Secret Life of Books

The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 14

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Few novels capture a moment and place in time as The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece captures a generation determined to live and party hard in the aftermath of the First World War. There are love affairs, exotic cocktails (a ‘gin rickey’ anyone?), no less than three car crashes and, of course, the famous party scenes. It has been adapted at least eight times for film and television, yet the road from publication to becoming considered one of Great American Novels was a slow burn. Fitzgerald died believing his life a failure. 

The Great Gatsby has some of the most famous final lines in literary history. But what exactly is the ‘green light’ and can the future really be ‘orgastic’ or did Fitzgerald make a typo? Sophie and Jonty wrestle with these questions while asking how a book so specifically rooted in the 1920s has proven so timeless. In the process, Sophie shows off her detailed knowledge of the landscape between Manhattan and Long Island, and Jonty confirms Tom Buchanan’s claim that Jay Gatsby can’t be an Oxford man because ‘he wears a pink suit’. 

We also look at Fitzgerald’s life. His determination not to end up a failure like his father (a former salesman at Proctor & Gamble), his turbulent relationship with Zelda Sayre and the long road to Gatsby via a disastrous play called The Vegetable.  

Content warning: discusses alcoholism, racism, scenes of violence. And Sophie uses a swear word.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further reading: 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth (2022)

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald by Matthew J Bruccoli (Open Road Media, 2022) 

Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Cambridge UP, 2023).

Speaker 4:

Every book has two stories. The

Speaker 3:

one it tells. And

Speaker 4:

the one it hides.

Speaker 3:

Welcome to The Secret Life of Books.

Speaker 4:

I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

Speaker 3:

And I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer.

Speaker 4:

In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker 3:

Today, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Welcome to So F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby is a book about car crashes, exotic cocktails, tawdry affairs. It's about the American dream gone wrong. And it ends with some of the most famous lines in literature. Curiously enough, it wasn't a huge success when it was published in 1925. It was almost forgotten by the time of Fitzgerald's death, 15 years later. But since then, slowly but surely, and aided and abetted by a lot of adaptations, there are six movie adaptations of Great Gatsby, plus two musicals, and a sort of immersive experience that actually goes for eight hours, Great Gatsby's come to be seen not just as a great novel, but possibly the great American novel. So in this episode, we're going to find out why this book about 1920s New York and Long Island has only become more relevant and potent with the passing of time. Jonty, can you kick us off with a little flavor of what the text is like?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I'm going to do a A short extract from when Nick Carraway, who's the narrator of The Great Gatsby, talks about his cousin Daisy Buchanan, who turns out to be the woman that Jay Gatsby is in love with. Nick Carraway says, I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Um. Her face was sad and lovely, with bright things in it, bright eyes, and a bright, passionate mouth. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget. A singing compulsion, a whispered, listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since, and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I mean, if you're not in love with, Daisy Buchanan by the time you've read that paragraph,, you've got no capacity to love. You don't have a heart. You don't have a heart.

Speaker 3:

I've always loved, those lines, that, that description of a character. What a brilliant innovation about how to, how to give us a character through their voice. And Daisy's voice,, you know, it's not just that it defines her. It actually turns out to be this beautiful voice. vehicle, on which the plot turns towards the end. So we'll find out why, but remember the voice, the voice that whispered listen.

Speaker 4:

Yes. And I'm going to whisper listen now, as I ask you to listen to a brief synopsis of the story. So we know what we're talking about. So Nick Carraway,, recently graduated from Yale, has decided to become a bonds trader, which is the 1920s phrase for an investment banker and financial speculator. He moves to a small house by the shore on Long Island near New York. He finds himself next door to a vast, faux French mansion built by the mysterious Jay Gatsby. And Gatsby has these amazing, lavish, outrageous parties every weekend, but no one actually knows who he is. It turns out that Gatsby is in love with a woman. Daisy Buchanan, The woman with the voice. The woman with the whispering voice. A woman he met five years earlier during the war, who lives in another large house just across the bay with her rich, polo playing, husband, Tom Buchanan. In the mix is also their friend, a professional golf player called Jordan Baker, who Nick couples up with during the book. And as Nick gets to know Gatsby, it turns out that Gatsby has purchased his house entirely in the hope of impressing Daisy and winning her back. Tom, Daisy's husband, meanwhile, is having an affair. with her. with the local garage owner's wife, who's a ghastly woman called Myrtle. I quite like Myrtle, actually. Yeah, are you a Myrtle fan? Yeah. And the novel shuttles, well, I suppose she's just in it, I mean, she's honest, isn't she? Yeah, she's keeping it real. She's keeping it real, and she's getting what she can get. And the novel shuttles between New York, where the male characters work and have affairs, and Long Island Sound, where they entertain and spend the weekends, And at first, everything goes according to plan, Gatsby starts to woo Daisy back, and then it doesn't. And I have some qualms about spoiling the story for people who haven't read it, because it is such a spectacular and short read. So, fast forward 30 seconds now, or take your headphones off and stare at the clouds if you don't want to know. If you're still with us, I'm gonna whisper again, like Daisy Buchanan. Listen. Gatsby and Daisy are reunited, they're having an affair, but when it comes to the crunch, Daisy won't leave Tom. On the way back from an especially acrimonious and drunken lunch at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Daisy drives Gatsby's car and hits and kills her husband Tom's mistress Myrtle. So Sophie, that must be a disappointment to you.

Speaker 3:

As a Myrtle fan.

Speaker 4:

As a Myrtle fan. In Rageful Revenge, believing Gatsby to be his wife's killer, the garage owner shoots Gatsby and then himself, leaving Tom and Daisy to drive off into the sunset, scot free. Good pun on the word spoil. Scott there. I was thinking about that,

Speaker 3:

even as I scripted it and wondering if you'd give me a shout out for it. Yeah, it

Speaker 4:

is. It's a great pun.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So, you know, this is sort of a stalker novel. Gatsby's whole career, his, life, his house, his parties. It's all in the service of trying to find and get Daisy back. There's a literary critic called Merve Emre, who writes in a very sprightly and engaging way. And she's come up with this concept of what she calls the longing man. And Gatsby is sort of exhibit A of the longing man. Emery describes these people for whom yearning, indecision, impossibility. The frustrated agency of romance proves endlessly fascinating to the longing man. He believes in soulmates, in beloveds, and in the inevitability of cultivating his feelings for them in cultivating his feelings through them, which I just find a very On point, amusing description of people like Jay Gatsby, who's kind of a great character, but he's also a ridiculous character.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and listeners, we long to hear from you. We are longing podcasters. And we have, launching our website, secretlifeofbooks. org, where we have created a space where you can enter in your comments. So we don't feel like we're just speaking into the void in the studio. So if you want to weigh in about your own favorite longing men from literature, I don't know, it might be Heathcliff who we were talking about a few weeks ago, then put your longing man into the comments box.

Speaker 3:

Jonty, we've come to the moment in the show where we talk about why this book's a classic. So for me, it's that it's basically a dream turned into a nightmare. It's the American dream gone wrong, but it's also a fable of pleasure and decadence and glamour that now sort of feels gone forever. And I wonder whether even at the time that Fitzgerald was writing, it already felt gone. So it's got these big themes, new money versus old, Old university men, as they're called, people who've gone to college versus people who are entirely in business. It's about post war America versus pre war nostalgia for a certain kind of stability. There are great drinks in it. Four gin rickies that clicked full of ice. Mint juleps. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. Those are just a few moments. We don't even have finger bowls now. So That's why it's a classic for me. What about you?

