The Great Gatsby (Part 1 - The Book): Everything You Didn't Know - Too Much Information

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information,
the show that brings you the secret history and little
known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more.
We are your doom d romantics of details, your green
lights of Granularity, your bootleggers of Bonaldi, your jazz age
revelers of revelatory facts. My name is Jordan run Todg

(00:30):
and I'm Alex Sigel, and today we are taking our
first trip into the land of literature by looking at
one of the greatest books of all time.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, we did a poll on our KOFE and that's right,
Gutenberg's Folly, as I call books came out on top.
So you asked for it, you're getting it.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Deal with it.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, reap whatt you sew?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Not just one, but two episodes, because folks, we're looking
at the Great Gatsby.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
And Jordan's a Gatsby nerd. Oh yes, please tell us pal.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
First of all, I wanted to tackle this book because
it turns one hundred this month, which is kind of crazy. Yeah,
the first episode is going to be about the creation
of the book, and our second installment will be about
the various film adaptations over the years, from the Robert
Redford and Farrell one to the Boz Luhrman Extravaganza, and
there are even some earlier ones before that. But yes,

(01:23):
the Great Gatsby. It really resonates with me because it's
sort of what happens when the most overly earnest, hopeless
romantic does a tour of duty in the real world.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
In many ways, your life story.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
This book was born from author F. Scott Fitzgerald's own
personal heartache and also his disillusionment with the excess and
hedonism during the post war prosperity of the so called
jazz age, an era that he's credited with both naming
and defining with this book. But Scott knew what he
was talking about because so much of The Great Gatsby
has pooled from his own experience, not just the wild

(02:00):
lawn parties fueled by illegal bootlegs and socializing with grand
old money families on Long Island's Gold Coast. Scott knew
what it was like to want something so badly that you
dedicate your life to it, and he knew that having
your dream come true is sometimes even more disappointing than
failing to get it at all. For those who need
a quick recap, the Great Gatsby follows the exploits of

(02:22):
a man born Jay gats He was a small town
Midwesterner who falls madly in love with a woman named Daisy. Sadly,
her parents find him an unsuitable match for her, because,
as the famous line goes, rich girls don't marry poor boys,
and instead they arrange her marriage to the brutish but
rich Tom Buchanan. Jay Gatt spends the next few years

(02:45):
channeling all of his ambition into reinventing himself as Jay Gatsby,
a mysterious millionaire who purchases a mansion on the exclusive
Long Island Coast, just across the bay from his beloved
Daisy and you must understand her husband. He throws lavish
parties in hopes that Daisy will one day attend see
what a success he's made of himself and finally find

(03:08):
him worthy to be her husband. But in the end,
Gatsby's dream falls apart and he comes to a violent end. Now,
your take on Gatsby really says a lot about where
you're at in life, because on one hand, you could
hold him up as the ultimate romantic idealist. He's someone
who dedicated his life to harnessing every ounce of his

(03:29):
ambition and transforming himself into a man worthy of the
woman he loved. And not only that he nearly achieved it,
he almost got there until the system that was built
to keep outsiders out decided that he was getting too close.
Or you could view Jay Gatsby as a criminal, a
delusional stalker, pathetically insecure loser who just can't put his

(03:50):
past behind him. The violent final pages of the book
could be seen as the tragic end for a naive
man who wasted his life chasing a mirage. The most
evocative description of Gatsby that I've come across was that
he's quote a false prophet of the American dream.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah that's good. That's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
So what, you've never read this book? I'm dude.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
I'm sure I must have at some point in high school,
but I really blacked it out. I mean, like I
I I don't know, man, I truly don't, because like
I remember reading Shakespeare, I remember reading like Separate Piece,
Mice and Men, and like a lot of the curriculum
that like I understand to be this, like Salinger and
everything but I feel like by the time I was

(04:35):
in high school, I was either in like Honors or
ap English where we were doing like Walden or Part
of Darkness or other stuff, and I just never, I
just like never caught up to this book and any
of its media portrayals.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
And really so the story is totally unknown time. I mean,
like I know the broad strokes of it.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
There's there's like a pair of giant eyes I think
it's called egg and there's champagne and and beautiful shirts.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
That she's never seen in her life.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Beautiful, such beautiful shirts.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
That's a very specific reference for a book that you've
never read.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
So anyway, I was reading either stuff that was like
in a different like curriculum, and then I was also
personally doing like deeply embarrassing things like reading like Raymond
Chandler and hand come on. So like that was that
was a bit I did.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Uh, So you want to talk about high school bits
we did, well, we're going to go there.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Yeah. And then and then at some point, I mean
I had probably the bog standard. No, I think it
is like a bog standard evolution. Like I got into
the beats, and then I got into I mean Thankfully
I got my Bukowski the way in high school, because
I would have been a much worse human if that

(06:02):
had been like if that had carried into college and
informed my adulthood in a separate way. But so, yeah,
I was doing stuff like that and more than anything
in the Great American literature canon. And then even when
I did start getting into some of that stuff, I
tend to start around the fifties. I just like, I mean,
I mean, I've done some also rises, I've done a

(06:23):
couple of different Hemingways, but like he was a Hemingway guy. Yeah,
which is part of the cliche of my existence, but
as the one I'm meant, well, but it is. I mean,
of course I'm the Hemingway guy and not a gas Back.
You're a Gatspeak guy. And I don't mean that, you know,
as an insult. That's just our personality types. But yeah,
and then I don't know, man, like my American like

(06:45):
literary canon starts really with like, I like all the
fifties stuff. Man, like give me a give me a
John Cheever, give me a give me your Salinger, or yeah,
give me your Sallenger, give me your your confessional poets
from that era and your Vonneguts. I'm a happy man,
but for something like this, just I've just never felt
a tug towards it. So I've never And then every

(07:06):
movie came out like I was just in between movie adaptations, right,
like I was born too late to see the Redford one,
and then by the time the other one came along,
I was just like so checked out of Baz Luhrmann's
whole existence that I had no desire to see it. So, unfortunately,
apologizing to every English teacher I've ever had, I missed
this one.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Sorry, Well, you know how I go. I gotta say
it's pretty good, what's worth checking out. It's under two
hunter pages. It's really well written. And don't take my
word for it. I was.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
I was gonna say, yeah, maybe I'll read it on
the plane.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
You probably could, it is. It's a quick read. Yeah,
probably why a lot of high schoolers like it. I mean, yeah,
I like you. I first came across this book in
high school, like probably most people listening right now, but
I kept across it in high school in a way
that maybe is a little different and hopefully a little
different than most of the people listening in high school.
I liked the girl, which was not unusual, but I

(08:08):
didn't do the normal thing of asking her to come
over and hang out. I was far too shy and
secure for that, so instead I asked the entire grade
to come over and hang out. I grew up on
a lake, and I started throwing these big parties in
hopes that this girl I liked would come over and
be very impressed by my ability to throw a party. Yeah,

(08:28):
I wouldn't really think that far ahead, I guess, and
I would spend these gatherings either djaying or watching for
my balcony up above with my close friends. In either case,
I made myself scarce intentionally in an effort to add
to my mystique. That was my hope. Oh my god,
that's too funny, and my friends would all say, oh,

(08:49):
you're Gatsby. And I hadn't read the book by that point,
so I had no idea what they were talking about.
And they were like, oh, it's great. It's like a
soap opera. You would love it, and he's doing the
whole bit that you're doing.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
So you maneuvered yourself into an Airsat's version of living
the Great Gatsby before you'd read it. Yeah, exactly on incredible,
incredible stuff.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Ask me if it worked well, Jordan. No.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
Well, Thus, armed with that knowledge, I continue being your friend.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah. I mean I have to say kind of like
what you were saying. As much as I loved high school,
the required reading list that was forced on us left
a lot to be desired.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Oh wait, sorry, you loved high school?

Speaker 2 (09:31):
I did.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, okay, so that's where we differ.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah. But yeah, this book, when I did finally come
around to reading it, it really left a mark. I'm
reminded of that great quote from Alan Bennett's The History Boys.
He writes, the best moments in reading are when you
come across something, a thought, a feeling, a way of
looking at things which you thought special in particular to you.
Now Here it is set down by someone else, a

(09:56):
person you've never met, someone even who is long dead,
and it's as if a hand has come out and
taken yours. And I connected to Gatsby and by extension
f Scott Fitzgerald at this time of my life when
I was young, because I too felt this weird toxic
mix of wild insecurity mixed with belief in my own
abilities and possibilities. I was in my I can do

(10:19):
anything phase and believe that life was limited nearly by
the imagination. And you know, I still believe in that
second part to an extent.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Now that makes one of us.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
It makes sense a certain kind of teenager would look
up to Gatsby as heroic and not as a delusional
man attempting to recreate himself in a pathetic attempt to
remake the past that he said desperately sought. There's the
famous line in the book, Jay, you can't repeat the past.
You can't repeat the past? Why of course you can, Michael,

(10:53):
can you repeat the past? Well?

Speaker 3 (10:55):
I do identify with that aspect of it, because, like,
first of all, I was like any teen, but in
my case it was much more noticeable because the things
that I were picking were so outrait that like like
what well, I mean like, so at first, I like
attempted to just become like a pretty bog standard like
punk kid, and that was like perilous because you know,

(11:17):
I went to the Catholic high school and so nobody
everybody was like, what do you?

Speaker 2 (11:21):
How are you suddenly trying to pull off this one eighty?

Speaker 3 (11:24):
But I stuck that out for a while, but then
The next one was, as I think I mentioned on
our Tom Waits episode was Tom Waits, and so I
like started it was like Tom Waits and then the
Strokes hit uh wow for me, and then so it
was like, I mean they they'd been going for a while,
like obviously since two thousand and one, but it's I
think rum on Fire came out when I was at

(11:44):
sophomore or something. So I was just like, Okay, I'm
just going to lean into this thrift store aesthetic and
just like was dressing like a like a bowery hobo
in like for school. Like no, nobody was like doing
a wellness check or anything because of it. But it
became let's just say, my influences became very obvious. So

(12:06):
I understand what the attempt of trying to, you know,
reinvent yourself. And and you know, to a degree, we're
all trying to recreate the past because the present is
so miserable, dude, Like, what what are any of us
doing other than like, you know, that's the that's the
knock against most of our generation is that they're retreating
back into the comforts of youth because adulthood turned out

(12:27):
to be, like we just by dint of where we
were in late capitalism, like not a lot of panned
out unless you were already rich or you know, a
bad person.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Which is kind of what Fitzgerald kind of came to
realize this that I think will resonate with you.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, no, I know. And it's and and because of that,
I would call it like the quintessential American experience and
one that is still relevant. I mean, it's it's fascinating
to read also because like, well it's a I mean,
it's a bit of the you know, not that we
talk about him, but it's a bit of the Vind
Night in Paris, I mean, which also stars at one

(13:07):
point Fitzgerald and Hemyway, who's man Corey something who does
forget so damn funny in that. But you've got even
like even zoomers today are like thinking about the late
nineties as some kind of a like paradise because everything

(13:30):
is so dog right now.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
So I mean, I get it. I think Gatsby is
different though, in that I think we could all sort
of understand the sense of nostalgia wanting to go back,
I mean, the Don Draper thing, wanting to go back
someplace safe where we are loved, you know, But I
think with Gatsby, he wants to remake the past as
he wanted it to be but never was. And I

(13:55):
think that's the difference.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Well, that's just called lying. Have you ever been to
New York? Like people do that all the time, like oh, yeah, yeah,
I have Yeah, I have a DIY band. I'm also
you know, Kevin Klein's kid, but we don't talk about that,
or like, yeah, I have a cool metal band. I'm
also the grandchild of some of the richest people in

(14:20):
American history, but you know, we don't talk about that.
Like Joe, you want to meet a bunch of people
trying to remake a fake past, find a kid of
the trust fund passing themselves off as an artist, Like that's.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
I think you would have really liked Fitzgerald.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah probably, Yeah, I mean, any he was an alcoholic,
so we had that in common.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
I mean, this book. I think one of the reasons
it's resonated with teenagers for so many years now is
because it's less about love and achievement and more about longing.
And I think that's a that's a very teenage sentiment,
you know, would be nice. The Beach Boys, Yeah, love
to Pine. Yes. Yes. Scott Fitzgerald himself is a dreamer,
and all of his works are very sympathetic to those

(15:01):
who want to go beyond their limits. But his whole
ethos is tempered by the sense that achievement is fleeting
and the desire for success, that fire is more important
than reality. As the character Amory, who's a thinly disguised
version of Scott, says in his debut novel This Side
of Paradise, it was always the becoming he dreamed of,

(15:23):
never the being. F Scott Fitzgerald was one of the
great American strivers, and like Jay Gatsby, he died far
too young. What do you think. Let's get into it, baby, Yeah,
let's rock and roll. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy everything
he didn't know about the great Gatsby the book. I

(15:49):
call this section f Scott Fitzgerald's early years. He probably
could have been shoved into a few more lockers. Honestly,
let's get one thing out of the way, right off
the bat. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was indeed named after Francis
Scott Key, his distant cousin who wrote The Star Spangled Banner.
The lyrics at least the music is an old one.
Was a drinking song, yeah, exactly, which is amazing that

(16:10):
we've adopted that as a national anthem.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Interestingly, the title Scott initially wanted for The Great Gatsby
was under the Red, White, and Blue. And also interestingly,
another of Scott's distant cousins was hanged in eighteen sixty
five for being part of the plot to assassinate President Lincoln.
Hell yeah, brother, I just find it fascinating that the
man who seemed to articulate both the American Dream and
the American nightmare is descended from figures who both wrote

(16:36):
the national anthem and murdered the president who saved the republic. Well,
you know, sixth semper tirannus a little on the nose.
I saw a picture of the gun that was used
to kill Lincoln. Things a cap gun, thinking, like the
palm of your hand. It's insane.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, no, I mean I love that. I love That's
like my obsession with the shinzo abby thing of a jig.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
The guy who made the the homemade like look like
a potato launcher or something, the homemade gun.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, the thing of a jig, and like they've got it.
I mean that's just what people call it on the
internet because they've like they've had this thing in like
weapons labs, like in Japan, and they're not able to
replicate supposedly, they're not able to replicate it because they're like,
we can't figure out how he did this without blowing
his arm off, so we can't study it as like
a preventative measure for keeping these parts out of place,

(17:25):
Like it was made out of trash.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Is he a patsy? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
It was made out of trash and it miraculously worked
for the first and only time, So like that's it anyway, Yeah,
I mean, you know, good for uh, good for Lincoln.
He wanted out first of all. I think was the
best thing that could have happened to him. Reilcase considered

(17:50):
like it was like our most depressed president by a
country mile. He was probably gay, his wife was insane.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
I didn't I didn't know, he's probably. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
There's a lot of references to like compare Indians who
frequently like shared his bed or something in some of
the historical stuff around him, and I like, you know,
it's widely known that Mary Todd was like a like
a mentally ill person who they did not have any
wherewithal to treat in that time, and therefore was a
tremendous burden. So yeah, and then like there's a I

(18:20):
think it's after signing the there's a quote of his
I am now the most miserable man living. What I
feel we're equally this was This was a letter to
someone in eighteen forty one. I am now the most
miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed
to the whole human family, there would not be one
cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better,

(18:42):
I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not to
remain as I am is impossible. I must die or
be better, it appears to me. So, you know, getting
shot in the back of the head, like.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
In the middle of a play that was probably not
that great.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
Yeah, I'm just saying, like, there are worse ways to go, man,
including the shinzo abe thing of a jim.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
You get shot in the back of the head during
the play. What play would it be?

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Oh, waiting for GOODO from maximum for like maximum tragedy
cognitive disconnect, it would have to be I think after
the first act, which is like comic and the part
that everyone part, the part of it that everyone remembers,
because quickly afterwards the second act is like just pure
existential terror. So probably yeah, somewhere around the climax of

(19:31):
the first act.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Mom would be Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I hate
that show. I know, I know which which cat had
the most depressing life? Let's kill it. Yeah, that's the plot.
That's like, am I missing anything? And the songs aren't great?

