In Our Time - The Great Gatsby

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss F Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, published in 1925, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It is told by Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. In the age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, in the hope she’ll attend one of them and they can be reunited. They were lovers as teenagers but she had given him up for a richer man who she soon married, and Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back.The image above is of Robert Redford as Gatsby in a scene from the film 'The Great Gatsby', 1974. WithSarah Churchwell Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of LondonPhilip McGowan Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University, BelfastAndWilliam Blazek Associate Professor and Reader in American Literature at Liverpool Hope UniversityProduced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, the great Gatsby is now seen as F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel and one of the greatest of American novels. There we find Jay Gatsby, newly wealthy,

obsessed with winning the love of Daisy Buchanan for a second time. she had once given him up for a richer man and married him. In an age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from hers, in the hope she'll attend one and will pick up where they left off when they were teenagers. That would be his fairy tale ending, but this is no fairy tale. With me to discuss the great Gatsby are Philip McGowan, Professor of American Literature at Queen's University Belfast,

William Blashek, Associate Professor and Reader in American Literature at Liverpool Hope University, and Sarah Churchill, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London. Sarah Churchill, there are echoes of Fitzgerald's own life in the Great Gatsby. Can you tell me what they are?

It is certainly not an autobiographical novel, but it draws on many of his experiences and particularly his emotional experiences. And like several of the characters in the Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald grew up in the Midwest, in St. Paul, near Minneapolis. And he was Irish-American at a time when that was still looked down on by, if you like, the American patrician East Coast Wasp establishment. And he was always very sensitive about that background.

His family was from a merchant class, but they were not particularly affluent. His father wasn't very successful, although his father had aristocratic or patrician background himself. He was a Southerner and he was connected to Francis Scott Key, for whom S. Scott Fitzgerald was named. And Francis Scott Key was the author of the poem that became the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. He went to prestigious schools, thanks to a wealthy aunt who helped pay for his education. So he grew up becoming friends with wealthy and influential people. So he had the access to an aristocratic lifestyle without the me. means to support it. And Gatsby is really a novel about all of those kinds of emotions.

He went to Princeton University. We could call that an Irishocratic university. I'm sure we could. And there he wrote and wrote and acted and got involved in that sort of thing. Can you flush that out, please? He actually wanted to go on the stage at first. He wanted to write for the theater. And he got very involved in a production called The Triangle Club, which was very famous at the They actually used to write these musical comedies, kind of vaudeville meets Gilbert and Sullivan, and they would tour around the United States over the Christmas holidays. And his delight in the Triangle Club and the way his enthusiasm for it

affected his grades greatly because he spent all of his time writing these musicals and not actually pursuing his studies. And eventually, he didn't quite flunk out of Princeton, but he withdrew under the advice of the faculty who suggested that he withdrew withdraw before they had to flunk him out what did he publish before gatsby the great gatsby was uh fitzgerald's third novel in five years his first novel this side of paradise um was an overnight success in 1920 he uh fischerald was 24 when it was published nobody ever heard of him he'd only published a couple of short stories before then and when

this side of paradise uh emerged in the spring of 1920 it was It was a phenomenal overnight success. And it was seen as the great novel of the Jazz Age, in fact. And it very quickly made him, if not quite rich. It made him certainly very affluent and very bankable. So he began to write short fiction. And then in the space of the next few years, he churned out another novel, The Beautiful and Damned in 1922, two collections of short stories,

lots of magazine fiction, which was very high paying. and then he also tried to do a play. He thought he could easily write a big Broadway hit. But in fact, the vegetable flopped. He'd written to a novel and he comes to write Gadsbury, which is his third level. What was his reputation at that time? He was seen more as a popular writer at the time than as a commercial writer than as somebody who was necessarily going to be a great artist.

But he was also seen as somebody who had an enormous amount. of potential and artistic promise. And a lot of the responses to his first novels and indeed to his commercial magazine fiction asked whether he would pursue commercial success or artistic greatness. And they could see that he could go either way. They tended to think that he was going to take the easy route to commercial success and write popular fiction. The Great Gadsby was the turning point. Great Gadsby was the moment when Fitzger's. Gerald made a conscious decision that he would stop worrying about commercial success and that he would try to write a great artistic novel.

Thank you. William Bill Blashek, where's the great Gatsby said? What do we need to know about this area and about the whole context of that novel? It's written by the first-person narrator, Nick Carraway. The 29-year-old, soon to be 30-year-old, Nick has come east to New York. He's leaving his prominent, well-to-do family. in a Midwest city, he was staked by his father to start a career as a bond salesman. And so he rents a small house on Long Island next to the outlandishly built Hotel DeVille style of this mysterious Jay Gatsby who hosts wild and lavish parties.

