3. The Great Gatsby: Old Money, Murder, and the American Dream

Was Daisy Buchanan, the object of Jay Gatsby’s obsessive love in the novel, inspired by the author’s own love life? What window does The Great Gatsby open onto 1920s America, with its Jazz, flappers, and bootlegging? Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man behind one of the most iconic novels in all literature? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of the Great Gatsby, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order The Great Gatsby and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ Instagram: ⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠ TikTok: ⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠ X: ⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠ YouTube: ⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Oliver Oakley Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society and we are delighted, aren't we, Tabby, to welcome them as the new presenting partner of The Book Club, which could not be more fitting.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and Dominic, you actually gifted me a Folio Society book for Christmas and it's absolutely beautiful. Every detail feels considered, it's a work of art. And on the 3rd of March, they are launching The Great Gatsby as part of their spring collection. And I actually have that beautiful edition here with me now. Look at that, beautiful illustrations.

• 0:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fitzgerald lets the gold gleam and then quietly shows you the cost, which is why it's worth returning to the novel, spending a bit more time in those bright rooms and staying after the orchestra stops.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  It feels like the novel itself, the sparkle on the surface, the silence beneath. The Folio Society is a small, independent publisher, owned by their employees and based in South London. Folio's design captures the shine of Gatsby's world, lingering just long enough for the hollowness to surface.

• 1:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can order The Great Gatsby and explore the other books that we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

• 1:17Speaker 02

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• 3:27Speaker 01

  I turned again to my new acquaintance. This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there, and this man, Gatsby, sent over his chauffeur with an invitation. For a moment, he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

• 3:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm Gatsby.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  What? Oh, I beg your pardon.

• 3:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  I thought you knew all sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point, it vanished and I was looking at an elegant, young, roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Sometime before he introduced himself, I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. So, hello Dominic.

• 4:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hi Tabby.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  The man whose, whose own smile launched a thousand podcasts.

• 4:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thank you.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  That was, yeah, you're very welcome. That was a crucial scene in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. And it is perhaps the most celebrated of, of all American novels. It's a very short book, which I think people are always slightly taken aback by. It's less than 50,000 words. And yet it's seen as perhaps the classic example of, of the great American novel. And, and it's emblematic of the Jazz Age, you know, flappers, um, speakeasies, highball cocktails, rebellion against the status quo. And so because of that, it's generally taken to be a very frivolous and lighthearted book, but actually it's got a core of real tragedy to it.

• 5:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, absolutely. So it ends with the deaths of some of the key characters and it ends with the total disillusionment of the narrator. And actually, The Great Gatsby, in many ways, is a book about the tragedy of characters who are destroyed by their own dreams. So it's a book about wealth and pleasure, of course, as you say, the kind of the fast cars and the high living and the parties and stuff.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also the human costs of that. It's a book about the American dream, the idea of reinventing yourself and being reborn. But also the fear of that dream being punctured and the fear that we all have actually of being found out.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  The sort of fate that awaits us all, Tabby.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Terrifying prospect.

• 6:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  And something that actually I think people don't bring out very often about The Great Gatsby. I think it's a book about nostalgia and about the past and about the desire to

• 6:18Speaker 01

  It definitely is.

• 6:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  to turn back the clock and to clutch on to something that's vanishing out of sight. And that's something that this character, Gatsby, who I have to say, I felt like I, even in a few words, I think I really captured

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  the elusive charm of the man.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fraudulent old sport.

• 6:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the fraudulent, the essential, the essential falseness of the man, I feel like.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Well, later in the episode, we'll be meeting, um, Tom Buchanan, so maybe.

• 6:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  His cruel power. You reckon I can do that as well?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Brutish violence.

• 6:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So before we get into, you know, we'll be discussing the book, we'll be discussing the context of the 1920s and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. But first of all, Tabby, your first impressions of the book. I'm guessing you've seen the film as well, the Baz Luhrmann film.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I have. So like a lot of people, I studied it for my GCSEs and the movie came out actually in the run up to the exam itself. And then I watched it afterwards and I loved it. You know, I love the surface value of it. Flappers, fast cars, all of that. And but it didn't, it didn't make a massive impression on my mind. It didn't really stay with me. It didn't sink that deep. And then I watched the film and I was kind of outraged by its adaptation. But actually, the film had done just what I had done with the book because it's all about the surface. It's very blunt. It's, it's all about like jazz music. And at one point, for instance, Nick, the narrator says, oh, we all drunk too much, which is always implied in the book but never stated. And then rereading it, I mean, well, we'll discuss what we made of it this time.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  But it definitely didn't make a massive impression. I enjoyed it, but it didn't go much further than that.

• 7:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So for me, when I first read it, I remember being struck by how much stranger it was than I was expecting. So I thought it would be a book about cocktails and parties and hedonism and whatnot. And of course, those things are in it, but it was much more haunting and kind of oblique, I guess, than I was expecting.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything's beneath the surface, isn't it? It's all the things that aren't said, which is why I actually think it doesn't lend itself to movie adaptations. It's really one of those books that's almost impossible to do justice to.

• 8:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  I totally agree. And we mean, we're not going to spend ages on the film.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Baz Luhrmann film, the Leonardo DiCaprio film, the one thing that strikes me is it's so glitzy. Yeah, so sensual, so over the top, but actually it doesn't capture the subtleties and the nuances of the, of the book and particularly the writing.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Well, we'll see how our impressions change by the end of this episode. But let's start with some of the context. Baz Luhrmann actually has a wonderful montage of this at the beginning of the film because it's Jazz Age America.

• 8:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. So that's the period from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Massive economic growth in America, it's the rise of the city and mass consumerism. In the popular imagination, this is the roaring twenties.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, like one of the most iconic epochs ever in all world history.

• 9:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly, sort of Art Deco fashion and all of that.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  However, you know, there's definitely a dark side to it because it's the decade of the Second Ku Klux Klan. You see a hint of that in the racism of one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, which we'll come on to. It's the decade of prohibition, which has been enforced since January 1920. But the paradox is, on the one hand, you have prohibitions, that's the outlawing of alcohol. But at the same time, you've got bootlegging, which is smuggling of illicit alcohol. You've got illicit bars called speakeasies.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's seen at the time as an age of excess to the point of destruction. So The New York Times in 1922 had an article on the new phenomenon of the cocktail party. And it said, you know, the end of cocktail parties, basically, somebody always gets shot or stabbed. This sort of sense of danger, you know, hedonism and danger going hand in hand.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Thrilling.

• 9:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very exciting.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's exciting.

• 9:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like a kind of goal hanger.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Get together, isn't it?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly how all of our parties end.

• 10:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the Jazz Age label, obviously jazz, the emblematic music of the era. And that's popularized by one writer above all, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes a short story collection called Tales of the Jazz Age, published in 1922. And actually, tabby, that takes us very neatly to Fitzgerald himself, doesn't it?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think Fitzgerald is definitely one of those writers who it's really, really important to understand in order to kind of see the inspirations behind his book because he's everywhere in The Great Gatsby. And he really did live the Jazz Age. He was in the very middle of it all, but had a fairly mixed relationship with it. So this is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born to a middle-class Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896.

• 10:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  St. Paul?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Didn't you spend some time there?

• 10:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  So unbelievably, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a year.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  What were you doing there?

• 10:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was doing the research for my PhD.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's very cold. Like, I was there over the winter.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's very...

• 10:57Speaker 01

  So you weren't being a kind of enfant terrible at the very heart of a...

