>> From The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Ron Charles: Good evening.
Welcome, I'm Ron Charles,
Editor of "Book World"
at "The Washington Post"
which is a charter sponsor
of this national book festival.
We're so glad you're here.
It is a great pleasure for me
to introduce Washington's
own Maureen Corrigan.
She's the author of a memoir called
"Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading".
But we've never been
able to leave her alone.
She's one of the most trusted and
adored reviewers in the country.
We know her, of course, as
the book critic on Fresh Air
and from her frequent reviews
of mysteries and thrillers
for "The Washington Post"
and other publications.
Maureen has a PhD from the
University of Pennsylvania
and she's a lecturer at the English
Department at Georgetown University.
And, earlier this year,
she published a book called
"So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby
Came to Be and Why It Endures".
It's a highly personal,
deeply scholarly,
thoroughly enjoyable discussion of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel
and it's a perfect demonstration
of why we've been turning
to Maureen Corrigan for years.
She knows that literary
criticism doesn't have to be dull.
And that, in the end, what
matters is that we love to read.
Please join me in welcoming
my friend, Maureen Corrigan.
[ Applause ]
>> Maureen Corrigan: Thank you, Ron.
And, thank you, everyone, for
sticking around for my presentation.
I'm really thrilled to
see so many people here.
I'm also thrilled to be an
author this time around.
Usually I'm in the position of
introducing the wonderful authors
who come to this festival,
or interviewing them.
So it's kind of a kick to be
on this side of the microphone
and to be talking about my book
about Fitzgerald who I love.
Okay so how many people read "The
Great Gatsby" in high school?
Yeah. Every year, when I start
my new courses at Georgetown,
especially if I have first year
students, I say, all right,
how many of you read
"To Kill A Mockingbird"?
How many of you have
read "Invisible Man"?
How many of you have
read "Moby Dick"?
Hands go up, maybe a
few for "Moby Dick" but,
for the other books,
a lot of hands go up.
When I say how many of you have
already read "The Great Gatsby"?
Everybody's hand goes up.
If you've gone to high
school in America,
Gatsby is the novel that unites us.
It's the novel that
we all have in common.
I read it in high school and I
thought, eh, what's the big deal?
I was unmoved.
I was one of those students.
But then I went on to college to
grad school, I had to teach Gatsby.
I'd say, at this point, I've
probably read "The Great Gatsby"
about 70 times and counting.
I've crossed the country,
lecturing about Gatsby
for the National Endowment
for the Arts.
I've gone to see "Gatz" twice, the
amazing 7 and a half hour production
in which the Elevator Repair Service
Theater Company performs Gatsby,
the entire text in one night.
I'm crazy about Gatsby.
I do think that it's our
greatest American novel.
I think it's also our
greatest un-American novel.
It's such a slippery novel
about yearning and meritocracy
and about the American dream.
What happened to me, as a former
high school idiot, is what happened
to America, in a large
way, in the 1940s and '50s.
And what I mean by that is when
"The Great Gatsby" first came
out in 1925, its sales
were disappointing.
Fitzgerald-- this was
Fitzgerald's third novel.
He thought it was going
to be the most successful,
to date, of his novels.
And it turned out it
sold maybe 22,000 copies.
At the time of Fitzgerald's
death in 1940, at the age of 44,
when he died in Hollywood,
remaindered copies
of the second printing of "The Great
Gatsby" were still moldering away
in Scribner's warehouse.
Fitzgerald's last royalty check
was for 13 dollars and 13 cents.
He died firmly believing
that he was a failure.
But in the late 1940s into the
'50s, something began to happen.
And America took a second
look at Gatsby, as I did,
and realized that there was
something great about this novel.
In an ordinary year, Gatsby
sells about 500,000 copies.
That's a low estimate because we're
not counting eBooks and, you know,
sales of used paperbacks,
that kind of thing.
The-- a couple of years ago when
the Baz Luhrmann horrible film
of Gatsby came out,
that number tripled.
Gatsby has colonized the world.
I know people who teach
English in China, in Russia,
Gatsby is the novel
they teach to talk
about America and the
American dream.
One of the reasons I
wanted to write my book was
to find out how did this happen?
How did this novel
that was virtually
out of print upon Fitzgerald's
death, how did it come roaring back
in such a big way relatively
quickly after he died?
How did that happen?
I wanted to find out what Fitzgerald
thought he was doing in writing it
because Fitzgerald knew he
had written something great.
And it broke his heart that people,
you know, people didn't respond
to the novel when it first came
out in any kind of big way.
I wanted to find out what he
thought he was writing about.
And then I also wanted
to explore the mysteries
of the novel in a deeper way.
I don't think that we
solve great literature.
I don't think literature
is a puzzle that way.
But I think the more we read
great works of literature,
the more we think about
great works of art,
the deeper we go into
their mysteries.
So to do that, to engage
on all those projects,
I wanted to do something besides
sit at my desk at Georgetown
and reread Gatsby,
pleasurable though that may be.
