So We Read On: How "The Great Gatsby" Came To Be and Why It Endures

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you you good afternoon my name is Barbara Moreland I'm the assistant chief of the humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress the humanities and Social Sciences Division provides reference service and collection development in the main and local history and genealogy reading room also in the microform and electronic resources reading room and we always like to remind all of our audiences that one needs only to be 16 years of age or older and have a government-issued ID to obtain a readers card at the Library of Congress the humanities and Social Sciences Division regularly has programs such as the one that you will enjoy today they're in the arts humanities and social science subject areas on behalf of HSS the humanities and Social Sciences Division and the Library of Congress welcome to this afternoon's lecture by Maureen Corrigan it is a part of our ongoing series abby yochelson is the literature specialist in the humanities and social sciences division and is the lead arranger for today's program and we also express special appreciation to Rob Casper who is with the library's poetry and literature Center and is serving as a co-sponsor for this event the poetry and literature center Foster's and enhances the public's appreciation of literature the center administers the endowed chair u.s. poet poet laureate consultant in litter in poetry coordinates an annual season of readings performances lectures and symposia and sponsors prizes and fellowships for literary writers and now to introduce miss Corrigan Abey yochelson so back in 2010 a librarian I knew at Georgetown University called me and said I'd like to send a researcher over to you she is brilliant she is the nicest person on our faculty and she really appreciates libraries and librarians and I said great and then she said she's not all that good on electronic resources databases are in her strong suit and her topic is what people were reading the the sort of base of literary culture in the 1930s in New York and I gulped and thought all right sounds challenging Jill was right about everything about Maureen she is the nicest person and an ardent researcher and it's been a delight to work with her on this project by the time she got here though the topic had changed and it was the Great Gatsby instead of that really hard one which she says she's doing next I couldn't have been the only one who kind of rolled my eyes and said all right what is left to say about the Great Gatsby I showed her our online catalogue there were 70 works of literary criticism on F scott Fitzgerald and another 50 just on the Great Gatsby so I thought all right but we found a few other bits and pieces in the catalog that looked pretty interesting for different materials in the library but Maureen will tell you that she has read it more than 50 times taught it for over 20 years and toured the country talking to all kinds of audiences for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program so she was pretty convinced that she did have some things to say and the result is and so we read on how the gratz great gatsby came to be and how it endures I'm looking around the audience I know many of you will recognize her voice immediately from NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross she's a regular book critic there and her voice is just very familiar someone in the lobby stopped her is a former student and she's been teaching at Georgetown University and is the critic and residence there she has a specialty is in woman's autobiography and in 2005 she wrote her own leave me alone I'm reading finding and losing myself in books it could easily be on the syllabus there if anybody else was teaching the class her other expertise is in detective fiction and you will see how this has translated into aspects of the great gatsby she's an expert wrote a contributed and co edited a book on mystery and suspense fiction which run the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America that's just like as high as you can get in the mystery field and then others of you will certainly recognize her name from reading reviews in the Washington Post New York Times Village Voice and she's such a nice person she gets to be on lots of awards committees like the Pulitzer Prize for 2010 I had a great quote she's been getting unbelievable reviews had a lovely long quote I was going to read and then I just thought I like this one for Michael Cunningham Maureen Corrigan has produced a minor miracle a book about the Great Gatsby that stands up to Gatsby itself I give you more room Michael Cunningham is a very effusive and generous person thank you thank you very much Abby thank you so much a B and and thank you for for being here I I feel like in a sense I'm coming home because I spent so many happy days at the Library of Congress researching this book in fact I so felt that I was coming home that I reached over here and promptly went into the Jefferson building because I was ready to do some more research and then had to realize no it's the Madison building I read The Great Gatsby in high school that was my first reading of the Great Gatsby and I'm guessing that that's where many of you first encountered the Great Gatsby I have been teaching