Introducing The Book Club: The Great Gatsby

0:08Dominic Sandbrook:Hello, it's Anthony Scaramucci. Welcome to Dominic Sandbrook, who is the co-host of The Rest is History, but has a brand new podcast out. And so I'm a bibliophile, a big time bookworm. I'm super excited about your podcast. And the title of the podcast is The Book Club. Of course, Dominic is a friend of the show and a close personal friend of mine. Dom, tell us a little bit about this new podcast idea that you've come up with. Well, Anthony, first of all, thank you so much for having me on The Rest is Politics US. Now, you have your own book club show, of course, called Open Book, don't you? Which is a great show and an inspiration for us.

0:49Dominic Sandbrook:My producer, The Rest is History, Tabitha Syrett, and I love talking about books. We talk about fiction. What we're doing in the book club is every week we're taking a different novel and we look at the history behind the novel. We look at the author's biography, what they're trying to do. So sometimes they are great works of literature. There might be 1984 or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein. And sometimes they are more contemporary. So we've literally just recorded an episode. I imagine Anthony you're not a huge fan of the Romantic genre which is Fantasy meets romance Generally read by Teenage girls or women in their Twenties and early thirties Like the Fabio guys that are like walking Around on the cover There's a bit of that I'm probably too intimidated for that Dom Right exactly Probably too insecure for that but go ahead keep going Our first episode which came out a couple of weeks ago was about Wuthering Heights To tie in with the film and we've done an episode about kazuishiguro's book never let me go and we're just going to do a whole variety of books and we kind of rate them we talk about what we like what we didn't like it's a lot of fun okay how do you select the books tom i'm dying to know so we take it in turns basically it's what tabby wants to do and what i want to do we're a generation apart so that's a kind of fun dynamic um and each week we alternate so we might have an absolute classic You know, let's say Frankenstein or Dracula, John Steinbeck's book, East of Eden, or The Hound of the Baskervilles.

2:13Dominic Sandbrook:And then on the other week, we will have something more and more offbeat, maybe something that people read when they're a teenager. So there's a real kind of balance to it, which makes it good fun. It makes it fun for us to read. There's a vision here, though, Dom. I want you to tell us the vision, because I mean, I can hear the vision in my own words. It's like, I want to draw a new group of people in. I think I've been blown away. You probably have been blown away at the demographics of Goalhanger's podcast community. It's actually a young demographic. People think that they want two-minute shorts on YouTube, but they actually want a 45-minute real rigorous discussion about something.

2:50Dominic Sandbrook:So tell us the vision here. So the vision is, I think, it's the stories behind the greatest stories ever told. But what we're trying to do is to reach out to, as you say, particularly a young audience and to explain to people that reading books is not just it's not just doing homework. It's not just good for you and improving. Of course, it is all those things, but it's fun. It's a brilliant way to spend your time to escape into a world, to read some of the greatest novels ever written and to just enjoy it for that. You know, you don't have to worry about what you're reading. There's not going to be a test.

3:24Dominic Sandbrook:it's just fun it's just a brilliant way it's good and it genuinely is good for you that moment of reflection to step in someone else's shoes to escape from your daily cares i mean you know as well as anybody that we're kind of beleaguered with stuff with information with bad news at the moment and this is a brilliant way of escaping also it's part of the world's greatest conversation both living authors and those that have passed from our time you have this opportunity to delve into what their thoughts were and the conversation that they're sharing with the rest of us here. Right. Don, one of my favorite books is The Great Gatsby.

4:00Dominic Sandbrook:A little trivia about me. I actually grew up in East Egg. And so if you know the story of The Great Gatsby, you know, my family's from the middle class area, sort of frankly where the servants were. But on the waterfront in Sands Point is what Jay Gatsby was writing about. And of course, when I was a kid, probably 10, 12 years old, they used to go out on my dad's fishing boat with him. And we used to regale at these gigantic waterfront mansions. Unfortunately, Dominic, some of those mansions were torn down. There's still a few there that have been preserved, thankfully. But what a great story that is.

4:36Dominic Sandbrook:Will you be delving into The Great Gatsby? That episode is coming out. It was one of the first books we wanted to do. I think there is an argument, Anthony, I don't know if you'd agree, that it is the greatest of American novels. Because it's about the American dream. So you have a character, Nick Carraway, who's the narrator, and he's come from the Midwest. And he comes out east to the East Coast to all the wealth and the glitz and the glamour of the East Coast and the 20s, the roaring 20s. And he meets this guy called Jay Gatsby. Nobody knows where Gatsby's come from. Is he a bootlegger? You know, how has he made his money?

5:05Dominic Sandbrook:Is he a criminal or what? And there's this world of the cocktail parties and the speakeasies and the fast cars and all this kind of thing. but there's this kind of hollowness there this anxiety that basically the american dream is built on sand and you'll be caught out at some point you know you'll be found out and we explore that we explore the life of f scott fitzgerald the context of the 20s and we talk about like you know what the book says about america and america's vision of itself and why the book still speaks to us which i think it absolutely does i don't know if it i mean i guess it would still speak to you because it's about you know lots of things that you're interested in it's about politics it's It's about finance.