I went on the road, I went to
the great Fitzgerald archives
at Princeton, at the
University of South Carolina.
I went out on to Long Island
Sound because, even though I grew
up in Long Island City which is in
the geography of "The Great Gatsby",
I had never been out on Long Island
Sound to see East Egg, West Egg,
Sand's Point, Great Neck, that
geography of the novel still exists.
I went out on something called
"The Great Gatsby" Boat Tour
which I don't recommend, but it was
wonderful to still see, in a sense,
those over the top
mansions, you know,
the landscape that
Fitzgerald was writing
about in 1925 still existing
out there on the water.
And I also took the scariest
research trip of all.
I went back to the place where I
read Gatsby for the first time.
I went back to my old high
school in Astoria Queens,
a place I had had no desire to
go back to in almost 40 years.
I wanted to find out what those
students who were reading Gatsby
for the first time, what they
were getting out of the novel.
And what I discovered was,
well a couple of things.
My old English teacher was still
at my high school [laughter].
She was obviously 12
when she had me.
She's the Vice Principal
of the school,
she's one of those incredible
teachers who remember everybody.
I stayed with her, I spent a
couple of days at the school.
And I found out a lot of things
about the kids' responses to Gatsby,
especially their response
to how over the top--
excuse me I'm getting so excited--
how over the top the novel is.
And how over the top Gatsby's
yearning is in the book.
They really responded to that.
They thought, on the other
hand, that Nick Carraway,
who's my favorite character in
terms of his voice especially,
that Nick was something
of a sellout.
So that was interesting
to hear about.
Among the many things that
I've become more aware of over
and over again as I reread
this novel, well first of all,
how strange this novel is.
When Fitzgerald was working
on Gatsby, he wrote a letter
to his editor, the
great Maxwell Perkins,
about whom a new movie has just come
out, right, in which Colin Firth,
be still my heart,
plays Maxwell Perkins.
I'm told it came out last week.
Fitzgerald writes to his
editor, Maxwell Perkins,
who was also Hemingway's
editor, Thomas Wolfe's editor,
one of the great figures of 20th
century American literature.
And he says to Perkins, "I want
to write something beautiful
and intricately patterned".
And, boy, is it ever.
You go through Gatsby and
there are classical elusions,
there's this pattern
of color symbolism.
We all know about the
green light, that's just,
you know, the top of the iceberg.
Geographical symbols, East Egg,
West Egg, hot and cold imagery.
Time imagery, this is a book that's
very aware of a looming deadline
of Gatsby's death approaching.
Someone actually went through
and counted the number
of time words in Gatsby.
There are 450 time words in Gatsby.
You go on and on and on and,
yet, when you read the novel,
it reads so smoothly, you
can almost be unaware of all
of this intense patterning.
The fact that every chapter
is arranged around a party,
beginning with the dinner party
at the Buchanan house in chapter 1
to that failed party of Gatsby's
funeral in the final chapter.
I mean, it's so intensely patterned
and, yet, it reads so beautifully,
so smoothly, you can be
unaware of all of these symbols.
One of the symbols that I've
become more and more aware
of as I've reread the
novel is the water imagery.
This is our great American
novel about class.
Almost every other one of our great
American novels foregrounds the
great American subject
of race in America.
Gatsby foregrounds class and one of
the ways in which it does that is
to talk about the terror
of going under in America,
of losing your footing, of drowning.
I'd like to just read you a
couple of sentences from my book
where I talk about this
imagery of drowning
because it's so crucial to Gatsby.
And, yet, it's a symbol that I
think we overlook when we're looking
for the eyes of Doctor T.J.
Eckleberg and the green light,
all of that stuff which
is also important, right?
The great theme running throughout
all of Fitzgerald's writing
and his life is the nobility of
the effort to keep one's head
above water despite the almost
inevitable certainty of drowning.
While the name of the hero
in Fitzgerald's last completed
novel has always struck me
as comic book silly,
Dick Diver bluntly spells
out what Fitzgerald's
work is all about.
His best characters dive into life
with abandon and then must fight
to stay afloat by the
end of their stories.
They're almost always going
under if not altogether sunk,
weighted down by money
worries, overwhelming desire,
the burden of their pasts.
Sink or swim, it's the founding
dare of America, this meritocracy
where everyone is theoretically
free to jump in and test the water.
The fear is, however,
that if you don't make it,
you'll vanish beneath the waves.
So much of American literature is
saturated with images of drowning,
dissolving, being absorbed by
the vastness of the landscape.
It's our great national
literary nightmare.
Need I do more to start off
the great books parlor game
than to mention "Moby Dick"?
Think about it, water,
water everywhere.
We spend so much time on our
initial high school forays
into Gatsby focusing on those other
symbols, especially the green light,
that we overlook the most
pervasive symbol of all, water.
Every page of the novel
references water.
If you can find a page
in "The Great Gatsby"
that doesn't reference water, send
me an E-mail to Georgetown tonight.
I've gone through it, I
guarantee you, you can't do it.
Every page is about water.