at Georgetown for 25 years a lot of those classes have been freshman English classes I can tell you with absolute certainty that Gatsby is the novel that a freshman English professor can pretty much predict that 95% if not a hundred percent of her class will have read coming into the class after that it fragments Catcher in the Rye To Kill a Mockingbird a few brave souls have already done Moby Dick but it fragments if we have one novel that unites us in America it's the Great Gatsby but as I say I didn't care for it the first time it really took repeated rereading and teaching it in grad school and then beyond going around the country lecturing on it finally for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program I fell in love with Gatsby long before that but I do believe it's a novel of course that you have to reread in order to appreciate its greatness my experience with Gatsby was actually paralleled by America's experience with Gatsby and what I'm talking about is the fact that when it came out in 1925 and it got mixed reviews the most famous headline of a Gatsby review was in the New York world Fitzgerald's latest a dud that's you know but America took a second look after Fitzgerald's death in 1940 and when it took a second look in the late 40s 50s it too fell in love with Gatsby and you know as you know the novel is a staple on high school English curricula and even into college I wanted to write this book because I wanted to figure out how that happened and in fact I did first come to Abbey yochelson who is one of the greatest treasures that the Library of Congress has in addition to all of its other treasures I would still be wandering around the stacks if it were not for Abbey and wondering where to find the 1925 publishers weekly review of Gatsby I think I started think about writing a book on Gatsby because I went to see GATS the seven-hour production of The Great Gatsby that was the hit of the 2010 theater season in New York City if you don't know about it GATS was literally seven seven and a half hours of actors who had memorized the novel kind of performing it on stage but it was word-for-word perfect I went to see GATS twice and the first time I went to see it I went with my husband and after we left the theater I was babbling as all no doubt babble now and he said to me this is the book you should write you love it this is the book you need to write and I thought write Gatsby you know what is there left to say I could write another book on Gatsby and and I'm sure there will be many books after mine to follow and there should be there's so much to say I didn't just want to sit at my desk for this book and read closely much as I loved to do that I wanted to go out on the road so in addition to the big read events where you know I played Peoria I went to libraries in in Bowling Green Kentucky and you know all around the country and met people who were mostly rereading Gatsby for the second time I went out on Long Island Sound to take the Great Gatsby boat tour of Long Island Sound which is mostly a floating tourist trap but what it did help me see because I'm a geographically challenged person it did help me see those eggs those strange formations of land that Fitzgerald writes about in the novel they're really great Nick and Manhasset but they're still there the over-the-top mansions are still there and you see the Manhattan skyline in the distance you see in a way this perfect geography of yearning that Fitzgerald was able to inscribe into the novel because remember the first image that we get in the novel of Jay Gatsby it's at the end of chapter one is Nick Carraway looking out at night on the lawn of his cottage and he sees his neighbor Jay Gatsby standing in the dark at the edge of his property stretching out his arms to the green light across the long across the Long Island Sound to Daisy's house Daisy Buchanan's house I think that's the signal image in the novel that image of yearning more than the green light more than the eyes of dr. TJ eckleburg that image of yearning of stretching out your arms farther reaching higher running faster that's the all-american image in the novel for me when Fitzgerald wrote the novel or was in the process of writing the novel he really started in earnest in 1922 he wrote to his editor the famous Maxwell Perkins and he said I want to write something odd and beautiful and intricately patterned and boy is it ever it is intricately patterned there are over 450 time words in the Great Gatsby and yes someone has sat down and counted them and that's that's because the novel is very time conscious it's aware that time is running out you know it's it the entire action of the novel is bounded by one summer in 1922 and our narrator Nick Carraway is thinking back to that summer two years later and he's aware of the ultimate deadline that awaits Jay Gatsby I know most of you have read it so I'm not giving anything away that Gatsby is going to be dead by the end of that summer it's a retrospective novel four hundred and fifty time words the obsession with color the obsession with geography so many symbols that have to do with hot and cold flower symbols Daisy Buchanan Myrtle Wilson the the women in the novel car imagery throughout the novel an obsession with it with cars Jordan Baker the other female main character on her name comes from two popular