Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

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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I've heard. Alright. Well,

that's it for me.