The novel opens, in a sense, with
Gatsby's story of being pulled
out of the waters of what is it,
Lake Michigan on to
Dan Cody's yacht.
And it ends that final
image of Gatsby
where he is floating dead
in his swimming pool.
He could have died anywhere.
It's the swimming pool,
the symbolic drowning.
He loses his footing.
This is the great novel about what
it takes for a nobody to stay afloat
in America and he stays
afloat until he sinks.
If you're still scratching
your head saying,
so what's the big deal about this?
Let me try something out on you.
Daisy and Gatsby are reunited in
chapter 5 which is the dead center
of the novel, that's
roughly 180 pages.
Again, how overly patterned
this novel is.
And those of you who've read Gatsby
fairly recently might remember that,
on the day that they're
reunited at tea
at Nick Carraway's
house, it's raining.
It's raining and raining
and raining.
Gatsby is at Nick's house, Daisy
comes to the door, Gatsby panics
and he runs out of Nick's cottage.
And then there's a
knock on the door.
Nick opens the door and there's
Gatsby standing in the language
of the novel, in his glorious pink
rag of a suit that's dripping wet.
That scene is always
played for laughs
in the movies and even on stage.
At Gatz, people laughed.
Certainly people laughed
in the theater
when they saw Leonardo
DiCaprio dripping in that scene
in the movie because it seems funny.
No one should laugh.
What that scene tells us is
that Gatsby is already a drowned
man, he's already a dead man.
He's been lured to
his death by Daisy.
And think about Daisy for
a second and her symbolism.
She's never described as
a knockout in the novel.
She's not even blonde.
In the novel, she's talked
about as being dark haired
like Fitzgerald's first
love, Ginevra King.
There's one thing about
Daisy that the novel mentions
at least four times, something about
her that really distinguishes her,
anybody remember what it is?
>> Speaker 1: Her voice.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Her voice.
Okay, so here's the million
dollar Jeopardy question.
What creatures out of
classical mythology?
>> Speaker 2: The sirens.
>> Maureen Corrigan: The sirens.
They lure men to their deaths, to
their watery deaths by the sound--
the hypnotic sound of their voice.
One of the reasons why I couldn't
stand Baz Luhrmann's movie is
because he left out the most
important line about Daisy Buchanan.
Her voice is full of money.
The famous description of her voice.
So that's what I mean, this novel,
it reads so beautifully,
so smoothly.
And, yet, once you become aware of
the depths of symbolism, of imagery,
you realize how intensely it's also
talking about class, anxieties,
about this doomed attempt
to do better in America.
And how beautiful the attempt is
and, yet, how it's fated to fail.
Those last words of the novel, so we
beat on, boats against the current,
born back ceaselessly into the past.
They're both giving the judgement to
us, as Americans, that your attempt
to rise up, it's not going to work.
You know, Gatsby, he's
going to fall back down.
And yet, at the same time, it's--
that last line celebrates
the doomed beauty of trying.
I said, at the start of this
talk, that I also wanted
to explore how the novel comes
back and-- in the late '40s, '50s.
And, once I started
investigating that comeback story,
I found another great story that
I didn't know about literature
in the mid-20th century in America.
My dad was in the Navy
during World War II.
He served on a destroyer escort.
And like so many men of his
generation, he didn't want
to talk too much about the war.
But a couple of times, he told me
we had these funny paperbacks during
World War II and I never knew what
he was talking about until I went
to the Library of Congress and saw
for myself what he
was talking about.
There was this amazing
program during World War II
in which editors, publishers,
librarians,
paper distributors
all came together.
They wanted to do something
for the war effort.
And they figured that soldiers
and sailors serving
overseas needed books.
Rather than send hard
covers or even--
well there weren't really paperbacks
to any extent back
then in World War II.
What they came up with was this idea
to publish over a thousand titles,
everything from Margaret
Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa"
to the latest Rex Stout mystery to
"Moby Dick" to "The Great Gatsby".
To publish these books
on pulp paper.
They looked like this,
this is a replica
of these armed services editions
which were rectangular meant to fit
in the servicemen's pockets.
"The Great Gatsby" was chosen for
this program and over 123,000 copies
of "The Great Gatsby"
get disseminated.
These editions were meant to be
read 7 times before they fell apart.
So 1945, Gatsby's reprinted as part
of this armed services
editions program.
All of a sudden, this novel that was
moldering in Scribner's warehouse,
is being read everywhere.
I've gotten letters
from men who told me
that the first time they read
Gatsby was in 1945 during the war.
And that they never
forgot that experience.
After the war, of course, we
get the birth of the paperbacks
and Gatsby is picked up right away
by paperback houses like Bantam.
1949, we get the second
"Great Gatsby" movie.
The first was in 1926, it's a
silent film that's been lost.
1949, we have Alan
Ladd playing Gatsby.
And I love that version because
it's kind of a hardboiled version.
It brings out the hardboiled
suspense element,
crime element in Gatsby.