• 11:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? This is a massive...

• 11:01Speaker 01

  ...rabble-Asian scene of...

• 11:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Literally.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Drinking and stabbing and gabbling.

• 11:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can't describe how how different my life was from that. So basically, I remember really vividly, there was a moment where I had spent all day like at the archive and then I was walking back to my.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  You rock star you.

• 11:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  To my rented basement and through the snowdrifts. And I genuinely thought if I fell into a snowdrift now.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  No one would notice.

• 11:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I thought my body wouldn't be discovered for ages, but also no one would miss me. No one knows I exist.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Just getting eaten by Alsatians like the next summer. That's very Great Gatsby though, in a way.

• 11:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that gives you, yeah, a man who no, Mr. Nobody from nowhere has disappeared.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 11:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  In the snow, exactly. So, yeah, that my life was not like Fitzgerald.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, not not one bit. He was actually, this is a really fun detail. He was actually named after a guy called Francis Scott Key, a cousin, and he wrote the Star Spangled Banner.

• 11:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, which had not yet been adopted as the American National Anthem.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I didn't know.

• 11:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Until the 30s, I think.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I didn't realise it was so recent.

• 12:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Fitzgerald, he has a kind of, he's middle class, so he's he's not, you know, a super establishment or elite, but he still goes to private schools, doesn't he?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  He has quite a charmed life for sure. Yeah, he goes to private school, you know, he's clearly a gifted writer even from that stage. And then he goes to Princeton, where he's made to feel like a bit of an outsider because he's a Catholic. And again, there's echoes of that in in the Great Gatsby's narrator. And now we come to what is definitely one of the key moments of his story. So during a Christmas holiday, he met and fell in love with a 16 year old girl called Geneva King. And their doomed romance is just a massive inspiration for The Great Gatsby. People often think that it was his wife, Zelda, who we'll come to in due course, who's kind of the main inspiration for the book, but it's not. It's this romance that he has with this Geneva King. And she's a very rich debutante. She's one of what was called the four Debs or something like that.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  And they were the four most sought after, wealthiest, most attractive debutantes of that season. So she's very rich. From posh Lake Forest, Chicago, you know, it's all about tennis, golf, finishing schools. And her father, though, when Fitzgerald was courting her, allegedly said, poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.

• 13:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my gosh, that's harsh.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Very, very harsh, yeah, very. And he's absolutely gutted by this. I mean, he's almost suicidal. And so he enlists in the US Army to fight in the First World War, hoping that he'll get killed. But he never actually goes to France and ends up spending the war in a series of army barracks.

• 13:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is that where he meets Zelda?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  So this is where he meets the iconic Zelda Fitzgerald. So it's 1918, he's at Camp Sheridan in Alabama. And he meets another rich, fashionable, slightly nuts debutante, and she's a Southern belle with very intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South.

• 13:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, that's a bad sign.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Very, very dodgy sign from the start. And she's called Zelda Sayer. And he's clearly still in love with Geneva. In fact, I think he's probably in love with her the rest of his life. You know, he's still writing to her, he's begging her to get back with him. But then she writes to tell him that she's married a rich Chicago businessman. And three days later, so obviously massively on the rebound, he tells Zelda that he loves her and they become a couple. But she won't agree to marry him either until Fitzgerald makes something of himself, till he makes a bit of money. So he tries advertising in New York after the war. He and Zelda have this very turbulent on off sort of relationship going on. He considers suicide again, and this will also kind of continue for the rest of his life.

• 14:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And then he decides to have one more go at becoming a novelist. And he finally finds success with a very famous book, and this is called This Side of Paradise. And it's a huge hit. And it comes out in 1920, and it's very much based on his time at Princeton. So it's like love affairs, parties.

• 14:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  You know, right from that stage, he's drawing on his own life. So finally, he and Zelda get married, and they become the fashionable literary couple of the early 1920s. They're constantly in the papers for partying. Zelda is the definitive flapper. She even writes a long essay in defense of flappers. And then, in 1921, she gives birth to their daughter, Frances Scotty Fitzgerald. This poor child has a very turbulent life. And there's a really interesting story about how when she emerges from anesthesia, she says, "Isn't she smart? She has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool, a beautiful little fool."

• 15:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's a line from The Great Gatsby.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That's a line directly, yeah, taken from The Great Gatsby.

• 15:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, so let's move forward to the summer of 1923. Fitzgerald is 26, so he's you know, he's quite a handsome guy in a kind of slightly fae way, but he's

• 15:39Speaker 01

  In the photos of him, he's quite attractive.

• 15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  But he's already beginning to sink into dissipation, isn't he, even at this stage? Zelda, clever, witty and whatnot, but she's she's, she's quite hard work, I think it's

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, obviously it's a big spoiler, she's going to end up in a lot of kind of institutions, mental institutions and so on.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Can I, I have a fun, fun detail about Zelda.

• 16:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'd like a fun detail, I love a fun detail.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  You live for it. I named my dog after Zelda Fitzgerald.

• 16:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh my god.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, a blonde, deeply neurotic spaniel, so

• 16:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's apt.

• 16:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very apt.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 16:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they're both massive drinkers, aren't they? I mean, this is the, this is the core of their, their issue is that they're basically functional alcoholics, high functioning alcoholics.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Zelda was so notorious that when they were living in New York, the police detained her near Queensborough Bridge, I think, because they thought that she was this person called the bobbed head bandit, who was an infamous spree robber. Because she was so famous and notorious that they were like, oh, it must be Zelda Fitzgerald.

• 16:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, and it wasn't her?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And it wasn't her, but she was very shaken by the whole thing and that's why they ended up moving to Paris.

• 16:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, but before they go to France, they're living on Long Island, which is where the Great Gatsby is set. They're living in a place called Great Neck. And Great Neck, basically is this hangout, it's a former fishing village, it's now become a massive celeb hangout in the early 1920s. So movie stars and whatnot, and people call it the Hollywood of the East. And Great Neck, in the book, is a place called West Egg. Across the bay is a, a sort of slightly more upmarket place called Sands Point, which is in the book, East Egg. It's kind of more old money and less flashy. And when he's there, Fitzgerald is clearly, you know, he's fascinated by these issues of class and status and exactly where you sit in the hierarchy.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 17:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  And as we'll see, you know, there's a big party lifestyle and he throws himself into it and he's always, you know, first to the, to the drinks cabinet.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  But at the same time, he's kind of repelled by it. And I think there's a self-loathing about all the party scene that comes through.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  That Zelda doesn't have, I don't think, I think. She very much, you know, leads him astray in that, in that regard.

• 17:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  But to go back to The Great Gatsby, because this is when he starts thinking about The Great Gatsby.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  The big inspiration for this really is that doomed romance with his first love, isn't it?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely it is. He writes to a friend at one point, actually, which is so telling. The whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it. And actually, interestingly, during their relationship, Geneva wrote a very Gatsby-like story and sent it to Fitzgerald in which a female character is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man who cheats on her. But all the while, she's pining for this young love of hers.

• 18:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so she's pining for him too?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think she is pining for him, but I think he kind of represents an escape that is not really a reality. And they actually ended up reuniting in later life when she left her husband. And it's a disaster because Fitzgerald's so nervous that he gets really, really drunk.

• 18:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And messes the whole thing up. Yeah, it's really interesting.

