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00:12:09
00:16:38
00:12:09
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Transcription: [00:12:09]
{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
What is Nick Carraway doing in that man's bedroom while that man is between the sheets without any clothes on?

[00:12:15]
Interestingly, Zelda Fitzgerald and Scott Fitzgerald of course had a very bizarre marriage. She had, she had, mental instability running in her family, running amok. It was in her DNA. It was in her everyday behavior.

[00:12:33]
Zelda suspected Scott long of homosexuality. Zelda, on the other hand, was unfaithful to Scott. In 1925 she had an affair with a guy named Edouard Jozan. He was a French aviator. He was Mediterranean, good looking.

[00:12:49]
It was a brief affair but it stunned Scott forever. It put their marriage in a terrible place for a long, long time.

[00:12:57]
Scott on the other hand, other than the talk about this, this homosexuality- there's nothing really that's, that really is proof that that ever happened. Interestingly though, he did have mistresses.

[00:13:11]
Rosalyn Fuller in 1919 - Lois Moran, 1927 - Bijou O'Conor, 1930 - Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald's mistress in 1934 - Nora Lynn, Beatrice Dance in- Beatrice and Lottie Dance of Asheville in 1935 - his nurse, Dorothy Richardson in 1936 - and the woman with whom he was sleeping when he died, Sheilah Graham who was a British gossip columnist who lived in Los Angeles when Scott did.

[00:13:36]
[[cough]] Pardon me. By the time Scott Fitzgerald is in his thirties, Zelda has completely run amok. Both of them have really. At the Murphy's parties, they're doing things like throwing the Murphy's crystal out of the kitchen and onto the beach.

[00:13:55]
They're, there's all kinds of bad stories. Zelda enjoyed doing a little dance for the men-folks where she would get a little bit drunk, and she'd reach underneath her dress, and she'd pull off her underpants, and she'd throw them at the men.

[00:14:07]
She was a little bit bizarre- well a little bit bizarre, you know. Washington's a little bit political. She, she, she was way out there. Scott put her in several asylums.

[00:14:18]
By the 1930s, Scott is broke. The Great Gatsby, of all things, did not sell. The book sold poorly. Scott continued to be broke. He went to Hollywood in 1936. He began working on the movies. He was a failure at that.

[00:14:36]
However, when the Murphy's oldest son died, or when the Murphy's remaining son, Patrick, died-- and this is where I want to wrap things up. This is, this is the humanity that's left in Scott Fitzgerald by 1936.

[00:14:50]
Upon the death of their son, he writes to Gerald and Sara Murphy:

[00:14:55]
"The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice.

[00:15:09]
I can see the silence in which you hover now, and after this seven years of struggle— and it would take words like Lincoln's in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment —but I can see another generation growing up and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail death-ward.

[00:15:28]
Fate cannot have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. The golden bowl is broken, indeed, but it was golden. Nothing can ever take away those boys from you now." They'd actually lost two sons.

[00:15:41]
The stunning humanity, after life has completely butchered him, shows a spirit at the time this portrait was painted. Shows a spirit of a man— not the guy who was drinking thirty to forty bottles of beer every day, not the guy who was downing a quart of gin and taking sleeping pills and smoking and not eating —shows the spirit of a guy who, who didn't want to stop living.

[00:16:05]
Scott Fitzgerald, I think, well, let me see this copy of Gatsby--

[00:16:11]
When you read Gatsby, I think, I think you sum up, you sum up his whole life. The last sentence of Gatsby: "We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

[00:16:22]
And we have music to escort us out. Thank you all for coming. [[applause]] I'll see the Catholic University students outside. We'll sign a little sheet and be done with it. Thanks again for coming out on a very bizarre evening. [[laughter]]
[00:16:38]


Transcription Notes:
I checked name spellings online. These are corrections, following the information I found, but whatever... *Nora Flynn *Lottie Stephens (local call girl in Asheville)