car models of the time the Jordan and the Baker another huge image that you get or a huge symbol pattern has to do with the debt the novel owes to hard-boiled detective fiction you know when the great gatsby came out and it got those mixed reviews many of those mixed reviews in the popular press of the day read The Great Gatsby as a crime novel and that talking about it as a tough-guy crime novel it works three violent deaths Gatsby makes his money in the bootlegging business many of you will remember that famous meeting that Gatsby and Nick Carraway have with Meyer Wolfsheim the character who's who's patterned after Arnold Rothstein an actual underworld figure of the day in the 20s the guy who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series the Black Sox scandal you go on and on and on it's so much fun to kind of think about the hard-boiled influences in Gatsby Fitzgerald uses the word hard-boiled on page two of the novel he was a big fan of mystery fiction in fact the first the first story he ever wrote for his high school magazine was a mystery he he went on after Gatsby to become a great fan of Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon and Fitzgerald loved to draw up lists reading lists for his friends and people he knew I went to the University of South Carolina which has a big Fitzgerald archive and looked at some of these reading lists in addition to the Odyssey you know romantic poetry all of this highbrow literature that he's always recommending to people Stendhal the red and the black Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon he thought it was a masterpiece he had an admiration for that kind of writing and also for that kind of language one of the things I was I was trying to figure out is what makes Gatsby so different from Fitzgerald's previous two novels and one of the great elements that changes in Gatsby is the language as beautiful as unearthly as the poetry of the languages there are also a lot of slang words in Gatsby a lot of tough talk and I think Fitzgerald is partly indebted to the atmosphere of the day in New York City in the early 20s you know putting in some of this language that we would later very much associate with hard-boiled detective fiction and the later film dwarfs that were made from those novels by the way the first film of Gatsby was 1926 it's a silent movie we've lost that movie but we've got the the preview the trailer for it I watched it down in the Library of Congress's screening room another debt I owe to the Library of Congress the second film that was made from Gatsby came out in 1949 I also watched it here on a reel-to-reel projector in the screening room it stars Alan Ladd and those of you who know anything about the Golden Age of Hollywood know Alan Leeds career was a career largely made on tough guy roles detectives and then of course Shane he plays Gatsby I like him as Gatsby he's enigmatic handsome and blank which is what Gatsby should be the first shot you see of Gatsby in that 1949 version is Alan Ladd leaning out of his speeding roadster machine gunning down his rivals in the bootleg business so I love that Hollywood picked up on the crime element in Gatsby why does it matter you know apart from the fact that I'm fascinated with detective fiction in film noir it matters because of the heavy of fate in Gatsby you know it's a faded story all the events that take place in the last third of the novel are foretold even the fatal car crash for Myrtle Wilson is foretold by to earlier car crashes in the novel and Nick is looking backward and telling us this story for those of you who've ever watched Double Indemnity The Big Sleep The Maltese Falcon Mildred Pierce some of the great film Noirs that we have in the American canon all of those film Noirs are narrated by a voiceover by a man usually talking Sunset Boulevard about what's happened already and nothing can be changed the events of all transpired its retrospective how can this be our great American novel if it's everything is doomed everything is we're told we're the people who like to believe in infinite possibility you know that the future can always be changed made better that we can transform ourselves not so says the Great Gatsby it's all over before you even begin the novel Gatsby is dead at the beginning of the novel tying in with that I just want to mention one other image that comes up again and again in Gatsby and hasn't gotten enough appreciation and that's the water imagery in the novel like so many hard-boiled detective novels like so many film NORs this novel is soaking wet and that genre loves to play with the idea of drowning of going under of trying to you know set your sights high and being pulled under by the forces of fate by your own past by everything that's going to doom you I just want to read you a short little section from my book in which I talk about the water imagery in Gatsby the great theme running throughout all of Fitzgerald's writing and his life is the nobility of the effort to keep one's head above water despite the almost inevitable certainty of drowning while the name of the hero in Fitzgerald's last completed novel has always struck me as comic book silly dick diver bluntly spells out what Fitzgerald's work is all about his best characters dive into life with abandon and then must fight to stay afloat by the end of their stories