• 18:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  God, it's such a shame.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Such a shame. So, but he's still married to Zelda at this time, which shows you how tumultuous their relationship was. Anyway, so he ends up writing a first draft of The Great Gatsby, but he isn't happy with it. And then in spring 1924, he and Zelda move to the south of France and he tries again. And their marriage is in total crisis at this point. Zelda's had an affair with a French aviator, or allegedly. The guy himself totally denied it, said she'd made the whole thing up. And then as a result of this, she ends up overdosing on sleeping pills. And this again will recur throughout their life. And so in that, I think that's a massive inspiration on The Great Gatsby.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  It's like the idea of shattered romantic illusions, an ideal of love that can't ever live up to one's hopes for it, I suppose.

• 19:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's still working on the book, isn't he? Because he originally had been thinking about setting in the 19th century.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  And now, and he was going to call it Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, which is, I think, a terrible title, but not as bad as some of the titles he later, with which he later flirts.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a bad title. I think it sums up the book quite well.

• 19:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does, I guess, I guess. So the other thing is when he's in France, he's got, he becomes interested in this. Idea of basing it on a great kind of Roman classic, which is Petronius's Satyricon, which is from the late first century A.D. And there's a whole section of Satyricon, which is about a guy called Tremalcio.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tremalcio is a former slave who has basically got his freedom and he's nouveau riche. He's a kind of parvenu. He's very vulgar. He has this huge dinner party to show off his fortune to other kind of top Romans.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Top Romans.

• 20:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Top Romans. And he's telling, I'm sure, I'm sure there must be some more, must be some more specific.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure there is.

• 20:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Expression for this, but I'm just going to call them top Romans.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 20:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's telling loads of tall stories about himself, Tremalcio, and showing off. And he actually, it ends with him talking about his own death and staging a mock funeral of himself. And Fitzgerald found all this really interesting and suggestive. And he wanted to call the book Tremalcio in West Egg.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  This is mad.

• 20:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which I think is a bad title. And when he sent it to his publishers, he made a huge fuss, saying, I want to call The Great Gatsby Tremalcio in West Egg. And they basically said no. And then his other suggested title, did you see this?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he wanted to, he said, I could call it Gold-Hatted Gatsby.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which I think, I think hatted doesn't belong in a title.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  It sounds like a Bond, a Bond movie title.

• 21:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, well, this is really is a Bond movie title. Or at least the song from a Bond film or something.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  The High Bouncing Lover.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like a P.G. Woodhouse pastiche or something.

• 21:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess it is.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Totally mad.

• 21:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, anyway. So he finishes the book in 1924, in October 1924. His editor is a guy called Maxwell Perkins.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Really, really famous editor. He was Tom Wolfe's editor as well, wasn't he?

• 21:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, was he?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  They had a very, very famous relationship.

• 21:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Maxwell Perkins is one of those editors who's very into, American editors are always more interventionist than British ones.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's very interventionist, gets to do loads of rewrites and actually deserves a fair bit of credit for the finished book.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, he definitely does. I mean, Fitzgerald always kicks back against the title, which is a really good one, The Great Gatsby, but. He never, he never makes his peace with it. But another really interesting massive inspiration was the cover of the book. And it must be one of the most famous book covers ever. And it's called Celestial Eyes. And it's kind of this art deco image of these two massive eyes floating in a deep, deep blue sky.

• 22:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sort of blue, big, big blue landscape, right?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, blue landscape, the eyes of a flapper. And then you have this quite sensual mouth underneath. And it was by a very unknown Catalan artist called Francis Couger. And Fitzgerald's big mate, Ernest Hemingway, said that it looked like the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction.

• 22:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gosh.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  And I'm, I, there's so many interesting tidbits about Hemingway and Fitzgerald's relationship. But

• 22:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Nevertheless, Fitzgerald absolutely loved it. And he actually revised The Great Gatsby to match the cover.

• 22:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  To match the cover?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love that detail.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  That is so rare. It's so rare. And like, plays up.

• 22:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Never heard of that happening.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  No, never. massively plays up the themes of kind of eyes and blindness. And like, there's this omniscient watcher, or whatever it is. But we'll come back to that.

• 22:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  We'll come back to that. Just on the Hemingway thing, Tabby, I think it would be really remiss of you not to tell your anecdotes, which you've already shared with me. Is there not some issue with Hemingway and Fitzgerald having to go into the gents to inspect each other's equipment?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is, there is. So basically, Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald absolutely loathed each other.

• 23:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  He thought she was nuts. And she thought, she used to say that his overt masculinity hid his secret homosexuality. And she used to mock him about it all the time. And so he started saying that she was trying to destroy F. Scott Fitzgerald. And the way that she was going about this was by going to parties and telling everyone that he had a very small penis.

• 23:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  So Hemingway said, no, no, this is absolutely not right. I'm going to be a top friend. And I'm going to prove everyone that this is not the case. So he took F. Scott Fitzgerald into a public loo, examined it, and came out and confirmed to everyone that he had an average sized penis after all.

• 23:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my God. I think you enjoy telling that story too much.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  So much. But I don't know if that makes it worse. You hope to like, stage a robust offence and you have to tell everyone it's sort of quite average.

• 24:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah, exactly. Fitzgerald standing there next to him, right? His face falling.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  That's the best part of this whole episode. I've been building up to that for days. Anyway, back to The Great Gatsby.

• 24:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's The Great Gatsby. Actually, we should just say what happened to Fitzgerald and Zelda. Because, you know, we're going to talk about the book for the rest of the thing. But it is sad, isn't it? Because Zelda Basically, she was in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of her life. She had electroshock therapy and actually she died of a fire in a mental institution.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  They think now that she probably had bipolar.

• 24:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bipolar, yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  But at the time, they said that she had schizophrenia.

• 24:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Fitzgerald, he basically just drank himself to death. He sank into complete alcoholism.

• 24:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's a, he died a failure in Hollywood in 1940. And at that point, basically, people said he's just a footnote in history. No one will care about him, didn't they? Because his books had stopped selling. Did you see this fact about his royalties?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's absolutely tragic that in the last 12 months of his life, his royalties came to exactly $13.13.

• 24:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like my royalties, Tabby.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I know. Let's hope that your half a million word historical tomes, yeah, remain the bestsellers that they are.

• 25:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also, they'll have a better funeral than Fitzgerald. His funeral, he had an Episcopalian funeral. Only 20 people went and the minister said afterwards, "The only reason I agreed to give the service was to get his body in the ground. He was a no good drunk and bum and the world was well rid of him."

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a terrifying tragic symmetry there with, with The Great Gatsby, actually.

• 25:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  With The Great Gatsby.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  And the thing is, he was always criticised for trying to be too commercial with his writing, for writing to make money. But he said that with The Great Gatsby, it was going to be a work of art. It was going to have nothing to do with money. And then it was, it was quite negatively received.

• 25:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Which, which broke his heart.

• 25:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  As we'll get on to you. All right, so let's talk a little about that book.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess the first thing about it that strikes you is the sensuality of it. Do you not think?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Overwhelmingly so.

• 25:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's kind of full of music and colour and kind of, you know, I don't know, shimmering dresses and stuff and people, you know, parties with cocktails. I mean, that does, that's the, that's the stereotype of it.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  But when you first read it, it's hard to kind of miss all that, isn't it?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  But also, he, he has these minute details. He's an incredible builder of kind of tension. And, you know, there's a very fraught scene where he sort of describes a sweating bottle of whisky. And it's just, it creates a very tense atmosphere.

