Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Great Gatsby, the American Dream, and the Irrecoverable Past

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of 1925, is known as the short book of the Jazz Age: flappers, speakeasies, and a frivolous party. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett think that reputation misses it. It is less than 50,000 words, and it is a tragedy about people destroyed by their own dreams, the dream of reinventing yourself and the fear of being found out. The past is what the dream cannot beat. Syrett gives it nine. Sandbrook gives it nine, and calls it one of the greatest books to come out of America, if not the greatest.

Key ideas

1. The party novel is a tragedy, and the film is the surface. The episode opens on the book. Sandbrook calls it perhaps the most celebrated of American novels, and the classic example of the great American novel, then a book people take to be frivolous and light-hearted, with a core of real tragedy. It ends with the deaths of some of the key characters and with the narrator’s total disillusionment. It is about wealth and pleasure, the fast cars and the parties, and about the human cost. It is about the American dream, reinventing yourself and being reborn, and about that dream being punctured, and about being found out. He addresses her as Tabby inside that opening. After her ‘Terrifying prospect’, he says what people rarely bring out: ‘I think it’s a book about nostalgia and about the past and about the desire to turn back the clock and to clutch onto something that’s vanishing out of sight.’ Syrett’s first impressions answer his question. She read it for GCSEs. The Baz Luhrmann film came out in the run-up to the exam. She loved the surface, flappers and fast cars, and the book did not stay with her. She was outraged by the adaptation, and then saw that the film had done what she had done. It is all surface. It states what the book only implies. Nick says they all drank too much. The book never says it. Her reread, as she tells it there, still did not go much further than enjoyment. That sits beside the nine she gives later, which is a mark for the prose and not for the people. Inside the same stretch Sandbrook takes the handoff. He had expected cocktails and parties and found the book stranger, more haunting, and more oblique. She answers that everything is beneath the surface, which is why it does not lend itself to film, and why it is almost impossible to do justice to. He agrees, and says they will not spend long on the film. His remark is that the Luhrmann and Leonardo DiCaprio film is glitzy, sensual, and over the top, and misses the subtleties of the writing.

