When book critic Maureen Corrigan
first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in high school, she
was unimpressed.
"Not a lot happens in Gatsby,"
Corrigan tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It's not a plot-driven
novel and I also thought, 'Eh, it's another novel about rich people.' And I
grew up in a blue-collar community."
She also couldn't relate, she
says, because it doesn't feature any likeable female characters.
"In fact, that's one of the
reasons why Fitzgerald thought it didn't sell well in 1925," Corrigan
says, "because there are no likeable female characters and women drive the
fiction market."
But today Corrigan considers The
Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel — and it's the novel
she loves more than any other. She's written a new book about it called So
We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
Corrigan says she loves The
Great Gatsby in part because of its message that it's admirable to try to
beat your own fate.
"You can't escape the past,
but isn't it noble to try?" she says. "That's the message here ... to
be the boat against the current, even though failure and death inevitably await
you. The doomed beauty of trying — that's what this novel is about."
While Corrigan is hardly alone in
her evaluation of The Great Gatsby, she's perhaps unique in her ability
to write in such a lively and engaging way about the book, Fitzgerald's life
and the era in which it's set — the 1920s.
Corrigan has read The Great
Gatsby more than 50 times and has taught it to generations of college
students. She grew up near an area where part of the book is set in Queens,
N.Y., which is described as The Valley of Ashes because it was a dump for
coal-burning ashes.
As a book critic, Corrigan gets
more than 200 books a week delivered to her house by publishers, and she likes
to think that if The Great Gatsby were one of those books today,
she'd read it.
She says, "I would've opened
it and thought, 'Huh, The Great Gatsby.' ... The title wouldn't have
grabbed me. What I do think would've grabbed me is the book jacket design. ...
It's very striking, it's non-representational. It's odd. I think if I had
opened the book and began reading, that [narrator] Nick [Carraway's] voice
would've grabbed me. I want to think that I would've kept on reading."
Interview
Highlights
On The Great Gatsby's similarities to film
noir
Gatsby almost has the form of a film noir, where you have this
voiceover, with Nick Carraway remembering things that have taken place in the
past, things that can't be changed, events that can't be changed.
It's a violent story. There are
three violent deaths in Gatsby. It's a story in which you get
bootlegging, crime, explicit sexuality — and remember this is 1925 when it was
published, so it's pretty racy for its time. ...
We don't explicitly read about
[sex], but in chapter two, Nick is taken along by Tom Buchanan ... on a joy
ride into Manhattan where Tom takes Nick to ... a drunken party in The Love
Nest. So we know that there's infidelity — a lot of innuendo about people
having sex outside of marriage and a lot of drinking.
And, most importantly, film noir,
hard-boiled detective fiction and The Great Gatsby — they're all
stories that are obsessed with the presence of fate. There's a very fated feel
to Gatsby. Events that occur in the novel, they're foretold many times.
That car crash in which Myrtle Wilson is killed, Tom's mistress, there are two
other car crashes that preceded that car crash. So a lot of events are
predicted in this novel.
On Fitzgerald's
background
[Despite his success], he was
also that Midwestern boy from St. Paul, Minn., whose parents didn't quite
measure up to their neighbors. His parents never owned a home, for instance,
they always rented. Fitzgerald never owned a home — he always rented.
He was always kind of on the
outside looking in and hoping to be good enough for Princeton, to be good
enough for the crowd on the Riviera who he hung out with — [wealthy
expatriates] Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Hemingways, etc. I think you get that
sense in Fitzgerald of someone who remade himself but was also aware at times
in his life that he was pretending to be someone he was not.
Even when he died in 1940,
Fitzgerald was denied burial in his own family's plot in Rockville, Md.,
because the Catholic Church [Fitzgerald grew up Catholic] decided that his
novels were a little too risque and ... didn't approve of them. So Fitzgerald
had to be buried in a Protestant cemetery. He's always being pushed out and
told that he's not good enough.
On Gatsby's reception in its time
The literary readers — people
like Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Gilbert Seldes, who was a critic and
reviewer of the time who really got Gatsby — they loved it. ...
The popular reviewers read it as
a crime novel and thought for the most part that it was maybe just OK. There's
a famous headline for a review of The Great Gatsby that came out in the New
York World, and the headline reads, "Fitzgerald's Latest A Dud."
