Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and
understand yet another business book, on the Leadership Lessons from the Great
Books podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the
great books of the Western canon. You know, those
books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in
between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in
high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the
entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time
to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from
literature to execute leadership best practices in the
confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now
inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western civilization
at the intersection of literature and leadership.
Welcome to the leadership lessons from the great books podcast.
Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is Leadership
Lessons from the Great Books Podcast, episode number
one forty seven.
One hundred years ago, during the roaring twenties, the
gap between the American wealthy and elite
classes and the American rural poor and the veterans of World War
one was as massive as the gap is
in our current era. An
era of, quote, unquote, racing along under its its own power
served by great filling stations full of money,
these disparities between classes, while nothing new in
The United States and the tensions between those classes having always
been a factor in the rulings too that is the culture of The United States
led to a lot of dissatisfaction.
Writers, poets, comedians, and entertainers have always been
the class or part of the class of people who have held up a mirror
to the tensions and frictions inherent in a society and
culture that is based on freedom
and a creed that is supposed to be raceless,
classless, and ethno-less, and
yet stubbornly, humanly insists
on being so. Those same writers,
poets, comedians, and entertainers have sought to educate, explain,
and elucidate these splits between people
in a general population and to a general population
that may not always be paying that close attention.
Some of the best elucidators of the tensions of the lost generation
one hundred years ago included folks like Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. And
the author that we are going to introduce to you today
was one of the most delicate, personal, and poignant chroniclers
of the nature and the habits of
the elite culture that sat at the top
of a lost, cynical, and wounded generation
who, to paraphrase from Kurt
Cobain in another lost generation,
just wanted to be entertained now.
But also, this lost generation wanted
revenge for the last war that the senator's son,
the millionaire's son, and the elite man's son didn't have to
go to the Western Front to fight.
Today, we will be opening up and
introducing some of the themes embedded
for leaders in the Romana Clef of
decadent decline, what was euphemistically
called the lost generation during the roaring twenties,
Tender is the Night by f Scott Fitzgerald.
Leaders, it's not the society that's tragically screwed up.
It's all of us as individuals.
So today on the podcast, we will be joined by a guest.
We talked about in episode,
one forty six with Tom Libby, how we were going to be
changing up the format of the show a little bit, and this will be our
first attempt at doing that. Normally, on solo
episodes, I will wax poetically,
about some particular book and some themes that I have pulled from
the book. And normally, that poetic waxing will take around forty five
minutes, usually about a half hour with the music breaks not
inserted, and, then we'll get on out of here.
However, we're gonna go in a little bit of a different direction today. So I'm
not gonna talk overwhelmingly about the themes
in Tender is the Night, although we may touch on some of
that. Instead, I'm going to introduce the book. I'm going to
talk about the author. I'm going to talk about, his
background and his life, for those of you who don't know anything about f Scott
Fitzgerald, and sort of tee up, f Scott
and tee up Tender is the Night, in anticipation
of future guests coming on in the next couple of
episodes to talk about this writer, talk about the
book, and to talk about how it intersects with
leadership today. So that's where we're
going. This is the beginning of that new
project, that new approach, this new format that we are going to be
taking on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. And
I invite you to join us. I invite you to
come along for the ride, and I invite you I invite
you to take a listen and consider the life and
times of f f Scott Fitzgerald.
So let's, open up the door, and let's talk a little bit about
f Scott Fitzgerald. So Frances Scott Key
Fitzgerald, born 09/24/1896,
died 12/21/1940, was
a novelist, depicting the flamboyance
and the dominant excesses of what was
nominally called the Jazz Age.
During his lifetime, he published four novels,
including Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise,
The Beautiful and the Damned, and, of course,
his most, most popular
novel, at least the one that was most popular after his death, The
Great Gatsby. He published four
short story collections and 164 short
stories, mostly to make money. We'll talk a little bit about why in
later episodes, but, he he did publish a lot of
short stories. He was born into a
middle class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, though he
was raised primarily in New York State. He dropped
out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the United States Army
during World War one. Now during the
course of World War one, he,
he began to really, come into
his own with writing. Although he,
as a second lieutenant during the, quote, unquote, great war,
he largely described himself as, quote, unquote, the army's
worst aide de camp, largely because he preferred
writing to tactics and training.