2. The life is the novel, and the wound is Ginevra, not Zelda. Sandbrook sets the Jazz Age and then hands her Fitzgerald. The frame runs from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the Wall Street crash in 1929: the rise of the city and mass consumerism, the Roaring Twenties in the popular imagination, and a dark side. The second Ku Klux Klan. A hint of it in Tom Buchanan’s racism, which they come back to. Prohibition from January 1920, and at the same time bootlegging, speakeasies, and an age of excess. A New York Times piece in 1922 on the cocktail party, in which somebody always ends up shot or stabbed. The label Jazz Age is Fitzgerald’s, from Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). He lived in the middle of it and had a mixed relationship with it. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1896 to a middle-class Catholic family in St Paul, Minnesota. Named after a cousin, Francis Scott Key, who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, not yet the national anthem. They think the 1930s. Private school, a gifted boy, Princeton, where being a Catholic made him feel an outsider. That outsider note echoes in Nick. One Christmas he fell in love with Ginevra King, sixteen, a rich debutante, one of what was called the four debs, or something like that. Her father allegedly said, ‘Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.’ He was shattered, almost suicidal, enlisted hoping to be killed, never reached France, and spent the war in army camps. People assume Zelda is the muse. Syrett says Zelda is not. He meets Zelda Sayre in 1918 at Camp Sheridan, Alabama, another rich and unstable debutante, a Southern belle with intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South, which they mark as a bad sign from the start. He is still writing to Ginevra and begging her to come back. She writes that she has married a rich Chicago businessman. Three days later he tells Zelda he loves her. Zelda will not marry him until he has made some money. Advertising in New York, an on-off misery, suicide considered again. This Side of Paradise (1920), drawn from Princeton, is the hit that lets them marry. They become the couple in the papers. Zelda is the definitive flapper and writes an essay in defence of flappers. Their daughter is born in 1921. Coming round from the anaesthetic, Zelda hopes the child is ‘a beautiful little fool’. They say that line is taken from the novel. By the summer of 1923 he is twenty-six and already dissipating. They are both high-functioning alcoholics. He is repelled by the party life, and the self-loathing is in the book. One of them thinks Zelda leads him into the parties. A New York police detention near the Queensboro Bridge, they think, mistook Zelda for a spree robber called the Bobbed Hair Bandit. It shook her. They were living on Long Island, at Great Neck, a former fishing village that had become a celebrity hangout, ‘the Hollywood of the East’. Great Neck is West Egg. Sands Point, across the bay, older money and less flash, is East Egg. He wrote to a friend that the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money: ‘This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.’ During the affair Ginevra sent him a story in which a woman is trapped in a loveless marriage to a rich man who cheats, and pines for the young love. They did meet again later, after she left her husband. He was so nervous he got drunk and ruined it. He was still married to Zelda. A first draft dissatisfied him. In spring 1924 they moved to the south of France. The marriage was in crisis. Zelda had an affair with a French aviator, or allegedly: the man denied it and said she invented it. She overdosed on sleeping pills. The inspiration they name is shattered romantic illusion, an ideal of love that cannot live up to the hope. He had thought of setting the book in the nineteenth century. Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires: Sandbrook thinks it a terrible title, though not the worst Fitzgerald flirted with; Syrett thinks it sums the book up. In France the book was tied to Petronius’s Satyricon and to Trimalchio, a freedman, nouveau riche, throwing a vast dinner, telling tall stories, and staging a mock funeral. Fitzgerald wanted Trimalchio in West Egg inside a double title, The Great Gatsby with that subtitle. The publishers said no. He also offered Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover. He finished in October 1924. Maxwell Perkins, the editor, interventionist in the American way, they say, and also Tom Wolfe’s editor, deserves a fair share of the credit for the finished book. Fitzgerald never made his peace with the title. The cover, Celestial Eyes, by an unknown Catalan artist, Francis Cugat: enormous eyes in a blue sky, a sensual mouth, the eyes of a flapper. Hemingway said it looked like the jacket of a bad science fiction book. Fitzgerald loved it and revised the novel to match it, playing up eyes and blindness. They call that rare. Zelda was in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of her life. Electroshock. She died in a fire in an institution. They say she was said to have schizophrenia, and that people now think bipolar. He drank himself to death, a failure in Hollywood in 1940, his books no longer selling, a footnote. In the last twelve months of his life the royalties came to $13.13. The funeral was Episcopalian. Twenty people came. The minister, as they report him, said afterwards that the only reason he gave the service was to get the body in the ground, that Fitzgerald was ‘a no good drunken bum’, and that the world was well rid of him. Syrett’s next turn is the tragic symmetry with the novel. He had said this book would be a work of art and would have nothing to do with money, after years of being told he wrote for the market. The reception hurt him.