Speaker 4:

I just loved rereading this. I read it as a teenager and I haven't read it since and reading it last week, it is so incredibly good. I mean, that's the first thing to say about it. I don't think I had a sense of humor as a teenager because so many of these books we've been reading Sophie having not read for a couple of decades, I'm, I'm surprised at how, you know, Many of them just have this wonderful humor about them, and The Great Gatsby is no exception. It's, it's so funny and quirky, and I don't remember any of that about it. But the prose is just incredible as,, as well. It's like a poem. Every word is beautiful. And, building up to those unforgettable last lines, the characters are extraordinary, and it does, like no other book, manage to speak to a particular moment in history and a particular place. So, for me, it's a classic because, you know, It just technically and stylistically and in every way is flawless. I mean, I can't pick a single hole in this book.

Speaker 3:

I had the same experience rereading it. Just like, wow. And it's partly because it's so short. Fitzgerald's less good in the longer books. Tender is the Night and, well, Last Tycoon. I guess he, he didn't finish before he died. But when he gets long winded, he's not Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 4:

that's unfair to say he's less good. When he's dead. When he's dead.

Speaker 3:

Or dying. Yeah, sure. But, There's something about the concision of the book that really amps up what could otherwise be the slightly laboured quality of his prose poem. It was amazing. And I think you're right. It's kind of funny as well.

Speaker 4:

The secret is. Uh, Sophie, what's the secret for you in this book?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm worried this is going to be a bit ponderous and tedious for the listeners, but I hope it's going to be good for the people writing essays about the Great Gatsby. I think there's an allegory going on in this book. You know, it's nominally about these big characters and their wheelings and dealings with one another and affairs of the heart, but I think that he's writing about The history of America, the Civil War, the Industrial Age, America's entry into the First World War, as fatal flaws that America can never recover from. America has, as it were, been unfaithful to itself and its own founding principles. It's what the writer and, and journalist Nick Bryant calls America's forever war with itself.

Speaker 4:

So although it's about the 1920s in a very specific place, for you it's about American history up until that point. Yeah, it's about

Speaker 3:

America's endlessly tortured internal divisions, again, it's, it's one of the reasons that makes it so amazing that Great Gatsby's so short, you know, you could have got very long winded with this one, as I fear we are beginning to become. So have you got a secret?

Speaker 4:

No, I'm, I'm going to concur with your secret. Okay,

Speaker 3:

good. Yeah, my secret was a good one, I thought. Right, Can you give us,, some detail on the biography? Take us through, Fitzgerald's biography up to the writing of Gatsby.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, he's born in St. Paul, Minnesota, so he's born in the Midwest, towards the end of the 19th century. His, mother came from a wealthy family and had a big family. private income. His father, however, was was a salesman for Procter and Gamble. Procter and Gamble was a big consumer goods company in the 19th century and still is. And the big traumatic event in Fitzgerald's life when he's 12 is his father lost his job and never really got over the failure. He was never able to work again. And I think for the young Fitzgerald seeing his father humiliated and reduced filled Fitzgerald with this drive and idea that he had to be successful. So, I think that's the first thing, and all through his career,, he's never an ascetic writer who's just writing for art's sake. He's always about the market, he's always studying what the gaps are. He wants to succeed, he wants to make a lot of money, he doesn't want to end up like his father. So, if any of our listeners have heard those stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda partying in fountains through the 1920s and riding on the top of taxi cabs. There's this completely frivolous side to Fitzgerald and an alcoholic side. He becomes alcoholic very young. But alongside that is he is incredibly determined to be not just a successful writer, but the most successful writer,, in America

Speaker 3:

and it's funny because that fusion of, massive ambition and, total frivolity sort of coalesces in his having gone to Princeton in the, so it must've been in the period immediately before the 1920s. And he has some great description of what the, The experience was like of being an English major at Princeton,

Speaker 4:

right? I like this because it made me think of you. Sophie is an English, I

Speaker 3:

am an English professor at Princeton.

Speaker 4:

Fitzgerald found most of his teachers at Princeton disappointing and characterized them as having an uncanny knack of making literature distasteful to young men. Sophie, do you? As one of the teachers at Princeton have an uncanny knack of making literature this tasteful to young men. I'm

Speaker 3:

sorry to say that I think I probably do. you get these teaching evaluations all the time and one of mine once said, she doesn't teach us anything. All she does is talk about the books.

Speaker 4:

Hang on, Isn't that teaching? What were you meant to be talking about?

Speaker 3:

I don't know, but I did not give satisfaction to a young man. Right, okay.

Speaker 4:

You are keeping alive Princeton's illustrious tradition and when I

Speaker 3:

first went to Princeton, so I've been teaching at Princeton now for about 20 years, when I first went, everyone was writing their senior thesis, their sort of final paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald. There'd be you know, a clutch of them every year. There should have been a collective noun for Princeton theses written about F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know, 20 or so. He's sort of out of fashion now, but I think his spirit A vomit,

Speaker 4:

a vomit of essays. Yes, a

Speaker 3:

vomit of essays. Good. I like that. Very nice. but his spirit sort of lives on, I think, in the architecture and, uh, the greenery of Princeton. And Then he wrote This Side of Paradise, didn't he? About the Princeton period, which was his first great literary success.

Speaker 4:

Yes., He, after graduating, he joined the army because the first world war had broken out and he went into training. and he began writing an early version of this side of paradise at that time. And interestingly, right from the start, he's determined that this book will capture what? what he calls my generation in America. He's very hooked on the idea that his writing should be capturing the experience of a generation. While he's enlisted in the army, and I should say he never actually makes it to Europe to fight. He seems to spend a lot of time being posted around southern states on endless training escapades, but never actually gets sent over. And at one stage he's stationed near Montgomery in Alabama, where he meets a southern belle called Zelda, whose father is a judge., she's very spirited and very likeable. So Scott Fitzgerald has met Zelda, And he's then been posted elsewhere, and he writes his endless love letters to her, and Zelda, after a while She's a few years younger, she's 18, she has enough, and she writes back, Scott, you've been so sweet about writing, but I'm so damn tired of being told that you used to wonder why they kept princesses and towers. You've written that verbatim in your last six letters. It's dreadfully hard to write so very much, and so many of your letters sound forced. I know you love me, darling, and I love you more than anything in the world. But if it's going to be much longer, we just can't keep up this frantic writing.

Speaker 3:

That's so great, isn't it? I love it.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and they have, a very tumultuous relationship, they marry just a few weeks after The Side of Paradise has been published in 1920. It's very successful and it makes Fitzgerald, who's still in his early 20s, a young star of the literary scene. He and Zelda move to New York and boy oh boy they live it up, and 1920s New York is a place to be. It's coming out of the First World War, People want to just have fun and party and they are just going for it. They're hitting the drinks, they're jumping in fountains. Yes. And he Gave the name the Jazz Age for this decade. He called the Jazz Age the gaudiest, grandest spree in history, that the whole time was just this one long party. Yeah. And again, that's informing the world of the great Gatsby. Very

Speaker 3:

much so. And it's your sense, isn't it, that When Fitzgerald called it the Jazz Age, he's not really talking about jazz per se. He doesn't mean the music of African Americans.

Speaker 4:

No, he's unfortunately, because I'm dying soon on this podcast to have a long riff on jazz because I love jazz music. It's

Speaker 3:

your reformation. And

Speaker 4:

I thought Gatsby might provide me a way in, but no, when you read up about Fitzgerald's understanding of the word jazz, he's not very interested in jazz as a musical form.

Speaker 3:

No, it's a very sort of white man's drinking jazz.