On Gatsby's second life
When Fitzgerald died in 1940 in
Hollywood, his last royalty check was for $13.13. Remaindered copies of the
second printing of The Great Gatsby were moldering away in [publisher]
Scribner's warehouse.
World War II starts, and a group
of publishers, paper manufacturers, editors [and] librarians get together in
New York. And they decide that men serving in the Army and Navy need something
to read. ... They printed over 1,000 titles of different books, and they sent
over a million copies of these books to sailors and soldiers serving overseas
and also to [prisoners of war] in prison camps in Japan and Germany through an
arrangement with the Red Cross.
The Great Gatsby was chosen to be one of these Armed Services Editions. And what
that meant was that all of a sudden this novel that was basically nowhere, you
couldn't get it in bookstores in the early 1940s, [but] by 1945 over 123,000
copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed. ...
The greatest distribution of the
Armed Services Editions was on the eve of D-Day. Eisenhower's staff made sure
that every guy stepping onto a landing craft in the south of England right on
the eve of D-Day would have an Armed Services Edition in his pocket. They were
sized as long rectangles meant to fit in the servicemen's pockets.
So you read these accounts of the
guys on the landing crafts going over to Normandy Beach and they're reading,
trying to take their mind off of what's about to face them. ... It's just such
an amazing testament to what books can mean to people at critical times in
their lives.
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more,
visit http://www.npr.org/.
Transcript
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry
Gross. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has just published a new book of her
own. It's about the novel she loves more than any other, the novel she
considers to be the greatest American novel, "The Great Gatsby."
She's hardly alone in her evaluation of Gatsby, but she's perhaps in a unique
position to write in such a lively and engaging way about the book, its author,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the era the book is set in - the 1920s.
In writing about Gatsby, she also
writes about herself. She's read Gatsby more than 50 times, taught it to
generations of college students and grew up near an area where part of the book
is set - not near Gatsby's mansion but near an area in Queens, New York that
the characters drive through which is described as the valley of ashes because
it was a dump for coal burning ashes.
I've been suggesting our
listeners read or reread Gatsby before today's broadcast. But if you're
interested in books, I think you'll enjoy what Maureen has to say, even if
you've never read Gatsby. Her book is called, "So We Read On: How The
Great Gatsby Came To Be Written And Why It Endures." Maureen Corrigan,
welcome back to FRESH AIR. I so enjoyed reading your book.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Well,
thank you, Terry.
GROSS: So...
CORRIGAN: I know you're a
Fitzgerald fan.
GROSS: I am. So I will ask you to
confess something that you confess in the book, which is that you didn't
especially like "The Great Gatsby" when you were assigned to read it in
high school. Why didn't you like it then?
CORRIGAN: As far as I remember, I
didn't like it because I thought it was boring. Not a lot happens in Gatsby.
It's not a plot-driven novel. And I also thought, oh, it's another novel about
rich people. And I grew up in a blue-collar community, I guess, again, as so
many readers do, especially when we're young, I was looking for myself in what
I was reading. And Gatsby also famously is a novel that doesn't feature any
likable female characters. In fact, that's one of the reasons why Fitzgerald
thought it didn't sell well in 1925 because there are no likable female
characters and women drive the fiction market.
GROSS: Well, as you point out,
you read this book not for the story or for the characters, but for the voice,
for the writing. So I want you to read the opening of "The Great
Gatsby," and it's one of the most famous openings in all of literature.
CORRIGAN: Yeah, this is Nick
Carraway, of course, our narrator. (Reading) In my younger and more vulnerable
years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind
ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just
remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that
you've had. He didn't say anymore, but we've always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way. And I understood that he meant a great deal
more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit
that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of
not a few veteran bores.
GROSS: What do you hear in that
opening?
CORRIGAN: I hear a narrator who
we can't completely trust because, of course, I've read Gatsby so many times,
I've read it upwards of 50 times. When Nick tells us that he's inclined to
reserve all judgments, I say, oh, really? Because he does a lot of judging in
this novel. What I also hear is someone who comes from a world of privilege,
who's trying to tell us that he's just a regular Joe, that he's not a snob. And
so what the novel also is telling us right away in that opening is that this is
a novel that's very alert to the nuances of class in America. That - Nick is
partly defining himself by what class he comes from.
