169: An Epilogue to the 1920s: Youth culture, The Great Gatsby, and more with Professor Sarah Churchwell
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Welcome to History That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson, and as in the classroom, my goal here is to make rigorously researched history come to life as your storyteller. Each episode is the result of laborious research with no agenda other than making the past come to life as you learn. If you'd like to help support this work, receive ad-free episodes, bonus content, and other exclusive perks, I invite you to join the HTDS membership program. Sign up for a seven-day free trial today at htdspodcast.com slash membership, or click the link in the episode notes.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to an epilogue edition of History That Doesn't Suck. This, of course, is our time to break away from storytelling mode and dive into some analysis that doesn't suck. Specifically, our last few episodes have reveled in the stories of the 1920s popularization of movies, music, and sports.

So to help us better understand that lasting cultural impact, I've invited Dr. Sarah Churchwell, who is chair of public understanding of the humanities and professor in American literature at the University of London to join me on the podcast. That's right. She's currently based in London, England, but she's an American who grew up just outside of Chicago.

She has written extensively about 1920s American culture, including her acclaimed book, Careless People, Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby. Her very impressive full bio is in the episode description.

My conversation with Professor Churchwell includes fascinating takeaways from the 1920s that continue to resonate in our contemporary lives. These include the rise of American youth culture and the desire by older adults to be youthful, like the popularity of monkey gland injections as a predecessor to modern-day Botox injections.

Yeah. Well, we'll also talk about the birth of Tinseltown, aka Hollywood, radio, recorded music, magazines, and enduring literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. If you read it in high school but have forgotten, or if you've never read it, don't worry. We get right to the major themes of the book and why it's still relevant today.

But before we get to the interview, I'm going to make an assumption that you're listening to this epilogue because you're curious to learn more. You'd like to go deeper into the history that we cover on HTDS. If I'm right about that, then I invite you to go to our website, htdspodcast.com, to check out our book recommendations, live tour dates, and our membership program.

The HTDS membership program includes ad-free episodes delivered early, plus extra stories and deep dives. For example, there's an extra segment of my conversation with Professor Churchwell available right now to members. Check out the episode description or go to htdspodcast.com slash membership to learn more. Now let's unpack some of the enduring aspects of American cultural history from the 1920s with Professor Sarah Churchwell.

So with no further ado, welcome to Dr. Sarah Churchwell. We're glad to have you here. Thanks for having me. Let's talk a little bit about youth culture. It's going to be a couple of decades after the 1920s before teens and young adults are seen as kind of having their own demographic. But young folks are definitely having their moment in this period of post-pandemic, post-war revelry. So getting into this, why do we call this the Roaring Twenties? What's with that?

I'm so glad you asked this question. I actually, I get so nerdy about the 20s and you need to be really careful about asking me any question where I can just jump down a rabbit hole. But I actually love the Roaring 20s as a phrase because most people ask about the Jazz Age, of course, that other familiar name for it. Right. But the Roaring 20s actually came from an earlier idiom. It was just an expression and it was a way to talk about young people, particularly young men, in their Roaring 20s. So it was about like sowing your wild oats. Wow.

It was, oh, they're enjoying their roaring 20s. And then there was a feeling that this decade, which was, as you've already alluded to in your question, which was very quickly becoming associated with young people, that the decade was enjoying its roaring 20s. And so there was this nice consonance where it was the 20s and it was like, we're in our roaring, everybody's in their roaring 20s right now. Right.

Well, would you like to connect that at all with the jazz age? Do you want to go down that rabbit hole? Sure, if you like. Yeah, absolutely. So, well, it's worth saying then that the roaring 20s as a way to describe the decade didn't really take off till around the middle of the decade. So that's when you start to see it in popular conversations, popular magazine culture and stuff starts to get used. Jazz age is earlier, of course.

It was popularized by Scott Fitzgerald in his short story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, which was in 1922. And he always said that he felt that he gave the name to the decade. Now, he didn't actually coin the phrase the Jazz Age, though. But he'll take the credit. He'll take the credit. But he gets the credit for popularizing it. He certainly did popularize it. And the thing is that the other thing he did was he flipped it from a negative to a positive.

