Leaving Nicole in the care of his partner at the clinic, he goes away to ski for a few days by himself. He tries to think tenderly of Nicole, to love “her best self.” But, attempting to preserve his own sanity, Dick realizes that “he had lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zürichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.” He reflects that “he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.” This passage suggests the almost therapeutic drive in the novel: the search to determine when things had gone wrong, where Fitzgerald had “lost himself” and, most poignantly, how he could continue to see Zelda as the person he had once loved and had wanted to impress with his worldly success.
The drunken brawl with the police in Rome, which takes place at the end of Part II, parallels Nicole’s breakdown at the end of Part I. In the winter of 1924 Fitzgerald had actually been beaten by the police in Rome after he had punched a plainclothes policeman. The brawl in the novel starts when Dick slaps a policeman’s face (which recalls Barban slapping McKisco’s face to provoke the duel) and echoes the sad fate of Abe North, who has been beaten to death in a speakeasy. When Baby Warren rescues Dick from jail, she firmly establishes her moral superiority and uses it to control and to “own” him.
Dick’s infidelity with Rosemary and degradation in Rome persuade Nicole to have a retaliatory affair with the tough and heroic Tommy Barban. Before offering herself to Tommy (who is wearing Dick’s borrowed clothes) Nicole opposes Dick’s will, for the first time, by giving Tommy some rare camphor rub for his sore throat. At this symbolic moment, she transfers her emotions from Dick to Tommy and takes over Dick’s role as physician and dispenser of medicine. When she drives away with Tommy a little later, Nicole echoes the expression of sexual desire that Rosemary had overheard at the beginning of the novel by begging Tommy to stop the car so they can immediately have sex. Though Nicole, on the previous occasion, had to wait several hours to sleep with Dick, she cannot wait a minute longer to sleep with Tommy, when she feels sorry for Dick. As he tries to save himself from despair, she finally expresses the crucial truth about their disastrous marriage: “You’re a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”
Tender Is the Night has a melodramatic plot (a duel, two murders, incest and three mental breakdowns) and an excess of coincidence. Violet McKisco overhears the Divers at the Villa Diana and Rosemary overhears them in a Paris restaurant. Dick accidentally meets Nicole on a Swiss funicular, meets Tommy in Munich, meets Rosemary and then Baby Warren in Rome, and meets Tommy once again at a party on a yacht. Despite its faults in structure and plot, which Fitzgerald later hoped to remedy by changing the original chronology of the novel, it remains a carefully constructed work of art.
Dick’s decline from promising idealist to hopeless failure is precisely calibrated. He begins to drink heavily, kisses his patients, sleeps with Rosemary, is beaten up, betrays his son at Mary North’s house, loses interest in his career, his book and his clinic, breaks with his partner Franz Gregorovius, quarrels with Mary North, fights with his French cook, fails at water sports while trying to impress Rosemary, and adopts an increasingly passive and pathetic role with Franz, Rosemary, Tommy, Nicole and his children.
Fitzgerald used the details of his own life and Zelda’s illness as material for the novel. Nicole’s letters to Dick contain extracts of actual letters Zelda wrote. Many of the bitter conversations in the novel have the ring of real exchanges, and give the book a hard, Wildean brilliance. In Nicole’s dispute with Abe North at the station we hear the wife reproaching the husband for his drinking:
“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.”
“My business is to tear them apart.”
“When you get drunk you don’t tear anything apart except yourself.”
Abe’s sardonic epigram: “Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you,” could have been written by Dorothy Parker.
Fitzgerald also peoples his novel with characters drawn from life. It was dedicated to Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were the models for the positive side of Dick and Nicole Diver, before their tragic descent. Gerald’s Irish good looks, jockey cap and ritual of raking the sand, Sara’s skill in cooking and gardening, her habit of sunning her pearls on the beach, were portrayed in the novel along with their daughter Honoria, a partial model (with Scottie) for Topsy, and their luxurious house, the Villa America, which Fitzgerald calls the Villa Diana.
Abe North, the alcoholic composer, was based on Fitzgerald’s drinking companion Ring Lardner, and Tommy Hitchcock inspired the soldier of fortune, Tommy Barban, as he had inspired Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Nicole’s sister Baby Warren—whose callousness, unrequited sexuality and crass materialism provide a powerful contrast to Rosemary’s elegant innocence—was partly based on Zelda’s older sister and Fitzgerald’s bête noire, Rosalind Smith, who (like Baby in the novel) unfairly blamed Fitzgerald for Zelda’s mental breakdown. Rosemary Hoyt was modeled on Lois Moran, whom Fitzgerald had an affair with in 1927. It is significant that in the novel Dick’s affair with Rosemary occurs before—and directly provokes—Nicole’s retaliatory adultery with Tommy Barban. Fitzgerald had apparently tried to apportion blame more equally for their unhappy marriage.
Fitzgerald took some revenge, in his minor characters, on people he had known. The pretentious, corrupt and successful writer, Albert McKisco, was partly based on the alternately hard-boiled and sentimental novelist Robert McAlmon. An American expatriate and minor littérateur on the fringe of Fitzgerald’s Parisian circle of friends, McAlmon was notorious for his caustic tongue and malicious gossip. He spread the rumor that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.
