The Art of Manliness - #125： The Enduring Appeal of The Great Gatsby with Maureen Corrigan

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so one of my

00:00:18.640 all-time favorite novels is the great gatsby i know it's cliche but every time i've read and

00:00:22.440 i've read it multiple times since high school i've always found some new insight some new

00:00:26.100 symbolism that i hadn't seen before and it's just a fun fun read anyways when the great gatsby first

00:00:31.840 came out it was a complete critical and commercial failure and it wasn't until after s scott fitzherald

00:00:37.760 died that it started gaining the status of the great american novel and it became required reading

00:00:42.400 for high school english students but i guess they want to figure out why that was why it took so long

00:00:47.840 for the great gatsby to become this sort of cultural touchstone in the united states and then why the

00:00:53.980 book still endures today decades later a book written about the 1920s prohibition era america

00:00:59.660 why that story still resonates with us even in the 21st century our guest is maureen corrigan

00:01:05.240 she's a lecturer at georgetown university you've probably heard her on npr's fresh air where she's

00:01:09.340 the resident book critic and her book is called so we read on how the great gatsby came to be and

00:01:14.660 why it endures and in this podcast we're discussing all things gatsby so let's do this

00:01:20.040 maureen corrigan welcome to the show thank you brett happy to be here so your book is called so we

00:01:35.520 read on which is a play on a line for my favorite book the great gatsby there have been dozens you

00:01:43.100 know just lots of books written about this book articles essays dissecting it what angle are you

00:01:48.700 taking with your book on the gatsby yeah um i certainly when i started thinking about writing

00:01:56.520 a book about gatsby that was daunting to realize how much has been written about fitzgerald he's

00:02:02.080 probably you know the most chronicled american writer of all time and just also how much has

00:02:09.880 been written about the great gatsby um really daunting my angle was um to approach it as

00:02:16.720 someone who has read the books by now 60 plus times who's taught it you know almost all of my

00:02:25.380 teaching life so we're talking like 30 years and um i've traveled the country lecturing about it for

00:02:32.760 the big read program sponsored by the national endowment from the arts um i wanted to talk about

00:02:39.380 it as a passionate informed reader and to try to figure out where the power of this novel comes

00:02:48.000 from and um not really to talk about it in a scholarly way although i wanted to use some some criticism and

00:02:55.660 some biographical study but to really talk about it um the way i talk about books on fresh air as

00:03:04.080 which i do every week you know as someone who's really trying to get to the heart of well what makes

00:03:09.780 this book work or or doesn't and um what why is this book in in terms of gatsby which disappeared by

00:03:18.580 the time fitzgerald died in 1940 why did it come back so quickly and why has it had this power over us

00:03:26.780 uh as as americans ever since um one of the things i i talk about is the fact that

00:03:33.060 gatsby is probably the american novel that unites us if we've gone to high school in america

00:03:40.820 uh i i someone did a survey years ago and i didn't do an informal survey every year with freshman english

00:03:48.160 classes at georgetown where i teach i say well what have you read have you read uh to kill a mockingbird

00:03:53.940 have you read um you know god huckleberry finn and moby dick kids raise their hands but when you

00:04:02.360 say have you read the great gatsby pretty much everybody in class raises their hand year after year

00:04:07.960 that's the one you can count on that that's our unifying text well so how did that happen because

00:04:13.520 you talk about in the book that when the great gatsby first came out it really wasn't well received

00:04:19.220 by literary critics or the public um so why why was it such a flop when it first came out

00:04:25.600 yeah yeah it comes out in 1925 um probably the most famous bad review was in the new york world

00:04:36.060 joseph pulitzer's paper and the headline read fitzgerald's latest a dud gatsby was fitzgerald's

00:04:43.720 third novel he he had such hopes for it he thought it was going to outsell this side of paradise his

00:04:49.560 big hit of 1920 the beautiful and damned and then it turns out you know not even to sell out its

00:04:56.360 second printing um just to give you a sense of what i'm talking about when fitzgerald dies in 1940

00:05:03.920 remainder copies of that second printing that scribner does in 1925 they're still in scribner's

00:05:11.580 warehouse moldering away so it sold about 22 000 copies when it came out in 1925 um fitzgerald never

00:05:22.380 stopped torturing himself trying to figure out why didn't it sell and he had a lot of um you know

00:05:29.320 guesses he thought well it's too short and people want more book for their buck um he he never liked

00:05:35.980 the title he thought the title was terrible um and then i think most interesting of all he said

00:05:42.100 uh i in a letter to maxwell perkins he said i didn't create any favorable female characters

00:05:50.420 and women drive the fiction market and when i i saw that letter i really had a jolt because that's what 1.00

00:05:57.500 we say today women drive the fiction market men you know so for non-fiction um i i also think that a 0.50

00:06:04.660 lot of critics and book reviewers misread it as just a murder story i mean it was it was reviewed as a

00:06:13.520 crime novel by a lot of the popular book reviewers so i think they they didn't value it they said oh

00:06:21.340 here's this book about bootleggers and three violent deaths and you know a character whose name

00:06:28.300 even derives from gangster slang from the 1920s a gat is a is a gun so and i think they just sort of

00:06:36.100 dismissed it as um a crime novel well i thought that was interesting because uh you had a section

00:06:41.640 in your book about this because i think at least before i read your this your analysis of it um i always

00:06:48.100 saw i think most people do see gatsby sort of like this tragic love story and tragedy of uh aspirations

00:06:54.380 that aren't fulfilled um but you make a case that it could also be viewed as one of the first hard

00:07:00.480 boiled noir novels in america yeah i think it anticipates so much of what we later see in the

00:07:09.240 great noir movies like double indemnity and mildred pierce but also you know you think about gatsby

00:07:15.500 fitzgerald's working on it from about 1922 through 25 and he's also for a while living in new york i mean

00:07:26.240 he moves to new york in 1919 comes back in 1920 lives there for a few years and this is the era when

00:07:33.880 the hard-boiled detective and crime story is really kind of taking shape in cities like new york and la san

00:07:43.880 francisco um fitzgerald was a great admirer of dashel hammett all of these reading lists that fitzgerald

00:07:51.360 always made all of his life he'd have all of these classics and greek tragedies on these reading lists

00:07:57.140 that he'd give to friends and then he'd always have the maltese falcon by dashel hammett um he was great

00:08:03.640 he was a good friend of h.l mencken and the critic and h.l mencken for a while edited the black mask magazine

00:08:10.300 which which carried some of these first war stories you think about the fact that right we've got all

00:08:16.580 these criminal elements in gatsby not just gatsby himself but folks like myra wolfsheim who's modeled

00:08:23.480 after arnold rothstein the real life gangster who supposedly fixed the 1919 world series the black

00:08:31.380 socks scandal um we've we've got pro bootlegging prohibition we've got all of that atmosphere um

00:08:39.020 kind of loose morals people are having affairs you know and women are smoking and drinking but it's 0.99

00:08:46.360 also more than that it's the fact that you've got this heavy element of fate in gatsby um nick's

00:08:54.140 narration is retrospective when the book opens nick tells us that two years have gone by already

00:09:00.400 and everybody's dead um you know gatsby's dead uh he's looked nick is speaking to us present time

00:09:08.560 in 1924 and he's looking back two years to the summer of 1922 there's that funny sort of um

00:09:18.440 feeling like you get in a noir movie like sunset boulevard that everything that happens

00:09:26.500 in this story it's it's fixed it can't be changed because you've got this voiceover this narration

00:09:34.240 by in this case nick carraway who's looking backward and telling us what happens noir is fascinated with

00:09:42.280 fate and fascinated with the fact that people can't change their fate it's in some ways a very un-american 0.65

00:09:49.620 form and i think it's really interesting that that fitzgerald chose that kind of frame structure

00:09:57.220 for gatsby which basically forecloses all possibilities you know i i say that gatsby is our

00:10:04.200 our greatest american and un-american novel at once because it it celebrates this aspiration as you said

00:10:11.720 this character who tries to be more who reaches for the stars but at the same time it tells us

00:10:17.780 the game is all fixed you know it's it's over before it begins and in fact gatsby is dead as of

00:10:24.660 page two of the novel we learn that well it's it's very greek you know it's like a greek tragedy

00:10:30.440 yeah almost yeah yeah i mean i guess what is is that the appeal of the book is that what makes it what

00:10:37.800 americans are so drawn to is that yeah you should shoot for your dreams go for it even though it might 0.97

00:10:44.260 be impossible it's just the striving that counts yeah is that what is that the draw to of the book

00:10:51.320 the big that's its deepest draw uh that's what fitzgerald said the book was about he he writes a

00:10:57.800 letter um and he's living on the riviera and and finishing gatsby in the summer of 1924 he writes a

00:11:05.740 letter to a princeton classmate ludlow fowler who was the best man at his wedding to zelda in 1920

00:11:13.140 and he says to fowler that that the the novel is about those illusions that give such color to the

00:11:22.080 world that you don't even care whether they're true or not to lose them would be like death and he also