So the earlier uses of it had been in kind of cultural gatekeepers in totally warning mode saying, oh, we live in this age of jazz. And it was a way of saying, it would be very analogous to saying we live in a pop age or we live in a frivolous age. We live in an age of misrule. Very derogatory. Very derogatory. And of course, derogatory in highly racialized terms, because obviously jazz being very much

coming out of African-American culture, obviously. So the sense that it's derogation is that it's a risk to white mainstream culture. Anything goes. What's going on here? This is an age of jazz. There's no control anymore. It's chaotic. It's misrule. And of course, the young people grabbed that and they went, great. Yes, it is. Right. Yeah, that's what we're about. We want that. Off we go. Well, so let's carry on with this theme then. Oh,

I mean, my listeners have, of course, heard about prohibition and the alcohol that is still flowing, if anything, perhaps flowing even more in some circles. But what is it that really makes prohibition

things so riotous in the 20s? Or is that just perception? And really, this is just what young people have always done. No, I don't think it is just a perception. I think there really was a very clear gap between the young people of the early 1920s and their parents' generation. It was a much wider gap that has always been the case. And there were a few reasons for that. One is that there had been a rapid expanse of education. So

So after the Civil War period, as I'm sure your listeners know, American universities are exploding. Young women are going to universities. You've got the land-grant universities, all of the stuff that makes higher education more accessible. And more and more young people are going into secondary education. You have a demand for an educated workforce.

And both men and women are entering that workforce. But particularly once you have what we would recognize as a college experience, you have young people going away and living independently from their parents in a peer group really for the first time and in an increasingly co-educational environment.

Some of the universities themselves are co-ed. Even the ones that aren't, you've now got the Seven Sisters going with the Ivy League. So you've got all the kind of Fitzgerald-esque, you know, going to the prom with, you know, get the girl from Vassar or the girl from Wellesley to come to Princeton or Yale. And so all of that creates this kind of the sense that they have their own cohorts, that they are a peer group and they recognize each other. So that's one part of it.

Another really important part is cars. Once you get young people in cars, things change, right? Our culture is its own thing. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. You're no longer sitting in your parents' living room. You're no longer sitting on the porch with your mom peeking through the curtains to see what you guys are up to. So you've got privacy, you've got mobility, right? And...

You have, as of 1920, obviously, you have young women getting the franchise. You have women increasingly in the workforce since the First World War. So they have economic autonomy. Sexual autonomy follows economic autonomy. And again, the sense of the mingling of that generation means that they're behaving in very, very different ways. And a sense that, you know, it's not just sex, although I think we'll be coming back to sex because it's so important to the way that

that things changed in the 20s, but also young women are smoking. And of course, obviously the clothes have changed, right? It's the first time that we see what we might recognize as a modern silhouette where the men aren't in these like choking high collars with ties all the time and everything's more relaxed. And of course, young women thrown off corsets, thrown off petticoats. The reason they've done that is because, again, of really the First World War, but because during the First World War,

As American troops were, as soldiers were in camps around the U.S. before they went abroad, there was an explosion of sexual activity in those areas. And therefore, there was an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases in those areas. And the government had a sexual hygiene education campaign. And part of what that did was it led to certain kinds of innovations, including feminine hygiene programs.

i.e. the sanitary pad comes in in the early 19, in the late teens actually is when women can suddenly have access to something that changes everything because you don't need layers and layers of petticoats to hide that you're menstruating because you can actually manage it in a different way. So youth culture, what we think of broadly, these kinds of trends

is underwritten by certain kinds of technological and consumer advances that are driven by women entering the workforce, women getting education, and basically the broad explosion of consumer capitalism where business and industry realizes that women are a market and that they can sell to them. So we just have a convergence of

so many different things that are growing out of the second industrial revolution to political changes that are coming with the progressive era to what the war has done. Exactly. I very much take your point. This is not a typical generation. I see plenty of connections. That does sound pretty much where youth culture might be today. Obviously not apples and oranges, but would you say the 1920s compared to

the 2020s far more in common there than 1920s to maybe two or three decades before that then. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. And certainly more in common than the 1920s to the 1820s, right? This is a slightly easy example, but I like it because I really think it speaks to what you're talking about. They realized, you know, very quickly, not only that youth

sold to youth, but that youthfulness would sell to older generations as well. And it's the moment at which particularly women- Which, yeah, we still do. Yeah. Right? Start to want to be more youthful. It's when that whole trend starts to come in, this idea that it's preferable to be youthful and that you can sell youthfulness as such.

