Midnight in Manhattan

story of the Great Gatsby today omnibus now BBC one discovers how little America has changed it's most important American Novel of 20th century it's the great American novel that elusive notion of the American Dream has never seemed quite so tangible as it is in the context of the Great Gatsby it is filled with American themes American ideas American ideals and the ways in which the American Dream has rewarded its believers and betrayed its believers that book takes over your mind it takes over your heart that book can make you think and think and think about this country where we're going where we came from you I worked for scott Fitzgerald for the last 20 months of his life from April 1939 through December 1940 during that time I saw him almost daily whenever he needed to he needed you now this feels so strange than 60 years since I've been here ah the last time was when Fitzgerald had died and was lying on the ground when I came I didn't know what had happened I thought he had fainted and Sheila was in the background sobbing and I asked what happened and she told me that he was by the fireplace and just keeled over so it's very hard to to come into this freshly painted new place of where the old memories do linger but they they seem out of time all together when he died there was practically no sale of his books except by him he would buy the books to give as gifts to friends or to people who work with him wanted them and when he got a royalty statement at the end of the year he got the few pennies back because the royalties were on the books that he had bought so it is kind of ironic now that the sale has run into millions the great gatsby is f scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece this slim and seemingly in substantial book about a young man with a dream has long been recognized as the greatest American novel of the 20th century yet Fitzgerald's tale of romantic longing is now reaching even greater heights of acclaim hailed as a novel for this century rather than the last the great gatsby now sells more copies every month the United States than it's sold during Fitz Jones entire lifetime it must be up around a third of a million copies a year and this is 75 years after the thing was originally published April 1925 it shows no signs of tapering off that's not a long time ago that it was a Great American Novel it's only fifty five thousand words long that's a real feat to put that much of a story in that few words and then I've been trying all my life to compress things like that the Great Gatsby captures like no other novel the reckless pleasure seeking and exuberance of 1920s America at the height of economic boom a period Fitzgerald famously christened the Jazz Age there was prohibition which caused a lot more drinking than might have happened if there hadn't been prohibition so it's an enormous amount of drunkenness enormous amount of carousing enormous amount of surreptitious sex and he captured that that that was one of his his enormous gifts was his ability to to smell the excitement of that period the sky wasn't the limit and the stock market was booming times were great seemed to be no end in sight it was the time of great revolt in almost everything in dress morals manners and miss gerald of course was tucked away right in the middle of it it presents a picture of the nineteen twenties as an endless party as one long drunken revel the greatest party description in all of english-language literature is Gatsby's party that's the party no other writer can ever write a party scene again because Fitzgerald's done it there was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights in his blue Gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names okay Gatsby it does better in boom times like the present and it's impressive testimony to the scratch All American mind this book has made that when appears to be a great deal of mindless Hellenism and easy money people think of our Gatsby when the Great Gatsby was published Fitzgerald was already famous the success of his first novel this side of paradise had made him a celebrity at the age of 23 like his new hero the self-made Gatsby Fitzgerald believed all his dreams of romance riches and happiness could come true I think the child picked a good moment to come here to New York the times in the and the boy were were right for each other at least for a brief moment he was aware of the sort of infinite possibilities of the city and he was attuned to that to the myth of it over the Great Bridge with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon moving cars with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of nan al Factory money the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge anything at all even Gatsby could happen Fitzgerald loved New York he said New York has all the iridescent of the beginning of the world it was the place where anything was possible it was the place where the realization of the American dream might take place we're sprung from crabby bitter old pilgrims who didn't get it right in Europe and came over here and tried to get it right a second time it's a culture that really believes that if you're talented and good-looking and have energy and ambition that you can do any goddamn thing you want to do Gatsby and Fitzgerald had in common the belief of the possibilities of American life more than that the capacity the power of any American to remake himself you can be whatever your determination your dream your belief your conviction people don't consider it bogus in this culture to reinvent yourself to start again to get a new identity in fact it's rather expected of you and certainly Fitzgerald was able to reinvent itself many times in the point of Gatsby is exactly that he is an invention a construct a fable a cure old sport I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me