Tender Is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Not all the paternal duplicities relate directly to Dick. The Chilean aristocrat who begs treatment for his homosexual and alcoholic son is called Senor Pardo Y Cuidad Real - I offer in my own defence Dick's warning to Abe North, 'You can come if you want to play anagrams' (121) - transposed, the Spanish might read, 'Senior, sorry, I see you Dad for real.' Once witnessed, the indirect exposure of culpable fathers and consenting children proliferates and permutates. Baby Warren and Daddy's Girl are simply surface clues to an associative network capable of determining interpretation. Both casual and condensed usage contributes to an emergent, if occult, pattern which ghosts characters and modifies action. For example, Dick's cry as he assaults his policeman - 'first I'll fix this baby' (246) - could pass as coincidence, were it not that within a page, Fitzgerald notes, across from Baby Warren's hotel, two carabinieri 'grotesque in swaddling capes', one of them a 'tall member of a short race' (247). Sustained innuendo triggers a sub-plot pregnant with infantile desire. The same occult design probably prompts Dick to recall Fatty Arbuckle as he relieves Rosemary of her stained Parisian bed linen - Arbuckle's career was cut short by charges of murderous attention to a child below the age of consent. Sexually poisonous adults achieve their nadir in the father of the American artist treated at Zugersee for nervous eczema: she dies 'imprisoned' in an 'Iron Maiden' of scab (202) as a result of neuro-syphilis, possibly contracted from her father at conception. Under-aged girls come no younger. The diagnosis is Dohmler's; Dick does not want to hear it, insisting, 'If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that' (263). Why is he so secretive? During the patient's decline, Dick 'went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her' (204). The doctor would 'cherish' the deep 'mistake' of incest, containing the 'secret' with the therapeutic advice, 'We must all try to be good' (204). As an 'Iron Maiden' his patient is profanely pure and quite beyond sexual exchange; Dick's role as a surrogate good father is consequently eased. To conclude any account of what I would call the incest constellation with this example is to psychologize a sub-plot whose implications are far broader. The associative network should not be hidden within the psychology of one character, or indeed of the author, since Fitzgerald's preoccupation with the social and financial status of the father (good or bad) requires that incest be understood as a trauma within which the sexual and the economic semanticize one another.

  The father, according to the incest taboo, must release his daughter into marriage outside the family. Warren's greed is such that he fails in this exchange; he keeps his daughter for himself. The logic of accumulation transgresses the incest taboo, and Dick is hired to make good that transgression. The word 'cure' would be inappropriate. Dick as the good father supplants the bad father, restoring Nicole to integrity: she is made 'complete' and 'hard', terms carrying a Jamesian freightage. However, restoration involves blocking the trauma. Nicole is denied access to her father's offence. Secret keys proliferate on Dick's person: plainly he is the key to the case, but during Dohmler's clinical report Dick remembers 'a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet', a key he had hidden in his mother's top drawer (154). Janitorial duties started young. At some level Nicole recognizes Dick as her keeper: she bars Mrs McKisco from the troubled bathroom in the Villa Diana 'because the key was thrown down the well' (185), and Nicole knows who did it. Her allusion, redolent of nursery rhyme, chimes in with her own earlier letter in which she described Dick as 'wise behind your face like a white cat' (139). The wise 'pussy' who joins the key at the bottom of the well presumably sees the solution as incarceration. When - with 'verbal inhumanity' seeping through the keyholes - the reader finally enters 'the horror' in the bathroom it is to witness Dick shutting doors:

  Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. 'It's you!' she cried, '--it's you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world--with your spread with red blood on it. I'll wear it for you--I'm not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn't let me----'

  'Control yourself!'

  '--so I sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?'

  'Control yourself, Nicole!'

  'I never expected you to love me--it was too late--only don't come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.'