Speaker 4:

It is. So to get to the writing of Great Gatsby, he follows up This Side of Paradise with a second book called The Beautiful and the Damned, which also does pretty well. He then wastes a lot of time working on a play with a terrible title. Terrible

Speaker 3:

title. The

Speaker 4:

Vegetable.

Speaker 3:

Which vegetable was he, did he have in mind? I don't know.

Speaker 4:

The Vegetable's not, You know The Vegetable's not going to be a success. That's not going to hit, no. anyway, He puts a lot of time and a lot of money into getting this staged. And it's a complete catastrophe. And so Fitzgerald is already, he's only, he's still in his mid twenties, but his drinking, his tippling into alcoholism, he's got the failure of the vegetable behind him and he decides he needs to write a truly great novel. And he and Zelda, in order to get away from the New York partying, move to a small village in Long Island called Great Neck. Okay. Bye. Which is

Speaker 3:

where they live in, in Gatsby.

Speaker 4:

Except they call it Egg. They call

Speaker 3:

it West Egg and East Egg. So there's a, there's a popular misconception about the Great Gatsby, which is that it's set in the Hamptons. It's, it's not set in the Hamptons for two reasons. One, it's not set there. And two, the Hamptons didn't exist in the 1920s, which is to say that there wasn't a fashionable holiday resort out on the far, eastern end of Long Island. These were very much commuter suburbs for, for Nick Carraway. So if you go to Great Neck now, it's pleasant houses with three to four bedrooms, garages, lots of lawn, sprinkling systems, but it's not hugely affluent or anything like that. Like I used to drive out there if I wanted to go to a good plant nursery or get the car serviced, it was, it's that kind of a place, get your winter tires.

Speaker 4:

and when you mentioned the Hamptons, for those of us who haven't had the privilege of living in New York for a couple of decades, are the Hamptons also in Long Island? So the

Speaker 3:

Hamptons are in Long Island, but they're further east towards the tip of Long Island. And they were developed. From the, the 1950s and 60s initially as an artist's community, but then eventually became this super elite, quote unquote playground for lawyers and bankers and the kind of, affluent classes in Manhattan So, you know, all the stories about people flying their helicopters out to the Hamptons for the weekend, that all post dates Great Gatsby, that, that was not happening when, this story is set. So just need to clarify that.

Speaker 4:

No, That's very good scene setting of, where we are. There is a local figure to where Fitzgerald and Zelda are living, who is partly an inspiration for Gatsby. So there was a local figure called Max Gerlach, who was in trouble over bootlegging and called everyone old sport in the way that Gatsby calls

Speaker 3:

everyone.

Speaker 4:

So there is a Gatsby figure.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

In fact, despite moving to Long Island, which is a bit cheaper for them, by this point, they've run into financial trouble. they're living well beyond their means. And so in order to finish the great Gaby Fitzgerald and Zelda travel to the French Riviera, which believe it or not, was the budget option, is the, was the budget option in the 1920s. Yeah. You just go and live in the French Riviera

Speaker 7:

the final thing, just to say before we get into the book, is that in the last stages of working on, on The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera, while Fitzgerald is sitting at his desk with a furrowed brow, trying to write this masterpiece. Zelda's heading out on the town and having an intense flirtation, probably an affair, with a French aviator called Edouard Josin.

Speaker 8:

That's splendid. Ooh

Speaker 7:

la la. And she almost runs off with him. And I think that's, very much informs the plot twist towards the end of The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby and Daisy get back together again. And I think through the novel, Fitzgerald is often identifying with Jay Gatsby in some ways, but I think he's also identifying at that moment with Tom Buchanan, because Daisy almost leaves Tom to run off with Gatsby. So he's sort

Speaker 8:

of both the longing man and the jilted man. Yeah, and it's every

Speaker 7:

husband's absolute nightmare is a French aviator called Edouard Josin wanders into your wife's life. I mean, how can you compete with that? Yeah, you don't want

Speaker 8:

that. I mean, it's one thing to have a sort of nouveau guy with a fake French chateau across the bay with 17 cars and parties every night, but French aviator?

Speaker 7:

Yeah. And you can imagine him cornering Fitzgerald in the local bistro and saying, you know, Fitzgerald, I'm in love to your wife, really rubbing it in.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. Obviously that is what he'd say and how he'd say it, what is the point? So these are sort of Fitzgerald salad days, aren't they? The Riviera period and the New York period after the first two books come out. You know, he's the toast of the town. The drinking hasn't become. a massive problem for him yet, which it will become. They drank so much. They

Speaker 7:

drank so much. But yes, he gets Gatsby finished and will look later on at what happens to Fitzgerald after Gatsby. But let's get, get Ga Gaby Gatsby. Yeah.. So, so take us into the start.

Speaker 8:

Right. So I think the, the beginning of the novel, the first third of the novel is about setting up the world of the East Coast. And it's really a kind of contest playing out in a way between the. sensibility of the East Coast and the sensibility of the Midwest or the Middle West, as the characters call it. So all the main characters in this novel are actually not from the East Coast. There's a period where the Buchanan's live in Chicago. So Chicago is the big city for them. And then they've kind of drifted East so the, the descriptions, of the East, it's supposed to come across as a, as a, a very sparkly, wealthy, exciting, but ultimately unsatisfying social landscape. The novel starts with a flashback. Nick, Nick Carraway has returned from his time in New York and he's back living in the Midwest. And he says, when I came back from the East last autumn, I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever. I wanted no more riotous excursions with people. privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction. So basically he sort of can't stand the, the lushness and the dissipation and the lack of moral center of what Manhattan and the, the wealthy East Coast.

Speaker 7:

And Sophie, the Midwest has a sort of bad rep these days, doesn't it? It's sort of seen in the world of book lovers as being Trump heartland, I guess. But that's not how Fitzgerald sees the Midwest at all. Yeah, now people think of

Speaker 8:

the Midwest as sort of the flyover states, but at the end of the book, Nick does this great, paragraph on what the Midwest means to him. That's my Middle West, not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I'm part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the caraway house. in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West after all. Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. So that's sort of, what we're supposed to make of the geographic contest that's set up in the first part of the book. And then of course the other flashpoint that Fitzgerald is establishing is between Tom and Daisy Buchanan and the world that they belong to, and Gatsby

Speaker 7:

I want to say one more thing about The World as he sets it up, while Fitzgerald was writing the great Gatsby, he was reading extracts from Oswald Spengers, the decline of the West. This was a book of cultural history and sociology at the time. in the 1920s that was hugely influential on the Nazis, and it was hugely influential on Fitzgerald. He saw it as being one of the most important books written. And it's the idea that Western civilization, that the world of America and Europe has become decadent and is collapsing. And I think it's one of the things that informs the New York, Long Island world that Fitzgerald is describing. It's filled with an idea of racial degeneration. And there's a wonderful moment early in the book where Tom Buchanan is in conversation and he says, Civilizations going to pieces, broke out Tom violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? Why no, I answered, rather surprised by his tone. Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out, the white race will be, will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff. It's been proved. So

Speaker 8:

Yeah, Fitzgerald's got a great eye for the kind of terrible character, does it? Tom's just a total, he's just a shyster, isn't he? He's unbearable.

Speaker 7:

but, interestingly, he's articulating in a kind of humorous way something which Fitzgerald is feeling at the same time. And there is this decadence running through the novel, characters aren't really capable of virtues or benight. like, he sees the worst in everyone. Yes.