from all these stories you hear now I'm gonna tell you God's truth I was born in wealthy parents in the Middle West both dead I was educated at Oxford because all my ancestors were educated there after that I lived like a young Rajah and all the capitals of Europe painting a little things for myself only trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago Fitzgerald makes Gatsby's mysterious origins an essential part of his attraction even the name is assumed James gasps is reborn as Jay Gatsby Jay Gatsby has to reject his past this pathetic father this Midwest family and he has to give up James Gatz and become something completely new and self invented an important connection between Gatsby and Fitzgerald is the way both men reinvent themselves it's most people don't know the extent to which Fitzgerald made himself into the kind of person that he thought would be what people wanted there's a great deal of f scott Fitzgerald in Jay Gatsby both were from the Midwest both came east both reinvented themselves again and again here for instance you can see in the record of Fitzgerald's autographs the way his handwriting reflects his reinvention of himself even his very name he changes from Scott to scott Fitzgerald to f scott Fitzgerald like Gatsby Fitzgerald's background was not all he would have wished he was the son of a failed businessman from st. Paul Minnesota a small Midwestern City the family lived in a prosperous part of town but in a rented apartment the family was supported by the mother's family's money and Fitzgerald grew up on the periphery of beautiful homes and as he saw it beautiful people people whose lives were filled with possibility and he walked along the streets of st. Paul and looked in through lighted windows and saw these people in their finery what seemed to him finery and saw them in brightly lit rooms and they seemed so graceful to him compared to his own dreary family he was anxious to escape from st. Paul every train that left st. Paul was a train that Fitzgerald dreamed of being on the death of a rich aunt enabled Fitzgerald to attend Princeton University he called it the pleasantest Country Club in America I think Scouts sense of being an outsider was with him his entire life it definitely followed him to Princeton where he discovered he was a Catholic amongst Protestants and that he was from a sort of backwater as far as the East Coast was concerned that he wasn't accepted as a football player was a devastation to him because that was a way to prestige and glory on campus he did want glory in one form or another so he had keep revising his dreams Fitzgeralds chief study at Princeton was the social system here and though he didn't have the kind of family and money backing him up that would have sent him to the top he did have good looks and charm and talent and he made the most of them in many ways Fitzgerald was money driven he was fascinated by rich people he hung out with rich people he was like a moth drawn to a flame it's a famous cliche the one the famous line he made to Ernest Hemingway the written the rich are different from you and me he said to Hemingway in Hemingway said yes they have more money but I mean the point is that in that interchange on Fitzgerald's part there is an enormous adulation if you will for the idea of accumulating money oh it's wonderful to see you like this day all successful and everything it's wonderful to see you day see here my own home that's all it needs to make it perfect the way I've always imagined it and here's my gallery all genuine old masterpieces at the heart of the novel is the fact that Gatsby and Daisy have loved before but the relationship failed because of his lack of money what makes Jay Gatsby Noble and you know as if it's Gerald is that the money and the mansion and the parties and the silk shirts were really a function of a kind of romantic dream he became rich for Daisy he made himself into what he imagined to be a romantic figure to be the archetype of American success for love I think both Fitzgerald and Gatsby wanted to be successful meaning to be loved and it's impossible to separate a filthy lucre from a pure erotic adulation when Daisy's voice is compared to the sound of money we have the complete equation that beauty is social standing is exquisite Trust Funds is unlimited security for the rest of your life so to fall in love with the boss's daughter is to understand American society completely why why didn't you wait for me because rich girls don't marry poor boys dear cats me haven't you heard which girls don't marry poor boys Fitzgerald's Daisy was Zelda Sara a celebrated southern belle from Montgomery Alabama Fitzgerald found Zelda's aura of money beauty and social position irresistible and fell deeply in love when Zelda broke off the engagement in 1919 she was worried that Scott would not be an adequate provider the South was very poor and and all women were trained them to make sure they married well it was really the only avenue that you had to survive and the advice she was getting as homeless don't marry him then he had a great miracle in his life and in a fury of discipline and Industry he rewrites a very clumsy novel and it is accepted miraculously by a very prestigious publisher he goes to New York he now wins the girl Zelda joins him they marry in st. Patrick's Cathedral and he is now the toast of New York City they came East where all the power was where all the magazines were printed they found a way to get into those magazines based on their beauty and their brilliance and somehow contrived to become by dint of sheer ambition and talent and Moxie and pure nerve the Adam and Eve of modern celebrity culture when you realize how many thousands of photographs were taken of these kids in their 20s you have to look to Kate Moss and contemporary Madonna contemporary