00:11:28.140 talks about the fact that the book is about aspirations so yeah it's about dreams it's about

00:11:33.480 illusions it's about those enabling fictions that make life worthwhile it's about striving even though

00:11:40.780 you know inevitably you're going to fall short um i've listened to so many speeches i feel like

00:11:48.120 during the obama presidency where it's almost like he's channeling gatsby he's made so many

00:11:54.060 speeches where he's talked about you know this is our um kind of almost like inheritance as americans that

00:12:02.420 we're we're supposed to reach we're supposed to strive we're supposed to stretch our arms out run

00:12:07.240 faster you know try to be better even though we know inevitably we're going to die we're going to

00:12:13.540 fall short it's all going to end i think that's what the last line of gatsby is about so we beat on

00:12:20.300 boats against the current drawn back ceaselessly into the past you want to you want to keep trying

00:12:27.620 to row forward but you are going to be drawn back ultimately into the past into the great whatever

00:12:34.720 nothingness well i mean let's talk about um how gatsby became the great american novel and the novel

00:12:44.520 that high schoolers read um so after gatsby or after fitzgerald died there was sort of a renaissance

00:12:51.680 what caused that re-interest that rekindling of interest in the great gatsby yeah yeah it's funny

00:12:58.860 gerald dies um at the age of 44 in hollywood he's he's working for paramount he's sort of working on

00:13:06.900 different movies and really treat it like a hand in hollywood as so many of our great writers were

00:13:12.980 in fact he works for two weeks on gone with the wind before he's pulled out of that movie

00:13:17.920 and he dies in 1940 in december of what's probably his third heart attack um

00:13:24.220 and when he dies he can't even find gatsby in bookstores when he goes into bookstores in la

00:13:30.680 it was really sad his own works you know yeah you know really if i had one wish

00:13:36.500 um sometimes people ask me well what would you ask fitzgerald and i say i wouldn't ask him anything

00:13:42.480 i would tell him you did it you did it you wrote the great american novel you know you did it because

00:13:47.420 when he died he thought he was a failure um his well-placed literary friends people like hl mencken

00:13:54.500 edmund wilson dorothy parker his legendary editor maxwell perkins at scribner they work really hard

00:14:02.360 to try to get fitzgerald's writing back before the public so these different editions come out and in

00:14:08.940 fact edmund wilson even sort of completes the loves of the last tycoon the novel that fitzgerald's

00:14:15.560 working on in hollywood when he dies but what really gives gatsby a boost is is is world war ii

00:14:23.780 and it's a story i really didn't know about until i started researching my book um during world war ii

00:14:30.140 where there was this effort by publishers paper distributors editors authors librarians to try to

00:14:37.800 get get books in into the hands of soldiers and sailors overseas and they come up with this idea

00:14:45.900 for cheap pulp paperback editions of everything from you know the odyssey to margaret mead's coming

00:14:55.140 of age in samoa to the latest rex stout mystery moby dick and gatsby is chosen as one of the titles

00:15:03.960 to be distributed made into what are called these armed services editions um in fact i have a mock-up

00:15:11.880 of one here a sample they look like this yeah i have some rectangular because they're a serviceman's

00:15:18.380 pocket you have some originals yeah i got some we actually wrote an article about it a couple years

00:15:23.080 ago it's such a fascinating yeah and there's a new book it's so fascinating yeah um i mean really

00:15:32.240 anybody who cares about books you kind of feel like oh yeah books can make a difference you know

00:15:38.700 they certainly made a difference to these guys in world war ii so here's gatsby you can't buy it in

00:15:44.520 1940 and then by 1945 there are there are 155 000 editions of the great gatsby distributed you know

00:15:54.660 basically all over the world where american servicemen are i've gotten a couple of letters

00:16:00.300 which have been amazing from men who told me that the first time they encountered jay gatsby that's

00:16:09.440 how one of these guys opened his letter um when they were serving in 1945 one guy said he was a

00:16:15.980 power paratrooper about to you know be be thrown into occupied france and um and that's when he

00:16:23.300 encountered gatsby so shortly you know after the war ends then we get the paperback revolution

00:16:29.400 and gatsby is one of the titles that's picked up right away by bantam by by all of you know

00:16:35.060 scribner's paperbacks and in 1949 we get the second great gatsby movie and this one stars alan ladd who

00:16:43.020 was known for playing criminals and and tough guys and you know cowboy loners like shane and he plays

00:16:51.520 jay gatsby and it's my favorite gatsby movie of the ones that exist because it's not the it's not the