And the house is located on an oval-shaped peninsula named West Egg, which is based on Great Neck, Long Island, where Fitzgerald, first began drafting the novel in 1923. And the people who live in West Egg are the newly rich. They're connected with entertainment industry, Broadway theater, newspapers, and a criminal element, mainly bootleggers during the early years of prohibition. And then across from West Egg, separated by what's called the Courtesy Bay, an inlet of Long Island Sound, is East Egg,

where the wealthy, established old money resides, with inherited wealth, money from property and banking, etc. That's where Tom and Daisy Buchanan live in this Georgian colonial-style mansion. And Daisy Fay Buchanan is Nick's second cousin once removed. Tom was Nick's classmate at Yale University. Tom is immensely wealthy, a physically powerful former Yale football star, who is also a serial adulterer. So Nick first notices his neighbor Gaspian,

kind of gesturing and supplication across the bay to a green light on the Buchanan's dock. And that green light is a very famous symbol in the novel of hope and jealousy and longing with other things that might symbolize, including money. Now, the second chapter gives us the reverse picture of post-World War I American life. It opens in this place called the Valley of Ashes,

a fantastic farm where ashes grow like we eat, Nick writes. George and Myrtle Wilson own a small garage and gasoline station in the Valley of Ashes. George being an anemic run-down man who is unaware that his wife is having an affair with Tom Buchanan. Murdell is in her early 30s full of vitality. There are other important places, Louisville, Kentucky, where Daisy grows up with her friend

Jordan Baker and first meets the Army officer Jay Gatsby. But the class divisions between West Neuverich and East Egg's established money, and then the downtrodden Valley of Ashes, and New York City itself are the key settings. So we've got this island where the Nouveau-Riche are, and Gatsby's part of that, impossibly rich, as it were, and across the bay there's the establishment, the old money establishment are there, and people, the great thing about the beginning of the novel, I start, is these immense parties, and they come.

from New York to Gatsby's house. Now, Philip McGahn, is it possible for us to look back and assume that Gatsby's world was normal? What do you think about the setting that Fitzgerald gives him? Gatsby's house in particular, the factual imitation of some hotel de Ville. There's something artificial about the house, something fantastical. And this is what attracts a rest. Nick Carraway and his attention in the early parts of the novel. Gatsby's house is bedecked with multicolored lights.

It's the location, as you mentioned, of his parties. And this is where New York or Manhattan, East and West Egg, will go to party, even though we are in the middle of prohibition. And Nick Carraway, the narrator, who also plays a part in the book, Do we need to know anything more about him and his values? It suits Gatsby's story that Nick is the cousin of Daisy, so then he can be the go-between to pull Daisy into Gatsby's orbit again. But also, Carraway, at the start of the novel,

because he says he's restless, he is really interested in this sort of technological and the new of the 1920s. And so he sees that in Gatsby's parties. He talks about there's a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of 200 oranges and half an hour if a little button was pressed 200 times by a butler's thumb. So he's kind of fascinated about that stuff. But he's also giving us a critique of America

in that glorious riotous summer of 1922. Thank you. Sarah, Sarah Churchwell. Gatsby is presented as a mystery to the guests and to the reader at the start and quite a way in this novel it's a short novel 140 pages

something like that and people speculate about his past wildly he's on prohibition has been mentioned here

and prohibition is as it were like cocaine is today and it was associated with illicit wealth unsavory people

but that's that he forwards these parties and serves at these parties extraordinary wine and expensive champagne from France

and so on. Do we know more about him as the novel goes on than the guests do? What Fitzgerald does is he generates suspense around the character of Gatsby by kind of drip-feeding bits and pieces of Gatsby's backstory that he juxtaposes against the wild speculation of the guests at Gatsby's party and the other characters around him and indeed Nick's own questions about who this man is. Can you give us some examples of what the gossips are saying? The phrase that recurs is that they hear that he killed a man. They hear that he's the nephew to General Pershing, who was a great war hero. They hear that maybe alternatively he's related to Hindenburg, so he's on the German side of the war.

So this kind of wild gossip circulates around him. I think that your analogy of the cocaine dealer is exactly right. The one that I often use is he's basically like a Russian oligarch. So everyone is speculating about where he got his money from, but they know it's probably shady. And then bit by bit, Fitzgerald discloses the truth of Gatsby's background. Now, these parties are thrown by him because just across the bay is where Daisy lives. Daisy Buchanan, with whom he had an affair with five years, previously I understand it. She's very elusive.

He wants to somehow tease her across to him out of her marriage. So it's Tom Buchanan, a big establishment figure there. Can you just develop a bit in that area, Bill? The key difference, I think, between the Buchanan's and Gatsby isn't so much about money as about culture. Tom has converted his car garage in his estate that he bought and into a horse's stables. And so he's reversing the past here,

kind of holding back the modern change. Whereas Gatsby, he's got the modern conveniences, including a hydroplane. So Gatsby's earned his money, obviously quickly through these underground channels. But that's the underworld of criminality that's available to him. That is not something he could obtain the ways in which the culture elite could. The women, though, Bill has mentioned Myrtle,

who is the wife of the very down-at-heel, garage in the ashes, this derelict space between New York and the Long Island glamour and glitter. Can you tell us about the women in this? What actions do they bring which push the novel forward? Well, the novel is bookended by two very interesting descriptions of women in white. At the start, we have Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker, who is a somewhat corrupt golfer.

