#125： The Enduring Appeal of The Great Gatsby with Maureen Corrigan
Episode Stats
Summary
A book written about the 1920s Prohibition era in America, why that story still resonates with us even in the 21st century? Our guest is Maureen Corrigan, a lecturer at Georgetown University, who is writing a book about The Great Gatsby.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so one of my
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all-time favorite novels is the great gatsby i know it's cliche but every time i've read and
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i've read it multiple times since high school i've always found some new insight some new
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symbolism that i hadn't seen before and it's just a fun fun read anyways when the great gatsby first
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came out it was a complete critical and commercial failure and it wasn't until after s scott fitzherald
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died that it started gaining the status of the great american novel and it became required reading
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for high school english students but i guess they want to figure out why that was why it took so long
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for the great gatsby to become this sort of cultural touchstone in the united states and then why the
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book still endures today decades later a book written about the 1920s prohibition era america
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why that story still resonates with us even in the 21st century our guest is maureen corrigan
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she's a lecturer at georgetown university you've probably heard her on npr's fresh air where she's
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the resident book critic and her book is called so we read on how the great gatsby came to be and
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why it endures and in this podcast we're discussing all things gatsby so let's do this
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maureen corrigan welcome to the show thank you brett happy to be here so your book is called so we
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read on which is a play on a line for my favorite book the great gatsby there have been dozens you
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know just lots of books written about this book articles essays dissecting it what angle are you
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taking with your book on the gatsby yeah um i certainly when i started thinking about writing
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a book about gatsby that was daunting to realize how much has been written about fitzgerald he's
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probably you know the most chronicled american writer of all time and just also how much has
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been written about the great gatsby um really daunting my angle was um to approach it as
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someone who has read the books by now 60 plus times who's taught it you know almost all of my
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teaching life so we're talking like 30 years and um i've traveled the country lecturing about it for
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the big read program sponsored by the national endowment from the arts um i wanted to talk about
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it as a passionate informed reader and to try to figure out where the power of this novel comes
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from and um not really to talk about it in a scholarly way although i wanted to use some some criticism and
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some biographical study but to really talk about it um the way i talk about books on fresh air as
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which i do every week you know as someone who's really trying to get to the heart of well what makes
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this book work or or doesn't and um what why is this book in in terms of gatsby which disappeared by
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the time fitzgerald died in 1940 why did it come back so quickly and why has it had this power over us
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uh as as americans ever since um one of the things i i talk about is the fact that
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gatsby is probably the american novel that unites us if we've gone to high school in america
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uh i i someone did a survey years ago and i didn't do an informal survey every year with freshman english
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classes at georgetown where i teach i say well what have you read have you read uh to kill a mockingbird
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have you read um you know god huckleberry finn and moby dick kids raise their hands but when you
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say have you read the great gatsby pretty much everybody in class raises their hand year after year
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that's the one you can count on that that's our unifying text well so how did that happen because
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you talk about in the book that when the great gatsby first came out it really wasn't well received
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by literary critics or the public um so why why was it such a flop when it first came out
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yeah yeah it comes out in 1925 um probably the most famous bad review was in the new york world
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joseph pulitzer's paper and the headline read fitzgerald's latest a dud gatsby was fitzgerald's
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third novel he he had such hopes for it he thought it was going to outsell this side of paradise his
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big hit of 1920 the beautiful and damned and then it turns out you know not even to sell out its
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second printing um just to give you a sense of what i'm talking about when fitzgerald dies in 1940
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remainder copies of that second printing that scribner does in 1925 they're still in scribner's
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warehouse moldering away so it sold about 22 000 copies when it came out in 1925 um fitzgerald never
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stopped torturing himself trying to figure out why didn't it sell and he had a lot of um you know
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guesses he thought well it's too short and people want more book for their buck um he he never liked
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the title he thought the title was terrible um and then i think most interesting of all he said
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uh i in a letter to maxwell perkins he said i didn't create any favorable female characters
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and women drive the fiction market and when i i saw that letter i really had a jolt because that's what
