Writer and MET box office manager, Angela Carole Brown recently sat down for a chat with her friend and F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Dr. Park Bucker about his Gatsby Day event coming up on April 19th in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the book launch of The Great Gatsby, published on 10 April 1925.

 

ACB: Park, you’re a bit of a Renaissance man … aren’t you? ... as we first met at the Warwick where you were wearing your actor hat and performing in MET’s The Iceman Cometh. I’ve now known you a good few years yet had no idea until just recently that you are a recognized F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar. I learned this, of course, because of your idea of doing a marathon reading, at a single stretch, of The Great Gatsby. You brought this idea to the attention of Karen Paisley, MET’s Artistic Director, as an idea to commemorate the 100th birthday of Fitzgerald’s most famous work, and I remember thinking what a fantastic idea. First, tell us a little about your being a scholar of his work. How did this particular path unfold?

 

PB: In 1994, I was living on the beach in San Diego, CA, a graduate school dropout in English Renaissance drama, contemplating what to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to go back to graduate school, but this time in American Studies. I knew I wanted to focus on one author. I narrowed down my selection to three: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. My grandmother sent me a clipping from The New York Times that announced a major celebration of Fitzgerald on his centenary (1996) at the University of South Carolina.

The host of the conference was Matthew J Bruccoli, the world's foremost expert on Fitzgerald. I decided to apply to the University of South Carolina in hopes of being part of this celebration. I not only became a part of the celebration, but I was lucky enough to become Professor Bruccoli's student, then research assistant, then collaborator, and finally friend. I was fortunate enough to work with him for thirteen years until his death. We published three books together. 

 

As to why Fitzgerald? I first fell in love with his writing in high school, though not through The Great Gatsby (1925)—which I think should not be taught to high schoolers, as they are not yet old enough to appreciate it—but rather through his hilarious flapper story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), which serves as a primer on how to become a popular teenager. At 15, I desperately wanted to learn all I could about popularity. Even though the story was—then—over 50 years old, it read to me as a fresh, recognizable account of both adolescent angst and youthful exuberance. In college I continued to read Fitzgerald, and he became my favorite non-dramatic American author. 

 

ACB: It’s tickling me to no end to learn about your mentor/protégé friendship with Matthew Bruccoli, because something he wrote is where I learned that themes and even characters in The Great Gatsby had appeared, here and there, at some level of development in at least 4 earlier works of Fitzgerald’s, so clearly this was a story brewing in him for some time. Absolutely fantastic that you and Bruccoli were friends and collaborators!  Can you speak to the layers lurking within this novel that on the surface has often been pigeonholed as that book about wealth, decadence, gangsters, and speakeasies?

PB: You are exactly right in that Fitzgerald, like many authors, “workshopped” the themes of a novel in short stories.  The novel's premise of an imaginative poor boy in love with a destructive rich girl appears early in Fitzgerald's fiction.  This situation comes from Fitzgerald's own biography. Although Fitzgerald was raised solidly middle class, he felt very much the poor boy when he went to the rich man's College of Princeton. He fell in love with a beautiful Chicago heiress named Ginevra King ... but her father told him, “Poor boys don't marry rich girls.”  His first great examination of the effect of money on character appears in the novella “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), which is a wild fantasia of the sensual deliciousness and moral destructiveness of extreme wealth and luxury. His stories “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924) both examine an industrious young man’s doomed aspiration for a ‘diamond princess.’

 

ACB:  "The effect of money on character."  That very idea may just be one of the most fascinating examinations of humankind, and thus a great sort of character to create for a writer ... Fitzgerald coined the term the Jazz Age. What impact did that term instill on the culture of the times?  

 

PB: Although he is commonly credited with coining “Jazz Age” that is not technically true. It first appeared in 1921 in Jacobs’ Band Monthly, a popular music periodical. But Fitzgerald certainly deserves credit for popularizing the term, and he inserted it into the American vernacular when he used as the title of his second short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).  

 

The word “jazz” became an image for anything that was new, youthful, energetic, interesting, exciting, sexy, even subversive—all adjectives that resonate with the American character. One reason that Gatsby failed commercially in 1925 is that Fitzgerald exposed the superficiality and decadence underneath the “jazziness” for jazz’s sake.  In 1925—midway through the decade-long “party”—readers weren’t yet ready to be preached at. Only after WWII did Gatsby achieve popularity, as post-Depression readers saw the 1920s as the immoral orgy that caused the economic collapse of the 1930s.  

 

ACB: Thanks for clarifying about the Jazz Age! It’s really too bad that the book initially failed, because of course exposing the superficiality and decadence IS the novel’s very strength and soul.  But yes, I can see where a whole culture living that decadence wouldn’t want to have to hear about it. As a musician, myself, who’s spent significant time in the jazz world, I kind of adore that the term has been associated with the subversive, the sexy, and the energetic!  

 

Let’s pivot back around to this event coming up on April 19th. My understanding is that events of this nature are often done to commemorate the anniversaries of great books or great writers, so what’s in store for Park Bucker’s Gatsby Day?  What can audiences expect to experience?  

 

PB: I plan to set up a display from my personal collection of Fitzgerald's items, including facsimiles of items relating to Fitzgerald's greatest novel. These include a facsimile of Fitzgerald's ledger, the Gatsby manuscript, and revised galleys.  I will also exhibit a facsimile of first galleys of the novel when it was called “Trimalchio.”  Fitzgerald wanted to name the novel Trimalchio after a famous partygoer in the Roman poem The Satyricon. Maxwell Perkins wisely advised Fitzgerald not to use an obscure title. Fitzgerald always hated the title Great Gatsby. When the novel was at the printing press, Fitzgerald tried to have the title changed to “Under the Red, White, and Blue,” but it was too late.  I also have movie stills and memorabilia from the many movie adaptations, including a preview slide from the—now lost—1926 silent version. I even have a 12-inch fashion doll of Daisy Buchanan.

 

For the program itself, I will begin with a brief introduction and then proceed to a series of readings of the entire novel presented by over fifteen members of MET’s extended family.  Thankfully, The Great Gatsby is not a long novel, but it will take several hours.

 

ACB: So, it sounds like it’ll be part literary event, part gallery exhibit, which I think is just such a fantastic way to spend an afternoon. And the Fitzgerald trivia is so fascinating!  I hope some of that trivia will be shared with the audience. And speaking of audience, since it’s a several-hour-long event, with different readers picking up the baton, do guests typically file in and out, as a kind of flowing river throughout the day? 

 

PB: Yes, of course, people may come and go. I’ve read that when they do Moby Dick—a two-day affair—people bring sleeping bags!  But we’re looking forward to a casual long afternoon listening to great readers present arguably the Great American Novel in its entirety.

 

ACB: Thank you so much, Park, for joining me today! And thank you for this most perfect and apt vehicle for re-opening at least (for now) the threshold of the historic Warwick Theatre … its vibey and inviting lobby bar!  

 

To recap for everyone, Gatsby Day, in the lobby of Kansas City’s Warwick Theatre for its first event in more than a year, will happen on Saturday, April 19th, starting at 1:30pm.  

 

Don’t be a square!  Be there!