Tender Is the Night Read online

  Each Diver accessory is a potential meeting-point between the two forms of economic authority which I have allegorized in shorthand as accumulation and reproduction. The meaning of the sweater or the umbrella depends upon who is economic master. Mastery involves a conflict whose history constitutes the texture of the object. Fitzgerald has an eye for the detail that retains the tracery of this struggle; he registers the economic latencies which divide objects as an archaeology lying at the very surface of things. At first glance Gausse's beach is easily consumable, but the image is fissured: as a 'prayer rug', it summons ceremonies whose form Veblen might have declared typical of leisure in the 1890s; as a tanning mat, it services the body beautiful - that curious site of narcissism and self-denigration that encourages tourists to replace their own bodies with commodity selves.

  What passes on the beach (30), like the beach itself, is a struggle between forms of power. One incident may be treated as typical: Dick emerges from the dressing tent in transparent black lace drawers, pour epater la nouvelle bourgeoisie. His impulse is territorially effective; McKisco (one of the untanned among the pebbles) asserts his gender and insults the gender of his companions, while the knowing joke affirms the unity of the Diver entourage by releasing 'a nursery-like peace and good will'. In fairy stories frogs turn into princes at the drop of a kiss; Dick's transformation is only slightly less spectacular. Fitzgerald marks its importance by insisting, 'At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class.' As with incest, so with homosexuality: sexual preference in Tender is the Night should be read within an economic context. Dick, the keeper of accumulation's daughter, appears to reveal his own phallus (the drawers seem transparent) by performing the absence of that member (the drawers are opaque). At one level the genital logic accords with Dick's phallic subordination to the bad father. The daughter approves the emasculation, since it is she who sews the trick costume. Her needlework - in all probability Dick's conception - is part of a treatment which enables her to assure Rosemary that she is 'a mean, hard woman'. As a bonus, this particularly 'invidious comparison' captures the child whose Hollywood credentials commit her economically to the sphere of reproduction. With a 'bubble' of 'delight' Rosemary is initiated into the group and into Dick's love. Accumulation rules. However, 'in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.' It is apparent to Fitzgerald, for whom the 'pansy's trick' is capable of double articulation as two plots. Read from within the imperatives of reproduction, Dick transgresses the bounds of phallic sexuality through a stage-managed and 'spectacular' multiplication of his own gender. He woos and wins a very different Daddy's girl by establishing a disintegrative selfhood. Fitzgerald's point about the 'furthermost evolution of a class' refers to the moment at which a class becomes conscious of the need to assume alternative forms of behaviour, sexuality, spending and finance. Their 'bargain with the gods' is 'desperate' because transition is awkward. In this instance Nicole will make it, Dick won't. For Dr Diver 'gods' will always, in the last analysis, wear 'finely cut clerical clothes'. For Nicole the 'gods' will increasingly become the mass audience in the cheaper seats whose desires her fashions and her monies will seek to renew and control.

  Though the demise of a father-centred phallocentrism - with its attendant etiquette and economics - looks complete, it is neither easy nor radical. What Fitzgerald bears witness to via his semantic sub-plot or sub-articulation is a shift in the administration of power rather than the overthrow of that power. Dick's homosexual play leads, through the pun on 'gods' (theological and theatrical), to the world of the spectacle. Fitzgerald explores what is in effect a major economic transition. Since in market terms so much of that transition focuses on the redistribution of the human body (particularly the body of the female), it is perhaps unsurprising that Fitzgerald should approach the economic through the sexual.

  I would reiterate that the body in question belongs to a Daddy's girl. Incest is the constellation of difficulty upon which Tender is the Night turns. Devereux Warren's crime comprises a plot of considerable complexity and precipitates particular character groupings in order to realize the fullness of that complexity. Fitzgerald marries Dick to Nicole to explore accumulation and supplies him with Rosemary as an entree to the sphere of reproduction. Dick's affections shift between Daddys' girls to externalize the contradictory nature of Warren's incest. At one level the father refuses to exchange his child beyond the family; at another and opposed level he denies both the differentiation of social roles and the familial organization deriving from the incest prohibition - that is to say, Warren's sexual energy seeks unrealized relations and forms. The plot latent in the sexual/economic overlap thickens. Accumulation stores money; reproduction must create new needs and discover new markets. Late capitalism builds into each of us its own realm of desires lacking adequate objects, the better to pre-sell those objects.

  Rosemary markets desire. A product of the culture industry, she has at least two fathers, too many selves and absolutely no trauma about it. By responding, Dr Diver shifts allegiance from the integrating interior (the last territory of the private, bourgeois self) to a disintegrative and global image (Rosemary films in Rome and Hollywood, and screenings of her work seem available almost anywhere). Rosemary is publicity, and the changing pattern of desire which she instigates makes a comparison with Nicole obligatory. The two women, one 'hard' (dense) and the other transparent, stand at different moments in the history of desire. Veblen's terms still apply to Nicole, or at least to Mrs Diver, but Rosemary requires a new vocabulary. When Nicole's dress and manners provoke others to 'invidious comparison' or emulation, she can afford to ignore it because her 'ducal' wealth, though regulative of others, protects her from being regulated back. Rosemary, as publicity, stimulates envy but is inextricably tied to the gaze of those who envy her. Under Dick's tuition Nicole achieved self-possession, she grew 'hard', 'whole', 'complete' and anachronistic. Rosemary's self is a number of styles which exist to be alienated from her; like fashion, she is created to earn envy so that her style(s) may be purchased by others.

