Oeuvre rule: Finally, 5 months after the previous review, and nearly 17 years since The Beautiful and Damned (still the #1 post on Flying Houses after all this time, accounting for some 73,800 of the 1,010,000 all-time views, inexplicably) and nearly 18 years since This Side of Paradise, we've finally gotten around to Tender is the Night. Will we ever review The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon? Revisiting the former could be dangerous--a few months ago I got an email from Blake Butler's substack that re-posted his re-assessment of Gatsby, which was a total takedown that felt somewhat unfair--and I'd rather maintain my idea of it as the quintessential and definitive Great American Novel, as most all high schools dictate. Revisiting the latter--which friends and I once pronounced would have been his greatest novel of all, if finished, and which Edmund Wilson considered his "most mature work" (317)--will be a necessity. It's clear that some of the best writers have small oeuvres, and we could point to a similar assessment of J.D. Salinger: we have Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters/Seymour and Franny and Zooey here, but not the mainstay Catcher in the Rye (or Nine Stories, for that matter). Fitzgerald died far too young but Salinger emerged not long after and shape-shifted American literature into something more relatable. Kerouac and Vonnegut came along with their own variations and new writers continued to emerge that did their best to speak to the youth of the day to varying levels of success. Still, most acknowledged (even if they do not continue to acknowledge) that they could never touch FSF or BFF Hemingway.
Everyone knows the story of F. Scott. Born in 1896, achieved literary fame in 1920 with Paradise, married Zelda, had a baby, moved to Paris with the other expatriates, churned out Beautiful and Damned and Gatsby in short order, with the latter failing to make the commercial dent intended--and the years of struggle: publishing short stories to maintain a lavish lifestyle, Zelda losing her mind, both of them sinking deeper into alcoholism, their marriage unraveling, Fitzgerald moving to L.A. and ending his days seen as a hack screenwriter.
That's my memory off the top of my head, and it's not totally accurate. Fitzgerald lived a whole life before he was 24 and considered himself a failure, and before he met Zelda he had already been rejected by Chicago socialite Ginevra King, his first great love--apparently inspiration for Isabelle in Paradise and Daisy in Gatsby "and others," according to Wikipedia.
Just scanning the entry on him, nearly every biographical detail seems to have some referent in his work, and while he did not write Tender is the Night while living on the French Riviera, it feels that way and it feels like his most autobiographical work, in a career that appears heavily autobiographical.
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The main characters here are Dick and Nicole Diver, a psychiatrist and Chicago socialite, and the setting as referenced above is the French Riviera, though the novel jumps around to Zurich, Paris, New York state, and Rome. Dick and Nicole are ringleaders of sorts of their clique of expatriate acquaintances, and they are on the beach at the beginning of the novel, meeting Rosemary Hoyt for the first time, a 17-year-old American actress in town with her mother, recognized swimming near Sorrento a week earlier by one of the others in the clique.
"'We thought maybe you were in the plot,' said Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. 'We don't know who's in the plot and who isn't. One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character--practically the assistant hero.'
'The plot?' inquired Rosemary, half understanding. 'Is there a plot?'
'My dear, we don't know,' said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman's chuckle. 'We're not in it. We're the gallery." (7-8)
It appears rather meta:
"'My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.'
Rosemary said: 'Oh, he is?' She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.
'It's on the idea of Ulysses,' continued Mrs. McKisco. 'Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age--'
'Oh, for God's sake, Violet, don't go telling everybody the idea,' protested McKisco. 'I don't want it to get all around before the book's published." (10-11)
Like all of Fitzgerald's work, it is replete with period detail that allows the reader to slip into the past while maintaining a humanity that feels eternal and evergreen, still speaking to restless fortysomethings struggling with commitment over 90 years later. I first read Tender is the Night in college, over 20 years ago, and really just skimmed it--I recalled almost nothing on this re-reading. Suffice to say, reading it barely past Rosemary's age and younger than Nicole's at the start, and reading it past Dick's age at the end now, it is clear I could hardly understand it then. Sure, I could understand it from a plot perspective, but could not really feel it until now. It certainly must be Fitzgerald's true masterpiece. As he wrote himself in an inscription, "Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." (xv)
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The novel begins in medias res and then flashes back for Book II after 112 pages. There are only about 40 pages in Book II that flash back, and then it returns to the "present," and does not look back again. It is a bit confusing because Dick and Nicole do return to Switzerland after the Riviera. In the first stint in Switzerland, Dick is considering the morality of falling in love with his patient; in the second, he is considering the morality of leaving her for Rosemary. By Book III Dick is basically a full-blown alcoholic and it's hard to get into the particulars of each episode without spoiling the entire novel.
