I first read The Great Gatsby in 1975. Actually that's not quite accurate, I did it at school for A-Level. The book's appeal to a 17-year-old was obvious: it was short and, unlike The Knight's Tale, conspicuously modern. It was also American which made it seem if not more contemporary, then somehow younger, than anything by Graham Greene, say, or Evelyn Waugh. There was nothing dusty about it; it had - to encroach on Fitzgerald's own vocabulary - a kind of glow.
It wasn't just the experience of the book itself that was important but the direction in which it pointed. Gatsby lured me towards American writing generally, towards On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield, you will remember, was "crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport." That explicit creative continuity was my first inkling - though I could not have put it in these terms at the time - that literature was not a mausoleum to be studied archaeologically, critically, but a living, self-generating force.
On the downside, 1975 also saw the release of the film with Robert Redford in the title role and Mia Farrow as Daisy. The film had a completely contrary effect; although it initiated a brief fad for 1920s retro fashion, it turned the book into a species of costume drama, anchoring it too specifically to the look of the Roaring Twenties. The movie did more lasting damage by making it very difficult to read about Gatsby without seeing Redford's ruddy mug. By fixing one's impression of the enigmatic Gatsby like this, the film-makers, interestingly enough, were following the advice of Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins.
Fitzgerald sent off his novel - Trimalchio, as it was then called - from the French Riviera to Perkins in the autumn of 1924. Perkins responded enthusiastically but also made important criticisms, the most significant of which involved the vagueness about Gatsby's past, his relative intangibility as a character compared with Tom and Daisy, who were powerfully actualised throughout.
Fitzgerald went along wholeheartedly with Perkins's advice and, while not substantially different, Gatsby is subtly and significantly better than Trimalchio, "the early version" just published by Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, however, continued to vacillate about the title, eventually deciding that Trimalchio "might have been best" after all. By then it was too late to make any changes and so, in April 1925, the novel appeared as The Great Gatsby.
It's not just Trimalchio that's different to Gatsby. The Great Gatsby I have just reread, aged 41, is subtly different to the one I remember "doing" all those years ago. Back then my teacher placed much emphasis on the symbolism of the green light, on Gatsby and the American Dream. The famous passages - the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us - retain their old, cadential grandeur but they have become, like Hamlet's soliloquies, somewhat self-monumentalising. Certain phrases seem too weighed down with the burden of authorial yearning.
By contrast, other casual touches - like the phone book that "slipped from its nail and splashed to the floor" during the stifling crisis in the hotel - have an incidental magic that I had previously overlooked. Overall it is Fitzgerald's control of Carraway's narration, its tone of infinitely flexible reserve, that impresses most. This is not to diminish Fitzgerald's gorgeous lyrical flourishes; it is, rather, to see how that lyricism works best when earthed in the actual and immediate, how - to make the same point in terms of the novel's symbolic geography - the significance of Gatsby's mansion lies not simply in its "meretricious beauty" but in its tragic proximity to the ash-heaps of Wilson's garage.
Fitzgerald, it is sometimes forgotten, was not simply besotted by wealth and poise. As he put it in a letter of 1938: "I have never been able to forgive the rich for being, and it has coloured my entire life and works". He was the most materialist of romantics, the most romantic of materialists. At one point Gatsby interjects, famously, that Daisy's "voice is full of money". Of the equally captivating Nicole in Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald is calmly analytical about the global degradation on which her wealth and elegance is based: for her sake "girls canned tomatoes in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations . . ."
After finishing Gatsby, Fitzgerald hoped some day to "combine the verve of Paradise, the unity of The Beautiful and Damned and the lyric quality of Gatsby, its aesthetic soundness . . ." With the crucial, devastating addition of what he would later call the "authority of failure" he would do exactly that with his masterpiece, Tender is the Night, a denser and psychologically more complex book than Gatsby. Inevitably, perhaps, it has not enjoyed anything like the popularity of the earlier book.
Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is published in The Cambridge edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L. W. West III (Cambridge University Press, £30).
Geoff Dyer is a writer and critic. His latest novel Paris Trance, is published by Abacus (£6.99).