they're almost always going under if not altogether sunk weighted down by money worries overwhelming desires the burden the burden of their own pasts sink or swim it's the founding dare of America this meritocracy where everyone theoretically at least is free to jump in and test the waters the fear is however that if you don't make it you'll vanish beneath the waves so much of American literature is saturated with images of drowning dissolving being absorbed by the vastness of the landscape or crowds it's our national literary nightmare need I do more than to start off the saga great books parlor game then mention Moby Dick we spend so much time on our initial high school forays into Gatsby focusing on those look-at-me symbols of the green light and the eyes of dr. TJ eckleburg that we overlooked the most pervasive symbol of all water almost every page of the novel references water even the briefest plot summary of it is soaked to the bone James Gatz is born again as Jay Gatsby through a watery rite of passage on Dan Cody's yacht he drowns symbolically in his pool when his dream spring a leak and he can no longer float page for compact page the Great Gatsby maybe our dampest exemplar of the Great American Novel Fitzgerald didn't just stick his toes in the water here in this his most perfect meditation on the American Dream and its deadly undertow he dives in and goes for broke those of you who've got the novel in your head just think about that reunion scene between Gatsby and Daisy first of all it takes place in the dead center of the Great Gatsby that's how overly patterned this novel is overly designed it's raining that day Gatsby shows up at Nick's cottage where Daisy is already inside there waiting to have tea she doesn't know he's he Gatsby is about to arrive when Nick opens the door to his cottage Jay Gatsby is standing there in his glorious pink suit a bedraggled mess he's a drowned man already Daisy she's never described as a knockout in the novel there's one thing that marks Daisy her voice her voice is described as being full of money well think about think about though those of you who've got the classical education zhh think about what are the creatures in classical mythology who lure men to their death with their voices the sirens the sirens they they call out to the sailors in Homer's Odyssey and they pull them under they drown them with the sound of their voices so much going on in Gatsby and yet as the novelist Jake Jonathan Franzen said it reads so easily that you feel like you're eating whipped cream you can read it just on the surface and then you can read it as you know some of us who are more neurotic readers do you know checking off all of these symbols and and being really astounded by the level of design in this novel I also wanted to figure out how did it come back so quickly you know after Fitzgerald's death he died in Hollywood in 1940 basically broke and then the novel comes back certainly his high-placed literary friends had a lot of influence people like Edmund Wilson Malcolm Cowley Alfred kaizen Dorothy Parker they've worked very hard to keep Fitzgerald's name before the public but I wanted to also see if there was a bottom-up resurgence of interest in Fitzgerald in the 40s into the 50s and again for that I bow before Abby because one day she took me down to the lower stacks in the basement of the Library of Congress a place that's freezing which is why I brought a sweater today because I could never anticipate what the temperature would be like in various rooms in the Library of Congress and we spent hours down there imagine shelves of American literary anthologies from the 30s 40s 50s 60s and we went through the shelves pulling down literary anthologies trying to find out when F scott Fitzgerald finally gets admitted into American literary anthologies mostly designed for high school some for college hours our hands got coated with the with the chemical that the library uses as part of its deification at acidification process I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but but it was worth it I mean what we eventually learned Fitzgerald is pretty much nowhere in the anthologies of the 40s Hemingway is Faulkner is all sorts of other American writers very little Fitzgerald it's not until the 50s that he really enters in in a big way the other way though that he grabs the attention of the ordinary American is through an amazing program during World War two and foreknowledge of that program I doff my hat to John Cole who's sitting here in the front row who is the director of the center of the book and who has written about the armed services additions during World War two the Armed Services additions were the product of this amazing cooperative program among publishers paper manufacturers editors librarians authors who got together in New York and who said we want to do something for the war effort and soldiers and sailors need books what can we do eventually they managed to get over a thousand titles everything from Moby Dick my friend Flicka Margaret Meads coming of age in Samoa the latest Rex Stout novel they managed to publish them in these cheap pulp editions called armed services editions over a million copies went out to soldiers and sailors serving overseas as well as men in the prisoner of war camps in Germany and Japan through an arrangement with the