The subject matter is very adult, and it's a rather interesting window into proto-polyamory and possessiveness and jealousy and insecurity. It's easy to say Dick just totally DNGAF after a certain point, and the event in question should be fairly easy for anyone to identify.
"'You were scared, weren't you?' she accused him. 'You wanted to live!'
She spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick wondered if he had been frightened for himself--but the strained faces of the children, looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly." (192)
This is a disturbing novel that clearly clocked the emerging literary trend of moving towards darker and more nihilistic subject matter. Of course, Ulysses is referenced, and all involved questioned the nature of obscenity and how far experimental prose could go before it became "dangerous." Fitzgerald layers this understanding with a portrait of a psychiatrist when the profession was still in its infancy, when Freud was still very much alive, as well as the early days of cinema and the dawn of the sound age, foreshadowing what would become his final subject matter, as if he understood where fate was about to take him.
Is it dangerous? I don't think so. Divorce was once extremely uncommon, and by the 20s-30s, while this was still the case, the rate nearly doubled between 1900 and 1920. Of course in The Parent Trap in the early 1960s, there is a famous line, "Pretty soon there are going to be more divorces than marriages." The rate only increased slightly between 1920 and 1960, but in the 70s, it shot up dramatically and peaked in the early 80s. It has fallen since, along with a consequent drop in the marriage rate.
Of course many novels mined these ideas about everlasting love and commitment and faithfulness and the divide between one's inner and outer life for centuries, but FSF was a literary celebrity. Like Goethe 120 years or so before him, he had "juice," and he was "cooking" throughout the 20s. He represented the youth and the vanguard of the future of art. By Tender is the Night he had finally "grown up," and still struggled with the idea of "this being all there is." As such, it appears he strove to inhabit the concept of modernity in his work, while at the same time toeing the line of being anti-commercial. Because while he aspired towards greatness, the realities of life forced him to turn out "slop" (i.e. short stories, and I know it is not fair to call them that, even if he considered them that) to maintain an income stream in between his more ambitious works. He finished his first three novels in about a couple years each, I think.
Maybe the wikipedia notes are worth reading in more detail before I continue, but I find he published Paradise on March 26, 1920 and married Zelda on April 3, 1920, and apparently neither particularly cared for each other all that much, having already broken off one engagement before, with Fitzgerald remarking that he wouldn't mind if she died but couldn't stand to have anyone else marry her. This all sounds pretty insane but I love FSF because I can relate.
The Beautiful and Damned was published in March 1922 and The Great Gatsby came out in April 1925--so I wasn't far off at all. 9 years later, Tender is the Night joined them in bookstores--or maybe not, as Gatsby was a commercial failure, and this ended up selling even worse.
Even before Gatsby, however, Fitzgerald had already been through many of the incidents that seem to have been taken directly from his life and transplanted into his work. Now I have long believed that while there is some obviousness to thinly-veiled autobiographical creative writing, it is ultimately the most important sort of literature and the closest most of us will ever come to understanding the truth of the nature of existence. Kerouac took the idea to its logical extreme, but Fitzgerald crawled so he could walk. Hemingway also did this to a degree, but with heavier-veiling. We are all the heroes of our own stories and when we report back on our experiences truthfully and honestly, we become brothers and sisters with readers, sharing wisdom and compassion for one another as we undergo the thousand natural shocks to which we are all constantly subjected. This is why literature is everything to a certain type of person.
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A short bullet list of items of life experiences that find their way into this novel, from wikipedia:
- Being a distant cousin of Francis Scott Key.
