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ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART FOUR, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s
When I was half-way through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last completed novel Tender is the Night, I decided that the novel was upside-down and should have been reorganised. As with his second novel The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald divided Tender is the Night into three separate “Books”, but they were not presented in chronological order. The first “Book” introduces many characters whose relationships are not made clear. In the second “Book” we are given a long flashback to earlier years and only then do we discover who is related to whom and why one character behaves in an unbalanced way. Surely “Book” Two should have opened the novel? I am, of course, not the first reader to think this. Fitzgerald laboured long and hard over this novel. He began writing it in 1925, shortly after he’d had published The Great Gatsby, but he did not complete Tender is the Night until nine years later. (His growing alcoholism and his wife’s mental problems slowed him down.) Tender is the Night was first published in 1934 in serial form, and then in book form. Some critics complained, as I have, that it was presented in the wrong order. Fitzgerald was stung by this criticism and undertook to re-arrange the order of the three “Books”; and some years later it was published in this re-arranged form. But this version was soon rejected. Tender is the Night is now universally published in its original, more authentic, version. And that is the version I have read.
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To short-circuit my synopsis, Tender is the Night is essentially about a psychiatrist, Dick Diver, married to one of his patients, Nicole (nee Warren), and how their marriage gradually falls apart.
Book One is set on the Riviera where, in the mid-1920s, wealthy American ex-patriates lounge, laze and share gossip. Dick Diver and Nicole are wealthy. The Divers sometimes throw lavish parties in their palatial Villa Diana and it is very chic to be invited. Indeed, as he is first presented, Dick is a little like Jay Gatsby, the genial rich host but with a certain mystery about him. We are told “… to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience; people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in it effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world….” (Book 1, Chapter 6) We are also told that the Divers are intellectual people, but like to keep up with the latest trends, which would then have been hot jazz, dancing, travelling, swimming and gossiping: “Although the Divers were honestly apathetic to organised fashion, they were nevertheless too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat – Dick’s parties were all concerned with excitements, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.” (Book 1, Chapter 18) There are many diversions, much talk about travel, and some odd sightseeing, as when Dick Diver’s friend Abe North takes them to view former battlegrounds. The [First] World War was still a very painful recent memory and Abe says many cutting things about the futility of the war. (Book 1, Chapter 13)
Two things interrupt the apparent idyll of lazing and enjoying the sun. Nicole has some sort of breakdown – not specifically described. There is nasty gossip about her and, with an absurd idea of defending her honour, the soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban challenges one of the gossipers to a duel… which ends in farce. Nevertheless Tom Barban is obviously a great admirer of Nicole, virtually in love with her.
The other disruption comes when Rosemary Hoyt, an 18-year-old film star, turns up on the Riviera – with her protective, twice married, mother Mrs. Speers. Rosemary is beautiful. Given her age, she is of course partly naïve and partly scheming, but she moves from admiring the mature man Dick Diver to falling in love with him. Rosemary persuades her mother, Dick, Nicole, Abe North and his wife Mary to come on an excursion to Paris. The film studio she works for is based there. They bury themselves in fashionable parties and restaurants, but Rosemary also gets them to watch the film in which she starred. The film is called Daddy’s Girl. Without saying so, Dick has a queasy reaction to the film, much as he already has a crush on Rosemary. He notes in one sequence of the film “happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality.” (Book 1, Chapter 16). This reaction is one of those moments which makes sense only when we get into Book 2. Rosemary so idolises Dick that she says she’s going to arrange a screen-test for him – but he turns the offer down. He tells Rosemary that he loves her, but he still loves Nicole as well. Nevertheless, he finds himself wandering around Paris on his own looking out for Rosemary. Rosemary calls upon him when a dead Negro is found in her room in a Parisian hotel. To remove any whiff of scandal, which could destroy Rosemary’s career, Dick helps to remove the corpse and leave it in a hallway. This bonds them more closely. [Incidentally, this is one of those moments when Dick – or more properly Fitzgerald – displays the casual racism that was then the norm. He says to a distraught Rosemary “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this – it’s only some nigger scrap.” (Book 1, Chapter 25)]
You will notice that Nicole Diver does not take a major part in the more memorable moments of Book 1 – but that seems to have been Fitzgerald’s strategy in holding back Nicole’s troubling situation so that it comes as more of a shock in Book 2.