She's been involved in a scandal about improving the lie of her golf ball. And in the first chapter, Nick Carraway encounters these two women in white and they're on a sofa buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. And at the end of the novel, when Nick is thinking back and about, even though he kind of still thinks the East was exciting, he sees it as a kind of grotesque nightmare. And in this, there's a figure of a woman, a drunken woman in white, laid on a stretch. No one knows who this woman is. So there's a sense of inertia and anonymity about women generically in the text. But women are the motivating factors.

Daisy's the motivating factor for Gatsby to try and take her back. For Tom, you know, Myrtle, I don't know what, she really gives him a bit on the side. They have this... Sex. Well, well put. But they have this tawdry apartment

on 158th Street in Manhattan. That's part of the attraction for Tom. He's had enough glamour. It likes a total apartment in New York that they can hive off to, doesn't he? Absolutely. And it's too far up town. It's not classy.

It's not well situated. It's sort of crammed to the doors and to the walls with these massive pits of furniture. And one of the things that's really interesting about that is that the furniture depicts scenes from Versailles.

And we later on, we hear that in Gatsby's house, he has restoration salons and Mary Antoinette drawing rooms. And there's something about these characters, particularly Mertl on female side and Gatsby on the men's side, who are connected with revolution, with overturning things, with overthrowing marriages. I think it's a really interesting element of the novel that is kind of easy to overlook, particularly on, you know, kind of first reading. But Mertl and Gatsby are really each other's mirror images. They both want the same things.

They're both highly aspirational figures, effectively social climbers. They both want a Buchanan, right? They both think that a rich Buchanan will give them the life that they want. Gatsby wants Daisy and Mertl wants Tom. And so they both are trying to use sexual economics in different ways. But basically what Fitzgerald shows us is that Gatsby has this kind of more appealing version of the same story. And Mertl has this degraded version. and but the two of them effectively want the same thing.

They work as, well, it just is how Fitzgerald depicts it. So it is depicted in class terms. So the aristocratic version of this and the moneyed version of it is in the novel depicted in more attractive terms. And poor Myrtle is always this vulgar person. And so her version of aristocracy is hopelessly vulgar. But it's also worth saying in that context that Gadsby himself, as Fitzgerald, depicts him, is also a far more vulgar character.

than we tend to think about him, largely, I think, because of Hollywood versions of him. So we picture Robert Redford or we picture Leonardo DiCaprio. But that's not who Fitzgerald describes. Fitzgerald describes a kind of tacky guy in a pink suit who wears a silver shirt and a gold tie and says the wrong thing and tries too hard. And so this sense of social climbing and social exclusion of trying to believe that you can, you know, move up in life by getting. getting a, you know, by marrying up is something that both Gatsby and Myrtle share,

and it drives a lot of the plot of the novel. Can you tell us, somebody tell us for a moment, at the language that Fitzgerald uses throughout the novel, somebody said at the beginning of this discussion that he was, there was a suspicion among some reviewers that he was just a popular novelist. Is he trying to defeat that idea in Gatsby? Well, I think that he, in Gatsby, he set out consciously to show what he could do, to show himself what he could do and to show the world what he could do. He knew that he had the potential for artistic greatness in him and he knew that he needed to dedicate himself to that seriously. And so, and that's what he does in this novel to show what mastery he had achieved over language through this very rapid apprenticeship of his first two novels and all of the short fiction that he'd been writing.

And he particularly said later that he used Keats to help him write Gatsby. He actually told his daughter this some years later. And so he's actually trying to infuse this jazz age world with poetry. And you can open up, and it's really what to me anyway, what makes the novel so remarkable. The plot isn't actually especially remarkable. And it's one of the reasons the novel wasn't all that well received when it first came out. But if you open the novel almost at random on any page, you will. discover these absolutely remarkable, memorable phrases where he's, particularly in the party scenes, which is what makes them so memorable, where the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music. And cocktails are floating. He tells us that Buchanan's gardens are burning, and the lawn jumps and it runs, and everything is very alive. There's no dead language in this novel. You mentioned how short it is Melvin, and that's really important. It's really compact because there are no wasted words here. So there are the famous phrases, like Daisy's voice being full of money. Less famous, really surprising phrases, there's a woman who hisses like an angry diamond, the film star who's like a scarcely human orchid of a woman.

