The Ghost in My House: A Reminiscence

Abstract

F or almost half a century, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a member of my household. During the first years of our marriage, my husband, Henry Dan Piper, was working on a critical study of Fitzgerald, and by the time his book was published in 1965, I had been so immersed in Fitzgerald lore that I thought if I heard his name once more, I would . . . you fill in the blank . . . but mostly I didn't. Gradually, toward the end of his career, Dans creative and scholarly thinking went in other directions and the presence of Fitzgerald in our house faded. Then shortly before his death in 1 999, when he was already quite ill, Dan got a phone call asking about a reference to something he had mentioned to Arthur Mizener, footnoted in Mizener s 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise. Now, it seemed, scholars were trying to identify the person on whom Gatsby was modeled, and one source of information was a Mizener footnote: said late in her life that this was a Teutonic-featured man named von Gurlach (ZSF to H. D. Piper) (336). The question for Dan: was there a written record of this conversation with Zelda? To the best of Dans memory, he had never made a note about this comment. Already of a scholarly bent when he visited Zelda in 1 947, if he did not record her comment about the origins of Gatsby at the time he heard it and never referred to it in his own published writing, he probably didn't consider it of any great importance. His recollection was that he had told the story to Mizener as a sort of casual, amusing throwaway line in a conversation over drinks at the M LA meeting in New York in 1950.