Book Two begins with a major flashback to 1917. Dick Diver, a doctor of medicine, has studied psychiatry in Zurich, during the war, under the illustrious Doctor Dohmler. As a psychiatrist, he has met the very troubled patient Nicole Warren. In practical matters, she is often supported by her [perfectly sane] sister Baby Warren. What was the matter with Nicole? It was Doctor Dohmler who first diagnosed Nicole’s problem. Her father Devereux Warren had first brought her to the clinic, claiming that she had suddenly ceased to be the happy young woman she used to be and she is severely erratic in her behaviour. After much interrogation of the father, he admits that he had sexually abused her when she was a child. This is what at last makes understandable Dick Diver’s comment on the film as having "a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality”. Doctor Dohmler concludes that this incest has pushed Nicole into schizophrenia… and Dick Diver becomes her therapist. Nicole Warren, when under therapy, writes frequently to Dick Diver, and in one letter she expresses the truth about herself when she writes “I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion. I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest. Here they lie in their bath tubs and sing Play in Your Own Backyard as if I had my backyard to play in or any hope which I can find by looking either backward or forward.” (Book 2, Chapter 2) She is aware of her irrational moods.
Yet, while caring for Nicole, Dick also has his own ambitions and articulates his own self-analysis “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” (Book 2, Chapter 4) He also wants money and status. His colleague Franz Gregorovius is also focused on money.
It is clear that Dick becomes more and more attracted to Nicole, and Franz connects Dick with Doctor Dohmler to work out the ethics of getting mentally too close to a psychiatric patient - but despite all the cautions, Dick admits that he is in love with Nicole. Nicole has her artistic aspirations. Speaking to Dick she says “I hope you don’t think that I am only interested in ragtime. I practise every day - the last few months I’ve been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times – music and drawing… I’d like to draw you just the way you are now.” (Book 2, Chapter 7)
Nicole’s wealthy family scrutinise him and think he is acceptable. Fitzgerald now moves forward a number of years. Dick and Nicole are married. We get (Book 2, Chapter 10) a fragmented account of how they travel around Europe on long, luxurious holidays. And Dick (Book 2, Chapter 12) reaches a moment when he understands how much he depends on his wife’s family for money, regardless of how well he is working as a psychiatrist. Is he venal? Has he married for money without admitting it to himself? His colleague Franz Gregorovius is certainly a materialist who tries to entice Dick into getting money from his wife’s family to set up their own clinic. Dick is now almost flippant in the way he addresses his patients when doing his rounds. (Book 2, Chapter 14)… and by this stage, the novel has brought us up to where we were at the end of Book 1.
Dick and Nicole now have two young children, charmlessly called Lanier and Topsy, but Nicole is still having her extreme moments. Once she drives the family car so dangerously that it is clear she is trying to kill herself and the rest of the family on board. The driver’s wheel has to be wrenched from her to prevent catastrophe. Dick is gradually more alienated from her, his mood being made more sombre when he has to go to America for his father’s funeral. Five years have gone by since he last met the film actress Rosemary. He meets her again and attempts to re-ignite their old flame. They even sleep together and do the deed. But Rosemary by now has been around and had other lovers, and clearly their brief love won’t last. Disillusioned, (Book 2, Chapter 22) Dick goes on a wild drunken bender in Rome, gets into a fight with a taxi-driver, is jailed and beaten by the police. He has to be rescued and bailed out by Nicole’s practical sister Baby Warren.
Book Three. Dick goes back to his psychiatric practice and again hears Fritz tell him how they could set up their own clinic to attract wealthy Americans. [And, in another thing which would not now be sanctioned, Dick is part of an attempt to “cure” a young man of his homosexuality]. Nicole’s father appears to be on the brink of death, and sends a message begging to be able to talk to Nicole, presumably to ask her forgiveness for the incest that ruined her life… but he changes his mind and disappears back to the U.S.A. Things change radically for Dick after an altercation he has with an Australian client who complains that the sanatorium reeks of alcohol… and Dick has to admit that he’s well on the way to being an alcoholic. So, for a good price, he sells his practice and off he and his family go to the Riviera. And he drinks. And he and Nicole squabble and fight with a host for not bathing their children in clean water. They try to act in a romantic way with the moon shining - but the chivalrous Tom Barban comes back into their orbit and Nicole is drawn to him. More annoying for Nicole, Rosemary turns up again on the Riviera beach, and Dick feels he has to show-off for her with water games and balancing acts even though his affair with Rosemary is obviously over. Nicole is further disgusted with Dick. But where can she turn? She is desperate at the thought that she is losing her looks [like Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned] “She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I’ll do – in fact I’ll do as well as anyone I know.” (Book 3, Chapter 8). Now she welcomes a liaison with Tom Barban. She sleeps with him. The deal is struck. She realises that she no longer needs Dick, she is no longer his patient, and she declares her freedom from Dick as “… suddenly, in the space of two minutes, she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.” (Book 3, Chapter 9)
Thus the novel [interrupted by an irrelevant comical tale of Dick bailing some women out of jail] fizzles out in its contorted end. Dick and Nicole divorce and part amicably. She marries Tom Barban. He goes back to the U.S.A. and becomes a small-town doctor. He no longer has access to much money. He hasn’t made the great splash in the world he hoped to make. But he seems contented. Finis.
