1p Review: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night (available for a penny here) opens on the French Riviera in 1919. Through the eyes of a young film actress called Rosemary – the ‘new cardboard paper doll’ the film world has cut ‘to pass before its empty harlot’s mind’- we observe the apparently charmed lives of the main characters, a privileged group of rich Americans in Europe. After 100-odd pages of their antics, the action moves back two years and Fitzgerald reveals what’s going on beneath the brilliant, movie-like surface we’ve been shown. The postcard images – the ‘large, proud, rose-coloured hotel’ with its ‘dazzling beach’ and the dreamlike dinner with ‘fireflies riding on the dark air’ when ‘the table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky …giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe’ – are lovely but, it turns out, there is more to them than meets the eye.

At the centre of the initial tableaux of fun and gaiety are a couple called the Divers, the husband a doctor called Dick – or ‘lucky Dick as he was known in his youth’, a man of such charm that ‘save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious … [he] had the power of arousing a fascinating and uncritical love’ – the wife an heiress called Nicole – ‘a Viking Madonna, contributing just her share of urbane humour with a precision that approached meagreness.’ Having set these two up as a golden pair, Fitzgerald now digs down into their relationship to provide a rich, meticulously observed and often touching portrait of a marriage. He sets this portrait against the backdrop of post-World War One Europe, the ‘broken universe of the war’s ending’, after an ‘empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.’ He reveals that, while beauty appears to still exist, most things are now damaged, including Nicole and, possibly, her husband too – for, although he escaped the conflict, (‘already too valuable, too much of a capital investment, to be shot off in a gun’), he is haunted by the carnage that took place.

Throughout the book, Fitzgerald displays a sharp eye both for human character – who has not met someone like Nicole’s sister, Baby, about whom the reader is told, ‘her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them’; and who has not felt, as Dick does, on seeing the object of his infatuation after an absence, ‘an inevitable sense of disappointment’ – and for the loneliness at the heart of existence – ‘you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.’ He demonstrates his wonderful powers of description – ‘…outside the taxi windows the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine smokily through the tranquil rain. It was nearly six, the streets were in movement, the bistros gleamed, the Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty as the cab turned north’ – and he captures glimpses not only of the fevered melancholy of the post-war era but also of emerging modernity, including what may be the first description in literature of traffic smog: ‘In the square as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing – unlike pure heat, it held no promise of rural escape, but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma.’

He pays attention to everything, down to the smallest details, throwing in wonderful touches – such as a grotesque American diplomat wearing ‘a moustache bandage’, his face ‘covered with pink cold cream’ and an incidental character who is ‘a manufacturer of dolls’ voices from Newark’ – and devastating judgments, including this one about Switzerland and the hotel Dick Diver stays in there: ‘.. throughout this hotel there were many chambers where rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatized principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbitol, listening eternally, as to an inescapable radio, to the coarse melodies of old sins. This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions.’

Above all, he creates the character of Dick Diver, a person in command not only of great charm but also the most impeccable manners,  (‘he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was, but against how unpleasant it looked’), a man who wants, ‘above all to be brave and kind … [but] even more than that, to be loved.’

Although Dick recognises that ‘there was some element of loneliness involved – so easy to be loved – so hard to love’, he cannot resist using the charm that he possesses, in order to be liked, creating around him an ‘excitement that swept everyone up into it …generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with people’. The melancholy reaction that inevitably sets in, ‘when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust’, seems a precursor of the dilemma often bemoaned by modern day film stars and celebrities, who, unable to resist the impulse to be admired, find the results dismaying and unsatisfactory. Given the dim view of cinema that Fitzgerald appears to have had – in one scene he describes Rosemary’s progress through a darkened film studio in almost Dantesque terms: ‘here and there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen faces to her like souls in purgatory’ – this may not be pure chance. Perhaps, in fact, he dimly foresaw the celebrity-obsessed age that was to come.

In the novel, Dick blazes brightly to begin with, but soon his star appears to wane. Whether this is entirely a disaster is not made crystal clear: Fitzgerald’s observation about Abe North, another character who falls fairly spectacularly from grace – that ‘there is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions’ – and his reference to Dick towards the end of the novel as ‘at liberty’ suggests an ambivalent view of the situation.

What is clear, in any event, is the fact that Dick drifts away from the world in which he seemed for a time to have achieved success – although, again, why exactly this happens is not spelled out. Dick’s addiction to being loved may be the source of the problem – or perhaps it is the damage done to his character by his exemption from war service, or his decision to marry someone with ‘too much money … Dick can’t beat that’, or the tension between being ‘dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories’ and the fact that ‘he was yet swayed and driven as an animal,’ or simply his fondness for drink. In the novel’s final lines we get a glimpse of Dick’s new existence, but no loose ends are tied up and no answers are given to the questions that arise from what has happened. Far from being a flaw, however, it is this enigmatic quality that makes Tender is the Night so resonant. The book lingers in the mind because, like life itself, it does not reveal its secrets. Instead, it remains in the reader’s memory, puzzling, beautiful and rather strange.

