When did the idea for So We Read On occur to you, and how long did it take to finish?
I can tell you the exact time and place that inspiration struck: shortly before midnight on Thanksgiving Eve, 2010. My husband told me I should write a book on Gatsby as we were walking out of the Public Theater in New York. We had just seen a seven-hour production of Gatz performed by the Elevator Repair Service theater company and I was talking nonstop about the novel—how very funny it is and also what a strange and slippery reading of America it presents. My husband said right then and there that my next book should be on Gatsby. Once in a while he’s right. I turned in the manuscript of So We Read On three years later.
You’ve devoted your life to the written word in more ways than one—as a critic, an English professor, and a writer. What were some of the early reading experiences that got you hooked?
When I was a first-grader in the early 1960s, I remember my father taking me to the book department of Macy’s on 34th Street. (Department stores had separate book departments back in the olden days.) I’d asked him to buy me my own copy of the Dick and Jane reader that we were using in school. (We kids had to leave our books in our desks every day and I wanted to read ahead.) That’s a powerful memory for me about the pull of stories. A couple of years later, I got my first Nancy Drew book, The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, in my Christmas stocking and got hooked for life on mysteries. I fell seriously in love with Dickens as a teenager; in fact, my dream for when I’m finally put out to pasture as a book critic and English professor is to sit on a porch somewhere and read all of Dickens’s novels slowly, in chronological order. Fitzgerald, by the way, revered Dickens too; his favorite Dickens novel was Bleak House.
It’s rare to read a work of literary criticism (i.e., a book about books) that’s accessible and personal in the way that yours is. Was that a difficult balance to strike? What writers do you look to for inspiration?
I started out as a book critic writing for the Village Voice in the 1980s, and one of the things that was most freeing to me about writing for the Voice was that, if the review warranted it, I could be personal and funny and profane and enthusiastic—all the things most scholarly criticism back then disparaged. (I was completing a dissertation on nineteenth-century British literature at the same time and, consequently, I was used to aping the impersonal jargon of critical theory.) The Voice was the greatest writing school back then: people like Ellen Willis, Nat Hentoff, Stanley Crouch, Joyce Johnson, and Jon Pareles were writing about books, politics, film, and music in critical essays infused with their own idiosyncratic, first-person voices. Later on, I read the literary criticism of some of the great twentieth-century public intellectuals—H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Susan Sontag. While they didn’t always write personally, they wrote accessibly, to that ideal audience of “educated nonspecialists” that I imagine I’m talking to every week in my book reviews for Fresh Air, which are also often personal. The kind of criticism I most like to read is rooted in the critic’s personality and experiences and, at this point in my career, I can’t imagine writing about literature any other way.
The challenge I faced with So We Read On was juggling three stories within the main framework of the book: the story of how Fitzgerald came to write Gatsby; the story of the novel’s incredible “second act” after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 (when copies of Gatsby were almost impossible to find); and the story of the surprising things I’ve discovered about the novel by digging around in university library archives and through a lifetime of rereading it and lecturing on it to both college students and adults across the country.
What was the most surprising discovery you made over the course of your investigation into The Great Gatsby? What was one of the craziest things you did in the name of research?
I had no idea, before I began seriously researching for So We Read On, that World War II played such a crucial role in Gatsby’s resurrection. During the war, the army and navy—in conjunction with authors, publishing houses, and paper manufacturers—arranged to print special paperback editions of books ranging from the Hopalong Cassidy cowboy stories to The Odyssey. Gatsby was one of the titles chosen for this series of Armed Services Editions, as they were called, which were distributed to the troops. That meant that 125,000 copies of Gatsby were sent to soldiers and sailors overseas, in military hospitals and even in prison camps. Quite a boost for a novel that never even sold out its second printing in 1925!
The craziest thing I did in the name of research was return to my old high school for the first time in nearly forty years to sit in on classes reading The Great Gatsby. I wanted to go back to the place where I first read Gatsby and see what high-school students today thought about the novel. The fact that my high school is in Astoria, which is a locale in The Great Gatsby, added to the allure of the adventure. It turned out to be a terrific experience—my sophomore English teacher is still at the school!—but when the students learned that I graduated high school in 1973, the stunned looks on their faces made me feel like Grandma Moses.