Speaker 3 (19:48):
No, they sure aren't. Dude, I've tried to listen to
that when that movie came out and it was like, okay,
hates Yeah, well it's the same thing with Wicked. Man,
I was like, you know, if this is going to
be a thing, like I'm in a give it a
fair shake despite the fact that I hate musicals.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
It's gonna say, for a guy who hates musicals, you
really give these a shot. You haven't given The Great
gats Be a shot. You gave that Cats movie and
Wicked a shot.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
But yeah, I was like, oh my god, this music
is dogs. There's memory, there's memory, and then just the
most interminable parade of crap and I uh, anyway, so
that memory is mid Oh, come on, depends who's singing it. Okay, sure, anyway,
So I'll make sure to shoot you in the hen
during that.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
If I ever invite you to cats you know what
that means. You know that I want to.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
Yeah, we're actually not sitting together, You're sitting behind me.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, all right, moving.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
On, Moving on. F Scott Fitzgerald was born in September
twenty fourth, eighteen ninety six, in the frozen tundras of
Saint Paul, Minnesota. And this is where the soul of
Gatsby began to take root. Do souls? There's too many
There's too many things happening.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
There, mostly because the I don't think things rooted in
the frozen soil of Minnesota's only Jehovah's witnesses and alcoholics, right,
that's what they grow.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
There's Scott and his family lived on Summit Avenue, the
nicest street in town, boasting those beautiful houses. But while
the FitzGeralds hadn't address on this exclusive street, they lived
at the far end of the row in a house
that was not as nice as the others. Just before
the street turned or became not as nice, the FitzGeralds

(21:32):
were essentially a middle class family and Catholic double whammy,
living on an upper class street. Moreover, they never owned
their own home, but always rented. From his earliest years,
young Scott was painfully aware of his social status and
the sense that its family didn't measure up to the neighbors.
As a result, he developed what he described his incredible

(21:53):
way as a two cylinder inferiority complex. Yeah oh yeah,
you and me both. Like Jay Gatsby, whose home was
in the new money enclave of West Egg, New York,
Scott lived with a sense that there was something better
just next door, and he could get there if he
just put his mind to it. In a short story,

(22:15):
Winter Dreams, published in nineteen twenty two, Scott writes a
thinly disguised version of himself, a man who quote wanted
not association with glittering things in people. He wanted the
glittering things themselves. Scott both admired the rich and also
deeply distrusted them. Yeah, likely because he never felt accepted
by them.

Speaker 3 (22:35):
That's the correct position, buddy.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
He always remembered a storybook from his childhood where big
animals were pitted against the little ones. He resented the
fact that the author clearly seemed to favor the larger beasts,
But my sentiment, he later said, was with the smaller ones.
I wonder if even then I had a sense of
the wearing down power of big, respectable people. One of

(22:59):
the most prevalent archetypes in Scott's writing is a Midwesterner
who's been shut out by high society. This makes sense
considering he grew up as in his own words, a
poor boy in a rich town, a poor boy in
a rich boy's school, and a poor boy in a
rich man's club at Princeton. I have never been able
to forgive the rich for being rich, and it's held
my entire life and works. I need love this.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
Yeah, yeah, don't ever forgive them.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Scott had his first piece of fiction published at age
thirteen in his grammar school newspaper, and as he progressed
into his teenage years, he was sent to a New
Jersey prep school, where his writing talents were encouraged by
father Sigourney Fay, a man who.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Ne Sigourney Weaver is named after him.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Yes, yes, well no. Scott named a character one of
his books Sigourney, and then Sigourney Weaver chose her stage
name from that character. I forget if it was from
the set of Paradise or The Beautiful the Damned, I forget,
But yes, this priest may have also sexually abused him,
which adds a whole other wrinkle to Scott's writing. Well,

(24:06):
you know that'll happen too. You'll have some of those.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
You're gonna get some molesters.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
After prep school, Scott dreamed of attending nearby Princeton. He
considered Harvard men quote sissies, and Yale men as quote
wearing big blue sweaters and smoking a pipe, presumably in
a bad way. But Princeton, in his estimation, was quote lazy,
good looking, and aristocratic like a spring day.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Sure man, Yeah, all right, I don't. I definitely don't
characterize my spring days in relation to the rich.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
But whatever flats you about pow. To Scott, Princeton epitomized
the East Coast establishment, from which he desperately sought acceptance.
He failed the Princeton interest exams twice before meeting with
the admissions committee on what happened to be his seventeenth
birthday and talked himself into a place at the school.
Hell yeah. Upon enrollment, he promptly neglected his studies in

(25:06):
favor of writing for a number of campus publications and
drafting lyrics for a musical put on by Princeton's esteemed
Triangle Club. Initially, Scott wanted to be a poet. While
at Princeton, he wrote a number of verses inspired by
the works of keats Cool, but then disaster struck when
he met a Goyle.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Yes, during his sophomore year at Prindon. Yes, Marv Albert
talks about the Great Gatsby. During his sophomore year at Princeton,
eighteen year old Scott returned home to Saint Paul for
Christmas break, where he attended a sledding party much like
the kind depicted in the Sledding Song.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
I assume, oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
Sleigh bells, right, we covered that that. It's just it's
not about Santa, it's just about racing sleds.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Great, It's just kind of great.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah. It was there that he met Geneva King or
Geneva Genevra.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
I still don't know Genevra. I'm not sure. It's a
weird one.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
Guynevra, guyin Nevra.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
If you were a loved one, know how to pronounce
g I n e v R. He's get in touch.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
So her last name was King, who was also a
sixteen year old debutante from Chicago, and predictably, Fitzgerald fell
in love with her because she was not just any socialite.
Ginny was one of the self proclaimed Big Four debutantes
of the Chicago social scene. She and her three friends
literally commissioned rose gold pinky rings with the phrase the

(26:38):
Big Four of nineteen fourteen engraved in the inner band. Now,
the Big Four in American music often refers to the
most the pioneers of thrash music, which would generally consider
be Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and the fourth one kind of
gets moved in and out. It might be Exodus, depending

(26:58):
on if you're leaning towards to the Bay Area.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Anyway. But they don't have rose gold pinky rings unfortunately.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
So here's the Wikipedia page for the Big Four, because
it is quite catty. Raised in luxury, on their families,
I'm gonna see if I can do it in the
Robin Lee voice. Raised in luxury, on their families, sprawling estates,
and Lake Forest, a wealthy Chicago suburb. The quartet enjoyed
caffree lives as losing, consisting of Folo tennis, country cub

(27:30):
flirtations and private school feuds. So gossip girl. Classmates at
her Connecticut prep school included members of the Rockefeller and
Bush families. Should have bombed it. The Wikipedia entry for
Generva is even less kind. As a privileged teenager cocooned
in a small circle of wealthy Protestant families, King developed
a notorious self centeredness, and she purportedly lacked introspection. Oh

(27:53):
really intensely competitive. King disliked losing to anyone at anything, tennis, golf, basketball,
hunting the homeless for sport. This competitiveness did not extend
to her academic studies. However, Although she completed her schoolwork,
she disliked learning and instead preferred parties where she could
sit up late gossiping with her Big Four friends. She

(28:13):
had three friends and hangers on, rich fulfilling life. This
gets so much worse, I bet it does. Other members
of the Big Four included a woman named Edith Cummings,
who had soon become one of the premier lady golfers
of the jazz age. That's fine. Scholars believed that she
served as the model for Jordan Baker, Daisy's friend who
dates Nick Carraway in The Great Caatsby. So after this

(28:37):
meet cute between a twenty year old and a sixteen
year old at the Christmas sledding party in Saint Paul,
both sad that sounds like a Tom Wade song.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
He was eighteen, he was eighteen.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Oh he got into college two years early.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
I think he was seventeen when he got in anything.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yeah, all right, so fine, delete all that. After a
meet cute at the Christmas sledding party in Saint Paul,
both Scott and Geneva went back to their respective East schools,
he to Princeton and she to her Connecticut prep school, Westover.
Scott did what any self respecting romantic would do in
that era and pummeled her with letter after letter, also
his fists.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Because this was the era. No I'm kidding.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
He didn't, did he but he beat it? Did he
hit Zelda?

Speaker 2 (29:14):
I don't think so. She hit She probably hit him. Yeah, yeah,
that's good.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
This made Geneva happy because, per her Wikipedia page, she
measured her popularity quote by which boys wrote to her
and how many letters she received. Genevra Genivra Genevra would
frequently read Scott's heartfelt letters aloud to her other suitors
for their amusement, despite the fact that he'd specifically asked
her not to do that very thing. Once Scott mailed

(29:45):
her a short love story he'd written entitled The Perfect Hour,
in which he imagined the two of them together at last,
Guyinevra read the story aloud to a rival suitor, who
generously praised Fitzgerald's writing as excellent. She responded to Scott
with a letter that includes this hilarious sentiment, Someday, Scott, someday,
perhaps in a year two three, will have that Perfect Hour.

(30:07):
I want it, and so we'll have it. I want
it and so will have it.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:12):
It's like a weird mix of like extreme teasing and
then like extreme like Captain Picard assertiveness. I want it,
so we'll have it.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
The Queen of Hearts from also Want to Land.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Someone told me, I think I read this on Twitter,
but it was like they've like waited on Patrick Stewart
at like some Manhattan bistroer but they were like, uh,
They're like, he doesn't turn off the Picard voice, So
like when he got to the when she got over
to the table and was ready to take their orders.
He was like, the salmon, is it good? And she
was like, it's a very popular dish. He says, wonderful anyway,

(30:48):
So I'm going to read all of her stuff in
that yeah bad voice. Ginevra responded to his Perfect Hour
short story with one of her own, which she sent
to Scott in March of nineteen fifty. In retrospect, it
does not look great considering the source. In the story,
she's trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man,
all the while pining for Scott, her former lover from

(31:10):
the wrong side of the tracks. Ultimately, they're reunited after
Scott attains enough money to take her away from her
adulter's husband, so she goes to Great Gatsby. Yeah quite
part loud.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Here.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
The scholars have noted the similarity between the plot of
her short story and The Great Gatsby. Scott kept Geniva's
story with him until his death. Years later. Scott's daughter, Scottie,
seriously returned Genervra's letters to her upon reading the note
she'd pen as a teenager Genevre Geneva, now well into

(31:46):
her fifties, was horrified. I managed to gag through them,
although I was staggering with boredom at myself. By the
time I was through, She'd say, goodness, what a self
centered little ass I was. I was too thoughtless in
those days, too much in love with love to think
of the consequences.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Some self awareness arrived a little too late, but she
got there.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, should have been killed guilletin. It's nice that Ginevra
recognized that she was sort of terrible because she was
not very nice to our hero, despite the constant influx
of love letters from him. She still pursued other men
in the parliance of the times. She was a fast girl,
or a hoe, as she'd later say, I was definitely
out for quantity, not quality. In bo. Although Scott was

(32:29):
top man, I still wasn't serious enough not to want
plenty of other attention. Although she was honest ished Scott,
to whom she wrote, I know I'm a flirt and
I can't stop it. This tendency did end up backfiring
in a major way in May of nineteen sixteen, when.

Speaker 4 (32:46):
Jinev ganiv ganever, I have no idea I'm going to
get one of them, was expelled from her prep school
for the heinous crime of flirting with a crowd of
young male admirers for.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Her dormitory window.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
Her head mistress declared Geneva a bold, bad hussy and
an adventuress, an archaic term for a gold digger.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Could just set slut.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
That's a value judgment or value negative, value neutral appellation.
By the way, I can say that because there's a
book called The Ethical Slut that someone told me about once.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
I could say that because I have a slut. Well,
I mean.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Now, of course, jine Evra's influential daddy, who will be
not a metaphorical one that she would have entertained in
because she was a do nothing, rich lay about hoe,
but her actual father, who we will be hearing more about,
shortly threatened legal action unless his daughter was allowed to
return to school after the school agreed to that. After
the school cave to his bullying, he decided to pull

(33:52):
her out anyway and send her to another school, just
to prove that he could do it.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Now.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
This was disastrous for young Guinea, a burgeoning relationship with Scott,
because the new school was further away from Princeton, thus
limiting their ability to visit one another. This was possibly
not an accident, as we will get to. This hurdle
meant that Scott was forced to visit Guinevra at her
family's waterfront villa at the end of his summer break
in nineteen sixteen.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
This trip was an unmitigated disaster.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
First of all, her class conscious father, stockbroker Charles Garfield King,
didn't like the cut of Scott's jib.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
That's a sailing term, right, I think so? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
He supposedly interrogated the nineteen year old Fitzgerroad at length
about his financial prospects or lack thereof. Unimpressed by Fitzi's answers,
Gaynivra's father forbade her from pursuing the relationship and ultimately
ordered her to drive Scott to the nearest train station
at once, and supposedly Scott heard him utter poor boys.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
It actually doesn't appear in The Great Gatsby the book,
but it's infamy. That Line's infanmy comes from its inclusion
in the films where Daisy's to Jay. The line was
discovered scribbled in the margins of Scott's diaries. This couple
splintered throughout the fall, and by January nineteen seventeen they
were done for good. Ginny would say that she was

(35:12):
heartbroken because she was madly in love with Scott poorishness
be damned, but she didn't see a future with him
as a suitable partner due to his middle class status.
Scott himself recalled things a little differently, claiming that she
rejected his love with supreme bored and indifference, and ultimately
came to view her as an immature socialite who toyed
with his affections before throwing him away like a toy.

(35:34):
Ginny is obviously believed to be the inspiration for the
Gatsby character of dais A Buchanan, one of the careless
class of wealthy individuals who quote smashed up things then
retreated into their money. Scott would tell a friend in
his later years, the whole idea of Gatsby is the
unfairness of a poor young man not being able to
marry a girl with money. The theme comes up again
and again because I lived it. What did this dumb

(35:57):
bitch to it the rest of her life?

Speaker 2 (35:58):
I yeah, look that up. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Oh, she paid, she paid for her, she paid for
her shit.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Oh we get to their divorce and all that. Yeah,
she had, she married. The guy she married was pretty
much as bad as Tommy Cannon.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Yeah yeah, and then her sixteen year old disabled son died.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Oh I missed that part. Yeah so uh.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Oh she founded the Ladies Guild of the American Cancer Society. Okay,
so she turned it around. Okay, all right, I withtrack
most of my bile, but not all. Never all to understand,
never all.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
Scott was so distraught by the rejection that he dropped
out of his beloved Princeton or was kicked out or
left due to ill health your mileage macverary, whatever the case.
He enlisted in the Army amid World War one w
W one, the Big One, which the US entered in
the spring of nineteen seventeen. While awaiting deployment to the
Western Front, Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald received training at Fort Leavenworth

(36:58):
under the tutelage of future President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The
biography Ike, an American Hero by Michael Korda states that
Scott was a difficult student, quote who slept through Eisenhower's
lectures and disliked him immensely. His enlistment was basically intended
as an honorable suicide, but Scott was wary of shuffling

(37:19):
off this mortal coil without leaving a grand artistic statement behind.
He would later say, I had three months to live.
In those days, all infantry officers thought they had three
months to live, and I had left no mark on
the world. He spent those three months banging out a
one hundred and twenty thousand word manuscript entitled The Romantic Egotist.

(37:40):
Horrible title, but a self aware one. The Romantic Egotist
was both a memoir and believing that he was about
to die, a heroic war death, a last will and
testament from Fitzgerald. Ultimately, it was rejected by the publishing world.
Imagine think you're about to die and like spending three
months frantically writing a book that you try to get
it published, and everyone's like, nope, I bet you can

(38:03):
do that. You can't imagine that. I bet, yeah, yes,
very easily. The best that Scott got was an encouraging
note from Scribner's, urging him to submit again after some revisions.
This note was sent by Maxwell Perkins, a staffer at Scribners,
who went on to be one of the most famous
literary editors in history, and he'd play a huge role

(38:23):
in Scott's life. He also made Ernest Hemingway a star too.
Welcome back to him a little later. But things went
from bad to worse for poor Scott in the summer
of nineteen eighteen. His book had been rejected. He was
stuck in the army and denied the opportunity of dying
a hero's death because he was just stuck at home
base and the love of his life was gone for good.