figures to find equivalents money and success had played a critical part in winning Zelda money and success had undone the failure of history Fitzgerald in his own life was able to make the love story come true but Gatsby's tragedy Gatsby's doom as he confuses romantic love with money and he thinks that the money will buy the girl and this is a girl who's tougher than he is harder than he is and who understands more about money than he ever will poor Gatsby thinks all money is equal she knows that Buchanan money is better than Gatsby money Gatsby is naive and innocent what's the most memorable thing Gatsby says in the novel can't repeat the past why of course you can how do you repeat the past with money I've got a man in London revise all my clothes he sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season spring and fall one of the most telling scenes in the book is that marvelous moment when Gatsby reveals to Daisy his absolute credential which means that he has a Bond Street tailor who has made the most beautiful shirts in the world I've never seen such beautiful ships Daisy's sadness outside of these shirts I think is a kind of survivor rating factor in our own consumer lives in which we imagine that if we can only get this particular table for our apartment or this particular gorgeous stainless steel lamp that everything will fall into place for us you have to get past the plot of a Great Gatsby and as you get deeper into the book you see that Fitzgerald had very profound things to say about money its effect on people's behavior its effect on a whole culture and the whole striving in American life for social status and position and all that glamour that looks initially so appealing you can read the book in the end perfectly validly in one of two ways and they're totally antithetical to one another the surface story is simply the surface of the Roaring Twenties in the United States you know a good time is being had by all the parties go on all day and all night a stronger reading is a kind of almost meaningless dance of death the dancing that is going on we're gonna have a party Cheers people think oh it's easy and it's about the Jazz AIDS is about big parties and that's the surface but what they all have in common is violence or disaster I'm sorry I didn't belong with Silas Marner it's probably taught as much as any other book in American public schools and yet when you really know what the book is about which is about immense erotic longing about doing anything for money about how absolute power corrupts absolutely and about how getting what you want is often the end of you it's a pretty subversive and dicey text to be putting in the hands of 13 year olds the shock of the great gatsby is just how short a distance it is between love and hate happiness and desolation sobriety and Oblivion Fitzgerald had a much darker vision than I think is commonly realized an almost existential vision you know it is the what he described as the foul dust that floated in Gatsby's wake which ultimately is hanging in the air his was a tragic Sensibility the tempo of the city had changed sharply the uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar and many of our friends had grown wealthy but the restlessness of New York approached hysteria the parties were bigger the shows were broader the buildings were higher morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper but all these did not really minister much delight young people wore out early they were hard and languid at 21 and none of them contributed anything new most of my friends drank too much the more they were in tune with the times the more they drank all of Fitzgerald's friends remarked at the way the two of them were living they became more and more frantic and their exploits were reported throughout the newspapers jumping into fountains taking wild rides down New York City it became a kind of frenzy or a kind of hysteria which was like the hysteria that was going on in the country at the time every major American writer the first half of the 20th century with very rare exceptions was a serious drinker a hard drinker whether the alcohol whether the drinking fuel their writing we don't know it's a truth it's the circumstances of fact that American writers at a certain time were all serious drinkers Fitzgerald's reputation Fitzgerald's career his name if he's the prince charming of American literature he's the drunken Prince Charming of America he's the great American drunk Fitzgerald's closest friend during the 1920s was arguably Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway is the man who came up with a famous phrase that good writers are drinking writers and drinking writers are good writers evidence for the view that Fitzgerald was self-destructive is not hard to come by evidence for the view that he was consciously so and that this is revealed by him to us and to himself in his writing wouldn't be that hard to come by either for example here's a just a little passage in the book I just remember that today is my birthday I was thirty before we stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade thirty the promise of a decade of loneliness a thinning list of single men to know a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm thinning hair this is a guy who really thinks it's all over from now on it's downhill all the way it's burn out hemorrhoids impotence the lot is coming and he thinks well I don't have to go through with it I can flame out I'll skip that bit I'll cheat it and the cheating takes the form of success you were constantly drunk you didn't work and were dragged home at night by taxi drivers when you came home at all you got up for lunch you made no advances towards me and complained I was unresponsive you were literally eternally drunk for the whole summer all attendants cut was really killing drunker