  'Control yourself. Get up----'

  Rosemary, back in the salon, heard the bathroom door bang, and stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana. (125-6)

  In a room designed for purgation Dick insists on repression. Nicole resists as she has resisted before. Her memory of procedures at the Zurichsee might be glossed, 'While at the clinic, among the foolish and the mad, I wished to wear a spread but was given a domino.' 'Spread' condenses a plot; prompted by stained bed-linen, the word recalls the sheet marked with the blood of Nicole's hymen. Despite 'spread[s]' declarative openness, the clinical staff gave her a 'domino' - an elaborate and often sequined mask. When Nicole tried to understand her trauma, her doctors sought to disguise it with the artifacts of mannered wealth. Dick is of their party. He holds the key to her case and keeps the door locked. None the less, the stain and the domino are complementary; if they were not, Dick's therapy could not work. The mask typifies the affluence of a particular class, even as its occasion and incrustation embody those discriminating principles which condense leisure objects into systems of 'invidious difference' (Henry James). The stain too is a surface dense with comparative information: beneath it lies the father/phallus, but before he can be seen he is displaced by the hotel linen, the clinicians, the domino, Dick, Mcbeth ... Though the associative list can be extended, my point remains a simple one - items in both the bourgeois drawing-room and the unconscious solidify through cumulative nicety. The furnishing of each privacy depends upon an absent father; the Victorian interior expresses his consolidating aggression in the market-place, while in the unconscious, according to Fitzgerald, images solicit over-interpretation and designate at the core of their wealth the missing and threatening father.

  Dick's task, as a psychiatrist and socialite, is to reduce the paternal threat while maintaining the father's good name. He is therefore an agent who extends the logic and imperatives of bourgeois privacy. Nicole is Devereux Warren's continuity: his first daughter is 'wooden and onanistic' (168) and will possibly not marry; rebuilt by Dick, the damaged younger child will exchange with her proper mate, that is to say, with a male who can ensure the 'ducal' group's exclusivity and privilege. Warren's 'feudal' monies will be safe with Tommy Barban, mercenary in royal causes, opponent of socialism and trainee stock-speculator. Oddly, by preparing Nicole for the right marriage, Dick preserves the fount of his own gifts - the accumulations that foster and give purpose to his manners. As the Reverend Diver's child, nostalgic for 'religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes' (67), he cannot afford to acknowledge that the monies of the haute bourgeoisie were corrupt, even at their head and point of distribution. He knows, better than most, how 'a century of middle-class love' finally 'spent' itself: he could doubtless map 'the last love battle' and measure to the inch the 'great gust of high explosive love' (68); incest is very much his Western Front and the end of 'all [his] beautiful lovely safe world' (68). He says as much on a visit to the trenches around Amiens; however, by globalizing incest Dick gnomically and unanalytically extends the power of the father.

  The case obliges him to find paternity everywhere and to encourage the reader and Nicole to make and fear such revelations. At a late stage in their marriage Nicole objects, 'Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word "fat
her"?' (311). Her rebuke is a measure of her renewal: she ceases to be a child of two fathers and becomes instead her grandfather reincarnate - her voice and 'white crook's eyes' encourage her to believe that she has 'gone back to [her] true self' (314). There is, however, nothing regressive about her return, since, in this instance, the displacement of both fathers ensures the viability of the Warren monies. The whole point about crooked grandfathers is that they know how to invest. Nicole, as her grandfather's spirit circa 1929, would take his money to Hollywood: symptomatically, she marries a man who likens himself to Ronald Colman and who, in her eyes, resembles 'all the adventurers in the movies' (290).

  But I run ahead of myself. To recap: I have argued that, for Fitzgerald, the central sexual act of Tender is the Night operates as an economic metaphor, transposing Devereux Warren's sexual greed, in all its irresponsibility, into a symptom of compulsive accumulation. Dick by 'transference' (134) is associated with the values of a pre-war leisure class. His sureties grant miraculous longevity to the Father (after a brief interview with Dick in Lausanne the apparently dying Warren takes up his bed and walks (271)). None the less, it is important to recognize that the incest motif can be read in another and seemingly opposed way. Seen from within a longer economic perspective, the act contains a second impacted narrative: it embodies accumulation but simultaneously transgresses limits. By penetrating Nicole, Warren becomes father and lover, even as he makes his child into daughter and mistress. Incest creates disintegral selves through a multiplication of roles which, by analogy, I would liken to a shift in economic emphasis. An intersection between sexual and economic trauma registers precisely how a change in the history of capital changes the history of bourgeois selfhood. For the full and Janus-faced significance of incest in Tender is the Night to be recognized some account of a crucial shift in the history of capital is necessary.

