Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald poured everything he had into this novel, and it shows. If ever an author exposes his soul and his heart to the public, FSF did so with Tender is the Night. It is clear that Dick Diver is Fitzgerald himself, and that Nicole is Zelda, beautiful and out of her mind. That Nicole grows stronger than Dick in the noevl's third act is an indication of Fitzgerald's fear--and it was indeed a fear--that Zelda might recover enough to surpass him artistically. He had always drawn heavily on his own life for the material in his novels, and it is remarkable to see how threatened he was by his wife, who in the early 1930s had been consigned to a mental institution.

Tender is the Night has been roundly criticized for focusing on the lives of the wealthy in the middle of the Great Depression. That may have hurt its popularity when it was published in 1934, but are we then to read this wonderful and tragic story only during periods of economic expansion? Isn't the demise of Dick Diver sad in any event?

My only complaint about the novel is Fitzgerald's depiction of Nicole's sudden recovery and independence. Fitzgerald certainly knew the psychological theories of the day and was familiar with the literature. Why, then, does he not explain her recovery sufficiently? Did he really think that Zelda's case was so hopeless? If so, then why was he threatened by her?

Still, the novel is worth reading for Fitzgerald's prose. Consider the closing paragraph of the novel:

After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's at Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Thsi passage speaks volumes about Fitzgerald's view of himself, always impermanently arranged, always alone--his wife must consult an atlas to place him on a map, after all. The ocean that separates Nicole and Dick is little different than the chasm that Zelda's breakdowns caused between her and Scott.

Next: The Tale of Genji, among other projects.