3. Nick is not the honest man he claims to be, and Gatsby is a dream of Daisy rather than Daisy. The prose is sensual, impressionistic, minute: a sweating bottle of whisky in a fraught scene; women and dresses and gardens and cocktails, faces never quite specified, which one of them compares to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Sandbrook hears Joseph Conrad, a writer Fitzgerald loved. Nothing is quite in focus. Nostromo was, Fitzgerald said, his favourite book of the last fifty years. What he took from Conrad was a narrator, Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who tells you the story and what it means and is not necessarily to be trusted. The first draft of Gatsby had an omniscient narrator. Nick Carraway changes the book. He is a version of Fitzgerald: middle class, Ivy League, an outsider in the world he describes. Nick says he is ‘one of the few honest people that I’ve ever known’, and the book gives you reasons not to believe him. He joins the deceptions of the love triangle. He boasts that his family has been prominent in the Midwest for three generations, then undercuts the legend: the founder arrived in the 1850s, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started a hardware business. Nick’s banking books, ‘red and gold like new money from the mint’, are the same gesture as Gatsby’s unread library. Nick and Gatsby are versions of each other, and of Fitzgerald. Daisy is Nick’s second cousin once removed. He knew Tom at college. Tom and Daisy are old money, a secret society, and the thing people like Gatsby want to be. They hear The Secret History in that, a later episode of this show. Tom is stupid, brash, violent, a polo player, Yale, football, a rich Chicago family, with ‘shiny arrogant eyes’ and ‘enormous power in his cruel body’. Joel Edgerton plays him well in the film. Gatsby calls him the polo player. Tom is a racist, reading pseudo-scientific books about the white race being submerged. Daisy agrees, carelessly: ‘we’ve got to beat them down.’ One of them reads a favourite line, and the next turn agrees it sums them up: ‘they were careless people Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’ Daisy’s voice is full of money. We are never really told what she looks like, or what Nick looks like. She is slender, immaterial, unhappy, because Tom has a mistress. Jordan Baker whispers the affair at the first lunch. Jordan is based on Edith Cummings, a golfer, Ginevra King’s best friend. Jordan cheats. No one is what they appear to be. Gatsby, for the early chapters, is not a body. He is rumours: cousin of the Kaiser, a German spy, a killer, nephew of von Hindenburg, a bootlegger. Fitzgerald later told a friend who could not make Gatsby out: ‘you’re right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself. He started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.’ The man is Max Gerlach, a neighbour on Long Island, a major in the American Expeditionary Forces, then a gentleman bootlegger for Arnold Rothstein, living like a millionaire, never wearing the same shirt twice, calling people old sport, claiming to be a descendant of the Kaiser. The first physical sight of Gatsby is Nick’s, at the end of chapter one: the figure on the lawn, arms stretched towards the dark water, trembling, and ‘a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.’ The green light is hopeless yearning, something a reader can hang their own hopes on, the colour of money and of envy, and Daisy. Gatsby in person is a year or two over thirty, elegant, insubstantial. Often he had nothing to say. He fills himself in with stories: wealthy parents in the Midwest, all dead; Oxford, because his ancestors were educated there; a young raja in the capitals of Europe; rubies; big game; a little painting; trying to forget something very sad. The sad thing is the one true item. Jordan tells Nick the Louisville story. Gatsby the young officer, Daisy the rich girl, the family who would not let her see him off because he was poor, then Tom. The question they break on is what he has been doing, why that house, and what the green light is for. After the break, Tom’s phrase ‘Mr. Nobody from nowhere’ is snobbery, and it is also right. James Gatz, North Dakota, as provincial as America gets, and a pipeline for Canadian liquor during Prohibition, which is why the origin is a hint. Tom is a terrible person and right about the bootlegging. Lutheran farmers for parents. A college in Minnesota, then he dropped out. On the shore of Lake Superior he saved the yacht of a copper tycoon, Dan Cody. The name and the frontier fortune recall Buffalo Bill. Cody took him on as a pet and a protégé. Theories that they were lovers are raised and dismissed as projection. He renames himself Jay Gatsby, and Jay, for a reader in the 1920s, recalled Jay Gould, the railroad robber baron, wealth concealing crookedness. He does not inherit. The money goes to Cody’s mistress, Ella. How Gatsby makes his money is never exactly shown. Bootlegging, fixing, the mob: Chicago calling, and he says not now. The interesting thing, as they settle it, is not that he is a crook. He tells Nick tall stories and tries to recruit him. What everyone takes away is that Gatsby is a dreamer, committed to remaking himself. That archetype runs through American fiction, The Talented Mr. Ripley and, when they come to it, The Secret History again: people playing a self they are not. The self he invents is the self he thinks will win Daisy. He has never recovered, just as Fitzgerald never recovered Ginevra. The house is across the bay. The parties are thrown in the hope she will walk in. He has misunderstood old money and new. When she finally comes, she is appalled. It looks like romantic idealism. Further in, it is obsession. Daisy is a symbol of wealth, sophistication, and status, the things that were beyond him as a boy. He does not see her. From the reunion on, all that glitters is not what he hoped, and he tries to force the distant ideal back into being.