• 26:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  It's masterful, actually, I think. And yeah, you're right, but there is this kind of general impression of kind of beautiful women, shimmering dresses, people kind of wandering through shady gardens, bottomless cocktails. It's quite impressionistic, like. I always think there's Renoir's painting, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. And it's kind of lots of figures in and around each other, kind of lounging. And their faces are never articulated. You never see specific details, but it's kind of a mass of bodies and colour. And that's very The Great Gatsby.

• 26:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so I think that that style reminds me a little bit of somebody like Joseph Conrad, who actually was one of Fitzgerald's favourite writers. Like, it's always a little bit elusive and always a bit at the edge of your vision. Nothing is ever quite in focus and clear. And actually, Nostrumo, Conrad's brilliant book, was one of Fitzgerald's, I think was Fitzgerald's, he said it was his favourite book of the last 50 years. And what he got from Conrad was this idea of a narrator. So Marlowe in Heart of Darkness is Conrad's famous narrator. A narrator who's sort of telling, who's telling you the story. And he's also telling you what he thinks the story means. But at the same time, he's not necessarily reliable.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you always have to be a little bit, you know, sceptical of what the narrator is telling you. Which I guess brings us to the central, you know, the person who's telling us The Great Gatsby, which is this guy, Nick, Nick Carraway.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And it's so interesting because in the initial drafts of The Great Gatsby, he wrote it as having an omniscient narrator. It wasn't from Nick's perspective. And that totally transforms the whole story. Because Nick is actually, he's almost a version of Fitzgerald. You know, they're both from kind of middle class, midwestern families, both Ivy League. But they're both kind of somewhat outsiders to the worlds that they are a part of, the worlds that they're describing. And Nick says of himself, I'm one of the few honest people that I've ever known. But then everything that happens in the book kind of leads us to question that.

• 28:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, because he doesn't necessarily behave in an honest way.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 28:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a, he's a participant in a lot of the deceptions that happen. They're kind of love triangle deceptions. And actually, it's an interesting thing because class is such a big thing in this whole book. Nick boasts about his family at the beginning. He says, oh, we've been prominent in the Midwest for three generations. But then he goes on to say that they are kind of a bit of a fraud in themselves. So the Carraway's, he says, we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buckley. But then he says, well, actually, the founder of our family came to America. In the 1850s, he sent a substitute in his place to the American Civil War. He basically started a hardware business.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  He's a fraud.

• 28:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Quite a fraudulent and banal beginning. And actually, at one point when Nick, he moves to work in finance, doesn't he, in the, in the East Coast? And he says how he's bought all these.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  These books.

• 29:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  These books on banking, red and gold like new money from the mint. And actually, that is what Gatsby is going to do later on, is have all these sort of flashy books.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  To show off learning that he doesn't really have.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  He's like a later iteration of, of what Gatsby is trying to be, I guess, which is so interesting.

• 29:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think Nick and Gatsby, I mean, Nick is fascinated by Gatsby, but they're kind of versions of each other.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 29:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think. So, Nick, in the book, he moves to Long Island from the Midwest, as Fitzgerald did. And that brings him into contact with these two people, Daisy and Tom. So Daisy is his cousin, second cousin once removed, and he knew Tom in college. And he's very impressed by them because they are like a secret society to him. Reminds me actually of the secret history, which we're going to be doing on the show.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  There are echoes of the Great Gatsby throughout the secret history, which we've both kind of been reading recently. Yeah, it's so true. Because also, I mean, Tom and Daisy are properly, like, they're it. They are old money. They're everything that people like Gatsby aspire to be. So, and Tom is kind of like, he's a bit of a classic rugger lad, I guess.

• 30:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He plays polo, doesn't he?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  He plays polo. Yeah, he's stupid, brash, very violent. He's played by Joel Edgerton in, in the film, very well, actually. He's from a very rich Chicago family, went to Yale, played football. He has shining arrogant eyes, enormous power in his cruel body. And there's an ongoing joke in the book that everyone, that Gatsby refers to him as, as the polo player. And he doesn't like that at all. So just straight, straight out of your university friends.

• 30:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thank you. I'm, I, there's no doubt in my mind that you know loads of people like him.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  You love polo.

• 30:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know loads of people like him, come on.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I shouldn't have.

• 30:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you shouldn't have opened that.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Shouldn't have invited you.

• 30:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  You shouldn't have opened that Pandora's box.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. But he's married to Daisy.

• 30:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then Daisy, yeah. Now Daisy, do you see yourself in Daisy?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I'd like to think of myself as more of a Jordan Baker.

• 30:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Mean swing. Yeah, anyway.

• 31:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Having said, do you see yourself in Daisy? I then looked at the notes and saw the words brittle, comma, insubstantial.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Insubstantial. Both how sophisticated she is. God, that's uncanny, actually. It's like looking in the mirror. Terrified.

• 31:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Daisy has a voice full of money. No one would say that, have you, Tettey?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  No one would ever say that of me.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 31:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  But they're terrible people, aren't they?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  They're terrible people. But there's something utterly, utterly alluring about Daisy. Like, there's an immaterial immateriality to her because it's always about her voice. We never really hear what Nick looks like, but equally, we never really know what Daisy looks like. And yet, everyone has such a strong sense of her of being this kind of waif with big eyes.

• 31:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  So she's described as, she's, she's very slender, kind of immaterial, but she's also unhappy in her marriage to, to, to Tom, because Tom is having an affair. And there's this scene at the very beginning when Nick first meets them all at this very elegant lunch party. And her friend, Jordan Baker, whispers, kind of waspishly in Nick's ear that all about this affair and that the mistress is always calling. And actually, Jordan Baker is but based on a real person, too.

• 32:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. So she's the great, um, what's she, Gulf? Is it Gulf?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Edith Cummings. And she was Geneva King's best friend.

• 32:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  In real life. So.

• 32:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  So she's the character who ends up having a relationship with Nick.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she cheats. No one is what they appear to be.

• 32:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  No. And actually, a couple of quick things about Tom and Daisy. Tom is a racist. So Tom is reading these pseudo-scientific racist books. He's wittering on constantly about the white race is going to be submerged. And actually Daisy agrees with him on this. And she says at one point, we've got to beat them down.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. She's sort of jokingly, she's very carelessly flings it away. And there's this wonderful, wonderful quote about them. It's one of my favorite lines in, in the whole book. And it's, they were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. And that is, sums them up perfectly.

• 32:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does. Yeah. The careless people. And to be frank, I mean, there are lots of people like that. I mean, I can think of people I know who are like Tom and Daisy, actually.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I'm sure. I think we all do.

• 33:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then there's Gatsby himself. So let's talk a bit about Gatsby before we get into the break. Gatsby, in the first couple of chapters of the book, he's alluded to, is a neighbor of theirs in Long Island, but he's a mystery. He doesn't really exist as a physical being. He's just a sort of compilation of, of rumors and anecdotes, all of, a lot of which are kind of mad and wrong, right?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, like at the parties that Nick attends before he meets Gatsby. There are all sorts of things, like people say he's the cousin of the Kaiser. Somebody thought he killed a man once. He was a German spy during the war. No, it can't be that because he was in the American Army during the war. No one knows anything about him and no one knows where or how he got his money from. But there is gossip that he's a bootlegger.

• 33:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people, people think that he may have been the nephew of Von Hindenburg or whatever it is.