Speaker 8:

Well, that's sort of the queasiness of the great Gatsby. I think is that, is that we feel the kind of, you know, moral turpitude of these characters that they have no center and yet they're just, they're enormously alluring. And that's, I think it's why it's been endlessly readapted. I mean, the characterization alone is worth reading this novel for. So Tom is introduced, as a football star. In fact, he's also had military service, but whereas Gatsby's defined by his military service,, Tom is defined by his career as a football star at Yale, which by the way, is not referred to as Yale, but rather as New Haven, the town in Connecticut where Yale is, it's a piece of snobbery. Anyway, Tom, as a football player, quote, was one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax. Isn't that a great description?

Speaker 7:

Yes, it is. And happily true of a lot of people. A lot of people. He's

Speaker 8:

described as having since then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. And the reason that he can never settle down is that, according to Nick Carraway, he seeks the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Speaker 7:

I know, I know many Toms. Me too. I know a squad of Toms.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, I feel like there's a whole sort of admissions category in American colleges for Tom. So he gets Tom right. He gets Daisy and Jordan brilliantly right. They're these you know,, preppy Midwestern girls wearing white dresses who, are every Tom's dream. Jordan is a golf star. She's a professional athlete. Um, and she, She has a real substance to her, Jordan. I came away liking Jordan this time.,, but here's how Fitzgerald gets the characters of Daisy and Jordan across in the opening sections of the book. They're about to sit down to dinner and Daisy. Walks out and is intensely irritated that the servants have set out candles,, she says, why candles? I feel like we have to read this in an American accent, Jonty. you know, We've avoided accents so far, but I'm going to attempt it. Why candles? objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year. She looked at us all radiantly. Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it. We ought to plan something, yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. So that's Daisy and Jordan perfectly captured by that episode, I think.

Speaker 7:

As you say, they're so preppy and white, Daisy, Jordan, Tom. Yeah, yeah. Characters. And there's a wonderful moment where, Tom is having one of his kind of racist outbursts. And he says, nowadays people begin by sneering at, but I'm not going to do it. No, no, it's all right. I just,

Speaker 8:

mine was obviously definitive.

Speaker 7:

I think my signature is that I just turn every character in literary history into posh sounding southern, uh, English. Yeah, into

Speaker 8:

a BBC documentary.

Speaker 7:

I'm just gonna do it. So Tom says nowadays people begin by snaring at family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white. Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization and then Jordan says we're all white here.

Speaker 8:

I hope you're going to include Jordan's riposte. It doesn't hold itself back. They say what they think. So then we get Gatsby and, you can tell that Fitzgerald's having fun with this. You know, he's really showing us his writing chops. This is his description of Jay Gatsby's house. On my right, so to the right of Nick's, small house, was a colossal affair by any standard. It was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy with a tower on one side spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion, thin beard of Roar Ivy's great and

Speaker 7:

the

Speaker 8:

goshness of the marble swimming pool, which, you know, like all the little breadcrumbs that Fitzgerald throws down in this novel is going to come back in a very resonant way because the swimming pool becomes the kind of turning point at the very end of the novel, doesn't it?

Speaker 7:

He does a very clever thing, Fitzgerald, in that he plays with a tradition of heroes in which you don't meet the hero straight away. There's, there's a anticipation built up towards meeting them. So in Shakespeare's, Othello, people stand around and talk about Othello before Othello finally appears. And when he does, it's this moment of great excitement. And then Othello just becomes more heroic as the play goes on until his tragic ending. But Fitzgerald, completely flips that tradition on its head. So the anticipation and build up to finally meeting Gatsby is so extreme. And then once we meet Gatsby, it is. every stage he becomes less interesting and compelling as a character and more flawed and human. It's very cleverly done. The moment where you've described his house and the moment where Nick Carraway realizes he's accidentally met Gatsby, Nick Carraway is talking with a man who he suddenly realizes is Gatsby himself. They're at a party. And he says, He smiled 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 external 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 hoped to convey. And this is Gatsby, you. As his father, as the Proctor and Gamble salesman who has perfected that bullshit smile that makes you feel Sophie. Yeah. So special that you want to buy this oven. Glove. Yeah. And copy of the Ency Encyclopedia Britannica that I am holding right now. I think it's a wonderful description. It it's wonderful. And that's, and it also

Speaker 8:

explains why Daisy and Gatsby are attracted to one another.'cause you know, Daisy's got this voice that whispers, listen, it, it, it seems to be built for the. For the person to whom she's whispering at any given moment and Gatsby's got this smile that seems to draw the person he's speaking to into his innermost circle.

Speaker 7:

And it's a trick. It's empty because the more we get to know Gatsby, the less that smile has any merit to it.

Speaker 8:

It's interesting that you say that because I think in some ways, it is the question of this novel. Is Gatsby empty? Is Gatsby as empty as his house? Is, is he a marble swimming pool and, a thin beard of ivy or is there more to Gatsby than that? Cause I, you know, Nick Carraway at the end of the book keeps Gatsby exempt from his total condemnation of everyone else in the novel. And, I actually think that readers being asked to make a decision about Gatsby, the other thing that happens in the very first part of the book is that it emerges that Tom and Daisy have a child,, who is possibly the least memorable figure in the book,, intentionally so. She randomly appears and it's one of the ways that we know that Daisy's, you know, just totally full of shit, but in kind of a fun way. When she says to Nick Carraway, Oh, I, you know, I have a kid who at the time is two years old. Although Fitzgerald actually makes a mistake in the manuscript and says that she's three. And Daisy says, And I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world. A beautiful little fool., while there's a lot of resonance between Daisy and Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda was actually quite an attentive, mother. so Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda's child is called Scotty. Her real name was Pat. There's a letter, that Zelda writes soon after Scotty is born, which was when Zelda was 22. And she says, I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, lighthearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness. She says, I don't want Pat to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful. Which is sort of another version of the best thing a girl can be in this world is a beautiful little fool, but it's a bit more substantial,.

Speaker 7:

And, and we should say that a flapper was a 1920s buzzword for a party girl, essentially, right? Exactly. There's one other character we need to introduce, which is Tom's mistress, Myrtle. My fave. Your favourite. So Myrtle is the wife of the petrol station owner on the road between Long Island and New York. That's right. And Tom's basically chosen her as his mistress because she's convenient. She's literally on the road when he's driving into New York to work and can pick her up.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. And

Speaker 7:

there's not much at all.

Speaker 8:

There's something sort of honourable though about Myrtle and her sister actually, who's a very peripheral character in the novel, but who at the end really keeps faith with Myrtle, the sister, and won't divulge the ways in which her sister has made a fool of herself and, been compromised by Tom Buchanan. There's something real about the Wilsons, the garage owner and his wife. there's something real, for example, about Wilson's grief when at the end of the novel, Myrtle is violently killed. he's, Absolutely devastated by it in a way that I think rings more true than other griefs in this novel. yeah, I mean obviously, Immortal is a ridiculous character in many ways., She's described as being sensuous in a way that certain women who are a bit overweight can be. She really tries to look nice. She gets Tom to stop and buy her a, an Airedale puppy dog at one point. I mean, she's not a loyal wife

Speaker 7:

to her husband, is she? Let's face it.

Speaker 8:

No, but if you were living in a garage on,, the western end of Long Island in the 1920s and a man kept driving by in a, in a super flash car promising to buy you puppies, I mean, how loyal would you be?

Speaker 7:

I guess that's right. I want to ask you about the parties because I mean, if people know one thing about The Great Gatsby, they know it's a party book, that there are these extraordinary, decadent, wild parties that Gatsby hosts. And how did you find these parties when you re read the book?