  III

  The interlude which follows is premised on the belief that the foundation of manners is economic, and that as economic structures change, so manners are modified. From the close of the Civil War to 1900 the story of American capital is largely one of expansion and accumulation of resource. Alan Trachtenberg dubs the gilded age the age of incorporation; however, it is clear that during the opening three decades of the new century the very form of capital was seen to change. But first some facts and figures. While a worker's income increased by an average of 14 per cent between 1923 and 1929, corporate profit rose in the same period by 62 per cent, and corporate dividends by 65 per cent. The reason for this may be glossed in two terms, 'centralization' and 'standardization'. Mergers were endemic, particularly in the fields of electricity and banking. Even as the energy that drove industrial capital centralized, so the credit that financed expansion passed into fewer and fewer hands; by 1929, 1 per cent of the banking facilities of the country controlled over 46 per cent of the nation's banking resources.

  The net effect of centralization was an increasing rationalization of resources, and with it fresh fears of an excess capacity. To ensure continuous and full use of their accumulations firms had to move into new markets and develop new lines. Each expansion put greater strain on the running of production, and a managerial revolution, coupled with the multiplication of national distribution systems, simply fuelled the cause of standardized and efficient administration.

  By the 1920s 'administration' was gargantuan in ambition: as scientific management and technological innovation guaranteed that expanding and incorporating capital could produce cheaply, advertising sought to monitor and create market needs. Indeed, as early as 1843 one New York copywriter claimed:

  Advertising has to deal with the greatest principles underlying the relation of man to man ... It is the medium of communication between the world's greatest forces - demand and supply. It is a more powerful element in human progress than steam or electricity. (Quoted by Frank Presbrey 341).

  By 1920 it was plain that only by controlling desire could corporate capital reproduce itself. As Stuart Ewen puts it, the 'captain of industry' had to become the 'captain of consciousness' if his accumulations were to survive; between 1900 and 1930 national advertising revenues increased thirteenfold.

  Statistics can indicate the quantity of change but miss the qualitative shift. What one witnesses between 1900 and 1930 is a shift in economic emphasis from 'accumulation' to 'reproduction' characteristic of the age of late capitalism (Mandel 245). By 1900 the accumulated capital existed; the real issue was reproduction - how to produce sufficient profit to support that accumulation. Neither Taylor's time and motion studies nor Ford's flow production in and of themselves offer adequate protection, because high productivity can yield the necessary profit only if the markets are primed to consume what has been produced.

  Arguably, consumers are the most important product of late capitalism: they are the primary machine without which 'the very play time of the people' could not be 'run ... into certain moulds' (Lynd 491):

  Consumption is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is admitted today to be the greatest idea that America has given to the world; the idea that the workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers ... Pay them more, sell them more, prosper more is the equation. (Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer (1929), quoted by Ewen 22)

  In the words of Paula Fass, analysing collegiate youth in the twenties, 'the big sell had become synonymous with America's contribution to Western Civilization' (Fass 257). Selling required high levels of advertising and credit.

  All this may seem some distance from the 'richly incrusted' niceties of Dick Diver's mannered spaces. Although his quasi Victorian interiors at the Villa Diana and the clinic certainly manifest conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, they cannot guarantee a high turn-over in consumption, and positively militate against a truly mass market for the items that they contain. Those items are 'solid', even as the manners that surround them are 'solid' (so scrupulously learned as to appear innate). What capital increasingly needs after 1900 is a highly mobile, highly reproducible and highly controllable system of manners. That is to say, fashion must supplant manners: where taste once stood, style must stand.

  Manners and taste are cumulative and integrative; indeed the selfhood that they realize is its own ultimate possession. Fashions and styles are equally an extension of capital, but of capital focused on the sphere of reproduction. Fashion is always disintegrative; it aims to give us several selves, thereby providing capital with a diversification of markets.