And one of the most important linguistic effects that he uses throughout the novel is synesthesia, which is mixing different senses. and particularly attaching color where we wouldn't normally expect it to appear, like yellow cocktail music, but he talks about the pale gold odor of Kiss Me at the Gate, so the gold color of flowers, you know, and just constantly mixing these surprising juxtapositions of music and sound and sensory perception, which is what brings the novel to life. And it's what makes it, you know, haunt the memories of people who've read it, even if they're not conscious of the fact that it was the poetry that did that, it really is. Bill, yes. Besides that lyrical, luminous language, the romantic imagery, the inventive phrases

of the novel, he contrasts, though, when he needs to, with a really harsh realism, too, and I suppose the most brutal scene is the death of Myrtle Wilson and the description of her body with one of her breasts sliced sliced away. And so he can contrast. that sharpness with the softness of other passages in the text. Can we go to the kernel of the plot, really? Gatsby takes that place to tease Daisy Buchanan back to him. How does he do that and how successful is he? Can we concentrate on those two for a minute now?

Bill? Well, he draws her in through those parties, first of all, and then because of that relation between Nick and Daisy, he manages to convince Nick to, some critics would say, act as a pimp for Gatsby by inviting Daisy to Nick's house next to Gatsby's mansion. And then that's the scene where they come back together after five years. And soon after that, he shows Daisy around his house and throws his color of shirts on the bed. and then afterwards he becomes more secluded with her,

and they do start an affair at that point. And strangely, that's also the point when this grand illusion of the dream of Daisy that he's been working for for five years, it starts to break apart at that point too, because the reality isn't the same as the dream. But how does Fitzgerald convert the impression that there's a chance that these two really might get together again after

five years apart, that they could be pick up where they're left off, that they once were in love in this enormous way, passionate way, and it can happen again. What do you say about that, Philip? Well, I think there's a chance because Gatsby knows who Daisy is. And Sarah said earlier he's like Gatsby's this vulgar character who dresses and a silver shirt and a gold tie. But actually, you know, that's exactly what he needs to wear to get this girl whose voice is full of money. Gatsby knows, Daisy, and he thinks that what they had together, that preceded the war, that precedes Tom Buchanan, can be repeated. Of course, you can repeat the past is what Gatsby thinks. And the reason that the novel allows us to think that there might be a chance is because

Nick Carraway writes the novel to make us think that there might be a chance because Carraway needs there to be a chance even though we know it's doomed and even though the whole novel is constructed. Sorry, can I come in there? Why do we know it's doomed? Diasi's not going to leave Tom

and we know why eventually by the end of the novel. Yeah, eventually but isn't there, sorry, can you tell me you know more about an item but just for a second. There's a page of two where she says to Gatsby that she loves him, she does begin to drift away from Tom quite definitely. She's fed up at one presumes with him being the sort of man he is.

So do you think there's never a chance that he's going to get her back? She's had the opportunities. They start a sort of affair, don't they? They do start an affair, yes, but nothing really comes of that. And the moment that Gatsby sees the child, that is the product of Tom and Daisy's marriage, He begins to realize, the penny begins to drop that this isn't going to work so well. And even though Daisy loves Gatsby, she also loves Tom.

And that is unacceptable to Gatsby. There's not a chance. And if we could skip ahead a little bit to the confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby and the Plaza Hotel. Gatsby demands too much of Daisy. He says, just tell the truth that you. never loved him and it's all wiped out forever. So he wants to change time to make the past, the present, the future one thing. And she can't say that.

She did love Tom. She keeps saying you're asking too much. Yes. There are a couple of reasons also why Daisy starts up this affair with Gatsby again. First of all, she's confronted with an ex-boyfriend who has remained totally devoted to her for five years. So that's really quite appealing, actually. Right. So he has been this absolute, you know, he's faithful.

still in love with her and she has this husband who, as we've said, is playing around and she knows it, which is offensive. So she, of course, you know, she's not of course, but you know, you can see why she's perfectly, I'm willing to start this up again. But also, to a certain extent, I think she falls for Gatsby's showmanship. To a certain extent, she believes Gatsby's facade and she thinks that, that he has more to back it up than he actually does. She doesn't believe that he got his money from bootlegging. She doesn't think he's a criminal. And we should say he doesn't only get his money from bootlegging. He's actually a criminal across the board. He's engaged in all kinds of criminal activity and he's a gangster. But she doesn't

believe that. So she actually is confronted with, you know, this ex-boyfriend who apparently has become fabulously wealthy, has remained totally devoted to her. She's got a husband who ignores her and has a bit on the side where he's, you know, slumming in uptown New York, as she well knows. And he's rubbing her nose in it. And so, you know, she decides that she'll go off and have this affair. But that doesn't mean that she ever seriously contemplates leaving her husband and starting over again with Gatsby, and that's Gatsby's fatal error. Can we come towards the climax now? The climax is these people mixing with each other in the final scene, which is, which concerns

somebody is killed in a car crash and somebody shot. Philip, do you want to try that? Yeah, I'll try that one. There is quite a body count in the Great Gatsby, certainly in those leaders. scenes. Mertl is run over, killed. Wilson, George Wilson, her husband, out of anger, fury and whatever, he decides he's going to shoot Gatsby. He mistakenly thinks that she's having an affair with Gatsby. Yes, because she sees the car that had driven earlier, but the people driving the cars have changed. So, Wilson goes to track down Gatsby.

and obviously Tom has suggested who Gatsby is where he lives and Wilson goes and shoots Gatsby and then himself. What happens with those three deaths is that Tom wins the novel. Tom, Tom Becannon, like everything is perfect for him. An annoying mistress whose nose he's already broken, she's offside, her really annoying husband, who keeps bugging him for the car, he's dead, really annoying ex-boyfriend of his wife.