Speaker 8:

It's funny, so we've now got to the middle section of the book, and you're right, those are the sections of the book that people think about when they think of The Great Gatsby. And those are the episodes that people who restage the book want to reconstruct.. When people re adapt the novel, they're constantly trying to recreate the magic of these parties. The Baz Luhrmann film, I think, is really drawing you into the sensibility of these parties. I actually thought the parties were one of the least successful parts of the book. They're probably quite, authentic in the sense that it's a bit boring to read them. It's quite hard to get across the action of a party.

Speaker 7:

It is, and I think that's intentional. I don't think Fitzgerald thought I'm going to write a book about, glamorous parties. And I think that's the difference between him and film director Baz Luhrmann. Baz Luhrmann often has style over substance and makes these visually extraordinary films, which often lack any emotional call to them. And I think Fitzgerald, for him, the parties are background stuff. Which is how a story ought to work, right? You don't read a story for a great party scene. You read a story you care about the characters.

Speaker 8:

one of the things that, that I've noticed whenever I've tried to write, Set piece scenes like a party is how incredibly difficult it is because it's hard to sustain dramatic tension through an Action that involves so many different people and you're saying that that's Fitzgerald's point that the thread is is kept by the Main characters not by the party

Speaker 7:

his his point is that the parties are hollow So Gatsby in in order to try and woo Daisy Buchanan back into his life He he you know, he's bought the house off opposite the bay from her. He's having these parties, which are supposed to be exciting and glamorous. But the guests just turn up because they've heard it's a house you can go party at. They don't even know the host. Even Gatsby himself is very vague about them. And he says to Nick Carraway later when he's describing his plan. That he wants to make himself look exciting for Daisy. He says, I keep the house always full of interesting people, night and day, people who do interesting things, celebrated people. And of course, there's nothing less interesting than a house

Speaker 8:

full of celebrated people. Yes. So

Speaker 7:

I think the point is that the parties are meant to be just kind of hollow in it. yeah. Great. I like that a

Speaker 8:

lot. And Fitzgerald was sort of hit and miss with his titles. When he got them right, they were fantastic. This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby. When he got them wrong, they didn't work at all. So The Vegetable, but also the original title of Gatsby, which was Tremalchio.

Speaker 7:

Which is a terrible title. Terrible

Speaker 8:

title. No way would this have endured.

Speaker 7:

Tremalchio is a character from one of the surviving fragments of Petronius's Roman biography. book, The Satyricon, but he's a host. Tremalchio is a former slave who's become a nouveau riche millionaire, and he throws these,, Extraordinarily extravagant parties where people are eating, you know, bizarre bits of animal as food. Sort of whole birds. He saw Gatsby as being a, a Tremalchio character, but it's not a good title because 99. 99 percent of any population has not heard of Tremalchio and his editor said, please don't call it that because A, it's unpronounceable and B, no one knows what you're talking about. Yeah.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. And also that there's something sort of. Empty and hollow and meaningless yet deeply resonant about the great Gatsby as a, as a phrase that just exactly summed up the book. And Gatsby is

Speaker 7:

far more interesting than Tremalchio in Petronius novel. Gatsby has this kind of yearning and absence at his core where is just vulgar.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, with grapes around his head and stuff.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 8:

The other thing to note about the party sequences is the just unimaginable quantity of alcohol that's consumed during prohibition in the US. So, prohibition started After the First World War by something called the Volstead Act. but it started during the war as a kind of austerity measure., in 1919, Congress prohibited the sale of alcohol and intoxicating liquors. It was very hard to implement and to monitor, but technically speaking, alcohol could not legally be bought and sold So the fact that there's so much to drink at Gatsby's parties and no mention is made of it is just, A flying in the face of prohibition.

Speaker 7:

And that would have been very exciting for readers at the time, wouldn't it? Yes. If you're struggling to buy alcohol, a book which is dropping in an exotic cocktail every page is going to be very satisfying. Where the booze

Speaker 8:

is never not flowing, exactly.

Speaker 7:

Gatsby hooks onto Nick Haraway quite quickly. And Nick Haraway, can't really understand why Gatsby is so friendly to him. But it soon transpires It's because Nick is Daisy's cousin, and Gatsby's realized that his best chance of being able to meet Daisy again is through Nick. And so Nick, the narrator, starts to be used, doesn't he? Gatsby's cultivating this relationship with one end in mind, that Nick will bring about a reunion between he, Gatsby, and Daisy.

Speaker 8:

Exactly. And this finally succeeds. So let's turn briefly to the scene in which Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy over to his house, which is next door to Gatsby's and there's a nicely turned moment when Daisy arrives at this house And she's extraordinarily rude about it.

Speaker 7:

Yes, and Gatsby, who wants the reunion with Daisy to be perfect, even though it's going to be at Nick's house rather than his own, becomes obsessed with Nick's lawn being too long. That's right. It's a wonderful detail that Gatsby channels all his anxiety into the length of Nick's lawn and has his gardeners sent over to make the lawn look immaculate.

Speaker 8:

Despite the fact that it's pouring rain on the morning that he's going to show up, yes. And when Daisy does show up, she says, Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one? To Nick, how could anybody possibly live in a house this shabby and pathetic? Daisy's a great character. So they, they do have their reunion, Daisy and Gatsby, and at first it's an exquisitely awkward scene, which Fitzgerald does a great job. Job of I think the Gatsby sort of forced casualness as he leans against the mantle about to drop

Speaker 7:

the clock the

Speaker 8:

clock

Speaker 7:

And he can't speak because he's been waiting for this moment for five years So yes, but but then things warm up things warm

Speaker 8:

up and Nick gives them half an hour to themselves

Speaker 5:

He, he goes and stands under a dripping tree in the backyard. And when he comes back in, he says, Daisy's face was smeared with tears. And when I came in, she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed without a word or a gesture of exaltation, a new wellbeing radiated from him and filled the little room. So it is this, scene of them being reunited. And I, and I think we are meant to understand that, that Gatsby and Daisy, their attraction to one another, and their love, whatever you want to call it, their passion for one another, it's real.

Speaker 6:

It is real. And at that moment, Gatsby then takes them all over back to his house. And there's, Just an example of Fitzgerald's extraordinary way of writing where he never does the obvious thing. Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of his house and Daisy's suitably impressed because it's a vast mansion. And out of awkwardness he marches into his bedroom and starts showing his wardrobe. He shows his shirt. He wants Daisy to see how, how wealthy he's become. And there's a scene where he's taking out piles of shirts and just throwing them on the bed one by one. And then at this point, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. They're such beautiful shirts, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. It makes me sad because I've never seen such Such beautiful shirts before. I mean,

Speaker 5:

what an amazing piece of writing. It's completely, completely amazing, because it's, it's sort of real and not real at the same time. You feel Daisy's just, you know, hallucinatory hysteria at having been forced back into this relationship with a man who, you know, You know, she had a passing affair with five years previously, it's just kind of can't compute it. And at the same time, she means it, you know? Yeah, and

Speaker 6:

