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 today, And now that you've made it this far, you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major podcast players, including Apple iTunes, Spotify, YouTube Music, and everywhere else where podcasts are available. There's also a video version of our podcast on our YouTube channel. Like and subscribe to the video version of this podcast on
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well, you can always listen to another leadership show. There are several other good ones out there. At least that's what I've heard. Alright. Well, that's it for me.