5:43Dominic Sandbrook:It's about making something of yourself. It's about aspiration. All of those kinds of things that, I mean, you talk about a lot on your show. Listen, I mean, you know, that book has been with me as a kid because when we had our first English composition classes, that was our first book because of the lineage of the town. There's actually boat tours, Dom, of the area I grew up in where they'll take you into the scenery of the Buchanans, Daisy Buchanan, and also what they got to see back then. But for me, one of the things that's most fascinating about this, Fitzgerald dies in 1940. He's thinking the book is a failure.

6:23Dominic Sandbrook:It's not well-reviewed, by the way, by his contemporaries, but it becomes immortal because the U.S. Army ends up printing hundreds of thousands of copies of it, sends it to all the servicemen in World War II, and it popularizes it. And, you know, listen, for me, Tom Buchanan, either the antagonist or the protagonist, depending on what side you're sitting on. Yeah. But Tom Buchanan is the guy that I could never be, Dominic Sandbrook. Whoa, really? He, he, yeah, no, he's manner born. Yeah. As, as Fitzgerald says, he has a tendency to wreck things. Of course, Gatsby's, you know, murdered and those people go on and live their carefree manner born life.

7:07Dominic Sandbrook:You know, it's, it's just a, it's an amazing story about class in America. Exactly. I think it's fitting for your British listeners as well. But listen, I'm, I'm super thrilled about what you're doing with the book club. So actually, Anthony, I've got a treat for you now because we've got, she got a little clip for you where my co-presenter Tabitha and I discuss The Great Gatsby and hopefully some of your listeners will find this enjoyable.

7:29Anthony Scaramucci: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.

7:37Dominic 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 20s 100 like one of the most iconic epochs ever yeah in all world history sort of art deco fashion and and all of that yeah however you know there's a definitely a dark side to it because it's the decade of the second kukus clan 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.

8:15Dominic Sandbrook: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 speakeasers. 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, of hedonism and danger going hand in hand. It's thrilling. Very exciting. Very exciting. It's like a kind of goal hanger get together, isn't it?

8:48Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, that's exactly how all of our parties end.

8:50Dominic Sandbrook:But the Jazz Age label, obviously jazz, the emblematic music of the era, and that's popularised 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?

9:06Anthony Scaramucci: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. St. Paul? Yeah. Didn't you spend some time there?

9:35Dominic Sandbrook:So unbelievably, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a year.

9:38Anthony Scaramucci:What were you doing there?

9:39Dominic Sandbrook:I was doing the research for my PhD. It's very cold. Like I was there over the winter. It's very...

9:45Anthony Scaramucci:So you weren't being a kind of enfant terrible at the very heart of a...

9:49Dominic Sandbrook:Do you know what? This is a massive...

9:50Anthony Scaramucci:Revelation scene of... Drinking and stabbing and gambling.

9:54Dominic Sandbrook:I can't describe 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... You rock star, you. To my rented basement. and through the snowdrifts. And I genuinely thought if I fell into a snowdrift now...

10:11Anthony Scaramucci:No one would notice.

10:12Dominic Sandbrook:I thought my body wouldn't be discovered for ages, but also no one would miss me. No one knows I exist.

10:19Anthony Scaramucci:Just getting eaten by Alsatians like the next summer. That's very great Gatsby though, in a way.

10:25Dominic Sandbrook:So that gives you, yeah, a man who knows, Mr. Nobody from nowhere has disappeared. All right. In the snow, exactly. So yeah, my life was not like Fitzshald.

10:33Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, 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.

10:42Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, which had not yet been adopted as the American National Anthem. Yeah, which I didn't know. Wasn't adopted until the 30s, I think. I didn't realise it was so recent. But Fitzgerald, he's middle class, so he's not a super establishment or elite, but he still goes to private schools, doesn't he?

10:57Anthony Scaramucci:He has quite a charmed life, for sure. He goes to private school. 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 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.

11:34Anthony Scaramucci: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. And they're 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.

12:02Dominic Sandbrook:Oh my gosh, that's harsh.

12:03Anthony Scaramucci:And that's very, very harsh. 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 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.

12:18Dominic Sandbrook:Is that where he meets Zelda?

12:19Anthony Scaramucci: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

12:34Dominic Sandbrook:confederacy and the old south okay that's a bad sign very very dodgy sign from the start

12:39Anthony Scaramucci:and she's called zelda sayre and he's clearly still in love with genevra 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 um and then he decides to have one will 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 yeah 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.

13:49Anthony Scaramucci:She even writes a long essay in defence of flappers. And then in 1921, she gives birth to their daughter, Francis Scotty Fitzgerald, this poor child, has a very turbulent life. And there's a really interesting story about how when she emerges from anaesthesia, she says, isn't she smart? She has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool, a beautiful little fool.

14:12Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, that's a line from The Great Gatsby.