GROSS: And by the end of the
second page, we realize how disillusioned the narrator becomes by the end of
the story because at the end of the second page, when he's talking about
Gatsby, he says (reading) Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It's what
preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abort of sorrows and short-winded
relations of men.
So we know by the end of this
book, he's disgusted with people.
CORRIGAN: He's disgusted with
people, and we also hear that it's a retrospective story. You know, Nick is
remembering events that happened two years earlier in the summer of 1922. One
of the things that I talk about in my book is that Gatsby almost has the form
of a film noir where you have this voiceover with Nick Carraway, remembering things
that have taken place in the past - things that can't be changed, events that
can't be changed.
GROSS: You love hard-boiled
detective fiction and film noir. What other similarities do you see between
Gatsby...
CORRIGAN: Oh, my gosh.
GROSS: ...And...
CORRIGAN: Well, first of all...
GROSS: ...Yeah.
CORRIGAN: ...It's a violent
story. There are three violent deaths in Gatsby. It's a story in which you get
bootlegging crime, explicit sexuality - and remember, this is 1925 when it was
published, so it's pretty racy for its time as a novel.
GROSS: Whoa, hang on. The
explicit sexuality, we know explicitly that people have had sex. We don't
explicitly read about it.
CORRIGAN: We don't explicitly
read about it. But in chapter two, Nick is taken along by Tom Buchanan, who's
one of the greatest characters in the novel; he's taken along on a joy ride
into Manhattan, where Tom takes Nick to the love nest that he's established
with his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. And there's a drunken party in the love nest.
So we know that there's infidelity, a lot of innuendo about people having sex
outside of marriage and a lot of drinking.
And most importantly, film noir,
hard-boiled detective fiction and "The Great Gatsby," they're all
stories that are obsessed with the presence of fate. There's a very fated feel
to Gatsby. You know, things - events that occur in the novel, they're foretold
many times. That car crash in which Myrtle Wilson is killed, Tom's mistress,
there are two other car crashes that precede that car crash. So a lot of events
are predicted in this novel.
GROSS: When you say fate, you
mean doom (laughter)?
CORRIGAN: Yeah, doom. That's
right.
GROSS: We're fated for a bad
ending.
CORRIGAN: That's right. And I
think that's the beauty of "The Great Gatsby" ultimately - that it
talks about how noble it is to try, to try to swim faster, jump higher, you
know, go farther, even though inevitably we're going to be pulled under by the
forces of fate.
GROSS: So I want you to tell
just, like, the skeleton of the story of "The Great Gatsby." So
people who have not read the book or haven't read it in a long time, have some
kind of plot structure to hang what we're talking about on.
CORRIGAN: OK, in 30 words or
less...
GROSS: Good.
CORRIGAN: A young man named Nick
Carraway moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922. And he's kind of got an
internship - that's what we would think of it as - on Wall Street. And he
discovers that he's living next door to this enigmatic character named Jay
Gatsby, who lives in this over-the-top mansion. And he also discovers, as the
plot unfolds, that Jay Gatsby has been carrying a torch for his, Nick's cousin,
Daisy Buchanan for years and that Gatsby's whole purpose on living - to living
on Long Island is to be close to Daisy Buchanan and to rekindle the romance
that they once had years ago.
Things don't end well. After
Daisy and Jay Gatsby get back together again, there's a break in the novel;
there's a silence. It's almost as though Fitzgerald wanted to leave them their
privacy for a while in the novel. But then Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan,
realizes that there's something fishy going on. He confronts Gatsby. And in the
last act of the novel, as Daisy and Gatsby are driving on Long Island after
this awful confrontation has happened in the Plaza Hotel, Daisy, who's actually
behind the wheel, runs over her husband's mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Wilson's
husband thinks that Gatsby was behind the wheel, and he goes after Gatsby and
murders him. And - the end.
I mean, there are three bodies by
the end of the novel. And the Buchanans leave town. They leave other people to
clean up their messes. They're that kind of rich, privileged, entitled couple.
And we've only got our narrator, Nick Carraway, who's kind of like Ishmael in
"Moby Dick." He survives the wreck, and he lives on to tell us all.
And he tells the story of Gatsby to us because he thinks Gatsby is the one pure
soul in this entire story.
GROSS: A pure soul because he
believed in something so strongly...
CORRIGAN: Yeah, that's right.