Red Cross they looked like this and again thank you John John brought in some from his own collection this is the shape of them they were printed on cheap pulp paper this is a wartime Walt Whitman collection this is the selected short stories of Sherwood Anderson Willa Cather's oppaya nears I'll just go ahead Ernest Hemingway's to have and have-not here's a thick one a bigger one babbitt by Sinclair Lewis the Odyssey Moby Dick I mean incredible gatsby was chosen in 1955 sorry 1945 get my date straight over one hundred and fifty five thousand copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed in these Armed Services editions size to fit in servicemen's pockets and one of the incredible things I learned researching with John's help the armed services editions was that the greatest distribution was on the eve of d-day that general Eisenhower's staff decreed that every man going over in a landing craft would have an armed services addition in his pocket one of the most popular the most popular of the Armed Services additions that were printed for d-day was a Tree Grows in Brooklyn so it's it's such a I mean it's such a feel-good program for anybody who cares about books and wonders about their practical purpose they believe me they served a practical purpose when you read the letters of guys afterwards talking about what these books meant to them it's it's so moving so Gatsby gets distributed in a big way during World War two and then of course following the war we get the paperback revolution we get early TV things like the Philco theater picks up on the great gatsby and does a version and and it starts to really infiltrate the culture on in in such a big way Fitzgerald of course knew none of this he was dead by then he had gone out to Hollywood to work for the movies as so many of our great writers did and as so many of our great writers experienced Hollywood did not have such a reverential respect for novelists I'm thinking of Faulkner I'm thinking of Raymond Chandler oh my god poor Raymond Chandler working with Billy Wilder out in Hollywood on double indemnity what a nightmare anyway Fitzgerald was treated like a hand out in Hollywood he was put on movies to work on the scripts and then pulled and you know put on other movies for a while he even worked on Gone with the Wind which seems like a really bad match but I just want to wanted you to read it wanted to read a short section of Fitzgerald in Hollywood and and then show you quickly some photos from my research and then open things up to questions and comments because I know so many of you have a lot to say I'm sure about the Great Gatsby and let's see where did that go yeah okay luckily I know this book really well so if the if the sticky note falls out I think I can really find it quickly for you yeah there's a there's a story about Fitzgerald's Hollywood years that I can't get out of my head shortly after he met Sheila Graham in 1937 Fitzgerald read in the paper that the Pasadena Playhouse was presenting a stage adaptation of his short story the diamond as big as the Ritz Fitzgerald decided to put on the dog he called the Playhouse announced that he was the author and reserved two seats he also reserved a chauffeured limousine and took Sheila Graham who he was living with at the time in evening clothes out to dinner and on to the theater when they arrived no one was in the lobby it turned out that some students were performing the play in an upstairs hall the upstairs Hall was pretty empty to just about a dozen or so casually dressed people mostly the players mothers it seemed in the audience afterward Fitzgerald went backstage to congratulate the student players later telling Sheila Graham they were nice kids I told them they'd done a good job anyone who loves Fitzgerald can't help but wish that he could have had a glimpse into the future just a couple of decades beyond his own death he would have seen crowds of students much like those Pasadena amateur actors reading The Great Gatsby in college and high school classes across America further on he would have seen several more Gatsby films the operas the ballet and Gatz he would have seen volumes of criticism and biographies towering in piles big as the Ritz and he would have seen the money how he would have reveled in the money but for Fitzgerald saw none of that in the late 1930s he drew up a three-page list for Sheila Graham of quote-unquote possibly valuable books in his library that list is in Princeton's University Library which has most of Fitzgerald's papers the list included a first edition of the wasteland and notes on his personal copies of his own books at the end of page three he writes probable value of library at forced sale three hundred dollars Fitzgerald's last royalty check was for $13.13 his young secretary Frances Crowell ring remembered that when that final royalty statement came through from Scribner z-- and this is Frances Crowell ring speaking the handful of sales proved that the author himself was the only purchaser he told me about it laughing bitterly in May of 1940 Fitzgerald wrote a letter to max Perkins in which he abruptly detoured from updates about his work in Hollywood to talk for two paragraphs about Gatsby I think it's one of the saddest literary letters ever written as often happens with Fitzgerald though there's also that eerie quality of prescience I