And in the 20s, women in particular, but also men, start injecting themselves with monkey glands because they were told that monkey glands would make their skin younger. It would like, you know, rejuvenate their collagen or whatever. This is early Botox. It's early Botox. So there's a whole fad for monkey glands. And you can find all kinds of parallels like that. There are all kinds of analogies. Wow.

Well, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about entertainment specifically. So we've recently covered on HTDS several forms of popular entertainment in the early 20th century, especially sports, stage productions, and film. It's an era of innovating new forms of art and music, especially geared toward young people. Now, in one of your publications entitled Echoes of the 20s, you quote a Baptist minister who says in 1919, and I'll read this,

People not only demand violent rapid fire amusement, but they demand to be amused continually. They will not be calm. They will not concentrate. Okay, so that basically sounds so much like the critiques we hear today, right? And we could talk about TikTok and these same sorts of ways. So that said, how would you compare these emerging forms of entertainment in the 1920s to what we're doing now in the 2020s?

Well, again, yeah, I think it's really similar, right? I mean, what you have is at that time, you have the first explosion of mass media and the digital revolution that we're living through is, you know, a transformation of mass media. But theirs was equally transformative. You know, radio is a huge...

huge innovation, right? It changes everything. It creates simultaneity where you didn't have simultaneity. And that comes in in 1922, right? And so again, that's going to transform the decade to come. Music recording becomes widely available in the 1920s. So suddenly you're not just kind of plinking out a popular tune on the upright piano, again, in your living room under the supervision of your parents.

But you can go away and you can play a gramophone in an urban environment with your friends. And so everything starts to change around those available forms of entertainment. And of course, movies are the really big one, right? I mentioned a moment ago that cars transform behavior because of their privacy. Well, so does the darkness of movie theaters. Right.

Sure.

movies were similarly democratized in that they were much more affordable than the theater and they rapidly replaced theater. So, you know, vaudeville, you know, starts to tank as the, as movies come up. And so there's this sense, again, that there's a place for young people to gather and that American industry is rapidly working out that entertainment is a business. And of course they knew that with vaudeville at

which I've already mentioned. It's not as if that's a new idea, but they suddenly see that with new technologies, and you say with the second industrial revolution, that you can see the ways in which all of these technologies can spawn new kinds, new things to sell. So sports were popular, but sports start to professionalize when you have a mass media, when you have advertisement,

And when you can use newspapers and magazines and you've got photography, which becomes affordable and can be in the magazine so you can see the handsome new football player or whatever it is, right? And he can become a kind of matinee idol and

And all of that's in the newspapers as well. You start to see the photos of the rich and famous and celebrity culture as we know it emerges very, very quickly at this time and drives a lot of new forms of entertainment. We touched on that in our silent cinema slash early Hollywood episode, the emergence of Hollywood stars. It's happening. And to your point on the second industrial revolution, it gets outside of entertainment, but my mind goes to

these markets that are now exploding into a national thing. Railroad has connected the nation. And now similarly, we're talking about radio connecting ideas and the ability to listen to a ballgame

as it's happening. And you can experience that in California, despite the fact the game is in New York. Yeah. And it's transformative, right? And it creates a sense of shared, of imaginary connection. So again, that strengthens building a culture. Yeah. That strengthens the sense that there's a new culture happening and that you have an investment in that culture and that you identify with that culture. Now,

Now, you touched on publication. You touched on magazines a little bit. Could you elaborate a little bit more? Well, absolutely. And it's what you just said about trains, right? So as soon as you've got railroads around the country, you can distribute news periodical culture much, much faster. Again, you're moving towards simultaneity.