  Walter Benjamin, in his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', clarifies my distinction between density and transparency, through the distinction he draws between 'person' and 'personality'. While an actor in a theatre may regulate gesture in response to audience reaction, building a 'complete' performance over the span of the play, film actors are subjected to camera shifts and editorial decisions which fragment their role. The film industry responds to this shrivelling of the actor's 'person' with an artificial build up of the 'personality' outside the studio: 'The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of the personality", the phoney spell of a commodity' (Benjamin 233). I have my doubts about 'unique aura[s]': the Jamesian possessive individual is denser than Benjamin's cinematic personality, but both should be set within that anthology of selves which constitutes a history of the identities that culture has recommended. Rosemary is a 'star' in Benjamin's terms. The disintegrative requirements of cinematic capital are as immediate to her as the solidities of accumulated wealth are natural to Mrs Diver.

  Rosemary's greatest compliment to Dick is the offer of a screen test, even as 'the most sincere thing' she says to him is 'we're such actors--you and I' (118; italics in source). Her 'love' is gestural and involves careful self-direction, a dance of camera angles culminating in the ultimate movie still. Scene: Paris, a hotel. Enter two lovers, who are to walk up five flights of stairs. 'At the first landing they stopped and kissed.' Each landing is the site of variously careful kisses, until the final 'good-by with their hands stretching to touch along the diagonal of the banister and then the fingers slipping apart' (87). Freeze frame. The example is unfortunate in so far as it implies a degree of manipulation by Rosemary. What I am trying to suggest is rather different: that at spontaneous, intuitive, instinctive levels the sy
stem of production within which she works modifies her desire. Take her response to the director, Brady, in Monte Carlo: the director 'looked her over completely': he desires her, and in 'so far as her virginal emotions went', she 'contemplate[s] surrender'; 'It was a click ... Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him--like an actor kissed in a picture' (33). Brady desires the image of her that he might produce; she, in his looks as in a mirror, admires the image of herself remade: 'It was a click.' He has made her; she has bought it. Fitzgerald's terse noun is richly physiological and mechanical. Camera (lens) meets body (orifice) in a metaphor whose impertinence resides in the suggestion that desire is a machine. Fetishized and fetishistic, Rosemary is passive; she is pleasured by becoming an image in the directorial eye - an image which may be varied according to market requirements. In her manifestation as screen virgin she should be both penetrable and impenetrable, because to maximize profits she must, like the fetish, be available to all and possessed by none. Therefore, in Paris, when Collis Clay mentions her 'indiscretion' in a locked compartment of the Chicago train, Dick is agonized by 'the image of a third person' coming between himself and Rosemary. However, his obsessionally recurrent question, 'Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?' (100) casts him in two roles: as the lover who pulls down the blind and as the intruder requesting blindness. His duplicity conforms to the structure of the fetish within which violation is inextricable from innocence:

  The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

  '--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?(100)

  Repression succeeds only in generating phrases that censor as they sensualize: 'white excitement' and 'inviolable secret warmth' point two ways, offering double-sensed messages which dramatize the mental musculature of the recipient of commodified sex. Since the viewer of pictures is stimulated by what he cannot have, innocence fuses with semen ('white'), while, like a hymen within a hymen, Rosemary's virginity (?), locked in a compartment, enfolds the mind's eye of the voyeur in its 'warmth'. Nathanael West was to present the contradiction with cartoon clarity in The Day of the Locust (1939); his would-be starlet, Faye Greener, though a part-time prostitute, is most typically described as an egg, a cork, a tree and as having legs like scissors - all to underline her impenetrability. When we finally witness her penetration, two-thirds of the way through the novel, she raises a sheet in front of her face and vanishes. It is her last appearance because, possessed and thoroughly witnessed as possessed, she is no longer in the market.

  Rosemary lives her body as a series of takes: in love she makes 'an exit that she had learned young, and on which no director had ever tried to improve' (122), while 'a sort of ballet step' carries her clear of a dead black on her bed (122). Neither move is artificial; hers is simply a physicality keyed to the emergent forms of economic reality. Dick, appearing at the onset of her stardom, offers a brief regression to an earlier though still active social form - an affair of nostalgia for the world of archaic fathers. Though technically the child of two fathers - military and medical - Rosemary is really the adopted daughter of the new fathers, anonymous, corporate figures who work to establish different modes of authority, protected and indeed naturalized by consumer desires, or rather by consumer frustrations. Possessed, Rosemary is no longer a star. During the final, protracted consummation of the affair in Rome, Dick wonders whether he is first or six hundred and forty-first; Rosemary's assurance that her previous sexual experience has been 'abortive' (231) hardly reassures. Dick will never know nor will he need to know, since consummation cancels his desire.