He's dead. So, you know, if we're to look at the Great Gatsby as balancing who wins and who loses, well, Tom Buchanan wins, I think. There's a passage just before this multiple deaths where Nick Carraway shouts across the stretch of land or water to Gatsby, to whom he's quite ambivalent. You're better than all of them.

Your words, their effect. Why did you do that? Pardon? The whole damn bunch put together. So what does that add, Philip? Well, Gatsby by this stage for Nick has transcended being a gangster, being up to all sorts, whether it's bootlegging or having an affair with his cousin. Gatsby has come to represent something much more fundamental,

something that is connected to a higher sense of a sort of American possibility. and this is what he sees in Gatsby. At the start of the novel, the first page indeed, Carraway lets us know that he's kind of annoyed that he's been accused of being a politician when he was a college in Yale, but actually he is a politician. And he's the kind of ideal running mate

on Gatsby's dream ticket. And by the end of the novel, after he's seen what's happened with Daisy and Tom, Tom and Mercky. Myrtle's death and the fact that the Buchanan's cannot acknowledge the fact

that Gatsby is there or he was innocent of Mertl's death Gatsby then represents something better and that's what Caraway must make great and Fitzgerald gives Gatsby a certain heroism because it's

he is in the same car as Daisy and Daisy kills in her car Myrtle and Gatsby's prepared to take responsibility of that. No, I was driving the car. At best, I would probably call it nobility, not heroism. He's actually acting in a pretty sordid way.

He's covering up a crime. He's doing it, yes, to protect the woman he loves, but he's also doing it to protect his dream, which is to run off with the woman he loves. So there is a deeper level of selfishness to it, and it's about his... One of the questions that the novel forces us to ask is whether Gatsby's...

whether Gatsby's failures and his deep, real flaws are redeemed by this idealism, is the brutality and the violence of his behavior and his willingness to break anything to get what he wants, is that redeemed by the fact that what he wants is idealized and he's prepared to act in certain kinds of noble and heroic ways to get that. And that's one of the kind of driving tensions of the novel. And another is towards the end There are paragraphs about the hope of America and they're much

applauded by yourselves and by great many other readers closing a few pages of the novel and yet they're on the back of slees deceptions murder

that juxtaposition would you like to say something about that bill? Of course it's about the ways in which hope and ambition can in some ways overcome the flaws. But we have pictures of the Dutch sailors' eyes looking at this new continent. Nick Harkens back to this as he's thinking. And it's almost that sense that when humans interact with these edinic places,

that they're always going to spoil it. But then it's that sense of aspiration and opportunity. a hope that somehow will transpire over the innate corruption of human beings. Fitchell sketches this place as an Eden, and Sarah, can you develop that a bit more? Yeah, absolutely. So he sketches it as a paradise that we've already lost, right? So it's always a fallen Eden. It's very much a post-lapsarian vision. So what he does at the end of the novel is he imagines these Dutch sailors landing on Long Island for the first time. And it's important to say that they are not, as people often remember them, Puritans landing in Massachusetts.

These are not religious, the religious faithful, religious pilgrims. These are mercantilists. These are people coming to make a buck to get rich in New York. And when they see all of the vast continent rolling out before them and all of this unlimited potential, which becomes a symbol for all of the possibility in the world, You can do anything. You can build any utopian project in this new world, in this new land.

And what does America decide to do? It decides to cut down the trees and build some houses and make a buck. And it ends up with this kind. So we have a kind of fast forward to, you know, the skyscrapers emerging in the early 1920s in this sense that America has sold out, that humanity has sold out, that it was confronted with all of this beautiful aesthetic potential. And so that becomes an image for. or the kind of imaginative possibilities of the human character. We can do anything. And yet what do we choose?

We choose money. We choose power. We choose violence. And so it's about the ways in which those hopes keep pulling us forward. And we can't jettison them. We can't relinquish those hopes. And yet they are constantly betrayed by the brutal reality of American life. And it's perhaps a particular American quality.

I like to think of it as America's infernal hope. When Fitzgerald died, quite young, he thought that the Great Gatsby was a failure and it hadn't sold particularly well, not terribly badly, but not very well. Do you think you would have recognised it for what it has now become, this great classic piece of work?

Or do you think you would have thought, no, there's still too much sleaze there, there's too much, what would you have thought if you've been reviewing it? As Sarah had mentioned earlier, he had made such a sense, smash with this side of paradise. And that was the novel that created space for Fitzgerald.