Many Americans see this novel as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, just as Fitzgerald himself did. I dissent. Though better than his first novel, it is not as coherent (in the sense of meaningfully hanging together) as the leaner, more polished The Great Gatsby, which will continue to be the author’s most-read novel. There are too many irrelevant side-issues. When I finished reading Tender is the Night, I remembered that Thackeray subtitled his Vanity Fair as “A Novel Without a Hero”. I would suggest that Tender is the Night is also a novel without a hero. Dick Diver might have had some idealism and might have been a good therapist in relieving some of Nicole’s neurosis, but he allowed her to fall into what is now called “idealised transference”, that is, letting his patient believe that he was her saviour and thus putting her in an inferior and dependant position. This did not make for a good or stable marriage – along with Dick’s cheating on her with Rosemary. There are also the dodgy ethics of marrying somebody who is already psychologically damaged. Further, there is a very strong undercurrent of opportunism in Dick’s behaviour with regard to money. And yet perhaps this was exactly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s point. Dick Diver overreached himself in trying to make an international name for himself in psycoanalysis. He wasn’t suited for such a role. Medicine in small-town America was probably where he was most suited, and that is where he ended. As for Nicole, there is in her a wide streak of narcissism although it can be forgiven what with her mental state. So no heroes here.
Stepping back from the text itself, there is also the backstory of the novel. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was, after many therapeutic explorations, diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1930. Reference books [yes, I have dipped into many of them] tell me that some critics now claim Zelda was not schizophrenic but suffered a severe variety of bipolarism. Possibly this is true, but it does not alter the fact that her behaviour was often extreme and irrational. Her condition could also not have been helped by the three illegal abortions she had when married to Fitzgerald. Be that as it may, Zelda was a mentally-damaged woman and spent nearly all the rest of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Like Dick Diver, Fitzgerald continued to be an alcoholic, sinking further and further into drink and dying at the early age of 44. Obviously the two main characters of Tender is the Night are versions of Scott and Zelda. While Fitzgerald was toiling away at writing Tender is the Night, Zelda wrote a novel of her own called Save Me the Waltz, which managed to get published, in a very short print-run, before her husband’s book came out. Like her husband’s book, it gave as characters versions of her husband and herself. Fitzgerald was greatly annoyed. I can’t help feeling that Dick’s eventual divorce from Nicole was Fitzgerald’s wish-fulfilment version of getting free from Zelda… but he did pay her hospital bills and did visit her often.
As always in Fitzgerald’s novels, research tells me that many (probably most) of his characters and events were drawn from real life – the Fitzgeralds themselves to some degree of course, but Dick and Nicole in the beach-and-Riviera moments were also based on two wealthy Americans Gerald and Sarah Murphy. The minor film-star Lois Moran, with whom Fitzgerald had a brief affair, was the model for Rosemary Hoyt. Baby Warren, who offers Nicole sane advice, was based on Zelda's older sister. The soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban who falls for Nicole was at least partly based on a French aviator who was taken with Zelda years earlier than when the novel was written. Having Nicole attempting to crash a car and kill the occupants was based on the same thing that Zelda attempted. And it was Fitzgerald himself who, in a drunken stupor, got into a brawl and was thrown into an Italian jail.
FOOTNOTES
Puerile footnote: Why give the main character a name like Dick Diver which I’m sure, even in the early 1930s, would have been the butt of many crude and obscene jokes?
Informative Footnote: Yes, Fitzgerald was essentially a romantic (albeit a somewhat jaded one) and did take the title Tender is the Night from the very romantic poet John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. But please remember that a few lines later in the poem, Keats declares “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs / But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet…” In other words the poet says we are lost in darkness and manoeuvring in a difficult universe… just as the mentally-inflicted are lost. The novel’s title does not really suggest a dreamy, romantic tale.
Annoyed footnote. Speaking of dreamy, romantic mush, in order to see how Tender is the Night was treated by the movies, I sat down at my computer and found on Youtube the 1962 film version with Jason Robards as Dick Diver, a reasonably good actor, and the stone-faced Jennifer Jones as Nicole. Oh the things I do for you, dear readers! The film deeply bowdlerised the novel, missed out most of the more sordid details, ditched half the plot and basically turned the whole tale into a rather dull soap opera. How unimaginatively it was presented, with most sequences taking place in large rooms or balconies with people conversing. And there was Bernard Herrmann’s sound track, suggesting a sugary romance. Complete soporific tripe. Also on Youtube I found a one-hour-long black-and-white TV version of the novel, made in the 1950s. Dreadful. As always, to know Tender is the Night, you have to read the book.
Flyer for an excrutiatingly bad film.
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