On My Grandfather’s Novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at 100

I never met my grandparents: Scott died young, in 1940 at the age of forty-four. I was born in 1948. Zelda wrote my mother from Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, “I long to see the baby,” but she perished in a fire a couple of months later. Fortunately, both of my grandparents left such a trove of intimate letters and blazingly honest essays that I feel I have come to know them.

By the time Scott began to write The Great Gatsby, he had already produced two highly autobiographical novels. In 1923 he wrote his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, that he wanted his third novel to be different. “I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple & intricately patterned.” Although Gatsby is a work of his imagination, Scott’s experiences, along with those of family and friends, are elemental to the book.

My mother, Scott and Zelda’s only child, appears early in the story. When Daisy gives birth she says, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” This is uncannily similar to what Zelda said in 1921 as she emerged from the ether of childbirth. “Isn’t she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” Of course, my mother was no fool. She was christened Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and called Scottie.

“In my next incarnation,” my mother wrote years later, “I may not choose again to be the daughter of a Famous Author. The pay is good, and there are fringe benefits, but the working conditions are too hazardous….I suppose it is impossible [for writers] to form the habit of inventing people, building them up, tearing them down, and moving them around like paper dolls, without doing somewhat the same thing with live ones. Good writers are essentially nutcrackers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul.”

Scott was a devoted and difficult father. He was virtually a single parent when my mother was a teenager. He tried to dictate what she read. He tried to supervise her manners, her interests, and her friends. Scottie wrote, “My father had a terrific sense of wasting his own life, his youth, and he was trying to prevent me from squandering my resources as he felt he had squandered his.” She admitted that at Vassar College she sometimes didn’t open his letters, but was wise enough to stash them in a drawer. “Isn’t it odd,” she continued, “that the letters he wrote me, so full of advice and wisdom, but to me, plain harassment, have taken their place alongside his more famous writings?”

As a teenager, my mother avoided talking about her father because his reputation was thoroughly tarnished by alcoholism. She ignored her parents’ problems by forming a dramatic group at Vassar, immersing herself in a lively social life, and dating her future husband, Lt. Jack Lanahan. Scottie was twenty when Scott died suddenly in Hollywood. He was almost penniless, except for the seven hundred dollars hidden in his bookshelf, and a small veteran’s pension for Zelda. The Great Gatsby was no longer available in bookstores.

The revival came slowly. His Princeton classmate, Edmund Wilson, edited Scott’s notes for his partially completed novel, The Last Tycoon, and it sold respectably. The biggest boost for The Great Gatsby came when it was issued as an Armed Services Edition, a small pocket-size paperback, and given to one hundred fifty thousand soldiers during World War II. That introduced The Great Gatsby to all those young American men and their families.

By the mid-1960s Scott’s books were being included in college curriculums. My mother hid from any reflected glory. We lived in Washington, D.C., where she wrote a column for the Northern Virginia Sun and later for The Washington Post. The only time Scottie allowed her identity as the “daughter of” to be disclosed was on the campaign trail, stumping for a favorite candidate, and knowing her father’s name now opened doors. She claimed to have the hide of a rhinoceros when it came to hearing strangers’ opinions about her parents’ work or unsolicited diagnoses of her mother’s mental illness, but she wanted to shield us children from any negative fallout of their legacy.

I wasn’t encouraged to read The Great Gatsby and I don’t think our mother wanted us to grow up feeling we were related to anybody special. When I was about nine, my mother read us “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which I loved. A couple of years later Life Magazine ran a story, “The Spell of F. Scott Fitzgerald Grows Stronger.” We four grandchildren were photographed in the attic, playing with Zelda’s turquoise ostrich feather fan and arranging Scott’s battalion of lead soldiers. For the camera, we held up Zelda’s brilliant paper dolls, each with a costume appropriate to the court of Louis XIV, King Arthur’s Round Table, or the extravagant finery of fairy godmothers.

Eventually it became embarrassing to know nothing about my grandparents. I was seventeen when a young writer asked if I agreed that The Great Gatsby, more than any other novel of its era, had essentially lost nothing with the passage of time. I had no idea. In my freshman year of college, in self-defense, I read all five of his novels, along with a few stories and Arthur Mizener’s biography.

I was especially awed by Scott’s pitch-perfect use of language, as when Gatsby kisses Daisy. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her.”

I can’t account for all the reasons people love The Great Gatsby: perhaps for its champagne parties and of course for its glitz, elegance, gorgeous cars, enormous estates, and Gatsby’s vast collection of shirts. I remember my mother telling me she thought The Great Gatsby was popular with college students because it is a short book and an easy read. It was popular in Russia too; she speculated they liked to use it as an example of capitalism gone awry. My mother didn’t live long enough to explain Gatsby’s popularity in Japan, where the Takarazuka Revue staged an all-female performance. The Great Gatsby has been adapted to ballet and to opera, its symbols have been anatomized, its themes have been explicated, but Gatsby remains timeless. He stands in the dark, watching the green light on a dock across the bay.

At the age of twenty-seven, at Zelda’s death, my mother became the sole guardian of her parents’ estate. Thanks to her gift of her parents’ personal papers, photographs, and manuscripts, Princeton University now boasts an extensive archive. That collection has largely made this volume possible. Herewith is the best possible reading of this American classic. Professor James L. W. West III contributed years of scholarship to these judicious emendations. And now, it’s time to let Scott speak for himself.

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Adapted from the Foreword to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Foreword copyright © 2018 by Eleanor Lanahan. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.