and coming apart I felt a tremendous I pulled a tremendous sympathy for him I really I mean he he sort of made me cry really and I you know I'm one of the hug him I wanted to help him I became aware of how much he was drinking after a while when I came up to the house and there was an actor who owned the property and he was snooping around the barrels the trash barrels when I came in and made some comment about the drink about the bottles and I went in and told Fitzgerald as a kind of joke but his child got very annoyed at this and said look we have to get rid of these bottles I would say he could uh he could do two pints of gin a day say easily at one time in order not to drink what he called hard spirits he would drink 30 bottles of beer in a day which is a lot of alcohol you know and though it were berries in his life were if he wasn't in a hospital he's drunk drunk or hospital either one or the other now that's the ruinous period I mean what his agent couldn't sell his stories and he was getting close to destitution yeah when you're happy alcoholic it's different from being a desperate suicidal alcoholic when they get much fun you know you know what destroyed him was failure he was flirting with disaster at all times there's no doubt about it and in fact he was headed for a long slide downward and I think the character of Gatsby is a kind of image of this you sense doom in Gatsby because Fitzgerald sense dooming himself Daisy doesn't love you she's never loved you she loves me he must be crazy the only reason she married you was because I was too poor and she was tired of waiting it was a terrible mistake and her heart she never loved anyone except me oh you want too much I love you now isn't that enough I can't help what's past I did love him once but I love you too Gatsby and Fitzgerald were sacrificed to the very thing they most wanted this is the other side of this great lust for success by courting absolute love absolute money you set yourself up for the disaster a failure and the book becomes a kind of prophecy in relation to lived life and to the tragedy of his own burn out and the prophetic nature of the book was to resonate more and more as Fitzgerald and solders lives unraveled and the end of the decade approached the bubble burst from my grandparents pretty dramatically in 1929 when Zelda had her first nervous breakdown and the correspondence between my grandparents in this difficult time is heartbreaking dearest and always dearest Scott I'm sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell I love you anyway even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life I love you Zelda's collapse really marked the end of an era and it was timed precisely to the collapse of the stock market in America we were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert what was that it was nothing do you think we ought to go home and see no it was nothing in some ways a Great Gatsby it's parallel to what was going on in the Jazz Age this incredible sense of energy and moving forward and got to be realizing everything and it explodes and crashes and everything in that moment we know is laws the road is littered with bodies by the end of the book everybody who doesn't have major money is a casualty as time goes on I think we all realize that it was a kind of prophecy it winds up telling us what we can expect and what we should fear and what it predicts and what it warns us against is precisely this moment we're going through a period right now which is not unlike the 1920s huge wealth a lot of new wealth a lot of people become millionaires and very I would guess Gatsby like ways well we heard a lot of in the 80s about how much the 80s resembled the 20s the access and the greed and the Dionysian behavior of these two periods being so similar well here we are in the year 2000 and the wealth that I see around me is is staggering there was nothing like in the 80s it's an extraordinary moment right now and one that I think would be somewhat recognizable to Fitzgerald as we go into the 21st century America is plainly on the march toward trying to accumulate everything that can be accumulated there's an almost mystical need to celebrate wealth as a value in itself and that to that degree it's very guts be asked but behind all of this I think is something unspoken namely that there is an ominous cloud on the horizon in history no bubble has ever lasted forever it didn't in the 1920s and Fitzgerald's time it's certainly not going to do it again yeah there was a special light to it that or the light was knowing that was very temporal that was good while it lasted pretty special that's sort of what the 20s was for a lot of people in this country and they a hard time adjusting to the 30s just like a lot of people are going to have our demo justing too but when it happens here oh boy when it cracks here it'll be like the Titanic sinking you know the unsinkable ship where is the iceberg this chose a warning think he's an admonition his specter at the feast he's the moving finger at the banquet tracing a couple of stray thoughts on the wall to the effect you know there will be a terrible hangover to come after all this indulgence and excess and and selfishness and I think he's one of the he's one of the small but persistent voices that people hear in their heads at times when things appear to be mindless there's a Gatsby every 15 minutes in the electronic computer world people are making fortunes that make Gatsby's wealth look like nickels and dimes Gatsby has become a kind of quintessential American character people who have never read The Great Gatsby people who've never at a book people have never heard of him scott Fitzgerald refer to somebody oh he's like Gatsby he's a kind of Gatsby over the library rotunda of his hundred million dollar house Bill Gates quotes Gatsby he had come a long way to