I'll Remember Her that Way

F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, "believing himself to be a failure" (Bruccoli). He left behind him five novels, many short stories, and one daughter - Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. In her 1974 article "Notes About My Now-Famous Father" for Family Circle, Scottie attempted to explain the renewed interest in her father's work. She wrote, "people read him now for clues and guidelines, as if by understanding him and his beautiful and damned period, they could see more clearly what's wrong" (Smith). In the decadence of the Jazz Age, no one was interested in dissecting it, but in the painful aftermath Fitzgerald's cutting insight was finally appreciated.

But Fitzgerald did not write his stories just to warn society about its own shortcomings. Most of his plots are intensely personal. In The Great Gatsby, the title character is rebuffed by a rich girl in the same way that Fitzgerald himself was once rejected; in Tender Is the Night, hapless psychiatrist Dick Diver is powerless to save the woman he loves from her own insanity. For Fitzgerald, who had to watch his wife Zelda slowly slipping away until she had to be confined to a mental institution, this novel was more than mere symbolism.

One of the most poignant themes in much of his work is the relationship he portrays between fathers and daughters. In short stories like "Outside the Cabinet-Maker's" and "Babylon Revisited," he shows us sweetly and often doggedly devoted father figures. In Tender Is the Night, Nicole Diver's father is anything but a model of propriety, but he nevertheless has a profound influence on the unfolding of events. There is little doubt that Fitzgerald's feelings about his own wife and especially his daughter affected his writing: the three main father/daughter themes that run through Tender Is the Night and "Babylon Revisited" may be attributed to his own guilt, defensiveness, and deep affection for Scottie.