(38:44):
Even while courting the woman who had ultimately become his wife,
Scott continued to write the Genevre in a desperate bid
to win back her affections. This was not to be.
While Scott served in the army, Geneva's father arranged her
marriage to William Bill Mitch, a polo player who just
happened to be the son of his dear friend, a
prominent head of Chicago Bank. In July nineteen eighteen, Geneva

(39:09):
wrote Scott to inform him of her engagement. Bitch, I
know to say I'm the happiest girl on earth would
be expressing it mildly. She wrote, I wish she knew Bill,
so that you could know how very lucky I am.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Okay, I take back taking back all the things I
said about her. This woman deserved everything she got. Nice
What an abjectly horrible human?

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Ah? Yes, yes, yes, yes, would do that. The worst
part was Scott had met this man during his ill
fated trip to her family's house, and he wrote in
his diaries that he recognized this guy as competition, so
he was very aware of who this man was. In
a truly insane move, Geneva invited Scott to their wedding,

(39:52):
which he could not attend due to the fact that
he was enlisted in the army that he had done
after dropping out of Princeton because he was depressed because
of her.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah, yeah, not to put too fine a point on it,
but because of her.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Jesus Christ, these people the wealthy. Instead, Scott placed the invitation,
newspaper clippings of the ceremony, and a piece of Geneva's
handkerchief in his scrap book with the note the end
of a once poignant story. Though he would go on
to marry another woman, Scott carried a torch for Geneva
for the rest of his life. Friends would say he

(40:31):
couldn't think of her without tears coming to his eyes.
Many scholars would characterize his romance with Geneva as the
most consequential relationship of Scott's life, just as she would
provide the archetype of Daisy Buchanan. Her polo playing husband
who went on to become a director for Texico, served
as the model for Daisy's rich brute of a husband Tom.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
Oh, sorry, he went to work in petroleum.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, this is just.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
This is getting like I feel like you're fighting with me. Yes,
you made up a fake behind the scenes, her Great
Gatsby to make me hate the wealthy even more.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
Oh my god, guillotine. But scholars would observe that you
never made the same decision that Daisy Buchanan made, opting
for financial security and safety over true love, and given
the lack of rights and opportunities available to women in
that era, it's hard to blame her, and scholars have
since viewed Daisy more sympathetically in recent years. But even so,

(41:32):
this whole experience left Scott feeling immensely bitter towards the
upper class hell. He wrote in nineteen twenty six, here
you should read this.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
As he wrote in nineteen twenty six. Let me tell
you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does
something to them, makes them soft where we are hard
and cynical, where we are trustful, in a way that
unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
They think, deep in their hearts that they are better
than we are. One hundred years later, nothing's changed.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
I need like this episode.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, just yeah, just public service message, like do crime
to the wealthy? Like it doesn't it's not really You're
not they're.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Not real people. You're not actually hurting anyone.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
You're more likely to get caught because of course, the
police only exist for protection of property and social control
in this country.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
But you don't.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
You don't have to have a guilty conscience about anything
you do to the wealthy.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Chances are they'll get over it.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, yeah, that's also true. Yeah, they don't face real
consequences and they can bounce back. So yeah, I do
crime against the wealthy. What are they gonna do, like
write more art about it because they've never had they
don't they're bad artists on taboot.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
I love that this is still on the iHeart platform.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah yeah, I can't wait to get a one star
review from someone saying I'm I hate rich people, and
I'll be like, yes, I do, to give me a
reason why not to. The onus is on you stop
breaking everything.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Ooh we're so hated. Yeah, because of all the evil.
Three days after Geneva's wedding in September nineteen eighteen, a
deeply lonely Scott professus affections to another social LIGHTE dude,
lay off the social lights. I know. Man.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Come on, bud, yes, Steff, come on man, you don't
want to be doing this, buddy.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Her name was Zelda Sayre boom. Yeah, you're gonna love this.
He met the seventeen year old Southern bell wall stationed
at Camp Sheridan, Montgomery, Alabama.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
She was a.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Vivacious, highly sought after socialite, and the comparisons of Geneva
were obvious, but Zelda was a little bit more uh
Southern her heil, I think I think you. I would
love to hear you react to this. So here, how
about you take that? Yes?

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Uh yeah, okay, I can take this. Growing up in
the post Bellum South, Zelda would say she derived strength
from Montgomery's Confederate past. Early on in the courtship, Zelda
and Scott took a stroll through a local Confederate cemetery.
When Scott failed to show sufficient reverence Zelda, Zelda verbally

(44:20):
roundhouse kicked him, saying he'd never understand how she felt
about the Confederate debt, which, to be fair, was probably true.
This was because her grandfather was a Confederate senator whose
extended family owned the first and presumably only at this
point in history. Wouldn't be surprised if we got another
one white House of the Confederacy. Zelda's father, Anthony D. Seyer,

(44:44):
was an Alabama politician described on his Wikipedia page as
an avowed white supremacist. And if that all sounds harsh,
bear in mind that he authored the eighteen ninety three
Sayer Act, which disenfranchised black voters for seventy years and
ushered in the era that we now know as Jim Crow.
Quoting once again from Wikipedia, where the editors truly brought

(45:05):
their a game. During her idle youth, Zelda grew up
immersed in the white romanticism of anti Bellum plantation life
built on slavery and she lived a privileged existence, free
of any responsibilities, with her every whim gratified by African
American servants.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Damp, they really got her ass ye.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Living in a racially segregated society where the lynching of
African Americans often occurred, Zelda never questioned the brutality and
injustice of Alabama's Jim Crow laws, and she idolized her father, who,
as a conservative Southern judge and white supremacist, served as
quote one of the sturdiest pillars of Alabama's racial hierarchy, tremendous.

(45:43):
Also her father's uncle, so her great uncle was John
Tyler Morgan, who is a Confederate general in the American
Civil War and the second like as in right after
the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Oh, oh my god, I missed that, thank you.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
He also may have sexually abused Zelda as a child,
which yeah, her dad the not the grand the second
Grand Wizard of the heaven God.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Standards at borrels here.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
We sim belonged to a very old organization of a
certain cond.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
Later, when Zelda and Scott became pregnant, she insisted the
child be born on southern soil. Scott vetoed this wisely,
and it became a major point of contention. So all
in all, Zelda seems like a poor choice of rebound
for the heartbroken Scott until you realize the crucial point
that she was just as rich and just as vapid

(46:44):
as Guynevra, one of the most celebrated debutants of the
Montgomery Country Clubs set never heard a more pathetic sentence
in my life. A newspaper article about her quoted her
as saying she only cared about quote boys and swimming
and presumably instant uschanized racism.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
She was very active and energetic, though what's got that
going for? Yeah? Scott would later write to a friend,
I'm in love with a whirlwind who says the N
word a lot. And also, as previously noted, Zelda was
highly sought after. A friend would later note courting Zelda
Sarah was competitive business, and Scott was very competitive. Peace

(47:28):
was declared in nineteen eighteen and Scott was discharged from
the army soon after the following year. In nineteen nineteen,
he proposed to Zelda, who turned him down due to
his lack of financial prospects.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Oh my god, f take the hint, take the el. Yeah,
come on, buddy, go back to the North.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Coming so soon after the Geneva situation imploded, this rejection
did a number on Scott. He accepted a job writing
copy at a New York advertising firm, but it barely paid.
Things got so bleak that he publicly threatened to jump
to his death out a window of the Yale Club.
I guess presumably the Princeton Club wouldn't have him in

(48:08):
because he was a dropout. I don't know. And he
also carried a revolver in his pocket daily as he
contemplated whether or not to use it on himself. Hell yeah.
Eventually he quit his dreadit day job and made the
time honored move of moving in with his parents.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
Really just the er millennial huh yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah. He returned to Saint Paul, to the same low
rent house on the same wealthy street, and became something
of a recluse for a time. He threw himself into
one last attempt at writing a novel. Abstaining from alcohol
and parties. Per Wikipedia, he worked around the clock to
revise his thinly disguised memoir The Romantic Egotist, which had

(48:47):
been rejected in his Army Days. Although he retitled it
This Side of Paradise, it was a romana clef of
his Princeton years, and his romances was Genevra and Zelda.
You knowles A, that's a well known phrase.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Right, I don't know, but how many debutantes in your background?
I'm starting to look askance at you now, buddy, shockingly few?

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, well you are from New England. There's that.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Uh yeah, ROMONAICLEF. Sure it's a novel that everyone knows
is about somebody real, but the author pretends it's not there.
You go, well, well said thank you, as Scott finalized,
I still I can't.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
I'm laughing at f F is going to be the
best recurring joke of this and I can't even think
about it without I need to get through this. I
need to get through this, as he as he finalized edits.
Scott took a job repairing car roofs in Saint Paul
Jesus Christ, one of the more colorful pre famed jobs
I've ever heard. One evening in the fall of nineteen nineteen,

(49:51):
after an exhausted Scott returned home from work, the postman
rang the door of his parents' house and delivered a
telegram from Scribner's bouncing that his revised manuscript had been
accepted for publication. On reading the telegram, an ecstatic Scott
ran down the streets of Saint Paul, flagging down random
automobiles to share the news.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
I love that, and this is where the story ends. Yeah,
he lived happily ever after.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yes. One immediate upshot of his happy news was that
Zelda Sayer, the girl Nazi, agreed to marry him, you know,
since he wasn't a failure and and could afford to
care for her in the manner to which he had
grown accustomed. They tied the knot on the first Saturday
of April in nineteen twenty, just eight days after the

(50:40):
publication of This Side of Paradise, not a coincidence. Hilariously,
no parents were present and there was no reception following
the service. Though Scott was finally married, his feelings for
Zelda at this time weren't exactly warm. According to biographer
Andrew Turnbull, victory was sweet, though not as sweet as

(51:02):
it would have been six months earlier, before Zelda had
rejected him. Fitzgerald couldn't recapture the thrill of their first
love Fitzgerald himself told a friend at this period, I
wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand that
anybody else marry her. His feelings, though, would ultimately solveen.
He'd later write to a friend, I love her, and

(51:22):
that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic,
but Zelda is the only God I have left. Now
that's a hell of a lot.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
Yeah, you know, pretty good foundation for a marriage. I'd say,
nothing problematic about that.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, it's just like watching a drowning man. Like just
ask for another weight more wyeah. In the words of
Giles Corey, you like that for a pool.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Nice. Nice.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Too much information in just a moment. Wow, Wow, so
our boy.

Speaker 3 (52:23):
A F's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, appeared in
bookstores on March twenty sixth, nineteen twenty. It was an
instant success, selling forty thousand copies within the first year.
Critics hailed it as the best American novel over the year,
and Scott became a household name practically overnight. Side note,
this novel also contained the first written word of the
term t shirt. At the time, they were seen as

(52:44):
undergarments marketed to bachelors who couldn't see you. Also, This
Side of Paradise is credited with the first use of
the word wicked to describe something good. There's not a
lot of Bostonians that know that. Another upside of Scott's
newfound fame was that magazines now accepted his previously rejected
storre man. I was trying to get some lilliteration. Let
me try that again, Scott. Another upside of Scott's newfound

(53:05):
fame is that magazines now accepted his previously perniciously rejected stories.
Case in point, the Saturday Evening Post now published his
story Bernice bobs her hair. Okay, man, that's a famous story,
but there was less to write about back then.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
That's a famous one. That's about like somebody sort of
becoming a flapper. That's about like a woman becoming empowered.
And it was this big stuff. In May of nineteen twenty.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
And before his death in nineteen forty, Scott published one
hundred and sixty short stories, almost four for every year
of his life. That's a respectfable batting appage. Yeah, Soon
after the marriage, the new luweds resided at the Biltmore
Hotel in New York City, where they terrorized guests and
staff with their wild behavior. Scott would do handstands in
the lobby, while Zelda frequently slid down the banisters. Gosh, buffo,

(53:53):
variety calls it buffo after two and that's a word
they don't use light that after two weeks.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
That's a Simpsons reference.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
After two weeks they were asked to leave, so they
continued their wild jazz age Shenanigans two blocks away at
the Commodore Hotel. Upon arrival, they spent half an hour
spinning in the revolving door goodness. In general, they treated
the town as their personal playground. Scott would later liken
their behavior to two small children in a great bright,
unexplored barn spend a lot of time in Barnes, Scott.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
I mean it is Saint Paul, that's true. And a
listener right in asking if we do a lot of
Life show in Minneapolis or St. Paul in the summer, if.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
We can know if we can get it at Paisley Park,
then I'll do it. One evening, they took a drunken
trip to the County Morgue where they inspected unidentified corpses
for what who's to say.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
That's deeply troubling. That's a weird thing to do when
your hammered.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
It is, yeah, and like we're ruling out sexual stuff
just to give them a benefit of the doubt. So
what did they do? They tried to?

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Did they maybe they were going to taste them? Did
they taste them?

Speaker 3 (55:09):
Long pig is the last taboo of the of the
wealthy class, right, so they what do they bring along
like a little charcoal girl or something? Or do they
just defiled them? My research will bear me out. Another evening,
Zelda insisted on sleeping in a dog kennel. That's fine,
should have done it more. Honestly, what have helped? Dorothy
Parker first encountered them riding on the roof of a

(55:31):
taxi cab. Perhaps Scott merely was drawing on his prior
professional experience as a car roof repairman and inspecting it,
Parker recalled, they did both look as though they had
just stepped out of the sun.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Their youth was striking.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
Everyone wanted to meet him, and presumably the unsaid part
in there was and was willing to accept Zelda as
part of that bargain. Nevertheless, these days were not exactly
domestic bliss. During the first few months of their marriage,
Scott began to grow concerned that his unwashed clothes had
begun to disappear. Eventually, he opened a closet and found

(56:05):
months worth of clothes in a giant heap. Zelda, the
ex deb son of the slavery rich, had never managed
things like laundry before and simply didn't know what to do.
When a magazine asked her to contribute her favorite recipe,
she wrote, see if there is any bacon, and if
there is, ask the cook which panned, to fry it in.
Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so,

(56:26):
try to persuade the cook to poach two of them.
It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns
very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not
turn the fire too high, or you will have to
get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably
on china plates, though gold or wood will do if
handy get in their exploits in this era underscores the
uneasy relationship between Scott's life and work. He was living

(56:48):
the kind of life that could easily be transformed into fiction,
And then he wrote fiction while continuing to live it
out in his private life. This occasionally left him tied
up in psychological knots. He was working on a follow
up to his smash debut, a book that would become
The Beautiful and the Damned The damn Ned. The plot
follows a young artist and his wife who become burnt

(57:09):
out and bankrupt while partying in New York City. So
she's had no good car ideas did he? Nope, just no,
Just wrote from things that happened to him. Wonderful. He
was the first blogger.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
A Loser.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and
Gloria Patch in his words, the chill Mindedness and Selfishness
of Zelda. Metropolitan Magazines serialized the manuscript in late nineteen
twenty one, and Scriptners published the book in March of
nineteen twenty two, upon which it also became a success.
Soon after the birth of their only child, daughter Francis

(57:49):
Scott Scottie Fitzgerald nineteen twenty one and Losers, they moved
to Great Neck Long Island. This vantage point, Scott observed
the clash between old money and new money, which provided
the underlying conflict of Gatsby. The people who lived in
Great Neck on the west side of Manhasset Bay had

(58:10):
recently acquired their wealth, while those who lived in nearby
Manhasset Neck or Cow Neck on the east side of
the bay had inherited theirs. West Eggs, where Jay Gatsby
would live, and East egg Is where the Buchanans lived.
I'm right of this line from Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil, where someone is assessing the principal character,

(58:31):
the Kevin's basic character in the movie, who's this like
gay southern antiques dealer man about town in Savannah. Someone
is like, asks him if he's from new or old money,
and he says, which do you think? And he said, well,
at first I thought new because I don't know your family.
But then I realized it must have been old And
he said, how did you know that? And he said,

(58:53):
because new money would have had that fraying armchair fixed,
whereas old money would have left it as is, upon
which this main character says, Ah, but you've guessed wrong.
I am new money.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
I simply left it that way so that I could
sell it to old money. That's good.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Scott settled in Great Neck with other members of the
nouveau rich, and his neighbors included the writer Ring Lardner,
a made up name who never existed. What did that guy?