So what you have is newspapers and magazines that begin to have national distribution networks in a different way. Even if they're supposed to be local papers, they can have national distribution networks. And that, again, was a kind of post-Civil War innovation that had developed in the second half of the 19th century. So a lot of the big urban newspapers, for example, had newspapers.

like foreign correspondents in different American cities, right? The way that they would send somebody to Europe, they would send somebody to a regional city so that they were covering the news there. And they start to see that their readership is expanding and that it's not just selling New York stories to New Yorkers, but that people in Wisconsin want to read about what's happening in New York too. And so you start to sell, again, celebrity culture coalesces around this

And the idea that the gossip magazine starts to become a huge thing at this point in the late 19th century and into the turn of the 20th century, that people are interested in what the rich and famous are up to. And they want salacious gossip. And, you know, this is for people who remember Gatsby well, you might remember that Myrtle Wilson is a subscriber to a magazine called Town Tattle, which is based on a real magazine called Town Topics, which was a national gossip sheet.

And it claimed to be a New York gossip sheet, but it was read all over the country. It was the National Enquirer of its day, and everybody wanted to know the dirty little secrets. And then you've got mainstream publications like Saturday Evening Post, which, of course, throughout the 1920s is far and away the best-selling, most read, highest subscription magazine, a weekly periodical.

But everybody's, and it's like the latest television show, everybody is reading the latest story, talking about it. It's how somebody like Fitzgerald became so famous so quickly is because he starts publishing in the Saturday Evening Post and people start to recognize him.

his name. And again, it's a magazine that is shared cross-generationally. So you have, yes, older people are reading it, but kids can read it. And young people are still going to read it because, okay, their parents read it. And young people are going to associate themselves more with maybe the journals of H.L. Mink and the Smart Set because they want to be in the know and they want to differentiate themselves from their parents and be more avant-garde. But the fact that Saturday Evening Post is on every coffee table in every house in America

And so there again, there's a shared culture, totally accessible, and it's a shared culture. I would say that one of the bigger differences today, of course, is the way that digital media is driving atomization again. So we don't have that sense, I think, in the same way of a coherent coalescing mass culture where everybody is seeing the same movies, everybody is seeing the same, you know, reading the same stories, reading the same magazines.

as we all know, that the ways in which new technologies are driving a much more segmented marketplace is, I think, one of the cultural shifts that we're seeing, whereas they saw the coalescence of a marketplace. You just...

very well pointed out that really we've kind of gone the opposite direction with it. Yeah, I think to a certain extent we have. I mean, sure, there's still shared shows that everybody wants to watch and all of that stuff. So it's not like we don't have a shared cultural conversation. But increasingly, people watch what they watch and read what they read.

And we're back down into kind of individualization and away from a collective generational shared culture. As a historian, I hate when people ask me to predict the future, to prognosticate. So please feel free to take a hard pass. But do you see that shifting again in any sort of way? Or do you think that that further fragmentation is going to kind of be where we're headed for the time?

I certainly think for the time being, it's hard to see any trends that are going to suddenly reverse that. But yeah, I am going to, I'm not going to take a hard pass, but I'm going to take a soft pass and say, you know, I can't really see what that would look like right now. So I think for the foreseeable future, I think we're going to see the same trends I would have thought. Yeah.

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Well, let's actually stick with literature. When we talk about literature, though, in the 1920s, Fitzgerald is, I would think, probably the first name that comes to mind for the vast majority of people. But when we think about literature in that post-war, just after the Great War era, we

Who are some other authors? I mean, we covered a number of emerging Black authors in our episode on the Harlem Renaissance, but who would be, you know, a few authors that you'd say beyond Fitzgerald? So certainly Hemingway is the next obvious one. Not everybody is, you know, kind of thrilled with his politics these days, but his style is pretty, remains pretty fabulous. Right.

And Faulkner starts publishing in the late 20s. So some of our really great classic writers, but it's also worth thinking about playwrights as well. So Eugene O'Neill is being produced in the 20s. But I'm interested in the writers that they were interested in.

Some of whom, you know, don't hold up as well, but I find it really interesting to see the kind of predictions that they got wrong, right? So, you know, they absolutely thought that Sinclair Lewis, I mean, Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize, but he's not very well read anymore. Right.

He's still out there, but he's certainly not canonical the way that Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner are. And Upton Sinclair also. People always confuse Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, understandably, but they're both writing at the same time and doing important work. Gertrude Stein...