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we say today women drive the fiction market men you know so for non-fiction um i i also think that a
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lot of critics and book reviewers misread it as just a murder story i mean it was it was reviewed as a
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crime novel by a lot of the popular book reviewers so i think they they didn't value it they said oh
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here's this book about bootleggers and three violent deaths and you know a character whose name
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even derives from gangster slang from the 1920s a gat is a is a gun so and i think they just sort of
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dismissed it as um a crime novel well i thought that was interesting because uh you had a section
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in your book about this because i think at least before i read your this your analysis of it um i always
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saw i think most people do see gatsby sort of like this tragic love story and tragedy of uh aspirations
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that aren't fulfilled um but you make a case that it could also be viewed as one of the first hard
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boiled noir novels in america yeah i think it anticipates so much of what we later see in the
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great noir movies like double indemnity and mildred pierce but also you know you think about gatsby
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fitzgerald's working on it from about 1922 through 25 and he's also for a while living in new york i mean
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he moves to new york in 1919 comes back in 1920 lives there for a few years and this is the era when
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the hard-boiled detective and crime story is really kind of taking shape in cities like new york and la san
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francisco um fitzgerald was a great admirer of dashel hammett all of these reading lists that fitzgerald
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always made all of his life he'd have all of these classics and greek tragedies on these reading lists
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that he'd give to friends and then he'd always have the maltese falcon by dashel hammett um he was great
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he was a good friend of h.l mencken and the critic and h.l mencken for a while edited the black mask magazine
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which which carried some of these first war stories you think about the fact that right we've got all
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these criminal elements in gatsby not just gatsby himself but folks like myra wolfsheim who's modeled
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after arnold rothstein the real life gangster who supposedly fixed the 1919 world series the black
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socks scandal um we've we've got pro bootlegging prohibition we've got all of that atmosphere um
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kind of loose morals people are having affairs you know and women are smoking and drinking but it's
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also more than that it's the fact that you've got this heavy element of fate in gatsby um nick's
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narration is retrospective when the book opens nick tells us that two years have gone by already
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and everybody's dead um you know gatsby's dead uh he's looked nick is speaking to us present time
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in 1924 and he's looking back two years to the summer of 1922 there's that funny sort of um
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feeling like you get in a noir movie like sunset boulevard that everything that happens
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in this story it's it's fixed it can't be changed because you've got this voiceover this narration
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by in this case nick carraway who's looking backward and telling us what happens noir is fascinated with
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fate and fascinated with the fact that people can't change their fate it's in some ways a very un-american
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form and i think it's really interesting that that fitzgerald chose that kind of frame structure
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for gatsby which basically forecloses all possibilities you know i i say that gatsby is our
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our greatest american and un-american novel at once because it it celebrates this aspiration as you said
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this character who tries to be more who reaches for the stars but at the same time it tells us
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the game is all fixed you know it's it's over before it begins and in fact gatsby is dead as of
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page two of the novel we learn that well it's it's very greek you know it's like a greek tragedy
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yeah almost yeah yeah i mean i guess what is is that the appeal of the book is that what makes it what
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americans are so drawn to is that yeah you should shoot for your dreams go for it even though it might
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be impossible it's just the striving that counts yeah is that what is that the draw to of the book
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the big that's its deepest draw uh that's what fitzgerald said the book was about he he writes a
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letter um and he's living on the riviera and and finishing gatsby in the summer of 1924 he writes a
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letter to a princeton classmate ludlow fowler who was the best man at his wedding to zelda in 1920
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and he says to fowler that that the the novel is about those illusions that give such color to the
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world that you don't even care whether they're true or not to lose them would be like death and he also
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talks about the fact that the book is about aspirations so yeah it's about dreams it's about
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illusions it's about those enabling fictions that make life worthwhile it's about striving even though
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you know inevitably you're going to fall short um i've listened to so many speeches i feel like
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during the obama presidency where it's almost like he's channeling gatsby he's made so many
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speeches where he's talked about you know this is our um kind of almost like inheritance as americans that
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we're we're supposed to reach we're supposed to strive we're supposed to stretch our arms out run