Speaker 2 (59:21):
He's a famous sportswriter. You don't know him.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
Oh, one of those guys who's like the noble art
and wrote a lot about boxing.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
The Ringer might be named after him. Maybe no, no,
it's not. I regret there fine that. I'm just gonna
make fun of his name, which is stupid. That's two nouns,
ring and lard. Unlike Scott's most famous literary creation, the
home that he shared with his young family at six
Skateway Drive was not especially ostentatious. In fact, it more
closely resembled the Bungalow inhabited by Nick Carraway than Shay

(59:50):
Gatsby or the Gatsby Mons if you will. Fitzgerald House
was listed for.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
Sale in twenty fifteen for three point eight million, which
for that era. Yeah, yeah, that's shockingly affordable. But like Gatsby,
the FitzGeralds through raucous parties that they're home, fueled by
the newly prohibited booze prohibition became the law of the
land after World War II. That's a whole other episode

(01:00:17):
and an HBO series. I'm told, Oh, Empire with their
Boardwalk Empire.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
People were all up.

Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
They were all talking about Boardwalk Empire at one point,
and now people don't talk about Boardwalk Empire anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
Brian Brian, Brian, Yeah, Oh, we'll talk about it in
the morning.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
That's what I was going with. Those parties came with
some amusing unorthodox rules, including this one. Visitors are requested
not to break down doors in search of liquor, even
when authorized to do so by the host and host
Tess Okay. Scott had mixed feelings about living in the
land of the wealthy. On one hand, he continually strove
to emulate the rich, but he was also deeply offended

(01:00:58):
by their grotesque displays of health and fundamentally disproved of
their lavish parties.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
You gotta choose a sign. Scott was also somewhat unnerved
by one of his neighbors, an enigmatic man named Max Gerlash.
That's the thing about rich people in this area. I
can't pronounce any of their names. After serving the Great War,
Gerlash settled in New York, where he lived the life
of a millionaire playboy. He flaunted his wealth by throwing

(01:01:25):
elaborate parties, never wore the same shirt twice, and used
faux aristocratic jargon like old sport. No one in his
circle understood where he obtained his fabulous wealth, and he'd
liked to keep people guessing by spreading self created myths
about himself. He claimed that he'd been educated at Oxford
and he was descended from the German Kaiser.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
Many of these did you how did that test?

Speaker 4 (01:01:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Well, yeah, yeah. Many of these details, including the Oxford claim,
would be incorporated into the character of Jay Gatsby shocking
in truth. Max Gerlosh was what I've seen described as
a gentleman bootlegger who operated high end speakeasies on behalf
of Arnold Rothstein, the kingpin of the so called Jewish mafia,

(01:02:13):
who was notorious for having fixed the nineteen nineteen World Series,
which is a whole other separate episode. When prohibition was
repealed at the onset of the Great Depression in the
early nineteen thirties, Gerlash's bootlegging business dried up golf swing
and he lost his wealth. He was so despondent by

(01:02:34):
this that he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Nice Unfortunately or fortunately, this failed, and the gunshot left
him blind. As a result, he lived as an invalid
for the remainder of his days. Years after f Scott
Fitzgerald's death, Girlosh attempted to contract his biographer with claims
that he'd been the inspiration for the character of Jay Gatsby. However,

(01:02:59):
the biographer thought this was just the wild claim of
a broke invalid and refused to speak with him. Gerlosh
died in nineteen fifty eight and was buried in a
pine casket at Long Island National Cemetery, an appropriately sad
end for the man who was surely Gatsby. It seems
obvious that this man was clearly the inspiration for the

(01:03:19):
character of Jay Gatsby. A self mythologizing ex soldier who
rapidly amassed a ton of wealth through shadowy means associated
with the Jewish gangster, claimed to Oxbridge Education, had tons
of shirts through crazy parties, and called everyone old sport.
The evidence really kind of adds up. Both Zelda Fitzgerald

(01:03:39):
and several family members would say as much. Zelda's exact
quote was Gatsby was based on a neighbor named von
Gerlosh or something who used to say that he was
General Pershing's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging. But
for years, for reasons I don't fully understand, there was
some debate about this among historians. Literary historians, I should say,

(01:04:00):
I'm unclear if they didn't believe Zelda because the quote
was kind of vague, or because she spent the last
years of her life battling debilitating mental illness in a
psychiatric hospital, or just garden variety sexism. Could be all
the above. But in recent years information came out that
one of Gerlash's speakeasies was mere feet from the Plaza hotel,
where Scott and Zelda frequently stayed while visiting Manhattan. They

(01:04:23):
also discovered a letter from Gerlash in Scott's archives which
includes the phrase how are you and the family old sport.
This was all the proof that academics needed, and now
he is considered the true inspiration for the character of
Jay Gatsby.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
Yeah, I mean he stole everything else, right, like I'm sorry,
not steal he It seems very likely observed. It seems
obvious that this was his pattern. Yes, the guy had
had one move and it was writing from life.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
But he knew how to live an interesting life.

Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
No he didn't, Oprah. You gotta watch thirty Rocky Stupid
son of a Bitch. That's like one of my favorite
jokes in that show where they do a flashback to
Liz and Jenna doing improv in Chicago, like obviously a
second city reference, and then it just cuts to Tina
Fabian like, Okay, so I've got so we're gonna do

(01:05:12):
from the airs, like from the audience whatever, We've got
Oprah having lunch with sling Blade and she sits down
and she goes, mmm, I sure do love these French
fried pectators, and Jenna responds, no, you don't, Oprah, which
is like three levels of improv joke, like not yes, ending,

(01:05:35):
not recognizing her own character.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
It's just.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
Anyway that phrase lives rent free in my heart. No
you don't, Oprah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Soon after the FitzGeralds settled in Great Neck Long Island,
the local paper sensationalized the Hall Mills murder case. I'd
ever heard of this, It's been kind of memory hold,
but this was one of the earliest true crime sensations,
a real life soap opera that exposed the tensions between wealth, morality,
and justice in the roaring twenties. It goes a little

(01:06:07):
something like this five six seven eight. Reverend Edward Hall,
a married Episcopal priest in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was
having an affair with Eleanor Mills, a married choir singer
from his church. On September sixteenth, nineteen twenty two, their
bodies were discovered posed under a crab apple tree in

(01:06:29):
a secluded area, both shot in the head. Torn. Love
letters from Eleanor to Reverend Hall were scattered all around them,
adding to the sensationalism. Suspicions soon fell on Reverend Hall's
wealthy wife, France's Noel Stephens Hall, and her influential family,
the Stevens. Rumors swirled that France's, possibly aided by her

(01:06:50):
two brothers, had discovered the affair and orchestrated the killings Nice. However,
the initial police investigation was botched, the crime scene was contained,
eminated by souvenir hunters, and crucial evidence was lost or mishandled.
Nice A grand jury initially failed to indict anyone but
in nineteen twenty six, following new testimony from a maid

(01:07:12):
who claims she heard gunshots and screams from the Hall
of State, Francis Hall and her brothers were charged. The
trial became a media circus, with lurid details and class
tensions fueling public fascination. Nice Ultimately, the prosecution's case was weak,
relying heavily on circumstantial evidence and questionable witnesses, and after

(01:07:35):
a highly publicized trial, all three defendants were acquitted. It
was truly the oj trial of its day, and the
murders remain officially unsolved. So to recap, you have Fitzgerald's
life story where he's rejected by the love of his
life for being too poor. Then the love of his
life consents to marrying a rich cad while Scott's serving

(01:07:57):
the military. You have Scott's actual wife refusing to marry
him until he made something of himself. Yeah, you have
this mysterious rich neighbor who throws crazy parties with money
earned from the underworld, and you have this tragic, murderous
love triangle. All of the elements are in place for
the Great Gatsby. You would think Scott would recognize the
potential and get to work on it asap, but instead

(01:08:20):
he makes a doom attempt at becoming a Broadway playwright.
He spent his initial period in Long Island is seeing
He spent his initial period in Long Island hard at
work on The Vegetable, a satire that mocked the uniquely
American desire to get ahead and keep up with the Joneses.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
Okay, I'm sorry, Yes, I know this is perhaps the
foundational great American novel.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
But was Fitzgerald a secret idiot? He's a great writer? Like, yes,
to recognize you know, let me put this way. I
have a friend who's a photographer, and I sort of
would say to them. I didn't say this to them
because that would be offensive and rude, but I sort
of implied, like I didn't really understand, like what made

(01:09:07):
a great photographer? That's okay, yeah, and so you're a
credon what? And she basically described it as like you
have the entire world, you're picking this tiny little window
to like focus in on, and like, yeah, and that's
kind of how I viewed Scott here. He had his
entire world in front of him, which is all fairly
fascinating at this moment in history and where he was

(01:09:29):
at professionally and personally in his life. And he chose
that little window to zoom in on.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
But he didn't have an entire life. He had just
all of this life experience thus far.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Yeah, other things he could have pulled from.

Speaker 3 (01:09:42):
Yeah, but we know that he didn't. Like it's right
there in the novel that everything. He just wrote a
bunch of people as they existed.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
Yeah, but I'm sure you countless couldn't do that. Countless
others that he didn't put in there because it didn't work.
It didn't work for the story he wanted to tell.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
I'm gonna go with secret Idiot.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
Also, I mean, I don't know you could even have
an entire story laid out to you verbally, like pretty
much like he did with Genevro when she wrote that story.
But the way that it's told and just the writing
of it is really beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
I said, he wrote, Well, but maybe who's a savant anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
Well just think about it. Well, this was Less Good
The Vegetable. The play was an adaptation of one of
his short stories. The plot concerns a man who aspires
to be president, that is, if he can't hack it
as a postman. He doesn't actually want the presidency, but
he thinks that it would be nice in a culture
that's obsessed with money power and upward mobility. Yeah, the

(01:10:40):
whole this was a little too on the nose. If
you're critiquing the American dream and make it a little
more interesting, then the play was a flop, closing after
opening night in November nineteen twenty three. The audience began
walking out during the intermission, and Scott begged the lee
eating man to stop and just call it off, And

(01:11:03):
when the actor refused, Scott fled the theater and hold
up at the nearest bar. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):
Baby, And okay, that's sad. I feel bad worse. He
shouldn't have said he was a dummy for some reason.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
I don't know why. He owed money for this personally,
and so to pay off some of the debts incurred
by the play, he just began cranking out magazine stories,
which was the sort of go to move for him
when he needed money quick.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Oh it's a good to move for everybody. Dude, You
have no idea how many of your favorite authors subsisted
on hand and mouth on like, especially once we get
into the era of like sci fi and yeah, oh
my god, yeah, you know you used to be able
to live as a writer in this country. It's just shocking.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
Although he viewed these short stories for magazines as worthless,
One of these was Winter Dreams, which Scott would describe
as an early attempt to the Gatsby.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
Idea, inspired by the Holes Mills Murder, the shadowy character
of Max glac and the parties he had at the
homes of his long Island rich neighbors. Fitzgerald wrote eighteen
thousand words for his novel by mid nineteen twenty three, or.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
Roughly as long as this episode script.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Yeah that's what I'm saying. Come on, kind a real
job f podcasting. He discarded most of his new story
as a false start. His early version was set in
eighteen eighty five, a few years before he was born.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
And the plot followed the upbringing of.

Speaker 3 (01:12:27):
A Catholic boy growing up in the Midwest. This was
essentially meant to serve as a prologue that gave some
background on Gatsby, but he decided to cut it completely. Instead,
the bit was published in a as a short story
that's Got wrote called Absolution. In his early draft Daisy
was named Ada, and Nick Carraway was dud The aristocrats

(01:12:50):
the fuck back on the secret idiot train is that
was that common name of the era.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
Dudley.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
Dudley was this is my son, dud So after tossing
out this early draft, Scott began again in April of
nineteen twenty four. A few weeks later, the Fitzgerald, Scott, Zelda,
and their two year old daughter Fitzi, boarded an ocean

(01:13:20):
liner bound for France. They settled in the French Riviera Jordan.
You've been to this house.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
I've been to this Yeah, that's very cool. I think
it's a hotel now, ah, there it is, yeah, yeah,
uh not the first appearance of a house that one
of these people lived in that is now a hotel
for many people.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
So in this future hotel, Scott proceeded to write his
brutal indictment of the American Dream. Critics have suggested that
the melancholic mood of the book may have been inspired
in Parked by Scott's new home in Europe, which was
still struggling to recover from the Great War. It would
recover justin time for the Rolling Stones to go there
and do enormous amounts of heroin, so who's to say

(01:14:07):
if it was good or bad. I mean, we got
Exile on Main Street out of the French Riviera, so
like you can't be that kind of a wash, you know,
the World War One destruction Exile.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
Here's it. Here's Exile.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
Could be one album, right yeah, oh yeah, we all
know that there's some filler on it. Okay, I mean,
obviously there's the racist Calypso song, but like the rest
of that album could be they.

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
Could they drinks it fast? Yeah, very much.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
I'm glad they didn't. The melancholy may also have been
due to the fact that during their time in the
French Riviera, Scott and Zelda found themselves in the midst
of a serious marital crisis. While there, Zelda fell in
love with a French naval aviator, which is probably an
indictment of the French military that they have aviators in there. No,

(01:14:57):
I'm kidding, I know this all mesched up. This guy's
name was stu Though Edreward Josanne Edouard Jolins. After spending
a few weeks swimming with this dashing navy aviator during
the day and dry humping with him at the local
casinos on the dance floor at night, Zelda decided that
she wanted to leave Scott and asked him for a divorce.

(01:15:18):
Scott responded in a totally level headed, rational way by
locking Zelda in their home and going to confront his
rival face to face and challenge him to a duel.
Been there, Hell yeah. Unfortunately, upon trying to track Edrew
add down, he discovered this man, in the true manner
of all frenchmen, had turned tail with no intention of

(01:15:38):
ever marrying Zelda. He'd simply skipped town and FitzGeralds never
saw him again. You faded, La ma Seles. What a
great people. Zelda was distraught by this whole thing and
took an overdose of sleeping pills, but survived because she
just had so much more racism left in her. H

(01:16:01):
This is where things get weird weirder. Eduardo Edouard Josane
would later claim that Zelda had made the entire story
up and that there was no romance between them. They
both had a need of drama, they made it up,
and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled
and a little unhealthy imagination, which is fine, but I'm

(01:16:21):
also choosing him to paint him as a coward.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Yeah, because he's a Frenchman.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
The couple apparently never spoke of the incident again, but
it created a rift in their marriage that never fully healed.
Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, I knew something had happened
that could never be repaired. He took many elements of
his stormy relationship with Zelda, including the loss of his
certainty in her love, and as is becoming a.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
Theme, channeled it into his novel.

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
In August of nineteen twenty four, he wrote to a friend,
I feel old too this summer. The whole burden of
this novel, the loss of those illusions that give such
color to the world that you don't care whether things
are true or false as long as they partake of
the magical glory.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Yeah, he's a good writers. It's worth reading.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
He's a good Maybe I'll get to it, Maybe I won't.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
There's a lot to make.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
What are you gonna do? Also, it's hilarious that the
jazz age is coined by a white guy married to
a racist woman, and it was explicitly about just tooling
around and having parties with rich white people.

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
You this country. Tremendous, tremendous point.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):
You you fitzy, fucking Fitzy. He was always doing that
kind of ships.

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:17:40):
So, as as has become a parent by this point,
Jay Gatsby is primarily an amagamation. I do it put
that one in So as has become a parent, Jay
Gatsby's primarily an amalgamation of Flashy self, mythologizing bootlegger Max
Gaelach and Scott himself, the romantic Midwestern striver who spent

(01:18:03):
most of the life on the outside of high society,
looking in desperately hoping that he could be good enough
for the crowds of Princeton or Manhattan, or Long Island
or the Riviera. And if he couldn't get that, then
at the very least he'd shtook a couple of them.
Scott would later say in this period, I know gads
be better than I know my own child. Horrible. Wow,

(01:18:26):
Why would you say that to the world. I had
him a while and then I lost him, and now
I know I have him again.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
At okay once again.