And, by the way, when the
novel came out in 1925,
a lot of contemporary
reviewers reviewed it
as though it were a crime novel
which makes sense, 3 violent deaths,
bootleggers, even Gatsby's
name derives
from criminal slang of the 1920s.
A gat is a gun.
And the first scene in the Alan
Ladd movie is Alan Ladd, as Gatsby,
machine gunning down his
rivals in the bootleg business.
So it's a great film.
It's available, I think,
on Netflix still.
You can watch it.
I recommend it.
And, you know, Gatsby
just keeps going.
It eventually infiltrates
college and high school syllabi.
I want to give a shout out
to a spectacular Library
of Congress research librarian
who we have sitting here,
Abby Yochelson, who is in my
book because Abby took me in hand
and led me down into the bowels
of the Library of Congress
and we spent hours going through
American literary anthologies
of the '40s, '50s and
'60s trying to figure
out when does F. Scott
Fitzgerald come back?
When does he come back and
when does he enter the cannon
of American literature?
And I think we pretty much
found out what you expect,
kind of the mid '50s, he's
really coming back in a big way.
So that was another wonderful
research adventure that I had
at our very own Library of
Congress which also, by the way,
has the only complete collection
of the armed services
editions in the world.
And you can all go to the
rare book room and look
at these amazing armed services
editions and wonder where they were.
Wonder what kind of things they
were witness to during World War II.
Fitzgerald, of course, saw none
of this, he was dead by 1940.
And he died thinking
he was a failure which,
to me, is heartbreaking.
I wanted to leave, certainly
leave time to talk because I know
so many of you have read Gatsby.
You've got your opinions
about Gatsby.
But I just wanted to read
you a few lines from a letter
that Fitzgerald wrote
shortly before his death.
A couple of months
before his death in 1940,
he's writing to his editor,
again, Maxwell Perkins.
And he's talking about Gatsby.
He never stopped trying
to get Gatsby
out there before the public eye.
So in this letter, he also makes
reference to his daughter, Scottie,
who was about to start Vassar.
This is Fitzgerald.
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.
Fitzgerald would go into
bookstores in Hollywood and L.A.
and try to find his books.
A lot of times the bookstore
owners thought he had died already.
They were shocked that F. Scott
Fitzgerald was still alive,
it's heartbreaking.
Fitzgerald.
Would the 25 cent press keep
Gatsby in the public eye,
or is the book unpopular?
He puts that line in italics.
Has it had its chance?
Would a popular reissue in that
series with a preface, not by me,
but by one of its admirers make
it a favorite with classrooms,
professors, 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.
He writes that in May of 1940.
By early December, he's dead, again,
thinking that he was a failure.
I know it's somewhat
sentimental, but I kind of wish,
hope that F. Scott Fitzgerald
can see gatherings like this,
can see those classrooms across
America and across the world,
can hear from so many people, as
I have since writing this book,
people who just love Gatsby and
can't stop reading it like I can't.
Thank you for coming today.
[ Applause ]
I think we have mics set up for
people who want to ask questions
or get in on the discussion.
Yes?
>> Speaker 3: Okay I'll start.
So Fitzgerald was an original
and, as you just alluded to,
died pretty much without
the recognition
that he felt he deserved.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 3: Do you ever--
you mentioned in your
Terry Gross interview
that you get upwards
of 200 books a week?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 3: I think, to review.
Do you ever wonder or worry
that there's a Fitzgerald among us
who's going to have the same fate?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 3: And, if so, would
you like to namedrop any of those?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Oh, wow.
Well, I do worry, I worry
about myself as a reviewer
that I'm passing over
books that maybe I'll start
and somehow they don't grab
me, that actually if I stuck
with these first novels a little
longer, you know, past 50 pages,
maybe they actually would
come alive in some way.
I say in my book that I wonder
if I had gotten Gatsby, you know,
in that weekly pile that
I get of over 200 books
that publishers send me hoping
for a review on Fresh Air,
if I had gotten "The Great Gatsby" I
don't know what I would have thought
right away.
Because, remember, it was his
third novel, he's known for writing
about flappers and
philosophers of the '20s.
Fitzgerald never liked the title,
he thought the title was dull and I,
you know, I could see
that "The Great Gatsby".
The cover, you know, the
original Francisco Cougat cover
with the flapper's face, probably
the most famous book jacket cover
in American literature.
I'd look at that and think, oh,
another novel about
flappers, I don't know.
I think, though, if
I had opened the book
and began reading,
it's Nick's voice.
This is a voice driven novel.
I think Nick's voice
would have pulled me in.
So I don't know if we're, you know,
obviously if we're overlooking
people, I'm not able to name them.
But what I do believe very
sincerely is that eventually
if a book is good enough,
it finds its readership.
This book did, you know,
and it was dead in 1940.
I do believe that that happens.
It may not happen in an author's
lifetime, that's the catch.
And we have so many stories.
I mean, Fitzgerald isn't the
only one, Emily Dickinson,
Herman Melville, people
who die thinking they
don't have their audience
and then the audience
finds them after death.