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faster you know try to be better even though we know inevitably we're going to die we're going to
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fall short it's all going to end i think that's what the last line of gatsby is about so we beat on
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boats against the current drawn back ceaselessly into the past you want to you want to keep trying
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to row forward but you are going to be drawn back ultimately into the past into the great whatever
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nothingness well i mean let's talk about um how gatsby became the great american novel and the novel
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that high schoolers read um so after gatsby or after fitzgerald died there was sort of a renaissance
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what caused that re-interest that rekindling of interest in the great gatsby yeah yeah it's funny
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gerald dies um at the age of 44 in hollywood he's he's working for paramount he's sort of working on
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different movies and really treat it like a hand in hollywood as so many of our great writers were
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in fact he works for two weeks on gone with the wind before he's pulled out of that movie
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and he dies in 1940 in december of what's probably his third heart attack um
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and when he dies he can't even find gatsby in bookstores when he goes into bookstores in la
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it was really sad his own works you know yeah you know really if i had one wish
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um sometimes people ask me well what would you ask fitzgerald and i say i wouldn't ask him anything
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i would tell him you did it you did it you wrote the great american novel you know you did it because
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when he died he thought he was a failure um his well-placed literary friends people like hl mencken
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edmund wilson dorothy parker his legendary editor maxwell perkins at scribner they work really hard
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to try to get fitzgerald's writing back before the public so these different editions come out and in
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fact edmund wilson even sort of completes the loves of the last tycoon the novel that fitzgerald's
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working on in hollywood when he dies but what really gives gatsby a boost is is is world war ii
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and it's a story i really didn't know about until i started researching my book um during world war ii
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where there was this effort by publishers paper distributors editors authors librarians to try to
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get get books in into the hands of soldiers and sailors overseas and they come up with this idea
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for cheap pulp paperback editions of everything from you know the odyssey to margaret mead's coming
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of age in samoa to the latest rex stout mystery moby dick and gatsby is chosen as one of the titles
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to be distributed made into what are called these armed services editions um in fact i have a mock-up
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of one here a sample they look like this yeah i have some rectangular because they're a serviceman's
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pocket you have some originals yeah i got some we actually wrote an article about it a couple years
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ago it's such a fascinating yeah and there's a new book it's so fascinating yeah um i mean really
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anybody who cares about books you kind of feel like oh yeah books can make a difference you know
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they certainly made a difference to these guys in world war ii so here's gatsby you can't buy it in
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1940 and then by 1945 there are there are 155 000 editions of the great gatsby distributed you know
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basically all over the world where american servicemen are i've gotten a couple of letters
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which have been amazing from men who told me that the first time they encountered jay gatsby that's
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how one of these guys opened his letter um when they were serving in 1945 one guy said he was a
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power paratrooper about to you know be be thrown into occupied france and um and that's when he
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encountered gatsby so shortly you know after the war ends then we get the paperback revolution
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and gatsby is one of the titles that's picked up right away by bantam by by all of you know
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scribner's paperbacks and in 1949 we get the second great gatsby movie and this one stars alan ladd who
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was known for playing criminals and and tough guys and you know cowboy loners like shane and he plays
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jay gatsby and it's my favorite gatsby movie of the ones that exist because it's not the it's not the
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novel either but it's interesting because it really is is gatsby as a film noir it's very
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fascinating so i mean what's the status of gatsby today amongst academics um because it has during
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the past 70 years or so it sort of became a darling amongst academics to analyze it in all all sorts of
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ways what is its status now is it sort of a still a little alert literary darling or do academics sort
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of like yeah it's kind of lowbrow or oh it it's it's it's it's got this kind of strange schizophrenic
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reputation you know it's it's a great american novel i don't think anybody disputes that i mean a
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few people dispute it but they're idiots it's almost like it's wonder brit you know it's not sexy enough
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it's not um it it it's sort of seen as kind of it's so familiar that i think again it's downgraded
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a bit when when i would tell colleagues in the english department at georgetown um that i was working
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on a book about the great gatsby i was like oh okay you know it's sort of like can't you find anything a
