Tender Is the Night Read online

  Initially the facts of the new life do not support an act of severance and self-revision; indeed, the final chapter repeats the pattern of the larger narrative. Repatriation and return to Buffalo, the last parish of the good father, suggest a ghostly reversion to 'whole soul[s]', while Dick's choice of subsequent domicile (Geneva), allied to a disruptive association with a 'girl', indicates that disintegral elements persist. However, several details carry hints of Dick's 'interior laughter'. The choice of Lockport, given that Dick viewed himself as both key and janitor, is a striking revision of autobiography: the name splits - Nicole's keeper is now a creature of passage between several ports of call. His unfinished manuscript, whose title 'would look monumental in German' (162) (a taxonomic work, preoccupied with 'Uniform ... Classification'), is carried with him as a sexual come-on: the proximity between 'much admired by the ladies' and the 'big stack of papers on his desk' (338) is more than suggestive, it is a comic recapitulation of Dick's first love - after all, if his profession got him a wife, why should it not make him a less orderly ladies' man? Just as a Shakespearean sub-plot will often re-perform high doings among the lower orders, so the last chapter of Tender is the Night repeats the novel from an entirely different perspective. Dick is no longer a psychiatrist but a general practitioner, and his 'girl' is now culled from a 'grocery store' (I am reminded of the girls who 'worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve' to pay their 'tithe' to Nicole (65).) Once puns are recognized as a route to social inversion, other terms become loopholes, issuing covert glances towards another class. Dick stops for a time in Geneva, a town which Nicole locates with an atlas as being in 'the Finger Lakes' section of New York: since Dick has quit his adoptive class and wanders from town to smaller town to 'very small town', he doubtless practises or will practise among manual workers. Perhaps her session with the atlas reminded Nicole that she was 'born hating the smell of a nurse's fingers dressing her' (260); maybe the name even triggers Frau Gregorovious' body-odour, 'less a smell than an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay' (260)?

  Such speculation has less to do with Nicole's psychology than with the novel's tendency to promote the reading of its persons and things from divided and antagonistic social perspectives. Words like 'Lockport' and 'Finger,' once set within their associative networks, tend maliciously to distort themselves, hinting at diversity and implying that their diversity rises from social conflict.

  However, the double articulation which characterizes the last chapter of the novel is different from that into which the reader is elsewhere invited. The conflicting semantic determinants of 'Finger' and 'Lockport' may be traced to a suppressed dispute between voices, each possibility deriving its intention from a markedly different class position. In contradistinction, the broader duplicities of the incest story depend upon and express the changing dynamic of a single class. It is tempting to read Book III, chapter XIII as a return of the repressed, and therefore as Fitzgerald's exoneration of Lukacs' judgement that the proletariat (though hidden in puns and masked in simile) is the only radical class, because it sees the entirety of the system from the base (and so must murmur threats through the established meaning of dominant groups). It is striking that Book III draws attention to servants and features refusals and uprisings amongst underlings, most notably Dick's, but also Frau Kaethe's complaint against Nicole (Ch. I); the cook Augustine's assault with a butcher knife, accompanied by the charge that her employer drinks like 'a day-laborer' (286); prostitutes 'thin and barbaric' in Nicole and Tommy's hotel room (Ch. VIII), and Gausse's kick to Lady Caroline Sibley Biers' backside (Ch. X). However, to overemphasize subversion would be to carry reading against the grain towards a pet pathology. For all his sensitivity to double-directed words and fissured referents, Fitzgerald recognizes that capital - albeit capital in transition - determines semantic collisions. Labour, even in 1934, has to his ear only sufficient voice to whisper from the depths of concluding puns.

  It might be objected that my reading of Fitzgerald has made far too much of ambivalence, that multiple meaning has been induced and puns provoked by reference to associative networks that may look all very well in this essay but bear little relation to the pages of Tender is the Night. I can only appeal again to Fitzgerald's perception of economic history to explain his proclivity if not for puns then for internally polemical terms. In 1922 Fitzgerald described himself as 'a socialist' nervous about 'the people' (Fitzgerald, Letters 173); in 1932 he described Dick Diver as 'a communist-liberal-idealist, a moralist in revolt', adding, 'the hero ... is a man like myself brought up in a family sunk from haute bourgeoise to petite bourgeoise' (Fitzgerald, quoted by Bruccoli, Grandeur 335-6). A reading of the letters suggests that to combine any and all of these terms would be to approximate to the vagaries of Fitzgerald's political position(s). What is clear is that he read some Marx, advocated the reading of Marx and by the late thirties believed that 'most questions in life have an economic base (at least according to us Marxians)' (Letters 347). The throw-away parentheses are typical: writing to his cousin Ceci Taylor in 1934 he appends a confidential postscript to a letter preoccupied with the problems of making money from scripts and stories:

  P.S. Apropos of our conversation it will interest you to know that I've given up politics. For two years I've gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in ... I have become disgusted with the party leadership and have only health enough for my literary work, so I'm on the sidelines ... This is confidential, of course. (Letters 437)