The satiric caricature of Bijou O’Conor, begun in “The Hotel Child,” took more serious and substantial form in Tender Is the Night. In this novel she reappears as the fragile, tubercular, decadent Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, who is doing a dance of death as the Sepoys assault the ruined fort. This phrase, and Lady Capps-Karr’s favorite expression, “After all a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum”—Fitzgerald’s bizarre notion of quintessential upper-class English speech, which Bijou would never have actually said—occur both in “The Hotel Child” and in Tender Is the Night, linking Lady Capps-Karr and Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers to their common model, Bijou O’Conor.
Tommy Barban thinks Lady Caroline is the wickedest woman in London and Nicole cattily remarks: “it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms, could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire.”14 At the end of the novel Lady Caroline and Mary North dress up as sailors and are arrested—as Dick had been after a drunken brawl in Rome—after picking up two French girls. Though Dick had been insulted by Lady Caroline, he rescues them from an Antibes jail—as Baby Warren had rescued him from a Rome jail. As the French police express their disgust and Dick observes Lady Caroline’s lack of any sense of evil, he bitterly concludes that she represents the “concentrated essence of the anti-social.”
Though Tender Is the Night is intensely autobiographical, it also transcends the personal by placing the characters against a detailed contemporary background. The tragic episodes of the novel take place in the context of violent political events, suggested by the allusions to Ulysses Grant, the victorious general in the American Civil War, who “invented mass butchery.” Dick and Abe take Rosemary on a tour of the World War I battlefields, which had left “the dead like a million bloody rugs.” There is an implicit comparison between Dick—who spent most of the war as a medical student in neutral Switzerland and who feels a corresponding guilt for not having risked his life in the war—a
nd Tommy Barban, a volatile mercenary who will fight for any side that pays him. Fitzgerald refers to the Russian Revolution and the fighting between the Communists and Nazis in Munich, to the Spanish-Moroccan war in the Riff near the western edge of Europe and the Greco-Turkish war near the eastern.
Most importantly, the novel criticizes the capitalistic system that provoked and paid for these wars, and emphasizes the fissure between great wealth and moral values. The vast fortune of the Warren family—which includes trains, factories, stores and plantations—has engendered Devereux’s incest, Nicole’s madness and Baby’s masturbatory self-absorption, and brings about Dick’s corruption. Fitzgerald is once again writing about money and the power of the rich. But here the ducal class represented by the Warrens—and by Mary North’s second husband, a Moslem potentate whose money flows from manganese deposits in southwestern Asia—are viewed from the disillusioning perspective of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the hardships of the Depression and Fitzgerald’s own financial difficulties. Tender Is the Night is a representative between-the-wars novel. It expresses guilt about surviving the Great War, portrays anxiety about the present and senses the menace of the future. When Dick bids farewell to the beach, he also says goodbye to the twenties, to youth and to hope.
The outcome of the novel for Dick is tragic. He is sacrificed so that Nicole can be well, and she is now free to remain in the sun while he is condemned to live as a failure in obscure country towns. This conclusion must have afforded Fitzgerald some private gratification. Dick, at the end of the novel, is no longer tormented by Nicole’s madness. But Scott could never actually escape from Zelda.
IV
Fitzgerald’s friends, well aware of the intensely personal nature of the novel, responded enthusiastically. John Peale Bishop, who had often been condescending to Fitzgerald, was deeply moved by its tragic content: “I come fresh from reading Tender Is the Night and overcome with the magnificence of it. It surpasses The Great Gatsby. You have shown us, what we have wanted so long and impatiently to see, that you are a true, a beautiful and a tragic novelist. I have only praise for its understanding, its characterization, and its deep tenderness.” James Branch Cabell, Carl Van Vechten and Robert Benchley also admired the novel. Dos Passos, an early witness of Zelda’s madness, found the structure “enormously impressive” and declared: “the whole conception of the book is enormous—and so carefully understated that—so far as I know—not a single reviewer discovered it.”
Gilbert Seldes, who had visited Fitzgerald on the Riviera and had acclaimed The Great Gatsby, concluded, in the first important review, that Fitzgerald “has stepped again to his natural place at the head of the American writers of our time.” In the New York Times the critic John Chamberlain praised Fitzgerald’s technique and style: “his craftsmanship, his marvelous sense of what might be called social climate, his sheer writing ability. Judged purely as prose, Tender Is the Night is a continually pleasurable performance.”15 Mary Colum, a perceptive Irish critic, felt the novel was flawed but lauded Fitzgerald’s “distinctive gifts—a romantic imagination, a style that is often brilliant, a swiftness of movement, and a sense of enchantment in people and places.” But Philip Rahv, writing in the Communist Daily Worker, obtusely condemned the novel for deviating from the Party line. And William Troy, in the Left-wing Nation, found Dick Diver’s character unconvincing and depressing.
