah, it's apt.
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A
Very apt.
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C
Yeah, there you go.
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A
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.
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C
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 Head Bandit, who was an infamous spree robber because she was so famous and notorious that they were like, oh, it must be Zelda Fitzgerald.
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A
Wow. And it wasn't her.
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C
And it wasn't her. But she was very shaken by the whole thing. And that's why they ended up moving to Paris.
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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.
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C
Definitely.
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A
And 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.
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C
Yeah.
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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.
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C
I don't think. I think she very much, you know, leads him astray in that, in that regard.
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A
But to go back to the Great Gatsby, because this is when he starts thinking about the Great Gatsby.
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C
Yeah.
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A
The big inspiration for this really is that doomed romance with his first love, isn't it?
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C
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 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.
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A
So she's pining for him too?
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C
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. Oh, yeah. And messes the whole thing up. Yeah, it's really interesting.
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A
God, such a shame.
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C
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.
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A
And he's still working on the book, isn't he? Because he originally had been thinking about setting in the 19th century.
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C
Yeah.
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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.
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C
I don't think it's a bad title. I think it sums up the book quite well.
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A
It does, I guess. 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.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Trimalchio is a former slave who has basically got his freedom and his nouveau rich. 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.
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C
Yeah, I'm sure there is an expression
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A
for this, but I'm just going to call them top Romans. 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 A. This Is Mad, which I think is a bad title. And when he sent it to 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. Did you see this? Yeah, he wanted. He said I could call it Gold Hatted Gatsby.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Which I think.
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A
I think Hatted doesn't belong in a title.
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C
It sounds like a Bond. A Bond movie title.
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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.
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C
Yeah, that's like a PG Wodehouse pastiche or something.
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A
Yeah. Any. So he finishes the book in 1924, in October 1924. His editor is a guy called Maxwell Perkins.
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C
Really, really famous editor. He was Tom Wolf's editor as well, wasn't he?
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A
Oh, was he?
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C
Yeah.
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A
Wow.
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C
They had a very, very famous relationship.
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A
So Maxwell Perkins is one of those editors who's very into. American editors are always more interventionist than British ones.
- [20:31]
C
Yeah.
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A
So he's very interventionist, gets to do loads of rewrites and actually deserves a fair bit of credit for the.
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C
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 they're meant to be a 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 Coogar. 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 Match the COVID yeah. 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, Dominic.
- [21:45]
B
I absolutely love that clip. Where can we find this amazing podcast?
- [21:50]
A
So all you need to do, Anthony, you just search for the book club, wherever you find your podcast, on Spotify, on Apple, wherever. And it will come up. You'll see me and Tabby on the tile looking very stylish in our stylized outfits. And away you go. And we hope to take lots of people with us on our own kind of journey through the great world of books.
- [22:08]
B
Well, count me. And I think it's an amazing idea. Congratulations to you and Tabby, and I hope everybody will consider tuning in and eventually becoming one of your members, which was also a lot of fun.
- [22:20]
A
Thank you. Thanks, everybody.