GROSS: ...In his love for Daisy
and his desire to, like, get her back, even though she's married now...
CORRIGAN: That's right.
GROSS: ...Married to somebody
else. He totally remakes his life. He is from a kind of - what? - poor or
working-class background.
CORRIGAN: Yeah.
GROSS: And to make himself a kind
of guy she might consider worthy of him, he makes a lot of money bootlegging.
He buys piles and piles of shirts imported from England. He buys a mansion. He
throws these great parties - all things just to impress her. And he once
thought he might want these things, but the more of these things he gets, the
less meaning they have. All he really wants is her.
CORRIGAN: You know, yes and no.
When Daisy and Gatsby are reunited in the dead center of this novel, which is
how, you know, incredibly overdesigned Gatsby is as a novel. Daisy and Gatsby
are reunited in chapter five, the dead center of this novel.
There's a moment where Nick
Carraway, who's also at this reunion, says there must've been moments when even
Daisy fell short of Gatsby's visions. And we get that sense as the novel
reaches its conclusion, that Daisy is someone who Gatsby has been dreaming,
fantasizing about, for the years that they've been apart. But she falls short.
You know, she's not commensurate with his capacity to wonder.
I'm borrowing Fitzgerald's words
from the end of the novel. Gatsby is a dreamer, and so he ties his dreams to
Daisy. But ultimately she's about as empty as, you know, the Maltese Falcon is
in Dashiell Hammett's great hard-boiled novel of 1930, you know. She's
something everybody is chasing. But she doesn't measure up.
GROSS: And, you know, one of the
most famous things about "The Great Gatsby" is that Gatsby is always
looking across Long Island Sound at the dock where Daisy lives. And he sees the
green light that she has on at night on the dock. And he's always looking at
that light and yearning for his dream - for her. And as you point out, when we
first see him in the novel, he has his arms stretched out, as if reaching for
that light. And that light becomes a symbol of everything that he wants,
everything that he's remade his life to be near. And with that, I'd like you to
read the very ending of the novel. After...
CORRIGAN: As some people say, the
greatest ending in all of American literature. (Laughter) Yeah.
GROSS: And it's Nicks voice that
we're hearing here because Gatsby's already dead at this point.
CORRIGAN: Gatsby's dead, yeah.
(Reading) Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It alluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we
will run faster, stretch out at our arms farther. And one fine morning, so we
beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
GROSS: You know, to put in the
words of Chinatown, it's Chinatown Jake.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: It's like, you can't
escape the past. I don't know, is that a terrible analogy?
CORRIGAN: No, no, it's not a
terrible analogy. You can't escape the past. But isn't it noble to try? I mean,
that's the message here.
GROSS: To be the boat against the
current?
CORRIGAN: Yeah, to be the boat
against the current. Even though you know failure and death inevitably await
you. You're going - the doomed beauty of trying, that's what this novel is about.
GROSS: If you're just joining us,
my guest is our book critic Maureen Corrigan. And she's a written a new book,
it's called "So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It
Endures." Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more. This is
FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)
GROSS: And if you're just joining
us, my guest is FRESH AIR's book critic, Maureen Corrigan. And the occasion for
her visit is a new book that she has written. And it's called "So We Read
On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures."
You know, there was an article a
few years ago in the New York Times that was headlined, Gatsby's green light
beckons a new set of strivers. And it followed a class in which the students -
and a lot of them were first or second generation immigrants - were talking
about what is their green light? And one of the students said, her green light
was Harvard. And another student said, my goal is to make my parents proud of
me. And I thought, like, you really can't turn "Gatsby" into that
type of inspirational novel - of, like, pursue your dream, and you will achieve
it.
CORRIGAN: I mean, I love that the
students take that inspiration from "Gatsby", especially students who
are first generation Americans. They're remaking themselves. They're strivers.
I love that there is that positive element in "Gatsby."
But if it were just, you know,
this kind of cheerleading slogan for the American dream, Gatsby would be alive
at the end of the novel. He's not. So Fitzgerald famously has it both ways. He
celebrates the effort, the striving. And he also lets us know that there are
limits to the striving - that, you know, ultimately, we all reach the dead-end.
GROSS: It's often said that
self-transformation is the theme of a lot of American literature. And it's certainly
one of the themes of Gatsby. And he both fails and succeeds in remaking
himself. And where would you say that fits in - into American literature, in
terms of personal transformation?