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little bit more off road to work on you know um it's funny somebody pays posted on facebook today
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in honor of july 4th all of these novelists and critics from other countries around the world
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giving their suggestions for the great american novel and for the novels that tell us something
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about america and i've noticed that the list is interesting fitzgerald's on this number four
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but as as you know our american author but some people have put on the pat hobby stories or they've
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put on this side of paradise it's almost like there people are working to avoid mentioning gatsby because
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it's like water it's like air it's so much with us that i think there's a little bit of a backlash
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against it in the scholarly world that it's just too familiar yeah well what so you said you've read it
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60 times i've read i've lost count the number of times i've read it but what i love about the
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gatsby is that it's one of those books no matter how many times i read it it still feels fresh and it
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doesn't get stale and i always pick up some new insight or catch some new symbolism what what did
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fitzgerald do to accomplish that to give it make it so fresh even though you've read it 60 times
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i'm going to give you an answer that's going to probably put you to sleep and everybody else
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listening to sleep but it's the language okay you know i notice when i say to students and i'm or or
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even on fresh air when i'm trying to speak book strength if you say well it's got this poetic
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language you know everybody you can see the the ignition key turning off in students brains at least
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and i feel like i can hear it around the country because poetic language sounds um you know too high
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falutin um but the language is so rich and it's funny and fitzgerald's writing like a real poet you
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know in in gatsby um and it's condensed you know he he said to maxwell perkins his editor in 1922
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that his third novel was going to be something different and i'm i'm quoting mostly from memory he
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said i want to write something intricate and beautiful and simple and you know heavily patterned
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so he wanted all those things at once you can read gatsby like a simple crime story like a simple love
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story but then when when you start to reread it as you've done as i've done and you become alert to
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those layers of meaning it's just such a richer book i mean people have done you know they've toted up
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the symbols in gatsby there are 450 time words in gatsby because it's a novel that's so aware of an
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ultimate deadline looming that jay gatsby is going to die by the end of this summer you know and that
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the party is going to be over it's a novel that every chapter is organized around a party starting with
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that opening dinner party at the buchanons and ending with the failed party in quotes of of gatsby
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his own funeral i mean he's got some so many layers of symbols but he's not hitting you over
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the head with them they're integrate integrated beautifully into the story that's why i think
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as much as i love james joyce and i love dubliners and all of that i always feel like um joyce and t.s
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elliott and those other modernists who fitzgerald met and admired and was influenced by i feel like
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they're always nudging me in the ribs hey here's another symbol you know look how clever i am not
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in gatsby he's he's got everything in there that every other great modernist writer has and the
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fragmented storyline and all all of those other modernist tricks but it's it's not like he's
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constantly asking us to admire how clever he's being as a writer it's it is a masterpiece an
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overused word but not in this case what i thought was fascinating um you know one of the things i
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think it made it so great because he was constantly editing it and even after the book was published he
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was still editing the great gatsby i know it's crazy i i went to uh princeton where fitzgerald's
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papers or and i i looked at his own edition of the great gatsby and this is the first edition that
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comes out first printing and making changes and you know to an ordinary reader who can't i can't have
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access to what's going on in his brain the changes are sort of inexplicable like he's changing the
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number of the regiment where supposedly jay gatsby served or you know it's like why are you doing this
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but he's such a perfectionist he can't let it go um i don't know i love that about him he you know
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it probably shortened his life but i love that he couldn't let it go well it's very it's very like
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gatsby right the striving you know even though if you're not going to obtain perfection you still got
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to go for it that's right that's right and you know fitzgerald was raised catholic as i was and i i
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keep sometimes when i i've read his letters i i feel like i can hear that kind of catholic influence
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our nuns used to tell us way back when they used to recite this jingle good better best never let it
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rest until you're good is better and you're better best i feel like fitzgerald had that planted in his
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brain too you know you can't let it go you're never good enough you know yeah i'd love to get your
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thoughts on this because it's something that i've often wondered uh since i've read the gatsby and