The fact that he never saw combat, the armistice arrived as his infantry
unit was preparing to ship abroad, was a lifelong
regret as he
was surrounded by people, most notably Ernest Hemingway and
others who had actually been to war and actually
been in, as they would say in later wars, the
shit. Fitzgerald's third novel, The
Great Gatsby, received generally favorable reviews, but was a
commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in
its first year. As a matter of fact, The
Great Gatsby, just like the majority of f Scott Fitzgerald's
other novels, and we're gonna talk specifically about Tender is the Night,
right now or today on the podcast. But the
majority of his novels, now being read by high school
students would probably make Fitzgerald
blanch and become a little bit disgusted if he could see it
now. After a long struggle with
alcoholism, he attained sobriety only
to die of a heart attack in 1940 at age
44. After Fitzgerald's death,
Edwin Wilson, who befriended Fitzgerald at Princeton University,
described Fitzgerald's writing style. And I
quote, romantic, but also cynical. He is
bitter as well as ecstatic, astringent as well as
lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the
playboy, he incessantly mocks. He is vain,
a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has
the Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent
and surprising, close quote.
That's the literary life or at least the beginning of the literary
life of f Scott Fitzgerald.
So I'm gonna leap into some ideas that are explored in
f Scott Fitzgerald's biography that comes directly from the
f Scott Fitzgerald Society. And you can go check
them out at the
fscottFitzgeraldsociety.com.
So, couple of things that I wanna point out that I think are
relevant for understanding Tender is the Night and understanding f Scott
Fitzgerald as a writer, and they're also relevant for leaders to pay
attention to, as they read this book.
Fitzgerald suffered from a lifelong inferiority complex that he
later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival.
Quote, I talk with the authority of failure, he insisted, earnest with
the authority of success. That's from his notebooks three eighteen.
Fitzgerald was a man who was perpetually,
not necessarily down in the mouth, but per perpetually,
at least according to him, failing at life. He was failing
at writing, failing at his talent, failing at his creativity,
failing at being a friend to others, and most
notably, particularly in a post Victorian
or rapidly becoming post Victorian America. He was
failing at the one shining aspect of Victorian
morality, his marriage to
Zelda Sayer.
Most of Fitzgerald's fiction, was promoted as
autobiographical, and because he tended to do this, early
critics tended to dismiss him as being a facile
writer. However, during the peak years of his popularity from
1920 to 1921 I'm sorry, 1925, when
he wrote, you know, This Side of Paradise, he wrote short stories
for the Saturday Evening Post that were incredibly popular. Of
course, he wrote The Beautiful and the Damned,
and, of course, his penultimate book, The Great Gatsby.
When he wrote these books
and became a popular writer, he was probably The United
States' First most widely read writer
among the elite and among the common people who wanted
to see what the elite were doing, who wanted to be
and walk hand in hand with envy and jealousy
of what the elite had. From
the great Gatsby, you get the idea from its
narrator, Nick Carraway, of being inside and
outside the action. You also
see the challenges of dissipation,
the challenge of a lack of cardinal virtues,
and a world so prone to cynical expedience
and plausible deniability that optimism,
any kind of optimism, can seem tragically
naive. As a matter of fact, the
Great Gatsby, contains several of the most evocative
symbols in all of American literature, including, the green
light at the end of Daisy's Dock, the Valley Of Ashes that separates Long Island
from New York City, and the disembodied eyes of doctor TJ
Eckleburg that peer out from an abandoned billboard.
Gatsby's ambition, which is supposed to be, I
believe, a pronouncement, moralistic one, I
believe Edmund Wilson would say, pronouncement on the American dream
of the roaring nineteen twenties is, of course, exemplified
in Fitzgerald's most cited passage and elegized as
an expression of the American dream. And I quote
from the great Gatsby, Gatsby believed in the
green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It alluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow, we will run
faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning,
so we beat on boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past, close
quote.
Fitzgerald's other novel, the novel that we are going to be focusing on, Tender
is the Night, is so totally the opposite of The Great Gatsby.
It's kind of as if they were written by two different writers,
written over the course of a nine year period, that saw
Fitzgerald handicapped by his alcoholism and by
his wife Zelda's descent into schizophrenic
madness. The book is chaotic. It's nonchronological.
It's confusing. It had the urinations and rhetorical
sideshows. It did not sell nearly as well as
f Scott Fitzgerald wanted it to because people
wanted a linear story. They wanted
more of Gatsby. They wanted more of this side
of paradise. They wanted more of The Beautiful and the Damned. They wanted more of
the short stories. As a matter of fact, they wanted Gatsby to dance
like a trained monkey, and they also
wanted Fitzgerald to make Gatsby dance
like a trained monkey. And Fitzgerald
well, Fitzgerald wrote a story that expounds upon
the historical, cultural, and philosophical nature
of being an expat away from America and in
Europe in a post World War one world,
Full of ruminations, full of sadness, and
also full of chaos, the book shines a light on
what it means to start out as being serious as a leader
or as a person of any kind and then what it means to
descend to descend with
all speed into un
seriousness.