this blue lawn that wonderful line near the end how is it that somebody like Bill Gates associates himself with Gatsby well in some way that tells us that Fitzgerald has really tapped in to this American dream or we're currently having one of our usual ghastly four-year runs at the presidency in this country and most of the candidates seem to be characters out of the Great Gatsby they express the values of Tom Buchanan they wish to make the rich richer and the poor poorer the great American tradition I mean they don't quite say so but that's what they mean when they talk about this enormous tax cut but the the rhetoric spoken by George W Bush and Al Gore also is very much the rhetoric of the Great Gatsby it is the notion that each and every American will see all of their dreams and desires realized well this is the American Dream and the Great Gatsby just leads to self-destruction the book is lost it's a vision of loss not of gain 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 the American Dream is pretty candidly and cynically negated by Gatsby it's a remarkable thing that the book has become canonical in a society that perhaps by doing this demonstrates that it's not completely sure of the validity of its founding illusion it's a quadruple negation of the whole American idea of the happy ending and of their at least being some uplift in the final frames as absolutely none of that it's a dying fall Fitzgerald had the understanding to view a swimming pool as something not just to swim in but to drown in at a moment when pools were novelties and that is in some ways a kind of emblem of the 20th century when recreation becomes poisonous when idleness becomes a full-time job becomes a sort of step toward suicide as nicht surveys the wreckage and as he sees the damage that's done some kind of moral vision begins to kick in which finally drives him away from the scene once Gatsby's gone and and finally entitles him to that beautiful loss page the book in which he is able to imagine America as seen from the prow of the first ship to discover it it's a vision of paradise it's a vision of absolute innocence it's a vision of the landscape before mankind found a trillion ways to corrupt it as the moon rose higher the in essential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh green breast of the new world for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder I'm still trying to figure out what what is at the heart of the Great Gatsby I don't think of it as a dark book although dark things happen there is a nobility to the tragedy that justifies the life of of the hero he had a longing for something that was absolutely pure he comes outside leaving his party behind and all of the music and the dancers and all of his wealth and walks out through the Twilight out to his dock with the green light at the end and he looks out across the water towards the house where he knows that his unattainable love is Daisy Buchanan that's the feeling of the novel we yearned for something that we cannot have Fitzgeralds mystical greenlight endlessly perplexes and intrigues intangible to the last but at the same time full of meaning I think everybody has a green light that they see across the channel and can't quite get to I mean for everybody watching there will be another answer I don't know if it's the wish for absolute fame the wish for the ultimate erotic experience the wish for stocks and bonds enough to cause your children and grandchildren to live happily ever after you fill in the blank and it's inevitably a channel away it's always on the other Shore and it's one of the things that makes the novels so beautiful it's it's so full of longing and it's so full of impossible longing but that's what longing is and we're all on the road to tragedy to fail you to death and what Fitzgerald now the romantics say is perform all the miracles you can while you can fulfill all the possibilities drink the best wines eat the best meals make love to the most beautiful exciting women while you can because in the grave you don't get to do any of these things all great writers are revolt against death all great writers are writing about death no matter what else they're writing about and what the romantic says is do it while you can make it better through will through determination make it better than it otherwise be anyone who thinks have got to be as a romance is missing its point one it's an essential thing I think is the sense of pointlessness pervasive sense of pointlessness amounting almost to nihilism and that is that is a thought that leads to despair almost to suicide it's ever-present in the book at all at all times people of assessing what are we doing here what is the point what's the meaning of this Fitzgerald is some the American Camus that's not a romance that's modernism and of a pretty pitiless kind it's a great cure for a monster great gatsby lovers do not give each other copies of it they against me Gatsby believed in the green light the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us it eluded us then but that's no matter tomorrow we will run faster stretch out our arms further and one fine morning so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past every story taken to the end has the same end and we all know what the end is but the end does not diminish us the end does not make it less necessary to keep rowing our boats against the against the current which will in the end claim all of us we are all Gatsby's we are all rowing against the current and we never give up that was the last in the current series of omnibus it returns to BBC one in the autumn

Channel: Hans van der Laan

Views: 56,752

Rating: 4.7581396 out of 5

Keywords: F.Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Id: 6BhrzbHAoZU

Length: 49min 28sec (2968 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2013