I don't know if when you were talking about your Harlem Renaissance writers, if you're talking about Nella Larson as well as Zora Neale Hurston. Of course, Hurston doesn't publish until the 30s, but Nella Larson is publishing in the 1920s. And there was just that, in the late 20s, there was just that very good adaptation of her novel Passing. But also poetry, right? It's T.S. Eliot, it's Ezra Pound, it's William Carlos Williams, it's E.E. Cummings, it's Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Dorothy Parker,

Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, you know, could just Gene Toomer, Thomas Wolfe starts publishing at that point. Honestly, some of the most admired and most read American writers of all time come in this period. Absolutely. Can I ask why? What do you think about the 1920s that just makes for this, you know, boom of...

Yeah. What was in the water. But I think there were a bit like we were saying about the generational shifts. There's a kind of perfect storm here of a lot of causal factors that converge. So we already mentioned education. That's really important. You have more and more people getting secondary education who might not necessarily have done so before and a widening of voices elsewhere.

You have the professionalization of literature as a career, the professionalization of creative work generally, which again is a trend that began in the late part of the 19th century, is underwritten by the technological transformations that we're talking about by mass media platforms.

And so if you've got an explosion of magazines, you need people to create that content. So you've got a demand, you've got a marketplace, and people can see that rather than dabbling in their spare time, you know, Jane Austen on her six inches of ivory, you can be out there in the professional marketplace and saying authorship is a profession and it's something that you can pursue. And that as advertising and PR is developing in the 1920s, these things are all developing in relationship to each other and in tandem.

So there are structural and commercial reasons why there's this explosion. But that doesn't really explain the explosion of talent. That would explain an explosion of, you know, voices. Accessibility. Yeah. Of people, but not necessarily that it would be this. And, you know, there were earlier moments in the late 19th century, as I said, where we're not seeing that kind of, you don't go back to, I couldn't reel off a list of names like that in the 1870s or the 1880s.

I kind of wish my listeners could see how I was grinning from ear to ear like goofballs you were going. That was so impressive. I loved listening to that. And you can't do that in the 1870s. You can name Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and then you're kind of scratching your head a little bit.

And then you kind of go, Howells? Oh, no, Mark Twain is publishing. Okay, we've got Twain. Yeah, he's in there. But that's kind of what you end up doing, right? And you're kind of really digging for it. So there had to be other factors, too. You can't account for it, right? What accounts for the Renaissance, right? You can't account for the explosion of culture and art in Florence totally through structural factors in the 15th century any more than you can

in America in the 1920s. A lot of things come together, but you can start to at least try to describe them. So there is absolutely the influence of African-American culture, and the Harlem Renaissance is a really important part of it. This sense that they were driving something that mainstream white America was also trying to do, which was to find an authentic American art form and an authentic American culture that was not just copying Europe. And of course, this is

the great call that Emerson had made, again, hearkening back to the 19th century in the American scholars saying that America needs to stop copying, imitating Europe, and we need to start producing our own authentic, our own authentic, I'm putting that very much

Yeah.

But what was happening was that a generation, Fitzgerald's generation, which were better educated, more exposed to all of these mass cultural shifts that we're talking about, the grown-up reading magazine culture, they'd internalized those kinds of stories and also the variety of stories that were available across magazine culture. That's important, I think, that variety of voices and approaches.

helped them each kind of cultivate individual voices. And at the same time, then, modernism really was making its way into mainstream American culture much earlier than I think most people think. Forgive me, real quickly, would you define modernism for...

for everybody. What I'll do is I'll give everybody examples, which is much easier. So we're talking about Picasso, right? So Picasso in particular, this idea of that, what they actually called, they didn't call it modernism yet. They called it cubism and they called it expressionism. The sense that there were, but these new modern art forms were taking place and what they were doing was moving away from realism and verisimilitude and

and moving more toward extending what had already become popularized in the 1890s, which is art for art's sake. So the degree to which you become interested in art as an art form rather than as an attempt to only tell a realistic story. In modernism, not uniquely, but to a great extent, you have painting and music and art and advertising and consumer culture and literature all in conversation with each other, and you have the first kind of explosion of art

you know, what for lack of a more elegant phrase we could think of as kind of grab bag culture where everybody is kind of

putting everything into the mix and seeing what they create. Again, because of the magazines, they can start to reproduce these paintings. Even if you're in a provincial town, as Fitzgerald was in St. Paul, you can see Picasso's art in magazines. You can take inspiration from these pictures, and you can start to understand what it is that Picasso is doing in redrawing the human face and how that might apply to literature. Stein, Gertrude Stein, of course, is the

is the first great innovator in literature and American literature to try to take the techniques of the modern painters and apply them to literary art. But she does it very self-consciously, but I think that writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway were less self-consciously, but nonetheless,

influenced by all of these kinds of modern trends. So as Fitzgerald's generation comes of age, these are the influences that they're absorbing. So when they want to become writers, it all hits and it's new. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you can't just recreate in any given generation that sort of

explosion of new thoughts and ideas. Do you think that the fragmentation that we touched on earlier, that we have in the early 21st century to be a little bit broader,