And that was the novel that critics of that time always measured everything else against. And they always found everything else lacking. Now, scroll forward. Would you have felt you lacking, do you think? That's kind of impossible to say. It's a much better written novel than the side of paradise, which is a bit, bits and pieces sewn together. this is controlled, masterful, and it's interlaced with a huge sense of complexity. When I think about this question, I've spent a lot of time reading the original reviews of the novel and asking exactly this question.

And although I would like to flatter myself, of course, that I would have seen in it a masterpiece, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have. And the analogy that I use is that the plot that we've been detailing here, as you say, Melvin, it's about sleaze and, you know, gangsters. and it's about these kind of really tawdry people behaving badly, and these empty, rich people, and they're all really vulgar. And so this was all stuff that you would have been reading about in tabloid fiction. You would have been reading about it in the magazines

and in the gossip magazines, the celebrity magazines of the day. So the analogy that I always use is, imagine if today somebody wrote an absolute masterpiece, but it was about the Kardashians, I don't think anybody would be able to see past the fact that it was about the Kardashians to recognize it as a major work of art, because the subject matter would be seen as so definitionally trivial,

so definitionally tacky, that all of the quote-unquote serious critics might say, it's very well written, but why would you waste all of your energy writing so beautifully about the Kardashians? And I don't think that we would have the capacity to see the way that it cuts through our moment and see something profound about our society, that it pins to the wall, absolutely nails, and in this case, in the case of the Great Gatsby,

is also hitting the core of where American society was going. So it's something that has opened up for us through time. And then the reputation turned and changed and took off for the moon, really, Philip. When did that happen and how did it happen? Well, after Fitzgerald dies in 1940, a version of the Great Gatsby is released with his unfinished. novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. And then as we move into the 1950s and into the 1960s, as the American literary canon has

been formed in America's universities, the Great Gatsby's star begins to rise because people see in it more than just the tawdry and more than just, like one of the criticisms about the novel in the 1920s was that here's this author who's supposed to be the bard of the jazz age and people didn't think it was very jazzy. It wasn't jazzy enough. They weren't happy with its depictions of 1920s America. But the more people have looked at the novel and gone beneath that surface trashy love story and the deaths and the murders and all of that stuff, they see a much more long-lasting sense of a narrative of American possibility. Would you agree with that, Bill? There are also some practical reasons for that reviving of his reputation, in particular this novel.

His friends, first of all, in particular his Princeton classmate, the critic of men of letters, Edmund Wilson. He publishes Fitzgerald's fifth unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon in 1940, and it includes in the volume The Great Gatsby. And really crucially, in 1946, there's this armed service, Now, these editions were cheap paperbacks distributed by or for the U.S. Army and the Navy, something like 120 million books altogether were published during and just after the war. So 155,000 copies of the Great Gatsby were printed.

And with the kind of expected lifespan of five to seven reads per copy, up to a million people would have potentially read the book. and later on the Scribner's produces a school edition in 1961, and then the critical studies start flooding in the 60s and 70s, and with the help of his daughter, Scott and Zelda's daughter, Scotty Fitzgerald Smith, promotes his work, and particularly the Great Gatsby. Philip, do you want to come in? Well, I think if you looked on social media these days, you would find people who have a visceral hatred of this novel. But for those of us who aren't of that persuasion, I think what makes it last...

What do they hate about it? I think they hate the tackiness, the tacky love story. I think they think it's cliched. And importantly, it is. And that's the point, because Carraway is constructing in a novel, which is a kind of romance novel that he would want to read. Yeah, it's... Gatsby has to be great for Nick Carraway. But for us now reading this novel, Partly what Sarah says, that just the writing is immaculate. Finally, Sarah, I'll ask you, but if the others want to chip in, please chip. What is most valued about it now? The cliché of what is valued about the novel right now is that it's about the American dream, right?

I mean, that's the cliché. It's the most famous novel of the American Dream, and everybody kind of assumes that we know what that means, that it's about aspiration and it's about corruption, and it's about the myth of self-creation. And I think all of those things are true, as we've been saying, or at least implying in what we've been talking about. But I think that what people see in it now is, you know,

the way that people tend to talk about it is that it's a critique of the American dream. So what it shows is that the American dream is a myth. What it shows is that the American dream leads to tragedy, that the utopian possibilities are doomed to failure. But it also shows the ways in. which, as we've said, people can't actually relinquish that hope. So I like Bill's phrase of infernal hope, that this hope that kind of leads us to perdition. And I think those are still the themes that resonate for readers, but I would also go back to the language. And as I say,

whether or not readers are conscious of it or not, Melvin, you mentioned at the beginning, the idea that there are these two incredibly glamorous party scenes. But actually, when you go back and look at it, there's only one glamorous party scene in this very brief novel. The second The second party scene is tawdry and depressing, and it's actually about how, it's actually about looking at it through Daisy's eyes and how vulgar and tacky it is, and Myrtle's party is vulgar and tacky. So Fitzgerald expends all of this energy, a poetic energy of glamour and visionary, the gorgeous possibilities of life. And it's that party that everybody comes back to and that expands to fill our memory of the novel. It's that party that everybody wants to join.