The great relationship between Ernest Hemingway and f Scott
Fitzgerald is one that, quite a lot of digital
and literal ink has been spilled upon,
particularly when Hemingway was an ex pat in,
the nineteen twenties in Paris along with f Scott
Fitzgerald and his wife. And Hemingway happened to be writing
The Sun Also Rises, which we covered on this podcast
before with Libby Younger. You should go check that episode out.
And, there's a great story that,
relates in specifically to f Scott Fitzgerald and to
his wife, Zelda, and their
relationship, based off of the ruminations
and the observations that Ernest Hemingway
made, about their marriage that was
published in A Movable Feast, another book that
we covered by Hemingway on this podcast.
And I quote from A Movable Feast, the essay
entitled Hawks Do Not Share.
That fall of nineteen twenty five, I was upset because I would not,
because I would not show him the manuscript of the first draft of The Sun
Also Rises. I explained to him that it would mean nothing until I had gone
over it and rewritten it, and that I did not want to discuss it or
show it to anyone first. We were going down to Schruns
in the Voroburg in Austria as soon as the first snowfall there.
I rewrote the first half of the manuscript there, finished in January, I
think. I took it to New York and showed it to Max Perkins of
Scribner, then went back to Schreun's and finished rewriting the book. Scott did not see
it until after the completed rewritten and cut manuscript had been sent to Scribner's at
the April. I remember joking with him about it and him being worried and
anxious to help as always once a thing was done.
But I did not want his help while I was rewriting.
While we're living in Vorarlberg and I was finished rerunning the novel,
Scott and his wife and child had left Paris for a watering place at the
Lower Pyrenees. Zelda had been ill with that familiar intestinal complaint that
too much champagne produces and which was then diagnosed as colitis.
Scott was not drinking and starting to work, and he wanted to us to come
to Roi Le Pen in June. They They would find an
inexpensive villa for us, and this time he would not drink, and it would be
like the good old days. And we would swim and be healthy and brown and
have one aperitif before lunch and one before
dinner. Zelda was well again, and they were both fine,
and his novel was going wonderfully. He had money coming in from a dramatization of
The Great Gatsby, which was running well, and it would sell to the movies, and
he had no worries. Zelda was really fine, and everything was going to be
disciplined. I had been down to Madrid in
May working by myself and came by train from Bayonne to Juan
Le Pen's third class and quite hungry because I'd run out of money stupidly and
had eaten last in Hendaye at the French Spanish frontier.
It was a nice villa, and Scott had a very fine house not far away.
And I was very happy to see my wife, who had the villa running
beautifully, and our friends. And the single aperitif before lunch was very
good. And we've several more before lunch, which was very good, and we
had several more. That night, there
was a party to welcome us at the casino, just a small party, the
McLeish's, the Murphy's, the Fitzgerald's, and we who were living at the villa. No one
drank anything stronger than champagne, and it was very gay and obviously a splendid place
place to write. There's going to be everything that a man needed to write except
to be alone. Zelda was
very beautiful and was tanned, a lovely gold color, and her hair was beautiful dark
gold, and she was very friendly. Her
hawk's eyes were clear and calm. I knew everything
was alright and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned
forward and said to me, telling me her great secret,
Ernest, don't you think Al Jolson is
greater than Jesus?
Nobody thought anything of it at the time. It was only Zelda's secret that
she shared with me as a hawk might share something with a
man. The hawks do not share.
Scott did not write anything anymore that was good
until after he knew that she was
insane.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a man with an inferiority complex
who happened to come along and happened to have a talent for
writing during a time when
we were in an at the end of
an unraveling era during the last
great eighty year succulent cycle in America.
That last great succulent cycle ended, of course,
with the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. But during the
unraveling that took place between the end of world war
one and the beginning and throughout the great
depression, and through the Roaring Twenties,
we were convinced in America because the Roaring Twenties was part of the high
and then the Great Depression was the unraveling. We were convinced that we
were, at least in The United States, okay.
During a high, during a generational high, men like Fitzgerald,
these men set the table for other men who will come later.
Interestingly enough, the the man who was, Fitzgerald's
military commander at, at the training camp
at, at Fort Leavenworth was Dwight d
Eisenhower, interestingly enough, a man
who would be responsible for getting us out of the chaotic
period of World War two and the president
himself, a man Fitzgerald did not like.