- ["One of the girls hoisted her skirt suddenly, pulled and ripped at her pink step-ins and tore them to a sizable flag; then, screaming 'Ben! Ben!' she waved it wildly. As Tommy and Nicole left the room it still fluttered against the blue sky. Oh, say can you see the tender color of remembered flesh?--while at the stern of the battleship arose in rivalry the Star-Spangled Banner." (297)]
- Family moving from St. Paul to Buffalo, NY.
- ["'I'm a doctor of medicine, he said. 'My father is a clergyman, now retired. We lived in Buffalo and my past is open to investigation. I went to New Haven; afterward I was a Rhodes scholar. My great-grandfather was Governor of North Carolina and I'm a direct descendant of Mad Anthony Wayne.'" (158)]
- Travel from New Jersey to Lake Forest, IL to visit Ginevra King's family estate, with her family belittling him for his lower-class status compared to other suitors.
- ["'Of course, I've read about women getting lonesome and thinking there's a man under the bed and all that, but why should Nicole get such an idea? She could have all the young men she wanted. We were in Lake Forest--that's a summer place near Chicago where we have a place--and she was out all day playing golf or tennis with the boys. And some of them pretty gone on her in that." (127)]
- Drunken brawl in Rome police station.
- ["Dick sat in the sunshine that fell profusely through the guard-room window. Collis was with him and two carabinieri, and they were waiting for something to happen. With the narrowed vision of his one eye Dick could see the carabinieri; they were Tuscan peasants with short upper lips and he found it difficult to associate then with the brutality of last night. He sent one of them to fetch him a glass of beer." (232-233)]
- Meeting 17-year-old American actress Lois Moran, who had gained fame for role in Stella Dallas in 1925, who was smitten with him.
- ["'It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren't nice. They recognized me--no matter where we go everybody's seen "Daddy's Girl."'" (13)]
- Zelda taking wheel of the car and veering it off road with nine-year-old daughter in backseat
- [Referenced above; "He had turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic and now as he stepped on the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole's voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, right itself, swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore through low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle of ninety degrees against a tree." (192)]
- Decline into alcoholism and disgrace.
- ["Dick's bitterness had surprised Rosemary, who had thought of him as all-forgiving, all-comprehending. Suddenly she recalled what is was she had heard about him. In conversation with some State Department people on the boat,--Europeanized Americans who had a reached a position of where they could scarcely have been said to belong to any nation at all, at least not to any great power though perhaps to a Balkan-like state composed of similar citizens--the name of the ubiquitously renowned Baby Warren had occurred and it was remarked that Baby's younger sister had thrown herself away on a dissipated doctor. 'He's not received anywhere any more,' the woman said." (287)]
That's all we need to say about that.
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Perhaps all of this commentary is a superficial reading, and there is more depth to this novel than I can properly appreciate. Hemingway allegedly felt it was not properly appreciated due to Fitzgerald's symbolic status as a jazz age icon. Perhaps appetites changed in the Great Depression. In any case the introduction here does not tell that side of the story:
"The one that really hurt was that of Hemingway, who charged his fellow writer with self-pity ('Forget your personal tragedy...') and with creating false composite characters in merging Sara and Gerald Murphy with Zelda and Scott, instead of inventing Nicole and Dick Diver from the imagination alone." (xiv)
When we experience a personal tragedy or upheaval or situation that feels too strange, too meaningful, some of us have the urge to share it with others. The absurdity of life is a source of endless intrigue and examination, shifting between generations down through the ages to the present, and we see ourselves as advanced towards a more sophisticated understanding of our personal reality. And yet sometimes we see ourselves in literature written decades--or even centuries--before we were born, and we are reminded that while the outer contours of daily life have changed, what is going on inside of us all has not. Apart from the fads and trends and generational slang and influencing that he made iconic, his personal early-tabloid life a grand performance in itself, Fitzgerald achieved his artistic aims, expressing this shared humanity throughout an oeuvre that should rightly be cherished; Tender is the Night is simply his most precious offering.