wish I was in print it will be odd a year or so from now when Scotty his daughter assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye or is the book unpopular he puts that in italics has it had its chance would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers I can maybe pick one make it a favorite with classrooms professors lovers of English prose anybody but to die so completely and unjustly after having having given so much even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly bear my stamp in a small way I was an original heartbreaking heartbreak I want to show you some a few pictures from the Library of Congress collections and culled from my research this is wonderful I was on fresh air last week talking about the book and a librarian another heroic librarian from the motion picture arts library out in Hollywood contacted me and said I want to send you a still from a documentary made in 1945 about the d-day landing and you see the still from that documentary is of a guy maybe in a landing craft I can't tell reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that one of the ASC editions this is from the Fitzgerald photo album which the University of South Carolina has it's one of those albums I know I grew up with it the photos are black and white photos are pasted on the black paper so it's crumbling and incredibly they let me handle it I write in my book about how much influence New York City had on the great gatsby how much it owes to being a New York novel the last photo in the Fitzgeralds album when they come back at last from Europe in 1931 and by then Zelda has had her first hospitalizations for schizophrenia you know life is start is really going downhill for the Fitzgeralds the last photograph is this unfocused image of the Statue of Liberty which would have which was new in 1931 and someone Scott or Zelda maybe Scotty has written the words home again around the Statue of Liberty because I talked so much about water in the first chapter in my book and going under and the fear of being pulled under I love the fact that the Fitzgeralds in their albums took so many images of divers I don't know who that is it could be Scott it could be zelda could be someone whose name is lost to history but it's very atmosphere Gus again from the Fitzgeralds albums that's of course scott Fitzgerald holding little Scottie above the waves on the Riviera that's the summer that he was working on Gatsby he was revising Gatsby I found a letter by the way in the University of South Carolina archives from 1924 it's dated a few days before the Fitzgerald's leave Great Neck to go to the Riviera for the first time and Fitzgerald tells the person he's writing to that he's just finished Gatsby that he's just finished working on Gatsby and he says it's an experiment in and you can't quite make out that work it's either form which I think it's probably what it is it's an experiment in form force or force people vote for different things it's on a fold in the letter it's in his handwriting their cigarette burns in the letter I've shown it to other Fitzgerald experts I think we pretty much vote for for him but what that letter has not been collected anywhere I put it in my book because it was it was found too late to be collected in any of the editions of Fitzgerald's letters this is also from the Fitzgerald's album I love that image of Zelda almost every photo I see of Zelda whether she looks beautiful or not so beautiful she she almost always looks uncomfortable to me in photographs and in that image from her own album she's kind of mugging for the camera she's fooling around and I'm Scott and Scotty this is heartbreaking this is also in the University of South Carolina's our that's the briefcase that f scott Fitzgerald had when he was in Hollywood it's a leather briefcase I got to hold it very beat-up and what's heartbreaking about it is Fitzgerald goes to Hollywood in 1937 he dies there of probably his third heart attack in 1940 you see he's had his name engraved in gold on the briefcase but his address is the address of the Scribner Building in New York that was his only permanent address he's moving around two furnished apartments all the time that he's in Hollywood he doesn't have a permanent address so you know I think of this you know one of our greatest American authors and that's the only address he can put on his briefcase this is wonderful I it this the Princeton University Library has Fitzgerald's scrapbook that he kept of the Great Gatsby he pastes all the reviews in there notices about the play which came out on Broadway in 1926 notices about the silent film he even puts in the bad reviews you know Fitzgerald's latest a dud an anonymous cartoonist I had a researcher working on this but we could never find out where this newspaper cartoon was published or who did it the signature is really hard to make out I love it because he he gives us the climax of The Great Gatsby in one frame there's the car driven by Daisy Myrtle is being run over right miss mr. Wilson is committing suicide and there's Jay Gatsby so it's it's jaunty it's funny it's the way they read it in the popular press as this kind of you know over-the-top crime story so I I very much wanted to respect gas b-but also try to chip away at some of the fossilized great books criticism that we live with because I wanted to try