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About Author Profile: ZMKC

brit@thedabbler.co.uk'

14 thoughts on “1p Review: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  1. Worm
    May 26, 2011 at 09:34

    according to wikipedia – “Two versions of this novel are in print. The first version, published in 1934, uses flashbacks whilst the second revised version is ordered chronologically; this version was first published posthumously in 1951. Critics have suggested that..the revised version.. was undertaken due to negative reviews of the temporal structure of the book on its first release.”

    Tender is the Night is definately on my ‘to read’ list, I’ve just read his Benjamin Button book of short stories on holiday and liked it, it seemed so modern

  2. scbuckley178@btinternet.com'
    May 26, 2011 at 10:29

    En route to Strasbourg every December (taking students to the Euro Parl) we pull off the main road at Verdun and spend a while at Douaumont Fort and the Ossuaire de Douaumont . I usually stand in that dead quiet on the top of that awful ridge and am always reminded of the line in ‘Tender . . .’

    “This was a love-battle – there was a a century of middle-class love spent here…All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love….”

  3. tanith@telegraphy.co.uk'
    Adelephant
    May 26, 2011 at 12:45

    I read this as a teenager, and the subtle complexities and failings of the characters and their relationships left me feeling incredibly sad. I wonder if I read it again now I would experience the same disappointment in human nature, or if it was my youthful naivety which made it so poignant.

    Your review elegantly captures something of the spirit of the book, which is indeed “puzzling, beautiful and rather strange.” I am certainly tempted to revisit it.

  4. rory@peritussolutions.com'
    roryoc
    May 26, 2011 at 16:38

    I have to confess to reading half of this book in recent months. I enjoyed it for a while and the writing is often extremely impressive, especially the character descriptions, but I found it hard to be interested in the fate of the characters. There is some odd repetition – “as does a human hand picking up jagged broken glass” appears in the same paragraph as “of a hand moving among broken glass”. I found it a bit unengaging overall. Will add it to the list of classics that I didn’t finish!

  5. Brit
    May 26, 2011 at 16:41

    That sounds like a good new feature, Roryoc. “Classics I Didn’t Finish.”

    I’ll contribute Mrs Dalloway. Unreadable.

  6. rory@peritussolutions.com'
    roryoc
    May 26, 2011 at 16:52

    I’ll see your Mrs Dalloway Brit and raise you The Tin Drum ….

  7. Brit
    May 26, 2011 at 16:54

    That’s one of mine too.

    The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

  8. rory@peritussolutions.com'
    roryoc
    May 26, 2011 at 17:07

    TRTP is on my list of “Classics I Didn’t Start” – quite a long list to be honest.

    Of course my own book, when I write it, will be gripping.

    And there will be no repetition.

    It will be simply gripping.

  9. Brit
    May 26, 2011 at 17:14

    Proust, obviously. I read all of Swann’s Way by the skin of my teeth. The rest… forgeddaboudit.

  10. rory@peritussolutions.com'
    roryoc
    May 26, 2011 at 17:27

    I’m quite a slow reader too, much to my wife’s amusement, which doesn’t help. At an average of 6 books a year I may only have another 180 books in me, so don’t want to get bogged down in something turgid. Will have to take more holidays.

  11. Wormstir@gmail.com'
    Worm
    May 26, 2011 at 18:26

    I was beaten by the tin drum too

  12. rosie@rosiebell.co.uk'
    May 26, 2011 at 20:34

    I like The Great Gatsby and the stories, but I got bogged down with Tender is the Night. The characters never came to life for me.

  13. zmkc@ymail.com'
    May 27, 2011 at 06:24

    Worm – There are two versions but the one available for one p is the original.
    Stephen – It seems to me that the book is wonderful at expressing the trauma that World War One left behind
    Adelephant – I’ve been thinking about how a lot of American literature seems to be about people who have forgotten about love and kindness but, whereas many recent writers (Franzen, Jennifer Egan to name a couple only) seem to create a picture of a society that contains nothing but bleakness, Fitzgerald manages to inject his own romantic passion about an ideal life and a better humanity into his story, which gives the book a kind of tragic melancholy or something. Hard to pin any of this down without sounding pretentious.
    roryoc – the introduction to the book does say that Fitzgerald was extremely sloppy and wrote so many drafts he would forget that he’d already put something in and just shove it in somewhere else. I suppose you could argue that he was trying to build up a mesmeric repetitive beat or something or other but I think he was probably just getting in a muddle (possibly because he was quite fond of the odd alcoholic beverage – or possibly he was driven to alcohol by grappling with his sprawling drafts)
    Rosie – you have a contribution for Brit’s new Classics I didn’t Finish feature right there (although it looks as if there may be competition from one or two others as far as Tender is the Night goes)

  14. rory@peritussolutions.com'
    roryoc
    May 27, 2011 at 13:38

    Thanks for the review zmkc – the writing timespan, multiple drafts & boozing would certainly explain some minor lapses. I might give it another go!

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