  The new 'science' of advertising invested heavily in social insecurity. Consumers of the twenties were taught to denigrate their own bodies: in 1920 Listerene was just another general antiseptic - with the help of 'halitosis' (exhumed from an old medical dictionary) and a story line ('He never knew why') the copywriters Feasley and Seagrove invented a new anxiety and with it a new habit. Between 1921 and 1929 Listerene's 'virtues' spread panic through pore and orifice: the public learned of its capacities as a dandruff, cold and sore-throat cure, astringent, deodorant and douche. 'Bromodosis' (sweaty feet), 'office hips', 'accelerator toe', 'vacation knees', 'ashtray breath', and 'spoon-fed face' may be dated diseases, but the sustained economic assault on the consumer's 'integrity' is far from over, and its direction is ever inwards - witness vaginal deodorants and suppository selling. The problem lies in the finances of the corporate body and not in the sweetness of the bodies on the street. Likewise, the solution is corporate: consumers must forget their deficient 'self' and purchase the selves made available by the business community.

  One way of focusing the interconnected histories of self and capital is to present their liaison in schematic form:

  Sphere of accumulation

  Sphere of reproduction

  Inertia of capital ('emulation')

  High turn-over of capital (mass market)

  Leisure class

  Culture industry

  Manners

  Fashion

  Integrative selfh
ood

  Disintegrative selfhood

  (A drawing-room)

  (Hollywood)

  Tender is the Night straddles the transition from classical imperialism to late capitalism largely by way of the incest that lies at its narrative core. Witness how the incest victim is 'cured': her cure is unconventional, she simply moves towards an alternative mode of selfhood, lodged in a modified economic reality. She negates the incest trauma by ignoring it. The 'cord' can be 'cut ... forever' (324) because Nicole appreciates herself as a new species of consumer, one to whom accumulations are no longer of primary relevance. Consequently, her interior and its old environs - cumulative, private, dense and supported by an etiquette equally weighted with 'interpretation or qualification' (320) - can be forgotten. Indeed, amnesia is obligatory. The father-centred world must give way to brand name and movie still if grandfather's capital (the capital of classical imperialism) is to adapt and counter the inertia of excess capacity. For Barban she crosses herself with Chanel Sixteen and hopes to resemble 'the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children' (312); with Barban she stands 'black and white and metallic against the [Mediterranean] sky' (336), an apt study for the movies. Fitzgerald names brands to point to a transition that was merely latent in Nicole's life with Dick. The brand name and the tourist spot - no matter how exclusive - prompt rapid translation from word to material image, the better to speed consumption. Any associative pattern latent in the name has been pre-arrayed there by advertising. In contradistinction, the psychiatrist's phrase or any item beneath the Divers' beach umbrella emanates density and stasis. Gausse's beach is a commodity, but it is a commodity manufactured by Dick, during the early twenties, which might have been modelled on an orchid. Veblen would have understood the doctor's tireless application of the rake (302); like any rare hybrid, Gausse's sand denotes that key to 'good breeding', 'a substantial and patent waste of time'. However, by 1928 the leisured devotions due to 'a bright tan prayer rug of a beach' (11) are no longer observed. The sand serves a different expenditure and signals an alternative form of wealth. When Dick and Nicole bought 'sailor trunks and sweaters' in Nice backstreets (302), they did not intend to create fashion. Paris couturiers copied the style: Fitzgerald does not need to tell us that haute couture pirated from Vogue or Vanity Fair became a market leader - the busy presence of an Associated Press photographer on the steps of Gausse's hotel indicates that the new users are more interested in image and spectacle than in etiquette. With beach umbrellas and pneumatic rubber horses, those 'new things' purchased 'from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the War' (27), the Divers make their version of a Victorian resort and so manage temporarily to deny the very purpose of that wave of manufacture. They achieve 'absolute immobility' (27) on the sand, where the future health of their capital stipulates absolute mobility. The adroit instillation of cumulative nuance into necessarily transitory luxury items is an archaic trait that the Warrens cannot afford. Equine inflatables are not and should not be Jamesian porcelains. At the novel's close Dick quits the beach that is no longer his kind of artifact. Nicole, for all her recognition that it now serves 'the tastes of the tasteless' (301), stays, presumably to be photographed by the Associated Press.