Speaker 3 (01:18:36):
Scholar Mariene Corgan, who wrote the book, So we read
on how the Great gats became to be and why
it endures. Observed during her appearance on an episode of
Fresh Air, very white sentence, Yeah, I know. I think
you get that sense in Fitzgerald of someone who remade
himself but also was aware at times in his life
that he was pretending to be someone he was not.

(01:18:57):
Commentator Chris Matthews, not the hard ball I think it
is the heartball guy, the hardball guy. Chris Matthews elaborated
on this point. Catsby needed more than money. He needed
to be someone who had always had it, this blind
faith that he can retrofit his very existence to Daisy
specification is the heart and soul of the great Catsby.
It's the classic story of the fresh start, the second chance.

(01:19:20):
There are some who believe that Jay Gatsby resembles Scott's
maternal grandfather, Philip Francis McQuillan. A lot of Francis is
running around in this family who emigrated from Ireland. Whether
it is at age eight before settling in Saint Paul
and making a reasonable fortune running a wholesale grocery establishment,
then dying at the age of forty three of tuberculosis

(01:19:42):
and chronic nephritis, is that now, it's probably some skin
skin rotting thing. I don't actually want to know.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
No, I think it's like a liver thing. Kidney kidney
sounds awful.

Speaker 3 (01:19:57):
His money, however, apparently did not make its way to
our boy's parents, also known as f MA and f Pa.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
What's that?

Speaker 3 (01:20:08):
I'm gonna see how long I can push this until
one of them dies?

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
What's the life of the departed? Like lace, Curt and Irish? Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:20:16):
The line of the part is it when dignant?

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
Is is it?

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
When dignan's? I bet you had two accents?

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
H hang on? You were like two different people. Bet
you had two different accents.

Speaker 3 (01:20:26):
Oh right, hang on, hang on, hang on. Your family's
dug it in the south the projects like ticks three
deca man at best.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
You, however, grew up on the North Shore.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
Huh well, Lottien dah, you were some kind of a
double kid.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
I bet right.

Speaker 3 (01:20:38):
Huh one kid with your old man, one kid with
your mother. You're upper middle class during the weeks, then
you're dropping your ohs and you're hanging in the big
bad SOAUTHI projects with your daddy the fu donkey on
the weekends. I got that right. Yep, you have two
different accents. You did didn't, you, little fucking snake.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
You were like two different people. You're a psychiatry.

Speaker 3 (01:21:00):
Yeah, well, if I was, I'd ask you why you're
a stateie making thirty grand a year. And I think
if I was Sigmund Freud, I wouldn't get an answer.
So tell me what's a lace curtain mother like you
doing in the stadies? And then of course this is
this is God. This movie wins because then he hits
him back with families are always Rising in the Falling
in America. And then Martin Sheen goes, who said that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Hawthorn don't know any Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 (01:21:27):
Yeah, what's the matter of smart ass don't know any Shakespeare? God, God,
I don't. We haven't seen that's poetry. That's American literature,
all right, As you were.

Speaker 2 (01:21:40):
We mentioned earlier that the Fitzgerald's Long Island House wasn't
much the right home about Gatsby's palatial manner was an
amalgam of several real life mansions on Long Island's Gold Coast.
The most obvious candidate is the o'haca Castle in Huntington,
New York. Hobo my friend Anna, Maria's family and my
therapist one hundred and ten years after the construction began

(01:22:03):
in nineteen fifteen, the house is still the largest private
residence in New York State and the second largest private
residents in the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:22:13):
Tremendous.

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):
The Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family estate in Asheville, North Carolina,
is still the largest. That's the house I think they
use for exteriors in Richie Rich.

Speaker 3 (01:22:23):
I want to say, Oh man, we got to get
that out of the hands of the South. Come on,
what are these northern architects doing?

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
As originally configured, the hall Ojeka Castle, supposedly built on
the highest point on Long Island, I might add, consisted
of one hundred and twenty seven rooms over its one
hundred and nine thousand square foot floor plant. The name
O'heka is an acronym using the first several letters of
each part of its creator's name, Otto Herman Khan, who

(01:22:53):
commissioned the grounds to be designed by the almost dead
Brothers aka the guys who did Central Park. I can
only imagine that this guy was a real life cigar
shopping executive. Long care give me the guys who did
Central Park.

Speaker 3 (01:23:09):
I can't imagine. Yeah, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Man.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
Yeah, today. As you may have guessed, it's a boutique
hotel that has hosted weddings for Kevin Jonas, Megan Kelly,
Joey Fatone, Brian McKnight. Three of those people are the
less good members of boy bands. I have to add
and disgraced US Congressman Anthony Wiener. Boy some sports guy

(01:23:37):
died today. I think he's associated with the Yankees and
his name is Seymour Wiener. Yeah, it's easy. I know.
I take no joy in that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):
I know what a place to like. You know, you
get in that guest list, you better start looking looking
into C four because you are wasting an opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
God, you'd be remembered for years. This castle, though it
is an illustrious pop culture history.

Speaker 3 (01:24:02):
What do you think their security was like for a
or oh for the Oh yeah, they're frisking you, right,
frisking probably. But if I was wearing a fat suit
that had like a C four vest under.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
It, that's plastic explosives, that doesn't show up on right, yeah,
on metal detector because it's plastic or like yeah, or
like a porcelain knife. And then you just get closer.

Speaker 3 (01:24:24):
Then because then you can only then you can only
take out one, which is why I'm still advocating for them,
because there's no way every everybody at a Jonas Brother
wedding is a good person. So I'm really comfortable breaking
a few eggs there.

Speaker 2 (01:24:36):
Porcelain knife, I'm not familiar.

Speaker 3 (01:24:40):
Or plastic three D prinip plastic knife, dude. They make
fun knives out of toothbrushes and jail right knives aren't hard,
but the.

Speaker 2 (01:24:46):
Problem is you only get one shot, and even then you.

Speaker 3 (01:24:48):
Can't even be sure because if someone pulls you off,
they get pressure on the wound. Yeah, I'm reminded of
So there's an interview with Christopher Lee where he's talking
about his experiences in the in the Oss, in the
in the British in the British Oss, and counter intelligence
during the Wars, and he was saying that the best

(01:25:10):
you don't actually slit throats. The best thing to do
is if you're coming up from someone behind, you push
the knife in at the neck and then push outwards,
because then it's not even like a suturable wound. He
also was an invaluable consultant in the in The Lord
of the Rings because in the script, Peter Jackson had
written that the character of Grima Warrington gets stabbed from

(01:25:36):
behind and inhales, and Christopher Lee corrected him, speaking from
his vast experience, saying that when you stab someone, they
actually expel air because it's being driven from their lungs.
Just saying, in case anyone gets invited to like a
fortune five hundred CEO wedding, where were.

Speaker 2 (01:25:54):
We, well this house, I wouldn't want to use explosives
because it does do us have a very large place
in popular culture, and so I would like to preserve
it if at all possible. In addition to inspiring Gatsby's home,
photos of the mansion were used to portray the fictional
Xanadu in Citizen Kane. It was also the site of

(01:26:15):
the infamous bore on the floor scene in the HBO
dramedy Succession, and it was the filming location for Taylor
Swift's twenty fourteen music video for blank Space, Blank Space,
I'm leaving that one alone. You want to live, you
don't want, you don't want boxes tracks.

Speaker 3 (01:26:35):
I will gladly call for the general assassination of the
wealthiest people in this country. But one person I will
not touch, yes, is tannaf swift I'm not scared of
the FBI, but I am scared of Swifties.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
Some let scholars also believe that Scott was inspired by
Beacon Towers, a one hundred and forty room mansion that
was owned by the real life citizen Kane William Randolph Hernhirst. Tragically,
it was torn down in nineteen forty five. In fact,
most of these Gold Coast mansions didn't survive the Great
Depression good It was also a story that Scott was

(01:27:12):
inspired by a twenty one thousand square foot house, a
cottage really a bungalow on Land's End that would play
host to people like Churchill and Einstein before falling into disrepair. Condemned,
it was torn down in twenty eleven amid great protest
from preservationist organizations. It's likely that the parties there inspired Scott,

(01:27:33):
but he was thinking of impressive other homes when describing
Jay's house. Uh, I'm glad you left me with this section.
The Jewish gangster. We touched on him earlier, But let's
talk more about the source of Jay Gatsby's wealth, specifically
the bootlegger meyer Wolf Weinstein. Oh what Meyer Wolfshein? Meyer

(01:27:55):
Wolfshine but that's not really and that's the character's name.

Speaker 3 (01:28:00):
Oh okay, yeah, because Meyer Lanski is like the real
Jewish Kingpin.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
He's an album like a Scott does slot. He's an
amalgam Meer Wolfsheim.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
Yes of people in places directly in his field of vision.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
Meier Wolfsheim was portrayed as a mentor and friend of Gatsby's,
and he was based, as we mentioned earlier, on the
gambling gangster Arnold Rothstein, the man responsible for the nineteen
nineteen World Series scandal, when multiple members of the Chicago
White Sox threw the game after being paid off by Rothstein.
In The Great Gatsby, some of the remarks that Wolfsheim

(01:28:34):
helped fix the World Series, which really makes it obvious
who they're referring. Wolfsheim is appropriately a shadowy figure in
the novel. He appears only twice, the second time refusing
to attend Gatsby's funeral. Much has been made in recent
years of Scott's description of Wolsheim as quote, a small,
flat nosed jew with tiny eyes and two fine growths

(01:28:57):
of hair in his nostrils.

Speaker 3 (01:28:58):
That's just unnecessary, Yeah, yeah, especially if Scott you only
met him twice, right, like you you can't.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
Oh no, he appears twice in the book.

Speaker 3 (01:29:08):
No, well, he only writes about things that are directly
in front of him, like a child with no object permanence.

Speaker 2 (01:29:13):
Yeah, Scott really zooms in on Wolfsheim's nose. He describes
it variously as expressive, tragic, and able to flash indignantly. Interestingly,
this Jewish gangster works at the swastika holding company in
the book Are you kidding me? No? That's interesting, is it?

Speaker 3 (01:29:32):
Or just rabidly anti Semitic?

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
This was long before Hitler.

Speaker 3 (01:29:37):
Anti Semitism pre pre existed before Hitler. He didn't invent
anti Semetis.

Speaker 2 (01:29:42):
Swatstika wasn't seen as an anti Semitic symbol until it
was embraced a by the Nazis and the I mean
that is true. It was an old Buddhist symbol, wasn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:29:52):
I don't know, but I don't know where the edem. Yeah,
but it obviously wasn't called the schwastika that was in
the Tibet. That's a German word, swat. That's the you're
just pronouncing it like German schwashka. In Hinduism, the right
facing symbols called swatstika symbolizing the sun.

Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
Okay, prosperity and good luck. Well, the left facing symbols
called savatstika symbolizing knight or tantric aspects of Kali. No,
it's a Hindu term. Okay, fine, but the nose stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:30:22):
No stuff is bad. Okay, we'll fight you in the
nose stuff. All right, great, thank you for working with
me on this one. We solved anti semitism.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
However, it was fairly standard for Lost Generation works to
contain anti Semitic stereotypes describing Jewish individuals as corrupt and
or pathetic. For example, In the Sun Also Rises, Ernest
Hemingway vented many of his own anti Semitic feelings in
the character Robert Kohane. Yeah I did, Yeah I did.

(01:30:52):
In a nineteen forty seven article for Commentary, the scholar
Milton Hindus and assistant professor of human.

Speaker 3 (01:31:00):
Wait for it, the DWS Where's Your Family From?

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
And assistant professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago
observed that Wolfsheim is the most abrasive character of the book,
allowing that his characterization displays more than a hint of
anti Semitism. However, Hindus argue that Jewish stereotypes displayed by
Wolfsheim were typical of the time when the novel was written,
and that it's anti semitism was of the quote habitual, customary, harmless,

(01:31:37):
unpolitical variety, a.

Speaker 3 (01:31:39):
Lot to unpack.

Speaker 2 (01:31:40):
There. A twenty fifteen article by essayist Arthur Crystal agreed
with Hindu's assessment that Fitzgerald's use of Jewish caricatures was
not driven by malice and merely reflected the commonly held
beliefs at the time. He notes the accounts of Francis Kroll,
Fitzgerald's Jewish secretary, who claimed that Fitzgerald was hurt by
accusations of ante di Semitism and responded to critiques of

(01:32:02):
Wolfshein by claiming that he merely quote fulfill the function
and the story and had nothing to do with race
or religion.

Speaker 3 (01:32:10):
Okay, man, Yes, I guess I'll buy that. So other
Daisy's Daisy's move Potent Potables. Daisy Gatsby's lost love is
a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky, or as they call it.
And they will immediately spot you on this Louville. She
resides in the fashionable old money town of East Egg

(01:32:31):
on Long Island, and is married to the British Tom Buchanan,
an avid polo player. He goes without saying that Daisy
is based on Scott's relationship with Guynevra and her rejection
with him in favor of the financially secure life provided
by Bill Mitchell, the polo player and fossil fuel magnate
m I know. To Scott, Guyneva became the prototype of

(01:32:51):
the unobtainable upper class woman who embodies the elusive American dream.
Fitzgerald scholar Marine Corrigan notes that King, far more so
then the author's wife, Zelda, became quote the love who
lodged like an irritant in Fitzgerald's imagination, producing the literary
pearl that is Daisy Buchanan. Sure man, Yeah, okay man.

(01:33:14):
Scott himself would describe guyn Nevra as my first girl,
who I've used over and over in my writing and
never forgotten. We'll get to this in our part two episode,
but Scott and Guyneverra reconnected. Later in life, she had
separated from her philandering husband, and Scott's wife, Zelda, was
in a psychiatric hospital, providing an opportune time for the
two star Cross lovers to get back together. However, their

(01:33:36):
reunion proved to be a disaster to Fitzgerald's worsening alcoholism
or perhaps at this point, terminal alcoholism. Yeah, and a
disappointed genevra King returned to Chicago.

Speaker 2 (01:33:48):
The saddest part of the whole story is that I
guess he'd been on the wagon for like eight months
and he was so like destabilized by that meeting that
like that was why he drank. He was just so
nervous about meeting her again. And yeah, very sad, very
very sad.

Speaker 3 (01:34:03):
Yeah, I'm back to hating her. Jordan, you've been drawn
to a certain characterization of Daisy.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
Did share that with us? I always love this passage.
It's a discussion between Gatsby and the book's narrator, Nick Carraway,
who she probably should have touched on this earlier. The
entire novels told from the point of view of a
young man who settles for the summer in a bungalow
next door to Gatsby's massive mansion, and so it's all told.
He's sort of like the every man who's witnessing this

(01:34:31):
entire story, and so he's very much the voice of reason.
So when I read this, he's the narrator. She's got
an indiscreet voice. I remarked, it's full of I hesitated.
Her voice is full of money. Jay suddenly said, that
was it. I'd never understood it before. It was full
of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and

(01:34:54):
fell in it. The jingle of it symbols song of it,
high in the White Palace, the King's Daughter, the Golden Girl.

Speaker 3 (01:35:02):
So to a much lesser extent, Scott's wife, Zelda, also
provided an inspiration. Partially it was due to her initial
rejection of him until he became a published author, but
she also supposedly uttered Daisy's famous line about her daughter,
hoping that she's quote beautiful and a fool, A beautiful
little fool. That's the best thing a girl can be
in this world. How do you feel about that? That's

(01:35:23):
a very famous line from this. I know I did
know that line. Actually, Well, it says more about Zelda
than does anything else.

Speaker 2 (01:35:32):
Well, Well, let's read on, does it. Yeah, no, it
gets a little bit because she apparently said that when
she was like supremely doped up on anesthetics when she
was giving birth to their daughter, and it was just
like in a line of rambling non SEQUITURSA read her
full quote, it's great.