You mention a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report called “Reading at Risk” showing that fewer than half of American adults had ever read a work of literature in their leisure time. It feels like the humanities have come under attack lately, with cuts in funding and growing anxiety about the value of the English major in “the real world.” To put the question in a way that Tom Buchanan might, “leaning aggressively forward”: What is the point of reading great literature?
In response to this Tom Buchanan–type question, I’ll paraphrase Nick Carraway: Nick says that Gatsby lived with a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Reading great literature develops our own heightened sensitivities. Dreamers like Gatsby pay a price for their dreams (just as English majors pay a price—in terms of shaky job prospects and lower salaries—for their choice of major), but given how limited our time on earth is, wouldn’t you rather spend it as a Gatsby rather than a Tom Buchanan?
Any advice for teachers trying to hook their high-school students on Gatsby ?
I think it’s a killer to try to persuade high-school students to admire a book because of its language. That appreciation for the music, the sheer gorgeousness of Gatsby’s language, comes to most readers later in their lives. I’d recommend quoting some of the 1920s reviews that I cite in my book that refer to Gatsby as a crime story. (Three violent deaths! Racketeers!) That approach also opens up the whole consideration of Daisy as a femme fatale and the backlash against emancipated women (those dangerous flappers) that also marked the Roaring Twenties. These days, the 1949 Alan Ladd film of The Great Gatsby is available on Netflix and that’s fun to watch (it’s my favorite film version) because it’s something of a film noir.
You cite many critics of the 1920s and ’30s who dismissed Gatsby without a second thought. As a book reviewer yourself (for NPR’s Fresh Air ), do you live in fear of pronouncing an unwise or shortsighted verdict?
I’d be a delusional idiot if I said that never once in the twenty-five years that I’ve been the book critic for Fresh Air have I erred in my judgment of a book, giving it either too harsh or too positive a review. But, that said, I think most of my reviews are right most of the time. My one area of certitude in life is literature. I second-guess myself about my judgments in most other areas, but I feel pretty confident that I’m usually right about the books I review.
How do you choose which books to review? You must get so many!
I get at least two hundred books a week delivered to the front porch of my row house in Washington, DC. Inside, our basement and one bedroom have been totally taken over by thousands of books. It’s a candy store for book lovers, and a vision of chaos for those who prefer their living spaces streamlined and Zen. At the start of each publishing season, I draw up a list of books to review culled from Publishers Weekly and all the publishing catalogs I receive. My producer, Phyllis Myers, and I go through the list. Usually, if Terry Gross is interviewing an author, I won’t review the book. (There are so many books, there’s no need for duplication.) Things change, however, from week to week—that’s one of the beauties of reviewing for Fresh Air. If I’ve been reviewing a lot of nonfiction, for instance, or a lot of books published by the major publishing houses, I may try to break that streak by looking at small-press fiction for the coming week. Also, surprises always continue to pop up in the mail. I’ve reviewed everything from the Twilight saga to scholarly books (years ago, I reviewed a posthumous book written by the English historian E. P. Thompson on William Blake and the Muggletonian religious sect). As long as I can make the review interesting to a wide audience, I can consider the book.
Fitzgerald came up with some pretty wacky titles for Gatsby and even asked Max Perkins for a last-minute title change before publication—too late, mercifully. Did you consider any other titles for So We Read On, or did you settle on that title from the outset?