Yeah, thanks.
>> Speaker 4: At the F.
Scott Fitzgerald conference
up in Rockville-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- Yeah.
>> Speaker 4: About 4 years
ago, in your keynote address,
you concluded appropriately
that, at the end of Gatsby,
it leaves so many questions
unanswered.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 4: Could you talk
about that, again, here please?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, well
it's those last lines, right,
it's those famous last
lines of Gatsby.
You know, if you go up to Rockville,
as I'm sure many of you have,
Scott and Zelda are buried in St.
Mary's Church yard in Rockville.
There's a whole story
connected with that.
That wasn't their first--
his first burial place.
But it's a beautiful spot and, on
the slab that covers their grave,
there's the last lines
of "The Great Gatsby".
Nobody, nobody can say for sure
what those last lines mean.
So we beat on, boats
against the current,
born back ceaselessly into the past.
I mean it sounds like a
depressing, negative verdict
on the attempt to go forward.
Yeah. Remember the first time
you see Gatsby in the novel,
he's stretching out his
arms to the green light
across the bay to Daisy's dock.
Beat on, stretch farther, you
know, reach out your arms.
The novel seems to celebrate
all of that effort of yearning
and trying and, yet, the last words
say you can't escape your past,
you're going to be pulled back.
And, yet, the whole thrust of
the novel is to celebrate Gatsby.
And that's what Nick is doing.
Nick is so haunted by the
yearning, by the achievement,
by the aspiration of Gatsby,
that's what Fitzgerald
said this novel was about.
He writes to a couple
of his correspondents
that the novel is about aspiration.
And the novel seems to
celebrate aspiration.
So I always think the
novel has it both ways.
It celebrates that heroic
attempt to be better, to be more.
And it also tells us that the game
is somewhat rigged, that, you know,
to believe that you can really
be anything in America, well,
you've got to qualify
that American dream.
You know, it depends,
I think the novel says.
Certainly Fitzgerald felt
that, I think, in his own life.
He rose so high and then
he fell very quickly.
>> Speaker 5: I wanted to
get your views about what,
was there any particular
critic or writing or essays
that drove the re-recognition,
like, Kazin did that for Faulkner.
Cahiers du cinema critics did
it for what were B movies-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, yeah.
>> Speaker 5: That
re-awakened respect for them.
Was there a particular set of
critics or essays that drove the--
and did his friend Wilson
drive this [inaudible]?
>> Maureen Corrigan:
His friend Wilson.
I mean that's what's
fascinating and wonderful about,
I say, the Fitzgerald revival.
But people rightly have said,
you can't call it a revival
because there was never a, you know,
there was never a huge celebration
in the first place,
but that discovery
of Fitzgerald again
in the '40s and '50s.
Alfred Kazin, who you just
mentioned, did the first collection
of critical essays on
Fitzgerald in the early '50s.
Lionel Trilling was a huge mover.
Edmund Wilson who had been with
Fitzgerald, a year or so ahead
of Fitzgerald at Princeton and
was his friend and, probably,
America's greatest literary
critic of the 20th century,
certainly in a popular sense, Edmund
Wilson worked on the manuscript,
the unfinished manuscript
of "The Loves
of the Last Tycoon"
brought that out.
And also helped drive the
quote, unquote revival.
Dorothy Parker also wrote essays.
So you do have these well
placed literary figures
of the mid-20th century, Maxwell
Perkins was a steadfast friend,
always trying to get
Fitzgerald, you know,
in print before the public eye.
Fitzgerald was very lucky in
terms of his literary friends,
his editors, his supporters.
But then it's also this, it's the
popular wave in 1945, and beyond,
of guys who've read "The Great
Gatsby" in this format and come back
and they're curious
about Fitzgerald.
And that's very thrilling to
think that it's not just a top
down movement, it's also
a bottom up movement.
>> Speaker 5: Thank you so much.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Thank you.
>> Speaker 6: Hi.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Hi.
>> Speaker 6: I have a
green light question.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Okay.
>> Speaker 6: Okay.
What she did-- you don't
really suss out too much
in the book I thought, but-- .
>> Crowd: Can't hear you.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Can't hear.
>> Speaker 6: You didn't really
go into that too much in the book.
>> Maureen Corrigan:
People can't hear you.
You're going-- you're too tall.
>> Speaker 6: Okay.
Several years ago, I caught a
French film called "The Green Ray".
I think it came out in the-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- In the '80s.
>> Speaker 6: In the '80s.
And it was a-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- Yes.
I think I actually saw that movie.
>> Speaker 6: It was
an interesting film.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 6: And it was
inspired by Jules Verne book,
kind of a forgotten novel
called "The Green Ray" and based
on an actual optical phenomena that,
when the sun goes down over a body
of water, right before the sun
goes down, there's a green ray
that you can see, but it
lasts only a few seconds.
But if you see it, then
you can gain insight
into what other people are saying.
And in both the movie and
in Jules Verne's book,
they use it for, like,
romantic purposes.