to also read it the way it was first read in 1925 and I think that's it thank you very much for coming yes yes did it do I think Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator I think he he is in part an unreliable narrator because he so loves and it and Revere's gatsby so you're getting Nick's bias you know remember the opening pages of the novel he says Gatsby was all right in the end it was what foul dust preyed upon him so he's an unrepentant Gatsby partisan the very end of the novel remember he comes at night it's a double for the opening of the novel the opening scene Nick goes at night to sort of say farewell to Gatsby's mansion and as he says some rude boys have written a nasty word on Gatsby's house on the white marble of Gatsby's house and he erases it yeah that's kind of what Nick does I think in this novel he erases the blots on Gatsby's character and gives us this you know unapologetic love letter to the lost friend by the way that's another way in which the novel is so over designed everybody except Daisy in this novel is reaching out for somebody who's beyond their grasp Nick is reaching for Gatsby Gatsby is reaching for Daisy Myrtle Wilson is reaching for TomTom I mean you can just go down the list it's crazy yeah oh thank you well I'm not going to I'm not going to choose between the language and the message I'm going to say it's because because of how Fitzgerald presented that message so it's both I mean I the language I think and many other people do too is is especially the last seven pages of the Great Gatsby the most powerful and beautiful words anybody has ever written about America Fitzgerald has it both ways he says the dream is tragic he says you're going to get pulled under he says it's kind of a mirage but he writes about that dream in words that make it irresistible and when you think about the last words of the novel that my title riffs on so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past well that suggests of course that you can't escape the past but isn't it noble to try that's that's part of what those words are saying so we beat on I love the fact that he used that verb boats against the current that's the best in what used to be called our national character that we beat on we try we try to be better so I think he has it both ways I'm waiting for the man with the mic yeah yeah yeah um why in my humble opinion I mean Gatsby is a myth Gatsby seems to come out of nowhere in a in one way in one sense it's so much better than the beautiful and Damned then this side of paradise 1920 which is how Fitzgerald you know broke upon the scene the literary scene it gets published in 1920 and Fitzgerald and Zelda are become the toasts of New York and they defer you know he defines the age of the flapper the Jazz Age with the beautiful and Damned with this side of paradise and then beautiful in demmed is his New York novel specifically about a marriage that's falling apart they can't hold a candle to Gatsby for me that was part of the mystery how do i how do books like Gatsby happen some of Fitzgerald's short stories around the time he was writing Gatsby give us a clue the rich boy winter dreams absolution even earlier they're what they're part of what's called the Gatsby cluster of short stories where he seems to be trying out this idea of someone usually a poor boy reaching for a girl out of his grasp you know but it's not even Daisy it's not even that girl it's something else commensurate with to his capacity for wonder you know that that he's reaching for so I love to think about the fact that here we get Fitzgerald who's writing a lot for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post that's where he made his bread-and-butter that's where he made his fortune in the early 20s writing these novels that are okay but I don't think we'd still be reading them today a were it not for the Great Gatsby and then you you know you get tender as the night some of you will hate me for saying this I think it's a I think it's a noble failure I don't think it's quite there and then who knows what it would have happened with the loves of the Last Tycoon that was the novel he was working on at his death it was unfinished at his death it he said he wanted to make it condensed and patterned like Gatsby it's a Hollywood novel and I think it's really interesting but it's not finished I think the letters some of the short stories and the crack-up essays his autobiographical essays in the crack-up and Gatsby I mean those are the masterpieces you may be enemies that if we have one all-nighters in America it is the Great Gatsby and I wondered if you would comment on changes in curriculum where the word English is exercise where high school is now like a dark women even reading where novels are hand drawn so that nonfiction takes precedence and what would happen do they have it the Great Gatsby oh gosh oh thank you like let's make sure that doesn't happen let's really work to make sure oh I'm sorry the question or the comment is this kind lady has been teaching the Great Gatsby teacher for ten years and and she's asked me to comment on some of the changes in curricula that we're experiencing across America where it seems like rather than literature high school teachers in particular middle school teachers are being asked to to teach language arts more nonfiction rather than fiction