But as we've suggested, it's also a novel about the ways in which reality is always inevitably disappointing. So if you could get to that party, you would find it disappointing. And that tension is something I think that readers come back to again and again and again. Well, thank you, Sarah Churchwell. Thank you, Bill Blaschnick and Philip McGowan. Next week, we'll be discussing the plague of Justinian that hit Byzantium and its neighbors in the 6th century AD, later to reappear as the Black Death. So thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you didn't say? Starting with you, Bill. I'd like to say a few more words about the importance of the First World War in the text. So we know that both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby were combat veterans in the war. And it's particularly important for Jay Gatsby because of the way in which he, was given his commission. It wasn't through privilege and having a chance to

buy a commission. Instead, it was through, with Army, used different kinds of intelligence tests and skills, so it was by merit that he's been given a commission. And then he advances through the war to a captain and then a major, it becomes a major too. And so it represents

a bond. He recognizes Nick, first of all, and so they have that experience. And there's also something else that's perhaps deeper in the text, and critics have looked at the possibilities of each of them still undergoing post-traumatic stress. Their restlessness is always mentioned, their gestures, and Nick always admitting to that. So that's something that it might really think further into, the way in which the war itself is kind of hovering presence in the text. One of my favorite little touches in the text is, you know, when Gatsby's trying to prove his background,

and he's talking about how his combat experience earned him a number of medals from all sorts of allied countries, including Little Montenegro, Don on the Adriatic Sea, and then he shows him the medal. It looks authentic, says Nick. But, no, that's really worth unpacking a little bit, because Montenegro was an allied, one of the allied countries, but tiny little Montenegro.

And in order to kind of prove its value after the war, it's trying to produce medals. It's a way to show its identity, like Gatsby himself. You can prove his identity, an underdog who fashions a new sense of himself, like the country itself. It didn't work too well for Montenegro because in 1918, it becomes joined up as Yugoslavia, part of Yugoslavia. And in a sense, it perhaps doesn't work for Gatsby either.

But it's worth thinking about Nick Carraway in his narrative itself as a trauma narrative, trying to come to terms. He's 30 years old by the end. He's been, the time he's writing, it's been six years since the war, and he still doesn't have a job. He seems to have been drifting like others do in the text. And that's the bond between them, but also the contrast with Tom, who, strangely, despite his physical merit. he clearly hasn't been in the army. Maybe he's had bone spurs in his heels. Sarah, Sarah Churchill, would you like to say some more? Oh, yeah, there are so many things that I would say about this novel. I mean, as you've said,

it's amazing how much of a show packs into this novel that's less than 50,000 words and how many things, you know, we could sit and tease out about it. I mean, one of the things I would add that, again, I think that readers don't always notice because of the novel's cultural reputation, and again, that I think is very much shaped by Hollywood, but also this idea that it's a classic novel, and so we have to approach it in a kind of solemn and po-faced way, is that it's actually really funny. Once you get attuned to Fitzgerald's sense of humor, which is not a really obvious sense of humor necessarily, but his tongue is in his cheek a lot of the time. It's a very facetious novel in places. Nick is very sardonic. He has a mordent

sense of humor. He's quite judgmental and acidic about the people that he comments on. So there's more kind of like a kind of a Thackeray and, you know, Vanity Fair kind of aspect to the novel than I think is often picked up on this sense that Fitzgerald is poking fun at the, you know, the human comedy. And the, and he he, he peppers phrases that I, I mean, obviously comedy is very subjective, but phrases that, you know, I find really funny, like in the first party scene, um, Gordon is accompanied by a drunk and undergraduate who's given to violent innuendo and obstetrical conversation. And, you know, I think it's just a really funny way to say that, you know, he's trying to talk dirty and he's trying to, like, seduce her. And Fitzgerald likes, as I say,

as I say, is a kind of tongue-in-cheek tone. And we were talking already about the kind of tightrope act that Fitzgerald, you know, manages to move between, you know, the kind of brutal realism and the violence of the novel and the tautriness and the slees and then this kind of high poetry and these romantic Keatsian influences and there's actually there's kind of aesthetic philosophy in it and then he's also doing social satire so it actually does an extraordinary number of things in this in this highly compact way that you're not necessarily even conscious of and i think it's one of the reasons why it rewards rereading to the degree that it does because you can keep just, you know, you keep hearing different tones in the novel, and you can follow that

tone all the way through. You can follow its romance. You can follow its comedy. You can follow its violence along these different axes, and you get a different experience each time. Could I relate my perhaps favorite fun line, funny line in the text or comic line? It's very dry humor, and it comes at the time when you wouldn't expect it at all. It's after Gatsby's death, and there's a phone call at Gatsby's house that Nick answers, and there's this strange point when Nick becomes Gatsby, he's answering the phone. And the person on the other end of the line is talking about one of the criminal affairs that's going to go wrong, it has to be called off.