Speaker 3 (01:35:52):
Oh God, goof o, I'm drunk, Mark Twain. Isn't she smart?
She has the hiccups. I hope it beautiful and a fool,
a beautiful little fool. And then Scott added the additional
observation of that's the best thing a girl can be
in this world. Just a terrible period, all of these people.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
I think he took her gibberish that was from like
all the anesthesia, and took a little bit out of
context and then gave it that extra line about that's
the best thing a girl in the world could be
to give.

Speaker 3 (01:36:22):
So I understood, Okay, that's a thing to say about
your daughter. Sure right.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
I mean, it's not his daughter in this book, it's
Daisy's daughter.

Speaker 3 (01:36:33):
Holding the gun really gives you a sense of disconnect
from the person you're shooting at. It's almost not like
it's a real murder.

Speaker 2 (01:36:40):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:36:41):
It's important to note that more than just an indictment
of the American dream, The Great Gatsby also explores and
critiques question Mark societal expectations of gender norms in the
so called jazz age. That's jazz baby, that's jazz baby.
Anti Semitism, that's jazz. Yes, the gilded Lives is a

(01:37:02):
rich that's jazz baby. Take it from me, a white
guy from the Northeast jazz. So with that in mind,
let's delve into a little section called two cis het
white men explain what it was like to be a
woman one hundred years ago. There's a lot wrapped up
in the character of Daisy, we say broadly. A century

(01:37:25):
after her debut, she's still one of the most polarizing
female characters in the literature of this Grand American experiment.
For many years, she was viewed as one of the
great villains of literary history, whose actions directly or indirectly
caused the death of three people. An early review described
her as a monster of bitchery. That's pretty cool, Yeah

(01:37:48):
it is. That's what I call gravedigger baby. Anyway, getting
back to Daisy, this view continued into the forties and fifties,
also periods lauded for their progressive attitudes towards women. Critic
Arrius beuley Man has weak wrists. I just know it
commented on the character's vicious emptiness, while Robert Ornstein described

(01:38:09):
her as criminally immoral, Alfred Kazin judged her to be
vulgar and inhuman, and Leslie Fieldler regarded her as a
dark destroyer, purveying quote corruption and death damn well women.
They framed Gatsby as an instant victim and Daisy as
foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams.

Speaker 2 (01:38:29):
Foul dust.

Speaker 3 (01:38:31):
Even in the post women's lib era of the late
nineteen seventies, critic Rose Gallo described Daisy as a vacuous
creature whose beauty conceals her spiritual bankruptcy. But contemporary critics
and scholars view her much more sympathetically as a victim
of rather than a victimizer. A surface level read of
the character is that she personifies a flapper, or the
then novel generation of women who bobbed their hair, wore

(01:38:55):
short skirts or pants in some cases, drank and smoked,
and they stood the top flagpole or sat across flagpoles
for marathon periods of time, as immortalized in Harvey Danger's
nineteen ninety seven hit Flagpole Sida.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
In other words, they were the err liberated woman.

Speaker 3 (01:39:15):
But despite these superficial freedoms, Fitzgerald illustrates the lack of
agency that women had in this period. Daisy is subject
to both her husband Tom's brutal domination and then Gatsby's
objectification as the holy grail of his foolhardy quest to
recast his own youth in the way he wished it
could have been. The resulting power struggle between Tom and

(01:39:36):
Gatsby turns Daisy into a little more than a trophy,
a golden girl as fits, he writes, valued only for
enhancing the social and economic status of whoever claims her.
Writer Katie Baker observed in The Globe and Mail that
although Daisy lives and Gatsby dies quote in the end,
both Gatsby and Daisy have lost their youthful dreams, that
sense of eternal possibility that made the summertime sweet and

(01:39:58):
love her or hate her, there's something pity in that
irrevocable fact. Writer Dave McGinn suggests that Daisy's side of
the love triangle should be explored in another book, which
that's a dumb fucking idea. Are you gonna do it?
You're gonna write like the wicked of the Great Gatsby.
What are you gonna call it?

Speaker 2 (01:40:14):
Just great? Shut up?

Speaker 3 (01:40:16):
Dave McGinn's people postulating like expanded universe fiction or the
scum of the earth. Somebody did do that, Ibody good.
Thanks Dave for sewing that idea. It's a stupid idea.

Speaker 2 (01:40:29):
God damn oh.

Speaker 3 (01:40:31):
Someone should make a prequel to The Great Gatsby we
find out about Daisy, or a sequel to Great Gatsby too.
Gats harder to Dave McGinn. In the end, Jordan postulates
that most people's feelings aligned with those of Esther Bloom
writing in The Hairpin Great website rip Alright. Writing in

(01:40:52):
The Hairpinesther states that although Daisy is not the story's villain,
she quote still sucks, and if it weren't her, a
couple of key players in the book would be alive
at the end of it. That's truly the most progressive
thing you can do with characters in fiction or real people.
You can have pity for them and you can understand them,
but they can still suck.

Speaker 2 (01:41:14):
Another interesting snapshot of feminism in the nineteen twenties is
Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, who casually dates narrator Nick Carraway
throughout the book. As you mentioned earlier, her character was
based on one of genevra King's good friends and fellow
member of Chicago's Big Four Debs of nineteen fourteen, Edith Cummings.
Like Jordan Baker, Edith was a famous amateur golfer, dubbed

(01:41:38):
the Fairway Flapper in the press. That's amazing. She won
the US Woman's Amateur in nineteen twenty four, the year
before Gasby was published. Scott Fitzgerald named her character by
combining the names of two popular car brands of the era,
the Jordan Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle.

Speaker 3 (01:41:56):
Both of which no longer exist.

Speaker 2 (01:41:59):
Yes, the choice was meant to evoke the feeling of
freedom and speed of the age. In other words, she's
a fast girl. It was crazy about Elvis. It would
be like naming a character Kia Kamaro today.

Speaker 3 (01:42:12):
Don't put ideas in Hollywood's head.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
Yeah, Jordan Baker is arguably the most liberated female character
in The Great Gatsby. She's athletic, single, and, in the
parlance of the times, dates around even so many people
in this book voice their disapproval about the way she
lives her life, including Daisy and her husband Tom. The
scholar Sarah Churchwell writes in her book Careless People, Murder, Mayhem,

(01:42:37):
and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, as with Gatsby
and his dark path upward social mobility, the novel's charting
a cultural moment that was anxious about women's new emancipation
as much as it was celebrating it. Perhaps more than
any other character in this book, Tom Buchanan represents a
figure who suffers from status anxiety. If Gatsby worries about

(01:43:00):
getting what he wants, Tom concerns himself with keeping it.
He fears the changing views towards women, class, and also
what it meant to be an American quiet part loud
he was right is terrifyingly relevant today. Yeah. True. The
United States in the nineteen twenties was experiencing an influx

(01:43:21):
of immigrants from Europe and beyond, which struck fear in
the hearts of what I'll generally referred to as those
who were already here but whose ancestors had made a
similar trip white people, sure oh Man. For many Americans,
this otherness challenged their sense of what it meant to
be a quote. Real American literary theorist Walter ben Michaels

(01:43:46):
contends that this question was more prevalent in the national
discourse than the consequences of World War One, which had
recently ended.

Speaker 3 (01:43:54):
I mean, you know, if you argue that that wave
of that wave of immigration provoked probably the first national
immigrant crisis, yeah, and then that then put in motion
the slow assimilation of the Irish, Germans and Italians into

(01:44:16):
becoming American white, and therefore accelerated all of those groups
racism against black people and brown people, then yeah, I
would argue it is probably up there with World War One,
because that's the thing. There's this great book called called
Beyond the Melting Pot, and it's just examining this whole

(01:44:38):
old But it was an academic book came out of MIT,
I think, and it just has this it's the snapshots
of Jewish, Puerto Rican and Italian life in New York
City in the forties, fifties, and sixties. But the whole
theme of it is just like, yeah, man, as soon
as they stopped printing racist cartoons about you and you
get to officially become white, every one of those groups

(01:45:01):
just starts turning around and looking for the next person
they can bully tale as old as time.

Speaker 2 (01:45:07):
The character of Tom Buchanan touches on this paranoia when
he claims that he, the character Nick Carraway, and the
character Jordan Baker are racially superior Nordics yep. Within the book,
Tom's reading a fictitious book called The Rise of the
Colored Empires, Oh, which is Scott Fitzgerald's parody of a
book by Lothrup Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, which

(01:45:30):
was a bestseller in the nineteen twenties. In his book,
Stoddard warned that immigration with alter America's racial composition and
ultimately destroy the country. Tom parrots these beliefs by saying,
the idea is, if we don't look out, the white
race will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff. It's
been proved. It's up to us, who are the dominant race,

(01:45:52):
to watch out, or these other races will have control
of things. Yeah. Wow yeah. In addition to all this
racial stuff, Tom also fears that his turf is being
encroached upon by the Nuveau Rish and one of the
supercharged methods of upward mobility in the nineteen twenties, is bootlegging.
It's created this nightmarish scenario for old money folks, wherein

(01:46:15):
gangsters and criminals are now equally rich and powerful in
taking a position alongside them, leading to a general sense
of there goes the neighborhood. The aforementioned Gatsby scholar Sarah
Churchwell toldhistory dot com the whole plot of The Great
Gatsby is really driven by Prohibition in an important way.
The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight

(01:46:37):
is because prohibition created a black market, allowing bootleggers like
Gatsby and his partners to amass huge quantities of money
in a short time. As their wealth grew, it broke
down the traditional barriers of society. This in turn provoked
anxiety among upper class plutocrats like Tom Buchanan. Chishwell continues,
one of the many unintended consequences of prohibition was that

(01:46:58):
it created this accelerat upward social mobility. Fitzgerald is reflecting
a preoccupation at that time that there were these upstarts,
as they would have been called, these nouveau rich people
who came from dubious backgrounds and then suddenly had all
this money that they were splashing around. Clash conflict was
arguably at an all time high in the US, both
between the new money and old money, and also just

(01:47:20):
the standard rich and poor. Scott would later write that
there were two kinds of rebellions, the fire of the
revolutionary or the sullen resentment of the peasant. Hell yeah,
and more than Gatsby himself. Scott illustrates this point with
the character of Wilson, the gas station owner whose wife
well Well sign, whose wife Myrtle, has an affair with

(01:47:46):
Tom Buchanan and is then run down by Daisy driving
Gatsby's car spoiler oh yeah, sorry, mistakenly believing that Gatsby
was behind the wheel and therefore having an affair with
his wife rather than Tom. Wilson, at the end of
the book goes to Jay's house and kills him before
turning the gun on himself. Hell yeah. Scott felt very

(01:48:06):
strongly about keeping these scenes of brutality in the book.
For example, when Myrtle gets killed, he includes an extremely
gory detail for left breast being cut off in the accident,
and he made a note to his editor that this
detail needed to remain in the manuscript because to him.
It was very important to show mutilation. This was ugly

(01:48:27):
and grotesque. These people had cost things and they don't
pay the cost. Somebody else does. In this case it
was Wilson, the man at the gas station, Myrtle's husband's
long suffering husband, I might add, and gets I think
that's also a reference to antiquity. Oh that would make sense.

Speaker 3 (01:48:46):
Yeah, it's a whole thing going back to like the
Dexter sinister era of with like right, right and left
thing like it's Middle Ages, h like, so Middle Ages
to Renaissance was they were like breastfeeding is like sure's
illness apparently, so they like the right breast is like
the giver and the left breast is evil or.

Speaker 2 (01:49:06):
Something like that, like left handed right it isn't like
exactly left in Latin sinistra or something. And that's where
you get the word sinister.

Speaker 3 (01:49:15):
Yeah, yeah, sorry, dexter, dexter and sinister, I was saying,
goes back to the heraldry, like the dexter side and
sinister side.

Speaker 2 (01:49:22):
And then yeah, and do.

Speaker 3 (01:49:23):
You know why it's considered evil?

Speaker 2 (01:49:26):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:49:26):
I don't, because of sword sword fighting. Supposedly, if you
were left handed, you had an advantage in certain combat
situations because most people were right handed, and in particular,
because castles were designed with spiral staircases, you would have
an advantage against someone defending and retreating upwards as a

(01:49:46):
left handed person. So rather than them being like, yeah,
that's this is a normal way that humans evolved, they're like, no,
everyone left handed must be evil because they're beating us
in certain combat situations.

Speaker 2 (01:49:58):
That's insane. I had never heard that. Wow, that's incredible.

Speaker 3 (01:50:03):
Yeah, deep pool, that's why they can't like Ford. That's
why there's a whole generation left handed people who are
forced to right and left. Like it was just that
stigma persistent for so long as you meditate on that,
We'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages.

Speaker 2 (01:50:25):
Wow, well, there's an old line. Every character in your
dream is really you, christ I hope not you. That
expression comes to mind when looking at characters in The
Great Gatsby.

Speaker 3 (01:50:44):
Am I my father addressed as Michael Myers, pursuing me
through my childhood home.

Speaker 2 (01:50:50):
In a sense, you could argue that f Scott Fitzgerald
is Jay, this poor romantic who was scorned for a
subpar financial prospects and worked hard to make himself a
success worthy of the woman that he loves well. The
novel's level headed narrator, Nick Carraway, has just as much
in common with Scott as the titular anti hero. Like Scott,
Nick is a young Midwesterner who attended an Ivy League school.

(01:51:13):
Like Scott, Nick's father owns a hardware store, and in
recent years, scholars have spilled a lot of ink theorizing
about Nick's sexuality nice. They specifically side a passage where
Nick departs a drunken orgy with a quote pale feminine
man named mister McKee. Following what Wikipedia editors describe as

(01:51:35):
suggestive ellipses, Nick finds himself standing beside a bed, while
McKee lays between the sheets, claude only in his underwear.
Others have observed the way that Nick describes the people
in the novel. For example, the greatest compliment he ever
gives Daisy is that she has quote a low, thrilling voice,
and his description of Tom Buchanan focuses on his muscles

(01:51:58):
and the enormous power of body. An early draft of
the book featured a passage where Nick left the job
after a male coworker came on to him, but it
was excised before it came the publication. Maybe. Scholars in
recent years have re examined Nick's attachment to Jay Gatsby.
Critic Greg Olier argues that Nick idolizes Gatsby in a

(01:52:18):
similar way that Gatsby idealized Daisy, saying that if you
read the passage where Nick first encounters Gatsby out of
context quote, you would probably conclude it was from a
romance novel. If that scene where a cartoon cupid would
shoot an arrow, music would swell and Nick's eyes would
turn into giant hearts. Scholar Joseph Vogel writes that quote

(01:52:39):
a strong case can be made the most compelling story
of unrequited love in both the novel and the film
is not between Jay Gatsby and Daisy, but between Nick
and Jay Gatsby.

Speaker 3 (01:52:50):
It's funny because it's Sam Waterson in the movies, who
I would just never not think of as a law
and order prosecutor. It's like, you're not a sex symbol.
You're an old, wrinkly man. You don't have sex, You
just live in a courthouse.

Speaker 2 (01:53:07):
However, other scholars believe that people are reading a little
too far into things. Writing in Los Angeles magazine, the
novelist Steve Erickson argues that Nick Carraway's interest in Gatsby
is less about being in love with him than wanting
to become him, and not in the single white female way.
Caraway is back from the war and back from the

(01:53:28):
Midwest and wanting nothing more than to be Gatsby himself,
he says. Writer Michael Boorn offers a take that probably
aligns the most with me personally. Whether or not Caraway
is gay quote can't be proven one way or another,
he writes, but I suspect the queer readings of Caraway
say more about the way we read now than they
do about Nick or the great Gatsby got him. Interestingly,

(01:53:49):
as we touched on before, a Gatsby prequel about Nick
Carraway called Just Nick, was released in twenty twenty one
by writer Michael Ferris Smith that guy. It centers on
his pre long island life. I have not read it,
but I don't believe there are any homosexual undertones. My
heart goes out to this guy because he wrote it

(01:54:10):
and didn't realize that it was like a copyright infringement,
So we had the wait years to publish it until.