4. You cannot repeat the past, and the prose is why the book lasts. Fitzgerald thought the book would make his name. Most early reviewers found it superficial. H. L. Mencken called it ‘a glorified anecdote.’ Nobody would say that now. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers study it. What people take first is a window on the modernity of the 1920s: clothes, electric light, telephones, speedboats, a seaplane, fast cars, gas stations, commuter trains, newspapers, magazines, advertisements. Gatsby is a bootlegger and a bond-market speculator. A reviewer at the time said the world was one most readers could not relate to, in a period of poverty. From here, that does not matter. Henry James is the other comparison, for rich people and their love affairs, and the chasm is the point. James and Conrad feel like another century, because the time between them and this book has speeded up into telephones and cocktails. And yet everyone in the book is looking backwards. Tom Buchanan dreams of some irrecoverable football game at college. For Tom and Daisy the old world of servants and cocktails is making its last stand, and Tom can feel new money arriving. Nick tells Gatsby he cannot relive the past, ‘or something like that’. Gatsby says, ‘Well, of course you can, old sport.’ He is wrong. At the reunion Nick arranges, which one of them finds romantic at the start, Gatsby almost knocks over a defunct mantelpiece clock. Time has stopped, and something at the centre of the vision is broken. You cannot turn back the clock and recover what was lost. The Valley of Ashes is the third class, after East Egg and West Egg. The working people Tom and Daisy use. It is drawn from the real Corona dumps, mounds of ash and rubbish four miles long, worked by ‘ash-gray men with leaden spades’. Above them, a billboard: the eyes of Dr T. J. Eckleburg, no face, enormous yellow glasses. God watching the sin, or the false god of advertising. They leave both open. George Wilson, husband of Tom’s mistress Myrtle, pulls her to the window and says God sees everything, with Eckleburg in front of them. One of them says those eyes over the ash were the image that stayed from the first reading. The cover and The Waste Land lie behind it. One of them is a devotee of the poem. The other says Fitzgerald was a huge fan, ‘like you’, and sent T. S. Eliot a copy dedicated to ‘The greatest of living poets from his enthusiastic worshiper.’ Tiresias, the blind seer, is the poem’s figure. Eckleburg and Eliot are not so different. Nick wonders if Eckleburg sank down into eternal blindness like Tiresias. The observation the devotee had to remind the other of is the parties. ‘In the blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whispers and the champagne’ reminded them of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo. In the poem the parties are insubstantial and the people are alienated. That is Gatsby’s parties too: a succession of disconnected images, and a hollowness at the centre. Oranges peeled and carried through. Either the balloon deflates or it bursts. The guests have ludicrous names and absurd, dark, violent lives. There are stretches of caricature. Meyer Wolfsheim is the one they both regret: cufflinks made of human teeth, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, obviously Arnold Rothstein, and a portrait they agree is anti-Semitic. Fitzgerald lets himself down there. The fraud, by contrast, is done with skill. The house is an imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, with a marble swimming pool. It may have been modelled on Harry Guggenheim’s mansion at Sands Point, a mock-Gothic castle. The ivy is there to make the house look old, and the ivy is new and bright green. The moral of that reading, which the stretch does not hang on a named host, is that he does not understand that you cannot be in that world unless you were born into it. An owl-eyed man in the library, another pair of spectacles, is amazed the books are real. He thought they would be cardboard. ‘It’s a triumph. What thoroughness, what realism.’ Gatsby knew when to stop. He did not cut the pages. The library is a set. Sandbrook asks Syrett to read Tom’s line: ‘An Oxford man, like hell he is. He wears a pink suit.’ The pink suit is Tom’s snobbery, and the sign that Gatsby will never stop being an outsider. Daisy is the ticket into a world that stays out of reach, and one of them thinks Fitzgerald had the same feeling about Ginevra. The feeling of being outside the party, looking in through the glass, is the one they generalise. At the end Gatsby’s father turns up and shows Nick a boy’s timetable: ‘Read an improving book or magazine once a week.’ The timetable is a touching plan of self-improvement, and it mocks the Horatio Alger story in which the poor boy climbs. The lesson they draw is that you cannot. You will be dragged back, found out, and it will end horribly.