Fitzgerald did not understand that his
words, his critique of the high, and the
excesses of it in preparation for the unraveling
would allow for men like Eisenhower and even
Truman and many others to make hard
decisions while people who
would have to suffer under those hard decisions,
were becoming more and more, in the twenties anyway, at least
cynical about the bloom on the proverbial
rose. Fitzgerald, as I said before,
was a man with an inferiority complex. And because he was a man with an
inferiority comp an inferiority complex, he fell in love
with a woman with mental health problems,
a woman who his friends opposed
and deemed Zelda ill suited for him.
Of course, she was an Episcopalian back when religion
actually mattered, and the Episcopalians were
wary of Scott's Catholic background.
They were also wary of whether or not a writer could actually
make any money. Fitzgerald
died, in
Hollywood. Right? You know? And, Hollywood
at the time was not a thing. If you wanna sort of make a
parallel to today, Fitzgerald died at a time when
Hollywood would have been, like, would have been considered in the public
consciousness the way that YouTube is considered in the public consciousness
today. It wasn't a place of serious work. If
you wanted to be serious, you wrote books. If you wanted to be serious, you
went and worked in the theater in New York. But if you wanted to fool
around, you went into the movies.
Fitzgerald wound up working in the movies, which for him was a bitter
comedown the way that working on youtube would be a bitter
comedown for someone like well I don't know name
your writer here of this era
Fitzgerald was exposed to many, many of
the most famous folks of his day. I already mentioned some of these, Gertrude
Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and of course, Ernest Hemingway,
people who would wind up cast on the shores of their
own degradation at the end of the roaring twenties and the
beginning of the chaos leading into world
war two.
Fitzgerald was not ready for the Great Depression, and
he became bankrupt and spent most of
1936 and 1937 living in cheap
hotels, writing about the same things he had written about before, and
not really understanding that the world was
moving on. Suffering
from illness and constant guilt over Zelda's
mental health, he, he struggled to
do anything creative, finally achieving sobriety
a year before his death and,
well, then dying.
Fitzgerald was not critically evaluated, and his writing wasn't
critically evaluated as being more than light pop culture froth
when he was alive. But in retrospect,
he is probably the most famous chronicler of
the jazz age that we have. The folks who don't
like, or don't appreciate Ernest Hemingway's
hard look at the world through The Sun Also Rises, who
consider Hemingway to be too cynical, and he is.
They really like Gatsby, who's romantic. By the way,
Gatsby or not Gatsby, I'm sorry. They like Fitzgerald, who is
romantic. Gatsby was romantic too, but in a different kind of way. They like
Fitzgerald, who they consider to be romantic.
So what do we take from all of this? What
do we what do we to conclude about f Scott
Fitzgerald before we go into considering the
themes of Tender is the Night in our next episode and talking about
that with our guest. Well, one of the first things we can consider
is that in order to be a serious writer, a serious leader,
a serious artist, a serious creative, a serious person of any kind, you
must at the very minimum take your talent seriously.
One of the great knocks that Hemingway had against f Scott Fitzgerald
was that he felt the drinking and the carousing and the partying
was making Fitzgerald weak. Now that might have
been the Victorian coming up in Hemingway, but he may have also had
a point because two things can be true at the same time even
if they come from a source that we moderns and we postmoderns
may not particularly like.
You also have to do the work. I think that's the other
lesson that we can take. Fitzgerald was really good at writing short
stories, and perhaps he should have stuck merely to that. But
the novel was the place where the status was, but he could never really
wrap his arms around the discipline to do the work because he was
always being distracted by, well, other things.
And that's probably the third lesson we can pull from the literary
life of f Scott Fitzgerald, do the work in
a disciplined way. Discipline, as
Jocko Willock would say in our era, equals freedom.
If you don't have discipline, you don't have anything.
And some folks are natural talents. Don't get me wrong.
But most of us most of us are not natural talents at anything that
will get us paid, but we're natural talents at a bunch of stuff that the
market doesn't care about. But if we're natural talent and
the market does care about it and we can get paid, then we
owe it to the market to treat our talent seriously,
between treating all that stuff seriously and maybe
maybe putting our egos on the back burner
and treating ourselves as leaders, writers, creatives,
engineers, scientists, business people, whatever,
a little bit less seriously.
I don't know. This is just a few of my thoughts.
Let's, let's get into the book.
And well, that's it
for me.
Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast
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that's it for me.