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you are a book reviewer one of the things i love about gatsby is that it's both timeless but at the
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same time it perfectly describes you know jazz age new york captures a time yeah has there been a novel
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written in the past 20 years that does the same thing as gatsby where it's both timeless but also
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perfectly captures our time boy i hate these questions yeah if you don't have an answer it's
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okay but um you know you you're not gonna love my answer but i i think a lot of detective fiction
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does that still because detective yeah lee child sarah paretsky i've just read her latest which is great
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um i i i um i love this new detective fiction writer ax ahmad who has um an indian immigrant as his
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sort of amateur detective who's a taxi cab driver in new york it's a great series they're not cute the
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latest one is called the caretaker and it's um it it it's you know it's hard-boiled um i feel like
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when detective fiction is well written as as these examples are they're also linked to their time
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because they're investigating mostly social issues of the time they have that double identity um where
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they can sort of do that um i'm trying to think of other people i mean most of the writers who i who
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are flooding into my brain um are are people who i think are aiming more for that timeless quality
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like my favorite novel so far this year um is the buried giant by kazuo ishiguro and that's a fantasy
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novel so he's on board from um any particular time it's hard to do i i think um you know long time
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1980s of course tom wolf tried to do it with bonfire of the vanities he wanted to write this great
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dickensian sort of novel about new york in the go-go 80s but i don't think that novelist stood the test of
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time i think um it sort of was was people were reading it in the 80s and even into the 90s but it it's
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really not i don't think regarded anymore it's like this this novel that can stand on its own
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dated so yeah i'm not coming up with with fabulous no i love the detective novel thing
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that makes sense um i like that a lot i'm a big fan of detective novels um so last question um you
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know for our listeners who are listening and they've it's been a while since they read gatsby
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and they're listening like well maybe i should give it a second go do you have any suggestions on
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themes or motifs or something they can do to make reading more interesting or getting more out of it
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second time or third time they read it you know i first of all i would recommend that they watch the
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alan lag version okay because it's it's it really foregrounds the crime element and the film noir
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element and in that way i i think when people are uh have fallen out of love with gatsby or never got
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gatsby in the first place it's because it's been hammered into their heads that this was a great
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american novel this is a great you know and and um you know they approach it with almost too much
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reverence i think listening to it is is a fabulous idea um when i i went to gats twice the seven and a half
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hour off-roadway production where the actors kind of had memorized gatsby so they they did the entire
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novel in seven and a half hours and that was that was when i really heard the humor in it the first
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third of gatsby is filled with jokes with almost screwball comedy that opening dinner party uh daisy and
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and tom they're jabbing at each other like ricky and lucy almost you know so i would try to be alert to
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the comedy um you know the the hot reading now of gatsby is the homoerotic reading that that nick is
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in love with uh gatsby and it's and you know that must be what's what's going on um so i you know i
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think maybe that if that freshens it up for people to think of that um unrequited yearning everybody in
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the novel is reaching out for somebody or something that's out of their reach so um that's something to
00:28:47.720
pay attention to and you know i'm a big fan of looking at the water imagery which sounds such an
00:28:53.100
english teacher thing to say but you know the novel is terrified of going under people drowning people
00:29:00.200
going under you know they're um it's it's the great american fear that that you know you you're
00:29:06.780
reaching for the bars but you're going to be pulled under by your desires by the past you know
00:29:12.860
and certainly by the end of this novel pretty much everybody's underwater and there's a class element
00:29:18.200
to that to that imagery as well so those are some of the things i would maybe recommend doing but
00:29:24.040
if you can find a good um audio version of the great gatsby i think listening to it would be fabulous
00:29:31.300
fantastic well maureen corrigan this has been a fascinating discussion thank you so much for your time it's
00:29:35.600
been a pleasure oh thank you i could talk about gatsby for hours me too our guest today was maureen
00:29:41.920
corrigan she's the author of the book so we read on you can find that on amazon.com and if you love
00:29:47.140
the gatsby go get that book you'll really enjoy the sort of the historical backdrop of how the gatsby
00:29:52.300
came to be and some of the insights that maureen provides and if you want to learn more about
00:29:56.800
maureen's work you can find her on npr.org where you can find more of her uh book critiques
00:30:01.640
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:30:09.020
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:30:12.960
this podcast you get something out of it i'd really appreciate it if you'd give us a review
00:30:16.320
on itunes stitcher whatever it is use this to your podcast i'd really appreciate it help get the word
00:30:20.800
out and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay madly