The Guardian has compiled a list of the great interviews of all time , plus some of the more interesting things that happened when the tape was no longer rove . This week , we ’re offering a up a few highlights from the serial .
In 1936 , F. Scott Fitzgerald sit down down with theNew York Post . This was not a happy audience . In in truth breathlessPoststyle , the interview revealed a desperate , restless Fitzgerald , wandering through anecdote and shake with alcoholism .
Here ’s how Michael Mok , thePost ’s interviewer , start the meat of the article :
The audience ran in 1936 , just four years before Fitzgerald would conk of an apparent heart attack , a condition greatly look sharp by his longtime addiction to intoxicant . At the time , Fitzgerald ’s bright flaming literary whiz was lamentably , pitiably fizzling . confront with the steepen decline of his career , health , and personal life , Fitzgerald had been write autobiographical clause for Esquire magazine , muse on his life as a " snap plate . “
To his interviewer , he excuse , he had lost his assurance . " ˜"A writer like me,“ he said , " must have an utter sureness , an dead faith in his star topology . It ’s an almost mystical feeling , a intuitive feeling of nothing - can - happen - to - me , nothing - can - harm - me , nothing - can - touch on - me . “ '
Fitzgerald ’s constant companion at this time was his nurse , who dealt with both his physical nuisance – a broken shoulder the solvent of an accident on a diving add-in – and his mental anguish , his addiction to alcohol . At one point during the interview , a high-strung Fitzgerald leaves the way and the nurse takes a moment to admonish the interviewer : " ' Despair , desperation , despair , ' said the nurse . ' Despair mean solar day and night . Try not to talk about his work or his future . He does work , but only very little - maybe three , four hour a week . ‘“
As the interviewer ostensibly tries to play it directly – what does Fitzgerald recall of forward-looking writer ? What does he make of the flapper propagation he so brilliantly described in his novels ? – Fitzgerald becomes the embodiment of pathos . He ’s glitteringly bright , spill small bon mots just as he would his gin , but it ’s a window on the utterly uncheerful death of a gifted writer .
Regarding the " jazz - mad , gin - insane generation" that had provide Fitzgerald his cloth and his celebrity , the writer – and his interviewer – had this to say :
tale circularise that the clause had so dispirit him that Fitzgerald seek suicide after reading it . And reading the article today , it seems as if Mok was gun intemperately for Fitzgerald . But in the context of 1936 , Mok ’s disappointment in the writer stands to reason : For much of America , the Great Depression had been a sudden , violent hangover from a decade of Jazz Age decadency – the notice shaver of which had been hopeful untested things like Fitzgerald and his tragical wife Zelda . Unflattering in the extremum , the interview is a public dressing - down of a writer who , a ripe number of Americans seemed to trust , call for a scolding . Or at least a mirror .
In a preface to theGuardian ’s reprinting of the interview , writer Jay McInerney wrote , " Mok is call back as one of the villain of the Fitzgerald story , one of account ’s cloddish butterfly stroke crushers . “ Perhaps unfairly , McInerney argue – while Mok certainly pulled no clout in his depiction of the dissipated author , Fitzgerald seems ineffectual to control himself , to keep himself from play the purpose of a spread out writer .
Whatever else it did , this audience solidify the tragic mythos that surrounded Fitzgerald , recast him as one of the characters from his own novel .
Previously : Marilyn Monroe , Marlon Brando ( by Truman Capote).Tomorrow : Princess Diana tell all to Martin Bashir .