Speaker 3 (01:54:16):
Somebody had a better idea.

Speaker 2 (01:54:19):
In that user game, fair use or what's the expression
public domain? Public domain? Yeah, I mean, I know, I know,
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:54:30):
So this has led, this all has led a certain
subset of scholars certain love that this has all led
a certain selective subset of scholars to follow this thought process.
If Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is
supposed to be a closeted homosexual, and Nick Carraway is
also supposed to be kind of a stand in for
author F. Scott Fitzgerald by the transitive property you follow

(01:54:53):
in truth. People have been speculating about our boy F's
sexuality for many years. It was even the subject of
debate during his lifetime, at least within his own social circle.
Wikipedia editors feel the need to point out that as
a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with father Sigourney Fay,
a possibly gay Catholic priest, and Fitzgerald later used his

(01:55:14):
last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Faye.
Also Fitzgerald, per Wikipedia, cross dressed during outings in Minnesota.
His college theatrical troupe was, of course all men, and
Scott occasionally played roles in drags there in the Grand
shakespeare In tradition, so it's theorized that he might have
just worn these costumes as a gay lark in the

(01:55:35):
original term. He reportedly did this in later years as well.
For a gay prank. Cross dressing among the Lost Generation
literary crowd wasn't totally unheard of. A playful violation of
social norms. It supposedly reflected a broader spirit of rebellion
rather than deeper personal statement citation needed.

Speaker 2 (01:55:56):
Yeah, yeah, I who said that? Who said that? Who
said that? Hawthorne solom Wikipedia Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:56:09):
Scholars have honed in on a line that Scott wrote
in a nineteen thirty five letter to an acquaintance, in
which he stated that although he was quote born masculine
and so masculine, no one would ever doubt it, he
believed that he was quote half feminine at least my
mind is. Even my feminine characters are feminine Scott. Fitzgerald's

(01:56:29):
rumors about Scott's sexuality dogged him as he was finishing
The Great Gatsby. The gossip intensified then during his time
spent in Paris. It was there on the eve of
Gatsby's publication in April of nineteen twenty five that he
met Ernest Hemingway. In his memoir A Movable Feast, Hemway
wrote that Scott quote looked like a boy with a
face between handsome and pretty. He had dot dot dot,

(01:56:51):
a delicate, long lipped Irish mouth that on a girl
would have been the mouth of a beauty. The mouth
worried you until you knew him, and then it worried
you more.

Speaker 2 (01:57:01):
Wink wink. Was that about what he was gonna say
that way?

Speaker 3 (01:57:05):
I think so. No, No, I think it worried you
more because you wanted to just give him a smooch.
He'd also referred disdainfully to Scott's quote fairy side, which
seems more in line with you the Hemingway we all knew,
seemingly from the start. Though those in the literary ex
pat community in Paris wandered around the precise nature of

(01:57:29):
Scott's and Zelda's relationship, and Scott's wives would stoke these rumors.

Speaker 2 (01:57:35):
It wasn't all she stoked by.

Speaker 3 (01:57:37):
Openly asserting that Scott was a closeted gay man, hurling
homophobic slurs at him in public presumably after a few
drinks and accusing him of sleeping with Hemingway whatever moving
on women from.

Speaker 2 (01:57:48):
The South uh.

Speaker 3 (01:57:50):
This accusation, though, according to Wikipedia, possibly stemmed from an
incident in which Hemingway examined Fitzgerald's genitalia in a Paris
restroom after Zelda taunted him over his penis size. These incidents,
and many others like them, further strained the Fitzgerald's marriage, which,
as you can probably guess, was largely troubled. Hemingway started
to avoid Scott during these rumors, which is just so

(01:58:12):
sad because he could have just fought him and gotten
it out of the way, as he was.

Speaker 2 (01:58:17):
Wont to do.

Speaker 3 (01:58:18):
After Hemingway broke off relations with him, Fitzgerald wrote in
his notebook, I really loved him, but of course it
wore out like a love affair. Like affair, it wore out,
not akin to a love affair, not as in we
actually porked. But it would have been very moving had they.
Scott and Hemingway became close friends, but Zelda and Hemingway

(01:58:40):
instantly disliked each other from their first meeting. Although Hemingway
admitted to having a quote erotic dream about Zelda the
night they met, which is a weird thing to share.
Francis old Sport. I cranked it to your awful wife
last night.

Speaker 2 (01:58:55):
Won a box? Want to fight about it?

Speaker 3 (01:58:58):
I mean literally?

Speaker 2 (01:58:59):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:59:00):
Zelda would make frequent homophobic cracks about Hemingway's supposed relationship
with her husband, and thought that Hemingway's macho persona was
a facade to conceal his homosexuality. She would thus refer
to him to his face as a fairy with hair
on his chest. It's funny that we needed like fifty
years of Hemingway scholarship to be like he's probably by Hemingway, meanwhile,

(01:59:23):
considered Zelda insane in the best of times, and even
went so far as telling Scott that he felt she
was attempting to destroy his career with these public character assassinations. Now,
far be it for us to play into the crazy
woman's stereotype. But Zelda was actually crazy, and not just
in the southern way or even in the more charitable
She was a headstrong woman in the nineteen twenties kind

(01:59:45):
of way. Even as a teenager, Friends, family servants often
described him no, I'm kidding. They would never ask a
servant what they thought of the master girl, even to
the teenager. Friends and family often described Zelda as restless, volatile,
and prone to dramatic mood swings, traits that later deep
into more serious behaviors. During her early marriage to Scott,

(02:00:06):
Zelda would sometimes engage in risky behavior, like the time
she threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at
a party because Scott was busy talking to Isidora Duncan
and not her. In April of nineteen thirty, Zelda suffered
a serious mental breakdown. She became obsessed with becoming a
professional ballet dancer at the age of twenty nine, which
is passed far past the age when you can reasonably

(02:00:27):
expect to achieve this goal.

Speaker 2 (02:00:28):
Ballet dancing is a stupid dream. I'll say this right now.

Speaker 3 (02:00:32):
It's a wonderful form of art, but is a stupid
thing to want to be. You are inviting eating disorders
into your home. You are crippling your feet for a
career that is as marginalized as the rest of art
in this country and internationally except for maybe in Moscow.
But your career is like ten years long. You get
less time out of being a ballet dancer than you

(02:00:55):
do playing in the NFL. Parents discourage it, get them
into break dancing. At least you can back up. You know,
you can tour with musicians or cheerleading because the NFL
has money anyway.

Speaker 2 (02:01:11):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (02:01:13):
Zelda is undeterred by me. Adopted a punishing routine, maniacally
practicing eight hours a day, long past the point of
physical exhaustion and an injury, and long past the point
a functional alcoholic should reasonably expect to be able to
do anything. This obsessive behavior culminated in a collapse physical
and emotional. One day, Scott returned home to find an

(02:01:36):
exhausted Zelda seated on the floor and entranced with a
pile of sand, much like Brian Wilson would be decades later.
When he asked her what she was doing, she could
not speak, which must have been a real relief to him.
He summoned a physician, who examined Zelda and informed him
that your wife is mad. God, I missed those days psychiatry,

(02:01:56):
just take laudnum for it. Soon after, she was diagnosed
with schizophrenia. Today, some scholars think that Zelda might have
had bipolar disorder rather than classic schizophrenia, but at the time,
schizophrenia was a common catch all diagnosis. I actually have
something about this one second. This is from a book
called The Collected Schizophrenias by a woman named Sme Wadge
and Wong, who is schizophrenic herself, and she's written this

(02:02:20):
very powerful series of essays about dealing with the disease,
and she gives the.

Speaker 2 (02:02:26):
Kind of history of the term.

Speaker 3 (02:02:27):
Here where the German physician Emiel Krepalen is credited with
discovering what he called the dementia prey coox in eighteen
ninety three. The term schizophrenia was coined by a Swiss
psychiatrist named Eugene Blueler in nineteen oh eight, and that
came from the Greek roots schizo, split and free mind
to address the quote loosening of associations that are common

(02:02:49):
in the disorder. But Bluller conceived of schizophrenia as quote
a genus rather than a species. As a concept, Schizophrena's
encompass a wide range of psychotic disorders. I don't know
why I put that in there. I just wanted to, Well,
you're right, though, I mean that back then that was
it was a catch all at all. Yeah, and she
very likely was just bipolar or maybe just southern. So

(02:03:14):
from this point on, Zelda spent the rest of her
life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Medical records in
Fitzgerald's letters described Zelda experiencing hallucinations, paranora, and disordered thinking
during her hospitalizations. One report reads, the patient exhibits delusions
of grandeur, believing herself to be a world famous ballerina.
She is emotionally labile, alternating between violent outbursts and inconsolable weeping.

Speaker 2 (02:03:37):
Who among us.

Speaker 3 (02:03:39):
At various times, she believed that she was in direct
communication with historical or religious figures. She also suffered from
various religious delusions later in life, claiming at one point
to be a reincarnation of several saints. Zelda also attempted
suicide multiple times, and there would be points in her
life when she was lucid, but then she would revert
to periods when her mental health declined and she required

(02:03:59):
further treatment. She wrote to Scott shortly before his death,
I am losing my sense of reality and feel I
am wandering into a mist from which I shall not return.
Through this all though she remained highly creative writing a
novel of her own called Save Me the Waltz in
nineteen thirty two, a semi autobiographical work that contains the
telling line she refused to be one of those weak

(02:04:20):
women who fall ill of a disappointment. It was better
to go mad. She would also say privately, I am
only really alive when I am in madness. Other times
she would say, I am a phantom of myself. Rough stuff.
Hemingway meanwhile, had little sympathy for Zelda, purely because he
resented what her behavior was doing to his friend, and,

(02:04:41):
in his defense, more serious signs of mental illness didn't
become a parent.

Speaker 2 (02:04:44):
Two years later, Hemingway.

Speaker 3 (02:04:46):
Those saw Zelda, or rather her illness, although it is unlikely,
he made a distinction as overwhelming and destructive, and blamed
her for Scott's ultimate decline.

Speaker 2 (02:04:55):
As he wrote in.

Speaker 3 (02:04:56):
His memoir, Zelda was crazy. She would pull Scott down
with her if she could. He claimed that he realized
Zelda had a mental illness during an early meeting when
she aggressively insisted that jazz singer Al Jolson was greater
than Jesus Christ, which arguable, I mean, is this talkie?
It was only forty years until later the Beatles say

(02:05:17):
they were doing it, so what do they have? Al
Jolson didn't am I right. Hemingway frequently warned Scott that
Zelda was destroying his creativity, their constant demand for attention,
childlike need for stimulation, and the way she urged him
to write brain numbing articles and stories for magazines rather
than his novels, in order to obtain quick bursts of
cash to finance their lifestyle. She would later admit to this,

(02:05:39):
essentially saying I always felt a story in the Post
was tops, but Scott couldn't stand to write them. He
was completely cerebral, you know all mined. In a letter
to Fitzgerald from nineteen thirty four, Hemingway warned him that
Zelda would derail his career. Of all people on earth,
you needed discipline in your work. Instead, you marry someone
who's jealous of your work, wants to come heat with you,

(02:06:00):
and ruins you. It's not as simple as that. And
I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her,
and you complicated it even more by being in love
with her. And of course you're a rummy. I'd like
to see and talk about things with you sober you
were so damned stinking in New York, we didn't get anywhere.
You see bow, which is short for bo as in
like the love who's the nickname they had for each other.

(02:06:23):
It does not helping the gay case. Nope, you are
not a tragic character.

Speaker 2 (02:06:27):
Neither am I.

Speaker 3 (02:06:28):
All we are as writers, and what we should do
is write forget your personal tragedy. We're all bitched from
the start, and you especially have to hurt like hell
before you can write seriously. But when you get the
damned hurt, use it. Don't cheat with it. Be as
faithful to it as a scientist. But don't think any
of us is of any importance because it happens to
you or anyone belonging to you about this time. I

(02:06:50):
wouldn't blame you if you gave me a burst a punch. Jesus,
it's marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die,
et cetera. But Scott, good writers always come back. Always
your twice as good now as you were at the time.
You think you were so marvelous. You can write twice
as well now as you ever could. All you need
to do is write truly and not care about what
the fate of it is go on and write anyway.

(02:07:14):
I'm damn fond of you, and I'd like to have
a chance to talk sometimes always your friend, Ernest.

Speaker 2 (02:07:21):
May we all be so lucky to have a friend
like Ernest Hemingway.

Speaker 3 (02:07:24):
Yeah, I mean yeah, Ernest Ernest Hemingway also a great writer. Yeah, yeah,
better whole forget your personal tragedy thing and like to
like that to like the last entence in is uh.
Everyone who enters a creative writing program should have that
hand it out to them.

Speaker 2 (02:07:44):
That's excerpt from a longer letter, and there's some great stuff.
I think that's the note where Hemingway says something like,
you know, I write nine pages of garbage to like
every one good page. But the trick is knowing which
page is to put in the trash can or I'm paraphrasing. Yeah,
there's a lot of great stuff in that letter. Yeah.
I like their friendship. He was very heartwarming. Yeah. Through

(02:08:08):
the end of nineteen twenty four and early nineteen twenty five,
Scott revised his draft of the book. He had much
of it in Rome, where he moved after Zelda's alleged
affair with that naval airman not long after their arrival
in Rome, in the autumn of nineteen twenty four, Scott
was involved in a drunken brawl that ended in a
police station, where Scott was severely beaten after throwing a

(02:08:28):
punch at an officer.

Speaker 3 (02:08:30):
Good for him, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (02:08:32):
Know, I didn't think he had it in him.

Speaker 3 (02:08:33):
No, yeah, I love it.

Speaker 2 (02:08:35):
Where was this Rome?

Speaker 3 (02:08:37):
Oh well, that's an Italian cop. We're on there on
the grand scale of police inefficiency. I was gonna say,
from London, from like London, Bobby's to Japanese police, who
can basically politely whistle at you. Where to did the
Italian police fall?

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
Hey? You know, I don't know. Good question. I'm not.

Speaker 3 (02:08:55):
I can't imagine they're particularly efficient, but you know, good
for him.

Speaker 2 (02:09:01):
Am I reading? No, it's me sorry. You were just thinking.

Speaker 3 (02:09:05):
About and you just got all misty eyed.

Speaker 2 (02:09:13):
These revisions to the book that would be Gatsby were
made with the invaluable help of his trustee, Scribner's editor,
Maxwell Perkins. Perkins is probably the most important and consequential editor,
or one of them, at least in literary history. At
the time, Scribner's publishing house was somewhat of a stodgy
place known for publishing older authors like John Galsworthy, Henry James,

(02:09:36):
and Edith Wharton. Perkins wanted to provide a platform for
new voices, and he put his job on the line
for Scott. When the young writer first submitted the manuscript
what would become This Side of Paradise a few years earlier,
everyone else at the publishing house wanted to pass on it,
but Perkins told his bosses, if we don't publish this
or the likes of this, I don't know if I'm
in the right business. They allowed him to sign Scott

(02:09:59):
and they worked together to revise his first attempt at
a novel into what became the Side of Paradise, which
became a massive success. It was through Scott that Perkins
met and signed a young Ernest Hemingway, publishing his first
major novel, The Sun Also Rises in nineteen twenty six.
Scott sent Perkins a note about Hemingway which read, in part,
I look him up right away. He's the real thing.

Speaker 3 (02:10:21):
I ship them what him and Maxwell and.

Speaker 2 (02:10:25):
No, No, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald going to bath for
his buddy, the real thing. I know. Perkins fought for
Hemingway's work over objections to his use of profanity. Wow.
So without Maxwell Perkins, the world might have been denied
the works of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and Hemingway would

(02:10:45):
dedicate the Old Man in the Sea of Perkins, who
died while it was still being written. Perkins also was
responsible for the success of The Yearling Cry the Beloved
Country from Here to Eternity, and miss McIntosh, I don't know,
Miss McIntosh. His work on Gatsby was immeasurable. In one instance,
he gave the classic editor comment, your main character is

(02:11:05):
too vague. Give us some background, provide a convincing explanation
for his wealth, which is a classic bit of criticism.