  IV

  Dick's interest in Daddys' girls is ruinous but revealing. Named for a phallus, Dick as a Diver may only detumesce. The deep structure of the nominal joke contains an absolute impasse. Dick marries Nicole and renders her 'complete' (166) by way of the solid manners of his 'good' father. But, by standing in place of the 'bad' father, he risks repeating the incestuous offence. Dick's answer is to remain hard but not to spend, which returns me to my point of departure. In Book I, Dick the socialite organizes expenditure in highly liquid forms while stringently budgeting his own outgoings; Fitzgerald stresses that Dick draws a line between a limited scientific income and the expanding Warren fortune. Both sexually and economically, Dick is split by his desire. Seeking to be the 'good' father inside the 'bad' father's girl, he condemns himself to the psychic equivalent of coitus interruptus. I risk riddling, but offer in clarification the curious patterns of articulation ghosting Dick's sexuality.

  When Rosemary discovers Jules Peterson's corpse on her hotel bed, Dick immediately thinks of Fatty Arbuckle: his analogy sexualizes a potential scandal which is at that point merely murderous. However, since Peterson lies where Dick, earlier on the same day, all but lay, his blood is for Dick a necessary and scandalous sign of the deathly consequences of his own desired emission. Certainly, Nicole reads the stained bed-linen as evidence of an incestuous release. Scandal is avoided, and the disconcerting sheets suppressed, only because Dick exhibits control. My associative path is tangled, though not untypical of the novel. Peterson's blood is Arbuckle's semen, and since, by association, it first 'smear[s]' Dick and then Devereux, their emissions too are 'paint[ed]' black and marked for death (124).

  A similar pattern occurs when Dick encounters Tommy Barban in a Munich bar (Book II, Ch. XVII). Dick has taken leave of absence from the clinic; Barban has returned from fighting for the White Russians. Among Barban's companions is a Mr Hannan, who, in shaking hands, accuses Dick of 'fooling around' with his aunt, before changing tack and demanding to know why Dick, a stranger, has approached him with a 'cock-and-bull' story about aunts. The non-sequitur is sustained when, from the piano, Hannan insists that he didn't say 'aunts' but 'pants' (216). His wordplay links sex-inside-the-family to the sartorial elegance of Barban and the Russian prince with whom he sits; both wear suits 'of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a Sunday' (216). The suits, although made by a Polish tailor, are all but zoot suits, fashionable among African Americans in Memphis and elsewhere. At which point, Hannan's quick 'black eyes' have created a design sufficient to release Ham from Hannan and to darken all this inauspicious talk of 'cock' and 'bull'. (The sons of Ham were blackened in punishment for Ham's offence against his father Noah.) None of which might matter much were it not that similar semi-occult linkages surface in the next chapter.

  Dick has removed from Zurich to Innsbruck for the climbing: in his hotel garden, in the evening, a woman's figure 'detached itself from the black shape of a tree' (220), breaking the 'black frieze' she made 'with the foliage'. Dick is attracted, wondering whether 'strange children' should say 'Let's play' (221). The markers are in place: arousal; a woman rendered a child; ethnic stains among the shadows, with intimations of Genesis as a bonus. Nothing happens. But the next night, after dinner, 'he felt excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden' (221). Back in his room, and 'still excited', he opens a cablegram from America, which reads, 'Your father died peacefully tonight HOLMES' (222). The conjunction of a persistent and textually ill-concealed erection and the death of the 'good' father would be striking even without the appearance of a Holmes on the scene. The rector's name is a pun on the 'home' that Dick has finally lost, but summons 'Sherlock', already present in the text via an account of Professor Dohmler's head, which resembled 'some fine old house' (155) and nodded in the style of that arch-protector of Victorian domiciles, Sherlock Holmes (142). Little detection is required to spot a patricidal and poisonous emission, particularly since Dick's physical reaction substitutes grief for semen in an act of controlled purgation, mirroring the very emission that it interrupts: 'He felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat' (222). It seems barely necessary to point out that during a relapse, associated with the birth of Topsy, Ni
cole should toy with the notion that her doctors told her that her baby was black (178). Or that Barban, Dick's rampant substitute, should be repeatedly referred to as sunburnt to the point of blackness, becoming a 'Co[a]leman' (290), though 'without attaining the blue beauty of negroes' (289).

  Emission and its consequences are, for Dick, dark. He seeks therefore to avoid release while remaining 'hard'. Since his position is barely tenable and scarcely tellable, it emerges as a whisper forming among apparently coincidental items whose repeated proximity, one to another, infer a disruptive excitement, an excitement both sexual and semantic. The best gloss I can find for Dick's desire, as it prompts Fitzgerald to occluded exposure, is an observation of Nicole's, given in Book III as she measures her growing distance from Dick: