Backlisted - The Crack Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Episode Date: August 8, 2016

In a special edition recorded at Port Eliot Festival, the Backlisted team welcome comedy writer Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, Fresh Meat, The Thick Of It, Four Lions)to discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's posthumously published collection of essays 'The Crack-Up'. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)2'38 - The Crack Up by F Scott Fitzgerald* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a.m. A&W's Classic Breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11am. They don't do that at the TLS. Well, hello and welcome to this very special edition of Backlisted, the podcast that aims to give new life to old books. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the website where authors and readers come together to make great books. And I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of a book called The Year of Reading Dangerously and we're joined as ever on Backlisted by the writer and moral compass Matthew Clayton, you're welcome

Well it's difficult, you've got to be a moral compass if you've got your family here at Port Elliot We're out of our usual environment today which is as you probably know the kitchen table at Unbound but we're here in the idyllic setting of the walled garden of Port Elliot in Cornwall. In the middle of a festival. It's not just, obviously, just us.

There is a festival going on, the Port Elliot Festival. Are you all having a nice time at the festival? Yes! Good. So are we. We're very pleased to be joined today by Jesse Armstrong. Jesse has, with his, Sam Bain, created award-winning series such as Peep Show, Fresh Meat.

He co-wrote the film Four Lions. He's written for Veep. That Mitchel and Webb look, Smack the Pony, and his novel Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. Thank you. Was published in 2015. Very snappy title. Very snappy title.

And the book, the book that Jesse has chosen to discuss this week is The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And we're going to depart from tradition. This is normally the point of the proceedings when I look meaningfully at Andy and say, Andy, what have you been reading? But frankly, this week, I don't care what you've been reading, Andy. Because we're here in front of a very erudite audience who probably read more than we have anyway.

Yeah. How many people here, I will accurately report a show of hands. How many people here have read The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald? All of you. Wow, that's amazing. So Matthew's wife has, everybody. But no one else seems to have done. Well, you should do, because it is absolutely fantastic. Jesse, thank you so much for choosing it. Yeah, it's brilliant.

Not at all. I didn't sadly write it. I hope nobody's here expecting to see F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's indisposed. Jesse, can you tell us when you first read either The Crack-Up or Fitzgerald he's indisposed Jesse can you tell us when you first read either the crack-up or Fitzgerald when did you discover Fitzgerald uh I read him when I was a young man yeah in my early 20s and now I'm just about the age uh that Fitzgerald died at 44 and I was rereading the crack-up and I just thought it's um, and I just thought it's a heartbreaking essay,

and we could profitably use this amount of time to read it to you, because it's brief, and if not many people have read it, it might be good to just do an audiobook edition. Yeah, we definitely should do some bleeding chunks to get you in the mood. But one of the weird things is it doesn't come in a standard edition does it that we've no i think i think he wrote it as a magazine piece and then um it was then collected after his death by his friend uh the literary critic edmund wilson and then uh and has become i guess better known it's about really his his uh nervous breakdown i mean it's about i'd

be interested to see actually what everyone thinks specifically because it's about, really, his nervous breakdown. I mean, it's about... I'd be interested to see, actually, what everyone thinks specifically, because it's, in some ways, rather imprecise, exactly what he's describing in his crack-up. Yeah, it's very much... I mean, to say I'm sure we don't need to recap who F. Scott Fitzgerald was, but, of course, Fitzgerald was synonymous with writing about the Jazz Age

and the pre-financial crash America of the 1920s. And he wrote this when? 1936, right? Yeah, I think so. So he's writing about both his own nervous breakdown and his battle with alcoholism, but he's also writing about what it was like to have lived in America in the 1930s after the speakeasies and Charlestoning, literal and metaphorical, of the 1920s, I think, isn't he? Yeah, absolutely.

I think all the editions include the essays Echoes of the Jazz Age and My Lost City, which are about his early success. And I think one of the things I would recommend these essays uh as being great at is they totally take you back to that moment and so all those images we have which become uh a little bit uh worn out the charlestoning and the speakeasies suddenly you're there vividly with someone who takes you on a night out you know in new york in in in prohibition new york and we can read a little bit later, but it's so... It's journalistic, and you're back there, right?

It's so freshly minted, isn't it? That's the thing that really struck me. I'd read it a long, long time ago, and then rereading it just this last few days. But it's that extraordinary ability that great writers have to make it feel like it was written yesterday. I mean, it's so vivid. And like you say, it's not got any of the usual...

None of the clichés in there at all. He's just... And it reminds you again that the person who wrote... Somebody said that Great Gatsby was 45,000 words, every one of them in exactly the right place. And it's that ability to do that. Great Gatsby was 45,000 words, every one of them in exactly the right place. And it's that ability to do that. Even when you're turning in a piece about your own mental breakdown,

there's still the artist in Fitzgerald is remarkable enough to do that without you thinking, come on, mate, you know, cheer up. I'd forgotten, it happens to contain the best, this is the best, I used this in an early QI show, but to contain the best this is the best I use this in an early QI show but it's the best my whole life philosophy in one sentence which is I know Jess is going to read some but this is this very quick sentence

on the first page of the crack up before I go on with the short history let me make a general observation the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function it's great it is the paradox within which we all live our lives it's just great you know to compete it's a bit like I think it was

the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr who said the opposite of a a small truth is false but the opposite of a great truth is also true it's the same basic idea basically life's fucking difficult yeah and follow that yeah and it's he's an epigrammatic writer right if you read these you will find little jewels studied all the way through i I might read, just to give people a flavour of the sort of stuff that's in these essays, a little bit from My Lost City, which I'll just go into it, and then you can say how you feel about it. Instead, there were speakeasies, the moving from luxurious bars, which advertised in the campus publications of Yale and Princeton,

to the beer gardens, where the snarling face of the underworld peered through the german good nature of the entertainment then on to strange and even more sinister localities where one was eyed by granite-faced boys and there was nothing left of joviality but only a brutishness that corrupted the new day into which one presently went out. So I think all the sort of clichéd images of that era, I think, are refreshed by suddenly feeling like what it might be like to go in a taxi cab to you-don't-know-quite-where and get stared down in a bar. Yeah.

I think it's probably worth reminding people that Fitzgerald, we think of Fitzgerald now, I mean, we've all heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald and he's widely perceived to be one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and The Great Gatsby is frequently cited as the greatest novel of the 20th

century. But when Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was widely considered to have been a failure, who had started well with a novel called This Side of Paradise, which was a bestseller in about 1920, I think I'm right in saying, 21. And then he wrote a novel called The Beautiful and the Damned, which didn't sell as well. And then he wrote a novel in 1925 called The Great Gatsby which was a terrible failure

huge flop wasn't it and got awful reviews and then he struggled for nine years to write another novel that novel was Tender is the Night that didn't sell that got terrible reviews and then he never finished another novel

and he used to supplement his income by writing stories for the Saturday Evening Post in particular, which were widely perceived by his contemporaries to be trash. Stories like Bernice Bob's Her Hair were thought to be awful, dreadful, commercial nonsense. Which was turned into a song by the Divine Comedy, I believe. It was indeed, yeah. Always on hand for the Divine Comedy, I believe. It was indeed, yeah. And then when the crack up...

Always on hand for the tenuous link. Actually, that's Gemma's tenuous link. That's not mine, I have to admit. She's signalling from the back. She's signalling from the back. Yeah, she is. We're beginning to see how it works now. Gemma does the heavy lifting.

Yeah, I'm afraid so. She reads the books, makes the jokes. So when the crack up is published in 1936, it's perceived as, by his contemporaries, such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, as both an awful confessional failure by this man who could have been a great writer and also an embarrassment.

There's a letter from Hemingway that Hemingway writes to Fitzgerald's editor. His editor who described the crack-up as Scott's indecent invasion of his own privacy. And Hemingway said, Scott seems almost to take a pride in the shamelessness of defeat. These Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There's another one coming.

I always knew he couldn't think. He never could. But he had a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it not whine in public now the thing is first of all that when the crack up was published, I've got another one of those that I'm going to read in a minute which is genuinely shocking

when the crack up was published first of all although his contemporaries hated it the public absolutely loved it, it was the most popular thing that Fitzgerald had written since this side of paradise and the second

thing to say is that when The Crackup was published in book form five years after Fitzgerald died as I said earlier Fitzgerald who died a failure by all contemporary commentators reckoning. It was the book

that began the revival of his fortune and as one of the great writers of that era. And I think, John and Jesse, what's really interesting about this is that confessional tone is something

that wouldn't be shocking at all today, right? No. It's something that's so embedded in modern culture and literary culture as well that no one would bat an eyelid, would they? But I think, no, I think you're right. It's very much to the fore. But I think it would have remained shocking right up until, what's the

William Styron book about his depression? Darkness Visible. I think it wasn't, people still are wary about writing about these difficult times in their lives. Cheever's journals, that kind of thing. Ah, it's the journals. Have you read the journals?

I haven't, no. Well, you really should. With Cheever, it's essential. No, but I think that degree of self-revelation and as you say i mean and just again the epigrammatic in fitzgerald oh to have been able to write a paragraph this good just the just the command of tone here and the intelligence uh you know he couldn't think listen to this life 10 years ago was largely a personal matter i must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort

and the sense of the necessity to struggle, the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to, in inverted commas, succeed. And more than these, the contradictions between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills domestic professional and personal then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last

now i reckon philip larkin read if that isn't the arrow showers somewhere, you know, becoming rain. And that is the other thing about Fitzgerald, his phrase-making and his intelligence. I mean, you can feel that when you read a Richard Ford novel. I think when you read... He kind of... He changed the game. And this essay, in a way, although it's short, I think it's probably shocking now in a different way.

It's shocking for us to realize just how unsuccessful he felt his own life to have been and yet how brave he remained to the end and how i mean that it's it's that's one of the great things about this piece is that it's it's kind of deeply admirable yeah i mean i guess what people um have sometimes criticized including hemingway is uh i would think that if people read these essays and we all went away, not everyone would respond totally favourably, right? No. There's self-pity, is what people would describe.

There's a moment that I always thought was rather beautiful when I read it as a young man, which was him being in a taxi cab going through the streets of New York and bawling, he says, because he realised he'd never be so happy again. Oh, yeah. And I think how you respond to that image is... Is that wonderful or rather not so wonderful?

I mean, he's such an accomplished writer, he's able to, you know, critique himself. And there's one of the um short stories in the my edition financing finnegan which i think is probably a satire on himself this writer who is constantly promising the great next manuscript and getting advances and going to the north pole and the the short stories never quite um never quite appear and uh uh his his uh his agent says of it says of this fictional Finnegan, it's all beautiful when you read it, this man said disgustedly,

but when you write it down plain, it's like a week in the nuthouse. And sometimes there is, especially in the crack-up, there is a sense that beautiful phrase-making, but especially in the crack-up, going back to it, I mean, he's an alcoholic. I don't think he mentions alcohol as a problem in the crack-up. No, in fact, he skirts over and says, I hadn't had a beer for ten days or whatever.

And there's a strong feeling of, like, stop bullshitting me. What's really going on here in amongst all these pearls and epigrams and wonderful images and evocations of the moment. It also moves brilliantly from a kind of... Because it's written in three stages and was published in three issues of Esquire. And clearly the first essay had a sufficient impact that he was asked then to write the second and then the third.

And the third, so it's like three chapters and the third in particular Jesse, I don't know what you think about that, that's a kind of, that thing's, he paints it pretty black in the third one right there's a bit that's worth maybe reading out which is at the, I think it's at the

end of that third one and it's sort of his this rather phony solution he comes up with for what for his breakdown the only way he can really come go forward is to stop giving anything of himself to anybody around him and um he says and if you were dying of starvation outside my window and i would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice, if no longer the hand, and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance. That is, if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.

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Discover more value than ever at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions apply. See in-store for details. I'm just going to read a bit of this letter from John Dos Passos.

So we've established there's Fitzgerald pouring his soul out. A poor man, a man in torment, but still able, John says about able to hold two ideas in mind at the same time. The idea that you have lost faith in your ability to write,

and you write that feeling quite brilliantly. And you know it's brilliant. So he's published that, and then he gets this letter, another letter from his friend John Dos Passos. I won't read all of it, but I'll just give you a flavour. Why, Scott, you poor, miserable bastard, it was damn handsome of you to write me. Had just heard about your shoulder and was on the edge of writing when I got your letter. Must be damn painful and annoying.

Let's know how you are. Katie sends love and condolences. We often talk about you and wish we could get to see you. I've been wanting to see you naturally to argue about your Esquire articles. Christ, man. How do you find the time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? If you don't want to do stuff on your own why not get a reporting job somewhere and then he goes on and he says uh we're living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history and if you want to go to pieces i think it's absolutely okay but i think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich at Esquire.

And anyway, in pieces or not, I wish I could get an hour's talk with you now and then, Scott. And again, damn sorry about the shoulder. Forgive the locker room pep talk. Yours, Doss. So they loved him, but they were incredibly frustrated by him. You know, that narrative that I was talking about earlier, that he had screwed it all up,

was something that he bought into, clearly. Oh, absolutely. It comes up again and again in these pieces. I think one of the themes that come up is there's booze, there's hard work, hard work to the point of exhaustion, and this continual sense of having dissipated his life, you know. Yeah. It suffuses the whole thing.

And the phrases are fine. And anyone who has felt low will recognise sometimes things very, very accurately portrayed. He says, I saw for the long time I'd not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I mean, you get both sides. You get a wonderful description of it, and then sometimes a feeling of too much. So when did you do most of your reading of Scott Fitzgerald?

I feel like we all read Scott Fitzgerald when we're teenagers. Too young, I think. I re-read Gatsby recently because my boy was doing it at A-level. And, uh... God. It's so good. It's so... But I was saying to Jesse earlier, I think I

read, like, I think I read This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby at school and then I don't think I've read any Fitzgerald I've read more novels

by Dan Brown in the last 30 years than I have books by F. Scott Fitzgerald you know that can't be right can it? But one thing that's good

I would recommend the other reason I wanted to recommend this collection is you can go back to the short stories and I think like a lot of people

you mentioned how they were disregarded at the time and there definitely is a massive uh quality difference i would say between some of them really do feel dashed off for that next check but some of them like babylon revisited which is in my personal collection uh yes it is is is a is a heartbreaker and is you know uh you you, you could read in ten minutes and it gives you a very strong hit of Fitzgerald. No, he felt that he had underachieved and that his friends felt that. I mean, do you think when you look back on that body of work that it's a disappointment? Well, no, it's not a disappointment I think the thing about Fitzgerald which I understand more

clearly now is that he was a very autobiographical writer and to some extent he the crack up is the logical thing for him to write because he's he's cannibalised his own life for all those novels

actually his short stories are closer to pure fiction they tend to be to write because he's cannibalised his own life for all those novels. Actually, his short stories are closer to pure fiction. They tend to be imaginative exercises, whereas certainly The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and especially Tender is the Night, they are all feeding on things, and as we know in the case of Tender is the Night, his marriage to Zelda, which had caused him great heartache. And so you can see when he writes this, a couple of case of Tender is the Night, his marriage to Zelda, which had caused him great heartache. And so you can see when he writes this,

a couple of years after Tender is the Night, you know, it's that post-Tender is the Night sense of I spent ten years writing a book, it was an artistic and commercial failure. I broke down. What do I write about? I can only keep writing about what I know, you know. So it's a disappointment. but it's not a disappointment. It's artistically consistent.

I was just going to say, one of the essays in the book calls it the crack-up self-autopsy and funeral sermon. There is a sense in that that writers would love to write their own obituaries, and he's not quite doing that here, but it's not far off. He writes a couple of times, doesn't he, about hoping to hit 50, and if I can make it to 50, it would have been... He doesn't use the phrase good innings, but that we would. And, of course, he didn't.

And it's very sad. I don't know whether... Obviously, when he died, he'd gone to Hollywood and was not feeling like he was in a fecund creative time, I don't think. Yeah, that's right. He was writing... He was in Hollywood for how long? He was in Hollywood a long time.

He was, like, five, six years in Hollywood and he gets one screen credit in that time. He writes a rejected draft of the script of Gone With The Wind. I found out. Much to my... And the mind boggles at that. But I think everyone had a bash at Gone With The Wind. But he wrote some funny stories, the Pat Hobby stories are about the film world yeah about about the screenplay

yeah are they good are they worth reading they're good there's uh yeah they're what you would hope they're these little acerbic little portraits of golden age hollywood so yeah they're very very uh very much worth he liked musicals as well fit Fitzgerald, didn't he? He had a kind of... Yeah, he wrote one play, which opened and closed on Broadway very fast, with the amazing title, The Vegetable. He decided perhaps that wasn't a rich vein for him to mine any longer.

You were talking about the Pat Hobby story. We should just read a couple of... Just the beginning of the story that's in the crack-up. Pat Hobby himself. A patriotic short. It begins like this. Pat Hobby, the writer and the man, had his great success in Hollywood

during what Irving Cobb refers to as the Mosaic Swimming Pool Age, just before the era when they had to have a shinbone of St Bastien for a clutch lever. Mr Cobb no doubt exaggerates, for when Pat had his pool in those fat days of silent pictures, it was entirely cement, unless you should count the cracks where the water

stubbornly sought out its own level through the mud. But it was a pool, he assured himself one afternoon more than a decade later you know it's that it's proper gallows humor right does your edition does your edition have in the um the notebooks no it doesn't and i would and i'm gonna buy your your edition because he was famous he was famous for uh going through his rejected stories and getting his secretary to clip out with nail scissors even sentences, half sentences

that he would then reuse and I think a lot of those are probably in the notebooks Have you got the list of toilet books here? I've got some great one line novel ideas A tree finding water pierces roof and solves a mystery.

A criminal confesses his crime methods to a reformer who uses them that same night. Then, slightly worryingly, girl and giraffe. That's all it says. Play opens with man run over. Yeah, this is great.

There's also a list in from the notebooks of potential titles. Have you got that? I don't't think i have i'll give you a few of them journal of a pointless life your cake tall women um a title for a bad novel god's convict and you know you mentioned the autobiographical nature of his uh famous novels were you struck when you read this with how much is recapitulated in here i mean there's a there's a there's a bit in my lost city where he gives us a typical moment in his life when he when he first went to new york i think he was an advertising copywriter and um not rich but um wooing zelda who came from a rich southern family and he'd been turned down i think uh at least once um because he wasn't going to be rich enough to support her um and uh he he he writes this about it as i hovereded ghostlike in the plaza red room of a Saturday afternoon

or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East 60s or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar, I was haunted always by my other life, my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama. Would it come and what would it say? My shabby suits suits my poverty and love and I think you know

Nick Carraway is strongly there if you choose to see him right I'd not previously made a mental link between F Scott Fitzgerald and Malcolm Tucker but

I can't see it myself can you draw it we're intrigued andy let me see if i can make that he's a character in the thick of it a sweary uh spin doctor but there is a precision about the language in the thick of it right and i i know i i feel with we've said on batlister before that a lot of comic writing a lot of writing what makes it work is rhythm, is how a word lands, right? And that's true when you're writing comedy, isn't it? And certainly, you know, there's a real verbal precision in your work with Sam, be it in The Thick of It or in Peep Show or whatever, you know, it's finding the right word, the funny word that's going to nail the sentence and nail the joke down, right?

funny word that's going to nail the sentence and nail the joke down, right? Yeah, absolutely. I'd hope so. And, you know, obviously I should give credit to Peter Capaldi, who plays Malcolm Tucker, and it's a semi-improvised show, so some of that is his own brilliance in the moment. But we worked hard at the scripts and even the profanities. And, yeah, I think word order in, well, in all things counts a lot, but in comedy it's crucial, and an extra word or a misplaced stress can make or ruin a joke.

Matthew Clayton asked me earlier not to expand his children's vocabulary of swearing on this podcast, so I can't ask you what your favourite made-up swear is, unfortunately, I might ask you, unless you give me permission, Matthew. I'm not going to do that, unfortunately. I might ask you. Unless you give me permission, Matthew. I'm not going to do that, Andrew. OK.

Very wise. I think I already transgressed earlier. Sorry. Matthew, do you have a tenuous link from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up? I wondered when you were going to ask. Yeah, so I've got a tenuous link. So at the end of the backlist,

we'll always do a tenuous literary link. And the tenuous link this week is to where me and John work, which is Unbound. We did a book called Letters of Note by a guy called Sean Usher that was very successful. And in it, there's a letter by Fitzgerald that he writes to his daughter. When she's 11 years old, she's going away to camp for the first time. And it's kind of a bit of advice and I'm going to stand up now because Kitty Taylor

Kitty Taylor How old are you Kitty? She's 10, so she's the nearest person I know in the audience to the age that Fitzgerald's daughter was when she was 11 and she's going away to camp so it's kind of similar to Port Elliot, really.

Thanks, Charlie, thanks everyone there. Maybe Georgia, you're a little bit older than mental age, about 11. Georgia, do you want to come down the front and I'll do it to you? Come on. Come on, Georgia. Come on, Georgia. So I think there's only really one of these things that Fitzgerald says actually is kind of applicable

but I'm going to say it to you now Georgia so things to worry about worry about courage worry about cleanliness worry about efficiency sorry I don't know what I'm saying worry about horsemanship not sure about that one

things not to worry about popular opinion don't worry about dolls don't worry about the past. Not sure about that one. Things not to worry about. Popular opinion. Don't worry about dolls. Don't worry about the past. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about growing up. Don't worry about anyone getting ahead of you, Georgia. Don't do it.

Don't worry about triumph. Don't worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault. Your own fault. Eek. Don't worry about mosquitoes. Actually, at Port Elliot, worry about mosquitoes. That's the one I'd say doesn't really apply here.

Don't worry about flies. Don't worry about insects in general. He's clearly got a thing. There's a thing going on, isn't there? To be honest with you, I'm not sure it's very good advice. I think it's the finest thing he ever wrote. Okay. Don't worry about parents. Don't worry about boys. Don't worry about disappointments. Don't worry about parents. Don't worry about boys. Don't worry about disappointments.

Don't worry about pleasures. That's it. I don't think that's very good, is it? Georgia, that doubles as your annual appraisal. Yeah, thanks, Georgia.

To Georgia and to Kitty, that's a round of applause. Thank you. Yeah, it's not very good advice, is it? It's like, don't worry about anything. Yeah.

Is that good advice? That's from F. Scott Fitzgerald, right? That paragon of... Yeah, it's not very good advice, is it? It's like, don't worry about anything. Is that good advice? That's from F. Scott Fitzgerald, right? That paragon of sensible living. Yeah, exactly. So, Mark, are you ready to wrap up? I've got one final question that I want to ask. How you would answer this question.

Do you think these essays are analysis or evidence because i think that he thinks he's writing this this thing which is a forensic dissection of his world and sometimes of himself but when i come back to it i feel like because of those evasions and um yeah those evasions it's's really... It's evidence about something, but the analysis is only a quarter there. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I mean, I would agree with that. I think the strength of those essays... I read it through twice, the crack-up.

Boasting. Boasting, well, true, because it, like, takes 20 minutes, so it's fine. And the footnotes. But what I felt was it's such a brilliant mixture of genuine self-revelation but also framing failure in a way

that was palatable to the person writing it. So it's a portrait of bullshit but understandable bullshit, beautifully written. So the idea that it's purely confessional, that he's just typed out something, seems nonsense to me. It's very brave, but also not without the need to make sense of something which hurts.

I mean, it reminded me of... Sorry to jump in, but you know when you read those Hello magazine interviews with a celebrity and they're asked, how are they doing. And it's always, well, I had a tough last year, but now the drink, drugs, divorce, everything is over. I'm through. And I'm moving on to this next exciting period in my life.

And then you read six months later that they were in the middle of a heroin addiction triple relationship thing. And it's impossible really, isn't it, to say, yeah, today you're meeting me and it's impossible really isn't it to say yeah today you're meeting me and it's the worst day ever i'm you know i'm in the the slough of despond and i'm going to throw myself in the river it's always it's a very human thing to go yeah it was it's been tough but uh i'm feeling it's going to be fine actually i i completely agree with that i think one of the great mysteries is that novelists often don't have self-knowledge

in the way that we would think that they would have because they're too busy in other people's heads and making stuff up and making it work. And when you read this, it's kind of, although I do think it's a remarkable piece of work and I think in lots of ways it's wise, you're right in a way

you don't, it reads too much like the monologue of a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It doesn't really feel, in the end, that he's telling you... You know, fictional truth is different from when people are really being confessional. It's the work of... But that's great. But that is great. That's why novels last and journalism tends on balance not to.

Yeah, I do recommend the extended edition with lots of extras in the back, including essays by people I've never heard of.

But good, letters from Tom Wolfe and Dos Passos and it's nicely produced as well, which matters. True publishing. We didn't do our blurb, did we? No, we didn't do produced as well, which matters. True publishing. We didn't do our blurb, did we?

No, we didn't do our blurb. It doesn't really... There's loads we didn't do this time. It's freeform. It's fine. It's great. We're on holiday. We're on holiday.

Well, perhaps I should, unless anyone has a better idea, shall I wind up and let these people go about their appointed business? So, thank you, you jesse no it's always been an absolute pleasure thank you matthew as ever uh thank you to matt our producer thanks to the stage team here at the wall gardener port elliott festival and thanks to you the patient extremely well-read uh audience thank you thank you for coming have a lovely time thank you you. Thanks for listening. Thank you very much.

If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.