00:16:59.640 novel either but it's interesting because it really is is gatsby as a film noir it's very

00:17:06.460 fascinating so i mean what's the status of gatsby today amongst academics um because it has during

00:17:12.740 the past 70 years or so it sort of became a darling amongst academics to analyze it in all all sorts of

00:17:19.560 ways what is its status now is it sort of a still a little alert literary darling or do academics sort

00:17:26.120 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

00:17:34.920 reputation you know it's it's a great american novel i don't think anybody disputes that i mean a 0.98

00:17:41.820 few people dispute it but they're idiots it's almost like it's wonder brit you know it's not sexy enough 0.97

00:17:48.800 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 0.99

00:17:59.600 a bit when when i would tell colleagues in the english department at georgetown um that i was working

00:18:06.060 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

00:18:12.480 little bit more off road to work on you know um it's funny somebody pays posted on facebook today

00:18:18.580 in honor of july 4th all of these novelists and critics from other countries around the world

00:18:26.880 giving their suggestions for the great american novel and for the novels that tell us something

00:18:33.580 about america and i've noticed that the list is interesting fitzgerald's on this number four

00:18:39.900 but as as you know our american author but some people have put on the pat hobby stories or they've

00:18:47.040 put on this side of paradise it's almost like there people are working to avoid mentioning gatsby because

00:18:54.140 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

00:19:00.580 against it in the scholarly world that it's just too familiar yeah well what so you said you've read it

00:19:07.740 60 times i've read i've lost count the number of times i've read it but what i love about the

00:19:13.680 gatsby is that it's one of those books no matter how many times i read it it still feels fresh and it

00:19:20.060 doesn't get stale and i always pick up some new insight or catch some new symbolism what what did

00:19:27.680 fitzgerald do to accomplish that to give it make it so fresh even though you've read it 60 times

00:19:34.020 i'm going to give you an answer that's going to probably put you to sleep and everybody else

00:19:39.400 listening to sleep but it's the language okay you know i notice when i say to students and i'm or or

00:19:44.840 even on fresh air when i'm trying to speak book strength if you say well it's got this poetic

00:19:50.980 language you know everybody you can see the the ignition key turning off in students brains at least

00:19:56.560 and i feel like i can hear it around the country because poetic language sounds um you know too high

00:20:02.680 falutin um but the language is so rich and it's funny and fitzgerald's writing like a real poet you

00:20:11.540 know in in gatsby um and it's condensed you know he he said to maxwell perkins his editor in 1922

00:20:18.520 that his third novel was going to be something different and i'm i'm quoting mostly from memory he

00:20:25.520 said i want to write something intricate and beautiful and simple and you know heavily patterned

00:20:34.100 so he wanted all those things at once you can read gatsby like a simple crime story like a simple love

00:20:40.240 story but then when when you start to reread it as you've done as i've done and you become alert to

00:20:47.040 those layers of meaning it's just such a richer book i mean people have done you know they've toted up

00:20:54.620 the symbols in gatsby there are 450 time words in gatsby because it's a novel that's so aware of an

00:21:02.460 ultimate deadline looming that jay gatsby is going to die by the end of this summer you know and that

00:21:09.000 the party is going to be over it's a novel that every chapter is organized around a party starting with

00:21:16.460 that opening dinner party at the buchanons and ending with the failed party in quotes of of gatsby

00:21:24.600 his own funeral i mean he's got some so many layers of symbols but he's not hitting you over

00:21:30.700 the head with them they're integrate integrated beautifully into the story that's why i think

00:21:36.540 as much as i love james joyce and i love dubliners and all of that i always feel like um joyce and t.s

00:21:45.720 elliott and those other modernists who fitzgerald met and admired and was influenced by i feel like

00:21:54.920 they're always nudging me in the ribs hey here's another symbol you know look how clever i am not

00:21:59.500 in gatsby he's he's got everything in there that every other great modernist writer has and the

00:22:05.840 fragmented storyline and all all of those other modernist tricks but it's it's not like he's

00:22:12.140 constantly asking us to admire how clever he's being as a writer it's it is a masterpiece an

00:22:19.340 overused word but not in this case what i thought was fascinating um you know one of the things i

00:22:25.280 think it made it so great because he was constantly editing it and even after the book was published he

00:22:29.640 was still editing the great gatsby i know it's crazy i i went to uh princeton where fitzgerald's

00:22:36.520 papers or and i i looked at his own edition of the great gatsby and this is the first edition that

00:22:44.780 comes out first printing and making changes and you know to an ordinary reader who can't i can't have