CORRIGAN: Well, we see so many
conmen in American literature, you know. And I think of almost all of our great
novels - Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, you know, on and on. At the
center, there's someone who's pretending to be something that he's not. We're
fascinated with the freedom that America allows us to sort of forge our own
identities. But, you know, our smart American writers also know that it's not
that easy, and it's not that simple. And you carry the past with you.
I mean, I think Fitzgerald felt
that very much. He knew success so early, as a young man in his early twenties,
with "This Side Of Paradise," his first novel in 1920. It was a hit.
He was the toast of New York. But he was also that Midwestern boy from St.
Paul, Minnesota, whose parents, you know, didn't quite measure up to their
neighbors. His parents never owned a home, for instance. They always rented.
Fitzgerald never owned a home. He always rented.
He was always kind of on the
outside looking in. And hoping to be good enough for Princeton - you know, to
be good enough for the crowd on the Riviera who he hung out with - Gerald and
Sara Murphy, the Hemingways.
So I think you get that sense in
Fitzgerald of someone who remade himself, but was also aware at times in his
life that he was pretending to be someone he was not. Even when he died in
1940, Fitzgerald was denied burial in his own family's plot in Rockville,
Maryland, because the Catholic Church - Fitzgerald grew up Catholic- decided
that his novels were a little too risque, and they didn't approve of them.
GROSS: Whoa.
CORRIGAN: So Fitzgerald had to be
buried in a Protestant cemetery. I mean, he's always being pushed out and told
that he's not good enough.
GROSS: They missed a real
opportunity. (Laughing).
CORRIGAN: Well, they did. I mean,
they made up for it. In 1979, Scottie Fitzgerald, the only child of Scott and
Zelda - their daughter - had her parents reinterred in the family plot in
Rockville. And I live quite close to that cemetery. It's a beautiful little
churchyard. The church is - was a church on the underground railroad, so it's
an old spot in Rockville. Unfortunately, these days, it's about 10 inches from
a highway, so you do hear the traffic going by. But Scott and Zelda are buried
together under a slab that has the last words of "The Great Gatsby"
written on it.
GROSS: Yeah. And reading that in
your book - reading about that in your book, I kept wondering, what would
Fitzgerald have thought when he wrote those lines - and so we be on boats
against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past - if he thought that
that would be on his tombstone? And would you even want that on your tombstone?
CORRIGAN: (Laughing).
GROSS: I mean, it's such a kind
of pessimistic, like, ill-fated...
CORRIGAN: I guess. I don't know,
but they're the most...
GROSS: It's beautiful.
CORRIGAN: It's so beautiful.
GROSS: It's so beautiful the
words, but...
CORRIGAN: It's so beautiful. And,
you know, people leave all sorts of tributes there. They live miniature liquor
bottles.
GROSS: (Laughing).
CORRIGAN: They leave their own
writing.
GROSS: Because of all the
parties?
CORRIGAN: They leave coins. Yeah.
I mean, it's lovely. It's not a shrine that a lot of people know about. But it
seems like the pilgrims who do know about it - it means a lot to have those
last words right there on the tombstone - not a tombstone, but on the slab.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan will be
back in the second half of the show. Her new book is called "So We Read
On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures." Maureen is our
book critic and teaches literature at Georgetown University. I'm Terry Gross,
and this is FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm
Terry Gross back with our book critic Maureen Corrigan. She has a new book of
her own which is about the novel she loves more than any other - "The Great
Gatsby." Her book is called "So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came
To Be And Why It Endures." Many critics, including Maureen, consider it to
be the greatest American novel, but few readers in 1925 when the book was
published would have imagined it would attain that status.
Gatsby was not that well-received
in its time, right?
CORRIGAN: No, not at all. It got
mixed reviews. The literary readers - people like Gertrude Stein, Edmund
Wilson, Gilberts Seldes, who was a critic and reviewer of the time who really
got Gatsby - they loved it. Edith Wharton - although she thought famously that
Fitzgerald should've done more with the character of Gatsby - but she generally
liked it. The popular reviewers read it as a crime novel and thought for the
most part that it was maybe just OK. There's a famous headline for a review of
"The Great Gatsby" that came out in The New York World, and the
headline reads, Fitzgerald's latest - a dud.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: You say something in your
book about "The Great Gatsby" that I totally identified with, even
though I'm not a book critic like you are. You write that you are afraid if you
were reviewing the book in 1925 that maybe you might not have realized how
great it is, or if it came to you over the transom now, a book like it, maybe
you wouldn't notice, maybe wouldn't have spent enough time initially looking at
it to realize that it was worthy of a serious review. I worry about this all
the time with books that I look at. Maybe I'm not looking at it long enough to
realize how worthy it is of an interview on the show. Can you just, like,
elaborate on that fear little bit?