Does that fragmentation make it more difficult for a 21st century writer to be able to get the inertia that a 1920s writer had and basically become canonized for the next generation? I think that we're seeing commercial influences on literature right now that are ironically, although there's that fragmentation that we're talking about, is actually creating an extremely homogeneous, homogenous. I've lived in Britain too long, and I don't know whether we

We say homogenous, don't we, in America? We say homogenous back here in the States. Okay. I'm going to talk like an American again. So let me do that again. There you go. There you go. I'll go back. I want to stick to my American roots. It's a bathroom. It's not the loo. Oh, Jesus. It's not a lift. It's an elevator. I said to my sister getting in the car, and I said, oh, there's something on the windscreen. And she said, on the what? And I said, on the windscreen. And she said, on the what? And I said, what do you say? And she said, what do I say? And I said, okay, this has all...

all just broken down. I've got no idea what's going on. So let's do this again. You got it. So ironically, even though we're talking about this fragmentation, I think that commercial pressures on writers right now in the early 21st century are, ironically enough, creating a more homogenous culture than there was a century ago, which might sound

Like it contradicts what I was saying earlier, but I think it's pretty straightforward, which is that writers are unsurprisingly writing for screen adaptations. And, you know, people have started talking about novels as pre-adapted, right? So they are producing the novels that are ready, they're screenplay ready, right?

So what we're seeing is a whole cohort of novels over the last five, 10 years that are, it's first-person narration, it's conversational, it's quippy, it's wry, it's self-aware, it's got cinematic pacing, it's about social encounters, it's about relationships. It's all of this stuff, which makes it very, very adaptable to screenplays, but it also makes it homogenous. When you think about the fact that in 1929, Scott Fitzgerald

and Hemingway were all publishing in that year and how different their voices are, even though they were all reading each other. You start to see the difference between how they were able to maintain an individuality that I think market forces are...

And this is in no way a pejorative against – I'm not in any way saying that these writers today are any less talented or any less individual in their heads. No, but this is the situation. The market. Yeah. The market is driving a, I believe, a homogenized product. And I use that word advisedly because I think we are increasingly seeing products.

There are a few exceptions, but I think that individuality of voice seems to me to be getting further and further away. And of course, creative writing workshops have a lot to do with that as well. And I support people learning how to do creative writing. I'm not against creative writing workshops. But once something is workshopped with all of these people, people all have, you know, it's a focus group. You're teaching a process.

Yeah, it's a recipe.

But Fitzgerald didn't read Hemingway while he was composing because he didn't want to muddy his voice with somebody else's. And now I think we see a much more openness to the influence of other voices.

That makes beautiful, perfect sense, everything you said. And so I see all of that flowing perfectly with the very fragmentation that you talked about. It feels ironic and it feels like it doesn't connect. And yet when you talk through all of it as you just have, as eloquently as you have as well, yeah, it clicks and it makes perfect sense.

let's hit the big iconic work of the 1920s. Can we Gatsby it up here for a minute? Oh, if we must. I love to Gatsby it up. It's hard to stop me from Gatsby-ing it up, to be honest with you. I feel great about that. Let's go down this path then. So your book, Careless People,

skillfully combines the sensational story of the Hall-Mills double murder with the creation of The Great Gatsby, giving some context for how the now-forgotten darkness of the era affected Fitzgerald's opus. So let's start there. Why is The Great Gatsby an enduring classic? Well, I want to thank you for the question, the preamble to the question, bringing in the darkness of

Because to me, that is such an important and neglected part of the novel, but it has so much to do with its enduring power. It's very easy to overlook, especially on first reading, because it's such a beautifully written novel and because he's so good at glamour that people just read it and they think, oh, glamorous parties and Leo DiCaprio with, you know, a big glass of champagne. The meme, right? Everyone knows the meme. Everyone knows the meme. And everybody's at the parties and it's all just so much fun, but it's a very dark novel.