Context

The story a stranger needs

Nick comes east from the Midwest and rents a house next to Gatsby’s. Daisy and Tom are across the bay. Gatsby is a rumour, then a host, then a man with a green light and a past in Louisville. He wants Daisy back. Nick arranges the reunion. She comes to a party and is appalled. On a boiling day, which they compare to The Go-Between, they are at the Buchanans’ and Daisy tells Gatsby, ‘You always look so cool.’ That is when Tom understands. They drive across the Valley of Ashes into New York. Tom says ‘Mr. Nobody from nowhere’, asks if it is now the fashion to sleep with someone’s wife, and reaches a low point about intermarriage between black and white. They call it a low point. Gatsby’s speech sounds to them like a soap opera or a sentimental melodrama: she never loved you; she married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting; in her heart she never loved anyone but me. Nick sees that Gatsby knows it is gone. Daisy says she loved Tom too, and loves them both. For Tom that is enough. In that old-money world people hurt each other and do not break. For Gatsby it is not enough. He needs to own her entirely, or the dream cannot be completed. Tom says there are things between Daisy and him that Gatsby will never know, and the words bite. They wonder whether that is a memory of Scott and Zelda, the abortions, the miscarriages, the drunken damage, a bond of mutual suffering. It is their wonder, not a key they turn in the novel. Then: ‘We drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.’ They stop. They will not narrate the deaths for listeners who have not read the book. The opening has already said that key characters die and that the narrator is disillusioned. What they do tell is Nick widening the frame. Long Island had flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, ‘a fresh green breast of the new world’, and ‘the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ The dream is not only Daisy or the green light. It is the dream of becoming new, of starting again, of reinventing yourself and the world. It has turned out disastrously. It is a dream that kills. Gatsby pays for building a life on one hope. Syrett’s statement of the theme is that you cannot turn back the clock, even with his force of will, and you cannot undo the past. The book is melancholy. She reads the close, after he asks her not to do it in an American accent. The reading keeps ‘the orgiastic future’, and ends: ‘so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ The same turn says that final line is what was written on Fitzgerald’s headstone. The ‘I didn’t know that’ in the segment is the reaction to the detail, not a second reading of the line.

How the book sits

Conrad for the narrator and the things at the edge of vision. Eliot for the waste land, the blind watcher, and the empty party. James as the world this book has already left. The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Secret History as later American stories of people playing a self they are not. Horatio Alger as the ladder the book kicks away.

The scores

They mark out of ten, and they reject green lights as the unit. Syrett proposes pink suits, telling Sandbrook the episode has been about him. He lets her go first. During the recording she raises her mark from eight to nine, persuaded by his analysis, and thanks him by name. She docks the one mark because she does not care about the characters and the book has no great emotional heft for her. ‘I think in terms of pure writing, line by line writing, it’s as good a book as was written in the 20th century and as good a book as you’ll ever read.’ The layers of nuance are tremendous. Nine. Sandbrook, in the same stretch, after that nine: ‘I think this is one of the great books. Just definitely one of the greatest books that’s come out of America, if not the greatest.’ He gives it nine. The next stretch docks his mark because Fitzgerald flirts with caricature. They notice they are agreeing, which they treat as a failure of the show’s habit. Next week is Hamnet. A film has just come out. She rates Maggie O’Farrell highly. The Secret History is later, not next.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host