• 33:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah. And that sort of mystery reflects what Fitzgerald himself said about Gatsby. So Fitzgerald later said to a friend, the friend had complained about Gatsby and said, I can't work out who he is. And Fitzgerald said, you're right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself. He started as one man I knew and then changed into myself. And the, the man he knew, you've, you know who this bloke is. You've done some digging on this.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  I thought this was so interesting. So Fitzgerald's neighbour, while living on Long Island, was a guy called Max Gerlach. And he'd been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War One. But then he later became a gentleman bootlegger who operated speakeasies for the Jewish mob boss in New York, Arnold Rothstein, and we'll, we'll come to him more later. He lived like a millionaire. He kind of flaunted his wealth by having massive parties. He famously never wore the same shirt twice, which is a detail about Gatsby. And apparently he referred to everyone as old sport, which is like-

• 34:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, so he's very Gatsby like?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Very, very, very Gatsby. And he used to spread very outlandish myths about himself. Like he once said, I'm a descendant of the Kaiser. So, I mean, that has Gatsby written all over it. Yeah.

• 35:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally, it does.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  So interesting.

• 35:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then we first see Gatsby physically in this very, very famous scene at the end of the first chapter. When he's, I mean, maybe Tabby, you want to read a little bit of it. He's gone outside and he's, Nick sees him. He's standing, looking at the stars and looking up at the heavens. And in this very, very- Memorable and strange kind of posture, right?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, very odd. So it's written, "A figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens." And then, this is the amazing bit, "He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily, I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock."

• 35:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  That green light is the thing that guides him throughout the whole book. And the colour green recurs again and again, doesn't it?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I think people who don't know much about The Great Gatsby, everyone's heard of the green light. And its meaning, as you say, it's hard to pinpoint, you know. It's kind of the embodiment of hopeless yearning. And it's something that anyone who reads the book can kind of transpose their own hopes and desires onto. It's symbolic of longing, isn't it?

• 36:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, green, the colour of money, of envy. But the green light, as we discover, is kind of also Daisy Buchanan, right? And he's got this, yeah, he's got this kind of yearning for Daisy Buchanan. Anyway, they first meet in person, Nick and Gatsby, at that party. That's the passage that I think we read or performed so magnificently at the beginning, Tabby. And he's never really physically described, he's just like, almost like a version of Nick, isn't he? So he's, you know, he's a year or two over thirty, he's elegant, but he sort of feels insubstantial. And actually, weirdly, when Nick talks to him, Nick says, "Often Gatsby had nothing to say. There was almost nothing there."

• 37:02Speaker 01

  He's like an outline of a man, isn't he?

• 37:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And he, he kind of tries to fill it in for other people, rather than letting people make their own judgement of him. And he tells all these wild, fantastical stories. So he says, "I'm the son of..." He's trying to tell Nick about himself. He says, "I'm the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West, all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. After that, I lived like a young Rajah in all the capitals of Europe, Paris, Venice, Rome, collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago." That's the one honest thing that he said, because that one tragic thing was his, his love for Daisy.

• 37:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so the love for Daisy, Nick's girlfriend, Jordan Baker, tells him the whole story, doesn't she? She basically says, you know, Gatsby was an officer. It's very Fitzgerald and Zelda.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  It is.

• 37:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gatsby was a young officer and Daisy was a kind of posh girl, rich girl from Louisville, Kentucky. He fell in love with her, he courted her. He was posted overseas, but her family wouldn't let her go and see him off. You know, he was too poor. She pined, she got over it, she married this guy, Tom Buchanan. And so the question is, what's Gatsby been doing in the interim? Why has he taken the house across the bay? What is his, how has he got all his money?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  And what is his plan? What is this, and what is this kind of yearning for this green light all about?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Well, the answers to these intriguing questions are coming for Nick and also for our listeners in just a moment. But first, in true 1920s style, we'll take a break to hear from Dr. TJ Echelberg and some of our other beloved advertisers.

• 38:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right, see you after the break.

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• 40:21Speaker 01

  Welcome back, Dominic. You promised us answers to all these burning questions about Gatsby's money and his plans. And obviously, people who've read the book will know what's coming. But for everyone else, indulge us, tell all.

• 40:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tom Buchanan, at one point, who's actually Gatsby's love rival, describes him as Mr. Nobody from nowhere. And it's a phrase that says a lot about Tom's snobbery and his arrogance. But he's actually right. Gatsby is Mr. Nobody from nowhere. He's originally James Gatz from North Dakota. We discovered this about two thirds of the way through the book.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And coming from North Dakota, you could not find a place in the United States that's more provincial, more far from the metropolis and the bright lights, a more banal kind of background. But also, North Dakota, interestingly, it was a key kind of pipeline for illicit alcohol during prohibition from Canada. So right away, the fact that he comes from North Dakota is a little signifier that he's involved in bootlegging, in smuggling, just as actually Tom had predicted. So Tom is horrible and just a terrible person, but he's also right about Gatsby. Gatsby's parents, we discover, were Lutheran farmers. He went to college in Minnesota, like, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, was from Minnesota. But he dropped out.

• 41:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And one day, he was walking along Lake Superior, along the sort of the lake shore.

• 41:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he saw a yacht in trouble. And this yacht belonged to a copper tycoon called Dan Cody. Now, Dan Cody's name, you know, Dan Cody is obviously an invented character, but his name Cody, and the fact that he has made his money on the frontier from copper in the West, recalls Buffalo Bill, because Buffalo Bill's

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Ah, that's a great detail.

• 42:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  surname was Cody. So the very name of Dan Cody tells you that he's out there on the frontier in the West and he's made his fortune.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  And a bit dodgy.

• 42:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Cody adopts him because he saved the yacht, almost as a pet and a protege.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Sorry, there are all these kind of theories that they're sort of lovers or whatever, but I think that's

• 42:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think that's mad.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  projection, yeah.

• 42:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So Gatsby goes aboard, and over time, he renames himself a more, what seems like a more prestigious name, Jay Gatsby. Although that name too, I think, the name Jay to an American reader in the 1920s, the most famous Jay in American history was a guy called Jay Gould, who had been a corrupt railroad magnate and financier and robber baron in the 1870s and 1880s. And he had become a byword, Jay Gould, for vast wealth concealing immense corruption and crookedness. So again, the name Jay Gatsby

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  kind of is a clue

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Parallels.

• 43:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  to American readers in the 20s, right?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, because also the thing is, we never do find out exactly how he does make his money. And, you know, there are all sorts of, he thinks he's going to be inheriting Cody's millions after he dies, but it all ends up going to his mistress Ella. So instead, Gatsby, the implication is, goes into crime of some kind, bootlegging, maybe fixing, maybe something to do with the mafia, because there are all these kind of dark allusions to it throughout the book, because he constantly has butlers coming up to him saying, oh, Chicago's Colin. And he just says, no, not now, not now.

• 43:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Great American accent, by the way, that's

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, I mean, you had a sampler of it in the opening reading.

• 43:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  The interesting thing about him is not really that he's a crook, though, to me.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's not crooked at his soul, and he's definitely not crooked to Nick.

• 43:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, he's not, I guess. Although, although he does tell Nick some tall stories, doesn't he?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  And he does try to recruit Nick into his sort of funny

• 43:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  dodgy schemes.