one of the things I do at the end of the book is to serve a college curricula in America mostly I go to the Ivy League but I take a look at some of the colleges that were important to Fitzgerald and st. olaf's which is mentioned in the novel you know there is a lot of a lot of nonsense out there I'm going to be the unrepentant canon defender here I think I think that we need to get our what many of us consider the great books under our belt before we digress before we play with them before we disagree and say no they're not so great you know and that's a that doesn't just mean books by dead white men that means beloved by Toni Morrison which is a great book that means Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison which is a very tough novel to teach but I do it in freshman English because where else are student's going to read it if they don't read it then I mean I think that's part of our work that we've got to do the tough stuff because people don't just pick up these novels later in life unless something amazing happens to them and unfortunately you get this in high school you get it in college you know part of what's happened at least I can speak in colleges and universities is that teaching has become a popularity contest and so if you don't if you make students work really hard and you know they're not grateful to you for staying up all night reading Invisible Man or Moby Dick or the great gatsby and your numbers start to plummet at your ratings start to plummet you know if your job isn't protected you have to start to worry it's not a great system I'm not happy about it and I think that I certainly know that Fitzgerald wouldn't have been happy about it judging from the books that he kept recommending people read I think we need to stretch out our arms farther and and and reach higher as readers as well as everything else we do that's my crank response to what you said and by the way in case I run out of time I also want to make sure to thank Eric Fraser from the rare books room here at the Library of Congress which is such a beautiful space if you've never been there and you have any occasion to go to look at the ases we the Library of Congress has the only complete collection in the world it's it's really such a treasure and such a gift to be able to do research in Washington DC and have all of this at our fingertips one my question is more valuable I really have two questions I found in in the way it was all very careless and confused they were careless people Tom and Daisy they smashed out things and creatures and then retreated back into their own money or their carelessness or whatever it was that oh well I just want to say one or two words about the prescience of the Gatsby students are always fascinated by this the way the novel seems to predict the Great Depression the lights go out in Gatsby's mansion in the third act and the great national party is about to come to an end and almost like Fitzgerald's sort of knew it the way the novel predicts the details of Fitzgerald's own first funeral when he was buried in a Protestant cemetery in Rockville in the rain about 15 people showed up the minister who buried him didn't know who he was that's in in Scotty's memoir that wasn't published so it's it's amazing how he does seem to look forward to things you had a second Hemmingway I love Hemingway's writing it's hard for me now to talk about Hemingway without saying something about what a bastard he was to his dad and to so many other people I mean he's so mean to Fitzgerald and Hemingway up with with Maxwell Perkins with Scribner z-- when Fitzgerald got a glowing review about the Great Gatsby from the literary critic Gilbert's eldest in the dial the kind of review as a writer you that just makes your your year if you get this review Hemingway said to Fitzgerald too bad about that review now it's going to ruin you for writing any other novel you know he just loved to do that kind of thing Hemingway's language is funny it's it's more pared down I mean a lot of people will argue that Hemingway started to write hard-boiled prose before people writers such as Dashiell Hammett that you know it's kind of neck-and-neck this attempt to get American speech on the page and tough-guy speech and yet at the same time I think Hemingway is more enamored of kind of the biblical stuff you know the biblical Cadence's and references then Fitzgerald is and I'm especially thinking of course of the Old Man and the sea which I had to read three times before I graduated college I'm thinking though of you know the Sun Also Rises which gets its title from Ecclesiastes there's a way in which I feel that Fitzgerald is much more modern by the time you get to Gatsby not in the earlier novels but by the time you get to Gatsby then Hemingway is of course Hemingway got the Nobel Prize Faulkner got the Nobel Prize Fitzgerald number of prizes he got in his lifetime zero it's tough being a writer Gertrude Stein loved it that Fitzgerald yes that probably killed their relationship that Gertrude Stein's told Hemingway that Fitzgerald was the better writer here thank you this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Keywords: Library of Congress, The Great Gatsby (Book)

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Length: 58min 24sec (3504 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 07 2014