So We Read On was my first title and it’s the most fitting title because the book is largely about reading and rereading The Great Gatsby—how America reread Gatsby in the 1940s and ’50s and was knocked out by a novel that had garnered mediocre reviews and sluggish sales the first time around in 1925, and how that experience of rediscovery is replicated on an individual level every time someone who first read the novel in high school and thought it was just “okay” (that would be me) rereads it later in life and realizes what a masterpiece it is. Of course, I found myself neurotically tinkering with the title, mostly because my first book was entitled Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading and I worried about again having some form of the verb “read” in the title of this book. A friend suggested Great Gatsby! which I really liked for a week or so until I realized that the whole appeal of that title rested on an exclamation point. I also came up with a title every bit as bad as Fitzgerald’s clunker, Trimalchio in West Egg. My alternative was Jay and the Americans. I thought (briefly) that it was a witty way of signaling Gatsby’s centrality in the American canon by invoking the name of a 1960s rock band. My agent wisely pointed out that no one under fifty would get the joke and even most people over fifty would be baffled.
You’ve certainly convinced me to give the Great American Novel another (and closer) read. Do you have recommendations for other great American novels that may have slipped below the radar?
There are so many.
Willa Cather wrote more than one masterpiece, but I’d vote for My Ántonia, a haunting novel about pioneers in Nebraska. It reminds me of Gatsby in that it’s a “memory novel” in which the narrator reaches back for a person and time irrevocably lost. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is a novel I mention more than a few times in So We Read On. It’s a mystery, sure, but as a mystery it’s the equal of Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Waste Land, and other modernist texts in the way that it looks squarely and unsentimentally at a post–World War I world devoid of a benevolent God. And Hammett’s language is as pared down and evocative as Hemingway’s. Anyone who hasn’t read Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth must do so, now. It’s a great novel about class instability in America and the pressures of the marriage market as experienced by turn-of-the-last-century women of the upper classes. Fitzgerald, by the way, greatly admired all three of the writers I’ve just mentioned. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a brilliant novel that, like Gatsby, tells a seemingly realistic story with mythic overtones. Ellison charts the mid-twentieth-century coming-of-age of an ambitious (and deluded) young black man as he journeys from college in the South up to New York City. I think Invisible Man scares off some readers because it’s so symbol-heavy, but I’ve found that students—once they crack its code—love its humor and are moved by its story of an American dream that’s always deferred for its hero.
To throw in a curiosity that might be more unfamiliar to most readers, I’d recommend Louisa May Alcott’s Work. It’s one of the few American novels I know of from the nineteenth century that describes the working life of a poor-but-educated woman and her scramble to keep body and soul together. Alcott herself held most of the jobs she describes: teacher, caretaker, nurse, and freelance writer. It’s a bit like Little Women without the cozy uplift.
What are some of your favorite books about books?
I love Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young for its depiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and their circle on the Riviera in the late 1920s, and I also love Gertrude Stein’s memoir of Paris in the teens and twenties, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I find almost everything Janet Malcolm writes is eye-opening, but The Silent Woman, her investigation into the many contradictory biographies of Sylvia Plath, is a book I’ve reread many times. Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars is terrific on Shakespeare and the latter-day controversies that have shaped the publication and teaching of his work. Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, and his latest book, The Swerve, about how the rediscovery of a poem by the Roman philosopher Lucretius helped kick-start the Renaissance, are both revelatory reads. Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful book on Montaigne, How to Live, is also a recent standout.
Some classic critical books written for a wide audience that influenced me to read more deeply are Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (about nineteenth-century female Gothic literature), and Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun. Finally, for anyone interested in the feminist and erotic subtext of those innocent-seeming Nancy Drew novels, I recommend Bobbie Ann Mason’s Girl Sleuth.
If you could direct the ultimate, finally-going-to-get-it-right Gatsby movie, who would you cast as Gatsby? How about Daisy, Tom, Nick, Jordan, Myrtle?
Fitzgerald wanted Clark Gable to play the role of Gatsby—go figure! The best movie version of Gatsby I could imagine would be a film of Gatz, the amazing seven-hour performance of the novel by the Elevator Repair Service theater company that I saw twice in New York. Gatz is all about the astounding language of the novel, and its casting was perfect: Jim Fletcher was spot on as a Gatsby who’s uncomfortable in his own skin (unlike the too smooth Leonardo DiCaprio), and Scott Shepherd has just the right meditative voice for Nick. It’s the only dramatic “version” of The Great Gatsby I’ve ever seen that’s worthy of the novel.