CORRIGAN: Yeah, you know,
Fitzgerald was known for tales of the Jazz age. You know, in his novels and
short stories - tales about flappers and their boyfriends. I think if this book
had landed on my porch as so many books do - I get about 200 books a week
delivered to my house from publishers - I would have opened it and thought, oh,
"The Great Gatsby." It's a slim novel. It clocks in at about 50,000
words, so it's a short novel - 180 pages.
The title is nothing to grab you
- Fitzgerald always had trouble with the title up until almost publication day.
He kept changing the title of "The Great Gatsby" and everything else
he came up with was worse - you know, "Trimalchio In West Egg," awful
titles. So the title wouldn't have grabbed me.
What I do think would've grabbed
me is the book jacket design. It's got that famous book jacket design by
Francis Cugat, who, for listeners of a certain age, he was the brother of the
bandleader Xavier Cugat. He did that book jacket design of a flapper's
disembodied face floating over a night sky, and you can see an amusement park,
which looks like Coney Island - the lights of that amusement park at the bottom
of the painting that became the book jacket - it's very striking. It's
nonrepresentational. It's odd.
I think if I had opened the book
and began reading, that Nick's voice would have grabbed me, and I want to think
that I would have kept on reading, but, you know, it's a hard call because I
think, you know, maybe I would've opened up the envelope that contained
"The Great Gatsby" and thought, oh, another book about flappers.
These days I get so many books still about dogs. I think we're still living
through the "Marley And Me" phenomenon. And I love dogs, but I'm kind
of tired of reading about dogs. So I probably might have thought, oh, another
book about flappers - do I really need to read this? And maybe I would've put
it down. That would've been a mistake.
GROSS: "The Great
Gatsby" was not very well-reviewed in its time. It wasn't a hit in its
time, but it got a second life in the 1940s during World War II which is so
interesting, again something I didn't know about until reading your book. Can
you talk about how it got that second life?
CORRIGAN: Oh, yeah. This is such
a feel-good story for anybody who loves books and who wonders sometimes as I
do, well, what practical purpose does this great love of literature really
serve? When Fitzgerald died in 1940 in Hollywood, his last royalty check was
for $13.13. Remaindered copies of the second printing of "The Great
Gatsby" were moldering away in Scribner's warehouse.
World War II starts and a group
of publishers, of paper manufacturers, editors, librarians, get together in New
York and they decide that, you know, men serving in the Army and Navy overseas
need something to read. Up until this time, civilians had been sending copies
of surplus books overseas through an Army program, but that wasn't enough. And
so they hit on this idea of what they called the Armed Services Editions -
paperback editions of both popular books and classics everything from "My
Friend Flicka" to "Moby Dick" to "Coming Of Age In
Samoa" by Margaret Mead - they printed over a thousand titles of different
books, and they sent over a million copies of these books to sailors and
soldiers serving overseas and also to POWs in prison camps in Japan and Germany
through an arrangement with the Red Cross.
"The Great Gatsby" was
chosen to be one of these Armed Services Edition,s and what that meant was that
all of a sudden, this novel that was basically nowhere - you couldn't even get
it in bookstores in the early 1940s - by 1945, over 123,000 copies of "The
Great Gatsby" were distributed to the Armed Forces. The more I read about
the Armed Services Editions, I almost start to tear up, I mean, because it's
such an amazing project - that all of these people - these editors and these
paper distributors, librarians - you know, work together to make happen.
The greatest distribution of the
Armed Services Editions was on the eve of D-Day. Eisenhower's staff made sure
that every guy stepping onto a landing craft in the South of England, right on
the eve of D-Day, would have an Armed Services Edition in his pocket. They were
sized as long rectangles meant to fit in the serviceman's pockets, and so you
read these accounts of guys on the landing crafts going over to Normandy Beach,
and they're reading. They're trying to take their mind off of what's about to
face them.