And just watching, I've always
thought of the green light.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 6: And I was just
wondering like I've always wondered
if there-- this isn't
so much of a question,
but just if he might have
been thinking of that or?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Jules Verne.
That's a good question.
You know, Fitzgerald made
reading lists all his life.
And he gave these reading
lists to people he liked,
to the private duty nurses
who tried to nurse him
through his periodic
withdrawals from alcohol.
I don't remember Jules Verne on any
of those lists, but I could just--
it's been awhile since
I looked at them so.
>> Speaker 6: I think you mentioned
that he read Jules
Verne [inaudible].
>> Maureen Corrigan: He did.
Okay well then he must have.
People have so many theories
about the green light.
You know, Sarah Churchwell in her
recent book, "Careless People" talks
about the fact that the
traffic lights had just come in,
I think it's 1922 in New York City.
And, of course, green is go.
You know, go forward, go ahead.
My students oftentimes are wedded
to the idea that green means money
and that Gatsby is, of course,
allied with this chasing
money in order to get Daisy.
Green is also the medieval
iconography,
green is always allied
to the supernatural.
And if you think of Daisy
as being this somewhat,
she's not supernatural, but
there is something unearthly
about her in Gatsby's eyes.
Maybe that works as well.
People have also written to me and
talked about boat traffic signs
and something about green.
So you can go, as with any of these
symbols here, you can really go deep
into the weeds thinking about what
Fitzgerald might have intended,
what works with the novel.
So I think it's interesting,
though, if you guys,
those of you who are real Gatsby
fanatics, go online tonight,
look at Princeton University
library's website.
You'll see the handwritten, first
draft of "The Great Gatsby".
And one-- a couple of
things that you'll see is
that Nick is not the
narrator in that first draft.
It's a third person novel.
And the other thing that
you'll see is chapter 1
where Gatsby is reaching
for the green light,
that's not how chapter 1 ends.
Chapter 1 ends with
the famous last words
of "The Great Gatsby" so we beat on.
So, at some point,
Fitzgerald realized
that he was blowing a great
ending and he put it back further.
Thanks.
>> Speaker 7: Hi.
My question was related to,
actually not "The Great Gatsby"
but the television show "The Wire".
>> Maureen Corrigan: Oh, yeah.
>> Speaker 7: David Simon does the
show and I see a lot of parallelism
to "The Great Gatsby" in that show.
And I was wondering, was he trying
to recreate "The Great Gatsby"
for a modern audience or do you
think that he just kind of intended
to create a really good
story that just happened
to have a lot of parallel?
>> Maureen Corrigan: I don't
know, that's the answer.
Do you know that there's
an episode in "The Wire"
where they have the
book club in prison
and they're talking about Gatsby.
>> Speaker 7: Yeah, it's
Barksdale where they're talking
about the scene with
the boats and the docks.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, yeah.
>> Speaker 7: And people
keep thinking
that D'Angelo's actually
Gatsby in the whole show,
but I really think it's Stringer
Bell because he has [inaudible].
I could argue for days, but I-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- You
want to come up, you know.
>> Speaker 7: But I think
that there is an interesting,
I just was wondering why do
you think David Simon did that.
And was it a way for him
to maybe relate that story
to a more common audience?
>> Maureen Corrigan: I don't know.
I mean I don't know.
I don't know if he was
specifically thinking about Gatsby,
but it's the American myths, right?
Gatsby really crystallizes in
180 pages the American myth
which doesn't, I don't mean that in
a pejorative way that it's not true,
but it's what we want to believe.
And Gatsby speaks to that.
When I, when I was first thinking
about this book and I was talking
to editors about it, they all
wanted to talk about "Mad Men".
They wanted to talk about whether--
ah, it's just blown out of my head.
What's?
>> Crowd: Don Draper.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Don Draper.
Whether Don Draper was
a Gatsby character.
So, you know, I think
there's something
to that as well, something.
But you see Gatsby in so much of
what we read, of what we watch,
not even explicitly,
but buried under.
I don't-- I'm not the scholar
of "The Wire" that you are,
but I do know that
I think I've heard
that it was "Clockers" Richard-- .
>> Speaker 7: Price.
>> Maureen Corrigan: God, it's
getting late, I can't think.
Richard Price who put in
that book club dialog.
So he was thinking of Gatsby.
>> Speaker 8: I first read Gatsby
in high school like most people did.
And it was actually the second
Fitzgerald book I had ever read.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 8: I had read another
short story of his about 5
or 6 years earlier as a child.
And that short story really
made a very large imprint on me.
And so, when I read
the Gatsby later,
it seemed to make a lot of sense.
And I was wondering if you might
comment on that short story.
>> Maureen Corrigan: What sh-- .
>> -- "Bernice Bobs Her Hair".
>> Maureen Corrigan: Oh,
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair",
that's a great short story.
So it's a great short story.
For those of you who don't know
it, we're not going to ruin it.
Go home and read it.
It's short.
But it's a great story about
female jealousy and conniving.
And, of course, there's
all the Garden of Eden sort
of biblical images in
that story as well.