I think a lesser writer would have their conversation being very on the nose, like, I've never been able to forget you, said Gatsby, and Daisy would say, Oh yes, sort of me too, but I married someone else and then kind of did forget you. And instead, it's all channeled into this exchange about the shirts. And I think she takes all of her emotional confusion and just cries about shirts. Yes.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, and it also goes back to this thing of how part of the brilliance of the novel rests on it being so short, you know, because he's forced to compress all these ideas, all this emotion into these snapshot moments, like Daisy pressing her face into the shirts, or the other sort of motif in the middle section of the novel, just before we get to the end, is the dangerous driving motif. So there's a real culture of driving accidents in The Great Gatsby. There's a massive focus on a pre seat belt, pre DUI. pre breath testing driving culture, and the whole plot kind of turns on it. Uh, there's this great moment at the end of one of the parties where Nick Carraway is trying to leave and he realizes that there's been some kerfuffle in the driveway, which turns out to be a sort of minor automobile accident. And one of the characters who has been at the party who's become known as Owl Eyes, steps out of this car that caught the edge of the wall as he's driven out of the driveway. The car's flipped over and, it's ripped one of the wheels off. Someone asks Owl Eyes, you know, what on earth happened? This is a scene of total catastrophe. Don't ask me, said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. I know very little about driving, next to nothing. It happened and that's all I know. And everyone keeps saying to him, how can you be driving a car when you don't know how? And then Allies says, you don't understand. I wasn't driving. There is another man in the car. The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained Ah! As the door of the coupe swung slowly open, the crowd, it was now a crowd, stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large, uncertain dancing shoe. And he says, did we run out of gas?, You know, they're these just really nicely turned moments. it's so

Speaker 6:

clever because Fitzgerald writing the book. I think he knows quite early on that the climax of the book is going to come around a car crash. When Myrtle, as we said at the start, is killed by,, Daisy driving the car. And Fitzgerald decides that he doesn't want that just to come out of the blue and look like a kind of forced plot turn. So Three car crashes in total happen in The Great Gatsby, and they escalate in terms of impact and danger. So the one you read is one of the early ones. And of course, rule of three, by the time you've had two, you instinctively know that there needs to be a third car crash, right? And that's what he's building up to. And

Speaker 5:

you assume that it will be relatively trivial, that the stakes are not that high, that once again, someone's going to step out with a dancing shoe, but the last car crash is an actual tragedy, and Myrtle is killed in a really very horrible way. Should we, should, let's move into the end of the book. Yeah. So the last section of the novel revolves around the question of whether Daisy is going to leave Tom or not. The only thing that we haven't yet mentioned, I've realized, Jonty, is the green light, the motif of the green light, which is such a big

Speaker 6:

thing in this novel. I was fretting about that a minute ago while we were talking about something else. I don't think

Speaker 5:

it's too late., Let's,

Speaker 6:

Let's shoehorn the green light in. Early in the book, the first time Nick Carraway sees Gatsby, he's at his house, he's just moved in, he's looking at his neighbor's house, which is Gatsby's house, and he sees a man come out in the darkness. So it's more of a silhouette. And he sees the man look across the bay, and there's a green light on the other side of the water, and he holds his arms out to it. and then goes back into the house and what Nick Carraway realises later is that that green light is the light at the end Daisy's house. Where they keep the boats. And so this becomes a motif in the book. The idea of reaching out for the green light, of reaching out for something in the past, for reaching out for a lost love, for reaching out for hope, and it becomes an embodiment of the American dream. The idea that if you strive, you can reach across the darkness and take whatever you want. So that's the motif.

Speaker 5:

Exactly. And just to add to that, if you ever spent time. In places like Long Island Sound or Maine or Rhode Island,, that image of the, of the green dock light across a still dark body of water, it's extremely resonant. it actually does say summertime in America. So it was a wonderful choice on Fitzgerald's part to, to load it up. with this sort of meaning that is also not meaning. I think that's one of the things that Fitzgerald does so brilliantly is he, you know, there's barely a sentence in this novel that you couldn't quote in an English essay that seems to be just, rich with symbolic,, resonance. there's the eyes on the Long Island expressway when you're driving into New York. TJ Eckleburg's Eyes, which is actually just an ad for an optician. They seem to mean something really profound. There are these ash piles, again, by the side of the road as you're driving from Long Island into Manhattan. And

Speaker 6:

those, by the way, the ash piles seem to be a reference to T. S. Elliot's Wasteland. So Fitzgerald was very, impressed by The Wasteland, which was published a couple of years before, and so he creates his own wasteland in between Long Island and New York that the characters have to pass through.

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

we haven't killed off Myrtle, we digress.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. Let's get back to Myrtle. So the end culminates in this confrontation between Tom and Gatsby. And the question is, who is going to win this contest? Is it going to be new money, idealism, the American dream, or is it going to be the sheer, Brutality of old money and privilege, that's represented by the figure of Tom Buchanan. So it all comes to a head when, Daisy has organized a lunch at the Buchanan's house on West Egg and she's invited Nick, he's come back on the train from New York City, and he knows what's happening, he knows that the setup is that, Gatsby is daring Daisy to actually leave Tom. So at the lunch,, there's this moment where,, Tom sees the intimacy between Gatsby and Daisy and he sees it because of the way Daisy speaks to Gatsby with a voice of too much knowledge, of too much intimacy.

Speaker 6:

Is she whispering listen? I

Speaker 5:

think she's whispering listen. And Nick says she's got an indiscreet voice. It's when the motif of Daisy's voice really starts paying off Tom sees what's going on. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago. It's this portrait of a lady moment. In fact, I think he, that Fitzgerald must have stolen it from Henry James because there's this incredible moment in The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James's great American novel, where the heroine, Isabelle Archer, realises that Gilbert Osmond, her husband, is having an affair with this woman, Madam Merle. And the reason that she realises it is that Osmond doesn't stand up when Madam Merle walks into the room and she realises that there's this intimacy. So there's a similar instance in The Great Gatsby. it's also in this scene that, that Nick finally explains to us what it is about Daisy's voice that is so utterly seductive. And he says, her voice is full of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbal song of it. It doesn't seem that sexy to us, I think, to say that someone's voice is full of money.

Speaker 6:

Oh, I think it's very sexy. Do you? Do you? Oh, yeah. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 5:

Oh, good. Come on. like it. So your Gatsby here, it does it for you.

Speaker 6:

If a voice sounds of money, who isn't drawn to that?

Speaker 5:

Love it. Um, that was an insight moment for me, John Teague.

Speaker 6:

Oh, I revealed myself unwittingly. Yes,

Speaker 5:

everyone's always revealing themselves in this novel. So in the aftermath of this reveal where Tom sees that they must be having an affair, he starts trying to find out who Gatsby really is and Nick says to him that he's an Oxford man And Tom says an Oxford man like hell he is he wears a pink suit.

Speaker 6:

So this is very accurate. I'm an Oxford man Yeah, I never wore a pink suit I've never seen you

Speaker 5:

wear a pink suit. Nor

Speaker 6:

did any of my friends. So I think Tom's definitely on something. He's not an Oxford

Speaker 5:

man.. And it actually turns out that Gatsby was very briefly at Oxford just for five months because it was a special program that was offered to soldiers after the armistice at the end of the First World War.

Speaker 6:

Okay. Kill off Myrtle.

Speaker 5:

Right. I know you want Myrtle dead, but we've got to explain how Fitzgerald stages the confrontation scene in terms of the dynamic of the relationships between, Tom, Daisy,, and Gatsby, because Gatsby,, basically pushes and pushes until, he says your wife doesn't love you. She's never loved you. She loves me. And Tom is just like, are you kidding? Are you out of your mind? And Tom says of himself, once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back and in my heart I love her all the time. And there's something about the sheer, determination of Tom's assertions here where we know that he's gonna get the upper hand and Gatsby's gonna go down.