One other quick fact - one of the
most famous and popular Armed Services Edition titles with one of these
so-called D-Day titles, it was "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" by Betty
Smith. I mean, I don't know. It's just such an amazing testament to what books
can mean to people at critical times in their lives.
GROSS: My guest is our book
critic Maureen Corrigan. She's written a new book called "So We Read On:
How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures." We'll talk more after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)
GROSS: If you're just joining us,
my guest is FRESH AIR's book critic Maureen Corrigan who has a new book of her
own. It's called "So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why
It Endures," and, Maureen, in the book you write a little autobiographically,
making some connections between your life and the novel. And you write that
your grandparents were in New York during the so-called Jazz age. Your parents
were born in 1919?
CORRIGAN: My mom, yeah.
GROSS: Your mother?
CORRIGAN: Yeah. which is when
Fitzgerald was first in New York, yeah.
GROSS: But, your parents and
grandparents lived in a different world of New York than Gatsby and Nick live
in?
CORRIGAN: Yeah. Yeah. You know,
it's interesting to me that the novel is so celebrated as a novel about the
high life, but this is a novel that also very much notices people who are not
rich, who are not white, who are not, quote-unquote, "American,"
again that famous Queensboro Bridge passage that people tend to remember - when
Nick and Gatsby are driving over the Queensboro Bridge, and they see the great
skyline of Manhattan rising up before them. What they also see are the people
in the cars around them, and one of the cars is driven by a white chauffeur.
And it is carrying in the language of the novel - it's two bucks and a girl -
African-Americans who are wealthy enough now to hire a white chauffeur. They're
also surrounded by a funeral procession of cars driven by people who look like
they come from Southeastern Europe.
This is a novel that's very
worried about who might be passing the white guys, speeding by the white guys -
Nick and Gatsby - on this roadway - people of color, immigrants. What's
happening to America in the 1920s? When America is still getting in the early
'20s, this huge wave of immigrants from South Eastern Europe, from Russia, when
the great migration is still happening and you're getting the Harlem
Renaissance happening in New York America is becoming a more diverse place, and
because "Gatsby" is a novel of its time, it's noticing these social
developments. And it's a little bit anxious about them.
GROSS: Do you cringe reading some
of those passages?
CORRIGAN: You know, I don't
cringe. I think Fitzgerald - as he so often does - he has it both ways. You can
look at those passages and say, this book is so racist and, you know, just go
down the list - homophobic and sexist, too, you know - in its judgments about
the female characters. And too bad we have to forgive "The Great
Gatsby" before we can really enjoy it. We have to forgive it for those
social judgments that are judgments of its time.
On the other hand, the character
who's the most racist in the novel is Tom Buchanan. I mean, practically his
very first words in the novel are when he's going on and on about a book he's just
read called "The Rise Of The Colored Empire," which is a book about -
that's basically a book talking about how the white race is going to be overrun
by all of these other, lesser races that are pouring into America. Tom is a
racist, and he's a character that we're not supposed to like in Gatsby. He's a
nasty guy. So ultimately my judgment on the novel is that it has it both ways,
and maybe Fitzgerald himself in 1925 didn't yet know what to think about all of
these ways in which America was changing.
GROSS: When Fitzgerald was
courting Zelda who became his wife, her father - who was a judge - wanted to
make sure that Fitzgerald could support her, and Fitzgerald knew - all right,
it's going to be really hard to do that as a writer. So even with the woman who
became his wife, class was a big issue.
CORRIGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Judge
Sayre, Zelda's father, stipulated that as a condition of their engagement,
Scott had to prove that he could support Zelda in the style to which she had
become accustomed. So when Fitzgerald is discharged from the Army in 1919, he
goes to New York. And Fitzgerald first gets a job - a day job - working for an
advertising company, and he's submitting short stories to all of these
magazines and getting rejected over and over and over again.
You know, he papers his one-room
apartment in the upper reaches of Manhattan with all of the rejection slips
that he gets, and he basically - he lasts six months in New York, and then he
returns home to St. Paul. He just can't cut it. Zelda breaks off their
engagement, the manuscript of "This Side Of Paradise" had been
rejected twice by Scribner's, but he rewrote "This Side Of Paradise"
for the third time. And the third time was the charm. Maxwell Perkins, his
editor at Scribner's, threatened to quit if Scribner's wouldn't publish the
novel. It was published and it became one of those novels that defined a
generation. It made Fitzgerald a star.