And part of what makes it so great is the way that the darkness in it gives gravitas to what otherwise would be superficial party scenes. And that, to my mind, is why so often the film adaptations basically fail, because they don't want to get at the darkness. And so they just want to enjoy the superficial glamour. Then it is just silly people at cocktail parties. I mean, that's all you got.

So the darkness is absolutely crucial to it, but it's the two together, right? What makes Gatsby so great is that what Fitzgerald did was he suspended two things together.

And there are different ways I've tried to articulate this over the years, and I can break it up in different ways. But basically, it's about the tension between America's illusions and its realities, our illusions about ourself and the realities of the world that we've created, and the tragedy that happens when we fall into the gap between the two.

It's about what Lionel Trilling called the tension between raw power and envisioned romance, right? Those idealistic illusions that are envisioned romance, this kind of willful romance that we have with our own utopian ideals, and then the raw power of how America actually works on the ground. And that...

Tension is the subject of the novel. It is the setting of the novel. But it also gives Fitzgerald his... It gives him his style because his style is also...

captures and fluctuates between because that would sound like it's not in control. But he pulls together power and romance, illusions and reality in the jazz surrealism of his style. So the language, if you actually look really closely at the language of Gatsby, it

It feels like realism when you're reading it, but it's often surrealistic. And what he's doing is pushing us to the very edge of reality and into illusions so that our experience of reading the book is supernatural. It is surrealistic, even though we are usually not aware of it.

We are living in a heightened existence when we're inside that book. It is a world in which the laws of physics don't apply. Champagne floats through gardens without any help. Nick says when they're in New York, he says he wouldn't have been surprised. It was so pastoral that he wouldn't have been surprised to see a flock of sheep on Fifth Avenue.

If you know the Lerman, as we were saying, the DiCaprio Gatsby, if you know that one, you might remember there's a scene on Broadway where we've got loads of neon lights and a ton of yellow taxis. There are no yellow taxis in The Great Gatsby. There are lavender taxis in The Great Gatsby. Now, in fact, there were lavender taxis in New York in the 20s, but there is nothing so trite as a yellow taxi. He's using synesthesia throughout, right? He's blending sensory impressions.

So he gives odor to color, and he gives color to texture, and he's constantly mixing up our senses so that we have this heightened sensory impression that anything is possible, which is what the novel's about. And the tragedy is that we can't make any of those possibilities real. And so we fall back into reality. And that's the constant emotional tension of the novel, and that's the tragedy of Gatsby's story.

And then that is in kind of counterpoint with Nick, who is totally misread. We could do a whole hour on how everybody gets Nick wrong. The short version is that what happens is Nick actually is very cynical at the beginning of the novel. Everybody thinks he's this naive who's following Gatsby around and Tom around being like, oh, you're so cool. It's not what happens in the novel at all.

And he's actually a cynic. And what happens over the course of the story is that he recaptures his faith in the need for idealism. He doesn't become idealistic again, because once you're a cynic, you can't become idealistic again, by definition. It's a fall, right, from innocence into experience. But what Nick finds is that idealism is necessary. And that's what Gatsby represents to him, is that we have to reclaim our idealism.

So if you ask me the question of why does Gatsby endure, Gatsby captures that constant need to reinvent our own idealism, to try to keep striving, to try to keep pushing forward. Sarah, it's always a pleasure talking to someone who truly loves their work and you can just see it on their face and hear it in their voice. And that is 100% you. Oh, thank you, Greg. This has really been fun.

Okay, my friends, that wraps up this epilogue. If you'd like more, head over to htdspodcast.com slash membership and become a premium member to hear an extra segment from my conversation with Professor Churchwell. In this bonus segment, we talk more about the optimism inherent in our American culture via the American dream.

We dive into the origin of the idea of the American Dream and its meaning in and beyond the Great Gatsby. We also talk about what it's like to be an American humanities professor, living, writing, and teaching outside the U.S. Want to know what the British are asking about their upstart former 13 colonies? Become an HTBS Premium member to find out.

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