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BOOK OF THE MONTH
The perfect American novel

by Andrew Begg
December 2004

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Wordsworth Classics, 274 pages, Dalles bookstore, 150,000 lei

Many literary critics and academics think of Tender is the Night as the perfect American novel, even though it has mostly been overshadowed by Scott Fitzgerald's other masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (which, incidentally, many critics are apt to call the perfect short novel.) First published in 1934, Tender is the Night and many of the wonderful short stories written in the late 1920s and early 1930s cemented Fitzgerald's reputation as the greatest chronicler of the Jazz Age ñ the golden, ultimately dissipated era in the 1920s epitomised by hedonistic flappers and Ivy League-educated college boys dancing the Charleston at parties until dawn. (''It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,'' he wrote in an essay called ''Echoes of the Jazz Age.'') It also confirmed that the talent first seen upon publication of Gatsby, that had rocketed Fitzgerald into the heavyweight league of American letters, was no fluke.

Tender is the Night is set for the most part about five miles from Cannes on the French Riviera, where Dick Diver, a brilliant psychiatrist and his beautiful wife Nicole while away the summer lazing in the sun, shopping in town, and entertaining friends on the beach and at dinner parties they throw. In many ways they are the ideal couple, living an idyllic life in ideal circumstances; that is at least what we are led to believe at the outset. To experience the Divers was to become part of an exciting clique in which anything was possible:

But to be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believe he made special reservations about them, recognising the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation.

One of their friends becomes Rosemary Hoyt, a movie starlet who has come to Cannes to escape the frenzy of enthusiasm her new talkie has stirred back home in America . She falls in love with both Dick and Nicole. Dick becomes the man she wants to be with, and Nicole the woman she wants to be.

Dick is very much in love with Nicole, but that doesn't stop him from pursuing Rosemary. Nicole has her admirers too; one, Tommy Barban, who is a part of the Diver's set on the beach, is in love with Nicole ìgently, reassuringly, enough, though, so that he and Dick have begun to disapprove of each other.î A drunken duel at dawn between Tommy, a French mercenary, and McKisco, a pulp novelist out of his depth on the Cote d'Azur will prove that Tommy is anything but gentle and reassuring.

There are a myriad secondary characters, many of whom are colourful and interesting. When we first encounter the Divers on the beach, the Norths ñ Abe and Mary ñ are, like Tommy Barban, very much part of the group. Abe North is a brilliant composer who has done nothing for six years and is careering towards alcoholism. By the end of the novel Abe has been beaten to death in a speakeasy (an illegal bar ñ this is during ëProhibition') and Mary is facing an uncertain future as Dick's consort. Baby Warren, Nicole's older sister, who Dick notices ìcrossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virginsî, flits in and out of the action. As does McKisco's wife, Violet, ìwhose prettiness had been piped to the surface of her, so that she ceased her struggle to make tangible to herself her shadowy position as the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived.î

Tender is the Night is a complex novel about love and relationships, and everything in between: trust, fidelity, loyalty, longing and lust and the strains that outside influences such as great wealth and alcoholism can bring. The novel is constructed in three parts - part two delves back into time when Nicole is a patient at an exclusive clinic where Dick works as a psychiatrist; we learn that the root cause of Nicole's psychosis lies in the fact that she has been sexually assaulted by her father. Later, when the Divers are their most sophisticated and happiest, and Nicole's love for and marriage with Dick has virtually cured her, there are indications that not all is as it should be.

But in the end it is Nicole who emerges the stronger of the two as Dick descends further and further into alcoholism which leads to their divorce, by which time Nicole has transferred her feelings to Tommy. Dick and Nicole Diver are loosely based on Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda; hugely successful early in his career, which coincided with everything that was good about the 1920s and the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived life to the full. Life was unkind to them however; Fitzgerald ended up an alcoholic and died of a heart attack at the age of 44, and Zelda spent much of the second half of her life in and out of mental asylums, and died in one when it was burnt down in 1948, eight years after Fitzgerald's death.

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