Speaker 6:

And this is Fitzgerald winning back Zelda after her flirtation with Gatsby. It's with the French aviator. So Gatsby is Edouard Chauvin and this boy,

Speaker 5:

does he go down? So Tom says, that's a lie. She didn't even know you were alive. Why there are things between Daisy and me that you'll never know things neither of us can ever forget. And I think it's actually, it's a very accurate depiction, of what would be said in a scene of that kind. And Daisy sort of backpedals. She says to Gatsby, You want too much. I love you now. Isn't that enough? I can't help what's passed. I did love him once, but I loved you too. She's sort of saying, Yeah, I loved you both in different ways at different times, which is actually one of the few true things that Daisy says in this novel. And Gatsby won't have it. So, you know, we get this kind of stalemate between Tom and Gatsby. And Tom basically dismisses the whole scene. He tells Gatsby that he's a fraud. And this is the genius moment, Tom tells Gatsby and Daisy to drive back to the house on Long Island together in Gatsby's car. And a less, a less brutal and aggressive man than Tom would probably have swept up his wife and told Gatsby to go packing, but he tells Gatsby to drive Daisy back to Long Island. And that is a sign that he knows that the victory is his. But what we don't know as the reader is that to settle her nerves, Daisy has actually decided to drive the car. Gatsby is not driving. And as they speed back toward West Egg Myrtle in a parallel scene because her husband has discovered that she has been unfaithful, although he doesn't know that it's with Tom Buchanan. Myrtle escapes the garage where she's been locked up by the furious Mr. Wilson. She escapes the garage and she somehow sort of runs onto the road and, The car, being driven by Daisy, swerves to actually avoid an oncoming car. It's quite a complicated piece of road safety setup. The car swerves, hits Myrtle at speed, rips the breast off her chest. It's intensely violent.

Speaker 6:

It's intensely violent. And when they find the body afterwards, It's part of this very pessimistic view of humanity, and he just reduces these human beings to sort of abattoir. Yeah, body parts. Fitzgerald writes, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little and giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Speaker 5:

That's a great line, isn't it?

Speaker 6:

Yum.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. So, Myrtle's dead.

Speaker 6:

I did it, Juddy.

Speaker 5:

I killed her.

Speaker 6:

You killed Myrtle.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. What happens then?

Speaker 6:

Well, after that, it's all over for Gatsby. Daisy's, goes back to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby takes the rap for, for the death of, um, Myrtle. He doesn't tell anyone that Daisy was in fact driving the car. Myrtle's husband, because he saw, I think it's a yellow sports car. It's a yellow, a big

Speaker 5:

yellow sports car, which very interestingly is identified by the one black character in this novel. It says a pale, well dressed, Negro identifies the car. The yellow car is Tom's car, but Gatsby's driving it. And the question is, how does Mr. Wilson find out? There's a moment in the sort of aftermath of the accident where Tom goes up to Mr. Wilson and he says something almost too quiet to be heard. And it turns out that what he says is that Gatsby was driving the car. So Tom shops Gatsby.

Speaker 6:

Yes. And at this moment, all of the glamour of Long Island, has gone for Nick Carraway. He realizes he's at the heart of this very sordid affair that somebody's being killed. And the way that Nick Carraway is the narrator describes events now is incredibly nihilistic and pessimistic. There's an amazing description where he imagines what would have happened with that car wreck the next day. And he says, I suppose there'd be a curious crowd around there all day, with little boys searching for dark spots, that's blood in the dust, and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened, until it became less and less real even to him, and he could tell it no longer, and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten.

Speaker 5:

Yes, it's this motif of the solidity and safety of the Midwest versus the flightiness. and artificiality of the East Coast and actually Nick ends up having the last and I think best summary of the Buchanan's, in the, in the last sections of the novel, he actually becomes very dismissive and,, judgmental about the way that the Buchanan's have handled the whole situation. And he said it was all very careless and confused. 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. That, that word careless has become a real touchstone for this novel, that the defining characteristic of people of the kind of wealth that the Buchanan's have is that they are careless. Which is true. It is true. And by, by contrast, I think that Nick retains a sort of respect and sympathy for Gatsby Gatsby, his heart broken, in this kind of over determined moment, sums it up by taking his blow up inflatable lilo to his marble swimming pool and deciding that he's not going to take any telephone calls, he's just going to spend the afternoon in the pool.

Speaker 6:

It's not very heroic, is it? The peak of complete despair.

Speaker 5:

It's very diminish. When

Speaker 6:

normally in fiction, somebody would go and shoot themselves on a clifftop. He just throws the himself on a Lilo in a swimming pool. In a swimming

Speaker 5:

pool. So, it's a really brilliant paying off of the swimming pool motif. But the bit I wanted to read is Nick's imagined description of Gatsby's despair. No telephone message arrived, so Gatsby never hears from Daisy again. But the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock, until long after there was anyone to give it, if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

Speaker 6:

The whole thing is exposing Gatsby not to be a hero at all. And we talked earlier about the build up to Gatsby's first appearances as the host of these very glamorous parties and then that winning, piercing smile that seems to validate you. And actually, At the end, he's so reduced and exposed that he can't even take his own life as, as, as a proper Yeah. Novelistic hero should do. He just sort of bobs about on the swimming pool. And in fact, it's Mr. Wilson, who is the husband of Myrtle, who having worked out that Gatsby was in the car with Daisy when it hit Myrtle, he's the one who has a gun and takes it over to Gatsby's house and shoots him in the swimming pool and then goes and shoots himself on the lawn.

Speaker 5:

You see, I told you, the Wilsons have a kind of sold of the earth solidity about them. You're

Speaker 6:

right, you've totally convinced me, they do.

Speaker 5:

She's the heart and soul of the book.

Speaker 6:

And the book ends, of course, in possibly the most famous final lines of the book. any book. I'm trying to, anyway. It's very,

Speaker 5:

it's very famous so will you read it to us?

Speaker 6:

Yes. It's back to the green light motif, which fortunately we did manage to shoe horn in earlier. And Nick Carraway just ends by saying Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further, and then one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Speaker 5:

It's almost completely meaningless. First of all, it's a good thing. Orga future. So I said it. Let, let's, let's have a moment with that.

Speaker 6:

So that word is very often misinterpreted and people think it is all gdic. Yes. It's what, which is like an orgy. Yes. But Fitzgerald, uh, was very insistent. When questioned It was orga. He, he meant it. It wasn't a typo. It was like an orgasm. Yeah. So, so the future is orgasmic and he just said orga instead. Yes. So yes, orgasmic future,, that's a weird combination of words. Really weird. But why do you think it's meaningless? I, I mean, it makes sense to me, which is saying Gatsby believed in the green light, which I suppose is that hope, the American dream. And you chase after it. And you think that if we push ourselves further, if we read the encyclopedia cover to cover, if we have enough ivy on our

Speaker 5:

houses, if

Speaker 6:

we keep on achieving, we will get it. And instead, we're just dragged back by our own history, ceaselessly into the past. So for me, it makes Real sense. No, you've classed it brilliantly. But why do you think it's real sense? No, I, I,

Speaker 5:

I, 100% Retract everything I said. You just told me what it meant. I'm one over by it. And to it. And actually per the conversation that we opened with, it explains the intense preoccupation with history in this book, the sense in which this novel is a sort of allegory for an the American past as opposed to an allegory for the future. It's a book that is continually drawing. Its its own narrative back to the past. You have to keep remembering the things that have come up in the story before. You have to remember that there's a green light. You have to remember that there have been traffic accidents.

Speaker 6:

It's quite a radical idea because there's a moment where Nick and Gatsby are having an exchange and Gatsby's blowing on about his love for Daisy and five years before and he's never got over it. And Nick Carraway says in a kind of really glib way, you know, well you can't repeat the past, you know, like what's the point of trying to go back? Yeah. And Gatsby says, what do you mean you can't? Of course you can repeat the past. Yes. And Gatsby, Nick at the end is, Confirming that Gatsby's right, that whatever we do, we are actually drawn back into the past, that we, that we do repeat the past, and that's all we do is repeat ad nauseam.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, and Nick in that, I think in that exchange, where Gatsby's kind of crapping on about Daisy for, hour number four. Nick's a patient man, isn't he?