I like that short story a lot,
it's not one of the short stories
that celebrated as part of
what's called the Gatsby cluster.
Fitzgerald tried out aspects
of Gatsby in short stories
that he wrote around this time.
And, you know, "Winter Dreams"
for instance, "Absolution".
So those are short stories in which
he's kind of doing this pattern
of the poor boy reaching for
the rich, the wealthy girl.
And you don't really
see that so much
in Bernice Bobs Her Hair,
although there's-- .
>> Speaker 8: -- Well.
>> Maureen Corrigan:
The outsider stuff.
>> Speaker 8: Yeah, the
outsider, Bernice trying to rise
up in the female social world
the way Gatsby was trying
to ride up in the male world.
>> Maureen Corrigan:
That's true, yeah.
Fitzgerald always seems to be drawn
to these stories about outsiders.
And, you know, I talk about
his life in this book.
I was just out in Minnesota for the
second time this year and I went
on Summit Avenue again which is
where Fitzgerald partly grew up.
And if you know Summit
Avenue in St. Paul,
I mean James J. Hill's house
is there, the robber baron
who Dan Cody is modeled
on, these amazing mansions.
The thing about Fitzgerald
living on Summit Avenue
as a boy is his family
always rented.
And so you kind of
imagine him next door
to these mansions,
but being a renter.
So you're in that world, but
you're not quite of it really.
You know, that inside
or outside focus.
I mentioned Ginevra King a
minute ago as being, you know,
one of the inspirations for Daisy.
Of course, Zelda was
another inspiration.
But Ginevra King, when
Fitzgerald met her,
he was a sophomore at Princeton.
She was still in high school.
Her father was filthy rich.
And Fitzgerald went to visit her at
her mansion in Chicago at one point.
And, as the story goes,
Ginevra's father said,
in Fitzgerald's hearing,
"Poor boys shouldn't think
of marrying rich girls"
and, you know, wounded him.
So that pattern, the outsider
trying to get in and, yet,
also scorning the club that
they're trying to get into,
it's all throughout
Fitzgerald's work.
>> Speaker 9: I like your book.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Thank you.
>> Speaker 9: You don't,
you didn't mention in there
that Fitzgerald was 28 years
old when the book was published.
>> Maureen Corrigan: I didn't?
Are you sure?
>> Speaker 9: Possibly not.
But what, maybe, I'm
interested in is who's able
to write the great American
novel when they're 28 years old?
Do you think Fitzgerald achieved
this through hard work, genius,
or was that era, men specifically,
had to grow up more
than they do today?
Or is it combination of all those?
>> Maureen Corrigan:
Think of Philip Roth,
"Goodbye Columbus", what was he?
He was like 29, 30 when "Goodbye
Columbus" came out, his first novel.
And, by the way, I think Philip
Roth should get the Nobel Prize
if anybody's listening.
I mean but, I mean we-- I nominated,
along with my fellow judges,
"Swamplandia" for the
Pulitzer Prize a few years ago.
Karen Russell was about 27
when she wrote that novel.
I don't think, I don't think
genius has an age limit either way.
But I also think Fitzgerald was a
poet and poets tend to ripen young.
Fitzgerald's, probably his
most revered poetic mentor was
John Keats.
He loved the poetry of the
Romantic poet, John Keats.
What was Keats when he died, 25, 26?
All of those Romantics
died very young.
So I don't think that, I don't
think the age is against him.
I think he did do his best
work when he was very young.
And he burned out early partly
because of the alcoholism.
Yeah.
>> Speaker 10: There isn't
any reason not to read
"The Great Gatsby"
because it has 2 strengths
which I think are overlooked.
One is very short and,
secondly, is easy to read.
And as a book critic,
you realize that, hey,
that's something that's
underappreciated now
because even potboilers now
are about 300 pages long.
"The Great Gatsby" is about 200.
And I'll let you comment on it,
but I hope as a book critic,
you'd never make the mistake
as some British critic did
who recently dismissed the
entire work of Terry Pratchett
without even reading a book
simply because of his--
he thinks the genre
is without merit.
How many people done the same--
would we talk about Fitzgerald
if ever a critic says,
who cares about this, it's
just about bootleggers.
>> Maureen Corrigan: I don't
think that, as a book critic,
that "The Washington Post" would
have printed that review by somebody
who hadn't read the book
so I can say that for sure.
>> Speaker 11: Maxwell Perkins is
credited with the title, right?
I mean he was the force behind
the title, "The Great Gatsby".
>> Maureen Corrigan: And Zelda.
Zelda like the title.
>> Speaker 11: Okay
well I'm wondering,
was there any other major
contribution Perkins made
in editing it?
Is there something that's
great about the book
that actually is his idea?
>> Maureen Corrigan:
Perkins loved Tom Buchanan
as a character as did Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald thought for a
while of rewriting the book
and making Tom Buchanan
the main character,
but Perkins loved Tom Buchanan.
Perkins, the line edits are
insane so there's a lot of really,
you know, line by line
editing that Perkins did.