  The two-year period in question (1932-4) spans his most concentrated work on Tender is the Night. A Ledger note of November 1932 reads, 'Political worries, almost neurosis' (Bruccoli, Grandeur 347). Just as in the last chapter of the novel Fitzgerald alludes to a class dispute that is contained within a semantic dispute, so, in his letters, those aspects of his life that threatened the social fabric to which he is committed are bracketed or set to one side. None the less, while writing Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald experienced 'double allegiance' with troubling intensity; his decision to bracket the political, and to interdict family talk about that decision, suggests that a certain leakage of anxiety into the manuscript was inevitable. In this case, the divided semantics which I have been tracing within the novel's language may be said to arise from Fitzgerald's acute, awkward and partially prohibited sense of the interrelations of class and change.

  Fitzgerald is not a punster in any simple sense of the word: the valency of his language is the product of significant quibbles within capital. Capital changes, particularly during the merger wave of the twenties and the early Depression years, dividing the bourgeoisie: social planes collide within a class, yielding divided objects, subjects and meanings. As capital perfects its translation from the monopoly form to what has been designated 'late' or 'multinational' capital, so its objects and subjects stabilize, at least for a time. The fissured owning-class heals itself and continues (Nicole is 'cured'). Fitzgerald's quibbling registers a revolution within a class. The instability of his text (also realized in its nine-year multiform gestation, and in its preoccupation with wounds, scars and surface 'completeness') is a response to a revolution within capital. Because, during the twenties, capital contained pronouncedly different kinds of capital, 'emergent' and 'residual' forms necessarily clashed within social and semantic relations. Read historically, Fitzgerald's puns are not playful; behind them, as with so much else in Tender is the Night, lie voices arguing for different ways of life.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Benjamin, Walter, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, London: Cape, 1970: 219-53.

  Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, John Willet (ed.), London: Methuen, 1974.

  Bruccoli, Matthew J., The Composition of 'Tender is the Night', Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1963.

  Bruccoli, Matthew J., Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1981.

  Cowley, Malcolm, Exile's Return, New York: Viking Press, 1974.

  Cummings, Katherine, Telling Tales: The Hysteric's Seduction in Fiction and Theory, Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1991.

  Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus, New York: Viking Press, 1982.

  Doherty, William E., 'Tender is the Night and the "Ode to a Nightingale" in Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Tender is the Night', Milton R. Stern (ed.), Boston: Hall, 1986: 147-59.

  Ewen, Stuart, Captains of Consciousness, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

  Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977.

  Feis, Herbert, The Diplomacy of the Dollar, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, New York: Scribners, 1925.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andrew Turnbull (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 'One Trip Abroad', The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew Bruccoli (ed.), New York: Scribners, 1989: 577-97.

  Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1975.

  Lynd, Helen and Robert, Middletown, New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1929.

  Mandel, Ernst, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980.

  Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

  Natterman, Udo, 'Nicole Diver's Monologue', Massachusetts Studies in English, vol. 10, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 213-28.

  Parkinson, Kathleen, Tender is the Night: A Critical Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

  Piper, Henry Dan, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1965.

  Presbrey, Frank, The History and Development of Advertising, New York: Doubleday, 1929.

  Prigozy, Ruth, 'From Griffith's Girls to Daddy's Girl: The Masks of Innocence in Tender is the Night', Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 26, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 189-221.

  Rosenberg, Emily, Spreading the American Dream, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

  Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, London: Verso, 1982.

  Stern, Milton R., Tender is the Night: The Broken Universe, New York: Twayne, 1994.

  Swann, Charles, 'A Fitzgerald Debt to Keats', Notes and Queries, vol. 235, no. 4 (Dec. 1990): 437-8.

  Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

  Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, London: Unwin, 1970 (first published 1899).

  Vot, Andre le, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, New York: Doubleday, 1983.

  Wexelblatt, Robert, 'Doctor Diver and General Grant in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night', Notes on Modern Literature, vol. 8, no. 3 (Winter 1984): Item 16.

  Wexelblatt, Robert, 'F. Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence: Bicycles and Incest', American Literature, vol. 59, no. 3, 1987: 377-88.

  Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, London: Constable, 1960 (first published 1920).

  Tender is the Night

  BOOK I

  I

  ON the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hotel des Etrangers and Cannes, five miles away.1

  The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provencal France.

  A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse's Hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one's eyes moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood--she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

  As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:

  "Something tells me we're not going to like this place."

  "I want to go home anyhow," the girl answered.

  They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact--moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.

  "We'll stay three days and then go home. I'll wire right away for steamer tickets."

  At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated--it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.

  Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.

  As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

  Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down
at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

  "I say--they have sharks out behind the raft." He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. "Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe-Juan."

  "Heavens!" exclaimed Rosemary.

  "They come in for the refuse from the flotte."

  Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink.

  Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth--the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

  Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as "that North guy" had kidnapped a waiter from a cafe in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.