And the narrative says his name was Slagel, and then the line is, the name was unfamiliar. It's hard to capture the ways in which that comedy of tone, works because it's highly contextual and it's very conversational. But there's a similar moment in the first party scene when a drunken woman says to a girl named Lucille, who's just one of the random party guests. We don't know who Lucille is.

She's not a major character. And one of the girl says, was it like that for you, Lucille? And Nick says it was like that for Lucille too. And it's, again, the dryness of the narration that you start to hear the way he's poking fine, at all of these characters and the sardonic tone

that starts to come through there. Philip, do you want to come in? Yeah, I think going back to what Sarah said about how much he packs in, Gatsby's house, which is referred to by Nick, being like the World's Fair, Gatsby or Fitzgerald, when he was a child, when he was four years old,

went to the World's Fair at Buffalo in 1901. The Fitzgeralds had been living in Buffalo the previous year. They were then in Syracuse, New York, before going back. And the Buffalo World's Fair was nicknamed the Rainbow City because of its multi-coloured

carnival showgrounds, two million multicolored light bulbs. And this seems to, I think, map on to what Fitzgerald is doing with Gatsby's House because on another September day, back in 1901, at the Buffalo World's Fair,

we have another assassination, and it's President William McKinley, another Midwesterner, to add to the death count of Midwesterners in the novel. So I think Fitzgerald is doing something with that sense of history, with politics, with Carraway as a would-be not-very-re-relipped, politician, and all of these political locations in the text, whether it's French Revolution drawing rooms, or the factual imitation of some... Hotel DeVille or the actual assassination of William McKinley at the Buffalo World's Fair.

It's been called what are the five finest novels? Is it in 20th century in American literature? Or in American literature, full stop? What specific qualities gives it that place in the pecking order? Compared to his earlier works, the beautiful and damned and this side of paradise, little bits and pieces are good but this, there isn't a spare syllable in this text. And later on, after this,

when he goes on to Tenders the Night, which is another fantastic novel, very underrated, but it's not as tightly controlled and just, you know, the writing of that novel has a number of difficulties involved in it, personal life issues for the Fitzgeralds, etc. But, you know, what we see in all of his

work is that Fitzgerald engages with other writers, with music of the day, with popular culture of the day, with psychiatric science for tenders the night. He's a much more accomplished and complex writer than people have given him credit for yet. Do you think that, I mean, did his, the faster life he lived deprive us of somebody with a second act as a novelist? some people. I think I might be one of them. It would actually claim that's a better novel. Tender's a 1934 novel. It has a much wider scope and chronicles the era from the First World War to the Great Depression. It uses all types of modernist techniques almost without you noticing it as well. So again, it wasn't a great commercial success, although for the Great Depression it didn't sell too big. badly. But then I think that the second act is also the third act, really, the last unfinished novel and the great regrets of Western literature, I suppose. It could have been his third great masterpiece, but another six months, and he might have given us that.

He might have finished it. It's also, it's a novel, though, that, I mean, I agree to the extent that, you know, Tender's the Night is unduly in the Great Gatsby shade, and I think that it deserves, you know, much more, you know, of a spotlight and not to be always kind of this also ran. I personally will put Gadsby above tender. But I'm also interested in the question of the last tycoon, the way that he he was writing letters at the time as he was working on it just before his death. And he was young, as you say, Melvin, he was 44 when he died of a heart attack. And he said to his daughter, who was at university by this time, he said that he was trying to return to the mode of Gatsby and that he wished that when he finished Gatsby at this point

15 years earlier, he wished that he had said, this is my method, this is my milieu, my metier, this is what I'm supposed, not milieu, but metier, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And he said, I wish I had never looked back. And with the last tycoon, he was trying to recapture not just the technique and the virtuosity that he had packed into Gatsby, but a certain kind of of aesthetic method, a certain kind of approach to the world and to bringing that poetry and into this compact and charging a social satire through with this romantic poetry and the kind of extraordinary, volatile, rich mix that that produces that we're talking about. It's almost like a chemical reaction when he puts the two together social satire and this romantic poetry.

and that's what makes Gadsby so extraordinary. And with the last tycoon, he was on track to do to classical Hollywood and the studio system what he does to Jazz Age New York in Gadsby. So if you can imagine that the great novel of Hollywood, he could have done it. Well, thank you all very, very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. This is how the pandemic ends, not with a bang, but with a shot, or rather billions of shots.

I'm Tim Harford, the presenter of more or less and 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. And in a new podcast series from the BBC, we'll be covering the defining story of the crisis. The Search for a Vaccine. We look at the cutting-edge biotechnology behind these vaccines and the underrated business of fridges and vials and porter cabins that will be essential in a huge public health campaign. And of course, there are the other questions. Who's going to pay for this? How will we persuade people to take the vaccine?

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