• 43:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the interesting thing about him, the thing that everyone takes away from the book is that Gatsby is a dreamer

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  who is committed to this project of reinventing, of remaking himself.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 44:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, shedding his skin and taking on a new identity. That becomes a very kind of familiar

• 44:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Archetype in American fiction. So I think, for example, the most, one of the most famous ones is Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  So many echoes of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

• 44:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or, as we'll come on to, when we come to it in the later episode, The Secret History, Jonathan Tartsch's book, these characters who are playing at being something they're not. It's a really, really common theme in American, in modern American writing, I think. And he has invented a character for himself, crucially, that he thinks will appeal to Daisy because just like Fitzgerald himself, with his first love, Gatsby has never, ever recovered from that initial disappointment with Daisy. And everything that he's doing is about turning himself into the kind of rich character that he thinks will win Daisy's heart.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, he, he gets the house that he gets because it's across the bay from Daisy. And it's revealed that he throws these massive parties in the hope that Daisy will come to one of them one day, fundamentally actually misunderstanding the, the chasm between old money and new money because his parties are very new money. And when Daisy finally does go to one, she's slightly appalled by it all. But so there's something very apparently romantic about that, you know, it's a kind of romantic idealism to it. But the further we get into the book, we kind of see that it's not very romantic at all because it's kind of more of an obsession. His feelings for Daisy are slightly, you know, unhealthy. He, he's built a whole life around them. And it's all about the pursuit of a, of a dream.

• 45:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, rather than about Daisy herself, right? It's about the, the idealized vision of Daisy.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  It's a flawed ideal. He doesn't actually see Daisy for what she is. She's just a symbol of like wealth, sophistication, status, all the things that he wanted as a child, but have always been beyond his reach. And in the realization of that dream, from the moment that they first reunited and then as their kind of love affair unfolds, you increasingly get the sense that it's, you know, all that glitters isn't gold. It's, it's not quite what he hoped it would be. And he's sort of trying to get around that and trying to make it this perfect ideal that it could only be from afar.

• 46:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I agree completely. So this takes us on to the question of what the book actually, in capital letters, means.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  If anything.

• 46:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, well, here's the interesting thing, because when it was first released, Gatsby had this Gatsby, I mean, the fact that I've called him Gatsby.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  I know, Freudian slip.

• 46:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, very Freudian slip. Fitzgerald thought that this book would absolutely make his name, that this would be the kind of masterpiece. And actually, most early reviewers said, it's not that great. And actually, they said it's very superficial. The great critic and satirist H.L. Mencken famously said, "It's a glorified anecdote", which I don't think anybody would say now, certainly not all these sort of hundreds of thousands of people studying it as teenagers in their English literature classes.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of the most written about, studied, but, I mean, even preparing for this episode, I mean, never ending things about this book.

• 46:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And just to pick up on a couple of things that are really striking about it. So first of all, I think what most people take straight away is that it's actually just a brilliant, brilliant window onto the sense of modernity of the 1920s. So the technology and the cars and all of that.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, what I read one reviewer from the time who said that it was a, it described a world that most people couldn't relate to because this is actually a period of great poverty in America, et cetera. But from the safe, you know, distance of today, it doesn't matter to us that we can't understand it. It's glorious, it's glorious looking into a world, you know, out of time. And as you say, it is so modern, you know, it's very fashionable, all the clothes that all the characters wear, but also, you know, it's electric lights, it's got telephones, Gatsby's got speedboats, he's got a sea plane. You know, it's all about, you know, the movie massively plays into this, fast cars, gas stations, commuter trains. And Gatsby himself is a very, very modern figure. You know,

• 47:51Speaker 01

  he's a bootlegger, a bond market speculator. And it's also a book of the new mass media and consumerism, newspapers, magazines, cars, advertisements.

• 48:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, all of which, so we mentioned before how Fitzgerald loved Joseph Conrad. The other writer that sometimes Fitzgerald reminds me of a little bit because of the way he charts all the, these very rich characters and their kind of love affairs is Henry James, another great American writer. But if you read, I mean, there seems to be a massive Chasm between Henry James and Joseph Conrad on one side and Fitzgerald on the other. His books seem to belong to it. Well, they do belong to a different century, even though the time lapse is not that great. It's as though time has really speeded up and suddenly we're in a world of telephones and, you know, cocktails and all of this kind of thing. And yet, at the same time, I think one of the things that I find so interesting about is it's a book about, it's very present minded, it's set in the twenties.

• 48:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  But all the characters are looking backwards the whole time. I mean, even somebody as unreflective as Tom Buchanan. We're told right away that basically he's constantly dreaming of some irrecoverable football game that he played at college.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Totally, but also for characters like Tom and Daisy. It's kind of like the last stand of that old world for people like them, a world in which you have, you know, servants everywhere and people bring you cocktails and stuff. And he can feel, Tom, the sense of incursion, the incursion of like new money and modernity.

• 49:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  And I think one of the most iconic lines in the whole book is when Nick says to Gatsby, oh, you can't relive the past or something like that. And Gatsby says, well, of course you can, old sport.

• 49:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah. And as we all discover, he's wrong. And actually that, so there's a bit when Gatsby first re-meets Daisy. When he meets Daisy again, Nick has arranged it for him. They meet at Nick's house.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  I find that quite romantic.

• 49:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Beginning of that meeting, Gatsby knocks over, or almost knocks over, a defunct mantelpiece clock. And that sort of sense of like time has stopped in the clock, right? But also something is broken, you know, there's something flawed at the centre of his vision. This idea that you can turn back time and recover something that was lost because you can't.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's actually quite a sort of tragic foreshadowing that moment. And the idea of something being broken brings us to a part of the book that always stuck in my mind. I'm sure it sticks in lots of people's minds. And this is the Valley of Ashes. And so obviously this is a book really preoccupied with class. These are the working class people, the people that people like Tom and Daisy kind of use and abuse. And they're very firmly delineated, the three classes. You have like East Egg, West Egg, new money, old money. And then you have the Valley of Ashes. And that's like where the sort of working man lives. And it's inspired by the real life Corona dumps, which are huge mounds of ash and rubbish, four miles long. And this is where we come back to the eyes that we talked about on the front cover.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Because there's this massive advertising billboard above this huge grey desolate land, you know. And it's described as being worked by ash grey men with leaden spades. And on this billboard are the gigantic eyes of Dr T J Eckleburg. No face, just these terrifying enormous yellow glasses. And it's not entirely clear what it means. I mean, it could be like God watching over all the sin unfolding before his eyes. Or, or is it maybe the false god of consumerism and advertising?

• 51:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  There's one point where, where George Wilson, who is the husband of Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle, he pulls her over to the window and he gets her, you know, and he says to her, God is, is, God sees everything. And they're directly in front of Dr Eckleburg's eyes.

• 51:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I found that thing when I first read it, the idea of these two weird eyes overlooking the whole scene, over this valley of ashes, really, really, I mean, that to me was the image that I remembered most from the book.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people.

• 51:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because it's so strange, right? It's so weird. And actually, this is so interesting because this actually reflects not just the cover, but also one of the other big inspirations for Fitzgerald, which is the poem The Wasteland by T S Eliot. I know you're a massive fan of The Wasteland.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan of The Wasteland, it's my favourite poem.

• 52:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, well, so Fitzgerald, like you, was a huge fan of it. And he sent a copy of The Great Gatsby to T S Eliot. And he wrote, dedicated it to, and I quote, "the greatest of living poets from his enthusiastic worshipper."

• 52:13Speaker 01

  No way.