Perkins also argued for Fitzgerald
to make it tight which he did.
He kept rewriting it to
tighten the design of the novel.
You know, Perkins objected to some
things that Fitzgerald ignored
when Myrtle Wilson dies, there's a
very hard boiled graphic description
of her breasts flapping in
the dirt when she's run over
and Perkins didn't
like that description.
And Fitzgerald writes back and
says, no, it's got to be that way,
it's got to be that coarse.
I want people to be in there.
But, you know, you can also
credit Perkins, I think,
for that book jacket in the sense
that he got Francisco Cougat,
who was the brother
of Xavier Cougat,
the band leader, to
do the book jacket.
And Fitzgerald loved the
book jacket which, as I say,
I think most people would agree,
it's the most famous
book jacket cover
in American literature
in the 20th century.
But the University of South
Carolina has online digitized
in their library, page proofs
from "The Great Gatsby"
and you can see Perkins, you know,
the blue pencil stuff line by line
if you go online and look
at those page proofs.
Yeah.
>> Speaker 12: Sorry.
I'm interested in symbolism.
And how much of it is
consciously there from the author,
how much of it is subconscious,
how much of it is read
in by critics and academics?
>> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah.
>> Speaker 12: For
example, the green light.
It's fun to speculate on what
that could have symbolized.
Did anybody ever ask Fitzgerald?
>> Maureen Corrigan: And, if
they had, why would it matter?
>> Speaker 12: Yeah.
Or what-- did he have an intentional
when he used the green light,
did he have a certain intent?
Or you mentioned the water themes,
there's water on every page.
Was he consciously trying to
make sure that there was water
on every page when
he was writing this?
So I'm just curious as to-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- Well, you
know, well this comes up again
and again in every literature
class I've ever taught.
John Ruskin, the great 19th century
critic called it the intentional
fallacy to think that
our reading of a book
or a great painting is
limited by what the author
or painter said he
or she wanted to do.
I take it into account when
Fitzgerald says the book is
about aspiration, but
that's not all it's about.
And I do think that there's a
level of creation on which artists,
painters, all these great people are
working, you know, subconsciously,
something else is at work as well.
I think our interpretations are
bounded by what's on the page.
So I'm not going to say
that "The Great Gatsby" is
about cigarette smoking
or, you know,
what's on the page,
that's important.
I just recorded a review of Elena
Ferrante's last Neapolitan novel,
for those of you who've
been reading her novels.
And it hasn't aired yet.
Some of you know Elena
Ferrante is a pseudonym
for this Italian author,
nobody knows who she is.
And when she published the
first of these 4 novels,
she wrote to her editor and said,
the author shouldn't matter,
I don't want to do book
tours, I don't want to talk
about these books, I want
to put the books out there
and the books speak for themselves.
So that, I agree with her.
If your question is really
short, it can be the last one.
>> Speaker 13: Yes, it's real short.
Thank you for being here.
I just had a question, we
mentioned Tom Buchanan earlier.
And in our lit-- when I teach
English, we teach this novel,
we talk a little bit about is
it possible that Tom Buchanan,
and I don't want to spoil the
book for those, but it's Gatsby
so we should all have read this.
Is it possible that Tom
Buchanan is maybe the assassin
that we think that Wilson is?
Or, meaning that Buchanan
sets Wilson up to do the deed
and then why is it that
this quote Holocaust occurs
when Wilson is a hundred yards away
from the pool, why doesn't he commit
that suicide there at
the time, is it possible
that Buchanan is actually the?
>> Maureen Corrigan:
Well, interesting.
It's definitely that Tom
tells Wilson where to go.
You know, there's that
mysterious phone call exchange.
And Nick says as much in that
last encounter that he has
when he meets Tom on the street
and they shake hands in front
of the old Tiffany's building.
I don't like the idea that
Tom is actually the guy
who pulls the trigger because
that's not how he operates.
He gets other people to do
his dirty business for him,
if that's what you're suggesting.
>> Speaker 13: Well not of Gatsby,
but of Wilson because it seems
that Buchanan likes to erase
certain things in his life
that he doesn't want to have to
deal with anymore or moves away
like he did from Chicago
to move to-- .
>> Maureen Corrigan: -- Yeah.
>> Speaker 13: So the
question always is, yeah,
it's pretty understood that
Wilson kills Gatsby, but who--
does Wilson kill himself or does
Buchanan do that dirty work there
and then no one would ever know?
>> Maureen Corrigan: What would
you gain having Buchanan pull
the trigger?
>> Speaker 13: Another
example of the--
how they fall back into the
carelessness of who they are
as characters of Tom
and [inaudible].
>> Maureen Corrigan: But
remember the rest of that quote
as I'm sure you do, they were
careless people, Tom and Daisy,
they broke things and money and
they left other people to clean
up the messes that they made.
You know, so I'm going
to hold fast to that.
That's what the book says.
>> Speaker 13: All
right, thanks again.
>> Maureen Corrigan: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
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