00:22:52.360 access to what's going on in his brain the changes are sort of inexplicable like he's changing the

00:22:59.140 number of the regiment where supposedly jay gatsby served or you know it's like why are you doing this

00:23:05.960 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

00:23:13.880 it probably shortened his life but i love that he couldn't let it go well it's very it's very like

00:23:19.960 gatsby right the striving you know even though if you're not going to obtain perfection you still got

00:23:23.960 to go for it that's right that's right and you know fitzgerald was raised catholic as i was and i i

00:23:31.200 keep sometimes when i i've read his letters i i feel like i can hear that kind of catholic influence

00:23:38.500 our nuns used to tell us way back when they used to recite this jingle good better best never let it

00:23:45.020 rest until you're good is better and you're better best i feel like fitzgerald had that planted in his

00:23:50.640 brain too you know you can't let it go you're never good enough you know yeah i'd love to get your

00:23:57.520 thoughts on this because it's something that i've often wondered uh since i've read the gatsby and

00:24:01.400 you are a book reviewer one of the things i love about gatsby is that it's both timeless but at the

00:24:08.080 same time it perfectly describes you know jazz age new york captures a time yeah has there been a novel

00:24:16.080 written in the past 20 years that does the same thing as gatsby where it's both timeless but also

00:24:21.760 perfectly captures our time boy i hate these questions yeah if you don't have an answer it's

00:24:30.340 okay but um you know you you're not gonna love my answer but i i think a lot of detective fiction

00:24:42.300 does that still because detective yeah lee child sarah paretsky i've just read her latest which is great

00:24:49.760 um i i i um i love this new detective fiction writer ax ahmad who has um an indian immigrant as his

00:25:00.660 sort of amateur detective who's a taxi cab driver in new york it's a great series they're not cute the

00:25:06.180 latest one is called the caretaker and it's um it it it's you know it's hard-boiled um i feel like

00:25:16.360 when detective fiction is well written as as these examples are they're also linked to their time

00:25:23.020 because they're investigating mostly social issues of the time they have that double identity um where

00:25:30.220 they can sort of do that um i'm trying to think of other people i mean most of the writers who i who

00:25:37.460 are flooding into my brain um are are people who i think are aiming more for that timeless quality

00:25:46.760 like my favorite novel so far this year um is the buried giant by kazuo ishiguro and that's a fantasy

00:25:55.560 novel so he's on board from um any particular time it's hard to do i i think um you know long time

00:26:06.840 1980s of course tom wolf tried to do it with bonfire of the vanities he wanted to write this great

00:26:13.300 dickensian sort of novel about new york in the go-go 80s but i don't think that novelist stood the test of

00:26:19.940 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

00:26:29.960 really not i don't think regarded anymore it's like this this novel that can stand on its own

00:26:34.740 dated so yeah i'm not coming up with with fabulous no i love the detective novel thing

00:26:41.700 that makes sense um i like that a lot i'm a big fan of detective novels um so last question um you

00:26:49.740 know for our listeners who are listening and they've it's been a while since they read gatsby

00:26:53.080 and they're listening like well maybe i should give it a second go do you have any suggestions on

00:26:57.900 themes or motifs or something they can do to make reading more interesting or getting more out of it

00:27:04.920 second time or third time they read it you know i first of all i would recommend that they watch the

00:27:11.440 alan lag version okay because it's it's it really foregrounds the crime element and the film noir

00:27:23.080 element and in that way i i think when people are uh have fallen out of love with gatsby or never got

00:27:29.740 gatsby in the first place it's because it's been hammered into their heads that this was a great

00:27:34.760 american novel this is a great you know and and um you know they approach it with almost too much

00:27:39.620 reverence i think listening to it is is a fabulous idea um when i i went to gats twice the seven and a half

00:27:50.480 hour off-roadway production where the actors kind of had memorized gatsby so they they did the entire

00:27:57.380 novel in seven and a half hours and that was that was when i really heard the humor in it the first

00:28:03.840 third of gatsby is filled with jokes with almost screwball comedy that opening dinner party uh daisy and

00:28:10.600 and tom they're jabbing at each other like ricky and lucy almost you know so i would try to be alert to

00:28:16.980 the comedy um you know the the hot reading now of gatsby is the homoerotic reading that that nick is 0.95

00:28:25.700 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

00:28:34.860 think maybe that if that freshens it up for people to think of that um unrequited yearning everybody in

00:28:41.000 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

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The Art of Manliness - July 29, 2015

#125： The Enduring Appeal of The Great Gatsby with Maureen Corrigan

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