• 52:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  And in The Wasteland, as you will remember, there's a character Tyresias, this kind of blind seer who can see into the future. And T J Eckleburg, T S Eliot, they're not so different. And at one point, Nick wonders if Eckleburg, and I quote, "sank down into eternal blindness like Tyresias." So this clearly, you know, this, I mean, this is The Valley of Ashes, is The Wasteland from T S Eliot's great modernist poem, which is basically, for people who don't know, it's a poem written in the early 1920s that's trying to capture the experience of Western civilisation after the First World War, kind of broken into fragments and whatnot. And it's haunted by death and despair and all of this kind of thing.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. But I mean, you made a very impressive observation, didn't you?

• 53:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, thanks.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks, Toby.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Just fabulous piece of critical analysis.

• 53:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  My other TS Eliot observation.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  I can't believe I had to remind you. You were so thrilled at this.

• 53:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  I talked about this the other day and I was so proud of myself. Yeah, so there's a bit in the book when Nick's talking about Gatsby's parties and he says, "In the blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperers and the champagne and the stars." And that reminded me of a line in a TS Eliot poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", where he says, "In the..." What's it? "In the something, the women come and go," talking of Michelangelo.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right? And in Prufrock, the Eliot poem, he's basically, Eliot is saying, "Oh, those parties are very insubstantial and everybody's actually alienated and they're making chit chat, but actually their lives are empty and hollow." You know, and...

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Such a good time.

• 53:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's what the... That's true of Gatsby's parties as well, right? And I love the way that Fitzgerald writes the party scenes in The Great Gatsby. Because I think, I remember reading, when I reread them this time, I thought, "That is like what parties are like. They're a succession of..."

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 54:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  "...of slightly disconnected images. The more you drink, you can't remember now why you're talking to this person and suddenly you're in a different place entirely and you don't know how you got there and all of this kind of..."

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I think this is your unique experience of parties, to be honest.

• 54:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe. I just have, I just have really fun parties.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, really, really fun. Calls to mind some of your journeys back to Chipping Norton from our team get togethers. But, you know, sitting on a 4am train, wondering how you got there. But you are actually right. There's such a hollowness at the centre of these parties. And even Gatsby's massive ones, and there's this enormous sense of excitement and everything's so beautiful and its colours and there's vast trays of peeled, like, oranges coming and going. But there's a creeping sense that either this kind of joyous balloon is going to just deflate and you're going to feel every second of it and feel utterly hollowed out as a result, or it's going to burst. And then again, everything's destroyed. There's nothing at the centre and people come for the wrong reasons. People don't really know each other.

• 54:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  The people who are there are painted in the most kind of scathing possible terms, aren't they? So they all have the most ludicrous names. There's a, there's a great passage, the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a man called Bunson who I remember at Yale, and Dr Webster Syrett, who was drowned last summer up in Maine, and the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaire's, the Catlips and the Benbergs and G Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife. And they've got ridiculous American names, I mean, obviously.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 55:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also, their lives are absurd and dark and violent.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Violence, yeah.

• 55:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I guess you could say in this passage, you know, so much of the book is very sensitive and nuanced, but there are moments where Fitzgerald kind of tips into caricature. So not just with the parties, but also, you know, you mentioned the mob and all of it. So there's a character called Maya Wolfshym, and he really is a very unappealing caricature of a corrupt Jewish gambler.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Fitzgerald lets himself down there, I think.

• 55:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does. His cufflinks are human teeth.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  He fixed the World Series in 1919. He's obviously based on the character you've already mentioned, Arnold Rothstein, who was the head of the Jewish mob in New York City. But the portrait of him is frankly antisemitic, I would say.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree with that. But the interesting thing as well about the parties is, is they are actually, you know, we, we described how there's nothing really at the centre of them. They're sort of fake and, and there's a confusion to them. It's actually during the course of these parties that we get the first hints that Gatsby's life is false and, and that he's a fraud. And, you know, if, if F. Scott Fitzgerald strays into caricature from time to time, this is done with immense skill and subtlety. So for instance, we start with like his house. It's sort of, it's described as an imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy with a tower on one side.

• 56:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  That was a most excellent French accent, by the way.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Yeah. Actually, I make a point of really, um, exacerbating my Englishness when I speak in French. Hotel de Ville. Innumendi.

• 57:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Continue.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  With a towel on one side, spanking you under a thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool. And so this may have been modelled on Falets, who was Harry, that's Harry Guggenheim's mansion across the bay at Sands Point, and it's kind of a mock Gothic castle. But the thing about Gatsby's house is, it's trying to be what the Buchanan's house is. And like, for instance, it's covered in ivy to try and make it look old, but the ivy is brand new and bright green. He doesn't understand that you can't be in that world unless you're born into that world.

• 57:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't, it's like, people used to say of the Tory politician, Michael Heseltine.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  God, that was a bridge out in the sea coming.

• 57:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is an unexpected link. He's the kind of man who buys his own furniture.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  In other words, yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Surely not.

• 57:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Other Tories would say this of him, right?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, and actually, there's a wonderful scene in the library.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I love this.

• 57:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, where the man with massive owl-eyed spectacles, so he's like Dr Eckelberg, or he's like God, or whatever, he's a man who's can see things.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's looking at Gatsby's books, and he's amazed that they're real. He says, I thought they'd be cardboard. He says of Gatsby's library, it's a triumph, what thoroughness, what realism. He knew when to stop, too. He didn't cut the pages. In other words, he hasn't actually read the books.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's a sort of, you know, it's fake, it's a set, it's a Hollywood backdrop, and the whole thing is designed. And even Gatsby's clothes are fake, aren't they? Because Tom says of him at one point.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  This is so harsh.

• 58:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you want to do the line, Tabby?

• 58:32Speaker 01

  An Oxford man, like hell he is, he wears a pink suit. And in fairness, I mean, who wears a pink suit?

• 58:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I'm an Oxford man, so, you know.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, uncanny. And you have dodgy dealings with the mafia.

• 58:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  So, it all fits together. Tom's very snobbish comment there. It brings us back to the class thing, which is just, it's everywhere in this book. And it's the sense that Gatsby can just never transcend this outsider status. You know, he'll never fit in, he'll never make it. And I think that, deep down, that's kind of what Daisy is for him. It's not that he loves this woman necessarily, you know, the nuances of her personality. It's what she represents. She, and I actually think maybe Esco Fitzgerald had that a little bit with Geneva King. You know, it's a ticket into a gilded world that is always out of reach.

• 59:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's feeling that is so, I've been so common to lots of listeners, so common to all of us.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, there are so many scene moments in the book where there's a Nick thinks of somebody outside the party, looking in through the windows or something. And that feeling that we all have sometimes that there's there's a, there's an exclusive party going on and we're not invited and we'll never get in and we'll never be accepted. Because even if we're not wearing a pink suit.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Even if we're not wearing a pink suit.

• 59:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Our essential pink suitedness will, will identify us as an outsider.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  It's writ large all over our faces.

• 59:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah, exactly. And there's a very sort of, almost a poignant moment at the end when.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Big spoiler, Gatsby's father turns up and he shows Nick this book that his son had when he was a boy with a kind of timetable in which he said, you know, practice elocution, poison, how to attain it. Read an improving book or magazine once a week.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Quite touching that, actually.