Speaker 6:

He is, yeah. yeah, good

Speaker 5:

friend, good friend to Gatsby. There's a moment where Nick says, for all his, he says, appalling sentimentalism, there is something authentic about this. There's something, genuinely impassioned about the way in which Gatsby just, he cannot forget her. For him, it was the most important, the most defining moment of his life to have met Daisy. And, and Nick ultimately explains it as being something that is very understandable. That Gatsby, who turns out to have been from an extremely poor family, and we meet his father very briefly at the end of the book when Gatsby dies. And the fathers are touching and, quite sympathetic character. And Nick says, Gatsby had never met anyone like Daisy before. He'd never seen a house like Daisy's before. He'd never met girls who had that much money and who were carefree in that way. And it, you know, it explains why it's so compelling that her voice sounds like money. It's this promise of safety and security and opulence and,. kind of glamour.

Speaker 6:

let's talk about how the book was received. It was published in 1925. it was critically very well received, but it didn't sell. And that was a massive blow for Fitzgerald.

Speaker 5:

I hate to correct you, Jonty, but it was, it actually was published to a mixed reception.

Speaker 6:

Oh. Yeah, there was a mixed reception. Not only did it not sell very much, but it, it wasn't even unanimously critically revered.

Speaker 5:

A lot of people thought it was immature and trivial. To be honest, I, it makes me realize that I'm not a very good reader of contemporary fiction, because if I, I think if I'd read Great Gatsby in 1925, I would not have realized that it was a world masterpiece. I would have thought it was immature and trivial. I

Speaker 6:

was I would have recognized it. You would have known, wouldn't you? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5:

You probably would. But I have a

Speaker 6:

better judgment than you do, so. Yeah, and also,

Speaker 5:

I mean, we haven't had our question this episode, but, uh, I'm going to guess that you think that Tom and Gatsby and Nick all would have liked you better than me.

Speaker 6:

I'm thinking more about Fitzgerald.

Speaker 5:

I

Speaker 6:

think I could probably party better with Fitzgerald than you could.

Speaker 5:

You've got more stamina, that's for sure. You're holding up

Speaker 6:

a bit of paper with a sort of air of, I'm going to read out some reviews to you. Can I do it? Would you like

Speaker 5:

to interrupt me again? No, get it done.

Speaker:

The LA Times kind of got it right. It said, The story is powerful as much for what is suggested as for what is told. It leaves the reader in a mood of chase and wonder, in which fact after fact, implication after implication, is wandered over, Weighed and measured. And a critic named Gilbert Seldes, who was well known, in the Dial said, Fitzgerald has mastered his talents and gone sawing into a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders. That's the review you want, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

It is. And I think that's the one that,, induced the writer's block that Fitzgerald then, and, one of his friends later said, I think it was Edmund Wilson, the historian and critic, said that that review was the one that Fitzgerald kind of felt stopped him from writing another book straight away. He was like, how could I beat that?

Speaker:

Yeah. the other thing that's really, you mentioned T. S. Eliot before that, that he put the ash heaps in because he was thinking of the wasteland. So T. S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald afterwards and said, It was the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

Speaker 2:

Yes, he did only write Fitzgerald because Fitzgerald sent him a copy with a very desperate, needy note inside it. Okay,

Speaker:

but still, he got the reply. No,

Speaker 2:

he could have done a neg. he could have said something like, the choice of font by the publishers is really wonderful and not commented on the book at all. Or he could

Speaker:

have done what most people do these days with email and all unsolicited approaches, which is just hit delete. Gertrude Stein was very keen on it. Who's Gertrude Stein, Jonte? She's a famous American writer. She was living in Paris.

Speaker 2:

And a bit of a bore. She's a bit of a

Speaker:

bore, yeah., so she said that he was creating a contemporary world much as Thackeray did, and Edith Wharton, who was, you know, the grand dame of American letters, said, let me say at once how much I like Gatsby, or rather his book, and how great a leap I think you have taken this time. That's pretty nice.

Speaker 2:

At some point we may do Tender is the Night, which is Gatsby's next, and in fact the only other novel he published in his lifetime. So we don't want to go too much into what happens next in Fitzgerald's life, other than to say Fitzgerald really struggled to write another book soon afterwards. I think he was very daunted by the perfection of the Great Gatsby. Also his alcoholism had really ramped up and his relationship with Zelda was deteriorating, he did manage to write two books. And published Tender is the Night in about 1934. And then he didn't really write another book or he sort of tried to write one and he died of alcoholism or,, symptoms relating to in 1940. So he doesn't get beyond 40 years old or much beyond. he considered his life to be a complete failure by the end and he was largely forgotten. And then what happens is shortly after he dies is Gatsby reemerges as a book and during the Second World War. It's partly because during the Second World War copies of The Great Gatsby were given to American servicemen. It was a free book. Yes. I think something like over a hundred thousand copies were given away. And they loved it. And they loved it. Yeah, it was a sort of

Speaker:

cheap remaindered book that they started handing out to American servicemen as a social duty kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

And so for a younger generation of writers who'd been drafted for the Second World War, they all read The Great Gatsby. Yeah. And so it then just began this reemergence and,, escalated into being considered one of the, if not the, great American novels. But unfortunately Fitzgerald died having no idea that was going to be the case.

Speaker:

it's moving actually. So how much do you reckon you'd have to pay for a first edition of The Great Gatsby today?

Speaker 2:

Well, I would reckon probably about 150, 000 American dollars.

Speaker:

Oh, you got it right.

Speaker 2:

Because it's written down in front of me.

Speaker:

Funnily enough, I, I would have thought it would be significantly more. When I read that, I thought that was less than I'd have expected. Listeners, podcast. The worst bit and the best bit. Is it overrated or is it underrated?

Speaker 2:

Well, there is no worse bit. I mean, there just isn't. Yeah. This is a book that has no bad bit. No. It's flawless. And

Speaker:

all the maudlin, sort of, clichéd, over determined bits and the symbols that mean too much, that's all part of what's brilliant about it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. And the best bits, Well, it's the dialogue. We haven't talked much about Fitzgerald's mastery of dialogue and funny dialogue, but the things the characters say are so brilliant and funny. Yes,

Speaker:

yes. And the way that the dialogue carries the weight of the characterization. You know, as we saw in that exchange between Daisy and Jordan, you know who they are after they've had that exchange about the candles.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Have you got any worse bits, or?

Speaker:

No, I, I I loved it, rereading it.

Speaker 2:

Really loved it. So is the Great American Novel overrated or underrated?

Speaker:

And we haven't talked about this yet, so we don't know what another is going to say. Shall I go first?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

I'm going to say, Junty, I'm going underrated.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker:

Underrated. I feel like it's out of fashion at the moment, Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby generally, and re reading it, I thought it was just, it was a perfect novel.

Speaker 2:

I think it's underrated as well, in that my understanding of it before re reading, having not read it for a couple of decades, was, oh yeah, we're going to read The Great Gatsby, it's, you know, I'm sure it's going to be pretty good, but it's probably going to be quite annoying and of its time as well. And, uh, Any book which is referred to as the great American novel is guaranteed to get my hackles up. And then I read it and went, oh, this is the great American novel.

Speaker:

It was amazing, wasn't it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

You've been listening to The Secret Life of Books.

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Jonty Claypole

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Sophie Gee

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