D. W. Harding, a professor of psychology at the University of London, felt that Fitzgerald (despite all he had been through) lacked insight into the “pathetic” and “harrowing” subject of the novel. But he thought that Fitzgerald managed to convey the idea that “people who disintegrate in the adult world don’t at all win our respect and can hardly retain even our pity.” Fitzgerald was especially pleased, therefore, by a psychiatrist’s anonymous review in a professional magazine, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, which extolled his “fascinating” and “valuable” clinical account. “As one grasps fully the scope of the author’s aim,” the doctor wrote, “and his discernment in face of the balance of psychotic cause and effect, the rich endowment of the book in regard to conscious mastery of authentic experience and exceptional descriptive powers becomes increasingly evident.”16
The man Fitzgerald most wanted to please remained silent. On May 10, a month after publication, Fitzgerald desperately wrote Hemingway: “Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers’ jargon out of my head.” Two weeks later Hemingway—influenced by personal knowledge of the Murphys and perhaps by jealousy of Fitzgerald’s achievement—bluntly replied that Scott had ruined the novel by conflating his own and Zelda’s characteristics with those of the Murphys, creating an unconvincing composite and wrecking the logical consistency of their behavior:
I liked it and I didn’t like it. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald. . . . Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that. . . . Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. . . .
You took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvelously faked case histories. . . . For God’s sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.
Fitzgerald defended himself in a letter to Sara Murphy by stating that his theory of fiction, antithetically opposed to Hemingway’s, was that “it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction[al] character.” Gerald agreed with Fitzgerald and wrote, a year after the novel appeared, that his imaginative reconstruction of their lives was truer than reality: “I know now that what you said in Tender Is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.” Four years later Hemingway reread the novel, saw its merits more clearly and revised his opinion. Recognizing Fitzgerald’s deep insight and ability to objectify his own tragic experience, he told Max Perkins: “It’s amazing how excellent much of it is. If he had integrated it better it would have been a fine novel (as it is) much of it is better than anything else he ever wrote. . . . Reading that novel much of it was so good it was frightening.”17
Fitzgerald had very high hopes for the novel that had evolved from so much suffering. He felt it was his last chance to restore his reputation, his self-confidence and his wealth. This Side of Paradise had sold more than 49,000 copies by the end of 1921. But Tender Is the Night, partly because of the economic depression and because his subject matter was unfashionable during those politically conscious years, sold only 13,000 copies. It earned just five thousand dollars, which was not even enough to repay his debts to Scribner’s and to Ober. Zelda’s third breakdown in February 1934 and the relative failure of Tender Is the Night in April propelled Fitzgerald into his own crack-up, from which he never completely recovered.
Chapter Eleven
Asheville and “The Crack-Up,” 1935–1937
I
When Zelda came out of her catatonic state at Sheppard-Pratt she tried to commit suicide by strangling herself. Despite constant surveillance she made frequent attempts on her life. Once, while walking with Scott on the grounds of the clinic, she tried to throw herself beneath a passing train and he caught her just before she reached the tracks. Gradually she calmed down and became accustomed to institutional living, one of three hundred patients in the huge towered and turreted red-brick Victorian buildings.
Dr. William Elgin—who was born in Cincinnati in 1905, graduated from Washington and Lee University in Virginia and earned his medical degree at Johns Hopkins—found Zelda confused, withdrawn and expressionless. The once active and vibrant woman now seemed to him a colorless “blob” who moved in slow motion and felt threatened by hallucinatory voices. Yet her tender and poignant letter of June 1935 showed that Zeld
a was all too aware of the devastation her illness had caused. She showed considerable insight into her emotional hollowness and expressed great sadness about all they had sacrificed. She also returned to the themes of lost identity and negation of the self which Scott considered in his “Crack-Up” essays:
Dearest and always Dearest Scott:
I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over me, the suffering this nothing has cost would be unendurable to any save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that all of my life there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty that we started with to offer you at the end. . . .
Now that there isn’t any more happiness and home is gone and there isn’t even any past and no emotions but those that were yours where there could be my comfort—it is a shame that we should have met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so many dreams. . . . I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life.
Three months later, after one of his heart-wrenching visits to the hospital, Fitzgerald told a friend that they still had, despite Zelda’s insanity, a powerful bond that could never be broken: “she was fine, almost herself, has only one nurse now and has no more intention of doing away with herself. It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have even now, closer to her than to any other human being.” Friends who saw Scott with Zelda during her visits outside the hospital confirmed the intensity of feeling that both destroyed and sustained him:
He was so dreadfully unhappy [said his Asheville friend Nora Flynn]. Zelda was then in the sanatorium. Once, after she got out, he brought her over to visit. She wore such odd clothes, and looked so ill—and walked about just touching things. Finally she started to dance for us. And Scott sat over there. I shall never forget the tragic, frightful look on his face as he watched her. He had loved her so much—they both had loved each other. Now it was dead. But he still loved that love and hated to give it up—that was what he continued to nurse and cherish, that love which had been, and which he could not forget.
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Page 31