• 1:00:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Gatsby had this sort of to do list to try and improve himself. And what that's doing, of course, is it's mocking all these characters in kind of late 19th century, early 20th century books. There's a character, this kind of writer called Horatio Alger, who specialised in this. Characters who improved themselves and rose up and climbed the ladder, the American dream, they made something of themselves. And actually, one of the lessons of the Great Gatsby is you can't.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can try to do it, but you'll be dragged back, you'll be found out and it will end horribly.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:00:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which brings us to the end of the book, Tabby.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I love, I think this is just such a brilliantly written scene. Cause it's, it's a boiling hot day, so quite like the go between. So there's this, there's this relentless beating heat and it reflects the emotional temperature. You know, all the characters, it's basically a moment of real revelation for everybody. And it's building to this massive crescendo. But ironically, what triggers this massive denouement is that it's a, it's a lunch at the Buchanan's house that Gatsby is attending. And Daisy says to him, oh, you're so cool, you always look so cool, which shows that she actually does know him. And I actually think. You know, did always slightly love him. The way that she and Gatsby are looking at each other is Tom Buchanan finally realises that there is something going on between them and

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  he's absolutely appalled by this. He's very shaken by it, even though he's always had affairs. He possesses Daisy.

• 1:01:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he realises that they have a connection, doesn't he?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:01:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they have a past. And then they all go bizarrely, I mean, slightly perhaps, slightly implausibly, given what's just happened. They all say, well, we're going on this massive drive across the Valley of Ashes into New York City. They get to New York City and then they all meet up in New York City and they have a big showdown, don't they? Tom has this rant about Mr. Nobody from nowhere and says, you know, is this the fashionable thing now? You know, people can sleep with your wife. And then he really lets himself down. He says the next thing, you know, you know, people will be throwing everything overboard and we'll have intermarriage between black and white. So there's the ugliness of Tom coming back out. But Gatsby still is, there's still something contrived about him. Because I always think at this point, he sounds like someone from a soap opera

• 1:02:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  or from a sentimental melodrama. She never loved you. She only married you because I was poor. She was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake in her heart. She never loved anybody but me. And it always, it almost feels a bit trite, I think, a bit hollow, what are you saying?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Nick says at one point during this confrontation that he can see that Gatsby knows it's all unraveling. You know, he knows it's gone. He knows it's too late. So once again there, there's this massive clash between the sentimental ideals and the reality. Because, you know, Daisy admits at one point, she did love Tom and that actually she loves them both. And while this is enough for Tom, because he's from this old money world where basically people hurt each other, they throw themselves up against the rocks, but they never, ever break up because like tradition demands that you stick together. But for Gatsby, it's not enough. Gatsby wants to sort of own Daisy entirely, because that's the only way that his dream can kind of reach fruition. Tom says about he and Daisy, there are things between us that you'll never know. But these words seem to bite physically

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  at Gatsby. And I always wondered that thing, there are things between us you'll never know, if that was kind of a callback to F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with Zelda. You know, they'd hurt each other so many times. They'd had abortions, miscarriages, terrible drunken, you know, shenanigans.

• 1:03:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  But they're fundamentally bound by these terrible, terrible things they've both witnessed and seen.

• 1:03:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  By their suffering. Yeah, by their kind of mutual suffering.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And their kind of brutality with each other.

• 1:03:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you know, completely. So we've probably run out of time, so we can't really get into the absolute ending. I mean, there's an amazing line, probably one of the lines of the book that always sticks in my head. We drove on toward death through the cooling twilight, because they then drive back to Long Island. And this is when the great tragedy happens, which, if you've read the book, or if you've listened to the audiobook, you will know, maybe we shouldn't spoil the story. For those of you who haven't, there is this incredible moment at the event. I think it's a brilliant piece of writing, one of the great pieces of writing in the 20th century, where Nick Anarata sort of widens the focus out, and he turns the whole thing into a metaphor for the American dream and for the story

• 1:04:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  of America more broadly, doesn't it? Because he thinks about Long Island.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it's beautiful writing this.

• 1:04:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he says, "The old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams." And that dream, the dream is not just the dream of Daisy or of the green light, it's the dream of becoming new, of starting again, of reinventing yourself and the world. And that's been Gatsby's dream throughout, hasn't it? But it's turned out disastrously, as we'll discover at this point in the book.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a tragedy.

• 1:05:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because it's a dream that kills people.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it destroys people's lives. And Gatsby pays a very, very high price for building his whole life around a single hope, a single desire, and a single dream. You know, it's this theme, again, that runs throughout the book, that you can't turn back the clock, even with the kind of force of will that Gatsby has at his disposal, the determination that he has from being a young boy. You just can't do that. You can't undo the past.

• 1:05:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So it's very melancholy. I mean, actually, that's the one thing I really took from it. It's a really, really melancholy book. And actually, the last lines, the most melancholy of all, one of the most brilliant passages, I think, in all literature.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  I could not agree more. Yeah, I totally agree.

• 1:05:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you want to give us, do you want to give us a burst, Abby? Of course you do. But don't do it, but don't do it in your American accent.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  No, I won't. I don't, I won't. It's far too poignant. I don't want to, I don't want to make people sob.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He'd come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out further, and one fine morning. So, we beat on, boats against

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. And that final line, the boats against the current, is what was written on F. Scott Fitzgerald's headstone.

• 1:06:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, wow. That's a good detail. I didn't know that. Wow. That's very poignant detail.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So, we have to always give these things marks out of 10, don't we? And what are we marking in this week?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  I thought initially that we should do it in green lights, but actually, given that this episode has been really about you, maybe we should do it in pink suits.

• 1:07:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, I didn't see that coming. But yeah, I agree, pink suits is the best thing. So, who's going to go first? Shall I go first?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  You go first, yeah.

• 1:07:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm actually going to give it, do you know what, I've actually, this is a mad thing, but during the recording, I've actually increased my mark.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I've increased it from, I've been so persuaded by the power of your analysis.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dominic.

• 1:07:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  That I've increased it from eight to nine.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Oh, well.

• 1:07:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm going to nine, because I think, I'm docking a mark only because I don't really care about the characters particularly.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  All right, fair enough.

• 1:07:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't find it has a massive emotional heft with me, but I think in terms of pure writing, line by line writing, it's as good a book. As was written in the 20th century, as good a book as you'll ever read. And I, yeah, I think the, the layers of nuance are tremendous. So yeah, nine out of 10.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I hate to admit, but I totally agree. I, I think this is one of the great books. Just definitely one of the greatest books that's come out of America, if not the greatest. So I am going to give it nine out of 10. I just couldn't believe this time.

• 1:08:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nine out of 10 as well.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's the power of the writing and the nuance and the subtlety. I'm going to Doc Mark though, because he does flirt with caricatures.

• 1:08:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so we're not, we're not, we're not doing what we should be doing, which is disagreeing agreeably.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  No, but that was never the tagline.

• 1:08:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're agreeing disagreeably.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. We're reluctantly agreeing.

• 1:08:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, okay. So remind us, Tabby, what's coming up?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  So next week we are doing Hamlet. So if you've seen the movie that's just come out.

• 1:08:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Macio Farrell.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Very intriguing. Yeah, I, I can't wait to do that, G. It's one of my favorite books.

• 1:08:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wonderful.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Lots to come.

• 1:08:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, lots to come. Thank you so much, Tabby. Everybody enjoy your cocktails and your pink suits. Thank you very much. That was really good fun. Bye bye.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:09:03Speaker 07

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• 1:10:03Speaker 09

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