Speaker 3 (02:11:13):
There.

Speaker 2 (02:11:13):
I feel like every writing class I've ever been in,
it's like, yeah, it's too vague. I want to why
do you care about him?

Speaker 3 (02:11:18):
Because I say so?

Speaker 2 (02:11:20):
Yeah, I know, trust me. Yeah, Perkins help even stretch
the dumb stuff like spelling. Scott was a notoriously terrible speller,
and his first draft of The Great Gatsby, set on
October twenty seventh, nineteen twenty four, was riddled with spelling
errors and typeosts secret idiot, I'm telling your friends. Scott's friend.

(02:11:44):
The literary critic Edmund Wilson called an early draft of
This Side of Paradise quote one of the most illiterate
books of any merit ever.

Speaker 3 (02:11:51):
Published, telling you my theory is looking better and better.

Speaker 2 (02:11:55):
Errors presumably corrected. Fitzgerald submitted the final version of what
would become The Great Gatsby February nineteen twenty five. Interestingly,
to me, at least more than one thousand of Fitzgerald's
original punctuation marks were emitted from the novel over the years,
and finally an authorized version restored them in nineteen ninety two.

(02:12:15):
I actually noticed that reading some like versions that were
scanned in on old paperbacks online to prep for this,
there was a disturbing lack of commas. Hmmm.

Speaker 3 (02:12:24):
Interesting though. Yeah, it's funny how much leeway editors had
around this time. That was a big Raymond Carver guy too,
and he had a very specific editor at The New Yorker.
And when you like those those comparison drafts have been
published and it's like like just seas of red through
this and like a more you know, I don't know,

(02:12:45):
a more secure or confident writer might have been like,
I'm going to take this elsewhere. Dude, you're getting near
like being unnecessarily harsh with this.

Speaker 2 (02:12:52):
Yeah, it's interesting, what because we're so used to editors,
like magazine editors who you know that's more for economy
of language.

Speaker 3 (02:13:01):
And I was gonna say, how do he say this nicely?
I'm used to my editors being like make this dumber.

Speaker 2 (02:13:07):
Yeah, but or like not get a sued well that
those were notes for me, but not necessarily you. The
iconic cover of The Great Gatsby, designed by Francis Cugitt,
played an important role in shaping the novel itself during

(02:13:28):
the editing process. The design was commissioned by editor Maxwell
Perkins months before Scott completed the manuscript, and the artwork
featured two sad female eyes and bright red lips floating
above a night sky, above a glowing city scape, a
lurid blend of Coney Island and Times Square. Fitzgerald was
so taken Mcuget's haunting imagery that he rewrote parts of

(02:13:50):
the novel to emphasize the motif of the disembodied eyes
culminating in the character of doctor g j Eckelberg and
his famous billboard. In fact, Fitzgerald pleaded with Perkins. For
Christ's sake, don't give anyone else that jacket you're saving
for me. I've written it into the book because I
guess in this era, like, yeah, you know, these things

(02:14:10):
are interchangeable for the most part. The inspiration for doctor
Eckelberg's eyes likely cave from a real optometrist billboard Fitzgerald
had seen in Queens, New York. Hemingway later supported this connection,
recalling that Fitzgerald told him that the cover referred to
a highway billboard that he's seen out on Long Island,
and yeah, these eyes are basically like the all seeing

(02:14:32):
eyes of God kind of in the story.

Speaker 3 (02:14:34):
One of my buddies I probably should have mentioned this earlier,
but one of my friends from New York and actually
the first editor I had in New York when I moved.
There is an intern to write at nerve dot com,
which is no longer. There is a guy named Peter
Malamud Smith, and at one point he became minorly Internet famous,

(02:14:56):
but before I knew him for coding a great Gatsby
s NES game with a buddy of his. What or
a anys I should say, yeah, have you seen this online?
I kind of thought you there's like a fifty to
fifty chance because it was it did go quite viral
back in the day. And it's so funny. There's all
these little cut scenes that are like great job, old sport,

(02:15:18):
and then like you throw it's like a side scroller
action actioner.

Speaker 2 (02:15:22):
It's just beautiful.

Speaker 3 (02:15:23):
Yeah, and you throw like little bowler hats at characters
and the endgame boss is the eyes. It just float
around the screen like a Metroid villain or something like
shooting shooting energy blast statue.

Speaker 2 (02:15:39):
This is incredible. I'm looking at this now. This is amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:15:42):
Yeah, it's really it's really awesome.

Speaker 2 (02:15:44):
Okay, yeah, everybody looked that up. It's the great Gatsby.
For Nes is the person that comes up. Wow. Yeah, okay,
and that's incredible.

Speaker 3 (02:15:51):
I owe a lot to Peter, even though that was
Pete that, even though that was a the website was dying,
and he was right to leave there when he did,
and I left his soon as I could because the
thing was just running out of money.

Speaker 2 (02:16:03):
You know.

Speaker 3 (02:16:04):
He was the first person who gave me like real
professional feedback on anything. He's a great editor. So peace,
You've done good.

Speaker 2 (02:16:11):
You're up there with Maxwell Perkins. The Spanish born Francis Cougant,
the artist brother. It's a band leader, Xavier Cugat, Friend
of the pod, Xavier Cugen.

Speaker 3 (02:16:24):
Wow, I don't follow. You don't know Xavier Cugitt.

Speaker 2 (02:16:28):
No, he's like a forties and fifties like exotica band leader.

Speaker 3 (02:16:32):
Oh no, okay, good bravo.

Speaker 2 (02:16:34):
Yeah. Oh you would like him, you'd be into him.
Friend of the pod, Xavier cugen it's a joke for
one person. Uh. He had no notable career in book illustration,
Francis cug In fact, in book illustration, this was like

(02:16:56):
the only thing that he ever did.

Speaker 3 (02:16:57):
Well, we love a one hit wonder.

Speaker 2 (02:16:59):
Come on. He later worked as a technicolor consultant on
over sixty Hollywood films. Despite this, his work for Gatsby
became legendary. He was paid one hundred dollars or seventeen
hundred dollars today, but after that it was his one
and done. He never created another book jacket. His design
was initially forgotten after Gatsby's Lukewarm nineteen twenty five initial publication,

(02:17:22):
but it was revived by Charles Scribner the third for
his classic nineteen seventy nine reissue, securing its place in
literary history, and it's still used today.

Speaker 3 (02:17:31):
We've had that many goddamn scribners.

Speaker 2 (02:17:34):
Yeah. A sketch of the cover salvage from a publishing
house garbage bin by George Schliefen now resides at Princeton University. Interestingly,
Fitzgerald never saw the final painting before publication, but his
early drafts influenced them profoundly. The green light at the
end of Daisy's dock, which is another crucial symbol green

(02:17:57):
for go, moving forward, achieving, running, racing, rot right.

Speaker 3 (02:18:04):
Sorry, Sepsis, I can play word association games too, fitsy.

Speaker 2 (02:18:11):
That came from Francis Kucat's painting as well, and through
symbols like the billboard and the green light, Fitzgerald critiqued
the new American consumer culture, where marketing and materialism reigned supreme.

Speaker 3 (02:18:23):
Yeah, get their ass.

Speaker 2 (02:18:25):
Hemingway did not share his admiration for this cover. In
his memoir A Removable Feast, he remembered being embarrassed by what
he described as quote the ugliest jacket he'd ever seen,
comparing it to bad science fiction.

Speaker 3 (02:18:41):
I just I love Hemyway because despite being these like
uber macho like I shoot sharks with a machine gun
from the end of my doc and I will box anyone.

Speaker 2 (02:18:52):
He's so caddy caddy.

Speaker 3 (02:18:54):
Yeah, he's like a post like a mid century post gossom,
like he is a gossip columnist.

Speaker 2 (02:19:01):
You know, yes, yes. Nevertheless, he acknowledged its thematic connection
to the novel's haunting vision of loss and disillusionment big grudgingly. Yes, certainly, uh, okay,
the right out.

Speaker 3 (02:19:17):
So Scott was extremely under the cover of his book,
But the title not so much. In retrospect, the name
of The Great Gatsby seems like a slam dunk. It's alliterative, Scot,
the word great in there. Yeah, Gatsby's a good mouth sound.

Speaker 2 (02:19:31):
To it, good mouthfeel, good mouthfeel.

Speaker 3 (02:19:33):
But it was extremely late the game before Scott settled
on it, and he remained quite ambivalent towards it even
after he did. Considering this was a guy who's working
title for his first book was The Romantic Egotist, it
is safe to say that f struggled a little bit
with his titles. Early proposed titles for The Great Gatsby,
accordingly include such whack as on the Road to West Egg,

(02:19:58):
the High Bouncing Lover, and actually this one kind of
whips among the ash heaps and millionaires. I'm pretty sure
that's a my chemical romance song. But yeah. The high
Bouncing Lover is a line from the famous epigraph that
opens The Great Catsby. Then wear the gold hat. If

(02:20:20):
that will move her, if you can bounce high, bounce
for her too, till she cry, lover, gold hatted, high
Bouncing Lover, I must have you. It is credited to
the poet Thomas park Dinvilliers, and if you're unfamiliar with
his work, there's a good reason for that. He doesn't exist.

(02:20:41):
He was a character in Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side
of Paradise, And that's a neat bit of a meditextual
engagement with your own work, and also a really piece
of poetry. Did he think that was good anyway? John
Green later pulled a similar trick by citing a couplet
by a fictional poet in his book The Fault in
Our Stars. Other titles that were considered included gold Hatted Gatsby,

(02:21:04):
even simply Gatsby, and for a while, if preferred title
was Trimalchio in West Egg. If that name leaves you
scratching your head, then you're not alone.

Speaker 2 (02:21:15):
Don't worry. The original Trimalchio was a character in a
first century work of fiction called Satyricon. Trimalchio worked hard
to make his fortune, which he flaunted with lavish parties.
The comparison makes.

Speaker 3 (02:21:28):
Sense when you have the context, and Scott even name
dropped the character in the text of the book. A
little bit of a deep cut there f after the
lights failed to turn on to announce another Gatsby party,
he writes in the book, obscurely as it began his
career as Trimalchio was over. Trimalchio is referenced in Les
Miz and Henry Miller's Black Spring, as well as the

(02:21:49):
works of HP Lovecraft and Octavio Paz. You know, nerds,
but Scott's trusty editor, Maxwell Perkins argued that few would
be able to understand the reference, and moreover, worried that
people wouldn't even pronounce it. I don't think I am
either Tramalchio, Tramalchio, Tramailchio, trammel Quillo, leading them to refrain

(02:22:10):
from asking for it at stores. Something that's bad for business. Yeah,
give me the tromauk, Jimmy, the give me the true,
give me Sun.

Speaker 2 (02:22:17):
Also rises just kidding.

Speaker 3 (02:22:20):
I'm just kidding. We're having fun here. Interestingly, there are
a few early printings of Gatsby that actually include the
trimalchio title. Presumably these are worth an insane.

Speaker 2 (02:22:29):
Amount of money.

Speaker 3 (02:22:31):
The eventual title was supposedly inspired by even more nerge
French author Alain Fournier's book Le Grande Mellions or The
Great Millions.

Speaker 2 (02:22:42):
I don't know what that word transitions. I think it's
a guy's name that sounds stupid.

Speaker 3 (02:22:46):
Interestingly, this book has a lot of parallels to Gatsby,
and the author died young during World War One.

Speaker 2 (02:22:50):
Just as Scott feared he would.

Speaker 3 (02:22:53):
Scott didn't feel great about this title, and three weeks
before the book was due to be published, he asked
Perkins if they could change the title to Under the Red,
White and Blue, perhaps a nod to his famous relative,
Francis Scott Key. However, it was too late to change,
and The Great Gatsby was released on April tenth, nineteen

(02:23:13):
twenty five. Just as a fun little game, let's see
what happened on this day in history. Okay, here's one
for you. April tenth, nineteen twelve. The Titanic set sail. Yeah,
I know, here's one for losers. April tenth, nineteen sixteen,
The PGA is created in New York City, the Professional
Golf Association. Here's one for Tyranny. April tenth, nineteen nineteen.

(02:23:39):
I Leono Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government
forces in Mexico.

Speaker 2 (02:23:43):
Viva Zapata, Vivas Apata. Indeed, Oh well, here's one. April tenth,
nineteen thirty nine.

Speaker 3 (02:23:48):
Alcoholics Anonymous published the first edition of their Big Book,
which introduced the twelve set program.

Speaker 2 (02:23:55):
Look At nineteen seventy. I see in the recall, No
Yeah Fine.

Speaker 3 (02:24:00):
April tenth, nineteen seventy Paul McCartney announces he's leaving the
Beatles for personal professional reasons. April tenth, nineteen seventy one.
Ping Pong diplomacy. In an attempt to fall relations with
the United States, China hosts the US table tennis team
for a week long visit April tenth, nineteen seventy two,
for the first time in five years. American B fifty

(02:24:21):
two bombers begin bombing North Vietnam April tenth, nineteen eighty one.
Imprisoned Ira hunger striker Bobby Sands is elected to Westminster
as the MP for cities in Northern Ireland and dies
twenty six days later.

Speaker 2 (02:24:35):
All right, let's see what else we got.

Speaker 3 (02:24:36):
April tenth, twenty ten, Polish Air Force TU one five
to four M crashes near Smolensk, Russia, killing ninety six people,
including their president, his wife, dozens of other senior officials
and dignitaries. Reports suggest that Kazinski, as the president was named,
attempted to open the door and step.

Speaker 2 (02:24:58):
Out for a smoke.

Speaker 3 (02:25:00):
That's the longest build up to a Polish joke. I
think we've ever done, anyone has ever done.

Speaker 2 (02:25:04):
Maybe.

Speaker 3 (02:25:06):
April tenth, twenty nineteen, scientists from the Event Horizon Telscope
project project the first ever image of a black hole.
All right, I'm bored.

Speaker 2 (02:25:17):
Part two, Yes, folks, we'll pick it up on our
next episode, when you will learn about how this great
work of literature was nearly confined to the trash heap,
the ash heap, if you will.

Speaker 3 (02:25:29):
History of the printed page, yes, before being rescued by
the true.

Speaker 2 (02:25:34):
American art form. The movies. Well, no, the war, actually,
the war and the movies, well we will talk about
all right, Well, no spoilers, come on, Okay, sorry. Well,
now we got to get teasers to get people that
want to come back, because part to whatever we do
two parters.

Speaker 3 (02:25:49):
Oh, people never come back? Okay, all right, well they do,
all right, Part two, The Great Gatsby. It's got sex,
it's got violence.

Speaker 2 (02:25:56):
It's got Scott's sad end Scott, it's alcoholism, it's got Yeah,
you'll hear more of what happens when he reunites with
the love that inspired Daisy.

Speaker 3 (02:26:05):
Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of a lot of
post post jazz age, pre World War two sadness. You'll
get a lot of.

Speaker 2 (02:26:13):
Apps, a woman's burned alive and a psich word, you know. Yeah,
there'll be.

Speaker 3 (02:26:20):
Dogs maybe did they ever own dogs?

Speaker 2 (02:26:25):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (02:26:26):
Leon Leonardo DiCaprio nudes in our next episode. If you
listen all the way through, we'll send you his nudes.

Speaker 2 (02:26:32):
You will hear leon nude. Oh, they don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:26:37):
That's how we get them. That. That'll hold off of
SOVS for a while.

Speaker 2 (02:26:44):
Yes, folks, so we beat on the current podcast hosts
against our fraying vocal cords. Yea born ceaselessly back into
our throats. You're welcome. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtog.
We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 1 (02:27:09):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 3 (02:27:12):
The show's executive producers.

Speaker 2 (02:27:13):
Are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 1 (02:27:15):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 3 (02:27:18):
The show was researched and written and hosted by Jordan
Runtog and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:27:22):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 2 (02:27:29):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

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The Great Gatsby (Part 1 - The Book): Everything You Didn't Know

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Great Gatsby (Part 1 - The Book): Everything You Didn't Know