Shortly after the novel was
published, Scott and Zelda get married in the rectory of Saint Patrick's
Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York, and they become the toasts of the town.
The sad part of that story - because it's such an amazing rise - is that they
fall as quickly as they rose.
By the end of the 1920s, Zelda
has had her first schizophrenic episode in 1929, and Fitzgerald is struggling
to write a novel after "The Great Gatsby," and he's having a really
hard time. So it's - their story is so exciting and beautiful and shimmering -
the story of Scott and Zelda, and it doesn't last. The bubble bursts fairly quickly.
GROSS: And it burst after he
writes "The Great Gatsby."
CORRIGAN: Yeah, yeah. They're
restless people - Scott and Zelda and Scottie, their small daughter who they're
taking with them to Europe and back to America and back to Europe. They lived for
a time on the Riviera in Rome in Paris; that's where Fitzgerald and Hemingway
first meet, in Paris in 1925. But Fitzgerald is having a hard time cranking out
that novel after "The Great Gatsby." He's disheartened because he
thought Gatsby - rightly, he thought Gatsby was his masterpiece, and it didn't
sell. And then of course he's got all these personal problems.
Zelda is institutionalized. He's
writing short stories which are his bread and butter in order to pay the fees
for the private sanitariums where Zelda's being cared for. Scottie, his
daughter, is eventually sent away as a teenager to private girls' schools. So
he's got a lot of bills, and eventually in 1934 he publishes "Tender Is
The Night," which, I know I will alienate a lot of Fitzgerald fans, but I
agree with those critics who see it as kind of a noble failure. I don't think
it measures up anywhere near close to Gatsby and it didn't sell all that well.
So that further disheartened Fitzgerald.
Eventually he goes to Hollywood
in the late '30s to make a living, and there in Hollywood, he's treated, like -
basically like a hand - like a writer who can be plugged into movies to write,
to rewrite scripts. And he's even put for two weeks to work on "Gone With
The Wind" until he's taken off of that and put on another movie. I mean,
Hollywood famously treated so many of our great writers - it treated them so
shabbily, and Fitzgerald was very disheartened when he was in Hollywood. That's
where he dies in 1940.
GROSS: Maureen, would you like to
leave us with one of your favorite passages from the book, one that you haven't
already read?
CORRIGAN: Oh, gosh. You know
what? I could do that, but I'd love to leave you with one of the greatest parts
of a Fitzgerald letter, if that's OK?
GROSS: Sure, that's fine.
CORRIGAN: Fitzgerald never
stopped trying to strategize how to sell Gatsby. He thought it was his
masterpiece, and he was so disheartened that it didn't sell. He writes a letter
to his editor, Max Perkins, in May of 1940. This is a few short months before
he, Fitzgerald, dies in Hollywood, and in it he's talking about Gatsby and he
mentions his daughter, Scottie.
(Reading) I wish I was in print.
It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an
author and finds that no book is procurable. Would the 25 cent press keep
Gatsby in the public eye, or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance?
Would a popular re-issue in that series with the preface - not by me, but by
one of its admirers - I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with
classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody? But to die so completely
and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in
American fiction that doesn't slightly bear my stamp. In a small way, I was an
original.
GROSS: That is heartbreaking, and
he was an original.
CORRIGAN: He was an original, and
he knew it, but, you know, I do believe roughly in the meritocracy. I do
believe that great books eventually find their audience, but the key word is
eventually. Sometimes it doesn't happen until after an author is dead, and that
was the story with Fitzgerald and "The Great Gatsby."
GROSS: Maureen, thank you for all
that you do for literature and for our show, and thank you for helping me enjoy
"The Great Gatsby" even more.
CORRIGAN: Thank you, Terry.
GROSS: It's really been a
pleasure to talk with you.
CORRIGAN: Thank you so much.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan's new book is called "So We Read
On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures." You can read her book's
introduction on our website, freshair.npr.org. Maureen is FRESH AIR's book
critic and teaches literature at Georgetown University. Coming up, David
Edelstein reviews the new brutal prison drama "Starred Up." This is
FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
